EVERY ONE who has studied the workings of his own intelligence knows that it is not all at once that a discussion on an important and difficult subject sinks into the mind and produces its legitimate effect. The conversation on Theism narrated in our last chapter seemed at first to Cholmeley to be a sort of dream. The conclusions to which it pointed hovered about his intelligence, but when they sought to enter in and establish themselves there, they encountered a host of adversaries who challenged their right, some intellectual and some moral. The habits of thought which had been growing and strengthening for ten years and more were not to be dislodged so easily. The critical spirit demanded its right to play the part to which it had been so long accustomed, of an universal solvent. The unwillingness to submit, the dislike of the yoke which Theism imposes, made the thought of yielding a most repulsive one. All this put the positive arguments for a God at a great disadvantage, and there was a struggle in his mind in which the victory seemed very uncertain. On the one hand, habit and inclination, pride and self-sufficiency, stormed against the intruding convictions, and he was half angry with his friend for putting so clearly before him the arguments he had long managed to evade. On the other hand these arguments had, after all, an ally somewhere deep down in his nature, and this, their friend and ally, pleaded their cause and demanded for them a fair hearing, and urged him not to put them aside as he would fain have done. There was something within him that told him they were true, and forced on him an unpleasant conviction that, in all his sceptical talk and sceptical thoughts, he had partly been saying what he did not really mean, partly deceiving himself as well as others the self-deception following on and being the result of the frequent discussions in which he had urged the Agnostic arguments, often from a mere love of arguing and a mischievous pride in trying to make the cause he knew to be the worse appear the better in the eyes of his listeners. By frequent repetition of these arguments he had unconsciously made them his own, and been influenced by them, until at length, when he said that he had ceased to believe in a God, there was no conscious lie in his mouth, though all the time there was a half-conscious lie in his heart, an uncomfortable feeling that though the ground beneath his feet seemed solid enough, it might at any moment crumble away and send him headlong he knew not where.
And now an appeal had been made to him to put off this cloak that he had been wearing, and he somehow dreaded the consequences of laying it aside. He felt like a man to whom excessive stimulants had become a second nature, and who could not face the painful effort it would cost him to abandon them, though all the time, in spite of a feeble attempt to persuade himself they were necessary, he was conscious in his inmost soul that they were hurrying him to the grave. So too in the soul of Cholmeley, two counter tendencies were at work, producing a most unpleasant struggle, the pain of which made him wish from time to time that he had never allowed the question to be re-opened, and regret the candid avowal that he really wished to believe.
Saville observed the signs of a conflict going on in the mind of his friend, and wisely refrained for several days from any allusion to the subject. They talked over the scenes of their boyhood, and the various fortunes of their school-fellows in after life, and had a warm discussion on the moot question whether school-boy days afford a clear prognostic of the subsequent history of the full-grown man. This last topic led on somehow to the question of inherited tendencies, and Cholmeley had remarked rather cynically that the son of an Anglican clergyman rarely follows his father's profession, unless indeed there is a family living waiting for him, or some mental or moral deficiency seems likely to hinder his success in other walks of life. To this Saville objected as too sweeping an assertion, and had several instances to bring forward of clergymen's sons whom he felt sure had entered the Anglican ministry from conscientious motives, and whom he believed had been led to do so by the good influence of their sires. Cholmeley had answered that he did not deny that there might be developed in some family that mixture of mild benevolence and love of a comfortable easy-going life which characterized the parson, and especially the country parson, but that he did not think it right to regard the indulgence of such a natural tendency as an act of high virtue or as identical with an inspiration from Heaven. Then seeing his inconsistency, he corrected himself. "After all," he said, "perhaps there is no solid ground for distinguishing between one impulse and the other; the impulse to a life of easy-going comfort, and the impulse to a life of virtuous self-sacrifice. In the one case, as in the other, there are certain forces which impel us, and it seems to me that the forces which must ultimately prevail are those which are in the long run best calculated to promote the welfare of the individual or the species."
Saville saw that the conversation was drifting towards the object which was uppermost in the thoughts of both himself and his friend, and resolved to encourage its tendency. "I don't quite understand what you mean," he said.
"I mean," said Cholmeley, "that I think all virtue, even the highest, is ultimately identical with utility, even where the two seem at variance, and that therefore the choice of a higher life is really the choice of a life which in the long run will pay the best."
"I don't deny that," said Saville, "but quid deinde?"
