Theism

The so-called law of sexual selection, if it be a law at all, is obviously teleological in its nature. Its end is the production of beauty in form and colour. Can blind physical forces, if not subservient to intelligence, be conceived of as working towards so essentially ideal a goal as beauty?

I think enough has now been said to show that the researches and speculations of the Darwinians have left unshaken the design argument. I might have gone farther if time had permitted, and proved that they had greatly enriched the argument. The works of Mr Darwin are invaluable to the theologian, owing to the multitude of "beautiful contrivances" and "marvellous adjustments" admirably described in them. The treatises on the fertilisation of orchids and on insectivorous plants require only to have their legitimate conclusions deduced and applied in order to be transformed into treatises of natural theology. If Paley's famous work be now somewhat out of date, it is not because Mr Darwin and his followers have refuted it, but because they have brought so much to light which confirms its argument.34

I have challenged the theology of Mr Darwin, and those who follow his guidance in theology. I have no wish to dispute his science. I pass no judgment on his theories so far as they are scientific theories. It may be safely left to the progress of scientific research to determine how far they are true and how far erroneous. We ought not to assail them needlessly, or to reject the truth which is in them, under the influence of a senseless dread that they can hurt religion. In so far as they are true, they must be merely expressions of the way in which Divine intelligence has operated in the universe. Instead of excluding, they must imply belief in an all-originating, all-foreseeing, all-foreordaining, all-regulative intelligence, to determine the rise and the course and the goal of life, as of all finite things. That intelligence far transcends the comprehension of our finite minds, yet we apprehend it as true intelligence. It is no blind force, but a Reason which knows itself, and knows us, and knows all things, and in the wisdom of which we may fully confide, even when clouds and darkness hide from us the definite reasons of its operations. We can see and know enough of its wisdom to justify faith where sight and knowledge are denied to us. Let us trust and follow it, and, without doubt, it will lead us by a path which we knew not, and make darkness light before us, and crooked things straight.

LECTURE VII

MORAL ARGUMENT – TESTIMONY OF CONSCIENCE AND HISTORYI

We have seen how the power manifest in the universe leads up to God as the First Cause, the all-originating Will. We have seen also how the order manifest in the universe leads up to Him as the Supreme Intelligence. But there is more in the universe than force and order; there is force which works for good, and a just and benevolent order; there are moral laws and moral actions, moral perceptions and moral feelings. Can anything be thence inferred as to whether God is, and what He is? I think we shall find that they clearly testify both as to His existence and character.

The moral law which reveals itself to conscience has seemed to certain authors so decisive a witness for God, that all other witnesses may be dispensed with. Kant, who exerted his great logical ability to prove that the speculative reason in searching after God inevitably loses itself in sophisms and self-contradictions, believed himself to have found in the practical reason or moral faculty an assurance for the Divine existence and government capable of defying the utmost efforts of scepticism. Sir William Hamilton has also affirmed that "the only valid arguments for the existence of God, and for the immortality of the human soul, rest on the ground of man's moral nature." Dr John Newman has insisted that conscience is the creative principle of religion, and has endeavoured to show how the whole doctrine of natural religion should be worked out from this central principle. A well-known living theologian of Germany, Dr Schenkel, has attempted to build up a complete theology on conscience as a basis, starting from the position that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul" – the faculty through which alone we have an immediate knowledge of God. These thinkers may have erred in relying thus exclusively on the moral argument – I believe that they have – but the error, if error there be, shows only the more clearly how convincing that argument has seemed to certain minds, and these assuredly not feeble minds.

There is, besides, valuable truth underlying any exaggerations into which they may have fallen on the subject. There is probably no living practical belief in God which does not begin with the conscience. It is not reasoning on a first cause, nor even admiration of the wisdom displayed in the universe, which makes the thought of God habitually and efficaciously present to the mind. It is not any kind of thinking nor any kind of feeling excited by the physical universe or by the contemplation of society, which gives us an abiding and operative sense of God's presence, and of His relationship to us. It is only in and through an awakened and active conscience that we realise our nearness to God – His interest in us, and our interest in Him. Without a moral nature of our own, we could not recognise the moral character and moral government manifested by Him. We might tremble before His power, or we might admire His skill, but His righteousness would be hidden from us, His moral laws would be meaningless to us, and their sanctions would be merely a series of physical advantages or physical disasters. But a God without righteousness is no true God, and the worship which has no moral element in it is no true worship. As, then, it is only through the glass of conscience that the righteousness of God can be discerned, and as that attribute alone can call forth, in addition to the fear, wonder, and admiration evoked by power and intelligence, the love, the sense of spiritual weakness and want, and the adoring reverence, which are indispensable in true worship – such worship as God ought to receive and man ought to render – the significance of the moral principle in the theistic argumentation is vast indeed.

