BR US fin (^taxmll Wimvmii^ § ilr»g BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME | PROM THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF M^nvu ^^ Sage r89i /^//i/9S A...i:-^po_s:. 5 I2.jri- OC^' :'" "'H^ 1 Z i< Cornell University Library BR85 .H98 1888 Theological essays, by Richard Holt Hutt olln 3 1924 029 230 237 Cornell University Library The original of tliis bool< is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029230237 THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS BY EICHAED HOLT HUTTON M.A. (London) THIRD EDITION— REVISED ilonDon MACMILLAN AND CO. AND NEW YORK 1888 All rights reserv&i \ 1 i Mi/ A. 5-1+00 6" First Edition, Svo (^Strakan), i8yi. Second Edition, 8vo {Daldy and IsMster), i8y6 {Trafisferred to Macviillan and Co. iSSo). Third EditioJiy Revised, Globe 8vo, 1888. PEEFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION These Essays need no preface beyond the explana- tion that several of them appeared years ago in the National Review, while others have been published since in other periodicals. All have been carefully revised, and some re-cast and partly re-written. With regard to the last essay, it may be well to add that it was almost the first written, and that though it expresses a view which I still sincerely hold, I do not think it does full justice to the theology of Mr. Maurice, to whom indeed, but for a certain feeling that dedications have become a somewhat unreal mode of acknowledging mental obligations, I should have wished to dedicate these Essays. To him more than to any other man, I certainly owe my belief that theology is a true science, that a knowledge of God in a true scientific sense, however imperfect in degree, is open to us. But for what I venture to think the great living principle of Mr. Maurice's writings, this volume could scarcely have been written. That principle I take to be that all beliefs ahout God are but inadequate intellectual attempts to justify a belief in Him which is never a merely intellectual affirmation, but rather a living act of the spirit by no means confined to those who consciously confess His presence. Grant this, and it follows vi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION that all attempts to limit our living relations with God by beliefs about Him, — -whether those beliefs are negative, and deny His power to reveal Himself at all to beings so narrow, — or positive, and affect to express His essence exhaustively in a number of abstract propositions, — are mistakes of the same origin and root. Only where a belief about God helps us to explain a more real belief in Him, and only so far as it does so, has it any true value. Scepticism and dogmatism are but different forms of the attempt to accommodate infinite living claims upon us to our human weakness. The former, which declares God "unknown and unknowable," makes our weakness a sort of fastness in which we fortify ourselves against Him ; the latter, which insists on set formulae as alone representative of real spiritual life, dilutes the divine nature with human limitations to make an image more commensurate with ourselves. It seems to me that it has been the one purpose of all the divine revelation or education of which we have any record, to waken us up out of this perpetually recurring tendency to fall back into ourselves. If these essays have any worth in them, they owe it to the coherent application of this prin- ciple in a good many different directions ; and my grasp of it I date entirely from my study of Mr. Maurice's writings. E. H. H. lith January 1871. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION It has been impossible to revise again these sheets for the press without asking myself whether, even in the years which have intervened between the fiist publication of them and the present time, the ablest and sincerest of English thinkers have not rather increased their distance from the position here taken up than in any way diminished it. And no man, I think, however firm his personal convictions, can be, or ought to be, entirely unmoved by signs which appear to indicate that the most thorough and earnest thought of his time is drifting in a direction opposite to his own, and convincing itself that what seems to him the light of a growing day is but the rich after-glow of a departed and unreturning sun. Clear indications of this sort ought to set any man considering whether he can explain that divergence of thought as a temporary result of some wider and larger change in the intellectual tendencies of the day, which will end by bringing back again to his own point of view the conviction that seems drifting rapidly away, or whether he is himself holding fast to illusions from which stronger men have had the courage to break free. I have put this question to myself quite frankly, and I should be the last to deny that, so far as there has been a viii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION change in the temper of English thought on the great problems of theology, and on those of human character which are so closely allied with the problems of theology, since these essays were written and collected, it has been greatly in the direction of shaking men's faith in the deepest assumptions both of the Theistic and the Christian creed, and much less at least in that of establishing them anew. But the more I study and appreciate, or appear to myself to appreciate, the scope and significance of these negative tendencies, the more they seem to me to bear the character of those violent exaggerations of one-sided principles which are apt to catch the imagination in such times as ours, — when ecclesiastical authority is pushing its claims to the very uttermost on the one side, and on the other side science, by its new and rapid strides, is assuring itself on very untenable grounds that there is no presumptuousness in claiming the whole realm of certainties for its own, and in relegating religion to that region of the arbitrary emotions which has no sure relation with positive fact. Perhaps I cannot better introduce these essays to my readers at the present time than by briefly pointing out what seem to me the weak points of the extreme positions on both sides, and the indications that an intermediate standing-ground will be the final resting- place of the moral reason of man. The great fascination, and, in a certain super- ficial sense, naturalness, of the hypothesis that an infallible Church is essential to keep before man any absolute truth revealed to man by God, is one which I have never ignored. What, we may ask, is the use of God manifesting Himself to man without taking distinct provisions for securing that we shall PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION ix always have the means of clearly ascertaining what it was that He meant to reveal 1 A divine light which is discoloured, refracted, and dispersed as soon as it is given, by the medium through which it shines, might almost as well, it will be said, not be divine at all. At first sight, it certainly seems reasonable to expect that any truth which God chooses to communicate at all, should be so com- municated as to be certainly apprehended at all times and by all persons in the same sense, or, at least, in a sense as near to the same as the varying capacity of different conditions of life and growth and culture will admit. Nor can it be denied that Infallibilists, who persuade themselves that they have a guarantee for the truth of their creed which in certainty is far above that of their own conscience and their own intellect, gain in some resj)ects great advantages by that assurance. I have none of the horror of Romanism, as' we now know it in England, which some Protestants seem to think it a kind of historic duty to feel, though I believe that the sacerdotal principle, which is at its highest point of power in Eome, has, on the whole, been a mis- chievous and sometimes even a fatal one. Indeed I am certain that the intellectual dependence and confidence which the Eoman Church gives to nine- tenths of her children, however much it may paralyse the genius and the intellectual activity of the few, offers to the meditative piety and spiritual affections of the many just that guarantee of serenity, without which these aifections seldom or never attain their highest proportions. I doubt if there be in any Church in the world, in proportion to the number of its adherents, so much true devotion and piety, so much genuine religious ardour and self-sacrifice, and, X PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION more than all, that best of all tokens of the sub- stantial truth of religion, so much true blessedness in the devotional life, as there is inside the Roman Catholic Church. But it does not at all follow that because the comparative calm and peace of complete and unquestioning intellectual dependence favours the growth of the truest devotional life, that, there- fore, such complete and unquestioning dependence is founded on true assumptions. It may be, and I think it is, true, that an unrest, which, for a time unsettles the foundations of the devotional life, will lead to a much safer and higher devotional life afterwards. Now it is the main difficulty in the conception of an infallible human authority for any divine truth, that the larger and more divine a truth is, the more it depends upon the capacity of the taught to receive it ; and, if so, then equally of course upon the capacity of the teacher to instil it. If you are to have a truth infallibly taught, you must not only secure a pupil infallibly competent to appreciate it on all its sides, but a teacher infallibly competent to exhaust its significance in all its aspects. For a divine truth is not a truth intelligible at all as a matter of mere definition and intellectual exposition. It is a manifestation of the divine nature. What are called doctrines are not the rudi- ments of revelation, but rather the last results of men's intellectual meditation, guided by God in its musings, on the glimpses of God gained by the human conscience in its own interior life and in the history of the world. For ages there was hardly any doctrine beyond that of the righteousness of God, and the illustration by historical and moral example of what that righteousness really implied. Even the doctrine of human immortality was a com- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xi paratively late and gradual " development," derived by man from the character of the divine love ; indeed, this certainly was what Christ made it, when He said that God was not the God of the dead but of the living, so that beings who had ever been the objects of His love must be so for ever. Now, if this be the real character of doctrine — namely, a secondary result of reflecting on the glimpses God has given us of Himself — and I think even Roman Catholic theologians will hardly deny that Christian dogma has no true meaning except to minds saturated with the moral and spiritual vision of God on which all doctrine is built up — the great spiritual blunder of the Infallibilist view of Revelation lies in the assumption that there can be infallible teaching at all except by a Being as in- capable of living a false life as of pronouncing a false proposition. Revelation is essentially the direct manifestation of a divine character to man, and only secondarily the inculcation of such beliefs as result from the study of that divine character. Revelation certainly should influence the will and the affections more deeply, and probably, too, even more directly, than the intellect of man. Nor could any teaching be infallible which did not exert the same spell over the heart and afifections as the original divine teach- ing, for it would not have the same meaning. But even Roman Catholics are compelled to admit that their Church has been granted infallibility only in relation to the ex cathedrd expositions of faith and morals — that is, in relation to verbal statements, which lose half their significance, and, therefore, their truth, unless set forth in the same way in which they were originally set forth by Christ with the illuminat- ing help of a divine life. Now I do not believe that Xll PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION such a thing as merely intellectual infallibility as to spiritual truths is conceivable at all. Suppose, for instance, that the Church teaches that of " faith, hope, and charity," the greatest is charity ; but that, while she teaches this, her moral and spiritual policy and practice are of a kind to give the world which she teaches a most perverted and false view of the true meaning of charity. Can then hers be " infallible " teaching in any sense at all 1 Is not the deed or sign, the action or the smile or frown by which a moral or spiritual truth is illustrated, an essential element in the truth itself ? Might not our Lord's own sentence on the woman taken in adultery — " Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone " — if uttered by a cynic, by a disbeliever in human virtue, have been turned into a sneer at the radical rottenness of human nature — an argument for universal tolerance of sin founded on universal despair — instead of what it was, an argument for universal tenderness and sympathy, with self-abhor- rence, founded on the consciousness of universal weakness and temptation 1 It seems to me that merely intellectual infallibility as to such a matter as the nature of God, divorced from moral infallibility in setting forth that nature, is an inconceivable thing. A Church which should never use wrong words about the divine nature, but which for centuries together offered in its public conduct a moral interpretation of those words totally distinct from that given by its Lord, would not be an infallible Church in any use- ful or intelligible sense of the term. An infallible Church means a Church whose authoritative words convey truth, without risk of failure, to the minds of those who take pains to understand. But a Church whose authorities are an Alexander Borgia or even a PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xiii Leo X., and whose policy is a policy of interdict and blood, or even diplomatic craft, for century after century, puts a gloss on the meaning of our Lord's personal love and personal severity and personal prudence in withholding any truth for which his disciples' minds were not yet ripe, which makes such a Church not only fallible, but actually misleading to all who interpret her words — as all men always will — by her life and her deeds. The only use of an infallible teacher of revealed truth would be to keep the true meaning of that revealed truth constantly before the minds of men. But for this purpose, such a teacher must not only use correct words, but use them with the tone, and illustrate them by the action, which really carries their deeper meaning into the minds of the taught. A Church which repeats our Lord's language concerning the proposal to destroy the Samaritan village by fire, but gives it a totally different significance by her example, is so far from teaching men infallibly, that she distinctly and positively leads them astray, just as much as any sectarian sensualist who interprets the doctrine of Christian love in an immoral sense leads astray those whom he influences. What the Church of Rome maintains is, in Cardinal Newman's view, that her immunity from doctrinal error always guarantees to true Catholics a chance of repentance which those who have not this immunity do not enjoy. But what I cannot see is how immunity from doctrinal error can exist at all without immunity from spiritual error — from error of the affections and perversity of the will. " The firmest faith, so as to move mountains," says Cardi- nal Newman, " may exist without love — that is, real faith ; — real faith in the strict sense of the word, as XIV PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION the faith of a martyr or a doctor." "A Catholic," he adds, "may ever be falling, but his faith is a con- tinued invitation and persuasion to repent." But can "real faith" exist "without love"? Is it con- ceivable that we can have any real intdligence of what Christ meant, without a share at least of His spirit of love ? Has not the teaching of almost all Churches in their turn been a mere parody and misrepresenta- tion of Christ's teaching, just for want of that nameless influence of the divine life which showed men what .his severity meant, and what his love meant, and what was the relation of the one to the other ? A divine mind cannot be infallibly revealed, ex- cept by a character overflowing with the divine spirit; and the absence of that spirit causes a greater and more serious flaw even in the intellectual exposition of that mind, than the want of a correct phraseology would cause if the right spirit were there. It seems to me that even a Church which should constantly use important doctrinal words in different, and there- fore necessarily in inconsistent and erroneous, senses, and which of course could not pretend to be held infallible, might be a far more effectual and less mis- leading teacher of divine truth than one which always used such words correctly and in the same sense, and yet constantly misled men by its actions as to the lesson it was intended to convey. An in- fallible Church needs moral infallibility — infallibility of the will and the affections — even more than she needs infallibility of the understanding, in order to keep God's truth alive in the world. If you use a language which has lost its true and high meaning, and has become a slang — as missionaries imperfectly acquainted with a new tribe's language often have done — you do not express by it what you mean, and PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XV you are not therefore teaching infallibly. It is just the same when the obscuring cause is not a mistake in usage, but perversity of character — the false construction which life and conduct put upon the language used. Christ could not have revealed God without being divine ; and the Church could not reveal Christ, except so far as she remained Christ- like. An infallible Church which has in any degree or for any time, however short, lost the secret of the Christian temper, is a contradiction. The least fallible Church, at any time, is the Church which is most adequately setting forth the life of God and Christ. Intellectual infallibility, without moral and spiritual infallibility, can only exist in relation to subjects which are purely intellectual, and which involve no moral and spiritual qualities. I can con- ceive an infallible authority in physical science, who might be as obtuse or even as wicked as he pleased. But I cannot conceive an infallible interpreter of a divine being, without the fulness of that divine life which he is to interpret. I can see very well how the Roman Catholic Church has been led to rely more and more on her supposed intellectual infalli- bility, and to distinguish it sharply from moral and spiritual perfection. But I conceive that, in doing so, she has gradually been led farther and farther away from that infinitely truer notion of a Church, which regards it primarily as the habitation of the Holy Spirit, and only secondarily as the embodiment of the spirit of true doctrine. There seems to me no trace in the Bible that the communication of pure intellectual truth was ever made the antecedent condition of spiritual discipline and teaching ; but very many proofs that an advance in spiritual dis- cipline and teaching always preceded — was always h XVI PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION the antecedent condition of — the evolution of such new intellectual truths, as ultimately resulted from the brooding of man's nature, under divine guidance, over this fresh moral and spiritual experience. The conception of a purely intellectual infallibility in re- lation to moral and spiritual truth is not only a mistaken one, but seems to me due to a profound moral blunder. Eevelation is a light on God's character, taken all round. And so far as revelation can be kept alive in the world, it must be by jealously guarding the whole contents — in all its deep com- plication with the affections of men — of the divine teaching. Nor is this a mere speculation or a priori criticism on the position of the Infallibilists. Unquestionably Rome lost her power, or at least so much of it as she has lost, not by doctrinal blunders, but by moral and spiritual failure. She lost it because the corruptions of the Church made her moral fallibility patent, and because the just moral instinct of men perceived at once that a Church which had, for a time at least, lost all her pre-eminence in righteousness over the world which she was teaching, could not by any possibility be competent to interpret infallibly spiritual truth. It was not what we now call Romanism, it was not certainly doctrinal Romanism — the belief, for instance, in transubstantiation, or any allied doctrines — which led to the great break-up of the sixteenth century ; but it was the great divorce between the spiritual affections of man and the moral character of the teaching, which made the theology taught seem not only unmeaning but false. The Roman Catholic doctrines of "works," "indul- gences," and so forth, which played so great a part in alienating men from the Roman Church of the PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XVll sixteenth century, were irritating and intolerable, not because they were incapable of at least a respectable interpretation, but because they were necessarily interpreted by the light of the actual practice of that corrupt and worldly ecclesiastical regime, and because, so understood, they were doctrines as pernicious and degrading, and as alien from all true spiritual righteousness, as if they had been the inventions of a purely evil being. It will be found, I believe, in fact, that the Eoman Church, like most other Churches, is always at her best when she is most conscious of her weakness and danger, and that her doctrinal infallibility seems most plausible when she is guarded from arrogance by a profound conscious- ness of her human feebleness. But that is a demonstration of her fallibility. It is fallibility which fails least when it is most conscious of its liability to fail. " Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall," is not a maxim for infallible but for fallible beings. Eome is best when competing with Protestant rivals — in the midst of hostile criticism and alien institutions — worst when she has it all her own way. But that is saying, in other words, that she is least fallible when she has most warning of her fallibility, and most fallible when she is most likely to think herself infallible. It was by her moral fallibility that her supposed intellectual infallibility came to be exploded. And so great is the paradox of human things, that even now she is probably gaining greatly in intellectual strength by her experience of the extreme difficulty of so setting forth the assumed dogmatic infallibility of her rulers, as to make it seem consistent with the weakness, intellectual, moral, and spiritual, which she has to confess, and to reconcile, by hook or by crook, with xviii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION this great claim of a divine guarantee against error, promised, as is asserted, to her official chief. It is easy to understand the temptation to make the rule of faith absolute ; but the result of doing so in the only Church that has announced a tangible and practicable test, has hitherto been much more to stimulate the scepticism of men as to the possibility of an absolute revelation, than to draw men towards the Church which claims to be infallibly guided in doctrine in spite of the many corruptions and the frightful sins which have marked the course of her ecclesiastical administration. If Rome has gained more in humiliating experi- ence than in prestige or power by that great develop- ment of her doctrine of infallibility which the Vatican Council decreed, I think it cannot be denied that the so-called High Church party have also received a severe and awakening shock from the issues of the same great event. For they, too, have always rested their faith on " the authority of the Church," though they have shrunk from explaining what they regard as the true organ of the authority of the Church. Some of them indeed maintain that a Council properly summoned from undivided Christendom is infallible, but that there is no infallible authority to be found in a divided Christendom. If that be so, it seems that a Church which, in throwing off the " corrup- tions " of Rome, acted on the authority of a mere fragment of Christendom, can have had no divine authority for what she did. But apart from such argumenta ad hominem, undoubtedly the realising effect of the appeal by Rome to a living and handy authority, which can and does profess to declare officially what is true and what is false in religious and moral subjects, has been to make Anglicans more PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xix sensible than they ever were before, that they don't really believe, and hardly wish to believe, in any infallible human authority, — that, in fact, they shrink from any appeal to such an authority, — and that so far from its being a relief to them if they could have once more what they call a real Council of the Church to appeal to, they would be filled with dread lest such a Council should throw over any doctrine to which they had become personally attached, and lest they should in consequence be driven to one of those devices in which the minority in Church Councils have all but uniformly taken refuge, for proving that the Council was either not properly summoned or not " free," or not conducted according to precedent, or, on some excuse or other, — the real reason being that it overruled them, — not entitled to obedience. It is clear that Anglicans have felt more and more, since Rome has made clear what she means, and that she means something very definite and simple indeed by dogmatic infallibility, that they don't desire a living human authority of that kind, and that what they really mean by appeal to the Church from private opinion is little more than this, that they think that what affected men deeply and universally when Christianity was fresh from the lips of Christ has a right to be regarded as of its essence, even though it may be impossible for human intellects in any way to justify now the mysterious influence and authority which attaches to it. What the High Church hold, and I think hold not unreasonably, really amounts, I fancy, only to this, — though they may apply it with quite irrational and almost super- stitious wealth of detail, — that if you have once established the divine origin of a faith, you must not measure its meaning and contents by your XX PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION own mind, but must watch its whole effect and work in the world, and treat it morally and spiritually to some extent as you treat, intellectually, the secrets of Nature — that is, as something far above you, to which you must conform yourself so far as yon can enter into it, and not as something which you can define, analyse, and exhaust. So far as this is what the High Church party mean by declining to treat Christianity as a mere subject for private judgment, — that is, as an influence of which any man may explain for himself all the agencies, and verify all the assumptions, — I think they are quite right. It seems to me absurd, when once you are convinced that a stream of influence descends into the world from a source infinitely above you, to insist on clearly understanding all its instru- mentalities and fathoming all its mysteries. But where the High Church party seem to blunder, — apart from their wistful and pathetic desire to believe in a hidden centre of infallibility, at which it is, for- tunately, impossible to get, — is in preferring petty mystery to large mystery, in trying, indeed, to make mysteries where there are and can be none, in in- sisting more on punctual ritual than on the growth of the religious affections, in exhausting the mind by the business-detail of religious observances, in defin- ing what does not admit of definition, and what loses by definition, in identifying with symbols what sym- bols may faintly shadow forth, but cannot possibly embody, — or, to express as much as possible by a single sentence, in being thus far untrue to their own conception of Christianity as an infinite power shed abroad in the world, whose genius and life deserve humble and reverent study and treatment, that they bury its spirit under an arid mound of dreary PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxi minutise, exhaust faith on a multitude of what are at best pious conjectures, and fritter away the great river of living waters by dividing it into a delta of a hundred mouths, where it loses itself in the sand. It seems to me that the excessive ceremonialism of the High Church is in no small degree due to the predominance of that dry, systematising tendency which has also led the same party to maintain that somewhere or other there must be in the Church an infallible authority, even though it be beyond our reach for a thousand years at a time. If they could but believe that the only infallibility is in God, they would not be so willing to turn His revelation into a cut-and-dried bundle of observances, of which all the scheme and architecture, as it were, are obviously man's. If there be no infallible human centre to the Church, there can hardly be any divine obligation in a ceremonial which is all of traditional growth, and the very cement of which is mortal habit and association. But, after all, the true question of our day is not the question raised by the Infallibilists, nor the ques- tions raised by the Ritualists, but the question raised by the Rationalists. If we admit that there is and can be no such thing as an infallible human authority, unless there be also a human authority of perfect spiritual and moral life, must we therefore admit either that there cannot be, or even that there is not, any access to divine truth at all 1 Cannot we be certain without being infallible 1 Cannot God infallibly find us, without our having any infallible power of finding God? As regards, at least, the possibility of the matter, there is little that needs to be said. It is obvious enough that I am not infallible as to the fact that I am now tracing these lines on XXU PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION paper. I am not infallible, because there have been men, and one day I may be amongst them, who have suffered from the illusion that they were writing when they were not writing ; and I might suffer from such an illusion as well as anybody else. But though a creature liable to illusion can never be infallible, he may be certain, so certain that no doubts of his fellow-creatures on the subject ought to shake his certainty. What we mean by an in- fallible authority is an authority which cannot be wrong. What we mean by certainty is simply an unalterable conviction that, though we might be, under various conceivable circumstances, wrong, in point of fact we are not wrong. I cannot believe in an infallible Church, because I cannot believe in a Church whose authorities on various most essential points have not been and are not often wrong. Weakness or sin of any kind is inconsistent with adequate intellectual knowledge on the points where our faculties are injured by such weakness or sin. One man is less fallible than another on one point, a second man on a different point, and so the whole truth, faintly conceived, may be within the Church, though the whole, even in fact or theory, can hardly ever be present in any one mind. But what the Eationalists maintain is, that the weakness of human faculty renders the source and origin of things wholly inaccessible to us ; so that, though we may be certain of anything commensurate with our faculties, we can never pretend to be certain of anything that stretches beyond their range and above their reach. That, of _ course, is not only true but a platitude. Of course we must be capable of knowing anything that is known. But the question is whether we may not be rendered capable of knowing a being infinitely above PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxiii US, by the will and power of that being. And, in- deed, it is sufficiently curious that those who, like M. Renan, are most confident that God, in the Christian sense at all events, does not exist, that He is not a person at all, that He is not self-conscious, that He is rather in course of becoming than in being, still credit men with a power of attaining for themselves complete certainty on points both of transcendent importance and of transcendent difficulty, — which is far more surprising than what Christians claim for them, namely, that they can learn whatever their Creator finds it desirable to teach them. In the philosophical dialogue on "Certainties," which M. Eenan has published, he makes " Philalethe" — who may not, of course, in this respect represent his own mature view, but who certainly represents what he thinks a very plausible view — declare that one of the two theological propositions which he regards as certain, is that "the world has a destina- tion, and travails with a mysterious work " ;i that "like a vast heart overflowing with a vague and impotent love, the universe is incessantly in the pain of transformation." 2 "The consciousness of the whole," he says again, "appears up to the present time to be very obscure, and does not seem to exceed much that of the oyster or of the polyp, but it exists ; the world goes towards its end with a sure instinct."^ I quote this, not because I think that English Eationalists will generally approve M. Kenan's (or his alter ego's) one theological " certitude," but because it. illustrates how little there often is of real confidence in their "agnostic" position in the minds of those who deny to men the knowledge of ^ Dialogues et Fragments PMlosophiques, p. 22. 3 Ibid. p. 23. ^ llid. p. 24. XXIV PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION God. I can hardly conceive a more remarkable flight of intellectual arrogance than that of the man who maintains that there is no creature in the universe with half as much self - knowledge as man, that the consciousness of the whole is only the sort of consciousness which we may ascribe to the lowest of organised beings, and yet declares as a certainty that this huge inarticulate polyp of a universe has a destination of greatness to which it makes progress by a "sure instinct." Whether M. Eenan really holds this or not, it is impossible to say ; but he clearly holds it to be a much more reasonable belief than the ordinary faith of a Theist or a Christian. Could there be a more remarkable testimony to the deep-rooted conviction, even of sceptics, that there is something in men which is capable of passing, and on occasion is compelled to pass, beyond the humble conclusions of the individual sciences, and to leap into the world of transcendental realities t It seems impossible to believe in the failure of the universe ; so that that faith in some perfect end which is only reasonable when we suppose that end to have been foreseen and provided for from the beginning, is vehemently professed by him who regards the uni- verse as endowed with no more forethought than an oyster, and as no more ruled by purpose than a polyp. Considering that oysters and polyps, as we know them, are not particularly successful in securing great and progressive destinies, this faith of M. Eenan's seems to me to show that the religious instinct of man, when it declines to be teachable, is apt to be much less, instead of much more, humble and rational, than it is when it accepts teaching from above. Let me compare the principles of the extreme PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XXV scepticism with those of what seem to me reasonable faith. M. Kenan tells us that his first assumption, in relation to theology, is a negative one — namelj', that in analysing what passes in those parts of the universe open to our investigation, we find no trace of the action of determinate beings superior to men, and proceeding, as Malebranche says, " by special volition." Such interventions, says M. Eenan, if there were any such, would have been proved long ago, for the field of research is wide. " But no one," he declares, "has ever demonstrated the trace of the action of an intelligent hand interposing itself in- stantaneously in the narrow course of the world's affairs" {Dialogues, etc., p. 14). But even in relation to physical facts, that is, as M. Eenan well knows, a most bitterly disputed point, which has been disputed in every age, and has never been so ably disputed as in our own scientific age.^ But even if it were as certain as it is disputed, and in my opinion false, the reli- gious question is not as to the physical but mental trace of the action of definite agencies upon us ; and it seems to me that no one can read the history of the world, or review his own life, with his eyes open, without admitting at once that the belief in guidance from the spiritual side has been one of the most fundamental facts of all races and ages, and one far more clearly recognised by the higher races, and that in their highest moods, than by the lower. ' Wliat is called "spiritualism" should, I think, be called a mental species of materialism, if it were properly described. But no one who has looked into the vast amount of evidence, which every year swells in bulk in all classes of society, for the occasional appearance of intelligent agencies which do not act through any human brain or body, will feel at all inclined to acquiesce in M. Eenan's absolute statement. XXVi PEBFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Socrates speaks of the guidance of a spirit, Marcus Aurelius of the guidance of the divine spirit, the Hebrew prophets of the guidance of Jehovah, Christ of the guidance of His Father, the Apostles of the guidance of the Holy Spirit, Catholics in all ages of the guidance of saints, Protestants of the guidance of conscience or of God ; and even Pantheists, like M. Renan, after giving up belief in voluntary guid- ance, take to the belief in involuntary guidance by that " sure " but groping spirit of " the whole " which the latter likens to the tentative agency of an oyster or a polyp. " Le monde est en travail de quelque chose," he says, " omnis creatura ingemisdt et parturit. Le grand agent de la marche du monde c'est la douleur, I'etre m^content, I'etre qui veut se d6velop- per et n'est pas a I'aise poiu- se d6velopper " (p. 23). So that even the Pantheist cannot give up the fact of guidance, though he makes his guide a groping spirit which does not realise what it would be at, instead of a divine spirit which inhabits eternity and sees the end from the beginning. Nor is it only that all the higher races and ages have acknowledged the fact of moral and spiritual guidance : they have done more — they have allowed themselves to be most easily guided by those amongst them who have re- cognised the fact of their own guidance most dis- tinctly. In all countries it has been the men who have made light of their own intelligence and their own will, who have declared their own light dark- ness, and their own will of no account, who have been the prophets and teachers of others. It has been those who have declared themselves nothing who have been everything, — those who said, "I am a man of unclean lips," or, " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord," who have been made the PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxvii leaders of the new life, — those who have abased themselves who have been exalted, those once last who have been put first, and by whose exaltation to the first rank the world itself has gained. I think it is, to say the least, a mark of good sense, of plain historical sagacity, of modest willingness to recognise fact, to ascribe the regenerating move- ments which have made the world better almost uniformly to those who have looked within for spiritual guidance, and to the greater willingness of the world to yield itself up to the believers in such guidance, rather than to the representatives of an imperious self-confidence and a predominant self-will. Now it is hardly necessary to remark, that though the Pantheist cannot wholly give up guidance, and believes in the guidance of an " impotent love " groping after some dimly-felt end, he rejects entirely the spiritual guidance which it is alone becoming in us to obey ; for the very good reason that he be- lieves human consciousness to be the highest achieve- ment of the blind soul of the universe, not one of its lowliest instruments. " L'oeuvre universelle de tout ce qui vit," says one of M. Eenan's interlocutors, " est de faire Dieu parfait, de contribuer a la grande r^sultante definitive qui clora le cercle des choses par I'unite. La raison, qui n'a eu jusqu'ici aucune part K cette ceuvre, laquelle s'est accomplie aveugl^ment et par la sourde tendance de tout ce qui est, la raison, dis-je, prendra un jour en main I'intendance de ce grand travail, et aprfes avoir organis6 I'humanit^, organisera Dieu" (pp. 78-9). It is clear that if the human reason is to " organise God," it cannot accept guidance from God. The Pantheist must regard those promptings which are not clear decisions of his xxviii PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION own reason, not as guidance from above, but as blind stirrings of instinct from below. Now it seems to me that we make a very much less serious draft on human credulity, if we recog- nise the fact of superhuman guidance as the cardinal fact of all religious experience, and recognise the religion of Christ as that in which this cardinal fact reaches its culminating point and its highest explana- tion. And if this be so, — if we admit that we receive from above that which warrants its origin not only by the impression it makes on our consciences, but by the great achievements it can boast of, — why is it not reasonable, in the highest degree, to accept the account of the unseen world which Christ's words give us — not forgetting, of course, to test that account by all our other light, whatever it be — and to hold our judgment in suspense, wherever two or more independent and equally worthy sources of in- formation appear to yield up inconsistent results ? Surely it is not only more modest, but more in conformity with the capacity of human reason, to accept what a righteous Being, whose power over us we can all feel, tells us of Himself, than to set about the presumptuous work of "making God per- fect," and " after organising humanity " " organising God?" The reply would be, I suppose, mainly, that what Christ does tell us of Himself is not consistent with what we have slowly learnt from history and science, which are supposed to prove the existence of various unspiritual principles of things, and to explode miracles, the power of prayer, and the volition of unseen beings, as true causes or active conditions of earthly events. To a great extent, this volume is intended as a study of these and of kindred asser- PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxix tions. But, as I have said very little on the subject of the general relation between Christianity and the moral wants and conditions of our own day, I may as well, perhaps, explain here why I not only think these objections feeble, but believe that some aspects of Christ's teaching have a meaning for us which they have not had in an equal degree for any pre- vious generation. There is nothing which is more remarkable in our own time than the fact that while science has made very rapid strides in explaining the gradual evolu- tion of more refined and complex out of rougher and simpler physical organs, — in short, in explaining the upward tendency and pressure of the creative forces at the springs of the universal order, — it has made no such progress in explaining what is quite as marked a feature of our day, the new inwardness with which men are conceiving their relation to each other, at a time when the natural effect of the new scientific knowledge would be rather to increase our contempt for average specimens of humanity and to make light of human destinies. Thus M. Eenan, in the volume I have so often referred to, says that " the universe, like all the machines of nature, forces on our observation the littleness of the beneficial result in proportion to the mass ; in general the mechanics of the universe are very imperfect as regards the economy of their force. The universe is like an engine, in which for every hundred thousand measures of coal used, one would have been enough. The usefid man is scarcely one in a million" (Dialogues, p. 73). And this is the drift of the teaching, not only of M. Eenan, but of the science of the day, taken as a whole. Even English science, judging solely by its own characteristic scientific principles, XXX PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION would probably concur with M. Renan that " no one would hazard in business a hundred francs for the chance of gaining a million, on such a probability as that of a future life" {Dialogues, p. 31). And this general opinion of the scientific world as to the childishness of the faith in individual immortality, combined with the evidence which science has accu- mulated of the close relationship between the average man and the brute creation, has, no doubt, if taken alone, tended to produce a certain indifference and coldness in the relation between man and man, and a certain aristocratic contempt for the ignorant and animal-minded millions by whom the earth is mostly peopled, on the part of the cultivated caste. But this tendency is more than neutralised by a very opposite current of feeling, which seems to grow in depth and intensity in spite of the aristocratic tone engrafted on our literature by the higher science and the sceptical philosophy which is allied with it. Contrast, for instance, M. Eenan's tone on this matter with that of his great contemporary, Victor Hugo. M. Eenan allows one of the interlocutors in his Dialogues to assert expressly that the nature of the evil which is likely to result to the inhabitants of this planet from the exhaustion of our coal, is one akin to that similar evil which is likely to result from that diffusion of the notions of " a sordid de- mocracy," which in its way, he says, puts an end to the moral fuel of the earth, "at least, to the moral heat and the capacity for self-devotion," — both changes implying the " exhaustion of the old dis- pensations of the earth" (pp. 80-81). And he lays it down that science alone can adequately combat either evil, — the former, by inventing new modes of storing up the heat of the sun ; the latter, by PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxxi applying scientific methods to military concerns, so as to organise in the hands of an intellectual and moral aristocracy the power which alone can con- trol "the sordid democracy" whose advent he fears. In what strange contrast to such anticipations as these is the constant cry, not to say shriek, of faith, uttered year after year by Victor Hugo, in the divinity of the people ! But with Victor Hugo, and all the poets of demo- cracy, it is & faith, not a scientific certainty, that the collective spirit of the various peoples of the world must grow in spiritual nobility, and in the inward- ness of the brotherhood evolved. And this faith is founded on the advance, often seen even amongst fanatical sceptics, of those deep and inward concep- tions of the relations between man and man, of which Christ was the first revealer. His teaching that men all live in Him as He lives in the Father; that they are united in Him as the branches are united in the vine ; that a service done to the least of His brethren is done to Him, and that one refused to the least of His brethren is refused to Him ; that the love of men for each other is nothing but the poor sign and meagre hint of that love of God for man which is destined to produce infinitely richer and better fruit; that it is the divine life which feeds the sense of human brotherhood; that unity in Him is the only security for that true democracy which is but a transformed theocracy of the intense and inward type to which Christ gives us the key, — this teaching it is which is the fountainhead of the gospel of fra- ternity, and which alone ennobles and justifies it. On the view of positive science this craving for an inward and almost passionate gospel of human brotherhood seems to be unintelligible, or simply xxxii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION superstitious. Yet it persists and grows, in spite of the meagre nourishment it obtains from any elements of the sceptic's creed. If there be no more in men than the theory of physical evolution accounts for, — if we are to trust to science first "to organise humanity," and then to " organise God," — what intel- lectual turbulence, violence, and self-will is there not in the Hugoistic scream that the heart of the people is always to be trusted, though their heads may be full of illusions ! For my own part I think that no aspect of Christianity has more claim on the present generation than its declaration, in the very face of the new physical theory, that the true bond between men is at once inward and divine, that it comes from the world above us much more than from the world be- neath us, — and so far as it does come from the world beneath us at all, only because all that is beneath us is ultimately derived from what is above us, and that it penetrates into the secrets of human motive ; that the Creator, instead of merely welding us together by the cohesion of our external interests, and using the multitude as the lavish and wasteful machinery of nature for producing a few wise men, or as the hot- bed out of which the rare flower of scientific genius is elaborated, estimates the greater gifts of the few and learned entirely as talents meant to be expended in the service of the many, the ignorant, and the wretched — that is, as means for raising the millions, not as the final cause of the existence of those millions themselves. I doubt if any