been immense, for the star was actually re- is truth in all, and in some cases we may have duced to the gaseous state, and faded into a one or more of these causes acting at once, as nebulous form, showing in its spectrum the we venture to suggest is the case in Androm lines of hydrogen, nitrogen, and another un-eda. Even supposing that the nebula is not known gas. The new star in Andromeda also an outside galaxy, but is within our own galmay possibly have derived its increased light axy, and so not so remote as has been hithfrom immense falls of meteoric matter; it may erto thought, yet it must be immensely removed be a variable of long period, or its brightness from us, so far that its light may have taken may never occur again. hundreds or thousands of years to reach us. At that distance, then, nothing but the most mighty causes will account for the changes that have made the new star visible. The nebular theory we have seen cannot apply here; no near approach of planets could increase the brightness so much; neither can we suppose that different portions of the star vary so much in brightness; and as yet no positive evidence of the existence of incandescent gases is found, though Lord Rosse and others suspect it.

even partially gasify it, or, at any rate, so to disturb its outer parts as to liberate gases confined in its interior, and thus after a while we should see bright lines in its spectrum, as is already suspected. Indeed, it may be that the action will become so great as to completely gasify the whole star, as was the case with the new star in the Swan in 1876.

Such, then, are some of the methods which astronomers give of the birth of worlds and changes of variable stars. Of course, in most cases they are content to find out secondary causes-primary causes are beyond our ken. That there are other forces which we know nothing of is certain, and time may put our theories out of joint. It may be that we have seen the birth of a new sun; we may be looking on a world in flames; but certainly the most probable explanation is the one we have adopted that we have witnessed merely the accidental or perhaps periodic blazing forth with renewed vigor of a star long existent, but hitherto too faint to be visible.-Cornhill Magazine.

REASON AND RELIGION.*

I.

hottest, but led a goodly company with him; yet the change, so far from lessening, increased the honor and admiration in which he was held. He has, as scarcely any other teacher of our age, made us feel the meaning of life, the evil of sin, the dignity of obedience, the beauty of holiness; and his power has been due to the degree in which men have been constrained to believe that his words where sublimest, have been but the dim and imperfect mirrors of his own exalted spirit. He has taken us into the secret places of his soul, and has held us by the potent spell of his passionate sincerity and matchless style, while he has unfolded his vision of the truth, or his quest after it. He has greatly and variously enriched the religious life of our people, and he lives in our imagination as the last at once of the fathers and of the saints. Whatever the degree of our theological and ecclesiastical difference, it does not lessen my reverence for the man, or my respect for his sincerity. It is, then, with real pain that I enter the lists against so venerable an opponent. Before, the issue was more or less historical; now, without ceasing to be such, it is burdened with a personal element painful to the younger But I have no choice: the issue is too vital to allow me to be silent.

man.

I

Frankly, then, and at the outset, the sum of the matter may be stated thus: Cardinal NewIT is simply a duty, which I owe alike to man has done two things--he has repudiated Cardinal Newman and the readers of The Con- and denounced what my criticism never aftemporary Review, to ask, whether, in the firmed, and he has contributed new material light of his statement and the rigorous criti-illustrative of the very thesis it maintained. cism of Dr. Barry, I have anything to retract or modify in the judgment which has provoked these replies. It would, in some respects, be much more pleasant for me to allow the matter to stand where the Cardinal has left it, and were it simply a personal matter between him and me, it would, so far as I am concerned, be allowed so to stand. It costs a very peculiar kind of suffering to conduct a controversy, after his personal intervention, with the one man in all England on whose lips the words of the dying Polycarp sit with equal truth and grace.

He has represented me as describing him as "a hidden sceptic," and as "thinking, living, professing, acting upon a wide-stretching, allreaching platform of religious scepticism." never did anything of the sort; it would require an energy and irony of invective equal to the Cardinal's own to describe the fatuous folly of the man who would venture to make any such charge. What he was charged with, and in terms so careful and guarded as ought to have excluded all possible misconception, was "metaphysical" or "philosophical" scepticism. This did not mean that he was other Not that Cardinal Newman has been either than sincere in word and spirit, especially in a hesitating or a soft-speaking controversialist. all that concerned his religious convictionsHe has been a man of war from his youth, his good faith in all his beliefs is, and ever has who has conquered many adversaries-been, manifest to all honest men; but it meant amongst them the most inveterate and invinci- what it said, that he so conceived the intellect bie of English prejudices. He was one who not only changed sides when the battle was

that its natural attitude to religious truth was sceptical and nescient. Scepticism in philosophy means a system which affirms either, subjectively, the impotence of the reason for the discovery of the truth, or, objectively, the inaccessibility of truth to the reason; and such a scepticism, while it logically involves the completest negation of knowledge, has before now been made the basis of a pseudo-supernaturalism, or plea for an infallible authority, that

must reveal and authenticate truth, if truth is | tuted, as it were, the interpreter of the impresever to become or remain man's. This was sion, the condition of its being intelligible. the scepticism with which Cardinal Newman Without a constitutive and interpretative Reawas charged, and it was held significant, not son, the world that speaks to the senses would simply for his personal history, but also for be no reasonable world. the movement so inseparably connected with his name; and his last paper is as signal an illustration of its presence and action as is to be found in all his writings. The attempt to prove this will be my reply to Dr. Newman, and it will also include a reply to Dr. Barry's vigorous defence of him.

