KINGSLEY'S WESTMINSTER SERMONS.* THESE Sermons exhibit, as strikingly perhaps as

any he ever published, the characteristic merits and defects of their

author. When his heart speaks, when his instincts bear wit- ness to this or to that, Mr. Kingsley is trustworthy, impressive, admirable ; when he grapples with any problem of the pure in- tellect, when we press him for a pointed and final answer to any difficult question, the result is unsatisfactory. He was never more

earnest or more eloquent than he is in this volume ; he never -more perspicuously or more pathetically expressed those cravings

which mark out man, among the living creatures of this world/ as the one whose nature is religious, the one that will not be comforted till it feels itself close to the heart of a Father God. Never was the ardour of his enthusiasm for the Christian and the chivalrous virtues, the virtues of self-sacrifice, on the one hand, and the virtues of courage, generosity, mag- nanimity, on the other, more vividly imprinted on his thought and style. The frankness and boldness of his personal character are also sufficiently attested, and he does not scruple to repudiate in decisive terms sundry figments of a theology which has played a great part in the world, but is now fast becoming obsolete. He denies that the earth is under the curse -of its Maker :—

" The book of Genesis does not say that the animals began to devour each other at Adam's fall. It does not even say that the ground is cursed for man's sake now, much less the animals. For we read in Genesis ix. 21, And the Lord said, I will not any more curse the ground for man's sake? Neither do Psalmists and Prophets give the least

hint of any such doctrine Others will tell us that St. Paul has said so, where he says that by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.' But I must very humbly, but very firmly demur to that. St. Paul shows that when he speaks of the world he moans the world of men ; for he goes on to say, 'and so death passed upon all men, in that all have sinned.' By mentioning men, he excludes the animals ; he excludes all who have not sinned, according to a sound rule of logic, which lawyers know well."

This may not be exhaustive exegesis, though it seems to us to be substantially correct, or at least fair, but it is the clear and emphatic testimony of a robust nature against a monstrous doctrine. And Mr. Kingsley adds, by way of buttress to his argument, what is in all senses conclusive and exhaustive, to wit, a reference to the fact e pre-Adamic animal death :— " We know that ages ago, in old worlds, long before this present world in which we live, the seas swarmed with sharks and other monsters, who not only died as animals do now, but who did devour— for there is actual proof of it—other living creatures, and that the same process went on on the land likewise. The rocks and soils, for miles beneath our feet, are one vast graveyard, full of the skeletons of creatures, almost all unlike any living now, who, long before the days of Adam, and still more before the days of Noah, lived and died, generation after generation."

Facing thus resolutely the solemn fact of death's universality and painfulness upon earth, Mr. Kingsley declares that we must take refuge in faith. We cannot see, but we may trust. In the cross of Christ has been revealed the infinitude of divine love, compassion, sympathy, self-sacrifice ; and in view of the mystery of pain, we cling to the cross. This is the core of Mr. Kingsley's theology, and his words glow as he writes of it :—

" We know that God so loved the world, that He spared not His only-begotten Son, but freely gave Him for us. We know that the only- begotten Son Jesus Christ so loved the world that he stooped to be born and suffer as mortal man, and to die on the cross, even while Ho was telling men that not a sparrow fell to the ground without the know- ledge of their Heavenly Father, and bidding them see how God fed the .birds and clothed the lilies of the field. Ah, my friends! in this case, as in all cases, rest and comfort for all doubts and fears is to be found

• We:Minster Sermons. By the Rev. Charles Kingsley, F.L.S., F.G.S., em. London; Macmillan and Co. 1874.

in one and the same place —at the foot of the cross of Christ. If we believe that He who hung upon that cross is—as He is—the maker and miler of the universe, the same from day to day and for ever, then we can trust Him in darkness as well as in light, in doubt as well as in certainty, in the face of pain, disease, and death, as well as in the face of joy, health, and life,—and say= Lord, we know not, but thou knowest. Lord, we believe, help thou our unbelief. Make us sure that thou, Lord, shalt save both man and beast. For great are thy mercies, 0 Lord ; and the children of men shall put their trust under the shadow of thy wings.'"

While, however, Mr. Kingsley takes refuge from the appalling prospect of anguish past and present in unquestioning faith, be does not counsel submission to any preventible ill. He calls upon men to "study and obey the physical laws of the universe," and thus put an end to the miseries entailed upon them, and transmitted to their descendants, through their own folly and ignorance.

