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The bearing of these remarks on the great question which modern scientific thought has at last reached, and is facing with what vision or blindness it has (though it lies at the very beginning of the study of nature, and is the first question that opens on the mind of a child)—the existence of a personal Creator— must be obvious. The insufficiency of the ordinary methods of proving the existence of God, has long been apparent. The inductive or scientific method, though often tried, has never been successful, for this lies wholly in the plane of nature and natural law, and can never transcend it, or prove the existence of spirit. The scientific faculty, the understanding, judging only according to sense and wholly without insight, can only generalize phenomena, and call the result a law, or uniform method of nature's acting; but what it is that acts, or why, or the existence of any substantive cause other and higher than is manifest in the phenomena themselves, is confessedly beyond its province. This even so acute and devout a thinker as Sir Wm. Hamilton acknowledges. He says, "The phenomena of matter taken by themselves, so far from warranting any inference as to the existence of a God, would, on the contrary, ground even an argument to his negation." Hence those minds with whom all truth is measured by the logical and generalizing understanding, who have never had any higher faculty of spiritual insight awakened in them, do not believe in a God distinct from the universe.

The defectiveness of this method is also seen when the argument is drawn not from the material but the moral phenomena and order of the world, as in that recently put forth by Matthew Arnold in his "Literature and Dogma." All the Deity which he admits is the existence-to adopt his own definition of "an eternal power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." So much, he thinks, can be made out by induction. But he denies to this power personality, and identifies it with a mere impersonal law or moral order—a higher law, indeed, than gravitation, since it governs conduct and not mere matter, but as destitute as that of all the personal attributes of the God we worship. Why the existence of such a law does not necessitate belief in a lawgiver-a Deity who has established and maintains this order, who loves righteous

ness and hates iniquity, and who will render to every man according to his works-is logically owing to that fatal incapacity of admítting what cannot be seen with the eyes or demonstrated to the understanding. Morally, it may be explained by the language of the Apostle, "because they do not like to retain God in their knowledge," and because spiritual facts require a consent of the will as well as an intellectual perception, i. e., must be spiritually discerned. The truth is that God cannot be reasoned out by induction, or known inferentially by the understanding, any more than music can be perceived by the touch, or beauty apprehended by the smell, or the truth of poetry be logically proved by a syllogism. Always a higher faculty is requisite to complete and give validity to the argument. Spirit only can apprehend spirit. "By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God." And when faith, or the spiritual faculty, has once apprehended God and affirmed his existence and character, the witness of nature and the laws of the moral universe come in to confirm and illustrate the truth.

The a priori method of demonstration from the idea of God, or of the Infinite, revealed in the reason, is equally defective. This faculty, though higher than the understanding, deals only with abstract truth, or ideas. It does not reveal being or personal realities. The idea of God is indeed given by the moral reason, and is revealed with more or less distinctness in all men, is the inshining of that true light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. But this idea of God is not God, though a strong presumption of his existence. Not until faith has bridged this chasm between ideas and realities, and given substance to this invisible and ideal object, not till the heart has embraced this object in love and trust, and found it real by its own vital and experimental touch and taste, has man really found God. Then only, and thus only, can we see God.

But short of this practical and experimental discovery of God, there is what is called the argument from design, which is generally supposed to be valid, and whose force was felt and acknowledged in a great degree by the late Stuart Mill, as his This argument has

posthumous writings have recently shown.

unquestionably much of force in it, since if intelligent and

rational design can be shown to exist in nature, it proves the existence of a rational and designing mind behind or within nature as its author and controller. A rational effect can only proceed from a rational cause, except with those who, discarding the first principles of philosophy, assume to believe and teach that a universe of order and beauty may have grown, or been "developed" out of chaos, intelligence out of blind force, man with his spiritual and divine powers out of a jelly-fish or tadpole.

