BOOKS.

SUPERNATURAL RELIGION.*

(SEOOND NOTICE.]

WE have, in our first notice, given a description less elabo- rate than the subject deserves, though perhaps somewhat more lengthy than our limits could easily afford, of that part of the above work which is marked by vigour and precision of thought, and range and depth of learning. In turning to the division which remains, we gain as much in the intrinsic interest of the subject-matter as we lose in the character of the medium through which we contemplate it. In the dissertation on the Miraculous which precedes the examination of the antiquity of the Christian Scriptures already reviewed by us, the author throws his argument into the form of criticism of such writers as Dr. Motley or Archbishop Trench to exhibit the weakness of the case for the supernatural, and an account of the argument of Hume to show the strength of the case against it. A criticism of him therefore would take the form of a criticism of them at second-hand, not a valuable kind of intellectual effort. We propose, instead of making it, to approach the subject from another point of view, and ask whether the history of science itself does not suggest a certain doubt as to the attitude towards the supernatural which is taken by the thinkers followed by our author. We prefer the term "supernatural" to "miraculous." It seems to us to mean something more definite and more intelligible, but the other term could always be substituted for it by one who prefers it ; for the implied contrast with Nature, which is the point at issue, is the same in both.

The degree in which we should give credence to any account of a supernatural occurrence, as indeed of any other occurrence, would depend partly on our respect for the accuracy and veracity of our informant, and partly upon the expectations in our own mind. The last element, with which we are now dealing, is incomparably the most important, in regard to Christianity. Indeed it is the only one which affords the majority of Christians any ground for forming an opinion at all. How many persons who read even the name of the volume we are reviewing, are capable of estimating the author's attack on the antiquity of the Christian Scriptures ? And yet it will be felt that his criticism touches the smallest element in their views of the events narrated in the Christian Scriptures. Now how far is this reasonable with re- gard to what is supernatural in those events ? Is the supernatural essentially improbable? Is there anything which prepares our minds for a region lying beyond the order of Nature, and possibly invading it at certain intervals with 'seemingly irregular patches of alien territory? The only thing which can do so, we should answer, is that which leads us to expect the future to resemble the past—Experience. If there be any one who denies all knowledge of a power which acts directly upon him, not by evolving the present from the past, but by infusing a new stream of agency into the current of life,—then though such a one may possibly be convinced of the real existence of an event that he cannot explain by any natural principle, we should imagine that distrust of his senses, or of the senses of the witnesses of that supposed event, would be a more rational way of accounting for his impression, than the hypothesis of any cause so entirely unknown to him as that needed to work a miracle. And it is our conviction that all those who believe the narrative of Christ's life either find in it this cor- respondence with some part of their own lives, or believe on wrong grounds. We do not think the evidence for anything that happened eighteen centuries ago can be strong enough to over- come all the expectations formed by our experience of all the laws which rule this world. If, as Mr. Lewes says, "the starting- point is always feeling, and feeling is the final goal and test," the largest share in our belief about others must originate in that which we have felt ourselves, whether those others live now or lived 1800 years ago. There are some to whom the presence of a fountain of initial influence is the thing they are most certain of. To such persons the miraculous will never be hard of belief, the something above nature is always present to them, and the man- ner in which it shall manifest itself is a secondary question. For nature, as Coleridge has said, is no more than that which is in process of becoming—that which has its roots in the past,—that which is "about to be born." This influence, on the other hand, is no part of the chain of cause and effect, but something creative, original ; something that does not merely help the good to grow, but calls forth good out of evil. If any words coming from • Expernatvrai Religion. London: Longman&

the past suggest that the speaker was in some close union with this creative power, it will not be a difficult thing to believe that he was able to return from the region beyond the grave. But in this kind of belief there is nothing transferable. That A, B, and C have this conviction is no help towards D having it, in the same way that their view of anything obvious to the external senses would be. And so far, therefore, as anyone tests any belief by its trans- fembleness, he can take no account of this. We have discussed on a former occasion, and do not now propose to return to it, the question what the attitude of those who have no such preparation for belief in the supernatural ought to be towards the super- natural. We would speak now of another preparation for this belief which is wholly intellectual, of that indication which the laws of nature themselves afford of laws above nature ; an indi- cation, we hold, which is afforded by the graduated subordination of law in the natural world.

