MODERN SCIENCE AND MODERN THOUGHT. 23 



myths or fabulous fulfillment of prophecies, and they wage fierce bat- 

 ties over minor points, as whether the first quotations from the Gos- 

 pels are met with in the first or second half of the second century. 

 But they nowhere attempt to grapple with the real difiicullies, and 

 show that the facts and arguments which converted men like Carlyle 

 and Renan are mistaken facts and unsound arguments. Attempts to 

 harmonize the Gospels, and to prove the inspiration of writings which 

 contain manifest errors and contradictions, have gone the way of 

 Buckland's proof of a universal deluge, and of Hugh Miller's attempt 

 to reconcile Noah's ark and the Genesis account of creation with the 

 facts of geology and astronomy. Not an inch of ground that has 

 been conquered by science has ever been reconquered in fair fight by 

 theology. 



This great scientific movement is of comparatively recent date. 

 Darwin's " Origin of Species " was only published in 1859, and his 

 views as to evolution, development, natural selection, and the preva- 

 lence of universal law, have already annexed nearly the whole world 

 of modern thought, and become the foundation of all jihilosophical 

 epeculation and scientific inquiry. 



Not only has faith been shaken in the supernatural as a direct and 

 immediate agent in the phenomena of the w^orlds of matter and of 

 life, but the demonstration of the " struggle for life " and " survival 

 of the fittest" has raised anew, and with vastly augmented force, 

 those questions as to the moral constitution of the universe and the 

 origin of evil, which have so long exercised the highest minds. Is it 

 true that " love " is *' Creation's final law," when we find this enormous 

 and apparently prodigal waste of life going on; these cruel. inter- 

 necine battles between individuals and species in the struggle for ex- 

 istence ; this cynical indifference of Nature to suffering ? There are, 

 approximately, 3,600,000,000 of deaths of human beings in every cent- 

 ury, of whom at least twenty per cent, or 720,000,000, die before 

 they have attained to clear self-consciousness and conscience. What 

 becomes of them ? Why were they born ? Are they Nature's fail- 

 ures, and " cast as rubbish to the heap " ? 



To such questions there is no answer. We are obliged to admit 

 that as the material universe is not, as we once fancied, measured by 

 our standards and regulated at every turn by an intelligence resem- 

 bling ours ; so neither is the moral universe to be explained by simply 

 magnifying our own moral ideas, and explaining everything by the 

 action of a Being who does what we should have done in his place. 

 If we insist on this anthropomorphic conception, we are driven to this 

 dilemma. Carlyle bases his belief in a God, " the infinite Good One," 

 on this argument : " All that is good, generous, wise, right — whatever 

 I deliberately and forever love in others and myself, who or what 

 could by any possibility have given it to me, but One who first had 

 it to give? This is not logic ; this is axiom." 



