BOOKS.
MISS CAILLARD'S "PROGRESSIVE REVELATION." *
IN one of the noblest essays in the Spectator, Addison has drawn an argument for the immortality of the soul from the infinite capacity of man for perfection, and has dwelt on the "triumphant consideration" of the perpetual progress of the soul,—still adding virtue to virtue and knowledge to knowledge. A similar idea is the keynote to this interesting volume of essays, only that the notion of progress is dwelt on not as occurring in the individual in a future life, but as appearing in the history of the race of man and in this present state of existence. "If we have been unable," says Miss Caillard, "to think of revelation as progressive, it is because, however unconsciously, we have regarded it as dead instead of living, the stereotyped record of the past instead of the ever-developing chronicle of the present."
A kindred conception is embodied in the title of perhaps the best-known work of the present Master of Balliol, The Evolution of Religion. Of the two expressions, we prefer that of Miss Caillard, because it seems to us that the term Evolu- tion of Religion is open to considerable difficulty. If we con- ceive, as we do conceive, religion to mean the state of knowledge and feeling of the human soul in the presence of certain awful and partially known truths, then we may admit that that knowledge may have advanced, and those feelings may have grown more and more in purity and elevation, and yet we may hesitate to accept the suggestion that religion can be evolved. Evolution means, we suppose, the unfolding in process of time of something which has been infolded before that time began ; it expresses the peculiar action of a living organism ; and to apply such language to the change of mental condition which occurs as a cur- tain is gradually withdrawn from the eyes of the beholder, seems to be a clumsy metaphor. To call the increasing perception of a view, as we gaze at it, the evolution of a landscape, though it may fit the fashion of the day which talks of all change as evolution, does not seem very exact language. But, in fact, the expression is open to a yet graver objection, for it seems to suggest that the whole of religion is unfolded out of the mind of man, and that there is in it, therefore, no element of an external and objective nature over which his being and his perceptions have no control. The title of Miss Caillard's book, Progressive Revelation, is free from any such objection, and expresses a truth which the Bible recognises in every page, and which the author seeks to apply to the ever-widening area of scientific know- ledge in our own day. Her object is, as she avows it in her first chapter, "to prove that the Incarnation does not only satisfy the religious and emotional aspirations, but is also the one sufficient answer to intellectual and ethical per- plexities."
There are two views of the communciation of the divine to the human which are severally expressed by the terms Reve- lation and Inspiration, and Miss Caillard has not always observed the difference between the two. In popular re- ligions language the Bible is indifferently spoken of as the outcome of Inspiration and Revelation; and yet in point of thought and of the consequences which flow from the notions, they are essentially different. Revelation suggests the metaphor, as we have already hinted, of a curtain withdrawn from the eyes of the beholder, who is thus permitted to see things which before were hidden from his eyes, but who will, nevertheless, behold them with all the imperfections of his vision, and if he repeat what he has seen, will do so, not only subject to these imperfections of vision, but with all the imperfections also of apprehension, perception, and utterance. The metaphor on which Inspiration reposes is different, and suggests the direct action of one breath or spirit on another, —it brings, as it were, the divine afflatus nearer to the month • Progressive Revelation; or, Through Nature to God. By B. Cainard. London: John Murray.
of the speaker; it makes his speech more directly the out- come of the Divine Spirit. We are not now concerned to say which of the two views is the more true, and both can probably lind some support in the Bible itself; but they should not be taken for the same, as our author in one or two passages seems to take them.
Miss Gaillard has ingeniously sought to illustrate the relation of mind and matter by the relation of thought and language. "Matter," she says, "is a real thing, just as language is a real thing; but we could not have had language without thought, and in the same manner it is contended that we could not have had matter without spirit or the 'immanent Reason' of which it is the expression. At the same time, just as it is an inadequate representation of the relationship of thought to language to say that the former is the cause of the latter, so it is also inadequate to make causality the link between matter and that which reveals itself through matter." This kind of Monism is not without its diffi- culties, for it seems to lead us to this conclusion, that either matter and spirit are one and the same, or that two things may be connected together by some means other than the tie of cause and effect,—some link which has hitherto escaped observation in the universe, some new intellectual argon, we were almost going to say ; and the analogy suggested by the word may warn us against being too sure that we are thoroughly acquainted with the constitu- tion of our intellectual atmosphere. Another result of our author's line of thought would be the equality of mind and matter in point of the eternity or the non-eternity of their existence ; and this conclusion we undcr6I and her to accept, for she cites the saying of Professor Max
"Without reason no speech, without speech no reason," a doctrine to which we ourselves do not sub- scribe. "Words," it has been said by the late Mr. Romanes, "are the fortresses of thought. They enable us to make every intellectual conquest the basis of operations for others still beyond," and so Miss Gaillard asks us to consider every material form as a fortress of spirit; a product of spirit which in turn becomes a new support for spiritual growth.
