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THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
THE BELIEFS OF 
 UNBELIEF 
 
 STUDIES IN THE ALTERNATIVES 
 TO FAITH 
 
 BY 
 
 W. H. FITCHETT, B.A., LL.D. 
 
 Author of " How^ England Saved Europe," " The Unrealised Logic 
 
 of Religion," " Wesley and His Century," 
 
 etc. 
 
 POPULAR EDITION 
 
 CASSELL AND COMPANY, LTD. 
 
 London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne 
 1911 
 
First Edition January 1908. 
 Popular Edition lyii. 
 
 
 &y 
 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Proem 
 
 PACK 
 
 THE NEW UNBELIEF 1 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 GOD 
 
 Part I. The Christian Faith 
 
 CHAP. 
 
 I. GOD IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED . . . .17 
 
 II. THE EVIDENCES FOR FAITH IN GOD . . .31 
 
 Part II. The Alternative to Belief in God 
 
 I. ATHEISM 
 
 II. THE ETHICS OF ATHEISM . 
 
 Ill, AGNOSTICISM . 
 
 IV. THE CASE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 
 
 V. THE PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM . 
 
 41 
 55 
 
 67 
 
 81 
 
 101 
 
 BOOK II 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVES TO BELIEF IN 
 CHRIST 
 
 Part I. The Christian Faith about Christ 
 
 I. THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 113 
 
 II. THE FIRST ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN FAITH : A 
 
 DIVINE CHARACTER 130 
 
 III. THE SECOND ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN FAITH I 
 
 A DIVINE HISTORY 147 
 
 v 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 Part II. The Alternatives to Faith in 
 Christ 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE THEORY THAT CHRIST NEVER EXISTED . 171 
 
 II. THE THEORY THAT CHRIST WAS AN IMPOSTOR . 182 
 
 III. THE THEORY THAT CHRIST IS ONLY A MYTH . 189 
 
 IV. CONTRASTED CREEDS 204 
 
 BOOK III 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 Part I. The Christian Faith about the 
 Bible 
 
 I. THE PUZZLE OP THE BIBLE . . . .211 
 
 II. THE LOGIC OF THE BIBLE .... 228 
 
 III. THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE . . . 246 
 
 Part II. The Alternatives to Christian 
 Faith about the Bible 
 
 1. IS THE BIBLE A FORGERY? .... 253 
 
 II. IS THE BIBLE ONLY ONE OF THE SACRED BOOKS 
 
 OF THE RACE? 259 
 
 III. IS THE BIBLE A BOOK OF DREAMS? . . . 266 
 
 EPILOGUE. ........ 275 
 
• • • * l : 
 
 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 PROEM 
 
 THE NEW UNBELIEF 
 
 " How many things hard to credit one must believe, in 
 order not to be a Christian." — Newman Smyth, Reality of 
 Faith, p. 46. 
 
 The world sees, to-day, an unbelief of a new 
 type : vague, loitering, evasive, and strangely 
 contented. Doubt of the sterner sort, doubt 
 which "goes sounding on its dim and perilous 
 way," doubt which is an anguish, and which is 
 much nearer faith than it knows, is much less 
 common than formerly. In its stead has come 
 an unbelief which is as indefinite as a mist, as 
 obscuring, and as little shaken by storms. It is 
 not a landscape, but a vapour. " Christianity," 
 it whispers, " is, if not untrue, at least unneces- 
 sary : life can be lived well enough without it." 
 It is a mood untouched by any disquieting sense 
 
2 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 of ethical responsibility. It seems to itself to 
 dwell in a realm in which the challenge of that 
 " stern lawgiver " duty does not run. Unbelief, 
 for these easy souls, is a sort of lotus-eater's 
 paradise. Its spirit is expressed in Tennyson's 
 lines : 
 
 u There is no joy but calm ! 
 Why should we only toil, the roof and crown of things? 
 ... Is there any peace 
 In ever climbing up the climbing wave?" 
 
 The new unbelief, in brief, does not deny ; it 
 does not affirm. It would describe its own mood 
 as a state of mental equipoise, equally remote 
 from both affirmation and denial. " If I do 
 not accept the Christian faith," a doubter of 
 this school would say, " neither do I reject it." 
 His mood towards religion is that of a judge not 
 yet satisfied with the evidence. He is weighing 
 the arguments on both sides, and doing it with 
 dispassionate leisureliness. No argument as yet 
 has emerged which closes the case, and he waits 
 for its appearance with easy content. 
 
 This seems to its proprietor a dignified attitude, 
 and one which even has about it a gratifying 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 3 
 
 halo of intellectual distinction. In addition, it 
 is, or seems to be, delightfully free from any 
 uncomfortable moral responsibilities. It is 
 surely possible to argue that the obligations of 
 a creed do not begin until the creed itself has 
 been finally proved. So the doubter regards his 
 conscience as uncommitted to either side. It is 
 not responsible for any decision, for it has come 
 to none. The soul stands, or rather sits, in a 
 state of contented equipoise, betwixt mighty 
 opposites. 
 
 But, in mechanics and in morals alike, a state 
 of equipoise means a point of exact balance be- 
 twixt opposing forces ; and to justify the alleged 
 equipoise of doubt, not only the forces for faith, 
 and against it, but for doubt and against it, must 
 be ascertained and assessed. And it is certain 
 that in the case of most doubters of the type here 
 described no process of this sort has been under- 
 taken with sufficient seriousness. The difficulties 
 of religion are examined under a microscope ; but 
 the owner of the microscope does not apply it to 
 his doubts, or to the difficulties of his doubts. 
 That they have their own difficulties, indeed, is, 
 
4 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 somehow, regarded as a matter of quite secondary 
 consequence. 
 
 But in religion, and as an attitude towards 
 the great affirmations of religion, doubt is remote 
 by measureless degrees from that comfortable, 
 non-committal attitude usually claimed for it. 
 The human soul cannot sit, perched on a note of 
 interrogation, amid the tremendous opposites of 
 belief and unbelief, consenting to neither. Un- 
 belief is itself a choice. It is an act ; an affirma- 
 tion ; a creed, with the subtle, reflex influences 
 on life which belong to a creed. 
 
 We live under conditions which make any 
 imaginary state of suspended decision impossible. 
 Life runs swiftly. Its grammar is always in the 
 imperative mood. Conduct can know no pause. 
 The conscience refuses to dwell in a vacuum. 
 Each instant, whether we choose it or not, no 
 matter what may be our doubts, we must act. 
 
 Doubt, it is true, seems to its possessor to 
 suspend — or at least to postpone — the authority 
 of divine law. But that very suspension of law 
 becomes itself a rule of conduct, with all the 
 responsibilities of law. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 5 
 
 Time, in a word, is intolerant of hesitations. 
 Life has to be lived. The swift, unresting mo- 
 ments throng past us, each one, in turn, a 
 complete probation ; each one bringing with it 
 a challenge that pierces to the conscience and 
 judges it. At every instant the sharp challenge 
 of duty has to be met and answered. The ship, 
 to vary the figure, is on the wide and restless 
 sea, with its mysterious tides, and brooding 
 tempests, and far-off harbours. Sail we must ! 
 Some course must be chosen : some hand must 
 be on the wheel — is on the wheel. 
 
 Let us imagine a captain laying side by side 
 the conflicting charts of Faith and Doubt. He 
 is undecided betwixt the two. He accepts 
 neither. But that refusal to choose is itself a 
 choice. To let the ship drift is a choice. The 
 absence of a course is a course ! 
 
 Doubt, it is somehow taken for granted, 
 means only the refusal to decide. It is not an 
 act, but the arrest of action. But in religion 
 that arrest of action is itself an act of the highest 
 significance. It stops the train ! It cancels out 
 the most tremendous factors in the arithmetic of 
 
6 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 life. It thrusts aside, as though they were non- 
 existent, obligations which, if they have any 
 reality, are measureless. It forbids the hand 
 of Christ to touch the conscience. It puts God 
 Himself in the category of forces it is safe to 
 neglect. What decision could be more tremendous 
 in scale than that "refusal to decide," which 
 decides so much ! 
 
 Is it true that religion has no authority to 
 affect conduct until it has been proved with the 
 certainty of one of the axioms of Euclid ? Till 
 the last difficulty in religion is solved, and the 
 last mystery is dissipated, have we the right to 
 treat it as non-existent ? In what other realm 
 of life do we treat doubt as a discharge from the 
 obligation to act, or wait until the final un- 
 certainty has vanished, before we act? We 
 buy and sell, we risk money, and health, and 
 happiness, and life itself on what are not certain- 
 ties, but probabilities. We do this every day. 
 The whole business of the world would be 
 arrested if this w T ere not done. 
 
 And this law of action runs into the ethical 
 realm. Duty there, as everywhere else, begins 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 7 
 
 long before an unclouded certainty is reached. 
 The fool of the psalmist whispered in his heart, 
 " There is no God." The easy- tempered doubter 
 of to-day does not go as far. He affirms nothing 
 — even in a whisper ! " There may be a God/' 
 is his position ; " but the proof is not sufficient 
 to make His claim absolute." 
 
 Now, at the point of practice, and if he treats 
 his doubt as a discharge from all necessity for 
 practice, it is clear that such a doubter stands 
 beside David's fool without his excuse. If a 
 man has ascertained finally that there is no God, 
 he may act on that certainty. But not to be 
 sure, only to doubt, and yet to act as though 
 doubt were a certainty, and cancelled all duty, 
 is to out- fool the fool of the psalmist. 
 
 It is easy to show, in this way, that the very 
 make of the world, the insistent, unceasing 
 challenge of events, the mere rush of the swift 
 moments, make any easy, uncommitted equipoise 
 in the realm of religion impossible. But the 
 doubter tricks himself when he imagines that his 
 doubt represents any such equipoise. 
 
 Doubt is itself, as a matter of fact, a complete 
 
8 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 interpretation of life and the universe. That it 
 is an interpretation which empties life of mean- 
 ing, makes duty a guess, dismisses God from His 
 own universe, as an unproved hypothesis, and 
 turns the characters of the moral law into 
 fluctuating ciphers, capable of being read in a 
 hundred ways, need not be considered just now. 
 The point to be insisted on is that doubt is 
 in itself a creed, with its own conscious or 
 unconscious affirmations; it is to be judged, 
 like every other creed, by its affirmations. 
 
 The notion that doubt has no positives, and is 
 committed to nothing, is almost universal. Its 
 literature is one long, loud oratorio of mere 
 denials. It seems to have no theology of its 
 own for which it is responsible. 
 
 But, it must be repeated, our doubts are 
 creeds ! Creeds only half seen by their owners, 
 perhaps, because they are not steadily looked at. 
 But they are definite though unformulated creeds 
 in spite of that. Every denial is one facet of 
 a proposition of which the other facet is an 
 affirmation. 
 
 Take the foundation belief of all religion — the 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 9 
 
 doctrine of God. In substance, there are, in 
 relation to it, three schemes of thought possible 
 — Theism, Atheism, Pantheism. Is a definite 
 choice betwixt these three inevitable? Is an 
 uncommitted attitude betwixt them impossible ? 
 No — a theory which denies — or at least cancels 
 out — all three is thinkable. Huxley has in- 
 vented a name for it; Herbert Spencer has 
 drawn it out into a stately philosophical system. 
 It is Agnosticism. 
 
 But Agnosticism is itself, in turn, a creed, and 
 one of the most positive and practical quality. 
 Who denies that twice two makes four, need not 
 affirm that they make three, or five. He may 
 assert they yield a result unknown. But the 
 formula, 2 + 2 = x is a proposition as definite, 
 and one which carries with it as directly practical 
 results, as the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4. 
 
 The only difference is that he who keeps his 
 accounts, and carries on his business, on the 
 theory that 2 + 2 = x, will discover that this 
 is an arithmetic which — equally with the for- 
 mula, 2 + 2 = 3 or = 5 — leads straight to the 
 Insolvency Court. 
 
10 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Every possible alternative to Christianity, to 
 sum up, is itself a belief ; and being a belief it 
 has its own special and inevitable ethics. It has 
 for conduct the office which the axioms at the 
 beginning of a geometrical problem have for the 
 conclusion at its end. Conduct is the conclusion 
 for which a man's creed is the premiss. " Our 
 chief business with Christianity," says Chalmers, 
 "is to proceed upon it." That is true of every 
 creed. On what else should a man " proceed " ? 
 
