Agnostic asserts much more concerning the hidden Power of the universe than its inscrutability. To call it inscrutable is a merely relative assertion-this can only mean inscrutable by our understanding; but they also recognize it as a Power, and assert its self-existence and eternity-words which, so far as they go, describe what it is, not only in relation to our understanding, but in itself, and indeed nearly amount to a description of what, in the theology of the eighteenth century, used to be called the physical attributes of Deity. Such Agnosticism is not blank Atheism, but the first step out of Atheism; it may more properly be called naturalistic Pantheism. These, then, are the admissions of Agnosticism; that such a Power exists, and that man has faculties by which he can recognize, and is constrained to recognize, its existence. These are positive admissions, or rather positive assertions. It is true that from the religious point of view they do not in themselves amount to much; they can scarcely be called religious doctrines at all; but they constitute a foundation on which the entire system of religious doctrine may be built. But when we seek to build on this foundation, and to add to these the doctrines of Divine will, knowledge, and holiness, with the possibilities of Revelation and of Incarnation, the Agnostics meet us with the assertion that all these are beyond the limits of our possible knowledge; that even if true, we could not know them to be true. Why not? If we can recognize the Divine Power (as the Agnosticism of Herbert Spencer expressly asserts that we can and must, though he does not call it Divine), where is the impossibility of our recognizing the Divine intelligence and holiness? Even if it is certain that these are made known neither in visible nature nor in consciousness, where is the impossibility that God may make them known by revelation? On his own principles, one who asserts nothing about the invisible Power of the universe except that it is inscrutable, ought to pronounce no dogma on the subject. Dogmatic belief may possibly be reasonable-whether it is so depends on the reasons to be produced for it; but dogmatic unbelief cannot possibly be reasonable, because, by its own admission, it is not founded on evidence, but on the absence of evidence. If it is urged that negative evidence when complete becomes positive, and that the evidence of the absence for any revelation of God is equivalent to evidence of the absence of such revelation—we deny this; we maintain, on the contrary, that even if it could be proved as true-what we believe to be the opposite of the truth-that God had never revealed Himself in the past history of mankind, this would not exclude the possibility that all past history may have been leading up to a revelation yet to be made. Agnosticism, which is the formulized confession of the limits of our knowledge, cannot, consistently with its own principles, say anything against this as a possibility. Perhaps the reply to this will be, that there is in our own nature an impossibility of receiving a revelation of God; that our knowledge is exclusively knowledge of sensible things and the relations subsisting among them, and that we have no faculty whereby to receive any communication of knowledge of things belonging to a supersensible order. X We think we have replied to this already; and we may reply further, that our moral knowledge-our sense of dutyis knowledge transcending sensible things and the relations subsisting among them. But if it is said-and the Agnostic argument against all revelation must go this far if it is to be valid, not only against the fact of revelation, but against its possibility that no imaginable evidence, consisting of miracle and prophecy, could suffice to attest the fact of a revelation being made, because such evidence is addressed to the senses -miracle to sight and prophecy to hearing-while the revelation to be attested belongs to a supersensible order, we reply that, as a matter of fact, we can and do reason truly from data of sensible perception to conclusions in the spiritual order. We reason from action, speech, and expression in our fellow-men, which are data of perception, to their thoughts, motives, and characters, which belong to a different order of being; we have indeed no means of knowing the existence of minds in our fellow-men, except from such indications; and it is equally legitimate to reason from the actions of God, either in the ordinary course of nature or in prophecy, miracle, and revelation, to His purposes and His character. Further; though Agnostics know it not, the view which their philosophy gives of the relation of the Unknown Power of the universe to the mind of man makes such a revelation appear possible, and perhaps probable. We quote again from Dr. Matheson, who, after speaking of man's discovery of the limits of his own powers, goes on to say The recognition of a barred gate in the world of intellect is itself a recognition of the fact that we are too large for our environment. The very ability to perceive our imprisonment is a proof that imprisonment is not the natural state of our being; in other words, that there is something within us which already transcends the present limits of our nature. How do we know that there is a Power in the universe which is inscrutable to us? We can only know that fact by being ourselves, to some extent, and in some place of our being, sharers in the same force which constitutes the life of that Power. If man had wanted the sense of sight, he would not only have been ignorant of its existence, but he would have been ignorant of his own ignorance. To feel that the primal force of the universe is inscrutable is to be conscious of our own ignorance; that is to say, it is to be one step removed from absolute ignorance; it is to know something of God. To know something of God is to have something of God in us. The life which perceives its human limitation has already in some sense surmounted its limits; and it can only have surmounted its limits by having received into some phase of its being a portion of that illimitable force whose presence has created within it a vision of the illimitable (pp. 356, 357). We are here reminded of the lines For surely there is hope to find, Wherever there is power to seek ; Dr. Matheson says further on: Agnosticism, alien as it professes to be to the spirit of religion, is yet rooted and grounded in the same principle which has ever