• BOOKS.

ANCIENT RELIGION AND MODERN THOUGHT.* THIS is a book which evinces not only wide knowledge and much subtlety of thought, but a very high dialectic power. The fourth and fifth chapters,—in reality, the fourth and fifth essays, for we hold it to be a mistake to ascribe to this book the cohe- sion which chapters imply, whereas the subjects of it seem to us to be absolutely as separable as essays, and much less closely knitted together than some volumes of essays,—are, in the opinion of the present writer, far the ablest which the book con- tains ; and the dialogue is the ablest part even of these essays, though we wish that less colourless interlocutors than Damon and Pythias could have been provided for them. Mr. Lilly's study of the most ancient of the Eastern religions has evidently been a careful one ; but the long essay on "Religions and Religion" is the least interesting in the book, Mr. Lilly having evinced a much happier art for condensing the leading features of any system of thought in the course of a discussion, than he has for the systematic presentation of it. Even his exposition_ of the history of Cardinal Newman's mind is, we think, far less effective than the two last essays. And the essay on Schopenhauer is still less adequate to its subject,—in spite of the admirable and far more interesting study of Buddhism which it contains. There is a sort of wilful caprice about Schopenhaner's form of pessimism which Mr. Lilly does not bring out, and ought, we think, to have brought out. Why in the world should Schopenhauer assume that the reality beneath all phenomena is a sort of diffused animal craving, which he absurdly calls "will to exist ?" And how can Mr. Lilly say, as he does, that this impersonal but diffused craving " does not seem to be substantially very different from what is usually termed force." Surely Schopenhauer himself would• have repu- diated that in the strongest way. The mere fact that he regards the fascination of the sexes for each other as the chief and most characteristic illustration of the " will to exist," shows that he meant by it much more than "force,"—that it included the element of blind passion,—in other words, that Schopen- hauer ascribed even to the inorganic world a pervading prin- ciple of a kind of which we derive all our knowledge, not from the inorganic, but from the organic world. Schopenhauer'e statement that he regarded the tie between the sexes as the most characteristic manifestation of the reality underlying all phenomena, and as betraying its endeavour to secure the life of the species, nay that he held this truth to be the " pearl of his system " sufficiently shows that he had no idea at all of identifying his ultimate reality with what men of science call " force." It is nearer, we take it, to the force of desire, than to force as physicists speak of force ; and to our minds nothing can be more capricious than to assume a blind craving or desire as the constructive power at the core of the universe. That one essential property, if not the very essence of all matter, is physical force, has long been recognised ; but that " desire "—of any sort—should be the secret of physical attraction, or of molecular repulsion, is an absurd hypothesis, for which there can be no vestige of plausible excuse. We do not mean to hint that Mr. Lilly gives the least indication of intellec- tual respect for Schopenhaner's hypothesis ; but neither does he criticise or refute it,—as, with even a page or two of criticism, he might easily have done, by showing how arbitrary it is to assume for the ultimate reality, neither that which the most elementary forms of the universe suggest, nor that which its highest forme suggest, but one which starts up half-way in the " spiral" of evolution, and appears to be essential neither to its lowest nor to its highest life.

But while no one of Mr. Lilly's first three essays seems to us to give any adequate measure of his power,—full though the third is of the evidence of study,—the fourth and fifth are remarkable pro- ductions, full of force and subtlety. The fourth begins with a long exposition of, and criticism on, the book called Natural Religion by the author of Ecce Homo, and concludes with a dialogue between a Roman Catholic and an Agnostic on the com- parative difficulties of the Roman Catholic and the Agnostic view

• Ancient Religion and Modern Thought. By William Samuel Lilly. London: Chapman and Hall.

of the universe and of human life. The whole of this essay is very valuable, though Mr. Lilly has, in our opinion, somewhat over- weighted it with the lengthened exposition which he gives of that strange and, as we believe, very ineffective book on Natural Religion to which the author of Bete Homo has lent the adven- titious charm of his graceful and vivid style. Admirable as many of the criticisms in the early part of the essay are, the dialogue with which it concludes is far the best portion of it, Mr. Lilly proving terser and keeping closer to the point under the exi- gencies of dialogue than under the exigencies of impersonal criticism. Take, for instance, this preliminary statement of the case for believing in a Being who is behind the veil of phenomena, and whom mere phenomena can never manifest, though we find ourselves compelled to seek the explanation of the appearances of the world in that which does not appear:—

" Prrmes. I am curious to know—we are too old friends for you to attribute to me the impertinence of an idle curiosity—I am curious to know how you got over difficulties which, as I remember, we both felt strongly twenty years ago, and which I feel as strongly still.

DAMON. I will gladly tell you anything I can, and, although I do not profess, like the clown in the play, to have an answer that will fit all questions, still I say, with the clown, Spare me not.' But let us know what we start from. Here, too, it is true c'est le premier pas qui cants.' May I take it that you believe in God—in the old acceptation I mean : not as a mere anima mundi, nor as the totality of the forces of the universe, nor as an abstraction of the mind, like Humanity with a big H, but as a person in the most transcendent sense of the term, and as the person who put personality into us ?

