276 THE REV. CHANCELLOR LIAS, M.A., ON 



its superiority to the physical by another fact. We may and 

 do conceive of the possibility of the destruction of the 

 natural order, but we feel that the destruction of the moral 

 order is an absolute impossibility. The order of nature, it is 

 conceivable, might be swept away, and its place supplied by 

 a new order, with new laws of force, new arrangements of 

 material phenomena, new groupings and modes of grouping 

 of material particles. But we cannot imagine an order for 

 sentient beings where duty, justice, righteousness, mercy, 

 truth, love, shall be replaced by other principles calculated to 

 produce a moral order as good as or better than the present. 

 Moreover, the idea of the supremacy of the moral to the 

 material is inseparable from all rational thought. He would 

 indeed be a lover of paradox who would contend that the 

 laws of attraction and repidsion, of gravitation, heat, light, 

 conservation of energy and the like, were of more importance 

 to the world than the moral conceptions just referred to, not to 

 speak of those still higher ones which flow from the relations 

 of the Imman spirit to God. On the materiahstic theory we 

 feel, as regards man, that " dragons of the prime that tear each 

 other in their slime, were mellow music matched with him." 

 From the moral and spiritual stand-point alone do we obtain 

 any conception of man which can be regarded as adequate. It 

 is from that point of view alone that we come to regard the 

 world around us as a vast training school where man is being 

 educated for his true place in an vaiiverse which will for ever 

 be the organ of Eternal Love. 



I might also draw an argument from the last paper I read 

 before the Institute, in corroboration of the view for which I 

 have been contending. Mr. Herbert Spencer has shown that 

 all the facts with which we have to deal in physical science, 

 matter, motion, force, space, time, individual existence, are 

 ultimately unthinkable. What is this but to say that ail 

 forms of existence whatever in this physical world have their 

 roots in an order above and beyond it — that the idea of 

 existence cannot be expressed in terms of the visible order, 

 but must bo referred to that mysterious spirit-land which 

 encompasses us, and to which all forces at work here around 

 us may not improbably be found ultimately to belong ? Thus 

 so far from supernatural and spiritual forces being an intrusion 

 into the natural order, and calculated to disturb its exquisitely 

 poised equilibrium, the natiu'al order presentsitself to the mind 

 simply as the lowest and most mechanical portion of that 

 larger Divine order of which we human beings are permitted 



