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on the showing of the Higher Criticism) considerably over two thousand years ago. Had the sweet Singer of Israel examined the processes in the egg, or how did he know? We may not be sure of his name or anything else about him; but that he was not a scientific biologist we may with certainty conclude.

We do not remember, however, to have seen before such a statement and description as that which the writer gives of that something more than design, more than plan, which these investigations into Nature bring forth to the soul that is worthy of them. It is a view which at once silences and overawes, and strikes the mind with that surprise of suddenly revealed ineffable truth which bears us to the noblest heights of speculation. It is not only the revelation of a great mind in creation but something more intimate still, of a Personality not so much above us but that it can

be recognised, working in ways which we understand, as we might ourselves do were we great enough, -a power which we can feel to be like ourselves, as a generous child might see his greater self in his father. "This appears to me," he says, "to be the summit level in the path towards religion to which we are carried by the certainties of direct and immediate perception."

"Again, we must recognise the fact that one self-evident truth does not constitute religion. It does not in itself include any further and more definite conceptions or beliefs in our own relations with that personal mind, of whose existence we are so well assured. Yet it is in such further conceptions and beliefs that religion properly so called alone consists. On the other hand, let us not mistake the breadth and solidity of the foundations, which are laid in

and by the assured apprehension, as a fact, that in Nature, ourselves included, we are in the presence of a mind which has all the elements of what we know as personality in ourselves. It at once illuminates Nature with the light of an impression and dominant conception. It involves the idea, not as a consequence reached by reasoning, but as part of its own nature and contents, that we are always in presence of a mind which has some such close relations with our own that we can recognise at least its constructive powers as analogous with our own; and can identify these as exerted in our own organism as the highest type known to us of their working and effects.

Again and again let it be repeated that this powerful conception does not in itself and undeveloped constitute religion. But it does raise to the high level of a self-evident truth that one fundamental fact with which all religious feelings and beliefs must begin, and on which alone they can, and always do, repose. The moment the truth is apprehended in its fulness it becomes impossible to set religion aside as belonging to a region of mere fancy or imagination with no substance in it. The very hardly less self-evident than itself, is first inference that follows from it, that there must be some other rela

tions between us and the universal mind than that only of our being a product of its constructive skill. There must be some spiritual and ethical relations corresponding to the spiritual and ethical faculties of which we are conscious in ourselves. For these too, like all others, we know to be gifts inseparably connected with our special organisation. The subject, therefore, of these other relations rises upon us not only as a region in which facts must abound, but as a region filled with the very highest class of facts which we can ever reach. In their very essence they must be the supreme facts of the universe. They must be the facts on which some fuller knowledge is most to be longed for, by all to whom the quest of truth is the one pursuit of supreme interest and importance. This is a consideration of high significance. For as there is no kind of

doubt so paralysing in any subject of inquiry as any, even the very least, suspicion that perhaps after all there is nothing to be inquired about-that the very pursuit of it is in itself a delusion, a mere dream, a phantasy,-so, on the other hand, there is nothing so inspiring as the certainty in any such inquiry that we are dealing with veritable realities and are handling problems which concern facts indisputable, and, if indisputable, then all - pervading. And when this certainty is perpetually receiving, as we have seen it is receiving, ever fresh and accumulating illustrations from the analysis of all around us, it silences and extinguishes for ever any suggestion that in theology we can possibly be dealing with mere subjective phenomena the unsubstantial product of our own imaginative faculties. Whether this extreme form of doubt is widely prevalent it would be hard to say. But it clearly forms a large ingredient in the philosophic scepticism of many writers, both old and new. It is under the influence of this extreme form of doubt that such vehement antagonism exists to the recognition of purposiveness in Nature, and Nature, and that SO many attempts are made to resolve it, and dissolve it into such deceptive ambiguities as those which are hidden under the phrases of development and evolution. But no element of fact which does really exist in those phrases is incompatible with, or even antagonistic to, the one great fundamental perception of the universal purposiveness of Nature."

