"But thy dear home shall never greet thee more! A truth once uttered, that the mind would free Thou art safe! It is strange that a thoughtful mind that a susceptible heart-that a man of poetic geniuscould for a moment have deluded himself with the fancy that humanity was to be comforted in its sorrows, or strengthened for its duties, by a notion like this. No human being can be profited by being told that he will die as the brute dieth; that death will free him from pain and fear only by robbing him of all joy and love. But such is the only gospel which materialism has to offer. The system of which the first word is, In the beginning there was nothing except space and atoms, has for its last word, Eternal Death; as the system of which the first word is, In the beginning God. created the heavens and the earth, has for its last. word, Eternal Life. What man who has a mind to think can hesitate to choose between Eternal Reason and Eternal Unreason? What man who has a heart to feel can hesitate to choose between Eternal Life and Eternal Death? 1 Yet there are those who hesitate to choose; and there are those who choose wrongly. Much may be said in excuse of those who thus doubted and⚫ erred in pagan Greece and Rome. The only religions with which they were acquainted gave the most inconsistent and perverted views, both of Deity and of the world to come. If men in their abhorrence of these religions unhappily rejected all religion, we must pity them even more than we condemn them. But we live in a later and more favoured age, when God has been clearly revealed in the beauty of holiness and love, and when life and immortality have been brought to light. A higher good than the greatest of Greek or Roman. sages ever longed for has been placed within the reach of the humblest, the poorest, the least instructed. The way has been made plain by which we may be freed from fear of death, and from fear of all that lies beyond death. We can have no excuse for preferring death to life. Eternal death. ought to be no bribe to us. Light has come into the world. Let us not be among those who choose darkness rather than light. 1 See Appendix IX. LECTURE III. MODERN MATERIALISM. IN the middle ages there was little physical science and almost no materialism. This was not because there were few great minds or little mental activity in those ages, but because the human intellect was then almost exclusively occupied with religion and theology. Christianity rested on the belief that there was a God, the Creator of the universe and the Father of spirits, who had in the fulness of time made a special and perfect revelation of His character and will in Jesus Christ. Before the light and power of this belief, ancient materialism, like ancient polytheism, faded and withered away. The Christian Church in its earliest days had to battle with heathenism and Judaism, open and avowed, or with suppressed tendencies towards both, expressing themselves in the form of heresy. It had neither the time nor the inclination to busy itself directly with theories which it felt confident of being able to destroy by simply propagating itself. The Christian Fathers, down to the fall of the Roman empire, had their energies fully occupied in the defence of fundamental truths of religion, and especially of those involved in the great doctrine of the Trinity. The schoolmen sought to elaborate the faith which they had inherited into a comprehensive philosophy. Scholasticism was essentially the union, or, perhaps, rather the fusion of theology and philosophy. It proceeded on the assumption that there are not two studies, one of philosophy and the other of religion, but that true philosophy is true religion, and true religion is true philosophy. A theological philosophy was alone possible in the middle ages, and the widespread and intense interest felt in it shows how well adapted it was to meet the desires of men in those times. Medieval speculation was, as a whole, theistic and Christian; it was, as a whole, an effort to comprehend as well as to apprehend Christian truth. Even when not so it might be pantheistic, but it was not materialistic. Mohammedanism, although it was not found to be incompatible with the culture of physical science, was no less hostile to materialism than Christianity. Thus for centuries materialism had almost no existence, almost no history.1 1 See Appendix X. With the downfall of scholasticism and the emancipation of the mind from ecclesiastical authority, materialistic tendencies began to manifest themselves; but it is late even in modern. times before we reach a completely materialistic system. Lord Bacon ranked Democritus higher than Aristotle, but he was no materialist; he simply regarded the atomic hypothesis as luminous and fruitful. "I had rather," he wrote, "believe all the fables in the legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without Mind; and therefore, God never wrought miracles to convince atheism, because His ordinary works convince it. It is true, a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion; for while the mind of man looketh upon the second causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no farther; but when it beholdeth the chain of them confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity. Nay, even that school which is most accused of atheism doth most demonstrate religion-that is the school of Leucippus, and Democritus, and Epicurus; for it is a thousand times more credible, that four mutable elements and one immutable fifth essence, duly and eternally placed, need no God, than that an army of infinite small portions, or seeds unplaced, |