Natural Law in the Spiritual World | Page 9

the other hand,
such as Sir William Hamilton, admit analogy to a primary place in
logic and regard it as the very basis of induction.
But, fortunately, we are spared all discussion on this worn subject, for
two cogent reasons. For one thing, we do not demand of Nature directly
to prove Religion. That was never its function. Its function is to
interpret. And this, after all, is possibly the most fruitful proof. The best
proof of a thing is that we see it; if we do not see it, perhaps proof will
not convince us of it. It is the want of the discerning faculty, the
clairvoyant power of seeing the eternal in the temporal, rather than the
failure of the reason, that begets the sceptic. But secondly, and more
particularly, a significant circumstance has to be taken into account,
which, though it will appear more clearly afterward, may be stated here
at once. The position we have been led to take up is not that the
Spiritual Laws are analogous to the Natural Laws, but that they are the
same Laws. It is not a question of analogy but of Identity. The Natural
Laws are not the shadows or images of the Spiritual in the same sense
as autumn is emblematical of Decay, or the falling leaf of Death. The
Natural Laws, as the Law of Continuity might well warn us, do not stop
with the visible and then give place to a new set of Laws bearing a
strong similitude to them. The Laws of the invisible are the same Laws,
projections of the natural not supernatural. Analogous Phenomena are
not the fruit of parallel Laws, but of the same Laws--Laws which at one
end, as it were, may be dealing with Matter, at the other end with Spirit.
As there will be some inconvenience, however, in dispensing with the
word analogy, we shall continue occasionally to employ it. Those who
apprehend the real relation will mentally substitute the larger term.

Let us now look for a moment at the present state of the question. Can
it be said that the Laws of the Spiritual World are in any sense
considered even to have analogies with the Natural World? Here and
there certainly one finds an attempt, and a successful attempt, to exhibit
on a rational basis one or two of the great Moral Principles of the
Spiritual World. But the Physical World has not been appealed to. Its
magnificent system of Laws remains outside, and its contribution
meanwhile is either silently ignored or purposely set aside. The
Physical, it is said, is too remote from the Spiritual. The Moral World
may afford a basis for religious truth, but even this is often the baldest
concession; while the appeal to the Physical universe is everywhere
dismissed as, on the face of it, irrelevant and unfruitful. From the
scientific side, again, nothing has been done to court a closer
fellowship. Science has taken theology at its own estimate. It is a thing
apart. The Spiritual World is not only a different world, but a different
kind of world, a world arranged on a totally different principle, under a
different governmental scheme.
The Reign of Law has gradually crept into every department of Nature,
transforming knowledge everywhere into Science. The process goes on,
and Nature slowly appears to us as one great unity, until the borders of
the Spiritual World are reached. There the Law of Continuity ceases,
and the harmony breaks down. And men who have learned their
elementary lessons truly from the alphabet of the lower Laws, going on
to seek a higher knowledge, are suddenly confronted with the Great
Exception.
Even those who have examined most carefully the relations of the
Natural and the Spiritual, seem to have committed themselves
deliberately to a final separation in matters of Law. It is a surprise to
find such a writer as Horace Bushnell, for instance, describing the
Spiritual World as "another system of nature incommunicably separate
from ours," and further defining it thus: "God has, in fact, erected
another and higher system, that of spiritual being and government for
which nature exists; a system not under the law of cause and effect, but
ruled and marshaled under other kinds of laws."[9] Few men have
shown more insight than Bushnell in illustrating Spiritual truth from the

Natural World; but he has not only failed to perceive the analogy with
regard to Law, but emphatically denies it.
In the recent literature of this whole region there nowhere seems any
advance upon the position of "Nature and the Supernatural." All are
agreed in speaking of Nature and the Supernatural. Nature in the
Supernatural, so far as Laws are concerned, is still an unknown truth.
"The Scientific Basis of Faith" is a suggestive title.