 Ethics are not to be chosen, like toys, because 
 they are pretty ; or, like tools, because they are 
 useful. They are conclusions from accepted 
 postulates, and are as inevitable as the con- 
 clusions of geometry. Does any one imagine that 
 the conclusions of the problems in Euclid are 
 movable; that they can be attached to any set 
 of deductions at pleasure? 
 
 The spectrum analysis, as every one knows, 
 makes visible, by a law woven into the very 
 structure of things, the elements present in a ray 
 of light. No matter how remote is the source 
 of the light — it may come from Arcturus or 
 Orion — but under the test of the spectro- 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 11 
 
 scope the elements in it register themselves in 
 certain fixed lines, as characteristic as a human 
 signature. Does any one suppose that the 
 scientist can fit, at pleasure, to any particular 
 ray of light, any scheme of lines he wishes? 
 The lines in the spectrum are the reflex of the 
 elements in the ray. They are not accidents ; 
 they are results. And because they are results 
 they are a revelation. 
 
 And life is the spectrum of the creed behind 
 it. Exactly as the lines made visible by the 
 spectroscope are the register of the elements in 
 the ray, so the ethics of a creed follow, by a 
 law from which there is no escape, from the 
 structure of the creed itself. 
 
 Each creed inevitably yields laws for 
 conduct; and it is accredited, or discredited, 
 in advance, by the standard of life which it 
 creates. And nothing is more certain than that 
 all the rivals of Christianity are afraid of their 
 own ethics. They disown them ; they refuse 
 to so much as remember them ! They try to 
 steal the ethics of Christianity — its emotions, 
 its motives, its vocabulary, its hopes. What 
 
12 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 spectacle is more familiar than that of men 
 struggling to keep the moral system of Chris- 
 tianity, and even its sun-filled horizon, while 
 denying both its history and its doctrines? 
 
 And for a time they succeed. That the 
 denial of Christianity does not shape conduct 
 instantly, and in every case, to its own strange 
 and dreadful pattern, is due to the fact that the 
 very unbelief which rejects Christianity cannot 
 escape its influence. Something of the perfume 
 of Christianity is in the very air of the 
 world. The wholesome salt of its ethics is in the 
 blood of the race. The man of no faith is still 
 the child of whole centuries of faith. 
 
 The choice of the soul, to sum up, does not lie, 
 in the last analysis, betwixt Belief and Doubt ; 
 but betwixt rival forms of belief. If the Chris- 
 tian creed is not accepted, there emerge certain 
 alternative beliefs perfectly definite in character, 
 one or other of which must take its place. For 
 the temple of the human soul cannot be left 
 empty, swept, and garnished. Some Tenant 
 must come ! Men are unwilling to see the 
 inevitable and underlying affirmations of doubt, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 13 
 
 the dark alternatives to faith, from which there 
 is no escape ; they try, as we have said, to keep 
 the Christian solution of the great problems of 
 duty, while rejecting the axioms on which that 
 solution is built. But no attempt is more 
 certainly predoomed to defeat. 
 
 These papers are an attempt to define, and 
 assess, what may be called the positives of doubt ; 
 the strange beliefs which lurk under the mask of 
 unbelief. Faith suffers — and rightly suffers — 
 incessant challenge for its credentials. But let 
 us stop for a moment to consider what are the 
 credentials of doubt ? The fight has hitherto 
 raged round the evidences of religion ; it is 
 surely time to ask what are the " evidences " of 
 irreligion. The Christian faith has its difficulties, 
 it may be frankly admitted ; but let the question 
 be seriously considered : What are the difficulties 
 of the alternatives to that faith ? 
 
 No fair-minded disputant, of course, will wish 
 to push what may be called the logic of the 
 dilemma too far ; and no one with any adequate 
 view of either truth or history will deny that the 
 alternative doctrines of to-day may prove, with 
 
H THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 ampler knowledge, to be the complementary 
 truths of to-morrow. But this applies only to 
 truths of what may be called the secondary 
 order. Some truths are absolute ; some denials 
 are final. It is idle to blind ourselves to these ; 
 it is cruel not to deal honestly with them. 
 
 The positives of unbelief, in a word, exist, and 
 are inevitable ; they are tremendous in scale and 
 results ; they carry with them their own laws of 
 conduct. And the real test of unbelief lies 
 there, and nowhere else. 
 
BOOK I 
 GOD 
 
PART I 
 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 GOD IN THE CHRISTIAN CREED 
 
 "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of 
 heaven and earth." — The Apostles 9 Creed. 
 
 The Christian faith is a chain of positive 
 
 truths, the first and greatest of which aflirms 
 
 the existence of God. " In the beginning — 
 
 God." These are the first syllables in the story 
 
 of the universe, the starting-point of Christian 
 
 belief. " Theism/' says Professor Gwatkin, " has 
 
 been the greatest force in history, and remains 
 
 the general belief of serious men." And before 
 
 considering the inevitable alternatives to that 
 
 fundamental truth, it is worth while to put, in 
 
 plain and untheological language, what the 
 
 Christian faith at this point teaches. 
 
 But in what words shall Christian belief 
 o 17 
 
18 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 about God express itself? The subtleties of 
 metaphysics, the formulae of logic, even the 
 definitions of theology, seem to have no adequacy 
 in this realm. What the soul asks is, rather, 
 as Dr. Parker says, the six wings of Isaiah's 
 seraph, with twain to cover our face, with 
 twain to cover our feet, and twain with which 
 to fly. 
 
 It is easy to multiply stately phrases about 
 God. He is eternal in existence, measureless 
 in power, stainless in holiness, of goodness 
 infinite. All the forces of nature are but the 
 expression of His energy. All its life is the 
 creation of His breath. All its beauty is the 
 signature of His wisdom. But as a vehicle for 
 expressing the conception of God, language fails 
 or betrays us; and thought is scarcely less 
 adequate than speech, where God is its object. 
 
 If we take all noblest and highest things 
 within the range of our senses — the majesty that 
 dwells in the height of the heavens, the daily 
 repeated glory of the dawn, the flame-pictures 
 of the sunset, the ordered splendour of the stars ; 
 and if to such heights and depths of material 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 19 
 
 glory, we add the great things of the spiritual 
 order — all that is purest in the saint, and 
 wisest in the sage, and tenderest in human 
 affection ; and if we multiply these by innume- 
 rable degrees, and to infinite heights, we have 
 yet not reached any adequate conception of 
 God. 
 
 There is no measure within the scale of the 
 human mind of His glory. The curve of our 
 thought is too low for the conception of His 
 greatness. Our broken terms of love fail to 
 interpret the wonder of His love. Our yesterdays 
 and to-morrows cannot express His eternity. 
 
 We take the great and resounding words of 
 human speech, and describe God as Almighty, 
 Eternal, the Invisible, the King of kings and 
 Lord of lords. But the phrases give us only 
 faint and broken aspects of God. We can speak 
 of Him only in stammering phrases that are in 
 conflict with each other. He dwells in the 
 height of the heavens ; nay, the heaven of 
 heavens cannot contain Him. And yet He 
 dwells, too, in the cup of the violet; He is 
 present in tbs joy of a little child, in the sigh 
 
20 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 of the broken and contrite heart. He guides 
 the planets through space. But he watches too 
 the flight of the sparrow ; He numbers the foot- 
 steps of a child. 
 
 He is unthinkable, dwelling afar, in that light 
 to which no man can approach ; and yet — it is 
 the paradox of His glory ! — He gives Himself to 
 our human thought in the nearest, sweetest, 
 simplest terms. "God, Who commanded the 
 light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in 
 our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of 
 the glory of God in the face of Jesus Chmst." 
 So a human Face, written with the characters 
 of a love which shines on us through suffering, 
 is the highest interpretation of the unseen and 
 infinite God. And if we might choose the 
 form in which this Eternal and Almighty God 
 — the God of infinite holiness, Who is yet the 
 Father of our spirits — should come to us, would 
 we not ask that it might be in human terms; 
 in the shape which, for what is best in us, has 
 most of appealing power; in the vision, that 
 is, of a love which stoops to uttermost sacrifice 
 for us ? 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 21 
 
 wonderful God! At once so high, and 
 yet so lowly ; so far off, and yet so near. His 
 holiness is the terror of our sin. His will is 
 the law and measure of our duty. His love 
 is the hope of our penitence. His fidelity is 
 the pledge of our happiness. "God," says 
 Dr. Parker, " is a Fire that cannot be touched ; 
 a Life too great for shape or image ; a Love for 
 which there is no equal name." And when all 
 the subtleties and capacities of language have 
 been exhausted to express what God is, and 
 have failed us ; somehow, we find that the little 
 and familiar w T ords of human speech best present 
 Him to our faith. " God is Love ; " " God is 
 Light ; " !\ God is a Spirit ; " " a God of Truth ; " 
 "our Father in Heaven." Here is a golden 
 chain of creeds, each in words of one syllable ! 
 
 The God of Christian faith is not an im- 
 personal energy: "a stream of tendency"; "a 
 Power not ourselves," whether making for 
 righteousness or not. How could love awaken 
 towards an intangible Force ? How could 
 prayer whisper its petition to a " stream 
 of tendency," or hope cling to it? God is a 
 
22 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 person ; and we find the witness, and proof of 
 the personality of God in the deep, imperishable 
 sense of personality in ourselves. This is the 
 central fact of our own nature. Moral qualities 
 would be impossible without it. All the relation- 
 ships of life would perish if it did not exist. 
 And it is incredible that God can have given His 
 creatures something greater than He possesses 
 Himself. 
 
 At these great heights, it may be admitted, 
 it is easy for human feet to stumble and 
 human thought to fail. We are tempted to 
 ask what room is there for our poor little per- 
 sonality in God's universe ? Is not that 
 universe filled and possessed by His infinite 
 personality ? What is the dividing line betwixt 
 His personality and ours ? Must not our per- 
 sonality be lost in His? 
 
 A diluted Hegelianism has for the moment 
 become popular; it teaches that God is not a 
 person, but Personality itself. All other per- 
 sonalities are but so many thoughts of the 
 Divine mind, rays of the Divine consciousness. 
 God has created the universe only as a mode of 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 23 
 
 realising Himself; and He has no other con- 
 sciousness than the sum- total of consciousness 
 amongst His creatures. But this is a meta- 
 physical puzzle ; it cannot survive translation 
 into clear speech. If we conceive of our per- 
 sonality melting into God's personality, morality 
 itself must perish ; for all acts become God's 
 acts. This is the doctrine of Hegel, and of a 
 philosophy older than Hegel, but it is a philoso- 
 phy that has failed. It hides God behind a 
 haze of metaphysics, and leaves no ground for 
 sober Christian faith. That faith affirms not 
 only the infinite personality of God, but the 
 indestructible personality of man. 
 
 The personality of God, it must be admitted, 
 is a conception too great for the human mind ; 
 but its denial is a vaster incredibility than its 
 assertion. The logic which vindicates Christian 
 faith at this point can be packed into a very 
 brief compass. Truth, goodness, and love, we 
 are sure, are attributes of God. What is truth 
 but the infinite and absolute in thought; or 
 goodness but the infinite and absolute in will ; 
 or love but the infinite and absolute in feeling ? 
 
24 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Now if God be truth, He thinks ; if He be 
 goodness, He wills ; if He be love, He feels. 
 But truth, goodness, love, are the qualities of a 
 person. "They are the characteristic,' ! says 
 Principal Gar vie, in the " Hibbert Journal" (p. 
 567), "of consciousness. They have meaning 
 only within self- consciousness." To deny per- 
 sonality to God is to deny at once that He 
 possesses either truth, goodness, or love — a denial 
 that is worse than atheism. 
 
 It is because God is a person, He is capable 
 of personal relations with His creatures. Is 
 it thinkable that an imperfect human spirit can 
 come nearer to a fellow- spirit, equally imper- 
 fect, than God, the Father of our spirits, can 
 come to us all % Of all relationships possible to 
 us none is so close, none so sweet, none so sure, 
 as that into which God comes. 
 
 " Closer is He than breathing ; nearer than hands or feet." 
 