generation ever felt a more passionate sense of the mystery of human brotherhood than our own, and this at the very time when that mystery is most openly denied by the acutest of our teachers, and when our relation to each other is explained as the mere result of common PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxxiii interests operating through the cumulative law of inheritance, to give permanence and force to gre- garious caprices. Now Christ's teaching affirms and explains that mystery, when it declares that the sap of every man's true life is as much derived from Him as that of the branch from the stem of the tree, or as His own life from God's, and when it applies this to prove that all true growth is inward, — growth into the knowledge and love of God, and into that spirit- ual unity in man which results only from perfect harmony with the divine life. Again, even as to the doctrine of miracles, in which it is generally assumed that Christ taught what science has exploded, I think it will be found that just the reverse is true. Christ certainly taught, and taught most repeatedly, that there was no such thing in the moral world as magical transformations without previous preparation of the spirit. No miracle, He said, could transform a man who had not used the ordinary means at his disposal for the same end, " If he hear not Moses and the prophets, neither would he be persuaded though one should rise from the dead." " An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign," — -evil because it is only evil which obliterates the true sign, the sign in the con- science, — adulterous because there is a certain im- purity in the appeal of a heart that does not really desire God, for signs of His mere omnipotence, that it may cower before Him. All His teaching as to the moral life took its symbols from the gradual pro- cesses of nature. You could not expect from the soil that was only rich enough to produce a thirty- fold crop, what you might expect from a soil rich enough to produce sixty or a hundred fold. You must not expect the ear before the blade, or the ripe xxxiv PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION corn before the ear had had its full measure of exposure to rain and light and heat. You must not look to gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles. You must not try to separate violently evil and good. The tares must grow with the wheat. You must not suppose that the sun does not shine and the rain fall on evil and good alike. You must not fancy that because calamities fall on a man he is marked out for the vengeance of God. All Christ's teaching was in the same vein — that the divine grace in man has as much its regular and orderly methods as the divine life in physical nature. But then, in spite of all this, Christ claimed to give sudden succour both to the physical and moral life of men, — to heal the sick without visible or gradual remedies, and to pardon sin and renew the divine life in the soul without any necessary interval of external discipline or visible expiation. No doubt He did. But it would be a great mistake, I think, to suppose that in so doing He " suspended " any natural law. On the contrary, He was but infus- ing in a higher degree into the order of nature that predominating influence of a commanding per- sonality, which, though in a much lower degree, we have plenty of evidence that other human beings, by virtue either of their spiritual union with God, or of some high natural gift, have infused into it in other countries and ages of the world. I do not believe that " miracles " are, or could be, " suspen- sions " of natural laws. They are but the modifica- tions of the results of those laws caused by the intro- duction into the agencies at work of the influence of controlling spirits of unusual power. But whatever miracles be, I think history shows a very great amount of evidence, which it is but one of PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XXXV the superstitions of our modern science to ignore, that such events have happened in all ages. The curative or sometimes blighting power of mesmerism, which in some degree, however limited, all our best physiologists now admit, is but a slight illustration of the mysterious power which some men, if they choose, can infuse, as it were, into the energies of others; — a transfusion of energy of a subtler, and more mysterious, but probably very analogous kind, to that transfusion of blood from the healthy into the feeble man's veins, which has now been repeatedly used to save life. And in very rare and exceptional cases I do not doubt that this inpouring of new energy reaches limits which we reasonably believe to be impossible to human gifts of any calibre, and to be directly derived from a superhuman world. The question as to the fact is simply one of evidence, and no modern prejudice seems to me less truly scientific than that entertained against the large amount of evidence to show that events of this kind have taken place in all ages of the world under religious condi- tions more or less similar. Take, for instance, the evidence of the famous Jansenist miracle at Port Eoyal, which is thus re- lated by the Eev. Charles Beard, the accomplished author of the history of Port Royal,— an author who certainly shows no favour at all towards the physico- supernatural ; indeed, I should say a marked distrust for and suspicion of it. " The two daughters of Florin|P6rier and his wife Gilberte, eldest sister of Blaise Pascal, had in the year 1653 been placed as boarders at Port Eoyal de Paris, where their aunt, Jacqueline Pascal, was already a nun, under the name of Sceur Jacqueline de St. Euphemi^. In the year 1656, Marguerite P^rier, the younger of the sisters, xxxvi PEEFACB TO THE SECOND EDITION was from ten to eleven years of age. For three years and a half she had suffered from what the surgeon called an ' iegilops, or lachrymal fistula, in the left eye, about the size of a hazel-nut.' The symptoms were very distressing. The corner of the eye and the cheek were much swollen ; and when the swelling was pressed matter issued not only from the eye itself, but also from the nostril. Then, for a time, the swelling disappeared, but soon again became visible in its former dimensions. The surgeon in attendance, M. d'Alen9ai, was of opinion that the bone of the nose was carious, and that a part of the purulent matter found its way by this new channel into the throat. A fetid odour issued from the dis- eased parts, so that the poor child was necessarily separated from her companions. For eighteen months various remedies had been tried in vain, and now, in March, 1656, the operation of cautery had been finally resolved upon as a last resource, which might or might not prove successful ; and the child's father was on his way to be present. " Not far from Port Eoyal lived M. de la Potherie, a worthy ecclesiastic, distantly related to La Mfere Angflique, who had a passion for collecting relics, and considered it a pious duty to provide them with shrines of fit magnificence. Among others he had become possessed of a thorn from our Saviour's crown of undoubted authenticity. He could not selfishly keep so precious a relic for the admiration of his own piety alone, and lent it therefore for a time to the sisterhood of Port Eoyal. They received it with due reverence, and appointed Friday, March 24th, for a festival in its honour. Mass was said ; and it was afterwards long remembered that at the introit of the service for the day occurred those PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xxxvii words of the 86th Psalm, 'Shew me a token for good ; that they which hate me may see it, and be ashamed.' Then, after a solemn anthem in honour of the holy crown, the thorn was exposed upon the low altar, set in the middle of the choir, and the sisters, kneeling, kissed it one by one. Next came up the boarders to perform the same homage, their mistress, the Sceur Flavie Passart, standing by. As Marguerite P^rier approached in her turn, her eye attracted the notice of So3ur Flavie, who with her own hands applied the relic to the swollen part. No further attention was paid to the circumstance, and when the service was con- cluded the relic was restored to its owner. ' Towards evening,' writes Jacqueline Pascal to her sister, the mother of the child, ' my sister Flavie, who no longer thought of what she had done, heard Marguerite saying to one of her little sisters, " My eye is cured ; it does not hurt me now." She was not a little sur- prised at this. She drew near, and found that the little swelling in the corner, which in the morning had been large as a finger's end, very long and very hard, no longer existed ; and that the eye, which, before it was touched by the relic, was painful to look at, because it watered so much, appeared as healthy as the other, so that no difference between them could be perceived.' The purulent matter had altogether ceased to ooze out, and the cure was ap- parently complete. La Mfere Agnes was immediately informed of the circumstance, and on the next day the child's aunt ; but it was not thought advisable, in face of the active enmity to Port Eoyal, to publish the marvel to the world. On the 31st of March, exactly a week after the miraculous cure, came M. d'Alen9ai. The child was shown to him in silence, xxxviii PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION He began to press the eye ; to search for matter in the nostril ; in short to look for all the symptoms with which he had formerly been familiar. His surprise was great when Soeur Flavie recounted her story. Then he declared that such a cure could only be miraculous, and that he was ready to attest the fact whenever called upon to do so. Still the sister- hood were silent, and it was M. d'Alen9ai who spread the news through Paris. There, on the 14th of April, five physicians and two surgeons, who had more or less knowledge of the case, signed and pub- lished a certificate, stating their belief that such a cure ' was beyond the ordinary power of nature, and could not have taken place without a miracle.' In October of the same year, the officials of the diocese investigated the circumstances, and pronounced an authentication of the miracle, which was followed by a solemn Mass and Te Deum in the Convent Church. And finally, in 1728, when Port Eoyal had been destroyed, and the very bones of its saints cast out of their graves, Pope Benedict XIII. quotes, in his printed works, the case of Marguerite P6rier as a proof that in the true Church the age of miracles had not gone by. Marguerite P6rier survived her sudden and most firmly believed miraculous cure about eighty years. Long after the destruction of Port Royal, and when Jansenism was hastening to its final degradation in the miracles of the Convul- sionnaires, she was revered by the devotees of the sect as a living relic of the days of Blaise Pascal and Angflique Arnauld. Not long before her death, which took place in 1733, she writes in some memoranda of family history which she had com- piled, ' Such has been the life of all the members of my family. I alone remain. They all died in the PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION XXXIX immovable love of truth. Like Simon MaccabiBus, the last of all his brothers, I ought to say, " All my kindred and my brethren have died in the service of God and in the love of truth." I alone remain. If God please, I would that I may never think of failing in my fidelity. It is a boon which I ask of Him with all my heart.' These are not the words of one who had ever been a party to any conscious imposture. So also her family were strongly per- suaded of the reality of the miracle. They provided for the celebration of an annual service in the Cathedral of Clermont, on the 24th of March, and set up an inscription in the same church commemora- tive of the event. Jacqueline Pascal sang the praises of the Holy Thorn in an ode which, although an enthusiastic biographer pronounces some of its stanzas not unworthy of Corneille, somewhat tempers our regret that the stern discipline of Port Royal condemned her poetic powers, which had displayed themselves at a very early age, to lifelong inaction. And Pascal himself was so deeply convinced that his niece had been cured by a supernatural interposition of Providence, that he caused to be engraved upon his seal an Eye, surrounded by a crown of thorns, with the motto, 'Scio cui credidi,' and henceforth used this new device in place of his old armorial bearings." ^ I confess I think such evidence — whatever theory we may adopt of the motive of the cure, and however little we may be inclined to attribute it to the relic used — can only be rejected by those who have the strongest a priori objection to admit that the ordinary laws of evidence apply to marvels at all. I suspect that this was Mr. Beard's own, though unconscious, ^Port Royal. By Charles Beard, B.A. Vol. i. pp. 304-308. xl PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION assumption, when he explained it to himself as an event in which none but ordinary causes, assisted only by a little extra excitement in the child's mind, were at work. His view is that the pressure of the thorn at the time, aided by excitement, might have broken through the barrier in the tear-duct just as the intended operation would have done, and that, the diseased bone being broken through, the sub- stance of the swelling would pass down the throat unconsciously, and all irritation at once cease. But how, with a diseased bone, could the wholesomeness of the general condition have returned 1 The evi- dence, indeed, is all against this explanation. In the first place the momentary pressure applied in touch- ing the eye with a sacred thorn at the time of the procession must have been of the most trivial kind, — nothing at all like the pressure which the surgeon had habitually applied on all his previous visits, and which he applied again on his subsequent visit. In the next place there does not seem to have been any basis for the excitement. No one expected the cure. No one took any particular notice of the child. It was her own casual remark to a friend that she felt no more pain which first drew attention to the astonishing change in the eye ; and then the cure was effected. To explain the event on the physio- logical theory now so much in vogue, that great emotion and excitement will sometimes cause a sadden absorption of diseased tissue by the mere stimulus which it sends through the nerves to the suffering parts, seems hardly possible in the case of a child not yet eleven years old, who had apparently never been led to expect anything from the touch of the relic, and who certainly was not made the sub- ject of any kind of religious experiment by the nuns. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xli Diseases of three years and a half standing, in which the bone has become carious, do not disappear in this sudden fashion, and all the medical evidence of the day was unanimous against Mr. Beard's theory. Now, considering the excessive dislike of Port Eoyal felt by the Eoman Catholic Church, the purely natural explanation of the cure would certainly have been eagerly maintained, if the medical conditions of the case, at least as then understood, would have admitted it ; and I believe this is just one of the diseases on which the medical science of that day was not greatly if at all behind the medical science of this. It seems to me that an unprejudiced mind would be inclined to say of such evidence as this, that it is fully adequate to prove that some new in- fluence, not of the ordinary physical kind, produced the cure, especially as this cure was followed by many others, some of them authenticated with even more elaborate care ; though of course after the religious excitement and the vivid expectation of miracles had once begun, the modern explanation to which I have alluded would be far more plausible than it can be in its application to this case. But it is not as if the evidence of this case stood alone. I have heard one of the most sceptical and one of the very ablest and most distinguished physiologists of the present day say that he regards the evidence for some of the Lourdes miracles, which he himself had looked into — not, indeed, as convinc- ing, for it was not a case in which he was willing to admit anything like ordinary evidence as convincing, but as exceedingly remarkable ; so remarkable that he thought the evidence for the most universally accepted of the Christian miracles light in the com- parison. And any one who will read the striking xlii PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION paper on " Catholic Miracles," in the January number of the Dublin Review for 1876, and who will dismiss from his mind the prejudice that the best Roman Catholics are willing to tell any lies on behalf of their Church, — (it is, indeed, generally admitted by all well-informed Protestants that Eome is really very loth to admit miracles, and that by official cross- examination and suggestion of all possible natural explanations, she steadily discourages credulousness and sifts most jealously the evidence alleged for every miracle which she admits), — will be convinced that in various times and ages numbers of distinguished and apparently upright men have given their con- current testimony to marvels of this kind, as to which it was hardly possible for all of them to be deluded or mistaken. No doubt enthusiasm may account for much, and fraud for much. But enthusiasm and fraud cannot reasonably be asked to account for so much evidence on this subject as really exists. For the evidence is not limited to any Church or sect. That vision of Colonel Gardiner's which changed, as everybody knows, the whole course of his life, and turned him from a soldier of small scruples into a Protestant saint, was not, indeed, necessarily a miracle of the physical order, for it is not needful to believe that there really was a figure of Christ presented to his sight, i.e. one external to his mind. He himself, however, never felt a doubt that he had seen what was external to himself ; nor was he the kind of man to see visions and dream dreams. No one who reads Dr. Doddridge's report of Colonel Gardiner's own account of his conversion from a licentious to a spiritual life can help being struck by its singular straightforwardness and simplicity. Again, I quite agree with those men of science PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xliii who say that there is no difference in kind between any real divine answer to prayer and miracles. All divine answer to prayer must involve the infusion of some new influence into that chain of antecedents and consequents which would otherwise constitute human life ; and that is all that I can see, — though of course the kind of influence infused may be of a much more or much less startling kind, — in any miracle. It seems to me, therefore, that all who really believe in the answer to prayer, — except, perhaps, on the very difi&cult and artificial theory of a pre-established harmony by which God, foreseeing all the prayers which would ever be offered to Him, so fore-ordered the physical laws of the universe as to answer such of them as were agreeable to His will, — should be quite ready to accept, or refuse to accept, an alleged miracle, according as the evidence for it is strong or weak. I know how superstitious this view will seem to many. But no charge is launched with less con- sideration,— because with more confidence in securing the superficial and ready sympathy of the mass of mankind at the present day, — than the charge of superstition. Superstition seems to me nothing in the world but a proneness to believe what you have no sufficient reason for believing, except your desire, or a long-impressed habit of believing it. And I think, therefore, there is quite as much superstition in dis- believing what there is good reason to believe, only because you desire to disbelieve it, or because you have inherited the habit of disbelieving it, as there is in believing what there is no such reason to believe, only because you are accustomed, or would like, to believe it. The whole issue really turns on the alleged uniformity of the order of nature. But I never could see that that uniformity could be even xliv PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION reasonably asserted without a candid and calm exam- ination of all the principal evidences that the com- mon order of nature is subject to very serious and important, though rare, interruptions. It seems to me that most men of science prove the principle without any examination of the alleged exceptions to it, and then avail themselves of the principle so proved to throw discredit on all cases of exception, — surely a most illogical proceeding. Englbfield Green, llth September 1876. CONTENTS I PAGE The Mobal Significance of Atheism ... 1 II The Atheistic Explanation of Religion ... 25 III Science and Theism 39 IV Populau Pantheism 69 V What is Revelation ? 83 VI Christian Evidences, Popular and Critical . .128 xlvi CONTENTS VII PAGE The Histokioal Pkoblems of the Fouhth Gospel . 166 VIII The Incarnation and Pkinciples of Evidence . 241 IX M. Kenan's "Christ" 291 X M. Kenan's "St. Paul" 314 XI The Hard Church 337 XII KoMANisM, Protestantism, and Anglicanism . . 373 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM If ever the dark shadow of Atheism were suddenly to envelop the earth, would the crash of falling churches, the disbanding of ecclesiastical classes, and the vanishing of all conscious individual intercourse with God, be necessarily accompanied by the yielding of all moral ties and the dissolution of every sacred social organisation 1 Before it is jsossible to answer such a question, it is necessary to call to mind a very obvious but a strangely-forgotten truth, that human trust does not create God, and that human distrust would not annihilate Him. There is a thoroughly atheistic way of shuddering over Atheism, which is apt to express itself as if the spread of human dis- belief would not only overcloud but empii/ heaven. Although the darkness which I have supposed would hide God from us, it would not hide us from God ; nor should we ever be beyond the reach of His moral influence. When people assume that an Atheist must " live without God in the world," they assume what is fatal to their own Theism. I believe that by far the greater part of all human trust does not arise, as is commonly supposed, from our seeking God, but from God's seeking us ; and this, too, with- out any clear admission or confession on our part of VOL. I B 2 THE MOEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM i His influence upon us ; — that a great deal of it is trust in goodness rather than in any personal God, anjl might possibly be held along with intellectual disbelief of His personal existence ; in short, that if you could blot out on the one hand all acts of self- confessed trust in God, — if you could blot out all private and public worship, properly so called, sj)urious or genuine, all churches, all creeds, all Pharisaism, and all pure conscious devotion ; and if, on the other hand, you might leave all this, and blot out of the earth all unconscious and unconfessed acts of surrender to the divine influence in the heart, — all that might possibly be connected with purely intellectual Atheism, — you would blot out more of true "religion," more of that which "binds together " human society, more of God's true agency on the earth, in the latter case than in the former. Of course I do not mean that the truest unconscious trust in God's influence is not generally to be found in the same minds which, at other times, also con- sciously confess Him ; but only this, that if in every life, whether of faith or doubt, you numbered up the acts of trust which are not rendered to God person- ally, but to the instincts and impulses which so often represent Him in the heart, and which might continue to represent Him even when the cloud of conscious doubt of His existence had intervened, you would probably have numbered far more acts which really originate in divine influence than could possibly be found animated by a conscious personal belief. And if this be so, as I think most men will admit as much from self-knowledge as from knowledge of the world, it is a fatal blunder to attempt to prove to the, Atheist that, in consequence of his doubt, he has been and is living totally without God ; that his I THE MOBA.L SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 3 eyes need opening, not in order that they may recog- nise One who has been ever with him, but that they may help him to find a distant and alienated power. There is no teaching more mischievous in its effects than that which makes human belief in God the first regenerating power in human society, and God Him- self the second ; which makes God's blessing a conse- quence of man's confession, and which therefore limits that blessing to the narrow bounds of the confession. In fact, this delusion tends to depress rather than to exaggerate ordinary men's estimate of the value of faith. Hearing it constantly implied that God influ- ences men's hearts only so far as they confess His influence ; that He will do nothing for them, morally and spiritually, unless they render the " glory " where it is due ; and yet, seeing that in point of fact this sine qua non of divine influence is anything but a true mark of actual goodness, being often only the crown- ing element in evil, — a school of thought has sprung up which depreciates the value of faith altogether, which delights in discovering that the greatest good is, after all, to be found hidden under a mask of scepticism and self-mockery, in short, a school which replaces the religious ascription of all goodness to God's grace, by light satire on a human nature that cannot claim to be so assisted, but only to do the best it can for itself in an unostentatious way. This disposition to compare keen self-mockery with formal belief, and to give the preference to the former, is perceptible enough in the whole tone of our literature. Thackeray's writings were throughout tinged with the feeling that thorough self-mockery is one of the highest moral virtues of which men in general are capable. And until even honest self-exposure, and every other sort of goodness, so far as it is goodness, i THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM i be attributed to God's Sj^irit working in man, far though it be removed from the theological virtue of faith, faith itself will never recover from the discredit into which its undue isolation has brought it. As soon as God is confessed to be far greater than our faith, we shall begin to make the effort to render our faith more worthy of God : but while men own so many things to be noble which are never claimed as divine because they are unaccomisanied by this con- scious faith, so long men will care little what that faith does or does not include. They have found the faith-classification of human actions so narrow and unjust, they have seen so much goodness without faith, and so much faith without goodness, that they begin to preach justification by sincerity as a more human, if it is not a more divine formula than justi- fication by faith. In showing, then, that Atheism is false to human nature, that trust in God is the natural atmosphere of our moral life, it must not be taken for granted, as is so often done, that belief in God as God, and belief in goodness, are one and the same thing. We must grant the Atheist his unexplained impulses to good, the implicit God of his conscience, and show how he mutilates and dwarfs human nature by deny- ing it all explained impulses to good, the explicit God of faith. Though guarding against the error that distinct acknowledgment of God must accompany all virtual obedience to His word, it is of course manifest that, so far as human action is self-conscious as well as voluntary, blindness to God's existence must entail a large and constant loss upon the blind. Although other and deeper springs of divine influence be not closed, although there may be yet (except in the cases in which intellectual Atheism is the dulness I THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 5 produced by moral Atheism) far more effectual means of inward guidance still accessible to God's providence than those which any deadness of insight can obstruct, — yet all the tone of the reflective life must be greatly injured by the exclusion of this great object from the field of the inward vision. Not to see what exists must of course modify constantly the whole range of action and thought which has a real (though in this case unperceived) reference to that existence. As our ancestors, who did not know that air had weight, reaped unconsciously most of the benefits of the all- permeating atmospheric jiressure, but of course lost that which depended on the actual recognition and conscious use of its weight, so those who do not know that God is, while they experience, almost as much as any, the blessing of His existence and His charac- ter, cannot have the blessing which arises exclusively from taking account of the fact of that existence and character ; and therefore it is, I believe, that, in pro- portion as mental culture increases the horizon of man's exijerience, and brings more and more of his life beneath the eye of his thought, is the moral loss serious and deep which arises from this mental blindness. Those who have but little inward life, whose busy routine of occupation, or natural one- sidedness of character, leaves room only for a narrow moral horizon, suffer indeed, and bitterly, from blindness to the only great and tranquillising reality of life, but not at all in the same proportion as those whose whole nature is awake and sensitive to human emotions, without including the belief in God. Of all merely intellectual Atheisms, hard material Atheism betrays least strikingly and painfully the absence of the power of faith. There are so many natural obstructions in the minds capable of that 6 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM I type of creed, to the permeation of religious convic- tion, that its absence is not striking ; there would be so many clouds as to hide the sun even if it were up. But thoroughly cultivated and refined Atheism is always intensely startling and painful, like the blot- ting of the sun out of a clear sky. The actual loss is greater ; proportionally far more of God's influence would naturally come through conscious channels with the cultivated than with the uncultivated man ; proportionally less strength and warmth can be received unconsciously from "behind the veil." Now, first of all, look steadily at the startling fact which meets one on the threshold of this question — the fact, namely, that it is so much as possible for a sincere truth-loving mind to doubt of God's exist- ence — that the greatest of all realities appears so frequently, in the history of nations as well as in individual life, rather in the shape of a whispered haunting suggestion than of a fully illumined truth. Can any answer be found to the argument, "You tell us that this faith is the one pure spring of all the conscious purity and strength to which human nature has access. Why, then, is it at best a faith, and not a conspicuous fact ? Why can it ever, even for a time, be inaccessible to eager search ? And why, when attained, does it still linger in the background of your mind, as it were, being usually, even to your- selves, more audible than heard ? " The common and dreary answer is, of course, — on account of the mists of human corruption. But it seems strange that the very remedy which is to heal the blindness should be applicable only when the blindness is already healed. I believe, too, that this difficulty is not explicable by the suggestion of a distinguished theologian, that trust is imposed on us as a kind of I THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 7 probationary ventui-e of the will — a courageous risk of ourselves in a dim twilight, in order to test whether we would not rather serve even a probable God than a certain self-love. I do not deny that we ought to make this choice, if it were possible for Him thus to experimentalise upon us ; but it seems to me that it is a most unworthy representation of the divine character to represent Him as tempting us by self-concealment. Probably the account which most true men would give to themselves of the mystery is this : that while faith fosters, sight would arrest, the growth of our moral nature,— nay, that there may even be peculiar stages of individual and social life wherein the absence of faith alleviates instead of aggravating the danger of moral evil. I suppose that a constant vision of God would be an injury to almost all men, — that there are periods when even utter scepticism is the sign of God's mercy, and the necessary con- dition of moral restoration. A real independent moral growth would be impossible to natures that had not been shaded, as it were, by a special veil from the overwhelming brightness of a divine charac- ter ever present with us. Either everything human must have been changed, so as to make us impervious to personal influences, or there must be a special film to screen from our sensitive passive nature, at least during the growth of our character, the intense im- pressions proceeding from spiritual beings greatly superior to ourselves. Every one knows that, even amongst men, a powerful massive character, though it be nearly j)erfeot, often positively injures those within the circle of its influence. They lose the spring of their mind beneath the overwhelming weight of its constant pressure. They are crushed 8 THE MORAL SIGKIFICANCE OP ATHEISM I into an unconscious mechanical consonance with all its ways. Nay, even affection, not pressure, may do the same thing. Moral preference, moral freedom, moral character, may be superseded altogether by the single unanalysed predominance of another's wish. This it was, probably, which rendered the removal of Christ the first condition of the moral growth of the apostles. " It is expedient for you that I go away." In the case supposed we should lose the power of growing up to be " fellow- workers " with God, through mere unmoral captivity to His infinite influence. Faith means the discernment of His character without subjugation of the small finite personality to the infinite life. To exchange faith for sight on earth would be to exchange moral educa- tion for moral absorption. Again, I think it true, for a converse reason, that there are stages in human culture when even utter scepticism may be a divine remedy for moral evil. When civilisation has become corrupt, and men are living below their faith, I think it may often be in mercy that God strikes the nations with blindness, — that the only remedy lies in thus taking away an influence they resist, and leaving them to learn the stern lesson of helpless self-dependence. The shock of a lost faith often restores sooner than the reproach of a neglected faith. Nay, often before any real faith can be attained at all, scepticism may be, I believe, a discipline of mind and heart, given not in retri- bution but in love. The painful groping of an uncertain footing amidst immortal wants and affec- tions, is often the only means by which, as far as I can see, we could have our eyes opened at once to their meaning and to our own responsibility. It is in growing characters, maturing in the culture I THE MOEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 9 of all the finer elements, as well as in mere intellect, that scepticism seems most evil in its influences, — the character needing the genial influence of trust, and yet held fast in some of the many intellectual traps of human speculation. In other cases it cannot be regarded as unmixed evil. But, as I have said, in refined and cultured minds there is, I believe, no influence that can secure constant progress apart from personal trust ; and long-continued doubt, whether arising from personal unfaithfulness or from other causes, must in the end ossify the higher parts of the mind and distort the whole. What, then, is the atheistic type of character 1 In other words, what is the type of character which a fully realised disbelief in the existence and influence over us of any spiritual nature higher than our own (however faithfully our own may be accepted and trusted) tends to produce ? Vividly to realise the im- port of Atheism to human character, even though it be not moral Atheism (or disbelief in ultimate moral distinctions), is the first step towards its disproof. It is clear that Atheism necessarily tends to re- duce relatively the influence of the higher intellectual and moral faculties (even where the real existence of these is not disputed), as compared with that of the senses, social impulses, and those energies which tell most directly upon the world. And this it does both involuntarily and unconsciouslj', — by eradicating from the imagination that haunting imageof the divine character which most stimulates these faculties into action, — and also voluntarily and consciously, because the Atheist must in consistency believe that the Theist's worship gives these faculties an unfair promin- ence. Holding that the human mind is in direct con- tact with no other mind, but is the latest and highest 10 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM i consummation of forces pushing upwards from a lower stage of existence, the Atheist cannot regard his own highest mental states — conscience, affection, and so forth — as having any independent illumination of their own, — as skylights opened to let in upon human nature an infinite dawn from above, — but rather as a polished arch or dome completing and re- flecting the whole edifice beneath. To him the highest point of human culture is the absolutely highest point in the mental universe ; mere non- existence roofs us in beyond ; and of course, there- fore, the [highest faculties we possess must derive their sole validity and their sole meaning from the lower nature to which they add the finishing touch. No doubt he will admit that new power and insight is gained, the higher our self-culture is pushed ; but the new power is not power from beyond human nature, the new insight is not insight into a region above it ; it is only the stronger grasp of a more practised hand, the keener vision of a more compre- hensive survey. Hence, by dismissing the faith in G-od, Atheism necessarily bases the higher faculties of man comjjletely and solely on the lower organisa- tion, and denies them any independent spring. Moreover, the Atheist is led to justify and fortify him- self in this natural result of his modes of thought by assuming, as Feuerbach does, that the object of man's worship, if there be any, ought to be a perfect man, and that the Theist's God is not even strictly a mag- nified shadow of humanity, but only of a special and arbitrarily selected portion of humanity. This kind of worship, thei-efore, gives, he maintains, a factitious and disproportionate influence to certain so-called " higher parts " of human nature. An injurious and morbid reduplication is given, he thinks, to the I THE MOEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 11 faculties called moral and spiritual by this rapt attention to a fanciful religious echo of them, while the physical organisation and common-sense under- standing are left to assert themselves. And so the Atheist, denying any special or original sources of life for the highest part of man's nature, sets it to take lessons from the lower, and look down instead of looking up. Hence, I believe, Atheism is far more uncomfortably and consciously alive to the material conditions under which it works, and the physiological laws it so anxiously consults, than would be the case if man had no moral nature at all. There is the same kind of soreness in the alliance be- tween the moral and physical nature, under this level- ling theory, which usually exists between essentially different ranks, where the higher is induced by some theoretic conviction to disavow its special birthright. Again, atheistic theory in one still more important respect diminishes the influence that must be given to the moral nature of man. It necessarily regards good and evil as ideas attained and attainable only by human capacity, — as depending on natural genius and insight only, — as wholly limited by natural dis- position. Not seeing in them any movement of an independent character towards us, but only an exercise of human capacity, cases of moral diificulty are apt to be given up or slurred over by the Atheist as insoluble, which the Theist feels must be capable of solution if he can only trustfully follow, step by step, and without impatience, the gradual indications of God's purposes. There is all the difference in the world between the view of right and wrong which treats it as a mathematical problem which a man can solve or not according to his capacity, and the view of it as something which depends on the faithfulness 12 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM i of a personal relation — something certain to become clearer and clearer, not through our capacity, but through the free illuminating power of -another's in- fluence, if we use the dim hght we have in beginning to go where it leads. Eight and wrong are usually considered as extremely simple to see — difiBcult only to do. This is very false, however, especially when weakness and sin have already complicated human relations. And at this point the atheistic and theistic views of conduct necessarily become essentially differ- ent in the relative importance they assign to moral in- stincts. Neither Atheist nor Theist can see anything but thick darkness perhaps, and both are utterly incompetent to find their own way to the light. But the Atheist has only his own powers to trust, and, finding them shackled and paralysed by a thousand chains, can but despair, and find no help in the flickering conscience, which only seems to mock the gloom. The Theist, if he can still believe in the infinite love of God, can trust implicitly that every step into the darkness will be into a darkness less complete, and show the way to the step beyond. Hence he can never believe but that right is attainable, if he will follow on ; that the little insight he has must be implicitly obeyed, and not thrown away be- cause it seems utterly inadequate to his need. If you don't believe that " good " is living and free — that it is a person — you cannot believe that it will necessarily find you out ; and you may be as incom- petent to find it out as to leave the earth for the sun. And just in the same way as the absence of trust tends to nourish a despondency in deep moral diffi- culty, and a neglect of the inadequate faculty we have, in the case of the individual, — so it is also fatal to the healthy progress of nations. The Atheist says. I THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 13 "Eveu you admit that God helps only those who help themselves. Well, we help ourselves, and therefore God, if He exists, helps us ; if He does not, we have all the help we can. Science is the true providence of man. We put no faith in ' personal god'; we use our own faculties." Very well; but let men only realise your negative creed, and you will find they have not the heart, or perhaps the temerity, on great occasions, to help themselves any longer. Trust is the postulate of the capacity to help ourselves in any great or noble work. It be- comes impossible to do our part bravely without this perfect reliance on the co-operation of God. What is to justify trust in a mere sudden gleam of light, — a streak just flashing over a universe at mid- night, — except the conviction that it comes from One who will send more and more, as the occasions de- mand, if that be followed 1 Luther's intense saying, "We tell our Lord God plainly, that if He will have His church, He must look after it Himself We cannot sustain it ; and if we could, we should become the proudest asses under heaven," is the inspiration of all great action. No man will dare to follow a gleam of conviction which tends to overturn a world, unless he is sure that he is the interpreter of a Power who gave him that conviction, and who can guard it after His interpreter is gone. Luther took no re- sponsibility in the case, except the responsibility of his own individual life. How could he have done what he did with a sense of the uncertain fate of Europe when the Eoman Church should be gone, resting on his individual conscience 1 A small anxiety oppresses a man, if it be only his own un- certain judgment that he trusts. St. Paul was in- supportably anxious about the measures he took to 14 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM i defend himself from Corinthian ill-will. Luther was depressed into a state of chronic melancholy by the difficulties of marriage-questions referred to his eccle- siastical jurisdiction. Yet St. Paul snapped the chain which bound Christianity to the formal Juda- ism with the serenest equanimity ; and Luther was never so calm and loftily certain as in the act which rent Christendom and cut history in two. If there is no one else who has looked into the future for you, and distinctly told you how to act, then you are bound to look into the future yourself, and take the awful possibilities you initiate upon your own shoulders. Who could do this, on great or even small occasions, without a paralysing dread?' Atheism should tend to make prudent men and nations anxious, timid, hesitating, disinclined to place ample confidence even in such moral insight as they have. And further, Atheism shakes the authority of the moral faculties of man, by doing away with all adequate means of expressing the infinite distinction between right and wrong. Neither admitting that right action opens human eyes to a vision of Infinite holiness, nor that it survives for ever in the immor- tal life it assists to build up. Atheism has no language by which it can express the infinite nature of moral distinctions. Right and wrong, like all other quali- ties of human life, can, then, only be expressed in finite terms, — can only be symbolised by objects which are immediately swept away by the drift of time, — which are mere invisible points in the infinite universe of space. The Atheist has no infinite cal- culus applicable to human actions. He may say, indeed, that considerations of right and wrong differ from all others in their imperativeness, but he cannot believe that any infinite result in any way attends I THE MOKAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 15 moral choice more than any other act of finite life. Why should the aged be anxious about the regula- tion of their hearts, for example "i It may be absolutely right ; but how can we lay so much more weight on a right action than on others of a trivial and temporary nature ? In this case, it affects no external life ; it will almost immediately cease to affect any internal life. As is one act, so is another. All alike are temj)orary — all alike limited. Immortality — the communion with God — these are the only living expressions which the struggling nature of man, intensely conscious of the infinite character of duty and sin, can give to that infinitude. It is not, as is falsely said, that right and wrong take their distinctions from measures of duration, or from the arbitrary will of God ; but that faith in infinite personal life, and in our communion with, or separa- tion from infinite Good, is the only articulate utter- ance which our conscience can find for its sense of the absolutely boundless significance it sees in every moral choice. A rejection of these realities must react on the conscience itself, and force it to resign its " absolute and infinite " distinctions. Again, a fully realised Atheism will undermine the worth of personal human aflPections ; not merely indirectly, by losing sight of immortality, but still more by cutting off the chief spring of their spiritual life. If that fine wide-spreading network — hidden from all human eyes — the winding, crossing, blend- ing, diverging threads of human affections which hold together human society, be indeed conceived as issuing everywhere out of everlasting night, — as spun, snapped asunder, and again repaired by the mere automatic operation of Nature's unconscious and impersonal energy, — the personal affections lose 16 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM r quite the richest and most permanent of the conscious influences at least, which minister to their life and growth. If we cease to believe in the infinite spiritual jiresenoe mediating between mind and mind, and try to expel that conception from our thoughts, we must become more and more completely depend- ent for the growth of the higher human ties on the conditions of physical intercourse. The awkward and constrained intercourse of human beings, so rarely interchanging the real secrets of the heart, and often most frigid when covering the intensest life, is not adequate to sustain the growth of deep affections. It supplies the occasions, not the sources of that growth. If there be no Eternal Depository of our resolves and fears, and hopes and trusts, there is little new moral strength consciously poured into these higher human relations at all. He who sup- poses that his nature can never be directly addressed from the spiritual side at all — that it remains rooted in unconscious energies — may indeed indulge emotion, when it arises spontaneously within him, — nay, may entertain and welcome it ; but he cannot regard affection as claiming constant service from him, even where it has no external claim, — as a trust which he is bound to reverence ; he cannot feel it matter of self-reproach if he grow cold ; it is to him no withdrawal of a voluntary gift ; it cannot be regarded as a personal and moral matter at all ; it is the ceasing of that which he did not cause ; it is the subsiding of a wave ; he has no passionate dream that God is taking away that which was not treasured, — and that, even now, higher self-sacrifice, truer devotion, would bring back the receding tide. It is gone back out of the heart whence it came ; and that is but a fiction which would make it appear I THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISi\[ 17 a result