the flood of Noah and all previous ages, the resurrection and the life to come, the future judgment, and all the prospects of a coming eternity; all that is unseen, or visible only in other worlds beyond our own planet, and all the actings of the will of men through successive generations, to subdue the earth and bring it into subservience to the wants, and desires, and spiritual instincts and aspirations of their own nature. This ́terrestrial nature, shut in by these narrow limits, is a minute and almost infinitesimal fragment of the great scheme of universal being. The information which it supplies may be clear and express, and adequate, to the present guidance of life, with regard to individual men, animals and plants; and supply also some glimpses and vistas of thought leading us onward into the abysses that lie beyond. But to complete it into an adequate key to the future hopes of man, and prospects of the human race, and the vast scheme of universal providence, it needs to be pieced out and completed, if supernatural revelation be excluded, by infinite guesswork, blind conjecture, and baseless speculation. An inverted pyramid has to be constructed of prodigious dimensions, resting on a minute apex, little more than a mathematical point, of certain truth and well-attested experience. As we recede from this apex, conjecture is heaped on conjecture, and Pelion is piled on Ossa, in the vain attempt to scale the skies, and pull down the Almighty Creator from the throne of the universe, where He sits enthroned in glory for evermore. A hundred shadowy and spectral counterfeits are set up by the pride of unbelieving philosophy, to take the place of the Supreme and Eternal King.

One of these is M. Comte's new Supreme Being, collective Humanity, that is the sum total of all the sinners. of mankind, who have fought with and murdered each other through the last 6000 years, or fallen under the

stroke of death by wasting disease, and includes almost every variety of moral enormity, with bright exceptional instances of imperfect goodness and nobleness of being. What a hideous folly is this worship of collective humanity, this new god that has lately come up! A second counterfeit is physical force, a mock trinity of indestructible matter, persistent motion, and continuous force, and undiminished and unalterable solar energy. A third counterfeit makes this new divinity of Solar Force dissipate and waste itself continually in the regions of infinite space, till at length, after millions of ages, the new god of physical science is reduced to utter bankruptcy, and the Sun will become a stagnant mass, drained of light, and heat, and all its life-sustaining stores of energy, and nature sink under a reign of utter darkness and omnipresent death.

A fourth counterfeit and rival of the Living God has two different names-" Evolution" and "Natural Selection." The first, as one of its main worshippers allows, ought rather to be called Involution, and denotes the process by which a diffused nebulous mass gradually condenses, while the light and heat that may result from this condensation are dissipated, and lost in infinite space. It is a process of cooling carried on slowly through millions of ages, till instead of sun, stars, and planets, and animated worlds, the universe becomes one vast, inert, black mass of lifeless matter. The other name of this modern Divinity is "Natural Selection," that is, as expounded by its own author, "the course and sequence of events as perceived by us," choosing out through successive ages, what forms of life are fittest to endure; then, like Saturn, devouring all its children in swift succession; a selection in which there is no one who selects, and no real existence to be selected, and the lives selected for endurance disappear like bubbles in

the great ocean of being, as soon as the selection is made. A "survival of the fittest," where no one is fit to survive at all except for a few passing moments, and then each has to melt away in its turn into the "infinite azure of the future," the gulf of evanescent and perishable being. The true and self-existent Jehovah being denied, there is set up in His place the Buddhist Maya, or universal illusion, an endless phantasmagoria of evanescent sensations, without beginning and without end, an infinite waste of empty shadows.

The author of "Supernatural Religion," after defaming the Gospel of Christ, the glorious message by which principalities and powers in heavenly places learn the manifold wisdom of God, and are lost in adoring wonder, as "shocking to reason and moral sense," takes up the first substitute that comes to hand. This happens to be the third of Mr Spencer's three à priori schemes of the knowledge of the Unknowable, and the mode of action of the Unknowable through countless ages to come. The theory thus adopted is a climax of unreason.

CHAPTER VII.

MR SPENCER'S THREE THEORIES OF THE UNIVERSE.

MR SPENCER defines Philosophy as

"completely unified knowledge. This is the meaning we must give to the word philosophy if we use it at all.” (F. P. p. 134.) "This,” he says, "is tacitly asserted by the simultaneous inclusion of God, Nature, and Man within its scope." (P. 131.)

His next step is wholly to exclude the knowledge of God, and he then attempts to frame a philosophy or scheme of completely unified knowledge, from which the principle and source of unity is wholly excluded. Total ignorance of God, is the first maxim of this philosophy. He claims for it to be more religious than any actual religion.

"Those religions," he says, "are partially irreligious, because they profess to have some knowledge of that which transcends knowledge, and so contradict the teachings of religion.” (Ib.)

This monstrous folly, that there is no medium between Omniscience and utter Nescience is the foundation and corner-stone of the whole system. The author cannot even state his own first principle without a plain selfcontradiction.

"Religion has established the doctrine that all things are manifestations of a power that transcends our knowledge" (p. 100),

but a power of which we can know nothing at all plainly cannot be manifested.

"Religion," he adds, "has ever been more or less irreligious, because it has claimed to know something of a power which transcends knowledge,"

or cannot be exhaustively known.

Having thus rejected Christianity as irreligious, because it does profess to teach us definite truth with. regard to the nature and purposes of the great First Cause, how does the author build on this negative foundation? He offers his readers confidently, not one only, but three alternative theories of the universe, that is of the plans and purposes of this Unknowable God through ages to come. The first is the theory of endless Involution or condensation. It is a process by which satellites drop into their suns, and the suns by successive collisions fall into each other, till the whole universe will become one great mass of dull, dead matter, a monstrous extinguished sun, from which heat and light have disappeared and lost themselves in infinite space.

"We are manifestly progressing towards Omnipresent death. That such a state must be the outcome of the processes everywhere going on, seems beyond doubt...That the proximate end of all the transformations we have traced is a state of quiescence, this admits of à priori proof." (P. 514.)

This "prodigious amount of knowledge of the unknowable," that all the changes of nature are beyond doubt tending to a reign of Omnipresent death, is Mr Spencer's first offered substitute for the Gospel. It is made up of two à priori truths,—that motion is indestructible, and that all things are certainly tending to a state of perfect quiescence. His second theory in the same work, replaces the first by an endless oscillation theory

"An unmeasurable period, during which attractive forces predominating cause universal concentration; and then an unmeasurable period, during which the repulsive forces predominating cause universal diffusion, alternate eras of evolution and dissolution." (P. 537.)