 It is commonly said that to ascribe such qualities 
 to God is only a proof of the tyranny of anthro- 
 pomorphic conceptions. But what is dishonouring 
 to God in such conceptions ? We do not degrade 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 25 
 
 the Almighty by saying that He thinks and 
 knows and wills. " If the power behind Nature 
 were destitute of these faculties," says Professor 
 Momerie, " it would be infinitely inferior to the 
 poorest type of man. ... In power, as such, 
 there is nothing divine. What care I for a 
 Power that is eternally unconscious ? It may 
 have strength enough to dash the entire universe 
 into shivers ; but let me realise that it is sense- 
 less, and I look upon it with contempt." 
 
 The Christian conception of God, it is to 
 be noted, grows ever higher as our knowledge 
 of His methods and the scale of His works 
 increases. Science, wisely read, does not rebuke 
 faith at this point ; rather, it endows it with a 
 new vision, and kindles it to a new exultation. 
 God is better known to us than He was to our 
 fathers. David saw the glory of God written 
 in the heavens ; and he tells us in the music of 
 a great psalm how the sight affected him. But 
 how much of those heavens did David know ? 
 He could not pierce their heights, nor count the 
 multitude of the stars, as we have learned to do. 
 He spelt out only the first syllables of their 
 
26 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 mystic speech. He never saw more than the 
 mere outlying scouts of the great army of 
 rushing planets : and never imagined more than 
 those he saw. 
 
 But for us, with each new discovery of science 
 the heavens grow wider, and higher, and crowded 
 with yet vaster hosts. We have learned that 
 in their depths a thousand million stars are 
 wheeling ; and so we have a vision of the scale 
 of God's thoughts such as no saint or prophet 
 of olden days had. 
 
 We have another revelation, too, of God, of 
 which the earlier ages never dreamed. Science 
 is teaching us that God is in things infinitesi- 
 mal as surely, and on a scale as great, as He 
 is in things that are vast. When we untwist 
 the last and innermost thread of matter, we find 
 God there, hiding the splendours of His omnipo- 
 tence in the curve of an atom. The vision of 
 a hundred million stars, hung in the heights 
 and depths of space, is hardly so wonderful as 
 that latest discovery of science — a constellation 
 hidden in every molecule ; so that the dust 
 beneath our feet has, burning in it, unseen stars 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 27 
 
 as wonderful in their minuteness, as swift and 
 steadfast in their tiny orbits, as Uranus and 
 Sirius are in their vastness. And since God 
 must be as great in spiritual as He is in physical 
 terms, redemption gains, in this way, an ever 
 new credibility from each new discovery of 
 science. 
 
 The cross of Calvary, with its tremendous 
 significance, could hardly find standing ground 
 beneath the low skies of early human knowledge. 
 But the measureless heavens, as we have learned 
 to know them, rising ever higher; the scale 
 of the physical universe, with its constantly 
 expanding horizons, by the index they offer 
 to our very senses of the curve of God's 
 thoughts in the lowest circles of His universe, 
 makes credible the incredible story of our 
 redemption. 
 
 The last and highest word about God Chris- 
 tian faith knows is that great saying of St. 
 John — " God is love/' So we believe the uni- 
 verse is built on love ; it is shaped to ends of 
 love ; it is moving to a goal of love. And 
 Christian ethics are but love translated into 
 
28 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 terms of duty. All human obligations are 
 summed up in the terms of love. Not the 
 intellect, but love, is the organ of spiritual 
 knowledge. " Every one that loveth is born of 
 God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not 
 knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . God is 
 love ; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in 
 God, and God in him." 
 
 There is a divine accent in such words. They 
 break in on us from another realm than any 
 merely human literature knows. Here is a 
 strain of the music of heaven stealing across 
 the discords of earth. Love, on this reading, 
 is but the name for an impulse, an emotion, 
 a spiritual mood, by which the creature is knitted 
 into eternal moral harmony, not only with the 
 Creator, but with His whole unsinning creation. 
 
 This conception of God is the key which 
 unlocks all the mysteries of the universe. It 
 explains how the universe came into being. It 
 explains the height of the star-filled heavens, the 
 energy which floods all space, the march of the 
 seasons, the beauty of the sea and of the flowers. 
 It explains, too, the holiness of the saint, the 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 29 
 
 courage of the martyr, the child's gladness, 
 the mother's passion of tenderness. naked, 
 desolate, dreadful universe, if God did not exist 
 in it, and rule over it, and make it the servant 
 of His purpose, and the reflex of His character ! 
 
 For what is the guarantee to us of the order 
 of the universe? Why are we sure that the 
 stars will not break loose; that some vagrant 
 comet may not wreck the earth ; that the daily 
 miracle of the dawn will continue; that the 
 march of the seasons will still 
 
 11 Bring the flower again, 
 And bring the firstling to the flock * t 
 
 Science shows that the earth, to its uttermost 
 atom, and the whole depth of space through 
 which the earth is rushing, thrill with terrific 
 forces. What assurance have we that they may 
 not at any moment break loose and destroy us ? 
 
 We talk of " the constancy of nature " ; but 
 constancy is a quality of character, and the 
 constancy of nature is but the expression in 
 physical terms of the character of God. The 
 anima mundi is a well-known phrase in philo- 
 
30 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 sophy, and is the favourite Pantheistic name 
 for God ; but in a wiser sense than Pantheism 
 knows, and with a loftier meaning than philo- 
 sophy can teach, Christian faith believes God 
 to be the Soul of the universe. This lifts the 
 scheme of nature up into the realms of purpose, 
 and makes it the instrument and servant of 
 character. A living human body without a 
 soul, a mindless thing, incapable of volition, 
 would be a scandal and peril to its kind. And 
 this is what the universe must be apart from 
 God. God is the divine Soul of the universe; 
 and this anima mundi stands to us in a relation- 
 ship which He Himself interprets to us by the 
 words " Our Father." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE EVIDENCES FOR FAITH IN GOD 
 
 "The whole diversity of created things could have its 
 origin only in the ideas and the will of a necessarily 
 Existing Being." — Sir Isaac Newton. 
 
 What are the evidences for this great faith ? 
 " There are many proofs," says Professor 
 Gwatkin, " but no demonstration. " God can- 
 not be packed into a syllogism, or " proved " in 
 terms of logic. But neither can any one prove, 
 in terms of logic, that the world exists, or that 
 we ourselves exist ! The three final postulates of 
 thought are God, the world, and ourselves ; and 
 they are all incapable of absolute metaphysical 
 proof. Who limits his belief to that which can 
 be demonstrated, in terms of formal logic, 
 must deny them all ; and all, as a matter of 
 fact, have been denied. " Must we have logical 
 demonstration of that which underlies logic ? 
 Must we see God in the sky, as Lalande scoffs, 
 
 81 
 
32 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 or get Him into our laboratories, for analysis, 
 before we are persuaded ? " 
 
 Demand for logical proof in relation to God is 
 absurd, and yet what an energy of logic is 
 arrayed on the side of Christian belief ! Many 
 so-called "evidences" of God's existence touch 
 only the fringe of things ; but others run back 
 into eternal certainties. Let us take two — and 
 they are but samples; one resting on the ver}' 
 structure of the visible universe, and one wrought 
 into the structure of our own minds. 
 
 The highest expression of mind is to take 
 a number of unconscious, unrelated physical 
 things, and set them in relations which make 
 them the channel of a meaning of which they 
 are unconscious, the servants of an intelligent 
 purpose of which they know nothing. Such an 
 office laid on material things, or extracted from 
 them, is only possible in terms of mind. 
 
 For example, the letters of the alphabet are a 
 cluster of unrelated symbols, each standing for 
 one of those separate air-waves called sound. 
 But put together in a certain order they make 
 a proposition in Euclid, or a sonnet by Keats. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 33 
 
 Now, it is certain that the letters themselves 
 could not construct the theorem, or set the 
 cadences of the sonnet chiming. Behind the 
 unconscious symbols, and using them as its 
 servants, is the mind of the geometrician, the 
 imagination of the poet. 
 
 The seven notes of music are in Nature, and 
 exist independently of man : but they are merely 
 a succession of vibrations in the mindless air. 
 Beethoven knits them by subtle and innumerable 
 harmonies and contrasts to each other, till deep 
 calls to deep, and an ordered tumult of sweet 
 sounds is born, making perfect music. The 
 wedded harmonies of the great fugue are more 
 than the notes of the octave. The " Moonlight 
 Sonata " is the seven notes, plus Beethoven. 
 
 Now, exactly as the twenty- six letters of the 
 alphabet could not make Hamlet without the mind 
 of Shakespeare behind them ; or as the seven 
 notes of the octave must have the genius of 
 Handel flowing through them, before the " Halle- 
 lujah Chorus " is born, so the unrelated elements 
 of the physical universe must have an infinite 
 and controlling Mind behind them, and making 
 
34 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 them the servants of intelligent purpose, before 
 the order of the worlds is born. That the 
 physical universe is a unit is a final proof of 
 God's existence ; for that unity is born of the 
 relations of things ; and these relations are woven 
 by what must be the energies of an Infinite 
 Mind. 
 
 The ordered unity of the material universe is 
 everywhere taken for granted. " Here," in the 
 words of Martineau, " is a net- work of universal 
 media, which weaves the contents of space into 
 one system : a running thread of progressive 
 history blending all Time into one drama." 
 
 But the miracle it represents — the miracle of 
 an incalculable number of things so knitted 
 together into relation and interdependence with 
 each other that they produce a common result — 
 is not realised. 
 
 The stars are separated ; yet every particle in 
 each is at play with every particle in all other 
 stars, to farthest Sirius. Is there any rhythm, 
 indeed, born in the poet's brain, or woven of 
 music in Chopin or Mendelssohn, like the 
 rhythm of the worlds, the unjarring harmonies 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 35 
 
 of the planets? Still less can any harmony 
 born of wedded sound in music represent the 
 concord and agreement with each other of all 
 the separate forces which make the equipoise 
 of the physical universe ! 
 
 The universe is concrete music. It is a song 
 of which God is the singer ; a poem with stars 
 for syllables, and the measureless forces that 
 rush through space for melody. If the letters of 
 the alphabet cannot make Hamlet without the 
 mind of Shakespeare behind them ; if the seven 
 notes of the octave must have the genius of 
 Handel flowing through them before the " Halle- 
 lujah Chorus" is possible, how certain it is that 
 the unrelated elements and forces of the physical 
 universe must have an Infinite Mind, using them 
 as its servants, and setting them in terms of 
 mind, before the order of the worlds can exist. 
 
 And how far this miracle of co-ordinating 
 purpose — the supreme act and proof of mind 
 — extends! It is, we are sure, co-extensive 
 with the physical universe. Its existence is the 
 constant and most certain presupposition of 
 science. Its disappearance would be the wreck 
 
36 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 of science. Imagine intelligence standing amazed 
 in a realm where chance reigned, and law was 
 unknown ! The Mind which thus stamps itself on 
 the whole universe in characters of purpose visible 
 even to our dim intelligence, must be infinite; 
 and there is no certainty known to reason more 
 absolute than that such a mind exists. 
 
 The absolute proof of God's existence is 
 thus found in the relations in which the 
 mindless elements of the universe are set 
 with each other, producing an order of which 
 they are not only incapable, but unconscious. 
 
 An equally absolute proof of the existence of 
 God is found, again, wrought into the very con- 
 stitution of the human mind. The intellect is 
 so made that, whatever it may pretend to do, 
 it cannot accept an endless succession of second 
 causes ; a chain with no first link. An Ultimate 
 Cause, itself uncaused, is a necessity of thought ; 
 and the qualities of this Cause, we cannot escape 
 believing, are interpreted by its effects. It must 
 be rational, since the universe is built on terms 
 of reason. It must be moral ; or whence comes 
 conscience ? It must be personal ; or how is it 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 37 
 
 that we are endowed with personality ? And 
 a First Cause which is rational, moral, and 
 personal — is God ! 
 