"Why, if that is so, the so-called moral law is easily accounted for on utilitarian grounds, and the argument you alluded to the other day from the moral law to a moral Lawgiver, from conscience to God, is worth nothing at all."
"I don't see your inference."
"Why, it is clear enough, if all virtue promotes our interest and all vice is opposed to it, that by the law of evolution there will be gradually developed in mankind certain tendencies which men call virtuous tendencies, but which are really only the natural instinct which tends continually more and more to whatever experience shows to be beneficial to us. When once any such tendency is established in us, we are uncomfortable if we run counter to it; we are haunted by a fear of the evil consequences which we know will follow from the disregard of what has become a law of our nature. This voice of conscience, as it is called, is but the inherited persuasion that one kind of action will be followed by pleasant consequences and the other by painful ones, and in that case I do not see how you can argue from it to a Personal Being whose authority it bears. If I eat something indigestible for supper I have a most unpleasant conviction that during a sleepless night or on the morrow's morn I shall have to suffer for my imprudence. In the same way, if I break any of those generalized experiences which are called moral laws, I have a similar conviction that I shall have to pay the penalty of what I have done. The only difference between the two cases seems to me to be that the one case I argue mainly from my own personal experience, in the other from the accumulated experiences of mankind in general. In each case the painful feeling I endure has the same origin. It arises from a fear of the consequences of my own action. In the case of the indigestible supper you allow that there is no need for dragging in any supernatural Personal Being in order to account for my uncomfortable state of mind. Why then should you do so in the case of a breach of the moral law?"
"Cholmeley," answered Saville seriously, "I have already warned you that the arguments for the existence of a God though convincing, are not resistless. Somehow or other it is always possible either to propose a fair seeming theory which will account for at least the greater proportion of the facts adduced in favour of Theism, or else to create a mist in your intelligence, and under cover of it to evade the argument on the plea of its being a metaphysical or transcendental one, out of the sphere of human experience. If a man has the desire not to believe, depend upon it, believe he will not. Nay, I may go further, though after all it comes to the same thing, and do not hesitate to say that if he has not a positive desire to believe, believe he will not, or at least his belief will never be a firm or lasting."
"Don't be angry, Saville," said Cholmeley, "or give me up as a bad job. I think I have the positive desire to believe, at least I hope so. I put the case of the Experimentalists as strongly as I could to draw out your answer. I am sure you don't want me to shirk the difficulties."
"No, indeed," answered Saville with a sigh of relief, "and the argument we are engaged upon is one which has two peculiarities which expose it to the attacks of the sceptical objector. In the first place it appeals to the internal and individual experience of each, and in this respect a little resembles I the so-called argument from consciousness; in the second place it is an argument which will not stand by itself. It cannot be separated from the argument from design and from causation without being exposed to the charge of petitio principii, in that it implicitly assumes the very point it is supposed to prove."
"I am surprised to hear you speak so disparagingly of it."
"No, I don't speak disparagingly of it. To me it is an irrefragable argument. It cries aloud within me, and as I listen to it, I recognize in the voice that I hear the familiar voice of my Creator and my God. But that is very different from being able to appeal to it in the case of others. I cannot say to them: 'Listen! do you not recognize that voice that approves or condemns your actions? does it not proclaim itself to you as the voice of God?' To such an appeal the sceptic would answer smilingly: 'Not a bit of it. I recognize only the accumulated experiences of humanity.
"Why you are arguing on my side now."
"No, I am not. I am only anxious to guard against the fatal mistake of urging an argument which is by itself unconvincing, and therefore only does harm to the cause in favour of which it is adduced. Mind I say unconvincing, I do not say inconclusive."
"What is the difference?"
"An unconvincing argument is one which is of such a nature that an ordinarily intelligent man, who has it put before him and who has no strong antecedent prejudice, will not be satisfied with it. An inconclusive argument is one which has in itself some flaw which destroys its value. I should call the direct arguments generally adduced from Holy Scripture for the necessity of Baptism, or for the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity, unconvincing arguments, but I should be sorry to say that they are inconclusive."
"I suppose you mean that an unconvincing argument is such as that you cannot blame a man if he is not influenced by it, whereas an inconclusive argument is one by which he is bound not to be influenced."
"Exactly, and besides this an unconvincing argument may by a little more development, or if differently put, become convincing; whereas an inconclusive argument never ought to convince, however skilfully it be put. In fact the more it is developed, the more its inconclusiveness becomes manifest."
