Problems of Immanence: studies critical and constructive

by Joseph Warschauer

NOTE.

In order to afford an illustration of Christian Science as a thing in being, we reproduce without comment the following report of an inquest, as published in the Tribune, on January 9th, 1908:—

Remarkable questions were put by the coroner to witnesses at a Richmond
(Surrey) inquest yesterday on Mary Elizabeth Dixon, 58, a Christian
Scientist, who died of bronchitis.

Mrs. E. D., of St. John's Road, said that at the request of Mrs. Dixon she gave her Christian Science help—prayer which she had faith would be answered.

The Coroner (Dr. Michael Taylor): Was it?—She was in a state of collapse on Saturday night, but revived much. When Mrs. Dixon had a cold previously it improved wonderfully under Christian Science.

Then Christian Science is effectual if not much is the matter, but is not in the case of a serious illness?—I don't think she wanted to get better.

Is that the way you look at it?—No, I don't. I know God is all-power and ever present.

But if God is all-powerful, as you say, and as we all know, why did you have no response?—I suppose it was my lack of trust in that all-power.

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It comes to this, that although He is all-powerful, unless the person praying for another has perfect faith the patient will not recover?—Nothing is impossible to God. The doctor was called in because it was the law.

Then it was too late. It was as much the law to have called him in when the woman was alive. What is the practice with regard to illness?—It is prayer.

If you had a broken leg, would you send for a doctor?—Yes, to set it. I have not sufficient understanding.

Continuing, witness said she did not believe in drugs, but she did in food at present, because her understanding was not sufficient, as she was only a student.

By a Juror: The reason Mrs. Dixon got worse was because of lack of understanding on witness's part.

The Coroner: When she got worse, why did you not send for a doctor?—I asked her if she wanted a doctor to tell me.

Yet she was getting worse owing to your lack of understanding?—I didn't look at it in that light.

B. H., who attended Mrs. Dixon, said she was a trained nurse with nine years' experience. Witness had, during the past two years, become a Christian Scientist nurse. She was not a practitioner.

The Coroner: Has a practitioner any special qualifications?—No, a practitioner is one who prays for another.

The Coroner: Would you give a patient a mustard poultice?—No.

But you would give her a hot-water bottle?—Yes.

Then where do you draw the line? You don't believe in material aid?—No,
I believe the other is better.

Do you believe in a judicious continuation of both?—No.

Did you give her beef tea?—Yes, as a nourishment.

But, nurse, you ought to know what every medical man knows, that beef tea is a stimulant. Do you believe in stimulants?—Not at all.

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Then why did you give her beef tea?—(After a pause) It was simpler to get.

But it is contrary to your principles. Would you give sal volatile?—No.

Witness explained that she called in no other help because she believed prayer was the most effectual.

Why didn't you call in a doctor?—I think the patient should judge for herself.

Even though her brain is clouded and she is dying?—Yes.

On another point the Coroner said: Did our Saviour use food and stimulants?—He gave wine.

Why don't you give wine?—He did not give it in illness, but at a marriage feast.

You want us to believe He gave wine to people who could do without and withheld it from those who wanted it.

Asked a question as to calling in a doctor for surgery purposes, witness said he would only be called in for setting bones and not for an operation.

The Coroner: It amounts to this: you believe the Almighty is a bad surgeon, but a good physician?—Our faith is not yet strong enough.

Dr. Cockell deposed that death was due to acute bronchitis.

Would she have recovered with medical attendance for a week before?—Yes.

The Coroner, in summing up, said there was no doubt Mrs. Dixon was grossly neglected.

The jury returned a verdict of "Death from acute bronchitis, accelerated by gross neglect by Mrs. D. and especially by Nurse H."

The Coroner: I am afraid that will mean manslaughter, which would be too severe. Will you alter it, gentlemen? The jury then altered the verdict to one of "severe censure on Mrs. D. and Miss H. for neglecting to obtain medical aid."

[1] The Grammar of Assent, p. 201.

[2] Rudimental Divine Science, p. 10.

[3] Op. cit., p. 10. Mrs. Eddy is so incredibly ignorant of the meaning of words in common use that she says, "Mind in matter is pantheism." It has apparently never dawned on her that her own doctrine, "God is All—All is God" is pantheism pure and simple!

[4] Ibid.

[5] Op. cit., p. 9.

[6] Dr. Henry Rutgers Marshall, on "Psychotherapeutics," in the Hibbert Journal, January, 1909.

[7] The Christian Science healer is supposed to have had his or her powers trained by special tuition, for which, in the ordinary course, a fee is charged. Mrs. Eddy states that she has "never taught a Primary class without several and sometimes seventeen free students in it," but adds significantly "The student who pays must, of necessity, do better than he who does not pay" (op. cit., p. 14). The "necessity" is not quite obvious, but the statement sets one wondering whether it would hold true if for "student" the word "patient" were substituted.

[8] Op. cit., p. 3.

[9] Ibid., p. 13.

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CHAPTER IX

DETERMINISM

The under-emphasis of sin, we said, is one of the special dangers which threaten the present age; and nothing is more remarkable or disquieting to observe than the number of attacks that are being made to-day from quarter after quarter, all of them converging upon the same point. Now the cry is raised that sin is a mere mistake, due to ignorance; or that it is merely the absence of something, as a shadow indicates the absence of light[1]; or we are assured that "what we call 'evil' is only incidental to the progress and development of the [universal] order" [2]—a necessary step in evolution. Now again the burden of responsibility is shifted from the shoulders of the individual on to heredity and environment; or compromise with what is known to be moral evil is not only excused as a necessity, but commended as a duty; or the average person's feelings are considerately soothed by {142} the pronouncement that "the mass of a Christian congregation are about as innocent as men and women can well be in a world where natural temptations are so rife, and so many social adjustments discountenance heroic saintliness" [3]—the latter a truly admirable feat of circumlocution. And sometimes, as we have seen, sin and evil are themselves in essence negated—generally in virtue of some pseudo-philosophic or pseudo-scientific "doctrine of a universe"—as when we read that "in a universe . . . there cannot be any room for independent and creative wills, actually thwarting the Good Will." [4] Doubtless, these various statements, whether made in the name of Monism or Determinism, or some form of neo-Christianity, represent a reaction against that over-emphasis which taught that man was by nature under God's wrath and deserving of everlasting torments; but there can be no question that this reaction has gone very far in the direction of the opposite extreme, and that the time has come for reconsideration and a return to more balanced views.

So far as the virtual denial of human freedom, human sin, and indeed of human selfhood, {143} flows from a perversion of the doctrine of Divine immanence, we need not add anything to the observations made in earlier chapters upon this subject; we might, however, quote some pertinent words of Martineau's, affirming and explaining that distinction between the Divine and human personality which can only be ignored to the hopeless confusion of thought:

"The whole external universe, then (external, I mean, to self-conscious beings), we unreservedly surrender to the Indwelling Will, of which it is the organised expression. From no point of its space, from no moment of its time, is His living energy withdrawn, or less intensely present than in any crisis fitly called creative. But the very same principle which establishes a Unity of all external causality makes it antithetic to the internal, and establishes a Duality between our own and that which is other than ours; so that, were not our personal power known to us as one, the cosmical power would not be guaranteed to us as the other. Here, therefore, at the boundary of the proper Ego, the absorbing claim of the Supreme will arrests itself, and recognises a ground on which it does not mean to step. Did it still press on and annex this field also, it would simply abolish the very base of its own recognisable existence, and, in making itself all in all, would vanish totally from view. . . Are we, then, to find Him in the sunshine and the rain, and to miss Him in our thought, our duty and our love? Far from it; He is with us in both: only in the former it is His immanent life, in the latter His transcendent, with which we are in communion." [5]

Only where this fundamental principle of the non-identity of God and man is recognised, can the facts of human personality, {144} freedom and responsibility for willed acts be rationally based and defended.

At the same time this "otherness" of God, while it is the condition, is not necessarily the guarantee, of our freedom. Determinism is quite compatible, in theory, and has been so found in history, with belief in the Divine transcendence; but it is scarcely compatible with belief in the Divine goodness. There is no a priori reason making it inconceivable that the doctrine of absolute predestination might be true; but such a doctrine is not reconcilable with the belief that the Eternal Other is also the Eternal Father. The Divine Autocrat of Calvinism, who pre-ordained some of His creatures to eternal damnation—not for any demerit of theirs, but "just choosing so"—is not unthinkable; what is unthinkable is that we could love such a One—a God who had predestined all human sin and woe, who had fore-ordered things in such a manner that unnumbered hapless souls were doomed evermore to stumble and to suffer. Such a God might inspire a shuddering, wondering, abject awe, but never affection. Only a good God, aiming at the evolution of goodness, the making of character, could have endowed us with freedom, for only through such an endowment can such an aim be realised.

And hence there are perhaps few attitudes so entirely irrational as that which affects to see in a determinist interpretation of man's {145} nature a special reason for optimism. Occasionally one is invited to rejoice in the "great and glorious thought that every man is wholly a product of the Master Workman"; it is even urged that such a conception cannot change our appreciation of what is fine in human thought and action, just as "we do not admire a rose the less because we know that it could no more help being what it is than could a stinging nettle or a fungus." We can only say that such a superficial optimism seems infinitely more open to objection than the temper which, in the face of so much suffering and sin, has to struggle hard sometimes to preserve its faith in the Father's love, and half-wonders if some personal power of evil is not actively engaged in marring God's workmanship. Anyone who can believe that every man, just as he is, represents the Divine intention in concrete form—anyone who can believe this, and glory in the thought—must inhabit a strange world, remote from reality. He can never have learned anything of the greed which condemns myriads of human beings to sunless and degraded lives; he can never have been inside a police-court; he can never have seen hapless womanhood flaunting its be-rouged and be-ribboned shame under the electric light of West End thoroughfares—he can never even have reflected upon any of these things, and rejoiced in the thought that every human being was "wholly the {146} product of the Master Workman." If such a thought does not produce something like despair, it ought to do so; if it does not, then it represents not a conviction but a pose.

As a matter of fact, the determinist creed, with all its professions of charitableness towards the transgressor, and while pretending to soothe us by absolving us from responsibility for wrong-doing, fatally paralyses our endeavours. It is a message, not of liberation from guilt, but of despair. Christianity, even while condemning sin, in its very condemnation speaks of hope; it says to the sinner: "You are guilty—you ought to have done better, and you know it; you are guilty—you ought still to do better, and you can." That is a rousing, vitalising call: the very censure implies the possibility of better things. But Determinism says to the moral wreck: "Not only are you a wreck, but that is all you ever could have been; you not only cannot help being what you are, but in your wretchedness and degradation you are what you could not help being—this was your pre-ordained destiny from the beginning of time. We are not angry with you, any more than we are angry with tigers for being fierce, or with thorns for not bearing grapes; only, being what you are, you never could have borne, and never will bear, grapes." Truly a "great and glorious thought"! Determinism makes of the whole world of erring men a hospital, and pronounces {147} every patient an incurable—it is ready to grant kindly, considerate treatment to each, but holds out hopes of recovery to none. Who would not rather submit to a sterner physician, whose ministrations promised to medicine him back to health again! A consistent Determinism, prepared to look stedfastly at things as they are, can, we repeat, lead nowhere but to despair; a conclusion from which determinists, fortunately for themselves, escape by means of the most patent inconsistency.

But we turn to the further contention which we already mentioned in passing, viz., that the acceptance of Determinism would by no means change our admiration of what was fine in human thought and action—just as we did not admire a rose the less because it could not help being fragrant and beautiful. Here we have a very palpable, but all the more significant confusion between things totally different—aesthetics and ethics. Our admiration for a rose is aesthetic; our admiration for goodness is ethical, and we give it with the implicit understanding that the quality we admire is the result of voluntary acts and decisions. All moral judgments imply this; and in practice we know that the experience of moral struggle and moral conquest is intensely real, not to be argued away any more than we can be argued out of any other primary fact of consciousness, which is its own sufficient evidence. Let anyone ask himself quite {148} candidly whether the feeling called forth by some rare work of art resembles remotely the emotion with which he reads of some deed of humble heroism or self-sacrifice; the psychology which discerns here no difference is singularly shallow.

But when the would-be optimistic determinist is shown the sheer fatuity of pretending to rejoice in that everything is just as it is—a singular compliment to the "Master Workman"—he executes a volte-face and falls back upon the plea that his doctrine is at any rate a pre-eminently practical one. Instead of vainly deploring imaginary "sins," Determinism would simply have us recognise plain facts: it would arrange for healthy hereditary influences to cradle the coming generations; it would adopt the most enlightened educational, hygienic, reformatory methods; it would provide for all the citizens of the State such an environment as would steadily make for health and beauty and happiness. There are no "sinners," it says, but only the unhappy products of conditions which foster anti-social proclivities as automatically as dirt fosters disease; instead of punishing the products, let us attack the producing conditions, and by sweeping them away bring in the millennium.

Such a plea, it must be admitted, harmonises well with our modern tolerance, our modern zeal for reform; and yet it rests upon a fundamental fallacy. No one, of course, denies the {149} moulding power of heredity and environment; no one denies such an obvious truism as that we cannot expect to grow fine specimens of humanity in the reeking slum or the sweater's workshop. But as environment is a greater power than heredity, so there is only one power greater than environment—and that is our power to alter environment. "But that," protests the determinist, "is just what we hold ought to be done." Certainly; only it is just what, on his presupposition, cannot be done. For if the slum-dweller cannot help being what he is, owing to his environment, neither can the slum-owner, or the legislator, or the community, help being what they are, owing to the self-same cause. In fact, we cannot get the word "ought" from Determinism; it is as much out of place in that connection as a free worker in a slave-compound. But every reform springs from a sense of "oughtness"; and the sense of moral obligation is itself the spontaneous expression of the consciousness of moral freedom. So far as we believe in the duty of reform—or in "duty" itself, sans phrase—we have already renounced Determinism, and proclaimed our belief in liberty. Let it be said once more, before we pass from this particular aspect of our subject, that too much may be set down to, or expected from, even environment; everybody knows that from gentle homes, surrounded by what seemed the most favouring influences, {150} there have sprung vicious and depraved characters. We ask ourselves, in encountering such cases, "Wanting is—what?" And the answer must be given in Kant's famous dictum: that which is "the only good thing in the world—a good will."

