Sheehan. Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine

CONTENTS 

INTRODUCTORY 

CHAPTER PAGE [] 

Section I.-NATURAL APOLOGETICS 

CHAPTER I.-THE EXISTENCE OF GOD 

CHAPTER II.-THE HUMAN SOUL: ITS SPIRITUALITY AND IMMORTALITY .: 49 

CHAPTER III.-NATURAL RELIGION: ITS INSUFFICIENCY, PROBABILITY OF REVELATION 59 

Section II.-CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS 

CHAPTER IV.-THE SIGNS OF REVELATION: MIRACLES AND PROPHECY 68 

CHAPTER V.-THE HISTORICAL VALUE OF THE GOSPELS, THE ACTS OF THE CTS OR THE APOST APOSTLES, AND THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL SPA .. 74 

CHAPTER VI.-JESUS CHRIST CLAIMED TO BE GOD 84 

CHAPTER VII.-JESUS CHRIST, TRUE GOD

Section III.-САТНОLIC APOLOGETICS 

CHAPTER VIII.-JESUS CHRIST FOUNDED A CHURCH 

CHAPTER IX.-THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CHURCH FOUNDED BY CHRIST 130 

CHAPTER X.-THE IDENTIFICATION OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST 141 

CHAPTER XI.-THE CHURCH'S INFALLIBILITY 176 

CHAPTER XII.-ТHЕ TEACHING AND GOVERNiNG AutHORITY OF THE CHURCH 180 

CHAPTER XIII.-ТHE CHURCH-THE STATE-THE FAMILY 

CHAPTER XIV.-FAITH 208 

INDEX. 2

APOLOGETICS INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 

I. Apologetics defined; its aim is to prove the Divine Authority of the Catholic Church; its study, a duty and a discipline. The nature of its proof; its proof, conclusive but not coercive. 

II. The two methods of proof:-(1) the more elaborate method, arguing from the New Testament as history: (2) the simpler The more elaborate method, adopted in the body of the text; reasons. The simpler method, followed in the Appendix to method, arguing from our knowledge of the Church herself.- this Chapter. 

III. The relation of Apologetics to Faith. Appendix. Proof by the simpler method that the Catholic Church is the living work of God: arguments from her miraculous unity in government, faith, and worship; from the heroic i t faith and worshin from the beroic sanctity of so many of her children; and from her miraculous stability. 

I Apologetics. DEFINITION.-Apologetics is the science concerned with the defence of the Catholic religion. Its aim is to prove from reason the Divine Authority of the Catholic Church. Advancing through a series of connected truths, it concludes that the one and only guide of faith on earth is the Catholic Church, Holy and Infallible. It leads unbelievers to the portals of the House of God, and bids them enter. Within, they hear the Catholic Doctrine, Christ's message to them interpreted by His living representative.¹

ITS STUDY FOR CATHOLICS: A DuTy aNd A DISCIPLINE. -While still in the Primary School, we grasped the truth that our faith in the Church and her teaching is a reasonable faith. We were shown that it is defended by two convincing arguments, which were put before us in some brief form, such as the following :-(1) "Christ the Son of God founded a Church to teach all mankind. He promised to be with her all days even to the end of the world. Because of this perpetual help, His Church must claim to teach men as He taught them: she must claim to be infallible in her teaching. The Catholic Church is the only religious body in the world that makes that claim. She alone therefore is the Church founded by Christ."-(2) "The great antiquity of the Catholic Church, her marvellous growth, her unconquerable stability, her wondrous holiness, her inexhaustible fruitfulness in all charitable works, her power of holding her vast following together in solid unity, so that, in spite of all manner of differences in race and culture and ambitions, they remain ever one in faith, in worship, in obedience it is the combination of all these characteristics that sets the Church quite apart from merely human institutions and marks her plainly as the work of God." But, as we advance in secular knowledge, so also we should advance in our knowledge of our holy religion; we should seize the full content and plumb the depth of these simple proofs: we should familiarize ourselves with the whole net-work of argument by which our faith is defended. The age in which we live is hostile to God, to Christ, and to His Church; it is our duty, therefore, to master the proofs set forth in Apologeties, so that we may have a fuller vision of the reasonableness of our faith, of the enormous strength of its defences, and of the weakness of the objections alleged against it; it is our duty to remove temptation from our path, and to fortify ourselves against the spirit of infidelity that infects the very air we breathe; it is our duty to acquire sufficient enlightenment to enable us, at need, to answer the questions that may be addressed to us by the honest inquirer. The exhortation of St. Peter to the early Christians to be "ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you,"2 is as applicable to us as it was to them. Besides bringing the reward of a duty fulfilled, the study of Apologetics is in itself a valuable mental discipline : it stimulates and develops our reasoning powers by setting them to work at problems of profound importance and of unfailing interest. 

Our Proof. ITS NATURE.-The youthful reader, too much impressed perhaps by the methods he has seen employed in mathematics and physical science, must be warned against the assumption that, outside the sphere of exact calculation and experiment, absolute certainty is unattainable. On reflection he will realize that in the most important affairs of life truth is, as a fact, established by quite different methods. For instance, a man claims an estate by virtue of a will naming him as the heir; witnesses whose word cannot be questioned testify to the genuineness of the will; and the judge decides, saying, "It is clear that the witnesses have spoken the truth. He has proved that he is the heir." The judge is absolutely certain that his decision is correct, because it is based on the word of men whose truthfulness and whose knowledge of the facts to which they testify cannot be doubted; and if far greater issues were at stake,if, e.g., there were question of the lawful election or authority of a King, a President, or a Parliament, a question affecting the welfare of millions,-a bench of judges with similar human evidence before them, i.e., the evidence of living witnesses and authentic documents, would be equally certain of their decision. The certainty at which one arrives in such cases resembles the certainty which is given to us in Apologetics. In Apologetics we prove the Divine Authority of the Catholic Church by proving that we have God's word for it; He makes His mind known to us through the language of miracles, and His miracles are attested by men whose truthfulness and impartiality, and whose knowledge of the facts they report, exclude all reasonable doubt and give us the absolute certainty we require. The reader will therefore understand that human testimony, properly checked, is a most certain means of arriving at the truth.

CONCLUSIVE BUT NOT COERCIVE. Our proof is con-clusive. To question it would be unreasonable. But it is not coercive. It cannot force conviction on the pre-judiced or the foolish, for prejudice and folly wrap the mind round with an impenetrable casing. Thus, it is waste of time to argue with one who refuses to listen, or with one who seriously defends an absurdity, who main-tains, e.g., that a great work of litertaure is a mere chance arrangement of words, or that thieving and drunkenness are not vices. Folly is mere imbecility, mere incapacity of understanding, while prejudice acts like a brake on the reason, impeding its natural movement. Manifestly, then, a perfectly valid proof may not carry conviction to all. It deserves, but does not receive, universal assent.

II

The Two Methods of Proof. Having established the pre-liminary truths that God exists and that by miracles He can witness to the doctrines which He desires us to believe, we can prove by two methods the Divine Authority of the Catholic Church:-

The more elaborate method in which we argue from the New Testament

First we show that the writings of the New Testament considered simply as ordinary human compositions, are truthful and trustworthy; hence we accept as a faithful report the account which they give of Jesus, His words, and works.

A. We find in these historical documents :-

(1) that Jesus claimed to be God;

(2) that He made good His claim by miracles and prophecies.

B. Continuing our examination of the New Testament, we find also:-

(1) that Jesus, true God, founded a Church to carry on His work and teaching, and declared that she would last for all time;

(2) that He gave His Church certain well defined marks or characteristics, so that she could be clearly known to the men of all ages.

Equipped with the means of identification, we proceed to examine the religious bodies of the present day which claim Christ as their author, and we discover that all the marks imprinted by Him are found in the Catholic Church alone.

The simpler method in which we argue from our knowledge of the Church herself

In this method, we show from the unique and mirac-ulous characteristics of the Church herself that she is sustained and guided by God. The argument is developed in the Appendix to this Chapter.

NOTE. (1) The more elaborate method, which we follow in the body of the text, deserves careful study and should be mastered by every educated Catholic; because it meets on their own ground the large number of opponents who hold that in religious matters one should not move hand or foot without the authority of the Bible; because it provides a convenient occasion for dealing with a great variety of objections and diffi-culties; and, more important still, because it gives us such a knowledge of our Saviour and His work, that we should indeed be hard of heart, were we to deny Him the full homage of our gratitude and love.

(2) The proof by the simpler method of the Church's Divine Authority is one with which, in outline, Catholic pupils are already familiar. It has been thought advis-able that, while they are still on the threshold of Apologetics, they should study it in its amplified form; hence its place in this Introductory Chapter. As will be explained in the Note at the end of the Appendix, this proof contains within itself the proof of God's exist-ence and His use of miracles as signs of His revelation. The other short argument usually given to Catholic pupils in the Primary Schools (the argument from the Church's claim to Infallibility) would also have been repeated here in fuller form, but it is an argument with long roots and could not be impressively unfolded within the compass of a few pages. It will be found in the main text as a subordinate part of the proof by the more elaborate method.

III

Apologeties and Faith. One who has been an unbeliever is convinced by our argument, and says, "I believe that the Catholic Church is the true Church, because God has said so." Does he thereby make an act of faith? That will depend on his attitude to God and to the truth which God has revealed. He cannot make an act of faith unless (1) he freely, humbly, and reverently subjects himself to the Supreme Authority of God who knows all things and cannot deceive him, and (2) accepts with good will the truth which God has made known to him. Those conditions, however, he cannot fulfil of himself; he needs the help of God's grace.5

6 Many non-Catholics believe that the Catholic Church is God's representative on earth, and yet they make no act of faith. They do not welcome the truth God has sent them; some look on it with indifference, repugnance, or hostility; others shrink from the change of life it would demand of them; though recognizing God as the source of all truth, they seem to forget that He can give the strength to overcome every obstacle; they seem to forget that He is dishonoured by disobedience and by a false trust in His mercy."

Briefly, acceptance of the truth established in Apolo-getics is not in itself an act of faith; of itself, it is but an act of the natural reason; it becomes an act of faith, only when the two conditions mentioned above are fulfilled. A true act of faith always gives honour to God: it is an act of divine worship.

APPENDIX

Proof by the Simpler Method that the Catholic Church is the Work of God

THE HAND OF GOD IS SEEN IN THE MIRACLE OF THE CHURCH'S UNITY

Miraculous Unity in Government. To unite a vast multitude of men in working out a particular end without the incentive of earthly advantage, to maintain among them agreement of opinion and unanimity of purpose, to organize them and hold them together beneath a single government in spite of human weakness, of racial pre-judice and great world-changes, this surely needs more than human intellect can devise or human ingenuity achieve.

But in the Catholic Church we see the members of the greatest of all societies, acknowledging the sway of one ruler, yielding a ready obedience not through fear of armed force, nor through the urge of national sentiment, nor in the hope of earthly gain; we see them as one in professing their submission to the Successor of Peter although on all other matters they are sharply divided. Numbering amongst her multitudinous subjects men of every nation and of every race, men who differ in culture, in language, in customs, and in political ambitions, the Church is daily confronted with difficulties which have shattered kingdoms and empires, yet her sovereignty goes on with a permanence and smoothness, with an efficiency and a stability which are the envy of the statesman and the politician, and which manifestly proclaim the Guidance and Support of God.

Miraculous Unity in Faith. In the faith professed by the vast multitudes of the children of the Catholic Church, we see displayed the same miraculous unity. Pandering not to man's base passions, teaching doctrines repellent to human frailty, swerving not a hair's breadth from the truths she has defined, she is yet the teacher to whose words millions listen with reverent docility.

The human mind is fickle and wayward; opinions shift and alter in endless diversity; individual differs from in-dividual: what is asserted in one place is denied in another; what is held to-day is abandoned to-morrow; yet, in spite of this natural restlessness and disunion, the children of the Church never change in their belief. Con-quering the natural desire to exalt private judgment and follow its dictates, they humbly listen to the voice of their Mother: overcoming the natural reluctance to believe what cannot be entirely understood, they, at her com-mand, profess with alacrity their belief in mysteries the most profound. This unanimity in faith, this cordial submission of the intellect on the part of such great multi-tudes, can have but one explanation, viz.:-the direct and constant assistance of God Himself.

Miraculous Unity in Worship. And as her faith is one and unchanging, so too is her worship. In its essentials, it is the same in every land. All over the earth, she gathers her children around the altar to join with her in offering the same Great Sacrifice, the memorial and per-petuation of the Sacrifice of the Cross; and she presents to them the same seven Sacraments, the same seven channels by which the grace of the Redeemer is conveyed to their souls. She binds them all, learned and simple, great and lowly, to kneel at the feet of her priests, and confess their most secret sins. That men in such numbers should suppress their inherent desire for novelty and in-dividualism, their personal likes and dislikes, their in-grained reluctance to reveal their hidden wickedness, and take on themselves the yoke of a uniform worship, with all its severe exactions that is a phenomenon for which no human or natural explanation can be found.

The Church, therefore, in her triple unity of Govern-ment, Faith, and Worship is a living miracle of God.

§ 2

THE HAND OF GOD IS SEEN IN THE MIRACULOUS SANCTITY OF SO MANY OF HER CHILDREN

The holiness of the Catholic Church has always been so marked and unrivalled, that it cannot be explained as the effect of any merely human cause. It is a standing miracle of God's power and goodness.

Holiness implies sincere attachment to God, as our dear Father and Friend; it carries with it necessarily the avoidance of sin, because sin is hateful to Him; yet the mere avoidance of sin does not alone suffice for holiness. In ancient and modern history, we may find several in-stances of men remarkable for kindness, truthfulness, and justice; but while we willingly admit that no serious fault can be laid to their charge, we search the record of their lives in vain for the evidence of that burning per-sonal love of God which is found in the Saints of the Church. It is hard indeed to keep the soul free from sin, hard to conquer the desires of the flesh, hard to resist the attractions of the world; yet such avoidance of sin though a great and noble achievement, is still but a first feeble step in the direction of heroic sanctity. Morality alone is not holiness: no one would be content to speak of Christ as a moral man; He was something far more:

He was holy. But, granted for the sake of argument that there may have been men outside the Church equal in holiness to the Saints, the truth still remains that the instances are most rare, and therefore cannot have been due to one perpetually-operating cause. In the Church, on the other hand, the instances are numerous; they appear un-failingly, generation after generation, springing up in every rank of society, and presenting us with every phase of character and ability. The Church is the one and only fertile field of saints on earth; she is the garden of God in the desert of the world.

Whence do the flowers of sanctity which she produces derive their life and beauty?

Not from her doctrine alone; not from any rules of life which she has formulated or sanctioned; for nothing of all this is a secret her teaching and her methods are accessible to all, and may be, and have been, copied by others; but one thing she has which no outsider can imitate or reproduce: it is some special help which she gets from God, which is obtainable in her fold alone, and which, passing into the souls of her children, awakes in so many of them the radiance of a peerless sanctity.. In outward form, other religious bodies may resemble her, but they differ from her as the painted image differs from the living man, or as the electric apparatus, severed from the dynamo differs from one exactly similar that is connected with it.

Look over the great list of saints from the period of the so-called Reformation down to our own times. Many of their names are known to unbelievers as geniuses in the spiritual order, and are honoured by them almost as much as by ourselves. Who has not heard of that singularly gracious character, the seraphic Theresa of Avila, and of her contemporary and kindred spirit, St. John of the Cross? Who has not heard of Charles Borromeo the faithful shepherd of his people, and of the soldier-saint Ignatius of Loyola? Who has not heard of St. Vincent de Paul, the Christ-like friend of the poor and afflicted? And who in our own day has failed to hear of the youthful saint of Lisieux whose grace and innocence and wisdom are all so well expressed in the name she bears as the Little Flower of Jesus? Yet these are but a few from a roll of hundreds, many of whom, you will notice, have founded orders and societies which perpetuate their virtues; and as Christ lived in them, the founders, so He now lives in their spiritual children.

Nor can it be said that the title of saint is lightly given; in fact there is no process of inquiry on earth equal in jealous care and severe scrutiny to that which the Church conducts in the canonization of saints.

First a Diocesan Court is erected, which collects all evidence, unfavourable as well as favourable, including every scrap of the candidate's writings, no matter how trivial or casual they may appear. 10 Next, after a suit-able interval, the cause is brought to Rome, and the whole process is re-opened. The whole life is subjected to a most merciless examination; nothing must pass un-challenged; no secret is sacred, save that of the con-fessional; everything is laid bare; the faithful are even bound by Ecclesiastical Law to bring forward anything they may know against the sanctity or miracles of the candidate. 11 Each of the theological and the cardinal virtues is made the subject of a separate investigation, because it is necessary to establish that each and all have been practised in a heroic degree.

And even when this searching test has been completed, the Church is not yet satisfied. All possible human testi-mony has been called upon and has been found favour-able. She now seeks divine testimony, and it is only when God has granted two stupendous and indubitable miracles in response to the invocation of the candidate's name, that the Church is at last satisfied that the case has been established, that the person whose life has been under examination is worthy to be numbered among the saints. Yet, during the course of the last century, in face of those apparently impossible exactions on frail human nature, over three hundred were declared Blessed, and seventy-eight were enrolled among the ranks of the Saints. 12

Outside the Church there have been holy men to whose good deeds we pay the tribute of our sincere respect, but there is hardly one of them whose reputation would survive the preliminary judicial process of the Church; and as to miracles wrought in their honour after death, who has ever heard of a court of inquiry into such evidence of divine attestation? (६)

The Church, therefore, since she is, and has ever been the one and only Mother of Saints that there is in the world-the one and only Mother of men whose lives have been in themselves miracles of holiness the one and only Mother of men whose sanctity has been attested after death by the direct intervention of God Himself -is proved to be in possession of a perpetual and un-failing Divine help, and therefore of a perpetual Divine approval. 13

NOTE. The constant succession of miracles which God has granted to the children of His Church is in itself an all-sufficient proof of her Divine Authority.

The evidence for multitudes of these miracles is such that no unprejudiced mind can refuse to admit its cogency.

In Courts for Canonization, the miracles alleged are subjected to a most severely critical examination in all their aspects; scientific experts are called to sift the evidence, and a single flaw entails absolute rejection.

§ 3

THE HAND OF GOD IS SEEN IN THE MIRACLE OF THE CHURCH'S STABILITY

The stability of the Catholic Church is the marvel of her adversaries. It is only the hand of God that could have brought her safe through perils which have proved fatal to merely human institutions. Often she seemed rent with schism or corrupted by heresy. The pallor of death seemed to have come upon her, but, sustained by her Divine vitality, she cast off disease as a garment, and rose from her bed of sickness, renewed in youth and Pentecostal zeal. She is like the house of which Christ speaks in the Gospel: "and the rain fell and the floods came, and they beat upon that house, and it fell not, for it was founded on a rock." 14 Often have her children. heard the demons' exultant cry that, at last, she was whelmed in the wave of death. But the tempest passed, and day broke anew, and the eyes of men beheld her still firmly fixed as of old on the rock of Peter, triumphant

amid the wreckage of her enemies. "There is not," says the Protestant writer, Macaulay, 16 "and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Romar. Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilization... The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday, when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs. That line we trace back in unbroken series from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond the time of Pepin the august dynasty extends. The republic of Venice came next in antiquity. But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains. The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour. The Catholic Church is still sending forth to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustine, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she con-fronted Attila. Nor do we see any sign which in-dicates that the term of her long dominion is approaching. She saw the commencement of all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world; and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all. It is not strange that, in the year 1799, even sagacious observers should have thought that, at length, the hour of the Church of Rome was come. An infidel power ascendant, the Pope dying in captivity, the most illustrious prelates of France living in a foreign country on Protestant alms, the noblest edifices which the munificence of former ages had consecrated to the worship of God turned into temples of Victory, or into banqueting houses for political societies. But the end was not yet. Anarchy had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the confusion, new dynasties, new laws, new titles; and amidst them emerged the ancient religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore the weight of the flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy. It had been buried under the great inundation; but its deep foundations had remained unshaken; and, when the waters abated, it appeared alone amidst the ruins of a world that had passed away. The republic of Holland was gone, and the empire of Germany, and the great Council of Venice, and the old Helvetian League, and the House of Bourbon, and the parliaments and aristocracy of France. Europe was full of young creations, a French empire, a kingdom of Italy, a Confederation of the Rhine. Nor had the late events affected only territorial limits and political institutions. The distribution of property, the com-position and spirit of society, had, through a great part of Catholic Europe, undergone a complete change. But the unchangeable Church was still there."

The dangers to the Papacy came from within as well as from without. An elective monarchy, notoriously the most unstable of all forms of government, it attracted the ambition of worldly ecclesiastics and, for a time during the Middle Ages, became a prize for which rival monarchs intrigued, each trying to secure it for his own minion. It was, therefore, threatened with the twofold evil of an unworthy occupant and a disappointed faction. Hence, we find, as a fact, that there have been some few Popes, incompetent and even wicked, and that disastrous schisms have occurred from time to time. Any one of these schisms, any one of these Popes, if he had held a secular throne and were equally unfit for his office, would have brought the most powerful dynasty crashing to the ground. Moreover, the Papacy was threatened with another and, perhaps, greater, because more constant, danger, viz., the danger arising from ordinary human infirmity, for the Pope as a teacher, when not exercising his gift of Infallibility, is liable to the errors of common men: St. Peter was upbraided to the face by St. Paul for his mistaken indulgence to the prejudices of Jewish converts, and some of his successors, though acting like him with the best intentions, seemed to bring the Church to the very brink of peril by their imprudence. We may, indeed, make no difficulty in admitting that, in the long history of the Papacy, there have been errors of policy which would have cost a temporal monarch his throne. It seems as though God wished to make of the occasional weakness of the Papacy a motive of credibility, a proof that the Church is Divinely supported. "The foolish things of the world hath God chosen," says St. Paul, "that He may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen that He may confound the strong. And the base things of the world, and the things that are contemptible hath God chosen, and things that are not, that He might bring to nought things that are: that no flesh should glory in His sight,"16 s.e., so that no man could take credit to himself for what had been the work of God. Again, we read in the Book of Judges how the Lord said to Gedeon: "The people that are with thee are many, and Madian shall not be delivered into their hands, lest Israel should glory against Me, and say: I was delivered by my own strength." So He bade him keep but 300 men of the assembled host of 32,000. Gedeon obeyed, and with this insignificant force he put a great army to rout. And as the hand of God was manifest in the triumph of Gedeon in spite of inferiority of numbers, so has it been manifest in the survival of the Papacy in spite of the occasional weakness or unworthiness of those who have sat on the throne of Peter.

We may summarize the argument as follows:-(1) The Papacy, the foundation on which the Church is built, is the only institution which has survived all the vast social and political changes and revolutions in the life and government of Europe since the days of the Roman Emperors. (2) It has survived in spite of persecution, and political intrigue; in spite of heresy and schism among its subjects in spite of the worldliness and the weakness or incompetency of some of the Popes. (3) It has survived, not as a mere shadow of its former great-ness, but in unimpaired vigour. Such a survival is miraculous. The Papacy and the Church over which it presides must, therefore, be the work of God. 17

When Gladstone, angered by the decree of the Vatican Council and by the publication of a list of propositions condemned by the Holy See, asked contemptuously whether Rome could hope "to refurbish her rusty tools" and harness the avenging power of God to her excommunications in the modern world, he was reminded by Newman that the Pope who, in the Middle Ages, made Henry, the German Emperor, do penance bare-foot in the snow at Canossa, had had his counterpart in that other Pope who, in the nineteenth century, and by an actual interposition of Providence, inflicted a "snow-penance" on the Emperor Napoleon. We quote the memorable words of the Protestant historian, Alison1":"What does the Pope mean," said Napoleon to Eugene, in July 1807, by the threat of excommunicating me? Does he think the world has gone back a thousand years? Does he suppose the arms will fall from the hands of my soldiers'? Within two years after these remarkable words were written, the Pope did excommunicate him, in return for the confiscation of his whole dominions, and in less than four years more, the arma did fall from the hands of his soldiers; and the hosts, apparently invincible, which he had collected, were dispersed and ruined by the blasts of winter. The weapons of the soldiers,' says Ségur, in describing the Russian retreat, appeared of an insupportable weight to their stiffened arms. During their frequent falls they fell from their hands, and, destitute of the power of raising them from the ground, they left them in the snow. They did not throw them away: famine and cold tore them from their grasp." And Alison adds: "There is something in these marvellous coincidences beyond the operations of chance, and which even a Protestant historian feels himself bound to mark for the observation of future ages. The world had not gone back a thousand years, but that Being existed with whom a thousand years are as one day, and one day as a thousand years." And as He was with Pope Gregory in 1077, so He was with Pope Pius in 1812, and so shall He be with some future Pope again, when the need shall come, and show to His enemies that His arm has not forgotten its strength.

Any one of the special characteristics outlined above would alone suffice to justify the claim of the Catholic Church each one is in itself a moral miracle; 19 each one is in itself a proof of God's special and extraordinary support; but it is the combination of all, their mass effect, which makes the argument absolutely overwhelming.

The Church presents to the unprejudiced inquirer the unmistakable marks of her Divine Mission; from her brow there flashes forth the light of truth that brings assent. Truly she is "the standard set up unto the nations who calleth unto herself all those who do not yet believe, and giveth to her own children the full assurance that the Faith they profess rests on solid foundations."

Summary

We who are Catholics believe that the Catholic Church is the one and only Church of God.

We believe, because God has testified that what we believe is true.

He has conveyed His testimony to us in many ways, but chiefly by setting before our eyes the unique characteristics of the Church herself, viz., her miraculous unity with world-wide Catholicity, her sanctity, her gift of miracles, and her unconquer-able stability.

