X.I 
 
 T h e o 1 o g i 
 
 PRI 
 
 B R ^ K Y 
 
 
 (IJ- TICK 
 
 
 ical Seminar 
 
 Y' 
 
 HCETON, N. J. 
 
 1 
 
 Shell 
 
 BS 650 .M38 1863 
 
 Maurice, Frederick Denison 
 
 1805-1872. 
 The claims of the Bible and 
 
 Boo/. of science 
 
THE 
 
 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 . SCIENCE. 
 
 COKRESPONDENCE 
 
 BETWEEN 
 
 A LAYMAIS^ AND THE EEV. F. D. MAUHICE 
 
 ON SOilB 
 
 QUESTIONS ARISING OUT OF THE CONTROVERSY 
 RESPECTING THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 3Lonti0n anti Cambrititje: 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 1863. 
 
JOHN EDTVARB TAYLOR, PRINTEB, 
 LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDa. 
 
ADYEETISEMENT. 
 
 The opening Letter in this Volume was sug- 
 gested by Bishop Colenso's work on the Penta- 
 teuch. But it touches on several points which 
 have only an indirect connection with that work ; 
 it omits many which the Bishop would, no doubt, 
 consider important. The Letters which follow 
 are strictly in reply to the first, not the least 
 a refutation or review of the book which called 
 that letter forth. The final one states the im- 
 pressions of the Layman respecting the answers 
 which have been made to him. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Letter of a Layman 1 
 
 LETTER I. 
 Inteocuctoey 13 
 
 LETTEE 11. 
 Is Revelation a Word once given ? 19 
 
 LETTER III. 
 Subject-matter of the Bible ; How it must be 
 Read 25 
 
 LETTER IV. 
 Moral and Physical Studies 33 
 
 LETTER V. 
 Biblical Apologies 46 
 
 LETTER VI. 
 La-w-s.— Generalizations.— The Christian Faith . 56 
 
 LETTER VII. 
 The Facts of Bishop Colenso 65 
 
Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 LETTEE VIII. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Faith in Cheist, and the Authoeship of the 
 Pentateuch 79 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 The Pentateuch 92 
 
 LETTER X. 
 The Deluge 107 
 
 LETTER XI. 
 
 CUSEENT PhEASES IN THIS CoNTEOVEEST .... 119 
 
 LETTER XII. 
 The Law Couets. — The People of God. — Eternal 
 Punishment 127 
 
 LETTER XIII. 
 Opinions of Bishops on the Foundation of oue 
 Hopes 138 
 
 Lettee of a Layman 156 
 
CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 AND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 March Wi, 1863. 
 My dear Maurice, 
 
 I do indeed wish you to speak in 
 plain language about the Bible to English 
 Laymen at the present time. I will tell you why, 
 and I should be glad, as one of your oldest 
 friends, though much severed from you through 
 life, to tell others why. 
 
 For more than a quarter of a century you 
 have been helping Englishmen to see through the 
 theories and systems which have been invented 
 to prop up, restore, develope, or narrow the 
 ancient edifice of their National Church ; and 
 amidst ceaseless contumely and misrepresentation 
 levelled against yourself, you have striven to 
 teach, as Alexander Knox and S. T. Coleridge 
 
 B 
 
2 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 taught before you, that the Bible and the Churcli 
 of England, in all their comprehensiveness, can 
 best bear witness for their own truth, and for 
 God's providence, against infidehty and Pan- 
 theism. 
 
 Now that many are shocked by Bishop 
 Colenso's theories, or alarmed lest his criticism 
 should put the faith of England in danger, I 
 think you, who have been familiar with such 
 questions all your life, can tell us how little there 
 is to fear from a searching inquiry into facts. 
 The only ground for alarm is lest a false and un- 
 tenable position be taken up. 
 
 It is now thirty-five years and more since you 
 migrated from Cambridge by way of London to 
 Oxford. There are many now in high posts of 
 responsibility who will remember that, bringing 
 with you the inquiring and lovuig spirit of Julius 
 Hare, and more experience of life than we had, 
 you roused us to long for something deeper than 
 logic, and helped us to look beyond that thin 
 nominalism by which Whately and others were 
 upsetting old notions without putting anything 
 solid in their place. How Hampden's appeal 
 from dogmas to fiicts was denounced as the 
 Foundation of the Faith assailed in Oxford, and 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 what advantage was taken of the reaction to 
 build up the fabric of authority, we need not 
 now discuss. Much earnest work has been done 
 for which the Enghsh Church may be thankful. 
 If we are humbled and made more indulgent 
 to each other, by our several errors, mistakes, 
 and failures, by the loss to our communion of 
 some noble spirits, God's work may yet be ac- 
 knowledged in what seems to awaken fear, and 
 faith may be strengthened. 
 
 Meanwhile, whatever dreams, and notions, and 
 schemes may have occupied tlie minds of men 
 and women, the reality of physical, moral, and 
 political facts has asserted itself. Laymen who 
 have to work in the busy world, or in scientific 
 investigation, are influenced accordingly. One 
 feeling, however, is uppermost in the minds of 
 those who are not absorbed in their own affairs ; 
 namely, the desire that the clergy should look facts 
 in the face, as they hope to guide the consciences 
 of their brethren by the light of principles. 
 
 During the years which have elapsed since we 
 parted at Oxford, you have been at work with 
 agricultural labourers near a large manufacturing 
 town, with the sick and suffering in a large 
 hospital, with medical students, with practising 
 
 B 2 
 
4 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 lawyers, and, for the last ten years, you have 
 been specially engaged in reading the Bible and 
 English History with the self- improving working 
 men of the metropolis ; you ought, therefore, to 
 know something of the English laity — and many 
 of them know enough of you to listen to what 
 you have to say. 
 
 The laity are now appealed to from opposite 
 quarters to stake their faith and their hopes of 
 eternity on the results of arithmetic and criti- 
 cism, and on the possibility of reconciling God's 
 holy word in the outward form, in which he has 
 been pleased to give it to us and our children, 
 with the tangible facts of the world — that world of 
 which "the Book" tells us that "all things were 
 made by him " (the Word), " and without him 
 was not anything made that was made." 
 
 How well I remember the place in which you 
 first pointed out to me the connection of that 
 truth with life and light ! 
 
 Before 1 proceed to state the questions which 
 I wish you to answer, let me, at the risk of re- 
 peating commonplaces, explain the position of 
 parties as they appear to me in the case we have 
 to deal with. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 One of the most conscientious labourers in 
 the field of science once indicated to me what 
 he deemed the true relation between Science and 
 Revelation.* 
 
 Science is essentially progressive, and therefore 
 of necessity changeable, and in any given age 
 imperfect. It is only the sciolist who lays down 
 the law in practical matters, and says, " It has 
 now been demonstrated beyond all possibility of 
 doubt." The true philosopher says humbly, 
 " In the present state of our knowledge it ap- 
 pears that such a law or fact has been ascer- 
 tained." The more intense the attention given 
 to one class of facts, the greater the necessity for 
 not overlooking collateral considerations. 
 
 Revelation, on the contrary, is God's word 
 once given. Our comprehension of that word 
 may possibly be progressive, but it is necessarily 
 imperfect, generally because all human knowledge 
 is imperfect, specially because the subject-matter 
 is different from that of ordinary knowledge, and 
 because we are told that we must fulfil certain 
 conditions, and use certain means, in order to 
 attain to a knowledge of God. 
 
 Science and Revelation therefore are, so to 
 
 * See Note, p. 181. 
 
6 
 
 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 speak, in different planes, and cannot come into 
 real collision : unless we confound the one with 
 the other. 
 
 Any man who feels this to be a true state- 
 ment of the relation between Science and Reve- 
 lation, may be excused if he takes no interest in 
 the arguments of those who strive to prop up 
 Revelation by remarkable confirmations founded 
 on Science ; or who struggle to protect the Bible 
 from some imaginary danger, to be apprehended 
 from the last new theory propounded at the 
 British Association. Indeed, it is impossible 
 not to feel some impatience when one hears 
 those who know little of science, but wish to 
 serve the cause of religion, attempt to show that 
 the author of the first chapter of Genesis was 
 inspired to use language which should, by a 
 special miracle, anticipate and include all the 
 changing phases of human discovery. 
 
 Those writers who so handle the truth, whether 
 of God's word or of his world, are trying an ex- 
 periment on the faith of the laity, tending to 
 produce more serious results than all the doubts 
 anfl difficulties which they seek to remove. 
 
 The reply of Dr. M'Caul to Mr. Goodwin in 
 the ' i\ids to Faith,' following, as it does, on 
 
A'SD OF SCIENCE. / 
 
 Hugh Miller's last work, seems to bring such 
 attempts at reconciliation to a climax. It stands 
 in remarkable contrast to the candour of Profes- 
 sor Browne's paper in the same volume, which 
 admits and deals fairly with principles now 
 w^orking in the minds of many reflecting men. 
 If it be true that physical science is leading its 
 students gradually to an overpow^ering conscious- 
 ness of a vast unity of plan in Nature, and of 
 the continuity of general laws, it is the more 
 necessary that the one living " God the Father, 
 "Almighty Maker of heaven and earth," and 
 " his only-begotten Son," " who for us men and 
 " for our salvation came down from heaven, and 
 "was incarnate," should be preached to sinners 
 on grounds apart from physical laws ; and that 
 the "Holy Ghost," "who spake by the pro- 
 phets," should be " worshipped as the Lord and 
 giver of life " to us in this nineteenth century, 
 whatever may be the results of human inquiry 
 into the documents handed down to us as the 
 outward form of God's holy word. 
 
 Doubtless many earnest-minded young men 
 in the present day are perplexed, as we were in 
 our younger days, by abstract questions, and 
 metaphysical difficulties; but Bishop Colenso, 
 
8 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 avoiding all such questions, appeals to the test 
 of what he calls facts. His conception of facts 
 seems strange, and his deductions from doubtful 
 data remind one of Coleridge's metaphor of the 
 pyramid standing on its apex. I cannot presume 
 to judge of the temper, motives, or spirit with 
 Avhich he has entered on his work, or of the re- 
 sults to which he may be driven if he pursues 
 his present course. 
 
 My business here is only with the present in- 
 fluence on the lay mind of his alleged facts, well 
 known as those facts (so far as they are facts) 
 have long been to scholars, but entering little 
 into ordinary clerical instruction, and hardly at 
 all into current English literature, and therefore 
 noAV for the first time to be appraised for what 
 they are really worth by Enghsh piety and good 
 sense. 
 
 The attempt to fasten on Bishop Colenso all 
 the consequences of his hastily-drawn inferences, 
 including a charge of moral dishonesty (however 
 provoked by his unmeasured language, and how- 
 ever veiled under the form of a remonstrance), is, 
 to say the least, in the })rcscnt circumstances of 
 the English Church, premature ; nor is the at- 
 tempt unlikely to increase the importance attached 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 9 
 
 by the unlettered to false issues arising out of 
 data of which he offers one solution, as if no 
 other could be probable or possible. 
 
 But any one may venture to say so much 
 as this : first, That it is contrary to all analogy to 
 suppose that he has found at once the true solu- 
 tion of the difficulties he has elaborated. Second- 
 ly, That all his arithmetic and scholarship, whe- 
 ther they are torn to pieces or not, are secondary 
 matters in comparison with the questions how we 
 are to hear and receive God's word without equi- 
 vocation, and how we are to rescue the Church 
 from being proclaimed in a chronic state of siege, 
 under attack from Science, or from placing itself 
 in an attitude of hostility to critical inquiry pro- 
 perly conducted. 
 
 There are two questions to which a layman 
 may naturally at the present time ask for an 
 answer : — 
 
 1. Do not our faith in Christ, and our belief 
 in the four Gospels as a real history, rest on 
 grounds independent of the results of any cri- 
 tical inquiry into the authorship of the Penta- 
 teuch ? 
 
 2. May we not continue to read the Penta- 
 teuch as the Word of God, speaking of man and 
 
10 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 to man, without putting a forced construction on 
 the plain meaning of the words, and without im- 
 posing fetters on the freedom of scientific or cri- 
 tical investigation in any matters which God has 
 given us the power to inquire into ? 
 
 With these two questions I should be disposed 
 to close my letter, having purposely abstained 
 from all metaphysical questions, and all theories 
 about inspiration. 
 
 But I cannot help seeing, and therefore, in all 
 honesty, I am bound to admit, that a third 
 question, a most solemn and awful one, is op- 
 pressing the minds of those who love their 
 Bibles, and who cling to the infallibility of the 
 letter of Scripture as the ground of all their 
 hopes. 
 
 I will not attempt to state the general question 
 in distinct terms, but I may mention one illus- 
 tration. Those of whom I speak seem to fear 
 that if they once allow the historical reality of 
 the physical account of the Deluge to be called 
 in question, they are guilty of doubting the word 
 of Mini who is Truth. Thus faith in Christ is 
 made contingent on the proof or disproof of the 
 existence of certain natural phenomena. Or, to 
 put the matter in another and perhaps more 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 11 
 
 correct form, certain phenomena, which undoubt- 
 edly do exist, seem not to accord with the lan- 
 guage of the Bible. Hypotheses are suggested 
 (hivolving often a variety of supposititious uii- 
 racles), not with a view to give a natural expla- 
 nation of the facts, but to bring them within 
 the letter of the Bible ; thus, the belief in Christ's 
 heavenly promises is apparently made to stand 
 or fall with the probability or improbability of 
 the hypotheses suggested. 
 
 It appears to me deplorable that such an issue 
 as is here implied should have been raised. It is 
 still more deplorable that it should have been 
 countenanced, however unintentionally, by those 
 in authority. You will best know how to dis- 
 entangle the question from the mass of irrelevant 
 matter with which it is encumbered. You will 
 also be able to judge how far it is expedient that 
 it should now be discussed. 
 
 I must leave you to consider how far the 
 discussion of the Law of the Church on the 
 " Sufficiency " or " Infallibility " of Holy Scrip- 
 ture, or of the consequences deduced from arbi- 
 trary definitions of the terms " Word of God " 
 and " Inspiration," will help the solution of the 
 questions I have proposed ? 
 
12 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 Living, as I do, in the country, I may be quite 
 behindhand in my appreciation of what is going 
 on in the minds of thoughtful men. 
 
 If the questions are not put clearly, the name 
 of the querist will neither add to their relevan- 
 cy, nor to the value of your reply ; so I will only 
 say that I am, with grateful recollections of the 
 past, and hearty hopes that your future labours 
 may bring comfort and blessing to yourself and 
 others, 
 
 Your sincere friend, 
 
 A Layman. 
 
13 
 
 LETTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 The first impression which I received 
 from your letter was one of mere dehght at being 
 remembered and recognized by an old friend. 
 When I thought of it, there was much to qua- 
 lify that impression. Shame and repentance for 
 wasted opportunities and duties unfulfilled, was 
 mingled with an uneasy suspicion that I ought 
 to take part in a controversy which for many 
 reasons I had avoided, and for which I had per- 
 suaded myself that I was incompetent. 
 
 Your enumeration of the advantages which I 
 have enjoyed for acquaintance with various classes 
 of the laity — with young men at both the Uni- 
 versities — with medical men — with lawyers — 
 even for a short time with agricultural labour- 
 ers, and now, in London, with mechanics, startled 
 
14 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 and shocked me more than you can well ima- 
 gine. Our paths have, as you say, lain so widely 
 apart almost since we were at Oxford together, 
 that you cannot guess how very little I know of 
 any of these classes. Partly a terrible shyness, 
 partly a much less excusable indolence and cow- 
 ardice, have kept me from understanding those 
 among them who would not have refused me 
 their confidence if I had sought it rightly ; many 
 who did seek it have been repelled by the cold- 
 ness of my nature or my method of expressing 
 myself, which has hindered them from under- 
 standing me. These faults have had much to 
 do with the censures, which have been, you think 
 in your kindness, too liberally bestowed on me. 
 I have no business to say that they have been 
 uncalled for. I know that when they have irri- 
 tated me most they have been immeasurably less 
 painful than the reproaches of my own con- 
 science, which has told me how nuich better 
 they were deserved than the praises of friends 
 which have always overweighed them. 
 
 Still, whatever reasons I have for expecting a 
 very small audience, I have published so many 
 books that it would be affectation to allege any 
 feeling of this kind as a motive for not plunging 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 15 
 
 into the discussion which is now stirring so 
 many minds. I had determined to abstain from 
 it, because I supposed that a Hebrew lore, and 
 a knowledge of science, which I do not possess, 
 ought to be combined in every person who en- 
 gaged in it ; and because the Bishop, whose name 
 has been introduced into it so frequently, is one 
 from whom I have received much kindness, and 
 wdio has stood by me when I have been attacked. 
 To utter any words which might increase the 
 odium under which he labours would be disho- 
 nourable to me ; yet I could not express myself 
 respecting his recent opinions without showing 
 that I dissented from them as widely as many 
 who have denounced both him and me vehe- 
 mently. 
 
 Your call, however, is one which I must not 
 disobey. You ask me for some words upon 
 points which I have been considering seriously 
 during many years, which all m.y circumstances 
 and occupations have compelled me to consider. 
 I shall not be obliged to affect any knowledge 
 which I have not ; possibly my very ignorance 
 of physical science, and my partiahty for studies 
 of another kind, may make any testimony I can 
 bear on its behalf of more worth ; possibly my 
 
16 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 lack of the learning vvliich would enable me to 
 illustrate the Old Testament, may make what I 
 may say of the good which, as one of the people, 
 I have derived from it, less suspicious. If I have 
 not the intimate acquaintance with the Laity for 
 which you give me credit, I have at least mixed 
 more with them than with the Clergy ; they 
 may think me freer from professional prejudices 
 than some of my brethren. The question, as to 
 the merits and demerits of Bishop Colenso, has 
 reached a stage which will enable me to speak 
 of him without appearing to court the favour of 
 his accusers ; I hope, without inflicting any fresh 
 wound upon him. But most of all, it is your allu- 
 sion to old times, and to the hopes which you 
 once formed of me, that forbids me to be silent. 
 The first theological book, now long out of print 
 and forgotten, which I wrote, has a value in my 
 eyes for the intercourse with you into which it 
 led me. We both thought then that the Articles 
 of the Church had a much closer connection with 
 the University and its studies than with the 
 Catholic Church ; that the Creeds were the bond 
 of union to the people ; that the Articles were use- 
 ful to those who were seeking a learned culture, 
 and were needing to be warned against some 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 17 
 
 errors and superstitions which might interfere 
 with it. We have both, I doubt not, altered our 
 opinions about the wisdom of calhng laymen to 
 subscribe a formulary which they evidently do 
 not receive in this sense, which they look upon as 
 a mere bondage upon their consciences. We may 
 both begin to doubt whether the subscription of 
 clergymen is not becoming a snare to them also. 
 But I have been confirmed by an experience of 
 thirty years in the general principles which I 
 maintained in that pamphlet. I still think 
 the articles were not intended as terms of com- 
 munion. I am still grateful to them for the 
 service they have rendered me in warning me 
 against different partial opinions which I might 
 have accepted from different schools, in warning 
 me against my own private opinions, in pointing 
 me to a truth which embraces all our narrow 
 conceptions of it. 
 
 Many of the friends w^hom we cared for most, 
 and who took most interest in these questions, 
 are gone to their rest. Those who remain are 
 probably too busy in public affairs to remember 
 mere academical disputes. But a new generation 
 has arisen, to which we are bound by many ties 
 as closely as to our own. If anything I should 
 
 c 
 
18 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 write in answering your letter can save them 
 from any of the mistakes into which we fell ; can 
 point them a way out of their own special 
 temptations ; can turn the fathers more to the 
 children, and the children to the fathers, you 
 will not be sorry that the events of a recent time 
 have recalled one that has gone by, 
 
 I will waste no more time in preface. I pro- 
 pose to consider the different paragraphs of your 
 letter in succession. I am far too apt to follow a 
 method of my own. I am most thankful that 
 you have marked out one for me. 
 
 Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
19 
 
 LETTER II. 
 
 IS KEVELATION A WORD ONCE GIVEN? 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 Your friend's distinction between Reve- 
 lation and Science is accepted very generally by 
 men such as you describe him to be, and by di- 
 vines. To dispute it is an act of boldness. Yet I 
 must commit that act, for I am persuaded that 
 nearly all the difficulties which beset us most at 
 this moment, — nearly all those awkward attempts 
 at reconciliation of which you complain with so 
 much reason, — have arisen from the open or 
 implicit adoption of the doctrine that Science is 
 progressive, while Revelation is " God's word 
 once given." 
 
 Supposing the etymology of the word Reve- 
 lation were in the slightest degree the key to its 
 signification, it cannot be " a word once given." 
 It must denote an unveiling or discovery. And 
 
 c 2 
 
20 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 if it is, as we are wont to say, a Revelation of 
 God, the unveiling must be a gradual one, 
 adapted to the capacities of the creature to whom 
 it is made. We should assume that Revelation 
 had this force if we were not told the contrary. 
 Of course, we may be told the contrary. A Ma- 
 hometan is bound to hold that the Revelation 
 which he thinks is contained in the Koran is not 
 of this kind. That is for him " a word once 
 given." It comes in after our Scriptures, con- 
 firming a part of them, annulling a part, giving 
 what it adopts the same stationary character 
 with itself. I beg you calmly to examine every 
 passage in which the word airoKakv^ts occurs in 
 the New Testament, and to ask yourself whether 
 in any one that word can bear the Mahometan 
 sense ; whether in each one it must not have the 
 sense which 1 said we should naturally give it if 
 wc had heard of no other. I will go over the 
 instances, one by one, if you wish it ; but I 
 would rather that you trusted Schmidt's Concor- 
 dance, and your own observation of the context, 
 than me. I would rather you tried to find one 
 instance from which you could infer directly, or 
 by a process of reasoning, that Revelation is not 
 the Discovery or Unveiling of that which has 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 21 
 
 been hidden ; I will add, any considerable num- 
 ber of instances in which it does not import the 
 discovery of a divine Person. 
 
 But I am aware that the mere examination of 
 the uses and applications of the word, however 
 steadily and carefully pursued, will not be satis- 
 factory. Such an examination cannot, of itself, 
 conquer an impression so widely diffused, — for 
 many reasons so natural to us, — as that to which 
 the Mahometans generally, and so many Chris- 
 tians, laymen and divines, have yielded. Leave 
 the phrase then, and turn to the course of the 
 Bible narrative. Whether that narrative is 
 Jtistorical, as opposed to fabulous, is a question 
 belonging to another part of the subject. I am 
 now speaking of the fortn of the book, not of 
 its credibility. That form is obviously historical. ' 
 No book that you ever read contains so few* 
 formal propositions. All of it is connected with 
 persons and with life. The laws and decrees are 
 imbedded in what assumes to be, — whether it is 
 or is not, — a record of the growth of a people. 
 The idea which is expressed in the 11th chapter 
 of the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the fathers 
 were always expecting some better thing than 
 they had, so that they without us could not be 
 
22 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 raaJe perfect, is the idea of the Bible throughout. 
 Must there not then be sorae great fallacy lurk- 
 ing in the notion that Revelation difi'ers from 
 Science because it is not progressive? Is not 
 progress an essential characteristic of it, if we 
 assume the Bible representation of it to be the 
 right one ? Has it not been so esteemed by the 
 most orthodox students ? Is not " a progressive 
 unfolding of the Divine purpose " one of the 
 stock phrases of theologians ? 
 