 " It is impossible,' 7 says Herbert Spencer, " to 
 avoid making the assumption of self- existence 
 somewhere." All the creeds, in fact, begin with 
 exactly that assumption. Atheism assumes the 
 self-existence of matter ; Pantheism assumes 
 the self-existence of everything ; the Christian 
 faith rests on the self-existence of God. As 
 William Artkttr argues, in his " Eeligion With- 
 out God," we are shut up to one or other 
 of three conceivable starting-points : An Eternal 
 Nothing, which originated both mind and 
 matter ; Eternal Matter, which originated mind ; 
 or an Eternal Mind, which originated all things. 
 The first assumption is inconceivable ; the second 
 is impossible and absurd ; the third is the only 
 theory in which the sane mind can finally rest. 
 And it is the creed of Christianity ! " Belief in 
 God is the first instinct, and the last conviction, 
 of sane intelligence." 
 
 But are there no difficulties in this great 
 creed; no shadows in the glory of God's nature ? 
 
38 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Yes; theology would be incredible if it were 
 not dark with mystery. In this realm, finite 
 thought wanders amid infinities. "The power 
 which the universe manifests to us/' says Herbert 
 Spencer, " is utterly inscrutable.' 7 But in these 
 words he is only repeating unconsciously the 
 challenge of Scripture : " Who can know the 
 Almighty unto perfection ? " " Clouds and 
 darkness are round about Him." How can the 
 Infinite be uttered in terms of the finite? 
 
 And there are mysteries and ttoftkulties, not 
 only in the very conception of God, but in 
 the facts of His universe. How can it be 
 otherwise ? We see only one tiny point in the 
 great curve of God's plan : we have the record 
 of only one brief moment in the history of 
 His universe. But Christian faith, while it 
 admits that " clouds and darkness are round 
 about Him/' still affirms with rejoicing con- 
 fidence that "righteousness and judgment are 
 the habitation of His throne." "God's way 
 is in the deep, His path is in the great waters ; 
 His judgments are not known." But through 
 all the ages that lie behind us, and still, to-day, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 39 
 
 He leads the souls that trust in Him like 
 a flock ; though it is by hands, and in paths, 
 and towards a goal, they cannot see. 
 
 blessed faith ! " When I kneel n — says 
 that true saint and fine thinker, William Arthur 
 — "when I kneel at the throne of grace, and 
 say, ' Our Father, which art in heaven/ it seems 
 as if all my being were flooded with the light 
 of a countenance full of unutterable life and 
 love. ' Thou art a shield for me/ I cry ; * a 
 shield for me. My glory, and the lifter-up of 
 my head.' Yea ! even so. And therefore unto 
 the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the 
 only wise God, be honour and glory for ever. 
 And let all the people say Amen ! This, then, 
 be our witness before the living and the un- 
 born : we which have believed do enter into 
 rest I" 
 
PART II 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVE TO BELIEF IN GOD 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 ATHEISM 
 
 "The atheistic theory is not only absolutely unthink- 
 able; but, even if it were thinkable, it would not be a 
 solution." — Herbert Spencer. 
 
 The alternatives to the Christian faith about 
 God are easily named. "It is impossible," to 
 quote Herbert Spencer once more, M to avoid 
 making the assumption of self-existence some- 
 where." We may believe, with the atheist, in 
 the self- existence of matter ; or, with the pan- 
 theist, in the self-existence of everything ; or, 
 with the Christian, in the self- existence of God. 
 Or we may deny all three with the agnostic. 
 But he who rejects the belief of Christianity 
 as to God must put in its place one of these 
 three — atheism, pantheism, agnosticism. 
 
 41 
 
42 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 It might be imagined that pantheism, as an 
 alternative to Christianity, could be dismissed 
 almost without debate. The word is used in 
 literature as a label, but does any sane man 
 under civilised skies really hold the creed be- 
 hind the label, with all the consequences 
 which follow from that creed? Yet pantheism, 
 it cannot be denied, has inspired some famous 
 books ; it has captured some great thinkers — on 
 the Continent at least; it has yielded some 
 picturesque philosophies. But, stripped of all 
 ingenious disguises, what is the hard and naked 
 quality of its teaching? 
 
 Pantheism starts with a very different pre- 
 miss to atheism; but, paradoxical as it may 
 seem, it arrives at the same conclusion. Atheism 
 denies any creation, since there is no Creator. 
 Pantheism denies creation too, but it is because 
 there is no creature ! 
 
 But there are darker shadows still in this dark 
 creed. On the pantheistic theory God did not 
 create the universe. He is the universe — all 
 that is dark in it, as well as all that is bright. 
 Everything is but a disguise of God. All acts 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 43 
 
 are, directly or indirectly, His acts ; all wills are 
 but modes of His will, all characters disguises 
 of His character. He has no other conscious- 
 ness than the sum-total of consciousness His 
 creatures possess. His personality is only the 
 aggregate of all other personalities. 
 
 Everything is God; evil as truly as good, 
 falsehood as surely as truth, cruelty absolutely 
 as pity, Jack the Ripper as well as Paul the 
 saint. The lust of the brothel is His, the tortures 
 of Russian prison-cells, the obscenities of African 
 obi- worship, as certainly as the love of the 
 mother, and the courage of the martyr. The 
 atheist who denies there is a God is himself a 
 mode of God, and his atheism is a reflection of 
 something in God — if it is only of God's doubts 
 about Himself ! 
 
 This is a dreadful creed, a denial at once of 
 personality in man and of perfect goodness in 
 God. It teaches the divinity of evil as well as 
 of good. On this theory there is no sin, unless 
 God Himself is a sinner. 
 
 This doctrine cuts the very roots of all ethics. 
 It is not reason, but the mere bewilderment 
 
44 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 and scandal of reason. To ask what argument 
 sustains such a theory is absurd. According to 
 it we are all machines, or rather will-less bits of 
 that great machine we call the universe. Why 
 ask one little fragment of the machine for an 
 argument to prove that the machine exists ? It 
 is like asking the grease-box of a steam-engine 
 for a philosophy of the engine itself. 
 
 There remain only two arguable alternatives 
 to theistic Christianity — atheism and agnosticism, 
 and each may be considered in the briefest 
 possible terms. 
 
 It seems, perhaps, to the sober mind, incredible 
 that, outside a lunatic asylum, atheism can exist. 
 To waste ink or argument upon it is slaying the 
 dead. But atheism is, unhappily, a real creed 
 for many ; for some, indeed, it is a creed pro- 
 claimed in almost arrogant accents. In the last 
 French census, nearly 5,000,000 people wrote 
 themselves down " atheists." On the Continent 
 there are many writers who would repeat 
 Feuerbach's words : " It is clear as the sun, and 
 evident as the day, that there is no G-od; and, 
 still more, that there can be no God." 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 45 
 
 And we need not emigrate to foreign skies to 
 discover atheism. Mrs. Besant, in her " Gospel 
 of Atheism," declares that " the name atheist is 
 one of the grandest titles a man can wear. It is 
 the order of merit of the world's heroes." She 
 grows lyrical in praise of atheism. " Its soil," 
 she cries, " bears the fairest flowers and the 
 strongest trees. Over it sweep the purest winds 
 and shine the warmest suns " I 
 
 But there is a nearer and more deadly atheism 
 than any which finds expression in words. It is 
 a vague sense — lying like some deadly vapour 
 on multitudes of souls, stealing like some in- 
 visible but poisonous taint into men's blood — 
 that the existence of God is doubtful. It has 
 never been proved. Perhaps, after all, He does 
 not exist ! And this nebulous idea has for those 
 whom it possesses, the fatal offices of an opiate. 
 It drugs the conscience. It shuts out the 
 spiritual universe. It acts as a blindness, ob- 
 scuring the heavens. It makes life, in a literal 
 sense, godless. 
 
 It is worth while, if only for a moment, to 
 look seriously at atheism as a definite creed ; to 
 
46 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 assess its meaning and evidences, and the ethics 
 natural to it. 
 
 Atheism is the most spacious and tremendous 
 of negatives. " There is no God " : a creed of 
 four words, but how much dark significance is 
 shut up in the brief syllables ! The heavens 
 are empty. The world has no maker. Life has 
 no judge. Conscience has no law, or has none 
 speaking to it from any spiritual realm. The 
 visible universe is an accident. It has no 
 creative Mind above it, and no intelligent 
 purpose within it. 
 
 Now, it is an intellectual absurdity to ask for 
 the " proofs " of atheism. It is clear at the out- 
 set, and without argument, that this is a creed 
 essentially incapable of proof. A universal 
 negative of this sort lies beyond the range of 
 evidence. Proof of it — if it exists — is possible 
 only to universal knowledge. To reach the 
 great certainty that there is no God, " what 
 ages and what lights," asks John Foster, "are 
 requisite for this attainment ! " In a classic and 
 oft-quoted passage, Foster argues that a man 
 must himself possess the attributes of God 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 47 
 
 before he can be entitled to declare that no 
 God exists. 
 
 He must be omnipresent, to be sure of his 
 creed ; for if there is any realm from which he 
 is absent, God may be there ! He must be 
 omniscient ;. for if there is any fact he does not 
 know, perhaps that unknown truth is the fact 
 that Goci exists ! 
 
 How shall a finite intelligence, set on a little 
 island in the measureless ocean of space, and 
 whose existence, measured against the duration 
 of the universe, is less than the tick of a 
 clock, reach such a stupendous height and 
 certainty of knowledge as to entitle it to pro- 
 claim to the shuddering worlds, "There is no 
 God!" 
 
 Atheism, moreover, is in deep and eternal 
 quarrel with the very structure of the human 
 mind. Here, lying about us, is the visible 
 universe. It has to be explained ; and every 
 creed, in effect, is an explanation of the universe. 
 Now, to say, with atheism, that the visible uni- 
 verse has no Maker, is to declare it to be that 
 unthinkable thing — that impossible thing — a 
 
48 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 stupendous effect without a Cause. A creed which 
 sets out with such a proposition deserves to be 
 treated as simply a foolish jest. We cannot, 
 if we would, believe in so much as an old shoe 
 without a shoemaker. And to assert of the 
 majestic system of things about us, graven with 
 characters of design to its minutest atom, 
 flooded, as our very senses teach us, with all the 
 attributes of mind, that no designing Mind is 
 behind it; that it sprang uncaused out of no- 
 thing — this is the wildest unreason. 
 
 The denial of any antecedent cause necessarily 
 involves the denial of any beginning ; so atheism, 
 carried a step farther back, means the assertion 
 that the universe has existed through infinite past 
 time. This theory according to Herbert Spencer 
 is " unthinkable," and, therefore, impossible. It 
 is a more direct and simple answer to say that 
 such a theory is in open quarrel with plain facts. 
 That the world had a beginning in time, geology 
 and astronomy amply prove; and if it had a 
 starting-point it must have an end. 
 
 "The existence of an Ultimate Cause is the 
 highest of all our certitudes," says Herbert 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 49 
 
 Spencer, in one of his latest writings.* Belief in 
 an Ultimate Cause is that august thing, "a 
 necessary datum of thought." "Amongst our 
 beliefs, ,, Spencer declares, " this has the highest 
 validity of any." All that remains to be asked 
 is whether the nature and character of this Cause 
 are reflected in the universe He — or It — has 
 created; whether, having endowed us with 
 personality, It is a person ; whether, having 
 given us intelligence, It is Itself intelligent; 
 whether, having placed us in the moral order, It 
 is Itself moral? If so, this Ultimate Cause is 
 exactly what Christian faith declares it to be — 
 an Infinite and Eternal Spirit, the Father of our 
 spirits, the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth. 
 The mind can, perhaps, run back in imagi- 
 nation, and conceive of the self- existence of 
 space, and of nothing else; of space without 
 either mind or matter or motion in it. But, 
 then, how shall mind and matter and motion 
 come out of it ? " Infinite space and no matter 
 in it, no mind in it, no force or motion in it — 
 is this," asks William Arthur, "to be the mother 
 * Nineteenth Century, No. 89, p. 6. 
 
50 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 of the universe ? " Does any one wonder that 
 this conception of u Nothing, distinguished from 
 all other nothings by the power to develop into 
 Something/' is dismissed by Herbert Spencer as 
 " an absurdity " ? 
 
 To Spencer himself, atheism was frankly in- 
 tolerable. Even the ''unthinkable abstraction" 
 which, in the earlier stages of his thinking, he 
 put in the place of God, came, in later stages, to 
 be recognised as too thin and naked a conception. 
 So Spencer invents a whole procession of sonorous 
 phrases for it — phrases which grew steadily more 
 concrete and definite " until at last," as Frederic 
 Harrison complained, " it emerges as the Ultimate 
 Reality ; the Inscrutable Existence ; the Creative 
 Power; the Infinite and Eternal Energy by 
 which all things are created and sustained." 
 