PYTHIAS. You remember the verse of Goethe :—

Mein Liebehen, wer dart sagen, mob glaub' an Gott P Magst Priester oder Weise [men, Und ihre Antwort soheint nur Spott Reber den Prager sci sok':

It seems to me the last word on the question.

Denoti. Yes, indeed. I know the lines well, too well : So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men.' I remember that they long rang in my ears as the knell of Theism, until I rose up against their authority and fought my doubts for myself. Then I am to begin with the beginning, and to tell you how I got over the difficulties of the Theistic hypothesis ? Well, perhaps I may say that I feel them now as strongly as I ever did. Only they have sunk into another place in my mind. A difficulty is one thing. A doubt is quite another. What inexplicable difficulties attend every biological theory that has ever been put forward ! Yet who doubts the fact of life? Then again the difficulties of the Atheistic or the Agnostic hypo- thesis seem to me to be far greater than those of the Theistic : far harder to reconcile with facts. So far as I know, Butler's pregnant question has never received an affirmative answer Will any man in his senses say that it is less difficult to conceive how the world came to be, and to continue as it is, without, than with, an intelligent anther and governor of it ?' I was reading in a book of Schweizer's only this morning,—' It is indubitable that the human mind has from the earliest times worshipped as the higher truth the reality which is hidden behind phenomena but consciously felt in the heart, and has ascribed to it greater analogy with ideas than with the primary elements of the phenomenal world, such as matter and force.' Now this unquestionable fact seems to me a very momentous fact, not in the least robbed of its significance because a certain school of scientists decline to recognise anything beyond the physical phe- nomena to which the methods of their science necessarily restrict them. Their assumption that their way of investigation is the sole instrument of discovering truth, seems to me obviously false. As we used to read in Plato : 'Beauty is not perceived by sense, nor is goodness, beauty, resemblance, difference, number.' And St. Augustine says : God is nearer, more related to ns, and therefore more easily known by us, than any sensible, corporeal thing.' I hold that the senses are but one, and by no means the surest, of the ways of finding truth ; that there are in the moral order, as in the mathe- matical, certain necessary truths, not known experimentally but in- tuitively, recognised instinctively as tree by the cognitive faculty, truths which are their own sufficient vouchers and justifications ; in other words, that there is an d priori element in our knowledge, and that our instinctive faculties are rather to be treated than any con- clusions derived by the phenomenist, through inductive processes ' from his narrow and arbitrarily restricted range of experienced facts.' Hence it is that the argnmeut of the Divine existence drawn from conscience, from Kant's categorical imperative of duty, comes home to me with such irresistible force that I do not hesitate to say with Julius Muller : Conscience is the consciousness of God; "

A more powerful preliminary statement of the case against the sceptical school, and especially against the school which accounts for conscience as the product of social conditions im- pressing themselves on the individual life, it would be difficult to find.

Again, in the last dialogue, where the discussion is even more powerful than in the preceding one, Mr. Lilly states his own view of the • great question of immortality and eternal life with the utmost force. We must say, how- ever, that we do not think he does justice to the difficulty which besets the orthodox creed in relation to the state of probation and of punishment. It is not only that he mini- raises overmuch the general drift of ecclesiastical tradition as to the state of punishment, and makes light of everything which the Roman Church has not yet absolutely pronounced to be de fide, but he leaves out of view altogether the difficulty of difficulties,—the assumption which we should be surprised to hear was not even de fide for Roman Catholics,—namely, that the state of probation ceases absolutely with death—that no farther chance of attaining to the fall knowledge and vision of God is accorded even to the child of nine, educated perhaps in vice, who does not die in what the Church regards as a "state of salvation," than is accorded to the deliberate sinner who has had every means of grace offered to him, and who has rejected them all. This seems to us to add a considerable diffi- culty, of which Mr. Lilly takes no notice, and to deduct a great deal from the force of this powerful apologetic passage, which we take, however, not from the last essay, but from the previous one, not because it contains so adequate a discussion on the whole, but because it presents the leading question in a briefer form :—

"Pyrmas. You talk of an immortal hope. Bat surely the outlook which the theologians exhibit to the vast majority of mankind is rather an immortal dread. I was reading the other day in one of the profoundest and most eloquent of your writers : It is one opinion entertained among divines and holy men, that the number of Catholics that are to be saved will on the whole be small ;' and I suppose Catholics would be held by their divines and holy men to have a better chance than the rest of the world. But what a vision does this opinion raise in the mind,—the vision of a Being who could de- liberately and of His own free will call into existence myriads of creatures with infinite capacities for suffering, foreknowing, or rather knowing,—' in Him is no before,'—that an eternity of ineffable misery lay before them ! People are better than their creed, or the servants of such a Being would be absolutely inhuman. They may thank themselves, however, if such a representation of God drives men into negation of Him. But what makes the matter worse is, that, as I am firmly persuaded, the good men—I know they are some- times very good men—who put it forward do not in their heart of hearts believe it. How could they eat or drink, or sleep, if they did ? The horror of the thought would haunt them day and night, and in no long time drive them mad. Indeed, I think it may be safely affirmed that the only real believers in this Stygian Gospel are those who lose their reason by it, for that is its natural and logical result.

