temptible-out of your admirations for this and that hero which have often led you up into fuller and better life, and have as often signally failed you in your hour of need-out of this, "the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world," does there not rise a strong cry for some one simple principle, eternally true, which may rule and reduce to order all this troubled scene-"O set my feet upon the rock and order my goings." Never cease to believe that there is such a principle, even though you have not found it yet. We are young, most of us; and youth is the time when within the human spirit the nobler feelings are eager and strong. But beware: it is even John Stuart Mill who says, "capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed not only by hostile influences but by mere want of sustenance; and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupations to which their position in life has devoted them are not favourable to keeping that higher capacity in excercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have not time or opportunity for indulging them." Beware: ennobling thoughts depart as men grow older; they must be rooted to-day in the very passion of believing love, or to-morrow they will be dead. And then after to-morrow, old age will find us still wandering amongst the desert wastes of human ignorance and error, saying, Alas for the golden glow which shone upon them when I was younger, and made them seem to me like a garden of flowers.

PRINTED AT THE OXFORD MISSION PRESS, CALCUTTA.

Theism.

A

LECTURE

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The following is the third of a series of four lectures. The subject of the remaining one is Christianity, which will be published as soon as possible after its delivery.

Theism.

"O that I knew where I might find Him!"

If you think of it, my friends, you will find that that aspiration of a reverent doubter of old exactly expresses the point at which we have now arrived in the course of these lectures. We came here to enquire about the truth, but we determined that we would conduct our enquiry under a deep sense of the obligation to obey it when found, else we should be almost certain to miss it. That was the subject of the first lecture. And in the second we asked of human experience to tell us whether that really exists of which we are in quest: and human experience made answer, Yes, there is Something which can satisfy all your own righteous longings after happiness, while It fulfils that most pure desire for the welfare of others which you also find within your breast: It can meet your sense of what is beautiful, It can slake your thirst for knowledge: It shall furnish you with a rule of life, as well as with the interpretation of that mysterious inner voice which you have been accustomed to call conscience: It shall do this for one, It shall do this for all. Moreover we saw reason to suppose that this supreme Truth could not be so much a thing as a Person, some One to love, as well as something to believe.

In one word, it is GOD. For what do we mean by GOD, if we do not mean at least this, supreme Truth united to supreme Love.

Dr. Martineau has said: "No ethical conceptions are possible at all except as floating shreds of detached thought, without a religious background ["religious" here used in its narrower sense, "of based on divine truth"]; and the sense of responsibility, the agony of shame, the inner reverence for justice first find their meaning and vindication in a supreme holiness that rules the world. Nor can anyone be penetrated with the distinction between right and wrong, without recognising it as valid for all free beings, and incapable of local or arbitrary change. His feeling insists on its permanent recognition and omni

present sway; and this unity in the moral law carries him to the unity of the Divine Legislator. Theism is thus the indispensable postulate of conscience, its objective counterpart and justification, without which its inspirations would be illusions, and its veracities themselves a lie."* Thus the whole course of the argument of the last Lecture leads to nothing if it does not lead to this: there is One GOD.

So to night I pass on to the further question, Can we know Him? There is one God, we believe; but "O that I knew where I might find Him!"

1. The facts of life weigh heavily upon us. We look out into the world around us, and we do not find GoD recognised in the way that we should expect if He can really be known by man. As a matter of fact many men, perhaps the majority of men, are living "without GOD in the world;" they draw the laws and motives of their conduct, such as they are, from other sources. It may be that we hardly know a single one, who professes really to live by his belief in GOD. All this has a tendency to remove GOD far away from ourselves: to make us feel that He is practically unknowable, whether we could give a philosophic account of the feeling or not.

But ought we to allow this feeling to weigh with us? In science, the method by which the physical laws are established is commonly this for a great many years a number of facts are patiently observed and recorded; some of them seem to be connected with one another, others not; at last it is seen that many of them converge in one direction; then comes a Kepler or a Newton, and makes a splendid guess, which at once gives the explanation of all these. Still there are others which remain outside, any one of which is enough to vitiate this guess or hypothesis, if it should prove to the last incapable of being brought under it; but from the position in which the hypothesis puts him, assuming it to be true, the scientific man has a far better chance of explaining these facts than he had before the hypothesis is made: and when he has so explained them, so that all the facts have a coherence and consistency which is in itself the greatest proof of the truth of his hypothesis, he justly refuses to discredit it again on the strength of some mere phenomena which it is perfectly able to account for. No scientific man gives up his belief that the earth is a globe,

* Studies of Christianity. Quoted in "Church Quarterly Review" Vol. 2.