"Yes, but I have always heard the moral argument, as it is called, put forward as one which ought to carry conviction, and many a good Theist has put my back up by telling me that the reason I was not convinced by it was my own perversity and iniquity."
"Those good Theists are partly right and partly wrong. They are right in saying that it was your own fault that you were not in a position to recognize in the voice within the voice of God. They were wrong in saying that you ought to have admitted the sufficiency of the argument from conscience in itself, apart from the other arguments by which the existence of God is proved."
"I do not quite understand what you mean.
"I mean that if you had been obedient to the voice within there would never have risen up within you that spirit of rebellion which marred your power of appreciating the various influences which establish, in the mind of every one born into the world, the conviction of the existence of a Supreme and Personal Being on whom we depend and to whom we owe implicit obedience -- so far they were right. But they were wrong in maintaining the thesis that the argument for conscience is sufficient of itself to establish the existence of a God against the gainsayer, if we prescind from all other arguments."
"But is not this allowing that it is an inconclusive argument?"
"No, it is not; for if all the facts be taken into account, if we include within the range of our investigation each and every detail of the moral law, if we are not satisfied merely to take up the popular morality, but examine the higher aspects of virtue, such as are found in the saints and heroes of humanity, we shall find a great deal that no hypothesis can account for, save that of an influence within us, exerted by a Moral Governor of the Universe, whose law has been written in our hearts from our youth up."
"But this is what the Experimentalists deny. They say that it is generally agreed on all sides that every possible act of virtue tends to the advantage of society, and the more exalted the virtue, the greater the advantage that is its result. Hence they say that the law of parsimony condemns the unnecessary introduction of a Divine Lawgiver where the existence of the law, or rather of the instinct, which is promulgated in the voice of conscience, can be accounted for by a sort of natural selection."
"Yes, and my answer to this is that their theory leaves a number of facts unaccounted for, and therefore stands condemned as an insufficient hypothesis. First of all it does not account for the feeling of self-reproach, which is entirely different from the mere dread of disagreeable consequences, and still subsists even where no such consequences are feared either to ourselves or others. Take the case of a man who by some accident which is entirely out of his own power, and involved no sort of negligence, causes the death of a friend and that under circumstances which will involve him in grave suspicion of being a murderer: there you have the elements which on your showing ought to cause self-reproach, the destruction of the life of another and the probability of disgrace and perhaps imprisonment and death to himself: yet a sensible man will not take it to heart: he will have no self-tormenting thoughts, even though there should ensue to himself the most unpleasant consequences. He will have no pangs of conscience, and though he will regret the death of his friend, there will be no bitterness in his sorrow because of his own unavoidable share in causing it."
"But now take a different case -- the case of one who has taken the life of another under circumstances which make detection impossible, and, moreover, made the act no possible injury either to him who was deprived of life or to any one else. The murdered man was a hopeless idiot, a burden to himself and to others. His death would relieve from want a wife who had long been struggling against penury and misery. To all concerned the taking of his life was an unmixed advantage. Yet all mankind would condemn the deed, and the voice of conscience would proclaim in tones of unmistakeable reproach that the doer of it had been guilty of a most grave offence against an eternal law which carries its own sanction with it."
"Yes, that is true, and I think disposes of the assertion that self-reproach merely means a dread of consequences to ourselves or others, but I do not think it sets aside the difficulty, for the utilitarians assert that what is condemned by experience is not the fact of causing death, but the intention to cause death. It is this which experience shows to be opposed to the interests of society."
"Do you mean," answered Saville, "that the intention to kill is universally to be condemned? If so, how about the soldier in battle, or the man who to save his own life kills the unjust aggressor, or the woman who preserves her honour at the cost of the life of her assailant?"
"No, I only mean the intention to kill where there is not some greater benefit to society accruing from the death of the person killed."
"In that case, the instance I have just brought forward would certainly come under the exception, and the murderer of the poor helpless idiot would have an approving conscience. Yet you would agree in condemning him. Nay, the acknowledged maxim, you must not do evil that good may come, is a distinct condemnation of the utilitarian theory of conscience. But I have a further objection to your doctrine. It leaves a large set of facts entirely unaccounted for."
"What facts do you mean?"
