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[1] Before proceeding with the further consideration of the view of the relations between natural science and philosophy, and the accuracy of the portrait of Agnosticism presented in the Foundations of Belief, I think it desirable to deal with a passage in which Mr Balfour does me the honour to associate me with Mr J. S. Mill and Mr H. Spencer as one who has played "unconscious havoc with the most solid results which empirical methods have hitherto attained" (p. 121).
As I have much reason to doubt whether what Mr Balfour understands by 'empirical methods' has anything to do with scientific method, as I have still more reason to think that he is extensively and profoundly unacquainted with what I have written, I am not disposed to dwell upon the substance of the charge.
But perhaps it is needful that I should repeat here the expression of profound obligation to the study of Mr Mill's Logic that I have published elsewhere, if only that my objection to be held responsible for any of Mr Mill's opinions to which I have not expressly assented should be deprived of any appearance of want of respect for a teaches to whom I owe much.
My relations with Mr Spencer's philosophy are of a totally different order. Thanks to Hamilton and Mill, the fundamental principles of what is now understood as Agnosticism were clearly fixed in my mind when, in 1850, I returned to England with a well-studied copy of Mill's Logic, which, along with Carlyle's Essays and some volumes of Goethe and Dante, had shared my little cabin for four years, in each of which many months were spent in almost entire isolation.
Consequently, when I had the pleasure of making Mr Spencer's acquaintance in 1852, it was with much satisfaction that I found we stood on common ground; and no one could have welcomed First Principles so far as its critical positions are concerned, more warmly than I did. But even then Mr Spencer appeared to me to be disposed to travel along the path–by which, as I conceived, Hamilton had been led astray–further than I was. And in the forty-three years which have elapsed the divergence of opinion thus marked has unfortunately become greater and greater, until now we are speculatively (I hope in no other way) poles asunder. It is impossible for me to approve the a priori method, to admit that Mr Spencer's form of the doctrine of evolution is well founded; or to accept the ethical and political deductions which he makes from that doctrine.
Though I have nothing to say to Cartesianism, I shall not be charged with any want of appreciation of the genius and merits of Descartes; and what I have felt bound to say in order to put an end to further confessions of this sort, does not appear to me to be inconsistent with [a similar] high appreciation of Mr Spencer's abilities, and of the admirable courage and tenacity of purpose with which he carried out to completion the task he set himself when we two were young men with life all before us.
I now turn to the consideration of the two remarkable catechisms in which Mr Balfour has stated to his mind the leading doctrines of Demonism (A) and of Naturalism (B). They present five pairs of antinomies so bound together in their antagonism, that I must treat them as Siamese twins and take each pair together.
[2] I. A. The Universe is the creation of Reason, and all things work together towards a reasonable end.
B. So far as we are concerned, reason is to be found neither in the beginning of things nor in their end; and though everything is pre-determined nothing is fore-ordained.
I am really curious to know where Mr Balfour found his authority, either among agnostics or following natural science, for B. To me the former of the two propositions which it contains is absurd. If, according to natural science, reason is absent from the universe, how is it that men of science talk about, 'laws of nature' which are expressions in terms of reason of the order of nature? How is evolution conceivable, unless as the development of the energy of the cosmos according to fixed principles towards a definite result? Suppose, for a moment, that the whole solar system was once represented by an ocean of similar molecules, unless the energy which set these molecules in motion followed fixed rules of action–unless in that it operated rationally–the solar system could never come out of it. Unless the arrangement of the parts and the disposition of the latent forces of the germ of a frog were rational–nay, pitched in such a high key of rationality that human reason has not yet shown itself adequate to conceive them–no tadpole would ever emerge from the egg.
In these first articles of the catechism there appears to me to be the same tendency as elsewhere to employ terms of which the sense is left ambiguous. 'Reason' now, promoted to a capital R in A but reduced to the ranks in B–what does that much-misused word signify ?