 But are you quite confident in the correctness 
 
 — or at least the completeness — of the other 
 branch of the statement ? Is the idea of dis- 
 covery strange to the mind of the scientific man ? 
 Is not discovery what he is always looking for, 
 always aiming at ? But discovery imports the 
 removing a cover from something that was while 
 it wjis hidden, that is not changed by becoming 
 known. Science is not progressive in this sense, 
 
 — that it makes anything be which was not. It 
 rejoices to disclaim any such faculty. It boasts 
 q{ finding fixed, permanent, universal laws. I do 
 not ask the scientific man to say that God dis- 
 covers to him any law or princij)le. To many 
 that might not be real or honest language, — or 
 they might not feel it to be so, — therefore they 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 23 
 
 should not adopt it. To many, I doubt not, it is 
 the most simple, genuine expression of their in- 
 most thoughts. But, at all events, / am bound 
 so to speak. Believing the Bible to be true, I 
 cannot suppose that any discovery can be made 
 to a man except by God. I must suppose that 
 when at last it bm'sts upon him it is a gift from 
 God. I must suppose that all the previous pro- 
 cesses of inquiry which have led to it ; the cir- 
 cumstances which have assisted it or appeared 
 to hinder it ; the blunders, the disappointments 
 which have been the instruments of humbHng 
 the intellect of the inquirer, and delivering him 
 from rash conclusions ; the hopes, and the fears 
 that nourish hope ; have all been foreseen and 
 overseen. I repeat it, with the Bible in my 
 hands, I cannot interpret the struggles of the 
 scientific man in any other way than this. Whilst, 
 therefore, a " word once given " seems to me a 
 very inaccurate description of a divine Revela- 
 tion, in so far as it denies that to be a gradual 
 unveiling and unfolding of Truth, I can imagine 
 a sense of that phrase which a student of physical 
 science would not consider inapplicable to his ex- 
 perience. He too asks, and receives ; he seeks, 
 
24 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 and finds ; he knocks, and it is opened to him. 
 The " word " which he speaks to his fellow-men 
 has first been " given " to him. 
 
 Ever yours afi'ectionately, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
25 
 
 LETTER III. 
 
 SUBJECT-MATTER OF THE BIBLE; HOW 
 IT MUST BE READ. 
 
 My dear Eriend, 
 
 You go on, after defining Revelation 
 to be God's word once given, " Our knowledge of 
 " that word may possibly be progressive, but it is 
 " necessarily imperfect, generally because all hu- 
 " man knowledge is imperfect, specially because 
 " the subject-matter is different from that of or- 
 " dinary knowledge, and because we are told we 
 " must fulfil certain conditions, and use certain 
 " means, to attain to a knowledge of God." 
 
 You will observe that I do not identify the 
 progressiveness of Revelation with the progres- 
 siveness of our knowledge. Following the les- 
 sons of all great theologians, those lessons which 
 we must heed if we speak of the Bible as a history, 
 or distinguish between the Old and New Testa- 
 
26 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 ment, I have spoken of God's unveiling of Him- 
 self as gradual. 1 have accepted the doctrine that 
 God spoke in sundry times and diverse manners, 
 in preference to the notion of " a word once 
 given." How this language of the Epistle to the 
 Hebrews is compatible with St. Jude's respect- 
 ing a " faith once delivered to the saints ;" nay, 
 how impossible it is to accept that faith in its 
 fulness whilst we borrow our notion of the Bible 
 from the Koran, I shall endeavour to show here- 
 after. I ask no more now than that you should 
 not assume your definition of Revelation to be 
 the Bible definition of it. 
 
 But if the Revelation has been progressive, 
 the knowledge which has answered to the Reve- 
 lation must — not mat/ — have been progressive. 
 The eye can receive no more light than is vouch- 
 safed to it. The eye may be closed against that, 
 but just so far as it is opened, it takes in just 
 what is presented to it. Is not this true in the 
 physical world as well as in the moral world ? 
 Can you establish any distinction between them 
 on this ground ? 
 
 But there is a distinction, you suppose, from 
 the imperfection of the knowledge in the one 
 case. You do not mean this. You confess that 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 27 
 
 the imperfection applies in hoih cases. Our 
 knowledge of God is very imperfect. Our know- 
 ledge of the world, you will be the first to admit, 
 is very imperfect. You complain of divines for 
 wishing to hinder the removal of some of the 
 imperfections under which it labours. But while 
 you allow a general imperfection in all human 
 knowledge, you maintain there is a special im- 
 perfection, arising from two causes, in the case 
 of that knowledge about which the Bible is 
 conversant. It arises from the subject-matter 
 of that knowledge. It arises from the condi- 
 tions which are demanded for arriving at that 
 knowledge. 
 
 Each of these points deserves a careful con- 
 sideration. What is the subject-matter of that 
 knowledge Avith which the Bible is conversant? 
 You would say, perhaps, that it is the super- 
 natural, the transcendent. But see ! There is 
 no book which speaks so much of shepherds and 
 their flocks, of the most ordinary doings of fa- 
 milies, of nations and laws, and wars ; of all that 
 we are wont to call vulgar and secular things. 
 You might call the subject-matter of the greater 
 part of the Book of Genesis, the disputes between 
 brothers, and the famines which afflicted Pales- 
 
28 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 tine and Egypt ; the subject-matter of the Book 
 of Exodus, the escape of certain tribes from cap- 
 tivity, and their wanderings through a desert ; 
 the su])ject-matter of Leviticus, the management 
 of sacrifices, and the treatment of diseases ; the 
 subject-matter of all the books of the Old Testa- 
 ment, the various fortunes of an Eastern people. 
 And only by the most violent and tortuous pro- 
 cesses can you separate what may be called the 
 transcendent or supernatural part of the narrative 
 from these affairs of common life. 
 
 Must we not then say that the Revelation or 
 unveiling of the divine or supernatural, if it is 
 made at all, is made ihrough these relations of 
 ordinary daily life ? Is not this the great charac- 
 teristic of the Book, the one which, if we take it 
 to be the record of a continuous Revelation, pre- 
 pares us for the full manifestation in the Son of 
 Man ? Now this is, no doubt, a different subject- 
 matter from that of the physical philosopher. 
 One has to do with human life : with things, the 
 growth and decay of things, with the Cosmos of 
 things, only as they are related to man, only as 
 they speak to man. The other is occupied 
 mainly with the growth and decay of things, 
 mineral, vegetable, animal ; with man as con- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 29 
 
 nected with these things ; with man as part of this 
 Cosmos. The difference is the same essentially 
 as that between the subject-matter of the studies 
 in the school of Anaxagoras and of those in the 
 school of Socrates. The latter we are wont to 
 speak of as wore closely connected with the earth 
 than the former. Socrates boasted that they 
 were so. The question was then, and is now, 
 whether the road to the highest heaven is through 
 the stars or through man. But Socrates never 
 affirmed that the inquiries of Anaxagoras were 
 false because his own were true. If he was ever 
 tempted to adopt that conclusion, it will have 
 been because he distrusted the method of his 
 former teacher, because he regarded him as a 
 speculator rather than as one who investigated 
 facts. The teachers of the Bible in our day 
 have not that pretence for discrediting the 
 studies which are prosecuted in the schools of 
 physical science. They know that the method 
 there is tentative and experimental; that facts 
 are reverenced above all speculations. Woe to 
 them if they find any excuse for treating facts, 
 or the laws which lie beneath facts, lightly. 
 If they do, they will treat the Bible lightly. 
 They will misunderstand its scope and method. 
 
30 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 They will lose their faith in God Himself. With 
 religious phrases on their lips, they will become 
 Atheists. 
 
 And this brings me to your remarks about the 
 conditions which are required for arriving at the 
 knowledge of divine truth. Surely they are stern 
 conditions ! It is a straight and narrow way 
 which leadeth to life ! There must be a con- 
 tinual waiting for light ; a distrust of our own 
 assumptions ; a readiness to be detected in error, 
 certain that God's meaning is infinitely larger 
 than ours, and that other men may perceive an 
 aspect of it which we do not perceive; a belief 
 that He is fulfiUing His promise " that all shall 
 be taught of Him," in ways which we cannot 
 imagine ; a dread of shutting out any truth by 
 our impatient notion that it must contradict 
 some other ; a determination to maintain what 
 little has been given us in the hope of its expan- 
 sion, and never to contradict, if we understand 
 ever so little, what may have been given to ano- 
 ther ; a resolution to hold the ground on which 
 we stand, without judging him if he cannot yet 
 see what this ground is. Hard is it to form these 
 habits of mind ; I covet them more than I can 
 express, and believe in my sane moments that 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 31 
 
 the Spirit would educate us all into them if we 
 would but submit. Yet I fall continually into 
 habits the very opposite of these. And I cannot 
 help perceiving that this mind, the mind of the 
 little child, the mind which our Lord demands 
 of us, has been exhibited by many scientific men 
 who have been censured and scorned by the reli- 
 gious world of their day, and has been sadly de- 
 ficient in their accusers. All would confess now 
 that Kepler was right in his belief about the con- 
 stitution of the world, and that those who con- 
 demned him for appearing to contradict Scripture 
 were wrong. I cannot be content with saying 
 this. I cannot read those beautiful extracts v/hich 
 Canon Stanley has made from Kepler's defence 
 of himself without hearing a testimony in my 
 inmost conscience : ' That man was trusting in 
 ' God. He had been converted to be a little 
 ' child. Those who were trampling on him were 
 ' not acting as servants of Christ, but were full 
 ' of the intellectual pride, the arrogance of spirit, 
 ' which Christ condemns.' I dare not judge 
 them. If I had Hved in their day, I should pro- 
 bably have added my weak voice to swell the 
 shouts of those who had the upper hand. But 
 I think I could not have abided the searching 
 
32 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 eye of Him who said, " Judge not according to 
 appearance, but judge righteous judgment." I 
 think He would say to me, " Knowest thou not 
 " the truth which I demand in the inward parts is 
 " not tested by the favour of men ? Knowest thou 
 " not that priests and rulers pronounced Me a 
 "blasphemer?" 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
33 
 
 LETTER lY. 
 
 MORAL AND PHYSICAL STUDIES. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 " Science and Revelation," you say, 
 " are therefore, so to speak, in different planes, 
 " and cannot come into collision unless we con- 
 " found the one with the other." 
 
 So far as the " therefore " in this sentence 
 refers to the assumption of a difference between 
 Science and Revelation, because the one is pro- 
 gressive, and the other improgressive ; because 
 one concerns the things of earth, and the other 
 the things of heaven ; because the habits of 
 mind and the moral discipline required for them 
 are dissimilar; — I must, in conformity with what 
 I have said in my first two letters, dissent from 
 your conclusion. But I have intimated that 
 there is a ground upon which I can accede to 
 it, provided the terms of it are a little altered. 
 
 D 
 
34 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 The student of the Bible and the student of phy- 
 sics are, I conceive, moving in different planes /;/ 
 this sense, — that any discoveries which are made 
 to the former must be through the relations and 
 conditions of human life ; that the whole oj-der of 
 the universe must be for him subordinate to 
 man, and contemplated in reference to man ; that 
 for the other, human life is only one of the facts 
 of the universe ; its order must be regarded 
 as comprehending man. The forgetfulness of 
 this distinction between the functions of the 
 moral and the })hysical inquirer has been a fruit- 
 ful cause of " collisions " between tlieiii in all 
 ages. They have occurred, and would occur 
 continually were there no Bible, and were no 
 transcendent worth attached to its teachings. The 
 collisions ought, I conceive, to be fewer, at last 
 ought to cease altogether, because such a book as 
 the Bible exists ; because we accept it as marking 
 the true order and character of the discoveries 
 respecting man. If it has not produced that 
 effect, if the Bible has been made an excuse for 
 the collisions, this must be owing, it strikes me, 
 to some of those mistakes, respecting the object 
 and form of the Bible, at which I hinted in my 
 first letter ; to some of those transgressions of its 
 
ATs'D OF SCIENCE. 35 
 
 commands, departures from its spirit, neglect of 
 its warnings, upon which I dwelt at the end of 
 my second letter. Scientific men may have been 
 guilty of these, more or less. But I am not 
 able to estimate Uteir mistakes or their tempta- 
 tions, whereas I do know something of ours. And 
 if we profess to be teachers of the Bible, we 
 must be bound to a clearer understanding of its 
 purpose, to a stricter observation of its maxims, 
 than they can be. 
 
 You think " that a man may be excused if he 
 " takes no interest in the arguments of those vvho 
 " try to prop up Revelation by remarkable con- 
 " firmations founded on Science." I entirely ac- 
 quiesce in this opinion, though I do not accept 
 your statement of the relations " between Science 
 and Revelation " as a true one. I feel it difficult 
 to " excuse " any believer in the Bible who docs 
 look out for these remarkable confirmations. I 
 cannot help suspecting him of feeling a little in- 
 security about the ground upon which he is 
 standing. He is paying a compliment to physi- 
 cal science, which, though I reverence it greatly, 
 I cannot pay it. He is tacitly asserting that 
 physical demonstrations are more trustworthy 
 than moral demonstrations. I do not confess 
 
 D 2 
 
36 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 them to be so ; and I believe that much of our 
 fearfulness about the Bible results from a secret 
 notion that they are so. I cannot help seeing, 
 however, a good as well as a bad side in this 
 eagerness for physical confirmations of moral 
 truths. There is latent in it, an acknowledg- 
 ment that the results of the two methods must 
 ultimately harmonize if each is pursued faitlifully. 
 The mischief lies in the feverish anxiety to get 
 this result at once, and in the sacrifice of fidelity 
 to which such anxiety inevitably leads. The re- 
 ligious world offers a premium to the scientific 
 inquirer to make his conclusions fit the Bible 
 conclusions. So it produces a race of quacks, 
 w^ho can always prove what they are wanted to 
 prove ; men in spirit much like the false prophets 
 of old. And it often, I am afraid, bribes men of 
 real insight and diligence to suppress or misre- 
 present facts and their own convictions, lest they 
 should injure their reputation. A heavy price is 
 paid for these momentary triumphs. The dis- 
 comfiture wdiich follows of course, appears to 
 shake the edifice which had been buttressed so 
 feebly and so needlessly ; numbers suppose that 
 the very foundation of it is undermined. And 
 yet this is the smallest part of the calamity. To 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 37 
 
 obtain these physical facts on its side, the Bible 
 suffers greater perversion and contraction than the 
 facts have, suffered. We lose the very messages 
 which it delivers to us, whilst we are straining 
 our ears for proofs that it is not deceiving us. 
 
 That " struggle to protect the Bible from the 
 " last new theory propounded at the British As- 
 " sociation," which you so justly despise, is an- 
 other effect of this passion for " confiruiations." 
 If we can get any distinguished member of the 
 British Association to speak in our favour, we 
 are full of ignominious rapture ; if any of its 
 members throw out opinions which contradict 
 ours, or may lead to a contradiction of ours, we 
 are full of a terror as ignominious. I know no 
 more encouraging proof that the God of truth is 
 still among us, much as we are offending Him 
 with our lies in His Name, than that the faith 
 of scientific men in the Bible has not wholly 
 perished, when they see how small ours is, and 
 by what tricks we are sustaining it. "I have 
 listened," said an old official of a certain Univer- 
 sity, "for forty years to the sermons at St. s, 
 
 ''and, thank God! I am a Christian still." 
 Thank God! there are Christians still among 
 scientific men, though they have been listening 
 
38 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 for more years than those to our defences of 
 Christianity. 
 
 You go on, " It is impossible not to feel some 
 " impatience, when one hears those who know 
 " little of science, but wish to serve the cause of 
 " religion, attempt to show that the author of the 
 " first chapter of Genesis was inspired to use lan- 
 " guage which should byaspecial miracle anticipate 
 " all the changing phases of human discovery." 
 
 I dare say you have heard many speak thus who 
 know little of science. Hear then one who knows 
 almost nothing of science, and who, though he 
 thinks that the cause of religion does not want 
 his support, yet, being called to teach the Scrip- 
 tures, has been led to meditate somewhat on the 
 first chapter of Genesis, and who loves it the 
 more he meditates upon it. 
 
 If I supposed that it anticipated all the after 
 revelations of God which the Bible sets forth to 
 us, I could not believe the Bible. St. Paul 
 speaks of a Revelation of tilings ivhich had been 
 kept secret from the foundation of the world, but 
 now are made known to His holy Jpostles and Pro- 
 phets hy the Spirit. If I sup})osed that it an- 
 ticipated the discoveries which God has made 
 to physical inquirers, respecting that order and 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 39 
 
 constitution of the universe with which physical 
 inquirers are occupied, I must not only reject the 
 Bible generally, but I must reject this portion of 
 it particularly. For I cannot read this document 
 without perceiving that the words, " God made 
 man in His image," are the words upon which 
 the meaning of it all turns. Treat those words 
 as an interpolation, refuse to look upon them as 
 cardinal words — and the whole of the chapter, as 
 the unfolding of a divine order, is emptied of 
 signification. But so long as these words are 
 retained, and are regarded as cardinal words, we 
 must treat the order, which the Bible contem- 
 plates, as a different order from that which the 
 physical student contemplates. The elements of 
 which it consists are the same ; there are in both 
 earth and sun and stars, plants and trees, birds, 
 beasts, fishes, Man ; but these are looked at in 
 an altogether different relation to each other. 
 They compose, I can use no other expression, a 
 different Cosmos. Whether it is possible that the 
 same subjects should be looked at under these 
 two different aspects, whether there can be an 
 order in which Man is regarded as the Bible 
 regards him — 'this is a question which I 
 do not require the physical student to decide 
 
40 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 hastily. The history of past ages, — the expe- 
 rience of the present age, — tells nie that it is an 
 exceedingly difficult one for him to pronounce 
 upon ; that he has many motives which must in- 
 cline him to suppose the Cosmos, which has been 
 discovered to him, the only one. I am equally 
 persuaded, by the evidence of past history, and 
 by the experience of this time, that he will not 
 be able to rest in this conclusion ; that a thou- 
 sand arguments, wholly apart from any influence 
 which the Bible or the religious opinions of the 
 day may have over him, will drive him out of it ; 
 that afi^ection for his family, interest in the do- 
 ings of his own nation, and of all nations, hints 
 flashing forth from his own studies when they 
 appear most to tend in the opposite direction, 
 will bring him to claim a position for himself and 
 his race which they cannot hold — which they 
 have no right to hold — in his cosmology. I 
 have the profoundest confidence in God's lessons 
 coming through these experiences. I have the 
 least possible confidence in our reasonings. 
 
 My business, however, is not chiefly with the 
 men of science, but with men of my own pro- 
 fession ; men ignorant as I am of science, or 
 blessed with some apprehensions of it. They 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 41 
 
 must accept both these modes of contemplating 
 the universe ; they cannot preach God's Gospel 
 to men except they fully and heartily recognize 
 the one ; they cannot sail in a ship, or travel by 
 a railroad, without confessing the other. Many 
 things, indeed, in the management of a ship, in 
 the construction of a railroad, may suggest to 
 them thoughts of human dominion which will 
 accord well with the lesson of the first chapter 
 of Genesis. But they must be aware that rela- 
 •tions between the heavenly bodies and the earth 
 are presumed in navigation — that there are facts 
 of hydrostatics and dynamics presumed in the 
 existence of steam-power, and the use of it — 
 which are not taken account of in this chapter, 
 and could not be taken account of it, if it Avere 
 true to its own purpose. If this be so, then it 
 must be a solemn duty for the divine — in justice 
 to his own calling, that he may not abandon the 
 truth of which he is the guardian — not to attempt 
 an adjustment of two statements different in 
 kind, which never can be adjusted except at the 
 sacrifice of the simplicity and integrity of one or 
 both. 
 
 But after the numerous efforts at adjustment, 
 which were made when geology first began to be 
 
42 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 studied, and have been made recently, such a 
 maxim as this will be more easily proclaimed 
 than acted upon. The return to simplicity, like 
 the return of a frozen limb to warmth, is full of 
 suftcring. The man who is aiming at simplicity 
 will often seem to be more artificial than his 
 neighbours; he will be conscious how little he 
 attains his aim. I feel as much as you can do 
 the difficulty of not connecting the words, " Let 
 there be light. Let there be a firmament," with 
 notions of a material manufacture. And yet I 
 am sure, when I read all such passages as these 
 which represent the very mind of the Hebrews, 
 By the ivord of the Lord loere the heavens made, 
 and the earth l)y the breath of His mouth, that no 
 such notions as these — that the very reverse of 
 these — were conveyed to them by their divine 
 oracles; that they belong to an artificial manu- 
 facturing age ; that I cannot disengage myself 
 from them, because I am livhig in such an age. 
 Such a temper of mind did not belong to the 
 shepherd boy, to whom the heavens declared the 
 glory of God, and to whom the firmament showed 
 liis handiwork, to whom day after day uttered 
 speech, and night after night taught knowledge. 
 I may not be able to place myself in his point of 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 43 
 
 view ; to look at the world as he looked at it. If 
 I could, the first day would tell me of God calling 
 forth the light ; the second, of His giving a fixed 
 order to sky and earth, land and water ; the 
 third, of His evoking the productive powers of 
 earth; the fourth, of His bidding the sun and 
 stars appear ; the fifth, of His awakening to life 
 all the creatures of the deep ; the sixth, of His 
 bidding the animals live, and of His making 
 man in His own image ; the seventh, of the divine 
 rest, and His delight in what is very good, in the 
 unity of His works. Following that course, it 
 would never occur to this shepherd boy to think of 
 the world as consisting of huge continents, islands, 
 and peninsulas. The little spot on which his 
 home stood would receive the hght each morning, 
 would be spanned by a firmament, would contain 
 its garden ground with grass and herbs, would 
 be shined upon by sun and stars, would not be 
 far from some river full of fishes, would nourish 
 its own cattle, would have its family of human 
 beings. He would never be obliged to journey 
 back over centuries and millenniums, or to task 
 his fancy with the question what might have 
 been when these things were not. They were 
 there, and God, at the beoinning, had said that 
 
44 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 they should be there. Thus every day creation 
 would seem to him very old and very young. 
 His belief, — God spake, and it was done ; He 
 commanded, and all things stood fast, — would not 
 interfere with the feeling " Each day He makoth 
 all things new." Every day he would think 
 that he glorified the God of Abraham by dis- 
 covering, so far as his means permitted, fresh 
 treasures, which He had hidden that His crea- 
 tures might search them out. That it was in this 
 way the noblest Hebrews looked at the creation, 
 I gather from the Psalmists and the Prophets. 
 That their minds were open to receive fresh light 
 from fresh circumstances, I learn from those 
 wonderful visions of God which were granted to 
 Ezekiel, as he lay beside the river of Chebar, 
 when the forms of Babylonian sculpture were 
 presented to his outward eye. \]i\t the recollec- 
 tion that their God, the God of their fathers, 
 created the heavens and the earth, kept them from 
 the worship of things in heaven and earth ; kept 
 them from the dread which makes the investisa- 
 tion of these things impossible. Whenever we 
 Christians have lost this Hebrew culture, we 
 have sunk into an idolatry that has denounced 
 science as wicked and dangerous. May not the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 45 
 
 mixture of that idolatry in our minds now have 
 far more to do with our fear of physical inquiries 
 and speculations than our reverence for the first 
 chapter of Genesis ? 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
46 
 
 LETTEE y. 
 
 BIBLICAL APOLOGIES. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 You say, in reference to some who sup- 
 pose that the first chapter of Genesis anticipates 
 the discoveries of physical inquirers, " The writers 
 " who so handle the truth, whether of God's Word 
 "or of His world, are trying an experiment on 
 " the faith of the laity, tending to produce more 
 " serious results than all the doubts and difficulties 
 " which they seek to remove." 
 
 Such a warning from an earnest layman ought 
 indeed to make a clergyman pause and ask him- 
 self what mischief he is or may be working, 
 whilst he thinks he is doing God service. Look- 
 ing at the subject from my own side, considering 
 how these experiments have injured the Book 
 which they profess to defend, I cannot doubt 
 that you are rights The first chapter of Genesis, 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 47 
 
 read as it is written, is full of wonder and simple 
 beauty. The message which it has brought to 
 generations of men, and may bring to generations 
 more, is not merely obliterated, but contradicted, 
 by those who would use it either to support or 
 to control the conclusions of the physical student. 
 I do, nevertheless, most fully and firmly be- 
 lieve that so far as it has been left to tell its own 
 tale, — so far as it has made itself heard above 
 our noisy interpretations, — so far its influence 
 has been immeasurably more quickening and 
 beneficial to physical studies than those who en- 
 gage in them know. Sir Charles Lyell, if I do 
 not mistake, speaks of the valuable hints which 
 the geologist finds scattered about the Hindu 
 cosmogonies. Of such hints so laborious and 
 honest a student as he is would of course avail 
 himself. He might, for a time, be fascinated by 
 finding through what cycles of ages, so unlike 
 the poor seven days, the imagination of those 
 world-framers had travelled. But after paying 
 all the respect which is due to such dreams, — 
 and men who find that there is a waking rea- 
 lity corresponding to them cannot withhold such 
 respect, — what has been the actual result to those 
 who have grown up under this vast heap of 
 
48 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 thoughts about the universe ? The learned Brah- 
 min has to implore the help of the West, — fed, 
 as it has been, upon the Bible, — to extricate him 
 from his systems ; not that he may become a 
 Christian, but that he may look any fact of 
 science in the face, that he may dare to confess 
 it. The Englishman or German can actually 
 take possession of his books, and find a sense in 
 them which he, with all his marvellous acuteness, 
 is by himself unable to find. For the English- 
 man and German, whether he has kept the con- 
 viction or not, has grown up in the belief of a 
 Creator of heaven and earth. The world is not 
 his god ; he has not to find his gods in the world; 
 therefore he can examine it freely ; he has been 
 told that God hides Ilis counsels that man may 
 search them out ; therefore search is for him a 
 duty. 
 
