MISS COBBE'S ESSAYS:* - SEVERAL of Miss Cobbe's essays—which, it
may be said in pass- ing; take the breathless critic over a very wide and rarefied region of theology and metaphysics—have been noticed from time to time in the Spectator. For the one which gives a title to the volume we have already expressed an admiration which has not been diminished by a second perusal. We are not sure, indeed; that Miss Cobbe's position, logically considered, appears the more tenable the more carefully it is examined. She is perfectly pre- pared to receive the Darwinian doctrine of the descent of man from the lower animals. She is impatient and even scornful of the repugnance which that doctrine excites in the minds of some thinkers. But when Mr. Darwin goes on to assert the descent, so to speak, of man's moral nature from the instincts of animals, she makes a stand. The position is a perilous one. If the physical man, it surely may be argued, grew out of the brute or the mollusc, why not the moral ? The instincts of the creature must have developed as his corporeal frame developed. Were they not developing out of instincts into what we call a morality ? Or are we to suppose that at some point of his growth he came under the dominion of the independent moral laws with which he before had no more concern than the brutes have now ? Is not that hypo- thesis a demand which it is hopeless to make of those with whom Miss Cobbe would argue ? At the same time, the argument of the essay must be allowed to be able and of great cogency. We can- not imagine how the lucid exposition of the inadequacy of Dar- winism to account for the moral, and still more for the spiritual, phenomena of humanity, is to be met. Take this passage, for instance, which seems to us admirably forcible :— "If it were true of mankind in general (as it may be true of the most gentle individuals) that a return to sympathy and good-will spontaneously follows-, sooner or later, every unkind act, then Mr. Darwin's account of the case would supply us with an explanation of that side of the sentiment of repentance which is turned towards the person injured. It would still, I think, fail altogether to render an account of the mysterious awe and horror which the greater crimes have in all ages left on the minds of their perpetrators, far beyond any feelings of pity for the sufferers, and quite irrespective of fear of human justice or retaliation. This tre- mendous sentiment of Remorse, though it allies itself with religious fears, seems to me not so much to be derived from religious consider- ations as to be in itself one of tho roots of religion. The typical Orestes does not feel horror because he fears the Erinnyes, but he has called up the phantoms of the Erinnyes in the nightmare of his horror. Nothing which Mi. Darwin, or any other writer on his side, so far as I am aware, ham ever suggested as the origin of the moral sense, has supplied us with, a plausiable explanation of either such Remorse or of ordinary Repentance. In the former ease, wo have soul-shaking terrors to be accounted for, either (according to Mr. Darwin) by mere pity and sympathy, or (according to the old Utilitarians) by fear of retaliation or disgrace; such as the sufferer often notoriously defies or even courts. In the case of ordinary Repentance, we have a feeling infinitely sacred and tender, capable of transforming our whole nature as by an enchanter's wand, softening and refreshing our hearts as the dry and dusty earth is quickened by an April shower, but yet (we are asked to believe) caused by no higher sorcery, fallen from no loftier sky, than our own every-day instincts, one hour selfish and the next social, meaning them- selves in wearipme alternation ! What is the right of one of these instincts as against the other, that its resumption of its temporary supremacy should be accompanied by such portents of solemn augury ? Why, when we return to love our neighbour, do we at the same time bate ourselves, and wish to do so still more? Why, instead of shrinking from punishment, do men, under such impressions, always desire to expiate their offences so fervently, that with the smallest sanction from their. religious teachers they rush to the cloister or seize the scourge? Why, above all, do we look inevitably beyond the fellow-creature whom we have injured up to God, and repeat the cry which has hurst from every penitent heart for millenniums back, Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned!'"
Nothing in the volume is more interesting than the two essays which, as standing together in the volume, should certainly be reach in conjunction, "An English Broad-Churchman" and " A- French Theist." The "English Broad-Churchman" is Frederick Robertson, the "French Theist" is M. Felix Pecaut.
