BOOKS.
WHEN Dr. Martineau comes to connect the Cause of the Universe with the moral Ruler of the human mind, he comes, of course, to the most difficult part of his subject. He has, however, no difficulty in showing that man at least, and in his own personal
life, recognises the double power,—the power of the universal will which meets him as Cause in all the natural laws of Creation, and the power of the moral yoke which is fastened upon his own individual will, to keep him loyal to all the higher springs of action whenever they compete with the lower for his allegiance, and to punish him with remorse and self-abasement whenever he is disloyal to the moral law within him. And besides this recognition of double powers controlling him which man cannot but connect together,—so interlaced are the branches of each with the other in actual life,—Dr. Martineau shows that in a variety of ways the laws of the universe are so constructed as to paralyse revolt against the moral law so soon as that revolt reaches a certain acme of defiance, while they add continually to the weight and effectiveness of purpose wielded by those who are faithful to it. In short, not only does God manifest himself as Will in the dynamics of the universe, and as moral Will in the guidance of human purpose and the judgment upon human sin, but he takes care that all revolts against this moral authority shall have in them the seeds of their own decay. He sets all revolt at cross-purposes with itself, and multiplies the force of all faithful and self-denying reverence.
Still, when Dr. Martineau comes to compare the world of Nature and the world of human history, with the world as we should conceive it with a divine ruler of infinite holiness and infinite power in the supreme place, he admits that we must be very much staggered at the contrast. For, first of all, Nature seems full of indifference to the suffering of its multitudes of sentient creatures; and next, the history of man seems penetrated through and through by episodes in which the righteous have been over- borne by the unrighteous, and humility and piety have been trodden under the heel of unscrupulous and selfish ambition. Touching first the troubles and pains of the sentient world, Dr.
Martineau points out that in laying down the laws of any system of finite life that is to be subject to general laws at all,—and without such general laws there could be no education of the kind which seems to be the highest of the Creator's designs,— it is impossible to include all that might be desired for one end in framing what is intended to secure a different end :—
"I cannot deny that the phenomena of disease among the lower animals are perplexing facts, which at present admit of no satisfactory explanation. Why, in one season, the cattle should be smitten with a spreading malady, which they must be slain in order to arrest ; and, in another, the grouse pine away into skeletons and strew the moors with their dead : why, when the body's natural term approaches, the failing organs should be susceptible of so many forms of painful decay, so that, if all that are at the last stage were brought together, the scene would be like a battle field at evening when the fight was done, I do not find that any wisest thinker is able to tell. But neither do I know that we should expect to tell ; for these are precisely the phenomena in which the known marks of intention fail, which are evidently not the ends for which the organs are constructed, which even constitute the disappointment of those ends : for which accordingly it is as unreasonable to seek a • Where- fore,' as to ask the runner why be falls, or the boatman why he shoots Niagara. They are present, it is plain, in spite of the normal purpose of the structure they disturb ; relatively to which they must be re- garded as undesigned imperfections, however they may be embraced within some larger project in whose paramount good their partial evils vanish. Do you ask, what business have imperfections' in the work of an infinite Being ? Has he not power to bar them out ? Yes, I reply, if he lives out of his boundless freedom and, from moment to moment, acts unpledged, conducting all things by the miscellany of incalculable miracles, there is nothing to hinder his Will from entering where it listeth,' and all things will be possible to him. Bat, if once he commits his Will to any determinate method, and for the realisation of his ends selects and institutes a scheme of instrumental * A Study of. Religion: its Sources and Contcnts. JAIIICS Martineau, M.D., Press. late Principal of Manchester New Cellegv, Lodes, 0d9rd: 'Amadeu rules, he thereby shuts the door on a thousand things that might have been before; he has defined his cosmical equation, and only those results can be worked out from it which are compatible with the values of its roots. If the square of the distance gives the ratio of decreasing gravitation, the universe must forego the effects which would arise from the rule of the cube. If, for two transparent media, the index of relative refraction is made constant, the phenomena are excluded which would arise were it variable. Every legislative volition narrows the range of events previously open, and substitutes necessity for contingency ; and a group or system of laws, in pro- viding for the occurrence of one set of phenomena, relinquishes the conditions of another. It is vain therefore to appeal to the almighti- ness of God, unless you mean to throw away the relations of any established universe, and pass into hie unconditioned infinitude : in the Cosmos, he has abnegated it; and 'there is a limit for what you may demand from it as within its compass. The limits, it is true, which are assigned to its play are self-imposed : but, in order to any determinate action at all, some limits had to be assigned : and, unless you can show that to a different scheme better possibilities and a less mixed good would have attached themselves, a tone of complaint which can only be justified by such comparative criticism, is out of place. Most of the sufferings now under our notice arise from some troubled relation between the animal organism and the scene in which it is placed: ungenial seasons, desolating winds and floods, an atmosphere charged with germs of disease, a frost that creeps into the heart of the old, a marsh vapour that spreads the fever-bed for the young, are the visitations that make a wreck of life. And these are the occasional