 Nor can I overlook this consideration. You 
 will not bring us to tolerate some of the start- 
 ling observations which are made by physical 
 students on the relation of our race to the lower 
 creatures, as well as on the processes of destruc- 
 tion which are going on among those creatures 
 (and among men so far as they are of the same 
 kith and kin with them), unless you have some- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 49 
 
 thing to balance these observations, unless you 
 can point to some relation which we have to a 
 higher nature, unless you can assert a law of life, 
 beside the law of mutual destruction. Sir C. 
 Lyell quotes a saying of Mr. Hallam, that if man 
 is made in the image of God, he is also made in 
 the image of an ape. Be it so ; let the physio- 
 logist detect the relationship to the ape in any 
 Avay he can, in any way facts warrant him in 
 doing it. Only let us have some right to tell 
 him of his other kinsmanship ; only let us be 
 able to assure him that he can have a divine 
 eternal life, and so rise above the tendencies to 
 death and to murder which are in him. Then' 
 the more courageously that other region is ex- 
 plored, the more reason have we to be thankful. 
 Let the physical inquirer make out the affinity of 
 each of us to the ape — such humiliation is season- 
 able and profitable ; but he shall not hinder us 
 from bearing witness to him, that /lehns a glorious 
 parentage ; that /te has the nature which was re- 
 deemed by the Son of God. I do not say that 
 he will believe us when we say this, or that he is 
 bound to believe us. I only say that whilst we 
 profess a reverence for the Bible, — whilst we call 
 it a Book of Life, a Book concerning the Image 
 
 £ 
 
50 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of God, and the discovery of that image to man 
 — we are bound to take this course. And one 
 reward for taking it, as I think, will be this : 
 We shall sustain all the observations and expe- 
 riments of the man of science; we shall correct 
 anything which may be one-sided and narrow 
 in his conclusions, without throwing the least 
 obstacle in the way of his arriving at such con- 
 clusions, or complaining at all of them for being 
 one-sided. If we are right, his conclusions ought 
 to be so ; and are the more correct, as drawn ex- 
 clusively from the premises with which he deals, 
 because they are so. 
 
 You will see, then, that 1 cannot relish more 
 than you do, any ' Aids to Taith ' which inter- 
 fere with these inquiries, or try to prohibit 
 them as inconsistent with the Bible ; I should 
 name such interferences ' Hindrances to Faith.' 
 Whether the particular essay of Dr. M^Caul's, to 
 which you allude, has this character, I am nnable 
 to decide, not having read a line of it I should 
 be grieved to see an excellent man, for whom I 
 have a high respect, employing his great learning, 
 which ought be turned to such account for the 
 Church, in the work of exposing other men's 
 errors, if that work were performed ever so ably. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 51 
 
 If I thought my faith would be stronger for 
 undergoing that pain, I should submit to it cheer- 
 fully. But I am afraid, from some experience in 
 these controversial writings, that even the best of 
 them might operate the other way; so I have 
 abstained — except in the case of one essay which 
 contained reflections upon some valued friends of 
 mine — from looking into the volume of which you 
 speak. I can, however, imagine, — in my ignor- 
 ance it is better to make a favourable than an un- 
 favourable conjecture, — that a writer so strongly 
 Hebraic in all his feelings as Dr. M'Caul, may 
 have been as much offended as I was — contem- 
 plating the question from my English point of 
 view — by Mr. Goodwin's notion that the writer 
 of the first chapter of Genesis was an early 
 'Descartes.' There is something to me curiously 
 infelicitous in this conception. It involves as huge 
 a moral anachronism as I should think ever sug- 
 o-ested itself to an ino;enious and scientific man. 
 And yet it is one which deserved a carelYd treat- 
 ment, seeing that by the quiet examination of it 
 we might hope to banish for ever the notion, not 
 unsanctioned by some divines, that what we have 
 been wont to call the Mosaic record of Creation, 
 is in any sense whatever, an attempt to imagine 
 
 E 2 
 
52 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 or form a world. Descartes has told us so very 
 clearly, in his own exquisite language, how he 
 proceeded in his work of construction — he did 
 that work in so masterly a manner — that there 
 cannot be a better expermcnium crucis than 
 the one whicli he affords of tlie difference in 
 kind between him, the seventeenth-century phi- 
 losopher, and a man — call him Moses, or by 
 another name - who looked out upon the objects, 
 which every peasant in any corner of the earth 
 must behold, and who, in simple, authoritative, 
 brief words, tells the peasant, * Your God, your 
 
 * Deliverer created this ; and this, and this. See 
 
 * how the cattle feed and bring forth. He bade 
 *them feed and bring forth. See how the sun 
 
 * rises like as a bridegroom out of his chamber. 
 
 * He bade it rise at the beginning, and still 
 
 * bids it rise now.' I trust that Dr. M'Caul, — 
 of course with the kindness which he always 
 exhibits when not engaged in controversy, and 
 which is eminently due to a man so thought- 
 ful and serious as ]\Ir. Goodwin — has pointed 
 out the absurdity of this and all similar com- 
 parisons, and has set an example of discarding 
 for ever the attempt to spoil the truthfulness of 
 the Hebrew records by mingling them with the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 53 
 
 results of inquiries pursued in a method and for 
 an object altogether different from theirs. Such 
 a service to the cause of which he is the able 
 champion, was especially demanded of him ; if 
 he has rendered it, I cannot understand how he 
 can have committed those outrages upon scientific 
 freedom of which you complain. I am afraid, 
 therefore, that, in his eagerness to overthrow an 
 adversary, he nuist have forgotten what was due 
 to his own cause, and must have supplied one 
 more example of the wounds which the Bil)lc has 
 received in the house of its friends. I should have ' 
 supposed that Dr. M'Caul's dread of German 
 idealism would have led him to welcome with 
 peculiar satisfaction that zeal for fact, and pa- 
 tience in investigating it, which are the great 
 counteractions of this idealism, and which ap- 
 pear nowhere so remarkably as in our scientific 
 men. 
 
 If Hugh Miller was ever faithless to facts and 
 investigation, he must indeed have lost the use of 
 his right hand. I should judge, from the only 
 book of his which I am competent to speak of, 
 ' My Schools and Schoolmasters,' that he was 
 the best witness left in Scotland against the taste 
 for abstractions by which his countrymen are so 
 
54 CLAIMS or THE BIBLK 
 
 much infected. But if, in any weak moment, 
 the national passion got the better of him, he 
 may have been more helplessly immersed in the 
 quagmire, because he had never before walked 
 except on firm ground. 
 
 In conclusion, then, I plead guilty for myself 
 and my order to the substance of the charge 
 which you bring against us. I must take, how- 
 ever, what I think is not a frivolous or captious 
 exception to the form of it. I do not think w-e 
 have made too great a demand on the faith of 
 the Laity. I fear we have not appealed enough 
 to the faith of the Laity. If we had invited 
 them to faith in God ; showing that ice had 
 faith in Him ; that wc could trust Ilim to vin- 
 dicate His own purposes ; if we had acknow- 
 ledged that He, who spake by Apostles and Pro- 
 phets, is indeed speaking in every insect and 
 flower, — there would have been a response to 
 our call, and perhaps in no class of the Laity 
 more than in the scientific men. We have 
 spoken, not to their faith, but to their fondness 
 for controversy and disputation. We have tried 
 to prove how cleverly we could use all weapons, 
 some of them weapons which are fetched straight 
 from the devil's armoury. If in such a battle we 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 55 
 
 should be defeated, if when we ride on horses 
 those who pursue us should be swifter, we, not 
 our faith, must bear the blame. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 r. D. Maurice. 
 
5C 
 
 LETTER YL 
 
 LAWS. — GENERALIZATIONS. — TEE CHRISTIAN 
 FAITH. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 You say that " Physical Science is 
 "leading its students to an overpowering con- 
 " sciousness of a vast unity of plan, and of the 
 " continuity of general laws." Blessed of God 
 must Physical Science be, if that is its tendency 1 
 Such an overpowering consciousness is what we 
 especially need to deliver us from our frivolity ; 
 to make us ashamed of our rhetoric ; to bring us 
 low before the Lord of heaven and eartli. And 
 we have Scriptural warrant for the belief that 
 the contemplation of physical facts does lead to 
 this overpowering consciousness, and to this hu- 
 miliation. There is only one cardinal passage 
 (if we except the rapturous lOlth Psalm, and 
 those at the end of the book) upon the subject, 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 57 
 
 but that, to a believer in the Bibl€, is decisive. 
 Job, wearied with his own speculations and the 
 speculations of his friends about the cause of 
 suffering and moral evil, at last hears God Him- 
 self speaking out of the whirlwind. A glimpse 
 — a little glimpse — is given him of a vast unity 
 of plan ; of laws affecting the least and greatest 
 of the creatures which surround him. The con- 
 sciousness which follows is described as indeed 
 overwhelming. The result of it is that he says : 
 " I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, 
 but now mine eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I 
 humble myself, and repent in dust and ashes." I 
 do not doubt that it may be the purpose of God 
 to speak in like manner to this generation. Woe 
 to us if we try to hinder His voice from reaching 
 it by the loud discords of ours ! 
 
 But you feel that those of us who have no 
 vocation to deal with physical facts, who only 
 prove ourselves bunglers and darkeners of coun- 
 sel whenever we meddle with them, have yet a 
 duty to mankind, — a duty made more imperative 
 upon us by the vigour and earnestness of the 
 students of nature, and by the great effects which 
 they are producing. You have indicated our ob- 
 ligations most accurately, and you have thrown 
 
58 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 out an important hint respecting the help Avhicli 
 we may give to men of science, still in promo- 
 ting — not checking — the freedom of their inves- 
 tigation, whilst we faithfully fulfil the trust that 
 is committed to us. 
 
 The student of physical science, and the stu- 
 dent of theology, have, I believe, a common 
 enemy. We have talked so much of these things 
 in former days, that I shall not startle you as 
 I should many Oxford men, by saying that I 
 mean the generalizations of the logician. I hope 
 I am not insensible to the worth of logic, or un- 
 thankful to the new light which has been thrown 
 on many parts of it since the days when we 
 studied it, especially by Mr. Mill and Sir William 
 Hamilton. I have learnt something, and might 
 have learned much more, from these eminent men; 
 but 1 cannot conceal my opinion that Mill's 
 * Essay on Liberty ' is a very remarkable protest 
 against some of the perils to which his own logi- 
 cal completeness is exposing us; or that Sir Wil- 
 liam TTamilton's testimony against our attempts 
 to see things as they are in themselves, is a testi- 
 mony against the imi)erfection of his own instru- 
 ment, and a confession that we need some other, 
 if Science is not to be a dream and an impossi- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 59 
 
 bility. Each of these teachers seems to assert — 
 is iniclerstood by his disciples to assert — that we 
 cannot look through or beyond appearances ; that 
 all which we dignify with the name of laws are 
 only our generalizations from appearances. Each, 
 I think, having a high purpose, is hampered by 
 this determination of his intellect, and often, in 
 practice, breaks through it ; yet each, from his 
 very honesty and logical consistency, stoutly 
 maintains that it must not and cannot be broken 
 through, and suspects eveiy one of transcen- 
 dental leanings — even if he be a hard mathema- 
 tician — who speaks otherwise. In Mr. Mill's 
 case this tendency is strengthened by the habit, 
 acquired in the school of Hobbes and Bentham 
 and not overcome by his broader and freer cul- 
 ture, of treating the use of the word Law as 
 merely metaphorical, when it is not applied to 
 human creatures, and when it is not connected 
 with some formal penalty. 
 
 Now, I cannot think that that " overpowering 
 consciousness," of which you speak, will be pro- 
 duced in any man of science who bows before 
 what he feels all the while to be a generalization 
 of his own understanding. I cannot persuade 
 myself that Mr. Earaday, or Mr. Owen, or Mr. 
 
60 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Darwin, or Mr. Huxley, though they may all ex- 
 press themselves in conformity with the scholastic 
 usage of their day, fancies that he is only prac- 
 tising a feat of ventriloquism ; that he only hears 
 echoes in Nature of his own voice ; that he 
 only finds what he has first hidden. I am sure 
 he has a simpler and grander faith than this ; 
 that he often starts, * like a guilty thing sur- 
 prised,' at the apparition of a truth or principle 
 which, after long seeking, bursts upon him ; that 
 he is sure it was in the facts, and that it now 
 stands before him, the Law of these facts ; some- 
 thing laid down of old, though it may first be 
 made known now. And 1 think that we who, 
 through direction of our studies, happen to know 
 a little of the tyranny of the logician in other 
 spheres, and what rebellions that tyranny has 
 provoked, should put the man of science on his 
 guard, and encourage him to hold his own stoutly. 
 The writer of the ' Novum Organum ' did so nuich 
 for us divines in throvvinj? down the idols which 
 the logicians had set up, that we are bound, as 
 far as we can, to return the service in kind. The 
 idols are rising again under new names ; we have 
 the most intense interest in breaking them into 
 pieces, and grinding them small. If we can do 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 61 
 
 that, we may protect the physical student from 
 assaults which may ultimately render all his in- 
 vestigations abortive, though, in his devotion to 
 those investigations, he may be indifferent and 
 secure. 
 
 Generalizations substituted for eternal laws 
 and principles— these I regard as the plagues and 
 curses of the theologian and of the physical 
 student equally. I told you that I did not 
 acknowledge Revelation as a ' word once given,' 
 and that I did acknowledge a Faith once given to 
 the Saints. I did not acknowledge the one, be- 
 cause I acknowledge the other. It seems to me 
 that the Bible records the gradual revelation— 
 the divine evolution— of that Name into which 
 we are baptized ; that Name about which you 
 ask, with such striking and pathetic earnestness, 
 whether we cannot still believe in it, " whatever 
 " may be the results of human inquiry into the 
 " documents handed down to us as the outward 
 "form of God's holy Word." 
 
 My answer is this : If by that divine Name 
 we understand certain generalizations of ours con- 
 cernmg it, certain intellectual conclusions which 
 have either been transmitted to us, or at which 
 we have arrived ; those generahzations will be 
 
C2 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 subject to all the accidents to which our intel- 
 lects are subject; they will be various as our in- 
 tellects are various. They must depend at first 
 upon our confidence in the authority or judgment 
 of certain men who have imparted theui to us ; 
 next, upon our conclusions respecting the balance 
 of arguments in favour of or against their being 
 legitimately deduced from the Scriptures ; then, 
 upon our opinions respecting the probability that 
 all those Scriptures can be ascertained to be of 
 divine authority ; ultimately, upon our opinions 
 respecting the nature of divine authority. And, 
 oh ! what a question that last is ! A divi?ie au- 
 thority which must rest upon the deference which 
 we pay to a human authority, or to the sagacity 
 and security of our own judgments respecting 
 that human authority ! Finally, we must enforce 
 these conclusions of human authority, or our own 
 judgments about it, by prohibitions and persecu- 
 tions ; for the sake of whom ? Of the ignorant 
 multitude — of the women and little children — 
 whom we have actually cut off by our conditions 
 from the possibility of knowing the truths which 
 we are so tenderly preserving for them ! 
 
 Can this monstrous and hideous contradiction 
 last? No! for God is. And it is written in 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 63 
 
 the Bible that He wills all men to come to the 
 knowledge of the truth and live. Suppose we 
 actually hold those words to be divine ; suppose, 
 we think further — it is not too great a supposi- 
 tion for Churchmen of the English Church or any 
 other — that we are baptized into the Name of the 
 Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost ; and that 
 the faith in that Name is the faith dehvered to 
 the Saints which we are to cherish, and for which 
 we ought to die ; must we not say — can we help 
 saying — that our faith is in divine persons, not 
 in our generalizations ; faith in a Being whose 
 thoughts we cannot measure or compass, but in 
 whom we live, and move, and are ; faith in Him 
 who has promised to guide us into all truth ; faith 
 in Him of whom we may know a little here, 
 whom by slow degrees, in ages out of ages, we 
 may learn to know. If there is such a Name, 
 if we are sealed with it, can our apprehensions 
 of it depend upon the judgments which any 
 have formed in any day about texts of Scripture, 
 or about the human authority which pronounces 
 on texts of Scripture, or about the documents 
 which contain texts of Scripture ? All questions 
 on this subject may be interesting and important 
 in a very high degree ; but if the Scripture sets 
 
64 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 forth a Revelation, and if the Revelation has 
 issued in this wonderful discovery, must we not 
 suppose that God, as the Bible says, has founded 
 His Church, and that the poor of Jlis people may 
 intst in it? Can we desire anything for that 
 Church but the fullest, freest search into prin- 
 ciples and laws? For God must preside over 
 that search ; it must lead to the exposure of our 
 ipjnorance ; it must issue in the manifestation of 
 that Love, the height, and length, and depth, 
 and breadth of which St. Paul desired for us all 
 that we might know, even while he said that it 
 passed knowledge. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
05 
 
 LETTER YIL 
 
 THE FACTS OF BISHOP COLENSO. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 You say in one clause of your letter : 
 " Whatever dreams, and notions, and schemes 
 " may have occupied the minds of men and \vo- 
 "men, the reality of physical, moral, and politi- 
 " cal facts has asserted itself. Laymen, who have 
 " to work in the bu'sy world or in scientific in- 
 " vestigation, are influenced accordingly." There 
 cannot be a better introduction to the remarks 
 which I have to make respecting the Bishop of 
 Natal. Of him you observe that, avoiding all 
 metaphysical questions, " he appeals to what he 
 " calls the test of facts." 
 
 Assuredly that is his claim. The impression 
 which he has produced in England is derived 
 from this cause. He has excited the fears of 
 those Englishmen who wish to believe the Bible 
 
66 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 true, because he is supposed to have disputed its 
 message, not on metaphysical grounds, but as at 
 variance with facts. He has excited the hopes 
 of those who wish to beUeve the Bible false for 
 the same reason. His opponents try to prove that 
 he is mistaken in his statements, that he is feeble 
 in his scholarship, in order to dislodge him from 
 this position. By no other test than that which 
 he has himself chosen, can he — so all confess — 
 be fairly tried. I grant you also that Laymen 
 are the persons to apply this test. IFe have 
 various prejudices. JFe shall be apt to mix re- 
 ligious or metaphysical considerations with the 
 pure naked facts. Let the Laity, those men who 
 are busy with the affairs of the world — those of 
 them, if you like, who are engaged in scientific 
 investigations — be the jurors. There should be 
 a fair mixture of the two classes. Let the scien- 
 tific men be there, only not let them exclude the 
 busy men. 
 
 For, as you observe so truly, there arc certain 
 moral and political facts which are asserting 
 themselves, as well as physical facts. Neither 
 must be overlooked. The physical facts are 
 worthy of all consideration ; but if those who 
 are specially interested in these boast that they 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. G7 
 
 are the only facts — if everything which belongs to' 
 the human region, which has to do with the acts 
 and sufferings of men, is treated as fantastical 
 and not real — we must, not as clergymen at all, 
 but as plain Englishmen, in the interest of the 
 Laity, and their common business, speak up 
 stoutly, and declare, ' This shall not be. Numbers 
 ' are good. Weights and measures are good. All 
 ' honour to them. But man must have hk honour. 
 ' His transactions may not be capable of being 
 ' brought under the rules of arithmetic or geo- 
 ' metry, but they are bond fide transactions not- 
 * withstanding. The world in which we dwell 
 'cannot dispense with them.' 
 
 Now I must repeat to you remarks which I 
 have made elsewhere, and which are far from 
 being to our credit as clergymen ; that the 
 Bible is not in any sense our book ; that we 
 did our best to keep it from the Laity ; that we 
 fed them as long as they would suffer us with 
 legends, pictures, and mere dogmas ; that after 
 awhile they would not bear this ; that they said 
 they would have the Bible, and have it in their 
 own native tongue; that they claimed it espe- 
 cially, emphatically, as a history — in contrast to 
 the legends, or the mere school opinions which 
 
 F 2 
 
68 CLAIMS 01" THE BIBLE 
 
 we had doled out to them ; that they craved 
 more particularly in this sense for the portion 
 of the Bible which Bishop Colenso now declares 
 to be not historical ; that they used this portion 
 of it against us and our pretensions, saying that 
 it bore witness of One who was above all priests, 
 who called them, and kings also, to account for 
 their evil doings, who governed the world Him- 
 self, and did not trust it to our mercies. 
 
 These are facts with which every reader of 
 English liistory, and of the history of any nation 
 of Christendom that cares for the Bible, and has 
 adopted it into its common life, is perfectly fami- 
 liar. And I wish you to observe how truly this 
 lay movement, this rebellion against the Clergy, 
 was an acknowledgment of " facts which had as- 
 " serted themselves." They were not physical 
 facts, not facts of arithmetic. They were poli- 
 tical facts, which had for them the " sternest 
 " reality." They were called to be citizens, fathers, 
 husbands, brothers. How could they be actually 
 what they were meant to be? How could they 
 claim their rights ; how could they understand 
 and fidhl their duties? The Clergy had not 
 taught them these rights and duties. They had 
 been ciicouragcd to bring their gifts to the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 09 
 
 treasury of the temple, and so to be free of 
 obligations to fathers and mothers. They liad 
 been told tliat to renounce civic life was a vir- 
 tue. If there was a Lord God who had pro- 
 claimed His commands out of heaven amidst 
 thunders and lightnings ; if He was really what 
 He said that He was, a Lord God who brought 
 His people out of the house of bondage ; if 
 He had indeed redeemed slaves in Egypt out 
 of the hands of a tyrant ; if He had plagued 
 the tyrant, and thrown his hosts into the sea ; 
 if He had led the poor captives through that 
 sea ; if He had fed them with manna ; if 
 He had struck the rock for them ; if He had 
 borne with their murmurings, and complained of 
 them for not trusting Him always and in all 
 places ; if He was the same from generation to 
 generation ; if the laws which men confessed to 
 be binding upon them, were still laws that went 
 out of His mouth ; if He cared for the freedom 
 and order of nations now as of old ; if He was 
 jealous over them now as of old, not willing that 
 they should throw themselves into the hands of 
 enemies and oppressors ; if He punished them 
 now as of old, that He might deliver them from 
 the ruin they had brought on themselves, and do 
 
70 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 them good at the latter end ; if this were so, then 
 England might live, then Englishmen might hold 
 up their heads against their foes, and rise np 
 where they were ever so sunken, in the might of 
 Him who had promised not to forsake them, or 
 to forget them ; not to turn away His mercies 
 from them, but to pardon the transgressions of 
 them, their kings, their prophets, and their 
 priests, and to love them freely. 
 
 I know what idle sounds these are in the ears 
 of many of us, what mere repetitions of old 
 Hebrew phrases. But people conversant with 
 the ' stern reality of political facts ' did not find 
 them so, and do not find them so at this day. 
 To them, the dead phrases are words of life and 
 power — trumpet cries awaking them out of their 
 sleep, bidding them cast off the slongh of their 
 cowardice — such as they can hear from no modern 
 preachers of liberty, from no " party of action." 
 They raised the English middle classes into 
 moral and political existence; they ratified the 
 great oath of the Swiss peasants at Riitli; they 
 raised the Dominican Savonarola to be the wit- 
 ness against Alexander VI.; they made the Ger- 
 man monk mightier than Charles V.; their echoes 
 woke again among the peasants of the Tyrol ; 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 71 
 
 they stirred the scholars of Germany to a new 
 life ; they roused the Czar of the Russias to drive 
 back the invader who had profaned the holy 
 shrines of Moscow. When the ' sternness of 
 'political facts' has no more asserted itself; when 
 the ease and luxury which spring from civiliza- 
 tion and destroy it have taken place of toil, and 
 zeal, and hope ; then this Old Testament phra- 
 seology has become flat indeed ; then it has been 
 left to schoolmen and rhetoricians; only the hearts 
 of a few women have borne witness that it has a 
 voice for the personal and domestic, as well as for 
 the national life ; only the Laity have felt as the 
 people of Cologne felt about their Cathedral, that 
 the very scaffolding has a sacredness. They have 
 a respect for the shell of the words, if the life has 
 gone out of them. 
 
