unprejudiced by the subject-matter in hand. The miraculous and supernatural elements cannot be passed by as impossible in any conception which posits God in law and understands by law a universal and intelligent mode of action; and if some one says he cannot do this the answer is, He is not compelled to do so, for it is not a matter of compulsion, but of rationality. And further, the facts which cause mind to posit God in law and interpret law as a mode of God's action are of the same order with the facts which cause mind to posit gravitation in matter and to interpret it as a method or mode of matter's action.

Miracles cannot be ordered out, either by notions of possibility, experience, or expediency. To assert that nature has no room for miracles is to assert for some men what no man hasan adequate knowledge of all her laws. To insist that miracles are contrary to experience is to assume that one man's experience is identical with every man's experience. To aver that miracles are not needed is to claim magnificently egotistic wisdom as to the government of this universe. Miracles maintain a formally rational basis, thus: law is a method of divine action; Christ is an historic being; his character is inconsistent with self-deception or knavery; contemporaries witnessed his life; their character and the purity of their recorded testimony are similarly inconsistent with self-deception or knavery. At the present hour there is, after all, only one question worth considering the ability of Christ's disciples to see aright and report correctly the subjectmatter of their testimony. In determining this question the surreptitious introduction of the impossibility or indemonstrability of supernatural manifestations is the poorest kind of beggary. The records may answer as to the disciples' ability. The records present the facts, whatever these may be. The facts in the records show that these men protray a character utterly beyond them, in spite of their ignorance, their Jewish prejudices, and a natural bent to magnify or distort, and that they have made statements which the laws of human nature declare beyond the power of creative imagination, yet containing the germs of a philosophy of being as foreign to their natural capacities and the age in which they lived as Darwin's theory of origins or Kant's categories are beyond the people of darkest Africa. Nor does it solve the problem to transfer the authorship to later years. These propositions are true even of a deferred author61-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. XI.

ship. The four gospels are naked of the signs of fancy, unless anything supernatural is fanciful; and that is the old beggar. Arnold's dictum, that Christ was so far above his disciples that they could not have correctly reported him, is answered by the fact that they (or some others?) did report him as they did, in such a way that, if their report was not correct, we have the problem of explaining how he was reported at all.

Here is a greater problem than miracles. Miracles fit into a system of thought at least formally rational; while Arnold's supposition can be made to fit nothing, but is a tremendous strain on what we know of human nature. Is the record of Christ one in which healthy, honest men, by no known law of human nature, blunder into an accidental portrait, with statements, events, and truths severely sober and absolutely beyond their power to create intentionally or unaided? Is it all a blunder? And in answering the question must we forever insist that the writers were either not healthy or not honest? Other honest men have been deceived. But error does not disprove truth; it clears away the evidences. And it is not a question of error in general, but of this particular error. Never before was such a blunder. The record is unique in the total absence of those badges of legend, imaginative growth, religious accretion, and oriental or human propensity which accompany error, unless, again, the supernatural is, ipso facto, such a badge-the old beg gar once more. The fact that the gospel writers transcend themselves brings it out clearly that they have reported truth or blundered into the sublimest ideas and the most matchless picture. How they could thus blunder into what has caused an intellectual war of nearly twenty centuries, and into a system which enshrines the greatest force of earth's life, is a question so astonishing and so straining to the laws of life and good thinking that the questions of miracles and God manifest become merest child's play beside it. There is now but one problem for sages-to harmonize this astounding phenomenon with sober reason and accredited human nature. It seems easier to accept the record than to accomplish this unique task.

Beyond these lines rises the massing power of Christian evidences. No system of thought can be fairly judged by a study of isolated details. The study of an insect has small relation to physical life as a whole. If an extended view is essential to

