MENTAL DEFICIENCY A FAULT.

173

Lord Lytton, speaking of Mr. Darwin, says,— "If you tell me that this illustrious romance writer is but a cautious man of science, and that we must accept his inventions according to the sober laws of evidence and fact, there is not the most incredible ghost-story which does not better satisfy the common sense of a sceptic." How a thorough-going evolutionist who denies a Creator can scoff at our forefathers for believing in witchcraft, or alchemy, or any other now exploded superstition, I am at a loss to conjecture.

The habit of writing sermons, perhaps, will excuse me for endeavouring to "improve the occasion" by making a practical application of the subject. As examples of the mental deficiency of some very clever men, I have referred to the phenomenon of colour-blindness, and the want of an ear for music. But these instances imply no moral fault in those who are the subjects of them. Perhaps a more exact parallel might be found in the case of those schoolboys whom one often hears described as having no talent for the dead languages or for mathematics. Fond parents regret the case of their sons, pity them exceedingly, and condole with them for their misfortune, when all the while the fault lies in their own wilfulness. They might learn their lesson as well as other boys, but their minds are set on their tops and marbles, their cricket and boating, and they have

174

UNWILLINGNESS TO KNOW GOD.

not the moral resolution, or rather are too wilful to exert the faculties which God has given them, to perform what is their duty. Just so is it not the case with modern infidel philosophers, that they might know God and serve Him, and obtain His blessing as well as other people, but they will not exert their moral energies; their minds are so excessively devoted to their physical researches, their experiments and vivisection, their molecules and protoplasm, and all the rest of it, -the mere toys of science, they suffer themselves to be so deceived by the applause which unthinking people bestow on them for their cleverness in mere material objects, that they neglect the greatest of all requirements, give up prayer, and the contemplation of holy objects, and so fall at last into an absolute ignorance of that which after all is the true object of their lives.

EVOLUTION.-MR.

CHAPTER XVIII.

HERBERT SPENCER'S ARGUMENTS CON

SIDERED.THREE SORTS OF EVOLUTIONISTS.-THE TWO FIRST ATHEISTICAL, THE LAST NOT so.

As the controversy between believers and unbelievers in the present day turns very much on the question of evolution, I propose to examine the arguments of Mr. Herbert Spencer, who is one of the principal champions of this dogma, and whose book on "Biology" is much used by the students at Oxford.

"Both hypotheses," he says, "i.e., of evolution or special creation, imply a cause; the last certainly as much as the first, recognizes this cause as inscrutable. The point at issue is, how the inscrutable cause has worked in the production of living forms. The point, if it is to be decided at all, is to be decided by examination of evidence. Let us inquire which of these antagonistic hypotheses is most congruous with established facts."1

There can be no objection to the proposal, if 1 Biology, p. 332.

176

EVIDENCE OF TESTIMONY.

only we are agreed about terms. Evidence, for instance, what does Mr. Spencer mean by that? From the subsequent argument it would seem that he altogether sets aside the evidence of testimony. That, clearly, is not fair. A vast proportion of human knowledge rests on testimony. To exclude testimony is to exclude the principal source of human knowledge. This must be remembered in the following argument: We do not decline to follow Mr. Spencer in other kinds of evidence, but to leave out testimony is child's play.

"Early ideas," he says, "are not usually true ideas. (P. 333.) Hence the hypothesis that living beings resulted from special creations, being a primitive hypothesis, is probably an untrue hypothesis. If the interpretations of Nature given by aboriginal men were erroneous in other directions, they were probably erroneous in this direction." (P. 334.) Aboriginal men! What does the writer mean by this expression? We know that GOD created man in His own image-that is, gifted with holiness, free will, intelligence. That we know from history.. Is there anything impossible, or difficult to believe in the notion that GOD, having made an intelligent being, should inform him of the fact, that he and all the beings which he saw around him were creatures of His hand? It seems to me that nothing is more

likely than that GOD communicated to Adam the "wondrous story of his birth." At any rate, an argument which leaves the question unsolved, or ignores it altogether, cannot be considered as very cogent. If GOD did not communicate this information to Adam, but revealed it first to Moses, are the philosophers of the present day such mighty personages that they can venture to despise the great lawgiver of Israel, one of the greatest men the world has known, and call him an "aboriginal," as if he were a native of the Fiji Islands?

Again, the circumstance of GOD not having revealed other scientific facts, as the structure of the heaven or the form of the earth, is surely no argument against the belief that He revealed the great fact of creation to the creatures whom He had made to know and worship Him. Mr. Spencer's à priori arguments seem quite untenable.

Let us proceed to some other of Mr. Spencer's arguments. "Is it supposed," he says, "that a new organism, when specially created, is created out of nothing? If so, there is a supposed creation of matter, and the creation of matter is inconceivable." (P. 336.) What of that? Surely there are many things which cannot be conceived. Mr. Spencer admits that on both hypotheses, his own and that of his opponents, there must have been an inscrutable cause. In what respect is the

N