SCIENTIFIC LAWS AND CHRISTIANITY.* Tins is one of the most
impressive and suggestive books on religion that we have read for a long time. Indeed, with the exception of Dr. Mozley's University Sermons, we can recall no book of our time which showed such a power of restating the moral and practical truths of religion so as to make them take fresh hold of the mind and vividly impress the imagination. The author's name is, we should think, new to the greater number of readers of such books, and there is, therefore, some danger of his work being overlooked. But we are convinced that no one who reads the papers entitled " Biogenesis,' "Degeneration," " Eternal Life," and " Classification," to say nothing of the others in this volume, will fail to recognise in Mr. Drummond a new and a powerful teacher, impressive both from the scientific calmness and accuracy of his view of law, and from the deep religious earnestness with which he traces the workings of law in the moral and spiritual sphere. Mr. Drummond's object may be very shortly stated. He attempts to show how the same laws which science has discovered in the phenomena of Nature continue, and can be traced in the phenomena of the spiritual world ; how such great principles as biogenesis,—the origination of life only out of what is already living,—not only by analogy, but identi- cally, govern the course of spiritual, as they have been proved to govern that of natural phenomena. He takes, therefore, some of the chief laws of nature as they have been discovered and stated by evolutionists, and demonstrates their identity with those principles of Christianity which have hitherto been accepted on authority, but have never been reduced to law or compared with the laws of nature. Biogenesis becomes in religion regeneration ; spiritual death is want of correspondence ; eternal life is perfect correspondence with the spiritual en- vironment,—God ; conformity to type is conformity to " the image of his Son." These are some of the lines on which Mr. Drummond, with singular and convincing force, works out the continuity of law from the natural into the spiritual world.
In general, writers who attempt to treat religion scientifically give us a very colourless sort of Christianity. They take the minimum of dogma as the basis of their system, and in par- ticular they invariably adopt those optimist theories of man's capacity for good which are historically associated with the Pelagian heresy. So we did not expect to find much definite doctrine in Mr. Drummond's book. It is very remarkable, how- ever, that his religion is by no means undogmatic ; and what is more, his dogma is to a great extent that of the "stern, old- fashioned theology," as he himself calls it. He finds in natural laws the warrant for the doctrines of eternal punishment, sudden conversion, regeneration, the generic distinction between the lost and the saved, the necessity of mortification, the small number of the saved ; and perhaps the most striking thing about the book is the way in which one is led up to these, if we may so call them, most dogmatic dogmas, from principles which are drawn from Darwin, and Huxley, and Spencer. We do not wish to endorse all Mr. Drummond's conclusions. Very possibly, and this is, no doubt, a weak point in the method, the same principles might, on further investigation or under different treatment, lead to the disproof of some of these dogmas ; but whoever tries to do this will have to reckon with Mr. Drummond's arguments, and controvert his analogies. If the method is valid, Mr. Drummond's treatment of it has a very important claim on the attention of all who are inclined to sympathise with the modern developments of theology.
We will take, as the best illustration of the force and penetra- tion with which familiar religious truths are handled by Mr. Drummond, the first paper, which is also the most important, "Biogenesis." Starting from the now certain scientific doctrine of biogenesis, that " life can only come from the touch of life," he shows that the same principle is laid down for the spiritual world by the doctrine of Regeneration. Between the organic and the inorganic worlds lies a great gulf :—
" The passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal world is hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world is staked off from the living world by barriers which have never yet been crossed from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution can endow any single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of life. Only by the bending-down into this dead world of some living form can these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality, without this preliminary contact with life, they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere for ever. It is a very mysterious • Sn'ural Law Cu the Spiritual World. By Henry Drummond, F.R.S.E., F.G.S, London: fodder and Stoughton.
law which guards in this way the portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in Nature more worth pondering for its strange- ness it is the spectacle of this vast helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the Law of Biogenesis, and denied for ever the possibility of resurrection within itself."
Just so in the spiritual world. "The passage from the natural world to the spiritual world is hermetically sealed on the natural side." This is the truth stated by our Lord in the law of spiritual Biogenesis. "Except a man be born again, he cannot enter the kingdom of God." Another and still more important statement of the law is that other saying, "He that bath the Son hath life, and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." Therefore, "in his relation to the whole spiritual world, the natural man is regarded as dead." "To be casually minded is death." Thus Agnosticism is a fact, for " the natural man cannot know" the " things of the Spirit of God, for they are spiritually discerned.'' There is no possibility of " Christianity without a living spirit, or a personal religion without con- version." Christianity is thus finally distinguished from all other religions, because it alone requires this new birth, this creation of spiritual life, and it alone declares that this life is Christ. From this principle we deduce by analogy three things concerning Regeneration. " First, that the new life should dawn suddenly ; second, that it should come without observation '; third, that it should develope gradually." Thus Mr. Drummond brings us to the doctrine of sudden conversion, and justifies it as scientific, but he guards it carefully from misrepresentation. "There may be cases—they aro probably in the majority—where the moment of contact with the living Spirit, though sudden, has been obscure. But the real moment and the conscious moment are two different things. Science pronounces nothing as to the conscious moment."