a true grasp of nature, equally essential must be an effort to view religious truths in their entirety. The study of isolated details misses the effect of the whole upon the parts. To know the part it is necessary to allow for the influence of the whole. In moral things it is truer that the whole creates the parts than that the parts constitute the whole. It is impossible to convey a true impression of the whole by any isolated dealing with its components. If the one fact investigated remain a seeming contradiction, if its evidences, detached from those of its companions in the vast array of moral facts, seem inconclusive, it is apt to be denied as a fact, and this denial affects every other fact in turn. And yet the massing power of the whole may be the one thing necessary to the conclusiveness of the evidences under consideration. German rationalism multiplies instances. Christianity stands not by one fact, or by several facts considered separately, but by many, collective and relative. The nature of Christ does not rest upon miracles alone nor upon what he said of himself alone. A rational view of Christ is a complex result of mutually supporting and supported evidences. So of each great truth. It is true the study of details prepares for the study of the whole, but the massing force of the whole system is a factor returning upon the details, the value and validity of which are legitimately to be insisted upon. For, after all, only in those moods when the stress of thought over details is stilled in large outlooks, which forget the details in the immensities, does Christianity find its opportunity. Here appear the experimental evidences. In these moods Christian faith, as distinguished from belief, is born, and becomes the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." But the foundations are facts, and deductions therefrom come along by the same formal processes of reasoning that precede rational conviction anywhere.

Frank C. Haddock.

ART. VIII. THE MECHANICAL CONCEPTION OF THE WORLD.

AMID the many conflicting theories as to the origin of the universe and its wonderful phenomena, the mechanical conception has been more largely adopted, by those who have rejected the teachings of a biblical theism, than any other recent antiChristian explanation. To solve the problems which gather around the far-reaching realms of matter and mind and to lessen the burden of mystery which those problems contain, the endeavors of the ablest investigators have been directed from age to age. Without exaggeration, it may be affirmed that, after half a century of discussion, the best that the mechanical theory has to offer as an explanation of the universe has already been presented in the teachings of its ablest representatives. The demands which that theory makes upon the common intelligence of the race and upon the best instincts and convictions of our mental and moral constitution surpass in magnitude and difficulty all the miraculous interventions recorded in the biblical revelation, and involve us in contradictions and fallacies which cannot fail to force all healthy reasoning into a fierce and permanent rebellion.

The facts which confront us and demand an explanation are of the most wonderful character, and in extent are almost beyond calculation. The organic world around us and the farstretching universe, with all their forces, laws, and marks of intelligent design; the human mind, with its rational faculties and moral powers, and the special work to which, by some agency, they have been assigned; the unity of the physical world; the presence and reign of law in all the realms to which human knowledge extends; the correspondences between the instincts of the brute and the outer world from which it draws its sustenance; the moral order of the world; the consciousness of the race, its religious beliefs in spiritual and invisible realities, and the vast influence of these convictions in every past age; the intellectual and moral achievements of mankind; the splendid array of characters distinguished for their lofty qualities, in spite of the most unpropitious surroundings; the presence of Christ in the world, his matchless personality, his

unmeasured influence upon all subsequent generations, and the grasp of his teachings upon the world of to-day-here are facts which call for explanation. And it must be an explanation that will satisfy the demands of our rational faculties, nor leave us in the bewildering mists of an Atlantic fog, crying out for a solution that will place our hopes upon the rock of everlasting stability.

Whence, then, came all the venerable and wonderful machinery of the universe by which we are surrounded and of which our world forms a part? No wonder that, as Emerson looked upon the immense and infinite handiwork, he exclaimed, in the language of one thrilled with the grandeur of such a spectacle, "I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of all this magnificence, old with the lore and homage of innumerable ages." How came life upon our globe, with all its variety of manifestation? By what process came force and all the law and order which distinguish the physical and mental worlds, the freedom of choice which constitutes the true basis of moral responsibility and makes human conduct a vital element in the welfare of the race? Whence came our personal consciousness, and all the beliefs which have asserted their imperial power in the history of mankind and have proved themselves the sources of the mightiest impulses and organizations in the past and in this most progressive age? It is a noticeable fact that, as the universe is opened up yet more and more, its structure becomes invested with a grander meaning. W. S. Lilly, in the Fortnightly Review for July, 1887, has said that the progress of science multiplies the evidences of design in a most wonderful way. Dr. Dallinger, in his Fernley lecture for 1887, has also said:

Design, purpose, intention appear, when all the facts of the universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to be ineradicable. ... All the universe, its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of design, and the will and purpose running through it are incapable of being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties.

But, in responding to the demand for some adequate explanation of the facts already enumerated, what has materialism to offer? Does its solution of the vast order of things around us commend itself as sufficient to account for the results indicated? And, as a working hypothesis, is it adapted for general appli