There is the grand sense of [Logos], Vernunft, in English, Reason with a capital R, which means, so far as I can understand, the faculty of intuitive apprehension of being quite sure about things of which there is no scientific evidence. If Mr Balfour, by the help of this sublime faculty, tells me that it created the universe, I can only say that it may be so; but I do not see convincing evidence of the fact.
Ordinary usage spells reason with a little r, and denotes by it the mental process, of which the results are predication, induction, and deduction, and of which an account, usually supposed to be adequate, is found in the text-books of Logic. But I think these will be searched in vain to discover that reason, in this sense, is a source of energy–still less that predication, induction, and deduction, even if raised to the nth power, could create, I will not say the universe, but a three-legged stool. Moreover, from my point of view, there is another important consideration. So far as our knowledge goes, every state of consciousness has for its antecedent a state of nervous matter. The nature of the correlating bond is to me an insoluble riddle, and any transformation of modes of motion into consciousness inconceivable; but the fact remains. And granting this, it follows that the series of mental phenomena which represents a conscious ratiocination has for its necessary antecedent a parallel series of material phenomena; consequently, that the conscious ratiocinative process is but the expression of the order and nature of the series of changes in the material substratum of consciousness.
It is the physical powers which determine the psychical; the latter is merely the symbol of that which is the essential operation. Hence it comes about that among the lower animals generally and among ourselves so far as a large proportion of our lives is concerned, perfectly rational acts are performed without conscious ratiocination. Reason is there, but it does not ring the bell of consciousness to say so.
If this argumentation is sound, it follows that, so far from denying the existence of reason in the universe, natural science must regard it as reason in excelsis–a reason so far superior to that incarnate in man, that the profoundest philosopher stands to it in the relation of a schoolboy stumbling through his primer of arithmetic to an adept in the higher mathematics. The use of the word 'reason' in the sense here defined is no novelty, but has a very ancient precedent in Greek Philosophy. The universe conceived as a sphere of earth and water was invested with a coat of air, and outside that of ætherial fire. As Newton thought space to be the sensorium of the Deity, so the fiery Æther was conceived as the especial seat of the Reason or Logos–the primary source not only of thought but of energy–wherein, by the intermediation of the pneuma (a spirit that is subtlest air) diffused through all things and peculiarly resident in the human (especially the philosophic) mind, the rational order of things was maintained, and the cosmos pursued the necessary course of its evolution. It is not clear to me whether these great ancient thinkers held the operations of the Logos to be accompanied by its symbolic manifestation in terms of human consciousness. The gods themselves were products, not factors, in the evolution of the cosmos. There is no logical necessity for so doing. There may be endless other ways of arriving at the results which we attain through consciousness. And I should imagine that most sober thinkers will agree in the agnostic conclusion that this is one of the topics respecting which silence is better than speech. Certainly everything is pre-determined. Whether it can be said to be fore-ordained depends on what is meant by 'fore-ordained.' If Mr Balfour intends to suggest that before the world began the cosmic process was talked over and settled after the manner described by Milton in Paradise Lost, I can only reply that I feel as unable to adopt as unwilling to discuss the suggestion.
Agnosticism has one advantage–that of allowing us to take refuge in silence, when speech drifts towards grotesque anthropomorphism. But, for my part, I have not the least objection to 'fore-ordained' if reason can be shown for preferring it to 'pre-determined.'
Thus the first article of catechism B contains no tenet acknowledged by natural science or by Agnosticism. And the second is like unto it.
[3] II. A. Creative reason is interfused with infinite love.
B. As reason is absent so also is love. The universal flux is ordered by blind causation alone.
I regret to say that I am not able to attach an intelligible signification to A. 'Reason' and 'love' are names for mental phenomena of totally distinct kinds.
It seems to me that if I were to say that algebra is interfused with infinite odours, I should make quite as comprehensible a statement.
