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simplest and easiest operation, when all its uses shall have been fulfilled, it shall vanish like a dream. There is no instance in all history of the human will and intellect having perfected any great moral reform by methods which it adapted to that end; but the progress of the world at every step leaves some evil or wrong on the path behind it, which the wisest of mankind, of their own set purpose, could never have found the way to rectify."*

Accordingly Mr. Hawthorne's recommendation to the people of the Northern States is to acquiesce in the Southern encroachments, and trust to Providence for the removal of this foul blot on American institutions. He eulogises General Pierce as "the man who dared to love that great and grand reality-his whole united native country-better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory." And he warns the anti-slavery party, in General Pierce's name, that the evil of disunion would be certain, while the good was at "best a contingency, and (to the clear practical foresight with which he looked into the future) scarcely so much as that, attended as the movement was, and must be during its progress, with the aggravated injury of those whose condition it aimed to ameliorate, and terminating in its possible triumph,if such possibility there were,-with the ruin of two races which now dwelt together in greater peace and affection, it is not too much to say, than had ever elsewhere existed between the taskmaster and the serf."

This is the most immoral kind of political fatalism. It is true enough, and is often forgotten by philanthropists, that men can do little enough for each other's highest good by any voluntary effort. Most men who undertake such causes fall a victim not perhaps to the "mistiness" so much as to the narrow definiteness "of philanthropic theory." They forget that philanthropic tastes can only be safely humoured by those who keep constantly before their inmost hearts the exhortation, "Physician, heal thyself." But there is a wide distinction between a philanthropic cause and a concession of the barest justice to the oppressed. Measured by Mr. Hawthorne's standard, there is no criminal national custom, however oppressive, with which it would be our duty to proclaim open war. He might denounce the political advocates of any such war as sacrificing the national peace to the "mistiness of philanthropic theory." Is there, then, no distinction in moral sacredness between the claims of schemes. for doing good to others,-little good of the deeper kind as we can do for any but ourselves,-and the duty of removing obstructions which entirely blot out the proper voluntary existence of other men? Is the duty of restoring moral freedom to a whole race to be classed as one of the doubtful visionary phi* Life of Franklin Pierce, pp. 113, 14. † Ibid. p. 31. Ibid. pp. 111, 12.

lanthropies of modern times? Is it not obvious that, little as we may be able to organise mutual spiritual help of the higher kind, we are most fearfully competent to organise mutual moral injury of the lowest kind, and that slavery is one of the grandest of diabolic devices for that end? We do not say that Mr. Hawthorne is bound to be an anti-slavery agitator. We do say that he prostitutes the noblest speculative faculties when he attempts to perpetuate a fearful national crime, on the dishonest plea that those who strive to resist its extension and to limit its duration are endangering the Union for the sake of a "misty philanthropic theory.' The fatalism which Mr. Hawthorne rather suggests than advocates in Transformation, when he presents sin as the necessary condition of moral growth, receives a terrible elucidation when he calmly deprecates all impatient criticism of the providential "uses" of slavery as if they were the affair of Providence alone. When men cease to cling to the abuses of slavery, and are indifferent to the gratification which it affords to many of man's worst passions, we may look to see the Providential uses of slavery pretty easily disposed of.

We need scarcely apologise for treating Mr. Hawthorne as something more than a mere writer of fiction. His writings have a very wide and justly-deserved influence in America; for as a literary artist, if not in mere rough genius, he may safely be considered almost the first, and quite the highest, fruit of American culture. He has himself recognised the close connection between the political and literary condition of nations in his plea that America is too happy, too prosperous, too free "from any picturesque and gloomy wrong," to be made the scene of a romance. Let us sum up our criticism on his literary deficiencies in a single sentence by expressing our conviction, that if he conceded less to his "squeamish love of the beautiful,” if he could cultivate a deeper sympathy with action and its responsibilities, he would not only begin to take some interest in the removal of wrongs that are gloomy enough without being picturesque, but might widen greatly the range of his artistic power, and deepen indefinitely the spell of the fascination which he wields over his countrymen.

ART. X.-NATURE AND GOD.

The present Relations of Science to Religion: a Sermon preached on Act Sunday, July 1, 1860, before the University of Oxford, during the Meeting of the British Association. By Rev. Frederick Temple, D.D., Head-Master of Rugby School. Oxford and London, 1860.

The Correlation of Physical Forces. By W. R. Grove, M.A., F.R.S. Second Edition. London, 1850.

The Mutual Relations of the Vital and Physical Forces. By Dr. Carpenter (Philosophical Transactions, 1850).

Principles of Human Physiology. By Dr. Carpenter. Fifth Edition, 1855.

The Order of Nature, considered in reference to the Claims of Revelation." By Rev. Baden Powell, M.A., F.R.S., &c. London, 1859.

The Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the Views of Mr. Darwin and others, that the Progression of Organisms is determined by Law. By Prof. Draper, M.D., of New York. Communicated to the Zoological Section of the British Association (Athenæum, July 14, 1860).

Glimpses of the Heaven that lies about us. By T. E. Poynting. London, 1860.