In one sense, paradoxical as it may sound, much of the strenuous modern advocacy of Determinism or semi-Determinism is a kind of inverted acknowledgment of man's consciousness of freedom, viz., where that consciousness appears as the sense of sin. Of course, when a writer like Mr. Dole assures us that "there is no objection to a moral and spiritual Determinism that binds all things over into the unity of good," [6] we merely reply that on the contrary there is the very serious objection that "all things" are not good. But most advocates of the determinist position are, to do them justice, well aware of the existence of wrong and discord in human life; and their object is, by emphasising the influence of heredity and environment, to remove or at least materially to lighten, the crushing burden of the sense of sin. The same intention underlies the effort, occasionally made, to persuade men that, seeing they are such as God created them, it is not for them to repine at being what they are, nor to "take too serious a view" of any "penchant for {151} revolt"—another delightful phrase—they may discover within themselves; as a recent writer has it, "The responsibility of its presence and action does not rest with us, nor are we justified in insulting God who made us, by repenting of what He has done. We might as well repent of the tiger and the snake, the earthquake and the tempest in nature." [7] What are we to say of this attempt to make God answerable, not merely for the presence, but for the action, of whatever impulse to "revolt" of which we may be conscious?

To be quite frank, we cannot think the utterance we have just quoted other than extraordinarily ill-considered. The simple fact that we cannot follow all the impulses which arise in us, but have to choose between higher and lower—the fact that we are well aware of this conflict of unharmonisable elements within ourselves, some of which can only triumph at the expense of others—seems sufficiently to dispose of this writer's main contention. We may not be responsible for the presence of these warring instincts, but we are undoubtedly responsible for translating one kind into action while holding the other kind in check. The earthward and the heavenward are in each of us, striving for mastery; but no imagination is vainer than that we can indulge both, or practise the impartiality with which Montaigne's singular devotee lighted one candle {152} to St. George and another to the dragon. If we would realise the type of perfect in the mind, we must not gratify "the penchant for revolt," but exert ourselves to lay—

The ghost of the brute that is walking and haunting us yet and be free;

we must

Arise and fly
The reeling Faun, the sensual feast;
Move upward, working out the beast,
And let the ape and tiger die.

Granted that the lower impulses, the inheritance from our animal ancestry, are left in us by Divine decree, they are there, not to be indulged on the plea that to repent would be tantamount to "insulting God who made us," but to be conquered by the exercise of that freedom which is the earnest of our call to claim our birthright as children of God.

But when we are further told that, as well as repent of our actions, we might repent of the tiger and the snake, we are immediately conscious of a double confusion of thought behind that statement; for in the first place, we are not even called upon to repent of each other's failings but only of our own, and in the second there is no analogy between ourselves and the tiger and snake, creatures which act according to their animal natures, and are incapable of desiring to be other than they are. Our capacity of, and desire for, better things attest our possession of a measure of liberty, and {153} indicate at once our responsibility for the course we take, and the essential distinction between the animal creation and ourselves—a distinction wittily expressed in the remark that "everybody would admit that very few men are really manly; but nobody would contend that very few whales were really whaley."

But those who seek to spare us the discomfort of repentance by teaching us to declare with a new inflection, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves," forget that there is another side to this argument. It is, of course, very alluring to be told that we are not really blameworthy for acts which hitherto we have blamed ourselves for—that our impulses are God-given—that "the sinner is merely a learner in a lower grade in the school," [8] and so forth; one can understand how grateful is such a morphia injection for deadening the pangs of an accusing conscience. The art of making excuses, as old as the Garden of Eden, will never lack ardent professors or eager disciples. Says Cassius to Brutus:—

Have you not love enough to bear with me
When that rash humour which my mother gave me
Makes me forgetful?

And Brutus answers with a smile:—

Yes, Cassius, and from henceforth,
When you are over-earnest with your Brutus,
He'll think your mother chides, and leave you so!

{154} But, after all, we none of us do exclusively things for which we wish to escape being blamed; there is hardly anyone who could not name some occasion on which he has made some sacrifice, foregone an unfair advantage, declined to listen to selfish promptings, or held some baser impulse in check. None of these things were done for the sake of receiving praise; nevertheless, and quite inevitably, the doer felt praise_worthy_, conscious of an inner accord whose self-attesting power stamped it a reality, and not an illusion. But Determinism leaves no room for this emotion, any more than for that of remorse or blame-worthiness; we cannot get rid of the sense of sin, yet retain the sense of righteousness. The determinist sponge passes over the whole moral vocabulary, not only over the inconvenient parts; it obliterates the terms self-indulgence, dishonesty, cowardice, but the same fate overtakes self-conquest, integrity, bravery. To vary the phrase slightly, we must not, on the determinist hypothesis, insult God by taking credit to ourselves for what He has done. Are we prepared to surrender the approval of our conscience, the new-won self-respect which rewards the successful resistance offered to temptation, as having no basis in fact? And if we are not, what is this but to affirm our freedom and our responsibility alike in doing and forbearing?

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And this inner sense of peace or discord, according as we have acted thus or thus—this immediate consciousness that it lay with us to choose aright or amiss—is both anterior and superior to all argument; it asserts itself victoriously against all merely intellectual perplexities, such as are apt to arise when we ask ourselves how man could be free to commit or not to commit an act, in view of the Divine omniscience. The contradiction seems a stubborn one, yet in practice we never feel our freedom circumscribed by it. Probably our difficulty arises largely from the mistake of applying time-relations to God at all, and thinking of eternity as an enormously long period instead of timeless Present, excluding both "unborn To-morrow and dead Yesterday." We, of course, have to think under the category of time, remembering and looking forward; but the Divine modus cognoscendi excludes either of these processes, being the timeless act of One who "knoweth altogether"—in whose sight a thousand years are as a day, and a day as a thousand years. To the Eternal Intelligence, living in an unbeginning and unending Present, "past" and "future" must be equally unmeaning; to such a One we cannot but think that all events must be equally and simultaneously present, "for all live unto Him." If we could behold the drama of existence sub specie aeternitatis, we might be able to understand how {156} Divine omniscience can co-exist with human freedom; as it is, we can only say, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for us—it is high, and we cannot attain unto it." We know that we cannot know. In any case, even while the Divine omniscience may present itself to us as a necessity of thought, human freedom remains a reality of experience and a postulate of morals.[9]

There are, however, those to whom human freedom presents itself, not as a contradiction to Divine omniscience, but as a contradiction in terms. Man's choice of a course of conduct, they argue, cannot be thought of as other than {157} determined by an efficient cause; but if it is so determined, in what sense can it be free? An uncaused act is strictly speaking unthinkable; but do we not affirm that acts are uncaused when we speak of them as free—in other words, is not the only alternative to Determinism what might be called _in_determinism? The answer is (a) that every choice is certainly the result of an efficient cause; but (b) the fact of this being so interferes in no wise with the reality of liberty, nor does it contradict the universality of the law of causation. For the efficient cause is the man himself, and the fact that he can choose is attested in the very act of choice—which would not be "choice" if there were not at least two real alternatives. We do not quarrel with the obvious truth, stated by Mill, that the will is determined by motives; we contest the assumption that a "free" act is an "uncaused" act. The act is caused or determined by the free choice of a causal self; in strict parlance, indeed, we should have to say that neither acts nor wills, but only human selves, are free. The will is not self-determined, but determined by a self; and this self is able not only to choose between different motives, but to attend to one set of motives to the neglect of others, and even to create motives in order to become able to make a difficult decision.

Let us, however, guard against a possible misconstruction by saying that there is all the difference between this conception of freedom {158} and the mere spontaneity which is recognised by the followers both of Spinoza and Hegel, a difference which was luminously brought out by Martineau.[10] The Spinozist doctrine of spontaneity, as Mr. Picton points out, means that the individual follows an impulse which "has its antecedents . . . in the chain of invariable sequences." [11] Man, in this view, is "free" to do what he wants, because he wants it; he is not free in the sense that he could have wanted something different.[12] Nothing could be more frank than Mr. Picton's statements on this point—as when he speaks of the "free man's" sense that "all things are of God, and could not have been otherwise:"

Of course the obvious retort occurs, (he continues,) that if indeed everything . . . occurs by invariable sequence, all this intellectual gospel of freedom is vain, and exhortations to its acceptance thrown away. And to those who are not satisfied with the freedom of conscious spontaneity, a condition in which we do just as we want to do, though our will is a link in an endless series of untraceable sequences, I suppose this objection must still be final.[13]

The objection is undoubtedly final, because it is absolutely valid; for by freedom we mean the ability to do or leave undone, to act thus or thus, and apart from such an ability moral judgments are quite unthinkable. Where we pronounce praise or blame, the tacit {159} presupposition is always that the object of the pronouncement could have acted differently; and this Spinozism denies.

The same remark applies to the teaching of that modern Absolute Idealism which declares, with Green, that man is his motives, and that he is "free" inasmuch as it is by his own motives that he is governed. It would be as accurate to call an automatic machine "free" on the ground that it is by its own works that it is moved. This is only, as Professor William James aptly calls it, "soft Determinism." If the automaton could decide to slacken or increase its rate of speed, to go or to stop as it liked and where it liked—above all, if it could aim at and devise improvements in its own mechanism so as to make itself a better automaton—it would then be appropriate to speak of it as free; only it would no longer be appropriate to call it an automaton. And similarly it is only if man is able to determine his course of action—if he can "choose" in any real sense, i.e., in the sense that he might choose differently, if he wished to do so—that it can be anything but an abuse of language to speak of him as free; for only in that case can he be an object of approbation or condemnation. If he is merely the sum-total of his motives, he is as little free to act other than he does as a number of chemical elements combined in certain proportions are free to form anything but a definite chemical substance. As {160} Mr. Balfour has well expressed it,[14] "It may seem at first sight plausible to describe a man as free whose behaviour is due to 'himself' alone. But without quarrelling over words, it is, I think, plain that whether it be proper to call him free or not, he at least lacks freedom in the sense in which freedom is necessary in order to constitute responsibility. It is impossible to say of him that he 'ought,' and therefore he 'can,' for at any given moment of his life his next action is by hypothesis strictly determined." But the freedom of which we are conscious—e.g., in every experience of conflict between inclination and duty—is something altogether different; we know that we can yield or resist, choose between, reinforce, and if necessary make, our motives.[15]

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But is not sin, it is sometimes asked, inevitable per se, and in that sense natural to man, and if so, how can we be blamed for what we could not avoid? And again, is there not some truth in the statement that much that we call evil has been incidental to the progress of the race, just as the discords produced by the learner on a musical instrument are necessary incidents in the process which will teach him by and by to charm the ear with the perfect harmony? Such questions are frequently put forward; let us see if we are able to clear away the misunderstandings to which they bear witness.

(1) Admitting that a free moral being must be able in theory to choose the wrong as well as the right, it should in the first place be observed that the possibility of that or any course does not render it inevitable for him to take it, and it is only the possibility that is given. But it may be justly argued that since as a matter of fact all men sin, we cannot pretend that we are merely dealing with a theoretical possibility, but must pronounce sin to be de facto natural to man as well as inevitable—for who has ever avoided it? Let us observe what follows: this, and no more, that sin is "natural" only in the sense in which disease is "natural"—viz., as a disorder to which the human frame may become subject, but nevertheless a disorder. As physical disease entails a diminution of physical life, so sin entails a diminution of {162} our moral and spiritual life, an alienation of the soul from God; and while anyone may thus choose to describe sin—the wilful misuse of faculties lent us for other ends—as natural, it is significant that the result of sin is quite _un_natural, viz., a state of disunion between the soul and God. So much is this the case that the aim of all religion is to bring about a cessation of this unhappy state, and to effect the healing of the discord created by man's transgression. True religion treats sin, not as an error to be explained away, but as a wall of partition to be broken down; the essential aim of religion is atonement, man's reconciliation to God.

(2) But it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, then, sin be claimed as constituting part of the Divine plan? And if such was the case once, may it not be the case still? Here we are dealing with a very obvious confusion; for while man is in a low and undeveloped state, a good many acts which would be sins if committed by people on a higher level, have not that character at all. It is quite impossible, e.g., to read the Homeric poems and find in them any trace or indication that deceit, war and massacres are {163} regarded with so much as moral distaste; the men of the Homeric age had simply not risen to that moral height, and it would be futile to judge them by the standards of a more advanced civilisation. Undoubtedly, in its slow evolution from sub-human origins, the race passes through long sub-moral stages during which the animal instincts—"moods of tiger or of ape"—are still in the ascendant; it is only gradually that man becomes aware of certain practices with shame, disgust or remorse, and it is only then that we can begin to speak of the indulgence of the passions which prompt those practices as "sin." When Paul calls the law the strength of sin, or says that the law came in that the trespass might abound, he states a truth, but sees it, if one may say so, out of focus; for the law was not arbitrarily imposed in order to brand a multitude of harmless acts as offences, but in proportion as the moral law is discerned by man's mind, acts which formerly were merely non-moral begin to range themselves on this side or that, as right and wrong. True, even when our moral perceptions have thus been quickened, we shall not always "rule our province of the brute" with a strong hand—true also that, owing to our earthly nature, "in many things we all stumble;" but so far from viewing these failures complacently, they ought to spur us to more earnest endeavours to leave our lower inheritance behind. The truth {164} concerning the "inevitableness" of sin was stated by our Lord when He said, "It must needs be that occasions"—viz., of stumbling—"come; but woe to that man through whom the occasion cometh." Sin as such, as an "occasion," is inevitable; but for any particular sin, for acting contrarily to the known best, the individual is responsible—and greatest of all is the responsibility of one who knowingly and of design becomes an "occasion of stumbling" to another, making sin more difficult to avoid, or positively inciting another to wrong-doing. We do not forget the inequalities of moral endowment, nor do we leave out of sight that a temptation which for one man scarcely so much as exists may prove well-nigh irresistible to another; but the judgment upon each is in the wise and Fatherly hands of Him who knoweth our frame, and remembereth that we are dust.