The author we are reviewing notices this view as a common fallacy. "It is," he tent; us (p. 44), ." a fundamental error to speak in such a sense of an ascending scale of laws. There is no standard by which we have any right thus to graduate phenomena." This is the statement on which we would join issue with him. We are not careful about nomenclature. We suspect that much error has its source in the fact that we use the same word for an ordin- ance about human actions, which owes its very existence to the fact that it can be broken, and an observed sequence in the phenomena of Nature which is, while the circumstances continue unchanged, invariable. But we must take language as we find it; we shall have to go on talking about laws of nature and laws of men, and all we can do is to point out the fact that the word is, in the first of these senses, a metaphor, and that no inference must be drawn from it in which this metaphorical character is for- gotten. For instance, when our author denies our right to "speak of an ascending scale of laws," he has, we imagine, in the back-ground of his mind, a reference to complicated questions of jurisdiction, and ultimate reference to Some court of final appeal. Now we at once admit there is nothing like this in Nature. When the judge of one Court sets aside the decision of another, he is per- forming an act which is not a good type of anything that happens in those sequences of which Science takes account. Whether it is a much worse type, indeed, than any decision whatever of a judge is of any event in the natural world, we very much doubt, still custom has sanctioned this way of looking at things so far, and we must accept it, while to carry it on to this further stage of conflicting jurisdiction would, we admit, bring in decided error. When, therefore, our author asserts that the laws of Nature work harmoniously side by side, we would not accept these words as conveying the antithesis to the view we are trying to set forth. No doubt there is a harmonious working throughout the whole kingdom of Nature, in a sense in which you do not find the same thing in the human world. But what we mean is this—Whatever such a fact as the rise of a needle to meet a magnet is to such a fact as the continued pull of the earth on that needle at the same time, that the events of the world which is above Nature are to the events of Nature itself. For consider the statement of the law of gravitation—every particle of matter attracts every other with force varying inversely as the square of the distance. Of course that goes on being true always. But here comes in another kind of discriminating attraction, which in some sense sets aside this indiscriminate attraction. The needle recedes from the vast mass which is pulling it, and approaches to the tiny bar which is also pulling it, we must say, with a superior strength. And most certainly it is not from theology or metaphysics, but from science itself, that we gain the conception of a certain subordination in the laws of Nature. It would be easy to illustrate this assertion from the writings of living physicists, but the most striking illustration of it which occurs to us is to be found in the first con- ception of Chemical Affinity, and the relations which it bore to the prevailing conceptions of the time in which it arose. The picture which it presents to us of the difficulty which those who have watched the triumph of one kind of law have in adjusting their attention to the indications of another, has so many striking analo- gies with the state of mind in our day which these volumes imply and express, that it is worth giving the reader with some amount of detail.

About the time that Newton was completing the mighty work which the mechanicians of the sixteenth century had begun, scientific attention was drawn towards a world presenting the exact antithesis to that in which his genius had first discerned order and law, a world escaping observation by its minuteness, as the other baffles imagination by its vastness,—the world, in modern dialect, of molecular action. Science was not then the

