comprehensive." Nor is Paley's answer, which assumes the existence of God, at all available as against Hume, who, in his next section, puts into the mouth of an imaginary Epicurus all the arguments against such a belief. But it is a most just and reasonable remark that this predisposition does not exist in the case of those who again rightly or wrongly are wishing to know God and hoping to live after death. It is at this point that natural and revealed religion, weak when divided, becomes strong by combination. The Resurrection would certainly never be believed if it did not fall like a spark upon a mass of wishes and aspirations which are immediately kindled into life. Granted a man (and this is no supposition, but a fact), whose whole nature craves not to die, and whose mind is occupied by the standing miracle of its own immortality, and then the Resurrection, so far from being improbable, will be the very thing which gives life to his hopes. The more he sees that natural religion cannot give him facts as proofs, the more he will welcome Revelation which does, just because it will satisfy the rational desire which science is creating in the human mind. And just as there is no answer to Hume's argument for one predisposed as Hume was, so is there none to one predisposed as this supposed (but very actual) man is. The one is as incapable of disbelief as the other of assent. Hume and Paley do not really grapple with each other, but move in parallel lines that never meet. As Hume himself said of Berkeley, "His arguments admit of no answer and produce no conviction," so might each of the two say of the other. On the one hand, we have all the results of human experience, a severe standard of intellectual virtue, a morality which confines itself to its duties toward humanity, and the power of being able not to think about ultimate incomprehensibilities. On the other hand, we have intense longings after the infinite, which science, admitting, as it does, the existence of the Unknowable, cannot possibly deny to be legitimate in those who feel them sincerely; also a body of evidence, sufficient to prove ordinary events, for a fact that gives certainty and power to all these longings; a morality, which has reference to a Supreme Judge, and an absolute incapacity for life and duty until some sort of conclusion has been arrived at concerning the mysteries of our being and destiny. Both of these represent tendencies of human nature with which the world could at this stage very badly dispense; both may have their use and their justification; either may be true, but both cannot, for the Resurrection either did or did not happen.
From this account of things some very important considerations follow, a few of which I will endeavor to sum up in three heads. The scientific value of Revelation as a necessity, if there is to be any vital and practical religion at all, will, I hope, have been sufficiently indicated already:
1. The lines of a long and, perhaps, never ending conflict between
