gins the preparation for departure. Tents are struck, household effects placed in vehicles ready to receive them, and soon the faithful few who have remained to the last are wending their way to their various homes. Meanwhile the itinerants have mounted their horses and turned their faces toward their distant fields of labour. For a few days they have enjoyed sweet communion and have been sitting "in heavenly places in Christ Jesus ; now they go back to solitary journeys, to hardship and privation, to loneliness and poverty; but their hearts are strong in the Lord, and no murmuring thought has place. For a time, perhaps, they ride together; but soon

their ways diverge, and each rides forward alone, meditating on the goodness and faithfulness of God and planning fresh campaigns for the truth. Noble and heroic men, may your memories be ever kept green! Meanwhile, to us who linger a few moments by the deserted camp-ground there come, mellowed by distance, the strains of a familiar hymn sung by a group of rejoicing converts as they wend their homeward way. Gradually this also melts into silence. The feast of tabernacles is ended.*

*The foregoing may be accepted as a fairly accurate sketch of a typical campmeeting in the middle of the nineteenth century.

MID the many conflicting theories as to the origin of the universe and its wonderful phenomena, the mechanical conception has been more largely adopted, by by those who have rejected the teachings of a Biblical theism, than any other recent antiChristian explanation. To solve the problems which gather around the far-reaching realms of matter and mind, and to lessen the burden of mystery which those problems contain, the endeavours of the ablest investigators have been directed from age to age. Without exaggeration, it may be affirmed that, after half a century of discussion, the best that the mechanical theory has to offer as an explanation of the universe has already been presented in the teachings of its ablest representatives. The demands which that theory which that theory makes upon the common intelligence of the race and upon the best instincts and convictions of our mental and moral constitution surpass in magnitude and difficulty all the miraculous interventions recorded in the Biblical revelation, and involve us in contradictions and fallacies which cannot fail to force all healthy reasoning into a fierce and permanent rebellion.

The facts which confront us and demand an explanation are of the most wonderful character, and in extent are almost beyond calculation. The organic world around us and the far-stretching universe, with all their forces, laws, and marks of intelligent design; the human mind, with its rational facul

ties and moral powers, and the special work to which, by some agency, they have been assigned; the unity of the physical world; the presence and reign of law in all the realms to which human knowledge extends; the correspondences between the instincts of the brute and the outer world from which it draws its sustenance; the moral order of the world; the consciousness of the race, its religious beliefs in spiritual and invisible realities, and the vast influence of these convictions in every past age; the intellectual and moral achievements of mankind; the splendid array of characters distinguished for lofty qualities, in spite of the most unpropitious surroundings; the presence of Christ in the world, His matchless personality, His unmeasured influence upon all subsequent generations, and the grasp of His teachings upon the world of to-day-here are facts which call for explanation. And it must be an explanation that will satisfy the demands of our rational faculties, nor leave us in the bewildering mists of an Atlantic fog, crying out for a solution that will place our hopes upon the rock of everlasting stability.

Whence, then, came all the venerable and wonderful machinery of the universe by which we are surrounded and of which our world forms a part? No wonder that, as Emerson looked upon the immense and infinite handiwork, he exclaimed, in the language of one thrilled with the grandeur of such a spectacle, "I clap my hands in infantine joy and amazement before the first opening to me of all this magnificence, old with the lore and homage of innumerable ages."

How came life upon our globe, with all its variety of manifestation? By what process came force and all the law and order which distinguish the physical and mental worlds, the freedom of choice which constitutes the true basis of moral responsibility and makes human conduct a vital element in the welfare of the race? Whence came our personal consciousness, and all the beliefs which have asserted their imperial power in the history of mankind and have proved themselves the sources of the mightest impulses and organizations in the past and in this most progressive age? It is a noticeable fact that, as the universe is opened up yet more and more, its structure becomes invested with a grander meaning. W. S. Lilly has said, in The Fortnightly Review, that the progress of science multiplies the evidences of design in a most wonderful way. Dr. Dallinger, in his Fernley lecture for 1887, has also said:

Design, purpose, intention appear,

when all the facts of the universe are studied in the light of all our reasoning faculties, to be ineradicable. . . All the universe, its whole progress in time and space, is one majestic evidence of design, and the will and purpose running through it are incapable of being shut out of our consciousness and reasoning faculties.