We bless and thank Him for giving us the light to see so clearly the imprint of His, hands. We bless and thank Him for inclining our hearts to submit to His Church, and to love her as our Spiritual Mother.

Note. This proof contains within itself the demonstra-tion of those preliminary truths which are common to both Methods of establishing the Divine Authority of the Catholic Church. It can be briefly re-cast in the following form: The unique and marvellous characteristics of the Catholic Church cannot be due to the operation of any natural cause. They can be explained only by the action of some great, living, intelligent being, the master of the human mind and heart. That being we call God.

SEQUENCE OF THE ARGUMENT

(Chapters I-X)

I. Natural Apologetics: 1

1. God exists: He is the Supreme Being, intelligent and free, infinite in all perfections: He created the world and all things in it. (Ch. I.).

2. Man, one of God's creatures, possesses reason and free-will. (Ch. II.).

3. Man has duties to God, to himself and to his neigh-bour; but without a revelation, it would be practically impossible for the generality of mankind to arrive at a sufficient knowledge of these duties and of the truths that underlie them we have, therefore, an assurance that God in His Mercy must, as a fact, have given the necessary revelation. (Ch. III.).

II. Christian Apologetics:

1. Miracles and prophecies are signs by which a divine revelation may be known with certainty. (Ch. IV.).

2. The New Testament, as history, is trustworthy. (Ch. V.).

3. The New Testament shows that Christ claimed to be God. (Ch. VI.).

4. It shows likewise that His claims were proved by miracles and prophecies. (Ch. VII.).

III. Catholic Apologetics:

1. The New Testament proves that Christ established a Church, and that He invested Her, and Her alone with authority to teach mankind. (Ch. VIII.).

2. It proves also that Christ gave His Church certain characteristics, one of which was imperishability; His Church, therefore, still exists in the world. (Ch. IX.).

3. Of the existing Christian Churches, the Catholic Church is the only one that possesses all the character-istics of the institution founded by Christ. Therefore, the Catholic Church is the one and only true Church. (Ch. X.).

Note. (1) Chapters XI-XIV., though they belong to Catholic Doctrine, have been inserted in this volume: Chapters XI-XIII., to complete the treatise on the Church, and Chapter XIV because of its close relation to the subject-matter of Apologetics.

(2) The line of proof followed in the Appendix to the Introductory Chapter and in the body of the text is that which the Church herself set forth at the Vatican Council see extract from the text of the Council, Intro. Ch., footnote 17. This method of Apologetics may there-fore be truly called the official or classical method.-The Council lays stress on the double fact, viz., that God by His grace helps those who are in outer darkness to come to a knowledge of the truth that God by His grace gives to those who already dwell in the region of light the strength to persevere in the Faith.

(3) The work is arranged on the plan of providing a course for average pupils and, at the same time, for those who are more talented. The text set in large type gives a complete treatment of Apologetics suitable for an ordinary class. The teacher can direct the pupils to read the small print or selected parts of it according to their ability.

SECTION I

NATURAL APOLOGETICS

CHAPTERI

THE EXISTENCE AND THE NATURE OF GOD AS SHOWN BY PURE REASON

THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

From truths naturally known, we prove the existence of a Living, Personal God, i.e., of a Being endowed with intelligence and free-will, the First or Originating Cause of all things distinct from Himself.

BRIEF TREATMENT OF THE PROOFS

I

Proof from Order and Law in Nature

PROOF FROM ORDER IN NATURE

(Usually called the proof from Design)

In the works of nature, as well as in the works of man, order or orderly arrangement is due to the activity of an intelligent designer.

1. Suppose you pay a visit to a bicycle factory. In one of the workshops you see a number of parts, sorted into different collections a pile of steel tubing, a sheaf of spokes, wheel-rims, hubs, handlebars, pedals, boxes of nuts and screws and so forth. You return some hours later, let us say, and find that the entire assemblage of units has been transformed into a dozen new bicycles, each perfect in every detail: part has been fitted into part with deft adjustment, yielding a result which is a model of ordered arrangement. Could you possibly imagine such an achievement to have been the product of mere chance? No, you would recognise at once that it was the work of an intelligent mechanic.

Now turn from the bicycles to the human hand that helped to make them, and you will find a far more wonderful instance of order and ingenuity. Every move-ment of the human hand causes an interplay of finely wrought bones, a contraction or relaxation of pliant muscles, a straining or slackening of fibrous sinews. Its. framework is composed of no less than nineteen bones, while eight more of various shapes ensure strength and flexibility in the wrist. Surely blind chance can have had no part in the formation of such a highly-complicated and intricate system of bones and muscles, of sinews and arteries, wherein the several units are working har-moniously for the production of each and every movement of the whole. And, if we exclude chance, the question immediately arises, whence has it come? Obviously not from man, for it has grown and developed with himself. Who then is the author of that wonderful piece of mechanism? Who is it that has caused it to grow to its present shape, to develop so many different tissues, to attain to such efficiency? The answer springs to your lips. The Maker of the human hand and of the countless other marvels with which our world is filled is none other than the great Master-Worker, Almighty God.

2. The photographic camera consists of a case in which there is a circular opening for the admission of light; the light passes through the lens, and forms a picture on the sensitive plate. Parallel with this is the instance of the human eye, the eye-ball corresponding to the case of the camera, the pupil corresponding to the circular opening, the crystalline lens to the camera-lens, and the retina to the sensitive plate. In both examples, it will be observed, several distinct things are found united or fitted together to produce a single result, viz., a clear picture on the sensitive plate and on the retina. Could those distinct things have come together by chance? No, it is perfectly plain that such a combination could have been effected only by the intelligent operator. The camera was made by man the human eye was made by a worker no less real, though invisible.

How did the maker of the camera do his work? He collected the materials he required; he shaped, filed, and polished them with great care, and finally fitted them together. Though you may admire his skill, you are convinced that you yourself with proper training could imitate it. But what of the maker of the human eye? How did he do his work? In some most mysterious way which we are quite unable to understand, and which we recognise as far beyond the possibility of imitation, he caused a minute portion of flesh to multiply itself a million times over, and, in so doing, gradually to build up, shape, and perfect every part of the wonderful organ. He who could get a particle of matter to behave in that way is a worker whose intelligence and power it is impossible for our minds to measure. He is the Master of Nature: we call Him God.

PROOF FROM THE LAWS OF NATURE

All nature is obedient to law. Astronomy, physics, and chemistry show that inanimate matter, from the stars of heaven to the smallest speck of dust, is, in all its movements and changes, subject to fixed laws. The same holds for living things-plants, animals, and men: each species grows, develops, and acts in the same way. The entire universe is bound together into one vastly complicated whole, and is like a great machine the parts of which are admirably fitted together. The orderly move-ment of the heavens, the marvellous structure of living things and their organs, such as the organs of sight and hearing, the wonderful instinct of the lower animals, as instanced in the work of insects and the nest-building of birds, the free activity of man, his great achievements in science, literature, and art all these marvels are the gifts of nature and in conformity with its laws.

It is unthinkable that laws, producing effects so vast, and yet so orderly in their entirety and in their smallest detail, could have sprung from chance, or from any un-intelligent cause we choose to name. They must have been imposed by a wise Lawgiver who so framed them, and so directed them in their working as to achieve the ends he desired. That Lawgiver must be a being of vast intelligence. He must possess free-will for he has given that faculty to man. He must possess power beyond our capacity to measure, a power to which our minds can affix no limit.

"This The great Newton who discovered the laws of the motions of the heavenly bodies wrote as follows: most beautiful system of sun, planets and comets could nowise come into existence without the design and owner-ship of a Being at once intelligent and powerful.... This Being governs all things, not as if He were the soul of the world, but as the Lord of everything.... We admire Him for His perfections, we venerate Him and we worship Him for His Lordship." 3

II

Proof from Motion

Everyday experience shows us that things move. Nothing in the visible world can move entirely of itself, i.e., without help. No moving thing contains in itself the complete explanation of its movement. Consider the particular case of inanimate bodies. They move only as they are moved. They do not move themselves in any way. They get all their motion from without.

Let us apply these observations to the earth and to the heavenly bodies. That some of these bodies are in motion is manifest; the movement of the earth on its axis is a proved fact; its motion round the sun is likewise certain.

Ask yourself now how did the earth get its motion ? Many physicists say that it got its motion from the sun, which, while spinning round, flung it off as a fragment. But whence did the sun get its motion? Some say that the sun got its motion from a larger body of which it once formed a part, while others assert that the sun with its motion is the result of a collision between two stars. But how did the motion of the larger body or the stars originate? Science gives no answer, and even though it did, the answer would leave us exactly where we were: we should still be as far as ever from a final and satis-factory explanation of the motion of the earth. The only real reply, which excludes all further inquiry, is that the motion is due immediately or ultimately to some unmoved source of motion, to the first mover.

There must exist, therefore, a being distinct from the world who gave it motion. That being is either the first mover or a being moved by some other. If that mover is moved by another, whence did that other derive his motion? The question as to the source of motion can be answered satisfactorily only when, at last, we reach a first mover who is not moved by any other. That first mover we call God.

III

Proof from Causality

A thing must exist before it can act nothing therefore can make itself. If we see anything new come into existence, we are sure it must have been brought into existence by something else. That which is brought into existence is called an effect; and that which brings it into existence is called a cause.

If we find that the cause of any particular effect is itself an effect, our mind is not content: we feel that we have not yet arrived at a satisfactory explanation of the first effect. Take, for example, the electric light that suddenly springs up and floods your room at night-time. It is an effect. But what is its cause? The current. The current however is an effect of the moving dynamo. Now, if the moving dynamo is the last cause that we can name, we are still without a full and satisfactory explanation of the electric light. Why? Because the dynamo itself is an effect. Therefore; at the end of our series of questions, we find ourselves in the presence of an effect that needs explanation quite as much as the effect from which we started.

Let us repeat in general or abstract form what we have been saying in the last paragraph:

In the world around us, the existence of any particular thing, which we will call A, is accounted for by something else, which we will call B. A is the effect; B is its cause. But suppose B itself to be the effect of C; C the effect of D; D the effect of E, and so on through a long series. If the last cause which we can set down-let us call it Z-has itself been produced by something else, then we are still without a true and satisfactory explanation of A. The complete and final explanation will be found only when we reach a cause which is not an effect, a cause which has not derived its existence from something else. This cause which we designate the First Cause, accounts at once for the entire series of causes which we have been considering and of any other series which we choose to investigate.

The First Cause therefore of all things in nature must necessarily be uncaused (if it were caused it would not be the first cause). It was not brought into existence; thus, it must have existence of itself, it must be self-existent.

The first cause, the self-existent source of all things, we call God.

IV

Proof from Dependence

Everything in the visible world is subject to change and death. Plants, animals, and men come into being, and after a short time perish, while inanimate matter suffers endless changes. No particular thing in the universe has any grip on existence; its existence is an unfastened cloak that may slip from it at any instant: existence is no part of its nature. Everything in the world, therefore, is dependent, i.e., it does not exist of itself, but depends on something else for its existence.

Since dependent beings do, as a fact, exist, and go on existing, and since they do not exist of themselves, they must be held in existence by an independent or necessary being, i.e., by a being who is self-existent, a being to whose nature existence belongs.

Can the self-existent being be like matter, or electricity, or any other lifeless thing we care to name? No; to support in existence all things in the world, including living plants, sentient animals, and rational men, the self-existent being must be a Living Power. He must be the Supreme Being who holds within Himself the source of His own existence.

We call Him God.

Note. Grasp the significance of the truth that we are absolutely dependent on God for our existence. It is the foundation of all religion; it brings sharply before our mind the nothingness of man and the greatness and goodness of God. From it, springs the chief of all our duties, the duty of loving Him with our whole heart and soul as the Giver and ever-active Sustainer of our very life and being, and of acknowledging His supreme dominion over us and our total dependence on Him.

FULLER TREATMENT OF THE PROOFS OF GOD'S EXISTENCE

First Principles. Before giving our fuller treatment of the above proofs, we shall state the first principles on which they are based. First principles are the self-evident truths that serve as the basis of a science. Thus, in Euclid, the axioms are the first principles from which all the propositions may ultimately be deduced. In our proofs, the First Principles are chiefly two, viz.:

(1) That our reason and the evidence of our senses are trust-worthy.

(2) That anything which begins to exist must have been brought into existence by something distinct from itself (Principle of Causality).

We need not, and in fact we cannot, prove First Principles. They shine by their own light. Those who deny their validity put themselves beyond the pale of discussion.

I

PROOF FROM ORDER AND LAW IN NATURE

Proof from Order in Nature

Order Explained by Examples. The Photographic Camera. The photographic camera is a familiar object nowadays. It consists of a small case into which are fitted a sensitive plate and at least one lens. The plate is a little sheet of glass on which is spread a chemical preparation: it is called "sensitive" or "sen-sitized," because it retains any picture made on it by light-rays. The lens is of glass or other transparent substance, and has the power of casting on a screen the image of any object placed in front of it. The camera is completely closed but for a small opening in one of the sides. Through this opening, the light-raya enter they pass through the lens, and fall on the sensitive

plate where they make the picture. Without going into all details, we may note the following as camera: the essentials of a satisfactory cam

(1) A case, blackened within.

(2) A circular opening which can be altered in size so as to admit only the exact amount of light required.

(3) A lens of a special curved shape.

(4) A sensitive plate.

(5) An arrangement by which the lens can be adjusted to a particular distance from the sensitive plate, so as to secure the proper focus, and save the picture from being blurred.

All these things were shaped and brought together for the purpose of producing a good picture. We have here an example of order or design, i.e., a combination or arrangement of different things in order to produce a single effect.

The Human Eye. The human eye is similar in structure to the camera. Note the following points of resemblance:

(1) The eye-ball corresponds to the case.

(2) The pupil corresponds to the circular opening: it is of adjustable size, and can be altered according to the amount of light required.

(3) The crystalline lens, corresponding to the lens of the camera.

(4) The retina, corresponding to the sensitive plate.

(5) An arrangement for focussing in the camera, this is done by altering the distance between lens and plate; in the eye by altering the curvature of the crystalline lens.

Here again we have an example of order, because different things are combined to produce a single effect. Each contributes in its own measure towards the same end, viz., the formation of a clear picture on the retina.

Order Demands Intelligence. How did the camera come to be made? You have your choice of just two answers, viz., that it was made by chance or by intelligence. Now, you know that it could not have been made by chance: such an explanation is so foolish that you would regard it as a jest. You need no help whatever to convince you that the camera was put together by an intelligent workman.

How did the human eye come to be made? By chance? No: that is an absurd reply. The human eye was made by some intelligent being.

The Maker of the Human Eye Possesses Power and Intelligence without Limit. Make the following supposition: Suppose that all the parts of a camera lay scattered about the table, and sup-pose you saw them rise up and move towards one another and fit themselves together would you say that this happened by chance? No; you would say that it was brought about by some intelligent, though invisible, worker, and you would add that he must indeed possess very wonderful powers.

Now take a step further. Suppose that the case, the lens, and the sensitive plate were all ground to the finest powder and mixed thoroughly together; suppose that the minute fragments of each part sought one another out, and fastened themselves together again; and suppose that each part thus completed took up its proper place so as to give us a perfect camera-would you say that this was due to chance? No, but you would protest that here there was need of a worker, still more intelligent, still more powerful.

But we are not done with our suppositions. There is one more which we must make. Suppose you saw just a single tiny speck of dust on the table before you; suppose that, having grown to twice its size, it broke up into two particles, and that each of these two particles, having doubled its size, broke up into two others; suppose that this process of growth and division went on, and that, during its progress, the particles managed to build up the case, lens and plate; suppose, in other words, that you saw one and the same minute fragment of matter produce such widely different things as the case with its blackened sides, the transparent lens with its mathematically accurate curvature, the sensitive plate with its chemical dressing, the aperture with its light-control, and last of all, the mechanism for focussing. What would you say to such a supposition? You would be tempted at once to stamp it as utterly improbable. You would protest, and with good reason, that only an all-powerful being could get a single speck of dust to behave as we have described, to make it multiply itself, and, while so doing, form unerringly, and piece

together, an ingenious mechanism. But is there really any improbability in the occurrence of which we have just spoken? No, the very eyes with which you have been reading this page are witnesses against you. Each of them began as a single particle of matter: the hidden worker acted upon it, made it multiply itself millions of times and made it develop such utterly distinct things as the eye-ball, the retina, the crystalline lens with its controlling muscles, the contractile pupil, along with other parts equally marvellous which it is un-necessary to mention. That hidden worker is a being whose power and intelligence our minds cannot measure.

The Maker of the Human Eye is God. He who has made the

human eye is a spirit; He is a spirit because He is an active intelligent and invisible being. He is one to whom nothing is hard or impossible. We call Him God.

FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THIS CONCLUSION

God's Wisdom and Power.-1. The human eye, as we have ex-plained grows from a single particle of matter; but the entire

body with its flesh, blood, bone, musele, its various limbs and organs, grows in precisely the same way. It begins as a single living cell which multiplies itself, and gradually forms every part. That living cell, small as it is, is far more wonderful than any machine that man has ever made. You can show how a watch does its work; you can show how the movement of the spring passes from one part to another, until finally it is communicated to the hands; but you cannot show how the living cell does its work: it is wrapt round with mystery why? Because the mind that made it is too deep for us to fathom. But the mystery lies not only in the manner in which the cell works but in the results which it produces. As fruit, flowers, foliage, bark, stem and roots come from a single seed, so the wonderful powers of man, his sight, his hearing, his other senses come from the living cell. The more intricate and ingenious & machine is, the greater testi-mony it is to the cleverness of its maker: but there is no machine in the world that can be compared with the living cell which builds up a man capable himself of making machines and of

attaining to eminence in art and science. The power displayed in the development of the living cell is on a par with the wisdom. It is a power exerted, not through hands and muscles, but by a mere act of the will. God commands the development to take place, and nature obeys Him."

2. We have proved God's existence from a few special in-stances of order, but we could have argued with equal success from anything whatever in the visible world the very stones you tread under foot are made up of molecules each one of which, when studied scientifically, is found to possess a structure that could have been given to it only by a wise architect: it is as clearly the work of intelligence as is the house in which you live.

We read that in olden times a certain man was accused of denying the existence of God. Stooping down, he picked up a straw from the ground: "If I had no other evidence before me but this straw," he said, "I should be compelled to believe that there is a God." He meant that wisdom alone could have devised the special tubular shape in virtue of which a very small quantity of matter supports an ear of corn, and allows it to toss and sway freely with the breeze.

Proof from Law in Nature

All Nature is Obedient to Law. That the universe is obedient to law is a truth which forms the very basis of all physical science: (1) Inanimate matter is subject to law. (a) In Astronomy, the laws of Kepler and Newton have exhibited the heavens as forming so exact a mechanical system that seemingly irregular occur-rences, such as eclipses and the return of comets, can be pre-dicted with certainty. (8) In Physics, the laws of sound, heat, light, and electricity, work so perfectly that results can be calculated in advance with mathematical accuracy. (c) In Chemistry, substances are found to have definite attractions and affinities and to combine according to fixed laws. In all other branches and sub-divisions of physical science, the same regularity is observed. Everywhere, like agents in like circum-stances produce the same effects.

(2) Animate matter is subject to law. (a) All living things are subject to fixed laws of nutrition, growth, and reproduction.

Plants, animals, and men develop from a single living cell. In the higher forms of life, in man, for instance, that cell multiplies itself many times, gradually building up a great complexity of organs, such as the eye, the ear, the heart and lungs. (6) Every living thing possesses the capacity to repair its worn parts. (c) Among the lower animals, every individual of the same species is endowed with the same set of useful appetites and ten-dencies in connection with the quest for food, the defence of life, the propagation of its kind, and the care of its offspring. (d) The same holds for man, who, in addition, possesses inclinations in keeping with his rational nature. Impelled by the desire for truth and the love of beauty, his mind builds up many wonderful sciences, and produces all the marvels of literature and art. In its movements it is subject to certain laws, the laws of thought, just as the seed, developing into stem, leaf, and flower, is subject to the laws of growth.

(3) Animate matter is subject to, and served by, the laws of inanimate matter. (a) All living things are subject to the laws of inanimate matter. Nutrition, growth, and many other pro-cesses take place in accordance with the laws of chemistry. The laws of gravitation and energy are as valid for the living as for the non-living. The tree, for instance, which stores up the energy of the sun's rays, returns it later on when its withered branches burn on the hearth.

(5) Animate matter is served by the laws of inanimate matter. Examples: Gravitation has so placed the earth in relation to the sun that it receives the moderate quantity of light and heat necessary for the support of organic life. The air contains in every 100 parts nearly 79 of nitrogen and 21 of oxygen gas, together with 04 of carbonic acid, a minute proportion of ammonia and other constituents, and a variable quantity of watery vapour. In pure nitrogen, man would suffocate; in pure oxygen, his body would burn out rapidly like a piece of tinder; without carbonic acid plant life would be impossible. The plant exhales oxygen and inhales carbonic acid; the animal exhales carbonic acid, and inhales oxygen: thus, each ministers to the life of the other. The water, drawn by evaporation from the sea, drifts in clouds, and descends in rain on the mountains, thus feeding the wells, the streams and rivers, so necessary for living things. Bodies contract with a fall of temperature, and yet water expands when its temperature falls below 4º Centigrade. Hence, ice is lighter than water, and forms a surface-covering which, being of low conductivity, preventa the rapid congealing of the entire body of water and the destruc-tion of living things beneath.

(4) The whole universe, we may say in conclusion, is guided by law. Everywhere there is order. Everywhere there is admirable arrangement. Everywhere there are fixed modes of action.

The Laws of Nature could not have been produced by chance or by a cause acting blindly, which is but another name for chance. Is it necessary to refute the absurdity that chance could have generated a law? Law is the exact opposite of chance. Fixity is the characteristic of law; variability, the characteristic of chance: (1) Four rods of equal length, flung aimlessly from the hand, may fall into the exact form of a square. It is barely conceivable that this may happen once or twice; it is utterly inconceivable that it should happen a hundred times in unbroken succession; but what should be thought of the conceivability of its never happening otherwise? Yet this last must be realized in order to give us the basis of a law. (2) If the generation by chance of such a simple law be impossible, how can we measure the absurdity of supposing that chance could have produced the vast complexity of laws that rule the universe, the laws whose operation guides the course urse of planets, and accounts for the growth and repro-duction of living things, the instinct and tendencies of animals, the work of bees, the nest-building of birds, the activity of the mind of man?

The Laws of Nature have been Imposed by a Lawgiver. (1) The arguments by which we have shown that the laws of nature are not due to chance avail, also, to prove that those laws cannot be due to any unintelligent cause we choose to name. Therefore, they must be due to some great intelligence distinct from matter. They must have been ordained and imposed by a Lawgiver. And, as the statesman frames his legislation for a definite purpose, so, also the Lawgiver of the universe imposed His laws to achieve the ends He desired. The orderly arrangement produced by His laws was intentional. It was in accordance with His precon-ceived plan or design.

(2) Observe how the necessity for an intelligent author of the Lares of Nature is enforced by considerations such as the following:

(a) Great intelligence and skilful workmanship are required to construct a steam-engine that can feed itself with fuel and water. But indefinitely greater would be the intelligence and power which could make the iron-ore come, of itself, out of the bowels of the earth, smelt and temper itself, form and fit together all the parts of the engine, make the engine lay in its store of water and coal, kindle ita furnace, and repair its worn parts. Yet this is an everyday process of nature in the case of living organisms. And, as intelligence is needed to guide the hands of the mechanic who builds the engine, much more is it needed to combine and direct the lifeleas forces of nature in producing more marvellous resulta.

(6) The lower animals in the work which they do, often exhibit instances of wonderful order. They perform with great skill a series of actions for the achievement of a definite purpose. Take the following example: There is a kind of sand-wasp which prepares a worm as food for its larvæ by cutting as with a surgical lance and paralysing all the motor-nerve centres, so as to deprive the worm of movement but not of life. The sand-wasp then lays its eggs beside the worm and covers all with clay. It has got its surgical skill without instruction or practice. It lives for but one season. It has not been taught by its parents, for it has never seen them. It does not teach its offspring, for it dies before they emerge from the earth. It has not got its skill by heredity. For what does heredity mean in such a case? It means that some ancestor of the insect, having accidentally struck the worm in nine or ten nerve centres, managed somehow or other to transmit to all its descendanta a facility for achieving the same success. But it is mere folly to say that this chance act of the ancestor rather than any other chance act should become a fixed habit in all its progeny. And could the original success have been due to chance? Where the number of points that might have been struck was infinitely great, the chance of striking the nerve centres alone was zero. But perhaps the insect geta its skill by reasoning? No (1) because reasoning does not give dexterity; (2) because it is impossible that each insect of the same tribe and all are equally expert should discover by independent reasoning exactly the same process; (3) because, when the insect is confronted with the slightest novel difficulty, it acts like a creature without reason and is powerless to solve it. Therefore, the intelligence which the sand-wasp exhibits does not reside in the insect itself but in the mind of God: it was He who planned the work it is He who moves the insect to perform it.19

(c) Man is as much a product of nature as the bee or the flower. The elaborate works of civilisation, the arts and sciences, and all the accumulated knowledge of centuries, are as certainly due to the working of nature's laws or forces, as the honey-cell of the bee or the perfume of the flower. Is it for a moment conceivable that those laws were not directed by intelligence, that man and all his achievements could have sprung from a source, blind and lifeless, and, therefore totally inadequate to account for them?