 The fashion in which Herbert Spencer tried to 
 fill up the empty heaven of his faith with sound- 
 ing names is only an illustration of the fact — 
 discoverable everywhere in the sad realms of un- 
 belief — that the human mind, by some deep and 
 mysterious instinct, resents a vacuum where faith 
 ought to be. It is intolerant both of an empty 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 51 
 
 conscience and of a vacant heaven. The very- 
 atheism which declares the throne of the universe 
 is vacant, insists upon putting Something upon it. 
 
 Comte, for example, having denied the existence 
 of a God, proceeded to invent, as a substitute, 
 his " Grand Etre." He proposed to his followers, 
 as an object of worship, the sum- total of 
 humanity, minus its useless members, and plus 
 a percentage of the more helpful animals. " We 
 begin," says William Arthur, "with an un- 
 known sum of past, present, and future men ; 
 from this we are told to subtract an unknown 
 sum-total of useless men ; and to the remainder 
 we are told to add a fourth unknown sum of 
 helpful animals." 
 
 The four unknowns, put together, were to 
 make one great Known, the Supreme Being of 
 Comte. The first sum-total was an abstrac- 
 tion ; the sum deducted was an abstraction ; the 
 result is an unknown fraction of an unknowable 
 abstraction. And this is the "Grand ^tre " 
 which, as an object of worship, Comte thinks will 
 take the place of God ! No wonder that it 
 kindled the scorn of a strong if sceptical intellect 
 
52 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 like that of Huxley. "That the incongruous 
 mixture of bad science and eviscerated papistry 
 out of which Comte manufactured the positive 
 religion will be the heir of the ages/' he writes, " I 
 have too much respect for the humanity of the 
 future to believe. The Positivist asks me to 
 worship Humanity ; that is to adore the general- 
 ised conception of men as they ever have been, 
 and probably ever will be. I must reply that I 
 could just as soon bow down and worship the 
 generalised conception of a wilderness of apes." 
 
 Atheism, since it dismisses an intelligent 
 Maker from the universe, must regard that 
 universe as the product of chance; and this is 
 the fact which made atheism intolerable to 
 Darwin. " The impossibility of conceiving that 
 this grand and wondrous universe, with our 
 conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to 
 me," he declared, "the chief argument for the 
 existence of God." It is possible to express in 
 arithmetical terms the vast incredibility that 
 the physical universe is the product of chance. 
 "When only eleven planets were known, De 
 Morgan showed," says Professor Momerie, " that 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 5a 
 
 the odds against their moving in one direction 
 round the sun, with a slight inclination of the 
 planes of their orbits — had chance determined 
 the movement— would have been 20,000,000,000 
 to 1. And this movement of the planets is but 
 a single item, a tiny detail, an infinitesimal 
 fraction, in a universe which — in spite of all 
 arguments to the contrary — still appears to be 
 pervaded through and through with purpose. Let 
 every being now alive upon the earth spend the 
 rest of his days and nights in writing down 
 arithmetical figures ; let the enormous numbers 
 which these figures would represent — each number 
 forming a library in itself — be all added together ; 
 let this result be squared, cubed, multiplied by 
 itself ten thousand times ; and the final product 
 would still fall infinitely short of expressing the 
 probabilities against the world having being 
 evolved by chance." 
 
 Let it be repeated that atheism is eternally 
 and essentially incapable of proof. It is a guess. 
 And, regarded as a guess, it has every hateful 
 quality. It leaves the reason like a fluttering 
 and dying bird in an atmosphere exhausted of 
 
54 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 oxygen. It wraps the imagination in darkness. 
 It blackens the heavens. It proclaims the human 
 race to be Fatherless. It empties the universe of 
 purpose. This complex web of unresting energies 
 is a machine, not only without a Maker, but 
 without an end before it, or a mind within it. 
 
 What conception can be more terrifying to 
 the imagination than that of a mindless universe ! 
 We are passengers in a train rushing at maddest 
 speed, but whither we cannot tell. There are 
 no signals on this line ; no engineer has laid the 
 rails ; no driver is on the foot-plate. Happiness, 
 for us, depends on the presence of certain 
 qualities in the universe — love, foresight, justice, 
 righteousness. But these are personal qualities ; 
 and since there is no personal God these things 
 are not to be found in the system to which we 
 belong. We are an orphan race, wandering 
 under pitiless and empty skies. 
 
 Who would open his soul to such a creed 
 unless whipped into the acceptance of it by the 
 iron scourge of irresistible proofs ? But atheism 
 is a creed necessarily and eternally naked of all 
 proof. 
 
CHAPTEE II 
 
 THE ETHICS OF ATHEISM 
 
 " Unbelief saves itself from universal contempt by really 
 living on a wider faith than it allows. . . . What if un- 
 belief should live up to its creed ! " — Newman Smyth. 
 
 What, it may be asked, are the ethics natural 
 to the creed of atheism ? 
 
 From a Christian standpoint, atheism can never 
 be translated into conduct, or be accepted as a 
 basis of conduct, without an element of wicked- 
 ness. Taken logically, it is nothing better than 
 a guess ; certainty about his theory of the uni- 
 verse is, for the atheist, in the nature of things 
 impossible. Now, to act on the tremendous 
 negative, "There is no God," may be morally 
 justifiable when certainty is reached ; but 
 short of that certainty, it is nothing less than 
 wickedness. 
 
 Shall the measureless obligations under which 
 — if God exists, and is our Judge — we all stand, 
 
 55 
 
56 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 be dismissed on the chance that there is no God ? 
 That chance must become certainty before it 
 supplies a law for conduct ; and yet any such 
 certainty is impossible. To hold atheism as a 
 creed is to quarrel with reason ; but to act on 
 it as a law is to break with instinctive and 
 rudimentary morality. 
 
 Looked at as opposing creeds, it will be seen 
 that Christianity and atheism are, at this point, 
 parted by one profound difference. Christianity 
 is a theory of the world which, reason declares, 
 ought to be acted upon as if it were true, until it 
 is disproved. It is a creed which the sane mind 
 must wish to be true. It fills the sky with sun- 
 shine. It floods the universe with gracious pur- 
 pose. It is a challenge to the soul, putting it 
 under the sway of great motives, and calling it 
 to high standards. Moreover, to act on the 
 Christian theory carries with it no risks, even if 
 in the end it be disproved. For if in that last 
 moment when Time ends, it dissolves into a 
 dream, the Christian has been better for it while 
 he lived, and will be no worse for it when he is 
 dead. At the moment of death — if there actually 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 57 
 
 be no God — believer and unbeliever will drop out 
 of existence on equal terms, into that eternal and 
 dreamless sleep which, on the atheistic theory, 
 awaits the soul. 
 
 But the exact opposite, at every point, is 
 true of atheism. True or false, it is a hateful 
 creed. It has for the universe the office of an 
 eclipse. It cuts the very sinews of morality. 
 Every one must wish it to be untrue. No one 
 ought to act upon it till it is proved up to the 
 point where doubt becomes impossible. And 
 what tremendous risks pursue it ! The atheist 
 treats God as non-existent in His own universe ; 
 he dismisses His claims as worthless; he puts 
 aside His love as a fool's dream. And he does 
 all this on the strength of a guess. He surren- 
 ders transcendent hopes, and betrays obligations 
 which, if they exist, are overwhelming, on the 
 authority of what must be called debating society 
 logic. What other human being risks so much 
 on a warrant so frail ! 
 
 Many atheists, thank God ! are good men ; but 
 this is in spite of their creed. When Shelley 
 wrote "atheos" after his name at Mont Auvert, 
 
58 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 he was on fire with a generous hate of wrong, 
 which burned from a divine source. Atheists 
 are often better, as Christians are often, alas ! 
 worse, than their own creed. And it must be 
 remembered that even the man who denies that 
 God exists, breathes an atmosphere charged 
 with the idea of God, and with the great moral 
 forces which stream into human life from that 
 idea. 
 
 But the point to be considered is what, on 
 its own principles, and on its principles carried 
 to their logical conclusion, is the morality of 
 atheism ; and to that question the answer is 
 clear. 
 
 Atheism is the denial of all authoritative 
 ethics. Since there is no Law-giver, there can 
 be no law. The interval betwixt right and 
 wrong is a geographical or social accident. There 
 is no God, Himself infinitely righteous, who enacts 
 right-doing, and will punish wrong-doing. AH 
 actions, impulses, motives, on the atheistic theory, 
 have an equal right to exist. Hate is as natural 
 as love ; the rogue is as much a part of the 
 system of things as the saint, Nero as St. Paul. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 59 
 
 Why should not Nana Sahib kill the women in the 
 Murder House ? The deed shocks us, looking at 
 it across fifty years ; but it gratified that cold- 
 blooded Hindoo at the moment: and on the 
 atheistic theory his gratification is as legitimate a 
 part of the system of things as our horror. 
 
 On the principles of atheism, in brief, what 
 final standard determining whether a given act 
 is good or bad can exist ? There are laws of 
 society, but these vary with latitude and longi- 
 tude. Slavery is a social law on the Congo, 
 polygamy in Utah, the bowstring in Turkey, 
 wife-killing in Annam. 
 
 There is, again, the law of utility. Some acts 
 in their consequences are beneficial to society, 
 some are injurious. But if utility is our one 
 standard we must wait until the consequences of 
 an act are known before we can determine 
 whether it is to be approved or blamed. And 
 who can measure the consequences of acts? 
 When conscience, as the organ of the moral 
 sense, and the interpreter of a divine law, has 
 been dismissed, atheism can supply nothing 
 which will take its place. 
 
CO THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 The way to test the ethics of atheism is to 
 imagine what the world would be with all the 
 motives and emotions and restraints that go 
 with the conception of God cancelled. What a 
 desolate landscape, lying under black and empty 
 heavens, arises in the imagination at such a 
 thought ! From the root of belief in God 
 a thousand great hopes, heroisms, aspirations, 
 affections break into blossom like flowers at the 
 whisper of some divine spring ! If these suddenly 
 perished, it would leave the world a desert. 
 
 A world of atheists, and conducted on atheistic 
 principles ! A society with its institutions, its 
 literature, its politics, its domestic life untouched 
 by the great forces which stream from the idea 
 of God ! A race with a mindless universe about 
 it, a hopeless grave beneath it, and empty heavens 
 above it. What would happen in such a world ? 
 Prayer would die, and all the forces which go 
 with prayer. Worship would fall silent. The 
 great charities born of religion would perish. 
 Grief could have no comfort, mystery no ex- 
 planation, truth no necessary sacredness, loss no 
 compensating equity. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 61 
 
 In an atheistic home no mother would teach 
 her child to pray. Love would be left with 
 broken heart and empty hands ; for what epitaph 
 can atheism write upon a little child's grave ? 
 The feet made beautiful because they bring good 
 tidings, would run no more on errands of pity to 
 far-off lands and wild races. Can the human 
 imagination picture a committee of atheists 
 starting off, at risk and cost to themselves, to 
 transform savage races into a nobler type by the 
 news that no God exists ? 
 
 A new cruelty would creep into the world's 
 politics, and into its social life, if atheism became 
 universal. The whole conception of man would 
 be changed. The great law of love — love which 
 lifts its face towards God — would be unwritten, 
 for at the crown of the heavens there sits 
 no God. And the twin and equal law of love 
 — love flowing from man to man — would not 
 survive. 
 
 The sublime vision presented in the New Tes- 
 tament, of the Son of God, the Judge of the race, 
 in the hour of His judgment, rewarding all service 
 to man as service done to Himself, and all neglect 
 
62 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 to man as neglect of Himself, has done more to 
 make pity a virtue, to lift beneficence up to 
 the sacredness of a religion, than all the 
 speculations of the philosophers, and all the 
 maxims of the moralists. Christ stands behind 
 the hunger of the poor, the loneliness of the 
 orphan. 
 
 " Who hates, hates Thee : who loves, becomes 
 Therein to Thee allied ; 
 All sweet accords of hearts and homes 
 In Thee are multiplied." 
 