 But this respect for the shell, if it endures 
 among the easy and respectable middle classes of 
 our land, will not endure — I am sure of that — 
 among the working classes, especially in times 
 when bread is scarce. Words must either live 
 for them, or they will be treated as carcases 
 which are to be buried. Can we say to them : 
 " The God who rules over you is verily such an 
 " one as this book — taken in its simplest sense — 
 
72 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 "says that He is. We proclaim to you that 
 " God is the Deliverer of captives. He did not 
 " pretend that He delivered them ; He actually 
 " delivered them?" I believe that we may do this ; 
 I believe that it is our sin — the sin of us Clergy — 
 that we have not done this. I believe we have 
 shown our distrust in the letter of the book 
 which we profess to regard as divine, by not 
 doing it. I believe that we are all involved in 
 this sin, and that God will call us all to account 
 for it, and will torment us and our land for it. 
 I believe we have represented Him as an alto- 
 gether different Being from Him whom the Pen- 
 tateuch sets before us ; and that He is calling 
 us, in manifold ways, to repent of our slanders 
 against Him, and to speak of Him to the people 
 as the Bible speaks. 
 
 Now, just as some of us were beginning to 
 feel these things, — I do not say earnestly or 
 thoroughly, but so much that we could not be 
 .quite easy in making the brass sound and the 
 cymbals tinkle, — just as the 'political facts ' of 
 England's condition were becoming rather too 
 ' stern ' for us — we heard a loud ' Eureka ' from 
 a distant colony. A l^ishop came over to us, and 
 spoke to this effect : ' I have ascertained by the 
 
AND OF SCIEMCE. 73 
 
 clearest evidence that all this stoiy, to which 
 your fathers turned from the legends of the friars, 
 and the dogmas of the schools, is itself a mere 
 legend. You, Laymen, are not bound to believe 
 it. Churchmen, you must not preach it any 
 more. I went out, thinking I could tell it to 
 the Zulus. They did not understand it at all ; 
 they have led me to examine it. I find that the 
 statements about numbers in it are incompati- 
 ble with physical facts which I must acknow- 
 ledge. Therefore, while I admit that it may 
 contain some useful spiritual lessons ; whilst I 
 do not impute any worse motives to the com- 
 pilers than those \vhich may have been at work 
 in Homer, or any other poet, I say distinctly 
 this is not history.' 
 
 This is that appeal to the test of facts which 
 you speak of. As such, it has been recognized 
 and accepted by some of the scientific Laymen, 
 by no small portion of the Clergy. As such, it 
 will probably be accepted by no small portion of 
 the Avorking classes. As such, it has been vehe- 
 mently denounced. Its propounder has been 
 decried and scorned. The answers to him, so 
 far as they have not consisted of shrieks and 
 ridicule, have been directed to an exposure of his 
 
74 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 physical facts. Thoy, it is said, are not what he 
 says they arc, or, if they are, it is better not to 
 take notice of them, because they may disturb 
 our faith. The Bishops, who have addressed 
 him, appear to say : ' Your opinions about these 
 pliysical facts interfere with your position in the 
 Church. Therefore we request you — though we 
 may not be able to command you — to leave us.' 
 That is the interpretation put upon their words 
 by the Laity. Whether it is the correct one or 
 not, I do not venture to affirm. 
 
 Now, I apprehend that if the physical facts 
 on which the Bishop dwells, are as he alleges 
 they are, no possible arguments of ours can 
 shake them, or diminish their validity. And if 
 they are so, that they should be known and con- 
 fessed, must be right. We are dealing falsely 
 with God, we are not believing in the God of 
 Truth whom the Bible sets forth, if we wish to 
 hide them. But now supposing them admitted, 
 what then? Is the Bishop's inference that the 
 hisfon/ of the Book perishes — that it nuist be 
 disbelieved — if we do justice to these stern })hy- 
 sical facts, a reasonable or a tenable one ? The 
 more you examine it, the more unreasonable and 
 untenable, I think, it will appear ; unreasonable 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 75 
 
 and untenable, I mean, if the Bishop's own fact- 
 test be applied to it. Numerical facts are valu- 
 able, important, indisputable. But they do not 
 constitute history ; they do not even constitute 
 the evidence of history. A very great exaggera- 
 tion in numbers about the Expedition of Xerxes 
 — if it can be proved — may make me doubt the 
 information, or even the veracity, of Herodotus. 
 It will not make me doubt the truth of a battle 
 of Salamis and a battle of Plataea. It will not 
 make me doubt the grand truth that a set of tiny 
 European republics discomfited the great mon- 
 archy of Asia. Tliese events are taken out of the 
 region of letters. They do not depend any longer 
 on the credibility of records. They have established 
 themselves in the very existence of humanity. 
 You cannot displace them without destroying 
 that, or remaking it anev\% according to some 
 theory and fashion of your own. Yet how little 
 did it signify to the Middle Ages, occupied though 
 they were with great and living questions of their 
 own, that there had been a Salamis or a Plataea ! 
 Such facts are seized when they are wanted. The 
 narrative of them then becomes intelligible, be- 
 comes credible. They remain credible and intel- 
 lio;ible so Ions: as the need of them is felt. You 
 
7G CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 cannot produce faith or understanding by criti- 
 cism. You cannot shake faith or understanding 
 by criticism. But you may by criticism or with- 
 out it make men doubt and reject that which they 
 liave ceased to understand as connected with 
 themselves, as interpreting their own Hves. 
 
 I think no one felt more indii^nation than I 
 did against Bishop Colenso. He seemed to me to 
 be taking fiom us the very message which we 
 had been suppressing and mutilating ; to be in- 
 dorsing the crime which we had committed against 
 the Laity ; to be using physical facts for the sake 
 of cheating ns of moral and political facts ; to 
 be destroying the great link between God and 
 national life ; to be driving us to the old plati- 
 tudes and abstractions about the necessity of 
 order to freedom, and freedom to order, which 
 have no power over any human spirit, when we 
 might, if we believe the Kxodus, speak of an 
 Everlasting God of Freedom, who is also, and for 
 that reason, the God of Order. He was rob- 
 bing us of the facts of God's Revelation, and so 
 throwing us upon religious ideas, the * God con- 
 sciousness,' and all that talk which means some- 
 thing to Germans, but to an Englishman is the 
 substitute for a meaning. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 77 
 
 But the more I Lave watched the history of 
 this controversy, the more I have perceived that 
 my wrath cannot work out the Righteousness of 
 God ; that I have been unjust to the honesty of 
 a man struggling with great difficulties in his 
 own mind ; that I have not estimated the great- 
 ness of our offences, or the degree to which liis 
 offences are chargeable upon us ; that, above all, 
 I have not confessed how God is leading us by 
 strange ways back to the faith which has departed 
 from us. We have worshipped the letter of the 
 Bible till we are unable to read the letter of it. 
 The Exodus does not tell us of the God whom 
 it proclaims ; it does not tell tis that He is the 
 Lord our God. We talk of it and its authority, 
 and its infallibility. He is not in all our thoughts. 
 We do not trust Him, but a theory of our own 
 about the correctness of a document. In all 
 ages God has broken these confidences in pieces. 
 It was this confidence, in the Pharisees, which led 
 them to destroy the express words of the fifth 
 command ; to invert the meaning of the fourth ; 
 to tell our Lord Christ that He broke the law, 
 and that He was a blasphemer. If the Bishop 
 of Natal and his arithmetic are instruments in 
 overthrowing this idolatry, they may be instru- 
 
7S THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 ments in making the history which he tramples 
 upon, once more real and precious in our eyes. 
 That he sliould not discover the worth of that 
 liistorv whilst he was followino; the tradition of 
 Protestant missionaries in translating a book 
 into a barbarous tongue for a barbarous people, 
 which only gave ont its sense to Europeans when 
 they had felt the stirrings of a national life, and 
 had a language capable of expressing more than 
 animal wants, — need cause us no wonder. The 
 preface to his book shows us that he has retained 
 his faith in a God, ' whose everlasting arms are 
 under us.' If he commits himself to that God, 
 I doubt not he will be delivered from his con- 
 ceits and denials. If we commit ourselves to the 
 same God, we shall be delivered from ours. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
79 
 
 LETTER VIII. 
 
 FAITH IN CHRIST, AND THE AUTHORSHIP OF 
 THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 I come now to your questions. The 
 first is this : " Do not our faith in Christ, and our 
 " behef in the four Gospels as real history, rest 
 " on grounds independent of the results of any 
 " critical inquiry into the authorship of the Pen- 
 " tateuch ? " 
 
 That I may answer this question with the se- 
 riousness and directness which you would desire, 
 let me remind you what I, as an English clergy- 
 man, — sent to preach of Christ to my country- 
 men, accepting the Bible and the Creeds as my 
 guides how I should preach of Him — must mean 
 by faith in Christ ; what I must suppose the four 
 Gospels, if they are a history, to set forth. You 
 will then see, I think, how far it is possible for 
 
so CLAIMS or THE BIBLE 
 
 me, without renouncing my calling and my or- 
 ders, to make our faith in Christ dependent upon 
 an opinion respecting tlie authorship of the Pen- 
 tateuch. 
 
 I am certainly not using peculiar language, 
 unorthodox languaQ;e, when I sav that I am 
 bound by my office to speak of Christ to men of 
 this day as their Prophet, their Priest, and their 
 King. I must tell them that He died for our 
 sins, and rose again for our justification. I must 
 tell them that He speaks to us now as He did to 
 our fathers; that He is our Mediator at the right 
 hand of God ; that lie rules over our spirits, and 
 souls, and bodies, over the families and nations 
 of men. I must say that He is the Eternal Son 
 of God, begotten before all worlds, the Light of 
 Light, the very God of very God. I must say 
 that He took our nature to claim us as sons of 
 God in Him. I must say that He came to bap- 
 tize us with the Spirit, and so to give us power 
 to be sons of God. 
 
 All this it belongs to my function as a clergy- 
 man of the English Church to declare to people 
 of every class ; because 1 have confessed it to 
 be true for people of every class, a truth which 
 God has wished His creatures to know, and 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 81 
 
 which He has demonstrated to their consciences, 
 notwithstanding its strangeness and improbabi- 
 lity, and their reluctance to take it in. 
 
 Other men, of course, may consider this mes- 
 sage as an idle tale. But you are writing to me, 
 knowing what I have professed. This, then, is 
 what I try to preach about Christ. This is what 
 I think the Church bids me preach concerning 
 Him. And therefore, when I take my subject 
 from the four Gospels, I say : ' Here you have 
 ' a discovery of what He is, to whom you are 
 ' closely related, of whose body you are members, 
 ' who is fighting against your enemies, who is 
 
 * working in you by His Spirit. Here I find 
 ' how He manifested His power over men, and 
 ' His sympathy with them, during the years 
 ' that Pie dwelt upon earth. Here I learn the 
 ' nature of that Kingdom under which you and 
 ' I are living, and how all outward and visible 
 ' things explain and illustrate it. These Gospels 
 ' answer to their name, because they carry me 
 ' beyond themselves. They point me to a Person, 
 ' a Word in whom is Life, and whose life is the 
 ' Light of men. They commend you and me to 
 
 * His guidance. If we submit ourselves to it, 
 ' we shall know more of these Gospels, of our 
 
 G 
 
bZ CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 * selves, and of each other, than I, and all the 
 ' preachers in the world, can tell you.' 
 
 Now, supposing we did speak thus in sincerity 
 and truth, would it not be almost an insult to ask 
 us : ' Does your faith in Christ depend on your 
 ' belief in the authorship of the Pentateuch ? 
 ' Do you wish other men's faith in Christ 
 ' to depend on their belief in the authorship 
 ' of the Pentateuch '? And if any one had put 
 this question to an Apostle, to a true missionary 
 of any age or school, — to Boniface, to Xavier, to 
 Schwartz, to Henry Martyn, — I think it would 
 have been an insult, though such men were not 
 likely to resent that, or any other which was 
 offered them. I think it would have been an 
 insult to any Reformer, to any Evangehcal 
 preacher of the last age. Belief in Christ had 
 for all these so profound a signification ; their 
 sense of the necessity of Christ to all men was 
 so mighty ; they were so sure that it is the Father 
 who draws men to Christ, and not arguments or 
 arrays of evidence ; that they could scarcely have 
 brought the terms of your proposition home to 
 their minds. But to tis it is no insult at all. The 
 Laity have the greatest right to press such de- 
 mands upon us. We are bound to face them. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 83 
 
 Oh, if they might lead us to examine our ways, 
 and to ask ourselves solemnly in the sight of 
 God, ichat we have been believing, what we have 
 been teaching which can afford an excuse for the 
 opinion that we require an exercise of judgment 
 upon a certain document before we can allow 
 men to trust in their King and Saviour ! 
 
 We must be perfectly aware that nineteen out 
 of twenty of those to whom we proclaim the 
 Gospel, — to whom we must proclaim it, unless 
 we exclude those from it whom the Pharisees 
 wished our Lord to exclude, the people who knew 
 not the law, and are cursed, — have no capacity 
 whatever for examining the authority of docu- 
 ments, or for pronouncing any judgment respect- 
 ins; the writer of them. ' Bat if thev do not 
 ' hear any disputes about them, they will take the 
 ' author on trust, they will yield to the common 
 ' opinion.' Perhaps so ; and will their trust in 
 that common opinion have anything whatever to 
 do with faith in Christ ? Will it advance tliem 
 one step towards faith in Christ ? But they do 
 hear disputes about these things ; they icill hear 
 disputes about these things. How then? Are 
 we not to bid them to believe in Christ ? are 
 we not to preach His Gospel till we have settled 
 
 G 2 
 
84 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 their minds on this point? How sliall we settle 
 them ? Bv aro-uinsr about it, and then insist- 
 ing, under heavy denunciations, that they shall 
 come to but one conclusion as the result of the 
 argument? By resolving that Moses shall be 
 proved to be the author of the Pentateuch, and 
 declaring that our proofs must be accepted ? And 
 this, while we are saying the book is God's book, 
 and not the book of a man at all ; that the book 
 is to be received on His authority, and is not de- 
 pendent on human reasonings ! In what a weary 
 circle are we moving ! How are we setting aside 
 faith in the very act of insisting upon faith ! 
 How are we indorsing and canonizing rational- 
 ism — the determination of our own intellects — in 
 the very act of declaring it to be devilish ! 
 
 If I entered into an examination of the steps 
 by which we have been brought into these terri- 
 ble contradictions, I should have to go through 
 nnich more of our ecclesiastical history than you 
 would have leisure to consider. It is better to 
 " inquire with all earnestness how we may be ex- 
 ^tricated from thcuL It seems to me that God is 
 Himself extricating us from them, if we only 
 confess His hand in the affairs of churches and 
 of men, as we, at least, are bound to do. Can 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 85 
 
 we really reverence Him and His government, 
 if we suppose all these questions of criticism, all 
 these arguments respecting the books which are 
 most sacred in our eyes, have been stirred with- 
 out His knowledge or design ? Do we hold 
 that the eye which never slumbers or sleeps has 
 been indifferent to these movements in the minds 
 of His creatures ? Is it not very strange, what 
 Leighton would have called " very brutish," for 
 Christian men to cherish such an opinion as this? 
 But if there is some purpose in the direction 
 which the minds of some men in this age have 
 been taking towards these critical inquiries — if 
 we, who do not feel much call to engage in them, 
 who do not experience that strong compulsion of 
 the age, which the Bishop of Natal tells us that 
 he cannot resist — ought we not to inquire, ' Is 
 there no message coming out of them for us ? Is 
 God teaching us nothing by them?' 
 
 If we do not stop our ears, I think He will 
 teach us very great, if they be very humbling, 
 lessons by them. I think He will lead us back 
 to the faith of our fathers, otitcards to the appre- 
 hension of a truth which they could not fully re- 
 ceive, which was darkened by some of the con- 
 ceits of their own minds. I join these two hopes 
 
S6 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 together; for me they are inseparable. Many 
 think there is a great progress to be looked for. 
 But we must obtain it by renouncing the most 
 cherished convictions of the old time. Many 
 think that we must by all means recover the 
 faith which we have lost, or which is departing 
 from us ; that we must recover it by consenting 
 to abandon all thought of a larger knowledge, 
 a clearer spiritual light, than that which was 
 vouchsafed to the sixteenth or the seventeenth 
 or the eighteenth century. If this is so, we 
 are in exactly the opposite position to the stu- 
 dents of physics; for the condition of j)rogress 
 with them is the recognition of the light that 
 has been granted ; and, on the other hand, the 
 torch must be dimmer than it was in the last 
 hand which held it, if it is not fed with fresh oil, 
 if it does not bring forth something that had 
 ^ been hidden. But we are still more unhke the 
 Prophets of the Jewish Church, who always re- 
 buked their countrymen for falling away from 
 their trust in the God of their fathers, because 
 they were thus shutting their eyes to the higher 
 blessings which were reserved for their descen- 
 dants. If this is so, we are separated from the 
 good men of every time, who have comforted 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 87 
 
 themselves in all dejection respecting their own 
 age, by recollecting the things which God had 
 done in the times gone by, and by expecting a 
 Revelation of the Son of Man which should fill 
 the whole earth. 
 
 First, then, if it be true, as all in some way or 
 other admit, that our fathers did beheve in Christ 
 directly, as an actual Person related to them ; if 
 it be true that such a faith as this, and not one 
 grounded upon evidence respecting documents, 
 must be the faith of women and little children ; 
 are we not solemnly warned that our attempt to 
 make criticism give out one answer or another 
 is not more dishonest, according to its laws, than 
 it is injurious to the very cause with which we 
 suppose criticism is interfering? You prove Moses 
 to your satisfaction to be the author of the Pen- 
 tateuch. Be it so. Now go on. AVhat next ? 
 You will argue from the Pentateuch that Jesus 
 Christ is the Son of God, the Saviour of the World. 
 Perhaps you may : and perhaps, if I believe in 
 Christ already, and have confessed Him to be my 
 Lord, 1 may see some force in your arguments, 
 — or rather, I may see some force in the words 
 about which you are arguing, and which you 
 are exceedingly likely to overlay and kill with your 
 
88 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 argumeuts. But to ascend from the Pentateuch 
 to Christ ; to prove that because that is, He must 
 be ; who taught you this method ? Is it the 
 Apostolic one? Is it one which commends itself 
 to any man's conscience in the sight of God ? Is 
 it not utterly dishonourable to Him whom you 
 profess to serve ? Is it not this which God in 
 His good providence is confounding and making 
 ridiculous, on purpose to show us that men do 
 need a Christ, a vSon of j\Ian ; that they are 
 crying for Him, wailing after Him; and that 
 we have no right to hide Him from them, or to 
 impose any hard intellectual conditions, any 
 preliminaries of ours, to the admission of Him 
 as the Everlasting Word, as the Deliverer, and 
 Teacher, and Judge of the Universe? 
 
 But, secondly. If I thus bring myself into 
 harmony with the good and wise of other genera- 
 tions, from whom I have gone astray in the vain 
 ambition of displaying my intellectual prowess 
 and discomfiting some conclusions which I ac- 
 count dangerous, — I may also discover what it 
 was that hindered those wise and good men from 
 always trusting their own Gospel, from always 
 committing it to God, — as in their sanest and 
 devoutest moments they did, — to take care of it, 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 89 
 
 and to bring all men to the knowledge of it. 
 They knew in their hearts that it was not the 
 testimony of men, but the testimony of God, 
 which had brought them out of their narrow- 
 ness and selfishness to trust in One who had 
 given Himself for them all. They said so again 
 and again. And whenever they spoke what they 
 meant in prayers and thanksgivings, it was this 
 same testimony they recognized as the source of 
 all faith in their fellows ; it was this testimony 
 they desired for those who were in darkness, who 
 did not see the thing as it is. But there crept over 
 them, as there does creep over all of us, the no- 
 tion that this testimony of God concerned them, 
 and not their race ; that they were to know 
 Christ truly ; that the majority of men could only 
 know Him in some secondary sense — in what 
 they said, in their exhortations and warnings, 
 was no sense at all for any moral or spiritual 
 purpose. Yet they could not quite give up their 
 conviction, taught them so continually in the 
 Bible, that the Gospel was for all sinners, for the 
 whole world. So they began, slowly and re- 
 luctantly, to admit a kind of outside religion for 
 the use of people in general, resting not on the 
 testimony of God, but of men. People born in 
 
90 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Christian countries must be taught generally that 
 the Bible was the production of inspired men ; 
 that it had a divine authority ; that its books were 
 written by the men whose names they bear. Then 
 a few who had gone so far might be admitted 
 into the arcana of Christian faith, those arcana 
 being what St. Paul said was the good news 
 which he was to deliver to all nations. 
 
 My dear Friend ! I must and will speak my 
 mind. This is an accursed and a godless scheme, 
 and I bless and praise God that the Laity are 
 rising up to say that they will not endure it any 
 longer. They must be drilled into a certain set 
 of notions about books, that they may be pre- 
 pared to receive that which is an eternal fact, or 
 nothing ! They must accept certain conclusions 
 about human testimony, that they may be pre- 
 pared to receive God's testimony concerning Him- 
 self! I rejoice that we cannot inake out our 
 points ! I rejoice that people declare the evi- 
 dence we produce to be altogether insufficient ! 
 I see another mind in all this than the mind of 
 human scepticism and self-will. I see Him at 
 work, who desires that all men, from the lowest 
 even to the greatest, should hear the Gospel of 
 the Son of God, and should live ; who will not 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 91 
 
 suffer US to cheat mankind of that Gospel, who will 
 not allow us to withhold the doctrine that Christ 
 is the Head of every man, the first-born of every 
 creature. Our fathers did limit the message of 
 His salvation, though they believed in Him with 
 all their hearts for themselves, and for those who 
 accepted Him. To regain the old ground, we 
 are forced to conquer new. 
 
 I have answered your question exactly as it is 
 put, adhering to the very letter of it. I have 
 not inquired at all who is the author, or who are 
 the authors, of the Pentateuch. Anything which 
 concerns this subject will fall better into a con- 
 sideration of the next topic you have raised. I 
 thank you for the method you have followed in 
 proposing these questions. It will seem to some 
 not the chronological order. It is the right 
 order. It is for us the chronological order. We 
 profess to believe in Christ. That is our stand- 
 ing-point. From that we should start. The 
 past may be very precious to us, — will be far more 
 precious than it has ever been. But we shall not 
 know its preciousness if we forsake w'hat we have, 
 and deduce our rights from it. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
92 
 
 LETTER IX. 
 
 THE PENTATEUCH. 
 
 My dear Friend, 
 
 Your second question is this : " May 
 " we not continue to read the Pentateuch as the 
 " Word of God, speaking of man and to man, 
 " without putting a forced construction on the 
 " plain meaning of words, and without imposing 
 " fetters on the freedom of scientific or critical 
 " investigation in any matters which God has 
 " given us the power to inquire into?" 
 
 After the remarks which I made in the last 
 two letters, you will not wonder if I should answer: 
 " I doubt whether we are reading the Penta- 
 teuch as the Word of God, speaking of man and 
 to man." I think we shall begin to regard it in 
 that light when we cease to put forced construc- 
 tions on the plain meaning of words, and when 
 we resolve to impose no fetters on the freedom of 
 
THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 93 
 
 critical or scientific investigation in any matter. 
 Such is certainly ray conviction. I will try to 
 show how I have been brought to it. 
 