"I mean the joy that the best and most virtuous of mankind find in the very actions that utilitarianism would condemn. Take the case of one who in the bloom of his youth leaves the world to dwell apart from the busy hum of life, apart with God in the solitude of the cloister. His days are given to penance and to prayer -- wasted, utterly wasted, on the theory of utility. What good does he do to humanity? Even religious Protestants who profess to believe in the power of prayer, regard such a life as at least a great mistake, but the utilitarian, if he is consistent, will regard it as almost criminal. Yet such a life brings with it a calm, unclouded, peaceful joy unknown to the busy world outside. No men happier, more cheerful, more light-hearted than those who like St. Paul or St. Antony live the eremitic life. According to utilitarianism, they ought to be miserable in their selfish isolation, inasmuch as they run counter to the instinct of 'altruism,' so necessary for the welfare of our species."
"Do you not think that their happiness might be accounted for by the Experimental school on the ground of the benefit that accrues to mankind from the literary labours and ascetical treatises the class of solitaries has produced, and that the individual without any such idea of benefiting his species, nevertheless has a share in the happiness of those who live such a life to good purpose by spending it in writing books like the Imitation of Christ, even though he himself is utterly unproductive?"
"On the contrary, it seems to me that he would be utterly miserable, as one who failed of the essential end for which the solitary life could be regarded as of advantage to mankind. But your ingenious explanation is a good instance of the unconvincing character of the argument I am pursuing. Somehow or other there is always a plausible escape. Unless a man already believes in a God on other grounds, I should, as I have said, be very sorry to have to convert him by means of the argument from conscience.
"I do not understand, in this case, why you speak of it as an irrefragable argument yourself. It shares the vice of all arguments that assume their conclusion."
"No, it does not. Take a parallel case. Two men are sleeping in a house far away from all human habitation. One of them has no idea of the possibility of any third inmate being there, the other knows that his own father has taken refuge from his enemies within its walls. During the night there is heard amid the darkness a gentle sound as of a human voice. Can we be surprised if the one attributes the gentle and scarce audible sound to the wind whispering amid the trees, whereas the other recognizes not only the distinct speech of rational man, but the familiar voice of one whom he fondly loves? Would not the former quote a hundred natural causes which might have produced such a sound -- some animal hard by, or mere imagination, or some of those mechanical effects which often strangely counterfeit articulate speech? Would not the latter take the sounds he had heard as a proof of his father's presence, and if any should argue with him that at the time his father was not there, would he not rely with all confidence on the voice that had sounded in his ears, even though he had had no visible evidence of his father's presence."
"Yes, he would certainly; and I think your parallel is a just one. But it goes to prove that first of all you must establish on other grounds the existence of a Supreme Being, and then, and then only, can you appeal with effect to the voice within as an evidence confirmatory of your conclusion."
"That would be so if our beliefs were always based on a process which we can state logically. There may be gaps in the proof we bring forward, and yet we may be justly convinced by it. Non in dialectica placuit Deo salvum facere populum suum. I should be very sorry to say that the dictates of conscience are unauthorized until all the links in the argument are made up. A man can often appeal to a process as satisfactory to himself, even if it cannot be put before others in a syllogistic form."
"I only meant that it cannot be appealed to in controversy as against one who chooses to deny its authority."
"Yes, that is perfectly true. But for myself the voice within is its own proof even before dry logic has established the reality of the source whence it proceeds. But when I have argued out the matter, and reason has taught me the existence of a God by a formal proof, this voice does not merely confirm my conclusion. It gives it a living reality. It brings it home to me with an irresistible force. It clothes with the garb of life the dry bones of a transcendental fact. It impresses on my imagination what my reason is compelled on other grounds to admit as true. It gives a practical force to what otherwise would remain in the barren field of speculation. It banishes once and for ever the dread of being caught in the meshes of some subtle fallacy. The Supreme Ruler of the universe becomes my Ruler, exercising His right of command and passing sentence as a judge -- holy, powerful, all-seeing, retributive{1} -- on my every action and my every thought. There is woven into my life not only a conviction, but a consciousness of an ever-present God. In the voice of conscience He dwells in me, speaks in me, upbraids me, encourages me, approves me, condemns me. It is the voice of my Friend, and yet my Master, of one whom I love and whom nevertheless I fear, of one who pleads with me, and yet speaks in tones of authority, of one on whom I continally depend, and yet who rewards me for each voluntary act of dependence. I cannot put into words the sweet persuasiveness of that Divine voice. I cannot, and do not, urge it against those who hear it not. Yet, after all, hear it they must, in spite of themselves, and hearing it I do not believe that they can ever shake off entirely the half-stifled conviction, the secret dread, that its accents are the echo, not of the accumulated experiences of mankind, or the natural desire for what tends to their advantage, but of a Personal Being whom, at least in early youth, they recognized and feared, even though now they may have managed to ignore Him and to persuade themselves that if He exists at all, He is beyond the ken of mortal men."
