Beyond this point our essay does not go. Our battery is directed not against the existence of a Deity, but against the validity of the Design argument. With the so-called proof which seeks to establish belief in God by arguing that the IDEA of the most Perfect Being involves his objective existence; or with that which identifies the conception of an Infinite Being with his existence as the sole adequate cause of that conception; or with that which insists that every idea implies a corresponding object, and that so we have trustworthy intuitions of infinity and eternity; or with that which starts with the axiom that something exists, and that therefore an unknown necessary Being exists; with the proof which some theists prefer, that the soul is impelled by its cravings and aspirations to seek after God and to believe in him; with all these proofs, entological, psychological, cosmological, idealogical, emotional, we have not, or have not directly and intentionally, concerned ourselves. The theist, as far as we have argued the case, is left in undisturbed possession of all of them. On the other hand, the argument which we have assailed has been pronounced inconclusive and unsatisfactory by many decided theists. Pascal, Caird, Irons, all admit its inefficiency. Among philosophical writers who are adverse to its claims, or think them of little value, we may enumerate Spinoza, Hume, Bacon, Descartes, Carlyle,1 Darwin, Huxley,

1 "Of Final Causes, man by the nature of the case can prove nothing; knows them, if he knows them at all, not by glimmering flint-sparks of logic, but by an infinitely higher light of intuition."-Carlyle's Miscellanies, vol. iv. p. 320.

Zeller, Spencer, Lewes, and Fiske. That some thoughtful men, like the late Frederick Robertson, accord it a secondary value as a weapon of defence in the hands of a believer is true; but equally true the admission that "for proving God's existence, or demonstrating to one well-informed infidel the falsity of his opinion, [it] ever has been, and ever must be powerless."1 Coleridge, while declaring that the notion of God was auxiliary, called forth by the manifest adaptation of means to ends in the outward creation, yet as expressly declares that the existence of God is absolutely and necessarily insusceptible of scientific demonstration.

1 Life and Letters of Frederick Robertson, vol. i. p. 344.

CHAPTER XV.

EXPLANATORY AND PROSPECTIVE-CHRISTIAN LIFE AND CHRISTIAN DOGMA-THE

LIFE, THEORETIC AND PRACTICAL.

PHILOSOPHIC

IN arguing the question of Final Causes, I have neces-sarily expatiated on the imperfection of nature and the miseries of human life. The prominence given to the darker aspects of existence may possibly have produced the impression that I hold what may be termed an ultra-pessimist view of the world. As regards the future of man on our planet, such is not my conviction. My creed is not one of despair, but of hope. If I do not as yet believe in the ultimate " evanescence of evil," I at least believe in the indefinite improvability of man, and of the continued diminution of all hostile influences in the external world. The victory may seem to tremble in the balance, but the scale dips in favour of the good. Meanwhile, for the general accuracy of my conviction of nature's imperfections and man's wretchedness and degradation, I can cite high authority. Plato in the Laws teaches that the world is full both of good and evil, but has in it more of evil than of good. St. Paul in his letter to the Romans declares that the whole creation groans and travails in pain. Pascal insists that the condition of

man, that "dethroned king," is one of conscious corruption and continual misery. Dr. Johnson was of much the same opinion as Plato. A thinker of a very different school, Mr. J. S. Mill, deplores the sufferings of our race, and complains, as we have already seen, that "nature exhibits the most supercilious disregard of mercy and justice, and that there is no single point of excellence which is not repugnant to the untutored feelings of the human heart." A witness less exceptional in orthodox eyes, the acute and accomplished Cardinal Newman, re-echoes the sentiment in language so striking that we shall quote the entire passage in which it occurs:—

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual aberration, their conflicts, and their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship, their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design; the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things as from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes; the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain over his futurity; the disappointments of life, the defect of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish; the prevalence and intensity of sin; the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle's words, 'having no hope and without God in the world:' all this is a vision to dizzy and appal, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution.

"What shall be said to this heart-rending reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this

living society of men is in a true sense discarded from his presence. Did I see a boy of good make and mind, with the tokens on him of a refined nature, cast upon the world without provision, unable to say whence he came, his birthplace or his family connections, I should conclude that there was some mystery connected with his history, and that he was one of those of whom, for one cause or other, his parents were ashamed. Thus only should I be able to account for the contrast between the promise and condition of his being. And so I argue about the world: if there be a God; since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence, and thus the doctrine of what is called original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists and as the existence of God." 1

In the belief of Dr. Newman, some terrible aboriginal calamity, the great primeval fall of the first parents of our race, is the solution of the mystery. If the hypothesis be accepted, an explanation of the problem of the existence of evil is tendered. But then the Catholic or Christian theist must explain how an Omnipotent Being, who is also all-wise and all-good, who is not only the Governor but the Author of the world, and who, as the Creator of the material of which it is formed, is responsible for the character of that materia!, could have constructed such a universe; how, with a perfect foreknowledge of the consequences of the nature which he had given man, of the consequences of the passions and predilections of that crowning work of his own hands, of the ruin of man in this life and his terrible doom in the life to come, he could have 1 Apologia, p. 379.