of intimations from the spiritual world. It is impossible for any open-minded man to follow those lofty strains without recognising the mystery and the majesty of their import. It is no more possible, when doing so, to listen to the carpings of the verbal critics than it would be to listen to the rasping noises of some petty mechanical operation when the thunders of heaven are pealing overhead.

And here I may be permitted to express a very strong opinion that in recent years Christian writers have been far too shy and timid in defending one of the oldest and strongest outworks of Christian theology. I mean the element of true prediction in Hebrew prophecy. It may be true that in a former generation too exclusive attention had been paid to it, and too much stress had been laid upon details. Nay, more, it may be true that the attempted application of prophecy to time still future, has been the cause of great delusions amounting almost to religious mania. But the reaction has been excessive and irrational. A great mass of connected facts, and of continuous evidence, remains-which cannot be gainsaid. Even if the greater prophets could be brought down to the very latest date which the very latest fancies can assign to them, they depict and predict overthrows and vast revolutions in the East which did not take place for centuries. It is easy to see how and why this reaction has arisen. Besides that mere swing of the pendulum which affects more or less all progress in human thought, a false analysis of physical science has intimidated men into a languid submission to that greatest of all fallacies which is embodied in the very word 'supernatural.' They tell us they cannot believe in what they call the supernatural. But neither need they do so. For my own part, I believe in nothing above' nature or outside of it, which is not also in it, and visibly shining through it. It is so particularly with predictive prophecy. There is nothing more thoroughly in harmony with the system of things in which we live. The conception that all future events are connected with the present by the links of natural consequence, is a conception familiar to all science and to all philosophy. That those links should be capable of being followed, and their results foreseen by adjusted eyes, is quite according to the natural constitution and course of things. Prophetic prediction is implicit to an almost miraculous degree-in the mysterious instincts of many of the lowest animals. It is explicit, more or less,'in all the intuitions of human genius: and there is nothing difficult to conceive in this faculty being strengthened, intensified, and glorified, in minds whose relations with the spiritual world are close and special. In a more literal sense we may say of the Hebrew prophet what Tennyson says of the ideal poet :

The marvel of the everlasting will,

An open scroll,

Before him lay.

It is a comfort to observe that Professor Huxley is not very sanguine as to the early triumph of his own nonsense. There is no ground, he says, 'for much hope that the proportion of those who cast aside these fictions and adopt the consequence of that repudiation, are, for some generations, likely to constitute a majority.' Certainly not. Professor Huxley must know that the ranks of science are crowded with men, quite as eminent as himself, who are believers in Christianity. For more than 'some generations' these men are likely to have successors. A few Christian sects have lately been showing signs of a disposition to divorce belief from facts, and from all definite conceptions of objective truth. An authority amongst them has lately uttered a warning voice. He has told them that they have in consequence been losing ground. The undogmatic Churches have reaped the scantiest harvest, whilst the dogmatic Churches have hitherto taken the multitude.'47 This is bad hearing for Professor Huxley. But it is good hearing for all who hold that morality itself cannot be maintained except in connection with definite beliefs. The result, so disappointing to agnosticism, is the result of a great law-Nature abhors a vacuum. Men cannot live on a diet of negations. Both our intellectual and our moral natures have digestive apparatuses of their own. They require their appropriate food, and Professor Huxley has none to give them. The sect of the know-nothings is not likely to be ever popular, still less to overspread the world. It is too barren, too empty-handed. It makes even science poor, robbing it of half of its intellectual interest and of almost all its charm. Men who talk about plans,' and 'apparatuses,' and 'contrivances,' and then tell us they don't mean what the words imply, are feeding themselves and us on husks indeed.

But Professor Huxley has his revenge. In words which seem to express the most supercilious contempt, he refers to those who, 'having distilled away every inconvenient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine honours to the residue.' 49 This is a bitter sentence. I do not think it is a just one as applied to the authors of the volume called Lux Mundi. But I fear it is more justly applicable to religionists of the Robert Elsmere type. Professor Huxley ridicules them in a mock sentence supposed to be coming in some Bampton Lecture of the future: No longer in contact with fact of any kind, faith stands now and for ever proudly inaccessible to all the attacks of the infidel.' 49 949 I should not like to speak in this tone to, or of, any minds which are perplexed. But I agree with Professor Huxley that as flesh and blood must have a skeleton, so both sentiment and faith must have an object. They cannot hang in air with no footing either in earth or heaven. Nothing can be more certain than that 'nature' did not generate itself. The 4 Address of the President of the Congregational Union at a late meeting. 49 Ibid.