"I have often heard atheists and agnostics confess that they never could quite emancipate themselves from the superstition of their childhood. And I am not ashamed to confess, my dear Saville, that when my words have been the loudest, my heart has often been of the faintest, and there has echoed. within me a sort of self-reproachful remonstrance which I could not account for, and would fain have been rid of."
"I am glad to hear it, for it shows that the grace of God was at work in you, in spite of all your rebellion. But I want you now to be clear about the employment by the Catholic Theist of this argument from conscience. First he establishes his position logically from acknowledged principles of reason, and then he appeals to the voice within us as admitting of a far more satisfactory explanation on the principles he has laid down and the conclusions he has arrived at than on any other a posteriori hypothesis of inherited tendencies and accumulated experiences."
"Yes, that is all fair enough; and I suppose he first proves his point by the argument from causation that you explained to me a few days since."
"Yes, that is the staple proof. There are several others, or rather several ways of putting the same argument. But they all come back in the last resort to very slight modifications of the argument from causation."
"Can you give me an instance of the sort of argument you mean?"
"Oh, yes; there is the argument from the contingent and the necessary, as it is called, which may be stated thus: Everything around us is transitory and contingent, that is to say, we are compelled to admit the possibility of its never having existed at all, and can place ourselves mentally at a time when it had not yet come into being."
"But what if the world is eternal?"
"Even if it is, that does not make any difference. I am merely speaking of what we can conceive as possible."
"Well, what then?"
"Why, if this is the case, we can conceive an universal vacuum, a primeval blank, and I should like to know how out of its barren womb anything real or possible could ever have proceeded, unless side by side with it there existed a First Cause, an Eternal, necessary Being. If you can think all things out of existence, how could your supposition provide for their being reinstated?"
"That is quite true, unless you believe the world to have existed from all eternity. That seems to me to meet the difficulty."
"Yes, and for this reason I say that the argument really falls back on the argument from causation, which proves that the necessary Being existing from all eternity must have contained all the varied perfections of existing things, including Personality, Intelligence, Free Will, and, beside them all, one other perfection which differentiates the First Cause from all other causes, and renders the hypothesis that the world itself is the First Cause an irrational and self-contradictory one."
"What perfection do you mean?"
"I mean the perfection which is implied in the very name of First Cause, viz., independence in Its actions, independence in Its relations to things outside of Itself, independence in Its very existence, so that It and It alone is the source and origin of Its own being. It is in this attribute of self-existence that all the other attributes of the First Cause are rooted. It is because God, the Cause of all, is Himself uncaused, and has from Himself, and Himself alone, His own being, that He is the Eternal, Immutable, Omnipotent, Omniscient, Infinite God."
"Yes, all this seems reasonable enough. But do you rely for your proof simply on the argument from Causation under its various modifications?"
"Certainly not on it alone, though it seems to me the simplest and most satisfactory line of proof. But it has plenty of friends ready to come in and confirm its conclusions on very different grounds. The argument from design steps into the witness-box and bears testimony to the traces of a directing intelligence which lie scattered everywhere throughout the universe; and the argument from conscience recognizes in this necessary Being, in whom all perfections are summed up, the Author of that voice which speaks in such unmistakeable tones of approval or condemnation when the moral law is observed, or is violated. Then, moreover, there is another argument which I have not as yet even mentioned."
"What is that?"
"The argument from the general consent of mankind. Go where you will: north, south, east, or west -- to nations the most civilized or the most barbarous -- to the fair-haired Teuton or the swarthy Ethiopian -- to the most energetic or the most apathetic -- to those whose intellectual activity has weighed and sifted on strict philosophic principles every article of belief, or those who seem barely to overstep the line which separates rational men from the beasts of the field -- go to the frozen regions of the north or the wild luxuriance of the tropics -- and everywhere you will find a firmly rooted belief in a Supreme Personal Being, the Author of the Universe, to whom man is responsible, and who will reward virtue and punish ill-doing. The belief may be a vague one, it may be overlaid with hideous superstitions, it may have degenerated into false notions of a Deity, so fantastically perverted that those who hold them are rather devil worshippers than adorers of the true God. But, nevertheless, there it remains, and whatever the caricature which has taken the place of the reality, the very caricature bears of this tangible, sensible, material world, a world in which there reigns supreme an Invisible Being, all-powerful to save and to destroy, whom to serve is to fulfil the end of our existence, and whom to obey is the only road to peace and prosperity."