It follows, however, from the entire course of the reasoning in which we have been engaged, that the moral argument is not to be exclusively relied on. It is but a part of a whole from which it ought not to be severed. It cannot be stated in any valid form which does not imply the legitimacy of the arguments from efficiency and order. If other facts do not refer us back to a primary case, neither will moral facts lead us to the primary moral agent. If order is no evidence of intelligent purpose, moral order can be no evidence of moral purpose. The moral argument proves more, but also less, than the arguments which have been already expounded. It shows us that God is endowed with the highest moral excellence, and is the source of moral law and of moral government, but it does not prove Him to be the Creator of the universe or the Author of all order in the universe. It contributes to the idea of God an essential element, without which that idea would be lamentably defective, but it supposes other elements also essential to be given by other arguments. The office of bearing witness to the existence and character of God can be safely devolved on no one principle alone, even although that principle be conscience. It is a work in which all the principles of human nature are privileged to concur. Either all bear true testimony, or all have conspired to deceive us. The self-manifestation of God is addressed to the entire man, and can only be rightly apprehended by the concurrent action of all the energies and capacities of the soul.35

It is, perhaps, especially important in conducting the moral argument to ask ourselves distinctly, Whence ought we to begin? Is there any point, any fact or principle, which we are in reason bound to start from? Inattention to this preliminary inquiry has caused many to try to look at moral facts en masse, as it were, and to endeavour to draw an inference from them in virtue of something common to them all. This can only lead to confusion and error. Moral facts are of two radically distinct classes, and cannot be comprehended under any higher generalisation, which can be taken as the foundation of a theistic inference. The facts need to be distributed and interpreted – to have their characters discriminated; and we must begin with the principle by which this is done – that is, with conscience itself. We need no more attempt to judge of moral qualities without reference to our moral perceptions and feelings – to the information given us through conscience – than to pass a judgment on colours before seeing them, or irrespective of how they appeared to us when we saw them. If we look at the moral facts of the universe from any outside point of view – not from that of conscience – how can we escape ascribing the evil as well as the good to God, and trying His character either from both or from the preponderance of the one over the other? But if we do so, – if we seek to rise to God through an induction from all moral facts – we shall form a miserable notion of God, and we shall, besides, ride rough-shod, as it were, over conscience. For what is it that conscience declares most clearly about moral good and evil, right and wrong? Is it not that they are radically antagonistic – irreconcilable and contradictory, – that they cannot have the same ultimate author – that if the one be the expression of God's will, the other must be the expression of His aversion? If conscience have any testimony to give about God at all, it is that, as the author of good, He must be the enemy of evil. The contemplation of the moral world may perplex us, but conscience is an assurance that evil, however perplexing, is not to be referred to the same source as good.

The testimony of conscience on behalf of God has been presented in various ways, and it need not surprise us to find some of them unsatisfactory. I regard as unwarranted the view that conscience is "the religious organ of the soul," the sole faculty through which the human mind is in contact and communion with God. There is no one specific power or organ of the mind in virtue of which exclusively man is a religious being. It is by the whole make and constitution of his nature, not by a particular faculty, that he is framed for religion. I more than question if we have a right even to ascribe to conscience an immediate intuition of God. It brings us, some have affirmed, in a strict and positive sense into the real presence of God, with nothing intervening between us and Him – He as the absolute personality standing sharply and distinctly over against our personality. This doctrine has, however, one obvious and serious difficulty before it. Conscience – that is a word which has got in ordinary use a very clear and definite meaning. We all know what conscience is as well as we know what the eye or the ear is, and we all know what an act of conscience is as well as we know what seeing or hearing is. It is not more certain that by the eye we see colours, and that by the ear we hear sounds, than that by conscience we discern good and evil. When, therefore, any man comes and assures us that through conscience we have an immediate apprehension of God, it is natural that we should answer at once, You may as well assure us that through sight we immediately hear sounds or smell odours. What we immediately apprehend through conscience is the right or wrong in actions, and therefore not God. Morality is the direct object of conscience; God can therefore only be the presupposition or postulate of conscience, – can only be given in conscience as implied in morality. This, I say, is an obvious objection to the assertion that God is immediately known in conscience. It is an objection which has not been got over, and which, I believe, cannot be got over.36

