PROF, DRUMMOND AND THE TEACHING OF NATURE (Continued.)

Yet I have already stated that there is truth in Prof. Drummond's book ; and it is this which has laid hold upon so many; it is truth, too, which we cannot give up because of the association in which we find it there. But it needs limiting and defining, both:it needs, in fact, re-statement; and this, if we get the right standpoint, I believe it not to be difficult to give it.

Really we cannot give up nature to the infidel, nor the facts of nature, where truly that; no, nor the study of nature, as if it were God's witness no longer, and could only deceive the one who listened to it. It is true, godless science can even manufacture "facts,"-just by reason of its supreme faith in theories which necessitate them; while it is certain to select them according to the " law " of which Mr. Lewes speaks, " that we only see what interests us, and only assimilate what is adapted to our condition," and which thus "causes the mind to select its evidence." How great in this way must be the evil done by text-books in which not all the facts, but a chosen number of them only are presented to the learner, who perhaps never goes beyond these, unable, save as to the merest fraction, to. verify them at all! But this only shows the danger of leaving science in the hands of unbelievers. Shut men's minds out from the study of nature, we cannot if we would. It is God's own witness, expressly appealed to by Scripture itself as that, and that witness it would be a terrible thing to have to renounce as if it were false witness, and to answer the apostle's question, " Doth not nature itself teach you?" with a negative of this kind. Shut men's minds out from it, therefore, we would not if we could.

Yet the danger is terribly increased by the fact which this book of Prof. Drummond's so alarmingly illustrates, that not only from unbelievers comes this perversion of truth, but that Christians so easily can be carried away with what is not science, but usurps its name. This ought surely to make us ask, Is there not some guiding principle of interpretation, which may be a safeguard to us ? Has God not provided such ?-some clue-line by which to thread our way through the forest whose depths we can never fully explore, yet where we should be able to pause and worship, without danger of being lost ? Such a clue indeed there is, if only we will accept it, and it lies near where Prof. Drummond's error lies, in the adoption of that " Principle of Continuity," or, as we may better call it perhaps, the principle of Unity which pervades the works of the one God,-Creator and Redeemer.

I cannot express myself better here than I have done in the pages of a MS. which may, if the Lord permit, one clay see the light. Its argument at this point is just the continuity of nature and Scripture,-the unity of the first with the later witness for God; and that, according to the very principle of nature itself, the later revelation must interpret the earlier,-not indeed without getting back from it some of the light which it throws upon it, as we may easily understand, yet keeping ever its own higher place.

"The God of revelation has but one Revealer. Christ it is in whom, from first to last, He has manifested Himself to us. He is the Word, His Living Utterance. ' By Him,' little as it may be even yet believed,' were all things made ; and without Him was not any thing made that was made.' Creation is thus part of revelation, as indeed we are distinctly told:the primary one, but as that, the least distinct, and not the most. The written Word itself begins obscurely, brightens as it goes on, and ends in mid-day splendor, which illumines all before it. Thus here also not the beginning gives us to know the end, but the end rather the beginning. So not creation interprets the Word, but the Word creation. And for this last, Christ must be known. Not the seed interprets, but the flower and fruit.

" It must be one revelation, for the God of whom it speaks is one. Thus, as one has argued, the law of continuity is not broken. The types and parables, and indeed our common speech as well, are all based upon this essential unity. It is thus we argue from the natural to the spiritual, and are really just as much entitled to argue from the spiritual to the natural, instinctively accepting the truth of analogies which a more deliberate judgment approves and confirms. But, as I have said, the usual way is, to take the natural as illustrating and enforcing the spiritual, and for obvious reasons. The analogy must needs work both ways, if it work one, that is clear. But it takes, we think, only nature to know nature:to know the spiritual, we must be spiritual. True this is, but not the whole truth. Conviction of spiritual truth may be impressed on natural men,-the very parables are witnesses of this. And then-however unwelcome the thought may be,-nature itself can be only deeply known by the spiritual understanding. In the end, which is Christ, we find the beginning. He is both ; Lord of all worlds, whom when the elders praise, the heavens and earth and all therein break out in harmony. (Rev. 5:9-13.)

"This is the attractive truth in what we have heard much of lately, the presence of ' Natural Law in the Spiritual World.' It is only the order of apprehension which troubles us in this. Put in the reverse way, you have more the order of fact; and from ' Spiritual Law in the Natural World,' no believer in Christ would for a moment shrink. We may put it in a better form still, and call it, 'The Unity of Divine Manifestation every where.' But this would no doubt bring our wonder to an end. The attractiveness of novelty would be lost in such a proposition ; and novelty there is in the author's view, as well as truth also, as I have said. But the trouble is here:not that the earth should be, down to its elemental foundations, part of its Maker's universal kingdom, but that, in the way of statement, nature should seem rather to govern than be governed, and actually be put in the interpreter's place to read the riddle of spiritual things. Here, indeed, there is room for plentiful confusion, which our author has not escaped; and when the chiefs of an agnostic evolutionism are elevated to the rank of professors in the college of spiritual truth, it is not strange if many should refuse it, it is rather strange that any should accept.