In the chapter entitled "The Divine Sacrifice," Miss Caillard has some veryinteresting thoughts. She has brought out with much force the notion that if God is to communicate with man, he must do so by approximating himself to the character and capacity of the recipient, by a limitation of himself. "In the ease," she says, "where the person to be known is the superior of the one whom he desires to under- stand him (as when a grown man takes pains to be understood by a child), his breaking down of barriers involves a con- siderable limitation of himself. Were he to show all that is in him, he would merely cause hopeless bewilderment. He mast, for the time being, circumscribe his powers, veil his knowledge, use language suited, not to his own capacity, but to the humbler capacity which he has to meet ; in fact, as we say, 'put himself in the place' of his inferior A revelation of God to man must necessarily be the transcendent example of a self-limitation of which we have a familiar illustration in every parent and every teacher who is worthy the name." Thus she sees in the fatherhood of God and the sonship of man, the necessity for what is sometimes regarded as anthropomor- phism in the presentation of the Divine nature through the Christian revelation ; and she sees in the Incarnation of Christ the effort of the superior to use such language and deal with such thoughts, and such only, as the inferior can understand.
One of the most interesting passages in Dr. Weissman's Essays was the one in which he dwelt upon the natural im- mortality of the lower organisms, and the consequent fact that death is not inherent in life itself, but is, so to speak, an accident only of life in its higher forms, which comes in at a certain point as we go upwards in the scale of organisms. In the aniceba, as he pointed out, the act of generation and the nearest approach to death occur at one and the same time, and are in fact one event. The little organism divide l into two, and each part continues to live,—as new organisms, if you will ; but the old one can never be said to have died. Where is, as he pertinently asks, the dead body ? But this happy natural immortality does- not–exist in the higher organisms ; they contain within themselves the germs of death. Why has this change occurred ? . Why has death appeared as the inevitable shadow and counterpart of life?
It is to be accounted for, says one German teacher, at least in part, on the ground of utility to the species,—the greater good to the kind of new and fresh lives as com- pared with the battered hulks of older generations. This kind of utility is one which it would seem can never operate by means of natural selection, because the individual which
does the useful act, i.e., which dies—instead of being thereby
benefited, ceases to exist—ceases to be capable of receiving any benefits from his own acts or others. Such utility, if it
be operative at all, must, one would think, be so only by acting as a motive on the mind of some one who is above, arid regulates, the whole affairs of the species. But leaving aside this and many other speculations which Weissman's theory seems to open out, our present object is to observe that on this theory our author has some very interesting remarks. She finds in the physical facts with which Weissman deals, in evidence that "death is a sine qua non of fuller life," and she observes that "the sacrifice of self to an object outside the self is known to us by one name only, it is an act of love." She thus brings together in what she calls "cosmic relation" the death of the first multicellular organism that died by reason of its organisation, and the death of Christ; in each case it is expedient that one should die for the people.
It has often seemed to us a curious thing that scarcely any one of our modern writers ever touches upon the dignity of man, but they must add to it some expression of contempt for the lower creatures. And this is strange when we consider how little we really know of their mental constitution or their consciousness ; and it is all the more strange when the doctrine of evolution has taught us how closely we are connected with them in mental as well as in bodily structure. Miss Gaillard is not free from this besetting sin, and—in a way which we do not perfectly understand—she considers that the difference between men and the brutes is a pillar of the faith in our personality and in our immortality. "In God," she says, "is life for the whole universe, but to man alone is that life also light; and as he (individually or collectively) develops towards his perfect being, so does that light become greater, showing all things new to hini as he gradually perceives them more adequately and truly." Now, no one who believes in the spiritual nature of man and of the world can do other than admit a difficulty in conceiving the gradations of spiritual existence from the highly self-conscious and spiritual nature of the most lofty adult man to the earliest condition of that man before birth; or, again, from such a man to the lowest organism that has life. But what warrant is there for dogmatically asserting that that spirit, which appears as life throughout the animated world, nowhere appears as light until it reaches man ? It seems to us to be a statement entirely devoid of evidence. That man is the highest of God's creatures, that he is, indeed, the roof and crown of things, that all Divine revelation of which we know anything is addressed to him and to him alone, and that it gives no information to us about the spiritual condition of the lower animals,—all this is, or may be, true, but it seems to us to fall far short of a justification for the dogmatic statements which are so common to the prejudice of the brute-creation. And be it observed that they are really needless for the purpose with which they are generally connected ; the self-conscious- ness of man, the personality of man, the aspirations of man., are strong arguments in favour of his future existence and against the notion that he will perish for ever ; but the argument is made no stronger by adding to it the proposi- tion that none of these things are possessed in lesser degree by the brute-creation. It is in the affirmative part of the proposition that its whole force lies.
Miss Caillard has produced a volume of great merit; she has a strong sense of reverence and of the awe and mystery of the universe, but she has trained her mind by the study of modern science : and in the union of these, with very considerable powers of thought and exposition, lies the chief merit of her thoughtful volume. She has that faith in the ultimate harmony of things, in the ultimate victory of spirit and of goodness, which enables her fearlessly to meet, and to do her best to overcome, the mysteries and puzzles of this world of ours. We can honestly commend her book.
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