ON HUMAN RESPONSIBILITY. 39 
leader of those who fancy that they believe that the world 
made itself confessedly runs up all his prime causes at last 
into a thing which he calls Persistent Force, in no particular 
direction, which divided itself into the infinity of forces 
which are called Laws of Nature, by means which he calls 
“ unfathomable mysteries ;” and his latest expounder or rival 
(whichever it may be), Mr. Clodd, says just the same in a 
book which he designates The Story of Creation, beginning 
with “inherent forces” of two opposite kinds, and “the 
play” of them “causing the rearrangement of atoms,” of 
course with the presiding genius Evolution waving his 
explanatory rod whenever a dignus vindice nodus can be 
untied in no other way. He may call that a Story and a 
Play. But it is only a confession that he cannot get his 
leading actors on to the stage; andthe story is a fairy tale. 
Similarly, the phenomenon called Christianity m every 
civilised nation in the world has to be traced up to some 
prime cause. It is no use quibbling about the amount of 
proof that we ought to demand for this or that miracle. 
That has long ceased to be the real problem. The 
existence of Christianity is the real evidence now, though 
ocular testimony was originally. As I have asked in my 
S.P.C.K. tract thereon, what have Hume and Huxley and all 
their followers done to account for that phenomenon which 
is as glaring as the sun and moon? And what is it to us 
if some weak-kneed people who call themselves Christians, 
but want to pose as philosophers too, fancy that preaching a 
thing called Non-miraculous Christianity 1s the way to con- 
vert the world to that religion which is the grossest of 
impostures if the miracles of which it fundamentally consists 
were fictions. Such people are only converting themselves 
into un-Christians, just as others pretend to bring converts 
into the Church by abandoning ail distinctive doctrines and 
then calling themselves and those whom they have joined 
“the Church,” though no such church was ever known 
before, or can live on that foundation of sand. 
Now then see how this includes the responsibility ques- 
tion, even without bringing in the positive evidences of 
Christianity, on which so many books have been written 
without a shadow of real refutation. Here is a religion of 
which a primary doctrine is responsibility in a future life, 
which has grown from the smallest conceivable beginnings, 
with no earthly helps or advantages, and in the face of all sorts 
of difficulties, and no rational explanation of that growth and 
prevalence except the common historical one has ever been 
