There can be no wider interval in philosophy than the separation which must exist between the laws of mechanical force and motion, and the laws of free moral action. Yet the tendency of men to assume, in the portions of human knowledge which are out of their reach, a similarity of type to those with which they are familiar, can leap over even this interval. Laplace has asserted that “an intelligence which, at a given instant, should know all the forces by which nature is urged, and the respective situation of the beings of which nature is composed, if, moreover, it were sufficiently comprehensive to subject these data to calculation, would include in the same formula, the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and those of the slightest atom. Nothing would be uncertain to such an intelligence, and the future, no less than the past, would be present to its eyes.” If we speak merely of mechanical actions, this may, perhaps, be assumed to be an admissible representation of the nature of their connexion in the sight of the supreme intelligence. But to the rest of what passes in the world, such language is altogether inapplicable. A formula is a brief mode of denoting a rule of calculating in which numbers are to be used: and numerical measures are applicable only to things of which the relation depend on time and space. By such elements, in such a mode, how are we to estimate happiness and virtue, thought and will? To speak of a formula with regard to such things, would be to assume that their laws must needs take the shape of those laws of the material world which our intellect most fully comprehends. A more absurd and unphilosophical assumption we can hardly imagine.
We conceive, therefore, that the laws by which God governs his moral creatures, reside in his mind, invested with that kind of generality, whatever it be, of which such laws are capable; but of the character of such general laws, we know nothing more certainly than this, that it must be altogether different from the character of those laws which regulate the material world. The inevitable necessity of such a total difference is suggested by the analogy of all the knowledge which we possess and all the conceptions which we can form. And, accordingly, no persons, except those whose minds have been biassed by some peculiar habit or course of thought, are likely to run into the confusion and perplexity which are produced by assimilating too closely the government and direction of voluntary agents to the production of trains of mechanical and physical phenomena. In whatever manner voluntary and moral agency depend upon the Supreme Being, it must be in some such way that they still continue to bear the character of will, action, and morality. And, though too exclusive an attention to material phenomena may sometimes have made physical philosophers blind to this manifest difference, it has been clearly seen and plainly asserted by those who have taken the most comprehensive views of the nature and tendency of science. “I believe,” says Bacon, in his Confession of Faith, “that, at the first the soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so that the ways and proceedings of God with spirits are not included in nature; that is in the laws of heaven and earth; but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace; wherein God worketh still, and resteth not from the work of redemption, as he resteth from the work of creation; but continueth working to the end of the world.” We may be permitted to observe here, that, when Bacon has thus to speak of God’s dealings with his moral creatures, he does not take his phraseology from those sciences which can offer none but false and delusive analogies; but helps out the inevitable scantiness of our human knowledge, by words borrowed from a source more fitted to supply our imperfections. Our natural speculations cannot carry us to the ideas of “grace” and “redemption;” but in the wide blank which they leave, of all that concerns our hopes of the Divine support and favour, the inestimable knowledge which revelation, as we conceive, gives us, finds ample room and appropriate place.
7. Yet even in the view of our moral constitution which natural reason gives, we may trace laws that imply a personal relation to our Creator. How can we avoid considering that as a true view of man’s being and place, without which, his best faculties are never fully developed, his noblest energies never called out, his highest point of perfection never reached? Without the thought of a God over all, superintending our actions, approving our virtues, transcending our highest conceptions of good, man would never rise to those higher regions of moral excellence which we know him to be capable of attaining. “To deny a God,” again says the great philosopher, “destroys magnanimity and the raising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he will put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man; who, to him, is instead of a God, or melior natura: which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.”[45]
Such a law, then, of reference to a Supremely Good Being, is impressed upon our nature, as the condition and means of its highest moral advancement. And strange indeed it would be if we should suppose, that in a system where all besides indicates purpose and design, this law should proceed from no such origin; and no less inconceivable, that such a law, purposely impressed upon man to purify and elevate his nature, should delude and deceive him.
8. Nothing remains, therefore, but that the Creator, who, for purposes that even we can see to be wise and good, has impressed upon man this tendency to look to him for support, for advancement, for such happiness as is reconcileable with holiness;—to believe him to be the union of all perfection, the highest point of all intellectual and moral excellence;—IS, in reality, such a guardian and judge, such a good, and wise, and perfect Being, as we thus irresistibly conceive him. It would indeed be extravagant to assert that the imagination of the creature, itself the work of God, can invent a higher point of goodness, of justice, of holiness, than the Creator himself possesses: that the Eternal Mind, from whom our notions of good and right are derived, is not himself directed by the rules which these notions imply.
It is difficult to dwell steadily on such thoughts. But they will at least serve to confirm the view which it was our object to illustrate; namely, how incomparably the nature of God must be elevated above any conceptions which our natural reason enables us to form; and we have been led to these reflections, it will be recollected, by following the clue of which science gave us the beginning. The Divine Mind must be conceived by us as the seat of those laws of nature which we have discovered. It must be no less the seat of those laws which we have not yet discovered, though these may and must be of a character far different from any thing we can guess. The Supreme Intelligence must therefore contain the laws, each according to their true dependence, of organic life, of sense, of animal impulse, and must contain also the purpose and intent for which these powers were put in play. But the Governing Mind must comprehend also the laws of the responsible creatures which the world contains, and must entertain the purposes for which their responsible agency was given them. It must include these laws and purposes, connected by means of the notions, which responsibility implies, of desert and reward, of moral excellence in various degrees, and of well-being as associated with right doing. All the laws which govern the moral world are expressions of the thought and intentions of our Supreme Ruler. All the contrivances for moral no less than for physical good, for the peace of mind, and other rewards of virtue, for the elevation and purification of individual character, for the civilization and refinement of states, their advancement in intellect and virtue, for the diffusion of good, and the repression of evil; all the blessings that wait on perseverance and energy in a good cause; on unquenchable love of mankind, and unconquerable devotedness to truth; on purity and self-denial; on faith, hope, and charity;—all these things are indications of the character, will, and future intentions of that God, of whom we have endeavoured to track the footsteps upon earth, and to show his handiwork in the heavens. “This God is our God, for ever and ever.” And if, in endeavouring to trace the tendencies of the vast labyrinth of laws by which the universe is governed, we are sometimes lost and bewildered, and can scarce, or not at all, discern the line by which pain, and sorrow, and vice fall in with a scheme directed to the strictest right and greatest good, we yet find no room to faint or falter; knowing that these are the darkest and most tangled recesses of our knowledge; that into them science has as yet cast no ray of light; that in them reason has as yet caught sight of no general law by which we may securely hold: while, in those regions where we can see clearly, where science has thrown her strongest illumination upon the scheme of creation; where we have had displayed to us the general laws which give rise to all multifarious variety of particular facts;—we find all full wisdom, and harmony, and beauty: and all this wise selection of means, this harmonious combination of laws, this beautiful symmetry of relations, directed, with no exception which human investigation has yet discovered, to the preservation, the diffusion, the well-being of those living things, which, though of their nature we know so little, we cannot doubt to be the worthiest objects of the Creator’s care.
FINIS.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Loudon, Encyclopædia of Gardening, 848.
[2] Dec. Phys. vol. ii. 478.