A NEW NATURAL THEOLOGY.*

IT is curious to note the new forms in which the old difficulties and the old attempts at solutions of them, which have presented them- selves to religious thought in every age, come up again and again as science alters our point of view. Here we have in a little book, published just before Mr. Mill's new Essays, and in many respects one containing much more terse and original thought,—though thought expressed in a much less complete and artistic form,— an expression of belief virtually identical with Mr. Mill's as to the nature of divine power, assuming, that is, of course, what Mr. Mill thought no more than a probability of a low order, that there is any divine power, and its limitations. "One only form of be- lief," says Mr. Mill, "in the supernatural, one only theory respect- ing the government of the universe, stands wholly clear both of intellectual contradiction and of moral obliquity. It is that which, resigning irrevocably the idea of an omnipotent creator, regards

Nature and Life not as the expression throughout of the moral

character and purpose of the Deity, but as the product of a struggle between contriving goodness and an intractable material, as was believed by Plato ; or a Principle of evil, as was the doctrine of the Mani- chmans. A creed like this, which I have known to be devoutly held by at least one cultivated and conscientious person of our own day, allows it to be believed that all the mass of evil which exists was undesigned by, and exists not by the appointment of, but in spite of, the Being whom we are called upon to worship." (Mr. Mill's Essays, p. 116.) Was the person here referred to the author of the essay, at once mystical and acute, which we have placed at the head of this review? or is, as is more probable, Mr. George D'Oyly Snow only bearing his independent testimony to the force of the considerations there referred to? It is certain that the essay we are reviewing was published at least a month before any of the remarkable extracts borrowed from Mr. Mill's new Essays had found their way into the press. But the following is the language in which Mr. Snow anticipated Mr. Mill's assertion that all evil is "undesigned," and that the work of the Creator is the work of one who is always impressing design and. purpose on an intractable background of somewhat that we

can only conceive of as undesigned or chaotic,—somewhat by the contrast with which, and by that contrast alone,

Almighty power and goodness become visible :—" Evil," says Mr. Snow, "to my mind, means the undesigned; I mean, of course, only that in which we see no order or design, but only chaos and confusion. The fact that evil reveals goodness, and gives it a

meaning and a name, does not show it was designed to do so." Again, read this little passage on Omnipotence, and it will be evident at once that what Mr. Snow regards as the only intel- ligible meaning for the word 'omnipotence' is primarily what Mr. Mill described as very defective though considerable power struggling against severe limitations which are constantly making themselves keenly felt :—

" With regard to the question, Why does not Omnipotence at once crash Evil? I answer,—Ask yourself what you mean by omnipotent. Power means nothing, if not antagonism. You have nothing to measure it by but its antagonist. Infinite power means an antagonism that no known counter-antagonism can avail to balance. Such power is im- measurable. And living power means an antagonism that has not yet

" 4 Paitico-Theological Essay. By GeorgeD'Oyley Snow. London; Triibner. 1674.

overcome, but is in process of contending against a counter-antagonism. You cannot answer that omnipotence means that which overcomes re- sistance in a moment of time. For what is a moment of time It is a period that passes by too quick for our slow minds to be able to see the successive stages of any process that takes place in it. A momentary process means a process which is imperceptible to us except in its re- sults. If we are to see a living power of greatness at work, our thoughts must be quick enough, or in other words, the process must be slow enough for us to discern it. The idea of a gradual advance, a constant progress towards victory, is not inconsistent with the idea of living omnipotence, but is, on the contrary, essential to it. A present living, acting power, such as we adore as our God, implies an antagonism not yet overcome."

We do not agree with this, as it seems to identfy " power " with "effort," whereas our highest conception of power involves the absence of effort. But it is clear that what Mr. Snow calls " om- nipotence " Mr. Mill called an exceedingly limited form of power. The difference, indeed, between Mr. Mill's and Mr. Snow's belief about the Creator is simply this,—that what Mr. Mill regarded as a conceivable rationale of the state of the universe as we see it, and the most animating rationale of it; though one far from being proved, and, indeed, no more than a slightly probable hypothesis, Mr. Snow conceives as the true and certain rationale of it, to be cherished as a faith, and almost demonstrated as the upshot of all the facts pre- sented by the history of natural religion, as well in savage as in cultivated peoples,—and as the result, further, of the widest study

of nature, and of the story of revelation.

