sonal God, a moral Creator, and a moral Governor. A glimpse of his general idea may be obtained from the following words: "In our endeavour to trace in the conscience, and in the personal experience of individuals, the roots of our faith in a God of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, we have now advanced two considerable steps beyond our first and simplest sense of right and wrong. We have seen that this sense, when allowed to speak with its full imperative and personal force, arouses in us, as it aroused in the Psalmist, a sense of our being in contact with a personal and righteous Will. This conviction necessarily involves, as it involved in the writer of the 139th Psalm, the further belief that an authority which has this claim upon our obedience in every particular of our conduct, in all our thoughts and acts, must at the same time be the author and source of our whole constitution; that the righteous eyes which now penetrate, whether through darkness or through light, to the very depths of our souls, must also have seen our 'substance, yet being unperfect,' and that in their book must all our members have been written. If it be the imperative and paramount law of our nature to obey our conscience, and to make moral perfection, or spiritual excellence, our ultimate aim, we cannot but conclude that our whole nature, and the whole order of things in which we are placed, is in the hands of a moral power; and that, as we are fearfully and wonderfully made for righteous and reasonable ends, it must be by a righteous and reasonable Will that we are made. The conscience of man must never be omitted from our view of the design of man; and it is only when we contemplate the adjustment of his whole nature to the purposes of the loftiest

moral development, that the argument from design ac quires its full strength. The apprehension of a Power which establishes righteousness as the law of life, involves also the conviction that it is able to enforce that law, and to render it finally and everywhere supreme. The conviction, indeed, is one of faith and not of demonstration; and the Scriptures, no less than life, are full of instances in which this faith is tried by the bitterest experience. Even prophets, as I have before observed, are at times driven to the cry that 'the law is slacked, and that judgment doth never go forth.' But the deepest instincts and necessities of conscience forbid the toleration of any such instinct of despair. If right were not essentially and ultimately might, I do not say-God forbid—that it would not still claim the supreme allegiance of the soul; but life would be a bitter mockery and an inexplicable cruelty. Not merely to be under an imperative law to pursue that which cannot be realised, but to be bound to such a fruitless pursuit by every noble and lovely influence-to be condemned in moral and spiritual realities to the torments of a Tantalus-this is a conception of human life against which the whole soul rebels. Accordingly, a God of all righteousness must of necessity be regarded as a God of all power. That 'categorical imperative' of the conscience, on which the German philosopher insisted, is imperative in demanding not only a God, but an Almighty God."

The position to be assigned to Kant in the history of the moral proof has been indicated in Note XXV.

Hegel ignores the moral argument as one of the stages of proof which raise the mind to the knowledge of God, but he conceives of religion as presupposing morality,

inasmuch as it is the realisation of what morality merely seeks, the identification of the human with the Divine Will.

There is a very full and suggestive exposition of the Ethical Argument in Dr J. A. Dorner's 'Christliche Glaubenslehre,' Bd. I. 263-310.

NOTE XXXI., page 235.

DEFECTS IN THE PHYSICAL WORLD.

Lucretius (ii. 177—v. 196) has dwelt on the arrangements which render one zone of the earth torrid and others frigid-on the extent of barren heaths and rocks, of sands and seas-on the prevalence of unseasonable weather, storms, and tempests-and on the abundance of noxious herbs and destructive animals, &c.-as evidences that the earth was faulty and ill made, and could not be the work of a Divine Intelligence. Whether it was well or ill made appears to have been a favourite subject of dispute between the Epicureans and Stoics. Lactantius (De Ira Dei, c. xiii.) reports, and attempts to answer, the objections which the Epicureans and Academics were accustomed to urge against the constitution of the physical world. In Cudworth's 'Intellectual System,' vol. iii. pp. 464-8, Bentley's 'Folly of Atheism,' pt. i., Serm. 8; Derham's 'Astro-Theology,' book vii., c. 2, &c., such objections are discussed. In the remarks which I made on the subject in the lecture, I have had chiefly in view the opinions of Comte, J. S. Mill, and J. J. Murphy (Scientific Bases of Faith,' c. xvi.)

Mr Mill's charges against nature are very vigorously and graphically expressed. "Next to the greatness of

these cosmic forces, the quality which most forcibly strikes every one who does not avert his eyes from it, is their perfect and absolute recklessness. They go straight to their end, without regarding what or whom they crush on the road. Optimists, in their attempts to prove that 'whatever is, is right,' are obliged to maintain, not that Nature ever turns one step from her path to avoid trampling us into destruction, but that it would be very unreasonable in us to expect that she should. Pope's 'Shall gravitation cease when you go by?' may be a just rebuke to any one who should be so silly as to expect common human morality from Nature. But if the question were between two men, instead of between a man and a natural phenomenon, that triumphant apostrophe would be thought a rare piece of impudence. A man who should persist in hurling stones or firing cannon when another man 'goes by,' and, having killed him, should urge a similar plea in exculpation, would very deservedly be found guilty of murder. In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature's everyday performances. Killing, the most criminal act recognised by human laws, Nature does once to every being that lives, and in a large proportion of cases after protracted tortures, such as only the greatest monsters whom we read of ever purposely inflicted on their living fellow-creatures. If, by an arbitrary reservation, we refuse to account anything murder but what abridges to a certain term supposed to be allotted to human life, Nature also does this to all but a small percentage of lives, and does it in all the modes, violent or insidious, in which the worst human beings take the lives of one another. Nature impales men, breaks them as if on the wheel, casts them

to be devoured by wild beasts, burns them to death, crushes them with stones like the first Christian martyr, starves them with hunger, freezes them with cold, poisons them by the quick or slow venom of her exhalations, and has hundreds of other hideous deaths in reserve, such as the ingenious cruelty of a Nabis or a Domitian never surpassed. All this Nature does with the most supercilious disregard both of mercy and of justice, emptying her shafts upon the best and noblest indifferently with the meanest and worst-upon those who are engaged in the highest and worthiest enterprises, and often as the direct consequence of the noblest acts,—and it might almost be imagined as a punishment for them. She mows down. those on whose existence hangs the wellbeing of a whole people, perhaps the prospects of the human race for generations to come, with as little compunction as those whose death is a relief to themselves, or a blessing to those under their noxious influence. Such are Nature's dealings with life. Even when she does not intend to kill, she inflicts the same tortures in apparent wantonness. In the clumsy provision which she has made for that perpetual renewal of animal life, rendered necessary by the prompt termination she puts to it in every individual case, no human being ever comes into the world but another human being is literally stretched on the rack for hours or days, not unfrequently issuing in death. Next to taking life (equal to it, according to a high authority) is taking the means by which we live; and Nature does this, too, on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference. A single hurricane destroys the hopes of a season; a flight of locusts or an inundation desolates a district; a trifling chemical change in an edible root starves a million of people. The waves