I suppose, however, the intention is to affirm that the creative power (assumed to have given rise to the universe), reasoning in a manner analogous to human ratiocination, has been actuated by desires of emotions analogous to those which we denominate love.
For if the qualification 'infinite' destroys all analogy with the finite, then the use of the word becomes delusive.
Moreover there is a grievous hiatus. 'Infinite love'; but 'love' of what? Love implies an object of that emotion. In the present case the object may be the creative power itself–as some theologians have it that the object of creation was the glorification of the creator. If so, the demiurge might take pleasure in pain and inflict it to please himself.
On the other hand, this 'interfusing infinite love' may have for its object the whole universe or man alone, or an infinitely minute portion of mankind. Now this last is a favourite theological view. And I really am unable to reconcile it with the attribute of love–unless indeed the qualification 'infinite' means 'infinitely small.' And that I have no right to assume.
Let us turn to B. Agnosticism as strongly declines to assert the absence of love as the absence of reason. One agnostic, at any rate, has insisted, before now, on the amount of apparently gratuitous pleasure which human beings enjoy as a striking feature of the order of nature.
But it seems to me that a rational man should really think twice before he attributes human passions to this 'creative' power. If love, why not hate, envy, jealousy, and deceit? All which passions have been attributed to the creative power by both Gentile and Jewish piety.
I have heard a good deal about 'blind causation' in my time; but I have met with nobody who was able or willing to help me to the meaning of the phrase by defining its implied antithesis, 'seeing causation.' I suppose that, as here employed, the intention to charge Agnosticism with the denial of the existence anywhere in the endless worlds we know of, except among the grains of human dust on our speck of a planet, of mental phenomena of an order as much superior to man's as those of man are to those of a mouse; or at least with denying that there can be anywhere an analogue of the 'hegemonikon' of the Stoics, and thinking the thought of the cosmos in its own terms as our minds think the thought of [the] world in terms of our consciousness. If so, I can only say that neither of these denials would be uttered by a consistent agnostic, who might let his imagination wander freely among such possibilities and remain perfectly true to his principles, so long as he did not mistake his dreams for knowledge, or abuse other people because they dreamed dreams of another kind or refused to dream at all.
[4] III. A. There is a moral law, immutable, eternal; in its governance all spirits find their true freedom and their most perfect realisation. Though it be adequate to infinite goodness and infinite intelligence, it may be understood even by man, sufficiently for his guidance.
B. Among the causes by which the course of organic and social development has been blindly determined are pains, pleasures, instincts, appetites, disgusts, religions, moralities, superstitions; the sentiment of what is noble and intrinsically worthy; the sentiment of what is ignoble and intrinsically worthless. From a purely scientific view these all stand on an equality; all are action-producing causes developed not to improve, but simply to perpetuate the species.
I apprehend that by 'moral law' we mean the rule or body of rules by which the conduct of men must be governed if it is to meet with moral approbation. Moral approbation is a feeling associated with certain mental conceptions. Whether that association is innate and instinctive (as the pleasure, or the disgust, associated with certain sensations is innate), whether it is acquired artificially (as likings and dislikings are acquired in other cases), or whether both of these conditions come into play, certain it is that the sentiment of moral approbation and disapprobation is extremely strong, and that the certainty that the one or the other will follow upon certain actions is the most powerful of all inducements to do them, or refrain from them.
Moreover, it is not to be doubted that so long as human nature and the conditions of human life remain the same, so long will the rules of conduct remain the same. If mankind are 'immutable and eternal' and live under immutable conditions, then assuredly the moral law is 'immutable and eternal.' Nor can there be a doubt, to my mind, that, in practical life, the truest freedom is to be found in servitude to a moral law, and in no more self-assertion than is permitted by it. No one has expressed this better than one Benedictus Spinoza, of whom Mr Balfour, I am sorry to see, entertains so poor an opinion.
