the meaning of the word which has been so dear to mankind, from signifying duty to an invisible Being to duty to an abstraction,-that very effort betrays the inherent hopelessness of the system. Even Comte knew that the religious element in man is no more likely to die out than the social or the æsthetic. Human beings are no more likely to be born on earth without the religious sentiment than without conjugal or parental affections. He has thought to give that great sentiment the change, by calling it "Religion," to honour the abstract idea of Humanity, instead of the concrete idea of a Living God. The doll may serve his turn for a while, but men cannot long endure it. They will ask for something real to worship or cease to worship altogether, and of that we have no fears.

The real fear, in our opinion, lies in another direction. The centre of the battle-field will be, not the existence of a God, but His Moral Nature. "Has the Supreme Orderer of the world any moral attributes at all? Is He benevolent?" Those who find no satisfactory answers to these latter questions may not become nominal Atheists, but they will necessarily fall into a state which, as far as love, hope and reverence are concerned, is absolute Atheism.

We conceive that the case has been nowhere better stated on the adverse side to that which we would maintain, than in an able and very remarkable article in the Pall Mall Gazette of Nov. 13, 1867. After dismissing the Atheistic result, not so much as erroneous as unsatisfactory to whomsoever is more than a 'looker-on" upon life, the writer

adds:

"Those who form their idea of the Divine Attributes from facts can say at once, The facts which I see lead me to the belief that the Author of this system is very far indeed from being universally and unconditionally benevolent. The system which He has created is a system, and not a chaos. It contains in all directions proof of its unity, and of a kind and degree of skill and power on the part of its Author which simply baffle human thought and language; but it contains many contrivances for inflicting pain, and, although it opens a prospect of great happiness to some men, and affords a considerable chance of happiness to nearly all men, it does so only upon stringent conditions. is a world in which goodness is, on the whole, an immense advantage, and wickedness, on the whole, very much the reverse.

It

Its laws are undoubtedly favourable to virtue, and lead to the punishment of vice; but though virtue and vice operate on the happiness of men, they do not constitute it. A very large portion of human happiness is dependent upon what as a name for our ignorance we call chance, but still there is, on the whole, a great deal more happiness than misery in life, as appears from the value which people set upon it, and especially from the unspeakably touching resignation, fortitude and cheerfulness with which the most cruel sufferings are continually borne. If you wish to form a rational theory of the moral attributes of God, all you can say is that He is a Being who caused the state of things thus described."

Here is precisely logical Deism, using that word in distinction to Theism, and, as Parker defined it, " starting from the sensational philosophy, and deriving its idea of God solely by induction from the phenomena of material nature or of human history, leaving out of sight the intuition of human nature, and so getting its idea of God solely from observation and not at all from consciousness, and thus representing God as finite and imperfect."* Viewing the world as a system of purely material phenomena, it is true that the evidence is against its Creator being "purely and unconditionally benevolent"-if we mean by benevolence simply the desire to promote the happiness, (bienêtre eudaimonia (of His creatures. But viewing the world, on the other hand, first from the moral standpoint, a very different conclusion is attained. He who made us to feel the sanctity of Justice, shall He be unjust? He who made us to feel love and kindness, shall He be other than a God of Love? Nay, more: He who made us to hate, to loathe, to despise even absolute Power if wielded with cruelty and malignity, shall there be aught in His government of the world which in the remotest degree can bear those characters He has compelled us to contemn? The idea is absurd; and no apparent contradictions in the outward world, no apparent proof that God is unjust and cruel, can do more than meet our moral faith breast to breast. It is at the very strongest statement of the case nothing more than an equal contradiction. The internal world shews it to be absurd to suppose God is cruel. The external world might shew it to be absurd to suppose Him other

• Theism, Atheism, &c. p. 104.

wise, were every arrangement in it visibly intended to be productive of suffering. But on which of these two orders of evidence ought we rightly to place the greatest reliance? Which ought we primarily to consult, and afterwards, as best we may, reconcile the other with it? Assuredly it is the internal evidence which possesses the first claim, even historically.

Those who seek the evidences for the Divine Character primarily in the visible creation, approach the subject from the wrong end, and the difficulties which Nature presents come to them with false emphasis. Were their method in accordance with the actual genesis of human religion, had it been at first really derived from observations and speculations on the order of the external world rather than inward instinct, it would be, not the earliest and strongest of human feelings which have left their traces in the literature, the edifices and the institutions of all nations, but rather the last word of speculative philosophy, the hypothesis suggested to an Aristotle, a Pliny, a Descartes or a Newton, to account for the cosmos which his researches had brought to light. On such an "hypothesis of a God," originated by the scientific intellect in search of a last generalization of causation, some feelings of awe, and then perhaps of gratitude and reverence, by degrees might cluster (albeit how the moral sentiments would deal with such a new idea, it is not easy to see). The sense of allegiance towards Him, which we hold to be the very heart of religion, could hardly arise under any circumstances. But in any case there would be complete reversal of that process to which history hitherto bears unbroken witness, namely, that inen feel first and think later about religion. The "hypothesis of a God" is erected by the intellect out of the ruins of the earliest temple of pure instinctive feeling. No nation has ever yet waited for its philosophers to ordain its priests.