We have seen that Determinism, in spite of its humanitarian and even optimistic pretensions, when it is consistently applied falsifies every one of its promises; it is worth while to ask ourselves yet once more what is likely to be the effect of this doctrine upon the characters of those who seriously entertain it. Mill, in his frigid and precise, yet scrupulously just manner, expressed the opinion that

The free-will doctrine, by keeping in view precisely that portion of the truth which the word necessity puts {165} out of sight, namely the power of the mind to co-operate in the formation of its own character, has given to its adherents a practical feeling much nearer to the truth than has generally (I believe) existed in the minds of necessarians. The latter may have had a stronger sense of the importance of what human beings can do as to shape the characters of one another; but the free-will doctrine has, I believe, fostered in its supporters a much stronger spirit of self-culture.[16]

If for "self-culture" we substituted self-reliance, buoyancy, a sense of responsibility, we should scarcely go too far; for, indeed, it would be difficult to say from what sources the consistent determinist is to derive these qualities. He regards himself as the inevitable product of forces which have moulded him into that particular shape and no other; he cannot help himself or change his character by one hair's-breadth; he views his own life, as has been well said, not in the light of a story which he can carry on as he may choose, but as a sum which must finish in a given way; and his one dismal consolation is that he is not responsible for his shortcomings. He can but say with his favourite sage:—

The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes,
But Here or There as strikes the Player goes;
And He that toss'd you down into the Field,
He knows about it all—He knows—HE knows!

But to believe that no effort can avail will certainly not inspire anyone to make such an effort; on the contrary, the likelihood is only {166} too great that such a belief will upon occasion serve as a welcome excuse for not making it. It has been said that Determinism, if not a very heroic creed, will at any rate make for tolerance and charity towards human failings; but nothing is more certain than that this kind of charity will, in practice, begin—while its tendency will be also to end—at home.

This estimate, it is true, is often warmly challenged; in actual life, we are told, many of those who profess determinist principles are notorious for their strenuous moral calibre, and certainly not open to the charge of laxity. Let that statement be ungrudgingly accepted; what it proves is no more than that prussic acid is entirely harmless—provided it is not taken. We are quite willing to admit that Determinism, provided it is not put into practice, is nothing more than a mistaken theory. So long as men are content to be determinists in their studies and libertarians everywhere else, no particular mischief is likely to ensue; and it is matter of common experience, and for much congratulation, that our theoretical determinists should so far obey the instinct of moral self-preservation as to be for the most part practical libertarians, freely pronouncing praise and blame on human conduct, and feeling praise- and blameworthy themselves. But if they were logical and consistent determinists, they would do and feel no such thing; for the praise we give to a {167} well-poised spring-cart is one thing, and the praise we give to a well-poised character is another. And again, given a man who really believed, or whom it suited to believe, that he was quite irresponsible for his actions, and that no morally valid censure could attach to him for gratifying some appetite or passion, one cannot help suspecting that the result would be something much worse than mere laxity. That most persons who argue in favour of Determinism do not act up to its principles, is surely nothing in the doctrine's recommendation; on the other hand there is always the unpleasant possibility that some day they may begin to take their philosophy seriously. And just as one would not like prussic acid to lie about promiscuously where all and sundry could have access to it, lest there should be a great deal of accidental poisoning, so we are justified in viewing the broadcast dissemination of determinist theory not merely with the antipathy one may feel towards intellectual error, but with the apprehension excited by a moral danger. Every system or movement which involves the denial of evil or of freedom—the denial or under-emphasis of sin—menaces not only religion in the narrower sense, but the structure of civilisation itself.

The rock upon which all these theories make shipwreck is the fact that we cannot abolish the reality of sin and leave the reality of {168} goodness intact. Saint and sinner, hero and coward, martyr and traitor, all, as we have seen, are reduced by Determinism to a common level where there is neither admiration nor censure, but at most a vague wonder at all the unnecessary suffering—for that at any rate remains real—involved in this profoundly futile procession of phenomena; and that is a conclusion to which humanity has always refused, and will always refuse, to reconcile itself. If we wish to see how utterly a deterministic conception empties morality of meaning, we need only turn to the earthly career of our Lord, and ask ourselves what it is that gives to that life and death their poignant significance but the voluntariness with which the Saviour took each successive step on the road from His native Nazareth to the place called Calvary. Think of Him simply as the product of a compelling Force, unable to act otherwise than He did, and at one stroke all that moved us to gratitude, to admiration, all that appealed to us most deeply, is gone. There can be no such thing as compulsory heroism or non-voluntary self-sacrifice; moral judgments upon "inevitable" conduct are merely absurd—we do not bestow moral approval upon this kind of higher automatism.

Sometimes, indeed, in a connection like this, an attempt is made at some sort of compromise: granted, it is said, that each separate action of Christ's was voluntary, yet His life-purpose {169} as a whole was surely pre-determined, and not left to Him to adopt or refuse. Yet how impossible, upon closer reflection, is this species of semi-Determinism! Every single act of Jesus was voluntary; but His whole life and character and purpose—which is just the sum-total of these single, voluntary acts—these, we are to believe, were strictly necessitated. He could choose every step of a way which was yet absolutely chosen for Him, so that He could tread no other! A tremendous decision like His going to Jerusalem lay within His power; but the aim and meaning of His life, viewed as a whole, He had no power of voluntarily determining. That, to our mind, is a wholly irrational position; one might as reasonably say, "Every link of this chain is golden; but the chain itself is iron." Simple consistency requires the admission that if the chain is iron, so must the links be, and if the links are golden, so must be the chain.

We say again—all that enshrines Jesus in our hearts, all that gives its redemptive power to His love-prompted death, and its significance to Calvary, rests upon the fact of His moral freedom. He had power to lay down His life; therein lay the glory of His self-surrender. He was, indeed, God's instrument in effecting the reconciliation of sinners to the Divine Love, but it rested with Him to decide whether He would be that instrument or no, and the course He chose was not that of {170} mechanical necessity, nor was the decision to which He came a following in the line of least resistance. In accepting the pain and shame of the Cross, Jesus worked His Father's will; but that will was not imposed upon Him from without, but freely responded to from within. As the author of the Theologia Germanica has it, a man should strive "to be to the Eternal Goodness what his hand is to a man": but all the ultimate splendour of the achievement is bound up with the initial possibility of the striving. Not only the yearning love of God, but the conquering freedom of Man is finally attested by that blood-red seal which bears the impressure of a Cross.

[1] So e.g., In The Theology of Civilisation, by Charles F. Dole, p. 49.

[2] The Coming People, by the same author, p. 49.

[3] The Over-Emphasis of Sin, by the Rev. Alexander Brown, in the Hibbert Journal, April, 1909, p. 616.

[4] The Theology of Civilisation, p. 61. It would, of course, have been easy to give references from other authors; but there is an extraordinary family-likeness between the writers of this School, extending down to the very phrasing of their ideas.

[5] A Study of Religion, vol. ii., pp. 166, 179.

[6] Theology of Civilisation, p. 129.

[7] The Rev. Alexander Brown, loc. cit., p. 619; italics ours.

[8] Dole, op. cit., p. 101.

[9] The analogy of the tyro and the expert chess-player—the tyro "free," yet the expert foreseeing and holding the issue of the game in his own hands—is only superficially plausible. There seems, however, one other possible explanatory hypothesis, though it is here advanced only in the most tentative manner: may it not be possible for the Most High to impose a limitation upon His infinite knowledge corresponding to that self-limitation of His infinite power which we regard as a necessary assumption? It would be difficult on a priori grounds to declare such a thing to be inconceivable. When Paul spoke of himself as "determined not to know anything save Jesus Christ," he signified his intention of shutting out from his knowledge whole ranges of facts, for reasons dictated by the purpose he had in hand; and as a matter of every-day experience, we all practise something like this habitually, voluntarily narrowing the range of our consciousness and our immediate interests for one cause and another. Might not God, if the reality of our freedom could not be guaranteed in any other way, and if that freedom was necessary for the attainment of His purpose with man, forbear in some measure, however slight, to exercise His omniscience? We are well aware that the subject admits of nothing more than reverent surmise; and having stated our suggestion, we simply leave it with the reader as one of those possibilities which will appeal differently to different minds.

[10] Types of Ethical Theory, vol. ii., pp. 31 ff.

[11] Spinoza, p. 195.

[12] Cp. Pantheism, p. 74.

[13] Spinoza, p. 196.

[14] In Mind, October, 1893; quoted in Professor Upton's invaluable Hibbert Lectures on The Bases of Religious Belief, p. 293, n.

[15] It may be interesting to quote a recent popular statement of the neo-Hegelian position in regard to this question: "The feeling that we are free is true in this sense, that the cause of a moral deed is a motive within us, and not some power outside us. But this motive moves us because of what we are, because of our characters, and the character is the product of inherited instincts, appetites and passions, modified by controlling ideas which have been acquired since our birth. Mr. Blatchford is so far right in his book, Not Guilty. The inward and outward conditions of a man's life, of course, make him what he is inevitably. We choose, but our choice is governed by all our past, and by present circumstances. . . We have our ancestors rolled up in us. A man is the last result of the universe. All is law. All is inevitable by the laws of life:" (The Rev. G. T. Sadler, B.A., LL.B., in the Clarion, June 11th, 1909). That, of course, is not liberty at all; and the logical honours appear to rest with Mr. Blatchford, who, arguing on the same assumptions, declares sin to be a meaningless term, seeing that "man is not responsible for his nature, nor for the acts prompted by that nature."

[16] System of Logic, vol. ii., p. 412 (third edition).

{171}

CHAPTER X

MORALITY AS A RELIGION

That minimising or denial of moral evil with which we dealt in the preceding pages, is common to, and follows as the corollary from, all systems in which the personality and transcendence of God are either explicitly denied or virtually ignored. Monism, that is to say,—whether of the idealistic or the materialistic variety, whether pantheist or atheist in complexion—finds its ethical counterpart in Determinism.

There are, however, in our pathetically restless age a number—probably a growing number—of serious men and women who attack the problem from the opposite end. Weary of speculation, and leaning on the whole to the side of negation rather than affirmation in matters of theology, they say that one thing at any rate is left, a certainty of which no one can deprive them, an ideal sufficient to inspire mankind—the supreme worthiness of the good life. While the creeds of the Churches divide their respective adherents from each other, here, they tell us, is a basis upon which all can unite, and which therefore {172} should assuredly prove adequate and attractive; nay, since religion is valued for the kind of life it produces—since the tree is judged neither by its name, nor age, nor foliage, but simply and solely by its fruit—shall we not say that morality itself is the true and only religion, that residuum of valid and vital truth which remains when all the errors of supernaturalism have been purged and filtered away? Certainly there are those in our own day who, while definitely rejecting the sanctions and authority of religion in its commonly accepted meaning, are fully convinced that to live an unselfish life is a duty incumbent on man, and who honestly endeavour to practise what they believe. That being so, is not faith shown to be practically superfluous, and the autonomy and sufficiency of ethics a demonstrated fact?

Such, in short, is the contention of the Ethical Movement, so ably and often eloquently represented by leaders like Felix Adler, W. M. Salter, Washington Sullivan, Stanton Coit, and others; all these teachers with one accord deprecate and dismiss theological doctrines as at best not proven, at worst a hindrance, and commend instead morality as the all-embracing, all-sufficing and all-saving religion. To quote Mr. Salter, who certainly speaks with authority for his side:—

A religion that will teach us how to live, that will hold up clear and high the laws of life and win us to obedience {173} to them—this is the religion the world needs, and it is the only true religion; all others, all that seek to make something else sacred, that make men put their trust in "God" or Christ or the Virgin or the Bible or the Church or its sacraments and rites, are a diverting of man from the real issue; they are the blind leading of the blind; they are a delusion and a snare.[1]

Mr. Salter is, indeed, willing to show "charity" for the belief "that the authority of the right is in some way connected with God"; but it is the charity that may be extended to an exploded superstition on account of certain beneficent associations that cling to it. "If by the term 'God,'" he says,[2] "was meant simply the reason and nature of things, it might perhaps be freely used; but the word means something else to most persons"—and therefore the honest ethicist will not employ it. For this sensible and candid course we cannot but feel thankful; Mr. Salter at any rate knows well enough that there is all the difference between "the reason and nature of things"—between a mere "totality of being"—and a personal God.

We cannot disguise from ourselves that the present juncture is in many respects singularly favourable to the ethical movement; to not a few who have lost their earlier faith and feel the need of something to take its place, Ethicism will seem to meet that want, and they will accordingly give a wistful, grateful {174} hearing to what Mr. Salter and his colleagues have to preach. Probably, indeed, it will be people of a higher than the average intellectual and moral calibre who will seek to fill the void left by Agnosticism by embracing "morality as a religion"; and more particularly is this likely to happen when this cult has for its apostles, men of high character and gracious personality. It is for that very reason that we are bound to examine this plea carefully, and to ask ourselves whether it is really possible, as we are assured, "by purely natural and human means to help men to love, know, and do the right." [3] The issue is no less than a momentous one; for if religion, as generally understood, is a mere graceful superfluity when it is not "a delusion and a snare," very vast changes are bound to follow the recognition of such a fact. Dr. Coit may be a little premature in making his voluminous arrangements for the adaptation of the Established Church and the Book of Common Prayer to the uses of ethical religion; but if ethicists can convince us of the validity of their claims, then we must look forward to the fruitful service of man taking the place of the fruitless service of God.

Now the first remark we have to make is that as a matter of fact and of history a high morality has never made its appearance apart {175} from religion. Such as they are, our moral code and moral standards at their best are the product of the Christian faith; the ethical movement has neither evolved a morality of its own, nor has it anything better to put in the place of that which we owe to Christianity. Such suggestions of alleged defects in the ethics of the Gospel as are brought forward by Mr. Salter—e.g., that Jesus lacked "a scientific sense of cause and effect"; that He failed to inculcate "intellectual scrupulousness and honesty"; that we cannot go to Him for "political conceptions" and "industrial ethics," and so forth—strike one as palpably trivial, irrelevant, and made to order;[4] and leaving these not very imposing criticisms on one side, it is simply a fact that the highest laws of life were declared by Jesus Christ, and have never been superseded. And since ethicists have nothing better to propose in the domain of conduct than what we find in the Gospel—since the "higher law," as formulated by Mr. Salter, reduces itself to altruism versus living for self—there is nothing harsh in saying that the ethical movement proposes merely to take over Christian morality minus its Christian setting. If a simile may be allowed, we should say that this new firm has no goods of its own manufacture; it intends to trade with the stock, and hopes to take over the goodwill, of the old. {176} Whether that is a feasible modus operandi is another question, at which we shall glance presently; for the moment we would simply insist upon the fact that hitherto at any rate the ultimate sanction of morality has always been the religious sanction. The Churches, in basing morality on religion, can at any rate point to some actual achievements in the past; on the other hand those who maintain that morality is independent of religious belief, and that human conduct will actually rise to a higher level when this truth is recognised, must pardon us if we tell them that they are merely issuing promissory notes which may or may not be honoured when they fall due. A certain extremely important thing has been done—we will not say perfectly, but nevertheless done—in a certain way and by certain means for a very long time; anyone who assures us that he will accomplish the same important thing for us without the means which we have hitherto deemed indispensable, can hardly be surprised if we reply that while we do not doubt his entire good faith, we cannot possibly content ourselves with his bare promises in so vital a matter.