"But is there evidence of such an universal belief? Do not scientific travellers tell us that there are islands in the Malay Archipelago and the South Seas whose inhabitants show no sign of any belief in a God?" "Even if this is so, it does not interfere with my argument. I said that it was a general, not an universal belief. It may be that there are tribes so utterly degraded and given over to vice and ignorance, that those who belong to them for the most part have lost before manhood or womanhood arrives their perception of things Divine. They do but reproduce the type described by St. Paul,{2} and which was common enough in ancient Rome. They do not like to have God in their knowledge, and so God gives them over to a reprobate mind. They disobey the voice within them, and cease to hear its warnings. They become unable to rise from the visible to the invisible, from the creature to the Creator, and sink down into that unhappy ignorance of God in which they are not alone in the present day. But these are but the exception that proves the rule, and even they have each and all deliberately shut their eyes to the light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world."
"This might account for many instances, or for most, but I do not see how it accounts for the total absence of any idea of God, however vague, in the minds of a whole tribe of savages."
"I do not believe that there is any tribe thus destitute of all knowledge of God, and those who have made the most intelligent and thorough investigations confirm what I say. It is not the chance visitor touching at a savage island whose testimony we should accept. I do not think the evidence of any one is of value unless he has spent months or years among those whose beliefs he professes to fathom. What opportunity has a mere passing traveller of arriving at the mind of a savage? Sometimes he speaks through an interpreter, and sometimes he relies on his own imperfect knowledge of the language -- partly by words and partly by signs he makes his rather unintelligible inquiries. It is ten to one that his interlocutors are either frightened out of their wits, or anxious to propitiate the stranger, or more anxious still to be rid of him somehow. He asks his question, and the natives not having the faintest idea of what he means, shake their heads in evidence of their perplexity, and the scientific traveller comes away and triumphantly reports that his personal inquiries made with the greatest care in various parts of the Pacific have convinced him that there are numerous tribes absolutely ignorant of any idea of a God. Who can refute him? He is a distinguished man, and his words, deservedly of weight in scientific questions, unfortunately carry weight in matter where his knowledge is anything but scientific. He publishes the pre-conceived hypothesis which he has carried with him to the savages and brought home again, as now an undoubted fact, and we hear your friend who professes to have examined Theism candidly declaring that 'the argument from the general consent of mankind is so clearly fallacious, both as to facts and principles, that it is quite unnecessary to notice it.' "
"You have not shown that it is not fallacious in principle. You know that the sceptics attack it, even allowing the universality of the belief, on the ground that it does not follow that because the great mass of men are led by certain plausible arguments and surface analogies to hold a certain belief, that it is therefore true, any more than the once universal belief that the world was flat and was the center of the universe. Exact thought they allege is gradually upsetting the hypothesis of a Personal God, just as it upset the Ptolemaic system."
"I told you," said Saville, "that I do not rely on the argument from universal consent as a means of refuting the agnostic, but nevertheless the objection to it abounds with fallacies. The Ptolemaic system was at once relinquished by all men of intelligence as soon as certain facts inconsistent with it were estabished, whereas Theism is the prevailing belief among the great mass of educated men, philosophers, men of science, 'thinkers,' (to use a cant word which I abhor). As knowledge increases it becomes more firmly rooted, and men of the greatest genius and in their daily experience fresh proofs of a fact which they could no more deny or doubt than they can deny or doubt their own existence."
"Yes, this certainly tells in its favour; but to those who think little of authority, and assert that the 'thinker' should think out for himself his every opinion, and accept none unchallenged, however great the genius of its supporters, the belief of distinguished men carries no great weight. Mill, after giving a list of distinguished men who were all Theists, adds: 'To a thinker, the argument from other people's opinions has Little weight. It is but second-hand evidence, and merely admonishes us to look out for and weigh the reasons on which this conviction of mankind or wise men was founded.' "{3}
"There is some truth in this. Mill seems to me to be in the right here. For to a non-Catholic I do not see why the consensus of eminent men, or even of all the world, should be absolutely conclusive. It is true that Aristotle tells us that the agreement of all on any point is taken as a proof of its truth, but he does not give it as his own opinion. I said to a non-Catholic, because to a Catholic the universal consent of the faithful, on a point of faith or morals, is a sufficient evidence of its truth."
