Genre:

Regular Feature, Biography

Subjects:

Heredity, Scientific Naturalism, Religion, Psychical Research

    Comments that the late Charles H Spurgeon's staunch Calvinism 'brought him into unconscious sympathy with the whole drift of modern scientific speculation' (242). After all, 'what is the doctrine of heredity but the reaffirmation of the grimmer doctrines of the Calvinistic creed? The reign of law which modern science has revealed, has scared many by seeming to exclude all possibility of the supernatural and the miraculous and which, when developed into a necessarian philosophy, seems to abolish the moral responsibility of man' (243). The power of prayer, however, is 'a constant confirmation of the divine intervention in the affairs of life', which 'must be admitted, on purely scientific grounds, whether the sceptic may explain it on the ground of telepathy and the influence of a strong mind upon other minds which are in a mysterious way, not yet fully known, brought under the influence of a human will operating through other channels than the five senses' (244).