We referred to the strength of Mr. Kingsley's religious instincts. They speak in him with an intensity and freshness which lend them a kind of authority, as if nature found in them a voice. There are few demonstrations constructed by philosophers to which so much weight may be justly attached as to the inspirations of true poets, and there is a breath of real inspiration in the following assertion that there is a religious element in the normal human creature :—

"Those men talk of facts,—the facts of human nature. Why do they ask us to ignore the most striking fact of human nature, that man, even if he were a mere animal, is, alone of all animals, a praying animal ? Is that strange instinct of worship which rises in the heart of man as soon as ho begins to think, to become a civilised being, and not a savage, to be disregarded as a childish dream when be rises to a higher civilisa- tion still ? Is the experience of men, heathen as well RB Christian, for all these ages, to go for nought? Has it mattered nought whether men cried to Baal or to God, for with both alike there has been neither sound nor voice, nor any that answered ? Has every utterance that has ever gone up from suffering and doubting humanity gone up in vain ? Have the prayers of saints, the hymns of psalmists, the agonies of martyrs, the aspirations of poets, the thoughts of sages, the cries of the oppressed, the pleadings of the mother for her child, the maiden praying in her chamber for her lover upon the distant battle-field, the soldier answer- ing her prayer from afar off with, 'Sleep quiet, I am in God's hands,'— those very utterances of humanity which seemed to us most noble, most pure, most beautiful, most divine, been all in vain, imperti- nences, the babblings of fair dreams, poured forth into nowhere, to nothing, and in vain ? Has every suffering, searching soul which ever gazed up into the darkness of the unknown, in hopes of catching even' a glimpse of a divine eye, beholding all, and ordering all and pitying all, gazed up in vain ? Oh! my friends, those who believe or fancy that they believe such things, must be able to do so only through some peculiar conformation, either of brain or heart. Only want of imagination to conceive the con- sequences of such doctrines can enable them, if they have any love and pity for their fellow-men, to preach those doctrines without pity and horror. They know not, they know not, of what they rob a mankind already but too miserable by its own folly and its own sin ; a mankind which, if it have not hope in God and in Christ, is truly—as Homer said of old—more miserable than the beasts of the field. If their un- conscious conceit did not make them unintentionally cruel, they would surely be silent for pity's sake ; they would let men go on in the pleasant delusion that there is a living God, and a Word of God who has revealed him to men, and would hide from their fellow-creatures the dreadful secret which they think they have discovered,—that there is none that heareth prayer, and therefore to Him need no flesh come."

This, as a reading of his religious consciousness by a sincerely religious man, has a scientific pertinency for anyone desirous of ascertaining the value and finding the place of the religious element in the human animal, akin to that of Dr. Newman's statement of the irresistible, innate power of his conviction that God lives. To reduce it, however, to its exact scientific worth, as indicating a normal and trustworthy characteristic of humanity, we should require to subject it to an amount of sifting to which it was im- possible for Mr. Kingsley to subject it in the pulpit. The right of cross-questioning clearly belongs to objectors, and they are not the less but the more entitled to exercise it in the present instance, from the side-glances at their possible conceit or cruelty which the preacher permits himself. They might press for that verification through whose ordeal they insist upon passing all human instincts, expectations, cravings, and presagings, whether they are original or derived. They might hesitate to admit that the religious illusion, if an illusion, is in all instances sweet and soothing. If forced to concede that, even when deduction has been made on the score of religious despondency, religious madness, religious wars, reli- gious persecutions, religious deadening of the intellectual nerve in whole nations (as in Spain by means of the Inquisition), religious consecration of murder and lust in countless instances known to all informed men, even then, we say, religious faith has nevertheless been a clear gain to humanity, they might fall back on the position that the sweetness and utility of illusion will for a brave and high- souled man, have less attraction than the sternness of truth. It is, of course, impossible for us to go into the question here ; but while unaffectedly declaring our belief that the religious instinct of man is to be relied on, and that its trustworthiness as a normal

attribute of the race admits of strictly scientific verification, on the ground that where it has failed to assert itself, or ceased to assert itself, in man or in nation, the fibre of character has wasted away in frivolity, lassitude, sloth, sensuality, and selfishness, we still are bound to maintain that the vague statement of it, or of one aspect of it, in such a passage as Mr. Kingsley's, can have but a limited value for argumentative purposes. The pulpit, once for all, is a bad place for mere reasoning. If we will not admit that proposi- tion at this time of day, neither would we do so if Socrates rose from the dead to teach us, as he tried to teach the Athenians, the first elements of dialectical science. Cross-questioning is an indis- pensable part of the process by which truth is ascertained.