"I did not know that," said Cholmeley. "Now I understand better why you call this argument from universal consent conclusive, rather than convincing. You mean that to one who has a true conception of authority it will be by itself sufficient, but that an outsider is quite justified in rejecting it."
"I should scarcely say that," was Saville's answer, "for there is an element in the matter that good Mr. Mill does not take into account. He does not inform us of a further consideration which gives to the opinions of these eminent men who are upholders of Theism a paramount weight and authority, and which some non-believers confess with mournful sincerity. It is not so much the preponderance of intellectual men on the side of belief that is decisive in its favour, as the preponderance of virtuous men. The sceptic is compelled to allow that all the heroes of humanity are against him -- all those who have the truest claim to the admiration of mankind for their lofty deeds and pure lives and self-sacrificing devotion, are without a single exception Theists. On the other hand, among agnostics and atheists, you may find many men of ability, but none of whom you can say that their generous, self-denying, noble life, was the admiration of their contemporaries, and will live after them in the grateful memory of their country and their friends. Take the names which rise to our lips: Tom Paine, Voltaire, Comte, Renan, Bradlaugh. What a list! What a contrast to the friends of God! I do not say that their lives were always openly flagitious, or that they were destitute of many natural virtues and good qualities. But if he cannot be wrong whose life is in the right, if there is any connection between a virtuous and unselfish life on the one hand, and the attainment of truth on religious matters on the other, if he who obeys the moral law receives light denied to him who breaks it, it is impossible to deny that scepticism, in virtue of its close alliance with a low morality and a sordid selfishness, is relegated to the region of darkness, where shadows are mistaken for substances and falsehood is undistinguishable from truth."
"Yes, indeed it is so, and to be frank with you, I have always found that offences against the moral law, and a desire to be free from its restraint, made me inclined to search out arguments favourable to unbelief. What you said at the beginning of our discussion was perfectly true. I was always conscious, or half-conscious, when I was boldly attacking God, that my attack derived its force from my desire to be rid of His most inconvenient demand on my obedience. Sometimes it was the moral law that I should have liked to see abolished, sometimes it was the sense of dependence on an external authority that I desired to be rid of, lust or pride, always one or the other. I would not curb my passions, and I was unwilling to own that I had a Master over me."
Saville could not refrain a smile. "Habemus confitentem reum. I knew all this well enough, at least I guessed it, long ago. Thank God that you acknowledge it now. Do you know, Cholmeley," he added, seriously, "that I think there are some people whom God seems determined to save in spite of themselves, and it seems to me that you are one of them. Such men don't seem able to go wrong in the end however hard they try. They may go utterly astray for years, morally and intellectually; they may even have professed themselves. sceptics, and sometimes actually joined in a propagandism of iniquity. But somehow God is too strong for them in the end. All their lives through their conscience will not let them alone. It pulls at them, and pulls so hard that they must perforce give way sooner or later. God arranges events so as to drag them back whether they will it or no. They play a perilous game, and if they do overstep the line, and try His mercy too far, God help them! But nevertheless, it is wonderful what He will put up with from those who are the special objects of His love."
"Perhaps you are right there," answered Cholmeley. "Something has always been dragging at me. I was never perfectly comfortable even where I believed that my arguments had some weight in them. I was honest in a sense. I did not see my way out of the reasons I adduced. But there was always a note of dissonance -- something jarred on me in Mill and Bain and Herbert Spencer and Huxley. Just as in Catholic doctrines I found an indescribable harmony, even though I did not believe them, so in the infidel tenets I recognized a prevailing element of discord, or, if I may change my metaphor, in the one case it was like stroking gently the smooth fur of a cat, and the other like rubbing her roughly the wrong way. I must say this for myself, that I do not think I should ever have got off the line as I have if I had been brought up a Catholic, instead of having to identify orthodoxy of belief with a lot of contradictory nonsense I could not accept. I was drawn towards Catholic beliefs from the first, and if I had been as faithful to my conscience as you were in early life I dare say I should have followed your example long ago. When I asked you down here it was not merely for the pleasure of your company as an old friend, but because something seemed to tell me that you had a message for me to which I should do well to listen. And please God I will listen."