But when we say this, we shall at once be met with the rejoinder that it is manifestly unfair to argue as if Ethicism were all promise and no performance. Are there not plenty of kindly, conscientious, well-conducted agnostics who might serve as models to some of {177} their Church-going neighbours? And have we not already referred to some of the ethical teachers themselves as men of high character and gracious personality? All this may be very readily admitted; but all this has not an atom of bearing upon the matter in hand. The question really is not whether certain avowed agnostics are not as good men as certain professing Christians; but whether the moral excellences of the good agnostic are the product, the fruit, of agnosticism, in the same sense in which the virtues of the Christian are the product of Christianity. The answer to that question must be unhesitatingly in the negative. There is no disputing the historical fact that the force which has been most potent in building up our Western civilisation is none other than Christianity; the ethics which have shaped and guided right conduct through all these centuries are Christian ethics. Think as we will about dogma, few will feel competent to contest Lecky's verdict, when the historian of Rationalism and of European Morals declares that Christianity "has been the main source of moral development in Europe"; we know what this religion has done, because its actual record is open to inspection. To quote Lecky again, "Christianity has produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed." Now Agnosticism has not created its own moral system; agnostic morality at its {178} highest has so far grown in Christian soil, and to say that the flower will continue to grow in quite a different soil is to make a very bold and very hazardous prophecy. In the West we have never had anything like an agnostic civilisation, which would allow us to test the effects of non-belief upon conduct on a large scale; in the East, it is true, Japan offers us something like an agnostic civilisation, but those who are best acquainted with that nation are least inclined to exalt her performances in the domain of ethics. Japanese commercial morality is notoriously low; while Japan's dealings with Korea have called forth the unmeasured denunciations of European eyewitnesses. The material advances and military exploits of this virtually agnostic nation must not blind us to other and less admirable features; it would, indeed, seem that this highly-gifted race, while frantically eager to "gain the whole world," has not yet discovered its own soul, and the familiar question, "What shall it profit?" inevitably suggests itself.

But not only has Agnosticism so far not grown its own morality; there is yet another consideration which leads us to listen with a certain measure of scepticism to the assurances of those who say that right conduct will survive though religion be surrendered. It has perhaps not been generally observed that just as the virtuous agnostic is generally the child of Christian parents, so by a seeming irony he is {179} often found to be the father of Christian children: there is hardly a genuine case on record where "free-thought," Agnosticism, Rationalism, has descended from parents to children to the third or fourth generation without a break, and the practical non-existence of such cases proves something of real and great importance. It has been said that pure-bred Londoners die out in three generations at most, unless new blood from the country is brought in to replenish their failing vital power. If unbelief shows the same incapacity to propagate itself by natural descent—if the descendants of unbelievers show a marked tendency to "revert to type," i.e., to religion—such a fact suggests only one adequate explanation, viz., the instinct of self-preservation, a return to the soil which made the growth of the flower possible. The virtues of the agnostic may be not unfairly compared to cut flowers, which may continue to shed their perfume for awhile, but are bound to fade before long. Our agnostic ethicists, being themselves the products of a Christian civilisation, may commend, approve and practise—they may wear the Christian virtues; that those virtues will bear transplanting into an agnostic soil and flourish in an agnostic climate is a highly dubious proposition. We can only say that available experience seems to be against it. The Christian morality implies the Christian religion which has created it; as for the {180} high-minded, altruistic individual agnostic, he must simply be pronounced a credit to Christianity.

We say "the high-minded individual agnostic," because candour compels us to go on to state that generally speaking those who have thrown religion to the winds hardly strike one as standing on a particularly high ethical level. One can only go by facts; and the facts are that the frequenters of the betting-ring, the dram-shop, the light-minded, pleasure-seeking throng that flutters from amusement to amusement without any interest in life's serious duties—these are hardly drawn from the Church-going strata of society. Religion says "no" to this whole mode of life; and unbelief is most frequently, and in its most typical forms, found where the restraints of religion have proved too irksome to be tolerated. Before arguing in the abstract that morality is independent of religion, and will be advanced by its abandonment, it would perhaps be better to observe the average, concrete case of the man who has cut himself adrift from religious beliefs and influences; then it will be time to decide whether we should like to see the experiment tried on a national scale. It is easy to theorise in vacuo; in practice we are well aware that without the sanctions and the guardianship of religion morality tends to sink to the level where the accepted motto is the hedonist's "Let us eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die."

{181}

But at this point another objection will be raised; "surely," it is said, "we do not seriously maintain that men are kind to their families, honest in their every-day transactions, truthful in speech, and so forth, merely because they believe that to do so is to act in accordance with Divine injunction, and that if this belief were suddenly destroyed we should be reduced to moral chaos." But this argument, so frequently met with in this connection, misapprehends the real issue. We do not dispute that the elements of moral conduct begin to be inculcated wherever there is any social life at all. Where there is any living together, complete selfishness is impossible; there must come into being a rough law of give-and-take, a recognition of mutual rights to be respected, a certain loyalty from the individual towards the tribe, which in turn befriends and defends each of its members. Quite a number of rudimentary virtues are thus developed by the force of public opinion, which cannot tolerate flagrantly anti-social acts from one member of the community towards the rest; murder, violence, theft, false witness—these and the like offences are suppressed with a strong hand, without the need of a special supernatural revelation to decree "Thou shalt not." To be brief, there is no doubt that this social pressure is powerful enough to insist upon behaviour which will regulate most of the ordinary relationships of life in a fairly {182} satisfactory manner—i.e., relationships between equals or members of the same community. The latter is a highly important qualification; where purely natural sanctions obtain, equal rights might be enjoyed by all bona fide members of the tribe, but the same rights would not necessarily extend to an alien. And even within the community governed by such sanctions the weaker, and especially the weakest, did not rank as equals; among the most highly civilised nations of antiquity, the Greeks and Romans, infanticide and exposure flourished—indeed, as Lecky points out,[5] by the ideal legislations of Plato and Aristotle, and by the actual legislations of Lycurgus and Solon, infanticide was positively enjoined. Nothing can be more significant than to find in the Self-Tormentor of Terence the very character who expresses the noble sentiment, "I am a man, and deem nothing that is human alien from me," giving instructions that if the child that is to be born to him should be a girl, it is to be put to death. The public opinion of an enlightened and cultured paganism countenanced such deeds without reproach; it was Christianity, or rather He who said, "Suffer the little children to come unto Me," that put a stop to these barbarities.

The point which we wish to establish is this: that while "evolutional ethics" and natural {183} sanctions will carry us a certain way, they will certainly not carry us all the way; indeed, the moment we come to the higher reaches of character, these sanctions are seen to be quite inadequate. Why, e.g., should the conviction be born in man, and become a governing conviction, that he must under no circumstances commit a certain act, though to do so would be easy and advantageous, and detection not to be feared? Why should the moral consciousness of the higher races accept the principle which places self-sacrifice above self-seeking? There is only one explanation for this paradoxical phenomenon: it is that, as men rise in the moral scale, there dawns on them the sense of a law that is not of this world, an Ought-to-be, which speaks with a strange authority, and will not be denied; and when this authority is properly interpreted, it reveals a Righteous and Sovereign Will to which we owe unconditional obedience.

And here we may quote in support some significant words of Mr. Salter's—words whose full significance, we venture to think, that able and distinguished writer hardly realised when he penned them: "The whole meaning of ethics is in the sense of an invisible authority; to bow to custom, to public opinion or to law, is moral idolatry." [6] "Whatever else I may doubt about, I cannot doubt the law of duty—that there is a right and a wrong; that the {184} right obliges me, that I ought to do it. . . . The law is over all, though it were never obeyed. . . . Ethics is nothing but the response which man and man make to the higher order of things. . . . Ecstasy is the grace heaven sets upon the moment in which the soul weds itself to the perfect good." [7] Let us see what is implied in these truly remarkable statements. The real sanctions of moral conduct are not the sanctions of expediency or force, but are derived from a higher law, an invisible authority; the finest morality is man's free response to a higher order. But, we ask, what is this higher order, this note of command, but the expression of a higher Will? And how can there be a higher Will without a Higher Personality, a God who impresses His law upon us and makes us aspire after the ideal good? Mr. Salter explicitly denies that the moral virtues come "from below, from prudence, from the sense of decency, from longsighted selfishness; they who think so," he declares, in a fine burst, "never breathed the climate of morality." [8] But if not from below, they must come from above; and this "above" really must be something more than an atmospheric conception. Will Mr. Salter help us to determine its nature more clearly? He says, "The Mighty Power, hid from our gaze by the thin screen of nature and of nature's laws . . . is {185} with our struggles after a perfect right" [9]; but if this Mighty Power, which is not so much expressed as hidden by nature's laws—which therefore transcends nature—is in the highest sense moral, how can it be less than personal? It is this Power which, according to our author, gives us the vision of the ideal, this Power which sets the mark of its approval upon our surrender to its behests, this Power which manifests its character in doing justice upon individuals and nations alike, weeding out the selfish, the wanton, the luxurious, and preserving the pure and upright; may we not ask what reason there is for withholding from that Power the one adequate name of God?[10]

Let us pursue and emphasise this thought a little further. Already we have seen that—teste Mr. Salter—the highest ethics require our belief in a mighty, transcendent and benevolent Power; that admission means nothing less than the surrender of naturalism {186} in morals—it is an acknowledgment that ultimately a true ethic involves and presupposes a metaphysic. Indeed, when Mr. Salter speaks of ethical religion, the same implication is there. Religion signifies a living and personal relationship between the worshipper and the object of his worship: we can stand in such a relationship to a living, personal God, in harmony with whose will alone we are able to find our true happiness; we cannot stand in such a relationship to an impersonal power or a universal order. Mr. Salter speaks of man "bending hushed and subdued, as he thinks of those mighty laws on which the health and safety of the race depends," and calls that a religion; we submit that so far as such an emotion is religious, it means that behind those mighty laws there stands a mighty Lawgiver, whom we worship and seek to obey because He is good. We can keep a law, we can conform to it so as to escape hurt, but we cannot worship it except when we conceive of it as the manifestation of a good Will; neither can we derive moral stimulus from an abstract ideal. It is when the ideal speaks in us and to us as the behest of the Living God—above all, when it stands before us incarnated, made actual in the Son of God—that it becomes dynamic, drawing and uplifting and transforming men into the Divine likeness. We are not greatly helped by such a statement as that the bare idea of morality, {187} quite apart from faith in God, "may be the supreme passion to a man"; we have to deal with things as they are, and in actual life we well know that the most commonplace presentation of the Gospel has been more of a force in the making of character and as an inspiration to righteousness than the most refined philosophical Ethicism.

And now let us show, from yet another point of view, as we think may be done quite simply and cogently, that it is impossible rationally to get away from the theistic position if we are in earnest about morality, viewed as the pursuit of the ideal. In order to engage in such a pursuit, we must in the first place be free agents, able to choose between conflicting motives and to follow the right. If our actions are necessitated, then to speak of our "pursuing" this or that course, choosing and rejecting, is of course a mere contradiction in terms. But if the universe, including ourselves, is simply the resultant outcome of the interaction of unconscious mechanical forces, freewill is an absolute illusion, and Determinism the only true theory; and again, if Determinism is true, we cannot choose, we cannot strive—in a word, we cannot help being what we are. Hence, if morality in any intelligible sense is to exist at all, we must be free; and only a personal and transcendent God could have conferred on us the faculty of freewill.

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We pass on to one or two final considerations. One of our ethicists, who genially informs us that "theology is discredited . . . and the world is indifferent to what the Church either thinks or says," writes as follows: "The Ethical Movement believes that the good life has an imperative claim upon us because of its supreme worth for humanity." [11] As against this statement we have no hesitation in affirming that only religion, in the accepted sense of the term, can give us the absolute conviction of the absolute supremacy of moral claims—the assurance that it were better to suffer, to hunger, to be despised and rejected of men, to die on a cross, than to violate one of these. Grant that the good life is of supreme worth for humanity; yet supposing a man is sorely tempted to obtain some immense advantage or to gratify some consuming passion, at the cost of injuring someone else—suppose he can do so with safety and success—why should he prefer humanity's interests to his own? Why, indeed? We make bold to say that no one in the throes of conflict between duty and desire, at the moment of moral crisis, has ever been influenced by the worth of his action for humanity. The ultimate sanction of right conduct must be drawn from a Source beyond humanity, which enjoins the right at all costs—from Him who is humanity's Maker and Ruler.

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And the same fact is borne witness to by the experience which waits upon wilful wrong-doing, by the sense of sin. Such an emotion can never be inspired by an impersonal order with which we have come into conflict, but only by a personal Will against which we are conscious of having offended. The man who disregards the law of gravitation and falls from a ladder, experiences one kind of painful sensation; but the man who disregards the law of righteousness and falls into sin, experiences quite a different kind of painful sensation—the sensation, not of self-pity, but of self-accusation and remorse, because it is God's holiness against which he has transgressed; and that feeling finds utterance age after age in the agonised cry, "Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in Thy sight."

The truth is, those who claim to set up morality as a religion, while declaring "the personal Deity of theology illusory," are engaged in an impossible task; and it is because of the inherent hopelessness of their enterprise that we must raise our voice in warning to any who may be tempted to put faith in their fair promises. The ethicist's intentions are admirable; but he sets about their realisation in a manner which dooms him and them to failure. Let us have practice without theory, he says, the superstructure without the foundation, the fruit without the root, works without the {190} faith which produces works: and such being the nature of his undertaking, he fares accordingly, a spectacle of ineffectual goodness, wondering why the world declines to listen to his so reasonable gospel. But the world continues to cling to an ultra-rational Gospel because it is instinctively aware that morality rests upon ultra-rational sanctions. Ethicism may borrow from Christianity the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, but it has no explanation to give of the basis supporting that axiom—why we ought to regard each human being as having certain indefeasible claims upon us, so that we may not treat him as a mere means subserving our ends. That position can never be defended on purely natural grounds; in the last analysis the brotherhood of man has a right to be accepted as true only by those who believe in the Fatherhood of God.