We differ very widely from Mr. Snow as to several of his

fundamental conceptions. He seems to go wrong, also like Mr. Mill, by failing to discriminate between the region of morality proper, and that of intellectual order or design. He avows him- self unable to understand "free-will," though he finds a nichefor it in that intractable element of human individuality which it takes divine grace to subdue,—a definition which makes room for an evil free-will, but not for one that really co-operates with God, which he regards as a mere manifestation of God in men. In strict keeping with this view, Mr. Snow says, "My conscience rightly interpreted does not seem to tell me that I could have helped the things I have done wrong, but rather, it seems to me, to tell me that I have deserved to be brought to shame and sorrow for them." (p.145.) Again, Mr. Snow asks why does man deserve God's punish- ment? And he answers,—" Because it is the only means whereby he can be made better. Well, then, according tothat, he cannot make himself better. If he did, he could not deserve (or need) punish- ment. The use of punishment is to do for him what he cannot do for himself. What is punishment, with all its concomitants of shame, remorse, and misery ? It is the coming of that wider, more central, more proportionate view of his relations to the world around him that convicts him of impurity,—that is, of undue adhesiveness to unworthy things, or inordinate affection." (p. 141.) Now, all this seems to us to confound things wholly different. " Deserving " and "needing," which, Mr. Snow tells us, mean the same thing in relation to punishment, seem to us to mean totally different things, just as sorrow and shame with relation to an individual error, which Mr. Snow identifies as meaning the same thing, seem to us to mean totally different things. A man may, and often does, need suffering which is not punishment, which is merely discipline, and which opens his eyes to an altogether higher life. In that case, the suffering is in relation to the moral affections precisely what the toil and pain of study and learning are to the intellectual part of man. Would any one talk of the toil and pain of learning as the punishment of ignorance? yet if Mr. Snow is right, such an expression would be right. There seems to us the widest possible distinction between the toil and pain of moral expansion, and the punishment of moral degeneration. The former is the incident of progress, the latter the retribution of sin. Mr. Snow's language admits no distinction between " shame " and "sorrow." Now there is plenty of sorrow even for our own shortcomings which contains no shame. I may be sorry I am not as good as St. Paul, but it would never occur to any man but the very highest or the most conceited to be ashamed .of not being as good as St. Paul. Jam ashamed of not being what I know I might have been, not of not being what I never could have been. Mr. Snow's whole identification of moral with intellec- tual evil,—the bad with the undesigned,—his whole treatment of free-will,—and his discussion of the theory of punishment,— seems to us to be based on radically unsound ideas, and to be the flaw in an otherwise profound and very striking essay on natural theology. But this once pointed out, it would be most unjust to an essay of which these are not the most characteristic points, but to our minds the incidental and in a large degree the unnecessary blemishes, not to insist on the more original and prominent fea- tures which make the essay as remarkable in substance as it is fresh (though too abrupt and discontinuous) in style. We shall, therefore, briefly note a few features of this littl book, in which we believe the author's originality to be most visible, and his freshness most instructive. Mr. Snow's deriva- tion of both morality and religionyfrom the germ of natural affection is very striking (though it seems to us that he takes too little note of that distributive justice which transcends mere natural affection, as a necessary "preservative additian," to use the language of development, of natural affection, a preservative addition in which morality, as distinguished] from mere instinct, begins). What is more striking still is his terse and triumphant confutation of the greatest-happiness principle as utterly un- meaning, because assuming the fieekraduation of relative clair,s to happiness which it ought to explain :— " The figment of an equal and impartial beneficence to all creatures of the genus bimanum, down to the little dwarfish obongo lying in a hole like a spider and watching his snares, falls to the ground, b3cause there is no instinct or natural sentiment to work it. A benevolence distributed equally and impartially over the whole of mankind, and limited wit!' the limits of mankind, is a pure fiction. To us the lowest savages arc mere brute IC What does interest us in them is the manifestation of those affections they share with the brutes, their tenderness to their little ones; so that, in fact, that sympathy which binds us to the lowest of our kind extends beyond our kind. Mill's greatest-happiness principle really has not an atom of rationality in it ; there is no basis of sentiment on which to rest it. To make the numerical increase of happy beings the object of our desire, irrespective of the nature of the beings made happy, or of their likeness to us, or of the likeness of their happiness to ours, seems to me incredibly absurd. To act it out, we should kill every swallow we can, because they certainly numerically diminish the gum of beings capable of happiness by the quantities of insects they eat. Nay, we ought to kill ourselves, in order to feed the worms. But, it may be said, Mill limits his greatest-happiness principle. He would not put all sorts of happiness on a par, but would sacrifice the lower to the higher kinds of happiness. Well, what does he mean by higher '? What is most in accordance with his own taste. Then his greatest- happiness principle falls to the ground together. It is no longer the greatest happiness of the greatest numbers, but tho widest possible diffusion of gratification for men with tastes like mine."