 I cannot open the Bible in any part of it, — in 
 the books of the Law, in the Psalms, in the Pro- 
 phets, — without meeting with this expression : 
 ' the word of God,' or ' the word of the Lord.' It 
 is the characteristic expression in all these books, 
 that which binds them to each other. The preva- 
 lence and persistency of this language is what any 
 person, reading these documents for the first time, 
 would feel to be their distinction from all others 
 which he had ever met with. He would find, as I 
 have said already, all Creation attributed to this 
 ' word of the Lord.' That by it the heavens 
 were made, is the familiar, the nniforra phraseo- 
 logy of the Hebrew writers. But the falling of 
 the snow, the coming of the frost in its regular 
 seasons, or at any unexpected season, is equally 
 traced to this ' word.' 
 
 The application of this language to natural 
 things, often as it occurs, does not, however, ex- 
 hibit the full import of it. You have described it 
 with accuracy and fidelity to Scripture usage, as 
 ' speaking of man and to man.' Whilst other 
 nations thought of great powers which ruled in 
 
94 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 the sun or stars, which exercised dominion over 
 man, to which man owed homage, and which he 
 must propitiate, the Jew was taught always to 
 think of a Being who addressed him directly, who 
 had raised Mm above the works of His hands, 
 who had given Idm dominion over sheep and 
 oxen and all the beasts of the field. That su- 
 periority is especially indicated in the gift of 
 speech. Man's power is through words. And 
 words are the signs to him that he is made in the 
 likeness of God, that he is intended for converse 
 with God. 
 
 There is nothing w^iich is so much to be de- 
 sired as that " no forced construction " should 
 be put upon " the plain meaning " of this phra- 
 seology. If w^e are to speak of the Bible as the 
 word of God, we must let it tell ns about the 
 word of God. We cannot contract and subvert 
 its own teaching, and then say that we accept it 
 as the guide and judge of our acts and thoughts. 
 And this, it seems to. me, is what we have been 
 doing. Just that sense of the word of God 
 which is most distinctly set forth in the Scrip- 
 ture, which has commended itself to men's con- 
 sciences as its most natural sense, which can be 
 shown to have had most influence on the mind 
 
AND or SCIENCE. 95 
 
 of Christendom — to have moulded its language, 
 its literature, its arts, and have been most wel- 
 comed by the devoutest people in all ages, when 
 their devotion was strongest, — ^just this is dying 
 out of our minds, is practically rejected by the 
 religious w^orld. The behef of God actually 
 speaking to men, of His speaking to men in all 
 generations, of its being the greatest misery for 
 any period not to hear His voice in the move- 
 ments of the universe, in the transactions of king- 
 doms, — this belief, which alone makes it possible 
 for us to attach any significance to His acts of 
 old in Egypt or Palestine, which alone causes the 
 existence of a Bible to be conceivable, — this be- 
 lief is assailed and undermined — by whom ? By 
 those who are demanding the most unquestioning 
 and unreserved assent to the letter of the Bible, 
 wdio say that no errors can exist in that letter ; 
 yes, who say, — for this is the practical corollary 
 to the former proposition — that our construction 
 of the letter, our opinions respecting it, must 
 determine what men shall think about any ques- 
 tions which may be raised either by students of 
 human history or students of nature. AVhat is 
 meant, what is often said, is that the letter of 
 the Bible is the word of God, that there is no 
 
96 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 other. It is admitted, perhaps, that there is a 
 technical, artificial, figurative meaning of that 
 word in which it was applied by St. John to our 
 Lord Jesus Clirist ; but this meaning has no- 
 thing to do with the common one. Thai refers 
 to the book only, and to the letters of the book. 
 Now, not in the least in the interest of phy- 
 sical science or of free inquiry — the champions 
 of both would repudiate me, and probably call 
 me very disagreeable names, — but simply as one 
 who has learnt all he knows from the Bible, 
 simply as a minister of the Word, I do solemnly 
 abjure this doctrine, and protest against it. I 
 am convinced that any Jewish prophet would 
 have considered it as broadly and directly 
 atheistical. I am convinced that any Pharisee, 
 who hated Christ, would have given his unfeigned 
 assent and consent to it, and would have made 
 it, — why do I say would have made it, did make 
 it — into the most powerful and cruel of his 
 weapons against Him. And therefore the Pha- 
 risees could not understand what the prophets 
 said of a Word of God coming to them, of a Word 
 of God speaking in them, and speaking to the 
 people. Therefore they could not understand 
 how they should rebuke their countrymen for 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 97- 
 
 their deadness in listening to that Word, when 
 He was addressing them, as He addressed their 
 fathers, by sore trials, punishments, and daily 
 blessings. And therefore we cannot understand 
 those prophets. We must turn their message 
 into figures, or nail it down to some event that 
 happened once, or project it into the far future. 
 As a message from Him, who is, and was, and 
 is to come ; as a message concerning our hypo- 
 crisies, our idolatries, it is nothing. To serve a 
 political purpose indeed, to crush an opponent 
 whom we cannot meet on a fair field, we do 
 resort to Isaiah and Jeremiah, as if they had 
 a great significance ; we find them denouncing 
 the Maynooth grant, and threatening those who 
 vote for it. But our worship of gold, and our' 
 worship of the letter of books, — the prophets 
 have nothing to say against these. They give 
 no warning about turning to men whose breath 
 is in their nostrils, and not heeding the Lord 
 of Hosts. They do not tell us that He may be 
 arising to shake terribly the walls which we have 
 built, and which we are daubing with our untem- 
 pered mortar. 
 
 I am speaking of the Old Testament generally. 
 You wish me to speak of what we call the Five 
 
98 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Books of Moses particularly. We call them by 
 that name. One of the first points which sug- 
 gests itself to some persons in the consideration 
 of them is, ' Have we a right to call them by that 
 name?' I suppose, before we examine that point, 
 there can be no objection to our reading them. 
 On every hypothesis they must be worth some- 
 thing more than any notions of ours about them. 
 AVeli, then, is the assertion of their proceeding 
 from Moses, the most prominent assertion in 
 them ? Is that the one to which they especially 
 demand my assent? Where do I find it? In 
 Genesis ? No ! there the creation of all visible 
 things is ascribed to the Lord God. There the 
 government and punishment of men, and their 
 restoration, is ascribed to the Lord God. There 
 the Lord God is reported as calling Abraham, 
 and bidding him go into a land which he shall 
 be told of. There the Lord God is reported as 
 speaking to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, and 
 giving them wisdom ; as speaking also to Abime- 
 lech and Pharaoh. But so far, at least, I have 
 heard nothing of Moses, nothing therefore of 
 his being the author of that book. I go on to 
 Exodus. There undoul)tcdly I hear much of 
 Moses. He is drawn out of the water. He 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 99 
 
 grows up as a son of Pharaoh's daughter. He 
 feels for his people. He takes a wild way of 
 redressing their wrongs. He is an exile in the 
 land of Midian for forty years. There God speaks 
 to him. The name of the I AM is proclaimed 
 to him. He is sent to tell the people that the 
 Lord God of their fathers has seen their afflic- 
 tions, and has heard their cry, and is come to de- 
 liver them. Moses, we are told, slowly and re- 
 luctantly yields to the divine call, submits to be 
 the messenger of God to his countrymen. He 
 has all opposition to encounter from them as from 
 the Egyptians. But He who has sent him pre- 
 vails over the tyrant : bears with the murmurs of 
 the slaves, who long for the flesh-pots they have 
 lost ; educates them to trust through their dis- 
 trust ; orders their society ; gives them laws, sta- 
 tutes, a tabernacle, and priests to minister in 
 it. The Word of the Lord speaks to Moses as- 
 suredly. The Exodus may be called in all simpli- 
 city a Book of Moses. But, if we believe wdiat 
 it says, how can w^e care much wdiether Moses, 
 or any one else, wrote down the letters of it ? 
 Is it different with Leviticus, with Numbers, with 
 Deuteronomy, except that this last book contains 
 the record of the death of JMoses ? Are not all 
 
 H 2 
 
100 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 discoveries to us of a divine Lord, speaking to 
 man, and of man? Is not the interest, the 
 beauty of the narrative, that the men who appear 
 in it feel themselves to be witnesses and servants 
 of Him ; that they arc just as ready to exhibit 
 thciv own weaknesses, faikires, unbeliefs, as any 
 of those qualities which show that they had the 
 divine image ? Yet we must, in spite of them- 
 selves, without the slightest warrant and encou- 
 ragement from them, call them infallible, so put- 
 ting them between us and the divine Lord whom 
 they Hved and died to proclaim to us. And, as if 
 that were not enough, we nmst exalt the letter of 
 the book above these holy, inspired, but imper- 
 fect servants of the great King. We must make 
 that more sacred than their living acts, more sa- 
 cred than what they declared to be the triumphs 
 and deliverances of the Living God ! 
 
 Now, since all the attempts to impose fetters 
 on the freedom of scientific or critical investiga- 
 tion arise from the notion that the letter of the 
 Bil)le ought not to be subjected to the same kind 
 of handling as the letter of other books; that dis- 
 putes about the authorship of the books in the 
 Bible are more dangerous than disputes about 
 the authorship of other books ; I might at once 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 101 
 
 say, * Such attempts are unlawful, because they 
 ' are insulting to the majesty of the Word of 
 ' God, because they suppose either that the Word 
 ' of God is not really speaking to men in all 
 ' ages, as the Bible affirms ; or else that the 
 
 * Bible is the one book in the world which God 
 
 * does not care about, which is not safe under 
 'His protection, which we must patronize and 
 
 * watch over, and keep from injuries.' Priests and 
 doctors in all ages have held this last opinion. 
 They have looked upon the Bible as a feeble, 
 tender plant, which was committed to their nurs- 
 ing, which they were not to let the winds of heaven 
 visit too roughly. And the great proof of its vita- 
 lity is, that it has lasted through all this nursing ; 
 that they have not been able to kill it ; that their 
 forcing-rooms and hothouses have been thrown 
 down by the winds which they dreaded for it ; 
 that it has thriven, and put forth fresh leaves and 
 richer fruits in the open air. 
 
 I would not, however, confine myself to gene- 
 ralities. The evidences of these facts are about 
 us. This very controversy has brought forth 
 numbers of them. The religious world complain 
 of Bishop Colenso. What has he done? He 
 has accepted their own dogmas. He has identi- 
 
102 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 fied the letter of the book with tlie Word of God. 
 He has not been able to read its own testimony 
 respecting that Word of God. He has assumed 
 that it is giving, not a revelation of God's ways 
 to men, of His mode of governing men and 
 holding intercourse with them, but a narrative 
 of events which are unlike all other events that 
 have happened in any generation since. There- 
 fore he demands — reasonably demands — that 
 there should be a minute accuracy in all the de- 
 tails of these events to ensure iUeir credibility, 
 which would not be needed to ensure the credi- 
 bility of any other events. And the moment be 
 misses that minute accuracy the whole vanishes 
 into air. All that have appeared to mankind the 
 most substantial facts, the great deliverances from 
 fables, the great witnesses for a true God who 
 is fighting with the false conceptions of men, be- 
 come legends in his eyes ; they may be as ho- 
 nest as the Homeric legends .- he hopes they are ; 
 much more they cannot be. 
 
 It is easv to exclaim a^^ainst such lan2:uaG:e. 
 I am as ready to exclaim as any one, if I saw any 
 good in exclamations, and if I did not fear that 
 I might 1)0 denouncing a fair and logical deduc- 
 tion from premises which he and his accusers 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 103 
 
 have equally accepted as sound. Is it not better 
 to look into those premises than to quarrel with 
 the conclusion ? Or if the conclusion startles us, 
 is not that a solemn call and obligation to inquire 
 whether we may not be cleaving to a principle 
 which involves it ? If we are, surely we can only 
 avoid the result by shutting our eyes ; and we 
 may not be able, any more than Bishop Colenso, 
 always to keep them shut. 
 
 Still, is there not a fear of dislodging some 
 old and dear faith whilst we draw this distinc- 
 tion, even though the Bible warrants it ? Shall 
 not we outrage the decisions of the Church even 
 if we adhere to the doctrine of the book which 
 the Church recognizes ? There is an illustration, 
 also taken from the present controversy, of that 
 danger. The Bishop of Natal does not like to 
 read the passage in our service about the Israelites 
 being led through the Red Sea, — " figuring there- 
 by thy holy Baptism." Of course he does not — 
 of covirse he cannot. He feels Baptism to be 
 a witness of a truth. He supposes the passage 
 of the Red Sea to be a miraculous leojend. But 
 now observe how the composers of the Baptismal 
 Service felt about this passage of the Red Sea, 
 and how exactly, how felicitously, they expressed 
 
104 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 the true mind of Christendom concerning it. That 
 deliverance was not, in their eyes, a special 
 anomalous transaction, to be set down among 
 the world's curiosities. It was the type and ex- 
 ample of all deliverances that had been wrought 
 for nations ever since ; of this, the great Redemp- 
 tion of mankind by the baptism and death of the 
 only-begotten Son. All were God's deliverances. 
 In every salvation, little or great, that ever came 
 to an individual, to a family, to a nation, to the 
 universe. He was making a way for his ransomed 
 to pass over. He was commanding the water to 
 stand on the right hand and on the left, He was 
 throwing the horse and the rider into the sea. 
 Is not the whole literature of Christendom, as 
 Dr. Stanley has so well shown in his admirable 
 ' Lectures on the Jewish Church,' leavened with 
 this conviction ? Has not this story of the Red 
 Sea given faith to men in sore trials when they 
 needed something else than fictions to rest upon ? 
 Yes ! The modern method of treating these as 
 mere exceptions in the order of the divine go- 
 vernment, not striking and glorious illustrations 
 of it, is a hard, cruel, destructive method. It 
 must lead to such denials as those of Bishop Co- 
 lenso. We should be thankful for knowing that 
 it does. 
 
AND OP SCIENCE. 105 
 
 Believing that the history of Israel is not a 
 Homeric legend, but a revelation of the Lord of 
 heaven and earth, the Lord of man, I can do 
 justice to the Homeric legends, I can see in 
 them a confession of a divine protection and go- 
 vernment in the affairs of men, of a divine inspi- 
 ration of the thoughts and acts of men. All the 
 world becomes a mere stage, on which men are 
 playing different parts and wearing different 
 masks, without this message concerning a Living 
 Word. With it, the stage becomes a place of real 
 actors. One is in the centre of all, directing all. 
 
 But do I care nothing whether Moses or 
 Samuel, or any man whom I have reverenced 
 most, should turn out to be an impostor ; not 
 some ancient Descartes, but some ancient Ca- 
 gliostro ? I care immensely ! To think of 
 Samuel as some critics think of him, would be 
 as painful to me as to count the dearest friend 
 or kinsman I ever had a rogue. But for that 
 very reason I would not have him snatched 
 away, like a Homeric hero, in a cloud, just when 
 the darts are striking him. I should wish the 
 character of my own friend to undergo investi- 
 gation, not to be saved from it or to be sustained 
 by any foregone conclusion. I can trust God 
 
106 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 with His own acts. I can trust Him with the 
 defence of His servants. Let all criticism — the 
 severest — be applied to them. I think they will 
 endure it. I am sure that He will be justified 
 when He speaks, and will be clear when He is 
 judged. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
107 
 
 LETTEU X. 
 
 THE DELUGE. 
 
 My dear, Priend, 
 
 You approach yonr third question 
 with much timidity. You say that "it is op- 
 " pressing the minds of those who love their 
 " Bibles, and who cling to the infallibility of the 
 "letter of Scripture as the ground of all their 
 "hopes." 
 
 I am sure that there are such persons as those 
 whom you describe; I am sure, at least, that 
 there are persons " who love their Bibles," and 
 who yet think that " they cling to the infallibi- 
 " lity of the letter of the Scriptures as the ground 
 "of all their hopes." But I cannot admit — 
 after what I have said in previous letters you 
 cannot expect me to admit — that their love for 
 the Bible is identical with this clinging, or is 
 the cause of it. When they confess that the 
 
108 CJiAlMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 ground of their hopes is not the infallibility of the 
 letter of Scripture, but the Rock of Ages, the 
 Living and Eternal AVord, I am convinced they 
 will love their Bibles far more ; they will receive 
 what their Bibles say with far more simplicity 
 and reverence ; the Bible will take the place in 
 their minds of a theory about the Bible; they 
 will care more for David and Isaiah than for 
 M. Gaussen. Thinking, as I do, that their love 
 for the Bible, and that their faith in the Word 
 of God are in unspeakable peril, not from the 
 disturbance of this sandy foundation, but from 
 the fancied security with which they build upon 
 it — being convinced that God is now shaking 
 this foundation for us all, that we may discover 
 that which He has laid — I Avould approach cau- 
 tiously and with awe, yet without any cowardly 
 dread, the subject which you propose to me. I 
 am glad to escape from a vague general discus- 
 sion, in which much may be said and little ex- 
 pressed. Your instance is the best that could 
 be selected. It is important in itself. Any 
 principle which is applicable to it may govern 
 a number of other cases. There are some who 
 " seem to fear that if they once allow the histo- 
 "rical reality of the physical account of the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 109 
 
 " Deluge to be called iu question, they are guilty 
 " of doubting the word of Him who is Truth." 
 
 I do not object to your mode of stating this 
 difficulty. It perhaps conveys your meaning 
 better than any other would convey it. But 
 there is an ambiguity which I think you will 
 now perceive, in the phrase " historical reality of 
 "the physical account of the Deluge." There 
 may be an historical reality in that which does 
 not in the least correspond with those facts with 
 which the physical student is occupied. It might 
 be true of a deluge covering a very small portion 
 of the earth, that God saved a man and his family 
 from perishing in it ; that He gave him a warn- 
 ing of the calamity which was coming before it 
 came ; that He taught him how to save his family, 
 and how to save creatures of various kinds, in 
 the same building in which he himself took re- 
 fuge. All this might be a very simple, child-hke 
 narrative of an historical fact, not in the least 
 a legend. This you could easily suppose. But 
 then you will say, 'What is such a narrative 
 * worth? Who would care the least for it? How 
 ' can a great divine book force such a story upon 
 ' my notice ?' 
 
 I answer, To the physical student, occupied 
 
110 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 with his Cosmos of great continents and islands, 
 a story of this kind would be simply insignificant, 
 simply like any record of the doings of a parti- 
 cular country or province. But I have already 
 started two or three doubts which I wished you 
 to weigh very seriously in your mind. Supposing 
 there is no Cosmos but this, what becomes of all 
 that is recorded in r//;j/ human history? Sup- 
 posing there is }io Cosmos but this, can you look 
 this Cosmos in the face? can you examine it? 
 will you not be crushed by it ? Supposing there 
 is a Cosmos besides this — supposing there is one 
 in which j\Ian is not a mere element — nearly the 
 most insignificant of all its elements — who shall 
 explain that Cosmos to us ? AVho shall give us 
 a key to the principles of it ; to the method in 
 which these principles have unfolded tlunnselves ? 
 If there is a Bible, must not this be its object? 
 If there is such a Cosmos — not approached at all 
 by the })liysical student and his in(juiiics — do 
 we not want a Bible of this kind? 
 
 Now, then, for our immediate topic. In the 
 story of the Deluge of Noah \ have that which 
 men in various stages of geographical knowledge, 
 with various degrees of information respecting 
 the relation of this planet to other parts of the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. Ill 
 
 universe, have recognized as a message concern- 
 ing One who punishes men on this earth for their 
 lust and violence, of One who redeems and re- 
 stores the earth and the human race after He 
 has punished it. This has been the lesson which 
 generation after generation has perceived to lie 
 in it. To have that lesson given in formal didac- 
 tic words would be nothing. To have it given 
 in some grand legend, surrounded with all kinds 
 of romantic incidents, would not be much. The 
 story of Noah is familiar and prosaic. If you 
 had no associations with the length and breadth 
 of the world to which it referred, you would not 
 be inclined to doubt that it had occurred. Has, 
 then, that length or breadth anything to do with 
 it? I should say, "Absolutely nothing ;" if I did 
 not reflect that just in proportion as my thoughts 
 of the earth expand, I must treat the jjrinciple 
 of this narrative — the law of this narrative, as 
 also expanding. If it was true once that God 
 punished men for their lust and violence, it 
 is true still. If it is true that He called forth a 
 righteous man, and preserved him and his fa- 
 mily, and other tribes of creatures at that time, 
 it is true that He will do so hereafter; that He 
 has been, and is, and will be the preserver and 
 
112 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 restorer of the universe and of living things, and 
 
 of the race which He has made in His image, — 
 
 a preserver and restorer, let men and animals do 
 
 destroy each other and the 
 
 ^ dwell. 
 
 .en, the history of this Deluge 
 as 1 tind it given in the book of Genesis. If 
 there are passages in it which assume that more 
 of the earth was covered by the Deluge than mo- 
 dern investigations show can have been covered 
 by it, I would say : ' Either those passages are 
 ' mistaken, or I am mistaken in the interpreta- 
 'tion of them.' Both solutions are possible — 
 both are reasonable. God, if we accept the 
 statement of the Bible, has given us an assur- 
 ance that we shall have His Spirit to guide us 
 into truth. He has not given us a promise or 
 assurance that there shall be no errors in the let- 
 ter of the Scri})turcs. If He has, let the passage 
 be produced ; let us hear something more than 
 mere inferences as to what men suppose must be, 
 — inferences which I hold to be profane and 
 irreverent. But the other alternative is also 
 quite possible. We have made i)rodigious blun- 
 ders in our interpretations of Scripture. We 
 have forced it to say things which it has never 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 113 
 
 said, that it may square with our conclusions. It 
 is very hard when we have a certain conception 
 of the earth not to impute that conception to 
 writers who had quite a different conception of 
 it ; very hard to remember how much better it 
 may have been that a book which was announ- 
 cing a moral law, an eternal principle, should 
 meet the various conceptions of men respecting 
 physical things, and that it should demand of 
 us an effort to disengage the permanent truth 
 from these accidents. 
 
 And here again we discover from our eccle- 
 siastical documents that it is not the physical 
 fact, but the historical fact, which has impressed 
 itself on the mind and conscience of Christen- 
 dom. The Baptismal Service uses the Deluge, 
 just as it uses the passage of the Red Sea, with- 
 out reference to its dimensions, with a simple 
 and direct reference to God's deliverance of man. 
 And quite consistently Bishop Colenso objects 
 to the use of this story, just as he does to the 
 use of the other, because dimensions are for him 
 everything — because a small fact is for him no 
 fact at all. Noah's deluge must have been uni- 
 versal, else why make so much of it ? I reply. 
 Because the whole Bible is occupied about small 
 
 I 
 
114 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 areas, little families, contemptible tribes, shep- 
 herds, fishermen, One who was called a carpen- 
 ter's son, upon whom the Roman soldiers put a 
 purple robe and a crown of thorns in derision — 
 who was nailed to a cross as slaves were. All is 
 consistent. Bulk, as Southey remarked, is sub- 
 limity in the mythology of the Hindoos. Goethe 
 saw that the Gospel was, throughout, doing 
 homage to that which man despises for its little- 
 ness. 
 
 May we not, then, have been weakening in- 
 stead of strengthening the lesson which has 
 been imparted to age after age by Noah's flood, 
 through our eagerness to make its power con- 
 sist in its vastness ? Perhaps you will say, ' The 
 ' doctrine so stated was very well for the child- 
 'hood of the world; we have outgrown it.' 1, 
 should hold, on the contrary, that it is more 
 wanted for our manliood than it was wanted for 
 our childhood ; that it is more necessary when 
 we are overwhelmed with the mass of pliysical 
 facts, which are every day accumulating upon 
 us, than it was when only a few here and there 
 had been gathered up, or those few were in the 
 custody of learned men. I remember saying 
 to myself when I read Mr. Wilson's celebrated 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 115 
 
 Essay, wherein he describes the changes and ad- 
 vances in our knowledge, and compares it with 
 that which the writers of the Bible could have 
 possessed : ' If this is so, how can we breathe 
 if we have not some witness on behalf of huma- 
 nity, something to save us from sinking under 
 this Atlas load ? ' I never saw more clearly 
 than from that Essay what would become of us 
 if we were left to the teachers of Physical 
 Science, or if we tried to turn the Bible into a 
 book of Physical Science. And surely it is not 
 in this day that the revelation of a God who 
 permits mutual destruction, and yet is Himself 
 the renovator and restorer of life, is unnecessary 
 either for the physical student, being also a 
 man, or for the divine. The one is confronted 
 with all the facts of this mutual destruction, the 
 other is inclined to turn them into a law, and to 
 hold forth the final discovery and judgment of 
 the Son of Man as that which is to ratify the 
 curse, not to declare the redemption of the uni- 
 verse. Bishop Colenso may tell me that I am 
 a coward and poltroon because I do not inform 
 my people that they have been deceiving them- 
 selves in heeding the story of a Deluge. I should 
 deserve this contempt if I ever bade them hold 
 
 I 2 
 
116 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 any opinion about the Deluge Avliich I do not 
 hold myself. But I will bear his contempt rather 
 than the stings of which I shall suffer from my 
 conscience, if I took from them what I feel to 
 be an authentic testimony concerning the cha- 
 racter and purposes of Him who is the same 
 yesterday, to-day, and for ever — an authentic 
 pledge for the salvation of my race. 
 