The Lawgiver is God. (1) As the carpenter is distinct from the must be distinct from the universe and its laws. (2) A scientist table he makes, the architect from the house he designs, as every cause is distinct from its effect, so the Lawgiver of the universe of exceptional talent, aided by perfect apparatus for research, succeeds after many years of study in understanding, more or less imperfectly, the working of one or two of those laws. Must not, then, the Author of them all be a Being of vast intelligence? (3) That Being must possess free-will. Else, how does man by a law of his nature come to possess such a faculty? And why should the laws of nature be precisely as they are we see no reason why they might not be otherwise except from the act of a Being free to choose as He pleases? The Being who pos sesses these perfections we call God.

II

 PROOF FROM MOTION

The Existence of Motion in things around us is proved by in-numerable instances from whose work.

In the Visible World nothing moves entirely of itself, i.c., without help. You can divide all things in the world into two classes, viz., things animate and things inanimate, or, things with life and things without life.

(1) No lifeless thing moves without help. This obvious truth can be illustrated by a thousand examples. The marbles with which a child plays are propelled by his fingers: the stone falling through the air is being pulled down by gravity: the steamer gliding through the water gets its motion from the engine-and so on for instances without number. If then you see any quantity of inanimate matter in motion-any quantity be it ever so great or ever so small-you are certain that it must have got help from without.

(2) No animate or living thing moves without help. This, at first sight, is not so clear, yet a little reflection will show that it is true. (a) Living things move themselves but can do so only by receiving help from outside. Both animals and plants require food; it is the source of their energy; without it they would cease to be living things. (6) Life, or the principle of life, is not like the movement of a particle of matter; life is not energy, but a director of energy. The total energy of a plant or animal during the whole course of its existence (including the store of energy which it may possess at death) is exactly equivalent to the energy which it has absorbed from without; and this equality remains, no matter how the energy may have been expended. (c) The principle of life never begins its work, until it is stimulated from outside. One illustration will suffice take, for instance, the grain of corn in the earth; the living principle in that grain will remain inactive, unless the proper conditions of warmth, moisture, etc., are present.

"But," you will say, "what of our free-will? Using the word motion in a broader sense to mean more than the movement of something material, cannot we say, and must we not say, that our will moves itself?" Yes, but it never moves itself without help. The will cannot choose between two courses, unless those courses have been laid before it by the intellect. "But what of the intellect? Does it not conceive ideas unaided?" No; it cannot take its first step, until it gets information from one or other of the five senses; and the senses themselves would remain forever passive, unless stimulated or affected by things distinct from them. 13

There would be no motion in the world but for help given by some-one who is outside the world. Since nothing in the world moves of itself, since everything requires help of some kind for its motion, it follows that there must be some Being outside the world who gave it its first motion.

Suppose that there are five children who are willing to obey you strictly suppose you get each to promise not to speak until spoken to; and suppose you lock all five in a room by themselves: then, no word would ever be spoken in that room, unless someone from outside were first to speak to the occupants. It is so with the motion we see in the world; as the silence in the room would never have been broken but for the voice from without, so the motion in the world could never have existed but for the motion given by some Being outside the world.

So far we have been thinking of the world as it is to-day, with its great number of living as well as lifeless things; but it is the teaching of Science, that at some time in the distant past the earth was a fiery globe revolving then, as now, round the Sun, but with no life on its surface. How did it get this motion? Scientists say it got it from the Sun. The Sun while spinning round flung off several fragments: these fragments are the planets of which the earth is one. But how did the Sun get its spinning or rotating motion? It got it from a larger moving mass of which it once formed part or as some assert, the Sun with its motion was produced by a collision between two stars. But, again, how account for the motion of the larger mass, or of the stars. There is no answer from Science and, even if there were, it would merely tell us of another moving body or bodies whose motion would equally need explanation. Here then is the problem the universe was formed from a quantity of moving matter; who gave that matter its motion? Someone who is outside the universe, and is no part of the universe. Someone who is truly called the First Mover.

The First Mover is God. If you suppose that he who gave the world its motion was himself moved by a second being, the second by a third, and so on indefinitely, you make a supposition which leads nowhere, because it would still remain true that there must be some being who is the fountain-head of all that motion, there would still be a First Mover. The hands of a watch are moved by one of the wheels, that wheel is moved by another and so on. But it is quite absurd to think that we can do without the main-spring by merely increasing the number of wheels indefinitely.

The First Mover cannot be a lump of inert matter; if he were, his motion would have been derived from without; he could not have been the First Mover.

He is not like us: he is not united to a body; if he were, his knowledge would depend on external stimulus, and he would not be the First Mover. He must be a Being whose knowledge had no beginning, whose mind was never in darkness.

He Himself is the source of all His activity. He is a Spirit, the Lord and Master of the universe: His name is God.

Note. According to the capacity of the pupils, the teacher might explain that in God the mind knowing is not distinct from the object known; that the mind knowing is God himself, and the object known is likewise God himself; and that through His self-knowledge He has a perfect knowledge of His creatures. This identity in God of the mind knowing and the object known enables us to understand how His knowledge never had a beginning.

III

PROOF FROM CAUSALITY

The only full and satisfactory explanation of the universe is found, as we shall see, in the existence of a First Cause, to whom all things and all changes, all facts and events are directly or indirectly due.

Take anything you please in the world about you let us call it A-and try to account for its existence. You discover that it has been produced by B; that B has been produced by C; and C by D. Now, if the last cause named by you in this or any other such series be itself an effect, you are still without a true and full explanation of A, and you will not find that explanation until you arrive at a first cause, a cause which is not an effect, a cause which has not derived its existence from anything else, a cause which is uncaused and self-existent.

If it be objected that A may be caused by B, B by C, and C by A, thus moving in a circle, as it were, we answer: (1) If A has been caused by B, and B by C, it follows that A has been caused by C. But if A has been caused by C, then C cannot have been caused by A. (2) If A is caused by B, then B must have existed before A; if B has been caused by C, then C must have existed before B. Therefore C existed before A, and could not have been caused by it.

The series of effects and causes, A, B, C, etc., leads us there-fore to a First Cause which is uncaused. Being uncaused, it was never brought into existence by anything else; it always existed; it has existence of itself; it is self-existent. It is idle to inquire why it exists, for it exists of its very nature. 14 The First Cause is thus self-explanatory, accounting not only for itself but for A and B and C, and for each and every member in any other such series which we choose to set forth.

Now, since there is nothing in the visible world about which we cannot ask the question, why it exists, it follows that the independent being who is the explanation and cause of all things in nature must himself be distinct from all and superior to all.

Each individual thing in the visible world, as we have seen, needs an explanation, and finds it, directly or ultimately, in the existence of a first cause. But the universe in its entirety like-wise needs an explanation it is not self-explanatory; it is not the full explanation of all that takes place within it: The universe is made up of a certain number of constituents; the action of any one of them (X) may be explained by its properties, and by the influence exerted on it by all the others; the action of the second (Y) may be explained in a similar way, and so on, yet this leaves still unexplained why the constituent X existed at all, and why it had Y, Z, K, etc., acting upon it, and not a totally different set of influencing companions. Hence the universe considered as a whole, is not self-explanatory it needs an explanation just as much as the smallest thing in it. It points beyond itself; it points to an uncaused being outside nature, a being that contains its own explanation, and is the final ex-planation of everything else, the first and sufficient cause of all

things. Since this being is the author of the order of the universe, the author of the intelligence and free-will of man, he himself in some supereminent way, must possess intelligence and free-will, for the cause must be sufficient to account for the effect.

This First Cause, this Self-existent and Intelligent Being we call God.

Note. (1) The student should observe that a physical cause, that is, a cause whose operation comes under the observation of the senses, can never fully account for its effect. Let us take an example: Suppose we are asked to account for the letters we see in this printed page. The physical causes of those letters are the metal type, the ink, the absorbent nature of the paper, the printer's hands and eyes. But, clearly, these causes do not explain how the page came to be printed. The real cause is not physical. It is the free-will of the printer. Note how the example applies to the motion we observe in the world around us the physicist explains the motion of the train by the motion in the piston of the engine; the motion in the piston by the expansion of steam; the expansion of steam by the heat from the coal; the energy in the coal, which is nothing more than compressed vegetable matter, by the sun's heat and light; the sun's heat and light, by the motion of the nebula out of which it was evolved. Therefore, as far as a complete explanation is concerned, we find ourselves, at the end of a long series of physical causes, just where we were at the beginning. The motion of the nebula requires explanation just as much as the motion of the train. Thus we are driven once more to find the ultimate explanation of all physical phenomena in the will of some all-powerful Being distinct from the world.15

Note. (2) The Existence of a First Cause is demanded by the Law of the Dissipation of Energy. Men of science agree that the two following principles belong to the fundamental laws of physics: 16 this orament by means of a...

IV

PROOF FROM DEPENDENCE

(Usually called the Proof from Contingence)

The Meaning of "Dependence" and "Necessity." Contrast these

two statements:-"The sky is clear," "The whole is greater than the part." The former is a dependent truth: the latter is an independent or necessary truth.

The former may be true at this moment, but need not be true; its truth depends on the fulfilment of a condition, viz., that there be no clouds or mist: it is therefore a dependent truth. The latter is true at this moment and must ever be true; its truth does not depend on the fulfilment of any condition: it is an independent or necessary truth.

(1) If a statement which is now true was not always true, we know at once that it is a dependent truth; the very fact that it is a temporary truth shows us that it is not a necessary truth. May we infer from this that every statement that is true for all time must be a necessary truth? No. We can suppose that the statement, "The sky is clear," was always true and always will be true; we can suppose it to be eternally true; but even so, our supposition will not make it an independent truth; it will remain a dependent truth, eternally dependent on other truths.

A dependent statement such as, "The sky is clear," no matter how long it may continue to be true, can lose its truth at any instant: our mind admits the possibility without hesitation; but an independent statement, such as, "The whole is greater than its part," can never cease to be true; our mind rejects the possibility as absurd and inconceivable. A dependent statement is always reversible; it is subject to death, as it were; it is a perishable truth; while an independent statement is a truth which is irreversible, deathless, imperishable and necessary.

(2) The nature of anything is shown to us in its definition; the definition tells us what precisely the thing is, or how it is constituted. We define "the whole" as "the sum of two or more parts." The very nature of "the whole," therefore, compels us to assert that "the whole is greater than its part." The assertion is really contained in the meaning of " the whole."

Now look at the other statement, "the sky is clear." We may define the sky as "the visible region above the earth." It is obvious that the nature of what we call "the sky" does not compel us to assert that "the sky is clear." Such an assertion would not follow from our definition of "the sky."

It is the nature of "the whole" to be greater than its part.1" It is not the nature of "the sky" to be clear. The truth that "the whole is greater than its part" is true of itself; it does not lean for help on any other truth. The truth that "the sky is clear" is not true of itself; it needs outside help to make it true.

(3) An independent statement explains itself it shines by its own light; it does not force us to look elsewhere for the reason why it is true. A dependent statement is the opposite of all this: it does not account for itself; it shines by a borrowed light; it leaves us dissatisfied, and sends us farther afield until we find a self-explanatory truth.

Now, as a truth may be either dependent or independent, so too an existing thing may be either dependent or independent. An existing thing is dependent:

(1) if it exists for but a time; or

(2) if existence does not belong to its nature; or

(3) if it compels us to look outside it for the reason of its existence.

If, therefore, any one of these three conditions has been verified, the thing derives its existence from without.

Everything in the World is Dependent. (1) Everything in this

world about us is subject to change and death. Plants, animals and men come into existence and pass away. Inanimate matter suffers endless variations; new substances are being constantly built up and broken down." All these things are obviously dependent, because their existence is merely temporary; but even though their existence were everlasting, it would still be, as we shall see, a dependent existence.

If we were asked to give the list of things that make up the nature of man or, in other words, if we were asked to set down all those things which constitute a man, we should not mention "existence" as one of them. The description of a man remains precisely the same whether he exists or not, or whether he exists everlastingly or not, and this is true of any particular thing in the world we choose to name. Existence, therefore, does not belong to the nature of man, nor to the nature of anything else in the world. Hence we say that everything in the visible world is dependent or contingent, i.e., that it need not exist. Not merely is there no necessity for its coming into existence, but there is no necessity for its continuing in existence. Nothing in the world exists necessarily. Nothing in the world has any grip on existence.

(2) If we examine the world at any stage of its history, we shall arrive at the same conclusion. Go back, if you will, to the remote age when, according to scientists, nothing existed but the fiery nebula out of which all things around us to-day are supposed to have been evolved. Here again you find a merely dependent thing: (a) it existed but for a time; (6) it was composed of a definite number of particles linked together in definite ways, and the fact that it possessed such a particular arrangement and no other shows its dependence on something outside itself; it needs explanation quite as much as the blast-furnace in one of our factories. Existence does not belong to its nature.

(3) With scientists we may conceive the possibility that, amid all the transformations through which the world has passed, fundamental particles of some simple kind may have persisted fixed and unchanged, serving as the material out of which all 23 else has been made. But these particles, as scientists them-selves admit, would be dependent things; (a) they would possess only a definite, limited power, a fact which would send our mind in quest of further explanation; (b) the power exerted by them would be described by scientists to put their view in the simplest form as a certain amount of activity; but this activity would need explaining quite as much as the activity of our muscles. 26

Dependent Things are held in Existence by an Independent Being. Since the visible world with all that it contains is dependent, it

must be held in existerice by some being distinct from it. If this being were dependent on a second and higher being, the second on a third, the third on a fourth, and so on endlessly, we should thus have an infinite series; but the entire series would be dependent quite as much as any member of it, and would not account for its continued existence. Therefore, no explana-tion of the continued existence of ourselves and all else in the world can be found, unless we admit the existence of an in-dependent or necessary being, existing of itself, existing of its very nature.

Max Physical scientists are not in disagreement with us. Planck, one of the most eminent of them, expresses a common view in the following quotation (his word "absolute" is equiv. alent to "independent"; his words "accidental," "contingent" and "relative" have the same meaning as "dependent"):

"From the fact that in studying the happenings of nature we strive to eliminate the contingent and accidental, and to come finally to what is essential and necessary, it is clear that we always look for the basic thing behind the dependent thing, for what is absolute behind what is relative. After all I have said, and in view of the experiences through which scientific progress has passed, we must admit that in no case can we rest assured that what is absolute in science to-day will remain. absolute for all time. Not only that, but we must admit as certain that the absolute can never finally be grasped by the researcher. The absolute represents an ideal goal which is always ahead of us and which we can never reach." 28

The search of the physical scientist for the independent, self-existent being is doomed to failure, because his sphere of inquiry is restricted to the visible world, where he will never find any-thing but dependent things or activities like those with which we are familiar; his last word will take us no farther than the theory of the Indian sages who said that the earth is supported by an elephant, the elephant by a tortoise, and the tortoise by-?: he will never reach the end of his inquiry, because he will never see the Absolute, s.e., God, in the microscope.

The Independent or Necessary Being is God. The Independent or Necessary Being, the giver of dependent existence and the up-holder of every dependently existing thing, from intelligent man down to the least material thing, must be a great living Power: we call Him God. Existence must belong to Him as truth belongs to the statement that "the whole is greater than its part." He must be self-existent. He must be one who cannot, without an absurdity, be divested of His existence. He must, therefore, be identified with existence itself, a concept which excludes every demand for further explanation and sets our mind at rest.

Note.(1) For the purpose of this argument, it would have been sufficient to show that there is at least one contingent being in the world. From that one contingent being we could have proved the existence of a Self-existent Being.

Note. (2) To the beginner in these studies, the proofs from Motion, Causality and Dependence may seem to be much alike. It is therefore well to point out that each leads to a distinct notion of the Supreme Being:

The proof from Motion shows that He is not moved by any other being.

The proof from Causality shows that He is not produced by any other being.

The proof from Dependence shows that He exists necessarily-that He exists without the help of any other being.

In addition to the proofs for the existence of God set forth above, there are many others. Among them may be mentioned, in particular, the Aesthetic Argument, based on the perception of beauty in the universe, the Ethical Argument, based on the voice of conscience, and the Moral Argument or the Argument from the universal belief of mankind.

§ 2

THE NATURE OF GOD AS KNOWN FROM REASON

By the light of pure reason we may arrive at some knowledge of the Nature of God from the fact that He is the First Cause, eternal, self-existent.

We can show that, since by the mere act of His will, He can call things out of nothingness into actual existence, and annihilate them at His pleasure, He must be the Master of existence, subject to no deficiency and con-taining within Himself in some higher way every created perfection that can possibly exist; in other words, we can show that He must be infinitely perfect-infinitely perfect in Power and Knowledge and Goodness and in the splendour of Beauty. But, to those who have been taught by Bethlehem and Calvary to know Him and love Him with a warm, personal love, our philosophic argu-ments must appear to be as chill and formal as the pro-positions of Geometry. The Incarnation of the Son of God has given sight to us men who were groping in darkness; He who dwelt among us has thrown a light on the Divine Nature which does not shine from the ablest treatise on philosophy.

THE PERFECTIONS OF GOD

Simplicity. God must be simple, i.e., He cannot consist of separate parts united into one whole. In a being so compounded, it is the union of parts that forms the whole. This union would require a cause. But the First Cause is uncaused.

Spirituality. God cannot be matter, because all matter is made up of parts. He is, therefore, a Being with no extension. But He is also an Active, Intelligent Being, because He is the Creator of all things, ineluding the human soul. An Active, Intelligent Being without extension is a Spirit. Therefore, God is a Spirit.

Infinity. God is infinite, i.e., He possesses every perfection in its highest form-Power, Wisdom, Goodness, Kindness, and Mercy, and the Splendour of Beauty.

(1) We get the measure of a sculptor's ability by comparing the finished statue with the rude block of marble. His ability is in proportion to the distance he places between the perfect work of art and the unshapen stone, The greater the distance, the greater the ability. Now, the Divine Artificer had no material on which to begin His work. The things He made were nothing until He made them. But the distance between "nothing" and actual existence is infinite. God, therefore, produced something which is at an infinite distance from its previous state. Such an act is infinite and can come only from an Infinite Being."

Note. The arguments set forth below in (2), (3) and (4) rest on the truth already established, that God is the only being whose nature is such that He must exist. God's nature is what makes Him God and sets Him apart from all else. How then can we best describe His nature? Is it enough to say that He is the most wise or the most beautiful of all beings? No; because we can think of a being as wise or beautiful without having to think of Him as actually existing. Search as we may, there is only one name for God which shows clearly what His nature is, and that name is Existence itself. As wisdom cannot be unwise or beauty unbeautiful, neither can existence itself be non-existing.

(2) We speak of a living plant, a living animal, a living man. Each of these possesses but a share of life, a limited life. But suppose that there were such a thing as life itself actually existing. It would not be a mere share of life; it would not be a limited life; it would be a perfect life. Now, apply this to what we know of God. He is Existence itself; He cannot even be conceived as non-existing. All other things get their existence from Him; their existence is limited. His existence is unlimited; He cannot be short of any perfection, for, if He were, He would have but a share of existence, and would not be Existence itself. Therefore God is infinite, i.e., He possesses, in its highest form every perfection that can exist.

(3) A being is something that exists or that can be given exist-ence; if it cannot be given existence, it is a mere nothing; it is something inconceivable (like a square circle). God is the Supreme Being. He is Existence itself. He is the Master of Existence. He can give existence to anything that can con-ceivably exist. If then we suppose Him to be wanting in any conceivable perfection, we are at once confronted with an ab-surdity, for He would possess the power to call that perfection into existence and should, therefore, already possess it. Not only should He already possess it but He should possess it in a higher form, as may be seen from the following illustration: The beauty of a picture comes from the æsthetic beauty of the painter's mind; his mind is capable of conceiving, in line and colour, countless beautiful designs; and, as the source must be higher than the stream that flows from it, so must his mind be in a higher order of beauty than any or all of the works he is capable of producing. So it is with God; He, the source of all conceivable beings, is above them all, and must possess in a higher way all their greatness and goodness and beauty.

(4) We can give the preceding argument in a slightly different form: If God, the Master of Existence, were imperfect, He could make Himself perfect; He could raise Himself from a lower to a higher state. But the less cannot produce the greater without outside help, and God could have no helper; outside Him nothing can exist but His own creatures, things to which He has given a small share of being and which have to be held in existence at every instant by His power. Therefore the supposition that He could be imperfect is absurd.

Unity. (1) Since God is infinite, He must be One. Two infinite beings, each containing all perfections that can possibly exist, would be a contradiction. If there were two infinite beings, each should possess some perfection which the other had not, otherwise they would not be distinct. But since each would be infinite, each should possess all perfections. Moreover, each would be independent, and outside the power of the other. Hence, neither could be infinite.

(2) Since God is Being Itself, He must be One, for Being Itself is one. If there were two Gods, each would possess but a share of Being, and neither would be identical with Being Itself.

Omnipotence. God is omnipotent because He is infinite. All things that are possible He can do. They are possible only because He can do them. They can come into existence only because He can bring them into existence. He cannot contradict His own Will or Truth. He cannot commit sin, for instance, for the essence of sin is opposition to His Will. Nor can He attempt what is absurd, the making, for instance, of a four-sided triangle. Such a figure would be a mere nothing, a contradiction in terms. Men, because of the imperfection of their will or understanding, commit sin, or undertake what is intrinsically absurd.

Omnipresence and Omniscience. God is everywhere, for He sup-ports in existence everything outside Himself. He is Omni-scient, that is, He knows all things. He is Omniscient because His knowledge is infinite. He has not a number of distinct ideas as we have. By one act of His intellect He knows and knew from all eternity all things past, present, and to come.

Goodness and Happiness. Goodness is what makes a thing or being truly desirable or pleasing. Since God is infinite, He is goodness without limit; He is infinitely pleasing to Himself and, therefore, infinitely happy.

Note. The Nature of God is incomprehensible. But so is our own nature. So is the nature of all things around us, from the star to the daisy by the wayside. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists that ever lived, compared himself to a little child picking up a few shells on the shore, while all the depths of the ocean remained hidden from him. He felt that his momen-tous discoveries had revealed, but without explaining, just one or two levers in the infinitely complicated structure of the universe, while all the rest lay beyond in impenetrable darkness. His know-ledge seemed to him as nothing compared with his ignorance. If it be so difficult, then, to know anything worth knowing of the visible world, how incomparably more difficult it must be to understand the Nature of its Author?

The Perfections of God in General.-(1) We speak of men as possessing various perfections, e.g., wisdom, justice, courage, reasoning power, but not as possessing them in a perfect degree. No man is perfectly wise, just, courageous, logical. May we pre-dicate all these things of God? No, not all, since some of them involve an imperfection. We may say that God is perfectly wise, i.e., that He knows the causes of all things, or that He is perfectly just, i.c., that He rewards and punishes according to merit. But we cannot say that He is perfectly courageous, for courage implies a willingness to face danger, and danger implies weakness, a condition in which one's life is threatened. Neither can we say that He is perfectly logical, for the epithet implies the power of passing from the known to the unknown, and to God nothing can be unknown.

The perfections, traces of which we observe in men, are, there-fore, of two kinds, absolute and relative. Absolute perfections of their own nature involve no imperfection, while relative per-fections do involve an imperfection. The former class God pos-sesses formally that is, He possesses them as they are in them-selves. The latter class He possesses eminently that is, He is the source, perfect in itself, whence they are derived.

(2) Agnostics say that the perfections we ascribe to God are merely "anthropomorphic," i.e., imitations of human perfections; that if, for instance, a watch could think, it would have just as much right to argue that the watchmaker was made up of springs and cog-wheels, as we have to say that God possesses intelligence, goodness, justice, etc. We reply (a) that we do not ascribe to God mere imitations of our human perfections; that the per-fections we ascribe to God are found in Him in an infinitely higher manner than in creatures; that in creatures intelligence, goodness, justice are distinct qualities, while in God, in some incompre-hensible way, they and all perfections are one and the same, identical with His nature or essence; (b) that, if the analogy of the watch were justified, we should be found ascribing to God hands and eyes and bodily organs, but such is not the fact; that, if the watch could reason aright, it would justly ascribe to the watchmaker the beginning of its movement and the orderly arrangements of its parts.

Conclusion. Thus, with no aid beyond the natural light of reason, we have laid bare the foundation on which all religion is built.

We have discovered the great fundamental truths that God of His own free will has created the universe; that He has given us every good thing we possess, our life and our very being; that He holds us in existence from instant to instant; that, without His supporting hand, we and the whole world with us would lapse into the nothingness from which He has called us; that He is supreme in goodness, wisdom and power.

Our reason casts us at His feet. It impels us to a great act of loving adoration. It bids us tell Him that we love Him with our whole heart and mind and soul, and that we humbly and gladly acknowledge His absolute dominion over us and our absolute dependence on Him.

§ 3

REPLIES TO OBJECTIONS AGAINST THE PROOFS OF GOD'S EXISTENCE AND NATURE

KANT: HIS PHILOSOPHY; HIS CRITICISM OF OUR PROOFS

The Philosophy of Kant. Kant, a German philosopher (d. 1804) held that space and time are mental forms and nothing more; that they are mere moulds within our minds, which give our thoughts their special shape or quality; hence, the world about us, the earth, the sun, the stars, our own bodies, the people with whom we converse, the very book we are reading, are all so many images which our mind has constructed; similarly, our conviction that time is passing, that we have lived so many years, that such-and-such events belong to this or that point in the past, is merely a notion fashioned by ourselves. Does then nothing really exist? Yes, he says, there is something really existing outside our mind, acting on it, and giving rise to all the different kinds of ideas we have; this real thing, however, cannot be known as it is in itself..

The successors of Kant, quite legitimately, have gone a step further and have denied the existence of the external reality which he postulates. One of his disciples, Fichte (d. 1814), held that we ourselves do not exist, nor anything outside us; that nothing exists but thought; in other words, he maintained that thought exists but not the mind that thinks it. He and those that share his views are called Idealists. Kant was a modified or incomplete Idealist; an Idealist because he said that our ideas are not the images or likenesses of anything real an incomplete Idealist, because he held that they are derived from some really existing thing even though its nature be unknown to us.