Now, we have often heard the argument from the lesser to the greater. The fact that man, however degraded, is still made in the image of God, and, consequently, that broken lights of the Maker are yet to be found in the most debased of His creatures, is familiar enough. But it is seldom that the other side of the subject is thought of the argument from the greater to the less. The great Unknown Being, upon whom we all depend, whom no man hath

to

seen at any time,-how strange, how overwhelming, is the suggestion that in His work we may find something, much, by which we can recognise that image, the great glorified prototype of ourselves, the Original from whom our poor faculties came,-to think that thus we too might have laboured had we the power, and that in the hand of the Father, so infinitely greater, there are-wonderful thought! - resemblances that of the son. We know no more elevating, no more amazing thought. The writer leaves the great suggestion to our minds without attempting to adorn it with eloquence, or to stir up anything of the emotional. He asks simply if in this one portion of His work our hearts recognise Him, how is it possible that there should not be other and more assured meeting grounds between us? But these unadorned words thrill the reader more than eloquence. It is a higher argument than any we remember to have heard upon this great subject. To perceive design in nature is a great matter, though it is but as To find ourselves A, B, C to this.

thus suddenly in front of a mind infinitely greater, yet, in its superlative height, like our own, recognisable, "its constructive powers analogous," is a situation which moves the whole being.

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man who anatomised and dissected himself at last, according to his own statement, out of every consciousness of beauty, art, or human interest. Huxley, with a different meaning, and no recognition of any such impression, yet describes himself as interested chiefly in "the mechanical engineering of living machines." "What I cared for was the architectural and engineering part of the business-the working out of the wonderful unity of plan in the thousands and thousands of diverse living constructions, and the modification of similar apparatuses to serve different ends." Behold the difficulties into which human language brings a philosopher! No ignorant person reading this could imagine that there was no living inquirer in Huxley's thoughts, no power which had arranged the "apparatuses" to serve their purpose, any more than that the elaborate structures in the egg were "laid down" by no hand. It is very puzzling for the writer, who has nothing but this supply of old-fashioned words to express his meaning in them; and when he begins to invent new ones, the effect, as we have seen, is more painful still.

It is but, we think, within the last fifty years that devout minds have begun to feel, or at least to permit themselves to say, that the Atonement is wholly wrapped in mystery, and that the reason why that sacrifice should have been demanded is beyond the researches of man. How it is "that all the great effects attributed to it on the characters of men, and on the acceptability of their worship by God, could not have been secured at less cost, or without any cost beyond some omnipotent exercise of the Divine will"-is, without any tinge of unbelief, always present in our author's thoughts. Yet we think, so far as it is possible to be impartial on such a subject, that it is comprehensible, and that no mere proclamation of an exercise of the Divine will could have been effectual with us. A mere change, or apparent change, in the mind of God towards us, a free pardon costing nothing, would that ever have affected the minds of men in the way which the sacrifice of our Lord has done? We think with all humility that it would not. "It costs more to redeem their souls," says the Psalmist, groping amid the dim greatness of truths which he could not understand. Whether necessary for God or not, it was surely necessary for us that the gift should be attended by some such great convulsion.

We doubt whether the reader will follow with as much ease and satisfaction the continued thread of analogy between external and spiritual things which the Duke essays to draw between the un- There would be nothing revoltparalleled history of the visit of ing to human nature, there would Christ to this world, and all its indeed be many things that would wonderful effects, and the abiding appeal to us in the very depths of laws of nature. He does make our being, should some generous this effort, often with great skill, young man for example, some king's and in many admirable passages son, with all the prestige of his rank from the first of those Hebrew and greatness-take up the cause, previsions which indicated that say, of such a fine but savage race coming, in the early beginnings of as the Matabele, and throw himknown history and literature, down self among them, accepting without to the final fact itself, the mystery reserve the risks of that position, of which no man can penetrate. and whatever dangers it might in

volve. Even if it involved slow torture and a hideous death, the world around, little capable of any such sacrifice as it is, would yet understand. In the heat of indignation there might be protests against the folly of the victim, or of those who permitted him thus to risk himself; but at least a universal human understanding would attend upon his act. And the tremendous cost to himself, all envisaged and foreseen, before he devoted himself, would not only seal his sacrifice in the way most satisfactory to our minds, but would be instinctively comprehended wherever it was told. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." It is stated as a thing not impossible, comprehensible even by human faculties. "Peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die." is not a strange suggestion, arbitrarily imposed upon humanity, but such as humanity unassisted could at least understand: we cannot but feel that this is a most striking instance of those reflections of the mind of God, from whence came originally that sublime expedient, which are conscious and apparent in the mind of man.

