The supernatural in relation to the natural

Front matter

QassJB-LUjlQ.

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THE SUPEKNATURAL

CHAPTER I. General Remare:s ON THE Supernatural, .. .. 101

Sect. I. The Precise Nature of the Supernatural, . . 101

Sect. II. The Possibility of a Miracle, .. .. 118

Sect. III. Purposes served by the Supei'natural, . . 133

Sect. IV. Relation of the Supernatural to the Natural, .. 150

Xll

CHAPTER II. The System in the Supernatural

PACK

Sect. I. There is System in the Supernatural, . . 166

Sect, II. The Typical System of Revelation, . . 178

Sect. III. The System of Prophecy, .. ... 204

Sect. IV. The Plan of Christ's Life, . . . . 228

Sect. V. The System of Miracles, . . . . 237

Sect. VI. The System of Doctrine, . . . . 256

Sect. VII. The System of Duty, .. .. .. 267

Sect. VIII. The System of Means. . . . . 271

Sect. IX. The System in the Dispensation of Grace, . . 274

CHAPTER III. The Evidences of Christianity

Sect. I. A Study of the Christian Evidences. The Evidences a System, . . , . . . 282

Sect. II. Connexion between the Miracle and the Doctrine, .. .. .. .. 308

Sect. III. Ends accomplished by the Systematic Character of Revelation, . . . . . . 316

Appendix

Art. I. Oxford Philosophy,

Art. II. Bunsen and German Theology^

353 363

BOOK FIEST.

THE NATURAL IN RELATION TO THE SUPER- NATURAL.

CHAPTER I. MAN DISCOYERma THE UNIFOEMITY OF NATURE

It is a most vivid and intensely interesting picture which is presented to us by Humboldt in the second volume of the Cosmos, where he unfolds the ideas which mankind have formed, in successive ages, of the magnitude of nature, and of the manner in which their views of earth, ocean, and sky, of plant, animal, and man, became enlarged, as voyagers and travellers explored new countries, and as science extended its observations and calculations, and combined them into general laws. It would be quite as interesting, and fully as instructive, to have a like panoramic view of the conceptions which men have been led to entertain, at various times and in various countries, of the nature and extent of uniformity and of law in creation, and of the enlargement of their apprehensions and beliefs, as observation and science pushed on their researches, and widened the sphere of their discoveries. In now endeavouring to furnish this, I am not to attempt such a glowing historical painting as Humboldt has set before us; I must content myself with a simple sketch in plain water-colours.

Let us try to put ourselves in the position of a shepherd, a hunter, or a tiller of the ground in the early ages of the world, or of an uneducated man in countries beyond or in states of society beneath the reach of civilization, as he looks out on the phenomena of nature. Two deep impressions, I think, w^ould be left on the mind of such an one ; — one, that there is uniformity, and the other, that there is irregularity in nature.

The uniformity presses itself everywhere on his notice. He sees it in day following night, and night succeeding day, in the sun pursuing his steady course in the heavens, and in the seasons appearing in due order ; he discovers it in food nourishing and sleep refreshing him, in the growth of the grass and the trees, of his lambs and his cattle. But in the very midst of these regularities there are occurrences which come after a different fashion. The sun rises and sets with undeviating constancy, but the eclipse appears very inconstantly and the lightning flashes very unexpectedly. The seasons accomplish their

TEE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 6

beneficent rotation without a failure; but storms arise and rains descend (in most climates) in perplexing and puzzling uncertainty. His bodily frame performs its functions, and his grain and fruit-trees, his flocks and herds, spring up and grow according to a very obvious course, which he can, to a large extent, anticipate; but blight or disease may come upon them at most unexpected and troublesome times, to disappoint his plans and blast his prospects.

If our observer be a godly man, that is, with a heart inclined towards God, he will discover and acknowledge the presence of a Divine Being in each of these classes of objects. But, on the other hand, if he be disposed to live without God, and to keep Him at a distance, he may find a convenient means of accounting for both without calling in a living and acting being, employing physical agents to accomplish beneficent and moral ends. To explain what seems settled and constant he may give a power and a being to Nature, constituting it into a self-working machine, while he refers the irregularities and interferences to Chance, not that he ever thinks of defining Chance ; but he means that the events come without any purpose of a designing mind.

