Chapter XXXVIII: Some a Priori Arguments, 425 (6)

To ascribe the origination of order to _law_ is a manifest evasion of the real problem. Law is order. Law is the very thing to be explained. The question is--Has law a reason, or is it without a reason? The unperverted human mind cannot believe it to be without a reason. "The existence of a law connecting and governing any class of phenomena implies a presiding intelligence which has preconceived and established the law. The regulation of events by precise rules of time and space, of number and measure, is evidence of thought and mind." So says Dr Whewell; and the statement is amply justified by the fact, that all laws and rules in the universe imply that existences are related to one another in a way of which intelligent adjustment alone is the adequate and ultimate explanation. The existence of a law uniformly involves the coexistence of several conditions, and that is a phenomenon which, whenever the conditions and law are physically ultimate, and consequently physically inexplicable, clearly presupposes mind. Laws, in a word, are not the causes but the expressions of order. They are themselves the results of delicately accurate adjustments, which indicate the operation of a divine wisdom. There are chemical laws, for example, simply because there are chemical elements endowed with affinities, attractions, or forces the most diverse, yet so balanced and harmonised as to secure the welfare of the world. Besides, laws do not act of themselves. No law produces of itself any result. It is the agents which act according to the law that produce results, and the nature of the result produced depends on the number and character of the agents, and how each is situated and circumstanced. If the agents oppose each other, or are inappropriately distributed, they bring about disorder and disaster in conformity to law. There is no calamity, no evil, no scene of confusion, in the known world, which is not the result of the action of agents which operate in strictest accordance to law. The law of gravitation might rule every particle of matter, and yet conflict and confusion and death would prevail throughout the entire solar system were harmony and stability and life not secured by very special arrangements. Matter might have all its present inherent and essential laws, and yet remain for ever a chaos. Apart from a designing and superintending intelligence, the chances in favour of chaos and against cosmos, even allowing matter to have uncreated properties and laws, were incalculable. The obvious inference is that which Professor Jevons expresses in these words--"As an unlimited number of atoms can be placed in unlimited space in an unlimited number of modes of distribution, there must, even granting matter to have had all its laws from eternity, have been at some moment in time, out of the unlimited choices and distributions possible, that one choice and distribution which yielded the fair and orderly universe that now exists." Only out of rational choice can order have come.

The most common mode, perhaps, of evading the problem which order presents to reason, is the indication of the process by which the order has been realised. From Democritus to the latest Darwinian there have been men who supposed that they had completely explained away the evidences for design in nature when they had described the physical antecedents of the arrangements appealed to as evidences. Aristotle showed the absurdity of the supposition more than 2200 years ago. But those who deny final causes have gone on arguing in the same irrational manner down to the present time. They cannot, in fact, do otherwise. They are committed to a false position, and they dare not abandon the sophism on which it rests. Nothing else can explain how any sane mind should infer that because a thing is conditioned it cannot have been designed. The man who argues that the eye was not constructed in order to see because it has been so constructed as to be capable of seeing, is clearly either unable to reason correctly, or allows his reasoning faculty to be terribly perverted by prejudice. That a result is secured by appropriate conditions can seem to no sound and unprejudiced intellect a reason for regarding it to have been undesigned. And yet what other reason is involved in all the attempts to explain away final causes by means of the nebular, Darwinian, and other development hypotheses?

M. Comte imagines that he has shown the inference of design, from the order and stability of the solar system, to be unwarranted, when he has pointed out the physical conditions through which that order and stability are secured, and the process by which they have been obtained. He refers to the comparative smallness of the planetary masses in relation to the central mass, the feeble eccentricity of their orbits, the moderate mutual inclination of their planes, and the superior mean density of their solid over their fluid constituents, as the circumstances which render it stable and habitable, and these characteristic circumstances, as he calls them, he tells us flow naturally and necessarily from the simple mutual gravity of the several parts of nebulous matter. When he has done this, he supposes himself to have proved that the heavens declare no other glory than that of Hipparchus, of Kepler, and of Newton.

