possibility of their being mutually destructive. To consider reason to be hostile to revelation is to regard God as divided against Himself, labouring to destroy His own work. Reason is a gift of God and faith is a gift of God. Each has its own sphere. Combat between them, as Leibnitz says, is God fighting against God.' Each is necessary to man; each in its own sphere. Faith is the conviction of the heart, and it is absolutely impossible that a thesis which is opposed to it can be veritably demonstrated. Truth is That which is. I arrive at Truth through my sentiment. I put together two sentimental truths and conclude a third, the third is a rational truth. A rational truth cannot contradict a sentimental truth. That which is cannot overthrow that which is. The last Council of the Lateran, held under Leo X., established dogmatically that philosophic verity and theological verity are always in accord: "Cum verum vero minime concordicat, omnem assertionem veritati illuminatæ fidei contrariam omnino falsam esse definimus." S. Thomas Aquinas, in like manner, always full of respect for the rights of reason, concludes that the light of faith cannot eclipse the light of intelligence; and that philosophy and religion cannot be ranged in hostile ranks." How comes it about that they do clash? For practically we find philosophy attacking Christianity, and the Church arming herself against philosophy. This is the result of reason and faith attempting to invade each other's territory. If reason attempt to operate without belief of some sort. as material, it is making bricks without straw. If faith attempt to build without reason as its architect, its structure is without cement and will fall to ruins at a touch. 1 Essais de Théodicée, No. 39. 2 Concil. Lat., sess. 8. out reason. Reason is dependent on faith, and faith is helpless withA belief of some sort underlies every system of thought. If we bore as deep as we can through systems, the deepest thing we reach is an undemonstrable thesis, which is accepted and believed in as a verity. It is the primary substance which is unaffected by the most corrosive acid so long as it remains uncombined. Reason has to deal with facts, but it cannot deal with. things as facts till they have been asserted. Until they have been cognized, they are non-existent; they begin to exist relatively to our reason only when they have been cognized, that is, when they have become beliefs. Every logical act of the intellect is an assertion that something is. Each major premiss is a belief, each minor premiss is a belief; each conclusion is a belief, but this alone is a rational belief; and an argument is an enchainment of related beliefs. An hypo Belief is the distinguishing of the existent from the nonexistent, it is the predication of reality, and on this reality depends the possibility of reasoning. We may deny all other things, and yet leave our logical forms intact, but if we deny belief, with the denial, not only does the thing abolished disappear, but argument disappears as well.1 Some truths are irrational, some are rational. thesis is always irrational. The primary beliefs we start from, the identity of the exterior world with the ideas we form of it, our own personality, and the like, are irrational, but they are the basis of scientific and metaphysical argument, and the conclusions derived from the assumption of these hypotheses are rational verities. But, if we assume a God, that assumption will be an irrational truth, and we can 1 See a very able article on "The Universal Postulate," in the Westminster Review, N. S., vol. iv. 1853. deduce from it the verity of our primary beliefs, and then they become rational truths. Or, starting from these primary beliefs I may argue the existence of God, and thus His existence becomes a rational truth. In the first volume I have shewn that philosophical systems are divided into three groups; the school which starts from the exterior world, as really existing, that which argues from the reality of personal consciousness, and that of the sceptics who refused to argue from assumptions. Thus, the Ionic school and that of Pythagoras laid down the existence of the Universe as an indisputable fact. The Eleatics distinguished the essence of being from phenomena. Protagoras made man the measure of all things, and Socrates and Plato followed his lead. The same antagonism reemerged in the Epicurean and Stoic schools, and the new sceptics trod them both under foot with a denial of the first axiom of both, declaring that it was sheer impossibility to arrive at truth from internal consciousness or from sensible observation. Descartes re-affirmed the conscient self as the only true foundation on which philosophy could be reared; Hobbes and Hume place all knowledge in the evidence of the senses; Kant returned to the Cartesian thesis, and rooted his system in rational intuition. Fichte and Hegel continued his work. The Positivists, at once inconsistent and Catholic, despairing of attaining Truth by metaphysical argument, reject all evidence that is not sensibly knowable, and then accept both reason and sensation as the criteria of truth, and base their philosophy, not on one, but on two undemonstrable hypotheses. Christianity is, in like manner, based on hypotheses which are beyond the possibility of demonstration, without assuming other hypotheses. If I take the Incarnation as an irrational verity, I can argue from it to other truths which are rational. Or starting from the existence of the world and the facts of human nature, I can argue up to it. My course, in the first five chapters, has been to shew from the constitution of man and his nature that such a dogma is essential to him. In the sequel I shall argue from the Incarnation to its logical consequences. But before proceeding with my argument, I wish to say a few words which may remove some of the difficulties besetting the conciliation of the rational idea of God, and the sentimental Ideal. According to the hypothesis Christ harmonizes both; that is, in Him both are true. The rational conception of God is that He is; nothing more. To give Him an attribute is to make Him a relative God. The sentimental conception of God is that He is the perfection of relations; the tendency of sentimentalism is to deny that He is absolute. Both are true and both are false; both are true in their positive assertions, both are false in their negations. Before the world was, God was the Absolute, inconceivable save as being. We cannot attribute to Him any quality, for qualities are inconceivable apart from matter. Properly speaking, the name of God is not to be given to the Absolute before creation; the Absolute is the only philosophical name admissible, and that is unsatisfactory, for it is negative; but the idea of God before matter was must be incomprehensible by material beings. This transcendent principle, superior to the world and to all thought, is the fixed, immanent, immutable Being, force in vacuum, unrealized, unrevealed. By love, the Absolute calls the world into being, and becomes God, that is-let me be clearly understood-He is at once absolute and relative, and as relative He is God, and clothes Himself in attributes. Towards creation He is good, wise, just; nay, the perfection of goodness, wisdom and justice, the Ideal of the heart. The creation is the first step, the Incarnation is the second. The first leads necessarily to the second; it is the passage from relations simple to relations perfect; it is the bringing within the range of man's vision the Divine Personality. I know that the question has been ventilated, whether personality implies limitation, and therefore makes it impossible for the Deity to be a person. It has been asserted that to precise the idea of I-myself is to distinguish one's self from others; and that, as nothing can exist outside of God, God cannot distinguish Himself from other things, and therefore He cannot be personal. But to this I answer, that our ideas of personality are purely relative. Human thought can only attain God in His relations to the world, and the limits of our knowledge are not the boundaries of reality. If one wishes to make the personality of God an express philosophical proposition, without abandoning the idea of personality being necessarily relative, one may say that God constituted Himself a person by the act of creation. Those who deny the divine personality probably deny creation. God is not a person in the human sense, which is exclusive of other personalities. He is immutable, all-inclusive, absolutely free, intelligent and loving, that is, He is personal, because the world exists, and by its existence He becomes relative. Thus, the proposition that every personality is limited and relative does not exclude the Divine personality. But this thesis, taken in itself, is very contestable; it reposes H |