40. But it is needless to say that this offer of a certain class of theologians to surrender everything except a single shred of the worn-out body, liberal as it may appear, was nevertheless at once rejected by the school of scientific men. Death, they replied, must be regarded as a total and complete destruction of the visible body, so far at least as the individual life is concerned. At the same time professing themselves unable to conceive such an existence as a disembodied spirit, they were forced to conclude like Priestley,[25] that the soul is not in its nature immortal. At this point, however, the scientific school splits up into two or even three sections, one believing with Priestley and others that immortality is a fresh and miraculous gift conferred upon man at the resurrection; another, unable to conceive the possibility of a miracle in the case of each individual, denying a future state altogether; while a third section maintains that there is no use in discussing the subject, because man after death has passed beyond the sphere of human inquiry. 41. Regarding the existence and nature of the Deity, various opinions have been entertained by the disciples of what we may term the extreme school of science. Some have maintained that we have no evidence of the existence of any such Being, others that we have no evidence of His personality, while others argue that although we may become convinced of His great power and wisdom from the works of creation, there are other attributes of His character which are not so revealed. We cannot, for instance, say they, maintain the benevolence of the Deity in the way in which we understand the word benevolence, nor have we any evidence that He is just in the way in which we understand the word justice. It is well known that the late John Stuart Mill would have regarded the claims of Christianity with more favour had its character been more Manichæan, that is to say, had the spirit of evil been allowed a position more nearly equal to that of the spirit of good in the government of the universe. 42. Let us here pause to indicate two points of similarity between this scientific school and the system of Christianity. Both, we conceive, maintain in some sense the supremacy of law or the invariability of the procedure adopted by the Deity in the government of the universe (Art. 36); both maintain likewise that the outer works of the visible universe are insufficient to manifest certain attributes of the Deity. Here, however, the likeness ends; this scientific school conceive they have no information beyond the visible universe, while the Christian system asserts the existence of an invisible order of things, and the fact of communications having taken place between the two for the double purpose of revealing God to man, and of raising man towards God.