BOOKS.
DR. LIDDON'S ELEMENTS OF RELIGION.* Tars is a fine series of lectures, in which our readers will find some of the most candid, temperate, and thoughtful answers which have ever been given to the religious doubts of our day, and will find these answers arranged with all that lucid beauty of state- ment and profound depth of feeling which have long constituted the fascination of Dr. Liddon's sermons. So far as we have any criticism to pass upon them beyond expressing our deep sympathy with their general tone,—indeed, you would hardly know from them that Dr. Liddon belongs to the High '-Church party,— it would be that for a popular work Dr. Liddon at times enters too deeply into refined discussions which are rather dialectical than practical ; for instance, the old controversy as to the nature of the soul of man, whether it is derived from the nature of his parents (Traducianism), or independently created in each indi- vidual instance (Creatianism). In the absence of any real know- ledge as to the extent and depth of the connection between the body and the soul of man, this controversy is, in fact, simply insolu- ble. For instance, Dr. Liddon's statement " that children gene- rally resemble their parents in those qualities which we describe collectively as temperament, as belonging to the region of animal life-power, but that no such resemblance can be calculated on, or where it does occur, regarded as other than purely accidental in respect of strictly personal qualities, such as genius or will," seems to us extremely dubious, and would, we imagine, be directly traversed by Mr. Calton, at least as regards the qualities which go to make up genius. It has frequently been noticed, for instance, that the mothers of great poets have had a good deal of the sensitive receptive nature which is of the essence of poetic genius. Indeed we should have thought Dr. Liddon mistaken in speaking of genius as essentially personal. A quality which depends more than any other on the time of life, which, as the common parlance attests, not merely grows and matures, but decays, and sometimes even expires, while the moral character undergoes no substantial change except what may be due to the constant pressure of volition, can hardly be said to be of the essence of the individual.life. We should have been disposed to say that genius, and intellectual gifts generally, are not of the essence of the individual life, except so far as they have been incorporated by the free effort of the possessor,—so far, that is, as they have received their aim and guidance, taken a new direction and pur- pose impressed upon them, from the voluntary life of the soul. At all events, be this as it may, it is surely wisest and safest, while insisting on the spiritual individuality of man as attested by his consciousness of free-will and responsibility, to keep aloof from the extremely debateable ground as to the extent to which the intellectual and moral powers are derived from our ancestors or not. We should have thought it probable a priori that all the mere conditions of moral life, all those dispositions and faculties,—as distinguished from the direction freely impressed on them,—which show themselves in a marked degree at the very dawn of life, are in some way traceable to antecedent circumstances, among which the natures of the parents must be of the first importance. It is only in the free-will itself that we can quite safely assert the existence of a germ of spiritually modifying power capable of dis- sociating itself from the past so far as to check or reverse the tendencies inherited from the past.
But if there are directions here and there in which Dr. Liddon seems to have diverged from the broad track of his subject to enter on winding paths of an intricate and some- what dangerous kind, there is no trace of over-refinement and want of respect for the solid ground of recognisable fact in by far the greater part of these lectures. The lecture on " Prayer" especially, though we have one reserve to make to our entire sympathy with it, is full of that masculine and candid force which disdains to leave a single objection that weighs heavily on other minds unstated, and as far as may be, unreplied to. Take, for instance, Dr. Liddon's powerful answer to the com-
Biv* i Elemenis of Religion. Lent Lectures, 1870. By H. P. Liddon, D.D. London : ngton.
mon objection that the prayers of Christians for specific blessings are commonly inconsistent with each other, and that God cannot grant one without denying another. Dr. Liddon replies that "all Christian prayer takes it for granted that the material world' exists for the sake of, and is entirely subordinate to, the interests of the moral ; and secondly, that God is the beat judge of what the true interests of the moral world really are. Therefore if his petition be not granted, a Christian will not con- clude that his real prayer is unanswered. His real prayer was from the first that God's name might be hallowed among men by the advance of his kingdom and the doing of his will, through God's granting a particular request that he urges. He knows that his own highest object may be best secured by the refusal of the very blessing for which he pleads." That is an answer put in the broadest way and on the strongest ground, and seems to us the full truth on the subject of this particular puzzle.
We are not so well satisfied with Dr. Liddon's answer to the objection from the universality of law. He points out, just as Dr. Carpenter did at the British Association, that ' Law' is only another name for our conception of the regular order of the external universe, and that if it be universal, it is only so as expressing, not as constraining, God's own purpose. And then he goes on :—
"If, however, we mean by law the observed regularity with which God works in nature as in grace ; then, in our contact with law, we are dealing, not with a brutal, unintelligent, unconquerable force, but with the free will of an intelligent and moral Artist, Who works, in His per- fect freedom, with sustained and beautiful symmetry. Where is the absurdity of asking Him to hold His hand, or to hasten His work ? He to Whom we pray may be trusted to grant or to refuse a prayer, as may seem best to the highest wisdom and the truest love. And if He grant it, He is not without resources ; even although we should have asked Him to suspend what we call a natural law. Can He not then provide for the freedom of His action without violating its order? Can He not super- sede a lower rule of working by the intervention of a higher? If He really works at all ; if something that is neither moral nor intelligent has not usurped His throne,—it is certain that ' the thing that is done upon earth He doeth it Himself ;' and that it is therefore as consistent with reason as with reverence to treat Him as being a free Agent, Who is not really tied and bound by the intellectual abstractions with which finite intellects would fain annihilate the freedom of His action. No; to pray for rain or sunshine, for health or food, is just as reasonable as to pray for gifts which the soul only can receive—increased love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith. All such prayers presuppose the truth that God is not the slave of His own rules of action ; that He can innovate upon His work without forfeiting His perfection ; that law is only our way of conceiving of His regularised working, and not an external force which governs and moulds what we recognize as His work. It dissolves into thin air, as we look hard at it, this fancied barrier of inexorable law ; and as the mist clears off, beyond there is
throne of the Moral King of the universe, in Whose eyes material, symmetry is as nothing when compared with the spiritual well-being of His moral creatures."
