SCIENCE AND IMMORTALITY. 37 



comprehensive." Nor is Paley's answer, which assumes the existence 

 of God, at all available as against Hume, who, in his next section, puts 

 into the mouth of an imaginary Epicurus all the arguments against 

 such a belief. But it is a most just and reasonable remark that this 

 predisposition does not exist in the case of those who again rightly 

 or wrongly are wishing to know God and hoping to live after death. 

 It is at this point that natural and revealed religion, weak when 

 divided, becomes strong by combination. The Resurrection would 

 certainly never be believed if it did not fall like a spark upon a mass 

 of wishes and aspirations which are immediately kindled into life. 

 Granted a man (and this is no supposition, but a fact), whose whole 

 nature craves not to die, and whose mind is occupied by the standing 

 miracle of its own immortality, and then the Resurrection, so far 

 from being improbable, will be the very thing which gives life to his 

 hopes. The more he sees that natural religion cannot give him facts 

 as proofs, the more he will welcome Revelation which does, just 

 because it will satisfy the rational desire which science is creating in 

 the human mind. And just as there is no answer to Hume's argu- 

 ment for one predisposed as Hume was, so is there none to one pre- 

 disposed as this supposed (but very actual) man is. The one is as 

 incapable of disbelief as the other of assent. Hume and Paley do 

 not really grapple with each other, but move in parallel lines that 

 never meet. As Hume himself said of Berkeley, "His arguments 

 admit of no answer and produce no conviction," so might each of the 

 two say of the other. On the one hand, we have all the results of 

 human experience, a severe standard of intellectual virtue, a morality 

 which confines itself to its duties toward humanity, and the power 

 of being able not to think about ultimate incomprehensibilities. On 

 the other hand, we have intense longings after the infinite, which 

 science, admitting, as it does, the existence of the Unknowable, can- 

 not possibly deny to be legitimate in those who feel them sincerely ; 

 also a body of evidence, sufficient to prove ordinary events, for a fact 

 that gives certainty and power to all these longings ; a morality, 

 which has reference to a Supreme Judge, and an absolute incapacity 

 for life and duty until some sort of conclusion has been arrived at 

 concerning the mysteries of our being and destiny. Both of these 

 represent tendencies of human nature with which the world could at 

 this stage very badly dispense ; both may have their use and their 

 justification; either maybe true, but both cannot, for the Resurrec- 

 tion either did or did not happen. 



From this account of things some very important considerations 

 follow, a few of which I will endeavor to sum up in three heads. The 

 scientific value of Revelation as a necessity, if there is to be any vital 

 and practical religion at all, will, I hope, have been sufficiently indi- 

 cated already : 



1. The lines of a long and, perhaps, never-ending conflict between 