Now, the assertion that the peculiarities which make the solar system stable and the earth habitable have flowed naturally and necessarily from the simple mutual gravity of the several parts of nebulous matter, is one which greatly requires proof, but which has never received it. In saying this, we do not challenge the proof of the nebular theory itself. That theory may or may not be true. We are quite willing to suppose it true; to grant that it has been scientifically established. What we maintain is, that even if we admit unreservedly that the earth, and the whole system to which it belongs, once existed in a nebulous state, from which they have been gradually evolved into their present condition conformably to physical laws, we are in no degree entitled to infer from the admission the conclusion which Comte and others have drawn. The man who fancies that the nebular theory implies that the law of gravitation, or any other physical law, has of itself determined the course of cosmical evolution, so that there is no need for believing in the existence and operation of a Divine Mind, proves merely that he is not exempt from reasoning very illogically. The solar system could only have been evolved out of its nebulous state into that which it now presents if the nebula possessed a certain size, mass, form, and constitution--if it was neither too rare nor too dense, neither too fluid nor too tenacious; if its atoms were all numbered, its elements all weighed, its constituents all disposed in due relation to each other--that is to say, only if the nebula was in reality as much a system of order, which intelligence alone could account for, as the worlds which have been developed from it. The origin of the nebula thus presents itself to the reason as a problem which demands solution no less than the origin of the planets. All the properties and laws of the nebula require to be accounted for. What origin are we to give them? It must be either reason or unreason. We may go back as far as we please, but at every step and stage of the regress we must find ourselves confronted with the same question--the same alternative.

The argument of Comte, it is further obvious, proceeds on the arbitrary and erroneous assumption that a process is proved to have been without significance or purpose when the manner in which it has been brought about is exhibited. It is plain that on this assumption even those works of man which have cost most thought might be shown to have cost none. A house is not built without considerable reflection and continuous reference to an end contemplated and desired, but the end is only gradually realised by a process which can be traced from its origin onwards, and through the concurrence or sequence of a multitude of conditions. Would a description of the circumstances on which the security and other merits of a house depend,--of the peculiarities in its foundation, walls, and roof, in its configuration and materials, which render it convenient and comfortable, or of the processes by which these peculiarities were attained,--prove the house to have been unbuilt by man, to have been developed without the intervention of an intelligent architect? It would, if Comte's argument were good; if it would not, Comte's argument must be bad. But can any one fail to see that such an argument in such a case would be ridiculous? The circumstances, peculiarities, and processes referred to are themselves manifest evidences of design and intelligence. They are a part of what has to be explained, and a part of it which can only be explained on the supposition of a contriving and superintending mind. They entitle us to reject all hypotheses which would explain the construction of the house without taking into account the intelligence of its architect. The circumstances, peculiarities, and process described by Comte, as rendering the earth an orderly system and the abode of life, are no less among the evidences for the belief that intelligence has presided over the formation of the earth. They require for their rational comprehension to be thought of as the means and conditions by which ends worthy of intelligence have been secured. They require to be accounted for; and they cannot be reasonably accounted for except on the supposition of having been designed. If we reject that view we must accept this, that the present system of things is a special instance of order which has occurred among innumerable instances of disorder, produced by the interaction of the elements or atoms of matter in infinite time. These elements or atoms we must imagine as affecting all possible combinations, and falling at length, after countless failures, into a regular and harmonious arrangement of things. Now, we can in a vague, thoughtless way imagine this, but we cannot justify our belief of it either by particular facts or general reasons. It is an act of imagination wholly divorced from intelligence. Thus to refer the origin and explanation of universal order to chance, is merely mental caprice.

If the evolution of the earth and the heavenly bodies from a nebula destroy neither the relevancy nor the force of the design argument, the development of complex organisms from simple ones, and the descent of all the plants and animals on earth from a very few living cells or forms, will not remove or lessen the necessity for supposing an intelligence to have designed all the organisms, simple and complex alike, and to have foreordained, arranged, and presided over the course of their development. Were it even proved that life and organisation had been evolved out of dead and inorganic matter, the necessity of believing in such an intelligence would still remain. Nothing of the kind has yet been proved. On the contrary, scientific experimentation has all tended to show that life proceeds only from life. But had it been otherwise--had this break and blank in the development theory been filled up--matter would only have been proved to be more wonderful than it had been supposed to be. The scientific confirmation of the hypothesis of what is called spontaneous generation would not relieve the mind from the necessity of referring the potency of life and all else that is wonderful in matter either to design or chance, reason or unreason--it would not free it from the dilemma which had previously presented itself.[32]

[32] See Appendix XXIII.

