It is by close examination of our own nature and its workings, perhaps, that we are most likely to solve the enigma of our being. The word spiritual surely has a meaning; it suggests self-culture not only for the present but for a higher state.
Evolution is a great discovery. But evolution cannot have evolved itself, nor does there seem to have been an observed case of it. Points of similarity between the ape and man are not proofs of transition. Has any animal given, like man, the slightest sign of self-improvement or conscious tendency to progress?
The putting on by the mortal of immortality, it must however be owned, baffles conception. In the apologue of Dives and Lazarus the dead appear still in their human forms and talk to each other across the gulf, apparently narrow, which divides the abode of the damned from that of the blessed. This clearly is the work of imagination. Nor, seeing the infinite gradations of character and the frequent mixture of good and evil in the same man, can we understand how a clear line can be drawn between those who are admitted to heaven and those who are condemned to hell.
Mere difficulties of sense or intellect on mundane questions might be met by appeal to the mysteries of a universe which may conceivably be other in reality than to us it appears. But it is to be supposed that divine beneficence would give its creatures all powers of intelligence necessary to their moral welfare, above all those entailing reward or punishment in a future life.
What is to be said in this connection of man's aesthetic nature, of his sense of beauty and melody? Can they be the offspring of material evolution? As they meet no material need, we might almost take them for the smile of a beneficent and sympathizing spirit. The basis of the gifts no doubt is physical, but we cannot easily understand how they can have been developed by a purely physical process.
To ghosts and apparitions of all kinds, spiritualism included, we bid a long farewell.
We turn to the universe, of which while we believed in the Incarnation our earth was the central and all-important scene, but in which it now holds the place only of a minor planet. We see order and grandeur inexpressible, but with some apparent signs of an opposite kind—the conflagration of a star, a moon bereft of atmosphere, errant comets and aerolites. In our own abode we have variations of weather, apparently accidental and sometimes noxious, atmospheric influences which beget plagues, ministers of destruction such as earthquakes and volcanoes. The plan, if plan there is, transcends our sense and comprehension.
Still, be it ever borne in mind, of the human race, progress, moral and mental, is the unique characteristic, and the one which suggests a divine plan to be fulfilled in the sum of things. It distinguishes man vitally and immeasurably from all other creatures. Fitful, often arrested, sometimes reversed, it does not cease. It may point to an ultimate solution of the enigma of our chequered being such as shall "justify the ways of God to man." This may be still the world's childhood, and the faith which seems to be collapsing may be only that of the child.
Whatever trouble, moral, social, or political, a great change of belief may bring, there is surely nothing for it but to seek and embrace the truth. Whatever may become of our creeds and of the dogma, so plainly human in its origin, of some of them, we have still the Christian ideal of character, which has not yet been seriously challenged, does not depend on miracle or dogma for its claim to acceptance, and may continue to unite Christendom.
Superstition can be of no use morally; even politically it can be of little use, and not for long. In the Christian ideal we still have a rule of life. Robinson, the good Puritan pastor, taking leave of the members of his flock who were embarking for America, bade them not confine themselves to what they had learned from his teaching, but to "be ready to receive whatever truth might be made known to them from the written word of God." If there is a God, are not all truths, scientific, historic, or critical, as much as anything written in the Bible, the word of God?