nd very well as a hypothesis to work with, until facts should either
confirm it, or force it to give way to another, either different or at
least modified. That this Personal Will is benevolent, and is shown to
be so by the facts of the Universe, which evince a providential care for
man and other animals--this is just one of those plausibilities which
passed muster before scientific method was understood, but modern
science rejects it as unproved. Modern science holds that there may be
design in the Universe, but that to penetrate the design is, and
probably always will be, beyond the power of the human understanding.
That this Personal Will has on particular occasions revealed itself by
breaking through the customary order of the Universe, and performing
what are called miracles--this, it is said, is one of those legends oL
which histories were full, until a stricter view of evidence was
introduced, and the modern critical spirit sifted thoroughly the annals
of the world" (p. 11). These, in our author's words, are the two
opposite theories of the Universe before the world: two "mortally
hostile" (p. 13) theories; the one "the greatest of all affirmations;"
"the other the most fatal of all negations," (p. 26) and the latter, as
he discerns, is everywhere making startling progress. "The extension of
the _methods_ of physical science to the whole domain of human
knowledge," he notes as the most important "change of system in the
intellectual world" (p. 7). "No one," he continues, "needs to be told
what havoc this physical method is making with received systems, and it
produces a sceptical disposition of mind towards primary principles
which have been of steam locomotion and electric telegraphs, of cheap
literature and ubiquitous journalism, ideas travel with the speed of
light, and the influences which are warring against the theologies of
Europe are certainly acting as powerful solvents upon the religious
systems of the rest of the world. But apart from the loud and fierce
negation of the creed of Christendom which is so striking a feature of
the present day, there is among those who nominally adhere to it a vast
amount of unaggressive doubt. Between the party which avowedly aims at
the destruction of "all religion and all religiosity," at the delivery
of man from what it calls the "nightmare" or "the intellectual whoredom"
of spiritualism, and those who cling with undimmed faith to the religion
of their fathers, there is