The development of higher from lower organisms, of course, still less frees us from the obligation to believe that a supreme intelligence presides over the development. Development is not itself a cause, but a process,--it is a something which must have a cause; and the only kinds of development which have yet been shown to be exemplified in the organic world demand intelligence as their ultimate cause. I do not know that I can better prove that there is no opposition between development and design than by referring to an illustration which Professor Huxley made use of with a directly contrary view. To show that the argument from final causes, or what is often called the theological argument, had, as commonly stated, received its death-blow from Mr Darwin, he wrote as follows: "The theological argument runs thus--an organ or organism (A) is precisely fitted to perform a function or purpose (B); therefore it was specially constructed to perform that purpose. In Paley's famous illustration, the adaptation of all the parts of the watch to the function or purpose of showing the time, is held to be evidence that the watch was specially contrived to that end, on the ground that the only cause we know of competent to produce such an effect as a watch which shall keep time is a contriving intelligence, adapting the means directly to that end. Suppose, however, that any one had been able to show that the watch had not been made directly by any person, but that it was the result of the modification of another watch which kept time but poorly, and that this, again, had proceeded from a structure which could hardly be called a watch at all, seeing that it had no figures on the dial, and the hands were rudimentary, and that, going back and back in time, we come at last to a revolving barrel as the earliest traceable rudiment of the whole fabric. And imagine that it had been possible to show that all these changes had resulted first from a tendency in the structure to vary indefinitely, and secondly from something in the surrounding world which helped all variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper and checked all those in other directions,--then it is obvious that the force of Paley's argument would be gone. For it would be demonstrated that an apparatus thoroughly well adapted to a particular purpose might be the result of a method of trial and error worked by unintelligent agents, as well as of the direct application of the means appropriate to that end by an intelligent agent."[33]

[33] Lay Sermons, pp. 330, 331.

Our great comparative physiologist would probably not write so at present. He may still not accept the design argument; but he is now well aware that it has not got its death-blow, nor even any serious wound, from the theory of evolution. He has since, on more than one occasion, shown the perfect compatibility of development with design. He might, perhaps, in defence of his earlier and less considerate utterances, maintain that no organ has been made with the precise structure which it at present possesses in order to accomplish the precise function which it at present fulfils; but he admits that the most thoroughgoing evolutionist must at least assume "a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences," and "is thereby at the mercy of the theologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena of the universe." Granting thus much, he is logically bound to grant more. If the entire evolution of the universe may have been intended, the several stages of its evolution may have been intended; and they may have been intended for their own sakes as well as for the sake of the collective evolution or its final result. If eyes and ears were contrived for a purpose, the eyes and ears of each species of animals may have been made with the precise structure which they exhibit for the precise purposes which they fulfil, although they may have been developed out of a different kind of eyes and ears, and will, in the lapse of ages, be developed into still other kinds. The higher theology, the general designs, which Professor Huxley admits evolution cannot touch, is in no opposition to the lower theology, the special designs, which he strangely supposes it to have definitively discarded.

Nothing can be more certain than that Dr Paley would have held the design argument to have been in no degree weakened by the theory of evolution, and that he would have been very much astonished by Professor Huxley's remarks on that argument. In referring to the mechanism of a watch as an evidence of intelligence in its maker, Dr Paley pointed out that our idea of the greatness of that intelligence would be much increased if watches were so constructed as to give rise to other watches like themselves. He must necessarily have admitted that the watch imagined by Professor Huxley was still more remarkable, and implied a still greater intelligence in its contrivance. The revolving barrel must have had wonderful capabilities, which only intelligence could confer. All the circumstances in which it was to be placed must have been foreseen, and all the influences which were to act upon it must have been taken into account, which could only be done by intelligence. All that helped variations in the direction of an accurate time-keeper must have been brought into requisition, and all that hindered it, or favoured variations in other directions, must have been detected and checked; but no unintelligent agents can be conceived of as accomplishing such work, or as more than the means of accomplishing it employed by a providential Reason. The greater the distance between the revolving barrel and the most elaborated watch--the greater the number of mechanisms between the first and the last of these two terms, or between the commencing cause and the final result--the greater the necessity for a mind the most comprehensive and accurate, to serve as an explanation of the entire series of mechanisms and the whole process of development.

Mr Darwin, and a large number of those who are called Darwinians, profess to prove that all the order of organic nature may have been unintentionally originated by the mechanical operation of natural forces. They think they can explain how, from a few simple living forms, or even from a single primordial cell, the entire vegetable and animal kingdoms, with all their harmonies and beauties, have arisen wholly independent of any ordaining and presiding mind, by means of the operation of the law of heredity that like produces like; of variability from the action of the conditions of life, and from use and disuse; of over-production, or a ratio of increase so high as to lead to a struggle for existence; of natural selection, or the survival and prevalence of the fittest, and the disappearance and extinction of what is unsuited to its circumstances and inferior to its competitors; and of sexual selection. But the remarkable originality, ingenuity, and skill which they display in endeavouring to establish, illustrate, and apply these laws, make all the more striking the absence of freshness and independence, of force or relevancy, in the reasonings by which they would attach to them an irreligious inference. The same men who have adduced so many new facts, and thrown so much new light on facts previously known, in support of the real or alleged laws indicated, have not adduced a single new reason, and scarcely even set in a more plausible light a single old reason, for the denial of design. They assure us, copiously and vehemently, that the laws which they claim to have proved are in themselves a disproof of design; but they somehow forget that it is incumbent on them to bestow the labour requisite to make this manifest. They reason as if it were almost or wholly self-evident, whereas a little more thought would show them that all their laws imply mind and purpose.

