154 
person, is not carefully observed. But this is only a subsidiary point. I 
want to remark that the God, here put before us, is the God of a Trinity, 
the First Person of whom is absolutely unapproachable and has no connec- 
tion with us, so that it is untrue to say that “ our fellowship is with the 
Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” And with regard to the Third 
Person, I could not see, when I was reading the book, why there should be 
any third person at all as an eternal developing “ agency of life.” The first 
principle is that of an eternal developing “ agency of energy,” and then we 
have an eternal developing “ agency of life.” I could not gather why, on 
scientific principles, there should have been these two developing agencies, — 
why the one developing agency should not have developed life as well as 
energy ; and it appears to me that the second agency was only supposed, 
and given a distinct work, in order to meet what is conceived to be the 
notion of Christianity. I cannot say that I can see from the book any 
reason, on scientific principles, why there should have been two of these 
emanations in order to carry on the work. 
Dr. Irons. — The reason is that energy and life evidently did not come 
into being at the same time. That is the writers’ theory — that the two 
things were distinct creations — that the Second Person in the Trinity is the 
Founder and Creator of energy, and that the Third Person in the Trinity 
is “ the Lord and Giver of Life,” — a phrase which they skilfully adopt. 
Mr. 0 xenii am. — Y ou are landed in a speculative difficulty as to whether 
life can exist without energy. This appears to me to be a very unsatisfactory 
notion of God. Let me next observe as to the second conclusion to which 
our authors bring us, that is to say, the description of immortality in which 
they are landed, that it is an immortality which is the necessary result of 
the material development of atoms. Of course it is needless to say that if 
immortality is a necessary result of the material development of atoms, we 
can have nothing whatever to do with any “ hope ” of immortality. Where 
you bring mere physical laws of cause and effect into the question, nobody 
thinks of moral causes. In sec. 39 of the paper, Dr. Irons says : — 
“ Thus also, the prospect itself of immortality, on any such theory of 
eternal and mechanical continuity, is fundamentally changed from that of a 
promise, a hope, an aspiration for the individual, to that of a physical, or 
transphysical certainty of a consecutive order of perpetual transitions, in 
which Personality (which is now supposed for all of us), need not, perhaps 
could not survive. To know that after the present life we, and all other 
existences, necessarily pass into another and differently conditioned Universe, 
and when that also is ended, as it will end, then pass on into another, a 
thinner and remoter Universe, still differently conditioned, and so on, and 
on, and ad infinitum, is' at least different from the personal hope and ex- 
pectation, of the Christian, that after this life, he personally shall be ‘for 
ever with the Lord.’ ” 
And Dr. Irons adds, with great force, and without going in the least degree 
beyond the truth, that “ To call the two ideas by one name, ‘ Immortality,’ 
is at least misleading, though necessary to our authors’ scheme.” I am quite 