of moral conduct on our part, — an expres- sion of the character of a vigilant God. The atheistic theory thus tends to reduce the life of human affection to dependence on the ruihlc relations between man and man. It leaves some sense of responsibility towards the living and present object of affection, but it cancels all idea of moral responsibility to the Inspirer of affection. It would tend to make us measure the self-sacrifice due from us by the self-sacrifice deserved by others, instead of measuring it by the eternal purposes and the im- measurable love of God. It destroys in this way the fulcrum on which human affection is sustained ; for though we can feel the claim of another upon us, yet to hear it selfishly advanced is utterly destruct- ive of its power ; — only the great Mediator between the severed minds of men can revive the fading sense of duty, and melt the mind into bitter memory, without further estranging the rebellious heart ; and if- no such Mediator be recognised, all conscious seeking of His influence or submission to His prompting is of course impossible. All the promises, the prayers, the self-reproaches, the resolves which assume both a providential origin, and a divine influence, for our spirits, are rendered impossible, and Atheism thus clips the life of human affection down to the mortal type which atheistic theory assigns to it. Of course Theists are in this respect often practical Atheists, and Atheists may uncon- sciously treat as a moral trust and result of providen- tial government that which their theory should represent as an involuntary, inevitable event. But just so far as the conscious life influences us at all, just so far theoretic Atheism dries up the sources of personal affection by sweeping away that searching VOL. I c 18 THE MOEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM I moral relation to the Inspirer of affection in which, even far more than in its relation to human objects, its safety and strength consists. The best and purest part of conscious self-sacrifice and devotion is not that which passes directly between men, but that which goes round by God, and is sifted and purified in the very act of submission to His eye. If you sweep this away, there is danger of falling back into the jealous, exigeant type of affection which at best weighs out with scrupulous care the exact debt. Moreover, there is nothing more narrowing to the character than even true human love devoid of a deep faith. Its very nobleness, being without trust, tyrannises over the mind, and would take the place of Providence in anxious guarding against fate. The Atheist can scarcely admit any claim higher than a strong personal affection, since he believes that no hetter being is claiming his service, and that no immortality can ever repair the final evil of separation. Yet the narrow anxiety that would thus supplant a hopeful trust, and limit the aims and activity of man in order to cheat separation a little longer of its pain, is apt to foil its own end, and cool the affection which thus unnaturally limits the range of life. Once realise Atheism, and it will soon appear that affection must burn itself away, without that separate life of responsibility • to its Inspirer which the Atheist does not acknowledge ; and further, if that could be otherwise, that it would soon eat into the healthy energy of man, if it had no Infinite Love to trust, while it had a certain impending fate to fear. But turning now from this tendency in Atheism to impair the authority of the moral faculties and I THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 19 the worth of the personal affections, consider how far it affects the worth of that one great idea for the sake of which it considers all these sacrifices as nothing. If God be dislodged from our thoughts, will Truth cover a wider area, and gain a deeper significance ? Will it spread itself over that world of thought from which the image of God is banished, absorb into itself the sacred attributes with which Theists invest Him, and supply anything analogous to the softening influence of personal reverence 1 Clear the mind of God, and truth is reduced almost to mere knowledge — or " information." The aggre- gate of the actual and temporary relations between the short-lived intelligent beings, the animals, the plants, the stones, the forces, which are thrown to- gether in more or less permanent connection in this big, round, and rather empty sphere of space, would then constitute Truth. The highest truth would be the account of the observed and quite momentary influences of human minds upon each other, such as the relation of the vestiges of Shakespeare's mind to the quickly vanishing generations of his successors — in short, the momentary relations of minds ceasing to have relations to anything in a few brief years. The most permanent truth would be the lowest — facts about cohesion, gravity, and mineral life. Naj', suppose that — and this is indeed true — physical science discovers some gradual destructive agency, which must, in the course of ages, remove man wholly from that universe in which for a few centuries he has managed to live in curious wondering contempla- tion of the irrational silence around him: — this agency, when discovered, would itself be a part of this " sacred " truth which Atheism worships in the place of God. It would be to man the most im- 20 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM I porfcant inference from actual fact hitherto attained. The knowledge that a time was coming when the force of gravitation (or perhaps not even that) should be left in undisputed possession of the limitless blue spaces, and when there would not even be any one on our planet to know that the " eternal truth " of nothingness had survived its evangelists — this know- ledge, I say, if it were attainable, should be " sacred " to the minds of the discoverers, if, at least, it is to bare fact, as such, that saoredness belongs — if it depends only on the certainty of the fact announced, and not in any way on the quality of that fact — i.e. on the kind and number of the influences it puts forth over our nature. With the Theist, " The Truth," as distinguished from mere reality, signifies the whole web of durable personal influences which he believes to bind together God with man, and man with man through God. It is therefore " sacred " to him as affecting the highest life of man, and as affecting it eternally. But blot out this eternal centre of creation, and what is left for truth to include except a rationale of relations of which the least human are then be- lieved to be the most permanent, and the highest of all are not only almost momentary for individual men, but quite transient for the race itself ? If we believe in no immutable Eeality, truth itself must change with history, and at best is nothing more than a rough computation of the law of change. To tell how human lives influence each other for the present, and are likely to influence each other while things go on in the main as they do now — and how they stand related to the rocks, and the ocean, and to light, and to the worlds of plants and animals — this is the highest import of " truth " to the Atheist's I THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 21 mind. The man who could resolutely keep down his conception of " truth " to this standard would scarcely feel it very sacred, or worthy of much costly sacrifice. It is the ever-retreating horizon of an eternal life, and faith in the inexhaustibly fresh possibilities of every opening relation between character and character, and awe at the new insight into our dependence on God, which unconsciously or consciously give their fascination and sacredness to the search after "truth." The tendency of Atheism is to lower these feelings into mere curiosity craving "information." It seems, then, that Atheism, in proportion as it is fully realised, cannot but tend to weaken and even shatter the authority of conscience ; to sow despond- ency both as to personal and human progress ; to cast the personal affections in a much narrower and more selfish type ; and to dispel all the highest fascination and grandeur of the conception of Truth. The Atheist may fairly reply, of course, that this only shows that the existence of a personal God may be desirable, not that it is real, that men would benefit by believing in Him if they could only see ground to believe in Him. As Mr. Holyoake insists, human wants and wishes must not be allowed to create a delusion merely for their own satisfaction. Presenti- ments must not be regarded as proofs of external existence. On the contrary, the Atheist may main- tain, as Feuerbach does, that it is precisely in these human wants and presentiments that we find the explanation of the mirage of Theism — a view of the case which I must reserve for discussion in another essay. But, in point of fact, I believe we are so constituted that no sincere Atheist is really able to think that any illusion is better for human nature 22 THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM I than Truth. This is exactly the laoint at which Atheists show themselves to be above their opinions. Where is the Atheist who does not encourage himself to disclose his unpopular opinions expressly on the ground that the extinction of the old illusions will give the highest play to the energies of human nature 1 Yet in assuming this, the Atheist assumes that truth must be morally best for the mind, and conversely that whatever is morally best for the mind is true — an assumption of a "pre-established harmony " between human nature and the universe, which evidently covers the old "superstition," as the Atheist would call it, of Providence, under another name, and bears remarkable testimony to the truth that God besets even the intellect of the Atheist " from behind," though He be hidden from him " from before." So much of Atheists. But of these there are, in the higher walks of literature, comparatively very few. And though modern science is generally be- lieved to strike more or less at the faith in a personal God, it is not true to say of even the most negative of the men of science that they are Atheists. They themselves vehemently dispute the term, and usually prefer to describe their state of mind as a sort of know-nothingism or Agnosticism, or belief in an un- known and unknowable God. This is Professor Huxley's phrase. This also is Professor Tyndall's, if I may judge by his assertion that the ideal man of science has " as little fellowship with the Atheist who says there is no God, as with the Theist who professes to know the mind of God," and by his pro- fessed symj)athy with Goethe's view of matter as " the living garment of 'God." Mr. Herbert Spencer, the most eminent of the metaphysicians of this school. I THE ^[OK.\-Ii SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM 23 even maintains, I believe, that the attitude which it is reasonable for the mind to assume towards the inscrutable Cause of the Universe, may some day be seen to be as much higher than the personal depend- ence of a Theist of Christian type on his God, as the mental attitude of the Theist is generally supposed to be than that of the Polytheist. This clinging to the name of God when coupled with such adjectives as "unknown and unknowable," this deep-rooted belief that there is and must be something higher in the feeling towards the inscrutable Cause of the Universe, than in that of the ordinary Theist who supposes that he has a clear glimpse of God's char- acter, seems to me to betray the belief that the ultimate Cause is not quite so " unknown," " un- knowable," or " inscrutable " as the language of these distinguished men suggest. Why should a name be claimed for the Unknown and Unknowable so full of personal conceptions as " God," if personal conceptions are altogether misleading 1 Why should the feeling of awe directed towards the inscrutable Cause of the Universe be higher than the personal dependence of the ordinary Theist, unless there be some jjositive and discernible quality in the object of awe to exercise this influence 1 It seems clear that, for a completely unknown Cause, no one would ever care to claim the name of God ; and that towards an utter inscrutability, the attitude of mind could hardly be either high or low, but must be one of pure marvel. The Agnostics, the adorers of Inscrutability, clearly limit their own very strong language as to the un- knowability of the primal Cause by the very claim they make that it provides them with an equivalent for religion, and one which must in the end prove higher than that which they suppose it destined to 24 THE MOEAL SIGNIFICANCE OF ATHEISM I replace. This seems to me a very remarkable testi- mony to the ineradicable belief that the highest truth leads to goodness, and the highest goodness to truth — a belief for which I never could see any speculative justification, unless righteousness in some more or less human sense be attributed to the primal Cause. However, one may, I suppose, say as much as tliis of the know-nothing school of religion, — that the further it diverges from the ordinary Theism, the more nearly the i^receding sketch would apply to it, and that so far as that sketch would mis- rej)resent it, it would be because the know-nothings really feel towards God as if they knew something of Him, and something which inspires an apjjroach to trust and love. The attitude of mind towards a mere Enigma can only differ from that towards a jjure vacuum, in so far as one really guesses at the solution of the enigma and relies on the truth of one's own guess. What is true of a deliberate Atheist is true of a religious know-nothing — just so far, and only so far, as he sedulously repudiates the trust and love with which the true Theist regards God. II THE ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION^ The " essence of Christianity " is pronounced by Feuerbach, the ablest of the atheistic thinkers of Euroj)e, to be the trust of man in himself or in the dignity of his own nature. God is but the magnified image of man reflected back upon space by the mirror of human self-consciousness. As pilgrims to the Brocken often observe, during an autumn sunrise, shadows of their own figures enormously dilated confronting them from a great distance, bowing as they bow, kneeling as they kneel, mocking them in all their gestures, and finally disappearing as the sun rises higher in the sky, so the German Atheist main- tains that in the early dawn of human intelligence, man has been deluded by such a Brocken-shadow of himself, which has been childishly worshipped as an independent being and named God, but which must vanish soon. Feuerbach attempts to prove this assertion in precisely the same fashion in which travellers to the Brocken have satisfied themselves that the great spectre of the mountain is but their own shadow. Look, Feuerbach virtually says, at the ^ The Essence of Christianity. By Luclwig Feuerbach. Translated from the second German edition by Marian Evans. Cliapman, 1854. 26 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION 11 accounts which those men give of God who have from age to age recorded their religious experience. Where man has been savage, earthly, and fierce, and his joys those of animal excitement, this spectre also has been seen to brandish spears, or to be draining wine-cups. Where man was sensuous, cultivated, joyous, reflective, artistic, — the spectre, too, was graceful, intellectual, smiling, calm, contemplative. Where man was imperious, ambitious, inflexible, ad- ministrative, the spectre was cold and haughty, and made stern gestures of command. Where man was scrupulous, self-accusing, long-suffering, loving, con- scientious, — the Brocken-spectre he beheld was also a spiritual, just, loving, and gentle apparition. And so argues this writer, if we can detect no gesture in this figure which the spectator has not himself pre- viously made, — if all our human peculiarities are mimicked by the mysterious phantom before us, — is it not evident that instead of man's being dependent on this moral spectre, the spectre is dependent on man t If the initiative can always be detected in the heart of the worshipper, only vivacity of imagina- tion is needed to see the action or the emotion repeated by that vague image of himself which the fancy of man is taught to paint upon the clouds. Thus Ludwig Feuerbach goes through all the attributes ascribed to God, and detects their human origin. Reason, Moral Law, Love — the three prin- cipal divine attributes — are clearly recognised as divine in God, because felt to be divine in man. Human sufi'ering for others' sake is deified by his- torical Christianity in Christ. In Eoman Catholicism, even the peculiar beauty of feminine excellence has attained a certain modified deification in the worship of the Virgin. Yet while suffering is recognised as II ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION 27 divine in the deification of Christ, immunity from suffering, or abstract impassibility, is equally recog- nised as divine in the Father. And hence arises, says Feuerbach, the moral and intellectual contra- diction in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man, sensible that his capacity for emotion and for suffering arises from limitation in his nature, ascribes no such limita- tion to God. Yet equally conscious that his endur- ance of suffering for others is a noble endurance, he does ascribe this endurance to God, and is obliged to get out of the contradiction, as best he may, by a separation of the two divine jiersons, v\'herein also lies this additional gratification to the religious nature, that God, instead of being conceived as eternally lonely, is conceived as having had an eternal object of love in the Son. Then, again, in the doctrine of creation, man seeks to reconcile the contradiction between the conception of Nature and his own human idea of God as its cause, by repre- senting the powers of Nature as proceeding out of the pure will of a being constituted like himself. God is to be conceived as a " person," i.e. says our author, as man, although man stripped of certain finite limit- ations ; but there is nothing in the mind of man at all analogous to the genesis of physical life in nature ; in order, therefore, to humanise the cause of the uni- verse, man represents creation to himself by the analogy of human "making or fashioning," a totally different conception, and affirms that by some in- stantaneous act of mere volition, God made the world out of nothing. Feuerbach therefore truly represents all miracle (such as Christ's multiplication of the loaves) and creation in this sense as identical, inasmuch as in both cases the natural and ordinary constituents of the result were not present, and their 28 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF EELIGION li place was supplied by the mental exertion of a supernatural will. When our author approaches the spiritual evi- dences of religion, he still feels no kind of embarrass- ment. The peace of prayer he ascribes to the delusive self-confidence of human feeling, which, when most excited, is so conscious of its own sacred- ness, that it believes no obstacles to be worthy eventually to obstruct its wishes, and feels itself certain to triumph in the end over the merely physi- cal limitations against which for the present it may be struggling in vain. " Prayer," says Feuerbach, "is the certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of nature, — that the heart's need is absolute necessity, the Fate of the world. . . . In prayer man forgets tliat there exists a limit to his wishes, and is happy in this forge tfulness." " What else is the Being that fulfils these wishes but human affection, the human soul giving ear to itself, approv- ing itself, unhesitatingly affirming itself ? " Thus everywhere Feuerbach goes through the modes of thought of a religious mind, only asking himself in point of fact, — " If Religion he an illusion, what would be the best explanation of it?" and then, after finding the best answers he can for each case, he considers them as constituting a proof that Religion is an illusion. The reasoning of the whole book is indeed one long expansion of the following passage : — " Man's nature demands as an object, goodness per- sonified as God ; but is it not hereby declared that goodness is an essential tendency of man ? If my heart is wicked, my understanding perverted, how can I perceive and feel the holy to be holy, the good to be good ? Could I perceive the beauty of a fine picture if my mind were Eesthetically an absolute piece of 11 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION 01? RELIGION 29 perversion ] Though I may not be a painter, though I may not have the power of producing v^'hat is beautiful myself, I must yet have assthetic feeling, £esthetic comprehension, since I perceive the beauty that is presented to me externally. Either goodness does not exist at all for man, or if it does exist, therein is revealed to the individual man the holiness and goodness of human nature. That which is absolutely opposed to my nature, to which I am united by no bond of sympathy, is not even con- ceivable or perceptible by me. The Holy is in opposition to me only as regards the modifications of my personality, but as regards my fundamental nature it is in unity with me. The Holy is a reproach to my sinfulness ; in it I recognise myself as a sinner ; but in so doing, while I blame myself, I acknowledge what I am not, but ought to be, and what, for that very reason, I, according to my destination, can be ; for an "ought," which has no corresponding capa- bility, does not affect me, is a ludicrous chimera without any true relation to my mental conscitution. But when I acknowledge goodness as my destination, as my law, I acknowledge it, whether consciously or unconsciously, as my own nature. Another nature than my own, one different in quality, cannot touch me. I can perceive sin as sin, only when I perceive it to be a contradiction of myself with myself — that is of my personality with my fundamental nature. As a contradiction of the absolute, considered as another being, the feeling of sin is inexplicable, unmeaning." The argument .here developed is the kernel of Feuerbach's system, and reappears so constantly in sceptical writings that it deserves the most careful consideration. Its burden is that as the righteousness 30 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION II of God could not be discerned at all without a moral faculty in man, and cannot be apprehended except in proportion to the development of that moral faculty, it is philosophically gratuitous and superfluous to attribute any reality to this divine Object which only comes into our theory along with our conscience, and stands for the index of its discriminating power. But if this be final, it will apply just as well to cases where it would yield a false conclusion. "Were Newton's mind presented to a series of learners in each successive stage of mathematical culture, each would only discern and admire as much of his power as his own gifts and study had enabled him to appreciate — all the rest would only affect the student with a vague unmeasured sense of power, as going beyond the margin of his own comprehension. "What does not disprove, then, the real existence of a human mind, cannot disprove the real existence of a divine mind. Because Newton would be conceived by the child only as one who had unlimited powers of counting, by the boy as one who could even deal easily with fractious, and had all Euclid in his head, by the youth as one whose conceptions of space were close and vivid to an extraordinary degree, and whose powers of imagination and combination were never confused by the variety and complexity of abstract processes, — it of course would not follow that no real Newtonian intellect existed at all, but only some imaginary ideal conception, named the intellect of Newton, differing according to the mind of the observer. How, then, are we to discriminate between a real and an imaginary object which varies with the in- dividual mind and only has the same name in each case 1 Feuerbach thinks that the only criterion of a II ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF KELIGION 31 real existence is physical sensation. If there is a real object, then there must be something which affects my sensorium, he says. He would not pre- tend to doubt Newton's existence merely from the various estimates formed of him, but he would admit it only because a human body so named once produced certain effects on the sensoria of men existing in a certain century and certain place — effects which were " not dependent on their own mental spontaneity or activity, but by which they were involuntarily affected." He does not doubt the existence of mind and will, and affection, but he entirely disbelieves in their existence separate from the body. " Personality, individuality, consciousness, with- out Nature is nothing ; or, whicli is the same thing, an empty unsubstantial abstraction. But nature, as has been shown and is obvious, is nothing without corporeality. The body alone is that negativing, limiting, concentrating, circumscribing force, without which no personality is conceivable. Take away from thy personality its body, and thou takest away that which holds it together. The body is the basis, the subject of personality. Only by the body is a real personality distinguished from the imaginary one of a spectre. What sort of abstract, vague, empty personalities should we be if we had not the property of impenetrability — if in the same place, in the same form in which we are, others might stand at the same time ? Only by the exclusion of others from the space it occupies, does personality prove itself to be real." In other words, if something affects my senses with- out my concurrence or consent, Feuerbach admits that that something cannot originate in me. In any other case, he virtually says, "You suppose this influence 32 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION ir not to originate in your own mind ; but that is an error. You admit that it did not affect you through your senses, and anything that affects your mind only must have originated in your own mind." Thus Feuerbach says expressly: "Eeal sensational exist- ence is that which is not dependent on my own mental spontaneity or activity, but by which I am involuntarily affected, which is, when I cannot, when I do not think of it or feel it. The existence of God must therefore be in space — in general, a qualitative, sensational existence. But God is not seen, not heard, not perceived by the senses. He does not exist for me if I do not exist for Him. If I do not believe in a God, there is no God for me. If I am not devoutly disposed, if I do not raise my- self above the life of the senses, He has no place in my consciousness. Thus He exists only so far as He is felt, thought, believed in, — the addition ' for me ' is unnecessary. His existence, therefore, is a real one, yet, at the same time, not a real one, — a spiritual existence, says the theologian. But spiritual existence is only an existence in thought, in feeling, in belief, so that His existence is a medium between sensational existence and conceptional existence, a medium full of contradiction." It is hard to call this series of reiterated assumptions reasoning ; it is mere tenacious assertion that sensation is the only conceivable evidence of independent existence. It is not even clear what Feuerbach means. I have no sensation of the attraction exercised upon me by the matter of the earth and sun. Eeasoning alone persuades me that there is such an attractive force. Am I then to disbelieve in the independent existence of that attractive force ? Feuerbach will, indeed, hardly be supported even by the members of his own school II ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION 33 in maintaining that there can be no evidence of in- dependent existence except what is derived through tlie senses. Men of science would hiugh at him for an assumption wliioh would at once dispose of most of their discoveries — gravity, an undulating ether, the velocity of light, and a host of others. Passing by, however, this obvious blunder, of which it would be absurd to take advantage, it must of course be admitted that we do mean by evidence of an " independent existence," evidence of an exist- ence " by wliich I am involuntarily affected, which is even when I cannot, when I do not think of it or feel it." If God be not that, the Atheists are right. If He cannot be shown to our own minds to bo that, the religious sceptics, " agnostics," or " know-nothings " are right. But, curiously enough, Feuerbach never really grapples with this question, never discusses any other criterion of independent existence than this false criterion of the evidence of sensation. We have seen that the religious phenomena on which he harjjs so much are capable of two explanations, — the gradual unfolding of human faculty to apprehend a really existent God, and the mere " projection " of. its own conceptions into the external universe. But the latter explanation is bound to show also wliy man is so deceived by the phantom of himself as to believe universally in his own dependence on that phantom, instead of sooner discovering, with Feuerbach, the dependence of that phantom upon him. Surely an explanation ought to be found for this extraordinary illusion. So far as it goes, it is at least a consider- ation against Feuerbach's explanation that man has so universally accepted the opposite view. It is at all events, for so universal an error, one of an eX' ceptional kind. We do not usually " project " our VOL. I D 34 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF EELIGION II Ariels or Calibans, our visions of imaginary worlds, into a fanciful reality. I think I can show that, on the contrary, we have a real criterion, of which Feuerbach takes no notice, that God's existence is in- dej^endent of ourselves. Feuerbach avoids altogether the consideration of that experience of moral obligation which chiefly compels man to believe in a universal mental power distinct from himself and unfettered by limits of space and time ; that is, he never touches the deepest of all the roots of our faith in the supernatural, the moral root. The consciousness of moral obligation, and that of moral freedom which accompanies it, are due to no abstracting process such as Feuerbach uses to explain our conceptions of God. They are the essential characteristics of a very positive experience, which, from its universality, and at the same time its absolute independence of space and time-relations, forces on us the sense of a Power which besets our moral life, while absolutely penetrating all the physical conditions of our existence. " Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid Thine hand upon me," — "Whither shall I go, then, from Thy Spirit, or whither shall I go then from Thy presence ? If I climb up into heaven Thou art there; if I go down to hell Thou art there also;" — are no vague utterances of the imagination, striving to set free its ideas from the limits of finite existence. This is but the natural language of the mind that truly describes the j)ressure and the absence of pressure — it is either and it is both — of dufi/ upon it. Accustomed as man is to feel his j^ersonal feebleness, his entire subordination to the physical forces of the universe, — unable as he is to affect in the smallest degree either the laws of his bod}^ or the fundamental II ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION 35 constitution of his mind, — it is not without a neces- sary sense of supernatural awe that, in the case of moral duty, he finds this almost constant pressure remarkably withdrawn at the very crisis in which the import of his action is brought home to him with the most vivid conviction. Of what nature can a Power be that moves us hither and thither through the ordinary courses of our lives, but withdraws its hand at those critical points where ve have the clearest sense of authority, in order to let us act for ourselves 1 The absolute control that sways so much of our life is waived just where we are imjsressed with the most profound conviction that there is but one path in which we can move with a free heart. To what end, then, are we allowed this exceptional liberty to reject that path, unless a special interest attach to our use of it 1 And, if so, are we not then surely watched ? Is it not clear that the Povrer which has therein ceased to move us, has retired only to ob- serve, to see how we i^ass through this discipline of self-education ? The sense that a supernatural eye is upon us in duty is so strong, because the relaxation of constraint comes simultaneously with a deep sense of obligation, just as the child is instinctively aware, when the sustaining hand is taken away, that the parent's eye is all the more intent on his unassisted movement. The sense of judgment, of a constant vigilance exercised over the secret exercise of free will, can never be obliterated from the human breast. The mind is pursued into its freest movements by this belief that the Power within could only voluntarily have receded from its task of moulding us, in order to keep watch over us as we mould our- selves. And this instinctive conviction of the super- natural Life surrounding us in the exercise of our 36 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION 11 moral responsibility, is taken up and strengthened by that mysterious guidance through the labyrinth of outward circumstances which almost all observant consciences feel to be full of purpose in its adaptation to their individual moral wants. That sense of an internal spiritual vigilance over us which is first and most deeply impressed on the mind in every experi- ence of moral obligation, is echoed hy the experience of outward influences, as we see those moral situa- tions prepared for us which are most needed to dis- cipline our special gifts, or supply our special de- ficiencies, or bring home to us our special sins. The experience of moral responsibility first inspires, and the personal appeals of Providence deepen, the trust in the moral Power that embraces us. According to the concej^tion of Feuerbach, the blind agencies of the universe first develop into consciousness in man — a belief which renders the whole experience of moral obligation utterly inexplicable. Like a mount- ain summit, the human mind then stretches upwards into vacancy, while it covers a mass that is rooted in the earth. The moral nature must, then, be wholly determined by the physical agencies on which it is reared. And to suppose that they could give a power of self-determination of which they are not themselves possessed, or issue in a sense of obligation, when they are a mere bundle of necessary forces, is to suppose Nature at once free and servile, vigilant and asleep. Take another test whether or not the moral con- stitution of man contains in itself any distinct evi- dence of independence or dependence, of being in itself the summit of creation, or of showing its high- est perfection in that receptive and listening attitude which implies that there is a region beyond and II ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION 37 above it from which it may receive and hear wliat is most essential for its guidance. A great discoverer, or a great genius in purely human arts, is a man who, after he has learned all lie can, shows a deep self-reliance and an imperious audacity in making- new combinations and striking out new enterprises. In such arts a man who jealously restrained his own impulses of self-confidence would be at once felt to be second-rate, — to be a copyist. How is it that by the universal assent of mankind this is otherwise in relation to moral excellence, that the ideal char- acter — the character which we even regard as morally the most original, that is, as embodying the most of true creative genius — is of the opposite type 1 How is it that humility, or the habit of waiting to be ruled by some power that is acknowledged to be often mortifying to self, — not enterprise or the ambition of boldly striking out the path most in harmony with previous theory and experience, — is regarded as affording the highest tyj^e of moral ex- cellence ^ If a real revealing character draws men on, in proportion as they have faithfulness and trust, this is natural enough. But if spiritual progress is all self-caused, and our religion is only the high-tide mark of our self-attained practice, it would seem that a certain boldness and self-dependence and natural arbitrariness would be the best means of access to new and better standards of moral conception. Yet it is the very basis of a religious character, and of the essence of that prophetic power which has most influenced the fate of men, — it is even the essence of such characters as that of Socrates, no less than of that of Christ, — to be utterly dependent on guidance from within. It is no accident that the highest and finest minds are essentiallj' of the leaning type, and 38 ATHEISTIC EXPLANATION OF RELIGION li marked chiefly by humility. This truly indicates that those learn most of moral truth who are most willing to be passive in the hands of God. Were God only the glorified image of man, those who had the greatest amount of intrinsic self-reliance and in- born impetuous impulse, would be as much leaders in the sjriritual and moral as thej'' are in the secular world. Ill SCIENCE AND THEISM 1 There is a vague, general dread that Science, if fairly faced, is atheistic in its tendency. Men are haunted with the phantom of a power that they dare not challenge, which is rumoured to have superseded and exposed natural theology, and to be gradually with- drawing every fold of mystery from the universe, without disclosing any trace of God. I hope to show that, though Science cannot be expected to reveal God, it is nevertheless far more favourable to Theism than to Atheism — indeed, that it jjresents to the thought a spectacle of incredible incoherence without the tlieistic nexus. On every side alike — in the ab- sence of this ground-faith — analysis unravels the component threads of reality, but dissipates, by some strange sleight of hand, the living force that wove them, and leaves us at last with a so-called " equiv- alent " for concrete fact, which, like drj^ colours scraped off a picture, has indeed been fetched out of actual existence, but which no power could ever con- stitute into it again. ^ Frinciplcs of Psychology. By Herbert Spencer. Longmans, 1855. Oil the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Itaces in ffie Struggle for Life. By Charles Darwin. London. Murray, 1860. 40 SCIENCE AND THEISM in The object of all science is said truly to be the attainment of unity. But unity is an ambiguous word ; and there are two ideas concerning scientific unity in vogue, one of which is synonymous with generality or high abstraction, the other with the idea of a real tie or bond. The one notion of unity is derived from each single science, and is related to concrete fact exactly as universal truths are related to particular cases. Here the unity is really the unit of which the individual elements are fractions ; there is no uniting, because there is no jiossibility of real separation even in thought. The special cases illustrate the abstract whole ; they cannot be bound up together, because they are only different aspects of the same thought. The other notion of unity is derived not from single sciences, but from the con- junction of many, and denotes the vinculum, or sheath, under which branches of thought or existence, really different in kind, are taken up into a single complex root or stem. In the former case the unity and the variety are both purely formal, and the tie or bond is purely intellectual, — standing for the necessity in our intelligence of explaining different examples by the same rule; in the latter case the unity is upowcr — hold- ing together j)ositively divergent provinces, distinct forms of existence. Now Science, properly regarded, aims, I believe, at reaching both these kinds of unity, eacli in its right j^lace. In each single science it aims at generalising the particular cases into the ab- stract formula which includes them all — at setting back to the fundamental conception of the science by studying to comprehend all its phenomena in one law. But universal Science does not attempt to ignore the real differences of kind between the special phenomena of its various branches ; and therefore it Ill SCIENCE AND THEISM 41 aims not at falsely identifying radical distinctions, but at finding out how they may be really united without being confounded. The real unity, then, at which true Science aims is unity of conception. ^A^liere it can identify appar- ent varieties as mere modifications of one and the same conception, it does so, and creates a science. Where,' on the other hand, it can make the universe conceivable to us only by admitting, to the full, specific and ultimate differences of kind in its phe- nomena, it admits those differences, and studies to find the higher unity not by further generalising, but by looking for a umtmg poiver. The only test we have of the truth of scientific hypothesis is the degree of aid it gives us in representing to ourselves at will the facts of the universe without distinct individual study of each. Nothing is less scientific than any hypothesis which tries to run one set of facts into another without justification, in order to evade the admission of a distinct root. Instead of inci'easing our means of representing the universe, such a pro- cedure confuses and disturbs them. Why was Co- pernican astronomy preferred to the old Ptolemaic astronomy ? First, because it rendered the mental representation of the facts studied simpler than before ; next and most, because it suggested new and true representations of relations not hitherto represented to the mind at all. It was one step to- wards a justification, to find that we could conceive as simple relations what had hitherto been conceived as most complex relations ; but when that mode of conceiving the -planets' motions suggested mode.s of including quite other relations (such as the motion of bodies on the earth's surface) in the same thought, — that is, not only simplified what had before been 42 SCIENCE AND THEISM in reduced to definite conceptions, but reduced other facts within the scope of the same definite concep- tions, — the thing was regarded as certainly estab- lished. Of course it could not be proved. No one can see what force keeps the earth in her orbit, or the moon in hers, or what draws the stone to the ground. It is still quite conceivable that no such forces exist at all, but quite different and far more complicated forces, producing the same effects. But the belief in the new astronomy is grounded on the assumption that whatever hypothesis gives our reason the best means of representing actual fact, gives us that means just because it is the reflected image of actual fact. For instance, why do scientific men daily attach more and more credit to the wave-theory of light, and less and less (I believe) to the atom- theory of matter ? Simply because the former not only enables them to represent all that is hitherto known, but daily increases their power of represent- ing to themselves hitherto unknown relations of light and colour. It is a working hypothesis, opening up ever new explanations of relations hitherto more or less outlying and unattached. The latter (the atom- theory) has, on the other hand, never represented anything but the combining proportions of chemical substances, and is a mere arbitrary form of that. It is a dead addition to the law of combining propor- tions, suggesting nothing beyond it. All science, then, aims at enabling us to represent fact more and more completely to our own minds. It takes accurate representative power as its best test of reality. Hence any attempt to merge the distinctive characteristic of a higher science in a lower — of chemical changes in mechanical — of bio- logical in chemical — above all, of mental changes in Ill SCIENCE AND THEISM 43 biological — is a neglect of the radical assumption of all science, because it is an attempt to deduce re- presentations — or rather misrepresentations — of one kind of phenomenon from a conception of another kind which does not contain it, and must have it implicitly and illicitly smuggled in before it can be extracted out of it. Hence, instead of increasing our means of representing the universe to ourselves without the detailed examination of particulars, such a procedure leads to misconstructions of fact on tlie basis of an imported theory, and generally ends in forcibly jser verting the least -known science to the type of the better known. These remarks apply almost necessarily to any view of science that excludes the conception of a primary mind in the universe ; unless, indeed, it be bold enough — which it never is — to assert that at every stage in the evolution of the universe new phenomena throng into existence, self-created, which had no j)revious equivalent, no spring or source of being at all, — which admit, in short, of no analysis into any antecedent phenomena. If this be admitted, then Science is a body of thought, which, starting from concrete reality, utterly loses a thread at every step back into the past, till it unravels into the " Pure Nothing." Mental phenomena fall off first into the " Pure Nothing," as they rose last out of it ; then vital phenomena drop away, then biological, then chemical, then mechanical ; lastly geometrical ; and Science has rendered her account by gradually wiping out her score. This system, which deifies the creative power of Zero, is the boldest but also absurdest form of Atheism. In it Science boasts to be identical with Nescience. No one ever seriously held it, though of course it has been maintained. 