There is a law of heredity: like produces like. But why is there such a law? Why does like produce like? Why should not all nature have been sterile? Why should there have been any provision for the propagation of life in a universe ruled by a mere blind force? And why should producer and produced be like? Why should offspring not always be as unlike their parents as tadpoles are unlike frogs? The offspring of all the higher animals pass through various embryological stages in which they are extremely unlike their parents. Why should they ever become like to them? Physical science cannot answer these questions; but that is no reason why they should not both be asked and answered. I can conceive of no other intelligent answer being given to them than that there is a God of wisdom, who designed that the world should be for ages the abode of life; that the life therein should be rich and varied, yet that variation should have its limits; that there should be no disorder or confusion; and who, to secure this result, decreed that plants should yield seeds, and animals bring forth, after their kind. He who would disprove design must certainly not start with the great mystery of generation.

Then, the so-called law of variability is the expression of a purpose which must have Reason at its beginning, middle, and end. There is in no organism an absolutely indefinite tendency to vary. Every variation of every organism is in some measure determined by the constitution of the organism. "A whale," as Dr Huxley says, "does not tend to vary in the direction of producing feathers, nor a bird in the direction of producing whalebone." But a tendency to definite variation is an indication of purpose. If a man could make a revolving barrel with a tendency to develop into a watch, he would have to be credited with having designed both the barrel and watch, not less than if he had contrived and constructed the two separately. Further, variation has proceeded in a definite direction. Darwin admits that there is no law of necessary advancement. There is no more reason in the nature of the case for improvement than for deterioration. Apart from the internal constitution of an organism having been so planned, and its external circumstances so arranged, as to favour the one rather than the other, its variations could not have been more towards self-perfection than self-destruction. But variation, according to the Darwinians, has taken place in one direction and not in another; it has been forward, not backward; it has been a progression, not a retrogression. Why? Only because of a continuous adjustment of organisms to circumstances tending to bring this about. Had there been no such adjustment, there might have been only unsuitable variations, or the suitable variations might have been so few and slight that no higher organisms would have been evolved. Natural selection might have had no materials, or altogether insufficient materials, to work with. Or the circumstances might have been such, that the lowest organisms were the best endowed for the struggle of life. If the earth were covered with water, fish would survive, and higher creatures would perish. Natural selection cannot have made the conditions of its own action--the circumstances in the midst of which it must operate. Therefore, there is more in progressive variation than it can explain: there is what only an all-regulative intelligence can explain.

Again, there is a law of over-production, we are told, which gives rise to a struggle for existence. Well, is this law not a means to an end worthy of Divine Wisdom? In it we find the reason why the world is so wonderfully rich in the most varied forms of life. What is called over-production is a productivity which is in excess of the means of subsistence provided for the species itself; but no species exists merely for itself. The ratio of the production of life is probably none too high for the wants of all the creatures which have to be supplied with food and enjoyment. And the wants of all creatures are what have to be taken into account; not the wants of any single species--not the wants of man alone. If we adequately realised how vast is the number of guests which have constantly to be fed at the table of nature, we would, I have no doubt, acknowledge that there is little, if any, real waste of life in the world. Then, the struggle to which the rate of production gives rise is, on the showing of the Darwinians themselves, subservient to the noblest ends. Although involving privation, pain, and conflict, its final result is order and beauty. All the perfections of sentient creatures are represented as due to it. Through it the lion has gained its strength, the deer its speed, the dog its sagacity. The inference seems natural that these perfections were designed to be attained by it; that this state of struggle was ordained for the sake of the advantages which it is actually seen to produce. The suffering which the conflict involves may indicate that God has made even animals for some higher end than happiness--that He cares for animal perfection as well as for animal enjoyment; but it affords no reason for denying that the ends which the conflict actually serves, it was also intended to serve. Besides, the conflict is clearly not a struggle for bare existence; it is, even as regards the animals, a struggle for the largest amount of enjoyment which they can secure, and for the free and full exercise of all their faculties. It thus manifests, not only indirectly but also directly, what its ends are. They are ends which can only be reasonably conceived of as having been purposed by an intelligence, and which are eminently worthy of a Divine intelligence.