So far, then, there is considerable verbal agreement between us. But I have a regretful suspicion that it is only verbal. For I confess that I fail to comprehend how a 'moral' law can be either 'adequate' or inadequate to 'infinite goodness' and 'infinite intelligence'–always supposing that the adjectives here prefixed to 'goodness' and 'intelligence' have not reduced the values of these terms to mere unknown quantities x and y. Perhaps I may avoid this difficulty by suggesting that 'goodness' and 'intelligence' of quite finite and conceivable extent would suffice to render a moral law a superfluity; that, in fact, such law would be a generalisation from actions carried out under their inspiration, not the regulation of those actions. It is putting the cart before the horse to say that the moral law makes goodness and intelligence; on the contrary it is they which make the moral law.
Still more am I at a loss to understand the concluding sentence. How could anything which was not understood by man 'sufficiently for his guidance' be a moral law, if morality is in its very essence a rule for the guidance of his conduct? Suppose there is an immutable eternal moral law for the angels: what is that to us who are not angels and do not live under heavenly conditions? Surely a farmer, who laid down rules for his horses and expected his pigs to obey them, would be a little unreasonable! The singular fancy for harnessing the horse behind the cart, which I think I have already noticed, pursues Mr Balfour through B.
According to the doctrine of Evolution there was a time when mother earth was the scene of no one of those groups of phenomena called 'pains, pleasures, instincts, appetites, disgusts, religions, superstitions,' &c.
[These] are every one products of the cosmic process, contained in it potentially up to the epoch of the appearance of certain forms of animal life, but not actually manifest until that epoch. Such phenomena are no more 'the causes of the course of organic and social development' than the performances of the famous town clock at Berne are the causes of its going.
From a 'purely scientific point of view' again, if I may presume to know what that is, I fail to see how the predicate of equality attaches to things so diverse; and why science should be accused of affirming that the object of the process marked by these phenomena is 'not to improve but simply to perpetuate the species,' when the progressive improvement is just what variation and natural selection are supposed to account for, passes my comprehension. I am afraid Mr Balfour has hardly given the Origin of Species the attention which that great little book really needs if one is to understand its teachings.
That painting is all one process, namely, that of dabbing colour on a surface, is a scientific verity. It does not follow that from a purely scientific point of view all paintings should be on an equality. For from such point of view it is an unquestionable truth that the inequality of a signboard and a Cuyp dealing with the same subject is very considerable.
[5] IV. A. In the possession of reason and in the enjoyment of beauty, we in some remote way share the nature of that infinite Personality in whom we live and move and have our being.
B. (1) Reason is but the psychological expression of certain physiological processes in the cerebral hemispheres. (2) It is no more than an expedient among many expedients by which the individual and the race are preserved, (3) just as Beauty is no more than the name for such varying and accidental attributes of the material or moral worlds as may happen, for the moment, to stir our æsthetic feelings.
This article of B is so loaded with matter that I have been obliged to take it to pieces and deal with them one at a time.
When I read B (1), I rejoiced to meet at last with a proposition to which (leaving out the 'but,' which is both superfluous and misleading) I could fully assent, in the catechism prepared with so much care for my use. But any hope of continuing in the same light-hearted vein was effectually dissipated by B (2).
To say truth, an age ago, when I expounded the very view expressed in B (1) to Mr. Darwin, he pointed out that it was fatal to the application of natural selection in this region, inasmuch as consciousness becomes as it were a by-product. That which avails in the struggle for existence is the physical process. In fact the perfectly rational actions of the lower animals avail them just as much in the struggle for existence as if they were accompanied by conscious ratiocination.
Thus I must decline to have anything to do with B (2) on scientific grounds; B(3) I find equally repugnant to sound æsthetics and to common experience.