elaborately divided region it is now. One part of it then led to another, instead of, as .now, being cut off by almost insuperable barriers from every other, and any great discovery in one part would send its echo through the whole domain. And we can imagine that, partly by contrast and partly by a suspected simi- larity, the knowledge gained respecting the movements of mighty and distant masses quickened and guided investigations concerning those at hand, and infinitely small. The expectations which men would bring with them into this region are obvious from a review of the knowledge which they had gained of the other. The work of the great astronomers of this time was, as we believe all great scientific work is, almost as much destructive as constructive. Seeing that movement was perpetual in the heavenly bodies, and came to an end on earth, people had .invented principles of motion for the unchanging quite different from those with which their experience of the changing had made them familiar, and what they had to learn from "the new philosophy" was that these familiar laws had a further range than had been suspected, and that the princi- ples which held good for earth held good for heaven also. Now, turning with this view to speculations on the internal constitution of matter, how natural that they should suppose that here, too, the principles of mechanics should explain everything. They had just learnt that the same cause produced effects of the most opposite character,—effects so different, that they only could be referred to the same cause by what we may term, we believe with the strictest adherence to the meaning of the word, a great act of faith. It was inevitable that in the mental impulse thus generated, any cause heterogeneous to that which had shown itself universal when it was believed to be only local should be swept aside as a mere incumbrance in the path of Science. And it is a very striking point in the analogy we are trying 0 suggest, that the state of chemical science at this time was such as to a great extent to justify this assumption. Chemistry in the time of Newton, except so far as it was a handmaid to medicine, was a guide to the discovery of the philosopher's stone, and the investi- gator who interrupted his labours at the furnace and alembic to become intimate with the thoughts of his predecessors, had to wade through fanciful dreams and obscure allegories, belonging rather to the region of magic than of science. When this was brought into contrast with the demonstrations of mathematicians, it seemed that the contrast was one between the fancies of dreamers and the principles of Science itself. In discarding these mystical dreams, and adhering to the clear and certain teaching of Mathematics, would be found, it seemed certain, the clue to the whole labyrinth of Nature.

It was with this conviction ever present that students of Nature approached the problem of that action of matter on matter which is exhibited to our senses only by the changed qualities of its results, and it was by the help of an ideal system of mechanics that they attempted to explain it. Chemical action was to be made clear by imagining the ultimate particles of one substance as a series of little wedges, all driven into that with which it was to combine, while some force from without smote upon them, and broke up the body to be dissolved by this means, so that it was ready.to unite with the other ; or we might imagine one set of particles shaped like a lancet and the other like a well-fitting sheath, so that the greatest change in the properties of the two sub- stances were observed from their union, or they might be likened to a lock and key. The effervescence of an acid and alkali in combination was the breaking-up of the brittle par- ticles of the alkali by the sharp points of the acid, the fact that the acid was composed of sharp particles being one our sense of taste was sufficient to decide. The science of medicine was to be revolutionised by mathematics. The action of poisons and medicines would be alike explained according to the shape of the ultimate particles, and the physician who was no mathematician would be stigmatised as a quack. These are all the speculations of distinguished scientific persons of the seventeenth anti eighteenth centuries, just about the time that chemistry was disengaging itself from the fancies of the alchemists and be- coming a science. But did these geometrical fancies help it one step ? They were a simple hindrance in its way. The root-idea of chemistry, the very conception of chemical combination, is impeded by the attempt to represent it in any mechanical fashion. Some of our quotations are taken from the teacher who first discerned the true import of this root-idea, Boerhaave, the great Dutch physician, who was driven to publish his lectures on chemistry by the surreptitious editions which his fame had tempted his pupils to publish in his name. Of course it is the same thing to say that he recognised the peculiar nature of chemical affinity, and to say that he saw it to be something which could not be