But, meanwhile, man has deep religious tendencies and impulses, which will break out despite his unbelief and in the very midst of his

^ MAN DISCOVERIFG

ungodliness. Circumstances arise and feelings are awakened, ^Yhich constrain him to look out for, or to believe he discovers, a Being above these mundane agents. But the whole history of man shows that while he has deep religious instincts, they do not usually work in a healthy manner. Too frequently they are in a dormant state, and they are called forth only by what rouses the mind into excitement, into a state of hope or a state of fear. The consequence is that God comes to be seen in certain of His works, and not in others; — in those w^hich move and alarm, not in those which come daily and steadily; in the drought or tempest which blights the crops, not in the heat and moisture which make them to spring up and grow and ripen ; in the disease which wastes and ravages, not in the health which has sustained and gladdened the frame for years ; in the lightning which smites, but not in the light which smiles ; in the eclipse with its lurid darkness, but not in the pleasant sunshine daily playing on our earth ; in the meteor which bursts out so ominously, but not in the stars which look down upon us so purely and benignly ; in sudden and unexpected prosperity, but not in the common blessings which are showered upon us from day to day ; in the storm which sinks the vessel, but not in the favourable breezes which 'have borne it along for such a length of time ; in the

TEE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.

preservation of the individual in a shipwreck, but not in that assiduous care which to so many has prevented shipwreck altogether. This is superstition, which, in its narrowness and partiahty, discerns the God who is in all nature, only in certain portions of it. When unrestrained by foreign influences it soon issues in polytheism, or the belief in " gods many and lords many," each supposed to be engaged somehow^ or other in interfering with what has been settled, and in producing those irregularities which spring up in the midst of the uniformities, to control or to disturb them.

It is a perception of the uniformity of nature which forms the most effective natural means of making mankind keep hold of the unity of God. Those who have lost, or who have never reached, the idea that there is a connection between the various physical agencies in the world, are sure to look upon them as being directed or interfered with by a number of conspiring 'or conflicting supra-mundane beings, each with a purpose of his own ; and I believe the great body of mankind can be kept from this error only by a direct revelation from heaven of the character of God. Even those who have a written word will ever be tempted, like the Jews in old times, to run after the worship of a multitude of gods, or like rude unlettered Christians in modern times, to make a subordinate class of preternatural beings, such as saints or witches, act an important part in those cross events for good or for evil, which interpose to help or to hinder the more direct and settled tendencies of natuje.

But the same spirit of ungodliness which allures so many to an adulterous attachment to a multiplicity of gods, who suit their contracted views and corrupt taste, may take another form am.ong those who have been kept from polytheism by a comprehensive conception of nature ; or, by what is more common in the ages when persons begin to reflect and philosophize, by a vehement inchnation towards abstract thinking, which, as in the case of the Eleatic school of early Greece, perceives, but exaggerates and misinterprets, the unity which exists amidst the variety of physical agents. The deep natural aversion to a pure and personal God, who sees the hearts and judges the deeds of man, tempts this latter class into pantheism, of a ruder or more refined character ; and they look on nature personified as being God, and the sun, moon, and stars, or the animals in whom the principle of life is most active, or the more powerful physical agents, such as light and fire, as being themselves the acting deities. In many Eastern countries the two forms of error coalesce and exist side by side ; the pantheism being the form adopted by the

TEE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. *

sages who mount up into high abstractions, and the polytheism furnishing the channels in which the religious feelings of the people expend themselves. These two, the nature pantheism and the nature polytheism, have a great many more points of affinity and bonds of communion than we might at first suppose. The philosophic pantheist is quite willing to allow the rabble to be polytheists, since they can rise no higher in their conceptions ; he will let them freely indulge in the worship of the sun, and moon, and animals, and elements, and will himself fall in, without compunction, with their worship, looking upon the individual natural objects, or the symbols of them in the temples, merely as representatives of the Whole ; and with this accommodation the polytheist is entirely satisfied, which he would certaiDly never be with the uncompromising position of stern distance held towards him by the pure theist. The two, indeed, often meet in the same individual; the pantheist, finding that his abstractions are cold and unattractive, has to lavish his pent-up feelings on beings who can hear and respond to the breathings or beatings of his heart; while the polytheist, in his times of deeper thought and sentiment, or of more terrible emergency, feeling as if all inferior and divided powers were failing him, casts himself on the One Supreme and Omnipotent Ood.