II.

Now, Cardinal Newman may be described as, by virtue of his doctrine of the Reason, an empiricist in the province of religious truth. The Reason is, as he is fond of saying, "a mere instrument," unfurnished by Nature, without religious contents or function, till faith or conscience has conveyed into it the ideas or assumptions which are the premisses of its processes, and with religious character only as these processes are conducted in obedience to Dr. Newman's reply, then, is so without rel- the moral sense or other spiritual authority. evance to the original criticism, save in the way It is to him no constitutive or architectonic of illustration and confirmation, that it may be faculty, with religious truth so in it that it is well to attempt to make the real point at issue bound to seek and to conceive religious truth clear and explicit. He speaks of me as having without it; but it is as regards Religion been "misled by the epithets which he had at- simply idle or vacant till it has received and tached in the Apologia to the Reason." The accepted the deliverances of conscience, which epithets had nothing whatever to do with the stand to it much as Hume conceived his “immatter; all turned on the substantive or mate- pressions" and their corresponding "ideas" rial idea. The criticism was simply an en- to stand related to mind and knowledge. deavor to determine, on the one hand, how But, then, to a reason so constituted and conCardinal Newman conceived the Reason and the Conscience in themselves and in relation to the knowledge of God; and, on the other hand, how these conceptions affected or regulated the movement of his mind from Theism to Catholicity.

strued how is religious knowledge possible? How can religion, as such, have any existence, or religious truth any reality? What works as a mere instrument never handles what it works in; the things remain outside it, and have no place or standing within its being. And hence. my contention was and is, that to conceive reason as Dr. Newman does is to deny to it the knowledge of God, and so to save faith by the help of a deeper unbelief.

III.

1. I repeat, then, the doctrine of the Reason Cardinal Newman stated is precisely the doctrine on which my criticism was based, and it is essentially, in the philosophical sense, a sceptical doctrine. But let us see how he formulates it. Here is what may be regarded as his earliest statement, with his later notes incorporated:

Stated in another form, the question is this: How is knowledge of religious truth possible? What are the subjective conditions of its genesis and continuance? How and whence does man get those principles which are the bases of all his thinking concerning religion? and in what relations do they and the reason, at first, and throughout their respective histories, stand to each other? It is the old problem, under its highest and most complex aspect, as to the grounds and conditions of knowledge, how it is ever or anywhere possible? The older empiricism said: All knowledge is resolvable into sensuous impressions and the ideas which are their faint image or copy. There are no ideas in the mind till the senses have conveyed them in; it is but a sheet of white paper till the outer universe has by the finger of sense written on it those mysterious hieroglyphs which constitute our intelligible world. But the critical transcendentalism replied: The impression explains nothing-[(2.) Because we may be reasoning from wrong princimust itself be explained: how is it that it becomes rational, an intelligible thing? The mind and the sheet of white paper differ thus: The paper receives the character, but the mind reads it; indeed the character would have no being save in and through the reading of the mind. It is clear, therefore, that we must get before and below the impression to thought, which is by its forms and categories consti

"There is no necessary connection between the intellectual and moral principles of our nature [(1.) That is, as found in individuals, in the concrete.]; on relig ious subjects we may prove anything or overthrow anything, and can arrive at truth but accidentally, if we merely investigate by what is commonly called Reason

soned upon. Thus, the moral sense, or 'spiritual disples, principles unsuitable to the subject-matter reacernment' must supply us with the assumptions to be used as premisses in religious inquiry.], which is in such matters but the instrument, at best, in the hands of the legitimate judge, spiritual discernment."*

University Sermons, p. 55. The notes are added, for here, as elsewhere throughout the volume, they are the text, explain a term or a phrase, protest against a significant by their very limitations. They may qualify given inference or result; but they never either modify