But what of the law, or so-called law, of natural selection? In itself, and so far as physical science can either prove or disprove it, it is simply an expression of the alleged fact, that in the struggle of life, any variation, however caused, which is profitable to the individuals of a species, will tend to their preservation, will have a chance of being transmitted to their offspring, and will be of use to them likewise, so that they will survive and multiply at the expense of competitors which are not so well endowed. But natural selection thus understood is obviously in no opposition to design; on the contrary, it is a way in which design may be realised. Some might even hold that design cannot be conceived of as realised in any other natural way; that if not thus realised, it could only be miraculously realised. But Mr Darwin, and many of those who call themselves his followers, tell us not only that there is natural selection, but that blind forces and mechanical laws alone bring it about; that intention and intelligence have nothing to do with it. What proof do they give us? Alas! the painful thing is that they give us none. They point out the blind forces and the mechanical laws by which the selection is effected and its results secured; they show how they are adapted to accomplish their work: and then they assert that these forces and laws explain the whole matter; that no underlying and all-embracing reason has prepared, arranged, and used them. They see the physical agencies and the physical process by which order and beauty have been attained--they do not see intelligence and design; and because they do not see them, they conclude that they have no existence. They describe the mechanism which their senses apprehend, and affirm it to have made itself, or at least to have been unmade, and to work of itself, because the mind which contrived it and directs it is inaccessible to sense. All their reasoning resolves itself into a denial of what is spiritual because it is unseen.

The only instances of natural selection which have been adduced to show that blind forces may bring about results as remarkable, and of the same kind, as those which are accomplished by intelligent agents, are manifestly irrelevant. They are of such a nature that every teleologist must hold them to imply what they are intended to disprove. When Professor Huxley points to the winds and waves of the Bay of Biscay as carefully selecting the particles of sea-sand on the coast of Brittany, and heaping them, according to their size and weight, in different belts along the shore; to a frosty night selecting the hardy plants in a plantation from among the tender ones; and to a hurricane transporting a sapling to a new seat in the soil,--he completely mistakes what the problem before him is. Fire and water can produce wonderful effects in a steam-engine; but the man who should infer, from there being no intelligence in the fire and water themselves, that intelligence must have had nothing to do with their effects when they were brought into contact in a steam-engine, would deserve no great credit for his reasoning. It is precisely Professor Huxley's reasoning. He looks at the fire and water separately, and completely ignores the engine. Because in a world which is a system of order and law a certain collocation and combination of physical conditions and forces will produce an orderly result, he infers that design and intelligence are not needed to produce such a result. I submit that that is illegitimate and irrelevant reasoning. It resolves itself into a denial of Divine and intelligent agency, because the senses apprehend merely physical elements and a physical process. It assumes a selected adaptation, which presupposes intelligence in order to get rid of intelligence. It begs the whole question.

The so-called law of sexual selection, if it be a law at all, is obviously teleological in its nature. Its end is the production of beauty in form and colour. Can blind physical forces, if not subservient to intelligence, be conceived of as working towards so essentially ideal a goal as beauty?

I think enough has now been said to show that the researches and speculations of the Darwinians have left unshaken the design argument. I might have gone farther if time had permitted, and proved that they had greatly enriched the argument. The works of Mr Darwin are invaluable to the theologian, owing to the multitude of "beautiful contrivances" and "marvellous adjustments" admirably described in them. The treatises on the fertilisation of orchids and on insectivorous plants require only to have their legitimate conclusions deduced and applied in order to be transformed into treatises of natural theology. If Paley's famous work be now somewhat out of date, it is not because Mr Darwin and his followers have refuted it, but because they have brought so much to light which confirms its argument.[34]

[34] See Appendix XXIV.

I have challenged the theology of Mr Darwin, and those who follow his guidance in theology. I have no wish to dispute his science. I pass no judgment on his theories so far as they are scientific theories. It may be safely left to the progress of scientific research to determine how far they are true and how far erroneous. We ought not to assail them needlessly, or to reject the truth which is in them, under the influence of a senseless dread that they can hurt religion. In so far as they are true, they must be merely expressions of the way in which Divine intelligence has operated in the universe. Instead of excluding, they must imply belief in an all-originating, all-foreseeing, all-foreordaining, all-regulative intelligence, to determine the rise and the course and the goal of life, as of all finite things. That intelligence far transcends the comprehension of our finite minds, yet we apprehend it as true intelligence. It is no blind force, but a Reason which knows itself, and knows us, and knows all things, and in the wisdom of which we may fully confide, even when clouds and darkness hide from us the definite reasons of its operations. We can see and know enough of its wisdom to justify faith where sight and knowledge are denied to us. Let us trust and follow it, and, without doubt, it will lead us by a path which we knew not, and make darkness light before us, and crooked things straight.

LECTURE VII.

MORAL ARGUMENT--TESTIMONY OF CONSCIENCE AND HISTORY.

