Bishop Butler's great work. Butler, following Origen, has met by anticipation any argument against supernatural revelation derived from the necessary unity and harmony-for "uniformity" is a very questionable word-of all divine operations. If, indeed, the word Nature be restricted to physical Nature, the harmony of miracles with its constitution and course is easily contested. But such a limitation simply begs the question, which is whether the moral and spiritual forces of human nature do not necessitate, under certain circumstances, a supersession of mere physical consequences. It is a matter of evidence whether instances of such supersession have occurred, and in considering the value of this evidence we are brought back to the question from which we started on this short digression.

That question is whether we can accept the testimony of persons whose competence as witnesses transcends our means of judgment on the sole assurance of their word. If the previous arguments of this Paper have been valid, they will at least have advanced us one important step in considering this question. They will have shown that we must approach it from the moral rather than from the scientific point of view, and that we must consider it in relation to action, and not to speculation. The primary question is not, what are we to think? but what are we to do? These men-St. Paul, St. John, St. Peter-for reverential reasons I abstain from directly introducing into this discussion the Name which should be the most decisive of all-invite us to accept their guidance in life and their comfort in death, and to trust ourselves, body and soul, to the belief of their assurances. The function of the Christian Church and of its ministry is to bring that invitation home to every man's conscience, and as long as the Church performs its duty the appeal cannot be evaded. Shall we accept it, or shall we go elsewhere, to some modern guide, who will pronounce upon our duties and our destinies by the light of scientific forecast and legal evidence? The answer to that question can only be given individually, and its nature will depend, in the first instance, partly on the degree in which we retain that childlike habit of faith, of mutual trust between person and person, which I have endeavoured to vindicate as our normal and healthy disposition; and partly on the force with which the moral and spiritual power of such Saints lays hold our souls. There are those to whom that force is overwhelming, and to whom it appears idle to compare it with the moral force of other religious leaders. It touches at once the strongest and the tenderest fibres of the heart. It controls the fiercest passions and supports the gentlest. It is associated, in a manner which no similar influence has approached, with whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure,

whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report. To those who are sufficiently sensible of this intense moral illumination, the supposition that it is associated with false testimony on matters of supreme moment is inconceivable. The case completely fulfils Hume's condition that, to establish a miracle, "the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish." It seems idle to draw "psychological parallels," as has recently been attempted, between a moral giant like St. Paul and a worthy gentleman like Sir Matthew Hale, and still worse to compare the dark and confused morality of other Eastern religions with the grace and truth which came by Jesus Christ. His Apostles appeal to my whole being, to every moral sense of which I am conscious, to my weakness and my strength, my sin and my repentance, my intellect and my heart, and evoke towards themselves, and still more to One beyond themselves, that complete allegiance of the whole man which is designated Faith.* I do not pretend to have a scientific knowledge of divine things, or to rest my convictions upon a scientific demonstration; but I can venture to say that "I know in Whom I have believed." Such a belief will be supported by collateral evidence, acquiring from age to age a cumulative and converging force; but its essential virtue will in all ages be derived from the vital sources of personal love and trust.

Such, I would suggest, are in substance the Ethics of Belief, as contradistinguished from the Ethics of Science. Their essential peculiarity is that they are concerned in the first instance with

There could hardly be a better illustration of the claim of the Apostles in this respect than is afforded by the two following parables, which I take the liberty of extracting from Sir James Stephen's article on Authority in the April number of the Nineteenth Century. He appears to suggest their application to the claims of modern religious authorities. Whether or not tuose authorities would have occasion to shrink from such a test, there is nothing they would more desire than that it should be applied to the Apostles. Perhaps the strongest claim of Christ and his Apostles is that they have proved themselves to be our superiors by appealing to the faculties"-above all the moral faculties-"which we have in common:"

A blind man and a seeing man were once discussing the existence of sight. The seeing man told the blind man that he had a faculty by which he could perceive innumerable things which he could neither hear, touch, smell, nor taste, and which were at a great distance from him. The blind man challenged the seeing man to prove his assertions. "That," said the seeing man, "is easily done. Hold me by the hand. You perceive that I am standing by you. I affirm that if you will walk fifty steps along the side of this wall, which you can touch with your hand, so as to be sure that you are moving straight on, you will find such and such objects, which I specifically describe, and as to the existence of which you can satisfy yourself by your own fingers." The blind man admitted that the seeing man had proved his assertion.