48 P. 22.

things which are seen were certainly not made of things that do appear.50 The things which are seen are all temporal. It is the things which are not seen that are alone eternal. All this belongs to our universal experience, and is part of our all too scanty stock of necessary truths. What we call nature ourselves includedmust have had an origin and a cause. These are the objects of religion. Of two things we may be sure about theology: first, that there must be facts concerning it; and secondly, that these facts must be the supreme facts with which we have to do. They may or may not be accessible to us, but they must exist as realities-with all their dynamic apparatus, and with all their corresponding laws. It is the business of all men to see those facts as best they may, and to obey those laws as best they can. It is impossible, therefore, to admire or even to respect the attitude of men who, in these matters, do nothing but stand by the high waysides of life mocking. Least of all is this attitude to be respected in our professed agnostics. They should at least remember that they have nothing to give us of their own. Ignorance-even fictitious ignorance-is the motto on their flag. They do not plead it humbly as a confession, or use the sense of it as a stimulus to exertion. They claim it proudly as a boast, and use it as a weapon to repulse the light. With them knowledge is 'quite shut out,' not because they have by nature no sense enabling them to see it, but because they choose to close its door and to starve it into atrophy. They are the men who cannot rise to the higher interpretations even of their own science, or read the discoveries of their own dissecting knife. We accept their teaching as far as it goes, but we need not and cannot accept their mastership. We desire to assimilate every fact which they can prove, and we are grateful for all the thought, and care, and labour, through which alone these facts have been established. But other men must be allowed to see other related facts to which experts may be blind. On any pure question of biology there is no man to whom we can go more safely than to Professor Huxley. An original and careful investigator, a brilliant expositor, and in many things a cautious reasoner, he enjoys, on his own ground, a high and a just authority. But off that ground he passes into the shadows of a great eclipse. He labours under insuperable bias. Through this, and this alone, and through we may be sure-no conscious unfaithfulness to truth, there is one great subject on which his judgment is warped by an obvious antipathy. On all questions bearing on 'Christian theology' he is not to be trusted for a moment. Loud and confident in matters on which both he and we are profoundly ignorant, we see him hardly less boisterous in asserting ignorance where the materials of knowledge lie abundant to our hands. We have seen his canons of criticism-how rude and undiscerning; his claim for the physical sciences-how

50 Heb. xi. 3.

inflated; his own dealings with one of them-how shallow and how dogmatic. Professor Huxley may depend upon it, that the time has come when the great questions raised by the indisputable facts of Quaternary geology of which the Deluge is perhaps the least important must be taken out of the hands of men who, by his own confession, have hitherto dealt with them in no voice more articulate than a smile, and in no attitude more intellectual than a shrug.

ARGYLL.

VOL. XXIX.-No. 167.

D

HOME RULE FOR THE NAVY.

DURING the Parliamentary Session of 1888, a royal commission, known, by the name of its chairman, as the Hartington Commission, was appointed to inquire into the civil and professional administration of the naval and military departments. In their report the commission stated that the questions referred to them grouped themselves under two principal heads, viz.:

(a) Measures required to ensure closer administrative harmony between the naval and military services.

(b) The internal administration of each of the two departments, and their respective relations to the Treasury.

It is with the first of these two heads that I propose mainly to deal.

As to the existing state of things in respect of the interdependence of the naval and military departments and the want of harmony between them, the commissioners spoke with great clearness and force. So important is the language which they held on this subject that it is worth quotation if for the hundredth time.

6. The system on which we are called upon to report is one in which two departments are engaged in two branches of what is or ought to be one duty and one combined work-viz. primarily, the defence of the United Kingdom, its colonies and dependencies, and the protection of its commerce, supplies of food, and other necessaries; and, secondly, the organisation of the naval and military strength of the Empire with a view to the conduct of any hostile operations against foreign powers in which the policy of the country may cause it to be engaged.

7. The first point which strikes us in the consideration of the organisation of these two great departments is that, while in action they must be to a large extent dependent on each other, and while in some of the arrangements necessary as a preparation for war they are absolutely dependent on the assistance of each other, little or no attempt has ever been made to establish settled and regular inter-communication or relations between them, or to secure that the establishments of one service should be determined with any reference to the requirements of the other.

8. As illustrating the dependence of the army on the co-operation of the navy, it may be pointed out that a large part of the duty of the army in time of war would be the defence of distant possessions and dependencies, such as India and the colonies. No perfection of military organisation, no completeness of military establishments, could enable the army to discharge this function unless the navy were, on its part, in a position to undertake the safe transport of reinforcements and of the necessary armaments and stores.