II. But now let us draw near to this God, and try and construct Him for our minds, as He is in relation to ourselves. Is it unfair in trying to discover what God is, the limited God as opposed to the illimitable God, in relation to man,-is it unfair to look at the world about us and say, 'I will reason from what I see here, from what I know of the universe and of man to the relative nature and constitution of God?' I will reason in this way, because, whatever exists now actively must have had an appropriate origin—the source from whence it flows must have impressed upon it its own law, so that if I find certain qualities in the world I may reason to a power or source from whence those qualities flow; or at least I may say, that Reality which both science and religion agree in declaring to underlie the phenomena displayed in the world and in human nature must be something similar in character to the phenomena themselves, or it would not have given rise to them as appearances or manifestations of itself. Surely that is no outrageous proposition, but one most reasonable and satisfactory, for it puts within a man's grasp the very detail and particulars of God's nature.

What do I see in myself and the world? First, materiality, or at least force under conditions called by the senses 'material;' therefore, I say there must be something analogous to an element of materiality in God, or a point of contact between materiality and God. There must be a certain relation between the Divine Being and the principle of matter of which the visible universe is composed. You will anticipate the next step.

I now discern a primal intelligence manifested in what I call laws, or orderly sequences. I see laws in my own nature, I see laws of body and of mind; our minds are constituted so as to perceive all this, therefore I infer that the laws and the intelligence which perceives them must have come from some intelligent source. But, leaving man entirely out of the question, I can see an immense and incomprehensible intelligence displayed in the growth and development of the universe, and I therefore infer that there is intelligence, or some vast force analogous to intelligence, in God. So that I get two Divine qualities from observing the universe and man; I arrive at something analogous to matter and something analogous to mind, or I am able to say that in God there are forces arranged under conditions which we call matter; and, combined with matter, forces arranged under conditions which we call mind.

But are we nothing but flesh and blood and bones, or, at best, animated calculating machines? In human nature there is still a residuum to be dealt with-a residuum intimately connected with and yet distinct from matter. There are impulses and emotions, there are powers of self-sacrifice, and powers of discerning good and evil; there are, in short, a number of properties belonging to the affectional life of man; his religious feelings, his moral sentiments, his aspirations, and the motive power which lies at the root of these; accordingly, from what I find in man, I again reason to God, and I infer that in Him, too, there is something analogous to love. That He, too, feels some vast joy in the joy of His creatures,

and some deep 'painless sympathy with pain.' Thus I seem to reach a sympathetic element in God's nature.

12. Now I come to a point where grave questions arise. Modern science has told us that we cannot thus argue from the love in man to anything corresponding to that in God. Modern philosophy says the sentiments of conscience, the moral law, are not inspirations; simply matters of natural development. They have arisen step by step, they did not exist formerly in man; they have slowly grown up by the pressure of experience evolving a moral nature in man. Let me analyse the way in which this is said to have been brought about. Primeval man, we will say, was at first without any sentiments of right, wrong, truth, justice, etc.; there was a great struggle for bare existence, and the natural instincts were very strong for the maintenance of life. Therefore, if one man saw another who had food and drink, he would naturally go and deprive him of his food and drink. At first there would be no control, no mastery of the appetite; where one got hold of what another had he would take it all, when he might have divided it and still had enough. The weaker companion would be often killed in this struggle. The struggle would end in the survival of the fittest, that is, the strongest. Nevertheless it might well happen as time went on that some one so killed was valuable to society, and the rest would soon learn on utilitarian principles to punish anyone taking away the life of one valuable to the community; and thus you would have a reflex feeling generated, for if occasion

arose for you to kill anybody, you would remember the consequences. You would restrain yourself, and hence would come to you the habit of restraining yourselves, and the habit of respecting your fellow-creatures, and this incipient and utilitarian kindness would ripen into benevolence, and willing self-sacrifice would not be long in following. Such is the explanation of modern science, and moral law turns out after all to be only a system of checks and counter checks, nothing but that; the affections have been evolved by civilisation out of brute instincts, and the moral sentiments of self-sacrifice, disinterestedness, and such like, only came from imperative habit and motives which have been the results of what we may call the agglutinated experiences of mankind, as regards what was likely to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. That is the scientific theory of the moral sentiments. This may or may not

be the right explanation of the moral sentiments; but, suppose it is the right one, suppose moral ideas are human experiences, slowly accumulated and organised. Suppose you can trace the order and development of the moral ideas; nay, suppose you can explain the religious passion itself as the work of the imagination projecting its sentiment into the external world, and thus making a God. You have not answered the question whence whence the power which has constituted society on this self-preserving, this moral basis; and especially, whence the sentiment which has created your God? Simply because you see, or think you see, the way in which things have been developed, and you can trace

the growth of each, step by step-do you therefore deny that power which has thus ever directed each after his kind, and constituted the world in one way and not in another?

Here is a forest. You bring me an acorn: if you cut it in two you will see the little germ from which by-andbye will come the oak, when planted in the earth, and nourished by the influences of nature. You can explain the causes which end by producing this forest of oaks. Then you say, 'I see it all; this forest of oaks came from these acorns.' You have only got over one difficulty. The oak came from the acorn, but where did the acorn come from? where did the principle of life in the acorn come from? I see and wonder at the great arboreal group of moral sentiments. You show me the seed. You say, 'All this has been the necessary consequence of certain things which went before.' What do you mean by necessary consequences? You mean a certain apparently invariable order or succession of phenomena, which you call a system of laws by which certain things are developed out of certain others. You then come to ask who made these laws, where did they come from, why that fixed order of development and no other-why not chaos? That original law, that stream of tendency is none other than the underlying Reality-is none other than God, in whom we live and move and have our being, and in whom must lie the conceptional germs not only of force as apparent in matter, but also Intelligence, Will and those other perceptions of human nature called Love and the Moral Sentiments.

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