Here is his latest statement, which will be found in everything material identical with the earliest :

son, and by being reduced to a mere ratiocinative instrument, its very ability to handle religious principles, even in a ratiocinative process, is denied. For the reasoning process, "In its versatility, its illimitable range, its subtlety, to be valid, must proceed from principles valid its power of concentrating many ideas on one point, it to the Reason; but to be so valid they must (the Reason) is for the acquisition of knowledge allimportant or rather necessary, with this drawback, be more than deliverances or assumptions however, in its ordinary use, that in every exercise of coming to it ab extra; they must have a root it, it depends for success upon the assumption of prior in its own nature, and be inseparable from the acts similar to that which it has itself involved, and very being of thought. To use principles therefore is reliable only conditionally. Its process is a passing from an antecedent to a consequent, and actruly, one must be able to judge concerning cording as the start so is the issue. In the province of their truth, and how can a Reason truly and religion, if it be under the happy guidance of the moral justly act, even as a mere instrument of infersense, and with teachings which are not only assump-ence, on the basis of premisses it neither tions in form, but certainties, it will arrive at indisputable truth, and then the house is at peace; but if it be in the hands of enemies, who are under the delusion that its arbitrary assumptions are self-evident axioms, the reasoning will start from false premisses, and the mind will be in a state of melancholy disorder. But in no case need the reasoning faculty itself be to blame or responsible, except if viewed as identical with the assumptions of which it is the instrument. I repeat, it is but an instrument; as such I have viewed it, and no one but Dr. Fairbairn would say as he does-that the bad employment of a faculty was a division,' a contradiction, and a radical antagonism of nature,' and 'the death of the natural proof' of a God.":

2. Now, I do not wish to be minute in my criticism, and argue that if reason, "in every exercise of it, depends for success on the assumption of prior acts similar to that which it has itself involved," then the genesis and very being of Reason are inconceivable, for we are landed in the notion of an infinite series. As to Hume, man was a succession or series of impressions and ideas;" so to Newman, Reason, as mere faculty of reasoning, is a series of "antecedents and consequents;" the difficulty in both cases is the same, to find how the series began, and how, having begun, it has developed into what it is.

found, nor framed, nor verified, being indeed so constituted as to be unable to do any one of these things. Reason, then, can be ratiocinative only as it is constitutive; we must have truth of thought that we may know or possess truth of being. The getting of principles is a more vital matter than the reasoning concerning them, and if the constitutive or formulative and determinative factor be made not only distinct from, but independent of, the dialectic and deductive, how can they ever be made to agree, save by the subordination or enslavement of the one to the other? And even then they will not agree, for the principles cannot signify the same thing to faculties that are not only distinct, but, as realized in the living person, without " necessary connection." The dictate of the Conscience changes its nature when it becomes the axiom of the Reason; the "categorical imperative" ceases to be the moment it is translated into a speculative or intellectual truth. It may-it must -be true that the man who is deaf to the voice of Conscience cannot reason rightly in religious matters; but it is no less true that the man who doubts or misuses his Reason But without resorting to minute analysis, we cannot hear or be enlightened by his Conmay begin with the last sentence of the above science. The only justification of Cardinal quotation; and concerning it, it is enough to Newman's doctrine would have been the resay, Dr. Fairbairn never said any such thing, duction of Conscience and Reason to a higher or, meaning what he did and does, could have unity; his last condemnation is his distinction said it. His criticism referred not to the em- and division of the faculties, for it involves ployment of the faculty, but to the doctrine of our nature in a dualism which makes real the faculty, which determined its use; and this knowledge of religious truth impossible; there latest statement seems expressly designed to is unity neither in the man who knows nor in elucidate and justify the criticism. For Rea- the truth as known. For, make a present of son, as here described, is condemned, in all true premisses to a faculty merely ratiocinathat concerns the higher problems and funda- tive, and they will be to it only as algebraic mental verities of thought, to incapacity and symbols, not as truths of religion; its deductive impotence. It is emptied of those constitutive process may be correct, but it will have no reand constructive qualities that make it a Rea-ligious character. But to a Reason without

or alter the radical doctrine. These notes are needed to elucidate the criticism, for nothing has been more helpful to it than a minute and comparative study of

them.

A few more instances from the University Sermons, of Dr. Newman's use of the term Reason, may be

added to those he has himself given; they ought to be studied with the Catholic Notes, pp. 58, § 4, 60-61, § 7; 65, 67, 70, 73, 88, 179, 194-195, 214-215.

religious character, unable to construe religious truths for what they really are, there can be no legitimate reasoning concerning religion; truth is inaccessible to it, and it is incompetent to the discovery and determination of if, to avoid the logical issue, the truth denied truth. This is philosophical scepticism, and to the Reason is granted to the Conscience,

and is, on its simple authority, to be accepted or oracle of God, but simply a servant, whose as a magisterial dictate," then a "division," duty was to obey, and whose only virtue was "radical antagonism of nature," is intro- obedience. Here from the critical year 1841 duced, which is "the death of the natural is a significant passage, one out of many, illusproof" for the being of a God, and of all the trative of how little the empirical and instruprimary truths of religion. This, and no mental Reason, as he conceived it, had of other, was my original criticism of Cardinal God, and how little it could find Him in the Newman, and this, confirmed and illustrated Nature it was called to interpret :— by his latest statement, is my criticism still.