His teaching, logically developed, takes us even beyond the absurdity at which Fichte arrived. It leads to the conclusion, now held by many in the modern world, that truth itself is only the result of a "mould" of the mind, so that a doctrine can be, at one and the same time, both true and false true for some, and false for others..

No form of Idealism, however plausibly constructed, can ever command wide acceptance; the principles that an external world really exists, and that a true knowledge of it can be obtained through the senses and the intellect, will always be regarded as self-evident and unassailable truths not only by the generality of mankind, but by all sane and profound thinkers. The undoubted hold which Kant still has on a small circle of non-Catholic intel-lectuals is due to the ability which he displayed in his wide survey of all branches of knowledge, and the ingenuity with which he worked out the details of an elaborate system, based though it was on the shifting sands of falsehood. Kant professed himself a Protestant; his philosophy, like the religion to which he belonged, has degenerated into a Babel of contradictory voices.

Kant's Criticism of Our Proofs of God's Existence. Kant did not deny the existence of God, though if he had been logical he would have done so. He put it forward as a practical necessity: if there were no God, he says, there would be no morality, and morality is a necessity of social life.

Kant objects as follows against the proof from Order in Nature:

"is A.-"The order which we observe in nature," he says, a limited or finite thing; it might have been produced by a finite being; we are not justified, therefore, in concluding that it must be the work of an infinite being."

Reply. 1-Neither the argument from Order nor any of the arguments for God's existence professes to prove that He is infinite; this is quite clear from the italics at the head of this Chapter where we state what we purpose proving. Each argu-ment examines some phase or aspect of the world its order, its mechanism of cause and effect, its motion, its (instances of) dependence-and shows that each phase finds its ultimate ex-planation in a being distinct from the world supreme and in-telligent. No doubt, at the close of each argument, we push on to the further conclusion that God is infinite, but that con-clusion, though correctly drawn, is not required for our proof of His existence; it belongs strictly to the next Section, "The Nature of God as Known from Reason," where we address ourselves directly to the questions, whether He is one or several, whether He is a spirit, whether He is infinite, etc.

2. Let us suppose for the moment that the objection is sound; let us suppose that the great Designer of the world is a finite being. What follows? A most important conclusion, fatal to Materialists, who hold that nothing exists except what we per-ceive by our senses, the conclusion, viz., that, outside the world and distinct from it, there exists some Being of vast intelligence and power, on whom we are utterly dependent.

3. A thing may be finite, and yet the work done in connection with it may be possible only to an infinite being; thus, for in-stance, a grain of sand is only a finite thing, yet to make it from nothing demands infinite power. So, too, with the ordered universe the universe is limited, yet the order which it reveals as we have shown above (pp. 1-4; 10-12), is due to a power and intelligence to which the human mind can affix no limit; it is due to a Being whose infinity we are unable to question or deny. But we may bring this argument to a sharper point:-Life, the source of the marvellous order we observe in plants, animals and men, was introduced into the world at some point of time in the remote past; it was created, and its creation is a direct proof of the infinite power of the Designer.

We have given Kant's objection against the argument from Order, because it is one that anyone might reasonably propose. The only other arguments that he notices are those from Causality and Dependence, but his attacks on them are undeserving of an extensive reply.

B.-Kant held that the Law of Causality is merely a conception of the mind. Examples without number will show up the absurdity of this. Let one suffice. Look at a watch. You see the second-hand moving quickly round its little dial; you attribute its busy movement to the works within; that is, you hold that the works are the cause of the motion of the hand. But Kant would say: "No. Neither you nor any man can ever tell whether the works drive the second-hand or not. All that you can justly assert is that your mind represents the works as the cause, and the motion of the hand as the effect." We need not be astonished that Kant should hold such an absurd opinion. In his view, the watch, with its mainspring, wheels, dial, hands, and case, is simply a construction which our own mind has fashioned from some unknown and unknowable reality outside us.

Kant would say also that what we call "causes" must always be things that can be perceived by the senses, and hence that we can never prove the existence of an invisible First Cause. This error too can be swiftly extinguished: our will is imper-ceptible to the senses, and yet it can work on the muscles of our body, causing movement in our limbs. Neither causes nor effects need be visible: our will, e.g., can move our intellect to build up a new science; the science would be the product or effect of the working of the intellect; and the working of the intellect would be caused by the will; and yet neither will nor intellect nor science is perceptible to the senses.

C. Apart from the special errors of his philosophy, Kant com-pletely misunderstood the argument from Dependence. He fancied that, when fully analysed, it was identical with a proof put forward by Descartes (d. 1650), who derived his inspiration from St. Anselm (d. 1109). The proof may be put as follows: "All, even atheists, understand by the word 'God' a being who contains all perfections. But existence is a perfection; therefore, God must exist." This proof is obviously defective. In the first place, it is not true that all, even atheists, understand by the word "God " a being who contains all perfections; "many of the ancients," as St. Thomas says, "asserted that this world is God, and therefore supposed Him to be limited." In the second place, the conclusion, "God must exist," does not follow; all that follows is that those who conceive God as a being possessing all perfections must conceive Him as existing; but to conceive Him within our mind as existing is no proof that He actually exists outside our mind. There is, however, a third and more important objection which we give in the footnote below. 30

The great St. Anselm, who first proposed this proof, did not deny the value of the others. It was his laudable purpose to construct a simple argument which in a few words would carry conviction to all men, but he did not succeed. He was refuted by St. Thomas (d. 1274), Scotus (d. 1308) and many other Catholic philosophers. Atheistic writers, however, still persist in spreading the falsehood, originated by Kant himself, that in proving the existence of God we place our chief reliance on this argument of St. Anselm; they ignore the fact that we exclude it as unsound, and that we have been more successful than they in exposing its fallacy.

AN OBJECTION AGAINST THE ARGUMENT FROM CAUSALITY

Many Scientists assert that the Law of Causality is no longer valid, and that its place has been taken by what they call "the statistical Law."-(1) What the scientists who speak in this loose way should have said is that, because of their imperfect knowledge, they are unable to find the cause of certain happenings and have to depend on the statistical law. They have noticed, for instance, that atoms behave irregularly, as though they had a will of their own; to determine, therefore, what the atoms will do in any single instant, they have to rely on the law of averages or the statis-tical law. The case is exactly the same as that of a gardener who cannot discover why some of his rose-bushes fail every year, and who after ten years' observation puts down the yearly failure as averaging 20 per cent.; he is thus using the statistical law; it gives him a high probability but no certainty; his loss in any particular year may be more or less. But he is not so foolish as to think that his rose-bushes are perishing without a cause, and scientists who are unable to discover why atoms move as they do should show equal good sense. Their belief in the self-moving atom is an exact reproduction of the antiquated idea that the wind had a will of its own and moved where it pleased.

(2) Two leading scientists, Max Planck and Einstein, hold that the law of causality is universally valid. "Science," says Max Planck, " can only accept the universal validity of the law of causation which enables us definitely to predict effects following a given cause, and, in case the predicted effect should not follow, then we know that some other facts have come into play which were left out of consideration in our reckoning." 3" Commenting on the statement that "it is now the fashion in physical science to attribute something like free-will even to the routine process of nature," Einstein says: "That nonsense is not merely non-sense. It is objectionable nonsense"; " of Jeans, Eddington, and other English advocates of this "nonsense," he says that "scientific writers in England are illogical and romantic in their popular books, but in their scientific work they are acute logical reasoners." The fact that Eddington and Jeans profess them-selves idealists completes their discredit; they say in their popular writings that the world is not a material thing but a mental thing.* "No physicist," says Einstein, "believes that; otherwise he would not be a physicist; neither do the physicists you have mentioned. You must distinguish between what is a literary fashion and what is a scientific pronouncement. These men are genuine scientists, and their literary formulations must not be taken as expressive of their scientific convictions. Why should anybody go to the trouble of gazing at the stars, if he did not believe that the stars were not really there? Here I am entirely at one with Planck. We cannot logically prove the existence of the external world, any more than you can logically prove that I am talking with you now or that I am here; but you know that I am here, and no subjective idealist can persuade you to the contrary." 40 The law of causality which says that nothing can come into existence except through the agency of a previously existing thing, can never be shaken or overthrown. To question or dony it is to abdicate one's reason. The objection we have been considering is a good illustration of the ineptness of physicists when they venture into the field of philosophy.

AN OBJECTION AGAINST THE NATURE OF GOD

The Sufferings of Life and the Prodigality of Nature seem to argue against the Wisdom of God. The notion that there are defects in the work of God is due, not to the imperfect character of His design, but to our imperfect understanding of it. We cannot hope to understand God's purpose in everything. His design is not always clear to us. (a) Sometimes we not only fail to dis-cover wisdom in the happenings of life, but seem to find a colossal cruelty in them. "Why," we ask, "is there so much pain and grief in the world?" But, if there were no pain nor grief, there would be no pity nor self-sacrifice, no noble discipline for the soul of man. To complete our answer we must look to Revelation. It will tell us of the fall of man and its consequences. 41

(b) Sometimes we marvel at the prodigality of Nature, and ask ourselves why there are so many useless things in the world. On this point St. George Mivart says that if the animals called labyrinthodonts which belong to the early geological ages had been endowed with intelligence, they might have made a strong case against the wisdom of Providence from the lavish waste of fern spores. Yet, all that vegetable waste has given us our coal. The animals would have judged wrongly "from their not being able to foresee events of what was to them an incalculably remote future. .. Let a brood of young birds die before fledging," he continues, "their bodies feed a multitude of smaller creatures, these serve for others; and ultimately swarms of bacteria reduce lifeless organic matter to elements which serve to nourish vegeta-tion, which serves to feed worms and other creatures, which again actively minister to the welfare of all the higher animals and of man. Nature is so arranged that the purpose of its First Cause can never be defeated, happen what may.' "We may add that our argument does not require us to prove design in all things. It is sufficient to prove it in some things. Neither are we called on to prove that the design is perfect. Whether perfect or im perfect, it establishes the existence of a Designer: a hand-loom proves the existence of a designer just as well as a loom driven by steam, although the design may be less perfect in the one case than in the other. 43.

§ 4

ATHEISM IN GENERAL

We apply the term "atheist," not to those who deny the existence of an Ultimate Reality, a First Cause of all things, for there are none such, but to those who deny the existence of a Personal God, Intelligent and Free, to whom men are responsible for their actions.

(1) The fact that the greatest minds in all ages were firm believers in a Personal God refutes the contention that such a belief is the mark of ignorance and low civili-zation. Our belief, and the belief of the vast majority of mankind, was the belief (a) of the ancient philosophers, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, men to whom the modern world owes a debt that cannot easily be estimated; (b) of the astronomers, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Leverrier, and Herschel; of the chemists, Berzelius, Dumas, Liebig, Chevreul, Davy, and Dalton; of the zoologist and geologist, Cuvier; of Schwann, the founder of the modern school of physiology; of the physicists, Ohm, Ampère, Galvani, Volta, Faraday, Joule, Clerk Maxwell, and Lord Kelvin; and of Pasteur, to whom humanity is so much indebted for having founded the study of bacteriology. 44 These are but a few of the names that might be mentioned. An exhaustive list would include the greatest statesmen, artists, poets, generals, inventors and scholars of every age.

(2) Atheism is found chiefly among (a) men who find the belief in a Personal God an irksome check on the indulgence of their passions, 45 and (6) students of physical science who, from a too intense concentration on their own particular line of work, which is concerned exclusively with material things, come to doubt all that is spiritual and moral, everything in fact, except those things to which the tests of the laboratory can be applied.

Atheism is the Enemy of Human Nature. Atheism has already been refuted by our arguments for God's existence, but it can be refuted also by the fact that it is contrary to the well-being and nature of man:-

Society is necessary for man, because it is only as a member of society that man can attain to the normal development of his faculties; " and society can have no stable and happy existence unless its members observe the moral law. The moral law requires justice and kindness in those who govern, and willing obedience and loyalty in their subjects; it forbids murder, lying, and every kind of wicked desire; it unites husband and wife in lifelong marriage; it binds the family together, and ensures the proper rearing of children. That society is necessary for man, and that its success depends on the observance of the moral law these are truths which no sane man denies; they flash out from our very reason, and they cannot be rejected unless we surrender all trust in human intelligence, and confess that the discovery of truth is impossible. But, for the mass of mankind, the observance of the moral law, over any great stretch of time, is quite impossible, unless they believe in a Personal God, All-powerful, All-knowing, who will reward the good and punish the wicked. Belief in a Personal God, therefore, is a demand of our very reason and nature, and must be true.

It may be objected that in many countries to-day large sections of the population either deny or ignore the existence of God, and yet are well-behaved. We reply that these are people whose good habits have been derived from believing parents or from other Christian influences; that the momentum of Christianity by which they are now being carried along will inevitably spend itself in this or a future generation; and that their Atheism, which removes the only effective check on sin, will inevitably lead to moral degradation and the destruction of human society. Atheism is man's greatest enemy.

Atheism has taken several forms, with which we deal in the following pages.

MATERIALIST EVOLUTION

Materialists hold that nothing exists but matter and its modi-fications. In ancient times, the chief materialists were Democritus of Abdera (d. 360 B.C.) and Epicurus (d. 270 B.C.); in modern times, the French Encyclopaedists, Diderot and d'Alembert, (c. 1750), Feuerbach (d. 1872), Moleschott (d. 1893), Tyndall (d. 1893), and E. Haeckel (d. 1919).

At the present day it is taught by some Russian scientists, writing under the watchful eyes of an atheistic government. In its existing form, Materialism takes its colour from the theory of Evolution. It is explained and refuted in the following paragraphs.

Materialist Evolution says that the Laws of Nature may be due to blind forces inherent in Matter itself. We may express the doc-trine in the following form: "Nothing exists, nothing ever existed, but matter, s.e., nothing but what has extension (length, breadth, and thickness), and can be perceived by the senses. The universe was once a fiery rotating nebula, i.e., a cloud of glowing gas. Its molecules possessed those chemical and physical forces which, by action and interaction, have gradually evolved the great variety of things, with and without life, which we see in the world at the present day. Living creatures are, therefore, nothing more than cunning clocks. Thought and will are mere motions of matter." 47

Under criticism this theory falls to pieces. Though it has been implicitly refuted by our proofs of God's existence, its defects and absurdities become still more manifest when we reflect on all that it involves.

The Theory does not account for the Characteristics of the Original Nebula. 48 Granted for the moment that Materialist Evolution accounts satisfactorily for the universe as it now stands, what of the original matter itself? Its motion, its physical and chemical laws, the precise number of its particles and their relative position, all these characteristics with many more that might be mentioned, call for an explanation, because they of themselves offer none whatever.

(1) The motion of the original nebula, whether linear or angular, must have been in one definite direction why in that particular direction rather than another? Our reason insists that the direction must have been determined by a Cause. Its velocity also was a definite velocity. Why that exact and particular velocity rather than another? Our reason again demands a Cause.

(2) The physical and chemical laws that governed the supposed development of the nebula, formed one particular set or system. But why that particular system rather than another? Further-more, the very fact that matter obeyed that particular combina-tion of laws demands an explanation, a cause it points con-clusively to the determining mind of the Lawgiver.

(3) The original nebula, with its particular complexity of pro-perties, containing in germ, according to the Evolutionists, the present state of things, was itself evidently a particular nebula. It was made up of a definite number of particles in a definite arrangement. There was no absolute necessity for that particular number of particles, or for that particular arrangement of these particles. Fix your mind on any one atom or ultimate particle of the nebula: it gives no explanation of itself, or of its position with regard to the other particles. How did it come to hold the position it occupied? Why had it the particular particles near it that were actually around it and not a completely different set of neighbours? The same questions may be asked of any other particle we choose to examine-And why was there the particular number of particles that actually formed the nebula and not a different number?

The original nebula therefore, does not explain itself; it is not by its nature a necessary thing; it calls for an explanation; it requires a cause. And we are back again to the Uncaused Cause, to the Universal Designer, to the Necessary Being.

The Theory does not account for the Origin of Life and Reason.--(a) The theory assumes quite gratuitously that life had its origin from non-living matter. As the science of Biology ad-vances, that unsupported theory is being more and more dis-counted. There is not a shred of evidence in its favour; on the contrary, it has been demonstrated that the living cell possesses a structure complicated beyond description, and that in its action it differs essentially from any material machine that we know of.50

(b) Even though the great chasm between living and lifeless matter were successfully bridged, there would still remain the greater chasms between sentient and non-sentient life, thinking and non-thinking. Spirit (as we shall see in Chapter II) differs absolutely from matter. The human soul by its ideas of truth and beauty, by its judgments of good and evil, exhibits itself as something completely different from a material thing. A mass of mere matter has in no way the power of a thinking being, and can never give itself these powers. The chasm between them is impassable.

(c) Each one of us possesses what we call self-consciousness, that is, a perception of his own acts, of his own existence, of his distinctness from the rest of the world. That consciousness began for us when our minds first awoke and commenced to take notice; it is so strictly a part of us as individuals that it could not have existed before we came into existence. Is it not then a wild absurdity to assert that such a thing existed long before we, as individuals, existed, that somehow or other it was tucked away by itself in some vibration of a fiery nebula ?

And yet an extraordinary and unscientific reluctance to admit the existence of an Intelligent First Cause led some scientists of other days, such as Haeckel, to close their minds to sound reason, and to put forward the fantastic idea that all matter is alive and endowed with sensation and will. Needless to say Haeckel produced not a particle of evidence for his contention. Even though admitted, it would be no sufficient explanation of the evolution of the world.

" The "will" which he ascribed to primal matter was, on his own admission nothing but the "tendency to avoid strain," and "sensation," nothing better than an extremely attenuated and rudimentary power of perception. "Will" which is not will, and sensation" whi which is far beneath the humblest sense-power within our knowledge, could not, of themselves, by any possi-bility, account for the free will of which we are all conscious, for the great products of the human intellect, and for the entire order of the world. It is a maxim in Philosophy, approved by common sense, that, without extrinsic aid, the less can never produce the greater life, therefore, cannot come from dead matter, nor sentient life from non-sentient, nor rational life from irrational, except by the act of some power capable of breathing into matter these higher activities.

Physicists admit that the universe is bound together in a close unity and that every particle affects, and is affected by, every other. To account satisfactorily for the existing order of the universe on the lines of Haeckel, each particle of matter should be capable of understanding the whole plan, and its own par ticular and ever-changing part in it. It should, moreover, be willing constantly to co-operate with every other particle. In such a supposition, which is not advanced by anyone, every particle of matter would be God-a conclusion which is fraught with countless absurdities, and is repellent both to our personal consciousness and to normal human reason.53

On a General Survey the Theory offers us no more than a Series of Absurdities. -Taking a general survey, see what the theory proposes: The nebula derived its heat and motion from nowhere. When it had cooled down, some fragment of it, by a process in-conceivable to the modern chemist, made itself into the first living thing; that living thing got, somehow or other, the power of pro-pagating itself, and of developing, under a law of unexplained origin, into the higher forms of life, and finally into man himself; poets, philosophers, scientists, and all their works, are, therefore, the offspring of a mere clod of earth, developing under the in-fluence of a law which sprang out of nowhere, which was imposed by no lawgiver, which wrought and shaped with consummate skill, although there was not a glimmer of intelligence to guide it. The more this Mechanical or Materialist Evolution is examined, the more preposterous it seems. As a final and complete ex-planation of the world, it is a far greater absurdity than the statement that the picture of the Sistine Madonna was the work of a paint-pot. It was much in vogue among non-Catholics during the latter years of the nineteenth century; it was advocated by Tyndall (d. 1893) and others as the full explanation of things, but, nowadays, the difficulties against its acceptance are admitted to be overwhelming.

Note. Even if the fact of an unbroken line of evolution from nebula to man were established beyond doubt, the arguments for an Intelligent First Cause would remain unaffected. Nay more, if it could be proved that the world passed through this orderly and progressive development, like the seed that becomes the giant of the forest, then the argument for the necessity of a designer, lawgiver and perfecter, so far from losing force, would but receive an intensified cogency. The more vast and complicated the design, and the more intricate the interdependence of order, the clearer becomes the evidence for the mind of the Designer.

Only the briefest mention would have been made of the theory we have been discussing, but for the fact that it is taught in Soviet Russia, and is part of an active Communist propaganda abroad. Materialist evolution is quite dead. At the present time, no scientist of repute (unless under atheistic constraint) would venture to say that a merely material or mechanical explanation of the world is conceivable.

PANTHEISM

The chief Pantheists were, in ancient times, Heraclitus (c. 500 B.C.), and the Stoics (a school of philosophy founded c. 350 B.C.); in modern times, Spinoza (d. 1677), Fichte (d. 1814), Hegel (d. 1831), Schelling (d. 1854), to-day its chief representative is Einstein. Pantheism, in the form in which it is commonly professed, is the direct opposite of Materialism. Materialism holds that nothing exists but matter; Pantheism, that nothing exists but spirit, God, the Absolute. Therefore, according to the Pantheists, all the phenomena of the universe, all contingent beings, are but manifestations of the Divine Nature; everything is one and the same. The logical issue of these principles is to remove all distinction between right and wrong, and to identify God with all sorts of different things good and evil, living and lifeless, intelligent and unintelligent, present, past, and future. Pantheists do not shrink from such conclusions, and so set them-"Is it selves in opposition to the common-sense of mankind: not ridiculous," says Fr. Boedder," " to say that a cat is the same real being with the mouse which she devours, and with the dog that worries her, and that cat and dog alike are the same being with the master who restores peace between them? Is it not absurd to maintain that the criminal to be hanged is really the same being with the judge who pronounces sentence of death against him, and with the executioner who carries out this sentence? And who can accept the statement that the atheist is substantially the same being with God, whose existence he denies, and whose name he blasphemes?" Briefly, Pantheism must be rejected (1) because it is opposed to the infinite per-fection of God God cannot change; He cannot become greater or less; He cannot be identical with what is limited, whether it be matter or human intelligence; (2) because it destroys God's freedom by representing Him as a kind of intelligent machine with no power of choosing, and as compelled by His nature to produce all the happenings of the world, including the decisions of men; (3) because it is opposed to human consciousness, s.e., to the knowledge which a man has of his own mind: every man is conscious of his individuality and of his free will; every man knows as clearly as he can know anything that he is distinct from the world around him, and that his will is free; if he is deceived in either of these, there is an end of certainty, and all reasoning becomes futile; further, if his will is not free, he is no longer responsible for his acts, and cannot be punished or rewarded for them, a conclusion opposed to the normal reason of mankind, and, therefore, unsound.

AGNOSTICISM

The term "Agnostic" was invented by Huxley (d. 1895). According to Herbert Spencer (d. 1903), the chief exponent of Agnosticism, the final explanation of the world is to be found in an infinite, eternal energy from which all things proceed-the ultimate Reality transcending human thought." This ultimate Reality is "unknown and unknowable." We agree with the Agnostics that the "ultimate Reality," whom we call God, transcends human thought, in the sense that we cannot know Him adequately, but not in the sense that we can know nothing about Him. The Agnostics themselves, although they describe Him as "unknown and unknowable," profess to know that He is "an infinite, eternal energy from which all things proceed." If they know so much about Him, it is difficult to see how they can describe Him as either "unknown" or "un-knowable," If by "infinite, eternal energy" they mean "in-finite, eternal activity," their difference with us may be a mere matter of words. But if they mean energy of a merely physical kind-and this seems to be their meaning then, they ascribe all the happenings of the world to motion of matter, and their position is that of the Materialists whom we have already refuted.

CHAPTER II

THE HUMAN SOUL AS KNOWN BY PURE REASON

We can divide all living things into plants, animals, and men. Plants have the power of growth; animals have the power of growth and sensation; men have the power of growth, sensation, and reasoning. Every living thing has within itself the source of its own special power, the source of its own activity. That source, in plants and animals, is called the principle of life; in man, it is called the soul.

We can learn something of man's soul by observing what it enables him to do. We notice that, in contrast to the lower animals, he is not occupied entirely with what his senses tell him; he is not concerned solely with the quest for food and animal pleasures; in his per-ceptions and desires, he is not pinned down to merely material objects; he can rise above everything in the visible world, and pass into a higher region. He can form ideas of " truth," "justice," "wisdom," "eternity" and countless other such things which he could never have perceived with his eyes or ears or other sense-organs. He can think of God and His angels, and he can love them; yet God and His angels are utterly beyond anything his senses can show him; they are not material things with length, breadth, and thickness; they are living, intelligent beings with no extension; that is, they are spirits. Man's soul, therefore, being fitted by its nature for the contemplation of immaterial things and for intercourse with spiritual beings must itself be akin to them; it must be immaterial and spiritual;

or, more plainly, it must be a spirit. Not only is the soul a spirit, but it is also an immortal spirit. It is not an extended thing like the eye or the ear; it is not made up of parts that can be taken asunder.

It does not perish with the body: ""Dust thou art, to dust returnest' was not spoken of the soul." After death it can continue to exercise its higher spiritual activity. It cannot be destroyed by any power except that of God Himself, the Master of existence; and, as the voice of nature confirmed by Revelation tells us, God will never annihilate the soul of man.

A

THE SOUL OF MAN IS SPIRITUAL

Summary.

Meaning of life and soul.

The soul of man gets its knowledge of material things through the senses, of immaterial things through the mind.

Man's will is free; how the will is exercised; definition of free-will.

How man differs from the lower animals; man is progressive, because he is rational; the lower animals are stationary, because irrational; man's work is marked by diversity, because his will is free; the work of animals is marked by uniformity, because they are not free.