results of that scheme of physical laws which, while preparing the theatre of animal existence and favouring its develop- ment, yet goes beyond it and steps from world to world, negotiating for other interests also, and contemplating more enduring good. In launching a power commissioned to a million ends, still more in adjusting together twenty different lines of power, whose crossing and confluence is to work out these ends, it is surely conceivable that the Creator's Will, while subjecting his means to steady rides, may realise some elements of his design less absolutely than if they had stood alone. To every finite method (and to create is to enter the sphere of the finite), this partial disability, this unequal approxima- tion to the ideally perfect, inevitably clings : if it is made inflexible, it must sometimes start a conflict between its universal means and its partial ends : if it is left fluid, it is no longer a method at all. The problems how much should be yielded of one design to serve another, and at what cost of purpose persistence and exactitude of rule should be secured, can be surveyed and solved only by a Mind that com- mands the whole field of the actual and the possible. They are entirely beyond the reach of any calculus of ours."
Dr. Martineau might, we think, have pushed the argument of this fine passage a good deal further, especially in relation to the law of evolution on which so much stress is now laid. The notion that the Creator's attitude towards all the suffering in the world should be the same as man's usually is,—namely, desire to relieve it and nothing else,—aesnmes, of course, that the Creator cannot see its ultimate purpose any better than man. Even we are not justified, and do not feel ourselves justified, in relieving suffering which we believe to be either in any high sense disciplinary or curative. We do not at once clear away all the difficulties and troubles,—though they may be serious,—of our children's first conflict with life, in the playground or the school, nor even do we yield to the restless dislike of the horse or the dog to be broken into the duties for which we intend him. We look beyond the immediate suffering to the better end which it is intended to pro- duce. And we must assume, therefore, that the Creator who sees the whole ground-plan of Creation, though he pities the innocent suffering of every sentient creature in it, will not remove it so long as it is essential to the laws of development which he has ordained for the life of the universe. Now, if it be certain, as Dr. Martineau shows when he comes to deal with the beneficent effects of human suffering, that in the higher stages of development suffering answers a very noble purpose, does it not seem probable that the universe could not have been made suitable for the scene of man's moral education, without planting even in the lower races, out of whose organisation we are now told that our own bodily life is developed, those liabilities to suffering as well as those passions which tend to the infliction of suffering, which, when they reappear on the stage of human life, are so full of moral significance to us ? If, as now seems probable, the biology and physiology of animal life is all on one plan, may it not be of the very essence of that plan that we should see in the life beneath us rehearsals, as it were, of those pangs and passions and cruelties and tragedies which only begin to have their explana- tion so soon as they appear in a world in which piety and penitence and remorse have begun to play great parts upon the scene ? We, at all events, cannot imagine any true principle of evolu- tion which does not plant in the life below, the germs of those problems which are to haunt the life above. And though, of course, the agnostic may say, So much the worse for Evoln- tion,—a perfectly wise Creator would have adopted a higher plan, not needing the appearance of pain until the moral faculty which could educe good from pain had also appeared,' yet it
seems to us at least a considerable attenuation of the difficulty to discover that the pain of lower creatures is necessary, if the higher organisations are to be evolved from theirs, while to those higher organisations pain is not only an essential stimulus, but often also a glorifying and exalting influence. And this is what Dr. Martineau truly enough contends :—
" Ease and prosperity may supply a sufficient school for the respect- able commoners in character : but without suffering is no man ennobled.' Every highest form of excellence, personal, relative, spiritual, rises from this dark ground, and emerges into its freedom by the conquest of some severe necessity. In what Elysium could you find the sweet patience and silent self-control of which every nurse can testify ? or the fortitnde in right, which the rack cannot crush or the dungeon wear out ? or the courage of the prophet, to fling his divine word before the wrath of princes and the mocking of the people P I know it is said, that these would be superfluous. virtues there, their worth being wholly relative to the evils which they minimise. But is this true ? Is the soul which has never been subdued to patience, braced to fortitude, fired with heroic enthusiasm, as harmonious, as strong, as large and free, as that which has beem schooled in martyrdom ? No, the least part of these conquests is in their immediate mastery of the besetting ill : they add a cubit to the moral stature : they clear the vision : they refine the thought they animate the will : so that there is not a duty, however simple, that does not win from them a fresh grace, or a mood, however common, to which they do not give a richer tone. And if to our own chastening we must acknowledge this personal debt, it is equally cer- tain that the sufferings of others speak with an indispensable appeal to our affections, and wake us into a disinterestedness else impossible. Not that we are without sympathy with happy lives also ; but as they need nothing from us, they are only a pleasant spectacle, and do- not stir us from our passiveness, and the affection remains superficial for want of striking root in effort of the will : for, until you serve and strive, you cannot truly love. It is in the presence of sorrow and privation that we most forget ourselves : and in many a home the crippled child or the disabled father has trained to tenderness and considerateness the habits which would else have been self-seeking and frivolous."
