169 



more indestructible, than the moral and religious realities of human con- 

 sciousness. Among those facts the distinctively religious are the plainest. 

 The consensus omnium as to the being of a Power superior to Nature is a 

 fact. The conscious good of Being, and hope of Future being, are facts. The 

 desirableness of Right-doing ; the wisdom of a pure direction of our Will ; 

 the inward Peace of nobleness in action ; the inward sense of Retribution 

 for wrong ; — these are " facts " which, as Mr. Herbert Spencer will yet teach 

 his feeble followers, cannot be ignored in a true philosophy. Here it is 

 that we see how the physical order of nature and the moral are distinct. 

 Experimentalists insist that the physical order is a necessary whole ; they 

 would say, with emphasis, that all " molecules " are mutually dependent 

 beings. But in the moral world we all recognize individual agency, — 

 agency from itself, upon itself, and amidst, and upon the whole. 



The Materialists' philosophy is self-limited at the outset to the pheno- 

 menal. It begins with the contradictory assumption that there is no unphe- 

 nomenal and no prephenomenal. Then it recoils from its assumption, on 

 finding that it cannot detect the starting-point of phenomena, and is obliged 

 to own a coming forth from the unseen. 



Some reason that precedes reasoning ; some ego that precedes thought and 

 action, is as indispensable to Materialists as to us. And the moment they 

 admit this, they have surrendered the entire pretended, principle on which 

 alone they can call in question the Christian doctrine and practice of Prayer. 



Their Pantheistic-seeming phrases as to the " conservation of force," or 

 " conservation of energy," will not help the Materialists in the least to evade 

 our conclusion. The mutual " convertibility," or the " conservation " alike 

 attests the unseen power which " converts " or " conserves." So, then, the 

 Experimentalists' denial of Prayer, as the Scriptures teach it, is not only a 

 denial of Christianity, but a denial of all communion of man and God ; and 

 it is even a rejection of the primary admissions of science itself, and of 

 facts of the world, both physical and moral. 



WILLIAM J. IRONS. 



VOL. VII. 



N 