It

It would be less remarkable

and less significant if such a book as this were framed upon those old-fashioned tenets, or, at least, methods of explaining the ways of God to man, which were still prevalent fifty years ago; if the balance of debit and credit, the sacrifice of Christ in one scale and the salvation of men in the other, had still been the principle which a man of that generation saw in the supreme sacrifice; and if the so-called inspiration of the Scriptures, minute and verbal, as of something written to dictation, had been the foundation on which

he established all things. But this is not at all the position of the Duke of Argyll. He has accepted all the recent teachings of science. Darwin does not alarm him, nor Huxley irritate. His love of investigation into nature, and conviction that nothing contrary to truth is ever to be found there, have made him an eager and delighted student of all the new ways and new lights-which reveal to him only new and beautiful details of the Maker's way of working, and no failure but only increase of loyalty to one supreme and all-inspiring Mind. His view of inspiration is as different as can be from the old doctrine, which would scarcely allow the possibility of an inadvertent word, even of the scribe hundreds of years from the fountainhead, having slipped into the sacred text. "Inspiration," he says, is a word "rarely used in the sacred books, either Hebrew or Christian."

"The mere word is, as it were, too external, too material, too much isolated or separated from the common facts and experiences of life. It does not accurately or adequately express the kind of influence which the prophets and apostles were conscious of in themselves, and which they evidently regarded as so perfectly natural that they did not habitually associate it with any special name. They thought of what they occasionally called inspiration as simply an unusually direct impulse from the living God to some one or more of the million living souls which could only live in Him. 'Holy men of old spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.' That moving might be more or less definite or distinct, more or less consciously understood by those to whom the impulse came. But in all cases it was but a special exercise of an influence perfectly according to the natural constitution and course of things. It is indeed impossible so to define that which we mean by in

spiration as to separate it in kind from all those instinctive perceptions of self-evident truth on which the whole structure and power of our reason depend."

The difference thus so distinctly apparent between the writer's standing-point and that of the reign of Theology under which he was born, gives all the more force to the strength of his conviction and assertion of the power of God, which every new discovery in

creases

and strengthens to his eyes. To him all Nature moves harmonious, in all her secret works revealing the sole and magnificent Workman who pieces every joint together and adapts each subtle line of all the mechanism to its use and in His work, whether great or small, gives us hints and indications innumerable of that link below Himself and us, which makes His work comprehensible and natural to us, born as we are with the power of understanding Him; formed as we are in a lower and lesser way, as He is, the children of His supreme mind as well as of His creating hand. It is this that gives the testimony of a witness its fullest force-for it is the testimony of an expert, not of one ignorant; of a man who knows good and evil, who has gone through all the experiences of this world, who has outlived the common age of man without ever losing his hold of the great interest and occupations of life. The aged philosopher and statesman here sets to his seal that God is true.

One wonders sometimes whether the discoveries of Science, so constantly held to be hostile to God and to the idea of a Divine operation and supervision in the world, might not be perhaps only another

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day of grace" and opportunity to the wise of learning the lesson

so often re-bestowed, put forth in so many forms. The gazers at Jerusalem were called upon to look at the works that were performed there, such works as no man ever did before, and to believe, but did not, their foolish eyes being darkened. Who can say that the men of this generation have not been called again to see and believe the amazing revelation of God, as discovered by them in what we call nature? The discovery of buried cities, and the primitive works of art in them, bring our minds with a leap to the conviction that the poet wrote no fable when he sang the wars of Troy. The other discoveries are of far more vast importance, and reveal one greater than Agamemnon; but again the eye is darkened that it cannot see, and the ear hardened that it cannot hear.

The labours of Mr Gladstone's old age are of a different character. They are not so independent or self-suggested as those of the Duke of Argyll. They are chiefly dependent upon and related to that great monumental work, of which he has with love and care set forth a new edition—which will probably bring Bishop Butler within the reach of a new generation of the ordinary reader not student, in a form more merciful to human weakness than the unbroken paragraphs of the original work. But it is in the accompanying volume, which is at once a commentary, a defence, and an elucidation of the philosophy of Butler, his methods, and the fashion of his mind, that we find his own original work, and also the evidence that he himself has looked upon it as we do—as a final word, the winding up of all his own extensive and varied experiences. "I feel it incumbent upon me, bearing in my advanced old age my latest testimony to the

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