religion in general, and to the Catholic faith in particular, present themselves, in fact, to the nineteenth-century mind? Suppose a man, who has enjoyed and profited by the best advantages offered by one of our great English universities: suppose that he has further received the intellectual discipline conferred by the study of the law-perhaps the best of all disciplines for accuracy of thought and appreciation of evidence; that the opportunities of his life have enabled him to observe "the manners and cities of many men;" that his mind, in maturer age, has not been so entirely engrossed by professional duties, or by public affairs-invaluable as the training ground where the student or the scholar passes from the abstract to the concrete, from images to facts, from theory to practice-as to withdraw him from historical and philosophical research: suppose, I say, such a man, after the best consideration he could give to the matter, and in spite of strong contrary prepossessions and interests, to have decided that so good a case exists for Christianity and for the Catholic form of it, as to make it a matter of conscience and duty with him to submit himself to the Church of Rome; and then imagine him meeting a friend whose voice and face, little changed by twenty years of the world's wear and tear, bring back with strange vividness memories of childhood and youth "Actæ non alio rege puertiæ Nature herself in such a case seems to suggest a quiet dinner together. It is arranged. The next evening finds Damon and Pythias (I know I ought to say Phintias, but habit is too strong) at table in a quiet corner of the Apollo Club. In half-an-hour the two friends are talking with as little restraint as they used to talk two decades ago at St. Mungo's College. I proceed to set down a fragment of their conversation. II. PYTHIAS. Well, my dear Damon, times are changed indeed since I picked you off the College railings and delivered you from danger of impalement. I wonder whether anybody now gets in that way, in the small hours of the night. I should not like to try it. "Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis." And so you have become a holy Roman. That is a change indeed. You used, I remember, to be the most thoroughgoing sceptic of the whole lot of us. DAMON. I am not disposed to say anything against that same scepticism. There is a fruitful doubt as there is a fruitful grief. I am as little inclined now as I was twenty years ago to make my judgment blind. If, after the best consideration I could give to the matter, I had thought the Catholic creed irrational, if I had discovered it to be in conflict with any truth, I could not have accepted it. To have found it teaching, as of faith, any demonstrated error, would have been, as Mr. Leslie Stephen would say, to have found it out; for that would have been fatal to its claims as the oracle of the God of Truth. PYTHIAS. 'Tis strange, 'tis passing strange: and I am curious to know we are too old friends for you to attribute to me the impertinence of an idle curiosity-I am curious to know how you got over difficulties which, as I remember, we both felt strongly twenty years ago, and which I feel as strongly still. DAMON. I will gladly tell you anything I can, and although I do not profess, like the clown in the play, to have an answer that will fit all questions, still I say, with the clown, "Spare me not." But let us know what we start from. Here, too, it is true "c'est le premier pas qui coûte." May I take it that you believe in God— in the old acceptation I mean: not as a mere anima mundi, nor as the totality of the forces of the Universe, nor as an abstraction of the mind, like Humanity with a big H, but as a Person in the most transcendent sense of the term, and as the Person who put personality into us? PYTHIAS. You remember the verse of Goethe: "Mein Liebchen, wer darf sagen, Ich glaub' an Gott? Magst Priester oder Weise fragen, It seems to me the last word on the question. DAMON. Yes, indeed. I know the lines well, too well: "So sweet a voice and vague, fatal to men." I remember that they long rang in my ears as the knell of Theism, until I rose up against their authority and fought my doubts for myself. Then I am to begin with the beginning, and to tell you how I got over the difficulties of the Theistic hypothesis? Well, perhaps I may say that I feel them now as strongly as I ever did. Only they have sunk into another place in my mind. A difficulty is one thing. A doubt is quite another. What inexplicable difficulties attend every biological theory that has ever been put forward! Yet who doubts the fact of life? Then again the difficulties of the Atheistic or the Agnostic hypothesis seem to me to be far greater than those of the Theistic: far harder to reconcile with facts. So far as I know, Butler's pregnant question has never received an affirmative answer :- -"Will any man in his senses say that it is less difficult to conceive how the world came to be, and to continue as it is, without, than with, an intelligent Author and Governor of it?" I was reading in a book of Schweizer's* only this morning, *The passage will be found in his "Die Zukunft der Religion," p. 94. It is much to be regretted that this writer, perhaps the first of living Protestant theologians-I know "It is indubitable that the human mind has from the earliest times worshipped as the higher truth the reality which is hidden behind phenomena but consciously felt in the heart, and has ascribed to it greater analogy with ideas than with the primary elements of the phenomenal world, such as matter and force." Now this unquestionable fact seems to me a very momentous fact, not in the least robbed of its significance because a certain school of scientists decline to recognize anything beyond the physical phenomena to which the methods of their science necessarily restrict them. Their assumption that their way of investigation is the sole instrument of discovering truth, seems to me obviously false. As we used to read in Plato : "Being is not perceived by sense, nor is goodness, beauty, resemblance, difference, number." And St. Augustine says: "God is nearer, more related to us, and therefore more easily known by us, than any sensible, corporeal thing." I hold that the senses are but one, and by no means the surest, of the ways of finding truth; that there are in the moral order, as in the mathematical, certain necessary truths, not known experimentally but intuitively, recognized instinctively as true by the cognitive faculty, truths which are their own sufficient vouchers and justifications; in other words that there is an à priori element in our knowledge, and that our instinctive faculties are rather to be trusted than any conclusions derived by the phenomenist, through "inductive processes" from his narrow and arbitrarily restricted range of "experienced facts." Hence it is that the argument of the Divine existence drawn from conscience, from Kant's categorical imperative of duty, comes home to me with such irresistible force that I do not hesitate to say with Julius Müller: "Conscience is the consciousness of God." Subsidiary (as I account of them) to this supreme proof there are of course others: others: the argument from design, the argument from first causes, the ontological argument urged by St. Anselm and Descartes from the necessary existence of an archetype corresponding to our idea of an infinite and immense Being, which Kant seems to me to have misapprehended and not to have refuted.