THE two brothers Humboldt, it is well known, applying each a fine genius to different pursuits, diverged in their convictions with regard to the supreme objects of thought and faith. William, in sympathy with the life of humanity, studious of its expression in language, in literature, in law, and in all the vicissitudes of civilisation, never lost the traces of a Divine Government over the world, and even in the superstitions of mankind saw only a barbarous jargon attempting an eternal truth. Alexander, at home in the great Kosmos, familiar with the ways of Nature from her rude Titanic workshops to her finest harmonies of life, significantly declared himself to be of "the religion of all men of science." That his implication of all men of science" in his own negative doctrine is far too sweeping, not less so, indeed, than the Bishop of Oxford's counterpart assertion that "no men great in science favour Mr. Darwin's hypothesis," is evident not only from the older examples of Newton, Boyle, Cuvier, and Davy, but from many of the newest representative names, Oersted, Herschel, Owen, Faraday. Still, there is ample evidence of a certain general tendency in Natural Science to foster habits of thought embarrassing to religious conviction. On a first view it certainly

appears strange that the men most conversant with the Order of the visible universe should soonest suspect it empty of directing Mind; that they should lose their first faith on the very field where natural theology gleans its choicest instances of design and on the other hand, that humanistic, moral, and historical studies,-which first open the terrible problems of suffering and guilt and contain all the reputed provocatives of denial and despair,-should confirm and enlarge, rather than disturb, the prepossessions of natural piety. The result, however, ceases to be paradoxical, on closer inspection of the relation between physical and moral knowledge.

The jealousy between natural science and religion is of very long standing. From the time of Anaxagoras onward, every attempt to explain by secondary causes phenomena previously unreduced has been regarded as an audacious wresting of some province from the gods. And, on the other hand, as early at least as Epicurus, the investigators of nature began to tolerate the reference to Divine agency merely as a provisional necessity, to be superseded in each field as it was explored, and serving only as a decent disguise for our residuary ignorance. The dialogue of the De Natura Deorum exhibits, in the persons of Balbus and Velleius, the same rivalry between Theology and Physics which often animates the Section-rooms of the British Association. The antiquity of the controversy attests its deep-seated origin, in causes beyond the range of the Biblical records and the peculiarities of the Christian doctrine. The Scriptures, in the presence of the Baconian logic, have merely encountered the inevitable fate of any inflexible litera scripta existing side by side with ever-widening inductions. A consecrated theory of the phenomenal universe, embodying the perishable imaginations of one age or people, necessarily blends with every religion, however charged with essential and inspired truth; and, as necessarily, comes to be discredited as discovery extends, till it has to be discharged from its spiritual receptacle. The series of questions on which the conflict has been renewed in modern times between the closed "Word" and the opening Works of God is as long as the chain of inductive sciences themselves; and the result has been invariable,-the patience of nature overcoming the authoritative plea of miracle. Copernicus, in spite of the hierarchy, has cried with more effect than Joshua, "Sun, stand thou still!" Ships are daily chartered to those Antipodes which Lactantius declared to be impossible, and Augustine unscriptural, and Boniface of Metz, beyond the latitude of salvation. Witchcraft, so long preserved by the Mosaic Law among our list of crimes, has disappeared from every European code; and demoniacal possession in mania

and epilepsy, though in the Gospels giving form to the miracles and evidence to the Messiahship of Christ, has been unable to hold its ground against the exorcism of the College of Physicians. The common parentage of the human race, already rendered distasteful by Prichard's suggested probability of a black Adam and Eve, has become an open question with the advance of ethnology, notwithstanding the absolute dependence upon it of the whole scheme of ecclesiastic theology. The tower of Babel faded into a myth, as the affinity of languages was better understood. Egypt, so long measured by the patriarchal chronology, and cowed by the song of Moses and Miriam, has at last taken a strange revenge upon her fugitives, by discrediting their traditions, and exposing the proofs of her dynasties and arts beyond the verge of their Flood, nay, prior to their Eden. The terrestrial cosmogony of Genesis, in spite of all the clamps and holdfasts of a perverted exegesis, has long been knocked to pieces by the geologic hammer. And now it would seem doubtful whether, even with regard to the specific types of organised beings, the idea of sudden creation may not have to be altogether relinquished in favour of a principle of gradual modification.

One by one, these questions may be determined and pass away. And if this were all, a mere glance at the past results, without appealing to the supreme security of truth, ought to tranquillise all religious alarms: for who that has in him any intelligent image of our modern Kosmos would think it "for the glory of God" to have back again the little three-storied, or seven-storied structure, in which the Hebrew and early Christian imagination found room and time for every thing, earthly, devilish, and Divine? Every thing has turned out grander in the reality than in the preconception: the heavens that open to the eye of a Herschel, the geologic time whose measures direct the calculations of a Lyell, the chain of living existence whose links are in the mind of a Hooker, Agassiz, or Darwin, infinitely transcend the universe of Psalmist's song and Apocalyptic vision. However obstinate the battle may seem to be on each of these particular points, as it arises, the combatants again and again fight out a peace at last :—why, indeed, should the theologian object to find the scene of Divine Agency larger, older, more teeming with life, than he had thought? But all these collisions have a significance far deeper than the special topic of each occasion. They are signs of a more fundamental conflict, whose essence remains when they are set at rest;—of a real, ultimate, irreducible difference, easily mistaken for contradiction, between the whole scientific and the whole religious mode of approaching and viewing the external world.

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