44 SCIENCE AND THEISM in But, Nihilism apart, science can only be atheistic through the confusion of the two kinds of unity I have mentioned — i.e. through that extreme analysis which admits no radical differences of kind in the phenomena of the universe at all, and proposes there- fore to deduce all the complex combinations from the more simple, and these again, ultimately, from some highly abstract and simi)le formula or unit of existence — the nutshell of the universe — by pure analysis of that unit into its constituent elements. This danger might be escaped, if such speculators chose to maintain that Reason is absolutely incapable of uniting the particular sciences into a single whole, and can neither analyse one into the other, nor find any living tie or knot by which to combine them, but must be content to bring their common analogies to light, and keep their distinctive phenomena apart. But this is exactly what Atheism almost always de- clines to do. Indeed, could Atheism take this course, it could scarcely long survive as Atheism. To admit the reality and irreducible nature of mental pheno- mena — to admit that they cannot anyhow be analysed into physical — is either to put a period to all inquiry as to cause, or to open a broad way into Theism ; and the less men believe in an Infinite Being, the more thirsty usually is their curiosity about the sup- posed genesis of our mental nature. The result is, that the problem of all atheistic philosophers has been, not to find the real ultimate link between the different classes of natural force and life, but to soften away as much as possible the one into the other, so as to make the transition imperceptible, and so introduce a thoroughly new creative force as if it were but an expansion of that beneath it. It is a mere self-deception of philosophy in SCIENCE AND THEISM 45 to accept the graduality of the stages by which life ascends, from the gravitating force of inorganic matter to the highest pinnacle of human reason, as any sort of evidence that the universe was all implicitl}' in- volved in its earliest stage. There can be no reason in assuming, contrary to all evidence, that all forces and all organisms, and all life and all reason, lie shut up implicitly (i.e. without any manifestation or pos- sible symptoni of existence) in that which seems possessed of no force and no organism, and no life and no reason. If this assumption be not made, then, as we know only of one great power totally escaping sensible analysis and yet able to effect sensible changes — the power of mind — the natural assumption is, that the actual and sensible additions to existence come out of that power. What is gained by showing the graduality of the transition from one creative process to another ? Because only a small addition has been made to the living resources of the world, is it any the more possible to identify it with that which it is not ? Because the boundary between vegetable and animal life is not very distinct, can we any the more ignore the fact that some fresh power has been given to the world when a loco- motive capacity gradually creeps into it 1 Because the creeping is so gradual, is it any the more pos- sible to identify it with no-creeping 1 Because the automatic action in the infant very slowly opens into consciousness, is consciousness at all the more capable of identification with automatic action 1 Because instinct and habit are the unconscious instruments of adapting means to ends, and intelligence is the conscious and voluntary adapter of means to ends, shall we talk of the germinal intelligence in the pro- cesses of the bee ? As correctly, or more correctly 46 SCIENCE AND THEISM III (for the act mat/ become semi-conscious and semi- voluntary), might we talk of the intelligent cough by which a man adapts the action of his lungs to the removal of an obstruction in the windpipe. This attempt to analyse away the positive ad- ditions of creative power, by merely noting how gradually they steal into the universe, appears to show most strikingly how the absence of theistic faith tends to exjjel reality from science, and to make philosophy the universal solvent of fact, in- stead of the spirit which investigates the order, correspondence, and the ultimate connections of all fact in the concrete and complex unity of the highest life. Thus, by far the most able recent writer of this school, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, as I said in my first essay, utterly disclaims Atheism, but yet recognises no evidence that the insorutaljle Cause of the Universe is what the Theist means by a personal God, looks for his definition of " life " in a survey of all the phenomena, vegetable, physiological, and psychical, of which it is ordinarily predicated. He defines it thus : " Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations ; " or more at length, but less simply : . " Life is the definite com- bination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence ivith external coexist- ences and sequences." Now, if Mr. Spencer only means by this to indicate that which all forms of what is ordinarily termed life have in common, we ought to be grateful for this contribution to the analysis of a most complex conception. But he slides in imme- diately a very favourite axiom of the religious know-nothing school, that all differences between the phenomena of the lower and higher sciences are differences of degree — -differences in the stage of ex- Ill SCIENCE AND TIIEISJI 47 pansion — not differences of kind ; and so proceeds to deduce that the highest mental life has nothing more in it than is indicated in this definition. He first overlooks, ignores, rejects, the special characteristics of personal life — which would be legitimate in form- ing an abstract idea — and then, forgetting that it is abstract, and that all the differentia of the highest kind of life has been neglected, he clips down that highest kind of life to the limits of his definition. There is positively nothing in his concejitiou of the higher life to indicate a real difference of kind between man and a vegetable. He must therefore, of course, reject originating power — free-will in man. He does so : and thus defends his jjosition : — " Respecting this matter, I will only fuitlier say, that free-will, did it exist, would be entirely at vaiiance with that beneficent necessity displayed in the progressive evolution of the correspondence between the organism and its environment. That gradual ad\'ance in the moulding of inner relations to outer relations, which has been delineated in the foregoing pages — that ever- extending adaptation of the cohesions of psychical states to the connections between the answering phenomena, which we have seen to result from the accumulation of experiences, would be arrested, did there exist anything which otherwise determined their cohesion.?. As it is, we see that the correspondence between the internal changes and the external coexistences and sequences must become more and more complete. The continuous adjustment of the vital activities to the activities in the environment, must become more accurate and exhaustive. The life must become higher and the happiness greater — must do so because the inner relations are determined by the outer relations. But were the inner relations to any extent determined by some other agency, the harmony at any moment subsisting, and the advance to a higher harmony, 40 SCIENCE AND THEISM in would alike be interrupted to a proportionate extent ; there would be an arrest of that grand progression which is now bearing humanity onwards to perfection." — which only means that Mr. Spencer thinks free-will h ]y)i(rri unlikely, because it is not a self-adjusting apparatus, but a self-adjusting spirit ; because it is not determined absolutely by the external world, but determines itself after free intelligent judgment on both worlds, internal and external. "The psychical states," as Mr. Spencer denominates a man, " cannot determine their own cohesions." I do not know a more remarkable instance of the confusion between the unity of the sciences and the identity of the sciences, than is given by this development of volun- tary life out of the idea of vegetable life. In the vegetable, Mr. Spencer says, the self-preservative correspondence between internal and external changes is simple, limited to a narrow region of space, and almost limited to the present moment in time. In the animal, with the gradual growth of a nervous system, the corresisondence becomes much more full — extends over a wider region in space (as when the bee is driven far and wide for its honey), and reaches over a longer time (as in the instincts which provide against the future emergencies of seasonal change). In the intellect of man it reaches its acme by the ripening of forecasting instincts into a widely-ranging consciousness. The " afferent " nerves bring reports to the brain, — the common-hall through which, now, almost all sensations pass, and where they establish a mutual understanding, so as to have their reports compared, connected, and enlarged. Here, too, ensues the conflict as to which of the "afferent" nerves shall get the command of the " efferent " nerves which convoy motoiy impulses from the brain. Ill SCIENCE AND THEISM 49 This conflict is wliat we mean by voluntary choice. The psychical states, which are too weak to win, and are merely candidates for an " efferent " nerve, are our passive memories, emotions, and the like. The victorious candidates are our volitions. And this is the rationale of our moral nature ! — biology ex- cluding from mental life all that does not suit the scientific analogies in her own domain ! Have I not some reason for saying that this is a confusion of the sciences, not a unity of the sciences 1 Is it not clear that this positive method puts into the higher science as little more than it gets from the lower science as it can possibly help 1 — that it strives to varnish over their distinctions, instead of to combine them 1 How could even the semi-intelligent life of the higher animals be described merely as a cohesion of psychical states, if the notion did not come up from the vege- table world beneath ? The unity that was not in the source cannot be in the result. A cohesion of simultaneous and serial changes is all that is seen in the vegetable, and therefore a cohesion of simultaneous and serial changes is all that can be found in the man ! There is, however, as is generally supposed, a much mightier stronghold of the non-theistic view of the Universe in Mr. Darwin's recent biological discoveries, than in the view of those who believe in the ultimate identity of all sorts of forms, physical and moral, and who explain away, as a mere change of form, the gradual accession of power which is gained at every step in the ascent from the force of gravity to the force of will. Mr. Darwin has discovered that very many of the more important modifications, and especially the improvements in animal and vegetable organisation, are ultimately due to what looks at first sight very much like a fortunate accident. At VOL. I K 50 SCIENCE AND THEISM III least lie shows that of an indefinite nnmber of individual variations in the type, that one which tends to give an advantage to the individual in the struggle for life in any particular region of the world, tends also to be perpetuated in that region ; while any variation that tends to cause a disadvantage to the individual in any particular region, tends also to be extinguished in that region. The mode in wliicli this happens is very simple. A creature with any variety of organisation useful to it, is in a position to avoid danger or to procure food more easily than its fellows which have not that variety ; it is therefore likely to have a less difficult and disturbed existence, and a more numerous family, many of which will inherit the variety : on the other hand, all creatures born with a variation of organisa- tion that is unfavourable to their escape from beasts of prey, or to their power of procuring the most appropriate food, will tend to die off exceptionally soon, or, if they live to breed, will breed descendants inheriting the unfavourable variety, and therefore in special danger of extinction. Hence Mr. Darwin has apparently discovered a principle which accounts for the selection of improved types, — improved, that is, in reference to the evasion of danger or the com- mand of the means of subsistence, — and for the extinction of deteriorated types — deteriorated, that is, in relation to the same conditions — without assuming that there was any more special design in the elaboration of the former than of the latter. It is as if Paley's imaginary watch, which immediately disposes the finder to believe that it was made by design, were traced to a manufactory containing a great variety of other instruments, varying through all degrees of usefulness and uselessness ; the more Ill SCIENCE AND THEISM 51 useful, however, having been at once vakied and pre- served and multiplied through the appreciation of the external world, while the vast number of useless ones had been neglected and allowed to go to decay. If this were so, people would at once be apt to infer that the useful articles had been originally no more de- signed than the useless ones ; though, once produced, they had been taken better care of, and multiplied in much greater numbers. If it were discovered that a certain poet had written nineteen or twenty sense- less stanzas, and nine hundred or a thousand stanzas of little meaning, for every stanza of pure poetry, though the latter had all been carefully preserved and published by a delighted world, while the former had been at once forgotten, such a poet would probably be supposed to have written his more popular pieces by accident ; though, when written, it was not accident which caused them to be valued and sedulously preserved. And, in the same way, Mr. Darwin's discovery that an improvement of organisation is only a single one amongst many changes which are not improvements, and many of which may be changes for the worse, suggests to many minds that there was no more design in the improvement which is perpetuated simply because it helps the animal to live, than in the variations for the worse which were soon lost, simply because they made it more difficult for the animal to live. In a word, Mr. Darwin's discovery seems to bring back the idea of luch into the modification of the forms of vegetable and animal existence. The varieties which succeed are those which hajjpen to be in harmony with the external needs of the creature ; those which are extinguished are those which happen to be out of harmony with those needs. The old conception of 52 SCIENCE AND THEISM ht Natural Theology rested on the notion that design anticipated all the wants of the different classes of creatures, and gave them at once and exactly what was most suited to those wants. What is the difference, it will be said, between trying a hundred experiments in organisation which fail, to one that succeeds, and playing at a game of chance where the odds are a hundred to one against you ? I will try to answer this. What Mr. Darwin has discovered is, a general system or constitution for the modifying of physical organisms ; and, as soon as any general constitution is established in the place of what looked like individual acts of adaptation or design, the jurisdiction of the inquiry as to design is clearly removed from the domain of the individual organism to that of the general constitution under which it is liable to be modified ; so that the true matter to be inquired into obviously is, not " Is there any more special design in the variation of type which profits an animal than in the variation of type which is disadvantageous to it ? " but rather, " Is the system, as a whole, one which implies design or not?" Now, in discussing this, I must note, first, that struggle and competition for food — the preying of one tribe of animals upon another — is not by any means a new fact, but is one of the old puzzles of natural theology ; but that which is a new fact, and one of Mr. Darwin's discovery, is that this struggle is the direct means of adjusting the organisms of the vegetable and animal world more comp)letely to the conditions in which they live, i.e. of improving the physical type of the various tribes of vegetables and animals. So far, I think, Mr. Darwin's discovery tends to diminish rather than to increase the old difficulty of animal conflict, and of the preying of in SCIENCE AND THEISM 53 one order on another, since the effect of all this is to introduce a greater perfection into organisation, and a greater economy into the whole system ; the tribes of plants and animals which are capable of economis- ing their means most, gaining a great advantage over those which are incapable of it, and so gradually superseding them. Sir Joseph Hooker has pointed out a very remark- able illustration of this, in showing that the plants and animals of the old world, which have, of course, had a far more complete sifting by the process of natural selection than those of recently discovered lands, have acquired so great a superiority over the plants and animals of New Zealand and South America, that they almost always beat the latter directly they are imported from home. Thus the English fly soon supersedes entirely the disgusting and enormous blue-bottle of New Zealand. The English rat drives out the Maori rat. The little clover competes suc- cessfully even with the pJwrmium tena.r, the sword- flax, " a plant of the coarsest, hardest, and toughest description, that forms huge matted patches of woody rhizomes, which send up tufts of sword-like leaves six to ten feet high, and inconceivably strong in texture and fibre." This is "the weak things of the world confounding the mighty " over again, though in a purely physical sense : — the explanation, no doubt, being that in the old countries only those kinds of vegetables and animals whose habits of life and growth have become in the highest degree economi- cal, survive ; and that these, when transplanted to regions where natural selection has not yet formed such habits of economy, drive everything before them, — the grasses sucking away nourishment from the great indigenous ferns and flax, the rats and flies 54 SCIENCE AND THEISM ni exploring and appropriating, with habits of ancestral economy and cunning, the storehouses of the native rats and flies. Hence, surely, it is obvious that the competitive system of nature, which, before Mr. Darwin's discoveries, looked simply purposeless and cruel, is now at last shown to evolve higher and more economical types of organisation types — which are more consistent with the wants of man, and less likely to come into collision with him. This is the removal of a difficulty, not the addition of one. But, then, is not this self-acting arrangement for weeding the universe of its inferior organisms capable of being interpreted as a substitute for a sovereign mind, as the explanation of what mimics the action of a sovereign mind, rather than as the indication of a real sovereign mind ? Does it not, like the nebular theory of astronomy, seem, if once assumed to be in action, to be as sufficient for the phenomena which come out of it, as the theory of an intellectual and conscious Creator ? That must, surely, depend rather on its relative place and importance in the universe, than on any examination of its particular operation. You cannot adequately judge whether geological causes might have produced the flint axes and knives or not, till you can compare, on a wide scale, what is actually produced by purely geological causes, with what is actually produced by human purpose. Now, I observe that the Darwinian theoi'y starts from the assumption of organic types compe- tent to reproduce themselves, and needing external food for their perpetuation, as its point of departure, and does not profess to go back for its origin to what I may call the ante-tentative and ante-competitive era of the universe, when the store of forms was as little variable as the store of forces. Moreover, it is Ill SCIENCE AND THEISM 55 obvious that the Darwinian theory is quite incapable of explaining the specifically human phenomenon of the rise of what may be called an anti-Darwinian con- science, which restrains and subordinates the principle of competition, inspiring pity for those poorer types of nature which, on Darwinian principles, simply stand in need of extinction, and expending the best elements of human energy on the rescue of weakness and the redemption of sin. In other words, the selective power of the com- petitive isrinciple is limited to the functions of physical life in the universe ; it cannot explain at all how physical life, capable of reproducing itself, comes into being from that which is not capable of rei)i-o- ducing itself ; it can explain still less how, out of a system sharpened and improved solely l:>y competi- tion, comes an order of beings who jjut strict limits on competition, curb it in the higher parts of their own nature, and recognise that lie \vho will not " break the Ijruised reed " is higher far than he who labours to extinguish a low type of humanity, how- ever unpromising for the purposes of future " selec- tion," instead of to use and elevate it. Taken, then, in its true place in the universe, the Darwinian explanation of the laws of organic progress seems to me to make for the theistic argument instead of against it. The evidence that the world is weeded of its lower organic types by the success of the higher, is no explanation of the growth of life out of that which is not living, and is no explanation of the growth of love out of that which is not loving. I think Mr. Darwin's discovery rather supports than weakens the impression that all these subordinate systems or constitutions in the universe are raised one above the other by a Being who embraces in 56 SCIENCE AND THEISM m Himself the full scope of all. Certainly, in showing that the bitter conflicts of animal (as of vegetable) life lead to higher types and greater economy of function, it somewhat dispels the darkness of a sviffi- ciently difficult problem. That which seemed to be mere war, is now seen to be war that weeds the world of what is worse adapted to its particular place in it, for the sake of what is better adapted to that place. And here seems the right point to note that neither the scientiiic principle of what is called the " correla- tion of forces" (that is, the equivalence of forces which seem to be of very different kinds, like heat and motion, or heat and nervous action, or nervous action and thought), nor the Darwinian law of selection by conflict for existence, seems to throw the smallest glimi3se of light on the origin of human free will, and that sense of responsibility of which free will is the absolute condition. As for the Darwinian law, it is simply inconceivable (supposing you deny free will to the lower types of organic beings, out of which, in his conception, the higher species are gradu- ally elaborated by natural selection) that an accidental variation should introduce free will ; and, as we have seen, Mr. Spencer asserts that if (by any possibility) it could be so, it would be a change so destructive of the harmony between " the vital activities " and " the activities in the environment," that the indi- viduals burdened with so fatal a quality would soon succumb in the conflict for existence. It is incon- ceivable that any law of transmission should introduce an element of freedom which was entirely absent from the universe before. All that is supposed to vary in the qualities derived from ancestors, is the proportion in which they are mingled, and, so to say, the mode of application to the universe outside. But that a in SCIENCE AND THEISM 57 necessary being should give birth to a being with any amount, however limited, of moral freedom, is infinitely less conceivable than that parents of the insect or fish type should give birth to a perfect mammal. An accidental variation only means a variation of which you cannot determine the direc- tion ; but you can determine that the direction of variation will not outrage all the laws of parentage. But if the Darwinian principle wholly fails to render such a fact as free will in the offspring of absolutely determined natures even conceivable, so equally does the supposed scientific principle that all the higher forms of force are mere highly-refined and complex equivalents of the lower forms. If all the lower laws of force and life are absolutely fixed and inviolable, then they cannot revoke their own consti- tution when they issue out of the region of biology into that of moral life. If it be the essence of all things to follow fixed laws, if there is nothing but unchangeable force moulding the universe by its gradually concentrating strength, then the conscience of man is a delusion, and his sense of responsibility and freedom must be explained away. But if the pressure of necessity is really removed just at the very point where the sense of the awful importance of our choice is most intensely realised, — if the iron chain of events by which our course is guided is unclasped, and we are permitted to go either to the right hand or to the left, just when we are most dis- tinctly conscious that a false step is an irretrievable and infinite evil, — then we cannot be the offspring of law, or mere embodiments of definite force. The logic of Science is consistent, but it does not explain freedom. We know that we are morally free ; and we know that a free jjerson cannot be the issue of 58 SCIENCE AND THEISM ni rigidly unfolded laws. It is impossible for necessity to emancipate itself Only if the observed necessity has been the " must " of a divine free will, can that "must" be withdrawn, and freedom restored wher- ever the materials for self-determination have been granted. The identity of all the sciences is assumed only at the expense of the falsification of some, and the total abrogation of one. The main facts of man's moral nature — all those, which assume personal re- sponsibility, duty and sin, merit and demerit, praise and blame, reward and retribution — all those on Avhich the great interests of mankind centre, all which are the life of reverence and love — are swejDt away into meaningless unreality by the absolute iden- tification of moral science with the natural sciences on the summit of which it stands. It is dangerous enough to scientific reality to confuse intelligence with instinct, and to describe memory as " a weak form " of pierception ; but it is the suicide of a science to manufacture a theory of moral obligation out of the materials of physical necessity — a theory of vision for the blind. IV I'OPULAll PANTHEISM ^ Mk. Fox's conception of the Religious Ideas makes faith not the controlling and regenerating power of human life, but the natural completion and embel- lishment of an otliei'wise maimed and fragmentary existence. He presents us with a kind of popular Pantheism, which adds the last beautifying touches, as it were, the intellectual finish, to the temporar}' happiness of earthly existence. He assigns to man his place in the universal order, pieces the human mind into its proper niche in the great scenic displa)- of Creative power, and shows man's adaptation alike for a God and a future. He discovers a religious firmament so sublime and universal that it bends equally over all aspects and developments of human nature, and is the ornament of all. He argues for God and immortality, and the final extinction of the negation which we call evil, on principles derived from a disjjosition to trust universal human hopes and to complete the cycle of human jirogress. In a word, the sense of harmony — the esthetic faculty — seems to require a religion for man, and, therefore, such religion as will satisfy this sense of harmony ' On the Belicjious Ideas. By William Johnson Fox, M.P. London : Charles Fox, 1849. 60 POPULAR PANTHEISM iv must be true. Such seems to be the general drift of Mr. Fox's Pantheism. Indeed, his book gives so slight and rhetorical a statement of this aesthetic phase of religion, that, were it not for the attraction which this kind of artistic religion seems to have, especially for those who make up for the absence of a real faith by the poetic religiosity of their views of the universe, it would hardly j)erhaps be very useful to point out what appear to be its chief deficiencies. But its eclectic width of sentiment, its generous iiro- mise of harmonising a satisfying faith with all positive religions on the one hand, and with all modern science on the other, its really liberal tone to more positive forms of faith, and its imjposing dress of illustration, are so representative of the school of easy-going Eesthetic religion, as to deserve to be regarded as a distinct type. Mr. Fox gives as the Eeligious Ideas which are the constituents of all forms of faith, Eevelation, God, Creation and Providence, Eedemption, Human Immortality, Duty, Heaven, and proceeds to discuss the grounds on which he considers them not merely subjective, but representative of realities beyond the mind. This discussion is not an important part of his book, and I may pass it by with the remark, that did anything essential depend on this part of his reasoning, he would have built upon very precarious ground. A pjhilosophjr which puts the evidence of religious faith on the same ground of certainty with the presumption that the most natural of Shak- speare's characters either do exist, have existed, or will exist (p. 27), and makes mere " coiiffniitij with the laws of nature indicative of reality" (p. 26), would not win any very general assent. It is, how- ever, quite unnecessary to deal with these general IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 61 remarks on the criteria of objective existence, because in the succeeding chapters Mr. Fox begins all over again with each of his religious ideas, when he con- siders them separately. After urging the usual diffi- culties against the possibility of any positive reve- lation, that is not sanctioned by the mind of man, Mr. Fox gives his own completely pantheistic idea of revelation — pantheistic, I mean, in the sense that it advisedly confuses the personalities of God and man — thus : — "Where^-or moral and .■spiritual truth suggests itself to the mind, grows in that mind, passes from it to other minds, there is revelation." — -P. 45. And again : — " There is a state of mind to which it comes^not pre- ternaturally, there is no conjuration in the case, there is no violation of law ; it conies in harmony with the great laws of matter, mind, spirit. AVlien a man has meditated in solitude or discussed in society — if he has become familiar with antique volumes, or has listened to living teachers — whenever and wherever lie has felt himself most at one with the scheme of things in which he exists ; when, his mind retiring from petty struggles and petty enjoyments, or seeking relief from its weight of sorrows, allowing the course of his thoughts to run freely, he has perceived, amid the various confusion of things, some moral truth as it were beaming from above, there has been God's revelation ; and let him lay it to his heart and cherish it."— P. 46. Now, inspiration is in truth denied altogether wherever it is reduced to a consequence of laws that act independently of the strictly personal, i.e. individual, relation subsisting between each human soul and the mind of God. What God suggests by 62 POPULAR PANTHEISM ir means of laws that arc, to use a mathematical jahrase, no frmdion of the individual, as e.g. the general laws of formal thought, that clearly is not inspiration. The truest and highest view of our relation to God, is to regard Him as a distinct person, having laws in His own nature, partially like those which He has given us for our nature ; and then what He com- municates to us by the general laws regulating the constitution which He gave us, and which we have modified, is in the ordinary course of His provi- dence ; what He communicates in consequence of prayers of our own, — imploring Him not to leave us to the providential laws which regulate and develop our present self-educated faculties, but to take up a personal relation to us in our present state as self-formed beings, — may be regarded as inspira- tions. The sense I wish to convey will perhaps be best illustrated by a comment on Mr. Fox's explana- tion of his own meaning. He says : — " When the impulse came to Gibbon, in the ruins of the Coliseum, amid mouldering walls and deepening shadows — when it blended with his recollections of grandeur passed away, and of its contrast with that other strange form of grandeur which had taken its place — no voice, indeed, from the clouds or from the earth said audibly to him, ' Go and write the history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in sentences as gorgeous as the hues of that sunset by which it is typified ; ' but the impulse came, came combinedly from without and from within ; it was the sort of occurrence which, told in Oriental phraseology, would be, 'The word of the Lord came to such a one, and said, Go thou and do this great work.'"— P. 58. Now this example, chosen no doubt expressly on account of the irreverent spirit pervading the great IV POPULAR PANTHEISJt 03 work alluded to, is admirably calculated to illustrate the difference between natural suggestion and divine inspiration. The impulse that came to Gibbon was obviously the consequence of natural capacity, acted on by the laws of association and memory, and stimulated by ambition and a moral spirit that was partly due to his own free acts, and I am certainly not at all disposed to deny it a place in the general plan of Providence ; still it was the result of the personal attitude of Gibbon's own mind, excited by the objects and sights around him. It was the effect of general laws acting on the particular, partly self- created, character of Gibbon's mind. On the other hand, that would be inspiration which proceeded, not from a regular development of the mind within, affected by its own volitions and laws, but from the spirit of God freely entering into it, whether as a consequence of inward need or entreaty, or for any other reasons such as might be sufficient to the divine mind. The moral distinction between the two cases would be this : Our facilities once given, are greatly under our own control, and their action, when once placed under the government of our wills, is no longer entirely from above, but is affected by every one of our own moral acts, so that their later sug- gestions are no longer purely from God as at first they might be, but are the complex results of God's providence and of the nature He gave us, taken together with our own free volitions. Here then a term is introduced due to our own free causation, and not of God at all. Inspirations, on the other hand, must be communications given directly and wholly from God, even though they be coloured, and, so to say, reduced by the limitations of the finite nature which receives them. The difference is some- 64 POPULAE PANTHEISM IV what the same as that between the conduct that would be suggested by a friend's past rehxtion to us, when received into our mind and modified there by our own actions and history, and that suggested by the living friend once more before us. Even in this case til ere might be misunderstanding, owing to our incapacity ; but the new impulse, the new shock, is from without, and not from our own self. Gibbon's impulse was thus not a direct communication, but the result of his nature modified by the laws that governed his life, and especially by his own voluntary acts ; had it been a pure inspiration, it might have been somewhat similar yet very different, and would have suggested to him to write a history that should attempt to trace in a very different spirit the in- fluences exerted over the world by the moral and intellectual characteristics of the Roman empire. Mr. Fox, in refusing, both philosophically and prac- tically, to make the distinction, appears to me to miss the very essence of religion, at the outset of his work. Besides, no theory of Religion could be complete that failed to distinguish between mere poetic in- spiration (a pre-eminence of original faculty), and that universal inspiration of the Spirit which, so long as it continues to visit us at all, comes direct from God, without being any further discoloured than the inadequacy of our minds to comprehend fully what is communicated, requires. Mr. Fox banishes this Holy Spirit entirely from human life by not admitting any personal discourse of God with the mind. Before leaving these remarks on the nature of inspiration, I may just add, that if what I have laid down be true, then the two kinds of God's intercourse with the mind, by faculty, and by direct teaching, would coalesce in any being absolutely perfect, since, when IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 65 untaiuted by neglect and sin, every faculty would remain the same channel of divine power that it was at first, and God would be as purely represented in the suggestions of a perfect nature educated in strict obedience to divine law, as in any direct discourse : in fact, the two would be identical. Revelation, Mr. Fox argues, supposes a revealer, and from the very consciousness of communication to the mind, of something entering it which was not there before, we reach the conviction of a power, a life, beyond the sphere of our consciousness, and yet able to connect itself with us through those mys- terious sources of being that we cannot penetrate. The entrance of pain from unseen sources, of blessing, of beauty, of right, of approval or dis- approval, all this necessarily implies a life, nay, a mind, which has access to the hidden springs of our own : and this Being, once conceived of, is invested with the highest functions and powers that are con- sistent with the education and the wants of the people or individuals who have lifted their thoughts up to Him. Mr. Fox traces the conception of God in the Jewish scriptures, through the stages of Deliverer (when the release from the cruel bondage of Egypt formed the summit of the people's con- ceptions of beneficent power), of Legislator (when the reduction of the barbaric elements in the Israel- itish society to a divine order seemed the most sacred and difficult of tasks), and of a divine Defender in battle (when the inroads of unjust and swollen powers caused the preservation of national liberty to be the greatest need and toil of the people). He then notices the Christian phase of religion which makes God a Father, and seems to regard it as but a temporary phase of the religious life. VOL. I F 66 POPULAR PANTHEISM IV " And then came the phase of supplication ; the re- liance upon pity in the Divinity ; the plaintive, childlike cry that called on God as ' our Father' ; then came those thoughts of mercy, and patience, and kindness, forbear- ance and all long-suffering, which the woes and miseries of humanity have made but too endu.ring a form of the theological conception." — P. 72. And this is giving way, he thinks, iii our own day, to a modification of faith wliich regards God chiefly in his aspect of — ..." universality, of a pervading power ; not only of an impartial providence over all human beings, of all countries and religions, but of an essence, a spirit, a soul of the universe, incorporate with all and in all, which manifests itself in every flower that blossoms, in every star that shine?, in every cloud that flits across the sky, as well as in that everlasting arch which bends over all and proclaims the Infinity coexisting with all these seeming and transitory modifications." — P. 74. That this so-called higher conception of God's nature is strictly pantheistic, we learn from the next chapter, where, in commenting on the idea oi^jlurality, which Mr. Fox thinks has never been excluded from religion, he accounts for the want of sympathy shown towards Christian Unitarianism, by its en- deavour to conceive of God as an infinite person, distinct from Nature and humanity. He says :— " It was a step in the doctrine, though it might at first seem in a backward direction, the ascription of Godhead to Christ. ' God in Christ ' was something towards God in humauit)', as God in humanity was a progress towards God in universal nature. There alone we find the infinity which satisfies the thought ; and departing from those blended notions that our own habit of conceiving of persons infuses into the mind, there we see one whose IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 67 countenance towards us is in all that is grand and lovely — who is one with the majestic frame of the heavens and the earth — one with the mighty movements of material nature — one with intellectual and moral development in humanity — who lives, breathes, thinks, feels, acts, in and by all that is — all that is being one with Him, and He all and in all. Such at least is the last effort which the human mind seems to have made in the endeavour more fully to develop this notion of infinity, which so early and so strongly associates itself with the thought of God."— P. 87. Now in this account of the manner in which the true notion of the great Revealer dawns upon the human mind, Mr. Fox seems to me, like all believers in a pantheistic creed, to destroy what he has set up, and get to so high a conception in the end as to in- validate all the premises with which he started. It is strange how the aesthetic faculty, craving the ex- citement of ahsolute infinitude for its contemplation, breaks loose from the restraints that the moral and intellectual nature would put upon it, and leads to a system as destitute of spiritual support as it is full of latent contradictions. The original grounds of faith in a divine cause and inspirer fail, the moment the per- sonal faculties which discover Him are surrendered in favour of the newly-found Spirit. Mr. Fox's own arguments are, that fear, gratitude, admiration, and love, arising on occasion of the events of outward or inward life which have no other cause, all imply an object, a terrible power, a beneficent giver, a Being beautiful and sublime, an object for affection ; — but the newest and highest modification of our concep- tion of this Being, according to Mr. Fox, is that of a universal Essence, an all-pervading life that is as much represented in the fear, the gratitude, the ad- 68 POPULAR PANTHEISM iv miration, and the love, as in the object of these emotions. True, it was this power which (in its infinite aspect) startled the fear ; but then (in its finite capacit}') it directly felt it. And so the sup- posed discovery turns into a mere childish game at hide-and-seek, where the finder and the found are identical, and yet each mu.st be evidence for the real existence of the other. Now, all the real spiritual evidence for the exist- ence of a divine object of our worship is upset at once, the moment we cease to distinguish between the worshipper and the worshipped. It is assuredly as certain that God is an object of recognition for our minds, as matter for our senses, and that too by an exactly similar act of faith, equally irresistible (when the approi^riate faculties are awake) and equally inca23able of demonstration. But what would be said were any philosopher to reason thus : " I cer- tainly perceive an external world as a reality beyond me, and to that perception I accord my faith ; but a truer modification of this conception of the external induces me to say, as a more complete description of the fact, that this external existence beyond me was itself the percipient agency which acted in me at the time " 1 I am totally unable to perceive any differ- ence between nonsense such as this, and the religious theory which relies on human faculties for reporting the presence of a divine power, by them perceived, and asserted in the very act of perception to be differ- ent from ourselves, — producing what we could not produce, giving us what we could not take, feeling differently from us, acting differently, thinking differ- ently, — and which nevertheless presently turns round and says, " This Being is not in fact distinct from us, and we have found out, after all, that while we were IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 69 searching for a fit object to adore and love, we were only in want of a more perfect knowledge of our- selves to show us, that it mattered not whether we loved the beneficence or the gratitude the most, since both are ultimately identical." The mystery of re- ligion can never be solved by a process which identi- fies the creature and the Creator, and it were better to place no faith in our spiritual discernment at all, than to credit the witness and yet deny his existence, which is the condition of his credibility. To my mind the assertion of the Pantheist, " I believe in God," is a contradiction ; for when you look for the subject of belief, it has vanished into the object, and you have the facts of fear, gratitude, etc., attesting the existence of their object, yet denying the existence of their source, — unless any one is willing to adrnit that source and object are identical, so that all reciprocal functions in mind are circular, and end where they begin ; the fear of the creature flowing out into the power of the Creator, and the power of the Creator renewing the fountains of the creature's fear. But I have said more than enough on this sub- ject : no one is or can be a consistent Pantheist in thought, and little would the system affect mankind did it end in the mere logical absurdity in which it begins. Unfortunately it is not so ; it has always moral consequences, and the attempt to sink the per- sonal distinction between man and God by resolving the former into the latter, is always followed by the loss of those personal relations of affection and con- science between them which are the very life of religion. When the universe is resolved into one mighty Being, and history into His self-developed life, and all human minds are but finite sprouts from 70 POPULAR PANTHEISM IV the same infinite root, it is impossible that the same importance can be attached to the particular relations of any single being to that great fountain of life with which he is believed to be already necessarily at one, as must belong to the hopes and fears of beings who know themselves to be free to wander from their Creator, and to be bound to Him, if at all, only by ties which they themselves may break. This form of faith necessarily dissolves the personal and volun- tary ties between the creature and Creator, in substituting a kind of physical tie which nothing (it is believed) can dissolve. God is already at one with, nay in essence identical with. His creatures ; He is so by the ties of Being itself ; He himself lives in them, their acts are His, their lives are His, — where then is the room for the spiritual ties which can only exist where there is a voluntary connection that might be broken, for the gratitude that requites a free and full obedience, for the love that works willingly that it may win love again, for the prayer that asks what it might not otherwise receive ? All the highest portions of human life would be im- possible, were the spiritual and voluntary relations between person and person superseded by one vast community of life, which, insuring unity in the whole, beyond the power of dissolution, would destroy all moral unison, and change the everlasting Father of Christ into the all-pervading Essence of Spinoza. No wonder that Mr. Fox considers the Christian conception of God a form of the theological concep- tion that has endured too long : for if the infinitude of God is to be conceived of as absolute, and His universality consists in His bearing the same relation to all His creatures, like the physical laws which Mr. Fox takes up as affording us an analogy for His moral IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 71 nature, then indeed the Christian conception of His rule attributes to Him superstitious partialities and dislikes. In treating of divine attributes Mr. Fox is, of course, obliged to give up the " holiness " of God, in the common, and, as I conceive it, the true sense of the word. He conceives that to represent Him as of "purer eyes than to behold iniquity," and as " angry with the wicked every day," is an arbitrary and degrading superstition ; — " Wiser he, to our perception, who perceives the rela- tion and sub-ordination of evil to good — who apprehends that the Deity meant virtue to be a progressive thing in human nature, to be attained by trial and struggle ; and the comparative and relative perfection of his Ijeing only to be reached by strife within and without, from which the spirit mounts stronger and yet stronger after every conflict, until it basks in the brightness of the unclouded rays of the perfectly Holy." — P. 84. This is so obvious a consequence of the premises Mr. Fox had already assumed, that I need not com- ment upon it further than to suggest that the theory which makes the subordination of evil to good (so much insisted on by the necessarian scheme) the means of making virtue either intelligible or desirable to man, professes to explain much more than it can : all that, at the most, it could account for would be the introduction of temptation into the world, not of sin. If needed as a background to set off the beauty and glory of virtue, the possibility of sin would do as well as its reality ; and if sin be not really a moral consequence of liberty, but only a providential con- trivance for enhancing the brilliance of virtue, the same effect could be produced by retaining all the moral phenomena of conflict and effort, only with 72 POPULAE PANTHEISM IV the provision that they should all end in victory. Nor let it be said that this would be a deception which would be unworthy of the Divine Being, and which would fail in its end, because finding that the danger was always surmounted, it would at last be disregarded. The moral struggle is alivays a decep- tion, if it be true that we only deceive ourselves in the belief that two or more possibilities are open to us ; and it would be as easy to Providence to im- plant in us the belief that it was only our own effort which prevented us from falling, as it is now to con- vince us that we have fallen by no necessity, but only by a moral wilfulness of our own. One would think that it might have been as easy to contrast virtue with the danger as with the reality of vice ; let the traveller's road pass along the brink of an awful chasm, at which his head turns giddy, and he will need no fall to convince him how very wise it is to keep his footing if he can : if the only object is to make a didactic impression on his mind, and show him the blessing of his position, this might surely be as well effected by the terrors of anticipation ; and it seems a useless cruelty to add the misery of actual degradation. The arrangement of Mr. Fox's book is almost as defective as its reasoning. In speaking of God, and drawing out the divine attributes, he argues from the human principles within to the divine character which they reveal. From our fear, he deduces our faith in a Power ; from our gratitude, in a Beneficence, around us. It is clear, therefore, that he should have considered the moral faculty in man, before speaking of the holiness of God, to which it corre- sponds. But this would not, in truth, have suited his purpose ; had he done so, he would have forced IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 73 upon himself the very questions which his previous assumption as to the all-pervading agency of God had led him to pre-determine. And so he puts this part of the discussion only at the very close, in time to aid him in determining the destiny of man, but too late to cast any light back upon the character of God. I must just notice how essentially the truer arrangement might have affected the conclusions arrived at, had it been faithfully followed out. The feelings thatwe have towards another being do notteach us to enter into that being's character ; gratitude does not explain to us the feeling of beneficence ; nor admiration the essence of beauty ; nor fear the hidden nature of power — they tell us that some Object of these feelings is, not wlutt he is ; what we feel for him, not what he feels for us. We must be in his position, dispensing good, creating beauty, wielding power, before we begin to understand the hidden life of Him who was the object of these feelings of gratitude, admiration, and fear. Hence we begin to Jcnow God, not in worship, but in action ; not when we are filled with affections reciprocal to His, but when we feel the same turned up)on other beings beneath and around vis ; and then it is that the moral faculty begins to act, telling us His wishes as to the regulation of our conduct, and so speaking to us implicitly of the law which guides His own. We know that He has been good -to us, and when we begin to labour for others we enter into the knowledge of His goodness ; we know of His power over us, and when we first wield that power over others we begin to understand divine responsibility ; we know His displeasure, and when we begin to blame and punish, we learn something of the emotions that accompany His discipline ; but we have no 74 POPULAR PANTHEISM IV knowledge of His holiness till we have formed some conception of the whole character which this de- tailed experience of right and wrong tends to form in us, and of the relative power of the various springs of action resulting in us after we have either obeyed or resisted these individual moral directions. By limiting his view to the sentiments we feel towards God (which are partly the root of our faith in His being, but explain nothing of His nature), and omitting those that we do or might feel mth him, Mr. Fox has missed the very point in the psychology of religion which might have diverted him from his religious theory. I mean the fact that there are some sentiments which we feel with God, but some that we feel without Him, and in opposition to His, in the actions of our life. Here it is that the separation between the divine being and our own ought necessarily to come in : here it is that we should at once recognise that He is 7iot the infinite person that gathers up all being in Himself j here He appears not as a force, but as a voice ; not compelling but appealing, wishing what we dislike, disapproving what we wish : here is the eternal protest against Pantheism, God not in man, but against him, telling us of a life separated from ours as far as the East is from the West ; identifying our d^dy with His desire, when our own desire is different from our duty, and so providing us with proof that our being