Of two men with eyes, A. and B., A. declared that he could see what went on in the sun, moon, and fixed stars, and that when he said "see" he meant not exactly common seeing, but a superior kind of seeing, very hard to describe to any one who did not possess it, which he called "intucing." B. (who had a good pair of eyes of his own of the common kind) challenged A. to read the Times newspaper at a distance at which B. Could not read it. A. failed to do so. "Why," said B., "should I believe that you can 'intue' things in Sirius, when you cannot read small print on the other side of the room? If you want me to believe that you possess faculties of which I am destitute, you must prove yourself to be my superior by appealing to the faculties which we have in

common."

our relation to certain persons, rather than to certain truths. They thus bring into play those obligations of trust and loyalty on which all social life is founded, and they render our religious convictions a matter of personal allegiance instead of mere opinion. The first question a Christian is asked is not whether he believes certain truths, but whether he believes in certain Persons; and he is a member of a perpetual society whose fundamental law is allegiance to its Head. The vitality of our religion and its influence for good have always been in proportion to the distinctness with which this characteristic element in it has been realized. In the early ages of Christianity, as Dr. Newman has shown, this personal devotion was predominant over all other influences, and constituted the supreme motive power of the Gospel. The great achievement of the Reformation was to revivify it, and to substitute a personal faith, involving trust in a person and selfsurrender to Him, for mere habits of assent and formal obedience. The effect, wherever the Reformed teaching took root, was to revive at the same time the faculty of faith between man and man, and thus to reinvigorate society. Possibly a similar revival is equally desirable at the present day in order to hold in check the disintegrating forces now at work amongst us. We cannot, at all events, be too careful not to be driven from this ground in upholding or in propagating our religious belief. The question at issue in the first instance is not whether we think certain opinions on theological questions more tenable than others, but whether we believe certain men more worthy to be followed and trusted than others. Could their testimony be shown to be incompatible with truth scientifically established, of course their authority would be proportionately weakened, if not overthrown. But until this has been done the faith we have once pledged to them imposes on us obligations of trust and loyalty similar to those involved in other personal relations, and we can no more be always questioning their authority than we can be always investigating the faithfulness of a friend, a wife, or a husband. We are willing to entertain such an inquiry upon good cause shown; but our whole presumption is in favour of faith and not in favour of doubt. Of the two errors, it is safer in matters of practice, both for the individual and for society, to err on the side of belief and trust than on the side of doubt and hesitation.

Such considerations, it may be added, seem to have an important bearing on the question now under discussion as to the influence upon morality of a decline in religious belief. As the Dean of St. Paul's has observed, the question cannot be properly discussed unless it is understood definitely what belief and what morality are intended. But one thing is evident, that a decline in Christian belief involves a decline in the personal influence exerted by our

Lord and by His Apostles. It is impossible that men who feel themselves competent, like most sceptical authors, to criticize the statements of St. John or St. Paul with as much freedom as those of any other teachers, should submit themselves to their moral and spiritual influence as completely as Christians, who accept such Saints as supreme authorities, and believe them to have been in possession of truths far beyond our natural ken. The great personages of the New Testament must cease to be, in anything like the same degree as before, the personal guides and leaders of our moral and spiritual life. Whether morality in the abstract would lose in authority may be a matter for argument. But it seems scarcely questionable that Christian morality would in practice lose one of the most potent forces which sustain it. If we would avert such a misfortune, we must adhere to the old, and it is to be feared too much forgotten, Ethics of Belief.

HENRY WACE.

MUHAMMADAN LAW: ITS GROWTH AND

CHARACTER.

II. THE TRADITIONS.

A

"TRADITION" is a recital containing a sentence or a declaration of Muhammad regarding some religious question, either moral, ceremonial, or theological. The Muhammadan belief is, that before the throne of God there stands a "preserved table," on which all that can happen, and all that has ever entered or will enter the mind of man, is "noted in a distinct writing." Through the medium of the archangel Gabriel, the Prophet had access whenever he pleased to the records inscribed on the "preserved table;" consequently, in all decisions enunciated by him, it was not he that spoke, but the word of God as written upon the everlasting table. Likewise, in all his religious acts, his method of praying, his method of making ablutions, his method even of cleaning his teeth--in short, in all that he did-there was nothing arbitrary, nothing that resulted from mere human caprice. The Prophet was a divinely-revealed type and exemplar for the strict and faithful imitation of all his followers. The traditions are the records of all that he said or did, orally handed down. Sometimes a tradition contains a strict injunction or prohibition; sometimes it merely preserves the account of an act by which the Prophet had attracted the attention of his companions; sometimes it records the guarded silence of the legislator with regard to certain cases presented to him-such silence being held equivalent to a formal approbation. The great traditionists in the beginning of Islam were Ayesha, the favourite wife of the Prophet, the four "rightly directed" Khalifs, and six of the companions known as "the Evangelists of Islam." These traditionists transmitted their knowledge to their disciples-the Tabis, as they were called-and these to the next generation, and