BOOKS.

GOD AND THE SOUL.* THE first half of this little book is a perfect model of subtle thought, apt illustration, lucid reasoning, and terse exposition. If we are less attracted by the latter half, it is not that there is anything poor in ik—unless it be perhaps in the last essay, where Mr. Armstrong seems to think it desirable to show a little almost ostentatious superiority to the ordinary " orthodox " Christianity,—but that it is not quite so vigorous in its exposition, and that the subjects are a little outlying and not so essential, or where essential, not welded into so convincing a form as those of the earlier essays. The first chapter, "On Trusting Our Faculties," is, on the whole, the tersest and most admirably illustrated essay we have ever read on the subject, notexcepting even what Dr. Martineau,— of whose teaching Mr. Armstrong is confessedly a humble disciple, and, we should add, a most able, not to say original, disciple,—has written on the subject. We do not say that Mr. Armstrong has enlarged the foundation of Dr. Marti- neon's exhaustive discussion of the subject, which, at least at the present time, would be hardly possible, nor that he has followed the argument out in so many directions, but that he has concentrated it with so strong a grasp,

• God and the Bout: an Rimy towards Fundamental Religion. By Richard Armstrong, B.A. London : Philip Green,

and illustrated it with so much skill, not to say brilliance, that it is hardly possible for any one who is competent to read this little book at all, not to feel the convincing character of the argument. Mr. Armstrong could not show more forcibly than he does that to begin to reason without assumptions is to throw up a cloud of gossamer into the air without any fixed points to which the threads are to be attached. If you have faculties you must use them, and the only question is whether or not you use them rightly, and do or do not confine them strictly and effectually to their proper functions. You must not strive to make them do more than they are competent to do, or you will walk off solid ground into the air and have a great fall. You must not miss what they are really competent to do, or you will narrow greatly the scope of the energies with which you are endowed, and voluntarily imprison yourself in a cell of your own arbitrary construction. The former has been the mistake of many of our more ambitious thinkers, the latter has been the mistake of many of our pedantically modest thinkers. Mr. Armstrong could hardly explain more admirably what he regards as the test of true faculty than in the follow- ing passage :—

