I

them from the power of the grave; I will redeem them from death. O death, I will be thy plagues; O grave, will be thy destruction." 'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." The first principle then, of the Creed of Nature-Worship, is an expansion of the voice of the "fool" in Ps. xiv. into a developed theory of the non-existence of God, our Heavenly Father. The second is the glad tidings of the invariable and gloriously perfect supremacy of death and the grave.

The third main principle is the other half of the Sadducean creed, or the doctrine that there is no angel or spirit. The Apostles are adjudged wholly incompetent witnesses of the fact, that they ate and drank with the Lord Jesus forty days after His crucifixion, because they shared with the other Jews in the belief that there are angels, and spirits, good angels, and demons. The sceptic, who after crawling on the surface of our earth like an insect for a few years, never able to leave it, assures us that there are no moral agents or rational intelligences in any part of the wide universe except himself, and his fellow insects on this one little globe, thereby evinces an audacious folly, hardly less than that of the "fool" who rejects the testimony of all Nature, when she bears witness to a supremely good and wise Creator. Surely, even apart from the express testimony of Him who is the Lord both of angels and of men, and who will assuredly return with His holy angels, to execute judgment "in flaming fire on those who know not God, and obey not the Gospel," there is every presumption from natural reason alone, that all the abysses of infinite space are not wholly bare and devoid of intelligent and rational existence, except this one little planet, which is a million times less than the central orb around which it revolves. There is no conceivable presumption of abstract reason, in favour of the doctrine that no spiritual

intelligence exists in the universe, which is not weighted and tied down, by a few stones weight of material substance, to one planetary prison.

The fourth principle or pillar of the system of NatureWorship, is the constancy or perfect uniformity of the course of Nature, as determined by the earthly experience of men for a few past generations, bounded and shut in by the grave; and thence extended conjecturally to all ages of past time, and to a coming eternity; and from the surface of our own planet to the whole range of the material universe, but so as to exclude all faith in things beyond the range of our senses, unseen, and eternal." This attempt to elevate the insect-like experiences of some myriads of men of the last two or three thousand years, ended in each case by the gloom and darkness of the grave, into the adequate foundation for a theory of universal being, and of the whole course of cosmical change through myriads of ages, and throughout myriads of starry systems, is surely almost the widest conceivable aberration of unreasoning folly. Especially when we remember that, even within these narrow limits, a constancy of variation, by which the past never repeats itself in the future, is still clearer than the partial resemblance which links past with future changes. The partial constancy of Nature, even within the narrow limit of two or three generations, is chequered by many striking catastrophes of various kinds. When we go further back, the whole globe of the earth from its surface to its centre seems, in the eye of science, like a stereotyped record of many catastrophes and changes, wholly different from the present quiet and orderly state of things, within the experience of the present or recent generations.

The three first principles of the anti-christian creed, which denies the Father and the Son, are gigantic falsehoods of a negative kind. The first blots out and annuls

the Living God, the good, wise, and intelligent Author and Disposer of the universe, and leaves the whole a sightless Samson, with no light either as to its own origin or issue. The second provides a gloomy substitute for the Living God, whom the first has dethroned, the eternal prevalence and unlimited supremacy of Death, thus turning the universe into one gigantic valley of the shadow of death, one bottomless gulph of dissolution and decay. The third is almost equally prodigious in its negative character. It affirms, without a grain of evidence, after abolishing the Creator, and enthroning Death in His stead, that nowhere in the wide universe, except on the surface of our planet, are spiritual and rational creatures to be found. The fourth principle degrades still further that little fragment of a godless, death-dominated universe, of which it admits the existence, by making it repeat itself in cycles of unending recurrence to all eternity. The dethronement of God, the enthronement of death, and the extinction of all rational creatures but men now living upon the earth, needed only this further element, to complete its emptiness and degradation, as a creed of utter vanity and hopeless despair.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE ATTEMPT TO REVIVE HUME'S ARGUMENT.

THE famous dictum of Hume, that it is not contrary to experience that testimony should be false, but is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true, has been answered and refuted a dozen times by as many authors; Campbell, Somerville, Penrose, Dr Chalmers, Bp. McIlvaine, Dr Mozley, Archbp. Trench, Paley, myself, and many others. The author strives to revive it out of the grave, in which it had lain for forty years, after being pierced through and through many times. Dr Farrar says,

"Its logical consistency has been shattered to pieces by a host of writers, as well sceptical as Christian."

This is quite true. Our author retorts that

"Apologists find it much more convenient to evade the arguments of Hume than to answer them, and where it is possible, they dismiss them with a sneer."

This monstrous inversion of the facts is worthy of one who spends a thousand pages in the effort to prove the Gospels forgeries, and the Gospel itself a series of incredible falsehoods. Instead of apologists evading the argument they have repeatedly laid bare its emptiness.

"The argument consists of two premises, that the falsehood of testimony is not improbable, since it is of frequent occurrence; and that

the truth of a miracle is impossible, because it opposes a fixed and unalterable experience. Each of these is a sophism of the grossest kind.

"And first, that some testimony is false, can never warrant the inference that all testimony alike is deceitful and uncertain. This is a return to worse than childish ignorance. It is the very test of growing wisdom to be able to discriminate between different kinds of testimony, according to the moral character of the witnesses and their means of information. But the force of the objection depends on a rejection of all these distinctions, the fruits of a ripe and manly reason. 'The error,' Dr Chalmers observes, 'lies in this, that, all testimony is made responsible for all instances of falsehood, whereas each kind should be made responsible for its own. Divide the testimony into its kinds, and the sophistry is dispelled. It were thought a strange procedure in ordinary life to lay on a man of strict honesty any portion of the discredit which is attached to an habitual impostor, or even to one who has been detected in one instance of fraud or falsehood. It were equally strange to lay upon testimony, marked by all the characters, and accompanied by all the pledges of sincerity, the burden of that discredit which belongs to testimony of a different kind.'

"The first sophism then of the sceptical argument has been answered long ago in that one brief sentence of the wisest of men, ‘A faithful witness will not lie: but a false witness will utter lies.' To confound together these moral contrasts, in order to shake our faith in the Gospel, is not only a wicked perverseness, but a childish folly. The other premiss is, if possible, still more strange. Miracles are said to be impossible, because they contradict a firm and unalterable experience. In other words, God cannot suspend any law of Nature, or reveal his will by supernatural tokens to mankind, because unalterable experience proves that this has never been done. This is the boasted argument against Divine revelation; to assume it false, to derive from that assumed falsehood a most absurd inference, and then by that absurdity to prove the falsehood again! The moral blindness implied in such reasoning seems almost incredible. To say that miracles contradict universal experience, is merely to beg the question that they never have occurred, or can occur. To say that they contradict our experience is simply untrue. They may lie beyond it, as the battles of Thermopyla and Salamis, or the death of Cæsar; but they contradict it only if they are asserted to have happened before our eyes, and we did not see them. Miracles are unlikely, prior to actual experience, only so far as it is unlikely that God should reveal His will to mankind. They are likely to be frequent, only if it be likely that God