other escapes are by Atheism (or Pantheism) and Manichæism. Of these I have said little in "The Eclipse of Faith"; but not because I have nothing to say, as I may perhaps show hereafter. The “Chaos of Faith" might furnish as ample and as instructive a theme.

Mr. Newman tells us, that "his faith in the moral qualities of the Infinite Deity does not rest" on the "sterner facts" of the universe.* I should think not. Did ever anybody's faith rest on the very difficulties which oppose and try it? Once more; what he has to show is, that those facts are consistent with that faith, while those of Scripture are not.

Mr. Newman, indeed, hints at an answer which he seems half afraid to resort to; and wisely; for doubtless he felt the frail ice cracking under him. He tells me that "I demand, as a reasonable preliminary, that we will approach the Book with the very same reverence as we approach the Universe, and will assume that the Book is the Word' of God as surely as the Universe is his Work.'" I do not want him to assume either; but if he means that I think it reasonable to apply his internal criterion of what is to be rejected as unworthy of God (a test derived exclusively from our moral intuitions) equally to the alleged Works and alleged Word of God, I answer, to be sure I do, if I am to apply his own criterion at all, and that criterion is worth a button, namely, that what we should feel to be in man harsh, cruel, or unjust, we reject as at once unworthy of God. If this be true, there is no help for it. If this criterion is to be absolutely trusted, then it will be equally applicable to the big "world" and to the little "book," to the works and to the

* Reply, p. 36.

† Ibid. p. 30.

words of God. It is, in fact, strictly applicable to neither, and for these very sufficient reasons; first, that men themselves are not agreed that any such criterion will apply (as these very controversies sufficiently show) to all that God can rightfully do; and, secondly, that men do not agree as to what are the "moral and spiritual" intuitions by which they can measure God; but all “nations, kindreds, and people," making gods after their own "corrupt minds," have manufactured for themselves a variety of deities, most of them unmoral and immoral enough.

Mr. Newman has a curious comment on Harrington's brusque dismissal of his little theories for getting rid of the difficulties connected with the permission of such an infinitude of physical and moral evil; -"those awful forms,” as the sceptic calls them, which Mr. Newman, with his accustomed candor and felicity, translates to mean "the horrible phenomena of Nature which suggest the immorality of God."* Harrington says: "I certainly know of no other man who has stood so unabashed in front of these awful forms. One almost envies him the truly childlike faith with which he waves his hand to these Alps, and says, 'Be ye removed and cast into the sea'; but the feeling is exchanged for another, when he seems to rub his eyes, and exclaim, Presto! they are gone sure enough!' while you still feel that you stand far within the circumference of their awful shadows." †

* Reply, p. 33.

6

† Mr. Newman says: "The author of 'The Eclipse' admits that the charges of immorality which he so vehemently urges against the God of Nature (1) press with equal weight against the God of Christianity." I need not say that I urge no such charges against either the God of Nature or the God of Christianity. The reader, I dare say, understands by this time, — though it is convenient for Mr. Newman to forget it, that the argument is purely hypothetical, and on the assumption of Mr. Newman's

Mr. Newman, for reasons best known to himself, printed the last words in italics, and the personal pronoun "you" in capitals; and then asks, " On which then of us two has an Eclipse of Faith fallen?" What wonderful power of refutation is to consist in the capitals I know not, the meaning of the passage being plain enough without any such emphasis, that in spite of Mr. Newman's curt formulæ of conjuration, you, gentle reader! I, and every one, are encompassed in those shadows which the dread mystery of the "origin of evil" has cast on every spirit that has ever profoundly meditated it, and which Faith, and nothing but Faith, relieves.

