A familiar illustration more than one organ is concerned. meets us in the fact that our knowledge of the form of objects is a composite result, obtained by the combined action of the senses of sight and touch. Another more familiar illustration may be seen in the fact that vision itself is ordinarily, though not necessarily, the composite effect of the simultaneous action of two organs. If there is a difficulty in solving some of the problems which arise from the relations of religion and science, it may be paralleled by the difficulty of solving the problem of binocular vision. Science has as yet furnished no satisfactory explanation of the fact that in the normal state of the organs of sight the distinct images formed on the two retinas blend harmoniously into the vision of one object. That in abnormal states of the organs, such as that produced by mechanical disarrangement, the two images do not blend, may serve to illustrate the occasional disharmony between religion and science. The chief source of apparent discrepancy in our day between the scientific and the religious faculty is the undue application of the principle of the uniformity of nature. This principle is the expression of a belief, confirmed, indeed, by ever accumulating evidence, yet never completely demonstrable. In its legitimate application, so far from being hostile to religion, it is distinctly religious. It asserts in the world of phenomena the steadfastness of Him who created and upholds all things. Nor is the principle, except in form and in the supposed range of its applicability, by any means a modern doctrine. For if, as some pretend, the religious ideas of mankind were originally obtained from the observation of nature, the observed uniformity of nature must have been in very early times one stepping-stone to the majestic conception of the 'faithfulness' of God so repeatedly insisted upon in the Bible. In our own view the regularity of nature was at least a help to the understanding of such declarations as 'God is not a man that He should lie, neither the son of man that He should repent;' 'I am the Lord; I change not;' and as such it was appealed to by the prophet.1 Doubtless modern science has tracked uniformity in large classes of cases in which it was formerly unsuspected; but it has not proved that physical regularity entirely overrides the spontaneity of spiritual beings. We have already seen that the certainty attaching to the fundamental moral convictions infinitely surpasses in strength the hold which any theory of 1 See Jer. v. 22-24. evolution can have on the mind; and similarly the immediate consciousness of the freedom of the will incomparably surpasses in any unprejudiced mind the belief in universal uniformity. The phrase Uniformity of Nature is, however, much too freely used, as if the laws of it were entirely ascertained; whereas it is the great task of science to discover those laws. So far science has only discovered some of them in phenomena far or near, which the senses, aided or unaided by instruments, can reach. There are, however, problems scarcely yet attempted, but whose solution, if the uniformity of nature were completely understood, ought to be deducible from laws. already known. We cannot, for example, determine what are the essentials or what are the forms of life in other worlds. Our ignorance on this point is frankly confessed by Mr. Romanes, no mean scientific authority. Life on earth is dependent upon carbon and oxygen; but, as he rightly declares, for anything we know to the contrary, life and organization may be able to exist, even if elsewhere it is not actually existing, in atmospheres composed of other gases.'1 This confession of ignorance we regard as very important. For the principle of the uniformity of nature certainly favours the belief that life exists elsewhere, though the conditions may differ from those on earth: and this belief does not conflict with religious ideas but is rather corroborated by them. Yet science cannot solve the problem of life in other worlds, though, if the uniformity of nature were fully understood, she would seem to have in her hands the data for its solution. A fortiori must the harder problem of life beyond the grave be outside her reach. And if on this point her voice is dumb, there is nothing to distract our attention from the other voice by which God speaks to us, the voice within, which, as we have seen, proclaims us to be partakers of an eternal order, the voice of conscience corroborated and informed by revelation. Nor, to touch lastly upon the vexed question of miracles, can it be pretended with reason that the scientific postulate bars their possibility or the credibility of well-attested accounts of them. For, as Bishop Temple argues on the one hand, uniformity of nature, if we knew the whole of nature, might be found to be not inconsistent with the miraculous element in revelation;2 and, on the other hand, it is See the Contemporary Review for October 1882, p. 541. 2 The Bishop goes much further than we are inclined to in allowing the possibility of several of the Gospel miracles having been accom out of our power to assert that uniformity can never be set aside by the direct interference of the Divine Will. Rather when we take into account the conviction, mentioned above, of the causative power of our own wills, we must believe in the freedom of the Divine Will to act according to Divine Wisdom; and when we believe in the supremacy of the moral over the physical, we must expect that that principle would be asserted in the physical world. ART. IV. DISSENTING TRUST-DEED CREEDS AND STATE CONTROL. 1. Manual of Congregational Principles. By R. W. DALE, LL.D. (London, 1884.) 2. The Congregationalist, December 1884. Edited by J. GUINNESS ROGERS, B.A. (London.) SOME two years ago there appeared in this Review a notice of a book called The Dead Hand' in the 'Free Churches.' In later English and Welsh editions that book, for greater explicitness of the description of its contents, has been published under the title of The Dead Hand in the Free Churches of Dissent. The primary objects of The Dead Hand were to show I. That ministers and members of Dissenting bodies have had, with but few exceptions (that is, in the event of their building new chapels and creating new trusts), neither vote nor voice in the matter of determining upon and drawing up their creeds, in settling upon their prescribed religious ordinances and observances, in fixing the basis of their corporate life, and in defining the legal theological conditions of admission to and exclusion from their Church fellowship, so far as these matters are scheduled in their trust-deeds. 