The æsthetic faculty, like every other endowment, from stature, muscular force, and digestion, to passion and intellect, is distributed to individual men in most unequal manner. It is hardly too much to say that the difference between a Peter Bell and the poet who created him is infinite–as great as that between the man who has never been able to get over the pons asinorum and a Laplace or a Helmholtz.
There are thousands of people who cannot follow a moderately complex argument, and thousands more to whom one tune is as good as another, and the Sistine Madonna nothing like so pleasant to look at as a gaudy Christmas chromolithograph.
But I do not know that the infinite diversity of opinions justifies us in saying that Truth is no more than a name for stirring of intellectual faculties, however varying and accidental. And I conceive there is as little justification for taking Beauty, to be just such stirring of all the world's æsthetic feelings.
If that is so, why are there certain works of art, certain natural objects, which will be as certainly accounted beautiful by all in whom the æsthetic faculty is normally developed, as certain propositions in science will be held true by all whose intellects are of normal capacity?
The qualities of the best parts of the Iliad or the Divina Commedia appeal to normally constituted men of the present day as strongly as they did to the Greeks of the eighth century B.C. or to the Italians of the fourteenth century A. D. So long as the æsthetic faculties exist in man, so long will the principles of æsthetics be as 'immutable' as those of morals. And it is as fortunate for mankind in matters of æsthetics, as in those of ethics, that they allow themselves to be governed by the minority. If science, art, and morality were ruled by universal suffrage, ugliness would soon be as rampant as vice, while dulness would be lord of all.
As with literature so with every form of art. That upon which the developed æsthetic sense has set the seal of its approbation will never appeal in vain to those who are similarly qualified; nor, so long as human nature endures, will there lack simple and untaught souls to whom the ever-varying aspects of nature–perhaps no more than the shadow of a cloud gliding over a plain, or the curve of a wave as the calm sea breaks lazily on a flat beach, or the weird light of a winter sunset athwart the western end of a London street–will be full of beauty. It is the nemesis of over-civilisation to cease to be affected by these things, and to be condemned to seek beauty without finding it in the varying and accidental combinations of jaded caprice, in the shams of dilettantism and the fads of fashion.
[6] V. (A) Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so placed as not to have within reach of himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavour.
(B) The individual perishes; the race itself does not endure. Few can flatter themselves that their conduct has any effect whatever upon its remoter destinies; and of those few, none can say with reasonable assurance that the effect which they are destined to produce is one which they desire. Even if we were free therefore, our ignorance would make us helpless; and it may be almost a consolation for us to reflect that our conduct was determined for us by the distribution of unthinking forces in pre-solar æons, and that if we are impotent to foresee its consequences we were not less impotent to arrange its causes.
Certainly natural knowledge gives not the least foundation for the belief that either individual existence or that of the human race is other than limited. But I know not why this should be accounted a doctrine peculiar to, or characteristic of, Agnosticism.
Pre-exilic Israel was of the same mind in respect of the perishing of the individual; the Sadducees, whose orthodoxy was unimpeachable, held the same opinion down to the year 40 at least; while high ecclesiastical authority down to our own day has maintained that Christianity does not teach natural immortality. And I confess I do not see how an unbiased reader of the Pauline epistles can escape that conclusion. In the fifteenth chapter of the first Epistle to the Corinthians, the resurrection is treated as a purely miraculous event. That which is vivified is not the natural body of the earth, earthy and corruptible, but a pneumatic body, heavenly and incorruptible.
So, under any theory of the nature of things, I am unable to discover that human vanity and ambition are better satisfied, or human ignorance better supplemented.
The 'current teaching' of my boyhood–nowise changed, I believe, down to the present time–insisted upon the fact that all things were ordered by God's providence before the world was– that, unless it pleased God to give us his grace, we were powerless to do any good thing and had nothing to expect but everlasting misery. So that, if we were 'free' we were certainly very helpless; and I do not see why we should find any consolation in reflecting that our conduct was determined for us 'in pre-solar æons' by the 'thinking' force of the Divinity.