premises; that if, as he says, the God of the Bible is chargeable with immoralities, the charge must be extended to the God of Nature, for he does the same things. "If I tell him," says my critic, "that the intended sacrifice of a first-born son did not deserve eulogy; he has no reply whatever, except that the God of Nature is equally atrocious." I need not say that the word "atrocious" is Mr. Newman's, not mine. I may here take notice of a convenient abridgment of Mr. Newman's. In lieu of quoting Harrington's illustration of the difficulties which are "found" in the adminis tration of the universe, Mr. Newman says, "What are found? I cannot quote such diffuse writing at full; but it is, things which shock the moral sense as flagrantly immoral, and which Mr. Newman must reject as not sanctioned by God.' He presently (p. 152) gives, as examples, the earthquake of Lisbon and the plague of London, which are thus laid down to be flagrant immoralities, which not only will make Mr. Harrington an atheist or pagan, but (he adds) ought to make me such, if I am consistent.” (Reply, p. 26.) Here Mr. Newman, who complains that people do not quote enough of him, cannot quote such diffuse writing as "The Eclipse of Faith." However, short as is the passage in single inverted commas, it is rather too much; and though given as Harrington's statement, it is not his, nor do I accept it; as before and all along, Mr. Newman quite forgets that the argument is founded on Mr. Newman's own principles ; that if the things he objects to in the Bible be "immoral," the things cited by Harrington are so. One as hasty as himself might ask here, Who is guilty of "stealthy misrepresentation," and " gross garbling"? But I do not; the eccentricity of Mr. Newman's logic shall still entitle him to charity.

SECTION III.

WHETHER MR. NEWMAN'S THEORY, THOUGH HE MEANS

IT NOT, DOES NOT INVOLVE THE CONCEPTION OF AN IMMORAL DEITY.

HAVING defended myself from the grotesque charge of having pleaded for an unmoral or immoral Deity, let not Mr. Newman imagine that I am content to let it end with defence. With more reason I make reprisals. Though I will not imitate Mr. Newman's injustice, by representing him as consciously pleading for an "immoral Deity,” I do contend that it is his theory, not mine (notwithstanding all his moral and spiritual intuitions), which directly involves the notion.

I believe in the God of the Bible; I believe in a God who created man holy, innocent, and happy, reflecting his image, and participating in his felicity; and that when God created him he said of him, as of all else that came immediately from his hand, that his creature was "very good." I believe in that God, if that is to believe in an immoral Deity; but what sort of God is it which Mr. Newman's theory requires? Why, one who is supposed to have launched man into the world, not only with a nature no better than he possesses now, but in a condition worse than that of the worst idolater, as the starting-point for that long curriculum of "Progress," in which "the old barbarism" and "methodized Egyptian idolatry" are to be supposed hopeful epochs and notable stages of improvement from his original condition! "The law of

God's moral universe," says Mr. Newman, "as known to us, is that of Progress. We trace it from old barbarism to the methodized Egyptian idolatry, — to the more flexible polytheism of Syria and Greece," (is the worship of Baal and Astarte, of Venus and Bacchus, the most hateful and fearful exhibitions of the corruptions of man, veiled under this polite periphrasis?)—"to the poetical pantheism of philosophers, and the moral monotheism of a few sages

the last term not being of the nature of a return in the right direction after deflection from it, but a gradual ascent from the depths of something worse than Plato's Cave, a gradual advance from the "old barbarism" and "Fetichism" to which the Theory of Progress remits us. In such a condition is man supposed to have made his début, on this most hopeful of all theories of God and the universe! It is certainly not my idea of a moral Deity,— for it is not, thanks be to God! that of the Bible, that the Deity chucked his human offspring into the world, such in his original nature as he is now, with all its infirmities, and such in his condition that an Egyptian idolater, adoring his Apes, his Cats, and his Onions, might regard him with compassion, as not having yet reached his own happy religious improvements on the primeval "barbarism"! Deliberately doomed, ab initio, to grope his way through unnumbered ages, from the starting-point of Fetichism through all the horrors and cruelties of the darkest superstition, each stage is an improvement, it seems, on the original felicity in which a God of unlimited benevolence had fixed his lot!—the result being, that after ten thousand years or so—it may be much more (for aught Mr. Newman professes to be

* Phases, p. 169.