live to Him." The morale, the God-fearing valor, the downright, heroic earnestness of our fathers came from their belief in fundamental truth; in a general sense, from their Calvinism, their Augustinianism, their Paulinism! The present is a period when nothing is more popular than to speak disparagingly of the value of doctrinal symbols, when men are ready to subscribe to almost any statement, for substance of doctrine, if they may be permitted to put their own construction to it, so little do they care what they think. Admitting all the mistakes of the fathers, may we not believe that the reaction against didactic theology has gone far enough for safety?

There is, doubtless, something worse than heterodoxy in thinking. It is that moral dishonesty which tempts a man to hold to a form when the spirit has left it; when it is like the body of Lazarus in Bethany-dead four days already; and especially to hold to it for position or salary. In one of his letters, Frederick Maurice writes: "You speak of some who have charged me with departing from the orthodox faith. So long as I continue a minister of the Church of England, such an imputation affects not only my theology, but my moral character; it is a direct impeachment of my honesty." It has been so long the fashion to speak in disparagement of Christian doctrines as such; to ridicule old statements of doctrine; to subscribe to doctrinal symbols for substance of doctrine when a man held directly the opposite; that moral honesty respecting what a man does believe is getting to be almost the exception. Frederick Maurice meant to imply that he held himself as in sacred duty bound to preach the doctrines of the Church of England, or to vacate his pulpit. Charles Kingsley was just as conscientious: "My rule has been to preach the Athanasian creed from the pulpit in season and out of season; to ground not only my whole theological but my whole ethical teaching formally and openly on it; to prevent, as far as possible, people from thinking it a dead formula, or even a mere string of intellectual dogmas." A man's conscience cannot be bound as to what he shall think; but it is no longer a Christian conscience when he believes one thing and teaches another; when he stands between the living and the dead, saying one thing to his

people and another in his own heart; or when, for the sake of securing or holding a place of power and influence, with his own hand he subscribes to that which his reason and his heart reject.

There are certain things to be remembered: First. That just in proportion as doctrinal statements are accurate they are the simplest and most condensed statements of facts. James Freeman Clarke says of the doctrines of the Incarnation and Trinity, that both of the mare "illogical and false as Church doctrines, but they represent most essential facts." This is all that need be claimed, and it is a claim that justifies doctrinal formulæ. Secondly. To dispense with formulated statements of Christian doctrine does not make the facts any less facts; but it does tend to make men disbelieve them. There can be no classification of the facts of Christianity without doctrinal statements. Erasmus says: "Every theological definition is a misfortune." Why not every astronomical as well? Thirdly. There can be no progress in the study of Christian doctrine except through formulated statements of facts already classified. The Bible is the firmament of religious truth. It is from heavenly bodies already located that we fix the place of those suspected or newly-discovered. The science of mathematics has a problem of this nature: a line approaching nearer and nearer to a curve, which it can never reach. And yet, even this problem, mathematics undertakes to formulate. Knowledge of God, either logically or spiritually, involves elements like those in the problem of the asymptote-an eternal approach and yet a distance still infinite. Theology is the algebraic statement of great facts and relations as between man and God. The binomial theorem was just as much a fact before Sir Isaac Newton as afterward; justification by faith just as much a fact before St. Paul as afterward. The best formulæ of mathematical facts make the best algebra, and the best formulæ of biblical facts the best theology. There are mighty symphonies in the great organ of God's truth which no finite mind can combine, which no finite hands can bring out. But the hour will come when God will open all the stops, and when He who is the Truth, still our great Teacher, with His human touch, as in His earthly life, will show that "of Him, and to Him, and through Him are all things; to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen."

THE SUBSTANTIAL PHILOSOPHY.

[From a Paper read before the American Institute of Christian Philosophy, February 3d, 1887.]

BY A. WILFORD HALL, PH.D., LL.D., NEW YORK.

ONCISELY defined, the Substantial Philosophy is a system

Co

of scientific, philosophical, and, in its ultimate bearing, religious teaching, growing legitimately out of one single, broad and basic principle of science, namely, that every force of nature, or phenomena-producing cause in nature, by which any sensuous or other observed effect can be produced, must, in the very necessity of things, be a substantial entity or objective reality; and consequently that light, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, cohesion, and gravitation are as intrinsically and as really substantial entities as are the physical sources from whence they emanate, or as are the material bodies which they affect. This is the basic element of the Substantial Philosophy, and it is the chief corner-stone upon, and over, and around which the superstructure of Substantialism has been reared, and is now being formulated and wrought out into presentable shape.