2. That all these important particulars have been decided upon by ministers and members of Dissenting communities in the past, excluding all power of any modification of opinion on these subjects by the ministers and members of these plished by means of a natural though unusual action of the mind on the body. So many of the miracles, e.g. the Incarnation itself and the raising of the dead to life, are left absolutely untouched by this suggestion that it seems to us hardly worth while to have propounded it. bodies in the present day. That the creeds and prescribed religious ordinances binding upon Dissenters are recorded in their trust-deeds, which have been drawn up by the sanction of, and under the protection and control of, the civil power. 3. That none of the Dissenting communities possess the power of legally interpreting their own trust-deeds, nor of authoritatively, with binding force, explaining what the doctrines set forth in such trust-deeds really are, nor of finally settling any disputes which may arise in their different communions as to the duties and obligations which are enjoined by the terms and conditions of these dead hand' documents. 4. But that all these and such like questions the Queen's State courts, by virtue of the Sovereign's supremacy over all causes temporal and spiritual within the realm, reserve and exercise the right of authoritatively and finally determining. 5. That the trust-deeds of Dissenters, especially those of the Congregationalists (including under that designation Baptists and Independents), with the extraordinary and obsolete Calvinistic, hyper-Calvinistic, and other repulsively repellent, but happily for the most part intellectually outlived, creeds,1 &c., which they contain, are inherited or succeeded to with— and in the same manner as they, the Dissenting bodies, succeed to their chapels and endowments; and that both creeds and chapels must be unconditionally accepted or rejected together. 6. But that it is an incontrovertible fact that, while Dissenters inherit and possess their chapels and pendant endowments on the moral and legal conditions of holding, teaching, and preaching in most cases the crudest, harshest, and most uncharitable of creeds, the great majority of them, especially those of the Congregationalists, are, notwithstanding, the most advanced in speculation, and practically recognize no limits with respect to what is called free-thought and freedom of faith in matters of religion. 7. That no relief can be given to Dissenters from the position of hopelessly involved confusion and wide-spread lawlessness in which they find themselves placed with respect 1 'I believe few of our ministers ever "read themselves in " with the Articles of their regulation religion prescribed in their trust-deeds. I never read the trust-deed of any Church of which I have been a minister until years after I had occupied its pulpit. I have in my memory the instance of one of the holiest ministers and most eminent teachers I have ever known, who declared that, had he been aware of the conditions of the trust-deed, he never could have accepted the pastorate of the church to which he had ministered for souls.'-See Christian World, February 17, 1881. to the deliberate and habitual violation of their trust-deeds, and their enjoined creeds embodied in them, but by Parliamentary legislation.' 8. But that the very proposal on the part of the leaders of Nonconformity to obtain such relief would fill the minds of Dissenters with consternation, by opening up and fully revealing to them the true state of things, and by proving beyond all dispute their entire subjection to State control and Parliamentary legislation in matters of religion, after all their boasted freedom from them. As illustrations of this, it is sufficient to point out that the Dissenters' Chapel Act of 1844 was necessary to give a new interpretation to certain chapel trusts, and to give congregations in possession of certain chapels a legal title to them. The Irish Presbyterian Trust-deed Act, 34 Vict., cap. 24, was necessary to effect certain changes in the trusts of the Irish Presbyterian body; and the Primitive Wesleyan Society of Ireland's Trust-deed Act, 34 and 35 Vict., cap. 40, was also passed to effect required changes in the trusts of that body. 9. That the serious results of all this are that Dissenters are held in legal bondage to creeds which they do not believe; that creeds and solemn trusts are deliberately and habitually violated by Dissenting ministers and the communities over which they preside, while they cling to the proprietary and pecuniary benefits attached to their belief and observance ; and that, in consequence, large numbers of Dissenting chapels with their endowments attached are being held in moral and legal alienation from their originally intended and primarily devoted uses.2 1 1 ́In the course of discussion many years since—for the agitation of the question is by no means new—Dr. Halley had said : “Let any practice or faith amongst us, however ancient, or however general, be proved unscriptural, and what should prevent any of our Churches from renouncing it?" This was a very innocent remark of the good doctor's, but not worthy of his reputation for sagacity and wit. Thomas Binney instantly replied, “What should prevent you? The State would prevent you; the State with which you have put yourself in voluntary union-the law, the Lord Chancellor: in other words, the legal document called a trust-deed, which has fixed your creed, defined your practices, and determined and regulated what you are to be for all time."—See Christian World, February 17, 1881. 2 'It is a fact beyond dispute, that there are many eminent ministers of the body who are uttering from their pulpits continually opinions in respect to God and man, theology and revelation, which contradict on many points the views commonly held and expressed in former days. It only needs, here and there throughout the country, that trustees should arise with the determination and the means of the plaintiffs in the case before us [the Huddersfield case of Jones v. Stannard], to procure the |