from no extremity of torture to their helpless victims -"our Poor Relations "-on, the chance of some great discovery—never -never made-which may minister to their lust of lucre or of notoriety: for that disinterested love of the human race prompts their atrocious cruelties I do not believe and I have never met with any man who did really believe it. But enough of this sickening subject; too much, indeed. Let us go back to your question. I believe that the faculty we call conscience in man is a form of the sonl itself, is innate in us, although the causes which the Associationists and Evolutionists dwell upon may have done much to develope it; and I am far from denying that something very like it may be innate, whether developed little, or not at all, in all sentient creatures. But if it could be proved that conscience is not primary but derivative, I should reverence it just as much, for it would be equally from God; His gift to man, to be the perpetual witness for Himself, the organ whereby He is known.

PYTHIAS. At all events your Theism is thorough: "Dieu se retrouve à la fin de tout."

you say to Spontaneous Generation?

And what do

DAMON. I would say, first, that I hardly see how it touches the Theistic, or the Catholic position. As a matter of fact, Catholics, generally, believed it until the other day. St. Thomas Aquinas and Suarez seem to have taken it for granted. Secondly, for myself, I ask permission not to be peremptorily called upon to believe it until it is proved, surely

CHAP. IV.] IS THE CHRISTIAN GOD CREDIBLE? 255

a modest enough request. Professor Allman told the British Association at Sheffield "No one has ever yet built up one particle of living matter out of lifeless elements"; not, of course, a conclusive argument, nor to me, a weighty argument against the theory, which I incline to hold. But shall we ever see the building up of that one particle?

see.

PYTHIAS. There is no knowing what we may

Swift tells us of certain Nuremburgers who undertook to construct a man of wood and leather that should reason as well as most country parsons. The science of the nineteenth century may actually produce that man. But let us go on. The argument from conscience, and the various other arguments, à posteriori and à priori, you hold sufficient to warrant our believing in the existence of God. But what God? I suppose we may say an Infinite and Absolutely Perfect Being; and so Omnipotent, Omniscient, All-Loving. But how does the God of Christianity correspond with this idea? Consider the accounts which your Sacred Books put forward. I do not press the manifest anthropomorphism of the ancient Hebrew narratives; I will suppose, for the present, that no one now accepts them literally as history: nec pueri credunt. Let us take it, if you like, that the first chapter of the Bible is "a sublime Psalm of creation": that the story of Eve and the apple is "the allegory of a moral fact”—as an episcopal champion of orthodoxy has expressed it-and so of the rest of those

venerable myths, of many of which, by the way, we possess what seem to be far older versions, in the legends deciphered by the late Mr. George Smith, and published in his Chaldean Account of Genesis: legends which well-nigh all Assyrian scholars consider to have been current before the Semitic tribes entered Mesopotamia. My difficulty is as to the general picture of the Divine character and government which Christianity presents. Omnipotence calling into existence the human race and the various tribes of sentient animals, while Omniscience knew the sufferings of countless ages which lay before them-how is this to be reconciled with Infinite Love? Consider human existence -the life even of the healthiest of us, what Pope called his, a "long disease," or as Schopenhauer said, "a struggle against death with the certainty of being conquered"; consider what you call-and I too, in perhaps another sense-inoral evil. It was a bishop, as I remember, who asked, "What does civil history acquaint us with, but the incorrigible rogueries of mankind, or ecclesiastical history more than their follies?" Consider

"What is the course of the life

Of mortal men on the earth?
Most men eddy about

Here and there-eat and drink,
Chatter, and love, and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing, and then they die-

CHAP. IV.]

THE MYSTERY OF SUFFERING.

257

Perish

and no one asks

Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves,

In the moonlit solitudes mild

Of the midmost Ocean, have swelled,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.

And what shall we say of the sufferings of the lower
animals; of their cruelty to one another, of man's
cruelty to them. Without going your lengths
about vivisection, I am quite at one with Schopen-
hauer when he denies our right to practise it,
especially on the higher vertebrates. I frankly
own it makes me ill to think of the performances
of a man like M. Paul Bert. Consider all this, and
tell me,
if you can, how it is reconcilable with the
conception of a Creator of whom you say that He
is God, because He is the highest Good. I agree
with Coupeau in L'Assommoir: "S'il y a un Dieu,
il arrange drôlement les choses." I frankly confess
that I think the Buddhist synthesis a far better
one than the Christian. That a perfect Creator
can have made so imperfect a world is surely, to
use Pontifical language, a deliramentum.

DAMON. I suppose it is this great mystery which more than anything else at the present day drives men into the falsehood of extremes: into Positivism on the one hand, which is the negation of evil; into Pessimism on the other, which is the negation of good. I do not wonder at it. What question is there which presses upon any one, who really tries to face it, with such overwhelming severity as the

S

question of the Moral Government of the world? Yes, as Descartes said, "God must transcend in excellence my highest idea of excellence." The perfection of the moral law-those unwritten and unchanging and eternal laws of the noblest passage in Greek tragedy- which is to me a self-evident, axiomatic, intuitive truth, witnesses for the perfection of the Divine Lawgiver. "Bonum nullo indigens bono," in St. Augustine's phrase, is the very sum of our conception of God. How reconcile with that absolute goodness the suffering of a moment's pain by any living creature? How reconcile with it the existence of the "purblind race of miserable men"? I can no more reconcile it than you. It is one of the overwhelming, heartpiercing mysteries that encompass human life. One out of many. Our ignorance here is the measure of our knowledge of all the profounder problems of existence. "Thy judgments are like the great deep."

Però nella giustizia sempiterna

La vista che riceve il vostro mondo,
Com' occhio per lo mare, entro s'interna;
Che, benchè dalla proda veggia il fondo,
In pelago nol vede, e nondimeno

Egli è, ma cela lui l'esser profondo.

Let us accept any "beam in darkness" which penetrates to us. And is not the Christian explanation, upon the face of it, more reasonable than any other? "Sin entered into the world, and death by sin," sin being, as St. Augustine tells us,