And

in love towards God, and this arises from knowledge. the mind that rejoices in the divine love or blessedness can control its emotions. The ignorant man is agitated by external causes, and never obtains true peace of soul: whereas the wise man, conscious, by a kind of eternal necessity, of himself, of God, and of things, is always in possession of true contentment.' He concludes, 'The way must be arduous, for its discovery is so rare. If salvation could be discovered without great toil, how could it be neglected by nearly all men? But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.' Compare too, as a typical example of scientific Faith, these words of Huxley: Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, to follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses Nature leads you, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this."1 This calm cheerfulness and unshakable confidence that the truth is salvation to him who can find it, seems to me more Christian than such a mental attitude as is described by Lecky: Young men discuss religious questions simply as questions of truth or falsehood. In later life they more frequently accept their creed as a working hypothesis, a consolation in calamities, as the indispensable sanction of moral obligation, as the gratification of needs, instincts, and longings which are planted in the deepest recesses of human nature, as one of the chief pillars on which human society rests.' The American Leuba says rather irreverently that most people don't so much believe in God as use Him. But God will not be 'used' for other ulterior ends-He is either the ultimate End, or He is nothing.

as

It seems to me that we must expect that if humanity is

1 So in art, J. F. Millet says: 'We ought to be steeped in Nature, saturated with her, and careful only to think the thoughts which she inspires. All you need is intelligence and a great desire. If you abandon yourself to her service, she will give you of her store.'

progressing, the intellect must play a larger part in the life of Faith in the future than it has done in the past. In the brute creation, instinct does the work of reason-sufficiently for the very simple conditions in which the animal creation lives. And so in the spiritual life, it is natural to suppose that a kind of instinct of the Divine is implanted in the human mind as soon as it becomes human. But as humanity advances to a more complex life, and has to adjust itself to new conditions, instinct becomes unequal to the tasks laid upon it. And then appears the new faculty of reason, which acts at first haltingly and uncertainly enough, often failing us where instinct would have guided us rightly. But we must accept these difficulties of adjustment. We cannot choose to continue to be guided by instinct; for instinct begins to fail and grow weaker, wherever the potentiality of reason exists. We see it in the case of the child. The human infant is far more helpless than the young of other animals. Where instinct keeps them alive, it leaves the human child to die, unless it has guardians to take care of it, and bestow upon it an amount of attention which would be utterly impossible in the lower ranks of creation. And yet the human child is destined to advance far beyond the most intelligent of the brutes, by the aid of the faculty of reason, which is so slow to develop, and so unsafe a protector until it is more or less mature. We can trace the same law by comparing civilised man with savages. Our instincts are decidedly weaker and less protective than theirs, though our reason is so much stronger. Is it not likely that the analogy holds good in the spiritual life? The will may be more 'primary and more powerful than the intelligence; it does not follow that we ought to make the will rather than the intelligence our guide. Reason, when it has come into its own, is a far finer instrument than blind will, or instinct. When we know why a certain course is right or wrong; when we have a clear idea of what we are aiming at in our

actions, we are not less likely to act morally, and we are much more likely not to act foolishly. It seems to me that this has a practical bearing on social morality. The great danger, in this country at all events, is that we are so prone to be guided by sentiment and wilfulness instead of by reason. We may be told that this is a penalty that must be paid for popular government, since the masses will always be swayed by their emotions and desires, and never by their intellect. To this we can only answer that, if so, we are likely to find that we have paid too high a price for a political theory.

I should also like to remind the Voluntarists that desire, even more than speculative thought, is never for its own continuance, but always for its own satisfaction and consequent cessation. Unless, therefore, the will is eternally self-stultifying, eternally and necessarily disappointedwhich is the creed of Pessimism-the heaven of the will is always static in respect of its present object. In other words, the will, in seeking its own fulfilment, seeks to pass into that higher sphere where it cannot remain will pure and simple, but must pass into some higher mode of activity.

The danger of Intellectualism, as of other one-sided ideas of Faith, is that it tempts us to make a premature synthesis, perhaps leaving us in bondage to the lower categories of mechanism. There are very deep antinomies which we must accept as existing for our minds at present, though we know that they are not real or fundamental. We must take no short cuts to self-consistency by suppressing half the truth. God, for us, is both changing and unchanging, blessed and suffering, eternal and becoming. These are just the antitheses which, according to Plotinus, are transcended in the intelligible world, but not in the world of our common experience.

CHAPTER XII

THE ESTHETIC GROUND OF FAITH

BEAUTY is a quality which the Creator has impressed, in various degrees, upon nearly all His works; and the recognition of beauty is a faculty with which very many conscious creatures are endowed. We are often surprised at the symmetry and beauty which appear in the constructions of animals—for example, in the nests of birds and the honeycombs of bees; and the sexual ornaments which many birds and beasts exhibit to win the favour of their mates prove both the important part which æsthetic taste plays in modifying species, and the delicate appreciation of beautiful forms and colours which makes these elaborate decorations necessary. Examples of ornaments which to our taste are grotesque, such as the bright colours of the male mandrill in the breeding-season, are so rare as to be negligible exceptions; far more significant is the exquisite sheen of the humming-bird's wing, or the glory of the peacock's tail. Nor is the æsthetic sense of the lower animals confined to form and colour. The song of the nightingale proves that some birds are no mean musicians; and even among insects, some spiders, we are told, have to please the female by an exhibition of elegant dancing. Moreover, inanimate nature is everywhere beautiful. Even decay and corruption, which in the animal world are repulsive, are beautiful in things without sentient life.

The view taken in these lectures is that Beauty is one of the fundamental attributes of God, which He has therefore impressed upon His world. I hold it to be a quality

residing in the objects, and not imparted to them by the observer. I hold Beauty to be, like Truth and Goodness, an end in itself, for God's creation. If so, it is right and natural for Faith to acknowledge beauty, and to strengthen itself by the contemplation and practice of the beautiful. To this view two objections may be made. First, it has been argued that our enjoyment of the beautiful is nothing more than a pleasant feeling arising from our perception of usefulness. For instance, the points of beauty in a human face and figure are all signs of health, strength, intelligence, and character. In the case of a woman, those lines are also thought beautiful which indicate that she is well suited for her special functions. But this theory does not fit the facts. Many of the animal decorations, to which we have just alluded, are apparently useless,' except to give pleasure by their form and colour. And the same impossibility of reducing the beautiful to the useful is apparent throughout human experience. Illustrations of this will occur to everybody. Beauty is clearly something sui generis. Secondly, we are told that the enjoyment of beauty is purely subjective. Not only does the beautiful object require a beholder, and one who has a seeing eye, but the beauty is in our own mind, and not in what we see. Now it would be a bold theory that the beauties of a play of Shakespeare are put there by us his commonplace readers. Is it not even more absurd to suppose that our minds create the beauty of a sunset, or of a glorious action in history? Again, if the appreciation of beauty is merely subjective, there is no appeal from individual taste. It is then an impertinence to speak of good or bad taste, for there is no standard to which taste can be referred. But no one can seriously maintain that the proverb De gustibus non est disputandum has any validity in the higher regions of art, of natural beauty, or of seemliness and propriety of conduct. Moreover, the strong protest of our own consciousness against theories of subjectivity ought to be