The argument from conscience, like all the other theistic arguments, is extremely simple. It is the obvious inference from the most obvious facts of our moral consciousness. It demands of us no subtle analysis of conscience. It is not dependent on the truth of some one particular theory as to the origin of conscience. It is based directly on what cannot be denied or disputed, – the existence of conscience, the existence of certain moral judgments and feelings common to the experience of all men. Conscience exists. It exists as a consciousness of moral law; as an assertion of a rule of duty; as a sense of responsibility. When it pronounces an action right, it does so because it recognises it to be conformed to law; when it pronounces an action wrong, it does so because it recognises it to fall short of or to transgress law. It acts as the judge of all that we do, and as such it accuses or excuses, condemns or approves, punishes or rewards us, with a voice of authority, which we may so far disregard, but the legitimacy of which we cannot dispute. It claims to rule over body and soul, heart and mind, all our appetites, affections, and faculties; and the claim is implicitly admitted even by those who have most interest in denying it. But it does not rule, nor pretend to rule, as an autocratic authority; it does not give us, nor pretend to give us, a law of its own: on the contrary, it claims to rule in us only in virtue of recognising a law which is over us; its authority is derived wholly from a law which it interprets and applies, but does not create. It thus speaks not of itself but as the deputy of another. It unequivocally declares itself a delegated authority. Some may say that the law of conscience is set by man's own will, and that the will is a law unto itself; but this assertion cannot bear examination. The will apart from reason and conscience is a mere force, not a true will. It has a rational law only through its connection with reason, a moral law only through its connection with conscience. Whoever affirms that the will is its own law must grossly abuse language, and signify by the term will what others mean by reason and will, conscience and will. He must do worse than this, bad as it is. He must contradict the plain dictates of his own consciousness. The will and its law are distinctly felt to be not one but two. The will is clearly realised in our moral experience as not legislative, as not giving itself a law but as being under a law, the law which conscience apprehends. To identify the will and its law is to confound entirely distinct things. For the will to rule the will, it would need at once to command and to obey, to be bond and free, dependent and independent. To be its own rule were for it to be without rule. Conscience claims to rule my will in virtue of a law which cannot be the expression of my will, and which cannot be anything else than the expression of another will; one often in antagonism to mine – one always better than mine – one which demands from me an unvarying and complete obedience. It comes to me and speaks to me in defiance of my will; when my will is set against hearing it, and still more against obeying it; when my will is bent on stifling and drowning its voice. It warns, threatens, condemns, and punishes me, against my will, and with a voice of authority as the delegate or deputy of a perfectly good and holy will which has an absolute right to rule over me, to control and sway all my faculties; which searches me and knows me; which besets me behind and before. Whose is this perfect, authoritative, supreme will, to which all consciences, even the most erring, point back? Whose, if not God's? Those who object that this argument is a mere verbal inference, or that it rests on a double meaning of the word law, do not understand it, simple as it is. They may be honest enough disputants, but their objection is strangely superficial. In the utterly irrelevant criticism of a word they lose sight of a great fact, and so necessarily fail to perceive its momentous significance. From no mere word, whether law or any other, but from that consciousness of moral dependence which no moral creature can shake off, which conscience implies in every exercise, which reveals itself in a thousand ways in the hearts and lives of men, do we conclude that there is One on whom we morally depend, that we have a holy Creator and Judge to deal with. Reason takes no mere name, but it takes the fact that man feels himself under a law of duty, that he is conscious of obligation and responsibility, that he has a conscience which does not counsel but which commands him to do what is right and to resist what is wrong; and it finds this fact inexplicable, this consciousness a delusion, this conscience a false witness – unless there be a holy God, a Moral Governor.

Conscience reveals a purpose as well as declares a law. Its very existence is a proof of purpose. The eye is not more certainly given us in order that we may see, than conscience is given us in order that we may use all our powers in a righteous and beneficent manner. Is it conceivable that any other than a righteous God would have bestowed on us such a gift, such a faculty? Would an intelligent but unrighteous God have made us to hate and despise what is characteristic of his own nature? Would he have made us better than himself? The purpose which conscience reveals is certainly not our own purpose, just as the law which it declares is not the law of our own will. The purpose which finds its expression in conscience, and our own purpose, are often felt by us to be in direct antagonism. Our souls may be tortured by the conflict between them. But in all phases of the conflict we are sensible that it is our purpose which ought to be abandoned; that the purpose which we dislike is that which we are bound to accept and to obey. In this way, also, conscience speaks to us of a righteous God by speaking in His name. If the inference from effect to cause, from manifestation of purpose to intelligence, is good anywhere, it is good here; and it warrants us to believe that the First Cause of conscience is a righteous Being.37