8 MAN BISCOVERING

Taking mankind as a whole, a far greater number fall into superstition than into pantheism. The victim of s.uperstition, we have seen, feels his dependence on God only in regard to supposed interferences with the settled course of things. The Egyptians told Herodotus that, as their fields were regularly irrigated by the waters of the Nile, they were less dependent on God than the Greeks, whose lands were watered by rains, and who must perish if Jupiter did not send them showers.* Persons trained in these narrow views are apt to be very much offended when philosophers argue that all things are governed by laws, or when men of science shew them natural powers, where they believed there was only a Divine agent. They feel as if one part of God's works after another were being wrested from Him by presumptuous and impious men, who would, in the end, leave him no place at which he can interfere, or at which we may discern his agency. Hence the conflicts between science and religion, or rather between science and persons resolved to stand up for God, but who have adopted the doctrine that they must cease to recognise Divine action as soon as they find physical agency. As one field of nature after another is taken from God and given over to mundane operation^ some grieve, others rejoice,

* Herodotus, II. 13.

TEE UNIFOEMITY OF NATURE. ^

while a third class are exasperated into bitterness and fanaticism. Some feel their whole soul perplexed, and their heart failing them, as they find the gods driven from the woods and the streams, from the mountains and the stars, and allowed to interfere neither with health nor disease. Not a few, as they discover that the Divinity can no longer be found in what they have been taught to recognize as his place of abode and special sphere of action, are greatly tempted to abandon themselves to utter unbelief, — it is as if they had entered into the inner shrine of their temple, where they were told that God dwelt, and found it all emptiness — it is as if a Jew had been brought, by unexpected circumstances, or by a rash deed of profanity, into the holiest of all, and found there no ark of the covenant, no Divine presence. Others feel and express their joy, as they have been delivered from all fear of a God to judge and to punish ; and they often break out into scoffing and profanity. As to the great mass of vulgar minds, they at once rush into an unwise and violent contest with the advocates of natural agency; they denounce them as ungodly, and at times expose them to a virulent persecution. These throes are the Nemesis which ever pursues error (as well as crime), till thinking minds are led to undertake the task of readjusting the relations of physical and Divine agency.

1 MAN DISCO r BRING

When nations are first brought into view by their historic records, we find them looking on certain objects and certain departments of nature as settled and fixed, while others are regarded as irregular, or at least disconnected the one with the other ; the former being ascribed to the gods or to nature, the latter to the gods or fortuity, according as persons are piously or profanely disposed. It is in this state that we find Greece, when its earliest writings enable us to understand the views and thoughts of the people. The hills,* the fields, the seasons, the ordinary life of the plant, of the animal, and of man, are objects about which little curiosity is excited, and little inquiry is made ; they seem all ruled and determined, or they run their undeviating course without requiring any external aid to help them on. It is different with objects within the reach of man's view, but beyond his minute inspection, and with events which come with variations, or which appear at unforeseen times or with tremendous energy. As observation extended, and science co-ordinated the facts gathered, the portion of the universe seen to be regulated by law of some sort, became larger in itself, and in comparison with the seeming irregularities and anomalies. It was seen, from the time when observation began, that the sun has in himself some power of shining, and that his course is a regular one ;

TEE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.

but certain superstitions were interfered wi th when the Babylonian star-gazers could predict the exact time of the occurrence of the eclipses of the moon. Those who were taught to consider the heavenly bodies as divine, could not look with much favour on Anaximander of Miletus, when he instituted calculations as to the sizes and distances of some of the heavenly bodies ; or upon another Ionian physiologist, Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, when he speculated as to the causes of the moon's light and the eclipses of the sun and moon, and maintained that the moon, like the earth, had plains, mountains, valleys, and dwellings, evidently for intelligent beings. A revolution was about to be effected in men's ideas of the world when Aristotle'^ elaborately demonstrated that the earth must be spherical.