"We must give up the idea that we are to decide whether to believe a thing by considering whether it can be proved or not. For no truth whatever can be proved except by first making assumptions which cannot be proved. But we are not left with- out practical tests of truth which serve our purpose. What are these practical tests ? The chief of them is : does it work ? ' If a certain belief will not work, try it how we will, the presumption is that it is not true. Suppose a man says that the sea is solid. The test is, does the doctrine work ? He steps down from the ship's side and sets his foot upon the wave. In a moment he is submerged; and he has more conclusive evidence that the waters are not solid than he could have got by arguing the matter with a philosopher for a year and a day. Suppose a man says that the granite road is solid; every step he makes upon it day after day, and year after year, more and more confirms his conviction. The doctrine works : and in the long run that will be the surest ground of his belief. Suppose you receive as a Christmas present from an anonymous donor a machine packed in a packing-case of two feet cube. But there are no directions. What is it for ? It strikes you it may be a new sort of roasting-jack. You put it in front of the kitchen fire, hang your sirloin on it, and set the cook to wind it up. But nothing happens except a purposeless buzzing and whirring of wheels. It does not work. Perhaps it is a clock, with the face left out. You make a cardboard face and fix it on, and fasten hands at a.likely place. But no ; though you wind it up, and the wheels start off again, the hands stops where they are, or jerk round spasmodically an hour or more at a time. Then someone suggests that it is a sewing-machine, which you can wind up and leave to work without treadle or personal attention. What a godsend ! You fix the end of a sheet into a holder that just grips it neatly, wind the machine up, leave it, and coming back , in ten minutes find the sheet hemmed all round. Then you begin to believe that the machine is a sewing-machine of surpassing excellence. So far, that is the only belief that works. It is true there is a little group of wheels and levers in one part which seem no use at all. They do not move, or they move without apparent effect. And this causes a doubt to haunt you whether, after all, the machine may not be for something else and only accidentally applicable for hemming. But one day, in the middle of the work, the thread snaps at a weak place. You expect the machine to go on drilling useless needle-holes all round, but to drop the thread; when, lo ! that little group of bars and wheels is suddenly all agog, the severed ends are re-united with a tiny knot, and the machine proceeds undisturbed to complete the job. Then you believe your doctrine without a shadow of a doubt—the doctrine that this is a sewing-machine—because it works not only in an ordinary way, but also and with special emphasis in exceptional circumstances or emergency. Using the machine in this way elevates it from a useless tangle of cogs and bars to an exquisite substitute for human muscles and intelligence. You are there- fore convinced that this is the way in which it was meant to be used." (pp. 22-24.) He follows up this illustration by another, perhaps even more striking, from the labours of the decipherer of an unknown language in which every detail tells. Of coarse, if the decipherer has made a false assumption at the start, and has assumed that he is dealing with something intended to convey thought or historic statements when it had no " rational " purpose at all, he labours hard at a riddle which is not really a riddle, because there is no problem to be solved, and therefore no solution. But if his assumption was true, and the language was really intended to be intelligible to those who knew it, he may easily discover clues which enable him to interpret it; and if then he distrusts his own intelligence, and prefers to believe that all his own clues were mere accidents from which no trustworthy inference could be drawn, he is one of those foolish creatures who, though they have eyes, prefer to shut them because it pleases them better to complain of the darkness than to find their way about the world in which they live. Mr. Armstrong goes on to discuss the Power manifest in the Universe, with all its exact and orderly method, and to insist that this ocean of Power can only be conceived (if we use our faculties aright) as intellectual energy, as energy full of intention and also of attention, and he uses a remarkable phrase, that the energy flowing everywhere through the world must be conceived by us as "attention concentrated everywhere." That appears to us a most lumi- nous expression, and so far as the present writer knows, it is an original phrase of Mr. Armstrong's own, to which we attach the highest importance. It is impossible to conceive such method and such force in combination as independent of attention, and it is impossible to conceive it in such a universe as ours, where every molecule, and every beam of light, and every atom that shows all sorts of specific affinities for other atoms, are manifestations both of thought and elaborated energy which works under the guidance of that thought, except as "attention concentrated everywhere." Let Mr. Armstrong speak for himself :— " Let me dwell for a moment on that conception, 'attention concentrated everywhere.' We men and women are capable of but the most limited range of attention. When we were children we were continually told that we could only attend to one thing at once.' That was never quite true : we learn by degrees to attend to three or four things at once. The art of the conjuror consists largely in drilling himself to attend unobserved to other matters besides those to which he is obviously attending in the view of the spectators. He is attending closely to his secret manipulations at the same moment that he is also attending to the by-play which is to divert the attention of his public from the machinery of his trick. To the non-musician it seems a miracle that the skilled pianist should be able at once to attend to the score that he is reading and to the swift movements of both his hands and all his fingers on the keyboard, and perhaps to carry on a lively conversation at the same time. But just as the little child who at the first venturous steps across the floor has to give absorbed attention to the planting of each foot and the balance of his body, ere long learns to walk without any attention at all and to occupy his mind with other things while he is walking, so in all the affairs of life we are continually learning to hand over the operations we most frequently perform to automatic action while we turn our conscious attention to other things. Now that is the necessary economy of our limited mental powers ; and we can only conceive that these automatic actions are discharged, like our breathing and the circulation of our blood, by the work- ing of those natural forces which everywhere carry on the pro- cesses of the natural world. But, on the one hand, God has no natural forces outside and distinct from his own energies to which to band over areas of the universe removed from his own atten- tion; nor, on the other hand, can his power of attention be con- ceived as limited in any way analogous to the limitations of human attention. So that while I would fain find, if I could, some word less anthropomorphic, less man-like that is, than attention' to describe the conscious touch of God on every fibre and every atom of his universe ; on the other hand I am convinced that we approach much more nearly to the truth when we con- ceive the attention of God concentrated everywhere,' than when we try to imagine any natural processes whatever as carried on apart from his instant and continuous heed. And thus I conclude that when Jesus said, Not a sparrow falls to the ground without your Father,' so far from over-stating, he was immeasurably under-stating the fact, since in every feather of the sparrow, and in every thread of down upon each feather, and in every chemical atom in each thread, the Divine Consciousness and Power are operating at every moment." (pp. 46-48.) We do not know why Mr. Armstrong should apologise for using so "anthropomorphic" a word as "attention," when an anthropomorphic word is necessarily the truest and highest kind of word which a man can use ;—and when the words "concentrated everywhere" so enormously extend the scope of the word, that it passes far beyond the grasp of human ima- gination, apology for its anthropomorphic character seems almost ostentatious. The only criticism we pass on this chapter is that Mr. Armstrong, though a profound believer in the free- dom and independence of the human will, seems to us to skip the great chasm between the divine energy and the human energy too lightly, and to ignore those preparations for independent life in the initial phases of organic existences beneath the human, which at all events prophesy the entrance of separate responsibility into the world, and suggest that the purpose of animal character, instincts, and passions, is not to re- veal. the nature of God, but to lay the foundations of those limited "islands" " of independent volition and gradually developed individuality of which man is at present our highest example. Mr. Armstrong seems to us to leave the lower organic life t000. much in the position of a real manifestation of simple divine energy, whereas we take it to be only intelligible as the germ of that insulated life of which free human will is the final explanation and, so to say, vindication.

