NATURAL THEOLOGY.

L

LECTURE L

ORD GIFFORD'S munificent endowment of a Lectureship of Natural Theology, to which I have had the undeserved honour of being elected by the Senate of this ancient and illustrious University, must be reckoned among the signs of the times, pregnant with meaning.

This lectureship, with three others in the Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews, and Aberdeen, was founded, as you know, by the late Lord Gifford, a Scotch lawyer, who by ability, hard work, and selfdenial had amassed a large fortune, and attained the dignified position of a seat on the Bench.

I have not been able to gather from his friends much information about his personal character and the private circumstances of his life. Nor do they all agree in the estimate they formed of him. Some represented him to me as a keen, hardworking, and judicious man, engrossed by his professional work, yet with a yearning for quietness, for some hours of idleness that should allow him to meditate on the great problems of life, those ancient problems which the practical man may wave away from

year to year, but which knock at our door louder and louder as we grow old, and will not allow themselves to be turned into the street, like beggars and vagabonds. We all know the practical man of the world, who tells us that he has no time to listen to these inward questionings, that he is satisfied with what the Church teaches or with what men wiser than himself have settled for him, that he has tried to do his duty to his neighbours, and that he trusts to God's mercy for all the rest. Men like to entrench themselves in their little castles, to keep their bridges drawn and their portcullis ready to fall on any unwelcome guests. Or, to quote the words of my friend, Matthew Arnold,

'I knew the mass of men conceal'd

Their thoughts, for fear that, if reveal'd,

They would by other men be met

With blank indifference, or with blame reprov'd:

I knew they lived and mov'd

Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest

Of men, and alien to themselves.'

But this was not the impression which Lord Gifford left on the mind of those who knew him best. Some of his relations and a few of his more intimate friends seem to have been startled at times by the fervour and earnestness with which he spoke to them on religious and philosophical topics. Even when he was in full practice as a lawyer, the first thing he did, I am told, when he returned from the Parliament House on Saturdays, was to lock the door of his library, and devote himself to his own favourite authors, never looking at a professional book or paper till it was necessary to begin work on Monday. He had a separate set of books altogether in his bedroom, amongst which he spent every moment of his spare time during

session, and probably almost his whole vacation. He was devoted to Plato as well as to Spinoza, and read philosophy both ancient and modern in all directions, as well as poetry and the best current literature of the day.

But the world at large knew him chiefly as a successful lawyer, as a man always ready to help in any useful and charitable work, and satisfied to accept the traditional forms of public worship, as a necessary tribute which every member of a religious as well as of a political community must pay for the maintenance of order, peaco, and charity. During the last seven years of his life, when confined to the sick-room by creeping paralysis, his mind, always active, bright, and serene, became more and more absorbed in the study of the various systems of philosophy and religion, both Christian and non-Christian, and he made no secret to his own relatives of his having been led by these studies to surrender some of the opinions which they and he himself had been brought up to consider as essential to Christianity. There can be no doubt that he deliberately rejected all miracles, whether as a judge, on account of want of evidence, or as a Christian, because they seemed to him in open conflict with the exalted spirit of Christ's own teaching. Yet he remained always a truly devout Christian, trusting more in the great miracle of Christ's life and teaching on earth than in the small miracles ascribed to him by many of his followers. Some of his lectures and manuscript notes are still in existence, and may possibly some day be published1, and throw light on the gradual development of his religious opinions.

1 One volume has been privately published, Lectures delivered on various occasions by Adam Gifford, 1889.

After his elevation to the Bench gave him comparative leisure, he lectured from time to time on aesthetic, literary, philosophical subjects; but he never seems to have given offence, and those who knew him, little suspected this hard-working lawyer of having his whole soul engrossed by Spinoza's Ethics or the metaphysics of religion.

And yet when his Will was opened, the one thing which that excellent man, after making ample provision for his family, had evidently had most at heart, was to help the world to a clearer insight into the great problems of life than he himself in his busy career had been allowed to gain, to spread more correct and more enlightened views on the origin, the historical growth, and the true purpose of religion, and thus to help in the future towards an honest understanding between those who now stand opposed to each other, the believers and unbelievers, as they are called, unaware that as we all see through a glass darkly, we can only speak through our words faintly, and not always, rightly.

Allow me to quote some extracts from this remarkable Will:

'I, Adam Gifford, sometime one of the Senators of the College of Justice, Scotland, ... having fully and maturely considered my means and estate . . . and the just claims and expectations of my son and relations... and considering myself bound to apply part of my means in advancing the public welfare and the cause of truth, do hereby make my Trustdeed and latter Will and Testament, that is to say, I give my body to the earth as it was before, in order that the enduring blocks and materials thereof may

be employed in new combinations; and I give my soul to God, in Whom and with Whom it always was, to be in Him and with Him for ever in closer and more conscious union.'

When Lord Gifford proceeds to declare that, after having provided for his relatives, he feels himself bound to employ what is over and above, for the good of his fellow men, he says,

'I, having been for many years deeply and firmly convinced that the true knowledge of God, that is, of the Being, Nature, and Attributes of the Infinite, of the All, of the First and only Cause, that is, the One and Only Substance and Being, and the true and felt knowledge (not merely nominal knowledge) of the relations of man and of the universe to Him, and of the true foundations of all ethics and morals,-being, I say, convinced that this knowledge, when really felt and acted on, is the means of man's highest well-being,' and the security of his upward progress, I have resolved . . . to institute and found. . . lectureships or classes for the promotion of the study of said subjects, and for the teaching and diffusion of sound views regarding them, among the whole population of Scotland.'

In a later paragraph of his Will, he defines more fully what he understands by Natural Theology and by sound views, and what subjects he wishes particularly to be taught.

'Natural Theology,' he says, 'in the widest sense of that term, is the Knowledge of God, the Infinite, the All, the First and Only Cause, the One and the Sole Substance, the Sole Being, the Sole Reality, and the Sole Existence, the Knowledge of His Na