It is really a profound mistake to suppose that Determinism is specially connected with natural science. Logically it is a tripod standing on three legs, one of which is the conception of futurity, another the conception of universal causation, and the third the conception of God.
In thinking of the future we imagine it to be indefinite and uncertain, simply so far as we know nothing about it. Yet a little consideration should produce the conviction that the future is as definite and fixed as the past. At this moment I am writing at a certain table in a certain room at 9.15 A. M. Yesterday this was part of the future, tomorrow it will be part of the fixed and unalterable past–becomes such in fact even as I write. Consequently any one who possessed the power of foreseeing the future yesterday or a thousand or a million years ago, must have seen me doing this exact thing at this very time and place. In fact it is not really in our power to conceive of futurity, however remote, as other than a definite series of events a, b, c, and no other. Only we do not know what a, b, and c are. Again, if the law of causation is absolute–that is to say, if nothing comes into being by chance–future events are the consequences of present events and therefore predetermined by the latter.
[7] Finally, if there be an omnipotent and omniscient God, to whom the past and the future are alike present and on whom all things are dependent, who holds the world in the hollow of his hand, it is surely childish to pretend that any room is left for action independent of his will.
Natural science had no hand in producing the doctrine of pre-destination. It did not dictate sundry passages in the Epistle to the Romans, nor whisper in the ear of Augustine of Hippo.
Luther was assuredly not influenced by it when he expressed it in somewhat brutal fashion, by declaring that man is as a beast of burden who goes the way his rider wills. His rider is sometimes God and sometimes the devil, but the saddle is never empty.
What did Calvin or Jonathan Edwards know about natural science? Yet who has ever put the case of Determinism better or more unanswerably?
In fact I am 'wee to think' of what might have befallen Mr Balfour if he had happened to promulgate the doctrines contained in the last-cited article of the catechism of Demonism, within reach of the Genevan Reformer. There would have been another Servetus stain on the Protestant escutcheon.
'Every human soul of infinite value!' Perhaps the arrogance of the worm's estimate of itself might be excused on the ground of its value as material for infinite suffering. 'Eternal' by the pleasure of God, surely not by its own nature.
But 'free'? City fathers, a strong stake and plenty of firewood! Man's "infinite endeavour?" "objects within reach of himself"? The creature able even to desire what is good without grace, without election? City fathers, let the wood be damp and the fire slow.
For anything I have to say to the contrary, the five (B) articles of the 'Naturalistic creed,' the examination of which I have now concluded, may be held by somebody. But I think I have succeeded in showing that they contain no single doctrine that Agnosticism recognised as peculiarly its own or that has a closer connection with the premises of natural science than with those of Demonism.
There remains a no less interesting question. Are the five (A) articles a more faithful representation of "current teaching"? I have already lamented the vagueness of this term; but I think I have ample justification for the assumption that it means Christian teaching, and that Mr. Balfour's object is to furnish a foundation for belief within the pale of Christianity, if only by that process of sapping the foundations of rival beliefs which it is the habit of the analogical mind to confuse with building its own.
It is notoriously difficult to define Christianity. Some there are who use the term "Christian" as if it applied only to the members of the Church of Rome; others who grant the name only to those who adhere to what they are pleased to call doctrines of the primitive church. The only point upon which all are agreed is that the creed held by James the brother of the Lord and the earliest church of Jerusalem is not Christian.
Therefore, what I am about to assume to be Christian doctrine will probably be denied to be such by the sects, as freely as they deny one another's Christianity. But I think that those who will look into the matter carefully will find my justification in history.
From this point of view I am bound to say that the articles of the (A) catechism appear to me to have their foundation not in Christianity but in pre-Christian Greek philosophy.