Anaxagoras, it is well known, represented reason as the first or deepest principle in the system of the universe, and maintained thai by it all things were caused and set in order. When some one read this to Socrates he was highly delighted, and thought he had now discovered a sufficient explanation of what came under his notice in the world. But having got the books of the Ionian physiologist, he was astonished to find that after making reason arrange all things, Anaxagoras makes no farther reference to it, but

1 3 31 AN DISCO r BRING

calls in " air, ether, and water, and many other things equally out of place."* From the few isolated references to the doctrines of Anaxagoras handed down to us from ancient times, we cannot ascertain how he reconciled his two statements, of all things being caused and disposed by intelligence, and of the physical elements being the agents employed in the production of natural occurrences. But the criticism of Socrates, and we may add, the like criticism in the next age by Aristotle,! shew that neither of these philosophers had attained clear ideas of the compatibility of all things being caused and arranged by Divine reason, and yet of the economy of the world being carried on under God by physical agents. Socrates may be taken as the type of the reljgious philosopher of ancient Greece or Rome, bent upon seeing God and the gods (for in his creed there is a somewhat incongruous mixture of pure theism and polytheism) in all nature and in a well-ordered providence. Aristotle may be taken as the representative of the mere metaphysical and physical speculators of the same era, acknowledging a God or gods, and perceiving an order and a system, but not discovering or explaining how God is using all physical agencies for the accomplishment of his purposes. Neither of these profound thinkers seems to have risen to

* Phaedo of Plato, 105—108. f Metaph. I. iv. 4.

TEE UNIFOBMITY OF NATURE. 13

the idea of a God acting everywhere in nature, by natural agency, according to natural law. Meanwhile, the great body of the people divided what we call nature into two parts, one of which they ascribed to the system of things, or to chance, and the other of which they ascribed to their gods, and they were jealous to an intense and vehement degree of all those philosophic speculators or physical inquirers, who maintained or who hinted that what they had reserved for these divinities could be accounted for by natural causes. I believe that the heart of many an earnest and thinking youth was wrung with agony, and could find no sympathizing one to whom to express it, as he struggled between the superstition in W'hich he had been trained, and the natural discoveries which were being opened to him ; as he strove to retain both, and found them to be incompatible ; or as he abandoned the faith of his youth to give himself up to a cold and comfortless scepticism. It is painful and humbling to read the record of such conflicts, in which a steadily advancing science has ever been victorious, while its opponents have been obliged to give up one untenable defence after another. But it is not, after all, without its valuable lessons, for it shews that the defender of religion is betraying the cause committed to him, when he allows directly, or by implication, that God is not to be seen in what is brought about by those wise and beneficent laws wdiich he himself hath instituted.

It can be proven that some of the ancients had grand glimpses of the unity of nature, evidently suggested by the correlations which were ever casting up among things, which at first sight seemed so unlike and disconnected. These were generalized far too hastily into doctrines not authorised by the facts, but some of them, notwithstanding, have turned out to be curious anticipations, and, as it w^ere, presages of modern discoveries. The Pythagoreans traced regulated numbers and forms through every object in the heavens and earth: it should be added, that they did so in a very mystical and unscientific manner. Plato delighted to recognize earthly things as being after the patterns of eternal wisdom ; and as he often failed to discover the Divine model, he ascribed the failure to the incapacity of matter to receive the Divine idea. The views of these gifted men, though large and expanded, were shadowy and uncertain ; they were the presentiments of genius looking to a few obvious facts, and not the results of a careful induction, and they were mixed up with innumerable errors. Of all the ancient sects, the Stoics, as we might expect from their methodical mode of procedure in everything, contrived to draw out the most com-

THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.