Thus, if we could admit the utmost position of the sceptic (which we presume few would be found to maintain), that the conclusion forced on us by the study of the external world is, that its Creator is malevolent, we should still maintain that we had a prior reason, a more authoritative argument, for believing He cannot be so in spite of all phenomena. But, in truth, this is obviously conceding far too much. The world is full of suffering, yet the conclusion

that the Creator is not benevolent cannot be drawn from those sufferings, till two important questions be first decided. 1st. Is the avoidance of suffering, the production of happiness, the only or the highest possible proof of the benevolence of a God towards His moral creatures? 2nd. Is the suffering of the world so predominant over the good to be found therein, as to warrant the induction that its Author is wholly bad; and if it be not so, is there any middle term for His character rationally acceptable? Can He be a little cruel, but, on the whole, rather good than bad, or vice versa ?

Now, for the first question, it seems to us that the continual assumption of such writers as the one whose arguments we are discussing, that Happiness is "our end and aim," is exceedingly gross. That the Infinitely Holy Father of Spirits has nothing better to do for His children than to make them perfectly comfortable in this world, and (we presume) still more comfortable by and by, is what we can by no means believe. We are even persuaded to the contrary, that God did not build these world-mansions and people them with rational beings for any such purpose, but for one far more worthy of Him, and, if we may say it, even of us. We believe God has made our world and us, that we may attain to the highest end, not of hogs, but of men, or archangels, namely, Virtue, the finite moral nature at its climax of excellence, the eternal union of the obedient creature with the Holy Creator. Such Virtue, we can understand vaguely, must in the nature of things be worked out through trial, and in some region of space, some condition of existence, wherein sin and suffering are possible. We cannot, indeed, apply this vast generalization to the details of human life, or see how this sin or that suffering can anywise aid the end of mortal trial. There are dark shadows here which try the faith of the strongest of us. Still less can we guess why the harmless brutes should endure their wrongs and agonies. But we hold to our position, that Happiness cannot be the only or even chief test of Divine benevolence, and that to adduce evidence of much suffering is not to conclude the argument, but only to open up one of its sides.

Again, for the second question, which must be decided before the argument can be held complete: Is the suffering

of the world so great, that its Author can be predicated to be wholly bad? or, if not so, may we logically predicate of Him a mixed character, half good, half bad? We presume no one has ever looked on the world even with the most tearworn eyes, and believed its Great Maker altogether evil. Good and beauty, the pleasures of the senses and the affections, predominate in too enormous proportion for such conclusion. What then? May we fall back on the idea that God may be like man, a Being "darkly wise and rudely great," loving a little and hating a little, having favourite men and animals, and disfavoured creatures also; sometimes full of tenderness, and, anon, ferocious and malign? The idea is surely too absurd to be entertained for a moment, since the word "God" has come to mean, not a Jupiter or Seeva, but the Infinite Spirit of this boundless universe. Nor can the doubter say, "Perchance God has no moral character at all. We know Him as the Mind who has designed the world, and know not if He either sees or heeds moral distinctions as we feel them. The 'Limits of Religious Thought' forbid us to decide either way." But in truth evil is quite as much a flaw in the intellectual as in the moral system. Put away the idea that we have any more interest in believing God to be beneficent, than Newton had in believing gravity to be the true law of nature. Let it be an interest purely scientific we take in the question. Still we are no less at fault. How is it that God,Nature, the Plastic Power, whatever we call Him or It,— has made ninety-nine things for the enjoyment of man and beast, and the hundredth thing for misery? Why is the general scheme of one sort, the exceptions pointing another way, and yet fitting so thoroughly into the text that nobody can deem them interpolations, or, as Plutarch described them, as “erasures in the well-written manuscript"? Why are ten thousand birds and beasts beautiful, and half-adozen grotesque and hideous?

There is no advantage in shifting the ground, then, from the moral to the intellectual aspect of evil. A God who acts ninety-nine times to produce pleasure and beauty, and once to produce pain and ugliness, is not at all easier to understand as an Intelligent than as a Moral Being. How human morality should exist at all, were the Creator of man immoral or indifferent, is another problem on which we