And what room, we are forced to ask, has he left for such a dogma? In the first portion of the work our author has been careful not to define his position. He has studiously avoided committing himself to a belief in a universal Father or a moral Governor, or even in a Personal God. If he had done so, he would have tied his hands at once. Very much of the reasoning which he brings forward against the miraculous element in Christianity in answer to Dr Mozley and Dean Mansel falls to the ground when this proposition is assumed. His arguments prove nothing, because they prove too much: for they are equally efficacious, or equally inefficacious, against the doctrine of a Divine providence or of human responsibility, as they are against the resurrection of Christ. The truth is, that when our author closes his work, he cannot face the conclusions to which his premisses would inevitably lead him. They are too startling for himself, as well as for his readers, in their naked deformity; and with a noble inconsistency he clutches at these 'dogmas' to save himself from sinking into the abyss of moral scepticism.
Mr J.S. Mill's inexorable logic may not be without its use, as holding up the mirror to such inconsistency. On his own narrow premisses this eminent logician builds up his own narrow conclusions with remorseless rigour. Our author in his first part adopts this same narrow basis, and truly enough finds no resting-place for Christianity upon it, as indeed there is none for any theory of a providential government. But at the conclusion he tacitly and (as it would seem) quite unconsciously assumes a much wider standing-ground. If he had not done so, he himself would have been edged off his footing, and hurled down the precipice. A whole pack of 'pursuing wolves' [29:1] is upon him, far more ravenous than any which beset the path of the believers in revelation; and he has left himself no shelter. If he had commenced by defining what he meant by 'Nature' and 'Supernatural,' he might have avoided this inconsistency, though he must have sacrificed much of his argument to save his creed. As it is, he has unconsciously juggled with two senses of Nature. Nature in the first part, where he is arguing against miracles, is the aggregate of external phenomena--the same Nature against which Mr Mill prefers his terrible indictment for its cruelty and injustice. But Nature in the concluding chapter involves the idea of a moral Governor and a beneficent Father; and this idea can only be introduced by opening flood-gates of thought which refuse to be closed just at the moment when it is necessary to bar the admission of the miraculous. Our author has ranged himself unconsciously with the 'intuitive philosophers,' of whom Mr Mill speaks so scornfully. He has appealed, though he does not seem to be aware of it, to the inner consciousness of man, to the instincts and cravings of humanity, to interpret and supplement the teachings of external Nature; and he is altogether unaware how large a concession he has made to believers in revelation by so doing.