Conclusion: the soul of man is spiritual, because it acts indepen-dently of matter and is self-directing. Therefore, it can exist apart from the body.

The Soul or Principle of Life. We are familiar with the common distinction between things with life and things without life. By life we understand a special kind of activity which manifests itself in various ways, in growth, sensation, free movement, in-telligence and reasoning. Plants grow and put forth leaf and flower; animals feel pain or pleasure, and possess freedom of movement; man grows like the plant, he has feeling and move-ment like the animal. and, in addition, he thinks and reasons. Every living thing-plant, animal, or man has within itself the principle of its own activity. That principle we call "soul" or "principle of life." Now, just as, by reading of the behaviour of a man whom we have never seen, we may learn much about his character, so, without directly perceiving the human soul, we may discover much about its nature by studying the acts that proceed from it. 1

The Human Soul in Relation to Knowledge. Let us examine the activity of the human soul in relation to knowledge. THE KNOWLEDGE GIVEN BY THE SENSES.-(a) Man is like a city

with five gates through each of which messengers come with tidings of what is passing in the outer world. These gates are the five senses, and each sense allows some special kind of know-ledge to pass in. Man has no other means than these of knowing anything about the external world. Through the eye he gets a knowledge of colour, through the ear of sound, through the nose of smell, through the palate of taste, and through the whole surface of the body, but particularly through the hands, he comes to know of the resistance, hardness, and softness of bodies and such like. (6) The eye is the organ, or instrument, of sight, the ear of hearing, and so with the rest. Each organ is a part of the body, or, for the sense of touch, the entire body, and is acted on only by things that are themselves bodies that is, by things that are material, things that have length, breadth, and thickness, The eye cannot see an object, unless its retina be set in motion by the vibrating ether; the ear cannot hear a sound, unless its tympanum be struck by the air-waves; the nostrils cannot perceive the perfume of a flower, unless the minute fragrant particles actually penetrate to them; the palate cannot taste, the hand cannot feel without coming into direct contact with their objects.

THE KNOWLEDGE GIVEN BY THE INTELLECT AND REASON.-(a) Man knows many more things than the senses tell him. Let us take some simple examples. When we say that "Honesty is the best policy" we understand what we mean by "honesty," and yet we cannot have learned its import by the senses alone. We may be acquainted with an honest man, we may see him do an honest act, but "honesty" itself we have never seen nor heard, nor grasped in any way by the senses. So, too, with such words as "truth," "goodness," "justice" and all the other abstract terms. We may have heard a true statement, witnessed a good deed, listened to a just judgment, but "truth," "goodness," "justice" themselves we have never reached with any organs of sense. Or again, we say that "man is a rational animal.' No man that we ever saw was without a particular height, com-plexion, manner, and yet we think of none of these things when we use the word "man." We are thinking of something common to all men, en, but which, by itself, we have never seen or perceived by any of the senses. (b) The senses allow knowledge of the outer world to pass into us. Some power within us raises the data supplied by the senses to a higher plane-a plane which the senses of themselves could never have reached. That power we variously call, intellect, reason or mind. These are but other names for the thinking or rational soul.

The Human Soul in Relation to the Exercise of the Will. Let us now examine the activity of the soul in regard to free choice.

MAN'S WILL IS FREE.-(a) Man is conscious that his will is free, s.e., that he performs actions over which he has a mastery. He is conscious of the power to choose whether he will or will not do a certain act. Every day, in matters trivial or important he is aware of the exercise of this freedom. When he chooses one course rather than another, he knows that he has acted freely and might have chosen differently. I am writing just now. I am sure that I can refrain from writing if I choose to do so. (b) If our wills were not free, "then counsels, exhortations, precepts, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be mean-ingless." When a man violates a law the State will punish. him, not exactly because he has violated it for it will not punish him, if he be insane-but because he has violated it wilfully and was free to refrain from doing so. We chastise a dog for dis-obedience, not because we regard him as a free agent and as responsible for his act, but because we wish him to associate disobedience with suffering.

When we have mastered the next paragraph, we shall find ourselves able to develop a third argument for the freedom of the will.

HOW FREE WILL IS EXERCISED ITS DEFINITION. (a) A man about to decide, let us suppose, whether he should study law or medicine, tries to take the measure of his aptitude for each of the two professions; he reckons up the years of preparation in each case, the means at his disposal, the chances of a successful career, and then, when he has fully deliberated, he decides that is, he exercises his free will. So many points may not have to be considered in other cases, but the process is the same there is first a deliberation, a weighing of advantages, and then a choice. But the choice is free. A man may select the lower instead of. the higher advantage. (6) As the senses serve the intellect, s0 the intellect serves the will. It brings before the will, as before a master, the opposing advantages, and the will chooses between them. The advantages may be, and often are, of such a kind as to be manifestly imperceptible to the senses, e.g., the advan-tages to the mind of studying astronomy rather than pure mathe-matics. Free-will may, therefore, be defined as the power of choosing either of two courses represented as good by the intellect, i.e., as having at least some good aspect. No man ever chooses evil as such; if he chooses what is as a fact, evil, he does so because he represents it to himself as good in some way. Note that the intellect, in declaring a thing to be "good," sets it down as belonging to a large class of things. That class, to which the general name "good" is given, includes everything man can desire from mere bodily pleasure to the happiness of heaven and the vision of God himself. "Good," therefore, cannot attract the senses, for it cannot be perceived by them. It can attract the will. The will has for its object the "good" presented to it by the intellect.

Note. The will of its nature is attracted by what is "good," and is repelled by what is "evil." As we have already conveyed, we take "good" to mean, in this connection, "anything which we believe will bring us happiness," and "evil," "anything which we believe will bring us unhappiness." org

If we were offered immediate, perfect, and eternal happiness, our will would not be free to refuse it; nor indeed could our intellect in such a case commit the absurdity of proposing an alternative. This immediate, perfect, and eternal happiness, which is attainable only after death, is what we call " the perfect good." The "good" things of our present life are imperfect; they are all mixed with evil, and, because of this very fact, they leave the will free to accept them or reject them. Let us take two examples: (1) A young man is thinking of becoming a doctor. His intellect represents the profession as "good" (because it is an honourable and beneficent way of living, etc.), and at the same time as "evil" (because of the long years of preparation, the severity and danger of the work attached to it, etc.). His will is attracted by the "good," and is repelled by the "evil." It is not forced to accept the "good," because the "good" is mixed with "evil"; it is not forced to reject the "evil," because the evil is mixed with "good"; therefore it is free. (2) A man is deliberating whether he will obey God's commandments or not. His intellect puts before his will the "good" of obedience to God, viz., great peace of mind in this life, and perfect happiness after death; but his intellect also puts before his will the "evil" of obedience, viz., the hardships which he must face, the checking of his passions, etc. As in the other case, his will is not forced to accept the "good" or reject the "evil"; therefore, it is free.

How Man Differs from the Lower Animals. MAN IS RATIONAL. THE LOWER ANIMALS ARE IRRATIONAL. Man has the faculty of reason, or the power of deducing new truths from those which he already knows, of passing from the known to the unknown. He is constantly pushing out the frontiers of knowledge; he adds new sciences to those already existing; he invents and perfects imple-ments and machinery, rejecting the old for the new. The lower animals, on the other hand, are confined within the same circle of actions. Bees are to-day just as they were in the time of Moses and Aristotle; spiders, as they were in the days of the Pharaohs; birds build their nests now as they have always built them, in the same shape and with similar materials; the most sagacious of the lower animals, the horse and the dog, which have been in contact with man for countless centuries, exhibit not the slightest progress. The lower animals are not inventive. They are held in a groove from which they cannot escape. They are stationary, they are enclosed within fixed narrow limits, because they are irrational. Man is progessive, because he is rational, because he sees that a general idea, e.g., "house" may take an infinite number of forms.

MAN IS FREE. THE LOWER ANIMALS ARE NOT. Men apply their minds to an infinity of subjects, and pass from one occupa tion to another; a man may begin life as a labourer and end as an artist or a philosopher. The lower animals, on the other hand, are pinned down to one set of actions. They do not possess free-will; therefore, the characteristic of their work is uniformity. Man does possess free-will; therefore, the characteristic of his work is diversity."

Conclusion; The Soul is Spiritual. The soul is spiritual, i.c., it

possesses activity, but has no extension and is independent of matter in its existence, and to some extent, in its operations. (1) The soul is spiritual, because some of its actions are indepen-dent of matter. It acts independently of matter, because it forms abstract and universal ideas, e.g., "honesty," "truth," "goodness," "man." Such ideas cannot be formed by the senses. They can be formed only by a faculty that resembles themselves in being immaterial. If the soul were a material thing and had extension like the senses, it could never pass beyond the pictures of concrete things with their definite shape, colour, hardness, etc. It could never deduce conclusions froin known truths. It could never get a notion of God, or desire Him above all things in the visible world.

(2) The soul is spiritual, because it moves and directs itself, as it does in the exercise of free-will, while matter moves only as it is moved: matter gets its motion and the direction of its motion from without. While the soul is united to the body, the senses supply it with the materials from which it derives its knowledge, but, in its life and action, it is as independent of the senses as the painter is of the men who supply him with his brushes and colours. Since it acts independently of the body, it can exist even when the body perishes, and can continue to seek the truth and to love the good.

OBJECTIONS ANSWERED

Objection. (1) "The mind cannot act, if the brain be injured. Therefore, brain and mind are one and the same, and what we describe as acts of the mind are merely movements of the brain."

REPLY. (1) By way of retort or turning the argument: "The violinist cannot play, if the violin be broken. Therefore the violinist and the violin are one and the same, and what we describe as acts of the violinist are merely movements of the violin."

(2) The conclusion cannot be sound. The brain is matter. Abstract ideas, reasoning, and free-will, are immaterial things. They have no extension. They are utterly distinct from matter, and cannot be identified with it or with any of its states, whether rest or motion.

(3) The conclusion does not follow. In the living man, soul and body are most intimately united together. Every act of the mind, even every act which is beyond the power of matter, is accompanied, or preceded, by some act or movement of the brain, which is an organ or instrument of the whole man. Hence, in the ordinary course of nature, thought becomes impossible, if the brain be seriously injured, or, if, as in sleep and uncon-sciousness, its proper activity be impeded. But does this make thought identical with a movement of the brain? By no means, as the following illustration will show: Suppose a lighted candle to be set in a lantern with a rather dim pane of glass. The candle, though burning with uniform brightness, will show only as much of its light as the glass allows to pass through. If the glass be thoroughly blackened no light will be seen. As long, therefore, as the candle remains in the lantern, its lighting-power will depend on, but obviously will not be identical with, the trans-parency of the glass. Now, the soul may be compared to the lighted candle, the body to the lantern, and the brain to the glass. While the soul is in the body, it cannot think unless the brain be in a suitable condition.19

Objection. (2) "It is assumed that animals have merely material souls or principles of life. Is it not possible that, un-known to us, their souls may have spiritual powers also?"

REPLY. To correct a possible misapprehension, the principle of life in a plant or an animal is not material in the sense that it can be seen or felt like a stone; it is a certain kind of activity and has no extension. However, it is correctly called material in the sense that its work has to do exclusively with material things; that it has no powers higher than those of the senses, and that it perishes with the body to which it is united. The possibility that the soul of an animal may be spiritual like ours is like the possibility that stones may be alive without our knowing it, or the possibility that there may be a sewing-machine and a vase of wild-roses at the centre of the moon. imaginings do not deserve consideration, because there is not an iota of evidence to support them. If the lower animals had spiritual souls like ours, they would be human persons with the Such same right to their lives that we have, and to kill them for food would be to commit the sin of murder. But observe that the proof of the spirituality of the human soul rests on our knowledge of ourselves and our acts, and would not be weakened even by the most extravagant concessions as to the powers of the lower animals.

Objection. (3) "It would seem reasonable to suppose that man has more souls than one; that he has three distinct souls, each doing its own work-a vegetable soul for growth, an animal soul for seeing, hearing, and feeling, and a spiritual soul for thinking and reasoning."

REPLY.-(a) No biologist would give the suggestion a moment's thought. In every living thing, whether it be plant, animal or man, the different parts or powers co-operate closely with one another for the welfare of the whole, which shows that they must be under the government of a single vital principle. To the biologist, there is no more perfect example of unity than the unity which he finds in each individual living thing.

(b) A man's consciousness-that is, his knowledge of his inward states and acts-tells him that he is one and the same person who thinks and feels. Therefore, he has but one soul for thinking and feeling; but if his soul can combine spiritual with animal powers, there is no difficulty in ascribing vegetative powers to it also.

(c) If a man had three separate souls, he would need a fourth soul to watch over them and act on them so that all three would work together harmoniously for his common welfare; but this fourth soul could not act on the others and direct each in the performance of its proper task, unless it possessed the three powers which we ascribe to the one human soul. Thus, the suggestion is shown to be useless.

B

THE SOUL OF MAN IS IMMORTAL

The Soul is Immortal.-(1) We have proved that the destruction

of the body does not involve the destruction of the soul. The soul, unlike the body, is immaterial. It is not made up of parts distinct and separable. Therefore, after death, it cannot perish of itself or through the agency of any creature. God alone can destroy it.

(2) Since the desire of perfect happiness is common to all men, it must spring from human nature itself, and must have been implanted therein by God, whose wisdom and justice exclude the possibility of its universal frustration. Perfect happiness, there-fore, is the Divinely appointed destiny of man, and must be attainable by all who act conformably to the Divine will. But perfect happiness in this world is beyond the reach of man. There must, therefore, be a future life in which it can be found.

(3) Conscience implies the existence of a Supreme Lawgiver who will reward the good and punish the wicked. It cannot be said that, in this life, the good and the wicked are uniformly treated according to their deserts. It happens only too often that the cunning malefactor succeeds in winning wealth and position, and that he ends his life untroubled by remorse and with a minimum of suffering, while the just man lives in toil and penury, and dies after a protracted agony, or freely sacrifices his life in the heroic discharge of duty. The justice of God, therefore, demands that there should be a future state in which this in-equality is redressed.

(4) We are certain, then, that there is a life beyond the grave. But is it the Divine will that that life should endure for all eternity? Shall the good be granted but a limited period of happiness, undisturbed by the thought of approaching annihila-tion? No; their happiness must be of unlimited duration, and must be known to them as such, otherwise it would not be perfect happiness. And as for the wicked, when we consider the infinite majesty of God and His infinite claims to the obedience and gratitude of His creatures, and when we recall their deliberate malice and rejection of grace in this life, we cannot but recognise that their eternal punishment involves no incongruity. It must, however, be admitted that the proof from reason of the Immor-tality of the Soul, particularly in its reference to the wicked, presents difficulties which cannot be satisfactorily solved without the aid of revelation.14

CHAPTER III

NATURAL RELIGION, ITS INSUFFICIENCY. PROBABILITY OF REVELATION

Summary.

I. Natural religion, defined. Its duties discoverable by the unaided

reason. Man has duties:

4. Individually and socially, to God;

B. To himself;

C. To his neighbour.

II. A full and accurate knowledge of natural religion, practically unattainable without revelation:

acquire it; (a) Man, unaided by revelation, has, as a fact, failed to

(b) Its discovery would be fruitless through defective teaching-authority and human weakness.

III. The goodness and mercy of God lead us to the assurance that the necessary revelation has been made.

I. Natural Religion. Individual and Social Duties. Natural religion is the sum of man's duties in so far as they can be ascer tained by the light of reason alone. From the truths already established, we infer that man has duties to God, to himself, and to his neighbour.

A.-INDIVIDUALLY, MAN HAS DUTIES TO GOD.-(a) In God he recognises a Being of supreme excellence, deserving to be loved above all for His own sake. (b) To God he owes his entire being and its preservation at every instant. (c) To God he owes all his faculties, or powers of acting every throb of his heart, every glance of his eye, every thought of his mind, even the most trivial movements of soul or body are possible only with Divine aid or co-operation. (d) To God he owes his sense of right and wrong, and his sure hope that a good life will bring him everlasting happiness after death. Man, therefore, perceiving his own inferiority and his total dependence on God, is bound to acknow-ledge His supreme excellence, to recognize Him as his Creator, Preserver, and Sovereign Ruler. He is bound to love Him more than all else, to love Him with his whole heart and soul and mind; he is bound to thank Him and pray to Him as his Bene-factor; to honour Him as the source of every perfection, to obey Him as his Master, and to conceive and express sorrow for the offences he commits against Him; in a word to offer Him the supreme homage of adoration.

SOCIALLY, MAN HAS DUTIES TO GOD.-(a) A society is a group of individuals united for a common purpose under a common authority. The. Family is a society for the rearing of children, under the authority of their parents. The State is a number of families united under one government for the temporal well-being of all. (6) The Family is necessary for the very life of man, the State for his normal development. It is only in a well-ordered state that any degree of civilization is possible: its members are enabled to provide more conveniently, by division of labour, for the necessaries and comforts of life, and to promote by inter-course and mutual training the development of mind and heart. Since society, whether it consist of the Family or the State, is necessary for man, it follows that society is a Divine institution. It is a creature of God, indebted to Him for its existence and preservation, and for the benefits it receives; it can think and act through its governing authority; it, therefore, resembles a living person; it is conscious of its debt to God, and is under a like obligation to discharge it."

Divine worship, naturally, in the case of individuals, neces sarily, in the case of societies, must take some external, sensible form. Man, obeying the instincts God has given him, assumes a reverential posture at prayer, sets apart times and places for public worship, orders special ceremonies and rites, and appoints ministers to take charge of them.

B.-MAN HAS DUTIES TO HIMSELF. God has given him his life and his faculties for use, not for abuse. He is, therefore, bound to take reasonable care of his life, to promote the health of mind and body, to be industrious, sober, and chaste.

C.-MAN HAS DUTIES TO HIS NEIGHBOUR. Since social life is necessary to man, and since social life is impossible without truth-fulness, justice, and obedience to lawful authority, it follows that these virtues, and all others akin to them, are prescribed by our nature, and, therefore, by God.

But even though man were not made for social life his reason would tell him that his neighbour, as being a rational creature and under God's protection, had the same rights as himself to his life, to his property, and to his good name.

The duties of Natural Religion may be summed up in the three great commands which God conveys to man through his reason.

(1) Honour God.

(2) Subdue your passions.

(3) Do as you would be done by.

In Natural Religion man would avoid evil and do good for a twofold motive, viz., the love of God and the fear of His judgment after death.

II. Without a Revelation, a Full Knowledge of Natural Religion is Practically Unattainable.-

REVELATION. A revelation, literally "a drawing back of the veil," is a communication of truth made directly by God to man. It is obvious that God can communicate directly with us, since it was He who gave us the power to communicate directly with one another. In reasoning out the chief truths of Natural Religion, we had the advantage of knowing them beforehand through God's revelation to us we set about the solution of a series of questions, the answers to which we knew in advance. But how should we have fared without this special help? No better than those of whom we shall presently speak.

MEN UNAIDED BY REVELATION HAVE, AS A FACT, FAILED TO ACQUIRE A FULL KNOWLEDGE OF NATURAL RELIGION. That man without special light from God cannot arrive at a full know-ledge of Natural Religion is evident from the failure of pagan nations and pagan sages. Among all the peoples of antiquity, the Jews alone excepted, the grossest errors prevailed. The Divine power in whose existence they believed was divided, they fancied, among two or more divinities. Their gods were at feud with one another; they were the patrons of theft, lying, and every disgraceful crime, and were offered a form of worship which in certain instances consisted of nothing less than public im-morality. Men with such notions of the Deity had no fixed and unalterable standard of right and wrong. There was a universal belief in a future state, but the notion prevailed among cultured peoples, particularly the Greeks, that even for good men life after death was much less happy than life on earth, while less civilized races contemplated an endless career of low, sensual enjoyment. A study of the general character of religion and morality among the pagans of the present day leads us to similar conclusions.

Plato (428-347 B.C.), one of the master-minds of the world, favours in his ideal state a community of wives and the de-struction of weakly and deformed children. His great disciple, Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who systematized so many branches of learning, held the same lax views as to the care of infant life; he allowed the exhibition in the temples of lewd figures of the gods; he had no proper conception of human dignity, and regarded slaves as mere beasts who could be tortured or put to death by their masters without injustice. It is true, however, that the moral code of the Roman Stoic philosophers, influenced possibly by the inspired books of the Jews, was re-markable for its elevation and purity, but still, Seneca, one of the leaders of the school, was emphatic in his approval of suicide, while Marcus Aurelius, its last and most perfect representative, hesitates, now approving, now condemning.

BECAUSE OF DEFECTIVE AUTHORITY AND HUMAN WEAKNESS, A FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE NATURAL LAW WOULD BE FRUITLESS FOR THE MASS OF MANKIND. Through the promptings of nature itself, all men may know of the existence of God, or some Supreme Power, and their responsibility to Him. But the other truths and precepts of Natural Religion, the unity of God and the worship He should receive, the duties of man to himself and to his neigh-bour, all depend on reasoning so manifestly abstruse as to be within the reach of only the exceptional few, of rare talent and ample leisure. Let us make the supposition, which, as a fact, has never been realized, that in some community a gifted man of this description appears, that he masters all the truths of Natural Religion, that he devotes his life to the instruction of his fellows, and that he has no rival in ability to challenge his conclusions and impair his influence. Still his mission would fail for want of authority. A man tempted to grievous wrong against God, against himself or his neighbour, would say: "This is forbidden by one liable to err like myself. All his reasoning may be false. I will not listen to mere man. I would listen to God but God, has not spoken." But would he listen to God? Taking him as re-presenting the mass of mankind, we are certain that the external help of a revelation would not of itself suffice to keep him in the straight path of duty. So dark is his understanding, so weak is his will, so strong are his passions, that he would need a further help from God, an internal help which would open his mind to the truth and enable him to beat down the evil influences within him.

III. The Probability of Revelation and other Divine Help. Man as we have seen, suffers from a moral sickness; his mind is dark, his will is weak; he is practically incapable of learning the Natural Law, and practically incapable of fulfilling it. But the goodness and mercy of God lead us to the assurance that He would come to the rescue of the plague-stricken members of the human race; that He would address to them a word that none could gainsay; that He would leave them in no doubt regarding the immortality of the soul and the judgment after death; that He would enlighten them as to all their natural duties; that He would establish among them a perpetual living authority to speak and teach in His name throughout all ages; and that in addition to this outward help He would give a constant inward help also, so that men might perceive the truth and have the strength to live up to it.

SECTION II

CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

INTRODUCTORY

God has given a Revelation to the whole Human Race

We recorded in the preceding pages the failure of the keenest minds among the pagans to arrive at a clear and accurate knowledge of our duties to God, to ourselves, and to our neighbours; we saw that even if they had succeeded in their search, they would have been unable, through want of authority in themselves and moral weak-ness in their hearers, to get the mass of mankind to live up to their teaching; and, arguing from the mercy of God, we drew the conclusion that He would help human insufficiency, that He would speak to all men and be their teacher, and that He would work on their minds and hearts so that they would see the truth and obey His precepts. Our inference as we shall see, was correct.

The Nature of the Revelation

God might have revealed to man nothing more than the truths and precepts of natural religion. By believing those truths and by obeying those precepts, man would be entitled to very great happiness after death. Freed from all temptation and misery, he would derive an in-tense pleasure from the contemplation of God, as imaged in His creatures. But God himself would be hidden from his eyes, God would seem to dwell in some separate world from which he was excluded. God would not be

his friend and intimate. In the revelation which God, as a fact, has given us, He has not only made certain for us the whole content of natural religion, but He has told us many truths which no human mind could have ever discovered, and He has appointed for us a destiny which no creature without His special aid could win. He has promised that we shall see Him as He is with all His perfections, that we shall live with Him for ever and taste of His very own happiness. No human tongue can tell the value of His gift to us, for the gift is God himself. In His revelation to us therefore the Bounty of God shines forth no less clearly than His Mercy: His Mercy has healed our wounds and restored us to health, while His Bounty has clothed us and en-riched us; it has raised us, poor creatures of earth, from beggary to royalty; it has made us sons of the Most High, destined for unending happiness in the home of our Father.

Christ, the Bearer of the Revelation

THE BEARER OF THE REVELATION. Who was the bearer of this revelation? Who was the messenger of God to all mankind? None other than His own Divine Son, Jesus Christ, Our Lord, true God, true Man. Born of the Virgin Mary, He lived and laboured and taught among us, and He died nailed to a cross.

By partial revelations delivered to the Patriarchs of old and to the Jewish people God had prepared the way for the full and universal revelation which He was to give us through His Son; God had foretold many things about Him so that when He came He might be known. He came to banish the dark ignorance that filled the souls of men. He was the Light of the world, and He still is its Light and will ever be so.

[When we pass on to the next Section, "Catholic Apologetics," we shall find that Christ founded a Church to continue His teaching. He promised it His unfailing support and guidance: He promised that it would last till the end of the world; and since He is God Omnipotent, no power of earth or hell can defeat His promise. Placed in the world by Him to be the one and only Light that shows us the way to eternal happiness, it can have no rival: all other so-called churches or religions must be false.]

OUTLINE OF THE PROOF IN CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS

The course of the argument is set forth in the following summaries of Chapters IV-VII. Chapters IV and V contain introductory matter.

Chapter IV. Miracles and Prophecies are Sure Signs that a Revelation is Genuine. A teacher makes good his claim to speak to us as the messenger of God, if he has the support of miracles and prophecies. Miracles and prophecies in the sense in which we use these words, are above the capacity of creatures. It is only God who has the power to work a miracle; it is only God who has the knowledge required for the deliverance of a prophecy.

Chapter V. The following Books of the New Testa-ment, viz., The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of Saint Paul tell us the truth about Christ. For the purpose of our argument, we abstract from the inspired character of the books we have named we regard them as merely secular records of past events. By applying the tests which we would employ in deciding the value of any work on history, we arrive at the conclusion that their account of Christ is true and must be accepted by anyone with an impartial mind.

