MR. GLADSTONE'S REPLY TO A FRENCH ATHEIST.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XIII, Issue 37, 8 January 1886, Page 9

MR. GLADSTONE'S REPLY TO A FRENCH ATHEIST.

( Weekly Freeman.) Pbbham the article which will attract most interest in the November magazines is one which Mr. Gladstone, in the midst of his schemes for overthrowing the Tories at the general election, has found time to write for the Nineteenth Century, entitled « The Dawn of Creation and of Worship." It is a reply to the « Prolegomenes de l'Histoire des Religion*," by Dr. Reville, professor in the College of F 'ranee, who in denying that there is revelation in the testimony of the Holy Scriptures, selected Mr. Gladstone as the representative "^7 W S ?? Warra ? t f ° r the aßßertion that *e» is such revelation. Jlr. Gladstone criticises Dr. Seville's work at great length, and winds up with the following eloquent attack upon the modern enemies of revelation and C ristianity •— " Mankind has long been too familiar with a race of practitioners whom courtesy forbids to name, and whose single medicine is alike available to deal with erery one of the thousand figures of disease. There are surely many sources to which the old regions are refer-S^wJ-hin*? •" WOl ll bip> earth worehi P. astronomic worship, SliSSi? ?J I9> t « h6 I worßhi P of evil powers, the worship of attractions, the worship of the dead, the foul and polluting worship of bodily organs, so widespread in the world, and especially in the East ; last, but not least, I will name terminal worship the remarkable and met important scheme, which grew up, perhaps, first on V^l '5 cc ™ nectlon ™ th the stones used for ma&ng boundaries^ which finds its principal representative in the god Hermes, and which is very largely traced and exhibited in the first volume of the work of M. Dulaure on ancient religions. «, ♦'• B 1 tt k n °u c ? f theße circumstances discredit or impair the proof that m the book of which Genesis is the opening section, there is conveyed special knowledge to meet the ipecial need everywhere so S^^S g \ hat 11 th «P r«r «c i ?^gi«,orthat any process known to 3l*££ su'rr^ed,^ 1118 *»" °' «"*"*• by "The burden and the mystery Of all this unintelligible world.' in SShM tF 1 ? 7 BU T iBe n u l only at tbe tact ' bat Ht th e manner ? ay 7 rit^ ra whoße name is le & ion ' unimpeached in character and abounding in talent, not only put away from them, £?J2£ * n? ? ° T iDt ? the very * ulf of itself the conception of a Deity, an acting and a ruling Deity. Of this belief Sda^f" l^ 6 ? d ° Ubl ? aDd Wip6d away the tea " a ° d toSS KfrS^L™ S r^PJ ° f B 0 mftny weary wanderers °° earth, which among the best and greatest of our race has been so cherished by those who bad it, and so longed and sought for by those who had ™°k TiHT B^ W08!W 08 !! tbat if L at len e th we had discovered that it was in the light of truth untenable, that the accumulated testimony ?! m& £ T wo r thleß /. and tha * b« wisdom was but folly, yet at least the decencies of mourning would be vouchsafed to this irre£KS\wV f, a i° f * tbi ?' !t ?8? 8 With a i°y and exultation that might almost recall the frantic orgies of the Commune, that this, at least at first sight, terrific and overwhelming calamity is accepted and recorded as a gain. O c recent, and, in many ways, respected writer— a woman long wont to unship creed as sailors discharge excess of cargo ma storm and passing at length into formal atheism-lrejoices to find herself on tbe open, free, and < breezy common of humanity ' Another, also a woman, and dealing only with the workings and manifestations of God finds ' in the theory of a physical evolution, as recently developed by Mr. Darwin and received with extensive favour both an emancipation for error and a novelty in kinds.' Bhe rejoices' to think that now at last Darwin • shows life as a D ] harmonious whole and makes the future stride possible by the past advance. Evolution that is physical evolution, which alone is in ZT'i^f £ c 9' ke v he 80lar tbeory )' may be delightful and wonderful _ xn its right place but are we really to understand that varieties of animals brought about through domestication, the wastin* of organs (for instance, the tails of men) by disease, that natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, all in the physical order exhibit to us the great arcanum of creation, the sum and centre of life, so that mind and spirit are dethroned from Sm^W^T 07 ; are n ,° longe - r BOTerei 8? n by ri ght, but may find somewhere by chanty a place assigned them as appendage?, pertups only as excrescences of the material creation f I contend that ev»luturn ip its highest form has not been a thing heretofore unknown to history, to philosophy, or to theology. I contend tbat it was before the mind of St Paul when he taught that in the fulness of time God sent forth His Son, and of Eusebiuswhen he wrote the ' Preparation for the Gospel, and of Augustine when he composed the City of God ; and beautiful and splendid as are the lessons taught by natural SmpSfJ 6'6 ' for Christendom at least, indefinitely beneath the sublime unfolding of the great drama of human action in which, through longyears,Greece was making ready a language and an intellectual type and Rome a framework of order, and an idea of law such that in them were to be shaped and fashioned the destinies of a regenerated wcrld IZ A°»f ,W, W ? be . hey . e 4 hat the L old f o«ndations are unshaken still, and that the fabric built upon them will look down for aces on the floating wreck of many a modern and boastful theory, His difficult to see anything but infatuation in the destructive temperament which leads to the notion that to substitute a blind mechanism for the hand of God in the affairs of life is to enlarge the scope of »■•*•} agency—that to dismiss the highest of all inspirations is to elevate the Btrain of human thought and life, and that each of us is to rejoice that our Beveral units are to be disintegrated at death irto countless millions of organisms,' for such it seems, is the latest revelation delivered from the fragile tripod of a modern Delphi " Assuredly on tbe minds of those who believe, or else on the minds ot those who after this fashion disbelieve, there lies some deep judicial darkness, a darkness that may be felt. While disbelief, in the eyes of faith, is a sore calamity, this kind of disbelief, which renounces and

repudiaWwith more than satisfaction what is brightest and best J^ e M^2r tlmCe ° f ms? is Mtoandin 8 «nd might be deemed incredible. Nay, some wil say, rather than accept the flimsy and hollow consolations which it makes bold to offer, might we not ro back to solar adoration, or to the hollows of Olympus "