* It must be owned that to many minds of which it would be impertinent to speak otherwise than with deep respect, none of these arguments, nor all of them together, bring conviction. I cannot help that. I can answer only for myself. But I suppose that what Mill says in his Autobiography about the fundamental difference between the two schools of philosophy, that of intuition, and that of association and experience, is profoundly true. · not who else among them combines such profound philosophical culture, such deep religious feeling, and such delicate critical acumen-is so little read in England. *On Kant's well-known criticism of this argument see "The Philosophy of Kant," by Edw. Caird, c. xviii.; and "An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion," by John Caird, D.D., c. 5. PYTHIAS. I suppose so. But conscience—you know that the late Professor Clifford has recorded his opinion that it is of human invention that it is "the voice of Man, ingrained in our hearts, commanding us to work for Man;" that it "springs out of the habit of judging things from the point of view of all, and not of one." DAMON. I remember the passage, and have always prized it as a curious specimen of dogmatic Materialism, enforced as it is by a sort of ex cathedrá "I say."* It seems to me, however, that this view of conscience is out of harmony with "experienced facts." Let any one consider what the monitions of his individual conscience and he certainly will not find that they are mandates "to work are, for man:" "Nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa," says the ancient poet, and he speaks more wisely than the modern professor. The voice of conscience is mainly an accusing voice. Self-disapproval, guilt, remorse-these are its most notable phenomena; it speaks of a law broken and of a Lawgiver outraged; and thus it is the creative principle of natural religion. PYTHIAS. Well, then, you know there are the Darwinian and the Spencerian theories as to the origin of conscience. And there is the spectre of Evolution, feared by the religious world. DAMON. Religion is one thing: "the religious world"-the phrase is significant-and its fears are quite another. PYTHIAS. I hope so, for the sake of religion. But you have considered the bearing of the doctrine of Evolution upon the Theistic controversy generally, and the Christian theory in particular? DAMON. Yes. "The doctrine of Evolution " is, of course, a somewhat ambiguous term. There are several doctrines of Evolution in the world. But if I may take you to mean by it the development of species in time from less complicated organisms, it seems to me to be almost proved: or, to speak more accurately, I think that a very strong presumption has been established that animals generally are modified descendants of more simple types, and that it is not improbable that every form of life on the earth may have originally sprung from some monad germ. To me, the analogy presented by the development of intellectual ideas and the formation of religious dogma is a weighty argument in favour of this doctrine of Evolution; for law reigns everywhere and is everywhere the same in its main features. But the accounts given by Messrs. Darwin and Spencer of the modus operandi are, pace these illustrious men, mere nude hypotheses. I confess that "natural selection" and "the survival of the fittest" seem to me big words covering extremely poor conceptions. *The passage referred to will be found in the late Professor Clifford's "Lectures and Essays," vol. ii. p. 238-9 :-"Such as we are-noral and rational beings— . . . . I say Man has made us," &c. PYTHIAS. Well, but as to the bearing of the doctrine of Evolution upon Theism? It DAMON. Evolution does not go beyond phenomena. Of causation, in the proper sense of the word, it tells us nothing whatever. merely removes the First Cause indefinitely farther off, and, as a very able Jewish writer has remarked, " instead of obscuring our ideas of the Divine Omnipotence, only increases a thousandfold our reverence for the Being who could endow an amorphous cell of protoplasm with such infinite potentialities." PYTHIAS. You find no difficulty, apparently, in admitting that man is, or rather very probably may be, the last term in a long series of biological expansion. But does not that make an end of his proud prerogative, as essentially different from the other animals? DAMON. By no means, as I judge. The notion of the evolution of a rational soul in a mere brute seems to me absurd. Between man in his lowest estate and any animal in its highest, there is—I use the word advisedly-an infinite difference. Somewhere in the ascending scale from Protogenes to the human race there is a chasm, and that, I think, nothing but the Divine creative act, the breathing into man a living soul, fills up. PYTHIAS. Let us go back to the question of conscience. Mr. Herbert Spencer, while admitting the existence in the human mind of certain fundamental moral intuitions, quite independent of conscious experience, accounts for them by a process of psychical or cerebral laws and developments which the nervous modifications of past generations have undergone. And the late Mr. Darwin thought it probable in a high degree that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as man's. DAMON. I have the greatest respect for all facts, and consider that we owe much, both to Mr. Darwin and to Mr. Spencer, for what they have done to collect and classify facts. But when they proceed to deductions, when they talk of what is probable, I often find myself unable to accompany them. I suppose our criteria of probability differ. Still, I do not deny that there may be an element of truth in these speculations. By the way, do you happen to know Mr. St. George Mivart's writings? PYTHIAS. I am ashamed to say I do not; ashamed, because I understand he is on all hands allowed to be one of the first of living Naturalists. I dimly recollect a controversy between him and Professor Huxley, some years ago, in which he was generally considered to have held his ground. But I forget the precise point upon which it turned. DAMON. It was a point of much importance, and certainly Mr. |