This inadequate sketch of a very remarkable paper may serve to show our readers something of the cogency with which Mr. Drummond presses home his analogy, and of the skill with which he applies it to the various parts of the subject. We wish we had space to draw it out at greater length ; and also to do more than mention his scientific statement of the nature of eternal life, his clear perception that the Christian argument for immor- tality rests upon the Resurrection of Christ, for "his mission on earth was to give men life," and life means the knowledge of God, and the Incarnation, scientifically considered, is " God opening to man the possibility of correspondence through Jesus Christ." Or again, we should like to dwell upon some of the obiter dicta, and suggestive remarks which the author makes as he works out his analogies. "'Prue mystery casts no shadows around. It is a sudden and awful gulf yawning across the field of knowledge." " We are not lodging a plea,for inactivity of the spiritual energies, but for the tranquillity of the spiritual mind." " It is the failure to understand the dynamics of Christianity that has most seriously and most pitifully hindered its growth, both in the individual and in the race." We can only indicate these and other merits of the book, and pass on to a few criticisms which must in fairness be made.
It is noteworthy that Mr. Drummond retains, or seems to retain, an omission which is patent also in the great original of all analogical theology. Bishop Butler ignored the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the body ; Mr. Drummond does not quite ignore it, but his only definite reference to it, so far as we can see, is in his adoption of Reuss's statement that the Apostolic doctrine of immortality "can dispense with the theological thesis of a miraculous corporeal reconstruc- tion of our person," which is a thesis "absolutely opposed to reason." This actual allusion is supported by the general tone of the book, and especially by the paper on " Mortification." Mr. Drummond separates the two spheres, the natural and the spiritual, so absolutely, that he does not seem sufficiently to recognise that this natural life is, after all, more than a proba- tion, it is a preparation for eternal life; and that the Christian, if he adopts the teaching of St. Paul, does not look forward to a time when " the spiritual shall be released from the natural," and "the balm of death, numbing his lower nature, releases him for the scarce disturbed communion of a higher life," but he hopes " to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." It is strange that Mr. Drummond should be so anxious to adopt Reuss's gross and ignorant misrepresentation of the " theological thesis," that he should overlook the great instance of analogical reasoning in which St. Paul gives a truly scientific statement and justifica- tion of this very doctrine. It was no Christian, but the heathen Plotinus, who thanked God that be was not "tied to an immor- tal body," and we are sorry to see the traces of this essentially heathen idea in Mr. Drummond's treatment of the subject.
A clear perception of this truth and all that it involves might have saved Mr. Drummond from his most serious, because most fundamental defect. The whole book depends upon the assump- tion that the law which is-true of natural is true of spiritual life, and that Biogenesis and Regeneration are merely different applications of the same principle, because that principle holds good of all pin;. But this never becomes anything more than an assumption. The author fails to establish the identity of the No; which is governed by the law of Biogenesis, with the 1:114, or rather Ceri, which is the gift of Jesus Christ. And yet this is vitally important to his whole method. 'Unless you can be sure that you are dealing with the same matter, you have no certainty that the law which governs it is identical with, and not merely analogous to the known scientific law of nature. And Mr. Drummond, quite rightly, insists that his position is "not that the spiritual laws are analogous to the natural laws, but that they are the sane Lass." He does not ignore the difficulty, but twice attempts to answer it. On p. 235 he declares that Christ must have meant literal " life," because we must always take the literal rather than the metaphorical meaning in interpreting the Bible, and to do other- wise here is to charge our Lord with " mystifying his hearers."
Also, he says, " the Apostles accepted the term in its simple literal sense." Now, this is more or less satisfactory to us, but we doubt whether it will be convincing to those whom it ought to convince on this subject. His other answer to the question, stated more generally on p. 4:5, will, we do not hesitate to say, fail to convince any one. The objection is given quite fairly."The life with which it [Biogenesis] deals in the natural
world does not enter at all into the spiritual world The vital principle of the body is a different thing from the vital principle of the spiritual life." But Mr. Drummond seems to think he has answered it by a most palpable petitio principii. " All this is as true as if one were to say that the fifth proposition of the first book of Euclid applies when the figures are drawn with chalk upon a bl.tckboard, but fails with regard to structures of wood or stone. The proposition is continuous for the whole world, and, doubtless, likewise for the sun and moon and stars. The same universality may be predicated likewise for the law of life. Wherever there is life, we may expect to find it arranged, ordered, governed, according to the same law." But that is the whole question,—/s there life P Is the word " life " used in the same sense when we speak of spiritual and of natural life ? This must be proved, before Mr. Drummond's book can be as convincing apologetically as it is impressive morally. We would suggest that the proof is to be found not in a priori and fallacious arguments, or in assumptions of canons of interpretation, but in an induction drawn from our own experience of the spiritual life in ourselves and in others. The scientific laws of life are proved by experience ; let us try to place the laws of spiritual life on the same foundation.
For this, and for other reasons which will, we think, be apparent, as Mr. Drummond himself seems to feel, on reading the Introduction, the book, unlike other analogies, is more satis- factory on the moral and practical than it is on the speculative side. We believe this is very probably due to the concentration of the author's attention on moral questions, and that he is perfectly capable of working out a complete and weighty "Analogy of Religion " adapted to the modern scientific position. Nothing more important could be done by any religious writer than to deal in this way with the great foundation doctrines of Christianity,—the Atonement, the Trinity, original sin, the Sacraments, justification, inspiration, and miracles; and we sincerely hope that Mr. Drummond may attempt this. In the meantime, we would most strongly commend his present volume to the attention of all who wish to see religions questions treated with wide knowledge and profound earnestness.
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