§ 2

Chapter VI. We learn from Genuine History that the Man Christ Claimed to be God. In the historical works we have mentioned, the man Christ appears before us as a teacher of religion. He does not represent Himself to be merely a messenger of God. He claims to be a Divine Person; He claims to be God. He expresses His claim in word and act. He speaks as only God could have spoken; He acts as only God could have acted.

Chapter VII. By Miracles and Prophecies Christ proved His claim to be God. In proof of His claim to be God, Christ worked miracles, and prophesied events which came to pass. He could not have done so if His claim were false God would not have lent His divine power and knowledge to an impostor. Therefore, He must be what He claimed to be. He must be a Divine Person; He must be God.

Note. In our study of Christian and Catholic Apolo-getics, we shall find that the revelation which God gave men through Christ is supported, not only by a single miracle or prophecy, but by many miracles and prophecies whose cumulative effect should compel conviction. It is supported by the great web of Messianic prophecies; it is supported by all the miracles of Christ during His life-time on earth, and by the crowning miracle of His Resurrection from the dead. It is supported by the miraculous spread of Christianity and by the constancy of its martyrs. It is supported by the miraculous nature and vitality of the Church which has survived innumerable dangers, and lives in undiminished vigour.

As to the nature of our proof, the reader is referred to the paragraph on this subject in the Introduction to this work. The proof that God has declared Christ to be a Divine Person is conclusive; it is based on evidence so complete, so telling as to leave not the smallest shadow of doubt on any unbiassed mind. On evidence of far less compelling force, men have risked the wealth and lives of millions.

CHAPTER IV

THE SIGNS OF REVELATION: MIRACLES AND PROPHECY

Summary.

How Revelation may be known;Miracles and Prophecies. Replies to the following objections against miracles:

A. That the evidence for miracles is necessarily unsatis-factory.

B. That miracles are opposed to physical science.

C. That alleged miracles need not be referred to Divine authorship.

:

How a Revelation may be known. We find certain men claiming that God has given them a revelation, and that He has commissioned them to speak in His name to the whole human race. We can know whether a teacher has been sent by God (1) if his doctrine be not unworthy of its alleged Author; e.g., it should not be ambiguous or trivial; and (2) if it be confirmed by miracles or prophecies.

Miracles. A miracle is an occurrence outside the course of nature, perceptible to the senses, and explicable only as the direct act of God himself. A miracle is obviously a clear proof of the Divine origin of the doctrine in support of which it is wrought; it is God's positive testimony that the doctrine is true, and God cannot testify to a lie.

The possibility of miracles cannot be denied by anyone who admits the existence of a personal God: He who fixed the course of nature can alter, suspend or supersede it at His pleasure. The question then to be decided in connection with miracles is not whether God could work a miracle, but whether, in a given case, a miracle has occurred or not. In other words, the question of miracles is a question of evidence.

In examining a particular miracle for its apologetic value we have to consider three points:

(1) Did the alleged occurrence actually take place? This reduces itself to an inquiry into the competence and veracity of the witnesses: Did they actually observe what they report? Can their words be trusted?

(2) Was the occurrence positively outside the course of nature or above its power? Without knowing all about nature we can still be absolutely certain that there are occurrences which are, outside its course and above its power; we know, for instance, that nature cannot fill up and heal a great wound in a moment of time, or raise a dead man to life; hence when we find that any such thing has actually taken place, we can assert with the most firm conviction that it must have been due to the direct action of God himself, who, when He wills, can override the methods of nature and quite exceed its power.

(3) Was the miracle worked in proof of a certain doctrine? was it clear that the worker explicitly or im-plicitly wrought the miracle in proof of the truth of his words? or did the circumstances clearly point to con-nection between the miracle and the doctrine? This again is a question of the competence and veracity of the witnesses.

It is manifest that under these three headings the evidence in favour of miracles can be so thoroughly tested and controlled that we can arrive at certainty both regarding the miraculous character of the occurrence and regarding its confirmation of a doctrine.

Prophecies. Prophecy also gives us a conclusive proof of Divine Authority. Prophecy is the definite prediction of events which depend for their occurrence on the exercise of free will, whether it be the free will of God or of rational creatures, and which are of such a nature as to be beyond the possibility of guess or human prevision. God alone can know beforehand what a free agent will do and all the particular circumstances of his act. A prophecy, therefore, if fulfilled, is as conclusive of Divine Authority as a miracle. The former can originate only in God's Omni-science, the latter only in His Omnipotence.

Objections.-A. The evidence for miracles is unsatisfactory. 1. "It is contrary to experience for miracles to be true, but it is not contrary to experience for testimony to be false. That the evidence is false will always be more probable than that the miracle occurred" (Hume's Objection). Reply: (a) It is never probable that the evidence which the Church requires for a miracle is false. The evidence is of such a kind, that, if we refuse to accept it, we can never believe anything that men tell us, and must reject all historical truth. This answer suffices, but a few further remarks may be useful. (b) Our experience is our knowledge of what we ourselves have seen and observed. When the first aeroplane appeared, those who had not seen it for themselves would be justly regarded as unreasonable men, if they were to say: "This machine is entirely outside our experience. It is therefore more probable that the evidence for its existence is false." Why would they be regarded as unreasonable? Firstly, because they reject the word of thoroughly reliable witnesses. Secondly, because they do not allow for the fact that an inventor may, at any time, construct a machine which will do a work outside all previous experience. Apply the illustration to the case of miracles. A man who refuses to believe in a properly attested miracle is unreasonable; firstly, because he rejects the word of reliable witnesses; secondly, because he makes no allowance for the possibility that God, the Author of Nature, may, at His own good pleasure, perform a work of which men had never had previous experience.

2. "The advance of physical science, and the deeper insight it has given us into the secrets of nature, has been fatal to credulity in every form, to belief in charms, magic, withcraft, miracles, and astrology. The Christian miracles belong to the childhood of the world, when men were prepared to believe almost anything" (The ordinary rationalist view). Reply: (a) Several eminent scientists of the present day believe firmly in spiritism, which does not differ appreciably from magic or withcraft. It is, there-fore, incorrect to say that credulity, as the rationalists term it, is a thing of the past. (6) The early Christians were by no means credulous in respect of the greatest and the all-important miracle of Christianity, viz., the Resurrection of Christ; they were most unwilling to believe it; they accepted it, as we shall see further on, only when overwhelmed by the evidence. But is it true to say that the age in which they lived was the childhood of the world? Not at all. Christianity appeared at a time when civilization was most advanced; it was embraced by men adorned with all the intense intellectual culture of Greece and Rome, by men who were specially fitted for the task of sifting evidence and appraising its value. It was embraced by them because they were convinced that the Resurrection of Christ, its basic miracle, was a fact.

B.-Miracles are opposed to physical science. 1. "Physical science claims that nature acts uniformly. The doctrine of miracles says it does not. Therefore, if we believe in miracles, we must reject physical science." Reply: We do not differ with scientists as to the uniformity of nature. We hold with them the general law of nature that the same physical cause in the same circumstances will produce the same effect, but we maintain that, when God intervenes, the circumstances are no longer the same; a new power has been introduced. His intervention is of rare occurrence and does not invalidate the work of the scientist whose conclusions are concerned only with normal cases.

2. "But an interference by God with the course of nature may involve a violation of the Law of the Conservation of Energy. If, e.g., the stones leave the quarry at the mere word of the miracle-worker and make themselves into a house, this must happen through the expenditure of some energy that did not previously exist." Reply: (a) The Law of the Conservation of Energy, it is hardly necessary to say, has not been proved for the whole universe, but only for isolated systems. If the total energy of an isolated system is observed to increase, the Law of Conservation requires nothing more than that the increase be ascribed to the entrance of some new energy. (6) The miracle referred to may have been due merely to a re-distribution of energy. According to physicists themselves, there are vast stores of energy in the universe on which the Creator could draw, if He did not wish to introduce new energy. (c) We need have no hesitation in admitting that a miracle is an effect produced in-dependently of the laws of nature. With those laws alone the physicist is concerned, not with an agency extrinsic to them.

C.-Miracles need not be referred to Divine Authorship.-1. "Miracles may be the work of evil spirits." Reply: Evil spirits can undoubtedly work apparent miracles, but evil spirits like all other creatures are dependent on God at every instant for their existence and power of acting. God will not permit them to involve us in inevitable deception. Their agency may be detected by the personal depravity of their human medium, or by the absurdity or wickedness of his doctrine.

2. "Miracles may be due to hypnotism." Reply: Hypnotism, as a curative agency, is successful only in certain forms of nervous disease. As a general explanation of miracles it is obviously inadequate. See below, Chapter VII (I.-A).

3. "We do not yet know all the forces of nature. So-called miracles may have been due to occult forces whose operation will some day be fully understood." Reply: (a) We do not know everything that natural forces can do, but we certainly do know some things which they can never do. We know, e.g., that natural forces alone will never raise a dead man to life, or build up a piece of living tissue instantaneously. (b) The objection assumes that miracle-workers had far more knowledge of natural forces than any modern scientist. To ascribe such knowledge to Christ, for instance, and the Apostles, who, from the human standpoint, were uneducated men, and who lived at a time when physical science was practically unknown, is to suppose a miracle as great as any. (c) The modern world has witnessed the utilization of natural forces previously unknown. Still, no natural forces can ever be utilized except specially constructed instruments or apparatus be employed. But workers of miracles used, in many instances, no means whatever, nothing but a word or a gesture.

4. "According to a modern scientific theory, the present order of nature, which seems to us to be so fixed, may be subject to occasional, though indeed vastly rare, interruptions. These interruptions, resulting from natural causes, might coincide with what we call miracles, and miracles would thus be susceptible of a natural explanation." Reply: (a) As may be inferred from footnote below, the vastly rare interruptions would be far too rare to coincide with the numerous and fully authenticated miracles that have taken place within the last two thousand years. Miracles, by comparison, would look like everyday occurrences. (6) The combined intelligence of all the scientists in the world at the present day would be unable to tell us the precise instant and the precise spot at which any one of the vastly rare inter-ruptions might occur. But apparently this knowledge was pos-sessed most exactly by a band of poor Galileans nearly two thousand years ago and by many others since their time, all of whom were presumably strangers to modern scientific ideas; when they commanded sickness to disappear or life to return, they picked out the precise individuals who were to be restored by an incalculably rare action of natural forces, and they timed their words of command to the very second in which the effects would be produced. Such knowledge would itself have been miraculous."

CHAPTER V

PROOF OF THE HISTORICAL VALUE OF THE GOSPELS, THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES, AND THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL

Summary.

The four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul must be accepted as historical, if they satisfy the three tests of (a) genuineness; (b) veracity; and (c) integrity.

A. The Gospels:

(a) Their genuineness proved by external and con-firmed by internal evidence.1

(b) Their veracity established by the character and history of the writers, and by the impossibility of fraud.

(c) Their integrity assured, chiefly, by the reverence of the early Christians for the sacred text.

B. The Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles of St. Paul: genuineness, veracity, and integrity, similarly estab-lished.

C. Views of adversaries.

Note. The New Testament may be looked at from two

points of view:

1. As consisting of ordinary historical documents;

2. As a series or collection of divinely inspired books, having God as their principal Author.

Inspiration is an influence breathed forth by God on the soul of a writer, so that he expresses what God wishes him to express and nothing else; it is not perceptible to the senses; the fact of its bestowal can be ascertained only from the testimony of God himself. That testimony He gives through the Catholic Church which, as we shall see, He has appointed to teach us with unerring voice all that we must believe. From her infallible authority we shall learn of the existence of inspired scripture and of the books of which it consists.

In this chapter we make no reference to inspiration; we treat certain books of the New Testament from a human point of view, and we establish by reason that they are trustworthy historical documents.

The Tests by which we shall establish the Historical Value of the New Testament Writings. The four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles of St. Paul, are the portions of the New Testament writings on which we chiefly rely to prove the Divinity of Christ, and the authority of the Church which He founded. As the Gospels are of special importance in our proof, we give at some length the arguments which show that, even though we abstract from all question of their inspiration and regard them as merely secular compilations, we must accept them as historical.

A work must be accepted as historical, or, in other words, as a faithful narrative of past events, (a) if it be genuine, i.e., if it be the work of the author to whom it is ascribed; (b) if its author himself be trustworthy, i.e., if it be shown that he was well informed and truthful; (c) if it be intact, i.e., if the text be substantially as it left the author's hand. All these conditions, as we shall show, are fulfilled in the case of the New Testament writings.

A

PROOF OF THE HISTORICAL VALUE OF THE GOSPELS The Genuineness of the Gospels. The Gospels are the genuine work of the writers to whom they are ascribed: 5 I. External evidence. The testimony of Christian and non-Christian writers of the first two centuries shows that the Gospels were widely known, carefully studied, and revered everywhere in the Christian world. (For details see small print below.)

The fact that the Gospels were held in veneration and were in practical use all over the Church, within one hundred years of the death of the Apostles, and while their memory was still vivid, is a conclusive proof of their genuineness. Would the Apostles themselves or their immediate successors, who gave their lives to testify to the truth of all that is contained in the Gospels, have allowed a series of forgeries to be published, and palmed off as the inspired Word of God? Would Jewish converts have accepted them, without jealous scrutiny, as equal in authority to their own profoundly revered books of the Old Testament? Would the Gentiles, so many of them men of the highest education, have embraced a religion which made such severe demands on human nature, which exacted even the sacrifice of life itself in witness of the faith, without previously assuring themselves of the genuineness of its written sources? Would learned pagans and heretics have fastened on all kinds of argu-ments against the Church, and have neglected the strongest of all, viz., that its sacred books were forgeries? Would the faithful throughout the world, at a time when to be a Christian was to be a martyr, have all conspired without a single protest to fabricate and accept these books, falsely ascribe them to the Evangelists, and hand down the impious fraud as an everlasting inheritance for the veneration and guidance of their children's children? We must, therefore, either accept the Gospels as genuine, or commit ourselves to a series of puerile absurdities.

Testimony of Early Writers.

1. Numerous texts from the Evangelists are quoted in the letters of Pope Clernent (95 A.D.), St. Ignatius of Antioch (107 A.D.), St. Polycarp of Smyrna (120 A.D.), and other disciples of the Apostles; also, in the Shepherd of Hermas (? 150 A.D.), the Letter to Diognetus (? 150 A.D.), and in the important work entitled The Teaching of the Twelve which was written, probably, as early as 95 A.D., but not later than 130 A.D.

2. (a) St. Justin' of Samaria and Rome, who became a Christian in 130 A.D., says that the Gospels were written by Apostles and disciples, and were read at the meetings of Christians on Sundays.

(6) Papias of Phrygia, Asia Minor, disciple or associate of St. John, writing about 130 A.D., explains the circumstances in which the Gospel of St. Mark was composed, and refers to a work by St. Matthew, probably his Gospel.

(c) Tatian wrote his Diatesseron, or harmony of the four Gospels, about the year 170 A.D. Since the publication of the Arabic version in 1888, the genuineness of the work is no longer in dispute.

"Matthew (d) St. Irenaeus, writing about 180 A.D., says: wrote a Gospel for the Jews in their own language, while Peter and Paul were preaching and establishing the Church at Rome. After their departure, Mark, also, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, handed down to us in writing the information which Peter had given. And Luke, the follower of Paul, wrote out the Gospel which Paul used to preach. Later, John, the disciple of the Lord, who had reclined on His breast, published his Gospel during his sojourn at Ephesus in Asia Minor." The personal history of St. Irenaeus invests his testimony with special import-ance: a native of Asia Minor, in his early youth he drank in with avid ears, he tells us, the discourses of St. Polycarp who was himself a disciple of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist; he became bishop of Lyons in France, and lived for some time at Rome. His testimony, therefore, representing the tradition of East and West and of what was then undoubtedly the heart of Christendom, must be accepted as decisive.

(6) Tertullian of Africa, writing against the heretic Marcion, about 200 A.D., appeals to the authority of the churches, "all of which have had our Gospels since Apostolic times." He speaks of the Gospels as the work of the Apostles Matthew and John, and of the disciples Mark and Luke.

(f) Heretics, e.g., Basilides (d. 130 A.D.), and pagans, e.g., Celsus (d. c. 200 A.D.), did not question the genuineness of the Gospels. Later testimony is abundant. Probably there is not one of the pagan classics whose genuineness can be supported by such convincing evidence. No one disputes that Cæsar was the author of the Commentaries on the Gallic Wars, and yet the only ancient references to the work are found, about one hundred years after its composition, in the writings of Plutarch and Suetonius.

II. Internal evidence. An examination of the texts themselves proves that the writers were Jews, and were contemporaries, or in close touch with contemporaries, of the events they record:

1. The writers were Jews: (a) The Gospels are written in the colloquial Greek of the period (Hellenistic Greek)," but show marked traces of Hebrew idiom. This popular form of the Greek language was employed as a literary medium by Jews during the first century of our era, but not subsequently. (6) ne writers show no acquaintance with Greek literature or philosophy, but are familiar with the religion, customs, and usages of the Jewish people.

2. The authors were contemporaries, or in close touch with contemporaries, of the events they narrate: (a) Modern scholar-ship has failed to detect any error on the part of the Evangelists in their countless references to topography and to the political, social, and religious conditions of Palestine at the time of Christ. Those conditions, peculiarly complicated and transient, could not have been accurately portrayed by a stranger to Palestine or by a late writer. The unsuccessful rebellion against the Romans (66-70 A.D.), which flung a devastating flood of war over the land, sweeping the Holy City and the Temple off the face of the earth, was followed by enormous changes in population and government. A writer, therefore, who was not a contem-porary of Christ, or in intimate relations with His contemporaries, would certainly have committed many errors when dealing with the period which preceded that great catastrophe. (6) The vividness of the narrative seems to spring from personal contact with the events recorded.

Trustworthiness of the Evangelists. The Evangelists are trustworthy, because they knew the facts and truthfully recorded them:

1. They knew the facts: SS. Matthew and John had been companions of Christ; SS. Mark and Luke had lived in constant intercourse with His contem-poraries.

2. They were truthful (a) Their holy lives, and their sufferings in witnessing to the very truths set forth in their Gospels guarantee their sincerity. (6) From the world's standpoint, they had nothing to gain but everything to lose by testifying to the sanctity and the Divinity of Christ. (c) They could not, if they would, have been untruthful: they wrote for contemporaries of the events they narrate, or for men who had known those contemporaries, and could not, without detection, have published a false account. (d) Their narratives appear at some points to be irreconcilable, but can be harmonized by careful in-vestigation. Had the Evangelists been impostors, they would have avoided even the appearance of contra-diction. (e) They could not have invented their portrait of Christ. His character, so noble, so lovable, so tragic, so original, emerging unconsciously, as it were, with ever greater distinctness of outline, as the Gospel narrative proceeds, is, viewed merely as an artistic creation, quite beyond the inventive capacity of men such as the Evangelists were. Besides, every Jew of their day and the Evangelists were Jews-believed that the Messias would come to restore the kingdom of David; not one of them ever dreamt, before the teaching of Christ, that He would come to found, not a temporal, but a spiritual kingdom, to preach meekness, humility, and brotherly love, and to live a life of poverty and persecution, culminating in the agony of the Cross.

The Integrity of the Gospels. The Gospels have come

down to us intact, i.e., free from corruptions or inter-polations. The purity of the text is assured by:

1. The great reverence of the Church for the four Gospels and her rejection of all others. 15

2. The practice which prevailed from the earliest times of reading the Gospels at public worship.16

3. The wide diffusion of the Gospels among Christian communities all over the world.

4. The substantial uniformity of the text in all manuscripts, some of which date from the fourth century. 17

B

PROOF OF THE HISTORICAL VALUE OF THE ACTS OF THE APOSTLES AND THE EPISTLES OF ST. PAUL

The Acts of the Apostles. The opening words of the Acts and the Gospel of St. Luke prove identity of authorship. St. Irenaeus, who quotes several passages from the Acts, says that St. Luke was the companion of St. Paul, and the historian of his labours. The Fragment of Muratori (second century) which contains the list of Sacred Scriptures says: "But the Acts of all the Apostles are in one book which, for the excellent Theophilus, Luke wrote, because he was an eye-witness of all." Similar statements are found in Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and many others. Even the sceptic, Renan, declares: "a thing beyond all doubt is that the Acts have the same author as the third Gospel and are a continuation of the same." Harnack, a much greater authority, is of the same opinion. The arguments, which prove the integrity of the text and the veracity of the author, are similar to those advanced in the case of the Gospels, and need not be repeated.

The Epistles of St. Paul. Our adversaries admit the genuine-ness of the epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, and Thessalonians; the other epistles, they say, with the exception of the Hebrews, were written under the direction or influence of the Apostle. We need not delay to establish the authority of the epistle which they reject or question, since it is not required for the purposes of our argument.18

C

Views of Adversaries. (1) Strauss (1808-74) said that the

Gospels were Christian myths, committed to writing about 200 A.D.; that they portray an ideal Christ; that of the real Christ we know nothing. This view is not now regarded as within the domain of serious scholarship. It is mentioned chiefly to draw attention to the fact that, as the groundwork of some popular romances, it has sapped the faith of the ill-instructed. (2) The latter-day representatives of the Tübingen school, founded by Baur (1792-1860), say that St. Paul is the real author of Christianity, the inventor of the Divinity of Christ, the Sacra-ments, and the doctrine of a visible Church. The Modernist school (Loisy and others) hold practically the same view. Reply: (a) St. Paul suffered and died for the faith which he taught. He wrote at a time when very many who had listened to the teaching of Christ himself were still living. Had he tried, h

could not, undetected, have falsified the doctrine of his Master. (6) We may add that "if Christ were not God, Paul could never have deified Him, and the Christians would never have admitted His Divinity, for the first Christians were Jews, and Jews were sensitive of blasphemy."

(c) Harnack (d. 1930), a scholar of high repute among Rational

CHAPTER VI

JESUS CHRIST CLAIMED TO BE GOD

Summary.

That Christ claimed to be God is proved:

I. (1) From His words as reported in the first three Gospels:

(2) From His words as reported in the Gospel of St. John.

II. From His acts.

III. From the belief of His Apostles and disciples.

Note. Christ claimed to be God, because He made claims that God alone can make

§1

THE FIRST THREE GOSPELS TESTIFY THAT JESUS CHRIST CLAIMED TO BE GOD

He claimed to be God, the Judge of all Mankind.-" The Son of Man¹ shall come in His majesty and all the angels with Him.. and all the nations shall be gathered together before Him, and He shall separate them one from another." a It is only God who can speak of Himself thus. It is only God who can read the hearts of the countless millions of mankind, and apportion to each individual his deserts. In the continuation of the same passage, He says that He, "the King," will tell the good on the day of judgment that in befriending others they were befriending Him, and He will tell the wicked that in neglecting others they were neglecting Him. He identifies Himself, therefore, with God, whom good men please and wicked men displease.

He claimed to be God the Lawgiver. The Pharisees accused the disciples of Jesus of having violated the Sabbath. Jesus replied that "the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath." That is to say, the Sabbath observance may be set aside by Him, viz., God, who instituted it. He said, in the Sermon on the Mount: "You have heard that it was said to them of old, thou shalt not kill. But I say to you that whosoever is angry with his brother, shall be in danger of the judg-ment." And, throughout the discourse, He returns repeatedly to the same emphatic declaration: "You have heard But I say to you." Had he claimed to be no more than a merely human envoy of God, He would never have spoken thus to do so would have been the vilest blasphemy and arrogance; He would have adhered with the strictest reverence and humility to the formula: "But God now bids me to say to you." The words He actually spoke show Him as claiming to enlarge and re-interpret the Ten Commandments on His own personal authority; but such authority can be possessed by God alone, the giver of the Law on Sinai.

He claimed to be Omnipotent; He elaimed to be a Divine Person, God the Son, equal in power to the Father," All power is given to Me in heaven and on earth.... All things are delivered to Me by My Father, and no one knoweth the Son but the Father; neither doth anyone know the Father but the Son, and he to whom it shall He claimed to please the Son to reveal Him." possess a power which only God could possess, power over the angels and all creatures, whether in heaven or on earth; but while making this claim, He stated clearly that He was not the only Person in God; He spoke of Himself as the Son who had received all things from the Father to whom He was mysteriously united in mutual knowledge, and whom He alone at His pleasure could make known to men.

He claimed to be God the Son, One in Nature with the Father. (a) One day, near Cæsarea Philippi, Jesus asked His disciples, saying: "Whom do men say that the Son of Man is? But they said: Some John the Baptist, and other some Elias, and others Jeremias or one of the prophets. Jesus saith to them: But whom do you say that I am? Simon Peter answered and said: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answering said to him: "Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona, because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but My Father who is in heaven." The expression "Son of God" is used sometimes in the Scriptures in the figurative meaning of "Friend" or "Servant of God." Here, however, there can be no question of such figurative sonship. In this sense, John the Baptist, Elias and the prophets were "sons of God." Besides, had St. Peter used the words in this weaker meaning, he would not have required a revelation from God the Father.

(b) In the hearing of the priests and scribes, Christ spoke a parable to the people; He told how a man planted a vineyard and let it out to husbandmen, how he sent servant after servant to them to collect his share of the fruit, how the husbandmen beat them and drove them away empty-handed, and how at last "the lord of the vineyard said: 'What shall I do? I will send my beloved son; it may be when they see him they will reverence him.' Whom when the husbandmen saw, they thought within themselves, saying: This is the heir.

