Christianity, engaged in establishing immediate relations between Man and God, takes little notice of Nature; which might in fact be absent altogether without material injury to a scheme pervadingly supernatural; and which was actually to vanish in order to the final realisation of the Divine purpose for Humanity. The defining lines of the religion run, so to speak, overhead of Nature, and pass direct from spirit to Spirit: Given, the human consciousness of sinful need and the sigh for holy life; given also, the Divine response of forgiveness, rescue, and communion; and the essential idea is constituted. The circle of thought and feeling which it collects around it has only a negative relation to the outward Kosmos, and finds Nature rather in its way. Still, when compelled to look the visible world in the face and recognise it as the depository of some permanent meaning, Christianity, like all pure and spiritual Theism, can only regard the universe as the manifestation and abode of a Free Mind, like our own; embodying His personal thought in its adjustments, realising His own ideal in its phenomena, just as we express our inner faculty and character through the natural language of an external life. In this view, we interpret Nature by Humanity; we find the key to her aspects in such purposes and affections as our own consciousness enables us to conceive; we look every where for physical signals of an ever-living Will; and decipher the universe as the autobiography of an Infinite Spirit, repeating itself in miniature within our Finite Spirit. The grandest natural agencies are thus but servitors of a grander than themselves: "the winds are His messengers; and flaming fire, His minister." Using Nature as his organ, He transcends it: the act in which he does so is the exercise of his own Free Volition, rendering determinate what was indeterminate before: it is thus the characteristic of such act to be supernatural: and Man, so far as he shares a like prerogative, occupies a like position; standing to that extent outside and above the realm of necessary law, and endowing with existence either side of an alternative possibility. At both ends therefore of the scheme of Kosmical order, are beings that go beyond it: all that is natural lies enclosed within the supernatural, and is the medium through which the Divine mind descends into expression and the Human ascends into interpreting recognition. The effect of this faith upon the study of objects and phenomena is obvious enough. They will be interesting, not on their own account, but as signs of the Thought which issues them: in quest of this, conjecture will turn inwards; and, taking counsel from the higher moral consciousness, will come back to them and see meanings and motives they do not contain. The

observer will be in danger of converting the universe into the mere reflection of his own conscience and emotions; of overlooking its calm neutralities; of reading some special smile in its sunshine and judgment in its storms; or, when experience and culture have rendered these simple interpretations no longer possible, of following some more elaborate, but still premature, clue of design, and losing himself in a labyrinth of misconstrued relations. The disposition of the human soul to seek for its own prototype and start at its own shadow in the outward universe, is a solemn and significant fact. But it can no more do the work of natural knowledge, than the inspection of a foreign people's expressive looks and gestures can supersede the patient study of their language,—a language formed by the working of the same feelings and ideas, yet not intelligible through mere sympathy with these. At a moment when our thirteen inches of summer rain are episcopally explained, in diocese after diocese, as a punishment of some unspecified sin, and are about to be stopped by deprecation, we can scarcely wonder at the well-known contempt with which both Bacon and Spinoza have visited the applied doctrine of Final causes.

Science, on the other hand, brings to the scrutiny of Nature quite a different order of faculty and feeling. It lays aside, as intrusive, the inner moral consciousness with its postulates and beliefs; and enters the field under pure guidance of the Perceptive and Comparing powers. It might accomplish the whole of its avowed aim, with less embarrassed speed, if the mind could actually be reduced to an unmoral, impersonal mechanism of intellectual elaboration; transfusing nothing of itself into the universe, but logically working up, in crystalline arrangements of resemblance, coexistence and succession, the phenomena given from without. This a priori limitation of its instruments involves a corresponding limitation of its field; precluding it from the whole area of free causality, and enclosing it within the range of phenomena now determinate. For the same reason, the order of its advance through this field must be ever one and the same,-from sensible particulars to related groups, from minor to major laws, from classifications with a single base to others that take account of many. Beginning with the rudest raw materials of observation,—the πρότερον πρὸς ἡμᾶς,—it carries up the rules they yield into the next rank of things, taking on some refined addition to make the expression adequate to the case; and so on, till the formula which shaped itself at the bottom of nature finds its way upward to the top, and humanity itself, as a scientific object, seems to come out as a mere culminating development of the earliest and lowest term. The hierarchy of laws which

Science constructs accomplishes the grand end, of enabling her to predict the course of nature. In part, they are direct rules of empirical and concrete succession, simply describing the order of bodies and their appearances, as in Plane Astronomy. In part, as in Physical Astronomy, they are rules combined out of the decomposed conditions of analysed phenomena. In either case, the power of prediction is attained; and equally so, whether the rules present the ipsissima vestigia of nature, as we believe to be the case with Kepler's laws, or whether, by some device of reduction and substitution, they furnish mere equivalent elements, tantamount, in all their combinations, to the natural facts. The Ptolemaic foreknowledge of eclipses was manifestly due to artifices of this latter kind: and we incline, with Adam Smith, to refer even the Celestial Dynamics of Newton to the same head. Be this as it may, the mere ability to reason out future individual phenomena by strict deduction from some equation of abstract conditions impresses us with a sense of Fate: the logical cogency of the inferential steps is mistaken for a material nexus among the objective facts and, when taken in conjunction with the uniformity revealed by inductive observation, fixes upon the scientific fancy that nightmare of Universal Necessity, beneath which every higher faith either is suppressed or cries out in agony. In a universe thus regarded there is no room for any thing but determinate phenomena: and the semblance of somewhat else in man is readily explained away, by simply throwing him in among natural objects, studying him exclusively from the outside, and disparaging the possibility or the validity of self-knowledge. Had he ever so free a causal power, its phenomena also, once summoned to exist, must be determinate, must vary with the scope and weight of his limiting conditions, must be no less open than any other facts to the statist's method of averages: so that you have only to shut the door on the inner consciousness, and restrict us to the gate where the facts come out, in order to lose witness of the supernatural in man, and draw him also within the meshes of inevitable Law.