" Yet nature remains unfallen from its place as the eldest of revelations. Corrupted indeed in man, even this has only, in a sense, confirmed its witness to us as from Him to whom man's ruin was no surprise, and redemption no after-thought. Assuredly, such a world as is around us would to an unfallen being be an inexplicable mystery; and we do not wonder to see the yet unfallen parents of our race shut off from it in a specially prepared and sheltered Eden of delight, which might be for them a better witness of creating Love,-a memory of blessing to them when fallen. And when sent forth into the earth then, they could find still amid conflicting elements around the assurance from this strange sympathy with the new strife within them, of omniscient foresight, undeceived and un-dethroned.

" Has science altered this when she bids me note that the very ground they trod on was already but the wreck of former worlds? yet that mountain-upheavals and glacier-plow, and the long list of catastrophic forces, had been used of Him who is the God of resurrection to prepare and fertilize and beautify their yet wondrous dwelling-place? 'Out of death, life' was already the grand redemption-hymn, prophecy and promise of an infinitely grander one.

" ' Doth not nature itself teach you ?' asks a guide we may not refuse. What shall we answer him ? If man has filled Olympus with his deities, the sky is still serene as ever there, and we may worship there without suspicion. But for this, the later revelation must fill up the gaps and interpret the parables of the earlier one, and then with fear dispelled, neither the demons of the mist shall hurt us, nor the earth be filled but with the whirr of soulless machinery, using souls for its material,-an infinite and remorseless prodigality without return. Nay, with one of old we will sit and sing,-

" ' Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit ?
Or whither shall I flee from Thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, Thou art there!
If I make my bed in hades, lo, Thou art there!
If I take the wings of the morning,
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there shall Thy hand lead me !
And Thy right hand shall hold me ! ' "

This principle of continuity (or of unity) we may well accept, then. God's work and His Word are thus one, and it does not need for this that we should apply the law of gravitation to spirit, as even Prof. Drummond allows us to escape from this, if spirit be in no sense material, which we take to be the fact. We might and should make other limitations, but which detract nothing from the truth that God's work and His Word have a real and beautiful correspondence, of which Mr. Drummond gives us in his first example, "Biogenesis" (or, Life from life alone), an instructive illustration. He is here on the safe ground of fact, as wide as the whole field of organic nature. It is quite otherwise when he undertakes to define "eternal life" by Herbert Spencer, and say of the Lord's words in Jno. 17:3, " For eighteen hundred years, only one definition of eternal life was before the world. Now there are two."

Even the Lord's words are not a definition of what in itself it is, but only of the character by which it is manifested in the soul that receives it,-a very different thing. And Herbert Spencer's definition would necessitate the annihilation of the wicked, a result which indeed to many now would be not unwelcome.

The doctrines of science must not be allowed to recast the doctrines of the Word ; but the Word must mold our science, and enable us to interpret aright the teachings of nature.* *Take but one fact,-that of the fall; how are we to have any true science or philosophy if we ignore this ''. The evil that is here, if man take not the shame of it, must he imputed to God as weakness at least, as one well-known man of late explicitly imputed it. He thought God had done the best He could ! Of old, Gnosticism and Manicheism had said similar things:mutter was, in their eyes, too intractable.* And this will give us lines large enough to inclose and give its true position to every fact with which nature can furnish us; while thus the whole will be transfigured into new and spiritual beauty, fit for the display of Deity to us, and surrounding us continually with admonitions of His presence and encouragement of His love. How would " day unto day " thus " utter speech, and night unto night tell knowledge"! The argument that Scripture was not intended to teach us science would be then seen as a partial truth miserably misused. Who indeed shall dare to say what Scripture cannot teach to him who is before God to learn ? And once let all truth be claimed for God as that which must needs testify for Him, the opposition between secular and sacred will end here as it ends in every true Christian life devoted to Him. Here, if the business be secular, can the life be as it should be-sacred? Have we not seen enough to know that a merely secular means a merely godless science? The realm in which Scripture has no voice is a realm in which God is not the King. Woe to the man who enters there !

Still more evidently is it true, then, that " where He speaks, whatever be the subject, it must be truth He speaks. ' Satan is a liar, and the father of it.' God is no more 'a man, that He should lie,' than He is 'the son of man, that He should repent.' And this applies equally to all subjects. He could no more give me false physics than false argument,-untrue statements as to sun or moon or firmament than as to Christ or salvation. Once admit a possibility of error, though it be infinitesimal, it must shake one's conviction as to the whole. 'If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not, how shall ye believe if I tell you of heavenly things?' Take away the truthfulness of Scripture in matters in which it can be tested, how shall we accredit it where it cannot be tested ? 'He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.' Such is the declaration of the Lord Himself. And with the Word of God, what may be pleaded for man may not be pleaded. Man is fallible and ignorant where yet he may be honest and true. With the Omniscient, mistake is impossible, and we dare not urge it."

To conclude, the work of God is as really a revelation of God as His Word is. The principle of continuity (or unity) requires that they should speak one language, and they do throughout. Spiritual law reigns in the natural world. While just as the plant in its flower and fruit interprets the seed, and just as the New Testament is the interpreter of the Old, so is the Word of God that which must give the proper understanding of creation. A science careless of God is none. It cannot be permitted to "recast" for us the truths of Scripture ; but Scripture is adequate to "recast," purify, and perfect science. The clue to the natural is to be found only in the spiritual, for which indeed alone it exists.