 I have told you what I think of this particular 
 instance. I believe we owe much to the physical 
 student for warning us off his ground in this 
 matter of the Delui>;e, for drivino; us back to 
 our own. We shall hold that far more firmly if 
 we accept the prohibition against trespass as a 
 divine one. I doubt not that theology will owe 
 other debts to those whom it sometimes regards 
 as its enemies. The new inquiries respecting 
 the Antiquity of i\Ian make some people tremble 
 lest the story of Adam in Paradise should be 
 shaken. My own anticipations from those in- 
 quiries arc altogether hopeful. I know not in 
 what they may issue. But while I have a strong 
 conviction that whatever way the facts go, they 
 will make that simj)le story more siuq)le and 
 more intelligible to us, and will strip it of a 
 thousand wilful additions, I have a still stronger 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 117 
 
 conviction that we shall never really regard the 
 Second Adam as Him by whom all things were 
 created, and by whom all things consist — as the 
 trae Man, the actual image of the Invisible God 
 — till the first Adam occupies quite a different 
 place in our divinity from that which he has 
 occupied for several centuries. The Old Testa- 
 ment speaks of him once after the record of the 
 expulsion from Eden, where Job declares that he 
 did not hide his shi as Adam. The New Testa- 
 ment speaks of him twice : once in the fifth 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, to call 
 him the type of Him that was to come, to say 
 that ' not as the offence, so also is the free gift ; 
 the other in the Epistle to the Corinthians, to 
 declare that as in Adam all die, so in Christ 
 shall all be made alive ; that the first man was 
 made a living soul, the last a quickening sjjirit. 
 Turn to any book of systematic divinity, and you 
 would suppose Adam's fall was the subject of 
 the Bible, the very ground of Law and Gospel. 
 Surely such a divinity needs reformation. Thanks 
 to the physical student if in anywise he helps the 
 Reformation forward. He will not help it for- 
 ward, nor promote his own cause either, by di- 
 minishing our reverence for the Bible, or by lead- 
 
118 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 ing US to think of it as less really a word of God 
 thau we have been wont to think it. As reverence 
 takes place of the idolatry which destroys rever- 
 ence, we shall learn from it to reverence all God's 
 voices to us in the history of man and the life of 
 nature. The living Word of God will indeed 
 be owned as the Light of men, the source of all 
 light whatever in their hearts and reasons. We 
 shall look upon the facts of the universe as His 
 facts. That we may investigate them, and grow 
 in knowledge of Him, we shall bid our noisy 
 disputatious intellects keep silence before Him. 
 
 Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
119 
 
 LETTER XL 
 
 CURRENT PHRASES IN THIS CONTRO^TIRSY. 
 
 My dear Eriend, 
 
 YoQ refer to several phrases which are 
 disturbmg many minds at this time. The first 
 is Inspiration. I have not thought it needful to 
 discuss the meaning of that word : our Church 
 Prayers speak of it sufficiently ; our Church Ar- 
 ticles are wisely, piously, and significantly silent 
 upon it. The subject is one for prayer, not for 
 definitions. If we pray, we must confess that 
 Inspiration for which our Collects continually en- 
 treat. We must suppose that we cannot think, 
 believe, act without it ; we must acknowledge 
 that all wisdom, illumination, power to will and 
 to do, proceed from the Divine Spirit. We dare 
 not define or limit His operations ; we only 
 know that He is the good Spirit, the Holy 
 Spirit ; that only good can come from Him ; 
 
120 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 that, He gives us insight to perceive evil, and 
 strength to resist it. 
 
 That holy men, then, of old spoke by the inspi- 
 ration of God, that the same inspiration enables 
 us to know what they said, to have any clear 
 understanding of any kind : this has been the 
 faith of the Church at all times. To control it 
 by theories of ours is to undermine it ; to say 
 that inspiration is confined to the writers of the 
 Bible, is formally and directly to contradict those 
 writers ; to determine in what measures they or 
 any other men have possessed inspiration, is to tell 
 Him who breathes where He listeth how tee sup- 
 pose He must breathe or ought to breathe. I 
 believe we should repent deeply of having enter- 
 tained so profane a thought. He knows what 
 inspiration is fitting for each of His servants ; we 
 cannot. A denial of the promise of the Spirit, a 
 disbelief that He has been given, and that He 
 dwells with us for ever, is surely latent in such 
 speculations. How is this denial, this disbelief 
 compatible with our acceptance of the most direct 
 declarations of the New Testament ? 
 
 On the other hand, I have spoken at some 
 length on the expression " IFord of God.'* It 
 seems to me that we clergymen should very 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 121 
 
 seriously apply ourselves to the question, " What 
 " sense does this expression convey to us when 
 " we read the Scriptures ? Have what we call 
 " the different senses of it no relation to each 
 "other? Is the use of it by St. John a mere 
 " figurative accidental use ; or does that interpret 
 " all the other appHcations of it ? Has it found 
 " its meaning till we come to that meaning ?" 
 If we do give ourselves steadily to this in- 
 quiry, I suspect that many of the complaints 
 which the Laity make of us will be found to 
 originate, not, as they often suspect, in our too 
 rigid adherence to our own peculiar phraseology, 
 but in our carelessness about it, in the low and 
 narrow signification which we attach to it. If 
 we had been more faithful in listening to the 
 testimonies of Scripture respecting the Word of 
 God, we should have embarrassed them much 
 less with cruel demands upon them to deny the 
 lessons which God gives them in their con- 
 sciences, in human history, in the world of na- 
 ture, out of deference, or supposed deference, to 
 the letter of the Bible. We must begin with 
 paying some respect to the letter ourselves, where 
 it is distinct and most uniform, before we call 
 upon other men to follow it in points which are 
 
122 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 trivial, and merely accidental to its main pur- 
 pose. 
 
 There is a third expression which has occupied 
 us much, which, I am persuaded, must occupy us 
 all continually, if we would see our w^ay through 
 the difficulties that beset us on every side. I be- 
 gan by confessing a difference with you as to the 
 meaning of Revelation. You will now see, 1 think, 
 why I insisted so much upon that difference. 
 The confusion which exists in all our minds be- 
 tween the mere book and the Revelations where- 
 of the book speaks, is the source of very many 
 of our confusions. " To what are we to trust ?" 
 this demand I hear continually; you yourself have 
 made it. ' Is it to the letter of the Bible ? But 
 ' who is to tell us what that says, what that 
 ' signifies ? Is it to some tradition or general 
 ' consent of the Church ? But the Church fled 
 
 * from the tradition and consent to an infallible 
 ' human interpreter, and was driven back from 
 ' that infallible interpreter to the Bible itself, 
 
 * as the great deliverer from bewildering decrees 
 
 * w^hich the Laity could not understand ; and 
 ' which weakened and depraved their consci- 
 ' ences, if through the help of some confessor or 
 
 * director they were changed from mere general 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 123 
 
 ' dogmas into maxims of individual conduct. 
 ' Must we fall back in hopelessness upon this 
 ' scheme, weighed in the balance and found want- 
 ' ing by Englishmen three centuries ago, not 
 
 * proved to be more satisfactory or more uniting 
 
 * by any recent experience ? Or shall the letter 
 ' of the Bible be claimed by every sect or school 
 
 * that is uppermost as a weapon for persecuting 
 ' and slaying all other sects and schools ? Or 
 ' shall a combination of sects and schools use it 
 ' for restrainmg examination into the facts of 
 ' God's universe ? ' 
 
 Is God the Revealer? Greeks, Romanists, 
 Protestants, all say that He is. The Creeds 
 affirm it ; the existence of the Church implies it. 
 Can He reveal ? Can He make us know what 
 He is; how Ave are related to Him; what we 
 are? This is the question. If it is resolved 
 negatively, ' He cannot reveal ; there is some- 
 
 * thing in the constitution of our minds which 
 
 * makes it impossible that He should show us 
 ' what He is, what we are, how we are related 
 
 * to Him,' then I do not see that it signifies 
 much how we settle the question about the Bible, 
 tradition, the infallible human authority. All are 
 equally deceiving us.- All are pretending to tell 
 
124 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 US something which they cannot tell us. All are 
 merely repeating phrases which begin in nothing, 
 and end in nothing. AVe have, then, only to ask 
 which party plays its tricks best, which shuffles 
 the false cards most dexterously. 
 
 I believe that the Bible and the Creeds, the 
 holiest traditions of the Church in all ages, the 
 holiest Greeks, Latins, Protestants in all ages, 
 are agreed in this one testimony : that God has 
 revealed, and does reveal, to men that which they 
 want to know ; that He only does, or can, reveal 
 anything. Every Reformation has been a protest 
 on behalf of this principle : an effort to shake 
 off, not faith, but denials, not authority, but the 
 rebellion of Popes, of Doctors, of sects, of a reli- 
 gious world, against the Divine authority : a de- 
 termination to recover the Divine teaching which 
 had been lost. If Bishop Colenso had made this 
 protest, this effort, this determination, with what 
 joy would some of us have followed in his steps ! 
 I have expressed in a former letter the pleasure 
 which his preface gave me, because it echoed 
 the words of that prophecy which is read as the 
 Epistle for the Tuesday before Easter, — Who is 
 among yoit that fearvth the Lord, that oljei/eth 
 His servants, that xocdketh in darkness, and hath 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 125 
 
 no light; let him trust in the name of the Lorclj 
 and stay himself upon his God. If he had gone on 
 to exhort us, one and all, to abstain ivom. kindling 
 a fre and compassing ouYsehes with sparks, not 
 to invent theories which shut out God's light 
 from ourselves and from other men — how should 
 we have listened to him as to a father in God, 
 owning that dignity in him all the more readily 
 because he had none of the dignity of earthly 
 greatness and wealth to mix with it and confuse 
 it ! But he has kindled these sparks ; he has 
 invented theories; he has taught us to distrust 
 God's past revelations, those which are the pre- 
 parations for His revelation of His Only Begotten 
 Son, those which are our encouragements to hope 
 for the perfect Revelation of Him when all our 
 partial glimpses shall be completed, all our dim 
 anticipations satisfied. 
 
 To such guidance we cannot commit ourselves. 
 But every fresh disappointment of this kind, 
 every confutation of any dreams we might have 
 formed of earthly leaders, are only reasons for 
 more entirely trusting the cause of God's Church 
 and of His Truth to Himself. Whatever be- 
 comes of our lights, His will shine more and 
 more to the perfect day. And that Light, I am 
 
] 26 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 convinced, will illuminate the path of the phy- 
 sical as well as of the moral student. The Hea- 
 vens shall declare the glory of God, when man is 
 taught that he was made of the dust of earth, 
 that he is meant to bear the image of the Eternal 
 God. 
 
 Ever yours affectionately, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
127 
 
 LETTEE XII. 
 
 THE LAW COURTS. — THE PEOPLE OF GOD. — 
 ETERNAL PUNISHMENT. 
 
 My dear Eriend, 
 
 It will occur to you to ask — in fact, 
 you have asked — How do these interpretations 
 of yours accord with the decisions of our Eccle- 
 siastical Courts? I am not so careful about 
 that question as about some others ; but I will 
 answer it frankly, certainly without considering 
 how far the answer may affect my own security. 
 In the cases of Mr. Rowland Williams and 
 Mr. Wilson we saw a most conscientious, able, 
 and kind-hearted Judge perplexed between the 
 claims of modern zeal for the Bible and the 
 authority of old books, compiled in times which 
 reverenced the Bible far more than we do, and 
 were supposed to have guarded its rights more 
 jealously. Ultimately- he decided, in deference 
 
l'2S CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 to those authorities, that clergymen possess a 
 liberty in the investigation of the Scriptures 
 which the public opinion of the day considers 
 perilous to the Scriptures, and which is perilous 
 to the maxims that this public opinion has ca- 
 nonized. 
 
 I draw this distinction. I feel it to be one of 
 unspeakable importance. Has Dr. Lushington, 
 by his decree in these cases, really weakened the 
 authority of the Bible, or has he only shaken 
 some notions about the Bible which interfere 
 with its riglitful authority, and with the under- 
 standiniir of its contents? Holdino; the latter 
 opinion, I only regret the degree of sanction 
 which the Courts have given to our current 
 notions. 
 
 I have contended already that Bishop Co- 
 lenso's offences against the Bible can be traced 
 to his too credulous acceptance of a prevalent 
 theory about the Bible. I have hinted at another 
 cause of his alienation from the Old Testament. 
 It has affected so many who have gone in his 
 direction, that I wish to speak of it a little more 
 at large. The Old Testament speaks everywhere 
 of " the people of God." A whole people — the 
 nation of Israel — is declared to be dear to the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 129 
 
 ]\Iost High ; to be chosen by Him ; to be che- 
 rished in spite of trangressions ; to be loved 
 with an everhisting love; to be sought after in 
 its wanderings; to have the hope of ultimate 
 repentance and restoration. There are godly 
 men among the people and ungodly. The for- 
 mer may be a little flock— a remnant. The lat- 
 ter may be very numerous. They may be seated 
 in high places. But the godly, however few, are ' 
 those who believe that God cares for the lohole 
 nation; that He is guiding it ; that He means to 
 preserve it and bless it. The ungodly, however 
 numerous, are those who distrust the God of 
 Abraham and of Israel; who make separate 
 gods ; who cultivate a religion of their own. 
 
 Now, the phrase " people of God " has been 
 distorted into a sense the very reverse of this. 
 There are certain evidences in certain persons 
 that they truly believe— believe things which 
 other men do not believe— believe in a way in 
 which other men do not believe. These persons 
 are said to be the people of God. Their belief 
 invests them with that character. Theij are 
 loved with an everlasting love. Their transgres- 
 sions are blotted out. They are to be brought to 
 an endless felicity. Devout men become aware 
 
 K 
 
130 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of the contradictions which this theory involves, 
 of its dangerous permissions, of its cruel exclu- 
 sions, of the security which it holds out to insin- 
 cere profession, of the despair which it causes to 
 humble Christians. They feel that it withdraws 
 them from trust in God's grace — to trust in their 
 own signs of grace. They feel that it leads 
 them to credit themselves with qualities which, 
 in their prayers, they confess that they want. 
 They become impatient of it. They long to 
 overthrow barriers which it has set up between 
 them and their fellow-creatures. But they 
 never dream that they might recover a sounder 
 position by reconsidering the language of the 
 book from which theirs has been adopted. They 
 have been efFoctually cut otf from the simple sig- 
 nification of its records. Its national phraseo- 
 logy is unintelligible to them. They suppose it 
 to be narrow, because their own minds have 
 been narrowed. They retain a certain notion 
 that rehgious men, or spiritual men, are the fa- 
 vourites of Heaven. They only alter their defi- 
 nition of religious men and spiritual men. They 
 discover religious and spiritual instincts in Greeks, 
 Brahmins, ^lahometans. There must be such if 
 the Bible is true ; if there is a Word of God 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 131 
 
 speaking to men ; if men everywhere have been 
 seeking after God as St. Paul snys that they 
 have. But those who are suddenly awakened to 
 the perception of this fact make a strange use of 
 it. The intuitions of heathens are turned to the 
 disparagement of the book which explains and 
 justifies them. They are made a plea for the in- 
 dulgence of that very exclusiveness against which 
 they are invoked. A refined religion is put in 
 place of a Gospel to all people. The Righteous 
 God, who hates idols that divide and degrade 
 men, is regarded as a mere hard conception of 
 Hebrew theology. A God who cares for a nation 
 is inconsistent with an expanded philanthropy. 
 So the way is closed to the revelation of a Son 
 of God, who in his own person contends with the 
 enemies of mankind ; to the revelation of a Father, 
 who in that Son sees and loves mankind, and 
 wills that all should come to the knowledge of 
 His truth. 
 
 Thus, the habit of mind which pervades our 
 English Christianity — which has penetrated so 
 deeply into the heart of our religion, that we all, 
 in our difterent ways, exhibit the tokens of it — is 
 responsible for that weakening of faith in the Old 
 Covenant which is charged upon Bishop Colenso, 
 
 K 2 
 
132 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 and which the Bishop of Durliam affirms to be 
 characteristic of our modern Hterature. Thus, 
 that same exchisive temper, which leads so many 
 to comphiin of our Catechism for claiming all 
 baptized men as children of God, is driving 
 numbers to seek in a vague philosophical uni- 
 versalism something better than the finished sal- 
 vation which is announced, and the restitution of 
 all things which is promised, in the New Co- 
 venant, 
 
 I am bound to make these remarks, even if 
 they are a digression — and I think they are not 
 — from our main subject, because, in a passage 
 of his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, 
 Bishop Colenso has referred to me with nmch 
 kindness and with most graceful modesty, say- 
 ing that he had once declared his dissent from 
 an opinion which I had expressed respecting the 
 possibility of good to those who leave this world 
 in an evil state; and tliat, uj)on more mature 
 reflection, he was inclined to withdraw that dis- 
 sent. I should be very base if I shrank from far 
 more than the disgrace to which such an allusion 
 may expose me. What he has embodied in the 
 form of a charitable hope I have j)ut into words 
 which directly contravene the sentence of that 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 133 
 
 excellent judge who has granted so much lati- 
 tude to the critics of Scripture, That judge 
 has said that the words " everlasting punish- 
 ment " or " everlasting fire," in the Athanasian 
 Creed must be taken to denote an endless de- 
 struction of certain persons in a future state. I 
 have said that I cannot give those adjectives this 
 sense, unless I take eternal life to mean merely 
 an endless future felicity; unless I regard the' 
 Eternal God, not as One who is, and was, and is 
 to come, but only as a future Being. The whole 
 New Testament is for me a revelation of eternal 
 life, the life of God ; a redemption from eternal 
 death, the death of which only a spirit is capable, 
 the death of separation from God, of attachment 
 to evil. If I preached that there could be no 
 deliverance from eternal death, I should be preach- 
 in 2; that no sinner can be raised from darkness to 
 light, from the power of Satan to God. That 
 this deliverance can only take place before the 
 grave closes upon us I am told is the doctrine of 
 Scripture. When I ask for the passages, I am 
 referred to those very words, ' eternal ' and ' ever- 
 lasting,' against the contraction and perversion of 
 which I am protesting. Or I am reminded of an 
 undying worm, which, I am sure, does and must 
 
134 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 prey upon the conscience of every evil man ; the 
 question being whether he must necessarily re- 
 main evil. In every case I plead, not for evasions 
 of Christ's words, but for the strictest explana- 
 tion that can be given of them, according to the 
 letter, the context, and the analogy of Scripture. 
 In every case I complain of the popular inter- 
 pretation, not for its severity, but for the prac- 
 tical laxitv which its fierceness eno-enders : I 
 complain because it deters from no crime, and 
 cultivates the despair which is the cause of ten 
 thousand crimes. 
 
 Instead, therefore, of flying from Christ to 
 some dreams of a possible felicity for man with- 
 out Christ, I turn to Ilim as the Friend and 
 Head of all men ; I turn to Ilim from the tor- 
 ments of my own accusing conscience, from the 
 hopelessness which the sight of the world's evils 
 is always causing me, and which no thoughts 
 about nature, or civilization, or the progress 
 of the species, or the power of man's will, are 
 able to dissipate. If I had not believed in the 
 revelation of the Eternal God of Righteousness 
 to the poor shepherd in the bush that burnt 
 and was not consumed, I should never liave 
 learnt to feel as I do feel about the abuse of the 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 135 
 
 word ' eternal.' If I did not accept the records 
 of the Jewish nation as veritable history, I should 
 never have had a glimpse of the patience of God 
 with the human race, or of His purpose towards 
 it. If I did not perceive that every Jew was a 
 righteous man just in proportion as he counted 
 his nation righteous, in spite of its transgressions 
 and infidelities, I should not confess that the 
 whole race of man is righteous in its King and 
 High Priest, and that no one of us can boast of 
 a private self-righteousness, but must abdicate 
 all title to such a distinction if he would be a 
 true man and a servant of God. My strong 
 convictions on this subject, therefore, increase 
 my dislike to Bishop Colenso's doctrines respect- 
 ing the Old Testament. Nevertheless, I cannot 
 deny that these convictions are more at strife 
 with ecclesiastical law, as it has been recently 
 expounded, than any of his doctrines are, and 
 that I am far more deeply committed on the 
 question of eternal punishment than he is. 
 
 On the other hand, I have no doubt that the 
 popularity of Bishop Colenso's work with a cer- 
 tain class of readers is mainly owing to the 
 opinion — how widely diffused I dare not guess 
 — that the Bible is a book which sentences an 
 
13G CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 immense majority of the creatures whom it de- 
 clares God has made in his image, to hopeless de- 
 struction. A less amount of arithmetic than he 
 possesses would induce men to throw off the in- 
 cubus of an authority which they suppose exists 
 to curse them. I do not believe that the clergy 
 M'ill abate his influence, or that of any person 
 who attacks any part of the Bible history, ex- 
 cept by bearing witness that the book, accord- 
 ing to the simple letter of it as it presents itself 
 to a wayfarer, is directly the reverse of that 
 which laymen, judging from our discourses, have 
 taken it to be. We must say plainly, " God is 
 declared in every page of the Bible to be a God 
 of Salvation. He is that, and only that. If we 
 suppose Him to be anything else, we confound 
 Him with the Devil." The Ecclesiastical Courts 
 cannot bear this testimony. Yet they cannot be 
 without their use, for nothing in God's universe 
 is without use. These Courts may teach mo- 
 dern clergymen that their ancestors left us a 
 freedom which they would take away ; tliat lay 
 Judges arc fairer than clerical Judges, because 
 they are occupied with sul)jects to which cri- 
 minal jurisdiction is applicable, and wc invoke it 
 for subjects to which it has been proved inap- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 137 
 
 plicable ; that those who try to turn this weapon 
 against their brethren will one day find it pierc- 
 ing themselves ; that no fear of it must make us 
 false to God, or lead us to suppress the Gospel 
 with which he has entrusted us for his creatures. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 r. D. Maurice. 
 
138 
 
 LETTEE XIII. 
 
 OPINIONS OE BISHOPS ON THE EOUNDATION 
 OF OUR HOPES. 
 
 My DEA.R Friend, 
 
 I thought I had said all that I had 
 need to sav in the Claims of the Bible and of 
 Science. But a letter has appeared during the 
 last week in the newspapers, signed by the 
 Bishop of Natal, which leads me to reopen our 
 correspondence. It refers to a speech said to 
 have been delivered by the Bishop of Man- 
 chester at a meeting of the Church Missionary 
 Society. If we may believe the reporter of that 
 speech, the Bishop of Manchester declared that 
 the very foundations of our faith — the very basis 
 of our hopes — the very nearest and dearest of 
 our consolations arc taken from us when one 
 line of that sacred volume, on Avhich wc base 
 everything, is said to be unfaithful or untrust- 
 worthy. As the Bishop of Natal had said that 
 
AND or SCIENCE. 139 
 
 many lines of the Bible are unfaithful and untrust- 
 worthy, Bishop Lee added that there was no 
 language befitting a gentleman and a Christian 
 which he could not use in his condemnation. The 
 Bishop of Natal immediately calls upon his Right 
 Reverend Brother to say whether he rests his 
 faith, his hopes, and his consolations on the truth 
 of the passage in the eleventh chapter of Levi- 
 ticus, which decrees, on the authority of the 
 Almighty, that the hare is not to be eaten be- 
 cause he cheweth the cud, but divideth not the 
 hoof. Bishop Colenso has asked Professor Owen 
 whether the hare chews the cud, and has re- 
 ceived an answer in the negative. 
 