]5 plete plan of the system of the world. Biit their scheme was entirely theoretical, and was built on no induction of facts, and modern science has completely set it aside. By help of a passive principle which is matter, and an active principle which is God, and the four elements, fire, moisture, air, and earth, they constituted the world, in which the presiding principle is fire, identified by them with God ; which world has undergone, and shall undergo, an infinite series of cycles, each closing as it had begun with a conflagration, in which all things are absorbed into the elemental, the intellectual, the Divine fire, out of which, as the heat subsides, there come, first the gods and the heavenly bodies, and then the earth with the objects on it, each new cycle exhibiting the same scenes as had gone before, so that in the next period (as in the present) there shall be a corresponding Socrates who shall marry a corresponding Xantippe, and be accused by a corresponding Anytos and Melitos."

It is only in modern times that the doctrine of the unity and system of nature has been established on a basis of facts. It is interesting to observe the stages by which the human mind has proceeded in its progress. First, Copernicus promulgates the great revolutionary truth that

1 6 MAN DISCO r BRING

the sun, as the larger body, must be the centre of the system, and that our earth goes round him as a dependency — an idea which had been thrown out in a mystic way by certain Pythagoreans at a time when the world was not prepared to receive it, but is now taken by the modern world as a fertile seed into its bosom. A change from the earth to the sun as the centre of the system would not produce so great an effect on the physical world, as that produced in man's ideas when he felt that he had a new and larger centre, and was in close relationship with a v/ider universe. The mechanical discoveries of Galileo removed deeprooted prejudices, by shewing what was the law according to which bodies tend to the earth. But the greatest impulse was given to the popular feeling, when the recently invented magnifying glasses were directed by Galileo towards the sky, and shewed that the planet Jupiter has its satellites, even as the earth has its moon. The new world discovered by Columbus was, in a higher sense, a new world to man's intelligence, it added more to man's ideas than it added to his wealth or his possessions. The very common people could no longer look on the earth as a lump of stone and clay, with a flat but variegated surface, covered so far with water, when seamen returned to tell how they had actually circumnavigated our globe. Order was introduced into the wandering

TEE TTNIFOBMITY OF NATURE. 17

movements of the planets, when Kepler proved that Mars pursues an elliptic path, and thus gave us, by consequence, the very orbit in which our earth runs in space. When Newton demonstrated that the moon is held in her sphere by the same power as draws a stone to the ground, men now rose in their conceptions to a law which embraces and binds the whole material world. Henceforth, even in the common apprehension, those spots of light which dot the sky at night became enlarged into worlds, possibly the suns and centres of other worlds each as large as our earth. The researches which followed the discovery of Newton shewed that gravitation operates far as observation, aided by the telescope, can reach ; and the calculations of the great continental mathematicians demonstrated that the variations in the movements of the bodies of the solar system are periodical, and that there is a self- regulating arrangement pervading the whole.

Another class of investigators have been strengthening and widening our conceptions by inquiries into the more latent forces which work on earth, and which seem also to be active all throughout the mundane sphere, such as light, and heat, and chemical action, and electricity, and galvanism, and magnetism. It cannot be said that as yet we khow the essential nature of any of these forces, but we have discovered

B enough about them to be quite certain that they operate universally, and operate according to fixed laws. Those who looked on thunder as in a special sense the voice of God, and on the lightning as the minister of his vengeance, must have had their feelings somewhat shocked by the discovery of Franklin that thunder is the noise made by natural forces, quite of the same character as those which act everywhere in bodies on the earth's surface, and that the lightning is so far under the control of man that it can be drawn from the heavens by a kite. The doctrine of the correlation of the physical forces, more than even that of universal gravitation, connects every part of nature with every other, in a thorough unity of action. Sir Humphrey Davy correlated the chemical and electric forces. Oersted correlated magnetism and electricity. Faraday has magnetised a ray of light, and illuminated a stream of magnetism. Late discoveries correlate all the physical forces, including heat and light, and mechanical powers, and demonstrate that they are related even to the vital forces. By an appropriate arrangement, any one physical force can be got from any other; and the amount of any one which can be derived from a given amount of another is definite, and admits of definite expression. As light is one of these forces, and as it is by light that the stars are revealed to

TEE TJNIFOBMITT OF NATVRE. 1 9

US, we are thus made to discover that there is a unity or connection offerees, running through the whole knowahle creation, to the most distant star which the farthest seeing telescope has disclosed. Such discoveries are turnings at which we see new aspects of old and familiar objects; openings through which we get views of far distant scenes; elevations from which we descry the directions, the bearings, and the connections of tracts of the universe which were before regarded as divided, separated, and isolated.