DAMON. Very little is of faith with Catholics upon this tremendous subject. This is of faith, that human life is a time of probation ; that the choice which every creature endowed with free will has to make, while in this world, is brief, and yet endless,' and that those who deliberately reject God by their own act shut themselves ont from the Beatific vision. What do the researches of the physicists, bring out more startlingly than the inexorableness of the laws of Nature,' as they speak ? All things are double one against another : the things that are seen against the things that are not seen. Law reigns everywhere. It is as irreversible in the spiritual order as in the phenomenal world. Thus Gotama, whose doctrine that a man's doing is his true self, embodies a great truth, teaches in the Pali Dhammapada that evil deeds must bear bitter fruits,'—there is no help for it : that though an evil deed, like newly-drawn milk, does not all at once turn sour, yet, smouldering like fire covered by ashes, it follows the fool' into the unseen world : that, if a man speaks or acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the carriage,' a most significant comparison. • As you will remember, we used to read in. Hogd, punishment is not something arbitrary ; it is the other half of crime.' It is not pri- marily nor necessarily remedial, but vindictive—a stern truth, which the jargon of so-called philanthropists has done much to obscure for the present age. Every great religion, every profound thinker, has realised as vividly as Christianity itself the tremendons, the far- reaching nature of sin. You remember the passage in Plato—it is in the Phcedo—where he says that the wicked would be too well off if their evil deeds came to an end with death, and that other passage at the end of the Republic, where one spirit asks another, Where is " Ardiasas the Great" ?'—the tyrant who a thousand years before had desolated one of the cities of Pampbylia—and is answered, 'He has not come forth from hell ; he is not likely to come forth.' It is a most striking thing that the two founders of religions who, as you will allow, have been most full of pity for men, Jesus the Messiah, and Gotama the Buddha, have presented the most terrible pictures of the consequences, in another existence, of moral evil in this. Think of Dives, the heartless glutton, asking in vain for a drop of water to cool his tongue in the unquenchable flame. Think of the monk Kokiliya, of whom we read in the Sutta Nipdta, condemned, for speaking evil of the brethren, to the Padnma hell, where the wicked are beaten with iron hammers, and boiled in iron pots in a mixture of blood and matter, and fed on food resembling red-hot balls of iron, and plunged into the accursed river Vetaraui, difficult to cross, and flowing with streams of sharp-edged razors, and where their torments last 512,000,000,000 times as long as it would take to clear away a large load of tiny sesamum seed, at the rate of one seed in a hundred years. If, as Catholics believe, God is the final end of man —to love him above all things, our friend in him, our enemy for him, oar great good—and if this life is a time of probation, what can We reasonably conjecture as to the destiny which anyone shapes for himself who deliberately turns away from that final end, and rejects that great good,—who takes sides with his enemies, and Bays Evil, be thou my good ?" 'L'enfer ' says Bossuet, &est le says, meme ; l'enfer c'est d'etre eloigne de Dien) He whose lips were fall of grace, speaks of eternal sin= reus astern delicti,'—a pregnant expression indeed. There is a fine passage in the Qur'dn, depicting with much boldness the 'Dies Irte,' as the Muslim prophet conceived of it, when the heavens shall be rent asunder, and the stars shall be dispersed, and the seas shall be mingled, and the sepulchres shall be overthrown, and every soul shall know what it bath done and left undone.' On that great and exceed- ing bitter day, in each man's hands shall be put the book of his deeds ; his account exactly stated ; himself called to witness that the Lord will not deal unjustly with any one.' The vision which you have conjured up, I of course put aside as the mere phantasm of a dis- ordered imagination. God is infinitely loving, as well as infinitely just. And of this we may be confident—it seems to me blasphemous to doubt it—that the eventual condition of every soul will be such as is best for that soul ; the best that is possible for it, as being what it is, what it has made itself to be.' This is the 'larger hope,' which we not only may faintly trust, but should assuredly be- lieve : the one ray of celestial light in this great darkness. Thou lovest all the things that are, and abhorreet nothing that thou halt made. Thou sparest all, for they are thine, 0 Lord, thou Lover of Souls !' "

Mr. Lilly's literary method—his efficiency as a writer—is, as we have said, very much better in the last two essays than in the

first three, in some portions of which the treatment may be said to be even clumsy ; but in nearly all of them there are epigrammatic sentences, not in the least dragged in, of great point and vivacity, while in the dialogue these are conspicuous.

Let us ask, in conclusion, whether Mr. Lilly is not mistaken in referring Cardinal Newman's sermon on "The Parting of Friends " to the year 1845, the year in which Dr. Newman joined the Roman Catholic Church. It is published in his volume of Sermons on Subjects of the Day, to the latest of which is assigned the date of 1843, and to this sermon especially is assigned the date September 25th, 1843. We had always supposed that for two years before joining the Roman Church Dr. Newman had ceased to preach,—and, indeed, we had regarded this long delay over the last step as especially characteristic of Dr. Newman's singular patience and of the fortitude of his resolve not to anticipate the growth of final conviction.