The view which Mr. Kingsley takes of the relation of science to Scripture is untenable and obsolete, and less than no good will be done by attempting to revive it. We make this statement with the precautionary remark, due to Mr. Kingsley and ourselves, that we are not prepared to prove that he consistently maintains his theory, or that passages might not be quoted from the book in which he seems to discard it. All we say is that the Babylonish garment is here, and that the man who candidly and carefully looks must find it. Mr. Kingsley argues that the Bible has anticipated modern science. Of course, he does not say so in as many words. Hugh Miller was the last thoroughly com- petent geologist who could, in perfect honesty of mind and conscience, maintain the doctrine in so many words. We have no doubt that Mr. Kingsley does not quite believe it, and that the indecisive, wavering tone of the passages in which he shows that he cannot give it up is accurately representative of his state of conviction respecting it. If he has deliberately and firmly accepted the fact that the language of the Bible is language intended to be intelligible to those to whom it was addressed, and not intended to be, in whole or in part, a collec- tion of enigmatic formulm, which the science of the future was to unriddle, why does he say, or suggest, that the Bible contains the modern doctrine of races and the modern doctrine of embryonic .development ? This is what he says of Scriptural embryology :—

" I ask you to remember that marvellous essay on Natural Theology —if I may so call it, in all reverence—namely, the 139th Psalm, and judge for yourself whether he who wrote that did not consider the study -of embryology as important, as significant, as worthy of his deepest attention as an Owen, a Huxley, or a Darwin. Nay, I will go further -still, and say that in those great words—' Thine eyes did see my sub- stance, yet being imperfect ; and in thy book all my members were written, -which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there were none of them '—in those words, I say, the Psalmist has anticipated that realistic view of embryological questions to which our most modern philosophers are, it seems to me, slowly, half-unconsciously, but still inevitably returning."

We do not profess to have more than a guess, a guess so dim and dubious as not to be worth stating, as to what Mr. Kingsley is driving at in the last words. What the passage, taken generally, suggests to our mind is that the Psalmist anticipated modern embryonic discovery in some way in which it would be incorrect to say that Homer or Herodotua could have done so. That Homer, and the wonderful poet who wrote the 139th Psalm, had a very considerable knowledge of anatomy and of natural history is beyond dispute. But the fact established by modern research, that the mammalian embryo passes, in its pre-natal stage, through the several types, fish, reptile, bird, of its vertebrate predecessors, was known neither to the one poet nor to the other, and is to be found just as much in the Iliad as in the Psalms. Mr. Kingsley ought not to have permitted even the shadow of a superstitious reluctance to admit this to linger on his page. On the question of race he is equally in error :—

" Physical science is proving more and more the immense importance of Race ; the importance of hereditary powers, hereditary organs, hereditary habits, in all organised beings, from the lowest plant to the highest-animal. She is proving more and more the omnipresent action of the differences between races ; how the more favoured race—she cannot avoid using tho epithet—exterminates the less favoured, or at least expels it and forces it, under penalty of death, to adapt itself to new circumstances ; and in a word, that competition between every race and every individual of that race, and reward according to desert, is, as far as we can see, an universal law of living things The natural theology of the future must take count of these tremendous and even painful facts. She may take count of them. For Scripture has taken count of them already. It talks continually—it has been blamed for talking so much—of races ; of families; of their wars, their struggles, their exterminations; of races favoured, of races rejected ; of remnants being saved, to continuo the race; of hereditary tendencies, hereditary -excellencies, hereditary guilt."

'To whatever cause it is due, whether to the culture of science or to something else, the logical faculty of the public has of late been quickening, and we fancy it is almost superfluous to point out to our readers the logical fallacy here. One thing is put for quite another thing, and resemblance of terms is passed off as

identity of facts. The " favoured " races of modern science are those of hard brain and sinewy muscle, with heart to match. The " desert " of modern science is capacity to get hold of the good things going. The favoured races of Scripture are those who have heard the voice of the Lord and done his will, and the strength given them is always pointedly specified to be his strength, not theirs. That strength was a, strength of spirit and of soul, a strength of calm will and hallowed resolution, a strength which triumphed over physical force in the moment of being overpowered by it, a etrength which realised immortality in the embrace of death. It is because the Bible, dimly in the Old Testament, clearly in the New, reveals this strength, that its inspiration is nobler than the inspiration of science, and that its revelation is required to prevent physical science from congealing into an intolerable, universal despotism of material force. But it is to throw the whole discussion into con- fusion to speak of Scripture having anticipated the modern doctrine of race.