MAN'S KNOWLEDGE OF GOD.*
FOR a thoroughly elementary book on the great question of Theism, it would be hard to imagine one better fitted to drive home the simplest and deepest of the reasons for believing in God than Mr. Armstrong has here provided for us. There are passages in it to which we should take exception, and there are difficulties, even more serious than any dealt with in the sixth and seventh chapters, which are not even mentioned ; for example, the difficulty involved in the inevitable, as contrasted with the not inevitable, evil of the world, the difficulty involved in the existence in a divinely created world of anguish, and evil, and degradation, which are in no sense the consequences of voluntary transgression in those who suffer from them, even if they are not,—as they often are,—independent of sin alto- gether, whether long passed or recent. On these difficulties Mr. Armstrong does not dwell, and probably his Unitarian theology would make them difficulties even more insoluble to him than they would be to thinkers who have more belief in the mysteries of Revelation than he has. But so far as it goes, the book is one of great power as well as great simplicity, full of vividness and force. Here, for instance, is a very striking passage, intended to illustrate the natural connection which refers perceived change to the will of some being capable of purpose :- " Nor is it possible to the human mind to conceive of any motion' of outward things otherwise than as caused in the last resort by some- living will. It does not, indeed, always appear that that will is the immediate cause of the motion that we see ; sometimes there are- several links between. For instance, you see a machine taking in sheets of paper at one end, and turning them out at the other out and folded and pasted into neat tradesmen's bags. If you showed that to a Hottentot or a Fiji-islander, he would most certainly think that the living will was in the machine itself, with its great jerking iron limbs. You know better ; but you are compelled just as much as the savage himself to take for granted a living will at the beginning of it all ; and you think of the man who made the machine or the one who set it going. And so when letters come to you through the post,. when your dinner is served up to you, when the strains of the street- organ penetrate to the room where you are trying to write, when the cricket-ball comes flying over the high fence on to the road where• you are passing, when the arrow whizzes through the air, when in the- dead darkness of the night the shrill shriek of the express makes you start from your slumber, your mind inevitably associates these things one and all with the unseen human wills which have wrought them and without which they never could have been. But after all, the vast majority of the movements in the midst of which we live and move and have our being can be referred to no human wills whatever. As I sit writing, I hear the tramp of little feet on the pavement below, a little bird flits across my window, the trees in my neighbour's garden are moving their heads gently to and fro, the light clouds sail across the bright spring sky, and all is glorified by the light that comes streaming down from the great sun to flood the whole. Of all these. movements I can refer the tramp of the little feet only to human. wills. The little bird, I think, has a will of its own—a dim, circum- scribed will perhaps, but still something akin to what I call will in me. But the swaying trees and the clouds and the wonderful light dashing across the vast void at a speed quite unthinkable,—no, neither bird's nor man's is the will by which these motions are. And. indeed, if in the light of modern science, we look out upon the great. cosmos in which we live, imagination is quickly overwhelmed by the.
• Modern Handbooks of Reigion.—Man's Knowledge of God. By Richard Acland Armstrong, B.A. London: Simptin, Marshall. and 0o.
marvel and the multitude of all the perpetual movements round about us. We talk of the immovable rooks. But all the rocks that gird the ocean, together with this solid earth on which we stand, spring forward nineteen miles each second upon their ordered path around the sun. Few of us realise the infinite variety of movement all around us. Suppose it is a still and sultry day. Not a breath of air is stirring, so you say. The very cattle lie weary in the shade, and the leaves of the trees hang down unswayed, and the only sound is the lazy murmur of the slothful brook. You say that nature is asleep and all energy is hushed. But if you had eyes that could penetrate through stem and stone, and ears that could hear what stir there is in the things on which you gaze, how wonderful would be the revelation to you of the energies that are awake and forceful all about you! See the trees that hang their listless leaves : why, the sap is rushing up within the bark, a perpetual stream of strength and life, pouring its juices into every fibre, emptying a million vesicles into every silent leaf, while in every cell the fluid leaps and dances madly to and fro, filling the region all around with life. Every blade of grass beneath your feet is thrilling with the currents that speed along its mazes. The green field bears multitudinous life, and under the soil burrow myriads of busy worms. Still ! why, the very light that dazzles your weary eyes is burled in dashing billows from the sun nearly two hundred thousand miles a second, and this busy earth is sorting these waves as fast as they come clashing down upon its face, absorbing these and casting those back, green and grey and brown, into the dancing air. And as for that great sun that looks one still ball of liquid light, out of the great whirlpools of blazing metal leap the terrific fires all around its giant globe, and one tongue of those titan flames would lick up this little earth as a snake licks up a fly. Then, as for sounds, could you hear the movements of the atoms all round about you, it would be as the din of a multitude rushing to battle. Within every fragment of stone or bit of clay that you hold in your hand or spurn with your foot, there ii probably an incessant vibration of molecules so minute that no microscope can detect them and so rapid that imagination cannot picture it. The gas in the air which we breathe is made up of molecules—estimated by some at 19,000,000,000,000,000,000 in one cubic centimetre—which are incessantly dashing to and fro in all possible directions at something like twenty miles a minute. On the nail of your little finger there are many millions of blows dealt every second by these flying particles. Now, if for a moment we even partially realise this extraordinary activity in every place and time, is it possible for us to help supposing some sleepless will-power behind it all ? Does not the very constitu- tion of our minds compel us to attribute it all to some living force working its mighty energy through all the structure of the worlds ?"