Of course this broad statement of physical law flatly antagonizes much of the current doctrines as set forth in our scientific and philosophical text-books, and much of the scholasticism taught in the schools and colleges of the world. Such a broad law as the basis of a Substantial Philosophy also necessarily repudiates the idea that force in any of its forms, or that any sensation-producing cause can be a mere mode of motion; that is to say, this philosophy totally denies that any phenomenaproducing cause in nature can consist of the mere motions of material particles of air, ether, or any thing else, as our textbooks tell us with reference to several of the recognized natural forces.

The new philosophy, on the contrary, maintains that the mere motion of a body, whatever may be its size, is the phenomenal effect of some substantial and extrinsic force as its

cause; and hence, the current assumption that the motions of air-waves constitute sound in its external or physical sense, while the force which must of necessity accompany such waves as their cause in order to keep up their condensations and rarefactions is nothing entitative, is too great an error to be entertained for one moment by an intelligent investigator of physical phenomena. Hence, Substantialism lays down this proposition as one of its basic principles, that motion, per se, as the effect of some form of force as its cause, is intrinsically nothing, just as the shadow of a tree is nothing except the phenomenal effect of the substantial force of light as its cause. Motion, therefore, according to this view, is a mere changing of the position of a body or substance in space, and since position, per se, is nothing, whether at rest or changing, being pure space, just as a shadow is nothing whether moving or at rest, motion is therefore demonstrated to be a norentity since motion, of whatever character, had no existence before the moving body commenced changing position, and manifestly, as all will admit, must cease to exist as soon as the moving body comes to rest, a fact which cannot be predicated of any substantial entity however tenuous or intangible it may be to our sensuous observation.

Such is the fundamental conception and definition of all motions according to the Substantial Philosophy, when conception and definition are regarded as lying at the very foundation of all true scientific or philosophical knowledge, and a radical misconception of which has led to every error concerning the nature of force now taught as physical science. This radical view of motion, as a mere phenomenon of some substance whether visible or invisible, whether corporeal or incorporeal, and not in any possible sense as an entity or objective thing, disposes at a single stroke, if such view be correct, of all the so-called modes of motion as taught in physics, such as those of sound, light, heat, electricity, magnetism, etc., a fact which will more fully appear as the unfoldment of this philosophy advances.

It was in the year 1874 or 1875 that the attention of the author of this paper was called to the necessity of meeting materialism on its own ground, and either silencing its objections

to religion, in the manner as just set forth, or else of publicly abandoning any substantial or rational hope of a future life based on the analogies of science.

After studying carefully the mode-of-motion theories as set forth in our text-books, and as everywhere taught in our schools, and after trying in vain to reconcile them with the possible substantial nature of life, mind, soul and spirit as a basis for immortality, we came to the most solemn, deliberate, and what we regarded as the most important conclusion of our life, namely, that either the soul, life, mind, and spirit were mere molecular phenomena, and consisted of the motions of nerve and brain particles as claimed by Haeckel and Huxley, precisely as sound consists of the motions of air-particles, and heat and light of the motions of ether particles, or else that the whole range of physical science, as taught in our colleges, must be wrong from beginning to end.

Viewing the premises thus, what was the position to which we were driven? We saw at a glance that no middle ground could exist in any kind of force, between motion and substance, difficult as it seemed to be to make such phenomena-producing causes as sound, light, and heat rank as substantial entities according to any definition of substance we had yet seen. Hence, as the dictionaries of our language had generally been compiled and revised under the same materialistic influences of our colleges which tolerate the teaching of the vibratory theories of sound, light, and heat, implying that there was nothing substantial in existence except matter in some degree of attenuation, we were compelled, at the very start, to revise the definitions of scientific words, especially that of substance, and to assume that not only were material bodies substantial, but that every form of natural force, by which an observed effect can be produced, is also a real substantial though immaterial entity. Either this view must be adopted, or else that all the forces, including life, mind, soul, and spirit, must be regarded as but the phenomena of matter under molecular vibration, and therefore, as mere motion, must, as the materialist urges, cease to exist whenever the vibrating particles come to rest.

We saw that if one single form of force, or one single sensa