of antiquity, its mischievous exaggeration of the value of the Logos, lie still broadly over us, and suffer us neither in the real nor in the ideal to observe that element in both which makes them better than all reason.* We cannot find a specific religious organ of the religious life in ourselves, as some have attempted to do, under the name now of thought,' now of 'conscience,' now of 'feeling,' and again of faith.' Rather is religion the expression of our spiritual life as a whole. Whether we contemplate the human spirit, its experiences, its history, its products, or the vast external universe-the microcosmus or the macrocosmus— we are studying the poem of the Supreme Poet, the text we can neither complete nor decipher, nor adequately interpret. The felt and the known must be in a small proportion to what remains to be felt and known. As the poetic faculty gives birth to the constructions of science and philosophy, so they in turn soon reach their bounds and tremble back into poetry. In the religious mind lies the felt unity of all. It is indeed argued by some that the criticism of the ordinary theology on the one side, and that of the speculative philosophy of religion on the other, leaves to the religious thinker no attitude but that of agnosticism. Yet this is surely as unphilosophical as either of the extremes of 'knowingness from which it expresses revolt. Strictly speaking, the mind cannot be said to be absolutely nescient of, or indifferent to, that supersensual world, the recognition of which is so deeply impressed upon universal poetry, and the sense of which continues to haunt men under the everchanging forms of imagination and of philosophic thought Christianity teaches what the result of all criticism of the intellectual powers teaches, that we see but in part and know but in part.' But this partial knowledge is still a knowledge of the truth. If we ignore that in these high matters 'the half is more than the whole,' we resemble him whom Hesiod called a fool. The great objects of religious faith lie before us in the chiaro-oscuro of intuition. It may be possible, by some trick of words, some art of fancy, soome illusory pretension of thought to cast upon them a light which is unnatural; equally possible to envelope them in an artificial obscurity; but the Divine Being will ever remain revealed yet concealed, known yet unknown, in each and all of His manifestations. Reverent contemplation and patient study of His sublime ænigma will ever be the just mean between the ambition of solving it and the abandonment of it as utterly insolublé. E. JOHNSON. 114 ART. VI.-Natural Law in the Spiritual World. Natural Law in the Spiritual World. By HENRY DRUMMOND. THERE is, we believe, no previous instance of any work on religious philosophy attaining such great and rapid success as that which is indicated by the heading of the present article. We have much satisfaction in noting the fact; and our satisfaction is in a great degree independent of any agreement or disagreement with the particular view of religious philosophy set forth by Professor Drummond; what pleases us to see that there is among us so much interest in religious philosophy as is shown by the demand which has already carried off so many editions of a work on such a subject. An interest in religious philosophy is not, perhaps, any strong evidence of spiritual life; nevertheless it is necessary to the spiritual life of a community, though not always to that of an individual, that some degree of intellectual interest in religion should be maintained; the union of intellectual with spiritual life is needed for the proper vigour as well as purity of both. We admit, however, that the extraordinary success of the I work before us is due to its merits. Perfect originality of substance is of course impossible in any work on such a subject, but its form and its leading ideas are quite original; it is one of the most suggestive books we have ever read; its style is admirable, and it has, throughout, that best kind of eloquence which attracts attention not to itself but to its subject. All this, however, does not prevent us from thinking that when tried by its own standard, which is a very high one, the book is a failure. Professor Drummond's claim is that he has set forth a system of religious philosophy; and we maintain that although there is much religious philosophy, and true religious philosophy, in his book, there is not a system at all, but only a number of detached suggestions, somewhat elaborately wrought out. Its eleven chapters are in fact eleven sermons from texts furnished by nature, all of them impressive, and all of them true except when exaggerated into falsity. But a series of philosophical treatises, however able, do not necessarily form a philosophical system, any more than the requisite quantity of bricks, slates, and timber, however good in quality, necessarily constitute a house. We believe in the existence of law in the spiritual world, in exactly the same sense as in the visible world; and in a very obvious sense such law is natural law; the laws of any order of being constitute its nature. But Professor Drummond means much more than this. He maintains that the same laws not only analogous, but the same-are continued from the visible into the spiritual world; and in the pursuit of this idea we think he falls into much exaggeration and some actual error. 'Natural Law in the Spiritual World' is a title that reminds us of Butler's Analogy of Religion to the Constitution of Nature.' But the two works cover totally different ground. When Butler speaks of religion, he means that part of the Divine Government which is not made known to us by sensible experience, and cannot be until the future life is revealed; and his analogies are not with the physical order of things, but with the order of human society, the political order in the widest and truest sense of the word political, which he rightly regards as part of nature. Professor Drummond, on the contrary, although a firm believer in a future life and a kingdom of God to be revealed, yet when he speaks of the spiritual world always speaks of it as a world that is, or may be, known to us by experience; and all his analogies are with the world of organic life. This double contrast is very interesting, and probably belongs quite as much to the periods as to the writers. In the