Saville's eyes filled with tears. "My dear Cholmeley," he said," you cannot think what a happiness it is to me to hear you speak thus. I do not want you to be in a hurry, but quietly to think over this fundamental question that we have been talking over. And now I do not hesitate to add what I said before with some misgiving: Pray God with all your heart that you may not strain His mercy too far."
"I hope not," said Cholmeley. "But I want to ask you one thing more. I want you to put the arguments for the existence of God in what you consider their natural order."
"I do not think there is any natural order. It varies with different individuals. But to my mind the first notion that presents itself is one of dependence. I cannot help recognizing in myself that at some time or other I did not exist, and that I somehow came into being. This suggests the idea of causation, and leads me up to a First Cause, on whom I ultimately depend for my being. Looking around I find that all else seems to share this dependence. Everything is the effect of some cause, and this cause again of some other cause, and so on till we come at last to a First Cause on whom all else depend. Then comes the further question: What sort of a Being is this First Cause? If from Him comes all that is good and beautiful, if all perfections are derived from Him, He must sum up in Himself all possible perfection. Then again I look around me, and I recognize the beauty and order of the external world, and I admire in it a faint reflection of His Divine beauty, and the various excellencies of created things help me to realize the uncreated perfections of the First Cause to whom they owe their origin. They lead me up to Him. They are the rays pouring forth from the sun, the drops of water testifying to the glories of the boundless ocean of His love. Next I look within, and listen, and there I hear a voice which speaks to me with an authority that I cannot gainsay, and from which I am unable to escape, reproaching me when I transgress its precepts, and approving when I obey, It has all the characteristics of a Personal Voice. Sceptics may invent far-fetched explanations of it, but still the conviction remains that it is the Voice of One who is my rightful Lord and Master, to whom I owe absolute and entire allegiance, and who will reward or punish me according as I listen to it or not. Then once more I look around me, and the transitory character of all around me, and of my very self, impresses itself on my reflective mind. All this universe around me, whether it be eternal or not, at least might never have existed. In that case was there nothing but a blank vacuum? If so, how could the existing universe have sprung out of its empty nothingness? And thus it comes home to me that this First Cause, this Being of absolute perfection, this Supreme Ruler of the universe, this Lord and Master of mankind, must have existed before them all; that He shares not their transitory or contingent character, but must be a necessary Being, who existed from all eternity, and from His very nature must exist to all eternity unchanged and unchangeable. Last of all I compare notes with other men. Almost all share the conviction at which I arrived. Some few do not. I weigh the claims of the advocates and the opponents of Theism. On the one side I find the great mass of mankind; on the other an insignificant minority. I go further and examine into the moral character and general tone of those who lead the van of the opposing camps. On the one side I find the heroes of humanity, those who live a life of self-sacrifice, who are the enthusiasts of virtue, and who are ready to lay down life itself for the sake of that God whose existence is to them as certain as their own. On the other I find those who are in general a villainous and abominable crew. I find among them all the filthy things that shun the light -- selfishness, lust, greed of gold, petty meanness, every kind of vice. The most respectable of them are but a handful of self-sufficient theorists, full of pride and vainglory, while the rank and file are corrupt beyond description. Joyfully then I cast in my lot with the friends of God; joyfully I recognize my dependence on Him; joyfully I listen to the accents of that soft whisper which is the voice of my Father and Friend; joyfully I admire in Him a perfection which sums up all the perfections of created things; joyfully I contemplate His attributes and try to realize in my poor feeble fashion how He is the First Cause, Himself uncaused, the Creator and Lord of all, Himself uncreated and Supreme, the Friend and Father and Lover of us His children, -- though He in His self-contained felicity has no need of our friendship and derives no benefit from our love, -- the Infinite, Incomprehensible, Omnipotent God. I do not think I could live if I did not believe in God and love Him. Truly indeed does your candid friend say that with the negation of God the universal has lost its soul of loveliness. What would the world be, without God but a miserable blank of hopeless despair?"
Cholmeley was silent, and for a long time made no reply. At last he said, "Saville, you were always the best friend I had in the world. I think to-day you have established our friendship on a firmer basis than it ever had before."
{1} Newman's Grammar of Assent, p. 107.
{2} Rom. i. 18-32.
{3} Essays on Religion, p. 156.