is not only distinct from His, but in very many of its tendencies widely divergent. This case of the moral faculty, where we feel that God exerts no force over us, but has sentiments directly contrary to our own, giving us His wish but saying nothing of His will, laying aside His power, and speaking only of right before our decision, yet distinctly telling of His IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 75 pleasure or displeasure afterwards — this surely would decide for ever that His being and ours are not really one. By considering only our affections towards God, which afford no possible means of comparing our natures with His, and deferring the consideration of the moral faculty which exhibits His spirit in close contact with and contrast to our own, till this very meagre survey of the divine attributes was concluded, so that the most complete and obvious means of distinguishing between the human and divine person- alities was neglected, Mr. Fox has avoided difficulties that his form of religion can never solve or explain away. He has formed his conceptions of Deity on the analogies of physical science and the newest thought of the age, and only where that fails him, and he can get no account of the future destiny of individual man, does he ask the human conscience to tell him somethingof the futureof humanity, though he omitted to question it as a witness to the nature of Clod. It will easily be understood what kind of a moral sense Mr. Fox's system, will alone admit : it is a mere taste or tendency in man towards the more beautiful course of conduct, which of course must take its place amongst the other tendencies of his nature. God being in all man's nature and actions, He is in this too, and, it would seem, more essentially, more per- manently, in this than in the others ; but still the fatal vice of all-pervading power comes in, so that even this becomes only one mode of the manifestation of that power, and cannot therefore be considered as the only true expositor of God's mind. Conscience is not, according to Mr. Fox, an expostulation with man, but an impulse in him, and its efficiency and strength in God can of course be estimated only by its results : so that the only means we could have of 76 POPULAR PANTHEISM IV estimating the nature of the divine ruler vi^ould be to strike a kind of average of the various impulses of which He is the source, at the same time taking into account the indications of increasing force in this, the highest impulse. The miserable vagueness in the treatment of this primary revelation of God's nature, the speed vpith which it is dismissed, and the suspicion with which it is treated rather as a rendezvous for impositions, than as our highest oracle of truth, is the most melancholy indication in this book. It is a con- sequence of this theory of the moral sense, that Mr. Fox pushes aside all retributive punishment as a superstition — he even calls it vindictive, a term that ought only to be applied to the anger excited by personal feeling ; and as a natural consequence, the attribute of justice is nowhere given to God. Re- pentance becomes, of course, a mere discontent with an unsatisfactory and inharmonious position in creation : — " Repentance is the opening of the heart to the mild and benignant influences of nature — an impatience of being any longer a discordant atom in that great system of things — a longing to be entirely at one with the life that is, and the life that is manifesting itself in progressive development." One might have thought that an atom sufficiently humble when placed in such a position would rest contented with the great work to which it was instrumental, the development of more perfect har- mony elsewhere, till it were swept along in the in- creasing stream of progress. But in this way must every system distort and caricature the moral nature of man, which takes the analogies of material science into the region of the spiritual life. One sees clearly, indeed, in the chapter on Crea- IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 77 tion and Providence, that this is the side from which Mr. Fox has approached the solution of the religious problems of this book. The difficulties involved in the conception of Creation being, however, totally unreligious, so long, at least, as a divine power is not changed into a mechanical force, I pass them by with the remark that Mr. Fox, whilst ridiculing unmerci- fully the theory which makes distinct volition the creative power, has nothing better to substitute him- self, but the dark phrases, " the infinite evolving the finite," — and " the one infinite, universal, and eternal, the great Original," giving out " modifications and manifestations." But the theory of Providence is one which, unless harmonised with general moral and physical laws, can assuredly stand no longer ; and yet it is one which has exerted so profound an influence over every Christian mind from the earliest Christian ages to our own, that to part with it would be to give up the very life of religion. Mr. Fox dismisses the difficulty by giving up all particular providence, — i.e. resigning Providence entirely, — in favour of general laws, and stating his belief that the whole series of objects and events are only complex results of a number of different and general laws. There are laws, he says, of the material, the mental, and the moral world, and no one class ever interferes with any other ; the material result is the consequence of material laws, the moral of moral laws ; and physical consequences are no more varied for moral reasons, than moral consequences for the sake of physical results. Now putting aside entirely at present the question of miracles (which of course would be assumed impossible by one who admitted the truth of this assumption), I am quite willing to 78 POPULAR PANTHEISM iv admit this rule ; as, for example, to use Mr. Fox's illustrations, " The ship not seaworthy will founder, whatever cargo it may hear of knowledge or bene- volence;" "The careful will accumulate, though his heart be as hard as the nether mill-stone." It is quite certain that in the ordinary course of Provi- dence, neither do the physical effects ever fail to fol- low their appropriate causes, nor do the moral effects of a man's own moral actions ever fail in their moral results on the mind. Yet to admit this is not to banish Providence from the lives of individuals any more than from the life of classes. One may even admit that of which there is at present no proof, that the first moral as well as physical constitution of every one, results as certainly from the moral and physical constitutions of his ancestors, as physical effects from their causes. Yet there is opening wide enough for the action of particular providential agencies, without the necessity of assuming that in the construction of the general laws of the universe, God chose such as in His infinite wisdom He knew should be the best suited to the moral wants of every individual case. Such an assumption would be impossible to prove, and sometimes seems to be untrue, as instances of strong seeming exception to the beneficial operation of these laws are constantly forcing themselves upon us. The true assumption with respect to these general laws, I am inclined to think, may be this, — that they have been so contrived as to be the best possible for the diffusion and strengthening of good in every individual case, did men always act with God and on the side of right. The human intro- duction of moral evil has introduced a confusion, however, into their operation, so that they often tend IV POPULAli PANTHEISM 79 to give force and diffusion to evil by the very means originally intended to aid and cherish good. An example of such a case might be taken from that well-known law of association, that the most vividly interesting thoughts gather closely round them all the dress of objects and events in which they were first clothed, so that the least of these last will recall the former to the mind. In the minds of those who regulate their thoughts by the highest law, never allowing themselves to dwell passionately on any but noble objects, this is a law of transmutation which changes at a touch the dross of physical sensations to the pure gold of the highest feeling. On the other hand, where the rule of conscience becomes a cipher in the heart, this law intended to transmit agencies of good becomes powerful for evil. Other cases might be adduced. But this is not all : not only is there providence in the general laws of G-od ; but there is philosophical room also for its introduction into the destinies of particular lives, as all Christians have always held. Clearly we must look for that introduction at the points where all the analogies of physical law fail, — in the free decisions of the human will. Here it is that higher suggestions are so constantly felt to occur, and to be so strangely beneficent in their results. Here it is that a thought or feeling darting into the mind, which, were it not for God's providence, would have never entered it, changes the whole course of duty and the whole destiny of life. From such moments of decision as these, go forth not only the immediate volitions, but the issues of life and death, and God, who knows the fates that await us, may often save us from the operation even of physical laws, not by suspending them, but by leading us from 80 POPOLAR PANTHEISM IV their sphere of action through the suggestion of an act that the will is prompt to do, or of a thought that detains us for a time from some eager pursuit. And thus, though it may be always true that no providential interference shall come between the care of the miser and the accumulation of his gold, yet it may, perhaps, intrude behind the sordid passion. At least, if the passion of avarice be not wholly rooted in him, but still be submitted sometimes to the deliberation of conscience, it may happen that a higher motive may for a time charm his heart into an hour's carelessness, and so cause the loss of all his hoarded gain : for the Providence who always carries out our volitions to their consequences, yet often interferes to prevent them, wherever that may be possible without a compulsion that He will not use. And so, too, though " the ship not seaworthy will founder, whatever cargo it may bear of know- ledge or benevolence," yet if God saw that such benevolence ought not to perish. He might turn aside its course by a suggestion of other duties in the moral deliberations j)receding the decision to sail. There is one consec^uence of this view of Provi- dence which is worthy of notice, and may, perhaps, be thought in some measure a verification of it. It has often been noticed that in very rude and very low states of society, individuals seem cheap, and that no visible Providence guides their lives at all. On the other hand, the higher the mind, the more it seems to glide into the region of providential control, and not only to be filled inwardly with a finer spirit, but guided outwardly through the ways where God's in- fluence will be greatest. Now the reason of this is plain on the supposition that the inlet for Providen- tial care is through those moments of deliberation IV POPULAR PANTHEISM 81 when a higher suggestion will avail. For in any society where men have not yet reached the stage of moral deliberation, this sphere is closed ; they are like physical atoms borne about by forces which they never stop to control or direct ; there is no space left between motion and action, desire and volition, where a suggestion may be interposed that could change their course. Animals who are blind slaves of impulse, driven about by forces from within, have, so to say, fewer valves in their moral constitution for the entrance of divine guidance ; and evil men who would not follow any thought but the fixed self-willed purposes of their selfish hearts, shut the door on Providence, and imprison their fate in a darkness where comparatively little of this special guidance can reach. On the other hand, the minds that are alive to every word from God, give constant oppor- tunity for His divine interference with a suggestion that may alter the courses of their lives ; and like the ships which turn when the steersman's hand but touches the wheel, God can steer them through the worst dangers by the faintest breath of feeling, or the lightest touch of thought. Will not this reconcile the universal faith in a Providence watching ever over our lives, with the most strenuous doctrine of immutable law, physical and moral, to any one, at least, who holds the liberty of the human will 1 I have given some little space to it, because Mr. Fox's remarks on the modern scientific notions of law, as exploding the old notions of Providence are not only likely to be generally impressive, but lie at the very root of his system, and colour his views throughout. For Mr. Fox obviously writes in constant dread of being supposed to believe any- thing superstitious, especially anything that could VOL. I G 82 POPULAR PANTHEISM iv come into collision with the discoveries of physical science. What, then, I have attempted to show in this essay is, that free vnll is the very centre of human personality, and that as, without it, it is impossible to distinguish between the agency of man and the agency of God, so it is equally impossible to distinguish between human impulses and divine inspiration : — finally, that without free will, special divine guidance and special Providence could mean no- thing except either a miracle (a suspension of law), or such an eternally pre-established harmony as should have made universal law to fit absolutely every particular case of human difficulty — a conception only consistent with the denial of free will : whereas, granting a limited free will to man, there is room for Providential guidance in the life of every man who is capable of guidance by spiritual influence. It would be useless to follow Mr. Fox into the discussion of his reasons for believing in immortality, or into his conception of the Christian religion, with these vast differences as to the very foundations of religion in the rear. The only useful discussion that is j^ossible between those who differ so widely, is discussion of the fundamental differences from which their other differences emerge. V WHAT IS REVELATION ? ^ As there is a substance, I believe, which not only- burns in water, but actually kindles at the very touch of water, so there certainly are insatiable doubts, which not only resist the power, but seem to kindle at the very centre of Christian faith. There is one question which I should have supposed set at rest for ever in the mind of any man who believes either in the revelations of conscience or those of Scripture, — the question whether or not it is per- mitted to man to hnoiv, and grow in the knowledge of, God. If that be not possible, I, for my part, should have assumed that religion was a name for unwise, because useless, yearnings in the heart of man ; and that the revelation — whether natural or supernatural — which professes to satisfy those yearnings, was simply a delusion. Yet so closely twined are the threads of human faith and scepticism, that probably half the Christian world scarcely knows whether to ^ What is Revelation 1 A Series of Sermons on the Epiphany; to which are oAdcd^ " Letters to a Student of Theology on the Banvpicm Lectures of Mr. Mmisel." By the Rey. F. D. Maurice, M.A., Cambridge. Macmillan, 1859. Preface to the Third Edition of Mr. Mansel's Bampton Lectures on the Limits of Religious Thought. London. Murray, 1857. 84 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? V think that the subject of revelation is God Himself, or only some fragments of His purpose for man ; while professed apologists for Christianity are often, like Dean Mansel, far firmer believers in the irremov- able veil which covers the face of God, than in the faint gleams of light which manage to penetrate what they hold to be its almost opaque texture. And, as I have intimated, this doubt is not only not extinguished by the Christian revelation, but it seems in some cases even to feed on the very essence of revelation. Dr. Mansel, for one, seems to regard the Christian revelation almost as express evidence that God is inscrutable to man, in that it only provides for us a " finite " type of the infinite mystery, and presents to us in Christ not, he thinks, the truth of God, but the best approximation to that truth — though possibly infinitely removed from it — of which " finite " minds are cajDable. In other words, he believes in the veil even more intensely than in the revelation : nay, he seems to think this conviction of his — that the veil is inherent in the essence of our human nature, and indissoluble even by death itself, unless death can show us how to evade the formal laws of human thought — likely to enhance our reverence for the voices, so mysteriouslj^ " adapted " to finite intelligence, which float to us from behind it. " In this impotence of Eeason," he says, " we are compelled to take refuge in faith, and to believe that an Infinite Being exists, though we know not how ; and that He is the same with that Being who is made known in consciousness as our Sustainer and our Lawgiver." And again, in the pre- face to his third edition ; — " It has been objected by reviewers of very opposite schools, that to deny to man a knowledge of the infinite. V WHAT IS BEVELATION ? 85 is to make Revelation itself impossible, and to leave no room for evidences on which reason can be legitimately employed. The objection would be pertinent, if I had ever maintained that Revelation is, or can be, a direct manifestation of the infinite nature of God. But I have constantly asserted the very reverse. In Revelation, as in Natural Religion, God is represented under finite con- ceptions, adapted to finite minds ; and the evidences on which the authority of Revelation rests are finite and comprehensible also. It is true that in Revelation, no less than in the exercise of our natural faculties, there is indirectly indicated the existence of a higher truth which, as it cannot be grasped by any effort of human thought, cannot be made the vehicle of any valid philosophical criticism. But the comprehension of this higher truth is no more necessary either to a belief in the contents of Revelation, or to a reasonable examination of its evidences, than a conception of the infinite divisibility of matter is necessary to the child before it can learn to walk." Thus, revelation, as it is conceived by Dr. Manse], is a mere adaptation of Truth to human forms of thought, whether it come through conscience or through Scripture ; in both cases alike it is the formation in our minds of a " representative idea," or type, of God, not the direct presentation of the Divine Life to our spirits, which he holds that we could not receive and live. By conscience the vision of a holy but finite Judge, Lawgiver, Father, is borne in upon our hearts, namely, through the conscious- ness of our dependence and of moral obligation ; by Scripture the historical picture of a finite law, a Providence adapted to finite minds, and lastly, a finite but perfect Son, are presented to our eyes. That is, certain messages have issued from the depths of the infinite mystery, and have been mercifully translated for us into the meagre forms of human 86 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v thought : some of them are siDontaneously welcomed by human consciences ; others, attested as they are by superhuman marvels, and not inconsistent with the revelations of the conscience, are ac- cepted as convincing by human reason ; and both alike help to teach us, — not what God is, — but how we may think of Him with least risk of un- speakable error. By these necessarily indirect hints, — the truest of which our nature is capable, — Dr. Mansel entreats us to hold, and to guide our footsteps ; calling them "regulative truths," by which he means the best loorldng hypotheses we are able to attain of the char- acter and purposes of God. They are the only palliatives of that darkness, to which the blinding veil of a human nature inevitably dooms us. Revela- tion, we are told, cannot unloose the " cramping " laws of a limited consciousness ; it cannot help the finite to apprehend the infinite ; but it can do some- thing to guide us in our blindness, so that we may not, in our ignorance, fall foul of the forces and laws of that infinite world which we are unable to know ; it can give us a " conception " of God, which is quite true enough as a practical manual for human conduct. But, to use Dr. Hansel's own words, " how far that knowledge represents God as He is, we know not, and have no need to know." This theory of Dr. Hansel's called forth from Mr. Maurice a reply, which was not merely an embodi- ment of a completely opposite conviction, but the insurrection of an outraged faith, the protest of a powerful character against a doctrine which pro- nounces that all the springs of its life have been delusions, and which tries to pass off human notions of God in the place of God. The somewhat thin V AVHAT IS KEVELATION ? 87 and triumphant logic of Dr. Mansel, — the evident preference for analysing the notions of man rather than returning to the study of the realities from which those notions were derived, — the dogmatic sentence passed on human Reason, condemning it to be imprisoned, as long as it remains human, in " the finite,'' — and most of all, the gospel of God's inaccess- ibility, — might in any case probably have drawn from Mr. Maurice a strong protest ; but when all these instruments were used avowedly in defence of Christianity, and Christ was put forward, not as the perfect revelation, but as the least inadequate symbol of the divine nature, I do not wonder that the tone of Mr. Maurice's reply was, if always charitable, often almost austere. Dr. Mansel had preached that the sphere of Reason is the field of human things ; Mr. Maurice holds that every fruitful study of human things implies a real insiglit into things divine. Dr. Mansel taught that the human mind is " cramped by its own laws " ; and that divine realities, therefore, so far as they can be the subject of its thoughts at all, must be stunted, or, as the phrase is, " accommodated " to the unfortunately dwarfed dimensions of the recipient : Mr. Maurice holds that the mind of man is " adapted " to lay a gradual hold of the divine truth it is to apprehend, and to grow into its immensity ; instead of the divine truth being "adapted" to the little capacities of the human mind. Dr. Mansel conceived that Christianity tells us just enough to keep us right with a God whom we cannot really know ; Mr. Maurice, that the only way we can be so kept right is by a direct and, in its highest form, conscious par- ticipation in the very life of God. On what, then, did Dr. Mansel profess to base his 88 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v assumptions ? Mainly on this, that if we really do hold direct and conscious converse with God, we should find the results of that converse, and of ap- titude for it, inscribed on our mental constitution. " A presentative revelation implies faculties in man which can receive the presentation; and such faculties will also furnish the conditions of constructing a philosophical theory of the object presented." With the first part of this sentence every one must agree ; if God can be present, as I believe, to the human mind, there must be faculties in us which enable us to discern that presence. But the latter assertion, that such faculties will also enable us to construct "a philosophical theory of the object presented," seems to me a most amazing and gratuitous asser- tion. A philosophical theorjr is possible when we stand above our object, not when we stand beneath it. The learner has faculties by which to learn ; but if what he studies is inexhaustible, he will never have a " philosophical theory " of it. Principles, no doubt, he will reach ; certain truths to mark his progress he will discover; he will know that he underdands better and better that which he can never comprehend ; but a theory of the whole he can never a.ttain unless the whole be within the limited range of his powers. Hence I entirely deny Dr. Hansel's assumption, that direct converse with God implies faculties for constructing " a theory " of God. This was the fundamental error of his work. He admits no knowledge except that which is on a level with its object. Nothing is easier than to prove that no j)lummet of human Reason can measure the depths of the divine mind ; nothing falser than to suppose that this incapacity shuts us out entirely from that Y WHAT IS REVELATION ? 89 mind, and proves it to be the painted veil of " repre- sentative notions " of God, and not God Himself, who has filled our spirits in the act of worship. I hold, then, that this was Dr. Hansel's first, and perhaps deepest, error. He saw that we have no "theory" of God which is not presumptuous and self-contradictory, and he argued therefrom that we have no knowledge. Surely he might have leai'ned better from the simplest facts of human life. Have we any " theory " of any human being that will bear a moment's examination ? Yet is our communion with our fellow-men limited to a consciousness of our own notions of them ? Are not " fixed ideas " of human things a sign of a proud and meagre intellect t Yet Dr. Mansel practically denies all knowledge of divine things, except knowledge through " fixed ideas." He mistakes that which hides God from us for that which reveals Him. "Notions," "fixed ideas," of God, no doubt, and very poor ones too, we have in abundance ; but instead of being the media of our knowledge, they are more often the veil which every true moral experience has to tear aside. When we turn to Him with heart and conscience, we find half the crystallised and petrified ideas profess- ing to represent His attributes, dissipated like mists before the sun. To know is not to have a notion which stands in the place of the true object, but to be in direct communion with the true object. And this is exactly most possible where theory, or com- plete knowledge, is least possible. We know the " abysmal deeps " of personality, but have no theory of them. We know love and hatred, but have no theory of them. We know God better than we know ourselves, better than we know any other human being, better than we know either love or 90 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? V hatred ; but have no theory of, simply because we stand under, and not above, Him. We can recog- nise and learn, but never comprehend. It is there- fore idle to argue that knowing faculties imply the means of " constructing a philosophical theory," when every case in which living beings share their life and experience with us adds to our knowledge and to our grasp of principle ; whereas we can con- struct adequate " theories " about only the most abstract subjects. But this point granted, Dr. Mansel took his next stand in favour of a merely " notional " theology, on the infinite nature of God. Admit, he said, that we cannot adequately comprehend our relations with finite realities, still such knowledge as we have of them may be direct, because our knowing power bears some definite proportion to the object known. But knowledge of an infinite being should either imply or generate, — so he reasoned, — infinite ideas in your own intellect. Have you such ideas ? If so, produce them. If not, admit at once that what knowledge you have of such beings is not direct, not first-hand at all, but at best only by rejDresentative ideas — miniature copies of the reality on an infinitely reduced scale. The object to be known is unlimited ; the intellectual receptacle a very narrow cell. There can be no room there for that which' it professes to hold ; if, therefore, anything which gives a real notion of that object actually has managed to squeeze in, it can only be a minute image, a faint symbol, an " adaptation " to the poverty of human nature. Only a finite fraction of the infinite Reality could be apprehended by a finite intelligence at best ; and that, of course, would give far less conception of the whole than a representative idea, reduced proper- V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 91 tionately in all its parts to suit " the apprehensive powers of the recipient." Such was, as far as I understand it, the nature of Dr. Hansel's objection. " In whatever affection," he said, " we become conscious of our relation with the Supreme Being, ive can discern that consciousness only by reflecting on it under its proper notion." Dr. Mansel did reflect on it, through many lectures, under several " notions," which he at least conceived to be " proper " ; and finding them all what he terms finite, he ended by telling us that the human mind can only apprehend a finite type of God, and yet is compelled to believe that God is infinite : whence he argues that we can have no direct knowledge of God at all, but can only study a limited symbol of Him, which He Himself has mercifully introduced into our minds, and reproduced in an objective and more perfect form in the incarnation of Christ. And if, still dissatisfied, any one suggests to Dr. Mansel that knowledge of God, like knowledge of human things, may be partial, but yet direct, and progressive, — in short, a real and growing union of our mind with His, — he replies : — " Tlie supposition refutes itself : to liave a partial knowledge of an object is to know a part of it, but not the whole. But the part of the infinite which is supposed to be known, must be itself either infinite or finite. If it is infinite, it presents the same difiiculties as before ; if it is finite, the point in question is conceded, and our consciousness is allowed to be limited to finite objects. But in truth it is obvious, on a moment's reflection, that neither the Absolute nor the Infinite can be represented in the form of a Whole composed of parts. Not the Absolute, for the existence of the Whole is dependent on the existence of its parts ; not the Infinite, for if any 92 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v part is Infinite, it cannot be distinguished from the Whole ; and if each j)art is finite, no number of such parts can constitute the infinite." Now what does all this prove ? This, and this only : that if we take the words " Absolute " and " Infinite " to mean that He to whom they are applicable chokes up the universe, mental and physi- cal, and prevents the existence of every one else, then it is nonsense and clear contradiction for any one else, who is conscious of his own existence, to use these words of God at all. Surely, this might have been said without so much circumlocution. And what would Dr. Mansel thereby gain % Simply, as far as I can see, that he had established the certain non- existence of any Being in this sense "absolute" or "infinite." Dr. Mansel denied this, and said, "No, I have only proved that a ijhilosophy of the Absolute and Infinite is impossible to man." But if asked, Why not to G-od also, and to all rational beings who do not believe in any philosophy of self-contradictions and chimeras 1 he would immediately turn upon me and say, " Because, after all, you must admit that there is an 'Absolute' and an 'Infinite,' and that these terms ought to apply to God. It is our in- competence to conceive, that involves us in all these self-contradictions. If you are going to deny the existence of the ' Absolute ' and ' Infinite,' you will get into as much trouble in another direction as if you admit and try to reason upon them. Suppose there is no Infinite and Absolute, and then we must assume the universe to be made up of finites, and to be itself finite. Which is the more inexplicable alternative of the two ? " Now, such reasoning seems to me a mere playing fast and loose with words. Dr. Mansel first wanted V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 93 the words " Infinite " and " Absolute " to exclude all limitation or order of all sorts. Everything like essential laws of mind or character, — every mental or moral condition or constitution, self-imposed or otherwise, under which the Divine mind could act, — he called a limitation, and excluded from the meaning of the words. When he had proved, what is exceedingly easy to prove on such an hypothesis, that we can only speak of the Infinite in self-contra- dictions, he added, " Well, then, here is an end of the Absolute and Infinite. Clearly we are unable to grasp this ; but the only alternative is the ' relative ' and 'finite,' an alternative still more inexplicable." And here by "finite," remember, he means, not that which acts under given conditions, — under the limit- ations, say, of a Perfect Nature, infinitely rich in creative power, though of ordered Creative Power, issuing from the depths of an Eternal Holiness and Eternal Reason, but limited in every direction ; con- ditioned everywhere, not by the life-giving order of Character, but by the helplessness of external bonds. I have no hesitation in saying that between unlimited Infinitude, understood in that sense in which Dr. Mansel thinks that less imbecile mental constitutions than ours would find no contradiction in it, and the absolutely cramped and fettered Finitude, understood in the sense in which there is no realm of unlimited development and free creation at all — between these extremes, I say, the whole universe of mind, from the Divine to the human, is necessarily comprehended. The one alternative, which Dr. Mansel did not deign to admit into his religious dilemma even hypo- thetically — that of unlimited energy, conditioned by definite laws, moral and spiritual — is that which the revelation of conscience and the revelation of history 94 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v alike offer to us as the actual standard of perfection. The sense in which the " Absolute " and " Infinite " are really self- contradictory terms, is the sense in which we try to make them proof against every limitation ; and they are so in that case for the very simple reason, that the absence of all positive charac- teristics is, as Dr. Mansel himself admitted, not only as great, but really a far greater limitation than the presence of those characteristics would be. A vacuum is certainly not limited, like a human being, by any specific mode of life ; but it must be said to be still more limited by the absence of all modes of life whatever. On the other hand, the sense in which the conscience and reason of man eagerly assert the reality of an " Infinite " and " Absolute " Being, is not in the least the sense in which they are self-contradictory terms. We are forced to believe in a being whose moral and intellectual constitution is, not vaguer and less orderly, but infinitely dis- tincter and more rich in definite qualities and char- acteristics than our own : but whose free Creative energies, as determined by those characteristics, are infinitely greater also. The mental constitution which impresses Order on the operation of Power is not, we are taught alike by conscience and inspiration, a true limitation on life, in the sense of a fetter; but is rather in itself a proper fountain of fresh life, and an enhance- ment of Power which would otherwise neutralise itself. Our incapacity to conceive the " Infinite " and " Ab- solute," in the sense in which they repudiate all con- ditions, turns out to be a positive qualification for conceiving them as names of God. We want them as describing attributes in which we can trust, and we can only trust in the attributes of a perfectly holy, and therefore, in some sense, defined Nature. V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 95 We may be fully satisfied, then, as the lesson of all experience, that the real fulness and perfection of character which we vainly strive to express by the word " infinite " is not gained by the absence, but by the expansion and deepening, of those defined moral qualities which Dr. Mansel wants to persuade us to consider mere Umitatio7is of nature. When, for in- stance, he applies the word " infinite," in its physical sense, to the divine personality, and asks if it does not exclude all other beings, -because any other really free will must impose a limit on the operation of the divine will, — I ask if there would not be far deeper limitation in the denial to God of the possibility of that divine love which can exercise itself only on free wills. That only can be considered a real limita- tion which chokes the springs of spiritual life ; and all self-imposed limitation on absolute power which is the condition of a real exercise of the spiritual or higher springs of life, is the reverse of real limitation. This is the lesson of every human responsibility. Is not every new duty, social or moral, a limitation of some kind — an obligation to others which at least in some direction appears to impose a limit on us, and yet which, enlarges the whole scope of our nature ? And is it not equally clear that a divine solitude would be more limited by the necessity of solitude, than by the freedom of the beings who are learning to share the divine life 1 Dr. Mansel would say that all this is playing into his hands. He desired to persuade us that all direct knowledge of God is impossible, because we cannot tell what is limitation and what is not; in other words, we can form no adequate " conception " of fulness or perfection of life. What seems to us limitation, may be, not limitation, but a mode of 96 WHAT IS REVELATION ? V divine power ; what we reverently think of as belonging to God because it is included in our notion of power, may not really belong to Him, but be, in fact, a human limitation. Assuredly this is so. I have already admitted that if adequate or exhaustive notions, not of God only, but of any living being, were needful to us for direct knowledge, we should have no direct knowledge of life at all. But I have been protesting against Dr. Mansel's theory, not for saying that we -have no adequate conception of God, but for saying that we cannot be conscious of His presence with us, conscious of the life we do receive from Him, conscious of what He really is, conscious in the same, indeed, even in a far higher, sense than that in which we are conscious of what human beings are. We cannot tell whether this or that would be a limitation on the divine essence ; but we can tell whether love and righteousness and power flow from Him into us. Does this give us no knowledge of God 1 Does this give us no communion with Him? "No," said Dr. Mansel ; "for 'love/ and 'righteousness,' and 'power,' can be received into your minds only in finite parcels, which give no approximation to a knowledge of their infinite fount- ain." Here, again, we come upon that delusive and positive use of the word " infinite " which, in spite of Dr. Mansel's protest that "infinite" has only a negative meaning, run through his whole book. He says we do not know what " infinite " means, and, therefore, cannot know that the "finite" is like the " infinite." We know God's love, and are obliged to believe that it is immeasurably deeper than we can know ; and Dr. Mansel would persuade us that this last faith may change the whole meaning of the first, that the very depth and truth which we assert V WHAT IS REVELATION? 97 ourselves unable to gauge, ought to be a source of doubt whether we know the reality at all. A life comes into a man, the depths of which he cannot sound ; and his very conviction that he has not the capacity to comprehend its fulness, is to empty it of all defined meaning ! Surely Dr. Mansel must see that " infinite " is a mere hollow word when used in this way. The conviction we express by that word is simply that what we know to be restraints on our own highest and fullest life do not exist in God ; but this con- viction, instead of leading us to fear that righteous- ness and love change their nature in Him because He is "infinite," fills us with certainty that they do not. In short, righteousness and love are qualities which, if we are competent to know them really in any single act, we know to be the same in all acts ; and all that we mean by calling them infinite is, that we have more and more to learn about them for ever, which will not change and weaken, but confirm and deepen, the truth gained in every previous act of our knowledge. Dr. Hansel's notion, that because our knowing capacity is limited and God inexhaustible, we can never know directly more than such a fraction of His nature as would be rather a mockery than a personal revelation, is a mere physical metaphor. Our capacity for knowing may be limited either so that partial know- ledge is delusive (as of one corner of a triangle if taken for the whole) ; or so only that it is true in kind, and extends to the whole, but is utterly in- adequate in depth. The latter is, of course, true of all direct knowledge of a persotiality which we know to be one and indivisible. What we do not know is, then, mainly, the immeasurable range and inex- VOL. I H 98 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v haustible depth of that which in a single act we do know. Or if there be other characteristics as yet wholly unknown, we know them to be in harmony with, because belonging to, the same personality as those we do know. In brief, I may sum up my differences with Dr. Mansel on this head by saying, that if " infinite " is to mean the exclusion of all definiteness of nature and character, — then we do know, and he himself admits, that infinitude has no application to God, if only because it would itself be a far greater limita- tion than that which it excluded ; that if, on the other hand, it be admitted to be consistent with a defined character, and to mean rather " perfection," — then that though we certainly have no abstract idea of what this is, we yet have positive faculties for conscious recognition of such a Perfect Being when manifested to our conscience and reason, and an inextinguishable faith in His perfection even as unmanifested. Finally, if it be maintained that what we can thus recognise is as nothing when compared with what is beyond our vision, we may admit it, provided only that what we do know is direct knowledge, and knowledge of God, not of a part of God ; and that it carries with it not merely a hope, but a certainty, that the inexhaustible depths still unrevealed will only deepen and extend, instead of falsifying, that knowledge at which we have arrived. I have dwelt somewhat long on what seems to me a most transparent sophism, because it is on it that Dr. Mansel relies for his assertion that our know- ledge of God cannot be direct; that Eevelation cannot reveal Him, but only a finite type of Him, more or less different from the reality — how differ- V WHAT IS EEVELATION ? 99 ent no one can dare to say. Such a position destroys all interest in the revelation when it comes. If it be only a working hypothesis, to keep us, while confined in the human, from blindly and uncon- sciously dashing ourselves against the laws of the divine; if it merely says, "Take this chart, which necessarily alters the infinite infinitely to make it finite ; but nevertheless, if you steer by it, it will save you as much from the rooks as if it were true," — I do not believe that any of us would care much for Revelation at all. We should say, " Show us fresh realities, and whether they be finite or infinite, we will attend ; but as for these magical clues, which only promise to keep us straight, without showing us how or why, we would rather be wrecked against one really discovered rock, we would rather founder in the attempt to sound our own ' dim and perilous wa}"-,' than be constantly obeying directions which are mere accommodations to our ignorance, and which will leave us, even if we obey them strictly, and reach the end of our voyage in safety, as ignor- ant of the real world around us as when we began it." Yet Dr. Hansel's great plea for Eevelation, as he understands it, is, that it provides us with regula- tive though not with speadaUve truth, — that it gives us wise advice, the wisdom of which we can test by experience ; though furnishing nothing but guesses at the true grounds of that advice. Now if any one is disposed to admire the apparent modesty of this conclusion, and to acquiesce in it as the true humility of mature wisdom, he will do well to study in Mr. Maurice's profound volume the evidence that every living movement of human thought, religious or othenvise, cries out against it. All regulative truth,— all truth, that is, which has a 100 WHAT IS REVELATION ? V deep influence on human action, all truth in which men trust, — is founded in the discovery of ultimate causes, not of empirical rules. The distrust of empi- rical rules in science, in art, in morals, in theology, is all of the same root. It may be safest to act on probabilities where there is no certainty ; to act by empirical rule where the principle of the rule is undiscovered ; to follow a plausible authority where there is no satisfying truth ; and by such rules, no doubt, in the absence of all temptation to disregard them, men are occasionally guided when they cannot reach any basis of fact. But, as Mr. Maurice very power- fully insists, there is no single region of life in which these "regulative" and approximate generali- ties exercise any transforming influence on the mind. The smallest probability will outweigh the greatest if it fall in with our wishes ; the empirical rule suddenly appears specially inapplicable to the exceptional case in which it becomes inconvenient. The plausible authority is disputable where its recommendations are irritating or painful. It is quite different where we have reached a fresh certainty, a new cause, a new force, a new and self- sustaining truth, a new fountain of actual life. Actual things and persons we cannot ignore ; we may struggle with or defy them, but we cannot forget to take them into account. For the lottery- prize we will pay far more than it is worth, the number of blanks scarcely affecting the imagination ; the danger of detection often fails to check the bond fide impulse to crime ; a single certain suffering independ- ent of success or failure, — the anguish of conscience, which success rather intensifies, — will outweigh it all. Exactly in proportion to the exclusion of hypothetical and the presence of known and tested elements is V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 101 the really " regulative " influence exerted on the human will. Believe with Dr. Mansel that Revela- tion gives us only a more or less true notion of God, and it will cease to kindle us at all. Eecog- nise in it with Mr. Maurice the direct manifestation of God to the conscience, and the life thus mani- fested will haunt us into war, if it do not fill us with its peace. If faith give no certainty, it is not " regulative " in Dr. Mansel's sense ; if it does not satisfy the reason, it cannot overawe the will. Dr. Mansel appears to regard the phrase " satisfying to the reason " as applying to that sort of knowledge which can answer every query of human curiosity. He tells us that the influence of mind on matter is a regulative- truth, of which we cannot give the least account, — and not, therefore, satisfying to the reason. In this sense, clearly, no living influence in the universe is satisfying to the reason ; for we cannot reason anything into life. But this is a totally different sense from that in which he invites us to surrender our desire for a reasonable knowledge of God, as distinguished from a regulative message from Him. Reason in the highest sense does not pursue its questions beyond the point of discriminating be- tween a real and permanent cause or substance, and a dependent consequence or a variable phenomenon. It asks " why " only till it has reached something which can justify its own existence, and there it stops. True reason is satisfied when it has traced the stream of effect up to a living origin, and dis- criminated the nature of that origin. It is not the impulse of Eeason, but, as Mr. Maurice has finely said, the disease of Eationalism, which continues to make us restless questioners in 102 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? v the presence of those living objects which ought to fill and satisfy the reason, — inducing us to ask for a reason deeper than Beauty before we can admire, for a reason deeper than Truth before we can be- lieve, for a reason deeper than Holiness before we can love, trust, and obey. But no true reason is, or ought to be, satisfied with an echo, a type, a symbol, of something higher which it cannot reach. If it find transitory beauty in the type, it turns by its own law to gaze on the Eternal beauty beneath ; if it find broken music in the echo, it yearns after the perfect harmony which roused the echo. Eeason might be defined to be that which leads us to dis- tinguish the sign from the thing signified, — which leads us back from the rule to the principle, from the principle to the purpose, from the purpose to the living character in which it originated, — which, in short, will not be satisfied with any image, but cries after the original. If this be Eeason, then to satisfy Eeason is to find out truly regulative truth : for what is it which, in the passion and fever of life, truly transforms and chastens human purposes 1 Surely nothing but the knowledge of realities, — sensible realities more than spiritual abstractions, — spiritual realities most of all ; even mere tJiinr/s painful or delightful far more than any abstract ideas ; men far more than things ; men present more than men absent ; but men absent more than the dream of an absent God, because we have lost our faith in God altogether when we have lost our faith in His direct presence with us. I need scarcely take more than one example of what Dr. Mansel calls regulative moral truth. It will be quite sufficient to test the utterly hollow and unregulative character of the gospel which alone he can deliver to V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 103 his disciples. He tells us that our human morality, like our human objects of faith, is an adaptation to our condition ; though it may resemble, with never- theless inconceivable differences, the divine morality from which it has been epitomised for us. What is his illustration 1 One so extraordinary, that it is difficult to believe he was not trying to prove that such reduced and "adapted" rules and types can have no regulative influence on the human will. He is arguing that there is not, and cannot be, " a per- fect identity," or even " exact resemblances " between the morality of God and man, — that actions may be " compatible with the boundless goodness of God which are incompatible with the little goodness of which man may be conscious in himself." The case he takes is the duty of human forgiveness. It is the duty of man, he says, to forgive unconditionally a repented sin. People who argue that God cannot be less good than man, assume that God must do likewise. The fallacy lies, he maintains, in forgetting that the finite form of human duty essentially alters the moral standard in the mind of God. This he proves as follows : — " It is obvious, indeed, on a moment's reflection, that the duty of man to forgive the trespasses of his neighbour rests precisely upon those features of human nature which cannot by any analogy be regarded as representing an image of God. Man is not the author of the moral law ; he is not, as man, the moral governor of his fellows ; he has no authority, merely as man, to' punish moral transgressions as such. It is not as sin, hut as injury, that vice is a transgression against man ; it is not that his holi- ness is outraged, hut that his rights or Ms interests are impaired. The duty of forgiveness is imposed as a check, not upon the justice, but upon the selfishness of man ; it 104 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v is not designed to extinguish his indignation against vice, but to restrain his tendency to exaggerate his own per- sonal injuries. The reasoner who maintains ' it is a duty in man to forgive sins, therefore it must be morally fitting for God to forgive them also,' overloolcs the fact that this duty is binding on man on account of the weakness and ignorance and sinfulness of his nature : that he is bound to forgive as one who himself needs forgiveness ; as one whose wealiness renders him liable to suffering ; as one whose self-love is ever ready to arouse his passions and pervert his judgment." I scarcely ever met with a passage in any thought- ful writer which seemed to contain deeper and more disastrous misreadings of moral, to say nothing of Christian, truth, than this. To me the profound and fatal falsehood lies exactly in that which con- stituted its value to Dr. Mansel — the assumption that man's duty to forgive is not grounded in his likeness, but in his unKkeness, to God. But it is not to this point I wish to call attention, but to the worth of such a truth as regards its power to regulate human conduct. If there be anywhere a duty hard of performance, it is the duty of human forgiveness. If there be one which the ordinary nature of man spurns as humiliating, and almost as a wrong to his whole mind, it is that duty. Ground it in the very nature of God, in the holy living will which, ever close to us, ever able to crush, is ever receiving fresh injury, and yet, even in inflicting the supernatural anguish of divine judgment, is ever offering anew both the invitation and the power to repent, — and you open the spirit to a reality which cannot but awe and may melt it, in the hour of trial. But ground it with Dr. Mansel on the old, worn out, lax sort of charity which is indulgent to others because V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 105 it is weak itself, and it will be the least regulative, I suspect, of regulative duties. Mr. Maurice's ex- posure of the hollowness of this foundation is too fine to omit : — " ' The duty of forgiveness is binding upon man on account of the weakness and ignorance and sinfulness of his nature.' But wliat if the weakness, ignorance, and sinfulness of my nature dispose me not to forgive ! What if one principal sign of this weakness, ignorance, sinful- ness of my nature is, that I am unforgiving 1 What if the more weak, ignorant, and sinful my nature is, the more impossible forgiveness becomes to me, the more disposed I am to resent every injury, and to take the most violent means for avenging it ? It is my duty to forgive, because I am ' one whose self-will is ever ready to arouse his passions and pervert his judgment.' To arouse my passions, to what ? To anything so much as to acts of revenge ? To pervert my judgment, how 1 In any way so much as by making me think that I am right and other men wrong, and that 1 may vindicate my right against their wrong ? And this is the basis of the duty of forgiveness ! The temper which inclines me at every moment to trample upon that duty, to do what it forbids ! The obvious conclusion, then, has some obvious difficulties. Obvious indeed ! Tliey meet us at every step of our way ; they are the difficulties in our moral progress. Forgiveness is 'to be a check on the selfishness of man.' Where does he get the check ? From his selfishness. It is the old, miserable, hopeless circle. I am to persuade myself by certain arguments not to do the thing which I am inclined to do. But the inclination remains as strong as ever : bursts down all the mud fortifications that are built to confine it ; or else remains within the heart, a worm destroying it, a fire consuming it. Whence, O whence is this forgiveness from the heart to come, which I cry for ? Is it impossible ? Am I to check my selfish- ness by certain rules about the propriety of abstaining 106 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? V from acts of unforgiving ferocity ? God have mercy upon those who have only such rules, in a siege or a shipwreck, when social bonds are dissolved, when they are left to themselves ! All men have declared that forgiveness, real forgiveness, is not impossible. And we have felt that it is not impossible, becavise it dwells somewhere in beings above man, and is shown by them, and comes down as the highest gift from them upon man. . . . And whenever the idea of Forgiveness has been severed from this root, — whenever the strong conviction that we are warring against the nature of God and assuming the nature of the Devil by an unforgiving temper has given place to a sentimental feeling that we are all sinners, and should be tolerant of each other, — then has come that weakness and effeminacy over Christian society, that dread of punishing, that unwillingness to exercise the severe functions of the Ruler and the King, which has driven the wise back upon older and sterner lessons, has made them think the vigour of the Jew in putting down abominations, the self-assertions of the Greek in behalf of freedom, were manlier than the endurance and compassion of the Christians. Wliich I should think too, if, referring the endurance and compassion to a divine standard, I did not find in that standard a justification of all which was brave and noble in the Jewish protest against evil, in the Greek protest against tyranny. Submission or Compassion, turned into mere qualities which we are to exalt and boast of as characteristic of our religion, become little else than the negations of Courage and Justice. Contem- plated as the reflections of that Eternal Goodness and Truth which were manifested in Christ, as energies pro- ceeding from him and called forth by his Spirit, — submission to personal slights and injuries, the com- passion for every one who is out of the way, — become instruments in tlie vindication of Justice and Right, and of that Love in the fires of which all selfishness is to be consumed." V WHAT IS KEVELA.TION ? 