Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/120

108 kind, start into being and waylay the theist,—spectral problems, fraught with the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world—awful ghostly visitants, haunting the soul, and not to be "laid" by any known summary of theistic exorcism—the grim offspring of a system which, according to theism, has no place (as well as no explanation) for them—the never-ending still-beginning autochthones, aborigines, of that whole creation which groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now. Mr. Parker rejects a revelation which contains difficulties irreconcilable with his ideal of Deity. The difficulties inflexibly confronting him in the analogy of nature, he nor any of his order can clear up. Allow that Butler's argument as Analogy is not valid in favour of a revealed religion—it not the less inflicts a fatal back-handed blow on the heart-region of "benignant" theism. A single catastrophe like the earthquake at Lisbon, which so startled and confounded the moral sense of a child Goethe, defies, as though with A-theistic defiance, the glosses of natural-religionists. The style and the tactics of the author of the "Eclipse of Faith" may be open to objection, but at least he has planted his step firmly on this logical stumbling-block, and made a very corner-stone of this rock of offence. How far those escape the perplexity who, with Mr. Lewes, repudiate the notion of "design" in the structure of the universe, or, with Mr. Carlyle, mockingly scout all such speculations with some bold banter about your pan-theisms, and pot-theisms, is another matter. It has not yet been escaped by the school, in any of its types, represented by Newman and Parker; nor is it easy to believe that if ever their school should succeed in dislodging the popular creed from a biblical foundation, the popular opinion should stop short just at their frontier-line, and should not pass it as a mere half-way house, to be eyed distrustfully as possibly a second house of bondage to the tramping myriads making their exodus from the first. Surely the absolute religion of Mr. Parker has the air of an absolute failure. If it is disengaged from the difficulties of a revealed religion, it is again self-involved in a tangled web of threefold cords, net easily broken.

It is allowed by writers of his own order, that in metaphysical questions Mr. Parker is "too ardent to preserve self-consistency throughout the parts of a large abstract scheme;" that he is too impetuous for the "free analysis of intricate and evanescent phenomena;" that the eclectic tendency of his mind, refusing to let go anything that is true and excellent, takes "insufficient pains," in adopting it, to " weave it into the fabric of his previous thought, so that the texture of his faith presents a pattern not easy to reduce to symmetry." Certainly, by no means easy: capricious eclecticism is apt to generate a highly heterogeneous ensemble. If we may credit one of Mr. Parker's compatriots, and one by no means hostile to him,