given birth to the spirit of religion-the sense of mystery, the vision of the inscrutable in nature' (p. 359). And elsewhere: Is there any fact regarding the transcendental Power in nature which has come to the knowledge of man? It must be answered that there is the fact that that Power is transcendental. To know that God transcends experience is to know something about Him' (p. 96). On the question of the probability of God making Himself known to man, Dr. Matheson says, contrasting these views with the mechanical view of creation that prevailed during the eighteenth century The empiricist of the last century sought communion with nature by excluding the idea of God. He did not indeed deny the existence of a transcendental Power, but. .. he saw no power within nature; nature was to him mechanical, not dynamical; it could only be influenced from without. That at certain periods of the far past it had been influenced from without, he felt bound to admit; the varieties of created species and the evidence of constructive design impelled him to the belief that there had been certain special occasions in which the transcendental Power of the universe had stooped from His transcendence to put forth a supernatural energy in the actual history of the world. But when once the empiricist had accounted for the variety of species, and explained by original Divine act the appearances of design in nature, he did not trouble himself further to trace the subsequent movements of that creative power. He thought of the Creator as one whose word was done. He looked upon the laws of nature as the forms of existence that separated the being of man from the being of God. It never occurred to him that these laws of nature might themselves be that which bridged the gulf between the human and the Divine (pp. 331. 332). This view of creation was ridiculed by Goethe in the wellknown couplet Was wär ein Gott der nur von aussen stiesse, Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse ? which may be translated somewhat freely, but without injustice to any sentiment of reverence that it contains What were a God that only from without Should drive and twirl the universe about? We by no means share the contempt for this mechanical view of creation which passed from Goethe to Humboldt, and has become a characteristic of the thought of the present time. To call God the Architect of the Universe, or the Great Artificer, is in our view not false, but an imperfect symbol of the truth. All symbolism is necessarily imperfect, and especially all attempts to symbolize the infinite and eternal by the finite and the temporal. And to represent the Divine as the life and soul of the universe, as is done in the now prevalent philosophy, is only a different symbol, equally true and equally imperfect. The former is Deism, the latter is Pantheism. A complete philosophy of creation, were it attainable, would no doubt unite these two symbolic conceptions and transcend them both. But what we have to remark now is, that in whatever respect the Pantheism of such writers as Herbert Spencer may represent the Divine less adequately than did the older Deism, at least, it brings God nearer to us. The hidden Power of the universe is not conceived in Spencer's philosophy as indefinitely far off, but as ever present and infinitely near A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought. This remarkable change in our views of nature is probably in part due to the prominence now given to molecular and chemical science, and the theory of such forces as electricity, which fix our thoughts more on the active properties of things than formerly, and less on such passive properties as impenetrability and inertia ; and partly to the general, though perhaps half-conscious, reception of the metaphysics of Berkeley, * Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey.' which do not teach the unreality of the material world, as they have been misrepresented, but the truth that the material world can only be interpreted in terms of mind. To quote again from Dr. Matheson In this new science. there is an incomprehensible force at the basis of all things. But, incomprehensible as it is, it is not uncomprehending. Incapable of being grasped by the human, it enfolds itself, the human, and all other things. It transcends physical nature, yet it dwells in that which it transcends-nay, is itself the cause of that which it transcends And this transcendental force is not only present in nature, it is omnipresent (pp. 334, 335). The change from the philosophy of the eighteenth century to that of the nineteenth is in this respect like the change from the Old Testament to the New. Though there are exceptions, the prevalent idea of God in the Old Testament is that He dwells at a distance in heaven, surrounded by clouds; and though He sees and hears all that is done on earth, yet He condescends to visit the children of men occasionally. A great part of the Book of Job is filled with a wail of agony at the inaccessibleness of God. In the New Testament all this is changed; as we read it we feel that Christ has indeed brought us to the Father, and that the Holy Spirit is come into the world. Such a religion harmonizes with a physical philosophy which teaches that the Power in which we live and move and have our being, and in which all things consist, is infinitely near to us; and such a philosophy forms an intellectual preparation for the religion of the spirit. The universe must have either existed from a past eternity or had a beginning in time. As Kant remarked, neither of these alternatives is conceivable, yet one must be true. We see no metaphysical or theological difficulty in the supposition of its past eternity; and, were this proved or probable, it would not make mere blank atheism the less absurd. For, as Dr. Matheson remarks (p. 38), it is easy to conceive the universe set going and then going on through a future eternity in virtue of the original impulse, but impossible to conceive that it has gone on through a past eternity, with no principle of causation at work except the continuance of the impulse which was never initially given. If there was a beginning in time, an Almighty Creator is needed as the author of the universe; but if there was no such beginning, an Almighty Sustainer is equally needed. Dr. Matheson remarks— We see a ray of light emanating from the sun, and we say that the ray of light owes its being to the sun. If it were proved that there neve |