 Grievous as this conflict between two fathers 
 of the Church must be to every member of the 
 Church, it throws a light upon the subject of 
 those Letters which we cannot afford to lose. I 
 hope I shall speak with the respect which I feel 
 for their office, and for them individually. But 
 there are duties which every Presbyter owes to 
 himself and to his calling, and with the perform- 
 ance of these that respect must not interfere. 
 
 I need not say that Bishop Lee's proposition 
 is directly and essentially at variance with the 
 principles which I have maintained in ray letters 
 
140 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 to you. I have acknowledged one foundation 
 as laid for us all. That foundation is not the 
 letter of any book. That foundation, being our 
 Lord Jesus Christ himself, could not be shaken 
 if the wiiole Bible were taken from us. I say 
 this on the authority of the Bible. I should 
 contradict the Bible if I said otherwise. Sup- 
 posing the Bishop of Manchester exacts from the 
 clergy of his diocese a confession similar to that 
 which he made at the Church Missionary meeting, 
 I, were I one of those clergy, should be silenced. 
 I could not preach the Gospel which has been 
 committed to me — I could not accept tlie creeds 
 I have accepted — and also take a pledge which 
 appears to me inconsistent with both. 
 
 But you will perceive also, from my Letters, 
 and from the statement I have just made, how 
 utterly unpalatable and offensive to me nuist be 
 the reply of the Bishop of Natal to the Bishop of 
 Manchester. If ever there was an occasion when 
 a moral principle was at stake, — when a protest, 
 if it was made at all, should have been made on 
 moral grounds, — when nothing should have been 
 allowed to rest on a point of scholarship, or on 
 the cpiestion of what might or might not be an 
 error in natural history — this was tliat occasion. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 141 
 
 If ever there was a question which demanded 
 the most serious treatment, — about which every 
 temptation to a joke, however lawful on certain 
 occasions, should have been resisted — this was 
 that question. The Bishop of Natal has made his 
 cause depend upon the accuracy of his know- 
 ledge of the force given by the writer of the book 
 of Leviticus to the words which we translate 
 " chewino; the cud." He has addressed himself, 
 not to the reason or conscience of his readers, 
 but to their sense of the ridiculous. He niay 
 justify himself by saying, " Why did you drive 
 me to this ? AVhy did you put so grave a matter 
 upon such an issue ? " But is that justification 
 available in a hidier court ? Is the extrava- 
 gance of one man a plea for another to be frivo- 
 lous, and to cultivate frivolity, upon topics of the 
 deepest human interest ? 
 
 But I have a more important objection to this 
 course. The Bishop's sneering allusion to Al- 
 mighty God as the author of the law about eat- 
 ing a hare, belongs to his wdiole conception of 
 the Pentateuch and its legislation. That this 
 legislation coutnins minute regulations concern- 
 ing the health and habits of an Eastern people, 
 and affirms those regulations to be divine, is for 
 
142 CLzVIMS or THE BIBLE 
 
 him an evident absurditv. He knows that it 
 sounds hke an absurdity to a number of his 
 countrymen. Pie can always invoke this feel- 
 ing to his side ; as a mere special pleader, that 
 is his wisest and safest course. But I am con- 
 vinced that this sentiment is as vulgar as it is 
 widely diffused. It is connected with the notion 
 of God as a very great Being, who does not care 
 about little things. Such a notion is exceed- 
 ingly natural to us all. I find it so natural to 
 myself, and so destructive of what is best in mc, 
 that I know scarcely a stronger proof of the ve- 
 racity of the Scripture records than this — that 
 they educate me, as no other books educate me, 
 out of this temper of mind ; that they compel me 
 to believe that God does care for the sanitary 
 condition, for the bodily circumstances, of the 
 people of my land and of every land. Statutes 
 which were adapted to the condition of an 
 Eastern people, to a race coming out of slavery 
 into freedom, out of a nomadic condition into 
 fixed habitations, fifteen hundred years before 
 Christ, or as many more as chronologers like to 
 fix, may be bad for our condition. But those 
 modern legislators who think they want no 
 divine guidance in judging what is needful for 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 143 
 
 the complications of a civilized State — those who 
 suppose that this can be ascertained by following 
 the newspapers and public opinion — appear to 
 me less wise than the early legislators of all lands, 
 who thought that to provide for a people, or to 
 govern a people, was an altogether amazing work, 
 for whicli they needed at every step a teaching 
 from above. All of them had this conviction, 
 and expressed it ; but most of them sought 
 help from other than righteous guidance — from 
 tricks and enchantments, from hereditary titles 
 or their own cunning. The Jewish legislator, 
 referring all his wisdom, all the sanction of his 
 laws, to the unseen Deliverer and Ruler, sinking 
 himself altogether, exhibiting the sins of his 
 family and tribe, conferred a blessing upon Is- 
 raelites which we can only appreciate by consider- 
 ing its effects on those who accepted his words 
 most strictly. Why did David take the shew- 
 bread for the wants of his soldiers, when that 
 bread was only for the priests ? Because he felt 
 that he was subject to a divine legislator; that 
 God, and not Moses, had consecrated that bread ; 
 that the decree had, therefore, a meaning be- 
 yond its letter ; that the God who cared for the 
 meanest wants of men would have him despise 
 
144 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 the letter to obey the sense. The Israelites were 
 raised out of superstition by that sentence — ' The 
 Lord God bath said,' ' Tiie Lord God gives this 
 command,' which the Bishop of Natal would 
 ridicule, as the cause of superstition. 
 
 Afterwards, in the days of letter worship, 
 these statutes were turned into pleas for the 
 basest superstition. Every commandment of God 
 was overlaid by the tradition of the elders ; and 
 then commandments, traditions, and all — the 
 traditions often stilling and destroying the com- 
 mandments — became a yoke which neither the 
 Jews of the latest age, nor their fathers, were 
 able to bear. But while the Scriptures, in which 
 the Pharisees sought their life, were used as 
 reasons for not coming to Him of whom the 
 Scriptures testified as the source of life — the wit- 
 ness against tliis tyranny and usurpation of the 
 letter was not a denial that God had given the 
 commandments — the particular and general, the 
 little as well as the great— but the assertion that 
 He had, and that He lived, and that He could 
 fulfil the meaning of them, and that He was ab- 
 rogating the letter in order to fulfil the meaning 
 of them. 
 
 I find, then, in this controversy of the two 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 145 
 
 Bishops, a remarkable illustration of the danger 
 to which we are exposed on both sides; of the 
 evil into which we shall certainly fall if either 
 prevails against the other. Unbehef in the Di- 
 vine Word is as much the disease of the Bishop 
 of Natal as of the Bishop of Manchester. In 
 both there is a denial of Him who is, and who 
 was, and who is to come; of His government 
 over the ages that are gone ; of His government 
 over us now. I say this is the disease of both, 
 because it is the disease of the age, yours and 
 mine. I do not say there is not a health in 
 both which is fighting against the disease. I 
 am sure there is. I am sure that in his heart 
 of hearts the Bishop of Manchester believes — 
 probably far more firmly and consistently than 
 I do — that Christ Himself is the Rock upon 
 which all our hopes and consolations must rest. 
 I am sure that the Bishop of Natal — he has 
 said so in words, and they are the evident ex- 
 pression of his profoundest conviction — casts 
 himself upon God as his only refuge from his 
 own feebleness and contradictions, and from the 
 evils which he sees about him. But then comes 
 the solemn question which each of us must ask 
 for himself — which will perhaps be answered 
 
 L 
 
146 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 in thunders and lightnings more terrible than 
 those of Sinai for the whole Church, — " How shall 
 the health in me, how shall the health in every 
 one of us, conquer the disease ? " 
 
 I have put this question to my own con- 
 science; and thus much, at least, of a reply I 
 have found to it : — * So far as I magnify my own 
 opinions — so far as I desire that they should 
 triumph — so far as I desire that the opinions 
 which are opposed to them should be put down — 
 so far I am strengthening the disease in myself 
 and in my contemporaries ; I am weakening my 
 own health and theirs.' Let me not stay for a 
 moment in generals. I will apply my principle 
 at once to the case before us. 
 
 I repudiate the maxim of the Bishop of Man- 
 chester; I repudiate the maxim of the Bishop of 
 Natal. Ought I, then, to desire that I could get 
 the Bishop of I\Ianchester removed from his dio- 
 cese, or pronounced guilty of heresy ? Our de- 
 sires are not tied by improbabilities, so I have 
 a right to consider whether this would be a legi- 
 timate wish, utterly unable as I might be to ef- 
 fect it. I say it woidd not be a legitimate wish. 
 I say, if I could get rid of that expression of 
 opinion which the Bishop has put forth — if I 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 147 
 
 could hinder any simple clergyman, any head of 
 a diocese, from using his language, I should be 
 injuring the Church by doing so. My reason is 
 this. If what I maintain is good for anything, 
 it is good on this ground ; it is good as a pro- 
 test against an attempt to substitute the letters 
 of a book, or the theories of a man about the 
 letters of a book, for Him of whom the book 
 speaks ; it is good as a declaration that Christ 
 is the centre of His Church, the bond of its fel- 
 lowship, and that no opinions about Him, or 
 about any other matter, are or can be the centres 
 of it, or the bonds of its fellowship. But if I 
 could suppress Bishop Lee's opinions and pro- 
 claim mine, 1 should be contradicting, ridicu- 
 lously contradicting, my own principle. / should 
 be enthroning an opinion ; I should be de- 
 throning Christ. 
 
 Well, but if this principle is true as to one 
 Bishop, it is true as to the other. Their opinions 
 both scandahze me ; I could not hold either and 
 be a minister of the English Church. But, thank 
 God ! I am not the standard for either of them. 
 I am not the least a judge what opinions are 
 compatible in them with the most living faith in 
 God's Word. I have- expressed my conviction 
 
 L 2 
 
148 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 that they have that living faith; that I should 
 be the better if I could increase mine by that 
 which is in either of them. And, after all, this 
 is not what we have to consider chiefly. Their 
 inward personal faith is open to another scrutiny 
 than ours. But is it beneficial for the faith of 
 the Church, for the faith once delivered to the 
 Saints, for that confession of the Divine Name 
 of which I spoke in a former letter, that either 
 of them should be restrained from entertaining 
 or from delivering those private and contradic- 
 tory judgments? Everything which I see in 
 the world, illustrating that which I read in the 
 Bible, convinces me that it is not beneficial. 
 That Name will, as I believe, be recognized at 
 last as above us all and beneath us all ; as the 
 consummation of all we can hope for; as the 
 eternal basis of society. But if we would reach 
 this result, we must walk in the way in which 
 God is leading us ; we must not choose a way 
 of ojiir own. AVe have all been choosing ways 
 of our own. We have all fancied that we can 
 provide better for the safety and well-being of 
 the Church than God lias provided for it. He 
 permits diversities of opinion in His ministers ; 
 we have tried to crush them. We have done it. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 149 
 
 no doubt, for His glory ; there is no crime that 
 we have not committed for His glory. But how 
 is His glory served by the substitution of one 
 opinion or another for Himself? 
 
 It is hard to persuade any man that this course 
 is a mistaken and an ungodly one ; very hard in- 
 deed ; since all the demonstrations of God's pro- 
 vidence, all our complaints of the impossibihty 
 of getting our own opinions established and other 
 men's proscribed, have not persuaded us. There 
 is not one Church — not one Sect— which has 
 not had a glimpse of this truth, which has not 
 asserted it manfully in hours of trial and perse- 
 cution ; there is not one which has not set at 
 nought the maxim learnt in the school of suffer- 
 ing when it has had the opportunity of punishing 
 its opponent and exalting itself. Why? Because 
 in adversity Churches and Sects, like individuals, 
 beheve in God. In prosperity they believe in 
 themselves, and sink into Atheism. The En- 
 gUsh Church is now on its trial whether her be- 
 lief in opinions which is rampant, or her belief 
 in God which is certainly not dead, shall prove 
 the stronger. Tor my own part, feeling how 
 strong my fondness for my opinions is, and how 
 weak my faith in the Living Lord and Judge is, 
 
150 CLAIMS OF TPIE BIBLE 
 
 I can only ask Hiui that I may never be in- 
 dulged with the chance of crushing any opinions 
 that are contrary to mine ; that I may, by any 
 discipline He knows to be best, be raised above 
 them, and taught to confide in Him. 
 
 To speak, however, of our general duty. Now 
 thai; men who are above us, whom we are bound 
 to respect, not for their worldly rank but for 
 their spiritual position, are divided from each 
 other — are saying as much against each other ' as 
 Christians and gentlemen may say ' — does it not 
 become absolutely necessary, if we would uphold 
 the cause of Order, if we would not have the most 
 outrageous spectacles continually brought before 
 our eyes, to accept our position ; to admit that 
 we cannot by the aid of any courts, common or 
 ecclesiastical, coerce opinions or establish opi- 
 nions ; to believe that God is King, actually, and 
 not nominally ; to believe that His Court of Ap- 
 peal is never closed against those who do not 
 anticipate its decisions, or try to enforce their 
 own ? " Shall not we gather tip the tares ?" ask 
 the servants. "No," answers the Householder 
 with unmistakeablc clearness, "lest, lohile ye 
 gather up the tares, ye root up the toheat alsX) 
 with them. Let both grow together till the har- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 151 
 
 vest!' I suspect the Householder knows better 
 than we do. I suspect that he does not mean 
 us to make the selection, which he says we 
 are incompetent to make. If our Bishops could 
 have rooted up the tares that grew on the 
 rich soil which the spades of the evangelical 
 teachers of the last century turned up, what an 
 extirpation they would have made ! What 
 wheat, dear to the Husbandman inestimable to 
 us, would have perished ! If they could have torn 
 up the tares which were sown plentifully du- 
 ring the High Church movement, how wise they 
 would have deemed themselves ! But what wheat 
 would they not have destroyed with the tares ! 
 And who can tell how much the tares have been 
 multiplied in both cases by the refusal to confess 
 the wheat? Must this new movement only lead 
 to a repetition of the same errors ; only give oc- 
 casion for the same repentance ? 
 
 But we cannot blame the Bishops. They 
 have responded to our cries; they have made 
 themselves the organs of our fears ; of our con- 
 tempt ; I must add, of our unbelief. If they 
 have exposed themselves to lay censure by hold- 
 ing out the threat of legal proceedings and an- 
 ticipating the decision in such proceedings, it is 
 
 
152 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 our impatience which has caused that indiffer- 
 ence to justice. If they have strangely mingled 
 appeals to the conscience with their threats, and 
 have made whispers of aflFection public through 
 the newspapers, they have but echoed the dis- 
 sonant notes and the confused sentiments of 
 their spiritual children. They have not too 
 much exalted their office. They have thought 
 too humbly of it. What blessings many of us 
 have derived from their private counsels and 
 encouragements when they have assumed a 
 right to correct us ; to rebuke our want of faith 
 and charity ; to show a more excellent way than 
 our own ! When they speak publicly or collec- 
 tively, that the world may know what they are 
 saying, we lose all these benefits. We are flat- 
 tered in our weaknesses ; comforted with the 
 assurances of our sound belief and extensive 
 knowledge ; confirmed in our animosities ; in- 
 structed how to conceal them in soft and tender 
 phrases. 
 
 Oh ! will not the clergy feel that they want 
 Bishops, not as their servants, but as their 
 guides and overseers; in very deed as their 
 Fathers? Will not those Fathers believe that 
 they are responsible, not to us, not to a public 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 153 
 
 opinion, but to a " Father in heaven " for their 
 care of us, for helping us to rise above slavery 
 to private or to public opinion ? At all events 
 that Father lives. We may betake ourselves to 
 Him. We may commit ourselves, the Bible, 
 the Church, to His keeping. 
 
 Affectionately yours, 
 
 F. D. Maurice. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 The last number of the ' Edinburgh Review * 
 which has just appeared contains two articles 
 which bear directly upon the subject of these 
 letters, and which are sure to be read extensively. 
 The first, entitled "The Bible and the Church," 
 is equally reasonable and devout. It exhibits very 
 strikingly the contradictions into which those 
 have fallen and must fall who are determined to 
 rest the authority of the Bible upon a theory of 
 their own respecting its inspiration and infallibi- 
 lity, when they might appeal to the actual autho- 
 rity which it has exercised over generations of 
 
154 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 men in the most civilized countries of the earth. 
 This article, I trust, will not be read chiefly as an 
 exposure of the weakness of those who assume 
 the patronage of the Scriptures — though that 
 weakness deserves to be exposed, because it is 
 accompanied with so much irreverence, so much 
 presumption, often so much cruelty — but far 
 more as a vindication of the faith of those who 
 look up to the Scriptures as their teachers ; who 
 turn to them from all their own theories and 
 speculations, as their helpers in every time of 
 need; who derive from them every day fresh 
 lessons of humility for themselves, and of charity 
 towards their fellow-men. 
 
 The second article, " On Mr. Huxley's Place 
 of Man in Nature," is one which I should not 
 venture to notice, seeing that I am utterly in- 
 competent to enter into the argument between 
 the reviewer and the subject of his criticism, but 
 for one passage which occurs in the latter part 
 of it (page 568). The scientific objections to Mr. 
 Darwin's and Mr. Huxley's theories having been 
 urged (I doubt not, with much ability), an ef- 
 fort is made to strengthen them by the insinua- 
 tion that these opinions must lead to materialism 
 and atheism. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 155 
 
 The odium theologicum is, in this case at all 
 events, brought into the controversy, not by a 
 defender of the Scriptures, but by a champion 
 of what is commonly called Natural Theology. 
 Such a person, it seems to me, may be well ex- 
 cused for the fears which he expresses. If 
 those fears interfere inconveniently with the 
 investigation of facts, they are still so serious 
 — the loss of everything spiritual and divine 
 to one who feels that he is a man as well as a 
 student of physics would be so tremendous — 
 that I cannot blame him (even while I feel that 
 he is dishonouring truth, and that he may be 
 doing a great injustice and injury to sincere and 
 worthy men) for hindering search by denouncing 
 its possible results. But I do say that a man 
 who accepts the Scriptures of the Old and New 
 Testament, and not Paley's ' Natural Theology ' 
 as his Bible ; who never dreams of rising " from 
 nature up to nature's God;" who starts with 
 the belief in God as his Father, has no right to 
 cherish those apprehensions, or to indulge in 
 those insinuations. Claiming for Man a place 
 above nature — a direct relation to God through 
 a Mediator — a mansion in a house which is 
 eternal in the heavens — he cannot be anxious 
 
156 THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. 
 
 about the place which Man may be found to 
 hold in nature. As I have urged already, we 
 want only free room and courage to tell men 
 that they are made in God's image, and that He 
 seeks to raise them to that image; we cannot 
 wish to check any inquiry respecting that lower 
 bestial image, the signs of which are palpable 
 enough in every one of us. Our physical stu- 
 dents may find, at last, that those who assert 
 most strongly the ' Claims of the Bible ' are the 
 least likely to deny or to endanger the * Claims 
 of Science.' 
 
157 
 
 April 17, 1863. 
 
 My dear Maurice, 
 
 I cannot regret that I have given 
 you the trouble of writing the series of Letters 
 you have now closed. Though you modestly 
 expect but a small audience, many who may have 
 been influenced by Bishop Colenso's evident 
 earnestness, or by his acuteness, will, I am sure, 
 be helped, by what you have written, to assume 
 for themselves a higher standard of historical 
 truth than his, and a more just estimate of the 
 bearing of physical facts on human history. 
 
 Whether your anonymous correspondent agrees 
 with all you have said may well be a matter of 
 indifference to your readers, who will form their 
 own judgment on the value of your answers to 
 my questions. 
 
 If I ask your leave to add a few supplemen- 
 tary words of my own, I must incur the risk 
 
158 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 of being compared to the country organist who 
 told Handel that, as he could not play out the 
 lingering audience, he would play them out for 
 him. As, however, I wrote to you because I 
 thought you could best answer questions which 
 I knew were engaging the minds of some friends 
 of mine engaged in various secular occupations, 
 it may not be altogether useless if I shortly put 
 together some practical reflections suggested by 
 the perusal of your letters, and by communica- 
 tions, received since I wrote to you, from another 
 friend well able to deal with such questions. 
 
 I must, however, guard myself by again say- 
 ing that, influenced partly by private considera- 
 tions, still more by a sense of what befits me as 
 a layman writing to a clergyman, I express no 
 opinion publicly on the conduct of the Bishop of 
 Natal, nor on the censures directed against him. 
 I confine myself to the facts and arguments 
 brought forward in the present controversy. 
 Those, however, who have means of judging of 
 the cflects on the laity of what is passing, may 
 regret, as a matter of expediency, much which 
 they have no power to influence, and no call to 
 criticize. 
 
 I have only to ask that the truth may not 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 159 
 
 suffer from the supposition that a dry statement 
 of mere opinion proceeds from cold indifference 
 to the great issues at stake, 
 
 I proceed, then, to remark shortly on the fol- 
 lowing points : — 
 
 1. The order in which the questions on this 
 controversy ought to be treated. 
 
 2. The connection of the Old Testament with 
 the New. 
 
 3. The critical results of Bishop Colenso's 
 publications. 
 
 4. Their bearing on the authority of the 
 "Word of God." 
 
 5. Their bearing on clerical obligations. 
 
 I. First, too much stress cannot be laid on 
 the principle you have pointed out as underlying 
 the order and mutual connection of the questions 
 arising out of the present controversy. We 
 should not begin with the Pentateuch, and post- 
 pone the study of the Gospel till we have settled 
 our difficulties about the Old Testament; but, 
 as you say, "we profess to beheve in Christ, 
 from that point we should start" (page 91). 
 The Dean of Ely, better known by the name of 
 Harvey Goodwin, as a practical mathematician 
 
160 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 not inferior to Bishop Colenso, and, like your- 
 self, the associate and friend of working laymen, 
 in his work " On the Doctrines and DiflScul- 
 " ties of the Christian Faith, contemplated from 
 "the standing ground afforded by the Catholic 
 " Doctrine of the Being of our Lord Jesus Christ ; 
 "being the Hulsean Lectures for the year 1856," 
 has, as you are no doubt aware, placed the ques- 
 tion on a basis which may come home alike to 
 the man of science and to the scholar. 
 
 Starting from the " point of view which forms 
 the basis of Bishop Butler's " great storehouse of 
 principles, he propounds, in substance, this ques- 
 tion — Given as our data the complicated facts of 
 our moral and physical existence, let us assume, 
 as a possible hypothesis, the Being of Christ. 
 Does the assumption of this hypothesis explain 
 the phenomena and solve the difficulties? As- 
 sume the contrary of this hypothesis, is there 
 any other solution ? From this point of view, 
 let us contemplate ancient and modern history 
 — the progress of science — the progress, if you 
 will, of revelation — the difficulties attendant on 
 the language, inspiration, and authority of the 
 Sacred Scriptures. Does not the hypothesis 
 bring the various phenomena into harmonious 
 
AND OP SCIENCE. 161 
 
 consistency? But, it will be said, it is only an hy- 
 pothesis. 
 
 Now let us look at the facts clearly within our 
 knowledge. Before we plunge into the difficul- 
 ties of books believed to have been written fifteen 
 hundred years before Christ — that is, a thousand 
 years before the birth of the Father of History — 
 let this be remembered : The Gospel history was 
 written in the blaze of the most brilliant age of 
 literature ; when the intercourse between edu- 
 cated men in all parts of the civilized world w\as 
 more intimate than at any period before or after, 
 up to our own age. It has been well observed by 
 a great historian that the death of Julius Caesar is 
 not so well attested as the death and resurrection 
 of Jesus Christ. Let this fact be well pondered 
 before any man allows himself to be entangled 
 by difficulties about ancient records, or by argu- 
 ments against miracles. It is not beside the 
 question to remark, in passing, that Bishop Co- 
 lenso raises no difficulties about miracles as such. 
 He who believes the Resurrection may approach 
 the whole question of more ancient miracles with- 
 out anxiety. Let that central fact be looked at 
 on its own merits. 
 