But, in responding to the demand for some adequate explanation of the facts already enumerated, what has materialism to offer? Does its solution of the vast order of things around us commend itself as sufficient to account for the results indicated? And, as a working hypothesis, is it adapted for general application and practice? The materialistic philosophy, though marked by various peculiarities, has always been substantially the same. As has been said :

It has ever regarded the raw eternal matter the elemental stuff of creation

as the only substance and as the allsufficient cause of every variety and species of life. It maintains that these various forms of life and the wonderful manifestations in all the departments of human thought are the outcome of forces which exist in unintelligible matter, and that evolution explains and accounts for the whole array of these wonderful facts. Man himself, with all his organs of body and faculties of mind, has been evolved from matter by physical laws or atomic forces working without guiding thought or influence.

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Prof. Tyndall has said, "The doctrine of evolution derives man in his totality from the interaction of organism and environment through countless ages." Buchner declares that the human mind is the product of the change of matter." Moleschott says, "Thought isa motion of matter." Carl Vogt has also said, "Just as the liver secretes bile the brain secretes thought." The ground is taken by the leading advocates of materialism that matter is the only real substance in the universe, or, at least, the only substance of which we have any knowledge or about which we can speak with certainty. Huxley says, "I believe that we shall arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat; and he adds, "Even those manifestations of intelligence and feeling which we rightly name the highest faculties are not excluded from this classification."

We are also assured by the same school that "the soul of man is nothing more than a quality of the brain, and when the brain becomes disorganized by disease and death the soul vanishes into nonentity." The mechanical conception, as expounded by its ablest authorities, professes to explain the universe and its phenomena in terms of matter. and motion alone. It thus deifies the mindless forces and operations of nature by making them adequate to

the production and maintenance of the whole procession of wonders that surround us. Whoever, therefore, holds that matter or material force is eternal and originates all mind and mental power is a materialist, and is compelled to accept the conclusions which that theory logically involves. But Dr. Dallinger has well said, "This coarse materialism ignores too much and assumes too much, and treats with manifest disdain the fundamental basis of our reasoning faculties."

Is it possible to accept a system which leaves the far-reaching universe, with its numberless evidences of intelligent purpose, to be explained by physical principles and methods alone, without inciting the indignation of those higher intuitions which distinguish us as intellectual and moral beings?

Mat

erialism assumes too much; and it is its unreasonable assumptions that the fallacy and weakness of the whole system lie. It breaks down just where the highest demands of philosophy begin. Is it rational or possible to regard man, the highest product of the universe, as the effect of something itself destitute of mind and consciousness? Can the effect in any case be greater than the originating cause? Hermann Lotze, we are told, is full of scorn for the idea that a power that invested us with personality does not itself possess personality. Carlyle has said, in his life of Frederick the Great, that there was one form of scepticism which the all-doubting Frederick could not endure: "It was flatly inconceivable to him that intellect and moral emotion could have been put into him by an entity that had none of its own."