The radical antithesis, then, between Religion and Science consists in this-that the former, proceeding on the data of our Voluntary and Moral faculties, carries a supernatural interpretation through the universe, and sees in nature the expression of affections and will like our own; while the latter, proceeding on the data of our Perceptive and Generalising faculties, discovers uniformities of phenomena, and accepts the conception of necessary law not only as the key to Nature, but as exhaustive and ultimate. Let the maxims which are self

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evident to either of these sets of faculties be applied to the sphere of the other, and the effect can only be to discredit and dissipate the objects in that sphere. If every phenomenon is the momentary expression of free volition,-if the supernatural reigns every where and alone, then is nature an illusion, and the demarcation is erased between Primary causality and Secondary law. If, on the other hand, "we know nothing but phenomena,"-if our cognitive endowments are exhausted upon "resemblances, coexistences, and successions," then is the Order of nature our only reality,-its Causality, our dream; and of God,-who is not "a phenomenon,"-we cannot rationally speak.

The most obvious way of escape from this dilemma is, to restrain the pretensions of each class of faculties within its own province, and protest against its ambition of universal empire. Let the moral and spiritual intimations, it is said, have their own authority and sustain their own beliefs; they need not be meddled with, so long as they stop at home and do not overrun the Kosmos with their theology. Let the observing and inductive tendency push on,-the mensurative and deductive calculus work out its results;-they can but give us new truth, so long as they deal only with finite things, and do not trespass upon the sphere of Personality and Infinitude. This is the tone prevailingly assumed both by liberal divines and by reverential or cautious men of science; and it suffices to establish an armistice between them which is at least an agreeable change upon open war. To this compromise Bacon habitually resorted: and quite in the sense of his philosophy it is found pervading the writings of the late lamented Baden Powell. To us, we confess, it is profoundly unsatisfactory: especially when the two separated provinces are treated, not as two independent and incommensurate kinds of knowledge or kinds of faith, but the one as knowledge, and the other as faith. Mr. Baden Powell intended, we are sure, to be not less loyal to his Christian Theism than he was to his Inductive philosophy. When, however, after volumes of proof that the universe discloses nothing but immutable law and material development, so orderly indeed as to bespeak Thought, but so inexorable as to be silent of Character, after treating the supernatural as intrinsically incognisable, and the moral and spiritual as entirely out of relation to the rational faculty, he briefly relegates us to "faith" for our grounds of religious conviction, we certainly feel that the door is rather rudely slammed in the face of our inquiry, and that we are turned out of the select society of the philosophers who know, to take our place with the plebs who believe. It is utterly destructive of the equipoise of authority between

the two spheres, to characterise the one as "knowledge," which involves objective certainty, the other as "faith," which goes no further than subjective assurance. This it was which exposed Bacon to the false, but not unnatural, suspicion of Atheism and the painful negative impression of unsolved problems, so generally left on Mr. Baden Powell's readers, is mainly due to the same crudeness of distinction. The truth is, he had effectually thought out the one side of the question which was congenial with his intellectual habits and pursuits, without gaining any corresponding command of the other and his imagination, left alone with the astounding revelations of modern science, was not simply possessed but overpowered by the conception of all-comprehending and necessary laws. A more balanced reflection would at once have shown the futility of the distinction he wished to establish. If by "faith" he meant reliance on a principle as self-evident, i. e. recommended only by its psychological necessity;-if by "knowledge," distinguished from faith, he, meant an acquired apprehension of truth on evidence other than its own ;*-then there is just as much "faith" concerned in Science as in Religion; and just as much "knowledge" in Religion as in Science. Not a step could Geometry, Arithmetic, Physics, advance without assumptions respecting Space, Time, external Substance, which are no less. pure and absolute gifts of our psychological constitution than the moral assurance of our responsibility. And in Ethics, the propositions-that it is wrong to punish an unconscious act, that extreme temptation mitigates guilt-in Religion, that the hypocrite's prayer is unavailing, that to the pure in heart God is best revealed,-are known not less certainly than in Science the place of the North from the pointing of the needle, or the recent birth of an animal from the mother's milk.

Even apart from the inexact and unequal balance maintained by Mr. Baden Powell between the rival claims, a mere compromise founded on a division of territory is intrinsically impracticable. The savant cannot help advancing his lines of thought into human and moral relations and esteeming them amenable to him. The theologian cannot help applying his faith to the universe, for the supernatural is conceivable only in relation to the natural, and the transcendency of God involves the subordination of the world. And if a man be at once savant and theologian, how is he to manage the partition of his creed? One side of him denying all knowledge but of necessity and nature, the other believing only freedom and

We do not propose these as satisfactory definitions of "faith" and “knowledge:" but the terms, if treated as mutually-exclusive opposites, appear to admit of no others. And this is the case with which we have to deal.