experience of their operation, fit it to be the guide of life. In this, the old Christian reading of the laws of knowledge, our intellectual discipline is everywhere intertwined with moral teaching, and the employments farthest from the direct subject-matter of religion minister to its highest purposes, like the Queen of the South bringing her choicest gifts to the elect King of the people of God.

6

While Lewis speaks of mental powers sufficient to comprehend a subject,' he has not, to my knowledge, supplied an explanation of his language directly available for the present purpose. It appears to me that the subject' to be comprehended is whether this or that proposition should or should not be accepted; for instance, whether we ought to believe that the grass grows; and not whether the entire meaning of each of the terms of the proposition lies within the compass of the understanding of the individual whose assent is in question.

Sir James Stephen next argues 25 that, like the first and the second, so neither can the third condition of competency be fulfilled: namely, disinterestedness. Neither Bossuet, nor Voltaire, nor Butler, to whom I rejoice to see that the masculine understanding of Sir James Stephen pays due honour, was impartial.

Lewis, however, does not require the absence of interest as an essential condition of competency. He allows a substitute to be introduced; and it is that there shall be a capacity to rise above the interest which tends to bias us, and thus to escape all sinister control.26

Of the three eminent men here quoted, I should have said that Butler was the only one who could be considered to possess the judicial quality, and that he possessed it in an eminent degree. It may still be true that his argument (in the Analogy) is the argument of an advocate; not, however, in the sense of suppressing or evading objections, but in this sense-that, after having judicially concluded which cause is the right one, he uses all his resources to set it forth.

But the question of religion in its elementary principles, like that of morals, is preeminently one in which human nature at large is entitled, with due consideration of degree, to be heard. And, therefore, it is less important to consider what was the bias in A or B—a question in most cases very hard to determine--than what is the bias of mankind at large, under the actual circumstances of their condition. It appears to be various. The many, to whom this world is a world of care and suffering, may seem likely to have a bias towards a world beyond. But these are mostly they, who live and die in silent obscurity. If I am to look for a community living on a high level of general intelligence, I should incline to seek it in Attic Greece; and the history of the religious principle among the Athenians, not as a speculation, but as a power, tends to the belief that the natural bias, among those who form opinion and tradition, is to dwell on and magnify things 24 Essay, p. 27.

25 P. 284.

!

seen, to overlook and undervalue things unseen. Often, in considering the enormous share preoccupied, and as it were mortgaged, to the senses in the sphere of life, it seems to me wonderful that faith should be able to do battle at all against sight, that remote wants should at all assert themselves against immediate, refined and ethereal desires against desires coarser and more earthy. Fear and superstition may have often propped the belief in a Divine Power; but their action is for the most part occasional, and it does not go to form the tradition of the intelligent. It is this tradition on which Lewis relies, and as to which I here venture to observe, that a true intelligence is found not only in masses like the rock, but in fragments like the pebble. Under this head of bias, I am prepared to contend that, upon the whole, religion lies under an actual prejudice; that the balance of forces, acting upon man otherwise than through his intelligence, is an adverse balance; that, but for the struggle of reason against bias, we could scarcely have had that authoritative consent which Lewis has recorded in the first two propositions.

I must concede to my opponent that the general dicta of the Sixth Chapter of the Essay, in favour of the few and against the multitude, sound as if they were in his favour. But I entreat him, in dealing with our author, to be like Lancelot and like Arthur, each of whom,

In open battle or the tilting field,
Forbore his own advantage,

and to give due weight to what I shall now point out.

The work of Lewis is an Essay, and not a strictly scientific treatise, or handbook of instruction. It contains many excellent and careful definitions; but it is, for the most part, a commentary clothed in at least semi-popular phrase. He does not, therefore, in every sentence guard himself against every other sentence; but trusts to an impartial collection of his general view. In general terms, he broadly distinguishes the turba from the few; as he limits the competency of the few each to his own branch.27 It is plain also to the impartial observer, that his book deals mainly with secular knowledge. The Chapter on Religion is fitted into it with care; but outside that Chapter religion hardly appears, and in the entire work the great subject of morals, with all that borders on it, is but slightly touched. In this Sixth Chapter, on which Sir James Stephen relies, Lewis begins by setting out a number of subjects: 28 science, arts, history, general literature, law, medicine, architecture, navigation, &c.; and my opponent will hardly say that religion and morals were in this et cætera. In none of these subjects does he mention the consent of nations;' but in touching on religion he does. Again he specifies questions of morality' 29 those on which the judgment of the public is

among

27 Essay, p. 167.

28 Ibid. p. 169.

29 Ibid.

p. 174.

'more correct' than on 'questions of speculation and abstract truth.' So that we have a wider basis laid, by Lewis himself, for authority in religion and morals, than in ordinary sciences. And this assumption is surely conformable to the nature of things. Science is made for few men; but duty is the mistress of all men: they cannot be men without it; and, small as is the space which its twin pillars, religion and morals, occupy in the Essay, he has admitted in his treatment of these two a modification of his phraseology that breaks down the hard line of exclusion between the few and the many, applicable more strictly to all kinds of knowledge and pursuits that are not the universal and personal concerns of man.

He seems to me, I say, to treat both religion and morals as belonging to the common patrimony of mankind, and as having appropriate modes of recognition accordingly; wherein, though the few lead, the many also have a share. My opponent seems anxious to obtain the aid of Lewis in support of the doctrine that there may be a consent as to morals, while there is none as to religion. Accordingly we find it said: 30 He contrasts the diversity of Christian Creeds with the "nearly uniform standard of morality, which prevails throughout the world."

