A CR1TICISM-ON 'PROFESSOR DRIMMOND.s' FEW religions books of our time
have excited so much interest and discussion as Professor Drummond's remarkable attempt to identify spiritual with natural laws. This is due, we believe, not so-mush to the admirable earnestness and spiritual insight of the writer, and' still less to the acenraoy with which he carries out his analogies, as -to the fact that he employs his scientific knows ledge-and his deep religious. earnestness-apparently to' support- the most rigid tenets of Calvinism, at least in so far as regards irresistible' grace. and human responsibility.. Any system which weakens the sense- of human- responsibility is so dangerous to what sve hold to be the truest and noblest form of religion, that we cannot regret that this part of Mr. Drums mond's argument liae been-so-vigorously discussed, even'though, it has-.been to the loss of the benefit that might be gained from the book as a whole. But, nevertheless; the general merits of the work should not be ignored;--the ingenuity of many of the analogies,,the vigour with which they are -applied to practical Christian life, and the intense spiritual earnestness which ani- mates the whole. Mr. Finlayson, in the pamphlet before us, cannot be changed with ignoring these, though he scarcely gives sufficient weight to.them ; and we may take his summing- up as . expressing fairly enough the truth about this much- discussed volume. "Theme must be few Christians," he says, " who can read' his book without feeling how-true anelimpressive and searching it is at. many points, considered simply as ,a book of practieakreligion."
Bat it-is the fact that Mr. Drummond claims much more than this for -his method that has induced Mr. Finlayson to subject it to a searching analysis. On. the whole, it cannot be denied that he has convicted Mr. Drummond of inconsistency in the application of his analogies,- as well as -of vagueness in his fundamental conceptions; though we hope- to show that he has not always understood him; and is at times unduly anxious to prove him wrong. Mr. Finlayson is right in criticising first of all the principle upoihwhich MT. Drummond hangs his whole method, viz., that natural laws are identical with spiritual laws. Had Mr. Drummondleen content to point out the-analogies betweeathe). two, his book would have been far lessopen to objection, though it would have lost in novelty what it gained, in logical con- sistency. Bat he expressly says, "It is not a question-of analogy, bat of identity.' Ma Finlayson, therefore,- is quite,.
• Bio/agiaal.Belioiout an Essay in :Criticism of Profeosor tfcsiovEruntmersti's " Na'ural Lam in the Spiritual World." By T. Cam bell Finlayson. Blanchester : Brook and Crystal.. - London : Simpkin and Co.; Hamilton and Co. 1885.
justified in pointing out that physical laws can have nothing to do with the spiritual world, for the very reason that is given by Mr. Drummond as his defence against the objection. "It is not gravitation that ceases,—it is matter." Precisely ; and therefore we do not come into conflict with the law of con- tinuity when we assert that because matter ceases, gravitation has nothing to do with the spiritual world. Mr. Drummond fails to see that, so far from being identical, physical laws are different in kind from spiritual laws. Had he begun from above, and traced out the laws by which, so far as we can see, God governs his own action in the moral and spiritual spheres, he might then have shown these same laws working wherever moral and spiritual phenomena exist, and using as their instru- ments those lower physical sequences which Mr. Drummond would extend, as laws, over the whole spiritual world. Justice and love are laws of God's nature ; gravitation and evolution are laws of the physical world, which does not partake of the divine nature. Mr. Drummond's mistake consists in overlooking the fact that the so-called spiritual laws are not mere sequences of spiritual phenomena, but are the characteristics of God Himself, and therefore infinitely unlike any physical laws whatsoever.
The strongest point in Mr. Finlayson's criticism of Mr. Drummond's theory of spiritual biogenesis is his demonstration that the New Testament contains so many different metaphors for describing conversion, that to confine one's self to the figure of the creation of life alone, is to fall into a serious error. He points out that the change is spoken of as "healing," as "reconciliation," as "entrance into the divine kingdom," as "a passing from death unto life," and "from darkness to light." None of these expressions can be fitted into the doctrine of bio- genesis ; and Mr. Finlayson shows with great cogency that the use of the idea of death for the unregenerate state is incompatible with Mr. Drummond's "law." He quotes the passage," Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light ;" and continues,—" Here the man who is spiritually dead is actually called upon to arise out of his death. Such an exhortation may well caution us against turning metaphors into 'laws." This sentence contains in brief the gist of the whole criticism of Mr. Drummond's book.
Bat Mr. Finlayson misunderstands his author in the earlier part of his chapter on "Biogenesis." He seems to confuse "life," in the ordinary physical sense, with the spiritual " life " of which alone Mr. Drummond is speaking. Natural life is no Life to him ; he only applies its laws to spiritual life. It is, therefore, no answer to say that "in an unregenerate man there are at least some kinds of life, and that, when once we have crossed the boundary between the non-living and the living, there is no limit to the possibilities of the development of life." No amount of natural life, Mr. Drummond would reply, can ever develop into spiritual life, for they are different in kind. But we must point out that he has only himself to thank for this confusion. He is so anxious to identify the laws of the spiritual life with those of the natural life, that he forgets that this identity must depend upon the identification of the two kinds of life, which throughout he strenuously denies.
Mr. Finlayson is too hard upon Mr. Drummond in his treat- ment of "environment." The latter says that an organism is alive only to its environment ; "to all beyond, to the all but infinite area beyond, it is dead." This is an intelligible, though not very important, application of scientific terms; but Mr. Finlay- son objects that "you cannot say of a tree that it is scientifically dead,' merely because" it has no correspondence with mach of the universe. Mr. Drummond does not say that it is absolutely dead, but only dead to something, and Mr. Finlayson's retort misses the point. So again, it seems to us that he is so eager to attack Mr. Drummond's doctrine of spiritual growth that he uses against it a more than doubtful interpretation of our Lord's parable about the lilies and the birds of the air. We should not accept either of the two commentaries on this passage ; but Mr. Drummond's seems to us less far-fetched than Mr. Finlayson's.
On the whole, however, this pamphlet contains much sound and valuable criticism of the remarkable book with which it deals. The importance of Mr. Finlayson's opposition to his author, and the force of his attack, may be best estimated from a passage in his chapter on " Environment " :—" It is just because man is not a living automaton, but a moral and respon- sible being, with a certain power of free choice and a certain range of free action, that we are justified in affirming that there must be points of contrast, as well as of analogy, between the laws of the natural and the laws of the spiritual world." The whole book emphasises this timely warning against the danger to which religion is exposed from the attractiveness of a scien- tific gospel. Science must deal with man as conditioned by physical laws ; religion must deal with him as free ; and any method which forces the two into an unnatural union must injure the one or the other.
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