All the feelings, emotions, and affections which gather around the apprehension of right and wrong, which accompany the sense of duty or conviction of obligation, point to the same conclusion. The consciousness of good or ill desert, remorse and self-approval, moral hopes and fears, concur in referring to a holy God. They imply that man is a person related not merely to things and laws, but to another person who is his rightful and righteous Judge. The atheist himself, when he grieves even for secret and private sins, or enjoys the inner peace which only his own heart knoweth, mourns and rejoices as if in the presence of a higher personal Being – the God whom he denies. Neither his sorrow nor his satisfaction is fully intelligible if his soul have before it only an impersonal law or the abstract nature of things; both presuppose that he has some kind of consciousness of being under the cognisance of a Person possessed of moral attributes. If men felt that they were responsible for their evil thoughts and words and deeds to no one higher than themselves or their fellows, is it conceivable that the consciousness of guilt and the fear of retribution would have been what experience and history testify them to have been? Would prayers and penances and sacrifices have prevailed so widely, if the law of right and wrong when broken had been merely felt to be broken – if there were no underlying sense of the existence of One behind the law whose righteousness must be satisfied, and whose wrath must be turned away by the breaker of the law? Would there have been in that case any moral conflicts in the human heart akin to those which a Sophocles or a Shakespeare has delineated? Were there no God, there ought to be no fear of God awakened even by crime; but atheism itself cannot protect a criminal when alive to his guilt from being haunted and appalled by fears of a judgment and a justice more terrible than those of man. When we are perfectly willing to bear any pain which the mere laws of nature attach to our sins, and when our reason assures us that we have nothing to fear on account of them from the law or even the opinion of society, why, if our moral natures are not seared and deadened, do we yet fear, and fear most when most alone? "Inanimate things," says Dr Newman, "cannot stir our affections; these are correlative with persons. If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same seeming serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on one receiving praise from a father, – we certainly have within us the image of some person to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away. These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being; we are not affectionate towards a stone, nor do we feel shame before a horse or a dog; we have no remorse or compunction in breaking mere human law: yet, so it is, conscience excites all these painful emotions, confusion, foreboding, self-condemnation; and, on the other hand, it sheds upon us a deep peace, a sense of security, a resignation, and a hope, which there is no sensible, no earthly object to elicit. 'The wicked flees, when no one pursueth;' then why does he flee? Whence his terror? Who is it that he sees in solitude, in darkness, in the hidden chambers of his heart? If the cause of these emotions does not belong to this visible world, the Object to which his perception is directed must be Supernatural and Divine; and thus the phenomena of conscience, as a dictate, avail to impress the imagination with the picture of a Supreme Governor, a Judge, holy, just, powerful, all-seeing, retributive."38

It will, I need scarcely say, be objected to the arguments which have now been presented, that conscience is a product of association or a consequence of evolution; that it has been developed either in the experience of individuals or in the course of ages, out of sensations of pleasure and pain, out of benefits and injuries; and that the convictions and feelings implicated in it are due to the circumstances under which it has grown up and the causes which have combined to generate it. But to this it may be answered either that conscience has not been shown to have grown up by association and development out of sensuous experiences, or that even if this were proved the argument would continue good; in other words, either the truth or the relevancy of the objection may be denied. All associationist and evolutionist theories of conscience seem to many of the most competent psychologists to have failed as regards their main object, although they may admit them to contain important elements of truth. This view I share. It does not seem to me that even Mr J. S. Mill, Prof. Bain, Mr Spencer, and Mr Darwin, have been able to show that conscience contains in it nothing original. But, of course, I am aware that the vindication of my dissent would require an adequate examination of associationism and evolutionism as explanations of the origin of conscience. No such examination is here possible. Nor is it required; on the contrary, a discussion of the kind ought, I believe, to be avoided in an inquiry like the present. No psychological investigation of a difficult and delicate nature is, so far as I can judge, essentially involved in the theistic argumentation at any stage. It is certainly unnecessary in conducting the moral argument to engage in any scientific disquisition as to the origin of conscience.39 For our second or alternative answer will suffice. It does not matter, so far as our present purpose is concerned, whether conscience be primary or derivative. It exists; it bears a certain testimony; it gives rise necessarily to the thoughts and feelings which I have mentioned. Are these thoughts and feelings true? If not, conscience is a delusion; it utters lies; the completest moral scepticism is justified. If they are, the argument stands. The mode in which they have been acquired is in this reference a matter of indifference.

The argument from conscience, I may add, rests on the general and distinctive characteristics of our moral nature; not on the truth of particular moral judgments or the purity of particular moral affections. It cannot, therefore, be affected by the fact that moral perceptions and emotions admit of variation and development, and are sometimes false and depraved. However important in other respects may be the circumstance that men's thoughts and sentiments as to right and wrong are not always identical or even accordant, it is plainly irrelevant as an objection to any of the forms in which the argument for the Divine existence from the constitution of our moral nature has just been stated. It cannot be necessary to do more than merely indicate this, although some who maintain the wholly derivative nature of conscience appear to believe that the moral differences to be traced among men disprove all inferences from the moral faculty which they feel disinclined to accept.