This inconceivability is an experience of which all are conscious who attempt to make any effect greater than its cause. To credit the wonders of the organic world and the working out of the most marvellous

and intelligent adaptations to "natural selection," to the notion of "unconscious ends," to the theory of "conditions of existence," or to "the fortuitous concourse of atoms" is not flattering either to science or to common-sense. To account for "force by matter, for the orderly by the unorderly, for the organic by the unorganic, for life by chemistry and mechanism, for thought, feeling, and volition by molecular motion in the brain and nerves," demands a credence compared with which the claims of Biblical revelation are unimportant. "We cannot," as a leading scientist of to-day has said, "think of any part of the world or universe and prevent the conviction that it has been ultimately caused." James Freeman Clarke has, also, observed, "If the universe has come from a gaseous nebula everything now in the universe must have been potentially present in the nebula, as the oak is potentially present in the acorn." We can only get out of molecular units that which is put into them. There can be no evolution without involution. If we accept the mechanical theory of the world's origin we cannot avoid accepting the absurd conclusion that the effect may be greater than the cause. No amount of intellectual acrobatism or legerdemain can shut off the inexorable demand that in every instance the cause shall be equal, or superior, to the effect. Dr. Lorimer, in his "Isms, Old and New," has said that Locke witnesses to the validity of this position in the following words:

Whatsoever is first of all things must necessarily contain in it, and actually have, at least all the perfections that can ever after exist; nor can it ever give to another any perfection that it hath not actually in itself, or, at least, in a higher degree; it necessarily follows that the first eternal Being cannot be matter.

Here the materialists are met with

a most formidable difficulty. They are utterly unable to show that whatever is in the effect was first in the cause-that is, in the cause which thev assign and consequently are shut up to the illogical and absurd inference that there is something in the effect which is traceable to no cause whatever. In order to meet this view, materialists have endeavoured to enlarge the original definition of matter, and new qualities have been ascribed to it. As Dr. James Martineau has said:

Starting as a beggar, with scarce a rag of "property" to cover its bones, it turns up as a prince when large undertakings are wanted, loaded with investments and within an inch of a plenipotentiary. In short, you give it precisely what you require to take from it, and when your definition has made it "pregnant with all the future" there is no wonder if from it all the future might be born.

To submit to such jugglery as this and to accept such new definitions of matter as materialists, by the very narrowness of their theory, are compelled to create, is to abnegate our intelligence and commit a mental suicide for which there is no apology whatever.

If the mechanical conception of the universe is carried out to its conclusion it leaves us with only a system of fatalism utterly antagonistic to that freedom of choice on which alone moral responsibility can rest. Man, with all his faculties, when viewed in the light of the godless system under review is nothing more than the outcome of blind and mindless forces, the splendid product of some hapless chance, the unfortunate victim of the bitterest delusions and of a relentless, iron necessity. There can be neither praise nor blame, because the foundations of an intelligent choice are swept away by the resistless current. Obligation, duty, accountability are simply convenient fancies-generous but misleading dreams-having

no more authority than an unbridled and healthy imagination sees fit to create. The disastrous results which would follow the unrestrained application of such teachings are worthy of more general attention than they usually receive. But the best con

sciousness of the race and the growing influence of deep convictions based on Christian theism will, we believe, neutralize the bold materialism of the age and grapple successfully with the errors which that speculation contains.

The apostles of unbelief may cry out about the "din of ecclesiastical rebuke," "irrational panics," and "theological gladiatorship; " but, when the loudest word has been spoken by these conjurers with atoms and molecules, let us remember that humanity adores no shadow, nor has it in its noblest instances been the deluded slave of some strange hallucination or misleading dream. Man is more than the child of

cosmic sparks;" his reason cannot be accounted for as the "grandchild of suffused fire mist;" he is something better than "wandering sor

row in a world of visions." When Herbert Spencer defines the moral sense as "only the past experience of countless generations commanding what is useful for the tribe," he does not furnish the explanation which the case demands.

With shameless audacity and a vandalism that is barbaric, this materialistic conception of man's higher nature practically ignores the responsible offices of our moral faculties, insults our deepest instincts, denies the immortality of the soul, and leaves us in the darkness of dumb despair. By the same theory the world around us is left to be explained in terms of matter and motion alone; and its splendid aggregations of material and intelligent combinations are nothing more than the final outcome of some strange "haphazard of unintelligent