• Darwinism in Morals. and other Essays. By Frances Power Cobbe. London: Williams and Non:ate. 1872 There can be no doubt, of course, as to which of: the two it ieto whom Miss Cobbe's sympathies and convictions incline her, nor need we say that our own faith leads us in an opposite direction. She prizes M. Pecant because, as she conceives, he has been able to show "what is the basis of fact in human consciousness which underlies popular Christianity," to explain philosophically the dif- ference between the place which Christ ought to hold, and' the- place which He does hold in the estimation of mankind. In Robertson, on the other, she sees that popular theology awitreaches its most attractive and most refined development. For the popular theology, take it apart from the scholastic subtleties which have overlaid or distorted it, has for its characteristic the' worship of Christ, and of that worship Robertson seemed the prophet and priest :— "From his first desire to devote himself, like a knight of old, to 'military service and the service of Christ,' Christ's name seemsto have been uppermost in his mind and on his lips ; and, as his biographer affirms, ho endeavoured to bring everything, even the petty worries of Brighton scandal, in some occult way to the test of• this life passed in Galilee eighteen centuries. ago. He deliberately identifies his wilde religion with the worship of Christ, rather than with the attempt to follow God according to the doctrines of Christ. Christianity in his. view is not so much the religion which Christ taught' to men (though, of course, this he would also maintain it to be), as the ristigioni which, teaches men about Christ. In one of his sermons (quotacl by Mr. Brooke) he says :—'In personal love and adoration of Christ the Chris- tian religion consists, and not in a correct morality or a correct doctrine, but in a homage to a King.' In another place he writes to a friend :- 'Only Only a human God and.none other must be adored by man.' Thus it appears that his intellect ratified the tendency of his feelings. He deliberately made 'the Christian religion' (i.e., his own religion) consist in 'love and adoration,' not of God, but of Christ ; not in morality, not in true belief, not in allegiance to the Lord of oonscience; but in 'homage to a King,' namely, to Jesus of Nazareth. How far this creed harmonised with his other ideas, how it coincided with that faith in the supremacy of moral good which he must have brought away from that grandest passage of his life, when fidelity to his own sense of Duty and Right alone saved him amid the shipwreck of all his theology, how far the 'homage to Christ' could be made the substance of religion by one who had learned that lesson—I cannot explain. It remains one of the thousand self-contradictions of the human mind which we are called on only to notice, and not to reconcile."
That Robertson, as other great teachers, may have sometimes obscured the truth of a Divine Father by vehement assertions of the love of the Son is not impossible, though we do not think that he did ; but it remains a fact that the doctrine of God mani- fest in Christ, which he felt to be of the essence of Christianity, does touch the hearts of men in a way that Unitarian theology has never been able to do. The reader must not fail to take in connection with these two essays a very interesting' articleon the "Religion of Childhood," an article which, admirable in many respects as it is, will scarely produce the conviction which the
writer intends.
Perhaps the least satisfactory essay inthe volume is-that entitled' "The Devil." A writer of Miss Cobbe's power ought certainly-in treating this subject to have dealt with the very able discussion of this belief in an Evil spirit which is to be found in Mr. Maurice's Theological Essays. That great divine, though he was wont to deplore that men believed more heartily in the Devil than they did in God, yet saw this belief to be a necessity. It made men feel that they had a common enemy with whom they are contend- ing, it explained, as generalising talk about principles of evil and negation of good cannot explain, facts of human consciousness. His may have been wrong, but the fact that such a thinker believed that "the evil" from which we pray to be delivered was a personal enemy is sufficient to raise that belief- above the level of a popular,
superstition.
We must be content with enumerating the other essays in Miss Cobbe's volume. These are "Hereditary Piety," "A Prehistoric Religion," "The Religions of the World, "The Religions of the East," "The Religion and Literature of India," "Unconscious Cerebration," "Dreams, as Illustrative of Unconscious Cerebra- tion," "Auricular Confessions in the Church of England;" and "The Evolution of Morals and Religion."
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