made clear by these ideal diagrams. And yet he seems to think that though they cannot make it altogether clear, they may do something towards this result, and nothing can be more timid than his protest against the mechanical ten- dency of which he is himself so often an illustration. In an oration in 1718, on the thesis that "Chemistry is capable of clearing itself from its own errors" (a proposition which we must rescue from its abject cautiousness by remembering that chemistry then meant almost the same as alchemy), he criticises himself as much as any one, in saying, "Although the alliance of late maintained between geometry and natural philo- sophy has very much increased the use of the former and the solidity of the latter, yet it has been perhaps too much the fashion of this age to solve all phenomena mechanically, as of the preceding to account for them chemically" i.e., on the abstruse and semi-magical principles of the alchemists. Now, what we would impress upon the reader's attention is that it was by an apparent return to these fanciful and mystic principles that this great chemist won attention to the idea which was his legacy to the world. In reading his curiously fervent description of chemical union, it has occurred to us that it may have been from the phlegmatic Dutchman that Goethe took the plan of the strange romance in which he has traced an analogous law moulding human destiny, — "the Eleetive Affinities." The chemiat, indeed, almost rises to the poet as he speaks of this mysterious foreshadowing of human passion in the world of matter. "Consider," he addresses his audience, "the agitation you have observed in any violent solution" (the word by which he designates chemical union) ; "the heat, noise, and confusion continue only till all the particles of the solvent have embraced all the particles of the solvend,—in the moment of their perfect union there is perfect calm Here is no mechanical action, no violent propulsion, but love, if love is the desire of intimate union. This is a paradox, I confess." Strange that a lecturer on chemistry should open a fertile vein of discovery in this fervid sally of imagination, and obstruct it by such dry and cautious suggestions as his lancets and sheaths, his locks and keys, his wedges and mallets ! The poetic, not the mechanical idea was the safe guide here. When Boerhaave was prefiguring the romance of a poet, he was opening the gates for a science of Chemistry, when he was retreating towards the demonstrations of mechanics he was throwing up earthworks against its advance. These mechani- cal fancies help neither our imagination nor our understanding; if they correspond with any fact, it is by mere chance ; they rest on no experiment, and elucidate no reasoning. The parable of human feeling, on the other hand, does point out exactly. the characteristic law of chemistry. It is the "paradox," not the prose rationalism, which connects and arranges the characteristic facts of a science, which is surely another way of saying it is nearer the truth.

"That may be," the author we are reviewing, or rather the thinkers whom he is following, would reply, "but in illustrating the universal tendency to make a principle which has explained a great many things explain everything, you make no advance to- wards establishing the ascending scale of principles in the natural world which is to prepare the way for a principle which overrules all below it." But the striking fact to Boerhaave in chemical combination was that in some mysterious sense gravitation seemed set aside by it. "When gold is dissolved in aqua regia," he says, "the particles of the gold remain so firmly united with those of the aqua regia, that though they are eighteen times heavier, yet they keep suspended in the fluid. Do you not plainly discern here a certain mutual virtue by which each particle of the gold loves, holds firmly, and unites with each particle of the liquid ?" And elsewhere he recognises it as the very distinction between mechanical action and this new power which he is describing, that in the first the parts ultimately arrange themselves according to their respective weight (as in a mixture of water and clay), and in the second this tendency to yield to the pull of the earth is held in check by some mutual bond. Of course, the pull of the earth issoing on all the while upon the molecules of gold during their suspension in aqua regia, just as it is on a man who is rising in a balloon, but what is it that is resisting it What corresponds to the balloon? No material thing, surely. We can only say that the selective force by which one particle of matter "loves, retains, unites with" another, does take precedence of that indis, criminate attraction of every particle of matter for every other which is the most universal fact we know of the outward world.

It appears to us that the world of thought has, in our day, taken up an attitude towards physical science exactly analogous to that which the world of science, at the beginning of the eighteenth

century, took up towards mechanics. The chasms in time which we have seen bridged by the uniformity of natural law are not less vast than those in space which the contemporaries of Coper- nicus, Galileo, or Newton saw bridged by the laws of motion ; it was as difficult for them to think of one law of motion for a star and a bullet, as for us to think of one law of evolution for the creation of man and the production of a new variety of pigeons. In both cases there has been a wonderful ex- pansion of a principle supposed to have a certain limited applica- tion, in both eases there has resulted a tendency to assume that what has explained so much will explain everything, and that any rival principle is an impediment in the path of truth. Just as the men of the seventeenth century were tempted to think that mathematical science was the whole of science, so the men of the nineteenth are tempted to think that scientific thought is the whole of thought. And in like manner, we believe the progress of thought will unfold new spheres of law, the first dim appre- hensions of which will seem as fanciful to the scientific world as the " amor " and " amicitia " of the Dutch physician doubtless did to his mathematical contemporaries.