 Now the unbelief that blotted out that belief 
 would certainly kill pity as a duty. How could 
 literature survive with universal atheism as its 
 atmosphere ! How could poetry sing, or fancy 
 dream, or hope breathe ? As well expect flowers 
 to bloom under skies empty of light, or birds 
 to sing in an atmosphere exhausted of oxygen. 
 In a universe emptied of God, what strange 
 terrors would steal out of the void into the 
 chamber of man's imagination. What cruel 
 and obscene shapes would haunt the empty 
 skies ! 
 
 Atheism has added to English literature one 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 63 
 
 singer — James Thomson — who, to something of 
 real genius as a poet, added the gloom of utter 
 unbelief. And looking at the world through 
 the lens of his atheism, he sees it, and sings 
 of it, as a " City of Dreadful Night" : 
 
 " The City is of Night ; perchance of Death, 
 But certainly of Night ; for never there 
 
 Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath, 
 After the dewy morning's cold grey air ; 
 
 The moon and stars may shine with scorn or pity ; 
 
 The sun has never visited that city, 
 For it dissolveth in the daylight fair. 
 
 " The City is of Night, but not of sleep ; 
 
 There sweet sleep is not for the weary brain ', 
 The pitiless hours like years and ages creep, 
 A night seems termless hell. . . , M 
 
 Thomson changes the scene of his poem from 
 this terrible city to a desert equally terrible : 
 
 " As I came through the desert thus it was, 
 As I came through the desert : All was black, 
 In heaven no single star, on earth no track ; 
 A brooding hush, without a stir or note, 
 The air so thick it clotted in my throat ; 
 And thus for hours ; then some enormous things 
 Swooped past with savage cries and clanking wings ; 
 
 And I strode on austere ; 
 
 No hope could have no fear." 
 
64 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 In that sad realm, one soul bankrupt of faith 
 calls to another : 
 
 " Brothers of sad lives ! They are so brief : 
 A few short years must bring us all relief ; 
 
 Can we not bear these years of labouring breath ? 
 But if you would not this poor life fulfil, 
 Lo, you are free to end it when you will, 
 
 Without the fear of waking after death." 
 
 Through the city that John saw coming 
 down from God out of heaven, there flows the 
 river of the water of life. And in the " City of 
 Dreadful Night " that atheism builds, this singer 
 of sad rhymes, too, sees a stream flowing ; it is 
 the river of suicides ! — 
 
 " The mighty river, flowing dark and deep, 
 
 With ebb and flood from the remote sea-tides, 
 Vague sounding through the City's sleepless sleep, 
 
 Is named the River of the Suicides ; 
 For night by night some lorn wretch, overweary, 
 And shuddering from the future yet more dreary, 
 Within its cold secure oblivion hides." 
 
 It is clear that atheism is, or ought to be, a 
 creed of tears. "' There is no God.' Is this," 
 asks Pascal, "a thing to be said with gaiety? 
 Is it not, rather, a thing to be said with tears, as 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 65 
 
 the saddest thing in the world ? " Professor 
 Clifford, after he had broken definitely with 
 Christian faith, yet recognised the wreck that 
 atheism makes of the universe. He pictures 
 himself amid the glory of a spring sunrise, 
 gazing on the empty heaven stretched over a 
 soul-less earth, and realising with a sense of 
 utter loneliness that " the Great Companion was 
 dead." A serious thinker, who felt himself com- 
 pelled by force of logic to hold this creed, ought 
 to hope that he might be mistaken ; ought to 
 long to be refuted. Henry Eogers, indeed, says 
 that he " ought to conceal his belief as if it were 
 a guilty secret, and to dread making proselytes 
 as men refrain from exhibiting their infectious 
 sores, or their plague-tainted garments in the 
 eyes of the world." 
 
 Atheism, as thus pictured is, then, one of the 
 inevitable alternatives to Christian faith. Now, 
 in spite of its hateful qualities, if it came to us 
 arrayed in proofs which to the honest mind were 
 final, proofs so strong that to reject them would 
 be disloyalty to reason, we must consent to it as 
 a creed. Truth is to be accepted, though it 
 
66 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 destroys us. But atheism, it must be insisted, 
 is nothing more than an eternally unproved 
 and unprovable guess. It is in quarrel with the 
 strongest law of the sane intellect. Belief in it 
 is intellectually lower than belief in the dead 
 gods, and scandalous goddesses, of heathen 
 mythology. 
 
 And let the two great opposites be put side 
 by side. Here is the Christian faith in God, 
 with its far-stretching evidences, its pure .ethics, 
 its sane interpretation of the universe, its un- 
 broken procession of saints, its hopes that have 
 the energy of creative forces. It is a faith 
 which visibly makes for the happiness of the 
 world. Beside this lofty figure, as an alternative, 
 stands atheism; a guess, a negation, a creed 
 without a proof, black with gloom, overshadowed 
 with tremendous risks; a creed which has no 
 restraint for sin, and no law for the conscience. 
 It is a belief which, when full-grown, must leave 
 the race bankrupt alike in ethics and in hope. 
 
 The choice betwixt Theism and Atheism is the 
 choice betwixt an archangel and — Caliban! 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 AGNOSTICISM 
 
 " We must replace the veil which Paul tore aside two 
 thousand years ago. . . . We must go back to the cult of 
 the Unknown God." — Joseph McCabe, in the Agnostic 
 Annual. 
 
 "The prevailing man of the future, like many of the 
 saner men of to-day, will presume to no knowledge what- 
 ever, will presume to no possibility of knowledge, of the 
 real being of God." — H. G. Wells, in Anticipations. 
 
 "Agnosticism is but atheism writ respectable." — Dr. 
 Aveling. 
 
 Agnosticism seems, at first sight, to be parted 
 from atheism by a very wide interval. It does 
 not set out with an audacious and infinite 
 negative. The assertion that the world has no 
 cause, or is its own cause, is an excursion into 
 the realms of unreason in which the agnostic 
 bluntly declines to accompany the atheist. 
 Huxley himself attenuates agnosticism into 
 what is nothing else than a definition of honesty. 
 " It simply means that a man shall not say he 
 knows or believes what he has no scientific 
 
 67 
 
\ 
 
 68 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 ground for professing to know or believe." In that 
 sense every honest man must be an agnostic. 
 
 As a matter of fact, agnosticism starts from the 
 same point as Christianity. It declares that the 
 universe is an effect, with an infinite and eternal 
 Cause behind it. " The consciousness of cause," 
 declares Herbert Spencer, "can be abolished 
 only by abolishing consciousness itself." So the 
 agnostic theory begins not with a doubt, still 
 less with a denial, but with a true and positive 
 faith. The throne of the universe, it affirms, is 
 not empty. There sits upon it an eternal 
 Energy from which all things proceed. This 
 infinite and eternal Energy — taking Spencer as 
 the interpreter of agnosticism — is the Ultimate 
 Eeality. Its existence is "a necessary datum 
 of consciousness," and doubt about it is to be 
 dismissed as an act of treason against the 
 laws of thought themselves. " Amongst all the 
 beliefs possible to the human mind this," says 
 Herbert Spencer, " has the highest validity of 
 any." * How, then, can agnosticism be described 
 as " atheism writ respectable " ? 
 
 * First Principles, stereotyped edit., p. 98. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 69 
 
 But the agnosticism discussed here, it must 
 be remembered, is not that distressed mood of 
 doubt which haunts some tender souls; the 
 hesitation of a sensitive conscience, which will 
 not say it is sure while a single flaw in the 
 argument remains. The popular form of agnos- 
 ticism is not a doubt ; it is a creed — convinced, 
 militant, triumphant ! It is a nescience which 
 talks in more confident accents than science 
 itself dares to employ ; and it springs from a 
 philosophy that blots out not merely the distant 
 heavens, but much nearer and more familiar 
 landscapes. 
 
 The kinship of this type of agnosticism to 
 atheism becomes evident at what may be called 
 the second stage of its logic. It begins, as we 
 have seen, by proclaiming the existence of a 
 First Cause. It affirms, on the authority of the 
 laws of thought themselves, that He — or It — 
 exists, and is, in fact, the One Reality of the 
 universe. It then, with a little spray of meta- 
 physics — a few passes of debating-society logic 
 — dismisses this one Reality out of the kingdom 
 not only of worship, but of knowledge, and 
 
70 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 therefore of consideration. It cancels it as a 
 force affecting conduct. It may be the Supreme 
 Cause of everything else ; but in the practical 
 business of human life it is the cause of nothing. 
 It is essentially and eternally the Unknowable ; 
 and the Unknowable, in the real business of life, 
 is the non-existent. 
 
 Some of the more belligerent agnostics, indeed, 
 declare, not only that we cannot know the 
 Ultimate Cause of our existence, but there is no 
 reason why we should want to know it. " Why 
 should we wish to know ? '• asks the author of 
 " Mr. Balfour's Apologetics/' " What is God ? " 
 he demands again, in a key of scorn. "The 
 word represents a phantom, born of man's 
 ignorance and fear." 
 
 Now we have only to look at dogmatic 
 agnosticism as one of the two practical alter- 
 natives to Christian faith, and a whole procession 
 of incredibilities instantly make their appearance. 
 Some belong to what may be called the moral 
 order. 
 
 Tried by the test of the black, incredible 
 shadow it casts on the entire landscape of human 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 71 
 
 life, agnosticism is not merely as hateful as 
 atheism ; it is more hateful, and this by almost 
 measureless degrees. Atheism declares, " The 
 heavens are empty. There is no God. We are 
 orphans. " Here is a creed of tears ! But 
 orphanage, after all, is not the worst of lots. 
 An unseen father may be loved. A dead father 
 may be a tender and kindling memory. 
 
 But agnosticism bids us see, sitting at the 
 crown of the universe, a Figure shrouded in a 
 mist through which breaks no gleam of light. 
 He — or It — hidden in the heart of that darkness 
 is the Father of our spirits. He could give us 
 the revelation of Himself. Nay, He has so made 
 us that the desire to know Him is part of our very 
 nature. How deep and indestructible is desire 
 in us for that knowledge is written on every page 
 of history. The temples and altars of every age 
 and every land are its witnesses. All human 
 literature reflects it. 
 
 But He Who put that impulse in us placed it 
 there that He might jest with it. He hides 
 Himself from His offspring. He has put — as if 
 in mockery — the instinct of worship within us ; 
 
72 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 He has made it the purest force in our nature, 
 the root of a thousand noble things. Yet it is 
 an instinct that lies ! It has been created only 
 to be cheated. 
 
 There is no other example in nature of an 
 organ left without an answering element and use. 
 All that we know of the method of nature makes 
 it incredible that the eye could come into exist- 
 ence if no light waited for it, to be its servant, 
 and the field for its exercise. But on the agnostic 
 theory the profoundest instinct in our spiritual 
 nature is that cruel and bewildering paradox, a 
 faculty without a use ; an eye set in a kingdom 
 of darkness ! 
 
 And reason, it may be added, has this to say 
 of religion. It represents exactly what, if God 
 does exist, ought to be our mood towards Him. 
 He is our maker. Our spirit takes its life from 
 the breath of His lips. His bounty feeds us. 
 His works delight us. The highest exercise of 
 our intelligence is, in Kepler's words, " to think 
 His thoughts after Him." That we should love 
 Him is surely the first impulse and the highest 
 expression of duty. It is the one supremely 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 73 
 
 rational mood of the soul. To be like Him ought 
 to be the sleepless aspiration of the spirit that 
 comes from Him. " Make me beautiful within," 
 was, Plato tells us, his highest prayer to God. 
 But only the thought and presence of God can 
 make the inner nature beautiful. 
 
 Yet this, the highest mode of our nature, which 
 has on its side the utmost warrant of reason is, on 
 the agnostic theory, the most complete delusion ! 
 It is nothing more than a mockery ; a lie, set in 
 the high places of the human soul, and set there by 
 the hand that made the soul ; for all knowledge 
 of God is eternally and essentially impossible. 
 What incredibility can be more stupendous than 
 this! 
 
 And strange to say, this instinct in us which 
 turns towards God, and which agnosticism 
 declares to be eternally predoomed to defeat, is 
 visibly the root of the best things in human life. 
 What heroisms it inspires ! What charities leap 
 into existence at its touch ! What saints it has 
 begotten ! What a literature it has created ! And 
 we are asked to believe that behind the heroisms 
 of uncounted martyrs, behind the hymns of 
 
74 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 worshipping multitudes, the prayers of little 
 children, the hopes of dying saints, is — a 
 mockery. Eeligion is nothing but an illusion ! 
 