connections of the ideas, the work before us reminds us very strongly of those parables of our Lord which are taken from vegetation and agriculture. Perhaps indeed the entire idea and plan of the work has been suggested by those parables; and we agree with our author that such parables as the sower (Mat. xiii. 3), the seed cast into the ground (John xii. 24), the vine and its branches (John xv. 1), and the seed growing in secret (Mark iv. 26), point to a real analogy between the life of the plant and the spiritual life in the heart of man. If an elaborate and eloquent commentary were to be written on these parables of our Lord, with emphatic assertions everywhere that the truth of the parable depends on identity of law between the natural world of types and the spiritual world of antitypes, such a work would very much resemble Professor Drummond's, not in detail but in its general ideas. Some of the chapters however, though their main argument is quite true, throw little or no light on the subject of Natural Law in the Spiritual World. That on Growth, for instance, is one of the most beautifully written treatises we have ever read; it is like Ruskin at his best, with his insight and without his perverseness. Its subject is the gradualness and stillness of growth. But we have always known that these are properties of all growth; and to show that they are properties of spiritual as well as bodily and mental growth, only proves that spiritual development and growth are effected under the laws of life and mind, and goes no way whatever towards proving, what is nevertheless the very foundation of Professor Drummond's philosophy, the reality and distinctness of the spiritual life, and its introduction into the natural world by the agency of the Spirit of God. The same remark applies to the chapter on Parasitism, which is an ingenious, eloquent, and picturesque illustration of the truth that as animals, and even plants, are not benefited but injured, and become degenerate, when they obtain their subsistence too easily, so it is with the spiritual life. Any religious system must cause degeneracy which tends to relieve the individual of responsibility and to relax exertion; such is that of the Church of Rome among her laity, and, as our author points out, of some forms of Protestantantism also. This is true in virtue of laws of life and mind which would be equally valid if there were no spiritual world at all;-too much ease, absence of responsibility, and temptas tions to sloth, are bad for man not only as a spiritual but aa rational being. We have to thank Professor Drummond for his very interesting instances of a similar truth from the organic world, but we cannot see that he has in these chapters made any contribution at all to religious philosophy. The same may be said of the chapter on Degeneration, which is in fact an admirable sermon on the text of the Sluggard's Garden in Solomon's Proverbs; but its scientific value is totally destroyed by the fact that the weeds which overgrow such a garden, and the wild types to which domestic breeds of animals revert when neglected, are not, from a biological point of view, cases of degeneracy at all. For a different reason, we think the chapter on Eternal Life scientifically valueless. Its argument is briefly this: that, as Herbert Spencer has shown, organic life, and mental life also, depend on correspondence between the organism and its environment. The environment means the universe, or rather that part of the universe in which the organism lives. The environment of an air-breathing animal, for instance, differs from that of a water-breathing one; it is necessary to the life of an organism that its breathing organs, and all the rest of its organs, should be adapted to, or in correspondence with, its environment; if they cease to be so, whether from any change either in the organs from disease or in the environment from circumstances, life ceases. Thus the result is equally fatal whether the lungs cease to act from disease, or become unable to act through the animal falling into water. In the case of mental life, the correspondence with the environment consists in knowledge of it; imperfection or limitation of the correspondence is ignorance, and failure of the correspondence is error. Now, as Herbert Spencer has remarked, if the correspondence of any organism with its environment were never from any cause to cease, such an organism would have unending existence; and if the correspondence of a conscious organism with its environment were perfect, this would constitute infinite knowledge. Here, says Professor Drummond, is a definition of eternal life, with a description of the conditions under which it would occur if the conditions themselves occurred. But they do occur; not in organic life but in spiritual life. God is the environment of the spirit, and the regenerated spirit will never fall out of harmony with God. This is true in the sense of not being false; but what is it worth? It is no doubt true that correspondence between the organism and its environment is necessary to life. But this does not constitute life; it is only a necessary condition of life, and its statement does not bring us one step nearer to knowing what life is. Spencer's statement that life depends on correspondence between the organism and its environment ought to be read in connection with Kant's definition of an organism, that all its parts are mutually ends and means. Kant's saying is as true as Spencer's, and far more luminous; and we may add to it, that life ceases when the several parts, or organs, cease thus to minister to each other. We should think, though we do not speak from special knowledge, that among the higher organisms disease as often consists in disturbance of the relation between the different organs as in disturbance of the relation between the entire organism and its environment, though no doubt the two kinds of disturbance tend to exist together, and either may be a cause of the other. And to say that death from the decay of old age consists in the organism falling out of correspondence with its environment, seems to us an unmeaning use of words. We think, then, that Herbert Spencer's remark, which to Professor Drummond appears so profoundly suggestive, amounts to nothing more than this: that if there could be such an organism that uothing would ever occur to |