Of course, the sceptic would reply by traversing Mr. Arm•- strong's assertion that because we are compelled by our Intel• lectual constitution to gather up the mighty forces of Nature under one name, "the only possible name is Will." He would say that we have even more experience of change brought about by instinct (like hunger) than of change brought about by will, even more experience of change brought about by sensibility (as of shrinking or stimulated nerves) than of change brought about by will, even more experience of change brought about by involuntary emotions of other kinds than of change brought
about by will. Of course, Mr. Armstrong's answer would be:— ` Yes; but in all these cases we feel ourselves passive, not active, and whenever we are passive and not active, we refer what we are incited to do, what we do involuntarily, to some cause beyond ourselves. But in the only case in which we are really active and not passive,—the case of will,—we are content with that as an ultimate and sufficient cause, and do not seek to
push behind it to anything which caused that cause.' Imagine the universe, what Benan in his dialogues suggests, a mighty polyp, stirred by forces which it does not understand, and we ask how it became what it is, how it got there. But imagine it the creation of a spiritual will, and we are satisfied without further asking how the spiritual will got there. We rest in the higher solution ; we cannot rest in the lower. Mr. Armstrong's chapter on " The Witness of Conscience " is the most adequate in the book, though we do not know that it is at all abler in execution than that on " The Witness of the Understanding ;" and the chapter on " The Witness of the Spirit " is also one of power and eloquence.
The chapter on "The Witness through Prayer" does not appear to us of equal merit. In the following passage, Mr.
Armstrong seems both to exaggerate the "reign of law" in a way that would make free will a chimera, and true sin im- possible,—and this we are sure is far from his real drift,—and also to separate between the spiritual and physical in a way
almost fatal to the ultimate principle of his book, as well as inconsistent with the facts of human life:— "When, however, the objection is raised to Prayer that it is incom- patible with that vast fact known as ' the Reign of Law,' it becomes necessary to consider the objection very gravely. Our belief in the Reign of Law is the grandest and most momentous of all the beliefs which modern science has established. It is the recognition of the sublime fact that order prevails throughout the universe. When I say that I believe in the Reign of Law, or in the universality of the Laws of Nature, I mean that I believe that the forces which act through the earth and the starry heavens always act in the like manner, and that under the like set of conditions the like results will always follow. This is only another way of saying that God's modes of action do not shift and change ; that his methods of work are so perfect as never to need altering. That being so, it would certainly be folly to expect that he would alter them in particular cases because we entreat him to do so. If that were indeed the case, awful would be the responsibility of any man who offered up any each entreaties. He would be setting his wisdom against God's, seeking to break the order that springs forth from the divine Will. The sunshine and the rain, however, and all purely physical pheno- mena depend, under the Reign of Law, on purely physical conditions. And Prayer, which is a spiritual act, will not affect those physical conditions. And therefore all the prayers of all the world cannot make one drop of rain fall in all the year, or one ray of sunshine break tbrongh the clouds in all the centuries, beyond such as the physical conditions would bring about in natural course. And if the farmer sees signs of a soaking summer or of an approaching drought, his course is not to ask God to avert it, but to make the best provision he can against it. And so with all phenomena that are altogether physical : they are not to be prayed for or prayed against ; such prayers are wasted forces issuing always either from sheer ignorance or from the moat overweening presumption. They may well be par- doned in a child or in the uncultured savage. In the ritual of a Christian Church they approach very near to blasphemy. But the world in which we live is not physical alone, but spiritual also. And the spiritual side of it touches our life even yet more nearly than the physical. And prayer is a spiritual force, and may well work won- derful effects in the spiritual sphere. I do not doubt, indeed, that the Reign of Law is as real and as universal in matters spiritual as in matters physical, though we are not yet able to discern the laws so clearly. But then I find that this is itself one of the spiritual laws : that prayer for spiritual strength is followed by the acquisition of that strength. Great mischief arises from confounding the spiritual sphere and the physical sphere, and expecting results in one sphere to come promiscuously from the exercise of forces in the other. In the physical sphere, for example, the law of God is that the nearer a needle is brought to a magnet, the more powerfully does the magnet attract it ; while in the spiritual sphere God's law is that the more earnestly the soul reaches up to God in prayer, the more surely does he make his strength to enter into it. It would, however, be as foolish to expect to attract the needle by prayer as to attempt by the magnet to win the strength of God to the soul."
