TWO PATHS, ONE GOAL. 



121 



think it is a very good plan. I was pri^'ileged to hear the Bampton 

 iectures referi'ed to and took careful notes of them. I also heard, 

 when an Oxford undergraduate, a sermon on the human race, after- 

 wards published as the first of " Essays and Reviews," which was not 

 so much on science as on the claims of conscience in man. Certainly 

 there was no one who could combine so much dogged courage and 

 great clearness on such a subject as Dr. Temple. He did his work 

 as a Bampton lecturer splendidly. I think the lecture that impressed 

 me most was the third lecture on Will. He reduced Will almost to 

 a minimum, showing that a great deal of what we should imagine 

 to be " free will " was the result of environment and habit, 

 automatic action and sub-conscious action and so on ; in fact we 

 wondered, some of us, if he would leave anything ; but he did, he 

 left a minute residuum of human A\ill, and on that residuum he 

 built an argument for Divine will; for, after all, though God 

 undoubtedly exercises will, yet will is that, in God, which goes 

 under the name of force in nature, " will force," and if we recognise 

 that we are creatures of God, then we recognise that there is 

 something in the human will which is analogous to the Divine will, 

 for we are made partakers of His Divine nature. AMiat is true of 

 will, is true also, I suppose, of purpose. 



I will, if I may, refer to the passage of the paper under the title 

 of " Characters common to Religion and Science." I am not quite 

 certain whether I agree with the sentence as it stands. Perhaps I 

 misunderstand it. " As each developes, a shrinking of the province of 

 mystery takes place," p. 95. " Shrinkage " may happen in one direc- 

 tion ; but I think when you lose the sense of mystery in one direction 

 you get it back again in another. I do not think that any discoveries 

 of modern Science have really reduced mystery. I think it is rather 

 the other way. I daresay most of us have read Professor Oliver 

 Lodge's speech at Birmingham the other day on the mystery of 

 radium. He tell us how many millions of atoms and trillions of 

 electrons, if placed in a row, would occupy one inch. I do not know 

 where the mystery lies more, whether in the fact he asserts, or in 

 the possibility of his having a brain to affirm it as a discovery. But 

 when you get the idea of millions of things, in a row, occupying an 

 inch, one feels at once that we are close to an exceeding mystery ; 

 and when we are told that the atoms that make up creation are 

 nothing more than positive and negative electrons, I do not think 



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