Herbert Spencer’s Sociology is only social physics. He denies freedom, and declares anyone who will affix D. V. to the announcement of the Mildmay Conference to be incapable of understanding sociology. Prevision excludes divine or human will. But Mr. Spencer intimates that the evils of natural selection may be modified by artificial selection. What is this but the interference of will? And if man can interfere, cannot God do the same? Yet the wise child will not expect the father to give everything he asks for. Nor will the father who loves his child give him the razor to play with, or stuff him with unwholesome sweets, simply because the child asks these things. If the engineer of the ocean steamer should give me permission to press the lever that sets all the machinery in motion, I should decline to use my power and should prefer to leave such matters to him, unless he first suggested it and showed me how. So the Holy Spirit “_helpeth our infirmity; for we know not how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself __ maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered_” (_Rom. 8:26_). And we ought not to talk of “submitting” to perfect Wisdom, or of “being resigned” to perfect Love. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 2:1—“What they [the gods] do delay, they do not deny.... We, ignorant of ourselves, Beg often our own harms, which the wise powers Deny us for our good; so find we profit By losing of our prayers.” See Thornton, Old-Fashioned Ethics, 286-297. _Per contra_, see Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 277-294.
Here the truth lies between the two extremes of quietism and naturalism.
(_a_) In opposition to the false abnegation of human reason and will which quietism demands, we hold that God guides us, not by continual miracle, but by his natural providence and the energizing of our faculties by his Spirit, so that we rationally and freely do our own work, and work out our own salvation.
Upham, Interior Life, 356, defines quietism as “cessation of wandering thoughts and discursive imaginations, rest from irregular desires and affections, and perfect submission of the will.” Its advocates, however, have often spoken of it as a giving up of our will and reason, and a swallowing up of these in the wisdom and will of God. This phraseology is misleading, and savors of a pantheistic merging of man in God. Dorner: “Quietism makes God a monarch without living subjects.” Certain English quietists, like the Mohammedans, will not employ physicians in sickness. They quote _2 Chron. 16:12, 13_—Asa “_sought not to Jehovah, but to the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers_.” They forget that the “_physicians_” alluded to in Chronicles were probably heathen necromancers. Cromwell to his Ironsides: “Trust God, and keep your powder dry!”