 Next, it is well to bear in mind that whatever 
 
 M 
 
162 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 may be too truly said about the defect of He- 
 brew scholarship amongst us, there is no nation 
 on earth that can claim superiority to England 
 in masculine Greek scholarship, or historical re- 
 search, I do not mean to deny the vast indus- 
 try and critical acumen of the Germans, or the 
 consummate clearness of the French ; but I am 
 confident that the critical judgment of England, 
 solid and acute, may face the world. Now, this 
 very Gospel history, and the history of the Acts 
 of the Apostles and of St. Paul, have been sub- 
 mitted to a searching criticism and examination 
 such as hardly any other subject has received. 
 All that lias been said is well known in England, 
 and accessible to hundreds — nay, thousands — of 
 educated laymen. If the same methods of in- 
 quiry be applied to the Old Testament, and if 
 the result should be to modify some of our pre- 
 conceived ideas, we know enough of what can 
 be said about the New Testament to feel no fear 
 that any truth which may be elicited will afl^ect 
 the grounds of Christian faith or practice. 
 
 II. The connection between Christianity and 
 the details recorded in the patriarchal and Jew- 
 ish history appears to be liable to misconcep- 
 tion. It opens, as I intimated in the third ques- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 1G3 
 
 tion which I addressed to you, a solemn subject, 
 which needs cautious and reverent handUng. I 
 am not about to go further into that question 
 than you have gone. But I think it may render 
 some service to direct the attention of your 
 readers to a passage in Paley's ' Evidences,' 
 which has been pointed out to me by a friend, 
 namely, part iii. chap. 3. After premising 
 that " our Saviour assumes the Divine orisrin of 
 "the Mosaic institution," and "recognizes the 
 "prophetic character of many of their ancient 
 " writers," Paley says : " So far, therefore, we 
 " are bound, as Christians, to go. But to make 
 " Christianity answerable with its life for the cir- 
 "cumstantial truth of each separate passage of 
 " the Old Testament, the genuineness of every 
 "book, the information, fidelity, and judgment 
 " of every writer in it, is to bring, I will not say 
 " great, but unnecessary difficulties into the whole 
 "system. These books were universally read 
 "and received by the Jews of our Saviour's time. 
 " He and his Apostles, in common with all other 
 " Jews, referred to them, alluded to them, used 
 " them. Yet, except where he expressly ascribes 
 " a divine authority to particular predictions, I do 
 " vot hnoio that we can strictli/ draw any con- 
 
 M 2 
 
164 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLK 
 
 " elusion from the books being so used and ajjplied, 
 " beside the j^foof, which it unquestionably is, of 
 " their notoriety and reception at the timer 
 
 It will not, I trust, be presumptuous in a Lay- 
 man if he expresses a hope that, before a bitter 
 controversy about our Lord's sacred ])erson, his 
 divine attributes, and his human nature springs 
 up, Paley's words may be well considered. On 
 the one hand, Bishop Colenso may see ground 
 to reconsider language which seems to impute to 
 the bishops and clergy disbelief in the Church's 
 doctrine, if they do not hold the literal account 
 of the Deluge to be accordant with the facts. 
 On the other hand, those who denounce him as 
 a heretic and a Deist because he has candidly 
 confessed the consequences jiossibly involved in 
 his inquiries may be induced to modify, or at 
 at least, to suspend their censure ; remembering 
 that he spoke of those consequences as opening 
 " questions for reverent criticism," and as point- 
 ing to conclusions " consistent," in his opinion, 
 " with the most entire and sincere belief in our 
 " Lord's Divinity." 
 
 At any rate, it will not be thought irrelevant 
 to point out to other laymen, that in the opinion 
 of such a man as Paley, " a reference in the New 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 165 
 
 ** Testament to a passage in the Old does not so 
 " fix its authority as to exclude all inquiry into 
 " its credibility, or into the separate reasons upon 
 " which that credibility is founded." It is much 
 to be wished that Bishop Colenso had weighed 
 well the words which follow : — " It is unwarrant- 
 "able, as well as an unsafe rule, to lay down 
 " concerning the Jewish history what was never 
 " laid down concerning any other, that every par- 
 " ticular of it must be true, or the whole false." 
 III. Let it then be granted that Christians 
 are at liberty, as Paley says, to inquire into " the 
 separate grounds of the credibility " of portions 
 of the Old Testament, and let the particular lan- 
 guage unfortunately used by the Bishop of Natal 
 be put aside for the moment, while we ask what, 
 in substance, he has proved or attempted to 
 prove ? The principal questions to which he has 
 drawn attention are — 
 
 1. The variance between facts on the surface of 
 the globe, now generally known, and the Scrip- 
 tural accounts of the Creation and Deluge. 
 
 2. The authorship and date of some books of 
 the Pentateuch. 
 
 (1.) Under the first head, the whole force of 
 his remarks on the nnhistorical character of the 
 
166 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 Pentateuch is derived from the supposition, that 
 either the Uteral account of physical details is to 
 be taken as matter of scientific record, revealed 
 by divine authority, or that the account is wholly 
 worthless. No doubt many clergymen do speak 
 as if they so thought. Many earnest workers in 
 science are thereby repelled from the Church, if 
 not from Christianity. With regard to the De- 
 luge, it is now almost certain that there are no 
 traces of an Universal Deluge ; but rather that 
 there is positive evidence of the contrary. Hugh 
 Miller has collected the evidence in his ' Testi- 
 mony of the Rocks.' Any educated man may 
 judge of it. The Bible account of the P'lood 
 bears no sign of being poetic ; on the other hand, 
 it does not bear the marks of contemporary nar- 
 rative. May we not, on many grounds, con- 
 clude that it is a later account of a great judg- 
 ment, based on tradition? 
 
 Certainly Bishop Colenso has not proved, nor, 
 it is believed, has any geologist shown, that there 
 are well-ascertained facts adverse to a bond fide 
 deluge of some kind, from which Noah and his 
 family were saved. How needless, therefore, 
 lias been the Bishop's outbreak about the Bap- 
 tismal Service ! Yet may not what he has said be 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 167 
 
 traced to an overstrained scruple, arising perhaps 
 from excited feeling, produced by his isolated 
 position and by what he considers undeserved 
 treatment ? 
 
 If we turn to the account of the Creation, we 
 are led to a very different conclusion as to the 
 purport of the record. I will give that conclu- 
 sion in the words of a candid writer, of whom I 
 know only what he has written in the volume of 
 ' Replies to the Essays and Reviews ' published 
 with a preface by the Bishop of Oxford. Mr. 
 Rorison, incumbent of Peterhead, Aberdeen, re- 
 jects successively the ideas that the first chapter 
 of Genesis is a " history or narrative," a "myth," 
 a " parable," a " vision," or a " plan." He says, we 
 " venture to think none of these descriptions satis- 
 " factory ;" he decides that " the Book of Gene- 
 " sis opens with the inspired Psalm of Creation." 
 A little further on, he says : 'On the hypothesis 
 " that we have to do with an ordinary prose nar- 
 " rative, chronicle, or diary, there immediately 
 " emerges the great difficulty of the ' days.' 
 " With this it is not much to say that no inge- 
 " nuity has as yet grappled successfully. The 
 " choice lies between the Chalmerian interpola- 
 " tion of the geological ages before the first day 
 
168 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 " begins, and the Cuvicrian expansion of the six 
 " days into geological ages. For these solutions 
 " respectively, Dr. Biickland* and Hugh Miller 
 " have each done their best, and more skilful ad- 
 " vocacy could not be found." Mr. Rorison re- 
 jects both, apparently regarding them as mere 
 " makeshifts." 
 
 Thus we have a candid defender of the vera- 
 city of the Bible, selected as the champion of 
 orthodoxy, writing with reverence and great ful- 
 ness of information, confessing that many of the 
 attempts to evade difficulties are " palpable sub- 
 terfuges." The account of the Creation is, in 
 his view, a Psalm. The days are not periods of 
 time ; they are part of the imagery ; the sequence 
 is one, not of time, but of dignity, rising from 
 the material to the spiritual. And how wonder- 
 ful is its teaching ! How does it lay a foun- 
 dation for all revealed religion ; for our know- 
 ledge of the supremacy of man over nature, of 
 our individual spiritual life, and of the origin of 
 family life, as our Lord says, " From the begin- 
 " ning of the Creation God made them male and 
 " female." (Mark x. 0.) 
 
 * The name of Dr. Pusey should be coupled with that of 
 Dr. Buckland. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 109 
 
 It is much to be desired that such frank ad- 
 missions as Mr. Rorison has made should be en- 
 dorsed by those in authority. 
 
 (2.) It was apparently under the impression 
 that there was no middle course open to a cler- 
 gyman of the Church of England, between a 
 denial or perversion of facts, and a reconsidera- 
 tion of the authority of the ancient records, that 
 Bishop Colenso applied himself to the examina- 
 tion of the credentials of that authority. Into 
 the details of this examination I have no inten- 
 tion of following him. You have done wisely to 
 take ground more suited to us laymen. 
 
 But I wish to call the attention of the young 
 friends, for whom I suppose myself to be wri- 
 ting as your lay assessor, to the results of Bishop 
 Colenso's two books — results the importance of 
 which he seems enormously to overrate. 
 
 Suppose his facts (those, I mean, which are 
 not simply trifling) be admitted — what is the 
 utmost they prove ? On the negative side they 
 cannot prove more than these propositions : — 
 1st. That the Book of Exodus, as we now have 
 it, is not a contemporary work. 2nd. That there 
 are signs in the Book of Genesis, and in other 
 books, that they were not written by one single 
 
170 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 hand. 3rd. He will probably complete the chain 
 by showing, w4iat is held by many critics on the 
 Continent, that the Book of Deuteronomy bears 
 marks of a different hand and of a later date than 
 the other books. Well, what then? In what 
 respect are we likely to be the wiser or the better 
 for these questions being thrust on the attention 
 of the laity in every country town, before their 
 moral and spiritual import has been duly consi- 
 dered and recognized ? Such facts, or, at least, 
 such opinions, have long been known on the Con- 
 tinent ; they have been kept out of sight in En- 
 gland as Rationalism. AVill it make any real 
 difference to us, as Christians, whichever way they 
 shall eventually be settled, if indeed they can be 
 settled ? 
 
 But let us look at the positive results of the 
 Bishop's writings. On the details of his theory 
 I am not competent to form an opinion. It 
 requires the life of a scholar to decide on such 
 questions. Even Niebuhr was not so sure in 
 constructing as in destroying. But I speak the 
 opinion of one who is able to judge when I say 
 that the Bisliop, in his theory about Samuel, has 
 given us nothing but a "baseless conjecture.'' 
 This is the opinion of one who has followed his 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 171 
 
 facts closely, and who had arrived in substance 
 at all that he has really proved long ago. 
 
 IV. The Bishop has, it seems to me, entirely 
 confounded two essentially different questions — 
 the authorship of certain books, and the autho- 
 rity of the " Word of God." He may, or he 
 may not, have proved their authorship to be 
 later than was commonly supposed ; he has not 
 touched the question of their credibility as his- 
 tory, of their authority, or of their inspiration. 
 But while he has not examined the principles by 
 which such questions must be decided, he has 
 taken on trust, as you have clearly shown, most 
 questionable premises, and drawn his conclusions 
 in a manner W'hich can only be called violent. 
 The Bishop seems to proceed throughout on the 
 assumption, that to prove a book to be incorrect 
 or inconsistent is to prove it uninspired, or, in 
 other words, that an inspired book must be in 
 all things infallible. Many of his opponents 
 seem to accept his terms, and to make the same 
 assumption. 
 
 I am not about to offer any opinion of my own 
 on a most difficult subject, namely, inspiration. 
 You have treated it from one point of view ; I 
 might be disposed to look at it from another. 
 
172 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 I wish only to call attention to the fact that 
 this assumption made by the Bishop and by 
 many of his opponents, is not held by persons 
 whose opinion is entitled to great weight.* 
 
 Dean Alford,f speaking of the Gospels, says 
 that " in minor points of accuracy or inaccuracy of 
 " which human research suffices to inform men," 
 such as "conventionally-received distances," "phe- 
 " nomena in natural history, etc.," the " Evange- 
 "hsts and Apostles were not supernaturally iu- 
 " formed." " The same may be said of citations 
 " and dates from history. In the last apology of 
 " St. Stephen, which he spoke being full of the 
 " Holy Ghost, . . . toe have at least two demonstra- 
 " ble historical inaccuracies. And the occurrence 
 " of similar ones in the Gospels does not in any 
 " way affect tlie inspiration or the veracity of the 
 " Evangehsts." 
 
 I quote this passage for the importance of the 
 principle, which is quite consistent with another 
 assertion of the learned author, that the inspira- 
 tion of the sacred writers " enabled them for 
 " their work in a manner which distinc;uislies 
 
 * A complete di<>;est or catena of opinions may, as you know, 
 be found in Mr. Stephen's speech in the Court of Arches, 
 published by Smith and Elder. 
 
 t Greek Test. vol. i. I'rolegom. p. 19, 2ud edition. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 173 
 
 " them from all other writers in the world, and 
 " their work from all other works." 
 
 The Dean of Ely, to whom I have already re- 
 ferred, has pointed out that no theory of inspira- 
 tion is given on Divine authority, that none is 
 necessary for the Christian faith, that it is suffi- 
 cient to maintain that the Bible is the Word of 
 God, without defining how much of fallibility is 
 introduced by its being clothed in human lan- 
 guage, nor how far it is consistent with inspira- 
 tion for the Holy Scriptures to contain " scien- 
 tific errors," or " historical errors," or " internal 
 discrepancies." 
 
 V. I will touch very lightly on the last point, 
 the relation of the present controversy to clerical 
 obligations. I am glad that you have decided 
 not to enter in this publication on any question 
 now under the consideration of the Legislature. 
 I have a very strong feeling that those who are 
 dissatisfied with the present position of affairs in 
 the Universities and in the Church should ex- 
 haust every other means of obtaining a remedy 
 at the hands of the constituted authorities be- 
 fore they apply to the House of Commons ; so 
 that if any application to Parliament should be 
 necessary, it may be made, if possible, with the 
 
174 CLAIMS OF TTIE BIBLE 
 
 weight of united counsels. Perhaps such a hope 
 is visionary. 
 
 It is now manifest that the danger lest the Uni- 
 versities and the Church should be weakened by 
 loss of intellectual power is imminent. Into all 
 the causes it is needless now to inquire. 
 
 But I may mention that circumstances have 
 brought under my notice the painful position of 
 young and able men who would gladly de- 
 vote themselves to the cause of education and 
 of the Church. They feel that in order to give 
 a liberal education with full effect, they should 
 have a commission to preach the Gospel to the 
 poor, and to lay down principles for the guidance 
 of the young from the pulpit. But they dare not 
 pledge themselves to an unfeigned belief which 
 may be construed as binding them to exclude 
 from their own minds all fair dealing with cri- 
 tical inquiry. 
 
 As far as our Prayer Book is concerned, in- 
 preted as it is by Dr. Lushington's judgment, 
 there would seem little to embarrass a young 
 man who is a sincere Christian, except the fear 
 of the sense which may be put by his Bishop on 
 the Deacon's declaration of unfeigned belief in 
 Holy Scripture. 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 175 
 
 It would seem that what is most to be desired 
 at the present time, is that some leading mind 
 in authority should make it plain to the young 
 men at the Universities that a declaration of 
 unfeigned belief in Holy Scripture is held, by 
 those who ordain, to be consistent with a pro- 
 gressive recognition of facts which increased in- 
 vestigation may disclose with reference to the 
 Sacred Volume. 
 
 The mind of the Church has been clearly de- 
 clared on the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, as 
 containing all things necessary for salvation, 
 after full consideration of the bearings of the 
 Romanist controversy. 
 
 But is it not equally clear that the question — 
 whether the Church holds the infaUihility of the 
 sacred writers with reference to questions raised 
 by modern science and modern criticism — has 
 not yet been decided, because it has not yet 
 been heard before the Church? Dr. Lushing- 
 ton's recent decision, which in part at least is 
 under appeal, declares only the legal and binding 
 effect of existing declarations sanctioned by the 
 Act of Uniformity. 
 
 Taking into account the learning, the candour, 
 and personal weight of some of those who com- 
 
J 70 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 pose the Committee recently appointed by Con- 
 vocation, the Laity may look for their Report 
 with hope, but not without anxiety as to the 
 principles by which they may be guided in their 
 opinion of the publication of the Bishop of 
 Natal. 
 
 Yours affectionately, 
 
 A Layman. 
 
 POSTSCRIPT. 
 
 Since this Letter has been in the hands of the 
 printer, I have seen the article on the Bible and 
 the Church in the ' Edinburgh Review ;' and, in 
 consequence of the praise there given to a reply 
 to Bishop Colenso's Part L by a " Layman of the 
 Church of England," published at Skettington's, 
 I have referred to that volume. 
 
 Writing, as I do, on the supposition that your 
 Letters may fall into the hands of many who may 
 not have access to much that is written on this 
 subject, I would venture to advise any one on 
 whom Bishop Colenso's line of argument has 
 had effect to read this book, in order to see how 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 177 
 
 strongly the Bishop can be met on his own 
 ground by an opponent whose courtesy and 
 Christian candour is a model to all who enter 
 into controversy. 
 
 I have implied (and I think you agree with 
 me) that Bishop Colenso's mode of reasoning in 
 his book on Exodus is w^eak and inconclusive, 
 except on certain assumptions, which are need- 
 less and unsupported ; and that he has been 
 made responsible for conclusions and inferences 
 which he may repudiate. 
 
 The answer to which I refer is of great value 
 as narrowing the question. It shows — 
 
 1. That Bishop Colenso brings no objections 
 against the probability of revelation, and there- 
 fore no objection against miraculous agency, if 
 duly testified. 
 
 2. No objections against the Divine element, 
 the spiritual and moral truths of the Bible. 
 
 3. That the Bishop accepts the five books as 
 in some sense inspired writings, containing the 
 true Word of God. 
 
 4. Further, it shows that Bishop Colenso, in 
 objecting to the historic truth of part of the 
 Bible, does not object to such facts as the Crea- 
 tion, the Fall, the Incarnation, Death, Resurrec- 
 
 N 
 
17S CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 tion, and Ascension of Christ, as incredible in 
 themselves, but only to another class of historic 
 truths, the objections to which are " vitally dif- 
 ferent in principle." 
 
 The question is thus, as by a skilful pleader, 
 reduced to simplicity of issue. 
 
 " Do the statements made in the Pentateuch 
 " about matters which it professes to narrate 
 " as common history contain contradictions and 
 " inconsistencies ?" Ay or No ? The several 
 counts of the indictment are enumerated under 
 three heads : — 
 
 1. Inconsistency with the conditions of the 
 story, and the circumstances of the time set forth 
 in the book itself. 
 
 2. Inconsistency between one part of the ac- 
 count and another. 
 
 3. Inconsistency with facts otherwise known, 
 such as profane history, geography, etc. 
 
 It will be observed that the question of in- 
 consistency with facts of science is not included. 
 The diiliculties about the Creation and the De- 
 luge form no part of the " Layman's " argument. 
 I have not yet had time to weigh fully the 
 evidence adduced, but it evidently deserves very 
 careful consideration ; and, as ngninst Bishop Co- 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 
 
 170 
 
 lenso's case, it seems to point to the following 
 
 verdict : — 
 
 That a very large proportion of Bishop Co- 
 lenso's difficulties are of his own making, arising 
 from his having put a meaning on the words of 
 Scripture contrary to common sense ; in fact, that 
 the man of straw is put up to be overturned. 
 
 That on the more important points he has 
 failed to make out any demonstrable impossibility, 
 contradiction, or inconsistency such as would ne- 
 gative the historic truth of the general narrative. 
 So far negatively. Further, positively. That 
 there is evidence of undesigned coincidences m 
 the actual statements made ; and that there are 
 such sif^ns, in the way both of remarkable allu- 
 sions and of not less remarkable silence, want 
 of method and arrangement, as point to con- 
 temporary authorship, at least in many of the 
 details. This conclusion leaves open the ques- 
 tion as to the persons by whom, and the time at 
 which, the Pentateuch was reduced to its present 
 form. Of course, it is only by reading and 
 carefully reflecting upon the details of such an 
 argument that any man can do justice to the 
 subject in his own mind if he has allowed weight 
 to the Bishop's details'. 
 
180 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 It will be a great gain if the work begun by 
 Professor Blunt, of applying the principle of Pa- 
 ley's ' Hora3 Paulinse ' to the early books of the 
 Old Testament, be continued, with all the aids 
 of modern criticism, by competent persons, pro- 
 vided that the results be frankly and fairly stated. 
 
 Meantime, it may be well to bear in mind, 
 that while the disproof of Bishop Colenso's arith- 
 metical tests of history — supposing it complete — 
 may be for many readers all that they need in 
 order to resettle their minds, such a line of argu- 
 ment will have little or no effect on another class 
 of readers. Therefore, those who speak of the 
 questions raised by the Bishop as disposed of by 
 triumphant refutation are much underrating the 
 work which lies before the guides of religious 
 thought in England. 
 
 The " Layman of the Church of England " has 
 stated his own view of the tremendous conse- 
 quences involved in the inquiry ; but, with re- 
 markable candour, he shows that the statement 
 of those consequences has nothing to do with 
 the truth or falsehood of the answer to which in- 
 quiry may lead. 
 
 He further shows, in a valuable appendix, that 
 the testimony of the New Testament does not 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. ISl 
 
 prove either the historic character of the Penta- 
 teuch or its Mosaic origin ; and that it is very 
 unwise to rest the case on that ground. 
 
 Therefore, while I think the Church owes a 
 deep debt of gratitude to the " Layman of the 
 Church of England " for the work he has done 
 and for the example he has set, the questions 
 which I originally proposed to you do not the 
 less require answers. Without pledging myself 
 to concurrence with all the opinions expressed in 
 your Letters, I am very grateful for the answers 
 you have given. 
 
 Yours affectionately, 
 
 A Layman. 
 
 NOTE. 
 
 It has been suggested that if in the first Letter ad- 
 dressed to Mr. Maurice, page 5, the terms used had 
 been " Science and the Bible" rather than " Science 
 and Revelation," the statement there made would 
 have been less liable to objectiou. That may be so. 
 But Mr. Maurice's readers will not regret that oc- 
 
182 CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE 
 
 casion was given for tlie letters which he founded on 
 the statement as it stands. 
 
 It may not be amiss, however, to add by way of 
 qualification, that it was not intended to deny that 
 there is progress in Revelation, both as regards its 
 manifestation and the capacity of its recipients ; nor 
 to deny that in Science there is Revelation to the 
 student who to the requisite diligence adds the pa- 
 tient and child-like spirit of which truly scientific 
 men have offered bright examples. 
 
 What was chiefly intended was to assert that if 
 we believe, however that belief be induced, that God 
 does truly reveal Himself in any sense which is above 
 human conceptions and logical rules, then in such 
 belief are involved two admissions. It must be ad- 
 mitted, on the one hand, that the methods of Logical 
 and Natural Science cannot destroy that which is 
 revealed, so far as it is supernatural ; and if they can- 
 not destroy, they cannot build up. It must be ad- 
 mitted, on the other hand, that the higher knowledge 
 of God, for which Mr. Maurice would most earnestly 
 contend, is not intended to impose fetters on the 
 humble and truthful use of the faculties which God 
 has giveu us, but rather to set them free, and 
 strengthen them by temperate and orderly use. 
 
 To what extent God's revelation or God's Word 
 has been, at any particular time or in any particu- 
 lar manner, supcrnaturally given (seeing that lie has 
 spoken at divers times and in divers manners) ; how 
 
AND OF SCIENCE. 183 
 
 that which is supernatural is connected with that 
 which is natural ; what are the several offices of the 
 human reason and conscience, of the written Word, 
 of the Visible Church, and of the Holy Spirit, are 
 questions doubtless closely connected with those ad- 
 dressed for an immediate practical purpose to Mr. 
 Maurice. But they require consideration and recon- 
 sideration, and perhaps never required more careful 
 and reverent handling than at this present time. 
 
 In the second Letter to Mr. Maurice, all that has 
 any real value is borrowed from a friend, the obliga- 
 tions to whom would be confessed more in detail but 
 for fear of making him answerable for the maimed 
 expressions of his own thoughts. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 LITTLE QUBKN 8TKEKT, LINCOLN'S INN F11^I.I>!>. 
 
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