Let us kill him, that the inheritance may be ours.' So casting him out of the vineyard they killed him. What therefore will the lord of the vineyard do to them? He will come and will destroy these husbandmen and will give the vineyard to others." 10 The people caught His meaning; they saw that His parable foretold that the Jews who had slain prophet after prophet, would at last slay the beloved Son of God himself, and so accomplish their own destruction. They cried out: "God forbid!" And the priests and scribes, but for the many friends about Him, would have seized Him on the instant. They saw themselves in the parable as the slayers of the true Son of God.

(c) When Jesus stood before the Sanhedrin on Good Friday morning, "the High Priest asked Him and said to Him: Art thou the Christ the Son of the blessed God? And Jesus said to him I am. And you shall see the Son of Man sitting on the right hand of the power of God, and coming with the clouds of heaven. Then the High Priest rending his garments saith: What need we any further witnesses? You have heard the blasphemy. What think you? Who all condemned Him to be guilty of death." 11 What was the blasphemy? It was the claim of Jesus to be the true Son of God, one in nature with the Father. It was for that blasphemy they con-demned Him to death.

cadastre

THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN TESTIFIES THAT JESUS CLAIMED TO BE GOD

He claimed Divine Prerogatives. The Jews said to Him: "Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast Thou seen Abraham? Jesus said to them: Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham was made, I am." 12

[The Father] hath given all judgment to the Son, that all men may honour the Son, as they honour the Father." 13 To Nicodemus He said: "He that doth not believe [in the Son] is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God." 14 He speaks of Himself as "the door " 15 through which men enter into life; He is "the vine," 16 we are the branches; He is "the Way, and the Truth, and the Life." 17 Before He suffered, He prayed to His heavenly Father: "Glorify Thou Me, O Father with Thyself, with the glory which I had, before the world was, with Thee.. And all My things are Thine, and Thine are Mine." 18 Many more texts of like purport from St. John and the other Evangelists might be quoted, 19

The Jews knew He claimed to be God. Jesus said to the Jews: "I and the Father are one." They were about to stone Him for these words, "because," they said: "Thou being a man makest Thyself God." 20 Jesus, replying to the Jews, who were offended because He had cured a sick man on the Sabbath day, said: "My Father worketh until now and I work." Whereupon "they sought the more to kill Him because... He said God was His Father, making Himself equal to God." Jesus, so far from saying that they had misunderstood Him, answered: ". what things soever [the Father] doth, these the Son also doth in like manner. For as the Father raiseth up the dead and giveth life so the Son also giveth life to whom He will." 21 When Pilate tried to acquit Jesus, the Jews cried out: "We have a law; and according to that law He ought to die, because He made Himself the Son of God." 22

THE ACTS OF JESUS TESTIFY THAT HE CLAIMED TO BE GOD

Jesus performed His many miracles, not merely as the ambassador of God, but as God Himself: "though you will not believe Me, believe the works," i.e., the miracles," that you may know and believe that the Father is in Me, and I in the Father." is He allowed men to adore Him as God. When He had given sight to the man born blind, He asked him: "Dost thou believe in the Son of God? He answered, and said: Who is He, Lord, that I may believe in Him? And Jesus said to him: it is He that talketh with thee. And he said: I believe, Lord. And falling down, he adored Him." "He forgave sin as of His own independent power. "Son, thy sins are forgiven thee," He said to the man sick of the palsy; and, when the Scribes ask themselves indignantly: "Who can forgive sins but God only?" He does not deny the assertion implied in their question, viz., "it is only God who can forgive sin," but goes on to re-affirm the claim He has already made: "that you may know that the Son of Man hath power on earth to forgive sins (He saith to the sick of the palsy) Arise, take up thy bed and go into thy house. And immediately he arose; and, taking up his bed, went his way in the sight of all." " To Magdalen, who had kissed His feet and bathed them with her tears, He said: "Thy sins are forgiven thee." And to those who sat at table with Him on the same occasion, He said: "Many sins are forgiven her because ahe hath loved much." It is only through love of God that sins are forgiven. Christ, therefore, asserts that love of Him is love of God. In other words, He claims to be God.**

THE APOSTLES AND DISCIPLES KNEW THAT CHRIST TARTSCLAIMED TO BE GOD

No one denies that, after the death of Christ, His followers, both Jews and Gentiles, preached His Divinity, and that they suffered and died in testimony thereof, 27 facts which can be explained only by their knowledge that He Himself had claimed to be the Son of God.

CHAPTER VII

JESUS CHRIST, TRUE GOD

THE CLAIM OF JESUS CHRIST TO BE GOD WAS JUSTIFIED BY MIRACLES AND PROPHECIES

Note. Jesus Christ claimed Divine Authority. He claimed to be sent by God, to be God Himself. We shall see in this chapter how the divine testimony of miracles confirmed His claim.

Summary.

We prove the Divinity of Christ by three arguments:

I. A. By His miracles.

B. By His prophecies.

C. By the fact that He was Himself the fulfilment of prophecy.

II. By His Resurrection.

III. By His perfection as a man and as a teacher of natural religion, considered in the light of His claim to be God.

FIRST PROOF

MIRACLES AND PROPHECIES PROVE THAT JESUS CHRIST WAS WHAT HE CLAIMED TO BE-GOD

A. His Miracles prove His Divinity. During His life on earth, Christ performed many miracles. He healed the sick, the blind, the lame, the dumb, the epileptic, by a mere word, and sometimes from a distance; specially re-markable was the cure of the man born blind. He raised the dead to life the daughter of Jairus, the widow's son of Naim, and Lazarus. He delivered men from evil spirits, thereby showing His dominion over the world of spirits. Many of His miracles were wrought on inani-mate nature: He changed water into wine; He fed five thousand with five loaves and two fishes; He stilled a storm with a word; He walked upon the waters. His miracles cannot be explained away (1) by the delusion theory according to which merely natural occurrences were regarded as supernatural by His credulous disciples, because the miracles were performed in public and their genuineness was not disputed by Christ's adversaries. Nor (2) by the theory of diabolical agency, because Christ was holy in His person and in His doctrine, and could not, therefore, have been an emissary of Satan; Christ, by casting out evil spirits, showed that He was not the agent of Satan, but his enemy. Nor (3) by the theory of hypnotism, or animal magnetism. Certain nervous dis-orders may be cured by hypnotism or suggestion, but the cure cannot be effected instantaneously, nor from a dis-tance; Christ cured all manner of diseases; in many cases the patients were not present and did not even know that He was about to cure them; the theory takes no account of cases of resurrection from the dead.

Christ appealed to His miracles as a proof that He was sent by God: "the works themselves which I do, give testimony of Me that the Father hath sent Me." Christ's teaching, therefore, was the teaching of God. But Christ taught that He Himself was God. Therefore, Christ is God.

B. His Prophecies prove His Divinity. Christ foretold many things which came to pass and which no mere man could have foreseen (1) With reference to Himself, He foretold His Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension into Heaven; (2) with reference to His disciples, He foretold that Judas would betray Him, that Peter would deny Him, that all His disciples would forsake Him; (3) with reference to His Church, He foretold that it would grow like the mustard-seed, that it would leaven all mankind, that, like Himself, it would be hated and persecuted by the world, and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. The fulfilment of these prophecies proves that Christ's teaching was the teaching of God. But Christ taught that He was God. Therefore, Christ is God.

His prophecy about Jerusalem and the Jews is par-ticularly noteworthy. He said: "The days shall come upon thee, and thy enemies shall cast a trench about thee, and compass thee round, and straiten thee on every side, and beat thee flat to the ground, and thy children who are in thee, and they shall not leave in thee a stone upon a stone." And again: "There shall be great dis-tress in the land, and wrath upon this people, and they shall fall by the edge of the sword, and shall be led away captives into all nations, and Jerusalem shall be trodden down by the Gentiles." 10 How accurately these pro-phecies were fulfilled will be understood by readers of the History of the Jewish War, written, in seven books, by Flavius Josephus¹¹ (A.D. 37-98) at the request of the Roman Emperor, Titus. The complete destruction of the city was quite unexpected, as it was the Roman practice to preserve conquered cities and particularly the temples. The Emperor, Julian the Apostate (361-363 A.D.), tried to rebuild the Temple, so that by re-establishing the Jewish state and the Jewish religion, he might falsify the Christian prophecy. Jews flocked in from every side, and assisted with great enthusiasm in the work. Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan writer, one of the imperial life-guards, tells us of the issue, one of the most remarkable, as it is one of the best attested events in history: "[Julian] committed the accomplishment of this task to Alypius of Antioch, who had before that been Lieutenant of Britain. Alypius, therefore, set himself vigorously to the work, and was seconded by the governor of the pro-vince. Fearful balls of fire, breaking out near the founda-tions, continued their attacks, till the workmen, after repeated scorchings, could approach no more; and thus, the fierce elements obstinately repelling them, he gave over his attempt." 18

C. Christ Himself the Fulfilment of Prophecy. Many Jews were converted by perceiving that in Christ were fulfilled the prophecies about the Messias contained in their sacred books, the books of the Old Testament. We are not here concerned to prove that these books were divinely inspired, nor even that they were authentic. It suffices to accept as true, what no one denies, that the books were in existence long before the birth of Christ.

The religion of the Jews was a religion of expectation, with the belief in a Messias, or a Redeemer to come, as its central doctrine. All that had been foretold of the Redeemer was accurately fulfilled in Christ. The follow-ing is a brief summary of the prophetic description of the Redeemer: He shall be sprung from the line of David (Isaias xi. 1, 2), and shall be born at Bethlehem (Micheas v. 2).13 He shall be born of a Virgin Mother (Is. vii. 14). He shall be called the Son of God (Ps. ii. 7). He shall be called a Nazarene-a man from Nazareth (Is. xi. 1).14 He shall judge the poor with justice (Is. xi. 4). His empire shall be multiplied (Is. ix. 7). His Kingdom shall be assailed but shall last for ever (Ps. ii. 1-4). He shall judge all men and crown the just with glory (Is. xxiv, xxviii). Yet He shall be a man of sorrows, despised and the lowest of men (Id. liii). He shall be sold for thirty pieces of silver, and the silver shall be used to purchase the potter's field (Zach. xi. 12, 13). He shall be offered of His own will, and shall not open His mouth; He shall be led as a sheep to the slaughter, and shall be dumb as a lamb before His shearer (Is. liii. 7). His hands and feet shall be pierced, His garments shall be divided, and lots cast upon His vesture (Ps. xxi. 17-19). He shall be a light to the Gentiles and bring salvation to the ends of the earth (Is. xlix. 6). "The God of Heaven will set up a Kingdom that shall never be destroyed"

(Daniel ii. 44),15 It is manifest that the fulfilment of all these prophecies in an individual¹ could not have been due to chance or human contrivance, but must have been the work of God. Christ was therefore the promised Redeemer. He had been sent by God. He taught with Divine Authority. But He taught that He was God, therefore He was God.

But why did not the entire Jewish people perceive that in Christ all prophecy was fulfilled? The question appears to be all the more difficult to answer, when we remember that, as the time of Christ's birth approached, hope in the speedy coming of the Messias had become intense. Reply: (1) The Jewish people at the time of Christ were, as a mass, morally corrupt. Flavius Josephus says that, had not the Romans come to punish them, an earthquake, a deluge, or the lightnings of Sodom would have overwhelmed them. Their wickedness closed their ears to the message of Christ. (2) They heard with savage bitterness the revolutionary doctrine of Christ that they would no longer stand apart from the rest of the world as God's chosen people, but that the hated Gentiles were to be admitted to the same privilege.1" (3) Their leaders, the Scribes and Pharisees, conceived a terrible hatred against Christ, because they were envious of His influence, and because He had unsparingly denounced their arrogance and hypocrisy. They were therefore not disposed to examine His claims impartially. (4) Owing partly to the Pharisees' interpretation of the sacred writings, partly to the foreign oppression and to national pride, the Jewish people had come to think of the Messias, not as one who would deliver them from sin, but as a temporal king who would break the Roman yoke and lead them to world-empire. The triumphs of a Spiritual King were all intorpreted as the triumphs of an earthly monarch. Even the Apostles could hardly rid themselves of the popular belief, for they asked Christ before His Ascension, with a pathetic yearning for the fulfilment of a patriotic hope, "Lord, wilt Thou at this time again restore the Kingdom of Israel?"1" 18

SECOND PROOF

THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST PROVES THAT HE WAS GOD

Outline of Proof. Christ claimed to be God; in proof of His claim, He said He would rise from the dead; Christ rose from the dead; therefore, Christ is God. The witnesses to the Resurrection were trustworthy. Refutation of adversaries' Theories: the Deception Hypothesis; the Hallucination Hypothesis; the Trance Hypothesis.

Christ said He would Rise from the Dead. When the Jews demanded a miracle in proof of His authority, He answered: "Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up." 20 "He spoke," the Evangelist says, "of the temple of His body." Later He speaks more clearly: "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign; and a sign shall not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the Prophet. For as Jonas was in the whale's belly three days and three nights, so shall the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights." 21 After the Transfiguration He says to Peter, James, and John: "Tell the vision to no man, till the Son of Man be risen from the dead." 22 Before going up to Jerusalem to suffer, He says with perfect distinctness: "Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man shall be betrayed to the chief priests and the scribes, and they shall condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified, and the third day He shall rise again." 23 That He had foretold His resurrection was well known to all, for the Jews, after His death, said to Pilate: "We have remembered that that seducer said, while He was yet alive, After three days I will rise again." 24

Christ Died and was Buried. The four Evangelists say that He died on the cross. The soldiers, finding Him already dead, did not break His limbs. One of them opened His side with a spear. When Joseph of Arimathaea asked Pilate for permission to bury Him, Pilate, before consenting, despatched a centurion to make sure that He was dead.25 It was not likely that His enemies would leave their work half finished. In the words quoted above (end of last paragraph) they say "while He was yet alive," i.e., they assert that He is now dead. 26

Christ Rose from the Dead. The Evangelists tell us that the grave was found empty on the morning of the third day; that Christ appeared to Mary Magdalen and the other women; that He appeared to the Apostles and showed them His wounds, "See My hands and feet that it is I Myself. Handle and see, for a spirit hath not flesh and bones as you see Me to have"; 27 that He con-versed with them and ate with them; 28 that He walked with the two disciples to Emmaus, and was recognised by them " in the breaking of bread." 29 "He was seen," St. Paul writes to the Corinthians, "by more than five hundred brethren at once last of all He was seen by me." 30

1

A

The Witnesses to the Resurrection were Trustworthy

(1) They were not deceivers they had no inducement to give false testimony; their labours and their sufferings are proofs of their sincerity. They were not themselves deceived the supposition is excluded by their numbers, their reluctance to believe, and the length of time Christ was with them after His death.

(2) God himself showed by miracles that they were neither deceivers nor dreamers but speakers of the truth. Through their hands and in the name of the risen Christ, He wrought many signs and wonders, so that "fear came upon every soul." 31

(3) Observe the striking fact that among the thousands of early converts that flocked to St. Peter, there was "a great multitude of the priests." 32 They belonged to the very class that had rejected the miracles of Jesus and had sent Him to His death; but now they broke away from the High Priest and the other leaders who were still fiercely brushing aside every new evidence sent them by God. These converts knew that they were sacrificing all the privileges of their priesthood for a life of per-secution; they knew that they would be branded as traitors to their order and their race. How could they have faced such a future? Only because of the sharp command of their conscience. The truth of the Resur-rection must have shone out, clear as crystal in their minds. This would have come to pass in either of two ways: either they were convinced that the miracles wrought by the Apostles were genuine, and that, there-fore, God himself had vouched for the truth of their statement that Christ was risen or else, they were con-vinced, after personally interviewing and cross-questioning the numerous witnesses to the Resurrection (to all of whom they would have had easy access), that there was no flaw in their testimony. However, with the severe choice before them, we may take it as beyond all doubt, that many of them would have examined both sets of evidence, and would, moreover, have studied anew the Messianic prophecies and have found their fulfilment in the suffering, yet triumphant, Christ, the Son of God made Man, who died on the Cross and rose from the grave.

St. Paul as Witness to the Resurrection.-St. Paul's testimony, so valuable in itself, confirms that of the other witnesses. No critic doubts his account of the miraculous vision on the road to Damascus; no critic challenges the authenticity of the great epistles in which, within thirty years after the death of Christ, he preached the Resur-rection to the Christians of Rome, Greece, and Asia Minor as the very basis of their faith; no one can question the holiness and complete sincerity of this former per-secutor of the Church. It is inconceivable that a man of his strict honesty, high intelligence and learning, would have joined a band of cheats or dupes. It is incon-ceivable that he who was in touch with the witnesses to the Resurrection could have discovered some discrepancy, some shade of suspicion, in their testimony, and have suppressed all mention of it.34

B

The Resurrection is Proved by the Miracle of the Worldwide

Belief in it

On the day of Pentecost, in Jerusalem itself, the scene of Christ's shameful death, the Apostles came boldly before the people and put the Resurrection in the fore-front of their preaching. On that day three thousand Jews were converted by St. Peter to belief in Christ whom, he said, "God hath raised again, whereof we all are witnesses"; and five thousand more were added some days later, when he spoke of Him as "the author of life whom God hath raised from the dead." 35 In Palestine and beyond its borders, converts of every rank and race multiplied rapidly; within a few years they were counted by millions; within a few centuries, they formed the vast, and still growing, majority of the population of the Roman Empire. St. Augustine says that had not the Resurrection been a fact, the conversion of the world to belief in it by a few Galilean fishermen would have been as great a miracle as the Resurrection itself. And that miracle of belief, a continuous miracle, gains in impressiveness as the centuries pass. Within the Church to-day, there are found four hundred million believers, and almost two hundred million more outside her fold; among them are men of every class, some of them of the highest intellect. Thus does God show that His Apostles spoke the truth; thus does He show that Christ our Lord rose from the dead.

These positive arguments are reinforced by the very weak-ness of the theories proposed by our adversaries to account for the undoubted fact of the empty tomb on Easter morn.

Adversaries' Theories. The Apostles were deceivers (the Deception Hypothesis). This was the earliest attempt to explain away the Resurrection and is an attack on the sincerity of the disciples. The guards at the sepulchre said that they fell asleep, and that, while they slept, the disciples came and removed the body. The story spread widely among the Jews and many believed it. If the soldiers fell asleep, they could not have known what happened during their sleep; all they could have said was that, when they woke, the grave was empty. They might have added that probably the disciples came and stole away the body. Let us assume that they put their statement in some such reasonable form. Can we imagine that the disciples who had shown utter timidity during the Passion would risk liberty, perhaps life, in an attempt to steal the body, and all with a view to fraud? And why perpetrate such a fraud? If they really knew that Christ was not risen, then they knew He had deceived them and was not God. What had they to gain by preaching a fraudulent resur-rection? Nothing but persecution, incessant labour, and death, not to speak of remorse of conscience. And could the five hundred witnesses have succeeded in their conspiracy of fraud? Im-possible: their cruel, skilful, and powerful enemies would have unmasked them. The fact that the Pharisees did not even try to break the testimony of the witnesses by cross-examination is a proof of their conviction that the task was hopeless: the sincerity of the Apostles and disciples was only too manifest. And there is a further point the silver in their treasury had bribed an Apostle to betray his Master; the silver was still there, and its pull on the avaricious would have been strengthened by the fear of persecution and death. There was no Judas among all the witnesses to the Resurrection; had there been even one false man among them, he would have broken under the weight of the double temptation; he would have sold his honour and saved his life by concocting a story to discredit his companions.

The Apostles were deceived (the Hallucination Hypothesis). This is the favourite hypothesis of modern adversaries. The followers of Christ, they say, were in a state of tense nervous excitement after the Crucifixion; they believed that their beloved Master would triumph over the grave and come back to them again; it was in answer to their passionate longing for His coming that their fancy bodied forth the vision of the risen Saviour. That an individual might suffer from such an hallucination is possible; that all the Apostles and hundreds of the disciples should suffer from it simultaneously and over a long period is impossible. Besides, the evidence against the existence of any "passionate longing" is overwhelming. The followers of Christ were not expecting His Resurrection. When He was seized by the Jews, they fled in terror, believing that all was over. He had un-doubtedly foretold His Death and Resurrection, but they appear never to have reconciled themselves to the thought of His Death, and so did not think of His Resurrection." Mary Magdalen and the other women brought spices to embalm His body on the morning of the third day. They, therefore, did not expect to find Him risen from the dead. Magdalen's first thought, when she saw the empty tomb, was that someone had stolen the Body, When Christ spoke to her, she did not recognize Him at first, believing that He was the gardener. Cleophas and the other disciple, as they talked sadly of Christ on the road to Emmaus, told the stranger, as they thought Him, how they had been frightened by the women's story of the Resurrection. When He revealed Himself to them as Christ, they returned and told the Apostles. The Apostles refused to believe them, just as they had already refused to believe the women. St. Thomas was not present when Christ first appeared to the Apostles, and protested that he would not believe, until he had put his finger "into the place of the nails," and his hand "into His side." 40 The wit. nesses, therefore, to the risen Christ were not credulous, but incredulous, and the hypothesis of hallucination is excluded.

Christ was a deceiver (the Trance Hypothesis). This suggests that Christ did not really die on the cross; He merely swooned; He recovered consciousness in the sepulchre; while the soldiers slept, He pushed aside the stone and rejoined His companions; and so He made on them the impression that He had triumphed over death. The mental anguish which Christ had suffered, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the crucifixion, the piercing of His side with a spear make the trance hypothesis impossible. Suppose for a moment it were true, could one so severely wounded, so exhausted from loss of blood, have moved aside the great stone, and have done so without waking the soldiers? Could He have played the rôle of victor over death, and walked like one in perfect health with those cruel wounds in His feet? Could He have entered the supper-room through closed doors? Could He have appeared and disappeared at will Could He make a vast concourse of disciples fancy that He ascended into heaven in their sight? Are we to suppose that this Man of perfect holiness, who had suffered the agony of the Cross in upholding His claim that He was the Son of God, was a vile impostor; that He could set His followers on fire with zeal to go forth and preach a lie to the world? Even the Rationalist Strauss rejects the hypothesis as unworthy of consideration.

Celsus Objection. Why did not Christ show himself publicly after His Resurrection to His enemies and the entire people? That question was first asked by the pagan, Celsus (d. c. 200 A.D.), and has been repeated by Renan and others. (1) God wishes us to turn to Him freely, and, as a rule, does not employ a super-abundance of means to bend the will of the evil-minded. He is content with giving clear, and amply sufficient proofs, that faith is reasonable." The rich man in the parable, calling out from hell to Abraham, besought him to send a messenger from the dead to warn his five brothers of the tortures of the damned. Abraham refused, saying: "They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. If they hear them not, neither will they believe if one rise again from the dead." The Pharisees asked Christ for a sign from heaven and were refused. While He hung on the Cross, they that passed by bade Him come down if He were the Son of God, but He paid no heed to them. To one adversary He gave an exceptional grace: He appeared to the persecutor, Saul of Tarsus, afterwards the Apostle Paul." (2) Had Christ appeared to all, the depraved subtlety of men would still have found a means to escape belief. "This is not Christ," they would have said, "but some evil spirit, an emissary of Satan." And unbelievers of later generations would probably ask: "If Christ appeared to all men after His Resurrection, why does He not appear to all men now? Why does He not remain on earth always?" Even though He did remain on earth always, these same unbelievers would still persevere in their incredulity, pro-testing that He was being personated by a series of impostors.

Conclusion. We have proved, therefore. through the

testimony of friends and enemies, that Christ died and was buried; we have proved through the testimony of witnesses who were honest and, at the same time, in-credulous, and through the success which attended the preaching of the Apostles, that Christ rose from the dead. Christ claimed to be God. In proof of His claim, Christ said He would rise from the dead. He rose from the dead. Therefore, His claim is true. 47

THIRD PROOF

THE PERFECTION OF CHRIST AS A MAN AND AS A TEACHER OF NATURAL RELIGION, CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT OF HIS CLAIM TO BE GOD, PROVES THAT HE WAS GOD

Outline of Proof. Christ, viewed from a merely human standpoint, was the most perfect man, the most perfect teacher of Natural Religion that ever lived. Our adversaries proclaim it as well as we. But this most perfect man, said repeatedly and emphatically that He was God. We must, therefore, conclude that His claim was just, that He was God; otherwise, we are driven to the appalling absurdity of saying that the most perfect of mankind was either a maniac or a blasphemer.

Note. In this section we are looking at Christ through the eyes of our adversaries. They hold that He was mere man, a teacher of mere Natural Religion, s.e., a teacher of religious or moral truths that can be discovered by the unaided human intellect. In the interest of our argument, we accept this false view of Him for the time being. In our sketch of His character, therefore, we ignore every word and act of His that show Him to be God. In our account of His doctrine, we allow ourselves to speak inaccurately of Him as a teacher of mere Natural Religion, sup-pressing everything that would set Him in His true light as a Teacher of Supernatural Religion, as one who taught that no act of ours, however good it may seem to men, is of any value in the sight of God unless it be inspired by belief in mysteries inaccessible to human reason.