We do not offer an analogy as a proof. We believe that there are few more potent warnings than that which lights up an opinion of the present with sudden similarity to an error of the past, but it is impossible to translate a warning into a demonstration. And we are quite aware that the present views of all scientific men would be against the conviction we still venture to express, that the view of Nature as a series of ascending forces, becoming more potent as they become more discriminating, is a preparation for finding a still stronger force beyond Nature, dealing with the spirits of men.

Whether the supremacy of this spiritual law over the natural was ever manifested in such an event as "the resurrection of an absolutely dead man," is a question of historical evidence,—it is only the possibility of such an event which is a question for scien- tific thought. The ability of our author in dealing with the first of these questions, and his feebleness in dealing with the second, reminds us that very few persons have the necessary mental equipment 'to deal with both. We have endeavoured merely to point out something in the region of the natural which prepares the way for the supernatural, and cannot enter on the question as to the degree in which this would modify the demand for evidence —a question liable to much misapprehension. No readiness to believe can convert a bad piece of evidence into a good one. A jury would not believe that an honourable man had paid his debts, that a benevolent one had relieved pressing distress, on the testi- mony of one who had no means of knowing these facts; and if the Resurrection of Christ takes the place with us of facts like these, we still require evidence to believe that it happened. But let us carefully distinguish between the character of the evidence and the character of the fact. We have said that we hope the effect of these volumes will be to bring out this distinction, and disen- tangle the question as to whether the narrative of certain events which occurred long ago is miraculously shielded from error, from the further question whether an influence is acting upon us now which is above Nature. This disentanglement is one of the greatest needs of our time. While it is uncompleted —while the correction of a date slackens the hold of the spirit on all that is most precious to it, and the tradition of an uncritical period of history must name an author or the fountains of life will fail—honesty in dealing with these records is impossible. The intellect canaot give its verdict faithfully, while the strongest hopes and fears stand by with their bribes and threats. And thus the divorce between the love of truth and a sense of spiritual reality is consummated day by day in pure and earnest natures, and the love of God has come to be associated in the minds of secular observers with irreverent carelessness as to fact.

These volumes may do much to end this fatal divorce. "Here," our author says virtually, "are, on the one hand, facts demanding some overwhelming mass of evidence, and on the other, an array of evidence which is plainly inadequate, for it is not contemporary. It is as if you were trying to prove some unheard-of facts about the Civil War, by some testimony you could not trace higher than the reign of George III." Anyone who is to decide whether the author has made out his case must possess learning superior to his own, a pretension certainly not made by us. We have carefully limited our review of this part of his work to a condensation of his argument where we think it strongest ; we do not, therefore, deny that an answer may take the form of simply denying his conclusion. But there are many whom the mere perception that this is a question of scholarship will awaken to the violent jar which their whole mental apparatus must undergo, if it is to perform any judgment at all on this matter in response to the summons of Christ, "Abide in me." We can easily conceive any one coming to think that those words mean nothing, but that they should mean something to which the preliminary should be ascertaining a date is to us quite inconceivable.

The problem will be simplified, we believe, when both sides have learnt to recognise that desire is an inevitable assoc'ate, though it must never be. a guide, of belief. The antagonists of Christianity must concede that what may have been in the past is just as legitimate an object of wish as what may be in the future ; and Christians themselves, that it is no more legitimate. If any one thinks that the resurrection of Christ is an event on the possibility of which speculation may occupy itself without rousing desire, he does not know what that speculation is ; he is not really allowing the possibility of the fact. We believe this most desirable of all events to be proved to us by the only evidence that could prove it,—that of the history of the human race ; but if we had to surrender this belief, if clearer insight into the history of the than taught us that it was founded on illusion—we should still say, as we say now, "The loss of the most striking historical illustration of our convictions respecting the eternal and unchanging does not remove the ground of these convictions. What happened, we believe upon a complex chain of evidence ; what is, we discern by those faculties what take a direct hOld on reality, and beyond which investigation cannot reach."