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can those of the other. Whoever conceives of any other will than his own, must do so in terms of his own will, which is the sole will directly known to him, all other wills being only inferred. But will, as such, is conscious, if it presupposes a motive, a prompting desire of some kind; absolute indifference excludes the conception of will. Moreover, will, as implying a prompting desire, connotes some end contemplated as one to be achieved, and ceases with the achievement of it; some other will referring to some other end taking its place. That is to say, will, like emotion, necessarily supposes a series of states of consciousness. The conception of a divine will, derived from the human will, involves, like it, localization in space and time; the willing of each end excluding from consciousness, for an interval, the willing of other ends, and therefore being inconsistent with that omnipresent activity which simultaneously works out an infinity of ends. It is the same with the ascription of intelligence. Not to dwell on the seriality and limitation implied as before, we may note that intelligence, as alone conceivable by us, presupposes existence independent of it and objective to it. It is carried on in terms of changes primarily wrought by alien activities-the impressions generated by things beyond consciousness and the ideas derived from such impressions. To speak of an in

telligence which exists in the absence of all such alien activities, is to use a meaningless word. If to the corollary that the First Cause, considered as intelligent, must be continually affected by independent objective activities, it is replied that these have become such by act of creation, and were previously included in the First Cause; then the reply is, that, in such case, the First Cause could, before their creation, have had nothing to generate in it such changes as those constituting what we call intelligence, and must therefore have been unintelligent at the time when intelligence was most called for. Hence it is clear that the intelligence ascribed answers in no respect to that which we know by the name. It is intelligence out of which all the characters constituting it have vanished.” *

On the moral side it is found impossible to reconcile the attributes of mercy and benevolence in the Creator with the condition of the animal world, which presents an almost continued scene of carnage and cruelty, and has done so from its commencement. Not only are the stronger carnivora fashioned and armed for the purpose of hunting and killing their prey-a gazelle or antelope, in a state of nature, is compelled to fly three times daily for its life-but innumerable parasites exist in the bodies and at the

Herbert Spencer, Nineteenth Century Review, 1885.

expense of animals generally much their superiors. "Of the animal kingdom as a whole, more than half the species are parasites." If each individual species, as Agassiz said, is an "embodied creative thought of God," his benevolence must be acknowledged to be of a singular character.

The best apologists admit that a mere metaphysical deity, an absolute First Cause defecated to a pure transparency, is not enough. What they wish to restore is a belief in the God to whom they learned to pray by their mother's knee. And they are abundantly justified from their point of view in such a wish. The only God whom Western Europeans, with a Christian ancestry of a thousand years behind them, can worship, is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; or, rather, of St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Bernard, and of the innumerable "blessed saints," canonized or not, who peopled the Ages of Faith. No one wants, no one can care for, an abstract God, an Unknowable, an Absolute, with whom we stand in no human or intelligible relation. What pious hearts wish to feel and believe is the existence, "behind the veil" of the visible world, of an invisible Personality, friendly to man, at once a brother and God. The unequalled potency of Christianity as a religion of the heart, has ever consisted in the admirable conception of the Man God, Jesus Christ.

Even a power hostile to man, if conceived as embodied in a person, has been felt preferable to vague, passionless, unintelligent force; because a hostile person could be propitiated, could be appealed to, could be brought over to mercy and good-will by prayer and sacrifice. That is to say, that an anthropomorphic God is the only God whom men can worship, and also the God whom modern thought finds it increasingly difficult to believe in.

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CHAPTER III.

WHY MEN HESITATE.

THE series of arguments and considerations against the current theology, of which a very imperfect summary was attempted in the last chapter, might seem sufficient to bring about a rapid extinction of the vulgar belief; and possibly that extinction is not so far off as both those who wish it, and those who deprecate it, may be apt to think. Still, whatever may be the case in France and Germany, Christianity, if moribund, is by no means dead, in this country at least: the land which has done most to work out the philosophy of evolution, is perhaps still the most Christian in faith and practice remaining in the world. The question arises, why has rationalism, after such brilliant victories, not triumphed completely? Why is the British Sunday without a parallel in Europe? Why on that day are museums and theatres still closed, and the churches and

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