In conclusion, as all true morality pre-supposes religion, so it is only religion which can supply the strongest incentive and encouragement to the good life; for it is religion alone which has the promise that the Good shall and must prevail, that the stars in their courses are fighting on the side of right and truth, and that it shall be well or ill with us according as we range ourselves on that side or in opposition to it. Take away the idea of a God whose will is that righteousness shall triumph, that life shall be lord of death, and {191} love victorious over all, and we have no guarantee but that all the efforts and sacrifices of martyr and reformer may be in vain, and the hope of the world a delusion. It is only the believer who can never despair, who knows that his work will endure and enrich the world—that there will be no collapse or final disarray, that the world is no blot nor blank, but means intensely and means good. It is that faith which makes endeavour and surrender worth while; that faith—the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen—which alone gives us a right to sing Felix Adler's noble hymn:—

And the work that we have builded,
Oft with bleeding hands and tears,
Oft in error, oft in anguish,
Will not perish with our years,
It will rise and shine transfigured
In the final reign of light;
It will pass into the splendours
Of the City of the Light.

For the assurance which breathes in these lines rests on a previous, deeper assurance: it is that which the Christian expresses in the words, "If God be for us, who is against us?"

[1] Ethical Religion, p. 48.

[2] Ibid, p. 39.

[3] See A Few Points about Ethical Societies, a tract issued by the Union of Ethical Societies.

[4] Ethical Religion, pp. 81, 84, 86, 89; for a concise treatment of this subject the reader may be referred to the present writer's Jesus or Christ? chapter iv.

[5] History of European Morals, ii., p. 26.

[6] Op. cit., p. 38.

[7] Ibid. pp. 16-18.

[8] Op. cit., p. 17.

[9] Ibid., p. 57.

[10] "If for the word 'God' you read the 'universal life,'" writes the Rev. R. J. Campbell, "you have at once gained the ear of every high-minded thinking man to whom you appeal." (The Christian Commonwealth, April 14th, 1909.) Are we, then, to understand that if we want to appeal to high-minded thinking men, we must drop the term "God" and substitute for it, as being less offensive to these higher thinkers, some non-committal phrase like "universal life?" We say quite frankly that we are not prepared to pay such a price for making such a successful appeal; for the "universal life"—just because it is universal and all-embracing—is no more "good" than "bad"—it has no moral character, and hence can exercise no moral authority, nor generate any moral enthusiasm.

[11] What the Ethical Movement is, by Harry Snell.

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CHAPTER XI

PROBLEMS OF PRAYER

In the opening chapters of this book we had occasion once or twice to ask ourselves in passing how the new emphasis on the doctrine of Divine immanence was likely to affect the question of prayer; in turning now to a more direct treatment of the latter subject, this is again the first and most important query we shall have to consider. Truth, as we all know, is a "mean"—it represents a balance between opposing extremes; what is, however, not always recognised is that the extremes are not necessarily equidistant from the true centre, and there are cases when it is of the greatest importance to discern which of them is nearer and which more remote from the truth. In the present instance we have insisted all along that of the two possible extremes of Deism and Pantheism the former, with its exclusive insistance upon God's transcendence, is not only more intelligible but far more true than the latter, with its one-sided stress on His immanence; for, as we previously expressed it, in the exercise of religion it is the transcendent God {193} with whom we are concerned. In fact, Deism may be a very faulty type of religion, theoretically considered; but Pantheism is religion's practical annihilation. It is not for nothing that in Persia, e.g., the name of Sufi—in theory a pantheistic believer in the identity of the worshipper with his Deity—signifies in current use not a mystic, but a freethinker!

So far as the religious life is concerned, we repeat that Deism is the lesser error and the lesser danger; and nowhere is this more closely brought home to us than when we consider the reality and the meaning of prayer. For however far-off God may be thought to be, it has never been suggested that the voice of prayer is not able to travel across the distance—He may "hear us in heaven, His dwelling-place, and when He heareth, forgive;" but if His presence is so universally diffused that we ourselves form part of it, we shall hardly know to whom or to what to address ourselves in the act of adoration. We can pray to a Deity conceived as solely transcendent, but not to a Deity conceived as solely immanent, i.e., as the Sum of Being. A vague "cosmic emotion" differs toto coelo from worship; we cannot worship that which includes us, for if we did we should be indulging in self-worship, and as for prayer, we could no more seriously offer it to the universe than to the atmosphere. This point cannot be too clearly realised. Prayer is the soul's communion with God; but if the soul is an {194} integral constituent of God, a mode or phase of the Divine Being, then this communion, being already an accomplished and unalterable fact, cannot be so much as desired, still less does it need to be brought about by prayer or any other means whatsoever. Nothing could be more instructive in this connection than what is apparently a favourite illustration with those for whom immanence is only a synonym for Monism, and which likens the relation of God to the individual soul to that subsisting between the ocean and some individual bay: "the hundred bays and gulfs and creeks that succeed each other round the island," we read, "are in the ocean, and the ocean is in them." [1] Now let us see what this means. There may be the most urgent necessity for digging channels to connect a reservoir with the sea, so that it may be filled with its fulness; but it would be absurd to speak of opening up or renewing communication between bay and ocean—a communication whose uninterrupted nature is implied in the very terms of the image. On such an interpretation of immanence, prayer in any real sense is either superfluous or impossible; for if no one hopeth for that which he {195} seeth, neither would any one in his senses seek to bring to pass a condition of things which is thought to be already existing. Here we see once more the unbridgeable gulf between every form of "idealistic Monism"—Eastern or Western—and Christianity; for while, e.g., "the central idea of Indian piety is meditation, the absorption of the individual in the life-spirit, the experience of identity with the universality and oneness of the Godhead," on the other hand "Christianity is the religion of prayer—prayer is its crown and its pearl." [2]

That is really the crux of the whole matter; prayer must be conceived as an active intercourse between the worshipper and a Person other than himself, who is the object of his worship. It is not a soliloquy—what the Germans expressively call a Selbstgespräch, or "self-talk"; it is not a monologue, but a dialogue; it is not a mere contemplation, but addressed to Someone who is thought of as willing to listen and able to answer. As Sabatier has well said, "Prayer is religion in act; that is, prayer is real religion." Wherever men believe in a personal God, as distinct from an "all-inclusive consciousness of being" of which they are fleeting expressions—mere surface ripples on an infinite ocean—that belief will attest itself by the prayerful life. On the other hand, a prayerless religion is a contradiction in terms; it either has no needs to express or {196} it will die from lack of self-expression. The believer will pray from a sense of inner necessity, coupled with the instinctive assurance that the need of which he is conscious will thus, and thus only, meet with its satisfaction. "The genuineness of religion"—to quote Professor William James—"is thus indissolubly bound up with the question whether the prayerful consciousness be or be not deceitful. The conviction that something is genuinely transacted in this consciousness is the very core of living religion." [3]

Is there, then, or is there not, something "genuinely transacted" in the experience of prayer? A transaction, ex hypothesi, can only take place between two parties; it implies two volitional centres. And, furthermore, what is it that is transacted? Is prayer only a very noble form of auto-suggestion—are its effects merely subjective, or are they also objective? These are problems which could hardly be said to exist for an earlier age; to the modern mind they are intensely real, and press for answers. It must be recognised at once that the idea of God as immanent in nature, expressing Himself in those observed uniformities to which we give the name of natural laws, creates difficulties of its own in regard to this subject; for if these laws show forth His will, is it even thinkable that our formulated desires could move Him to depart from what we might speak of as His original {197} intention? His will is either the absolutely best or it is not; if it is, why pray that He may modify it? If it is not, is He not less than perfectly good, since His design admits of improvement? Can we conceive of Him as doing something in answer to a human petition which He would not do apart from such a petition? Can we think of Him as being prevailed upon by our assiduities and importunities to alter His decrees—is not this whole notion rather paltry and derogatory to His dignity? Everybody is familiar with these questions and arguments; let us see in what proportion truth and error are combined in them.

(1) A good deal of unnecessary difficulty arises in the first place from the habitual failure of many people to bear in mind that though God is immanent in the cosmos, He is not only immanent; as soon as His transcendence is realised, it is seen that there exists no a priori reason against the possibility of what from our point of view would look like Divine interpositions in the ordinary course of nature. We have, it must be remembered, not the slightest grounds for assuming that there can be no departures from the uniformities of nature, nor are we in a position to state dogmatically that no imaginable conditions would ever furnish an adequate reason for such a departure. Admitting that the regular processes observed in the physical universe represent something of the Divine mode of action, we have no {198} warrant for maintaining that these are the only modes of such action; probability, in effect, is all the other way. "Lo, these are but the outskirts of His ways; and how small a whisper do we hear of Him! But the thunder of His power who can understand?" A transcendent God is eo ipso not limited to such methods as we happen to have caught a glimpse or a whisper of.

(2) But when this is clearly understood, it has on the other hand to be as frankly admitted—indeed, it is stating the obvious to say—that in modern times the idea of the uniformity of nature has obtained such a hold upon the general educated mind as renders any breach of that order far more improbable to us than it could have appeared to a pre-scientific generation. All physical science rests, broadly speaking, upon the assumption that nature acts uniformly; without saying that it must be so, we are well assured that it is so, because all observation and experiment are found to bear out the truth of the principle we have assumed. All we have learned concerning nature excludes the notion that there is anything haphazard or arbitrary in her ways. We do not feel at all as though the action of natural forces might be suspended or modified for our particular benefit, and hence certain ideas of the efficacy of prayer—e.g., for rain or fine weather—have become impossible for us to entertain with the ease of our ancestors. We start with a mental attitude—hardly {199} to be called a prejudice, since it is based upon a large body of experience—of profound assurance that in matters like these the will of God finds its expression in the unbroken operation of His ordinary laws, "without variableness or shadow of turning"; most people, moreover, would acknowledge that it is better that these laws should be stable and capable of being learned and depended upon than that the Divine will should be incalculable—ondoyant et divers—a matter of moods on His side and of importunity on ours. Tennyson's familiar lines represent the typically modern outlook with the utmost accuracy and conciseness:—

God is Law, say the wise; O soul, and let us rejoice[1]
For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His Voice.

(3) And while the scientific temper of the present day could not fail to affect our thoughts concerning prayer in some directions, the same has surely to be said about the ethical temper of the age, as shown in our enlarged conceptions of God. To put it bluntly, much of the language about what used to be called "special providences" has become unreal and ceased to be edifying for us. On this whole subject some words of Principal Adeney's can hardly be bettered:—

Under the old theory God had His favourites who were saved by hair-breadth escapes, in accidents that were fatal to persons who were not the objects of "special providences"; this was supposed to account for the fact that one man in particular found that somebody else {200} had taken the last berth in the ship he had meant to sail by, and so escaped the fate of the crew and passengers when it went down with all on board—no "special providence" saving them. It looks like a reflection of the pagan mythological tales about heroes rescued by the timely interference of gods and goddesses in battles where thousands of common mortals perish unheeded. It is the aristocratic idea of privilege carried up to religion. The newer view is more democratic, and it seems to agree better with our Lord's assurance that not a sparrow falls to the ground without our Father's notice, that the very hairs of our heads are all numbered.[4]

All this has its direct bearing upon the subject of prayer. We may still be occasionally regaled with stories of one solitary sailor being saved—Providence looking after him in response to his mother's petitions—while every other soul on board was drowned; but these narratives, once irresistible in the impression they created, are to-day received with somewhat mixed feelings. The view of God's character which they inculcate is apt to strike us as unsatisfactory; that He should avert a great and presumedly unmerited physical calamity from one individual simply and solely because He has been asked to do so by some other individual, while allowing the same calamity to overtake numerous others no more deserving of affliction, does not fit in with our conception of Him. We are slowly learning to substitute for the notion of any kind of preferential treatment at the hand of God a belief in the unchanging goodness of His decrees, in the wisdom of His counsel, {201} and in the reality of His abiding and enfolding love; by Providence we mean something that is neither local nor personal, nor particular, but universal—the Providence of unchanging law—that living and loving Will which "knoweth altogether."

(4) But if, owing to such considerations as these, we are less inclined to-day to frame certain kinds of petition, or to expect them to be answered, it is also true that we are increasingly coming to re-discover what should never have been forgotten, viz., that petition is not the whole but only a part, and perhaps a subordinate part, of prayer. A glance at our Lord's priceless bequest to humanity, the Model Prayer, should suffice to place this beyond a doubt. If we study it clause by clause, we find that the first place is assigned simply to adoration, and the claiming of the supreme privilege of spiritual communion, with an implicit, although not explicit, thanksgiving for that privilege; next we find two clauses expressive of aspiration for the achievement of the highest aims, with the implied vow to help on their realisation by our own conduct and efforts; and not until then do we come upon a supplication, which moreover prays only for the simplest of material blessings—for bare sustenance, in fact. This is followed by confession, with a prayer for mercy, and a promise to show ourselves merciful to our brethren; and a prayer for deliverance {202} and guidance brings us to the final act of praise. Thus, with one most modest exception, the blessings which God is asked to bestow are spiritual blessings; for a petition asking, e.g., that the operation of some natural law may be temporarily suspended for our benefit we should look altogether in vain. In any case we ought to learn from the one prayer which our Lord expressly taught His disciples to give to mere petition a much less prominent place than it usually occupies; adoration, confession and thanksgiving should between them take the predominant share in our communion with the Most High, thus correcting the tendency to make of prayer a mere recital of wants more or less indiscriminately addressed to the Divine bounty. The supreme object to be kept in view is that we should become of God's way of thinking—not that we should attempt to make Him of ours; in Matthew Henry's shrewd comparison, prayer is like the boat-hook, which brings the boat to the land, not the land to the boat.

