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cause, of no free cause, is to be measured by what it does. It must be adequate to produce its actual effects, but it may be able to produce countless merely possible effects. It has power over its powers, and is not necessitated to do all that it is capable of doing. It is difficult, perhaps, to show that the universe is not infinite. It is obviously unreasonable and presumptuous to deny that the power of its Author may be infinite. And yet we find men who do so. For example, the late Mr John Stuart Mill, for no better reasons than that nature sometimes drowns men, and burns them, and that child-birth is a painful process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not say what I think of such an argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness of a human intellect. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator.

A first cause, we have already seen, must be a free cause. It cannot have been itself caused. It is absurd to look for it among effects. But we never get out of the sphere of effects until we enter that of free agency; until we emerge from the natural into the spiritual; until we leave matter and reach mind. The first cause must, indeed, be in-all through-the universe; but it must also be out of the universe, anterior to, and above the universe.

1

The idea of cause is a delusion-the search for causes an inexplicable folly-if there be no first cause, and if that first cause be not a free cause, a Will, a Spirit, a Person. Those who object to the causation argument, that it does not take us beyond the world-does not lead us up to a personal cause of the world-have failed to apprehend what causation signifies. Secondary causes may not be true causes, and yet reason be trustworthy, for there is that behind them on which it can fall back; but if there be no first cause, or if the first cause be not free, reason is throughout a lie. Reason, if honest and consistent, cannot in its pursuit of causes stop short of a rational will. That alone answers to and satisfies its idea of a cause.

The most rapid glance at the universe, powerfully confirms the conclusion that its first cause can only be a Mind, a Reason. The universe is a universe; that is to say, it is a whole, a unity, a system. The first cause of it, therefore, in creating and sustaining it, must comprehend, act on, and guide it as a systematic whole; must have created all things with reference to each other; and must continually direct them towards a preconceived goal. The complex and harmonious constitution of the universe is the expression of a Divine Idea, of a Creative Reason. This thought brings me to my next argument and next lecture.1

1 See Appendix XII.

LECTURE V.

THE ARGUMENT FROM ORDER.

I.

THE prevalence of order in nature has already been referred to as contributing to prove that the universe is an event, a generated existence, a something which once began to be. It will now be brought forward as in itself a manifestation of, and consequently a ground for believing in, a Supreme Mind. Where order meets us, the natural and immediate inference is that there is the work of intelligence. And order meets us everywhere in the universe. It covers and pervades the universe. It is obvious to the ordinary naked eye, and spreads far beyond the range of disciplined vision when assisted by all the instruments and appliances which science and art have been able to invent. It is conspicuous alike in the architecture of the heavens and the structure of a feather or a leaf. It goes back through all the epochs

of human history, and all the ages of geological and astronomical time. It is the common work of all the sciences to discover and explain the order in the universe. There is no true science which is not constantly making new and fuller discoveries of the order in nature,-the order within us and without us; not one which is not ever increasingly establishing that in order all things move and have their being. What is maintained by the theist is, that this order, the proof of which is the grand achievement of science, universally implies mind; that all relations of order-all laws and uniformities are evidences of an intelligent cause.

The order which science finds in nature may be described as either general or special, although in strictness the difference between them is only a difference of degree, the former being the more and the latter the less general, or the former being the less and the latter the more special. In what may be called general order, that which strikes us chiefly is regularity; in what may be called special order, that which chiefly strikes us is adaptation or adjustment. In inorganic nature general order is the more conspicuous; in organic nature special order. Astronomy discloses to us relations of number and proportion so far-reaching that it almost seems as if nature were a living arithmetic in its development, a realised geometry in its repose." Biology, on the other hand, impresses us

by showing the delicacy and subtlety of the adjustment of part to part, of part to whole, and of whole to surroundings, in the organic world. There is, perhaps, sufficient difference between these two kinds of order to warrant their being viewed separately, and as each furnishing the basis of an argument for the existence of God. The argument from regularity has sometimes been kept apart from the argument from adjustment. The former infers the universe to be an effect of mind because it is characterised by proportion or harmony, which is held to be only explicable by the operation of mind. The latter draws the same inference because the universe contains countless complex wholes, of which the parts are so collocated and combined as to co-operate with one another in the attainment of certain results; and this, it is contended, implies an intelligent purpose in the primary cause of these things.

While we may readily admit the distinction to be so far valid, it is certainly not absolute. Regularity and adjustment are rather different aspects of order than different kinds of order, and, so far from excluding each other, they will be found implying each other. It is obvious that even the most specialised adjustments of organic structure and activity presuppose the most general and simple uniformities of purely physical nature. Such cases of adjustment comprehend in fact

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