I.

WE have seen how the power manifest in the universe leads up to God as the First Cause, the all-originating Will. We have seen also how the order manifest in the universe leads up to Him as the Supreme Intelligence. But there is more in the universe than force and order; there is force which works for good, and a just and benevolent order; there are moral laws and moral actions, moral perceptions and moral feelings. Can anything be thence inferred as to whether God is, and what He is? I think we shall find that they clearly testify both as to His existence and character.

The moral law which reveals itself to conscience has seemed to certain authors so decisive a witness for God, that all other witnesses may be dispensed with. Kant, who exerted his great logical ability to prove that the speculative reason in searching after God inevitably loses itself in sophisms and self-contradictions, believed himself to have found in the practical reason or moral faculty an assurance for the Divine existence and government capable of defying the utmost efforts of scepticism. Sir William Hamilton has also affirmed that "the only valid arguments for the existence of God, and for the immortality of the human soul, rest on the ground of man's moral nature." Dr John Newman has insisted that conscience is the creative principle of religion, and has endeavoured to show how the whole doctrine of natural religion should be worked out from this central principle. A well-known living theologian of Germany, Dr Schenkel, has attempted to build up a complete theology on conscience as a basis, starting from the position that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul"--the faculty through which alone we have an immediate knowledge of God. These thinkers may have erred in relying thus exclusively on the moral argument--I believe that they have--but the error, if error there be, shows only the more clearly how convincing that argument has seemed to certain minds, and these assuredly not feeble minds.

There is, besides, valuable truth underlying any exaggerations into which they may have fallen on the subject. There is probably no living practical belief in God which does not begin with the conscience. It is not reasoning on a first cause, nor even admiration of the wisdom displayed in the universe, which makes the thought of God habitually and efficaciously present to the mind. It is not any kind of thinking nor any kind of feeling excited by the physical universe or by the contemplation of society, which gives us an abiding and operative sense of God's presence, and of His relationship to us. It is only in and through an awakened and active conscience that we realise our nearness to God--His interest in us, and our interest in Him. Without a moral nature of our own, we could not recognise the moral character and moral government manifested by Him. We might tremble before His power, or we might admire His skill, but His righteousness would be hidden from us, His moral laws would be meaningless to us, and their sanctions would be merely a series of physical advantages or physical disasters. But a God without righteousness is no true God, and the worship which has no moral element in it is no true worship. As, then, it is only through the glass of conscience that the righteousness of God can be discerned, and as that attribute alone can call forth, in addition to the fear, wonder, and admiration evoked by power and intelligence, the love, the sense of spiritual weakness and want, and the adoring reverence, which are indispensable in true worship--such worship as God ought to receive and man ought to render--the significance of the moral principle in the theistic argumentation is vast indeed.

It follows, however, from the entire course of the reasoning in which we have been engaged, that the moral argument is not to be exclusively relied on. It is but a part of a whole from which it ought not to be severed. It cannot be stated in any valid form which does not imply the legitimacy of the arguments from efficiency and order. If other facts do not refer us back to a primary case, neither will moral facts lead us to the primary moral agent. If order is no evidence of intelligent purpose, moral order can be no evidence of moral purpose. The moral argument proves more, but also less, than the arguments which have been already expounded. It shows us that God is endowed with the highest moral excellence, and is the source of moral law and of moral government, but it does not prove Him to be the Creator of the universe or the Author of all order in the universe. It contributes to the idea of God an essential element, without which that idea would be lamentably defective, but it supposes other elements also essential to be given by other arguments. The office of bearing witness to the existence and character of God can be safely devolved on no one principle alone, even although that principle be conscience. It is a work in which all the principles of human nature are privileged to concur. Either all bear true testimony, or all have conspired to deceive us. The self-manifestation of God is addressed to the entire man, and can only be rightly apprehended by the concurrent action of all the energies and capacities of the soul.[35]

[35] See Appendix XXV.