But he has here fallen into a serious error of citation; for the expression of Lewis is not, throughout the world, but throughout the civilised world.' 31 And he has before supplied the definition of this phrase by saying that all the civilised nations of the modern world' 32 accept Christianity. All, therefore, that he asserts is that, while Christian doctrines greatly vary, Christian morality is nearly uniform: that is to say, that Christian consent in morality is more extended and emphatic than Christian consent in religion. A highly suggestive proposition, which I cannot now examine; but not one that denies, though it abridges, consent in religion.

I will only say that, if morality is either wholly or in great part the fruit of religion, then it may take a long time for a religion, slowly, very slowly, percolating through society, effectually to reconstruct its morality. But the morality so reconstructed may wholly or in part survive, if not permanently, yet for a time, the parent stock. I submit that the existing unity, such as it is, of morality, is greatly due to the remaining unity of religion. And it may also be, that the indubitable present excess of moral consent over religious consent may be a survival from the operation of that wider religious consent, which for so long a time prevailed in the Christian world. This, however, I am aware, is suggestion and not proof.

In following my antagonist to this point, I have not been able to disentangle his argument against my account of Lewis from his argument to show that Lewis is against himself. But I have still to deal

30 P. 278.

"Essay, p. 74.

32 Ibid. p. 69.

!

with the citation of special passages which he has made in pp. 277-9, and which he thinks nullify the propositions that there is an authoritative consent as to the being of God, and as to the acceptance of Christianity. I must still contend, as well as I can, with an inconvenient mixture of the two subjects; but I will state, as briefly and fairly as I can, what I take to be the substance of the allegations I have to oppose. They are these:

1. Lewis says there is an agreement of the civilised world in recognising some form of the Christian religion.33

2. But no such agreement Christianity.' 34

respecting the particular doctrines of

3. A cause of this is that it first assumed a dogmatic form in the hands of the later Greeks,35 who inherited, and applied to the Christian religion, 'a subtle, refined, and abstruse metaphysical philosophy.' From them he passes to the schoolmen, and the Reformation.

4. After pointing out these three great fountainheads of controversy, he assigns a cause overreaching them all: That religion as such is conversant with matters which are neither the subjects of consciousness or intuition, nor within the range of the senses.' 36

5. Hence, lines of difference have hardened; and the tenets do not coalesce, but continue to run in different channels.

6. Finally, my opponent cites a passage which begins with the words: There is no consent of competent judges over the civilised world.' 37 But he omits to observe the sentence which precedes : 'No one Church can justly make any claim to authority in matters of religious belief, upon the grounds on which opinions in matters of science require authority;' plainly showing that he refers to the matters disputed among Churches.

On these heads I have to point out:

1. That my opponent annuls particular assertions of Lewis, on the ground of wide general propositions held to be inconsistent with them.

2. That (as I think) he misapprehends, and overstates, the scope of these general propositions.

Now, on the first of these I hold it unsafe and unphilosophical to teach that deliberate particular assertions may, as a rule, be overturned, on the ground that they fall within the sweep of some wide general proposition, which, if mathematically applied, would annul them.

The human mind is capable of taking a more close and accurate survey of a limited and homogeneous subject-matter than when it embraces at once a vast circumference, a magazine of omne scibile. Just as an artist, beholding a tree, has a more exact record of it on his brain, than he can receive when he gazes over an horizon. Lewis has attempted in an Essay to deal with all human knowledge and 34 Ibid. p. 70.

33 Essay, p. 69.

36 Ibid. p. 72.

* Ibid. p. 97.

35 Ibid.

quasi-knowledge, except such as is taken to be already of absolute certainty. In so doing, he very naturally adapts his language, in the description of general rules and otherwise, to the subjects which form by far the greater part of that knowledge, the subjects in which the teachers and the taught are broadly separated. It is consequently less minutely applicable to the two great sciences of Duty, Religion and Morals, in which it may be popularly said all have something to teach, and all have much to learn. It is illusory, I think, and futile to argue on this account that Lewis could not have meant what he has deliberately said on either of those sciences.

It is not possible, with the utmost care, so to regulate diction in these matters, that it shall embrace every case alike, as if we were teaching from the text 'action and reaction are equal, and in opposite directions.' Nor is forethought often sufficiently alive, in dealing with generals, to make an entirely sufficient provision for every particular they may include. Take, for instance, the law of political economy, that the same article cannot be sold at two prices in the same market. Viewed as expressive of general or average results, this law is sound, and probably necessary; but, if taken as a literal statistical account of every exchange of commodities that happens, it is untrue, it is absurd. In describing the early stages of scientific growth, Lewis himself says 38 there is much hasty induction from single facts, and partial phenomena;' and what is his own work but an initial effort towards laying the foundation stones of a science almost wholly new, the science of Authority in matters of opinion'? Supposing that in an autobiography we found on one page 'I do not catch cold from wet,' and on another Yesterday I got wet and caught a cold from it,' with nothing in particular to discredit either proposition, which would be more rational; to cancel and disbelieve the particular proposition, or to hold that the broader assertion had not embraced every point in the experience of life, and that the rule did not exclude an exception?

I contend, then, that Lewis's declarations 39 All nations agree in recognising the existence of a God; all civilised nations agree in recognising some form of Christianity'-must stand even against abstract and general dicta inconsistent with them on the follow ing broad ground: it is probable that an author has more exact knowledge of his particular proposition, than he could have of each and all the particulars comprised within the sweep of his general proposition.40

38 Essay, p. 66.

39 Essay, Table of Contents, p. 6.

40 The reader of Aldrich will recollect the amusing logical fallacy: Epimenides the Cretan says that all Cretans are liars. Therefore Epimenides is a liar. Therefore the Cretans are not liars. Therefore Epimenides is not a liar. Therefore the Cretans are liars. And so on ad inf.