 This surely is one of the most incredible state- 
 ments ever offered to the human mind. " Even 
 as an illusion," says Professor Gwatkin, " the 
 belief has to be accounted for ; and if it is an 
 illusion, it is beyond comparison the mightiest of 
 human illusions. This illusion has been the 
 greatest nation-making, nation-binding, nation- 
 breaking power in history, the great guiding, 
 lifting, transfiguring power of human life. This 
 illusion has not only nerved men, and even 
 tender women, to face a cross of shame before 
 the world, but given them the higher courage, 
 and still higher patience, needed for the obscure 
 and hopeless toil of continual failure in the work 
 apparently appointed them. If the greatest 
 force of history and life is an illusion, can we 
 trust even the reasoning which professes to prove 
 it so?"* 
 
 But the antecedent incredibilities of agnos- 
 ticism on the moral side grow as we meditate on 
 
 * The Knowledge of God, vol. i., p. 116. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 75 
 
 them. If the best thing in us is the most false, 
 the Unknowable Cause of our lives intended it to 
 be so. He planted in us that loftiest impulse of 
 which the human soul is conscious — the aspiration 
 after Himself — only that He might mock it. 
 This is a creed which makes the veil on the face 
 of " the Infinite and Eternal Energy from which 
 all things proceed," a mask which hides the 
 grinning face of a devil ! 
 
 Yet if the Unknowable intended to conceal 
 Himself, and to remain always for us, His 
 creatures, an unguessed Riddle, He has some- 
 how failed in that strange purpose. The great 
 secret has not been kept. We have found out 
 the Undiscoverable ! We talk of Him, speculate 
 about Him, build temples to Him, sprinkle the 
 landscape with churches to His honour. The 
 very air of the world is shaken with hymns to 
 His praise. A whole literature has been created 
 by discussion about Him. And on the agnostic 
 theory the Unknown Cause of all things must 
 have meant this to happen. He must have 
 intended that, while the discovery that He is 
 for ever Unknowable should be reserved for a 
 
76 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 little committee of philosophers, an overwhelming 
 majority of the human race were to be persuaded, 
 not only that God could be known, but that 
 they knew Him ; that they possessed a revelation 
 of His will; that love was possible not only 
 from God to them, but from them to God. 
 
 The Ultimate Reality, in a word, is a riddle 
 which can never be guessed ; but the human 
 soul has been so planned by its Maker that it 
 cannot escape spending its utmost energies in 
 the exercise of trying to guess the Unguessable. 
 What a cruel jest is human nature if this be the 
 case ! And the sly Jester who planned it for 
 His own entertainment is — the Father of our 
 spirits ! On this theory man is, in Tennyson's 
 bitter words — and in a deeper sense than 
 Tennyson meant — 
 
 " . . . a monster then, a dream : 
 A discord. Dragons of the prime 
 That tear each other in their slime, 
 Were mellow music matched with him." 
 
 Agnosticism, it is clear, is a creed discredited in 
 advance by stupendous moral incredibilities. It 
 is a creed to be hated, since it implies that the 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 77 
 
 Unknown Cause which made us has towards us 
 a mood of scorn. But it is also a creed as 
 dangerous as it is hateful. Its logic leaves — or 
 in the long-run must leave — morality wrecked. 
 For it robs right of all divine sanction, and 
 wrong of all inevitable penalty, as completely as 
 does atheism. 
 
 It is true, and most gladly admitted, that 
 many agnostics are upright and honourable men, 
 with a high standard of personal morality. They 
 keep, as a personal possession, the ethics of 
 Christianity, while rejecting the roots from 
 which those ethics spring. But it is the second 
 generation which tests the morality of a creed. 
 And the question to be considered is : What 
 would be the moral state of the world if every 
 other faith perished, and agnosticism became the 
 one creed of the race ? 
 
 No divine law of right or wrong could, in that 
 case, be recognised. Men would have no vision 
 of an Eternal Justice linking consequences to 
 acts, and judging all men by its own august 
 standard. No one, on the agnostic theory, can 
 so much as guess what is the will of the Unknown 
 
78 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Cause behind the veil of phenomena. Does that 
 hidden Cause love truth and hate lies ? Will 
 He — or It — punish lust and reward love ? No 
 one can tell. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, the most philosophic brain 
 ever devoted to the exposition and defence of 
 agnosticism, protests, it will be remembered, 
 almost with a touch of irritation, that he has no 
 concern about morals. He believed that a certain 
 element of mystery, which may discharge some 
 of the offices of religion, will remain when 
 religion itself has perished. But he warns us, 
 " I am not concerned to show what effect religious 
 sentiment, as hereafter thus modified, will have 
 as a moral ageut." " Will it make good men 
 and women ? " Herbert Spencer says that he 
 " has not argued, and is not bound to argue, 
 that it will do this." "Will it answer the pur- 
 poses of religion I " " I have said nothing," he 
 protests, "about its adequacy or inadequacy."* 
 
 But as to its inadequacy who can doubt ? 
 The rare and fine spirits of our race, touched 
 by what is rarest and finest in the atmosphere 
 
 * Nineteenth Ceniury, No. 82, p. 85. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 79 
 
 about them, might keep a high standard of 
 morality even when agnosticism became universal, 
 and all hope of any knowledge of God had 
 perished. But what of their children — the 
 generations brought up in a dreadful vacuum 
 where knowledge of God is not ? And what of 
 the drunkard and the savage ? 
 
 For them agnosticism has neither law nor 
 restraint. In the words of Mr. Justice Stephen, 
 " It can neither hang them nor damn them ; 
 how, then, can it hope to govern them ? " And 
 the problem of all creeds, it must be remembered, 
 lies in the message it has for the crowd ; for the 
 defeated, that is ; for the wrecked ; for the moral 
 failures of the race. 
 
 For agnosticism, as for atheism, morality must 
 be built on social utility. Goodness is to find its 
 motive, and its driving force, in the consideration, 
 put brutally, that it will " pay." But if anyone 
 thinks that sin will pay, or is willing to run the 
 risk of its not paying, for him agnosticism has 
 neither restraint nor warning. The agnostic is 
 not able to say, finally, and with a certainty 
 that has its roots in the very frame of the 
 
80 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 universe, that lying, lust, hate are everywhere 
 and always wrong ; that if they seem to succeed, 
 it is only for a time. If they succeed they are 
 right! If murder is useful — if it is only not 
 found out — for anything that agnosticism can 
 teach, it is beyond blame. When all morality is 
 resolved into the question of utility, essential 
 morality itself has evaporated. And a creed, 
 equipped with such ethics, must, when it comes 
 to its natural kingdom — when it has finally 
 captured the imagination of the world — let loose 
 disruptive forces that will wreck society. 
 
 Here, then, is a creed antecedently incredible, 
 and essentially hateful ; yet if it can be proved to 
 be true, what remains for us all but to accept it ? 
 Shall we cling to a lie because it is fair ; or 
 quarrel with truth for no better than aesthetic 
 reasons? But where is the tremendous energy 
 of logic needed to accredit to reason a creed 
 burdened with such results ? It simply does not 
 exist ! 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE CASE AGAINST AGNOSTICISM 
 
 " The first Cause of a Cosmos to be an adequate cause 
 and deserve the name, must be a Supreme Intelligence." — 
 Ward, Agno&ticism> vol. ii., p. 269. 
 
 The logic of agnosticism, such as it is, may be 
 expressed almost in a phrase. It does not con- 
 sist of any reasoned induction, gathered over 
 a wide area of facts. Its strength does not lie 
 in any destructive analysis of the evidences of 
 Christianity. It consists in the alleged discovery 
 of a metaphysical impossibility — an impossibility 
 constituted by the very nature of the human 
 mind — that God can come within the area of our 
 knowledge. Such knowledge is discovered to be 
 intrinsically and eternally impossible. It is made 
 incredible by the very nature of knowledge itself. 
 It has not arrived, because it could not ! 
 
 About this alleged impossibility of possessing 
 any knowledge of God some things are clear at a 
 
 G 81 
 
82 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 glance. The first is that all the presumptions 
 are against it. Professor Gwatkin puts this 
 with a touch of dry humour which intensifies 
 the strength of his argument. "If there is a 
 God," he says, "a personal Being above us, and 
 not below us, I think we may take it as possible 
 that He may have something to reveal; and 
 then, if He is able to reveal it, if He may be 
 supposed willing to do so, and if man is able to 
 receive it — on these four conditions revelation is 
 possible." 
 
 Which of those four conditions is so much as 
 doubtful ? It is certainly not the possibility that 
 " God may have something to reveal." As little 
 can it be that He is able to reveal it. The beasts 
 can speak to us ; is God lower than they ? To 
 doubt whether He is willing to make a revelation 
 is to impeach His goodness. The only remaining 
 doubt is whether man is able to receive such a 
 revelation. 
 
 But as to this, let it be noticed that agnosticism 
 itself is built on a paradox. It commits suicide 
 in the act of defining itself. For this denial of 
 * The Knowledge of God, vol. i., p. 6. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 83 
 
 the possibility of knowing anything about God 
 is based on the amount of knowledge we do 
 possess about Him ! How much we must know 
 about God before we are entitled to announce, 
 with absolute certainty, that all knowledge of 
 Him is beyond the reach of our intellect! 
 
 Huxley invented the term agnosticism, but 
 Herbert Spencer has supplied it with a philo- 
 sophy ; and we have only to recite the titles by 
 which Spencer describes what he calls " the Un- 
 knowable " to see what an amount of knowledge 
 is connoted by them. The Unknowable is " that 
 Ultimate Existence which was manifested in 
 infinitely varied ways before humanity arose." 
 Surely an Unknown which is " manifested " 
 becomes, in part at -least, the Known in the very 
 process of " manifestation." The Unknowable, 
 again, is " that great stream of creative power, 
 unlimited in space and time, of which humanity 
 is a transitory product." " A stream of creative 
 power;" this is a conception as definite, and as 
 surely connoting knowledge, as the great affirm- 
 ation of Scripture, " God is a Spirit." The 
 Unknowable, says Spencer, is the All-being ; the 
 
84 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Ultimate Reality ; " the same power which in 
 ourselves wells up in the form of consciousness." * 
 This procession of titles certainly pre-supposes 
 a very large area of knowledge. Can that 
 Power about which so much is known, and 
 known so positively, be honestly described as 
 " Unknown " ? 
 
 But the assertion that God is unknowable, it 
 will be found, is extracted from a definition of 
 knowledge which begs the whole question ; and 
 about which only one thing has to be stated in 
 order to show that it means something else than 
 it seems to mean, and is, in fact, little else than 
 a trick with words. It is a definition which 
 proves that not only is the Ultimate Cause of all 
 things unknowable, but so are a hundred other 
 things that lie within the reach of our senses, 
 things which constitute the whole machinery 
 of practical life, and with which we deal every 
 moment of our lives. 
 
 Herbert Spencer introduces us to a vast 
 procession of " unknowables." " Space," he says, 
 "is unknowable;" so is matter, so is mind. 
 
 * Nineteenth Century, No. 89, p, 5. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 85 
 
 Force stands in the category of things beyond 
 the possibility of knowledge. So does motion. 
 The earth is unknowable ; we ourselves are un- 
 knowable even by ourselves. The solar system 
 is " an utterly inconceivable object " ; a statement 
 which, taken literally, reduces astronomy, as a 
 science, to bankruptcy. We may imagine we 
 know something about such a familiar exercise 
 as walking; but Herbert Spencer assures us 
 that " it is impossible to conceive of rest becoming 
 motion or motion rest." And yet we walk ! 
 