On the admirable chapter, "God Revealed as Righteous- ness," we have no criticism to pass, except the one we have just

indicated,—that it is needful in order to prevent a mistaken in- terpretation of the lower world of organic life, as revealing to us the moral significance of the "attention concentrated every- where," to guard against the notion that God in any sense re- veals himself, directly through it, even so much as he does through the physical laws of Nature, unless we take fully into account the preparation which he is there making for a being of limited individuality and limited independence capable of genuine education, probation, and moral discipline. This is the impressive passage in which Mr. Armstrong speaks of

"God Revealed as Righteousness " :—

" All our simple perceptions—all those perceptions of ours, that is, which cannot be analysed, taken to pieces, explained into something else—are given to us directly as part of the endow- ment of human nature. They are not and cannot be derived from some other perceptions of ours, for if they were, they would not be simple, but could be taken to pieces and analysed into their elements. But this moral sense, this perception that there is a morally right and a morally wrong, that the one is noble, the other base, that the one is to be approved and praised in others, the other to be disapproved and blamed in others, this sense of peace in ourselves at the one and of shame in ourselves at the other ;—this moral sense which we all have, but cannot explain, is simple; therefore it is given to us in our nature, not derived from any other sense or senses. It is part of the original make of human nature, like the sense of causality, or memory ; and though we can never prove it, we cannot help believing it. But when I say given,' the question starts up, • given ? given by whom F' And of this element in us, as of our bodies and our senses and our mental constitution generally, we can only say given by the action of that Living Energy akin to our will, which we have found moving through and controlling all the universe.' We can believe no other than that our moral nature is given us of God." (pp. 76-77.)

And he goes on to show that there is no inconsistency in speaking of this sense of right and wrong as a revelation, only because it is a very gradual revelation, one gradually evolved, like the strength of the man's body itself, from a slowly developed infancy.

The remaining essays of this little volume, though two of them are striking and full of interest, are not equal in vigour to the three earlier ones, and we cannot think that the fourth

on "God Revealed as Love" is properly named. It really is concerned with a different subject, "God Revealed as Beauty, or as the Object of Love." The much greater subject of God revealed as the lover of the human soul is hardly so much

as touched in it. The great thought of revelation, "Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you," makes hardly any appearance in Mr. Armstrong's volume, though it is partly implied in the chapter on Mysticism, but even there not adequately dealt with. The "Problem of Evil " has some very vigorous pages, but it too seems to us much less adequate to its subject than the earlier essays and the last essay,

"What Then of the Bible ? " is the weakest in the volume and the most banalt as if Mr. Armstrong were anxious to explain that he is quite superior to " orthodox " superstitions.

This, for instance, strikes us as almost patronising to Christ,

and a singular anti-climax to a volume of so much force and simplicity :— "Those who have most endangered the ascendency of Jesus of Nazareth over the affections and the loyalty of men are those who have most insisted on theological definitions of his nature. It is as a man among men that his moral and spiritual power becomes transcendent. Set him down, this peasant son of Mary, among the millions of his fellow-men. Let him find his own place in the company of the world's heroes, prophets, martyrs, saints. Have no fear for him. Let us meet him eye to eye and clasp his hand in ours. Let us talk with him on the way, kneel with him on the mountain-side, move with him among the crowd, hear the cordial of his speech to weary men and to stricken women, watch him at the last through the shadows of Gethsemane and the gloom of Calvary, and you need have no fear but what he will assert his power over our thought, our imagination, our emotion, our life."

(pp. 174-175.)

No, we need "have no fear for him ;" but there is a thin prag- matic tone in that passage which sounds a very discordant

note from that of the rest of the book. Nor does our author fairly represent (though no doubt he is entirely unconscious of any unfairness) the attitude of Mr. Gladstone towards the Christian Revelation. He declares that Mr. Gladstone re- gards the Bible as "the very starting-point for any religious inquiry." This Mr. Gladstone certainly does not do. He

accepts without the least question Bishop Butler's great principle that (to state it in Mr. Gladstone's own words) we

should be "cautious not to vilify Reason whereby we judge even of Revelation." But surely Mr. Armstrong might see that one who holds that Jesus Christ is much greater both in origin and in function than he himself supposes Christ to be, may well think that Reason (not reasoning) requires us to give a very much larger scope and meaning to the Church which Christ established, and the teaching of the Apostles he chose and left behind him, than Mr. Armstrong gives, and that such a scope and meaning is perfectly admissible even to one who regards Reason as the ultimate ground by which we must judge even of Revelation. Whatever may be said of the criticisms to which the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are fairly open, no one can reasonably say that there is not a great variety in the range of interpretation which those who take totally different views of the meaning and passion of Jesus Christ may and must properly assign to the authority of those Scriptures.

We accept the greater part of this little book with the most cordial admiration and respect, but we think it a pity that at the end of an essay on "God and the Soul" Mr. Armstrong should have added so shrill and irrelevant a warning that when you come to criticism of the Bible he and his friends of the Higher Criticism are not as other men are, nor even as Mr. Gladstone. We should have been quite aware of that without the solemn asseverations of the last chapter. The morbid fear of being thought to believe too much, leads sometimes to a unique species of superstition. It is not a question relevant to his main subject, to explain "what then" Mr. Armstrong may happen to believe "of the Bible ; " and it closes a remarkable volume with a needlessly jarring note.