CHRIST VIEWED AS IF HE WERE MERE MAN

His Origin, His Power over Men, His Eloquence, His Silence. He came from Nazareth, a village in Galilee, the most backward district in Palestine. Men asked in wonder: "Can anything good come from Nazareth? 49 Is not this the Carpenter, the Son of Mary? 50 How doth this man know letters having never learned?" 51 Yet this poor tradesman had a power over the human heart which men could not resist. He called them and they came. They left their homes and their fathers, their boats, their nets, and their money and followed Him52-He was gifted with a wondrous power of speech. He pressed a world of meaning into a short sentence. He employed the plainest and homeliest illustrations, e.g., the woman searching for the lost piece of money, the patching of an old garment, the shepherd in quest of his sheep. 53 He clothed His thoughts in simple and beautiful language, as where He says of the lilies of the field that "not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these." 54 By parables such as that of the Good Samaritan, or the Prodigal Son, he fixed His great doctrine of Love in the minds of the least instructed of His hearers. He touched at times a depth of pathos in such words as: "Come to Me, all you that labour and are burdened and I will refresh you"; 57 and, in His last discourse to His disciples, He speaks in the language of grave and tender sadness, full of the sorrow of parting and death, and yet breathing a sublime assurance that His work had not failed. 58 No wonder that men followed Him for days without food. Even His enemies said: "Never did man speak like this man." "50 He outmatched them in the gift of eloquence, and confounded them with His quick retort and subtle reply. Often they tried to ensnare Him into some awkward admission, but He baffled them by His wisdom.60 And He could be silent as well as eloquent. At His trial, He answered when adjured to answer, but He was silent while the witnesses were giving their perjured evidence. There was no need for speech, for they contradicted and confounded one another. Pilate, who knew that their testimony was worthless, still sought to provoke Him to reply, but "He answered him to never a word, so that the governor And when Peter had denied wondered exceedingly," 41 Him, He spoke, not with His lips, but with His eyes. It was enough. "Peter going out wept bitterly." ва

He was a Man of Superb Courage and Stainless Character. He was Firm but not Obstinate. The poor tradesman from Galilee had no fear of the proud and powerful Pharisees. He scourged them in a terrible invective for their hypocrisy, their avarice, and their hardness of heart. He knew that their fury could be sated only by His blood, yet He never ceased to whip them with the lash of righteous indignation. Several times He was on the brink of destruction. Once a raging mob had swept Him to the verge of a cliff, but, at the last moment, He eluded their grasp. 64 In the hour of His Passion, caught in the toils of His enemies, He made no appeal, no apology, no retractation of His doctrine. No cry for mercy escaped Him, when the pitiless scourges lacerated His flesh, nor when His sacred hands and feet were nailed to the Cross. Bitter though His enemies were, they were silent when He challenged them to charge Him with sin.65 He was the only man that ever lived who could stand up before His enemies and defy them to convict Him of a single fault. The traitor, Judas, confessed, "I have sinned in betraying innocent blood." At His trial, when His foes strained every nerve against Him, neither Pilate nor Herod could find any guilt in Him: 67 His character scrutinized in the fierce light of savage hatred showed not a stain. He was no self-seeker, no respecter of wealth. He fled when the multitude sought to make Him king. 68 He had not enough money to live without alms.69 He could not pay the temple dues without a miracle.70 He whose ability might have borne Him to the highest position had not "whereon to lay His head." 1 He preferred to be a teacher of truth, to wander about poor and homeless. He was firm, but not obstinate. He refused to abate His teaching to win the companionship of the wealthy young ruler." Yet He knew how to bend when no principle was at stake. He sought to escape, even by hiding, the impor tunities of the Syro-Phœnician woman who implored Him with piteous cries to heal her daughter, but, at last, touched by her profound humility, He yielded.

He was Affable, Gentle, Courteous, and Humble. He was a Man of Loving Heart. He did not shun the companion-ship of men: His enemies murmured because He ate "with publicans and sinners." 74 Though Jews were not wont to converse with Samaritans, He spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well." He was entertained at the house of his friends, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. 76 He gently remonstrated with His two Apostles, James and John, for their ambition." He was courteous to the Pharisee, Nicodemus, because he came to Him with a right intention. 78 He impressed more than once on His Apostles the need of humility; they were not to lord it over their dependants like earthly princes; they were to be the servants of their subjects. He Himself set them the example by washing their feet at the Last Supper. 70 He was a Man of loving heart. His three years' ministry was an incessant outpouring of love. The sick and the sinful came in vast numbers to Him. He healed them of their infirmities. His life was a daily triumph over sin, sorrow, and disease: He saved from death the un-happy woman, convicted of a shameful crime: "Не that is without sin among you," He said to her accusers, "let him first cast a stone at her," 80 and looking into their consciences they slunk away ashamed; He restored the widowed mother her only son as he was being carried forth for burial; He feared not to lay His hands on the foul leper. 81 He wept with passionate grief over the Sacred City, dear to Him and to all Jews as the very hearthstone of their race: "How often would I have gathered thy children, as the hen doth gather her chickens under her wings, and thou wouldst not." sa Some great light of love must have shone in His face, else, why were little children brought to Him that He might notice them? He chid the Apostles for trying to keep them back. He took them in His arms and blessed them. 83 On the Cross, His heart was still the same loving heart, true to its old affections, ready to receive the sinner and to pardon the persecutor and calumniator. Amid all His agony, He thought of His Blessed Mother, and asked St. John to be a son to her; with words of sublime hope, He blessed. the contrition of the penitent thief who, but a moment before, had been reviling Him; He besought His heavenly Father to pardon the very men who had nailed Him to the Cross, and who, even as He prayed for them, still pursued Him with mockery, insult, and blasphemy.

Summary: He was the Model of all Virtues. To a perfect

love for God and submission to His holy will ("Not My will but Thine be done "), 84 He united in a form, never before witnessed by men, the virtues of humility, courage, patience, meekness, and charity. He was a brave, strong man, who spoke His mind fearlessly, and died for the doctrine He advocated. He was gentle, courteous, affable, and unselfish. No contradiction, calumny, or persecution could wring from Him a word or gesture inconsistent with His dignity as a heaven-sent instructor of mankind. His goodness was without weakness; His zeal and earnestness, without impatience; His firmness, without obstinacy. He was not only a thinker, but a man of action. His eyes seemed ever fixed on heaven, but yet He was full of sympathy for the weakness of His disciples, full of tender-ness for the sorrowful and the afflicted, and He combined an intense hatred of sin with an intense love for the sinner. He is the model for men of all conditions in all ages, the ideal which, while remaining unattained and unattainable, has been the inspiration of the noblest lives.

THE TESTIMONY OF RATIONALISTS. All who have studied the Gospels, unbelievers as well as believers, are agreed as to the nobility of the human character of Christ. Lecky, a Rationalist, says: "It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which, through all the changes of eighteen centuries, has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind, than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists." 85

CHRIST VIEWED AS IF HE WERE A TEACHER OF MERE NATURAL RELIGION

Setting aside for argument's sake all the higher doctrines of Christ, we shall find that He who was perfect as a man, was perfect also as a teacher of truths which, in the view of our opponents, may be assigned to the sphere of Natural Religion. He stands alone and unrivalled because of His doctrine of the Law of Charity, His doctrine of the Law of Sincerity, His doctrine of the supreme importance of the human soul, and His ideals of moral excellence. He taught as one having power," not like Socrates and others, as though He were groping for the light. He taught with clearness and decisiveness, and was Himself the model of all His teaching.

His Doctrine of the Law of Charity. The Jews of His day held high dispute as to which was the greatest com-mandment of their Law. Some said it was the com-mandment to offer sacrifice; others, the commandment of Sabbath observance; others, again, the commandment of Circumcision. Christ swept aside all current opinion as so much rubbish, and laid bare the true foundation of sanctity. "The whole Law," He said, in effect, "is summed up in the one Law of Charity, i.e., the love of God and one's neighbour."86 But, in His Sermon on the Mount, the first great exposition of His teaching, He gave the Law of Charity a wider interpretation. "Neigh-bour," with the Jews, had meant a fellow Israelite or a before, had been reviling Him; He besought His heavenly Father to pardon the very men who had nailed Him to the Cross, and who, even as He prayed for them, still pursued Him with mockery, insult, and blasphemy.

Summary: He was the Model of all Virtues. To a perfect

love for God and submission to His holy will ("Not My will but Thine be done "), 84 He united in a form, never before witnessed by men, the virtues of humility, courage, patience, meekness, and charity. He was a brave, strong man, who spoke His mind fearlessly, and died for the doctrine He advocated. He was gentle, courteous, affable, and unselfish. No contradiction, calumny, or persecution could wring from Him a word or gesture inconsistent with His dignity as a heaven-sent instructor of mankind. His goodness was without weakness; His zeal and earnestness, without impatience; His firmness, without obstinacy. He was not only a thinker, but a man of action. His eyes seemed ever fixed on heaven, but yet He was full of sympathy for the weakness of His disciples, full of tender-ness for the sorrowful and the afflicted, and He combined an intense hatred of sin with an intense love for the sinner. He is the model for men of all conditions in all ages, the ideal which, while remaining unattained and unattainable, has been the inspiration of the noblest lives.

THE TESTIMONY OF RATIONALISTS. All who have studied the Gospels, unbelievers as well as believers, are agreed as to the nobility of the human character of Christ. Lecky, a Rationalist, says: "It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which, through all the changes of eighteen centuries, has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love; has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions; has been not only the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind, than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists." 85

CHRIST VIEWED AS IF HE WERE A TEACHER OF MERE NATURAL RELIGION

Setting aside for argument's sake all the higher doctrines of Christ, we shall find that He who was perfect as a man, was perfect also as a teacher of truths which, in the view of our opponents, may be assigned to the sphere of Natural Religion. He stands alone and unrivalled because of His doctrine of the Law of Charity, His doctrine of the Law of Sincerity, His doctrine of the supreme importance of the human soul, and His ideals of moral excellence. He taught as one having power," not like Socrates and others, as though He were groping for the light. He taught with clearness and decisiveness, and was Himself the model of all His teaching.

His Doctrine of the Law of Charity. The Jews of His day held high dispute as to which was the greatest com-mandment of their Law. Some said it was the com-mandment to offer sacrifice; others, the commandment of Sabbath observance; others, again, the commandment of Circumcision. Christ swept aside all current opinion as so much rubbish, and laid bare the true foundation of sanctity. "The whole Law," He said, in effect, "is summed up in the one Law of Charity, i.e., the love of God and one's neighbour."86 But, in His Sermon on the Mount, the first great exposition of His teaching, He gave the Law of Charity a wider interpretation. "Neigh-bour," with the Jews, had meant a fellow Israelite or a friendly alien. Christ broadened its meaning so as to include every man without exception, good or wicked, friend or foe. Men must love one another, because they are brothers. They are brothers, because they are children of the same heavenly Fathers who loves them all, who gives the blessings of His Providence, the sun-shine and the fruitful rain, to all, unjust as well as just, who goes in quest of the sinner, as the shepherd seeks for his lost sheep, who is no longer robed in the lightnings of Sinai, but shines with the radiance of kindness and love. Men must forgive one another as they hope to be forgiven. For how can they ask of their Father what they them-selves refuse to a brother? Christ's Law of Charity, therefore, may be briefly expressed thus: "Love God, for He is your loving Father. Love and be indulgent to one another, for you are all His children. Love and forgive, as you hope to be loved and to be forgiven." Christ, unlike all other teachers, drew men close to God. He taught them to turn to God with a warm, personal love, and to see His image in their fellow-man. 88

"Ye His Doctrine of the Law of Sincerity. Christ would have no mere outward sanctity, the sanctity of the Scribes and Pharisees who made light of internal sin. fools," He said to them, "did not He that made that which is without, make also that which is within?" 89 God is as much the author of the inner as the outer man, and will have service of them both. We must pluck anger and all uncleanness from our hearts. Our sanctity must be sound to the core, 90

His Doctrine of the Supreme Importance of the Human Soul. The human soul is infinitely more precious than anything else in the world. The loss of friends, the loss of all our possessions, the loss of life itself are all as "What nothing compared with the loss of the soul: doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever shall save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose his life for My sake and the gospel shall save it." 91 Others before Christ had perceived this truth, but dimly and as through a veil. He was the first to give it clear and fearless expression.

His Ideals of Moral Execllence. Profound reverence for God, perfect submission to His will, and readiness to rise to heroic heights of self-denial in His service were Christ's ideals of moral excellence.

Note.-1. (a) Had Christ not been God, or one sent by God, His teaching on natural religion would have failed for want of authority. (6) Clear though His teaching was in its main purport, it is obscure in some points. For instance, we are not always sure whether the heroic virtues which He commends are for all, or only for the few, or how in individual cases His doctrine should be applied. Hence the necessity of having always with us a living, infallible voice authorized to speak in His name, and to give the true interpretation.

2. Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is regarded as the noblest man of pagan antiquity, but he cannot be compared with Our Saviour. Socrates was the foe of pretended knowledge. He urged men to strive after precise ideas of goodness, holiness, justice, beauty, etc. He was put to death by the Athenian democracy in a moment of frenzy, not because of his supposed doctrines or method, but because of the profligacy and disloyalty of some of his com-panions. Though superior to his contemporaries in intellectual power, he shared the loose notions of his day in regard to chastity. He concerned himself only with the better educated among the Athenians. Even these he did not so much instruct as stimulate to inquiry. He undoubtedly helped to purify the gross popular notion of the Deity, but his ideas about a future state were vague in the extreme, and he had no conception of the brotherhood of man. Since he was born into a highly cultured state, and had as his contemporaries men of the first rank in philosophy, history, and art (e.g., Anaxagoras, Thucydides, Euripides), the development of his talent was, in great measure, due to environment. Our Saviour, if we view Him from the human standpoint, enjoyed no such advantage. He spent His youth and manhood among peasants or artisans of little or no education.

THE TESTIMONY OF RATIONALISTS. The German philosopher, Kant, says: "We may readily admit that, had not the Gospels first taught the general moral prin-ciples (i.e., the precepts of natural religion) in their full purity, our intellect would not even now understand them so perfectly." Harnack, who does not admit that there was anything supernatural in Christ, cannot find words sufficiently emphatic to express admiration for His moral teaching. His sayings and parables, he says, are sim-plicity itself in their main purport, and yet they contain a depth of meaning which we can never fathom; in His personality, He is not like an heroic penitent or an en-thusiastic prophet who is dead to the world, but He is a man who has rest and peace in His own soul and who can give life to the souls of others; He speaks to men as a mother speaks to her child. It is unnecessary to quote the opinions of other rationalists. All are agreed that Christ in His character and His doctrine was immeasur-ably beyond the noblest teachers that ever lived.

Conclusion. (1) It is admitted, therefore, that Christ was perfect as a man, was unsurpassed, unequalled as a teacher. But Christ claimed emphatically and persistently that He was God. We must admit that His claim was just, that He was God, or else face the terrible conclusion that He was a deceiver or a victim to some hallucination; in other words, we must say that the most perfect of mankind was a shameless liar and blasphemer or a pitiable maniac. Such is the colossal absurdity to which Rationalists are reduced, an absurdity which, when they realize it, must convince them that their entire position is untenable.

(2) The character of Christ-His wisdom, His goodness, His innocence-so absolutely above the limitations and frailties of human nature-a miracle of perfection-is wholly inexplicable without special reference to a unique Divine intervention. His very character therefore, is in itself a Divine testimony to the truth of His doctrine-to the truth of His claim to be God.

The Divine origin of Judaism. The Divinity of Christ estab-lishes the Divine origin not only of Christianity, but also of the preparatory religion of Judaism. Christ, in His human generation, was a man of the Jewish race. For nearly thirty years He pro-fessed and practised the Jewish religion. Therefore, it follows that the Jewish religion was what it claimed to be, a religion given to the Jewish race by God, and that the accounts of all pre-Christian revelation which its sacred books contain must be accepted as of Divine authority.

The Divinity of Christ therefore assures us of His own revela. tion, and of the revelations given before His time to mankind in general and to the Jewish race in particular.

APPENDIX

I

PROOF OF THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST FROM THE RAPID PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY AND THE FORTITUDE OF THE MARTYRS

Tacitus says that in the first persecution of the Church (64-68 A.D.) under Nero " a vast multitude of Christians" were put to death. Fifty years later, Pliny, 4 the Propractor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, reports to the Emperor Trajan that he is startled and perplexed by the number, influence, and pertinacity of the Christians he finds in his district and in the neighbouring province of Pontus. St. Justin Martyr writing about 150 A.D., says: "There is no race of men, barbarian or Greek, nay, of those who live in waggons or who are shepherds or nomads in tents among whom prayers and eucharists are not offered to the Father and Maker of the Universe through the name of the crucified Jesus." 95 At the con-version of the Emperor Constantine in 324 A.D., about one-twelfth of the Roman world was Christian. The proportion had risen to one-half about the year 400 A.D. Three decades later an imperial document declared that paganism had almost completely disappeared. The triumph of the new creed was social as well as numerical. Gradually it had worked its way upwards from despised toilers to proud officials, from ignorant Jews to learned philosophers. Such a rapid and world-wide revolution cannot be explained by natural causes (1) The founder of the religion was, in the eyes of the world, a poor Galilean tradesman. Four of His Apostles were fishermen, and one a petty tax-collector. When SS. Peter and John, after the first Christian miracle, were arraigned before the Council, wonder was expressed that they, being "illiterate and ignorant men," had the pre-sumption to preach a new Gospel. The same charge was repeated many times in the years that followed.

"Christians," said their opponents, "are fools lowest dregs of the people unpolished boors, ignorant even of the sordid arts of life; they do not understand even civil matters, how can they understand Divine? They have left their tongs, mallets, and anvils to preach about the things of heaven." 97 Such was the the character the Christian teachers bore. Against them were pitted the power, wealth, and intelligence of the Roman Empire. (2) The doctrine preached by the Apostles was new and repellent to the worldly-minded. It demanded faith and humble submission, brotherly love and self-sacrifice unto death, from a people sunk in materialism, lustful, proud, revengeful, and almost in-capable of any elevated concept of the Deity. It urged them to smash to pieces the long hallowed images of gods that were nothing more, they were now told, than personifications of the powers of nature and of base, human passions. It bade them forsake their ancient religion, so flattering to the senses, with its noble temples, its stately ritual, its days of public amusement, and attach themselves to a joyless band of despicable men whose eyes were fixed on the things of another world, and who bowed down in worship before the image of a crucified malefactor.

But it may be objected, perhaps the very corruption of the world at the time made men sick of vice and long for a great moral reform. We reply (1) that at Rome in those days the Stoic philosophers taught a very pure system of morals, and yet they made no impression on the masses; (2) that admiration for Christian morals is very far removed from full faith in Christian teaching and from the practice of Christian precepts; (3) that we cannot conceive how, without the grace of the Holy Spirit, men could ever have overcome their repugnance for what must have seemed the unspeakable folly or blasphemy of its central doctrine that a Galilean workman was the Son of God. But, again, it may be urged that the rapid propagation of Christianity can be explained by the ease and security with which men could travel in those days to all parts of the Roman Empire. We reply: (1) that other religions, e.g., the worship of Mithra and Isis, enjoyed similar facilities, and yet failed to win and retain world-wide acceptance; (2) that while Roman roads and Roman security on land and sea helped to speed the Christian messenger to the furthest limits of the earth, all such advantages were far more than counter-vailed by the edge of the Roman sword; ten times, that vast empire concentrated all its might on the destruction of the infant Church, and, ten times, the followers of the poor Galilean emerged triumphant, 98

The persecution of Christianity, in its severity and duration, in the number, quality, and fortitude of its victims forms a unique episode in history. The hostility of the Empire, never dormant for three centuries, broke out with especial violence on ten separate occasions.

"The very young and the very old, the child, the youth in the heyday of his passions, the sober man of middle age, maidens and mothers of families, boors and slaves as well as philosophers and nobles, solitary confessors and companies of men and women all these were seen equally to defy the powers of darkness to do their worst.

They faced the implements of torture as the soldier takes his place before the enemy's battery. They cheered and ran forward to meet his attack, and, as it were, dared him, if he would, to destroy the numbers who kept closing up the foremost rank, as their comrades who had filled it fell." 100 But their courage was not as the courage of a hardened soldier; he has been trained to valour; he goes into battle, not as a lamb to the slaughter, not as a passive victim merely to suffer and to die, but with weapons in his hands, prepared to give blow for blow; and in fulfilling his duty he is supported by the conviction that to stand his ground is safer than to retreat, or by shame of cowardice, or by desire to win the applause of men; whereas the martyrs, from the world's stand-point, had everything to lose and nothing to gain from their fortitude; they many of them no more than poor little children-suffered themselves to be smeared with pitch and set alight, to be flung into boiling cauldrons, to be torn to pieces by the beasts of the amphitheatre, and all this amid the execrations of the crowd who cursed their obstinacy and promised them every reward, if they would but yield. All their strength came from the one Thought, the one Image of their Crucified Saviour whom they loved with an impassioned love. But how, without the inspiration of God, could that same Thought have "entered into myriads of men, women, and children of all ranks, especially the lower, and have had the power to wean them from their indulgences and sins, and to nerve them against the most cruel tortures, and to last in vigour as a sustaining influence for seven or eight generations, till it broke the obstinacy of the strongest and wisest government which the world has ever seen?" 101

To put the whole argument briefly: The rapid pro-pagation of Christianity among all classes throughout the world was miraculous, (1) because its preachers were men of no worldly influence; (2) because its chief doctrine was strange and repellent, while its system of morals was severe and offered no bribe to human infirmity; (3) because it was resisted by all the power of the Roman Empire.

The fortitude of the Martyrs was miraculous, (1) be-cause the persecutions extended over three centuries; (2) because vast numbers of every rank and age, including children of tender years, suffered; (3) because their constancy was proof against the most terrible tortures; (4) because they were unmoved in face of the attractive rewards promised them, if they yielded; (5) because, in the throes of death they gave a beautiful and super-human manifestation of Christian virtue, of the joyful acceptance of death and suffering, of seraphic love, of profound humility, and of the very spirit of Christ on the Cross, praying with full heart for the salvation of their enemies, and blessing the very hands that were red with their blood. It is the combination of all these features,

a combination unique in human history, that sets beyond

the possibility of doubt the miraculous character of the

endurance of the early Christians. The persecutions to

which other religions have been subjected were either

not so lasting or not so severe or not so willingly borne,

and were certainly never accompanied by a great, steady,

and continuous effulgence of Christian virtue.

In the early history of Christianity, therefore, we are confronted with two great miracles, the miracle of pro-pagation and the miracle of endurance, in other words with two irresistible testimonies from God that the Christian religion was true, and that Christ, its Founder, was, as He claimed, the Son of God, equal to His Father.

APPENDIX

II

CHRIST, A LIVING FORCE A PROOF OF HIS DIVINITY

Newman represents Napoleon in the solitude of his imprison-ment as communing with himself, thus: 198 "I have been accustomed to put before me the examples of

... Alexander and Cæsar, with a hope of rivalling their exploits, and living in the minds of men for ever. Yet, after all, in what sense does Cæsar, in what sense does Alexander live? At best, nothing but their names is known. Nay, even their names do but flit up and down the world like ghosts, mentioned only on par ticular occasions, or from accidental associations. Their chief home is the schoolroom; they have a foremost place in boys' grammars and exercise books. So low is heroic Alexander fallen, so low is imperial Cæsar, ut pueris placeat et declamatio fiat.' 1

"But, on the contrary, there is just one Name in the whole world that lives; it is the Name of One who passed His years in obscurity, and who died a malefactor's death. Eighteen hundred years have gone since that time, but still it has its hold on the human mind. It has possessed the world, and it maintains pos-session. Amid the most varied nations, under the most diversified circumstances, in the most cultivated, in the rudest races and intellects, in all classes of society, the Owner of that great Name reigns. High and low, rich and poor, acknowledge Him. Millions of souls are conversing with Him, are venturing on His word, are looking for His Presence. Palaces, sumptuous, innumerable, are raised to His honour; His image, as in the hour of His deepest humiliation, is triumphantly displayed in the proud city, in the open country, in the corners of streets, on the tops of mountains. It sanctifies the ancestral hall, and the bedchamber; it is the subject for the exercise of the highest genius in the imitative arts. It is worn next the heart in life; it is held before the failing eyes in death. Here, then, is One who is not a mere name, who is not a mere fiction, who is a reality. He is dead and gone, but still He lives, lives as a living, energetic thought of successive generations, as the awful motive power of a thousand great events. He has done without effort what others with life-long struggles have not done. Can He be less than Divine? Who is He but the Creator Himself, who is sovereign over His own works, towards whom our eyes and hearts turn instinctively, because He is our

Father and our God?" The argument may be put briefly as follows: The power of Christ over the hearts of men is no natural phenomenon. It is miraculous. It is God's testimony to the Divinity of Christ.

Note. The mighty name of Christ shows its power in the savage hatred as well as in the tender love it evokes. Once known He cannot be forgotten. Those on earth who have revolted from Him canno cannot tear His image from their minds; they are obsessed by it and rage against it like the demons of hell.

The Various Methods of Proving the Divinity of Christ

A

God has made known to us by many miracles that Christ is His Son, one in nature with Him. These miracles are not all alike; they may be divided into different classes; each class gives us a distinct method of proving Christ's Divinity:

Miracles relating directly to Christ. 1. The miracles wrought by Christ Himself during His life-time on earth, and the miracle of His Resurrection. These are the miracles on which we depend for our main proof (Chapter VII, pages 90-103).

2. The miracle of Christ's undying influence in the world (Chapter VII, Appendix II). 

Miracles relating indirectly to Christ through His Church.-3. The manifold miracle of the Church, as seen in her several characteristics and age-long vitality, proves that she is from God, and that her belief in Christ's Divinity must be true (Introductory Chapter, Appendix).

4. The two-fold miracle of the Church's rapid propagation and the fortitude of the early martyrs proves that the belief of the first Christians in Christ's Divinity must have been true (Chapter VII, Appendix I).

In (3), we take a general view of the Church; in (4), we look at a special phase of her history.

B

Besides the four methods given above of proving Christ's Divinity from miracles, there is a fifth in which we show that Christ, measured by ordinary human standards, was the most perfect of our race, and that we must either admit the truth of His claim to be God or descend to the utter absurdity of supposing that a character of supreme and uniquo excellence could have been stained by the grossest blasphemy or a pitiable illusion (pages 103-113).