But when we have clarified our ideas on the subject to this extent, we must once more face the question suggested by Professor James—What is it that is transacted? The effect of prayer upon those who offer it is too well-attested to be called into doubt; what we have to ask ourselves, however, is whether those effects are, in the strict sense of the term, purely "subjective," i.e., as we {203} previously expressed it, in the nature of a noble auto-suggestion. The answer to that query must in the last resort be determined by our thought concerning God and our relation to Him. Let it be said once more: if, with the pantheist, we assume that we are essentially and inalienably one with the All—part of It, as the bay is of the ocean—prayer, as the theist understands it, is a self-contradiction; if offered at all, it will be, not the establishment of a relation which is ex hypothesi always in being, but at most a clearer realisation by the particle of its fundamental identity with the Whole. Prayer is founded upon the belief that the Deity is at least interested in His worshipper—or else, why speak to the Unheeding? But Spinozism distinctly denies the possibility of God's entertaining any feelings towards individuals—indeed, Spinoza condemns the individual's desire for God's personal love; at most he will admit that "'God, inasmuch as He loves Himself, loves men,' because men are parts and proportions of God. . . The complacency of the Universe in its self-awareness, the love of God towards Himself, as Spinoza has it, includes us in its embrace, and that is enough." [5] We reply that this "complacency of the Universe in its self-awareness" may be enough for Spinozists; but it is not enough to move men to prayer—and this is borne out by Mr. Picton's total silence on this {204} topic in his exposition of his Master's doctrine. Mr. Chesterton, with his usual felicity of phrase, hits the nail on the head when he says that upon this principle "the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person;" certainly it should be clear that on this assumption, as there can be no return of affection from a God whose love is only self-love, so the effect of prayer can only be that which is produced upon the soul by its consciousness—supposed to be elevating—of being an infinitesimal fraction of an infinite totality. We say that this consciousness is supposed to be elevating, though why it should be so is not quite apparent; for whatever this heterogeneous sum-total of existences may be, it is not, in our sense of the term, good, as the God of Christianity is good.

But if, instead of losing ourselves in the fog-land of Pantheism, Theosophy and their unavowed congeners, we take our stand upon the firm belief in the otherness of God, the case alters altogether. Prayer at once becomes rational instead of being a contradiction in terms; it is the accomplishment of something which is not already accomplished; it springs from the consciousness of a spiritual need, it is born of the instinct of spiritual self-preservation. It sets up a connection between two centres—man and God—which can only be connected because of a fundamental likeness subsisting between them; but the likeness is not oneness—indeed, the latter would exclude {205} the former, for only separates can be like each other. On this theory prayer is no mere meditation, but an intense and strenuous endeavour to make actual something that is only potential; to use the simile we previously employed, it is a digging of channels along which the sea may pour of its fulness into an inland reservoir. That this is what really takes place in prayer—that there is such a real response from Him to whom it is directed—we have no hesitation whatever in affirming; and this notwithstanding the fact that such an experience cannot be proved to one who has not shared it, any more than we can convey a sense of the grandeur of Mont Blanc to one whose eye has never beheld its majestic proportions. Evidently, in this as in every corresponding case the testimony of those who say that they have had a certain experience must be preferred to that of others who can only say that they have not had it; and the witness to spiritual renewal, reinforcement, replenishing received in prayer—to the entering in of a Presence when the doors were thrown open; to a peace and blessedness which were not of the world's giving—this witness is so strong and so uniform that we have no choice but to pronounce it decisive. In every such case something had been "genuinely transacted"; not only had man spoken, but God had answered—the worshipper had not merely invoked, but in a very real sense he had evoked, the Divine Presence.

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But can we go any further than this? Can we, that is to say, maintain that God answers prayer, not only by flooding the adoring soul with fresh strength, gladness, confidence, but by bringing to pass events which otherwise would not have come about? This "objective efficacy" of prayer, in the narrower sense, is frequently doubted to-day; but, as we shall attempt to show, upon grounds which, when examined, prove untenable. The difficulty, as it is most generally stated, arises from a misunderstanding; answers to prayer are regarded as interferences with the uniformities of nature, as arbitrary—and therefore unthinkable—interruptions of the chain of cause and effect, for which there can be no room in an orderly universe. This, no doubt, was what Turgenev meant when he asked, "Does not all prayer mean au fond a wish that in a given case two and two may not make four?" That Turgenev's aphorism quite illegitimately narrows down the meaning of prayer to petition, may pass; it is more important for us to investigate his implied challenge—the grounds upon which he expresses his absolute disbelief in the fulfilment of such petitions.[6]

A simple preliminary reflection should come to our aid. God is surely always bringing things to pass on condition that we first do certain other things, and on no other conditions {207} whatsoever. The seeking has to go before the finding, the knocking to precede the opening of the doors. He will give us waving corn, providing the ground is ploughed and sown; that is to say, He answers our request, if we will make it in the right manner—He lays down certain rules on compliance with which we may secure certain blessings. Is it objected that ploughing and sowing, unlike prayer, are physical exertions made for the purpose of bringing about physical results? That would be a very superficial view; it is certainly truer to say that they are acts of will, and even acts of faith; and in the ultimate analysis the power which has produced the harvest is not the power of matter, but of mind—the mind of man acting in accordance with the Mind of God. Man has asked, God has answered; and would not have answered in that particular manner but for the particular manner of that request.

Let us go a step further, still keeping to the obvious. Most visitors to Geneva have made the short excursion to the Forces matrices, the great power-station where the swift waters of the Rhone are pressed into the service of man and made to light the streets, propel the tramways and drive all the machinery of the {208} city. Now these vast powers were always there—no law of nature was broken, nor any new one introduced, when they were utilised to lighten man's labours and multiply his energies; all that has happened is that man has discovered existing laws and harnessed them to his use, and once more the real force motrice resides not in those silently-revolving engines that generate the electric current, but in the mind that devised and controls them.

Thought, then—unseen, impalpable—is energy in its essence, the master force which directs, subdues and uses matter; and in prayer we have already seen that we place ourselves in communication with the Central Force of the universe, acquiring power we should not otherwise possess, and replenishing our emptiness from an inexhaustible store. But if thought, mind, will, are that which lies behind all physical accomplishment, from the simplest to the most wonderful; and if by an exercise of the same faculty we may actually secure results of a spiritual order, direct answering messages, from God: why should it be a priori unthinkable that we may by the same agency of prayer obtain more "objective" responses, viz., the fulfilment of our petitions? Frankly, we can discover no theoretical grounds on which such a possibility could be merely waved on one side as not worth consideration. Shall we be told that we cannot think that God would grant a certain wish only on condition that we {209} expressed it to Him? But we have already found that in the regular experience of life the Divine bounty seems to come in response to human efforts which are ultimately efforts of the will. Once more, everything depends upon our thought of God; if He is such as Jesus taught us to regard Him, may it not well be that His Fatherly love goes out to us in fullest measure when we call upon it with fullest and most childlike trust? If it is urged that God would surely under all circumstances grant His children whatever may contribute to their happiness, we need only observe that every parent has had occasion to say to a much-loved child, "You shall have this when you know how to ask for it." The truth has been stated with characteristic simplicity and insight by Dr. James Drummond, in the words, "If God has left certain things dependent on the action of the human will, He may also have left certain things dependent on human petition." [7]

So much is sure, that in all true prayer we set spiritual forces in motion, to whose effects upon ourselves we can bear witness; and if their action in one direction is an ascertained fact, however mysterious and inexplicable, with what warrant shall we deny the possibility of their acting in another? Certainly we shall not argue that such action involves an "interference" with natural law; and if we have to admit our ignorance as to {210} how such a force would operate and bring results to pass, let us remind ourselves that the ultimate "how?"—the bridge between antecedent and consequent, and why the former should be followed by the latter—always and inevitably escapes us. Why in the thousand and more observed forms of snow-crystals the filaments of ice should always be arranged at angles of 60 degrees or 120 degrees; why sulphate of potash and sulphate of alumina should crystallise in octahedrons or in cubes, but in no other forms; what is the real connection between molecular changes in the brain-substance and states of consciousness—all these, and a myriad more, are unsolved mysteries: we can only say that we are dealing with facts of experience. And as in these and countless other cases, so here also, in this matter of answers to prayer, the final and only test is that of experience. That a vessel in distress should be able to send a message to another vessel a hundred miles out of sight, and summon it to its aid, would have struck an earlier generation as a piece of wild romancing—but we know it is actually done; that a soul's earnest prayer may avail to enlist mighty energies in its help and so to bring about results which otherwise would not have come to pass, ought hardly to strike the present age as an inherently incredible proposition.

But we shall be told that our parallel does not hold good: if the Marconi apparatus failed seven times out of ten, we should hardly {211} think it worth while to provide our ships with so unreliable an instrument; yet who would say that even three out of ten prayers for stated objects met with fulfilment? The objection, however, is not unanswerable; indeed, the very comparison employed in stating it may enable us to supply at least a partial answer. For we understand that the success of wireless messages being transmitted and received depends upon absolutely perfect "tuning"; the electric waves set up, i.e., will only act upon a receiver most delicately attuned to a particular rate of oscillations, and when the difference between the rate of oscillation of the waves and the receiver exceeds one per cent., resonance ceases altogether, so that the message may be sent, but will not be received. It strikes us as hardly a fanciful supposition that many prayers fail to obtain an answer for a precisely analogous reason, i.e., for lack of attuning. The mere uttering of devotional phraseology, or even the sending forth of anguished appeals, does not of necessity constitute true prayer at all, and hence remains ineffective, because the soul is not really en rapport with God. We suggest that the supplication which "availeth much in its working" will be the outcome of a whole spiritual discipline, whereby the individual spirit has become attuned to the Spirit whom it seeks; if the majority of prayers go unanswered, it is because they are mere recitals of a tale of wants, without even an attempt upon the {212} part of those who utter them to put themselves into the attitude upon which an answer depends. On the other hand, where the adjustment of which we speak has reached a high state of perfection, the soul not only transmits its message to God with the perfect assurance of being heard, but it is also continually sensitive to the messages which incessantly flash through the spiritual ether from God, but which only those can hear who have learned the secret of listening for His word.

In dealing with this question of unanswered prayer, we have given the first place to what seems to us the most important as well as the least frequently regarded reason—the lack of spiritual discipline, which is ultimately the lack of faith, with which we pray. When we remember, moreover, that many of our petitions are framed in very natural and inevitable ignorance of what is for our truest good, we realise another and very obvious reason for the non-fulfilment of a large proportion of the wishes we lay before the throne of God, whose goodness is as much attested by what He denies to our foolishness as by what He grants to our entreaties. And how numerous are the prayers which reflection and an awakened moral sense rule out of court: prayers which ask God to do for us by special intervention what we ought to do for ourselves by our own effort and industry; prayer for success in dealings and enterprises which in themselves are ethically {213} unjustifiable, and to which the only answer could be, "Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself"; prayers which carry the spirit of egoism, of competition, of bargaining even into our relations with the Most High; prayers of an imprecatory character such as meet and shock us in some of the psalms. How could these and their like possibly be granted by a just and merciful Creator?

But apart from such presumptuous, foolish, or impious supplications as are at once repulsed and rebuked by the Divine silence, what are the objects we may lawfully pray for, asking for a response? It must be confessed that with the exception of petitions for spiritual blessings—for a deeper faith, for a more complete obedience, for a humbler heart, for a wider sympathy—such as can never be out of place, it is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line; there is, indeed, a whole vast category of possible objects of prayer which one cannot a priori pronounce legitimate or otherwise. We can only humbly confess that "we know not how to pray as we ought," nor what things it is in our best interest to have granted or withheld from us; but with this proviso, and with the clause, "Nevertheless, not my will but Thine," added to our petitions, there can be no wrong in making our requests to God for every manner of blessing, material or otherwise, and whether on our own behalf or on behalf of others. Here we may surely with {214} all confidence and with all reverence invoke the analogy of human parenthood. No true earthly parent is offended or moved to impatience by his children expressing to him all their wants and wishes with perfect unreserve, even though his loving wisdom has anticipated their real needs, and will decide which of their desires may be granted; indeed, as we already hinted, the granting of those desires may depend to some extent upon the children's attitude, upon the filial, trustful, affectionate disposition they exhibit. So in regard to the supplications we address to our Father in Heaven: we cannot think of His being moved by our mere importunity, or by the mechanical repetition of set phrases; but that the fulfilment of some wish of ours may be conditioned by our humility and confidence in expressing it, presents no improbability. In any case, what is necessary on our part is that we should have faith, not only in God's power to grant our petitions, but in His wisdom in granting or refusing them as may be most expedient for us. We ourselves can, within limits, fulfil most of our children's requests; but a wise and loving parent will many a time say "no," when his child may marvel at what to him must seem a mere arbitrary or even unkind refusal of an innocent desire. That hapless man of genius, the late John Davidson, condensed the truth into one illuminating phrase when he spoke of prayer rightly uttered as {215} "submissive aspiration"; it would be difficult to devise another form of words equally brief yet containing so much of the essence of the matter. Even short of actual fulfilment, it is an immeasurable privilege simply to speak to God about all the things that weigh on our minds, assured of His hearing, nor should the fact that He knows all about our troubles before we open our lips concerning them restrain our utterance; for our object is not to give Him information, but to place ourselves in conscious communion with Him, and by viewing our affairs in His light to see light.

This applies to all our petitions, and perhaps in an especial measure to intercessory prayer, those touching requests which we send up for our dear ones in sickness, peril, sorrow, need, or any other adversity. Of course, all such intercessions ought to be mentally qualified by the assurance that God will do what is best, even though we may be unable to understand His decrees; but there is nothing unreasonable in the belief that our prayers for others may be, and frequently are, directly effective, setting energies in motion which might otherwise have remained latent and inoperative. How these energies operate may be quite beyond our power to ascertain or even to guess; but if—to say it once more—the action of matter on matter, the "how" of chemical combinations, eludes us, shall we complain because the action of mind on mind, spirit on spirit, is no {216} less elusive? The final test—whether, e.g., a mother's prayer that her absent son may be preserved from the snare of some great temptation, is able to work a change in his mind—is, as we said above, the test of experience; and unless we are dogmatically determined to reject all testimony which bears on this subject, there seems no escaping the conclusion that specific prayers have been specifically, directly, and unmistakeably answered in instances too numerous to admit of explanation by coincidence.[8] The volume of human testimony bearing on this subject is too great to be swept aside by a simple refusal to consider it; if there is no insurmountable logical obstacle to the possibility of prayer proving objectively effective—and we have tried to show that there are no such obstacles—we must examine the alleged instances of such answers without prejudice; and if we do so, then, after making all legitimate deductions, we shall still find a body of residual fact which is not to be explained away.

