IV.

THE MICROSCOPE AND MATERIALISM.

PLATO in his Phædon represents Socrates as saying in the last hour of his life to his inconsolable followers, "You may bury me if you can catch me." He then added with a smile, and an intonation of unfathomable thought and tenderness, "Do not call this poor body Socrates. When I have drunk the poison, I shall leave you, and go to the joys of the blessed. I would not have you sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the interment, Thus we lay out Socrates;' or, Thus we follow him to the grave, and bury him.' Be of good cheer: say that you are burying my body only" (PLATO, Phædon, 115; JOWETT's Plato, vol. i. pp. 465, 466; GROTE'S Plato, vol. ii. p. 193).

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Materialism teaches that there is nothing in the universe but matter and its laws; that there is no spiritual substance; and that what is called mind or soul in a man is but mode of force and motion in matter, and cannot exist in separation from the body.

If materialism is the truth, you and I cannot die as well as Socrates did. If that part of us which thinks and loves and chooses is not separable from

our present material frames, our souls are like the electrical charges in the glands of the poor torpedofishes, certain to cease to exist as soon as the cells which originate them have been dissolved. On the Peruvian coasts of South America, men drive horses down to the edge of the great deep, in order that they may receive shocks from electric-eels; and sometimes the hoof of a horse will smite the life out of one of his tormentors; and then the wrecked swimming creature ceases forever to be an electric battery, because the cells in which the electricity originated are destroyed once for all. Now, materialism is the doctrine that the soul is in some sense secreted by the brain, as electricity is by the cells of the torpedo-fish or electric-eel, and that, when the brain is dissolved, the soul is no more. I do not call this an impious inference, if it be, indeed, an inference fairly deducible from facts; truth is truth, even if it sears our eyeballs; I call it, however, a withering inference. I am not prejudiced against any conclusion reached through clear ideas; but the momentous issues involved in the affirmations of materialism make me anxious to look into these cells, which Häckel and Büchner and Moleschott say originate the soul. Cabanis, as Carlyle narrates with grimmest humor, thought the brain secreted soul as the liver does bile. This philosophy, and the gospel according to JeanJacques, were, we know, two of the broadest and blackest of the far-flapping Gehenna wings that fanned the furnaces of the French Revolution.

It is not commonly known, except among special

ists in microscopical physiology, that the latest science has something to say to us of immense import as to the relations of matter and life. That theme comes home to the business and bosoms of all men; and, whatever be the verdict of full investigation, all will be eager to face it, who seek, as we do here, whatever is new and true and strategic in religious thought. On the doctrine of organic cells and living tissues, there is surely no book over fifteen years old that is not largely worthless. A text-book on geology, it is often said, is out of date as soon as it is printed. So swift has been the advance of microscopic investigation, that our cell-theory, which began to be elaborated in 1838, has made its supreme advances since 1860. "All life from a cell:" we have heard that doctrine since 1840. "All life from bioplasm," which is the core of the organic cell, we have heard as a scientific truth since about 1860. The first physiological microscopist in the English-speaking world is now Professor Lionel Beale of King's College, London; and his work on "Protoplasm, or Matter and Life," published with elaborate original plates, some of which are of as late a date as 1874, is one of the most important contributions made to knowledge recently by any original investigator of this central question of questions, whether, when the cells of the brain are dissolved, the soul, like so much electricity developed through them, is dissipated forever.

You remember, gentlemen, that in Dresden the great picture of the Madonna di San Sisto has an interior which everywhere suggests an ineffable exterior.

Many look upon that painting, and study the hushed, shoreless awe and self-surrender of the eyes of the cherubs in the lower part of the transfigured canvas, and do not ask on what the cherubs are looking. But to cause the observer to ask that, is the chief object of this inspired part of the painting. The Madonna di San Sisto was made for an altar-piece. It was intended to stand before burning incense. In a great cathedral its place would be behind the altar, on which incense is burned to ascend to an unseen but near Holy of holies. It is on the central Ineffable Presence before the picture, and to which the incense rises, that these supernaturally intense eyes of the cherubs are looking. Santa Barbara, as you will observe, divides her adoration between the Son in the arms of the mother and the Unspeakable Unseen before him. Another kneeling figure looks toward what is within, but points to what is without. Even the eyes of the Son and the mother gather mysterious, measureless strength from the Unseen Ineffable to which the incense rises. To me, for one, that which is exterior in this most celebrated painting of all time is more impressive than that which is interior. If you look on the interior, there in the background, and not noticeable at first, but filling all the ambient air behind the mother and the Son, is a cloud made up of innumerable blissful faces of supernatural beings in eternal youth. But when at Dresden, day after day for a month, I studied the painting, I always forgot these in the Central Presence to which the incense ascends; and I went away

always in a kind of trance. I know nothing in art that moves me as much as the Unseen Holy suggested before that picture.

Will you follow me long enough to-day, my friends, to find out that this Madonna di San Sisto of Raphael, whose interior suggests an ineffable exterior, is a true analogue of the cell,- God and the soul without, inert matter within, - every movement of the latter pointing to the former as its only adequate cause. Come near enough to this Madonna painting of Almighty God, and you will be convinced that it was the purpose of the Artist to make the interior suggest the ineffable exterior. [Applause.]

When we study living matter with the highest powers of the microscope, and under the lead of the best original investigators, what does the latest science see?

1. That nothing that lives is alive in every part. 2. That the substance of every living organism consists of three parts,

(1.) Nutrient matter, or pabulum.

(2.) Germinal matter, or bioplasm.

(3.) Formed matter, or tissue, secretion and deposit.

As you stand on some murmurous shore of a tropical sea, and pick up a beautifully colored shell, with its occupant yet in it, you easily perceive a difference between the living and the not-living part of that organism. No doubt the shell grows; and yet, even while the animal bears it about upon his back, parts of the shell are as truly inanimate as they are when