It is, perhaps, especially important in conducting the moral argument to ask ourselves distinctly, Whence ought we to begin? Is there any point, any fact or principle, which we are in reason bound to start from? Inattention to this preliminary inquiry has caused many to try to look at moral facts _en masse_, as it were, and to endeavour to draw an inference from them in virtue of something common to them all. This can only lead to confusion and error. Moral facts are of two radically distinct classes, and cannot be comprehended under any higher generalisation, which can be taken as the foundation of a theistic inference. The facts need to be distributed and interpreted--to have their characters discriminated; and we must begin with the principle by which this is done--that is, with conscience itself. We need no more attempt to judge of moral qualities without reference to our moral perceptions and feelings--to the information given us through conscience--than to pass a judgment on colours before seeing them, or irrespective of how they appeared to us when we saw them. If we look at the moral facts of the universe from any outside point of view--not from that of conscience--how can we escape ascribing the evil as well as the good to God, and trying His character either from both or from the preponderance of the one over the other? But if we do so,--if we seek to rise to God through an induction from all moral facts--we shall form a miserable notion of God, and we shall, besides, ride rough-shod, as it were, over conscience. For what is it that conscience declares most clearly about moral good and evil, right and wrong? Is it not that they are radically antagonistic--irreconcilable and contradictory,--that they cannot have the same ultimate author--that if the one be the expression of God's will, the other must be the expression of His aversion? If conscience have any testimony to give about God at all, it is that, as the author of good, He must be the enemy of evil. The contemplation of the moral world may perplex us, but conscience is an assurance that evil, however perplexing, is not to be referred to the same source as good.

The testimony of conscience on behalf of God has been presented in various ways, and it need not surprise us to find some of them unsatisfactory. I regard as unwarranted the view that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul," the sole faculty through which the human mind is in contact and communion with God. There is no one specific power or organ of the mind in virtue of which exclusively man is a religious being. It is by the whole make and constitution of his nature, not by a particular faculty, that he is framed for religion. I more than question if we have a right even to ascribe to conscience an immediate intuition of God. It brings us, some have affirmed, in a strict and positive sense into the real presence of God, with nothing intervening between us and Him--He as the absolute personality standing sharply and distinctly over against our personality. This doctrine has, however, one obvious and serious difficulty before it. Conscience--that is a word which has got in ordinary use a very clear and definite meaning. We all know what conscience is as well as we know what the eye or the ear is, and we all know what an act of conscience is as well as we know what seeing or hearing is. It is not more certain that by the eye we see colours, and that by the ear we hear sounds, than that by conscience we discern good and evil. When, therefore, any man comes and assures us that through conscience we have an immediate apprehension of God, it is natural that we should answer at once, You may as well assure us that through sight we immediately hear sounds or smell odours. What we immediately apprehend through conscience is the right or wrong in actions, and therefore not God. Morality is the direct object of conscience; God can therefore only be the presupposition or postulate of conscience,--can only be given in conscience as implied in morality. This, I say, is an obvious objection to the assertion that God is immediately known in conscience. It is an objection which has not been got over, and which, I believe, cannot be got over.[36]

[36] See Appendix XXVI.

The argument from conscience, like all the other theistic arguments, is extremely simple. It is the obvious inference from the most obvious facts of our moral consciousness. It demands of us no subtle analysis of conscience. It is not dependent on the truth of some one particular theory as to the origin of conscience. It is based directly on what cannot be denied or disputed,--the existence of conscience, the existence of certain moral judgments and feelings common to the experience of all men. Conscience exists. It exists as a consciousness of moral law; as an assertion of a rule of duty; as a sense of responsibility. When it pronounces an action right, it does so because it recognises it to be conformed to law; when it pronounces an action wrong, it does so because it recognises it to fall short of or to transgress law. It acts as the judge of all that we do, and as such it accuses or excuses, condemns or approves, punishes or rewards us, with a voice of authority, which we may so far disregard, but the legitimacy of which we cannot dispute. It claims to rule over body and soul, heart and mind, all our appetites, affections, and faculties; and the claim is implicitly admitted even by those who have most interest in denying it. But it does not rule, nor pretend to rule, as an autocratic authority; it does not give us, nor pretend to give us, a law of its own: on the contrary, it claims to rule in us only in virtue of recognising a law which is over us; its authority is derived wholly from a law which it interprets and applies, but does not create. It thus speaks not of itself but as the deputy of another. It unequivocally declares itself a delegated authority. Some may say that the law of conscience is set by man's own will, and that the will is a law unto itself; but this assertion cannot bear examination. The will apart from reason and conscience is a mere force, not a true will. It has a rational law only through its connection with reason, a moral law only through its connection with conscience. Whoever affirms that the will is its own law must grossly abuse language, and signify by the term will what others mean by reason and will, conscience and will. He must do worse than this, bad as it is. He must contradict the plain dictates of his own consciousness. The will and its law are distinctly felt to be not one but two. The will is clearly realised in our moral experience as not legislative, as not giving itself a law but as being under a law, the law which conscience apprehends. To identify the will and its law is to confound entirely distinct things. For the will to rule the will, it would need at once to command and to obey, to be bond and free, dependent and independent. To be its own rule were for it to be without rule. Conscience claims to rule my will in virtue of a law which cannot be the expression of my will, and which cannot be anything else than the expression of another will; one often in antagonism to mine--one always better than mine--one which demands from me an unvarying and complete obedience. It comes to me and speaks to me in defiance of my will; when my will is set against hearing it, and still more against obeying it; when my will is bent on stifling and drowning its voice. It warns, threatens, condemns, and punishes me, against my will, and with a voice of authority as the delegate or deputy of a perfectly good and holy will which has an absolute right to rule over me, to control and sway all my faculties; which searches me and knows me; which besets me behind and before. Whose is this perfect, authoritative, supreme will, to which all consciences, even the most erring, point back? Whose, if not God's? Those who object that this argument is a mere verbal inference, or that it rests on a double meaning of the word law, do not understand it, simple as it is. They may be honest enough disputants, but their objection is strangely superficial. In the utterly irrelevant criticism of a word they lose sight of a great fact, and so necessarily fail to perceive its momentous significance. From no mere word, whether law or any other, but from that consciousness of moral dependence which no moral creature can shake off, which conscience implies in every exercise, which reveals itself in a thousand ways in the hearts and lives of men, do we conclude that there is One on whom we morally depend, that we have a holy Creator and Judge to deal with. Reason takes no mere name, but it takes the fact that man feels himself under a law of duty, that he is conscious of obligation and responsibility, that he has a conscience which does not counsel but which commands him to do what is right and to resist what is wrong; and it finds this fact inexplicable, this consciousness a delusion, this conscience a false witness--unless there be a holy God, a Moral Governor.

