Destiny (1881), The Idea of God (1885), and Through Nature to God (1899). The simplest statement of this transformed version of the old argument may be given thus.1 Here, outside of us, enclosing us, is an infinite Power,-a Power that was here before we were, that will be here after we have gone away, a Power that persists through all the countless changes of its manifestation, a Power of whose existence we are certain. This Power is the cause of Evolution-of all that Evolution has brought forth. What have we a right to think about this Power? We may take our stand the principle that no effect can contain more than the cause which produced it; and we may judge the great world-power by what it has accomplished. It has produced worldwide order, harmony, and beauty; but far more than this-it has produced life, consciousness, thought, love. Thought is; the power, then, of which Thought is a manifestation is not less than Thought. That which is the cause of Thought in the whole

upon

1 See, for example, Mr M. J. Savage's vigorous booklet, Four Great Questions.

human race must be at least equal to Thought, however it may transcend it beyond the farthest reach of our imagination. Love is; and that out of which it came cannot be something less, something poorer, something with no element of self-sacrifice in it.

These brief suggestions may suffice to show the general character of the argument from Nature to God,-in the only form in which that argument has any force at the present day.

We have said the Argument from Cause and Design, in its old form, if taken as the main approach to belief in God, belongs to an obsolete type of thought. Even if we suppose the argument to have a conclusiveness which it does not possess, it is still incapable of producing a satisfying conviction, a "real belief"; and the God whose existence is "proved" is only a Mighty Designer. The object of religious belief and worship must be something more than this he is not required only to account for the creation of the world. Hence, while the arguments of the eighteenth century

have survived, with fairly vigorous life, through the nineteenth century, there has been a rapid increase in the number of those on whose minds these arguments made little impression. Other foundations were needed to satisfy the expansive power of the poetic imagination in a Wordsworth, a Coleridge, and a Carlyle;1 to find the divine meaning of Beauty as Shelley and Keats sought for it; and to satisfy the ethical impulses of an age which quickly accomplished the Abolition of Slavery, Reform of the Criminal Code, Catholic Emancipation, and Freedom of Trade.

Other foundations have been sought for; and the most deeply significant appeal for a new source of belief rests-in the words of a modern thinker-on "a conviction of the absolute value of the ethical life." Our conception of God must be based on what we can discern in the moral nature of man, which lies at the basis of religion, and

1 The reader will remember Carlyle's attack on the notion of "proof of a God,”—“ a probable God,”—and his constant polemic against "the mechanical system of thought" to which such ideas belong.

beneath all forms of its best expressions. But if this attitude of mind is to have any meaning for us, we must understand that it rests upon a conviction which the intellect alone, exerted to its uttermost power, could never establish. I will express this conviction in the words of Frederick Robertson of Brighton. "In the darkest hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this, at least, is certain : if there be no God and no future state, yet even then it is better to be generous than to be selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than to be a coward. Blessed, beyond all earthly blessedness, is the man who in the tempestuous darkness of the soul has dared to hold fast to these venerable landmarks. Thrice blessed is he who, when all is drear and cheerless within and without, when his teachers terrify him and his friends shrink from him, has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because his night shall pass into clear bright day." This conviction, that moral goodness is not a mere utilitarian convenience or a

disguised prudence but an independent reality, is the basis of the Argument from Moral Obligation.

This argument was stated in an impressive form by Butler in his Sermons (1726) and Analogy of Religion (1736). In thus taking his stand on "the absolute value of the ethical life," in an age of Scepticism and Deism, his insight was both original and profound; but the necessities of controversy made his work rather a series of "splendid fragments" than a systematic exposition. Butler's position, as regards the Ethical factor in religious belief, is a striking anticipation of that of Kant, whose resort to ethical experience for the mainstay of belief has been described as "the most important contribution of modern philosophy towards a vital Theism." Among recent philosophical writers, this view is taken by Professor Fraser in his Gifford Lectures (1896), by Professor A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in Two Lectures on Theism and Man's Place in the Cosmos (1897), and by Professor G. H. Howison in The Conception of God (1898). These all follow the path