The purpose of the critic throughout these lectures was to establish the priority of thought by disposing one by one of the various attempts to post-fix mind to matter. The attempts successively made to attach mind, ideas, thought, conscience, and philosophy to the tail of the material kite, all tended, of course, to skepticism. As a theologian Dr. Fairbairn was instinctively drawn to the task of reversing this order so as to attach matter as a tail to the kite of the spiritual world. No matter how plausibly stated, the theory that our knowledge and our minds are a result of material energy reduces any possible God to the status of a product of nature. If in reasoning about ourselves we shall finally conclude that our inner totality is simply and only a product of the external world, we shall be forced to conclude that all thought in the universe is of like origin. The skeptical result is inevitable. Whatever view we take of substance in nature we are compelled to decide whether or not it is so moulded as to express the thoughts of an infinite God. If we so believe we shall find it easy to explain how thought in us finds a cosmos in nature. If the infinite mind reveals his thought in the order and harmony of the external world, the fact easily explains why we find order and harmony there. It is not necessary to reduce the external world to a phantasmagoria of the mind in order to vindicate a place for God. Rather the most subtle and dangerous of skepticisms may lie in the teaching that innate ideas construct the harmonies of nature. Berkeley said we are reading God’s thoughts in the visible world; and hegelianism, to which Principal Fairbairn evidently leans, dispenses with matter while filling the universe with thought. It is equally easy to give matter reality as a plastic thing on which God writes his thoughts so that we may read them. This question of the reality of substance may very properly be the next one to command the attention of philosophy. But it must be remembered that the science which resolves matter into motion and force conspires with the philosophy which makes matter merely the expression of divine ideas.
But we do not wish to make our readers heads ache with philosophy; only to suggest to those who are interested in it that these lectures will afford them valuable instruction. At their close on the Chautauqua platform, Chancellor Vincent expressed in happy terms the admiration of thousands who heard these lectures for their vigor and eloquence. He said: “Principal Fairbairn, in behalf of Chautauqua I desire to say a very few words. We are glad that you came. We are sorry that you must go. You have commanded our admiration by the elegance, clearness and force of your diction, but preëminently by the vigor and freshness of your thought. You stand before us a great ‘phenomenon.’ [Applause.] For we have been accustomed to vigorous thought read from manuscript, we have been accustomed to vigorous thought put into memory and recited with accuracy, but this living, present, compact, vigorous thinking on one’s feet, that has held us spell-bound, is a very remarkable occurrence at Chautauqua.” [Applause.]
EDITOR’S NOTE-BOOK.
The saying “politics makes strange bed-fellows,” never had a more dramatic exhibition than in the case of Henry Ward Beecher. In the late campaign, he was violently handled by the only paper in New York which supported and defended him in his trial; and he has been on the same side with the papers which at that time most infamously abused him. The press is also fairly representative of the public around him; his life-long friends have now been opposed to him; and one friend of other years has been branded by him as “a continental liar,” whatever that may be. “It is,” say his present friends, “the fate of a prophet.” His older friends say “he is growing old.”
In England, in one county, 30,000 acres of good land are tenantless because the laborers and farmers have gone to manufacturing towns. To cure this evil Lady Catherine Gaskell wants to put a stop to educating the poor. She is a picturesque reformer who may be safely classed with the Roman pontiff. She would forbid the humble classes to wear clothes such as other people wear, send them to the fields at three o’clock in the morning, and keep them with the cattle. The dear soul is probably mad, at least “south by southwest.”
It is said that the Jesuits are creeping back into Rome and buying property in the names of private persons. The Pope is very busy and hopeful in his work of strengthening the church. One aspect of this matter of the Papacy and its Jesuit agents, is too much overlooked. Italy can not successfully fight either the Papacy or Jesuitory with atheism. So long as the Catholics have the religion of the country they will actually rule it, whatever may be the form of government. A dreadfully perverted Christianity is still a positive force, advancing and aggressive. Atheism is not a force; it is a barren negation. A Protestant Italy is the want of liberty in that peninsula.