AN ATTEMPT TO DEVELOP, ACCORDING TO SCRIPTURE-TRUTH, THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE.
The title of the book which is before the reader
will prepare him to find in it a certain sympathy with a recent one,
widely known, yet. at the same time with a difference of method which
probably will account for a very different result. And yet Prof.
Drummond has actually in his introduction anticipated that definition
of the truth as to the "Natural" to which by the adoption of it I have
committed myself here. "After all," he says,
"The true greatness
of Law lies in its vision of the Unseen. Law is the visible in the
Invisible. And to speak of Laws as natural is to define them in their
application to a part of the universe, the sense-part, whereas a wider
survey would lead us to regard all Law as essentially spiritual. To
magnify the laws of nature, as laws of this small world of ours, is to
take a provincial view of the universe. Law is great, not because the
phenomenal world is great, but because these vanishing lines are the
avenues into the eternal Order."
And he adds further on, -
"How the priority of the
Spiritual improves the strength and meaning of the whole argument will
be seen at once. The lines of the Spiritual existed first, and it was
natural to expect that when 'the Intelligence resident in the Unseen'
proceeded to frame the material universe, He should go upon the lines
already laid down. He would, in short, simply project the higher laws
downward, so that the natural world would become an incarnation, a
visible representation, a working model of the spiritual. The whole
function of the material world lies here."
Now this is in the
main so true and good, that one might wonder that the author should
after all prefer for his book the title of "Natural Law in the
Spiritual World " rather than the converse. The fact is evidently that
he takes the two propositions as identical; and why not, if natural law
is but spiritual law projected downward into nature? This really
spiritual law must then, of course, exist in the spiritual world! Yet
it is no wonder if he is a little puzzled about the limits and
spirituality of the law of gravitation! Without insisting too much on
this, it is evident that the title he has chosen implies a method, no
less than that of following the "vanishing lines" of the seen into the
unseen. An ambitious attempt certainly! My own is humbler; and for me
at least I feel safer. His method is to take nature to interpret
Scripture; and I fear we must even say, to supplement it. On my part,
with no courage but such as the child's gained from the grasp of his
father's hand, I can only seek, in the light of Scripture, to interpret
nature.
Lest I should be thought to misconceive Prof. Drummond
here - a thing very possible to any, and of which I would desire to
remember the possibility - I shall let him speak for himself, and as
his book is in so many hands, it will be abundantly easy to verify the
quotations. At the very outset indeed he tells us in his preface
expressly, that when with him "the subject-matter Religion had taken on
the method of the expression of Science, and I discovered myself," he
says, "enunciating Spiritual Law in the exact terms of Biology and
Physics," that "this was not simply a scientific colouring given to
Religion, the mere freshening of the theological air with natural facts
and illustrations. It was an entire re-casting of truth. My spiritual
world before was a chaos of facts . . . It was the one region still
unpossessed by law. I saw then why men of science distrust theology;
why those who learn to look upon law as authority grow cold to it - it
was the great Exception."
It is true that he has said just
before this "I make no charge against theology in general. I speak of
my own." But he must have forgotten this before completing the
paragraph: for surely it was not his theology only that he says the men
of science distrusted, nor indeed any particular theology, but theology
as a whole. And this distrust, he tells us, is chargeable, not to any
thing in the men of science, but distinctly to theology itself.
While his spiritual world was thus a chaos, nature alone appeared to him firm: -
"And
the reason is palpable. No man can study modern science without a
change coming over his view of truth. What impresses him about nature
is its solidity. He is there standing upon actual things, among fixed
laws." "There is a sense of solidity about a law of nature, which
belongs to nothing else in the world. Here at last, amid all that is
shifting, is one thing sure, . . . one thing that holds its way to me
eternally, uncorrupted and undefiled." "In these laws one stands face
to face with truth, solid and unchangeable."
This is plain
speaking; and surely in the presence of authority such as this, it
becomes theology to offer her neck meekly to the yoke, and accept her
master: every natural law is that! But when she asks humbly to be shown
these laws, it is somewhat disappointing to be told, -
"The laws
of nature are simply the orderly condition of things in nature, what is
found in nature by a sufficient number of competent observers. What
these laws are in themselves is not agreed. That they have any absolute
existence even is far from certain"!!
One would have thought
that here there might be some hope of escape for theology after all, if
the last be true; but the first sentence was evidently intended to cut
off the hope. A "sufficient." number of "competent" observers have, we
suppose, undertaken the government for the unseen authorities and are
themselves, no doubt, authority enough. What observers are "competent,"
and how many of these are "sufficient," would, after all, perhaps, be
relevant questions still; but they are unanswered. Probably this
reserve is to increase our respect for the authorities, a thing which
proverbially, familiarity does not always do.
This government, strange to say, is a very modern one. Nature's voice, it seems, has hitherto been "muffled."
"But now that science has made the world around articulate, it
speaks to religion with a twofold purpose. In the first place, it
offers to corroborate theology; in the second, to purify it."
The last should be first evidently: it must purify it
first, or else in the nature of things it cannot corroborate it. It is
only the revised religion that it can confirm; and to submit to be
revised is the first necessity for confirmation. Yea, -
"and while
there are some departments of theology where its jurisdiction cannot be
sought, there are others in which nature may have to define the
contents as well as the limits of belief."
Practically, the obedient subjects of such authority,
"must oppose with every energy they possess what seems to them to oppose the eternal course of things."