[8] 'That the universe is the creation of Reason, and all things work together towards a reasonable end,' is a popular statement of the especially Stoical doctrine of the Logos. If I do not greatly err, Christianity says that the universe is the creation of God's will, in accordance with purposes altogether past finding out by what we know as reason; that the universe was at first 'very good'; but that two works of the Divine Artificer, expressly said to be made in his own image, on most trifling temptation fell away from goodness; that in consequence not only they and all their progeny became very bad, but the world was cursed for their sake, and was given over to the enemy of God, the devil, so completely, that he was officially recognised as the Prince of this world. That this state of things continues: now, as eighteen hundred years ago, the whole creation travaileth and groaneth in the bonds of sin and misery; now, as ever since Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, all but a mere fraction of the human race have lived sorrowfully and sinfully, and at death have passed to endless torment.
A mere fraction, on the other hand, not one in a million certainly, for no merit or good deed of their own, beyond taking advantage of the means of grace (inaccessible to the vast majority) offered them by the Creator who determined their nature and faculties, have passed or will pass, by a miraculous exertion of the Divine power, into a state of endless bliss.
And when the tale of God's elect is complete, the universe will be destroyed as the timbers of a booth in which strolling actors have played out the play are knocked to pieces and used for firewood.
If this is the end to which things work together, of course the universe is rationally disposed to bring about that end. If it were not, the end would be different. But, whether the nature of things as thus displayed is 'rational' in any other sense; whether the 'infinite love' which is thus compatible with the fore-ordained in pre-solar æons of infinite misery on 999,999 out of every 1,000,000 of human beings, has a resemblance to what we usually call 'love,' is, I think open to discussion. But perhaps 'love,' in Mr Balfour's language, has as special a sense as 'phenomenon' and 'naturalism.'
Again, the third article of catechism A breathes the purest spirit of pre-christian heathenism. I may be wrong, but I do not think there is anything about immutable and eternal principles of morality in either Law or Gospel. Judaism, Nazarenism, primitive Christianity, I imagine, agree in the equation, the moral = the declared will of God, and in the assertion that it is our duty to do whatever God commands us to do without reference to the ethical prepossessions of our sinful nature. How, indeed, is the slightest confidence to be placed in them, when we know that the natural man is corrupt, body and soul?
[9] To believe against the dictates of the carnal reason; to refuse to listen to the impulses of affection tainted by sin, and principles, the offspring of self-righteousness; to withdraw from all human interests, renounce volition, and sink into a quietistic machine driven by the Spirit–these are the counsels of perfection accepted in theory, though happily more or less ignored in practice, by the great majority of Christians.
The trail of Hellenism is even more evident in the fourth article. It is from a Stoical pantheist that Paul the apostle borrowed 'in whom we live and move and have our being.' The God whose nature we can be said to share is not the Jehovah of old Israel, on whom not even the friend of God could look face to face and live; and, on the other hand, the early Councils would not have had so much trouble about the union of the two natures in Christ, if they had known that natural man shares, in any way, 'the nature of the Divine Personality.' Indeed, Mr Balfour's conception of an 'infinite Personality' is Hellenic– was imported into Christianity with the other Hellenic philosophumena.
The second sentence of article 5 is one to which I heartily subscribe; he who refuses to do so may be a philosopher, but, in my judgment, is undeserving of the higher title of Man. But, really and truly, current teaching–that is, Christian teaching– has no exclusive claim to it–nay, it is doubtful whether it has any claim at all. It is the creed of the heroes of the lliad and of the Norsemen of the Sagas; it has been, and is, consciously or unconsciously, the axiomatic foundation of all worthy human life.
The nobler men who have professed the Christian faith have always acted upon this expression of the best that is in human nature. But those who have most zealously professed and called themselves Christians–those who have assumed airs of superior sanctity in all ages–have not done so. They have recognised in themselves and others only one object–the salvation of their souls to attain that they have been as ready to trample down every consideration of patriotism or social welfare. The mad lust of self-preservation blinds the undisciplined sailors to all pity for the weak, all obligation of honour and duty.
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