Miss Cobbe, in a recent article in the Contemporary Review,. which maintained that we cannot construe the character of God from external creation at all, that God's purposes are no more to be found in the laws of Creation than they were to be found by Elijah in the fire and the whirlwind, though they were to be found by him. in "the still, small voice" of conscience, has represented the so- called Darwinian law of conflict for existence as if it embodied in the very structure of Creation a remorseless and almost cruel indifference to the suffering of sentient beings. That seems to.
us a great exaggeration of the facts which have suggested the- law of Natural Selection. There is, so far as we can see, no more
cruelty in the retreat and extinction of one species before another, than there is in the succumbing of an individual member of one. species which continue; to hold its ground as a species, to the individual member of another species which yet gains no way as a species over its competitor. As Dr. Martineau says in this book :—
" The variable and unequal strain, which constitutes the motive power of animal existence, is seen upon the largest scale in what is called the struggle for life' between races needing the same field, and nearly matched in their claims for its possession. Both the good and the evil of the law of want seem here to be most conspicuous. On the one hand, the way in which every advantage gained, in_ organism or instinct, secures its permanent hold and enriches the earth with higher forms, strikingly marks the pressure of Nature towards the ulterior perfection, and betrays the ideal aim that works- beneath her physical procedure. And, on the other hand, the cost at which the victors win their race, the baffling of the slow, the perishing of the weak, sink into the heart of the generous observer, and make him complain that Nature is pitiless, and heeds not any suffering that enhances the glory of her works. This very complaint, however, is. in itself a homage to the worth of life, and no pessimist could urge it without answering himself. Is it a cruel feature in the competition for existence, that the halt and feeble lose their footing on the world, and are exiled from life ? Is it an evil which they thus incur ? Then. the life which they miss must be a good ; and it is a hardship not to find and keep a place within its teeming fields. If animal existence be not worth having, why invite our compassion for those that lose it ? Even on the opposite assumption, that, in spite of drawbacks, it is better to be alive, this plaintive plea for the beaten armies of Nature- has its ground more in imagination than in reality. The creatures. that cannot compete, that are more ugly, or more awkward, or less swift or strong, than their rivals, do but suffer the fate of any dwindling minority, which may accomplibh its ultimate vanishing without any great discomfort to its members, taken one by one. The extinct races whose only representatives are in our geological museums have suffered no agonies in their generic death, but have been quite unconscious of their interesting rarity ere they disappeared : and the last Dodo of New Zealand had no cause to envy the first."
The Maoris who dwindle before the Europeans of New Zealand, appear to dwindle without more pain to themselves than affects the same number of Europeans dying in the same period of time. Indeed, the life of the successful race may have far more of rest- less pang and convulsion in it, than the life of the feebler race which dwindles more from an overshadowed vitality than from active misery.
But one of the most powerful sections of this part of Dr. Martineau's argument, from which we regret that we have no more space to quote, is that which deals with the pessimist's doctrine that the triumphs of brute force in human history have been of a kind to refute the belief that a righteous will presides over the world's story. Dr. Martineau holds that the very reverse is true, and has reviewed the subject in a section of his book which, for terseness and vigour, leaves even many other parts of it in the shade.
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