Again, Mr. Snow is most original and fresh in his illustration of the fact that while the variations which lead to the differences ef species may be ascribed to that unknown and unknowable which we call "accident," the very essence of all life itself is rooted in providence, and providence of which we can verify the procedure. The inherited-experience school will not explain this, for, as Mr. Snow most justly and pithily says, "Each creature's experience comes by observing the results of those acts to which it finds itself im- pelled, and those acts which it sees done by its fellows." (p. 98.) In other words, experience couldinot be gained at all, without pro- vident precautions to copy. And this most pregnant criticism is illustrated with remarkable force andl adequate knowledge. A great part of the essay is a subtle and powerful disquisition on this theme.

Again, nothing is more subtle in the book than Mr. Snow's illustration of the unity of the divine government,—that unity of divine knowledge and judgment, which forces itself on man in all the higher religions,—from the vital unity which we know to be working at one and the same time in a great number of different organic centres in our own bodies. We know our bodies to con- sist, in fact, of a million separate wants and satisfactions, if there be a million separate organic cells in them,—yet all these wants and satisfactions seem, to our own consciousness, to make up amongst them but one want and satisfaction, namely, our own. The following passage seems to us one of the most instructive and. subtle ever written in any work on natural theology :—

"Now, what the soul of man instinctively pictures to himself as that which it needs is a personal, living Judge who knows all, and knows the claims of all—one to whom the oppressed may appeal against his oppressor—and also a personal Saviour and Guide to whom the ignorant may go for light in time of difficulty. This conception of a Judge of all has, by the process I have shown, been gradually making headway in the minds of men, and yet originally, to a primitive fetich-worshipper, such a conception would have seemed an incredible paradox. The idea of one and the same living person being present to many thousands of persons at once, so as to be in personal communion with them, was very slow in making head-way. The unseen Judge, in the popular Hebrew mind, was thought of as sending messengers, or coming in person to certain individuals here and there, and the multitudes, if they wanted instruction from Him, must go to His prophets. Still the paradox, irrational as it must have appeared, gained ground as men advanced in intelligence. One and the same spirit was thought of as dwelling in innumerable minds at once, dealing with each as if each was its exclu- sive care. Men found as a fact that they really could not escape from the Avenger and Judge of mankind. He visited them, He haunted them, and they could see no escape from His presence. Darkness would not hide them from Him. If they took the wings of the morning, and flew into the uttermost parts of the earth, He would follow them there. Their feeling was susceptible of the following explanation. If you injure your associates, you hurt yourself, for you injure that social nature from which you can never separate yourself; but this explanation was unsus- pected by them. They considered the inward hurt they carried about with them wherever they went as the persecution of an outward Avenger ; so they received into their minds the paradox of one and the same living Being present to who knows how many thousands of minds at once. Now I ask, Is it no solution to this paradox to find that the life, which we are inwardly conscious of as one, ALWAYS dwells and works concurrently in many centres at once? Just as the attractive power of one and the same magnet dwells in all the steel filings, and acting in antagonism to their gravity, draws them altogether by drawing them to itself; so one and the same tendency to association latent in every living soul, and brought out into palpable activity wherever two or three are thrown together, overrules their self-isolating proclivities, and draws them into harmonious association; and this concurrent, spon- taneous, united action, beginning in many separate centres at once, is the characteristic feature of life. When the imagination is overpowered with the thought of the infinite multiplicity of living beings, and of the infinite distance it seems to place between the creature and its Creator, let us think of the vital paradox, and that what is thought of as one by the mind presents itself to the eye of sense oftentimes as acting in infinite multiplicity : let us think how the constituent units of our own living frame make their innumerable hungers and wants and pains known to the mind as one hunger, one want, one pain, and are cared for by us as one and our own hunger, or want, or pain. So what is infinite in multiplicity to us may be one to a higher mind. His care and attention to us all may be felt by Him as tender care and attention to one."

That seems to us of far more value as an illustration of the unity in diversity which penetrates the universe, than any other of the kind we have ever seen,—because there is really as widely-dis- tributed a unity of plan throughout the whole universe, as far as we know it, as there is throughout the human body, so far as we know it ;—though the universe is certainly much more abundantly sown with centres of independent resistance, and therefore also, of course, with centres of independent and free co-operation, than is that human body to which Mr. Snow likens it. It seems to us, indeed, the mistake of his thoughtful essayto press the analogy beyond what it will bear, so as to suppress all real moral inde- pendence (except so far as moral independence is mere blind, chaotic resistance not reduced to order at all) ; but the analogy itself is full of light and fruitful in teaching. Indeed, while we believe this essay to be ,really defective in its ethical principle, it seems to us, as a rationale of the genesis of natural theology, to be a most valuable and original one, though its form is in some respects not quite equal to its substance, being a little abrupt in manner and very irregular in arrangement.