to much pulpit declamation, and rightly offends the instinct for truth, the fidelity to fact, of modern men of science. Brightness of the sun-blackness of the starless night-they both are here; and both must be faced, if we are to speak as honest men. Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Thou madest Death; and lo, Thy foot Tennyson never indulges in the unredeemed and imbecile folly of trying to get rid of the fact of evil by covering it up in veils of words-to hocus himself by talking of phenomena and noumena, and by saying that pain and privation, anguish of body and torture of mind, are not realities, but appearances. As if a million of industrious and peaceable men, women, and children perishing by the lingering torments of famine, were but an optical delusion! As if the locust cloud, hiding the sky and darkening the earth, were not as real as the rain-cloud, moving in beauty to the music of the west wind, and dropping heavenly dew upon the mown grass! Nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravine," be it what it will, is not unmixed, unqualified, unobstructed benevolence. One truth of transcendent importance is made plain by this fact-namely, that Nature is not God. "Are God and Nature then at strife?" asks Tennyson, and, finding the question too difficult to answer, betakes himself reverently to the prayer of faith and hope. I falter where I firmly trod, And falling with my weight of cares I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And faintly trust the larger hope. I venture to suggest that, by resolute firmness in declaring that nature is not God, the strife between God and nature may become less appalling. "Strife," indeed, is not the right word to describe the fact. If nature is imperfect and God alone. perfect, then the result, though looking like strife to us, cannot really be such. Bacon warned us long since against the mistake that God's works are His very image. The spirit, man, more nearly related to his Father Spirit than the material universe can be, is entirely at liberty to investigate nature, to modify the arrangements, to mend the defects, to resist the laws, of the material universe, in accordance with his own wants; and finds an infinitely purer and more faithful revelation of God in his own breast than in the stars of night or the blue sky of day. So many high-minded and reverent-minded. men in these times profess themselves pantheists, or use language which seems to me to imply pantheism, that I almost feel constrained to speak with bated breath of the system; but I cannot help seeing with perfect clearness that, in worshipping the universe, the pantheist abdicates man's sovereignty over nature, and annihilates God. Nature is neutral; neither good nor bad, neither just nor unjust, neither cruel nor kind; the wind that sits laughing in the shoulder of your sail, the wave that rushes in at the hole opened by a sunken rock, and hurries your ship and you to the bottom. It is one-sided to speak of nature as "a stern force to be tamed and mastered," for the balmy air that nurses the green blade in spring needs no taming, and the autumn sunshine that ripens the corn needs no mastering. Nature, I repeat, is neutral; smiles on the battle-field with its miles of quivering agony, as on the cradle with its sleeping babe. If you insist upon worshipping it, you are in the eyes of the cool man of science an idler, in the eyes of the spiritual theist an idolater. To worship reasonably, you must worship what is worthy of worship-namely, the "immortal Love," that is different from nature and above nature, that is not dead and un conscious, but a Spirit and alive. That which was incarnate in Christ, and which, in measure, is incarnate in every worthy man, we can intelligently worship;-nothing else. The pantheistic hypothesis of the individual life, as a bubble floating for one moment on the billow of existence and then lost in the All, is explicitly repudiated by Tennyson. That each, who seems a separate whole, Should move his rounds, and fusing all Is faith as vague as all unsweet: The eternal soul from all beside; And I shall know him when we meet. Against the idea that man is but a fleeting organism, the product of material forces which made him, and which will dissolve him, the poet protests with impassioned fervor. And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem'd so fair, Who trusted God was love indeed, And love Creation's final law Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw Who loved, who suffer'd countless ills, Or seal'd within the iron hills? No more? A monster then, a dream, PANTHEISM AND ATHEISM. O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! 325 He will not admit that, if the grave were known to be the end, life would still be precious. The shuddering sense of infinite, inevitable darkness, as it crept over life, ever coming nearer, would take the light from friendship, and crush the heart out of love itself. O me, what profits it to put An idle case? If Death were seen At first as Death, Love had not been, With perfect deliberation he records his opinion that, if we are mocked by the promises of our nature, it were well to fling back life as a pretended gift, but real burden and cheat. I trust I have not wasted breath: I think we are not wholly brain, Like Paul with beasts, I fought with Death; Not only cunning casts in clay; Let Science prove we are, and then What matters Science unto men, At least to me? I would not stay. The answer commonly made to this is that the desirability of a thing is no proof of its being a fact, and that it is childish to believe in immortality merely because it would be pleasant, or even because it would be morally beneficial, to be immortal. But those who thus answer mutilate the argument, and misconceive its scope. It is not upon desirability or upon undesirability, upon pleasantness or unpleasantness, that it depends, but upon what I may call genuineness of guarantee, as predicable of the surmise of immortality. Science recognizes the trustworthiness of every appetency normally pertaining to the living thing. It is in the form of appetency that the announcement is made of results supremely important to the organism. Hunger is in itself a mere want, but its satisfaction results in the perpetuation of the individual life. The genuineness of the hunger is all we require to know, in order to be justified. in trusting that the administration of food will be beneficial. So it is in the case of all our appetites and all our passions; and we can easily imagine cases in which, though the result of gratifying a passion had never been experimentally verified, yet its gratification, simply as such, would be followed by the resulting benefit. Were two human infants of different sex to be cast ashore on an uninhabited island, and to grow to maturity, it would be only by simple obedience, prior to all verification, of an appetency proper to the human constitution, that mankind could be perpetuated in the island. This case furnishes an exact scientific analogue to the argument in favor of immortality used by Tennyson. The impassioned longing for immortal life is, he virtually alleges-though I am not aware that he or any one else has stated the case in what I submit to be its exact scientific form-as proper to the human being as the passion of sexual love. It is real, it is normal, it is trustworthy; and this none the less though the objector may affirm that it has not been verified by experiment. Not only poets. and poetical philosophers have rested the defence of a confident hope of immortality upon its connection with a genuine appetency of our nature, but so rigid and dry a reasoner as Kant. In Memoriam was written before the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species, and before the critical elaboration, scarcely less valuable than the original work, of Darwin's argument by Huxley. These date a new epoch in the history of science, and the doctrine of evolution has been since accepted by a vast proportion of scientific men. After having been a chief subject of discussion in all educated circles for nearly twenty |