107 I have done my best to explain why I utterly dis- avow Dr. Hansel's interpretation of Kevelation, as a message intended to regulate human practice without unfolding the realities of the divine mind. It is a less easy task, but not less the proper task of those who are gravely sensible of the emptiness of such an interpretation, to give some exposition to the deeper meaning which the fact of Revelation assumes to their own minds. I hold that it is an unveiling of the very character and life of the eternal God ; and an unveiling, of course, to a nature which is capable of beholding Him. It is not, in my belief, an over- clouding of divine light to suit it for the dimness of human vision, but a purification of human vision from the weakness and disease which render it liable to be dazzled and blinded by the divine light. It is, in short, the history of the awakening, purifying, and answering, of the yearnings of the human spirit, for a direct knowledge of Him. It proceeds from God, and not from man. The cloud which is on the human heart and reason can only be gradually dis- persed by the divine love ; no restless straining of turbid human aspiration can wring from the silent skies that knowledge which yet every human being is formed to attain. Coming from God, this method, this " education of the human race," as Leasing truly termed Revelation, has been unfolded with the unfolding cajjacity of the creatures He was educating to know Him. Its signi- ficance cannot be confined to any special series of his- torical facts ; but it is clear that the Divine govern- ment of the Jewish race was meant to bring out, and did bring out, more distinctly the personality of God, while the history of other races brings out more clearly the divine capacities of man. Hence 108 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? V the co-operation of different nations was requisite for the efficiency of the revelation. Centuries were re- quired for the complete evolution even of that special Jewish history that was selected to testify to the righteous will and defined spiiritual character of the Creator. Centuries on centuries will be required to discipline fully the human faculties that are to grow into the faith thus prepared for them. The blind- ness of the greatest men, of the highest races, of wide continents, cannot shake one's faith that this purpose will be fulfilled ; for the term of an earthly life is adequate at best only for an immortal life's conscious commencement, and only under special conditions even for that ; nor are there wanting indications that both in the case of men and nations the longest training, and the dreariest periods of abeyance of spiritual life, are often preparations for its fullest growth. By tedious discipline, by slow Providence, by inspirations addressed to the seeking intellect of the philosopher, to the yearning imagina- tion of the poet, to the ardent piety of the prophet, to the common reason and conscience of all men, and by the fulfilment of all wisdom in the Son of God's life on earth, has the Divine Spirit sought to drive away the mists that dim our human vision. Alike through its wants and powers has human nature been taught to know God. Its every power has been haunted by a want till the power was referred to its divine source ; its very wants have become powers when they have turned to their divine object. If this, then, and nothing short of this, be Revelation, a living and direct unfolding of that divine mind in which, whether we recognise it or not, we " live and move, and have our being, " — an eternal growth in our knowledge of the eternal V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 109 Life, — one ought not to rest satisfied witli showing that Dr. Hansel's reasons for disputing the possi- bility of such a wonderful truth are unsound, — one ought also to show by what criteria we judge that this is the actual fact, the great reality, on which all our love of truth and knowledge rests. The first stage in any revelation must be, one would suppose, the dawning knowledge that there is a veil "on the heart" of man, and that there is a life unmanifested behind it. In Dr. Hansel's, as in my view, this is a knowledge which can be gained by man ; but he makes it the final triumph of human faith and philosophy to recognise and acquiesce in it ; while I hold it to be the very first lesson of the per- sonal conscience, the very first purpose of that exter- nal discipline which was intended to engrave the Divine personality on Jewish history, to teach that though such a cloud will ever threaten the mind and conscience, it can he dispersed. What, indeed, is the first lesson of the human conscience, the first truth impressed upon the Jewish nation, but this, that a presence besets man behind and before, which he cannot evade, and which is ever giving new meanings to his thoughts, new directions to his aims, new depth to his hopes, new terror to his sins ? Where, then, if this haunting presence be so overpowering, if it follow us as it followed the deep- est minds among the Jewish people, till it seem almost intolerable, — where is the darkness and the veil which Eevelation implies 1 Just in the fact that this presence does seem intolerable ; that it is so far apart from that of man, that, like a dividing sword, it makes his spirit start ; that he seeks to escape, and is, in fact, really able to resist it ; that he can so easily case-harden his spirit against the supernatural 110 WHAT IS REVELATION ? V pain ; that instead of opening his mind to receive this painfully tasking life that is not his own, he can so easily, for a time at least, set up in its place an idol carved out of his own nature, or something even more passive than his own nature, and therefore not likely to disturb his. dream of rest. This, I take it, is the first stage or act of revela- tion, whether in the individual conscience, or in that special history which is intended to reveal the conflicts between the heart of a nation and the God who rules it. It is the discovery of a presence too pure, too great, too piercing, for the natural life of man, — the eff'ort of the mind, on one pretence or another, to be allowed to stay on its own level and disregard this presence, — the knowledge that this must end in sinking below its own level, — the actual trial and experience that it is so, — the reiterated pain and- awe of a new intrusion of the supernatural light, — the reiterated effort to " adapt " that light to human forms and likings, — the reiterated idolatry which all such adaptations imply, whether physical, as in the Jewish times, or intellectual, as in our own, — and the reiterated shame of fresh degradation. If this be, — as, I believe, the human conscience testi- fies, — whether as embodied in the typical history of the Jews, or in the individual mind, the first stage in that discovery which we call Revelation, what be- comes of Dr. Hansel's theory that Revelation is the "adaptation " of the "infinite " to the "finite," of the perfect to the imperfect, of the absolute morality to the poor capacities of a sinful being? If so, why this craving of the nature to be let alone, — this starting as at the touch of a flame too vivid for it, — this comfort in circumscribing, or fancying that we can circumscribe, the living God in some human V WHAT IS REVELATION ? Ill image or form of thought, and worshipping that by way of evading the reality 1 Does the human spirit ever quail thus before a mere notion ? If God Him- self is inaccessible to our knowledge, should not we find it extremely easy to adapt ourselves to any abstract or ideal conception of Him 1 It is the living touch of righteousness, even though human only, that makes us shrink ; not the idea of right- eousness, which, as all theologies testify, is found pliant enough. But if it be a righteous life and will, not merely the idea or idol of a righteous life and will, that stirs human nature thus deeply, and finds us, as it found the Jews, afraid to welcome it, awe- struck at the chasm which divides us from it, fearful to surrender ourselves to its guidance, ready to adapt it in any way to us, unready to adapt ourselves to it, — if, I say, we know it to be a living will that thus checks, urges, and besets us. Dr. Hansel's theory as to the narrow limits of human knowledge would scarcely induce him to deny that it is God Himself ; for there is nothing in his theory which is not almost as much contradicted by any living spiritual converse between the human spirit and a spirit of perfect holi- ness as by direct converse with God. This first stage of revelation, which I have called the Jewish, may be said to discriminate the divine personality of God more sharply from His own works and creatures than is possible or true in any subse- quent and maturer stage of His unfolding purpose. It is, in fact, the first stage in the divine " education " of the individual conscience, as well as of the human race ; and is so vividly reflected in the national his- tory of Israel, only because that is the only history in which the appeals of God to the corporate con- science of a whole nation are recorded as fully as the 112 WHAT IS KEVELATION ? V actual national deeds in which those appeals were complied with or defied. In the history of other nations the divine will for the nation has been at once far less vividly interpreted, and, even when adequately interpreted, far less carefully recorded ; it has been allowed to gleam forth only fitfully through the often uneducated consciences of national heroes ; while in the case of the Jews, we find a suc- cession of great men, whose spirits were more or less filled with the divine light, in order that the world might see in at least one national chronicle some con- tinuous record of the better purposes of God for the nation, as well as of the actual history by which those purposes were partially frustrated or fulfilled. This, I believe, is the only peculiarity of Jewish history, that a race of prophets was permitted to pro- claim, — with varying truth of insight, no doubt, but still with far clearer and more continuous vision of the divine purpose than any other nation has wit- nessed, — what God would have had the people be and not be. To the nation itself this was not always a gain ; probably that which was evil in it would not have grown into so stiff and hard a subsistence but for the power inherent in divine light to divide the evil from the good (for the vision of a purpose too holy for the life of a people issues in greater guilt as well as greater goodness) ; but for the world at large no doubt it has been and is an immeasurable blessing, — strictly speaking, a revelation, — to see written out, parallel with the national life of a single people, the life to which God, speaking through the purest con- sciences of each age of their history, had called them. But the phase of revelation which we see in Jewish history is simply, on the scale of national life, what the first discovery of God by the individual con- V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 113 science is in individual life. In both cases there is a contrast presented between God and Man, between God and Nature, sharper than belongs to any other stage of His unfolding purposes. The separate pci-- sonality of God is engraved on Jewish history with an emphasis which indicates that to the Jew there seemed scarce any common life between God and man, — any bridge between the supernatural will and the easy flow of Nature. And is it not thus en- graven on the individual conscience when first men become aware that the natural veins and currents of their characters tend to a thousand different ends, whither the Spirit of God forbids them to go,— or whither if they do go, it haunts them with stings of supernatural anguish till they turn again 1 Is it not simply the discovery that the actual bent of our whole inward constitution is not divine, — the de- spair of seeing how it is ever to become so, — which makes us, like the Jew, separate the divine Spirit so sharply from God's living works and creatures, that for a time we doubt whether the nature within us can be used by God at all — whether, much rather, its forces must not be wholly cancelled, before the will can be set free ? But this shai'p contrast between the personality of God and the nature of man, and in lesser degree of the external universe, is not and cannot be final. And if the Jewish history witnesses that the Will of God is the starting-point of a new order, that the forces of human nature must be brought into sub- jection to that, if they can be used by God at all, — then the history of a hundred other nations, more especially of the Greeks, and in later centuries of the Teutonic races, does testify with equal explicitness that natural life is essentially divine, and requires VOL. I I 114 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? v at most remoulding by the Eternal Spirit, — a remoulding which is so far from cancelling, that it brings out the true nature in all its freshness, — in order to become the fitting organ of a supernatural righteousness. In other words, so long as man takes his stand on the level of his own motives and affections, and shrinks from the transforming influence of the Spirit of God, these motives and affections are the veil which needs taking away ; but if he will permit himself to be raised above that level, and will open his heart freely to the super- natural influence at which he trembles, then it will not be against the voice, but by the voice of his own spiritualised motives and affections, that God Him- self speaks. The veil itself becomes transparent ; the glass that was dark, illumined. Accordingly the revelation to conscience, which is more or less Jewish, and sets all the fibres of the natural life quivering like an aspen-leaf in the wind, is necessarily partial and temporary. Even in the highest of the prophetic strains there is perhaps an undervaluing of Nature, and of human nature in its natural manifestations, — a disposition to anticipate something like a revolution rather than a regenera- tion in its constitution, to represent direct praise of God as better and more worthy than the indirect jjraise implied in a perfect natural development. Could God's self -revelation have been stayed at that point, I doubt whether Gentile nations, — the Greek, for instance, — could ever have embraced it. Deep sensibility to the divine beauty of all human faculty and life was so deeply wrought into the very heart of Greece, that the Greek recoiled at the Hebrew vision of a God before whose presence human faculty seemed to pale away like starlight in V WHAT IS KEVELATION ? 115 the dawn. Nor could the Hebrew faith itself have lived on permanently in that phase. Already, before the Jewish era came to a close, the danger of idolatry with which Jewish faith was first threatened, — the danger that God would be confounded with His works, — had been exchanged for the danger that He would not be recognised as living at all in His works. There is an exactly parallel movement in the history of the revelation of God to the individual conscience. When first " Those high instincts before which our mortal nature Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised " come upon us, we feel that man is nothing, and God everything ; but soon human nature reasserts its dominion ; and if there be no full reconciliation be- tween the two, either the " high instincts " become ossified into dogma, and the " mortal nature " runs a fouler course in their presence than it would in their absence, or they fade away again altogether. There is a natural and legitimate revolt in man against any supernaturalism which does not do full justice to Nature ; and the opposite risk of a deifica- tion of Nature, such as Greece and the Gentile nations were prone to, produces perhaps less fearful, certainly less unlovely results than the error which divorces Nature from God, and by disclaiming in the name of piety any trace in Him of the life of the world, strips that world bare of all trace of God. Judaism taught us that Nature must always be inter- preted by our knowledge of God, not God by our knowledge of Nature ; but it was only the perver- sion of Judaism which completely dissolved the tie between the two. The Greek shuddered, and with reason, at the sacrilege of ignoring the breath of 116 WHAT IS REVELATION ? V divine life in the harmony of the world ; but it was but a perversion of Hellenism when the Pantheist sought to identify the two, — to multiply his delight in natural organisms until their influences fell into a kind of musical harmony in his mind, which he called the Divine Whole. Both of these opposite tendencies are equally perversions. And both alike witness to the expectation in the human mind of some revelation of the true tie between the life of God and the life of His creatures, — the yearning to know, not only what God is in His essential character, but what seed of His own life He has given to us, and what power it is by which that seed may be guarded through its germination from the extinction or corruption with which it is threat- ened. Accept with the Greek the capacity for a divine order in man and the universe ; accept with the Jew the reality of the " Lord's Controversy " with man ; and how are the two to be reconciled ? how is the supernatural righteousness to avail itself of the perverted growths of human capacity ] how is the " Lord's Controversy " to be set at rest 1 This was a question which the Jewish revelation never solved for the questioner, — except so far as it taught him that God could conquer the most rebellious nature. But even then he recognised the supernatural will as triumphing over the poverty of human and natural life, rather than as revealing itself actually through and in the divine springs of that life. The " Controversy " was solved for him rather by the power of God over Nature than by the power of God in Nature. But what was it that the Gentile nations craved 1 Some new conviction that the Supernatural was not at war with the constitu- tion of Nature, but the eternal source of it ; that the Y WHAT IS REVELATION ? 117 gradual growth, the seasonal bloom, the germinating loveliness of the natural and visible universe, culmi- nating in the \vonderful life of man, is itself not a veil but a revelation, a harmony of voices addressing us from the Divine life, and claiming our allegiance to One higher than themselves. They too saw, what the Jew had been taught, that in fact this was not really so, that there was a jar, a discord some- where ; but if they saw far less clearly whence came the power which could command the discord to cease, they saw far more clearly that, if it could cease, the true Nature would be restored and not conquered, vindicated and not extinguished, strengthened and not exhaled. The human condition of this revelation, as of all other revelation, is born with the human mind. The supernatural and righteous will, who besets and confronts on every side the unruly impulses of our lower self, is revealed to the conscience, and without the conscience could not be revealed at all. But besides this, there is another experience of man's which renders him capable of another revelation. Quite apart from the conscience and the sense of guilt and of the law, — quite apart from the living will, who looks into our hearts and searches out their evil, — there is, I suppose, in every man a more natural and genial experience of the spontaneous growth and unfolding, or it may be only the effort to unfold, of the true nature as it ought to grow, — ■ a gentle spontaneous resistance to the shapes into which our faults and imperfections force or try to force it, — the effort of the true man within us to grow into his right and perfect state in spite of the resistance of frailty, incapacity, and sin. What I am now speaking of is not an experience merely of the 118 WHAT IS REVELATION ? v moral life, but of tlie whole nature. Does not every man feel that there are unused capacities of all kinds within him, gently pressing for their natural develop- ment 1 — that a living tendency urges us to grow, not merely in moral but in physical and intellectual con- stitution, towards the individual type for which we were made t — that the various frictions of evil, moral or merely circumstantial, which prevent this, distort the true divine growth, and leave us less than we might have been 1 It was this experience which the religion of Greece has preserved so vividly, — the faith that, beneath the deformity of real life, there is a formative plastic power that is ever urging us towards our truest life ; beneath ungainliness, a growth, or effort to grow, of something more har- monious ; beneath ignorance, a growth, or effort to grow, of the true understanding ; beneath impurity and evil, the growth, or effort to grow, of the true moral beauty. It was, I believe, to this experience in every man's mind, an experience which cannot be called moral so much as the true instinct of life — that the unveiling of God in Christ appealed, and which fitted the Christian revelation to include the Greek as well as the Jew. There at last was the harmony of the supernatural and the natural, — the divine effort at harmonious growth which seemed to be in every man, unfolding from the germ to the full fruit with- out the canker or the blight, and yet at the same time revealing to all ^of us exactly what the super- natural vision reveals to the conscience, the absolute will towards right, the divine anger against sin, the infinite chasm between evil and good, the power and holiness of God. What was this life, in which the unity of God and man was at length vindicated ? V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 119 Did it not utter in clear accents the awful will which had spoken within the Jew 1 Did it not image in living colours the perfect Nature which had stirred so gently and breathed so deep a sense of divinity into the finer folds of Grecian life ? "Was it ■not at once the answer to that craving for a true vision of the moral nature of God which had haunted the Hebrew conscience, and the answer to that craving for a true vision of the undistorted life of man which had haunted the Grecian imagination 1 True, it was a vision of the Father only as He is seen in the Son of Man, of the filial and submissive will, not of the original and underived will; but as it is the per- fection of the filial will to rest in the will of the Father, the spiritual image is perfect, though the personal life is distinct. And this was, in fact, exactly what answered the yearning of the Greek for an explanation of that living germ of divine life within him. Was it not a perfect nature, filial like his own — the very nature into which he was capable of growing — that had thus been pushing against the weight of deformity, stirring the sources of natural perfection, and warning him that his mind was growing in wrong directions, and not blossoming into the beauty for which it was de- signed? He was ready to recognise as the divine Word, which had grown into perfect humanity in Christ, the very same higher nature which had been ill him but not of him; which had filled his mind •with those faint longings after something that he might have been and was not ; which was still stirring within him whenever a new blight, or a new failure, or a new sin, threatened to divert him still further from the destiny to which he knew he was capable of attaining. The secret Will of God 120 WHAT IS REVELATION ? V was, according to the longing of the Jews, first fully manifest iu Christ ; the secret hopes of man were, according to the " desire of all nations," in Him first fulfilled. If Christ, then, was to the Jew mainly the revela- tion of the absolute will as reflected in the perfect filial will ; to the Greek mainly the revelation of that perfect human nature which had been so long stirring within him, we might expect to find acts in which Christ especially revealed the living ruler of the Universe, and acts in which Christ espe- cially revealed the inward influences which were to restore order to the human heart ; — acts in which He manifested the Father, and acts in which He unsealed the eternal fountains of purity in human life. Mr. Maurice, in answering Dr. Mansel's assertion that the Absolute is beyond human vision, called attention especially to the former class. He intimated that in the miracles and the parables, for instance, we have revelations of the spiritual source of the physical world. There had been ever in man an awe at the mighty powers of the physical uni- verse, and the apparent recklessness with which these powers acted. The Jew, who loved to see in God the source of all power, still hardly dared to refer these crushing forces to the same national Providence which had guarded and governed his race with a jiersonal care so express. The Greek thought them in their awful undeviating order far more sublime than he could have done had he held them to be exercises of a mere supreme will. But yet he would willingly have connected them with an order, spiritual as well as physical, such as he recognised in the destinies of men. Christ, by mani- festing the power which controlled and upheld them. V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 121 and yet manifesting it with a healing and life-giving purpose, answered both these cravings. "These powers," His miracles said, " which seem so physical, so arbitrary, sometimes so destructive, — which some- times appear to be wielded by an evil spirit, — are all in the hands of one who would heal men's miseries, restore their life, moral and physical, purify them from disease, and hush the storm into a calm : if it ever seem otherwise, be sure that the seeming destruction has a life-giving purpose, the physical disease a deeper healing influence ; that the tempest is a bringer of serener peace, the blindness a preparation for diviner light. The order of the universe has a spiritual root ; the purpose of love which changes, is also the purpose of love which directs it. He who can bind and loose the forces of nature, has thus revealed the eternal purposes in which they originate." So again, Mr. Maurice, in a sermon of great beauty, claimed for the parables that they were intended to reveal the spiritual significance which had been from the first embodied in the physical processes of the universe, — that the analogy between the light of the body and the light of the spirit, the sowing and reaping of the external and of the spiritual world, and the other analogies in what we usually call Christ's "figurative" language, are not really metaphorical, but exhibit the perfect insight of the divine mind of the Son into the creative purposes of the Father. If it be true that the creator of our spirits is the creator of our bodies also, we might even expect that He who revealed the true life of the one, would know and exhibit its close natural aflBnities with the life of the other. Is not the physical universe as a whole meant to be for man the vesture of the spiritual universe 1 Is not all the truest language, therefore, necessarily 122 WHAT IS EEVELATION-? V what we call figurative ; and only false when the spiritual is interpreted by the physical, instead of the physical by the spiritual 1 " But if there is this correspondence between the organs of the spirit and the organs of sense, if experience assures there is, does not that explain to us the meaning and power of the parables ? May not all sensible things by a necessity of their nature, be testifying to us of that which is nearest to us, of that which it most concerns us to know, of the mysteries of our own life, and of God's relation to us ? May it not be impiossible for us to escape from these witnesses ? They may become insignificant to us from our very familiarity with them ; nay, we may utterly forget that there is any wonder in them. The transformation of the seed into the full corn in the ear may appear to us the dullest of all phenomena, not worthy to be noted or thought of. The diiference in the returns from different soils, or from the same soils under different cultivation, — the difference in the quality of the produce, and the relations which it bears to the quality of the seeds, — may be inter- esting to us from the effect such varieties have upon the market, from the more or less money we derive from the sale, not the least as facts in nature, facts for meditation. The relation between a landowner or farmer and those who work for him, between a shepherd and his sheep, all in like manner may be tried by the same pecuniary standard ; apart from that, they may suggest nothing to us. Thus the universe becomes actually ' as is a land- scape to a dead man's eye ' ; the business in which we are ourselves engaged, a routine which must be got through in some way or another, that we may have leisure to eat, drink, and sleep. Can any language describe this state so accurately and vividly as that of our Lord in the text 1 Seeing we see, and do not perceive ; hearing we hear, and do not understand." This revelation, however, through Christ, — by His V AYHAT IS REVELATION ? 123 life, by His miracles, by His parables, by His resur- rection and ascension, — of the supreme will, would not have fulfilled as it did the " desire of all nations," had it not also revealed that living power in man by which human nature is wrought into His likeness. To know God has been, in all ages, but an awful knowledge, until the formative influence which is able to communicate to us His nature is revealed also. And accordingly, Christ no sooner disappears from the earth than all the Christian writings begin to dwell far more on the new strength He had revealed within them than on His outward life. The interior growth of divine nature thus revealed might be called new, because now first it was recognised as a divine power, as a power inspiring trust, as a life that would grow by its own might within men if only they did not smother it and were content to restrain their own lower self from any voluntary inroads of evil. This power had been there, no doubt, in all men and all times; the germinating life of an inward spirit of involuntary good had never been a stranger to man ; it had always pushed with gentle pressure against the limits of narrow minds and narrow hearts and of positive evil, — not, indeed, with the keen and piercing thrusts of divine judgment, but with the spontaneous movement of better life striv- ing to cast off the scales of long-worn habit. But now this power was not only felt, but its origin was revealed. It was that same divinely human nature which had been embodied in the earthly Christ, that was stirring in the hearts of all men. It was He, whose life had been so strange and brief a miracle of beauty, to whom they might trust to mould afresh the twisted shapes of human imperfection, to push 124 WHAT IS REVELATION ? V forward the growth of the good seed and the eradi- cation of the tares between them. The same life which had shed its healing influence over the sick and the sinful in Galilee and Judea, was but the human form of that which fostered the true nature beneath the falsehoods of all actual life, and worked within the disciples as they preached their risen Lord. It was not they, but " Christ that worked in them." Here was the true explanation of the unitj^ of the human race, the common life which was the source of all that was deejD and good ; as separating influences grew out of all that was profoundly evil. Men were all members of Christ ; His nature was in them all, drawing out the beauty and chastening the deformity, breathing the breath of universal charity, and kindling the flame of inextinguishable hope. This was a power to trust in, the image of the Father's will, because breathing the very spirit of that will ; and fuller of hope than any vision of a holy king commanding an allegiance which men could not bend their stiff' hearts to pay, or conquering their moral freedom without acting on the secret springs of their humanity. They had known this power in themselves before ; but they had not read it aright, because they had not estimated aright its source and the certainty and universality of its operation. They had not before known it as directly manifested in Him who opened the eyes of the blind, and cleansed the leper, and stilled the storm ; who forgave sins, and wrestled with temptation ; and finally passed through the grave, and trouble deeper than the grave, without being " holden " of it, because His will was freely surrendered to His Father's. Here, then, was a revelation not simply of the Absolute nature of God, but of the formative power V WHAT IS REVELATION ? 125 of Christ that is at work to cancel distorted growths, and even mere natural deficiency in every human heart. But it was to do more than this, — it was to take away sin itself from those who could bring themselves to trust their hearts freely to His in- fluence ; — to reveal to them, in short, the great divine law that, as through the unity of human nature " if one member suffers, all the members suffer with it," so through the same unity a new life may spread into even the weakest and corruptest member. It was to declare it as the highest privilege of this great central human life to purify others, when once their will begins to turn towards Him, by entering into the very heart of their evil and reaching the very core of their inward misery ; so that while new life returns to them, the shadow of pain inseparable from the per- fect knowledge of human guilt falls back on the spirit of the great Purifier. This was the revelation of the true nature in man ; a nature that not only, as the Gentile nations felt, asserted the primitive truth and goodness properly belonging to every human creature, but that is capable of restoring that truth and good- ness, cancelling the sinful habit, melting the rigid heart, emancipating the sullen temper, by the mere exertion of its spontaneous fascination over any spirit which once surrenders to its control. And this, accordingly, is the great subject of Christian writers after once Christ had left the earth. It was to them a new discovery that the restorative power in every heart was not the power of their own wills, which they knew to be limited at most to a rejection of evil acts, but the very same power which had grown up into a perfect humanity in Christ, and only required an act of continuous trust to claim them for its own. To trust in such a power was not hard. 126 WHAT IS EEVELATION ? v To stifle the active rebellion of their own wills was possible ; but to purge the turbid fountain of their human life, had that also been required of them, as both Jew and Gentile had often fancied, was mere impossibility. To know who it was who was working in them, was to multiply infinitely the regenerating power of his life. Such, then, I hold to be the essence of the divine self-revelation of God. Into the question of its exact relation to the historical narrative in the Bible I cannot now enter. I feel little doubt that true criticism shows a large admixture of untrustworthy elements in the narrative of the Old, and some also in that of the New Testament ; and that when this is admitted, the emancipation of the intellect from what seems a purely literary superstition as to the infallibility of the Bible narratives, will probably bring far more gain to the spiritual freedom of man, and do more to direct attention to the spiritual evidences of truth, than any belief in verbal inspiration could educe. Bibliolatry has been, and is likely long to be, the bane of Protestant Christianity. Spiritual reali- ties would indeed be recognised as spiritual realities by few, had they had no perfect manifestation in the actual works and Providence of God, — had not the desire of the heart been embodied in the desire of the eyes. But that no minute history was needful of the earthly life of Him who can interpret His own meaning, and who came that He might draw the veil from eternal power and truth, and not to fascinate men's eyes and hearts to one single illuminated point of space and time, — is suiEciently proved by the absence of all records of His life which can be called minute, or which do not rely on the faithfulness of memory even for their Outlines. Human vanity, V WHAT IS KEVELATION ? 