Doubtless., so taught, they will throw sufficient energy into
the opposition. And no wonder if by this process there should be in
result "an entire recasting of truth." "The old ground of faith,
authority," he says, "is given up." Yet what else is the testimony of a
"sufficient number of competent observers"? Is it impossible that
Scripture, with its innumerable lines of proof - "many infallible
proofs" (Acts i. 3,) - should be equally trustworthy?
Note
that through all these quotations Scripture is not suffered to appear.
We hear of Theology and Religion, the last a term vague enough to be
applied to the worship of a fetish or a crocodile, the former an
extract of some kind from Scripture, or presumed to be so, but in the
form given it by human minds. As such this is necessarily fallible, -
as fallible as "a sufficient number of competent (natural) observers,"
- and being fallible, can be opposed to the solidity of laws of nature,
without its being clear that in fact what represents these laws of
nature is an "-ology" as much as the other, - an extract distilled
through human minds. How enormous is the blunder here! Let a man say,
if he will, that Scripture is fallible, but man's science not, we know
what that means: it is honest and straightforward. If it be really only
theology that is in question, it is simple enough that theology may be
as much at war with nature, as science so-called with Scripture. There
is nothing very brilliant or calculated to provoke comment in so trite
an observation.
Eloquent as the Edinburgh professor is, and
captivating as his book surely is, - captivating for many by the truth
that undoubtedly is in it, - the error of his method manifests itself
in result unmistakably. And it is not hard to judge either how far any
true science is from justifying his results. We will leave now his
introduction, from which we have hitherto quoted almost exclusively,
and take in evidence but two or three passages from the body of the
book. Here is a very positive statement from his paper on "Conformity
to Type" (p. 297): -
"We should be forsaking the lines of nature
were we to imagine for a moment that the new creation was to be formed
out of nothing. Ex nihilo nihil - nothing can be - made out of nothing.
Matter is uncreatable and indestructible; nature and man can only form
and transform."
Notice that he is talking here of new creation
- of God's work in the soul. And yet in the face of this he quietly
says, "matter is uncreatable." then this new creation one of "matter"?
If not, why speak of this? If it be, then that which Scripture calls
creation he says is not such! And this must be held if we would not
forsake the lines of nature! "Nature and man can only form and
transform." Theology certainly never taught that nature could create:
does science teach that God cannot? How great, to be sufficient, must
the number of observers be to prove so great a negative, and what
observers should we consider "competent" for this? Is this not a
wonderful induction from the fact that it is not in man's power to
uncreate, nor in nature's to commit suicide, that therefore God cannot
create? Is it not rather unspeakable folly and impiety, let who will be
guilty of it, to force nature thus into blasphemous revolt against her
Maker? Nay, nature will not be forced: "but who art thou, O man, who
repliest against God?"
Again, in his paper on "Eternal Life,"
p. 236, he quotes approvingly from Reuss, as discovering in the
apostle's conception of life, first, -
"The idea of a real
existence, an existence such as is proper to God and to the Word; an
imperishable existence - that is to say, not subject to the
vicissitudes and imperfections of this finite world. This primary idea
is repeatedly expressed, at least In a negative form; it leads to a
doctrine of immortality, or, to speak more correctly, of life, far
surpassing any that had been expressed in the formulas of the current
philosophy or theology, and resting on conceptions altogether
different. In fact it can dispense both with the philosophical thesis
of the immateriality or indestructibility of the human soul, and with
the theological thesis of a miraculous corporeal reconstruction of our
person; theses, the first of which is altogether foreign to the
religion of the Bible, and the second, absolutely opposed to reason."
Here
we find at once the affirmation of the materiality of the soul, and the
denial of the doctrine of the resurrection: with the last of which the
apostle affirms goes overboard the entire truth of Christianity. (1
Cor. xv. 12 - 18.) And this confirms the worst meaning of the extract
made before. Annihilation is only a lesser evil accompanying it, and
this the definition of eternal life which he accepts from Herbert
Spencer distinctly corroborates, for eternal life is according to it
nothing but eternal material existence, and the whole question with
Prof. Drummond in his essay on it is, how to escape extinction at
death. That he who does not here receive eternal life must become
extinct without a resurrection, is the natural corollary.
One more extract from the essay on "Environment" (p. 281): -
"The
completion of life is now a supreme question. It is important to
observe how it is being answered. If we ask science or philosophy, they
will refer us to evolution."
And he goes on to speak of struggle for life, etc., the elements of the most extreme Darwinian form.
Thus it is plain how for our author science must purify
theology, and the iron yoke which we are called upon thus to receive.
Yet the fascination for Christians of a book that contains such things
is a proof that it appeals to something within us which needs to be
met, and that it contains also truth which must be eliminated from the
error. Here as elsewhere we must, as God by Jeremiah warns us, "take
forth the precious from the vile," that we may be as His mouth. (Jer.
xv. 19.) The vitiation of the conclusion with Prof. Drummond may be
plainly traced to error in the method. That here pursued is, as will at
once be seen, entirely different. I accept as truth, and have done long
before his book appeared, that the natural world is, in the whole of
it, as it were, an incarnation, a visible representation of spiritual
things. Nature I accept as I do Scripture as a witness for God of the
most precious kind. But here Scripture it is, not nature, that is
decisively His revelation. By His Word alone can we rightly understand
His Works; and here we have a most fruitful principle which needs only
fully to be believed and followed, to show how fruitful and valuable it
is. But, first, it needs - and it is strange that it should need, among
any who accept Scripture as of God, - to be clearly stated, and
justified from suspicion, before we look at the results to which we
shall be led by it.