But this argument from design, as ordinarily employed, is. defective from a narrowness of conception and of treatment. It is based on the conception of the universe as a mechanical product, constructed artificially as a man constructs a watch; the mind that devises and makes it being outside of and aloof from the product. The only evidence of its existence is the traces it has left of skill and wisdom in adapting means to ends a skill and wisdom long ago exercised, and for aught we know, exhausted in the finished product. All we can know of the character of this mind is what appears in the way of design and contrivance. We see the building, and infer an architect; we see the machine, and infer a machinist. But a man does not express all his mind and character in what is called "design." A poet or artist reveals himself not merely by his consciously intended work, but quite as much by what is unconscious and spontaneous, the effluence, or spirit, or style, that flows not from his will but his genius. So a man's character is revealed more truly, often, in his countenance, his voice and bearing, and even in his figure than in those products into which he puts his conscious thought and will. Those reveal the voluntary, these the involuntary and deeper side of his nature.

Now it is a favorite conception of many, especially of poets and those who have the deepest insight into nature, that this material universe is not a mere mechanical product, but the living expression of a living, indwelling and ever present Mind. Nature is not a machine, but a poem or picture; that is, the original from which all poems and pictures, all art and beauty, as well as all utilities, are derived; and so embodies not the contrivances merely, but the living thought and mind and

genius of the author. Or, if it be a mechanism, it is like that which Ezekiel saw by the river of Chebar, whose wheels were instinct with the spirit of the living creature which they bore: "When the cherubim went, the wheels went with them; when they stood, these stood; and when they were lifted up, these lifted up themselves also; for the spirit of the living creature was in them.”

What we propose in the remainder of this article is to look at nature in the light of this broader and deeper conception, and see what evidences we have of the presence of Mind in Nature; seeking not so much for specific design as for rational and personal intelligence in the things that are made.

I. Intelligence is manifested in the manifold and endless forms of the material creation, and in the very existence of form.

For, consider, what is form, and whence does it come? Pure form is something ideal, a thought or idea of the mind, and can have no existence apart from mind, either as constructing or perceiving it. Take the necessary forms of geometry which the mind constructs or finds within itself. Have they any existence, or can they be conceived to exist, apart from intelligence, any more than their embodiment in outward figures can exist apart from space? They are in the mind as its necessary and innate ideas, or if not consciously there, recognized as soon as presented to it as its own, and belong to mind as essentially and inseparably as light belongs to the sun, or the property of resistance to matter.

Again, the embodiment of these ideal forms in the outward and visible world, or their impress upon material things, is no less the work and the mark of intelligence. In no other way can matter receive form except as mind imparts or impresses it; for outward form is nothing else but the expression of a thought, i. e., of an ideal form existing primarily in the mind itself. Therefore it is said, before the creative intelligence of God began to organize matter, that the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Formlessness, emptiness, darkness-this is the condition of matter apart from any higher principle; a mere receptivity for form and life. Whence is "development" to come? The

Scripture answers: And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Then, in consequence of this brooding of the Divine Intelligence and Will (for both are implied in the term Spirit), light, order, division of parts, and the manifold forms of life appeared. The "development" was in the beginning, what it has been ever since, from above, not from below, the action of a higher power, quickening, informing, and so creating whatever partakes of form or of life. The order and the time in which this creation was accomplished is not the main question, but the fact of Mind or Spirit as the Creator. All things were made by HIM (O' Дóyos, the Divine Intelligence) and without Him was not anything made that was made. All action of mind upon matter gives rise to material forms, and wherever form appears, there the presence and working of mind is demonstrated.

The origin and existence of writing is a confirmation of this. As thought seeks to utter itself in articulate sounds, and thus creates language, so it seeks to embody or outline itself in certain visible forms that address themselves to the understanding, the result of which is writing. The connection between mind and form is as close and universal as that between mind and speech. The first attempts at writing are pictorial, rude imitations of the forms and objects of nature, as the first beginnings of language are more or less imitations or expression in sound of the qualities of the object named. But whether the forms be pictorial or arbitrary, no one can fail to see that thought, intelligence or meaning is within and behind the form. The more perfect the form the more of mind appears in it, and the more impossible is it to have been the work of chance. Now all forms are the imprint and expression of some living thought, whether it be the simple geometric form of the crystal, the more beautiful and complicated forms of vegetable life, or the most perfect form in nature or above it-the human. Only this, since man is made in the image and likeness of God, expresses in its original and true form, not a divine thought, but the glory and beauty of the divine person.

We regard this argument as convincing and unanswerable, that the existence of form implies the existence and action of mind, or intelligence. The only escape from this is the assumption

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