127 eager to guarantee its own immortality, carries labori- ously about all the paraphernalia for setting down every word and action before its transient life is spent. He who is solving the hardest problems of ages, speaking to the depths of the human spirit in generations on generations yet unborn, and uttering " the things which have been kept secret from the foundation of the world," can afford to dispense with the minute history of His life, when He has power to turn every human conscience into a new witness of His truth, and every heart into a new evangelist of His glory. VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES, POPULAR AND CRITICAL It has often struck me, and I suppose must have struck most other persons of late years, that granting that the Christian history is true, it would not in the least necessarily follow that ordinary men and women liave the means of knowing it to be true. Nothing can be more certain to anyone who has looked at all carefully into the evidence of the great-trial regard- ing the Tichborne Estates, than that the Claimant to those estates is not Sir Eoger Tichborne, and nothing can be much more certain than that he is Arthur Orton ; but, as is well known, there are hundreds of thousands of people in this country who, from a curious mixture of plausible but inadequate with thoroughly bad reasons, were quite convinced that a great wrong was done by the verdict given in that case, and that the man who was convicted of perjury was really the missing heir to the estates. Hence a great many people have said, and have said with great plausibility, that the Tichborne case ought to teach us how little true evidences weigh in moulding the belief of the people at large. The majority of the human race, even in the countries which have had much popular teaching, attach, it is observed, a . quite fictitious importance to one or two kinds of VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 129 evidence of no great value, and yet no importance at all to a whole host of other kinds which it is far more completely beyond the reach of either conscious or unconscious deception to invent or modify. Now is the evidence of the far more distant, the far more important, and the far stranger events in which the Christian revelation is embodied, so much simpler in kind, founded on so much clearer testimony, and testimony so much less complicated with all sorts of difficult considerations, than the evidence which proves Arthur Orton's fraud, that it can really be brought home to the minds of those who are quite incompetent to sift properly the evidence of the great Tichborne trials 1 And again, even if it can be shown that the historical problem eighteen centuries old is a simpler one, and more within the grasp of the popular mind, than the great disputed identity question of our own days, is it so much simpler that the results of refined investigations of learned men only affect the question as slightly confirming the instincts of popular faith 1 These surely are questions of the highest importance. We cannot afford to ignore them, or to leave our minds in a haze about them. Not only are the witnesses of the present day 'tt'ith us to be cross- examined, but, as regards the Tichborne case at least, we have had them elaborately cross-examined, and we are able to ask those who complain that the most important part of the evidence was suppressed, why it was so suppressed — why the Claimant did not bring forward at the right time evidence which he now asserts to be essential to his case. With re- gard to the events which are declared to have occurred eighteen hundred years ago, this is of course not possible. We cannot cross-examine the witnesses to them at all. Where they appear to disagree, as K 130 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI they often do, we cannot make out by direct investi- gation the source of the disagreement. Nor can we by any means assume that all who had anything material to say on either side have given their evidence. Yet the historical character of the events we have to consider is infinitely more important to the human race, and is, to most minds, on a superficial view, decidedly more surprising and less probable, than that of the events to which either party in the late trial asked us to give our credence. If a great number of the people judged wrong with such elaborate help as the Courts of Law gave them in the latter case, how can we expect them to judge right, without any such assistance, in relation to the mar- vellous story of Christ's life and resurrection in the former case ? I do not think we can answer these questions by saying that the evidence of spiritual things is spiritual, oi: by any juggle of that kind. If ever there were a plain matter of asserted physical fact, which, whatever its connection with the spiritual world, is not in any sense purely spiritual, it is the asserted fact of our Lord's resurrection from the dead. If any one could prove the charge that we believe it on evidence on which we should refuse to accept any other fact not affecting our spiritual hopes at all, he would, I think, make out his case that our Christian faith rests on no secure grounds. Evidence which is not good enough to prove ordinary events, can hardly be offered in good faith in proof of extra- ordinary events. I propose to take the resurrec- tion as the keystone of what I may call the physical miracles of our Lord's life, for I imagine that no one who accepts that as fact would hesitate to accept a great many other miracles along with it ; and no one who rejects that, would accept any other miracle of VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 131 the same kind as having anything like the same amount of evidence. However, I do not think that any reasonable man would reject any fact less than miraculous, which came to us on the same sort of evidence as our Lord's resurrection. The whole incredulity which has been felt in relation to this statement arises, I imagine, entirely from its supernatural and miraculous character. There is no question of fraud at all, no necessity for disentangling a mass of carefully woven statements such as confused the popular understand- ing in the Tichborne case. Every sensible man admits at once that the Christian Church believed simply and entirely in Christ's resurrection, and that the only real doubt in the matter is whether that belief was a credulous and ill-founded or a reasonable and well-founded belief. But as it is quite certain that the notion of satisfying modern demands as to evidence had not so much as occurred to the Apostles, who apparently thought it enough to declare that they were all witnesses of their Lord's life, death, and resurrection, without stating in what sense they were witnesses, it is by no means easy to get behind the belief which they professed, to the facts on which it was grounded in the minds of the Apostles themselves. Yet a short statement of how the matter really stands will prove, I think, that, were the fact not supernatural, the various incon- sistencies in the evidence adduced of it, would not weigh a jot with any reasonable mind against accept- ing it. I quite admit that a very different kind of evidence is needed as to a fact which is super- natural ; and that the mere external evidence as we have it, without weighty confirmation from important evidence of other kinds, would be very 132 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES vi insufficient to warrant our belief in so stupendous a marvel. I will briefly sum up, then, the state of the ex- ternal evidence, without concealing or exaggerating anything. Within from eleven to thirteen, or at the most fourteen, years from the Crucifixion — within a less time, that is, than that which separates us (in 1876) from the dispute with America as to the capture of the Trent, and much less than that which separates us from the relief of Cawnjiore and the fall of Delhi — St. Paul found the belief in the resur- rection of our Lord firmly established among the Apostles at Jerusalem, so that he was afterwards able to tell the Corinthians that Christ was buried, and rose again the third day, that He was seen by Peter, then by the twelve (the eleven I suppose he meant), then by about five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part were then living, but some were dead ; then by James, then by all the Apostles, and last of all by himself (in vision). That the resur- rection was not only believed, but believed as only those things are believed on their faith in which people re-cast their whole lives, no one with whom controversy is worth while in the least disputes. If we may trust the account given us by the author of the Acts, of St. Peter's speech in the interval between Christ's final departure and the day of Pentecost, it was held essential in filling up the place of Judas, to choose one who had " companied " with the Apostles " all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out amongst us, beginning from the baptism of John unto that same day when he was taken up from us," and the especial object of the new choice was that he should be " a witness with us of his resurrection." And again, in the speech on the day of Pentecost, VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 133 the same Apostle is made to say, " This Jesus hath God raised up, tvhereof we all are witnesses." In the hardly disputed First Epistle of Peter, we have less explicit hut still confirmatory evidence to the same effect, in the words, " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, according to his abundant mercy, hath begotten us again {avayevvrjuas) unto a lively hope, by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead " — that is, no doubt, "who has restored us from the state of temporary despair in which we were after his death, to a renewed hope by the resur- rection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Amid the discrepancies which I freely admit in the gospel accounts of the resurrection, it is notable that St. Paul's statement agrees with that in the third gospel in stating that St. Peter was the first Apostle who was a witness of the resurrection, and that all the accounts agree that Jesus was seen by all the eleven Apostles together, though the gospel called St. Matthew's only mentions such a meeting in Galilee, while the concluding passage of St. Mark, which has no good MS. authority, seems to agree with St. Luke, St. John, the Acts, and apparently St, Paul, in placing the earliest and most important meeting with the eleven Apostles in Jerusalem. It must be frankly admitted, however, that while the gospel of St. Mark, as contained in the best MSS., ends with the statement that the sepulchre was found empty, and with a prophecy of a meeting to take place in Galilee, none of the extant accounts agree closely either with each other or with St. Paul's later summary of the facts. The first gospel speaks of no appearance, except to the women, in the neighbourhood of the sepulchre, and of but one meeting with the Apostles " in a mountain in 134 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI Galilee," and adds, " When they saw Him, they wor- shipped Him : hut some doubted," which reminds us of the story of Thomas's doubts given in the fourth gospel alone, the scene of which, however, is there expressly described as being in Jerusalem. The account in the third gospel is virtually identical with that in the less well -authenticated conclusion of St. Mark, recording the appearance to two disciples in their walk to Emmaus, and then to the eleven as they sat at meat, but agreeing with the fourth Gospel in making the first appearance of the risen Christ that seen by Mary Magda- lene. The fourth gospel differs from all the other accounts in describing the first appearance to the assembled Apostles as taking place to ten of them only, Thomas being absent, while only the second, a week later, included all the eleven, and in describing a meeting with seven disciples on the shores of the Lake of Galilee at some later time not defined. Of the appearance to James recorded by St. Paul, we have no other account at all, nor of the appearance to above five hundred brethren at once. I should add that the command to the Apostles recorded in the third gospel, to stay in Jerusalem till after Pentecost was past, makes the prediction in the first and second gospels that the first meeting was to take place in Galilee, and the assertion in the first that it actually did so, still less obviously in harmony with the other narratives. I think every candid person will admit that this condition of the merely external evidence is not of the kind which any one would wish for the purpose of establishing by direct testimony a very marvellous and unprecedented event. But I think every candid person will also admit that it is just the VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 135 sort of evidence we might expect, if there had been no attempt to take records at the time, — a good number of accounts (narrated by different persons) of different appearances in different places, a certain amount of local prepossession in favour of G-alilee as the appropriate place for Christ's renewed intercourse with His disciples, and a complete conviction that Christ, after His resurrection, had been seen so often and by so many persons that there was no real dispute about the matter. As I have said before, the only point on which all accounts agree is, that certainly all the eleven, and if the Acts can be relied on, all the twelve (including Matthias), had been witnesses of the resurrection. Indeed, the earliest tradition shows that it was considered essential for an Apostle to have been a witness of the event. Now, would such evidence as this, with all its dis- crepancies, be rejected for a moment as to any fact not supernatural ? I do not think it would. If the same evidence, with the same class of discrepancies in it, were adduced, for instance, as proof that a man for many years blind recovered his sight on the touch of Christ— an event not necessarily miraculous, but capable of explanation in various other ways — I do not suppose any one would question it, even though one account laid the scene in Galilee, and others in Jerusalem, and none of them agreed very minutely together. So long as it was clear that eleven or twelve men were declared to have been selected as witnesses of such an event ; that they all of them continued to lead a new kind of life expressly founded on this experience ; that they had all known the man while he was still blind as well as after his cure ; that a great many other witnesses were alleged to have been witnesses of the cure ; and that this 136 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI well-accepted belief in a large and closely organised body, of whicli the original eleven or twelve were the nucleus, prevailed widely within from eleven to fourteen years of the event itself, and that the organisation had its asserted origin in that event — I do not imagine any historian of sense would hesitate to accept the fact, though he would regret that it was no longer possible to recover the details. In fact, with an event not supernatural, it would be evidently far the simplest and most natural explana- tion of the testimony, to assume that the fact happened, though under circumstances rendered very doubtful by the discrepancies in the narratives. It is very easy to account for differences in the mode of describing a fact not recorded at the time ; it is not very easy to account for the universal belief, very clearly attested, in any society, that eleven or twelve named persons, with a good many other unnamed persons, were witnesses of a very remark- able fact, and made that fact the foundation of their whole subsequent career, on any principle nearly so simple as that it really took place. However, it is quite true that it is one thing to accept a particular explanation, even of a merely unusual occurrence, as the easiest, and another dif- ferent thing to believe it in the sense of that unshaken and heartfelt adhesion which we give to the founda- tion of our whole moral aims. It is quite true that you could not even find a man guilty in a Court of law on such evidence only as a historian might yet quite rightly accept as adequate to the probable and even plausible explanation of the facts with which he had to deal. And I do not think we can in any sense be said to believe a fact, as a Christian who builds his whole life upon it ought to believe in the VI CHEISTIAN EVIDENCES 137 resurrection of Christ, if we do not think it certain enough to satisfy more than the requisitions of a Court of law. Moreover, I quite admit that we ought to look for very much more evidence of a fact evidently out of the ordinary course of nature, than for one which, though unusual, might easily have been consistent with the ordinary course of nature. Are there then any important indirect confirmations of this evidence which ought to alter the effect pro- duced upon us by its external discrepancies ? First, there is one point of more importance, I think, than sceptics are usually willing to assign to it : I mean the certainty that, according to every account we have, according to the universal tradi- tion, the assertion of the resurrection was at first received with disbelief and doubt, — such is the express statement of each one of the three gospels, and also that of the more doubtful conclusion of the second gospel, — which disbelief and doubt were cer- tainly turned within a few days into , a sort of con- fidence and even of enthusiastic assurance very much exceeding, as far as we can judge, anything which had existed among the Apostles in the lifetime of their Master. Now I quite admit that beliefs which have a great deal that is legendary in them do grow up in the course of years, as the hearts of those who have been laid hold of by a profound affection recover gradually from the first bewilderment and soreness of loss, rally from their dejection, and begin to blend with a certain indistinctness in their memory of the past, dreams and hopes and fancies which that past has produced. But there was no time at all for this kind of idealising process in the case before us. It is as certain as anything can be that though all was dismay and confusion on the morrow of the crucifixion. 138 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI yet within two months of the death of Christ, the Church in Jerusalem was increasing at a rate at which we have no reason to suppose the number of Christ's disciples ever increased during His lifetime. It is certain too that within at least a still smaller number of weeks the Apostles proceeded in the most business- like manner to fill up the gap caused by the treachery and death of Judas, with the avowed purpose of organising the Church for its new life and victories. There seems to me the greatest possible difficulty in attributing so great and so sudden a change as this to the sort of illusion which a blending of regret and hope and aspiration and superstition produces. Nothing can be clearer than that up to the last moment the Messianic hopes of the Apostles had been of a very earthly kind. "Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel ? " is the first question attributed to the Apostles after the resur- rection in the book of the Acts of the Apostles ; and whatever may be said of its authority as testimony to a miracle, it is surely good evidence as to what the early Church hoped, since it must have been written after many of those hopes had been disappointed if not extinguished, and therefore at a time when the whole tendency would have been to picture the expectations of the Apostles as more in keeping with history than they really were. Now, with such hopes suddenly blasted by the disappearance of the one person in whom they centred, does it seem pos- sible that they would as suddenly have revived without some great substantial and even physical stimulus, if I may so express it, to the hopes of the Apostles ? If the person of our Lord was admitted by all of them to have reappeared amongst them, no doubt these hopes would have so revived. But with- VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 139 out that stimulus, is it conceivable that energetic forward-looking counsels would have begun to prevail within a week or two of the great blow ? If it had depended on what the women affirmed, or what an individual disciple here and there had fancied that he had seen, or on the assertion of two of them walking into the country that a stranger had joined them who disappeared suddenly and unaccountably, and whom in the moment of disappearance they recognised as their lost Master, would it not have seemed to them all " as idle tales " ? would not there have been, as we are told there was, some Thomas to say, " Except I shall see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into His side, I will not believe" 1 It seems incredible that if the Apostles had no common and united evidence of Christ's resurrection, the new work should have begun with such active confidence, and without affording us any trace of a considerable intermediate period in which a legend would at least have time to grow up. Yet as a matter of fact there is no trace to be found of a period of uneasiness such as a disputed assertion which various of the Apostles were anxious to verify would cause, except the account of the doubt of Thomas, and of its complete satisfaction within a week of the resurrection. Now with the Apostles' evidently vivid desire and expecta- tion of the erection of a physical sovereignty by their Master, and the sudden crushing of that hope, I can- not really believe that anything short of seeing and conversing with Him, and receiving His commands to act as they did, could have filled up so soon and so promptly the void caused by His death. If Mary Magdalene thought she had seen Him, and one or two others thought they had seen Him, and all these 140 CHllISTIAN EVIDENCES VI visions were mere caprices of a fervent and loving imagination, what should we expect as the result ? Why, that there would have been great excitement and much hope, and no agreement as to what ought to be done ; that everything would have waited for fuller knowledge and explicit communications from the vanished Messiah ; and that, when no such fuller knowledge and clearer communications came, the fraternal organisation would gradually have dissolved and been succeeded no doubt by a beautiful legend, but by no clear and unanimous and confident action. Only compare the wonder and doubt and dismay when, Christ being still with them, He merely talhed of a disgraceful death, with the energy, elasticity, and confidence displayed after it had really happened. For my part I cannot doubt that the best explanation is what it is alleged to have been, that Christ himself i-eturned to His Apostles after His death, and that it was His directing mind, exercising vastly more in- fluence than before in consequence of the evidence that He had overcome death, which gave them the new and powerful impulse. This seems to me a perfectly sober view, so far, of the evidence bearing on Christ's resurrection. But in discussing it I have hitherto purposely omitted one element which is, I think, one of great significance, the repeated prophecy of that event which the gospels record. I think that the most rationalistic critics are disposed to insist on these prophecies as quite genuine. Indeed, they would find it much less easy to account for the profound subsequent belief, and yet deny the fact, without the prophecy than with it. They hold that the prophecy accounts for the expectation, and that the expectation threvp^ the minds of the Apostles into that condition in which imagination passed into VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 141 belief. For those who accept the resurrection, the prophecy clearly increases the significance without increasing in any degree the difficulties which surround the record of the event, while for those who reject it, the real existence of the prophecy would remove some of the difficulties in explaining the growth of the belief. Certainly the prophecy is deeply em- bedded in every one of the evangelical narratives, in a manner that renders it hardly possible to give those narratives any credit for good faith at all — which few will deny them — without admitting that the attesta- tion of the whole body of disciples attributed this often reiterated, and at least in the first instance earnestly deprecated, prophecy, to our Lord's lips. There is no language of our Lord's the occasion of which is described with more vivid minuteness than that used by Him in repeating this prophecy, with especial solemnity, on the beginning of his last journey to Jerusalem : — " And tliey were in the way going up to Jerusalem ; and Jesus went before tliem : and tliey were amazed ; and as they followed, they were afraid. And he took again the twelve, and began to tell them what things should happen unto him. Saying, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem ; and the Son of Man shall be delivered unto the chief priests, and unto the scribes ; and they shall condemn him to death, and shall deliver him to the Gentiles : And they shall mock him, and shall scourge him, and shall spit upon him, and shall kill him : and the third day he shall rise again." Evidentlj' there was something unusual, and to the Apostles boding, in the gestures and mien of Christ in setting out thus on his last journey, which fixed the incident in their memories and embodied it in their tradition. The same tradition stated that on 142 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI Peter's first confession of his belief in Christ as the Son of the living God, this communication was first made, and that Peter then earnestly protested against it, and was immediately rebuked with a sharpness which must have humiliated him. But on this later occasion none of the disciples ventured to protest, though the third evangelist declares that they were still completely unable to understand and believe the saying. Now, if we are to admit, as I think ration- alists and supernaturalists will alike admit, that such a prophecy there was, how, if at all, does it bear on the evidence of the fact itself 1 To my mind it has a very important bearing on it. Nothing seems to me to have had more real influ- ence on the popular belief in Christianity than the prophecies of our Lord, and nothing to have re- ceived less attention of late years. And the more stress we lay on the incompleteness and unfinished character of the gospels — the more frankly we admit that, so far as the best MS. authority goes, the second gospel has no ending at all, the first a very abrupt and hurried one, not at all in keeping with the later tradition, and both the third and fourth most frag- mentary accounts of the evidence of the resurrection ■ — the less can it be maintained that the gospels were afterwards so retouched as to make the pro- phecies accord with the subsequent faith of the Church. I do not think that anything could be weightier testimony to the early preparation and complete freedom from dogmatic purpose of the first and second gospels, than the absence from them even of those details as to the resurrection which had be- come already for the Church of St. Paul's time the very alphabet of the Christian faith. Now, both these gospels contain minute prophecies like that of VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 143 Peter's three denials of his knowledge of our Lord, prophecies most unlikely to have been interpolated later vi^hen Peter w&s the heart and hope of the Apostolic body, and when, even though his denial might well have been frankly recorded, it would have been impossible for the imagination of the Church to emphasise it by inventing for itself a story of his ardent professions of loyalty and Christ's prevision of his lapse. Nor can any one maintain that either the first or the second gospel contains an anti-Petrine bias. On the contrary, the second is usually attri- buted to Peter's own impulse, while the first records at least one instance of Peter's pre-eminent ardour and faith which is given by no other evangelist. This is only a minute matter, and if it stood alone might of course well be attributed to coincidence ; but it is of importance so far as it goes, because it is a prophecy which can hardly by any possibility have been imagined after it had been fulfilled, and which evidently impressed itself deeply on the mind of the early Church. However, it does not stand alone. I do not lay great stress on the mere prophecy of coming death, deeply as it is ingrained in the gospel narrative, be- cause I know that it will be said that a very moderate insight into the power against which Christ was measuring Himself, would serve to fill our Lord's mind with a belief in a violent death, and that, when it was fulfilled, it would be very natural for His dis- ciples quite unconsciously to give His anticipations of that death more detail and speciality than they really had. But consider only what is involved in the in- stitution of the sacrament of the Last Supper. There again we have not only the unanimous agreement of the three first gospels, but the explicit evidence of 144 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES vi St. Paul that on the night on which Christ was betrayed — " He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he brake, and said, Take, eat : this is my body, which is broken for you : this do in remembrance of me. After the same manner also he took the cup, when he had supped, saying. This cup is the new testament in my blood : this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me." Here, then, was a rite instituted formally and solemnly as a memorial of His death by our Lord, at a time when, though it was the eve of His death, no one with merely human knowledge could have even conjectured with confidence that His death was at hand. The Jews themselves had no power to put to ■death. Christ had been guilty of nothing likely to stir up the jealousy of the Romans. The clear and steady vision of death which led our Lord to treat the bread He broke as His body, and the wine He was pouring out as His blood given for the world, seems to me as clear a case of supernatural know- ledge as history could produce of natural knowledge. And the supernatural vision extends not only to the event anticipated, but to the strange power of the rite thus solemnly instituted. Not only does His death at once follow, as He predicts, but the bread and wine become in some sense or other His body and blood to future centuries — " Both Faith and Art have given To that one hour a life of endless rest. And still whoe'er would taste the food of Heaven May to that table come a welcome guest." The rite thus instituted is in fact the most durable of monuments of a lucid prevision of the future — VI CHEISTIA2T EVIDENCES 145 both of the individual event and of its spiritual influ- ences — and one which assumes a knowledge far beyond that of men. I say nothing of the prophecy of Judas's treachery, or in this connection of that of the universal publica- tion of the deed of the woman who anointed Jesus with an alabaster box of ointment, though both were fulfilled, because it is easy to conceive that the first prophecy may have been more or less defined by the unconscious modification of tradition after the event, while the latter may well have caused its own fulfil- ment. But what is it reasonable to say about the prophecies of the destruction of Jerusalem 1 I con- ceive that, certainly as regards the first and second gospels, in which the traditions of the resurrection are so singularly "conspicuous by their absence," — at least if the concluding verses of St. Mark be of later origin, — it is almost impossible to suppose that these gospels assumed their present form after the armies of Titus had destroyed Jerusalem. As we have seen, St. Paul found a singularly clear tradition of the appearance of Christ after His death in the Church within at most fourteen years of that death, and from twenty-seven to thirty years before Jeru- salem was besieged. Is it credible that gospels not written at that time should have contained no account of Christ's appearances in Jerusalem, such as St. Paul and the third and fourth gospels refer to 1 Is it credible that if .they were subsequently so moulded as to include specific references to the destruction of Jerusalem in accordance with the facts, they should not have received the same kind of moulding to place them in harmony with the current traditions on the much more important point of the resurrection? Yet while the first gospel huddles up the whole h 146 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI account of Christ's appearances after His death into two or three sentences concerning a meeting between Him and His disciples on a " mountain in Galilee," the best MSS. of the second end with the story of the empty sepulchre. When we compare the chapter in the second gospel beginning with, " And as he went out of the temple, one of his disciples ^aith unto him. Master, see what manner of stones and build- ings are here 1 And Jesus answering, said unto him, Seest thou these great buildings 1 There shall not be left one stone upon another which shall not be thrown down," with the corresponding chapter in the first gospel, there seems to me to be no alternative between admitting that both must have been completed long before the year 70 A.d., and making the impossible supposition that the transcriber of a later tradition, though unconsciously moulding the words of our Lord to suit the known event, would yet have left the most important of all the elements of the Christian story in complete, or almost complete, oblivion. But there is another consideration which seems to me to render it clear that the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, at least as it is given in the first two gospels, borrows nothing from the actual event ; and that is the evident confusion in the mind of those who set it down, between that event and a last judgment. Of course it is quite open to the sceptic to say that this confusion was conveyed by our Lord's own language. But then that only vindicates still more positively the pro- phecy of the destruction of Jerusalem from the impu- tation of being recast after the event. For my own part, I believe the confident and mistaken anticipa- tion of the early Church, that the end of the world was at hand, to have been the source of this con- VI CHKISTIAN EVIDENCES 147 fusion, and that there is discernible in these pro- phecies of our Lord's a very clear though misunder- stood teaching that the kingdom of heaven was not to come " with observation," but gradually, and by a silent revolution in the heart of man. Still no one can deny the confusion in our actual narratives be- tween two quite distinct classes of prophecies, one insisting on the early destruction of Jerusalem, and the trials that would await those who were in Judaea at that time, to which class alone I believe the pre- diction that " that generation would not pass away till all things were fulfilled," applied, and another referring to the final spiritual judgment through which all men and all earthly institutions must pass. Now, what I want to press is the extraordinary im- probabiUty, not to say impossibility, that such a confusion should have been allowed to remain in this narrative, if it had taken its final shape after the destruction of Jerusalem and the suppression of Jewish revolt, when the Churches were saying within themselves, in the language of the second Epistle ascribed in our version of the New Testa- ment to Peter, "Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation." I think this consideration, no less than the absence of the current traditions as to the resurrection, proves that the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem was not only given, but recorded in the shape which it now takes in our first two gospels, before the event to which it referred. The cases I have now adduced are cases of explicit prophecies of individual events. But the truth is that, quite apart from individual events, the whole substance of our Lord's life was as full of compressed 148 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES vi prophecy as spring water is of compressed air. I' think it is hardly possible to lay too much stress on the ample and even redundant testimony which meets us in all parts of the gospel to the early and deliberately announced intention of Christ to found an enduring kingdom on materials which were not only not of the stuff of which earthly governments are made, but the moulder of which did not contem- plate, indeed steadily refused to contemplate, con- quering within any assigned period the help of earthly governments for His purpose, or making any alliance of that kind an essential condition of the kingdom which He proclaimed. The Jewish polity was a spiritual polity, but it rested on an organisa- tion which wielded all the recognised powers of the State. Christ rejected the idea of availing Himself of these means, and declared His purpose to use means so unpromising that, in the human sense, they were hardly means to such an end at all. I never hear without the thrill of a new surprise that calm, strange, and unique prophecy, addressed at the very outset of His short career to a dozen peasants, " Fear not, little flock, it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom," when I remember that a kingdom has really been given to them, though not a kingdom of this world. Nor is this a case of what has often happened — trust in the eventual ascendancy over man of great ideas. It is a case of the selection of special instruments, and of building up a human organisation explicitly designed for work of a most laborious and difficult kind. " Follow me," Christ says to one or two couples of fishermen, as they cast their nets into the waters, and mended them on the shores of the Lake of Galilee, " and I will make you fishers of men." And they were made fishers of VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 149 men, and obviously made so solely by Him who thus chose them from a calling apparently so little qualified to fit them for the hopeless task. It is remarkable enough that by far the greatest of the apostles — he in whom even human insight might have discerned the elements of marvellous force and moral influence — was not chosen for his work during Christ's earthly life. The "little flock" to whom our Lord announces so early and so peremptorily that they are "not to fear," because it is their " Father's good pleasure to give them the kingdom," are such a " little flock " as no one before ever pro- posed to make the founders of a new world. In- deed, Christ asserts repeatedly that they are chosen because they are not " wise and prudent," because they are "babes," and no doubt because on that very account they are not likely to aim at the con- struction of an ambitious polity ; because they have no sort of influence which would give them authority, even in the little world of Judaea. They are anxiously warned against any kind of striving to acquire earthly dignity. Wealth is even forbidden them. They are promised " the kingdom " in the same breath in which they are told to sell what they have, and provide for themselves bags which wax not old, " a treasure in the heavens which faileth not," in order that " where their treasure is, there may their hearts be also." Moreover, while the apostles are forbidden all the ordinary means of binding together a great earthly organisation, they are told that they are to be for a long time few and scattered, sowers of division, preachers to people who could not or would not understand. I do not refer to this as in any sense a further indication of prophetic insight, but 150 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI only as showing how well our Lord understood the conditions of the work which He was imposing on those few and ignorant peasants with the most absolute promises of success. " The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few." The kingdom is not to be a popular one, in that time at least. Yet the chosen apostles themselves misunderstand and misinterpret their Master. Peter, after being told that his confession is the rock on which the Church should be built, is spoken of as a tempter and an offence to his Master, as one who savours not of the things which are of God, but of those which are of men. John is twice rebuked, once for his revengeful spirit, once for his short-sighted ambition. Judas's treachery is predicted, as I have already noticed. All the twelve are warned that they will fail at the .hour of Christ's trial, and that warning, like the more individual prediction addressed to Peter, is certainly most unlikely to have been conceived after the event. In a word, from beginning to end of the gospels we have evi- dence which no one could have managed to forge, that Christ deliberately chose materials of which it would have been impossible for any one to build a great organisation, unless he could otherwise pro- vide, and continue to provide, the power by which that organisation was to stand. Who can hear the words, " I thank thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes," without being impressed with the divine confidence of the purpose which selected what we should have thought the least promising of all materials for the most majestic and enduring of works, and proved their fitness by the history of the ages 1 The VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 151 popular belief in Christianity has, I think, much more to do with the vivid impression made by these reiterated and emphatic prophecies, ingrained into the very essence of the gospel, that a kingdom should be built up out of elements thus humanly hopeless — and of Christ's clear knowledge that they were in every human sense hopeless — than with any learned evidences. And for my part, I hold the grounds of this impression to be worth more, even though, or perhaps I ought to say, because, they are thus open to the gauging of popular feeling, than all the learned evidences put together. Would it not be something incredible that a mere man should jsrofess his intention to establish a spiritual kingdom which shall endure for ever, by the help of a dozen ignorant men, who are warned explicitly that they will not even keep him with them for more than a year or two, who habitually misunderstand his words and mistake his spirit, even while he remains with them, and who are assured that they are destined almost involuntarily to drink of his cup and be baptized with his baptism, in spite of misreading the sort of destiny which that implies, and the kind of glory to which it leads — and then that his mere prophetic guess should be so far fulfilled as the history of Christianity has fulfilled Christ's prediction at this day 1 Is there not here a vision of what would be to man an impossible future, on the partial realisa- tion of which the popular mind is far better able to pass a trustworthy judgment, than is even the most judicial mind to pass judgment on the intricate details of biographic or historic evidence ? Take the language as to the likeness of the kingdom of heaven to a grain of seed, "which indeed is the least of all seeds, but when it is grown, it is the greatest 152 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI among the herbs, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof." Could that well have been invented at any time before our gospels were in existence as a true picture of the growth of the Church 1 And yet how distinct is its appreciation at once of the minuteness of the germ Christ was planting and of the vastness of its destined growth ! Now, surely the popular impression of these facts as implying that our Lord's knowledge had its roots planted in the very well-springs of the world's his- tory, is, to say the least, as fully justified by reason, as any inference, however judicial, from the careful survey of minute historic evidences possibly could be. The materials of this building are not only intrinsically frail, but it is the Builder himself who selects them because they are so, and who yet calmly announces that the building shall outlast the heavens. His own death is to be the signal of defection and despair to His followers, yet it is to be the firm foundation of the eternal structure ; and, as matter of fact, no sooner is His visible hand withdrawn than the living stones run from all quarters of the earth and pile themselves into the Temple of the ages. Is there no real solidity in the conviction of divine power which these evidences produce ? It seems to me that, looked at thus, Christ's life was full of the minutest, and what to mere men would be the most improbable, prophecy — the prophecy that He was Him- self to abandon, within a year or two, so far as any visible help was concerned, the work He had come into the world to do, to hand it over to a number of poor men who were fitted by nothing but attachment to Himself, and not all of them by that, for the strange enterprise in which He had embarked them, and yet that, through disappointment and persecution and trial VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 153 and blood, their enterprise should be fed and watered till it attained its gradually matured and mighty end. The minuter and more individual prophecies which I first cited are of importance only as showing that it was not merely trust in the operation of moral influences on the human heart which constituted Christ's prophetic power; that He saw individual details as well as general results. But in relation to the improbability of the forecast and to the calm certainty of the vision, they seem to me insignificant as compared vnth the larger prophecies on which I am now dwelling. No doubt it may be, in some sense, said of these that they fulfilled themselves, but not in any sense which detracts in the least from their supernatural character. They could not have fulfilled themselves without containing a true com- putation of the spiritual force at work in the world to fulfil them, which is as far beyond the reach of insight or human foresight, as to compass a resur- rection is beyond the limits of human power. I must notice one more instance of what is, I think, as strictly supernatural foresight as any I have yet given. That Christ should have understood the personal relation in which His immediate disciples would stand to Him was perhaps a mere instance of discernment such as, no doubt, many great men have shown. But that He should deliberately have de- manded the same kind of attitude towards Himself from all future disciples, as He certainly did, and have gained what He asked in the very act, does seem to me one of the clearest marks of supernatural knowledge of the human heart which could be given. Nothing could be more hazardous than this emphasis laid by any human being — especially one who from the very first preaches lowliness of heart, and pre- 154 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI diets the shortness of His life and the ignominious violence of His end — on Himself as the source of an enduring power, and the corner-stone of a divine kingdom. The necessity of loving Him, the perpetual fame of her who anointed Him for His burial, the grief that will be rightly felt for Him when He leaves the earth, the identification of men's duty to each other, even to " the least of these, my brethren," with their duty to Him, — all these are assumptions which run through the whole gospel quite as strik- ingly as does the clear knowledge of the frailty of the human materials Christ has chosen, and of the supernatural character of the power by which He in- tended to vivify those means. Though His kingdom is to be the kingdom of which a little child is the true type, the kingdom in which it is the " meek " who are blessed, in which it is the " poor in spirit " who are to be the rulers, yet in this He is only say- ing in other words that He is to be the life of it, since it is because He is " meek and lowly in heart " that those who come to Him shall find rest for their souls. Whether you choose to say that it is in spite of this humility or because of this humility, yet in either case Christ proclaims Himself as the true object of love, and the permanent centre of power through- out the kingdom He proclaims. He not only de- clares that His departure will be the first legitimate cause of mourning to His followers — " Can the children of the bride-chamber mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them 1 but the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast"— but even to all others the love of Him is to predominate over all other love. " He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and' he that loveth son or daughter VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 155 more than me is not worthy of me." Exclusion from His presence is everywhere treated as that outer darkness where there are weeping and gnashing of teeth. His vision of the spiritual future of untrue men is of men crying to Him, " Lord, Lord ! " and entreating Him to recognise them, to whom He will be compelled to reply, "I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." He justifies with warmth all honour paid to Him personally ; "The poor ye have always with you, but me ye have not always ; " " Verily I say unto you, wherever this gospel shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this, which this woman hath done, be told for a memorial of her." Is not that most hazardous policy for any one not endowed with supernatural knowledge ? Consider only what usually comes of self-assertion much less astounding than this in a human being, and yet what actually came of it in our Lord's case. The greatest of the world's teachers make light of themselves. Socrates treats his own death as of no moment. The Jewish prophets never think of treating their own careers as of any signifi- cance apart from the message they deliver. And as a rule in the world, when a man magnifies himself with gentleness and simplicity, we smile ; we may find him lovable, but there is always a little laughter mingled with our love. When he does it arrogantly or imperiously, we are revolted. In either case, the first generation which does not personally know him puts aside his pretensions as irrelevant, if not even fatal, to his greatness. But how was it with Christ 1 The first great follower who had never known him in the flesh, St. Paul, takes up this very note as the key-note of the new world. To him, " to live is Christ, to die is gain." His heart is " hid with 156 CHRISTIAil EVIDENCES VI Christ in God." His cry is, " Not I, but Christ that ■worketh in me." He makes his whole religious philosophy turn on the teaching of our Lord, that He is the Vine, and His disciples the branches. In the land of the olive St. Paul adapts the image to the husbandry of the olive. Again, Christ is the Head, and men the members. And what is true of St. Paul is true of all those in whom the Christian faith has shown its highest genius in subsequent ages. These sayings of Christ as to being Himself the centre of human affections and the light of human lives, instead of repelling men, interpret their own highest experience, and seem but the voice of an interior truth and the assurance of an imperishable joy. And what is to be said of the value of such verifi- cations of Christ's foresight? If one comes and shows us certain poor instruments with which we all admit that we could have done nothing and could do nothing, and he tells us, ' I will do much with them, and ever more and more, and infinitely more after I have disappeared from the earth than during the year or two in which I remain here ; and though the secret of my power is humility and self-abnegation, the only sap of that humility is love for me, and the essence of that self-abnegation is life in me ; ' and if the pledge given is actually redeemed, and redeemed, apparently, at all events by the very means he had pointed out, — if the work he began goes on with infinitely more power after his death than before it, and the whole inspiration of that work turns out to be the personal relation to him which he had pro- claimed, — is it irrational for us to draw the inference that the best account to be given of what is happen- ing is that which he gave who told us that it should happen — that is, in this case, that it all springs from VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 157 that hidden life in God which Christ led before He came here, while He was here, and after He was seen here no more 1 At least, if this be not a rational explanation, is there one more rational? Can we not admit that he who foretells a most improbable event is more likely to be informed of the secret principles determining that event, than those who disbelieve and discredit his language 1 And if Re cannot tell us what these principles are, how are we to trust to those who, if they had been living when He was here, would have ridiculed His anticipations as false, and condemned His arrogance as impious 1 It cannot be doubted that the sceptics of to-day would for the most part have been much more sceptics when all that Christ promised was still in the future, and far the greatest and divinest of His works — the work of realising what He had foretold — was as yet hardly begun. Is it, then, a popular blunder to repudiate the hypothesis of those who must on their own principles have discounte- nanced Christ's anticipations, if they had lived then, even more superciliously than they now explain away the issue ? May we not say that the principles on which it would have been folly to believe what has actually happened, can hardly be so sound as those plain popular principles intelligible to all the world, however little gifted with judicial faculties, on which it would have been from the first impossible not to believe it 1 As far as I know the only set-off against these considerations is one to which I have already referred — the evidence that Christ really raised in the minds of His disciples that expectation of the very close approach of a universal judgment, of a supernatural close to the existing order of things, 158 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI which almost all the Christians of the first generation — certainly St. Paul himself — clearly shared. I quite admit that in dealing with the signs of super- natural vision and knowledge we are not at liberty to ignore any single indication of error ; and no one can doubt that if our Lord taught His disciples that the end of all things was at hand, we must at once attribute to Him a strange mixture of foresight and blindness which it may be impossible for us to recon- cile, but which we ought to have the candour to acknowledge. But I find it impossible to study the passages which are supposed to prove that Christ did teach this approaching " end of all things " to His disciples without the inference that He distinguished clearly between two very different visions which they confounded — the vision of the end of the Jewish national life and polity, and that of the spiritual judgment of men according to their works. For instance, the most definite statement of the nearness of what is supposed by many to be a final judgment is in the differently related prophecy which the first gospel gives thus : — " For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own life 1 or what shall a man give in exchange for his life 1 For the Son of man will come in the glory of his Father with his angels ; and then he will give to every one according to his works. Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, who shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his Idngdom." In the second gospel the parallel passage says, " There be some standing here who shall not taste of death till they see the kingdom of God come in power {ev Svvdixii) ; " and in the third it simply runs, VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 159 " till they see the kingdom of God." But in all these passages it is certainly implied that those of whom He spoke should " taste of death " later, though not before the event of vi^hich He spoke, and what was promised was that they should have such a pledge of the power of God in their lifetime as should satisfy them that the kingdom of God was really manifested on earth. I suppose the connection with the previous words, which in varied form occur in all three gospels, to be this : that he who in the poorness of his ambition should work for what was not worth working for, and lose his own true life in doing so, would find out his mistake in the day of spiritual judgment ; and then, as if to answer the doubt whether such a day of true judgment should ever come, Christ went on to say that the kingdom of God, whose approach He was teaching, would, in the lifetime of those standing there, be sufficiently mani- fested to make His divine power clear to them. But this would be in their lifetime, not at the close of it. That the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem is greatly confused with the vision of the spiritual judgment of all things in our narratives, is clear enough ; and it is remarkable that two quite distinct statements as to time are jumbled up together in the oddest confusion, " Verily I say unto you, this genera- tion shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled;" " But of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only." It is impossible that two such statements could have been made in the closest juxtaposition without a clear distinction between the previsions to which they referred ; and it seems to me evident that though the tradition did not preserve that distinction clear, it did preserve the clearest possible traces of it. 160 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI The gathering of the armies and of the Eoman eagles, the slaughter, the famine, the destruction of the city, and the flight into the country — all this is to take place within that generation ; and this was what Christ taught to be the end of the old covenant and the begin- ning of the new, and what He described as the kingdom of God coming with power. But the final judgment with which the disciples certainly confused it, was, apparently almost within the same breath, declared to be absolutely indeterminate and reserved by God amongst the eternal secrets. I do not see how any one can suppose that the two entirely different and almost antithetical forms of speech can refer to the same event, as though the indeterminateness only ranged over a few years, and that what must happen before the generation then living had passed away, was yet hidden, as to its particular year and month, from all foresight except that of God alone. There would be an incredible flatness in saying, "This must all happen within the lifetime of men now living, but the exact moment of it is a secret so deep and mysterious that God has revealed it to no created intelligence whatever," which is quite foreign to the spirit of our Lord's solemn discourse, even in the perplexed account of it given by the evangelists. It is open to no reasonable doubt that He spoke of two events — one explicitly defined, which should be known to be approaching whenever the Eoman armies gathered round Jerusalem ; the other a spiritual event of far higher importance, but of which the Son of Man himself could not designate how near or how far off it might be ; yet the first was to be a pledge of the second, and, as it were, the sign to those whom He addressed of that great harvest for which all things were ripening. VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 161 That this was Christ's teaching is shown, I think, by all the many parables which indicate the slow and natural growth of the kingdom of God — the parables of the seed germinating into the blade, and the blade into the ear ; of the tares and the wheat, which were to grow together till the harvest ; of the leaven of meal, which was slowly to leaven the whole lump ; of the seed, which was the smallest of all seeds, but was to grow into the greatest of all trees, so that all the birds of the air should come and lodge in the branches of it. And even in the midst of the prophecies which led the disciples to expect so near a close to the secular order of the world, the warning is often repeated that " the end is not yet " ; that the Gospel must first be preached to all the nations of the earth ; that the time should come when they shall desire to see " one of the days of the Son of man, and shall not see it," and the exhorta- tion to possess their souls in patience is enforced. On the whole, the study of the passages which are ' supposed to show that Christ really predicted a speedy destruction of the earth, and earthly order of things, seem, while accounting for the error of the early Church on the subject, only to show that the Messianic ideas of the Jews were too deeply rooted to admit of their taking in the sharp distinc- tion, of which there are so many marks in our Lord's language, between the close of the Jewish dispensa- tion with the destruction of the Temple, and that spiritual judgment of all earthly lives and works, to which no date and no scene could be assigned. Now let me go back to the resurrection, and con- sider how far this evidence as to the habitual prophetic vision of which Christ's life seems to have been so full, should affect our view of the evidence M 162 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI external and internal bearing upon it ; and of course secondarily of the other alleged miracles which pre- ceded and followed it, most of which will certainly and rightly be accepted if the resurrection is accepted, and doubted or denied if the resurrection be doubted or denied. Of course one inference is clear enough. If, as I think is indisputable, Christ distinctly pre- dicted non- miraculous facts, both national and in- dividual — the destruction of Jerusalem, Peter's threefold denial, his own death, the success of the apparently hopeless enterprise of the Apostles — which actually occurred, and some of them in the exact way in which they occurred, there is very much more reason to believe in the fulfilment of His prediction of the miraculous fact of His resurrection, than there would be without this evidence of His wonderful foreknowledge. In relation to the ful- filment of such prophecies, we stand in a very different position from the Apostles ; we see the vastly larger fulfilment of some which to them were but anticipations. On the other hand they knew, what we can only infer from their own lan- guage and demeanour, whether their belief in our Lord's resurrection was firmly based on repeated and indisputable converse with Him, or was a doubtful mixture of ecstasies and dreams. But thus much is unquestionable, that prophecies even of non-miracu- lous events, duly fulfilled, should remove a great deal of the & priori incredulity with which we regard the same person's prophecies of a supernatural event. Whatever specific insight into the future means, it means something strange enough and to us unintel- ligible enough, to render us cautious how we dis- sociate it from power over the future. No reasonable man would hesitate to ascribe far more importance VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 163 to the prediction of a resurrection from the dead, coming from one who had clearly j)redicted very unlikely events which had hajjpened, than he would to the same prediction from any other person's lips. I hold then that there is far more reason to believe in the reality of the resurrection than there other- wise would be, on the ground that it was certainly prophesied at the same time when His death was prophesied, by one several of whose other pro- phecies, and those of a most remarkable kind, were fulfilled. And, further, I think there is this additional weight to be given to the testimony of the Apostles, and especially to that of St. Peter, on this head. They had before them at the time a measure of what was meant by the fulfilment of our Lord's prediction. St. Peter, as we have seen, is referred to by St. Paul, and by the third Gospel, as the first Apostle who saw Christ after His resurrection ; he is stated in the Acts to have himself asserted that all the Apostles were witnesses of that event, and in his own first Epistle he declares that he owed to that event his new birth into hope ; but St. Peter, if the whole story of the Christian Church be not pure and gratuitous legend, had but just recovered from the remorse into which his own fulfilment of the distinctly predicted threefold denial of our Lord had plunged him. What a real fulfilment of prophecy meant, must then have been most vividly present to him. Can we suppose that with that keen personal ex- perience in his mind, he would have confounded a fancy, a hope, a dreamy vision, with the distinct ful- filment of Christ's prophecy that He should rise again ? And all the Apostles had the same realising sort of experience to a less extent. They all knew that 164 CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES VI our Lord had predicted His shameful death, and that the prediction had filled them with dismay and bewilderment. They all knew, unless a most gratuitous tradition was afterwards invented Jby the Church to its own discredit, that He had predicted their all forsaking Him on the night of His arrest, and that the prediction had been fulfilled. Would they not all then have demanded, in any fulfilment of the prophecy of the resurrection which they would have accepted as a fulfilment, at least as much clearness of outline as they had already experienced in relation to that of His death, and of their own desertion of Him 1 This will seem a petty consideration only to those who forget how much depends on the reality of mind of a witness to a remarkable event. It is as bearing upon that reality of mind that I attach so much importance to the steadily forward-looking, business-like attitude of the Apostles within a week or two of the crucifixion; and by giving them a measure of what the fulfilment of prophecy ought to be, if they were to rely upon it at all, I think their recent experience must have guarded them against accepting the hearsay of a vision, in the place of clear and tangible facts. But after all, when we have exhausted all the more learned and all the more refined considerations bearing on the problem, I think it really comes to this — that the reasons which ought to determine our belief, as distinguished from a suspense of judgment, are really and truly popular reasons to which almost every mind is open. The consideration of the historic evidence leaves the problem indeterminate. What de- termines it is the evidence that there was in Christ a large and intimate spiritual knowledge of the springs of power and life, of His command of which His VI CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES 165 distinct foreknowledge of future agencies and events, as manifested in the individual instances I have dis- cussed, is but one, though to our intellects perhaps the most striking, illustration. This seems to me to be one of the rare cases in which the final considera- tions, the considerations on which belief or suspense of judgment should really turn, even in the most learned, are essentially popular, the apprehension of them de- pending even more on sensitive hearts and consciences than on cultivated minds. And indeed, if true and reasonable faith be impossible to the people at large, it is pretty evident from the history of all faiths that it is quite as impossible, not to say even more impos- sible, to the learned too. The foundations of faith do not exist at all if they be not in the truest sense within the reach of the people. That is why it seems to me useful to show that the principal ap- proaches by which religious truth reaches the mind, are approaches, I will not say as direct, but as much more numerous than those of nineteen centuries ago, as the craving multitudes of our own day are more numerous and in even deeper need of spiritual help, than the multitudes who looked for a new redemption in Galilee, Judaea, and Rome. VII THE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL ^ For many years back there have appeared, from time to time, one-sided and negative historical criti- cisms on Christian and Jewish records which have far exceeded in practical interest and power, books of what seem to me much sounder judgment. These criticisms have recognised the fact that history must lead to a conviction much deeper than history itself can give, if it would have a religious significance. They usually deny that history does do this, it is true ; but they echo the genuine feeling of men about historical criticism, in making the assertion. They say boldly : ' Historical criticism has an intense interest, if it is only one stage in the education of men's spirits into truths lying far beneath it : but better clear it away altogether than mistake the title-deeds for the title, — the hold on the mere medium of revelation for the hold on ^ ICritiscJie Untersuchungmi iiber die kanonisohen Evangelien, ihr Verhdltniss zu einander, ihreii Charakter und Ursprimg. Von Dr. Ferdinand Christian Baur. Tiibingen, 1847. Beit- rage aur Evangelien-kritik. Von Dr. Fried. Bleek. Berlin, 1846. The Gospel of St. John. By Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A. Note I. On Baur's Theory of the Gospels. Macmillan, 1857. VII HISTORICAL PROBLEMS OF FOURTH GOSPEL 167 the reality revealed. If you find that an imperfect history and literature is the introduction to a living and perfect trust — that as you pierce beneath the surface you get hold of far clearer and deeper certainties than the mere authority of the history or literature could bring with it — then historical criticism has a living significance, and we will follow it with you that it may lead us to something better than itself. But if you find that the thing revealed can only stand by the mere external force of its historical credentials, then you have got hold of no religion, but a mere piece of antiquarianism ; and we will show you how baseless your confidence is.' And I believe that such destructive criticism has done a great and most needful work. Why, indeed, is the sacred literature so complex in character, and the sacred history so entirely on a level in authority with all other ancient history, unless for this very purpose, to prevent us from holding religious faith by the wrong, i.e. the external, side,^to teach us to hold our trust in God by the same tenure as our trust in man, that of living and growing personal impression ; beginning, it may be, in outward historical evidence, but quite unable to hold and extend its influence on that evidence alone ? To my mind, the genuine and candid portion (for no doubt there is much both ungenuine and uncandid) of the destructive criticism of the last half-century has far more tendency to open the real issues of religious questions, and indirectly, therefore, even to quicken faith, than the " apologetic " criticism by which it has frequently been met. The former has, at least, often delineated a real crisis in the history of individual lives — the first conflict between the groping intellect and the yearning heart — the fixed 168 THE HISTOEICAL PEOBLEMS vil resolve to find something deeper than historical records on which to rest — the unshrinking scrutiny into the uneasy corners of intellectual profession ; while the latter has been emphatically " apologetic " — seldom courageous enough to face the inward crisis at all — dealing with its enemies in detail — wounding one, disabling another, slightly hampering a third — making the most of each separate triumph, but seldom daring to confront with its whole force the whole force of the foe — seldom asking itself : 'Are these "reasons" that I assign, the roots of my own faith ? Have I any deep inexhaustible springs of conviction, which no " difficulties " could choke up 1 And if so, would not the clearest and sincerest proof of the depth of those springs be attained by admit- ting eagerly and heartily the whole force of all opposite considerations, and convincing myself how powerless they are to undermine inward trust ! ' As a rule, the most depressing and disheartening of all religious literature is the apologetic literature. If I wished to doubt the possibility of a revelation, I should take a course of reading in defence of it. The works of professional assailants are often, in- deed, of exactly the same description ; but I know no books so valuable to probe the sources and show the real depth and realities of the Christian revela- tion as the books of profound -minded, honest, re- luctant sceptics, if only, instead of being scared by them, we would allow them to sink quietly into the mind, and be there fairly tested as " working hypo- theses," by voluntary judgments, thought, and reading. No doubt, at first, such works often produce a strong and painful, and purely negative impression — an impression partly due to their strength, partly to their weakness ; but, if they are true, the pain is VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 169 wholesome pain ; and if not, the quiet and un- shrinking study of them draws out latent truths and new aspects of truth, such as sadly few "apologies" hring to light. All delineations of real and eager mental conilict, of minds in honest transition, open out fresh realities to the mind ; and if tranquilly laid to heart, for every new difficulty there is generally found more than one new spring of faith. A very remarkable instance of this effect of genuine, even when most negative, criticism, is to be found in the influence which Bretschneider's and Baur's as- saults on the Fourth Gospel are likely to produce on the present condition of Christian faith. Baur's book shows remarkably how a genuine historical investigation, conducted on broad and courageous principles, will lead us beyond itself, and suggest issues of a deeper and more instructive class. Every learned English theological critic of the present day is acquainted with Baur's able researches, and occasionally mentions points in them in order to refute them ; but only one has ventured to face, in its original strength, the general tenor of Baur's argument, and he was precluded by the nature of his work from giving it more than a general con- sideration. I propose to condense the combination of converging evidences by which Baur demonstrates, to his own satisfaction, the historical incredibility of St. John's Gospel ; and to use the aspects of the subject, that will be thus brought out, as a guide in estimating the most plausible views of it. Theologians certainly miss more instruction by their timidity and negligent appreciation of hostile arguments, than by any diligence and enthusiasm of advocacy they can contrive to make up for. 170 THE HISTORICAL PEOBLEMS vii Baur maintains, and I may safely say proves, that the unity of the Fourth Gospel is a theological unity ; that the whole of the narrative is threaded together, by the single intention to unfold the relation of the Father to the Son or Divine Word, as the divine relation through a living participation in which all men may be set free. But it is not the theology of the fourth gospel which I intend to consider in the present essay : it is the bearing of that theology on the narrative of the Evangelist to which I must, for the present, limit myself. Baur's view is briefly this. The theology it contains is the theology of the second century. The Christian Gnosis or unfolding of the relation between the Father and the Son or Word, in the fourth gospel, presupposes the coarser Gnosis of the Syrian and Alexandrian schools ; and is set out, partly at least, in answer to them. The great superiority it has is mainly in this — that, while the false Gnostics re- presented the Light and Darkness as contending in an external and semi-physical conflict, the Christian writer limits the arena to the soul of man. But not the less, as Baur holds, does he fall into the Gnostic error of subordinating the moral freedom of man to the overruling metaphysical necessity he delineates. Only those who are virtually God's already, "come to the light, that their deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God : " while all whom the Father has not " drawn " to the Son, seem to remain helpless organs of the Darkness; and "hate the Light, neither come to the Light, lest their deeds should be reproved." To the delineation of the conflict between the " Word made flesh," and the power of darkness or unbelief in the Jews, and their leaders the Pharisees, Vfl OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 171 the whole narrative of the fourth gospel is, according to Baur, subordinated — and not merely subordinated, but completely accommodated — sometimes by the skilful use of traditional material, sometimes by the invention of symbolic miracles, everywhere by the free composition of appropriate discourse. It is to bring out more markedly the metaphysical opposi- tion between the Divine Light and the Darkness of Jewish unbelief, that the scene is so often shifted from G-alilee — almost uniformly the scene of Christ's ministry, up to the last crisis, in the other three gospels — to Jerusalem and its neighbourhood, where that unbelief was at once most intense and most culpable. It is to deepen the dark colouring of this unbelief, that most of the new facts, and new aspects of fact, are drawn up by the Evangelist. It is be- cause it does not bear directly on this strife between the self-manifested Light and human Darkness, that so much of the traditional history is left unused. But there was one other theological controversy in the second century, besides the Gnostic controversies as to the divine emanations issuing from the God- head — the Paschal controversy. The Jewish pass- over had, by its connection with the crucifixion of Christ, acquired in the minds of Christians an asso- ciation with spiritual deliverance from the power of sin and death, which almost absorbed its old associa- tion with the deliverance from political degradation and the Egyptian bondage. The paschal lamb was a sign of that mighty hand of God, which had been put forth to rescue the Jews from the rapidly multiplying sins of slaves ; and now, at the same season, they celebrated another sacrifice, a sign of a still mightier power, put forth to rescue them from the growing slavery of sin. The deliverance was 172 THE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS vil greater ; for, in the former case, their sins had been in some measure a result of their degraded political condition; in the latter, their degraded condition was the simple result of their sins. Hence the Jewish passover early obtained a Christian interpre- tation ; and even St. Paul exclaims, " Christ our passover was sacrificed for us." The superstitious mind of the second century- came gradually, says Baur, to wish to verify this broad and true insight by the minutest correspond- ences in times and observances ; and thus it became of importance to prove that Christ was slain exactly on the day and at the hour when the paschal lamb was slain, so fulfilling and exhausting the meaning of the Jewish rite. The three first gospels, however, represent Him as eating the paschal lamb with His disciples, at the usual Jewish season, on the evening before His death. It became necessary, therefore, for an evangelist, who, in Baur's view, certainly belonged to the Alexandrian school, to defend the doctrine of that school, by altering the date of the crucifixion by a day, and so bringing every thing into accordance with that view of the Jewish pass- over which regarded it as a typical anticipation of the Christian Easter. It was with constant reference, then, to these two leading theological controversies of the second cen- tury — the Gnostic and the Paschal controversy — that Baur conceives that the primitive gospel was intentionally and consciously remodelled by the fourth Evangelist. But, before I give in detail the evidence by which he defends his view, I must clear away two intermediate hypotheses, which might be, and have been, put forward in regard to this gospel. The difierences between the facts of the fourth VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 173 gospel and the others, and the preponderance in it of the theological element, may be explained on four distinct suppositions : — 1. That the theology, brooding in the minds of successive generations, has gradually modified, where it has not actually produced, the facts : the mythic theory. 2. That though the facts are, probably, less reliable than those of the other gospels, because they are preserved by a less primitive stream of tradition, their peculiar character may yet be explained on the assumption that they were preserved by the Hellen- istic Christian tradition, as distinguished from the Hebrew Christian, — each selecting, and perhaps exaggerating, those aspects of Christ's ministry which were most suitable to its own cast of thought : this may be called the theory of Hellenistic tradi- tion. 3. That the facts are consciously dressed up, and modified to meet the thoughts and wants of the Alexandrian Christianity in the second century : Baur's theory. 4. That the facts were selected for special illustra- tion of certain religious truths ; but are more reliable and closer to such events as this gospel touches at all, than even those of the other gospels, being more certainly the recollections of a personal disciple of Christ. Now, the first assumption may be very quickly disposed of. Baur's own answer to it is quite suffi- cient ; and Baur does not put anything like the whole strength of the case. He maintains, justly, I think, that there is no single portion of Scripture where there is so complete an absence of any indica- tion of the gradual condensation of belief into fact as 174 THE HISTORICAL PEOBLEMS Vil in the fourth gospel. Distinct theological purpose is not only everywhere present, but everywhere con- scious ; and the boundary between it and the facts narrated is remarkably sharp and clear. Narrative and theological principles are both there, no doubt, and both in organic connection ; but they are as separable as the principles and purposes of the hero of any modern biography are from the practical steps by which he illustrates them. For example, the gift of sight to the man born blind is clearly meant by the Evangelist to be taken in close connection with Christ's words : " I am the light of the world," and with His rebuke to the Pharisees : " For judgment am I come into this world, that those who see not may see, and those who see may be made blind ; " tior can it well be doubted that both the miracle and the sayings are strictly an illustration of the Evan- gelist's ovm prologue, where he speaks of the Light as shining in Darkness, — of the Darkness as com- prehending it not, while " as many as received " it therewith received power, like the man whose eyes were opened simultaneously to the physical and spiritual personality of Christ, to become "sons of God." There can be little doubt that in such instances as these discourses of Christ, the narrative of His actions and the introductory theology of the Evangelist are intended to form an organic whole ; but clearly one in which there is a conscious dis- crimination of the different elements of fact and doctrine. The procedure of Christ, the debate in the Sanhedrim, the examination of the blind man's parents, — none of these things have either a symbolic or a mythic character : they are at least put forth as straightforward incident : nor is there any single circumstance treated as narrative in the whole gospel, VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 175 which has any appearance of being intended to bear an allegorical or merely symbolic interpretation, nor anything like an imaginative representation of a popular faith. Even Baur has not noted the w^hole strength of this case. The temptation, the transfiguration, the supernatural birth, are none of them to be found in this gospel. The darkness which brooded over the earth when the Son of God expired, — the sudden rending of the veil of the Temple, — the visible ascension of the Saviour from the earth, — all of them events which necessarily have symbolic aspects, and are therefore especially liable to symbolic modes of interpretation, — are wanting in the fourth gospel. In fact, though the miracles of this gospel may possibly bear classification on a theological principle, in regard, namely, to the particular aspect of the Divine Word that each may illustrate, — as the re- storer of health and strength to the physically and morally paralysed, — as the " Bread of Life " to the common labourer in the fulness of his strength, — as the " Light of the World " both to the seeing and the blind, — as the " Resurrection and the Life " to the dead ; — yet in the account of the miracles them- selves there is no disappearance of those small physical details and incidental facts which seem to distract the mind from the ideal element. On the contrary, the only great miracle which the fourth gospel and the other three have in common, — the multiplication of the loaves (which in this gospel, we must recollect, immediately precedes the discourse on "I am the Bread of Life"), — is related in a way even less ideal than in the synoptic narrative. A narrative which was merely the imaginative embodi- ment of the discourse, would certainly not have 176 THE HISTOEICAL PROBLEMS VII specialised the loaves as " barley loaves." Yet this is peculiar to this gospel's account. And not only here, but everywhere, the fact and the engrafted teaching are kept sedulously apart. There are few matters of fact in the other gospels which it is so impossible to analyse hypothetically into purely ideal elements as those of the fourth ; simply because the ideal and the real side both exist here in their fullest strength, so that there is no pretence for saying that either of the two gave birth to the other. The second or traditional hypothesis, which regards the gospel as the result of a less primitive but bond fide tradition of the Hellenistic Christians, is hardly more tenable. In the first place, if a genuine tradition, its germ or historical nucleus must have been the personal testimony of one of Christ's apostles, who can have been no other than St. John. The gospel introduces us to the most private inter- course held by Christ with His disciples ; it contains in the last chapters the reported testimony of one specially connected with Peter (as we find John to be in the opening of the Acts of the Apostles) ; and it has domestic elements of Christ's history recorded by no other Evangelist. In short, if it be a genuine tradition at all, it can only have originated in the reports of one of the three apostles everywhere spoken of in the synoptic gospels as the special friends and followers of Christ, — -Peter, James, and John. Peter is excluded by the narrative itself. James was early put to death by Herod ; nor has any tradition ever connected the gospel with his name. Moreover, as has often been remarked, on the assumption either that this gospel is written in simplicity, or otherwise, the habitual absence in it of the description of John the forerunner of Christ as VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 177 " the Baptist " — a description universal in the other three gospels — rather points (unconsciously or fraudulently, as the case may be) to a writer who, being himself the other John to be distinguished, could not possibly have got into the habit of thus distinguishing John the Baptist from the well-known disciple of the same name. But be this as it may, the last chapters of the fourth gospel certainly profess to record much of the personal testimony of our Lord's most intimate friend among the twelve apostles ; and Baur freely admits that they intentionally indicate John. But when we add to this certainty, which bears, no doubt, only on a portion of the gospel, — a portion which may therefore have been the mere germ or nucleus of the rest, — the unanimous inference of all great critics, — Baur being the single exception, — from the mere styles of the gospel and the first epistle of John, that these, as wholes, are the com- positions of one and the same author ; and find, moreover, at the very outset of the epistle an asser- tion of the author's direct personal intercourse with Christ exactly similar both in tone and substance to an assertion in one of the later chapters of the gospel,^ ' In the gospel, chap. xix. ver. 35, we read, " And he that hath seen it hath borne witness, and his witness is true : and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye may believe." And again, chap. xx. ver. 31, " But these are written, that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye might have life in his name. " In the epistle, the words are, ' ' And the life was manifested, and we have seen, and bear witness, and declare unto you that eternal life, that was with the Father, and was manifested to us : that which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us : and our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." N 178 THE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS VII — it is almost impossible to avoid the conclusion that the fourth gospel was not merely originated, but written as a whole, by one who professed to be a personal — and most intimate personal — follower of Christ. But is it not possible to conceive the elements of the narrative properly traditional, in case the implied authorship by an apostle is a mistake or a fraud f I think not. Taking the broadest view of the con- tents of the gospel, I can find nothing less in it than a traditional character, if by tradition we are to understand that which has passed from mind to mind, and gradually taken the proportions and colouring in which it most powerfully affects the imagination either of a people or of a school. This traditional hypothesis, we must remember, is an attempt to account for the fresh aspects of Christ's character, and the new — nay, to some extent incon- sistent — story of His career, which this gospel, when compared with the three synoptic narratives, brings out. There is, it is remarked, a haze of mystic glory brooding over the character and pur- poses of Christ in the last narrative, which clears away in the three first, showing the delicate and majestic outline of a distinct human personality. Again, the miraculous power, which in St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke is mainly the organ of a Divine compassion for human misery and pain, is in this gospel — primarily, at least — the revealing medium of a mighty spiritual presence, and intended more as a solemn parting in the clouds of Providence, to enable man to gaze up into the light of Divine mystery, than as a grateful temporary shower of blessing to a parched and blighted earth. And further, the religious love which in the synoptic VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 179 gospels confines itself to the children of the kingdom, in this embraces at the very outset a village of the alien Samaria, and solemnly anticipates at the close not only the coming welcome of the Greeks, but the assembling of all men at the foot of the cross. And all these differences, together with that sub- ordinate difference as to the ordinary theatre of Christ's ministry whicli was needful to give the requisite solemnity of antithesis to the narrow notions of the Jewish teachers, it is proposed to explain by the colouring influence of a Hellenistic stream of tradition, which strove to see in Christ its own dream of supersensual brightness and self- revealing power. Now it is quite a different question whether or not this gospel contains a refracted and unfaithful image of the ministry of Chri.st, and whether or not that unfaithfulness looks like the unconscious modifi- cation of tradition. For many reasons it is desirable to keep the discussion of these questions as far as possible distinct, and it is the latter which I am just now discussing. The fourth gospel is much too remarkably peculiar and individual in its whole tenor to be the result of tradition. It is not simply that the selected thoughts and discourses of Christ are so entirely of one cast and tone, but the narra- tives themselves are all taken from the same point of view, — that of showing how the Son came into the world, not in His own name but His Father's, how the world would not receive Him, and how yet as many as received Him were, in proportion to the simplicity and fulness of their trust, justified by the issue. Now tradition does not take up single truths, or single aspects of truth, and illustrate them throughout a series of facts. If it takes hold of 180 THE HISTOEICAL PROBLEMS vil character, it sketches the same character from a number of different points of view, till the essence is engraved upon fyour mind by the variety of aspects in which you have seen it. If, on the other hand, it takes hold of narrative, as narrative, it brings out in clear colours the popular emotions, — the fear, the hope, the anguish, the triumph, — on which the interest of the story turns. Thus Elijah's character is brought out with marvellous clearness and sub- limity by the traditions of his people, in its various attitudes towards God and man, — towards the king and the widow, in the hour of awestruck inspira- tion, and in the hour of blank despair. But all these scenes are threaded together in the imagination of the people simply by the distinct personality they express, not by the illustration of any single aspect of Divine truth. And in the pastoral traditions of the Jews,— the narratives of Jacob and Esau, — of Joseph and his brethren, — of the Shunamite woman whose son was restored to her by Elisha, we find, on the other hand, the vivid colouring of popular sympathy with the broad human emotions of parental love and anxiety, of brethren's jealousy, of awe at the loneliness of Nature, and of trust in God. In short, the effect of tradition is to reduce the human narrative to its effective elements, — to pare away the small discrepancies and unrealities of a great character, which only mar the spectacle of it as a whole, — to omit those portions of a narratijie which have no special fascination for the simple 'and universal feeling of the human heart ^o doubt, in the case of an intellectual people like the Hellen- istic Jews the tendency might be something different — namely, to reduce the memory of facts to their ideal essence, — their intellectual significance as VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 181 thoughts. But of this too there is no trace in the fourth gospel. The facts remain presented not as distinct ideal wholes, but as accumulated illustrations of a single truth. It is not the varying and charac- teristic essence of each individual act and sign which the fourth Evangelist brings out, but a single perma- nent theological meaning, which he traces through all of them : and this, too, is so remarkably the case, that if we stripped the narratives peculiar to this gospel of all the details recorded with special refer- ence to this permanent theological design, we should leave little for the share of "tradition" except the naked assertion that such or such an event had once happened during the ministry of Christ. The only new details, indeed, which are not of this kind — namely, illustrative of theological signifi- cance — are details of personal and private affections, such as Christ's last recommendation of His mother to His disciple, the request of Peter at the Last Supper, " Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head," the grief of Mary Magdalene at find- ing the body of Christ removed from the sepulchre, the imputation of treachery to Judas in relation to his anxiety at the waste of the ointment, the de- meanour of Martha and Mary after their brother's death, and at the feast in Bethany, and the little by-play at the marriage feast of Cana in Galilee. In- deed, where the narrative of the fourth gospel seems confused at all, it is from the absence, even where you most expect them, of those broad general effects which tradition always preserves. It is almost impossible that the story of the marriage at Cana, for example, should in its present form have been preserved by either a Jewish or a Hellenistic tradi- tion; there is none of that broad feeling of the 182 THE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS VII sacredness of family life which would have endeared it to the Jew, and no clear ideal element which might have fixed it in the memory of the Greek. It does not catch the tone of sacredness and joy with which the popular imagination — especially amongst the Jews — always invests the threshold of family life ; it does not even mention the wonder of the rustic guests at the greatness of the miracle. And it has puzzled rationalistic criticism ever since by the absence of any clear suggestion for an allegoric interpretation, such as might have suited the Greek taste for symbol. Yet it glances at the private background of the scene, indicating the familiar terms on which the mother of Jesus stood in the household, both by the interest she feels for the hos- pitable treatment of the guests and by her freedom in addressing the servants ; it asserts emphatically, in the little dialogue between Jesus and His mother as to His "time being not yet come," a truth which is repeated again and again throughout this gospel, that there was a higher law for Christ's actions than could be derived from mere external circumstance — the law of a being whose guiding impulses were from within and from above ; and it draws careful atten- tion to the circumstances proving the greatness and the reality of the miracle — the magnitude of the water-pots, and the attestation by the governor of the feast. And lastly, it tells the effect of the sign ; — that His disciples "saw his glory, and l>eKeved on him." Now this may be theological invention for a purpose ; or it may be personal recollection or hear- say, modified by a special aim in recording ; but it surely is not proper tradition. There is a dispropor- tion in the parts of the narrative, a want of wholeness and distinctness, whether imaginative or rational, in vn OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 183 the effect, which is extremely unlike the filtering and colouring results of a slow straining through the minds of men. I doubt especially if any tradition — properly so called — concentrates the attention on points of evi- dence. These are, indeed, always prominent in the first narration of marvellous events, and in the imme- diate rehearsal of them ; but while the links of proof gradually fall out of the popular mind, and are absorbed into the ultimate effect which they were meant to accredit, the imaginative or intellectual influence which the event was calculated to put forth is developed and brought out into clearer outline. Thus, among all the proper Hebrew tradi- tions, there is none in which any special stress is laid on the points which a la^yyer would value as estab- lishing the truth of his case. And indeed this is one remarkable point in which most of the miracles peculiar to the fourth gospel differ from those in the other three, which approach more closely to tradi- tions. The nobleman whose son is healed by Christ in Cana, goes down to Capernaum (John iv. 52, 53), and finds that the child had begun to recover at the exact hour at which Christ said to him, " Thy son liveth." In the accounts of the miracle on the man born blind, and of the resurrection of Lazarus, there is very much of the same character, — a predomi- nance, namely, of that view of the narrative in which its testimony to the higher nature of Christ, and its adaptation to awaken belief in the beholders, are the two points regarded. The concluding assertion of the Evangelist, "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God," is verified through every narrative he gives. Everywhere attention is fixed on the 184 THE HISTOKIOAL PEOBLEMS Vil indications of a nature obeying higher and more mysterious laws than the common nature of man; everywhere attention is fixed on the indications that Christ's divine acts were real, and not fictitious. In the account of the miracle on the man born blind, this is remarkably the case. The narrative is intro- duced with an emphasis on the former point, in the recorded saying of Christ, that " neither did this man sin, nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me while it is day. . . . As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world." And then, throughout the narrative, the emphasis is laid on all the points which bring out the evidence of the fact most irresistibly, and which make the unbelief of the Pharisees seem most obsti- nate and culpable. But what we may call the general graphic effect, the spectacle of the divine act, is scarcely painted at all : the surprise of the neigh- bours, the emotion of his parents, the dawning of a new sense on the man himself, are not touched at all, or only touched in relation to the non-result produced on the minds of the obstinate Pharisees ; "We know that God spake unto Moses, but as for this man we know not whence he is." We are not told, as St. Mark tells us in a similar case, that the blind man's sight came gradually, that he first saw " men as trees walking." We are not told even of the man's own joy. These are the sides of a miracle that take hold of the popular imagination. But we are told of the blind man's immediate inference that Jesus was a prophet, and how, in spite of all evi- dence, the Pharisees remained blind though saying " we see," and cast out of the synagogue — as a penalty for his faith — the man whom Christ had restored to vn OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 185 sight. Every winding of the story that bears on its strength of reality as against sceptics, and on the certain inference it yields with regard to the nature of Christ, is anxiously followed out ; but no others. And as a whole, it is a living representation of the petty doubtings of Pharisaic pride and disbelief, but certainly not the popular vision of a mighty act of power. The same remark may be made on the account given us of the resurrection of Lazarus. It begins as before Avith Christ's teaching : " This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the Son of God might be glorified thereby." It then tells us that Christ, after hearing of the illness of Lazarus, stayed two days without moving. And later on He tells His disciples : " I am glad for your sakes that I was not there, to the intent ye may believe." Here, as elsewhere, the Evangelist not only takes pains to bring out the glory of God in the belief of the disciples as the end of the miracle, but lays stress on the circumstances that show the law of Christ's nature to be mysterious and given from above, and not determined by the small occasional motives which make sport with human wills. He does not go on the first news ; but when, afterwards, the disciples object to Him the great danger of going into Judea again, Christ intimates that there can be no danger in doing anything where there is clear light from heaven. As all men can walk safely during the twelve hours of the day, so could He go safely whenever His mind was clearly illuminated from above, as to the duty before Him. His light of life was not, like other men's, reflected back from the mere visible circumstances of His earthly lot, but shone directly on the earthly lot from the heaven in 186 THE HISTORICAL PROBLEMS Vll which His spirit dwelt. Then, if we omit the personal traits of Thomas's courageous affection and the sister's grief and trust, the principal stress of the narrative falls on the great words to Martha, " I am the resurrection and the life ; " and on the thanksgiving to which He gives utterance, "for the sake of the bystanders," that the Father had heard Him. This precedes the act of power itself ; and the Evangelist clearly means to draw attention to this, as bringing out Christ's conscious unity with God more strikingly than if it had been offered afterwards.^ Even the words, " Loose him and let him go," strikingly as they close the scene, are the natural ending rather to a mind riveted intensely on the manifestations of Christ's personal glory, than to one painting the startling awfulness of the event itself. It is the calmness of Christ's majesty, not the awe of the grave giving up its dead, which these words express. And as the evidences of His miracles, and the higher law of His heavenly nature, are the points on which the Evangelist always fixes attention in regard to Christ, — so the sincerity of other persons' belief, and the depth to which their belief in Him went, are the points on which He always fixes attention in regard to other men. They are all classified or measured by the kind and amount of their belief. The Galileans are marked as believing only because they had seen the signs He did at the feast ; His mother believes, but not implicitly enough to forego ^ A parallel incident in the other gospels is the healing of the man whose sins have been first forgiven by Christ, when He asks, "Whether is it easier to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee, or, Arise and walk ? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins (He saith to the sick of the palsy), Arise, take up thy bed and walk." VII OF THE FOURTH GOSPEL 187 prompting Him ; the nobleman at Capernaum cannot at first leave to Christ the mode of His divine help, but prescribes to Him "to come down" ere his child die, yet afterwards believes with his whole house- hold ; Nicodemus can assent to the convincing power of outward marvels, but cannot believe in the free- dom of the spirit ; Nathaniel, and afterwards the Samaritans, believe on Him on the testimony of their own inward experience to His divine power ; the Pharisees reject Him, because their own nature and deeds are evil ; the Jews of Capernaum are staggered by the first " hard saying," — with whom Peter is contrasted, asking, " Lord, to whom shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life. And we have believed and know that thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God ;"i the brethren of Jesus taunt- ingly say to Him, " If thou be the Christ, manifest thyself to the world. For even his brethren did not believe on him;" Thomas, — bold and enthusiastic, who would follow Christ into danger that "he may die vnth him" — who yet tells his Master, "We know not whither thou goest, and how can we know the way?" and who after the resurrection will not believe except he see the " print of the nails," — is finally classified by Christ in regard to the nature of his faith, in the words, "Thomas, because thou hast seen, thou hast believed ; blessed are they who 1 I adopt here and generally a translation of this gospel by- five clergymen after the authorised version (London, J. W. Parker, 1857) : a translation which is, however, by no means adec[uately corrected. For example, it is a very great mistake to continue to translate