By all means, then, we conclude, let us obey the instincts which urge us to turn to God in {217} prayer; they lie deeper and are less fallible—embodying as they do the experience of the race—than our individual reasonings. We may tell our Father in all simplicity of whatever desires we may cherish with an approving conscience, leaving the fulfilment to His wise and steadfast love; it is not the ignorance of our requests but the faithlessness of our spirits that we most stand in need of guarding against. Let us here, as elsewhere, follow the example of the Son of God, whose unique intimacy with the Father made Him only the more earnest in communing with Him, least lonely when alone with God. Above all, let us bear in mind that the best prayer is that which has least of self-seeking in it, but is answered in the making, and so sends us back to our tasks—perhaps to our trials—refreshed as by a draught from some hidden and precious spring, renewed in manhood and nearer to God. In the oft-quoted aphorism of George Meredith, "He who rises from his prayer a better man, his prayer is answered." As a Greater than Meredith said, "Your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things; but seek ye first His Kingdom, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." The ideal prayer is that which will ask little, aspire much, submit altogether; it is the soul's complete surrender to and rest in God.

[1] The Rev. E. W. Lewis, M.A., B.D., in a paper on "The Divine Immanence, its Meaning and its Implications." Compare also The New Theology, p. 34. As Dr. William Adamson observes, "The illustration is unfortunate. The supposed ocean is to be thought of as infinite, and the bay is finite, but in their essence and existence they are essentially one. There can be no bay where there is no boundary, and where in this case could the boundary be found, for there can be nothing outside the infinite?"

[2] Bousset, Faith of a Modern Protestant, p. 59.

[3] The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 466.

[4] A Century's Progress, p. 105-6.

[5] Spinoza, by J. Allanson Picton, p. 213.

[6] So far, of course, as such an attitude may be the outcome of an antecedent disbelief in God, it is perfectly logical; only we have no common ground with those who take that view. It is otherwise, however, where an avowed acceptance of Theism is nevertheless accompanied by doubts as regards any objective effects flowing from supplications addressed to God; it is with such doubts as these that we are concerned.

[7] Studies in Christian Doctrine, p. 197.

[8] Precisely such an instance was brought under the notice of the present writer by a correspondent, whose prayers that an absent one in distant lands might be able to resist the power of strong temptation was "heard" past all doubting—and that without the object of these petitions being aware of the cause, as let a remark of his own attest: "I don't know why, but sometimes I feel myself in some way held back from doing certain things—how, I cannot explain; I only know that I should do as others do, were it not for this compelling feeling."

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CHAPTER XII

IMMORTALITY

Throughout the preceding pages we have been principally engaged in tracing the effects of the idea of Divine immanence upon the main contents of religious thought. While trying to show that this idea, rightly understood and set in its proper place, embodies an important and at one time unduly neglected truth, we have also seen that its misinterpretation and over-emphasis—the tendency to view it as not only true but as constituting the whole truth—is attended by dangers of a particularly grave character. Under whatever name, idealistic Monism or any other, the doctrine which recognises only one ultimate Existence expressing itself in all things and working its will in all events, is fatal to any religion worthy the name; indeed, since the term "religion" indicates a link, and a link is possible only between things or beings requiring to be held together, the fundamental tenet of Monism excludes religion in the only vital sense it has ever been known to bear, and more especially the Christian religion. Quite {219} inevitably it abandons the personality and Fatherhood of God, the selfhood and freedom of man, the reality of sin and evil, which it describes as "not-being," and the value and rationality of prayer—for how or to whom can we pray if we are already "on the eternal throne"? Quite inevitably, therefore, we may add, the votaries of this philosophy, in attempting to accommodate it to the facts of life, the intuitions of the moral self and the aspirations of the soul, are faced everywhere by irreconcilable antinomies and "find no end, in wandering mazes lost."

Are the assumptions of the monist any more in harmony with the doctrine of immortality than with those other beliefs with which it thus finds itself at variance? We have already seen that they are not: neither the Monism of Mr. Picton nor that of Mr. Wells leaves any room for personal survival—as is, indeed, only to be expected in accordance with their premises; for if the individual as such does not really exist, why should he persist? And from yet another monistic quarter we are oracularly assured that we shall "one day know that the end of our being is that it may be submerged without reserve in the infinite ocean of God." Nothing could be more definite; nor, it must be confessed, more utterly hopeless. To be "submerged without reserve" is to cease from even the illusion of individuality; it is absorption, Nirvana.

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In taking up this position, in finally quenching

The hope whereto so passionately cling
The dreaming generations from of old,

the monist is merely true to his creed; we may, however, express a preference that he should do so without religious circumlocutions—that the verdict should be, as in the famous historical instance, "la mort, sans phrase." When Mr. Wells says—

I do not believe I have any personal immortality. . . The experiment will be over, the rinsed beaker returned to its shelf, the crystals gone dissolving down the wastepipe—[1]

we know where we are, and feel thankful to the author for his frankness; to talk about submersion in "the infinite ocean of God," on the other hand, invests an idea which, nakedly stated, means annihilation pure and simple, with a pseudo-religious air which is far more subtly dangerous. Indeed, of the various expedients for extinguishing men's faith in the life to come, this is probably the most insidiously effective in use to-day; it is the silken handkerchief, drenched with chloroform and held quite gently to the victim's face—a lethal weapon in all but appearance. And there are some who are attracted by the faint, cloying odour of this chloroform.

Before we examine this fashionable doctrine of absorption, however, it may be well to deal {221} with certain other causes which between them account for much of the uneasiness—often unavowed but nevertheless very real—concerning a future life, which unquestionably is widely felt in our day. All assertions to the contrary notwithstanding, it is a case of uneasiness, and not of indifference; the bravado which professes to give thanks to "whatever gods there be"—

That no life lives for ever
That dead men rise up never,
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea—

convinces no one. Most men have known moods of severe depression and lassitude when not to be at all seemed the one consummation to be desired; but that is not the normal attitude of normal people. Such would still fain believe that the grave is not the end, but many of them are in a state of bewilderment and insecurity. On the one hand men have never grown reconciled to the heart-breaking triviality of death, never accepted this dispensation without a question, a hope, or, failing hope, a sense of rebellion; on the other, we have to recognise that we live in an age when multitudes have ceased to accept religious beliefs simply upon the authority of the Bible—when educated people generally have come quite definitely to disbelieve in the resurrection of the body, a final day of judgment, a localised {222} heaven and material hell—an age which must be one of manifold doubts and misgivings.

But this break-up of Biblical authority and its unquestioning acceptance is itself largely due to that resistless advance of physical science which has reconstructed the world for us with such masterful hands. The results of the modern conception of the universe are only just beginning to get into our system; as yet they are still largely unassimilated, and give us trouble accordingly. Let us take such a statement as the following, and imagine its effect upon the average individual:—

Think of Mercury in its wild rush through the solar heat, or Venus gleaming in the western sky, or ruddy Mars with its tantalising problems, or of mighty Jupiter 1,230 times the size of our own planet, or of Saturn with its wondrous rings, or of Uranus and Neptune revolving in their tremendous orbits—the latter nearly three thousand millions of miles away from the centre of our system. . . But the true awfulness is yet untouched. What of the millions of millions of suns that blaze in immeasurable space beyond our comparatively little solar sphere? Sirius alone, at the foot of the constellation of Orion, is 125 times larger than our sun. Fifteen hundred millions of millions of miles away, where ordinary eyes dimly descry half a dozen points of light, the telescope reveals more than a thousand orbs, some seventy of them vaster than our sun. What indeed is the whole of this our tiny planet compared with Alcyone—1,000 times larger than our central sun![2]

These, of course, are among the commonplaces of modern astronomy; but we do not think we {223} are wrong in saying that they leave a great many minds singularly ill at ease, in a condition of vague but unmistakeable discomfort, oppressed by the vastness of the universe as revealed by science, feeling lost and utterly insignificant in this illimitable expanse of worlds on circling worlds, and aeons upon exhaustless aeons. It was possible, when the universe was regarded as a comparatively small affair, with our earth as its veritable centre, to think oneself of sufficient value in the scheme of things to live for ever; but now such a claim seems to not a few grotesque in its presumption. Have we not been told by Mr. Balfour that, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, man's "very existence is an accident, his story a brief and discreditable episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets"?—and shall such a one, member of such a race, dream of prolonging his atomic existence world without end? As Lucretius asked:—

What! Shall the dateless worlds to dust be blown
Back to the unremembered and unknown,
And this frail Thou—this flame of yesterday—
Burn on, forlorn, immortal, and alone?

This mental attitude, familiar enough nowadays, has been forcibly and typically expressed in a clever, melancholy book, The Letters Which never Reached Him. "We suffer," the author says, "from our own diminutiveness and from the narrow limits of our life and knowledge since the endlessness of space and time have {224} been taught to us. People of former epochs cannot have known this contrast between human smallness and the world's infinity; they must have been more contented, because they fancied they were made in right proportion to everything else." Such conditions as these favoured the flourishing of "that highest blossom of the conviction of personal importance, the belief in one's eternal individual continuance." "But one who has been cast by the waves on countless foreign shores, and who has reflected that everywhere, and since times infinite, millions and millions have been born and buried without leaving by their coming and going more trace than the swarms of insects which for a moment glide through the rays of the sun—such a one loses the belief in the importance of all transitory phases, and doubts the inner necessity of an eternal continuance for all those ephemeral, ant-like existences which in endless, unchanging repetitions ever rise anew to disappear again." Modern astronomy and geology, by expanding the world beyond all conception, seem, in fact, but to emphasise Omar Khayyam's mocking lines:—

And fear not lest Existence, closing your
Account and mine, should know the like no more;
The Eternal Saki from that bowl hath pour'd
Millions of Bubbles like us, and will pour.

And if such are the reflections forced upon us by the contemplation of the vastness of {225} the cosmos—a vastness in whose midst we feel homeless and forlorn—it has further to be remembered that the attitude of modern science, as embodied in that of some of its most confident and popular representatives, has been distinctly and openly unfavourable to belief in a future life. If man was truly descended from the lower creation, it seemed obvious to infer that as had been his origin, so also would be his destiny—the destiny of the beasts that perish. The Kraft und Stoff school of physicists proclaimed aloud that consciousness was only a function of the brain, and would come to a stop together with the mechanism which produced it; as Haeckel expressed it, "The various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts of the brain, and cannot be exercised unless these are in a normal condition; if the areas are destroyed their function is extinguished; and this is especially applicable to the 'organs of thought,' the four central instruments of mental activity." [3] But if our inner life was merely the counterpart of certain changes in the grey matter of the brain, how could the function be expected to persist after its organ had undergone decay?

Such, in short, are our principal modern difficulties with regard to belief in a life to come; do they, or do they not, present valid and insuperable obstacles to a reasonable faith?

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(1) While making all allowance for the feeling of insignificance and forlornness which is apt to overwhelm us when we begin to realise the immensity of the material universe, a little closer thought should make it obvious that nothing in the nature of mere bulk or bigness furnishes even a reasonable presumption, let alone a convincing argument, against the survival of the soul; it is indeed difficult to perceive what legitimate bearing these physical phenomena are supposed to have upon a purely spiritual question. If we are to argue on a priori grounds, we are on the contrary justified in saying that the human mind, which has discovered and is capable of co-ordinating the myriad facts concerning the world of matter that make up modern science, is itself something far more wonderful than any of its discoveries, or the sum of them. If we are asked, "Is it conceivable that suns and stars shall pass away—as they undoubtedly will—and that man shall persist?" we can but answer, "Yes; it is very conceivable; for man is far more highly organised than suns and stars, moves on an immeasurably higher level, can reason, look before and after, form ideals of conduct, reach out in love, and think the thoughts of God after Him." As soon as we leave the lower reaches of being, bulk is seen to matter very little. The immense proportions of those flying reptiles and other monsters which peopled the earth in pre-historic {227} times did not protect them against dying out, and their places being taken by much slighter creatures which had some more valuable attributes than size; the diplodocus Carnegii in the British Museum measures some seventy-five feet, but that fact did not prevent the species from becoming extinct uncounted ages since—simply because it was lacking in the higher qualities which would have enabled it to survive. And even the diplodocus, with its lumbering body and diminutive brain, was whole worlds superior to inorganic nature. That the marvellous thing called human personality should outlast the decay of what is so much inferior to itself, is therefore not only not inconceivable, but in itself not even improbable. It is a strange sort of modesty—to say the least of it—which would make us think ourselves of less account in the scale of existence or the sight of God than unconscious matter in its cruder and lower stages. One might as sensibly urge that the delicate hairspring of a watch, being of featherweight and almost invisible, must be worth less than a lump of crude iron-ore.

(2) We turn to the supposed argument from evolution, viz., from man's lowly origin, as furnishing a strong presumption against his immortality. This plea, familiar enough in sceptical discussions of the subject, has been put forward with great poetic force by Mr. William Watson; after graphically describing {228} "the gibbering form obscene that was and was not man," as lower in many respects than the beasts and birds in whose midst he dwelt, he suggests that it was

Rather some random throw
Of heedless Nature's die,
'Twould seem, that from so low
Hath lifted man so high.
If, then, our rise from gloom
Hath this capricious air,
What ground is mine to assume
An upward process there,
In yonder worlds that shine
From upward tracts of sky?
No ground to assume is mine
Nor warrant to deny.
Equal, my source of hope, my reason for despair.

But, with great admiration for Mr. Watson as a poet, it is impossible not to recognise that at least two radical flaws lurk in his agnostic argument. In the first place, he makes the mistake of judging issues by origins instead of origins by issues; the sub-human beginnings of man trouble us not at all, since we can see in the subsequent history of the race how great were the possibilities infolded in that "gibbering form obscene," and unfolded in a Plato, a Raphael, a Shakespeare. That such a development from such a lowly initial stage should have been so much as possible, is in itself significant of much; for nothing is evolved that was not first involved. But in the second place, Mr. Watson's assumption that the process which lifted man from the level of the {229} brute to one immeasurably higher was dictated by "hap and hazard" strikes us as wholly gratuitous. On the face of it, that process, in itself so little to be expected, bears the mark, not of chance but of its very contrary. That the cosmic drama should have followed this particular course; that from the cooling down of fiery nebulas there should have come forth the orderly system we behold in nature; that life should have climbed up from the speck of protoplasm "through primal ooze and slime," making its way step by step through all the lower creation until it "blossomed into man"—this, to the unbiassed mind, does not wear the aspect of mere incalculable accident, but of all-embracing wisdom and directivity. And once we have shaken off the delusion that the marvellous order and progress we behold in nature are the outcome of chance, we have the best of reasons for assuming that the same "upward process" will still continue, reaching forward from the seen to the unseen; at any rate, so well-qualified and thorough-going an evolutionist as Professor Fiske gave it as his mature opinion that "in the course of evolution there is no more philosophical difficulty in man's acquiring immortal life, than in his acquiring the erect posture and articulate speech." [4]

{230}

And the reasonableness of this view grows the clearer to us the more we realise the purposive character of the evolutionary process. The unmistakeable purpose of that process is the production of the higher from the lower; all through the ages the vast design works itself out in a ceaseless ascending movement, the theme expanding, its meaning becoming more apparent. Then, when a certain point in this development has been reached, evolution takes a direction such as no one could have forecast: "its operation upon the physical frame is diverted to the mind, the centre of interest transferred from the outward organism to the inner forces of which it is the vehicle"—and man becomes a living soul. Since, then, it has taken all these myriad ages, all this immense expenditure of planning and energy, to produce what is incontestably the crowning work of creation on this globe, must we not say that this was the issue towards which the whole process was set in motion from the very beginning? And if this is so, are we to think that at the end, when its carefully, patiently wrought-out purpose has been attained, this process suddenly turns irrational, and hands over its last and highest product to destruction? As has been well said, "To suppose that what has been evolved at such cost will suddenly collapse, is to suppose that the whole scheme of things is self-stultifying"; and for such a supposition we {231} see not only no necessity, but no shadow of warrant.