Conscience reveals a purpose as well as declares a law. Its very existence is a proof of purpose. The eye is not more certainly given us in order that we may see, than conscience is given us in order that we may use all our powers in a righteous and beneficent manner. Is it conceivable that any other than a righteous God would have bestowed on us such a gift, such a faculty? Would an intelligent but unrighteous God have made us to hate and despise what is characteristic of his own nature? Would he have made us better than himself? The purpose which conscience reveals is certainly not our own purpose, just as the law which it declares is not the law of our own will. The purpose which finds its expression in conscience, and our own purpose, are often felt by us to be in direct antagonism. Our souls may be tortured by the conflict between them. But in all phases of the conflict we are sensible that it is our purpose which ought to be abandoned; that the purpose which we dislike is that which we are bound to accept and to obey. In this way, also, conscience speaks to us of a righteous God by speaking in His name. If the inference from effect to cause, from manifestation of purpose to intelligence, is good anywhere, it is good here; and it warrants us to believe that the First Cause of conscience is a righteous Being.[37]

[37] See Appendix XXVII.

All the feelings, emotions, and affections which gather around the apprehension of right and wrong, which accompany the sense of duty or conviction of obligation, point to the same conclusion. The consciousness of good or ill desert, remorse and self-approval, moral hopes and fears, concur in referring to a holy God. They imply that man is a person related not merely to things and laws, but to another person who is his rightful and righteous Judge. The atheist himself, when he grieves even for secret and private sins, or enjoys the inner peace which only his own heart knoweth, mourns and rejoices as if in the presence of a higher personal Being--the God whom he denies. Neither his sorrow nor his satisfaction is fully intelligible if his soul have before it only an impersonal law or the abstract nature of things; both presuppose that he has some kind of consciousness of being under the cognisance of a Person possessed of moral attributes. If men felt that they were responsible for their evil thoughts and words and deeds to no one higher than themselves or their fellows, is it conceivable that the consciousness of guilt and the fear of retribution would have been what experience and history testify them to have been? Would prayers and penances and sacrifices have prevailed so widely, if the law of right and wrong when broken had been merely felt to be broken--if there were no underlying sense of the existence of One behind the law whose righteousness must be satisfied, and whose wrath must be turned away by the breaker of the law? Would there have been in that case any moral conflicts in the human heart akin to those which a Sophocles or a Shakespeare has delineated? Were there no God, there ought to be no fear of God awakened even by crime; but atheism itself cannot protect a criminal when alive to his guilt from being haunted and appalled by fears of a judgment and a justice more terrible than those of man. When we are perfectly willing to bear any pain which the mere laws of nature attach to our sins, and when our reason assures us that we have nothing to fear on account of them from the law or even the opinion of society, why, if our moral natures are not seared and deadened, do we yet fear, and fear most when most alone? "Inanimate things," says Dr Newman, "cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same seeming serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on one receiving praise from a father,--we certainly have within us the image of some person to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being; we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction in breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and, on the other hand, it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit. 'The wicked flees, when no one pursueth;' then why does he flee? Whence his terror? Who is it that he sees in solitude, in darkness, in the hidden chambers of his heart? If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive."[38]

[38] Grammar of Assent, pp. 106, 107.