We should say that, as a matter of fact, the "reign of law" is by no means universal. And if Mr. Armstrong believes, as we should suppose from his book that he does believe, in human free will, he must himself be the first to contend that physical nature, on the earth at least, is in a totally different condition from that in which it would have been if human wills had acted either more or less faithfully than they have done during the centuries of human existence here. Hills have been levelled, and mountains have been tunnelled, which would not have been levelled or tunnelled if the human beings who effected this work had been more indolent or less grasping ; cities are in a state of squalor and degradation which would have been pure and orderly, if all the human wills which were concerned in their growth had obeyed all the admonitions of conscience and piety; the rain itself has ceased to fall in many places where it would fall plentifully, had the wise counsel of those who deprecated the deforesting of the country been followed ; and, on the other hand, there are ample traces in the physical condition of our earth of the higher exercise of human will, which would not be visible at all, had the volitions to which they are due been withheld. We do not in the least believe in the possibility of separating the spiritual and physical spheres, as Mr. Armstrong suggests. Even spiritual nature acts directly on the physical, as well as physical nature on the spiritual. Take the case of mesmerism. Any man with mesmeric power can,—often by a mere exertion of will,—put the body of another man into a totally different state by that act of will, or at all events by that act of will if the will of the patient acquiesces in and concurs with what he does. If a mere man can give slumber (which is a physical consequence) by an act of will, is it not madness to say that God cannot do so, that he limits his answers to prayer to purely spiritual gifts, and that it is absolutely inconsistent with the laws of his nature to grant any physical blessing in answer to the prayer of the heart P It is one thing to say that God will not grant the prayers of those who have not done their best to secure the thing they ask for by the ordinary means involving toil and sacrifice. It is quite another to say that prayer can never affect the physical region at all on the ground that the physical and spiritual regions are divided by a deep gulf which no spiritual being can pass. Is not such a position really fatal to Mr. Armstrong's main thesis that the Divine will is as much the cause of the physical as of the spiritual life
Mr. Armstrong has, however, some admirable remarks in his sixth chapter on the confusion connected with the idea of law in Nature, which we must quote, as we have quoted what seems to us one of the misconceptions which that very confusion has, as we think, produced in his own mind :—
"When wise and learned men began to talk so much about Laws of Nature, and to assure us that every drop of rain and every flake of snow, every grain of corn and every pebble on the beach, is the -creature of Law uniform, certain, perpetual, maintaining that Law has away absolutely and for ever in all the motions of the universe,— a very carious trick of the mind came in and told with immense effect against the recognition of the energy of God throughout this region of beautiful and perfect order. So inevitable is it in the human mind to require Will as the cause of phenomena, and so closely did Law become associated in men's minds with all pheno- mena, that they unconsciously personified the Laws of Nature them- selves, and began to rest content in the conception that these laws themselves are the causes of the phenomena. A Law is really merely the fact that certain phenomena always happen in a certain order. It is no more the cause of the phenomena than the fact that a regiment is marching in step is the cause of Private Atkins' making a particular stride. The phenomena themselves go to make up the Law ; and if there were no phenomena there would be no Law. Nevertheless, the confusion prevails in tens of thousands of minds that Law is itself a cause. Law is practically personified in the thoughts of multitudes. And the result is that the natural sense of the need of God behind phenomena is dulled or altogether blotted out."
It would be hardly possible to express that better than Mr. Armstrong has expressed it ; but does not his own remark go to the undermining of the doctrine contained in the previous extract ? If the Divine will be as much the explanation of the unity of physical, as it is the explanation of the unity of spiritual, phenomena, not specially subjected to other wills than God's,—how blind must we be when we suppose that prayer can affect only the spiritual, and never, even though it be offered in a right spirit, the physical also !
But though there are some few passages in this admirable little book with the drift of which we disagree,—especially in the chapter on " Prayer " and in the chapter on " The Place of the Prophet,"—we welcome it most heartily, as the contribution of a very vivid and vigorous writer to the solution of the greatest problem with which the human mind has ever dealt, or is ever likely to deal, and as a contribution of the right kind.
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