The question is reduced to this: are man's highest spiritual qualities, into the production of which all this creative energy has gone, to disappear with the rest? Has all this work been done for nothing? Is it all ephemeral, all a bubble that bursts, a vision that fades? Are we to regard the Creator's work as like that of a child, who builds houses out of blocks, just for the pleasure of knocking them down? For aught that science can tell us, it may be so, but I can see no good reason for believing any such thing . . . The more thoroughly we comprehend that process of evolution by which things have come to be what they are, the more we are likely to feel that to deny the everlasting persistence of the spiritual element in man is to rob the whole process of its meaning. It goes far towards putting us to permanent intellectual confusion, and I do not see that anyone has as yet alleged, or is ever likely to allege, a sufficient reason for our accepting so dire an alternative.[5]

If belief in the soul's persistence must always be an act of faith, it is for the evolutionist an act of reasonable faith, based on his experience of the rationality, and what has been called the integrity, of the cosmos.

(3) Of the hostility of physical science to belief in life beyond the grave it is perhaps sufficient to say that the somewhat dogmatic attitude of denial which flourished in certain scientific circles somewhere about a quarter of a century ago has to-day made room for a very different temper, at once more sympathetic and more willing to acknowledge {232} that a belief is not necessarily disproved because the methods of the chemical or biological laboratory fail to substantiate it. As for the crude proposition that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile, and that the life of the soul must cease with that of the body, this was characterised by the eminent thinker whom we quoted a moment ago as "perhaps the most colossal instance of baseless assumption that is known to the history of philosophy." Admitting that to every state of consciousness, to every minutest transition in our thoughts, there corresponds a cerebral change, it is yet nothing less than a childish blunder to confound correspondence with causality. The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the causes of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, that "possesses the power of purpose," and may therefore be regarded as the final cause of matter.[6] When Professor Haeckel urges that "the various functions of the soul are bound up with certain special parts of the brain," and cease when the latter are destroyed, the reply is quite simple: non sequitur. He has apparently forgotten his own warning against the "dangerous error" of a "one-sided over-estimation of experience." [7] {233} The utmost that experience can prove is that the brain is the transmitting apparatus for flashing forth and making intelligible the messages of the soul, and that, when this apparatus breaks down, further transmission of messages becomes impossible; but no experience can prove that when the instrument is destroyed, the soul which used it for purposes of communication and self-manifestation ceases to be, and only slipshod logic would draw such an inference. In discussing the Divine Personality, we already quoted Mill, a far more careful reasoner than Haeckel, who laid it down that while experience furnished us with no example of any series of states of consciousness without a material brain, yet it was "as easy to imagine such a series of states without as with this accompaniment"; indeed, he saw no valid reason to preclude us from supposing that "the same thoughts, emotions, volitions, and even sensations which we have here, may persist or recommence somewhere else under other conditions"—i.e., without such an apparatus as is at present at our disposal. It is only a dogmatic materialist of Haeckel's almost extinct pattern who could fail to make the simple distinction between visible instrument and invisible player.

Turning aside, however, from the antiquated views of Haeckel—views which, as he himself bitterly complains, some of his most {234} illustrious scientific compeers in his own country, men like Virchow, Du Bois-Reymond and Wundt lived to repudiate[8]—we may for a moment glance at an argument on behalf of belief brought forward by so distinguished and modern a spokesman of physical science as Sir Oliver Lodge. His contention, set forth in the course of a paper on The Permanence of Personality,[9] is really identical with that which Browning expresses with such passionate conviction in the words, "There shall never be one lost good." While we have become familiar with such a conception as the conservation of energy, Sir Oliver Lodge brings before us Professor Höffding's axiom of the "conservation of value," and applies it to the question under discussion. According to him, "the whole progress and course of evolution is to increase and intensify the Valuable—that which 'avails' or is serviceable for highest purposes"; and he accordingly defines immortality as the persistence of things which the universe has gained and which, once acquired, cannot be let go. "From this point of view," he says, "the law of evolution is that Good shall on the whole increase in the universe with the process of the suns: that immortality itself is a special case of a more general law, namely, that in the whole universe nothing really finally perishes that is worth keeping, that a thing once attained {235} is not thrown away." The soul, in other words, will not perish—just as we had already argued—because it is too valuable to perish; if we may trust this latest interpretation of the meaning and purpose of evolution, the spiritual element in man will endure because it is worthy to endure.

But how are we to think of its enduring? As a separate self, conscious of its identity, able to form the proposition "I am I," or swallowed up in the Whole, with a final merging and loss of selfhood? Must we think of man's ultimate destiny in the terms of the concluding distichs of Mr. Watson's great Hymn to the Sea—a consummation

When, from this threshold of being, these steps of the
Presence, this precinct,
Into the matrix of Life darkly divinely resumed,
Man and his littleness perish, erased like an error
and cancelled,
Man and his greatness survive, lost in the greatness
of God?

That is the query with which we opened this chapter; and, in answering it, it is but fair to say that Sir Oliver Lodge shows a marked inclination to take up a position identical with that of Mr. Watson: "Everything sufficiently valuable," he says, "be it beauty, artistic achievement, knowledge, unselfish affection, may be thought of as enduring henceforth and for ever, if not with an individual {236} and personal existence, yet as part of the eternal Being of God."

Now this is not only a wholly unsatisfactory conclusion from the point of view of religion; it is a surrender of the very point at issue—viz., the permanence of personality—and in reality lets slip what Sir Oliver Lodge himself was contending for. It is unsatisfactory from the point of view of religion; for such a re-absorption of the soul into a "grand self-conscious totality of being," involving of necessity the end of all we mean by individuality, consciousness, character, is not immortality at all—to all intents and purposes it is, as we said, annihilation. There is not an iota to choose, so far as the religious believer is concerned, between this theory and the frank materialism of Lucretius, so wonderfully rendered by Mr. Mallock:—

The seeds that once were we take flight and fly,
Winnowed to earth, or whirled along the sky,
Not lost but disunited. Life lives on.
It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die.

They go beyond recapture and recall,
Lost in the all-indissoluble All:
Gone like the rainbow from the fountain's foam,
Gone like the spindrift shuddering down the squall,

Flakes of the water, on the waters cease!
Soul of the body, melt and sleep like these.
Atoms to atoms—weariness to rest—
Ashes to ashes—hopes and fears to peace!

{237} Pantheism may speak delusively of "the peace of absorption in the Infinite," or of the end of our being as submersion, "without reserve, in the infinite ocean of God"; but regarded from the standpoint of individuality, there is no difference between such a fate and the total extinction of the soul—

The healing gospel of the eternal death

—preached with such haunting eloquence by the Roman poet. The truth, as Dr. Illingworth has well expressed it, is that in practice "Pantheism is really indistinguishable from Materialism; it is merely Materialism grown sentimental, but no more tenable for its change of name." [10]

But, in the next place, in tentatively committing himself to the conclusion we are criticising, it seems to us that Sir Oliver Lodge loses sight of the very essence of his own contention: his conclusion, in effect, contradicts his premises. Syllogistically, and, of course, very bluntly stated, his argument might be summed up as follows: "What is of value is preserved; the soul is of value; therefore the soul is—dissolved." Let us put this a little more explicitly. That which has been gained in the course of evolution, so far as the human soul is concerned—that which makes it worthy to endure, viz., its character, conscience, idealism and so forth—belongs to the {238} soul precisely as an individual entity, and in no other way whatsoever; neither can it be effectively preserved save in the form of an individual entity. The soul, in other words, is not to be compared to a mere quantum of raw material, or to a cupful of water temporarily drawn from an infinite deep into which it may be poured back, and nothing lost: it is, on the contrary, a highly individualised product, so individual as to be unique, and in simply being merged in the totality of being all that is most valuable in it would be lost and wasted. We have no difficulty in believing that mere life—the potentiality, the material out of which higher things evolve—may go back into the all, to arise again in new manifestations and combinations; but it is otherwise with the highly complex resultant of the evolutionary process which we call personality, endowed as it is with self-consciousness, with the sense of right and wrong, the capacity for ideals, the faculty of self-giving, a god-like within answering to the God without. It is because these things—those which "avail for highest purposes"—make man personal and mark him off, broadly speaking, from the lower, sub-human life out of which he has emerged, that we believe in the permanence of human personality, of the spiritual element in man, in the survival of the soul as individual and personal, and not merely as "part of the eternal Being of God." A simple illustration will help us to enforce our {239} point of view. In the process of porcelain manufacture the half-finished ware is placed in "seggars" or coarse clay shells for protection in the glaze or enamel kiln. These temporary shells, having served their purpose, are broken up and ground down again into a shapeless mass under heavy revolving rollers; but no one would dream of treating the graceful vases and figures they enclosed for a time after the same fashion. The parallel is fairly obvious: the protecting clay envelope broken to pieces, merged and mingled with other clay, to be so used and broken a hundred times; the precious product carefully taken from its coarse shell and preserved. The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns unto God who gave it: returns, but not as it came forth from Him, but differentiated, individual, shaped and coloured; returns, not to be absorbed and lost in an "all-indissoluble All," but, as we hold, for still further processes of perfecting.

And if we are asked for the ground whence we derive the latter assurance, we answer, It is founded upon our belief, not in a "universal substance" or an "all-inclusive consciousness of being," but in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. By no possibility can these two conceptions be made to harmonise or to pass into one another; on the former view, as we have seen, the significance of the individual soul is and must be nil—on the latter, the value of the soul is infinite, because it is {240} the object of the Divine Love, created by God "unto Himself," in order to experience and respond to His affection. On the former view, we are finite modes of infinite Being—on the latter, we are children of the Father.

It is because we have believed the love which God hath to us—the love made manifest supremely in Jesus Christ—that we echo so confidently the poet's "Thou wilt not leave us in the dust": the Christian doctrine of immortality flows quite naturally from the Christian doctrine of God. The argument is frankly ethical; it flows from the view of God's character which we have received through the revelation of that character in His Son. Without hurling any wild indictment at life, we dare to say that it requires to be supplemented by the life to come in order to fit in with the idea of a just and loving God, a faithful and merciful Creator. This span of days, this hand's-breadth of existence, is too palpably fragmentary. The sinner, the failure, all those who have here missed the way, ask another opportunity of the Divine mercy; the wronged, the sufferers from unmerited griefs, those whose lives passed in gloom and closed in tragedy, appeal for justice; the longing for reunion with loved ones whose going hence has left us permanently poorer, demands fulfilment; the goodness of the good and the sanctity of the saint plead for "the wages of going on." This ethical argument for personal {241} immortality—Browning's "On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven the perfect round"—will carry no weight with those who profess a "religion of the universe"; for the universe, viewed simply as the sum-total of phenomena, possesses, as we have so frequently pointed out, no sufficiently decided moral character to inspire us with confidence in its justice, or mercy, or pitifulness. On the other hand, the same argument will powerfully appeal to all who believe in the Divine Goodness, and especially to those who, looking unto Jesus, have in His face beheld the lineaments of the Father. If God be such as Jesus taught, then life everlasting may be a dim, intangible dream, but a dream that is destined to come true: we shall be satisfied when we awake.

Thus, at the close of this inquiry, we find ourselves left with two ultimate realities—two, not one; alike, not identical; related, and therefore distinct, for a relation can only subsist between one and another: the realities of God and the soul. Gott und die Seele, die Seele und ihr Gott—these two, eternally akin, yet in their kinship unconfounded, make up the theme and the content of religion; and any attempt to obliterate the distinction between them in some monistic formula, any tendency to surrender either the Divine or the human personality, any philosophy which seeks to merge man in God and God in the {242} universe, is fatal to religion itself. We have been told of late that "there is no Divine immanence which does not imply the allness of God"; we reply that there is no sane and sober theology which will not feel called upon to challenge this fundamental error. God, immanent in the universe as life and energy, is not the universe; man, the partaker of the Divine nature, indwelt by the Spirit of God, is other than God. These are commonplaces, truly; yet in the presence of more than one contemporary movement aiming to set these basal truths aside—truths whose acceptance or rejection involves far-reaching issues in faith and morals—there may be some excuse and even some necessity for reiterating them so persistently and at such length as has been done in these pages.

Man is inalienably akin to God—man is everlastingly other than God; upon this note we are content to close. In that fact we have, not only the ultimate explanation of the phenomenon of religion, the ultimate foundation of ethics, the ultimate ground of the felt need of salvation, but also the ultimate hope of immortality—that reasonable hope, expressed by the Hebrew seer for all time in words of sublime and intuitive insight: Art not THOU from everlasting, O Lord my God, mine Holy One? WE SHALL NOT DIE.

[1] First and Last Things, pp. 80, 238.

[2] Ballard, Christian Essentials, pp. 10-12.

[3] The Riddle of the Universe, p. 72.

[4] Life Everlasting, p. 85. To the same effect is Huxley's statement declaring that while he would "neither affirm nor deny the immortality of man," immortality itself struck him "as not half so wonderful as the conservation of force or the indestructibility of matter."

[5] Man's Destiny, by John Fiske, pp. 114-116.

[6] Cp. Illingworth, Divine Immanence, p. 8.

[7] The Riddle of the Universe, p. 7.

[8] Op. cit.; see ch. vi., passim.

[9] See the Hibbert Journal, April 1908, pp. 565-567.

[10] Divine Immanence, p. 39.