SPIRITUAL EVOLUTION IN HISTORY. 505 In all the stress we have been laying on the spiritual, it is not meant that mechanical or terial forces are unreal and of no account, but only that the spiritual are the highest-a "highest" reached in and through the material, dull, and inert, as matters may appear to us. Certainly no power or force can, to theistic philosophy, assert itself as the right save as it is spiritual no less than it may be material. And it is far less with conditions of material happiness than with moral perfection we have here to do. The changes and progress, of which ultimate historic movement is made up, are, in its view, as we take it, dynamic manifestations expressive of thought and its determinations in virtue of its finding a Dynamic Reason disclosed by its study of reality as it appears in the universe. Yes, for why should not ideal plan and law obtain in the history of man as in the development of the individual, though he sin against them? Why should we not postulate a presidency of Deity-His directive agency -in all that reconstruction of society for which our time is making, as surely as we may and do for the great movements of past European history? Of course, a philosophy founded only on the most recent period of European history would be so imperfect, in its dissociation from the past, as to be fallacious, and yet the philosophical aspect of the most recent period may have its own instructive teaching for us as to the conditions of religion and For civilisation in such a new time. Our knowledge of His way and purpose may remain incomplete, but it is another and very different thing from the irrationality of those who assert that no revelation of Him is to be found in history, and deny any accomplishment of His will — Διὸς δ' ἐτελείετο Bovλn in the great world drama. Knowledge, power, social obligation and justice, spiritual life and human sympathy and philanthropic endeavour, are the results which we claim, in distinctly enlarged measure, for the great spiritual development of which we have spoken-a development proceeding under fundamental moral law, and pointing, as its necessary presupposition, to the activity of a Personality not without likeness to our own. personality in this large sense we take as, in Bunsen's phrase, "der Hebel der Weltgeschichte" or the lever of universal history, and the race is to us inspired by inflow of spiritual energy from a Being that transcends it. "The wisely ordered march of history," as a modern apologist has said, through the midst of all the turmoil brought about by the arbitrary conduct of so many millions of free men, can only be explained as resulting from the all-ruling providence of a personal God. It would be impossible, in the face of human freewill, for the unconscious wisdom of nature to retain the mastery over the course of events." Hence we regard theistic philosophy as having a right to demand the warrant of the Spencerian philos GOD IN HISTORY. 507 ophy to treat all history as but so many episodes in the gigantic movement of Nature-as only so many meaningless and immaterial accidents in the mighty and universal process which is to it the main concern—a right it is bound to exercise. Beyond the complicating and counteracting forces of evil it finds the spiritual forces that make ultimate development in the religious evolution. Behind our periods of social restlessness or lethargy, of movement or stagnation, it finds some ground of ultimate advance. And in so far as the theistic philosophy of religion contends for a force in history not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, it does and can contend for this only as there is love in God which will not let the world go from its altruistic and harmonising influences. For in the philosophy of history-if such there be-there is for it no more final note than that of Redemption, wherein God is seen reconciling the ages unto Himself through that Son, Who lives along and rules them all. It thus comes in its teleological view at length to say, with the philosophy of history of the poet of the "In Memoriam," "I see in part That all, as in some piece of art, Is toil coöperant to an end." Yes, for otherwise the workings of God in history would become for it, in the words of the poet of the "Paradiso," "not works but ruins" "Non arti ma ruine." Recent theistic philosophy of religion, in pursuance of its lofty spiritual view of man's nature and destiny, as we have in this chapter sought to present it, has not only been unable to abandon the belief in Immortality, but has even held it with new light and breadth. Looking at immortality in the light shed upon it by reason or the unaided human intellect, we find that philosophical thought has viewed the belief in it as more than ever rationally necessary and consistent-the most consistent hypothesis in view of all the facts of the world and of man's nature and life. It has more firmly grasped this faith as the culmination of a spiritual philosophy, and, notwithstanding the pretensions of some of the more thoroughgoing evolutionists, it has not found modern science adverse to the spiritual nature and destiny of man. Its hope for the future life— "Derives it not from what we have Or are we to treat that in us which is likest to God as a lying thing? thing? It agrees, as we suppose, with an American writer on the philosophy of religion, who maintains that the foundations of a future life do "lie outside of revelation," and who holds immortality to give "promise of revelation" rather than revelation to lay the "foundations of immortality." It holds, as against those who, with Goethe, take existence to be a duty, were it but for a moment, FOUNDATIONS OF IMMORTALITY. 509 that life here can never be morally and spiritually satisfying at least in any permanent way-without relation to the future life. It has never yet seen or found any satisfactory way or mode by which man's present life can be made wholly selfenclosed in respect of the world to come. Kant for this very reason dealt with the soul's immortality as a postulate of the pure practical reason, since perfect accordance with the moral law, such as is commanded and as must therefore be attainable, calls for a duration adequate to "an infinite progress towards perfect harmony with the moral law" a progress "possible only if we presuppose" the existence of a rational being to be "prolonged to infinity." When the materialism of to-day tells us that our bodily organisation is all that we conceivably are, we prefer to remind ourselves of the saying of Joubert: “I, whence, whither, why, how? These questions cover all philosophy, existence, origin, place, end, and means." We do not regard it as open doubt that there has in our time been clearer recognition of the naturalness of man's longing for immortality -as something rooted in his condition-as seen in his sense of progress and individuality, his desire for real and right reputation, his craving, nay, ineluctable demand for justness in the judgments of his work, his yearning for moral perfection, and his necessity for love, as that which is at least imperishable as to |