find, but must find their highest explanation. A work too, we are often told, by those who in the same school vary the argument, implies a workman; a plan speaks of a designer; a law implies a lawgiver; causation is only explicable by will; and the only really efficient cause of which we can form any conception is the Divine will. Putting aside altogether the general objection that might be urged against such reasoning as this, that it is simply arguing from abstract words, we ought to consider whether our notion of an artificer exalts our idea of God; whether that of a designer really elevates him to the extent that is often imagined by those who thus represent Him; or whether, in short, these notions correspond to the phenomena they are meant to explain. It is almost demonstrable that this is not the way from a scientific point of view, which is the view of those who argue as above described, of exhibiting God's work in nature, as they term it. It is at best only some men's way of looking at God's work in nature; but their way of looking at this work and God's way of accomplishing it may likely enough be widely separated, if they be in any way related.

If modern science tends to show anything, and it is perhaps premature to say positively that it does show anything regarding the correct mode of conceiving the universe as a whole, it appears to indicate that the idea of design, as generally explained, is not a perfectly adequate idea. There is far less intention, humanly speaking, in nature and history than is generally taken for granted in the theory of design. Evolution or growth seems to come nearer the reality than purpose. The explanation by design is very often applied in a somewhat similar manner to works of human genius, and not always with manifest aptness. Critics are now and then explicit and full in their assertions of how Shakspeare, for example, in certain positions and with given characters proceeded on some supposed preconceived plan. Our great novelists are likewise spoken of as having gone through the mental processes that a careful and attentive reader thinks he perceives evident in the execution of their works. Sculptors and painters may sometimes hear similar principles of action assigned to them in the execution of the best works of their chisel and pencil, and in many cases anything like direct purpose and design is as far from being the guiding and formative spirit of their works throughout as it is from being the expression of the agency that moulds the clouds of heaven into their marvellous shape, and steeps them in the most varied and harmonious colourings. Molière, I feel certain, only expressed the

bare truth, when he said of his "Misanthrope" that he scarcely knew what he meant by his creation; and the recent life of Dickens is psychologically interesting, as showing the undesigned, and to the author himself unexpected, turns in his work, as it grew under his hands.

A town or a government appears to be, more than most things, the result of direct foresight. It consorts well with the common notion of design to regard them as pre-determined products of human purpose, and the outcome of intelligent calculation and intention, and yet the gradual and adhesive addition in the formation of each of these institutions, if intimately traced, will be found to be a simple growth, fostered and developed by many influences beyond the calculation of human intelligence. They are each the result of forces that operate as unconsciously as those that are active in other orders of life, where we unhesitatingly apply the terms growth and development. In the case of a town now covering miles of ground, a castle planted long ago might bring some religious establishment to that corner of a country, and round this a little community would grow up. Or in another case, a river flows lazily, like other rivers, through some quiet meadow, and a village, accidentally formed on one of its banks, grows through the attraction of life and the assimilating and centralising power of trade, and becomes the metropolis of an empire, or of the world. And nature, studied in those sciences which may be called historical is, like human history and human institutions, an endless growth-an evolution whose first germ contains not so much the stamp of design as the impress of development. We do not need to lay stress again on the statement already made when reviewing the idea of causation in regard to the phenomena of the external world, that the idea of design applied to these phenomena, like the idea of causation similarly applied, arises from the introduction of a conception belonging to one sphere of experience into that of another.

Your theistic worshippers, like their primitive ancestors, in spirit at least, admire a watchmaker, and through his means they rise to the grand conception of the universal Watchmaker, who made the great world-chronometer, and winds it up, and keeps it going, and has hung it in space that men might puzzle over it, and after a time of anxious investigation and severe speculation rise from the work to the Workman. Chemical compounds also speak to such a mind as this of an almighty Chemist working in His great laboratory; zoology represents Him engrossed with more details and in less dignified

circumstances: each division of the sciences is traced up to Him— its patron and founder. But this intellectual abstraction which theism or science has helped to create for its supreme mental satisfaction or adoration, and as the representative of its highest induction, is not God. The method, which the theist takes, of realising this last result of knowledge is not the method, as we shall afterwards point out, that the Revealer Himself of spiritual truth adopted in His teaching. The principle is barren in its result, both as seen in its own development and as witnessed in its practical influence upon men around us, and upon those in former times already mentioned. The god thus postulated or attempted to be demonstrated to our intellects is no object for universal worship and reverence, as the true God must ever be. He is merely the metaphysical entity of the quasi-scientific mind, and capable of reverence and adoration only by such a mind. A god like this can no more be supposed to exist as a personality than the law of gravity for example can be supposed to exist as such. For what is he really? Is he not an attempted explanation of that and other laws, an arbitrary unification of multiform forces? Is he not the outcome of a futile exercise of our mental power endeavouring, not only to explain the modes of action of the different objects that meet us everywhere, but to explain the higher modes of action, or the highest law which includes them all? This is, in itself, an excusable effort, and in its proper way it may yet be crowned with success; at least, it is the goal to which all generalisations are moving: the acceptance, however, of the result of this effort as a being fit for Divine honours, is not so excusable. This last result can be no other than the ultimate law. If it be an induction from nature, and if it rest upon nature's operations as given in sensible experience, it can only be the expression that stands as the equivalent for the rational explanation of all phenomena. But if you accept the ultimate explanation or law as worthy of Divine homage as commanding universal adoration, what hinders you from worshipping the lower explanations-the intermediate and secondary laws? And if you adore the laws, what prevents you from bowing before the multiplied objects which make up these laws— from which these laws are inferred? If we prostrate ourselves before the one inclusive law that runs through all nature, why should we not kneel, as did our rude progenitors, before each object that we see? For if the whole be Divine, each component part must share its character; if the law be God, the phenomena―the manifestations of that law, are likewise gods: and thus we come, in a

singular, but we believe legitimate, manner back to the earliest and most primitive of all worships, the worship of nature in all her forms her woods, her hills, her streams, her seas, and stars, and

suns.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DIVINE IN NATURE.

"Every object is a window through which we may look into infinitude itself." THE opinions noticed in the previous chapter have been long held by a certain class of minds with singular tenacity. They have been honoured with the name of divine philosophy by no less an authority than Bacon, who considered that through this philosophy the rudiments of knowledge concerning God were to be obtained. Even in Bacon's day, however, enough had been said and written on the subject to lead him to warn men of the danger of excess in this divine philosophy or natural theology, as prejudicial to religion and philosophy alike; making heretical religion and fabulous philosophy, or, what we can now say, making a modern mythology. In a sense it is true that the universe is a Divine vision* and that reason in Sterling's acceptation of that term, peculiar to Coleridge's mode of thought, as the opposite of the sensuous understanding, is the inspired organ for beholding it. The objects of nature tell something of God, but they do not tell this to every one. This is simply a matter of fact. To a man like the Hebrew poet "the heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament sheweth His handiwork; day uttereth speech unto day: and night unto night sheweth knowledge:" but the utterance and the unfolding here spoken of are not to the intellect in man. These voices may "go through all the earth," but the voices are not heard by all, neither are they, when heard, the voices of abstract laws. They are spiritual voices, which no law of man's formulating can force from nature, but which will be heard within the soul, provided the soul be strung to the higher spiritual harmonies, and not hemmed in by the vesture of a sensible or merely intellectual life.

"Who can by searching find out God?" is the unanswerable interrogation marked on the attempts of theistic thinkers. A rough answer, a direct negative in fact, has been given by many in all times: an answer which every one anxious for the complete development of our nature must regret, since the reply is disastrous both to intellectual and religious life; it has been elicited,

* John Sterling.