CHAPTER VI.

THE PERFECTION OF NATURE, AND

DEITIES OF SCEPTICISM.

THE Conflict of Faith and Unbelief in the last times is often said in Scripture to be "like the day of Midian." There were two striking features of that day. The first was an extreme illustration of the impotence of mere numbers when opposed to faith and the fear of God. Gideon's little company of three hundred light-bearers went forth by divine command to encounter the Midianite host, four hundred times more numerous, who were slumbering in darkness, and the overthrow was complete and entire. "The host ran and cried and fled ... and every man's sword was set against his fellow throughout all the host." In the hour of panic they perished by mutual self-destruction. So, in the immense confederacy of unbelief in the last times, there is no unity, but endless self-contradiction, and all the materials are already prepared for the overthrow of sceptical speculations through intestine collision and conflict. Thus one leading sceptic prophesies that "the reign of matter must extend till it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and action." Another, still more eminent, assures us, that "Philosophy refuses to admit the very existence of matter," and that there exist nothing but " permanent possibilities of sensation." M. Comte tells us that the era of forces and causes is past with the childhood of

science, that faith in God and in supernatural powers is only the stage of its infancy, and that Positivism, which simply registers phenomena, is its full manhood. Dr Tyndal assures us the exact reverse: that to pass from phenomena to the forces by which they are produced, is the first requisite of philosophic thought. The author of Positivism in the very work where he reprobates the introduction of forces, laws and causes, contradicts his own principle two hundred times within ninety pages. Mr Spencer refers all theology to the Unknowable, and says that the "power which the universe manifests is utterly inscrutable." Mr Mill rejoins, and tells him that he admits an immense amount of knowledge of the Unknowable. What is equally clear is that he lays down the indestructibility of motion as an à priori truth, and tells us in the same work that the universe, by evolution and the law of equilibration, is tending to a state of perfect rest, and to the reign of omnipresent death.

“If equilibration must end in complete rest, what is the fate towards which all things tend? The solar system is slowly dissipating its forces, the sun is losing its heat at a rate which will tell in millions of years. If man and society are similarly dependent on this supply of force which is gradually coming to an end, are we not manifestly progressing towards Omnipresent Death? That such must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on seems beyond doubt...That the proximate end of all the changes we have traced is a state of quiescence, this admits of à priori proof." Spencer's First Principles, p. 514.

These contradictions of different sceptical theories, and different parts of the same theory, might be multiplied almost without limit. Never perhaps, since the beginning of time, was there so large a brevet as in Mr Spencer's philosophical works, by which direct selfcontradictions are promoted to the rank of à priori truths. One German atheistic theory professes to build

up the universe without a God out of atoms which are not atoms at all, but little whirlpools of revolving

matter.

With regard to Nature, and its perfection, we have the like antithesis. The writer before us, haying corrupted the Christian faith by patchwork additions of his own, directly opposed to the statements of Scripture, then contrasts the compound, with what he calls. the "glorious perfection of nature." This anti-supernaturalism encounters its direct opposite, in what may be called the hypo-physicism of Mr Mill.

"Nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another are nature's every-day performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognized by human laws, nature does once to every creature that lives. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this nature does, with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and justice, emptying her shafts on the best and the noblest, indifferently with the meanest and worst. She mows down those on whose existence hangs the well-being of a whole people,. perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature's dealings with life...A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts, or an inundation desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people; everything, in short, which the worst of men commit either against life or property, is perpetrated on a larger scale by natural agents. Nature has noyades more fatal than those of Carrier; her explosions of fire-damp are as destructive as human artillery; her plague and cholera far surpass the poisoned cups of the Borgias. All which people are accustomed to deprecate as disorder and its consequences, is precisely a counterpart of nature's ways: anarchy and the reign of terror are overmatched in injustice, ruin, and death by the hurricane and the pestilence." Mill's Posthumous Essays, p. 31.

Such, according to Mr Mill, is that "glorious perfection of nature," which the author of "Supernatural Religion" uses as a foil, to demonstrate by contrast, that the Christian faith is a contradiction to reason and the moral sense. Mr Mill, on the contrary, insists strongly that

"the morality of the Gospels is far higher and better than that which shews itself in the order of nature."

What is nature in the creed of Atheism, and apart from the vicegerent rule and action of man, ruling over the earth, and bringing outward things into subjection to his own will? Mr Mill gives only two meanings to the word, nature; the first is

"the aggregate of the powers and properties of all things, of all phenomena and the causes which produce them." "In another sense nature means, not every thing which happens, but only what takes place without the voluntary and intentional agency of man." "This distinction," he adds, "is far from exhausting the ambiguities of the word."

It does not in fact include the most fundamental meaning; it leaves Mr Mill quite unable to explain why "unnatural" in every language should be a term of strong reprobation; or why the foremost school of Greek philosophy came to make "living according to nature," the first and chief maxim of duty and wisdom. Nature, by its derivation, does not properly apply at all to mere matter, but to things that are born and live. It may be extended, by analogy, to God, the self-existent, who does not come into being; and by a further analogy, it may be extended, in the opposite direction, to things that are not born, such as lifeless atoms. The nature of any particular thing or being is properly that distinctive character wherein its being consists; the fundamental law imposed on it in the hour of its birth, the

specific gift of being it has received from the Creator; when Nature is spoken of as a collective whole, it is plainly a term of extreme ambiguity. It It may either include or exclude the perfect being and nature of the self-existent Creator. It may include or exclude the being and dominion of man, the vice-gerent of the Creator in this lower world. It may include all the unknown worlds throughout the universe, or be limited to the world of human experience alone in this terrestrial life; it may include only that which is known, shut in by the grave on the one side, and by two or three thousand years of known history on the other; or it may comprehend both all past ages and a coming eternity. When both the nature of God and of man are excluded, all the unknown future, all the unknown or unseen regions of the universe, and earthly life and experience for the last two or three thousand years alone is considered, it is plain that Nature so defined denotes a very small and infinitesimal part of the vast scheme of universal Being. When Nature within these narrow limits, is extolled as "invariable and perfect," and its "glorious perfection " is made the warrant for the rejection of the Christian faith, the moral teaching of the Gospel, the doctrine of the resurrection and the blessed. hope of immortal life beyond the grave, this is indeed an illusion as well as a blasphemy, "shocking both to reason and to moral sense."

How far is Mr Mill's counter indictment of the utter immorality, injustice and cruelty of nature, valid and well-founded? The constancy and perfection of nature to which the appeal is made in the sceptical argument, is really nothing more than our limited human experience of terrestrial changes on the earth's surface from the dispersion of the sons of Noah till the birth of Christ for two thousand years; excluding the beginning, and