Researches into the organic portions of nature have furnished equally beautiful illustrations of the order, and the unity of order, in creation. The observations of naturalists, the dissections of anatomists, the classifications of botanists and zoologists, shew that in every country, every plant and every animal, and every organ of every plant and every animal, is after a type or model, and that there is a mutual affinity and a harmony among organized beings, from the lowest lichen up to the highest quadruped, and to man himself. It has been shewn that the whole skeleton of the vertebrate animal is made up of a series of segments, which, with an infinite number of variations, are yet homotypal ; that is, of the same general form. It has been shewn that all the parts of the flower of the plant, sepals, petals, stamens, and pistils are after the model of the leaf, and it can be shewn that there is a homotypal correspondence between the leaf with its ^^eins or ribs, and the branch with its branchlets, and the whole tree with its ramifications. These discoveries make the animal and the plant a unity throughout.

Geology, the younger, does for time, what astronomy, the elder sister, had previously done for space ; shewing that law reigns through all knowable ages, as the other had proven that it rules through all knowable places. It shews us the very same agencies working from the remotest ages ; tracts of country widely separated from each other, raised or depressed by like causes ; and corresponding or homoeophyte plants and animals appearing on regions or ages far removed from one another. There are disputes as to whether there have not been supernatural exercises of Divine power in the creation of new species or orders of plants and animals ; and all believers in the Word of God, and most of those who have studied the psychological nature of the human soul, maintain that there must have been a special creative act when man appeared on the scene, but all acknowledge that physical causes operated on our earth, millions of ages ago, as they now do, and that on the plants or animals coming upon the stage, they are of the same fundamental types as those now on our globe, and

THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE. 2 I

that they Hved, and propagated their kind, and died, as they do in our epoch.

These are the views entertained by all educated men in our day, and for the professed defender of religion to set himself in opposition to tliem, would only be to injure the cause which he is seeking to benefit. It is quite as possible for those who adopt and cherish these conceptions to be religious, as for those who have more contracted ideas and convictions as to natural law. It may be all true that they have difficulties and temptations to contend against; but these will be found to have their seat and their strength in the ungodliness of the heai;t, which is much the same in all ages ; and though they may have taken a somewhat different form in this epoch of advanced physical knowledge, I doubt much whether they are greater and more formidable than those which have beset thinking minds in all times. It is surely possible for those who see natural law everywhere, to discover at the same time the present action of God. We should so train and discipline our minds, that we see God acting in all action, and living in all life. I believe we are now in more favourable circumstances than the heathen ever were, for seeing the Creator in all creation. In perfect conformity with all that science has discovered, we may look on the sun, moon, and stars as the symbols of his majesty; we may still hear his voice in the thunder and see his terrible power in the lightning. The gods have disappeared ; but it is as ghosts flee before a brighter light, which discloses the one God in all his greatness, and higher beauties in him and in his works. God may still be regarded as compelling the clouds and hurling the thunderbolt, with this only difference, that we also look upon him as making the sun to shine, and spanning out the bow of heaven, and preserving us in health in the midst of a thousand dangers. We can dispense with Neptune ruling the waves and Aeolus the winds, when we have one great God taking care of all, and making them work in harmony. We no longer need Phoebus and his chariot and his coursers to convey the sun ; we have a better provision for his fulfilling his course, in the laws and arrangements of the mundane system. It may have been a temporary disappointment to some, but should have been a permanent joy to all, when the Naiads were driven from the rivers, — on the banks of which we are encouraged to seek, and may actually find, communion with the one living and loving God. The Caffre, after becoming a Christian, may still see God as the rainsender, only he will now understand and believe that he does not send rain capriciously, but