That seems to us hardly to indicate the same fullness of insight into the scientific objection which Dr. Liddon's treatment of sceptical difficulties in this book, usually shows. That objec- tion we understand to be that a certain absolute universality in the physical order of the universe is now well ascertained to be a part of the divine rule, and consequently that to pray for any- thing which involves a violation of that order is to pray for what it is unreasonable, arrogant, and even irreverent to ask. For example, for a man to pray that a sword thrust into the body of his friend shall not wound him, that deadly poison if drunk by him should not injure him, that a stone thrown from a tower should be suspended in mid-air, that a body in which decomposition had set in should be restored to life, that a leafless tree should
blossom months before its season, that a ship should perform in two days a voyage never yet performed in less than ten,—to pray for these things, with however holy an aim or purpose, would; seem, we say, arrogant, unreasonable, irreverent, as assuming
that God had no higher or larger purpose in laying out the plan of the universe than one which any pious finite wish might overset. Now, if we understand Dr. Liddon aright, he would not admit that anything whatever was so thoroughly a. part of the physical order of the universe, but what it might be allowable to pray that it might not happen, under the due reserves. We say, on the contrary, that to pray thus is to pray for a miracle, and that no miracle properly to called' could be properly prayed for, for a private purpose, at at Our Lord's miracles were no doubt some of them of this kind,—
not answers to prayer wonderful only by their coincidence witb the time of the prayer, but real suspensions of fixed laws. The miracles of the raising of Lazarus, of the feeding of the multitude, and of the turning of the water into wine, are all of them simply inconsistent with the fixed laws of the universe as we know them, departures by the Divine will from its own ordinary principles of action. On the other hand, many of our Lord's so-called miracles may be explained as not necessarily supernatural in this sense, indeed, as only supernatural in that sense in which every real answer to prayer is so. It is quite conceivable that many of the miracles of healing were mere exertions in a higher degree of the kind of magnetic power which other men have in a less degree, and that other miracles were mere prophecies. But the former kind of miracles involved alterations of God's universal laws for the physical world, and are explicable only because the full manifestation of Christ was even more necessary for the universal restoration of the moral world, than man's trust in this unchangeable physical order itself. As Dr. Liddon finely remarks, the value of true miracle is to identify for us the author of the physical world with the divine inspirer of conscience :-
" But how is man enabled to identify the Author of this law within him, perfectly reflected, as it is, in the Christ, with the Author of the law of the universe without him ? The answer is, by miracle. Miracle is an innovation upon physical law,—or at least a suspension of some lower physical law by the intervention of a higher one,—in the interests of moral law. The historical fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead identifies the Lord of physical life and death with the Legislator of the Sermon on the Mount. Miracle is the certificate of identity between the Lord of Nature and the Lord of Conscience,—the proof that He is really a Moral Being who subordinates physical to moral interests. Miracle is the meeting-point between intellect and the moral sense, because it announces the answer to the efforts and yearnings alike of the moral sense and the intellect ; because it announces revelation."
But without so great and universal a purpose, true miracle, as dis- tinguished from regular, unmiraculous answer to prayer, is hardly conceivable. It seems to us that a physical order intended for the whole human race could not be broken through, nor could a pious heart even desire to see it broken through, for the sake of a special individual, however deep might be his moral need. We can only pray for physical benefits where we fully believe that they might be granted without miracle, that they might be granted, for instance, through that providential guidance of our own or other hearts and wills which may, as Mr. Galton has himself ad- mitted, materially alter the physical facts of the world without any real interference with physical law. The legitimacy of such prayers as that for rain, seems to us to depend on the possibility that the conditions of rain are not absolutely de- termined by fixed laws of creation, — that the conditions of rain are not as purely physical' as the conditions of an eclipse. All the world would quite rightly protest against the blasphemy of praying that we might be spared an eclipse at the time astronomers predicted one, however detrimental it might conceivablybe to human interests. On the other hand, it is possible, though hardly pro- bable, that rain, like human health and the health of cattle, may depend on laws not purely physical,—not absolutely invariable,— and so long as this is possible, there is no harm in praying for rain under the ordinary reserves of Christian prayer. But Dr. Liddon himself would hardly justify a prayer against an eclipse, even though it could be shown to be apparently in the highest degree injurious to us. And heartily as we agree that we must not hastily set limits to prayer in deference to what may be imaginary laws, we do not hesitate to assert that to play for what we have every reason to believe to be a miracle, except it be on such an occasion and for such universal purposes as our Lord's miracles, which brought a new manifestation of God's nature to the world, is to pray that God will reverse the rules which lie has after a sufficient fashion made known to us.
We wish we could extract at length from Dr. Liddon's last and finest lecture, on "The Mediator as the Guarantee of Religions Life." Nothing more powerful has been written for many a year past. But we could not do it any justice in the limits of this review, and must content ourselves with heartily recommend- ing it, as the gem of a very thoughtful and moat vivid book, to the attention of our readers.
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