 Herbert Spencer's logic is equally confident, 
 and equally triumphant, at all these points. And, 
 under the spell of his argument, a limitless con- 
 tinent of the unknown spreads about us, and 
 stretches from our very toes to the horizon. 
 After proving that " the ultimate unit of matter 
 must remain absolutely unknown " ; that " posi- 
 tion in space is inconceivable " ; that " motion is 
 truly not cognisable," Spencer concludes by 
 making the soul of man himself the most hope- 
 less of all unknowables. " The personality of 
 which each is conscious, and of which the 
 existence is, to each, a fact beyond all others 
 
86 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 most certain, is yet a thing which cannot be 
 truly known at all. Knowledge of it is forbidden 
 by the very nature of thought." * 
 
 This ought to be impressive, since it is " the 
 very nature of thought " which forbids us to know 
 ourselves. But then Spencer goes on to say 
 " the very nature of thought is itself unknown " ; 
 and how one unknown thing can explain and 
 prove another equally unknown, can be clear 
 only to a philosopher. 
 
 Spencer's logic at this point may be briefly 
 stated. Knowledge, he says, implies (1) some- 
 thing known, (2) some one, or something that 
 knows it. Here is the famous resolution of 
 knowledge into the antithesis of subject and 
 object. How can the soul know itself? If the 
 object known is self, what is the subject which 
 knows it ? Are there two selves ? The know- 
 ledge of oneself means a state in which the 
 object known and the subject which knows it 
 are one, and this means the annihilation of both 
 subject and object, which, to quote Euclid, "is 
 absurd." So we get Spencer's conclusion that 
 
 * First Principles, par. 20. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF Si 
 
 knowledge of ourselves is forbidden by the very 
 nature of knowledge. 
 
 Professor Momerie, it will be remembered, 
 cleverly applies the logic, by which Spencer 
 thinks he proves that self-knowledge is impos- 
 sible, to self-love. Certainly the fundamental 
 condition of all love is the antithesis of subject 
 and object. In love there is an object loved and 
 a subject that loves. To say that a man loves 
 himself is the assertion that subject and object 
 are identical; but this is, on Spencer's logic, 
 impossible. Therefore no man can any more 
 love himself than he can know himself. And 
 yet the biggest fact in human life is exactly that 
 self-love which, on Spencers logic, can never 
 exist. 
 
 " Personality, M says Spencer, "is the fact 
 beyond all others the most certain;" yet, to 
 quote Professor Momerie, " the fact which stands 
 first in order of certainty Mr. Spencer will not 
 allow to stand even last in the order of know- 
 ledge." He declares, in regard to it, we are and 
 must ever remain completely ignorant. Spencer's 
 law» of thought, in a word, go to prove that we 
 
88 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 are sure of what is somewhat doubtful, but are 
 not sure of that in regard to which there can be 
 no doubt. What a paradox is this philosophy 
 which describes beliefs of inferior validity as 
 knowledge, and that which has the highest 
 possible validity as ignorance. 
 
 To the practical reason it will seem unneces- 
 sary to consider, too anxiously, a definition of 
 knowledge which lands us in such remarkable 
 conclusions; but its logic is easily mastered. 
 Knowledge, according to Spencer, can only 
 come by comparison. There must be two or 
 more things to be compared before knowledge is 
 possible. Whatever cannot be referred to a class 
 is unknowable. Now as there cannot be two 
 Ultimate Causes to be compared, knowledge at 
 this point must be pronounced unattainable. It 
 is hardly a burlesque to say that, by the same 
 logic, if there were only one baby in the world 
 it, too, would be unknowable to its own mother, 
 until a little brother or sister arrived to make 
 comparisons possible. 
 
 To be known, again, according to Spencer, 
 "a thing must be conceived as having attri- 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 89 
 
 butes." * But since such things as space, time, 
 motion, God, have no attributes, they are for ever 
 unknowable, etc. 
 
 This definition of knowledge is, obviously, a 
 torpedo which blows up many other things than 
 religion. It shatters science. For what can 
 science teach if time, space, motion, matter, 
 the earth, the solar system, are all dismissed 
 into the realms of the essentially and eternally 
 unknowable ? The same logic which proves 
 that the soul can never know God proves a 
 man cannot know himself. We are invited, in 
 a word, to believe that there is no intermediate 
 stage betwixt omniscience, and universal and 
 eternal ignorance. We can know nothing if 
 we do not know everything. 
 
 A plain man will reply that Spencer s logic 
 works both ways. We are assured that, in a 
 metaphysical sense, we cannot rt know " God ; 
 and in exactly the same sense we cannot 
 know time, space, matter, motion, the solar 
 system, the earth, or our own souls. But we 
 certainly know enough about these latter 
 
 * First Principles, par. 13. 
 
90 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 V unknowables " to use them as forces for the ends 
 we choose. We build life and science on them ; 
 and life and science are realities. We win or 
 miss happiness in their use; and happiness is 
 not a dream. And if God is only " unknowable " 
 in the sense in which they are, we may know 
 enough of Him to colour life, and create a 
 morality ; enough for duty, for worship, for love. 
 We can, under such conditions, cheerfully leave 
 philosophers to wrangle over the metaphysics of 
 knowledge. 
 
 But another line of thought has to be con- 
 sidered. It is certain that, somehow, a knowledge 
 of that Unknown Power does exist — a knowledge 
 sufficient to create a literature, to inspire a wor- 
 ship, to deflect the history of the world. The 
 very starting-point of agnosticism, indeed, the 
 affirmation that the Cause of all things exists, is 
 an assertion of knowledge. We cannot conceive 
 of its existence except we know something about 
 it. " The Unknowable," says Professor Gwatkin, 
 "is the Unthinkable." 
 
 Herbert Spencer himself, in the name of 
 agnosticism, does a great deal of thinking about 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 91 
 
 "the Unthinkable." This Unascertained Some- 
 what, or Something, behind all phenomena, he 
 says, is u the Ultimate Cause of all things." 
 Now it is a postulate of the natural reason that 
 there must be some relation betwixt a cause and 
 its effect. Science itself is built on that postulate, 
 and would perish if it were disproved. 
 
 This Unknowable Cause must, for one thing, 
 possess power sufficient to produce the effects of 
 which it is the cause. So the visible universe is 
 a witness to the fact that the Unknowable is the 
 Almighty. As the system of nature is a unit, it 
 must be the product of a single cause. So the 
 Unknowable, we are sure, is One. 
 
 Nature, too, is built on plan. All science 
 proceeds on this assumption, and would be 
 impossible if it were denied. Therefore it is 
 certain that the Unknowable acts on method. 
 The visible universe is stained to its minutest 
 atom with the characteristics of design. It is 
 penetrated through and through with thought, 
 or we could not think about it. And how can 
 we have intelligibility in the result without 
 intelligence in the cause? 
 
92 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 The existence of general laws does not disprove 
 design ; they are an expression of it ; they act as 
 its servants. The "law3 of nature" are only 
 names for discovered uniformities and successions 
 in phenomena. Even if these laws can be ex- 
 pressed in mechanical formulae, the formula? 
 must have design behind them, and be its 
 manifestations. Purpose in nature can only be 
 denied by assuming with Comte that sequences, 
 because they are regular, cannot have an intelli- 
 gent cause. A disorderly system of nature, it is 
 taken for granted, would require a supernatural 
 explanation, but an orderly system requires none. 
 Professor Momerie's answer is final : " Purpose 
 is none the less purpose because it is unchange- 
 able. Knowledge is none the less knowledge 
 because it is complete. Will is none the less will 
 because it is unconquerable. Thought is none 
 the less thought because it embraces the entire 
 universe at once." 
 
 Now design means a reasoned end, and the 
 choice of fit means to reach that end. The 
 universe, in a word, is built on reason shaped 
 by purpose; and this proves the existence 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 93 
 
 of reason and will in its Unknowable Cause. 
 Reason and will, again, are the characteristics 
 of personality, so the Unknowable is a person. 
 Even Haeckel, who resolves "the ultimate 
 cause of all phenomena" into "an extremely 
 attenuated, elastic and light jelly " ; yet finds 
 it necessary to endow this primal jelly with 
 "sensation and will; though," he adds, on 
 reflection, " naturally of the lowest grade." 
 How this mysterious jelly from which the 
 universe has sprung, can bestow on us " sensation 
 and will " of a higher grade than it possesses it- 
 self is not clear ; but sensation and will are 
 certainly qualities of personality. 
 
 Thus, by a logic as absolute as the laws of 
 thought themselves, we can read in the visible 
 phenomena about us proofs that their Cause 
 possesses infinite power and wisdom, that He — 
 or It — chooses reasoned ends, and reaches them 
 by fit means ; that It is possessed of reason and 
 will, and so is a Person. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, indeed, goes on to say, in 
 express terms, that "the Power manifested 
 throughout the universe, distinguished as material, 
 
94 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 is the same Power which in ourselves wells up in 
 the form of consciousness." If this be true, 
 that Power must possess consciousness, or it 
 lacks what it has given us. In his auto- 
 biography, Spencer tells us there have been 
 moments in his experience when, meditating 
 on the amazing universe, he almost forgot 
 his own metaphysics; and "the thought," he 
 says, "that consciousness in some rudimentary 
 form is omnipresent was borne in upon 
 me." But consciousness is the sure mark of 
 personality. 
 
 It may be added that what makes science 
 possible is something more than the mere 
 observed succession of phenomena. It is an 
 element of what may be called trustworthiness 
 in nature ; a trustworthiness which runs back to 
 a spiritual root. Why is yesterday a pledge of 
 to-morrow ? Science is built on the belief that 
 what has happened once will, under the same 
 conditions, infallibly happen again. To doubt 
 this would be the wreck of all knowledge. Yet 
 we have no guarantee for the great uniformities 
 of nature, except in the assumption of Something 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 95 
 
 behind nature, of whose fidelity — to borrow a 
 moral term — they are the reflection. 
 
 The fidelities of physical nature are but the 
 expression in physical terms of the fidelity of 
 God. " A physical universe that is spiritually 
 and morally trustworthy at the root,'* is, in the 
 words of Professor Campbell Fraser, the one 
 condition that makes physical science possible. 
 So we get in physical science itself the revelation 
 of a moral quality in the Cause behind all 
 phenomena; and this, too, brings that Cause 
 within the area of the Known. 
 
 At the point where the revelation of lower 
 phenomena ends, another line of revelation 
 begins. Man is part of a system of things. He 
 is " the last work " of the Ultimate Cause ; he is 
 its highest work. And if the character of the 
 Ultimate Cause is revealed in the lower forms of 
 nature, it must find still clearer manifestation 
 in this, its loftiest form. 
 
 On what plan has the Ultimate Cause built 
 the soul of man ? By the witness of his own 
 consciousness — and this, for him, is the ultimate 
 certainty — man knows that he is a free spirit. 
 
96 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 He moves amongst the forces of nature, with 
 power to use them as his tools ; to set them in 
 new combinations, and so produce results of 
 which they themselves are incapable. 
 
 Moreover, the central thing in him is character, 
 and character is more than the sum- total of 
 habits. It has a moral root. Conscience is its 
 shaping force. Its culminating point is reached 
 when will and conscience move together in 
 unbroken rhythm. 
 
 Now, He who gave us these things, must Him- 
 self possess them ; or He — or It — is lower than 
 we are. Could That which is pitiless, endow us 
 with pity ? Could That which is Itself loveless, 
 set our natures in key with the music of love ? 
 The Ultimate Cause which has set that sublime 
 thing we call conscience in human nature, must 
 Itself be a moral agent; or It has bestowed on 
 us a loftier gift than is to be found in Its own 
 nature. 
 
 If we reflect, again, we find there is wrought 
 into the very fibres of man's nature a mystic, 
 resistless, universal Something which makes it 
 answer to the call of goodness, and recoil in 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 97 
 
 the presence of great wickedness. In the lower 
 forms of life, there is the strange thing we call 
 instinct. It is not reason. It reaches its end 
 by processes swifter than reason knows. What 
 science can explain that impulse which makes the 
 bee build its hexagonal cell ; or that teaches the 
 bird, born under northern skies, to wing its swift, 
 unguided flight southward, across trackless 
 leagues of land and sea, to warmer climates ? 
 
 And there is a mysterious force in us, linking 
 us to the moral realm, which corresponds to that 
 strange power in the lower animals. " Instinct," 
 says Professor Gwatkin, " seems a deeper mystery 
 than intellect, and may be more nearly connected 
 with the final secret of life. It comes up from 
 unknown depths, and somehow it comes up true." 
 In exactly the same way, certain moral instincts 
 lie hid in man's soul that science cannot explain, 
 but which exist, and, in Professor Gwatkin's 
 words, " they come up true." 
 
 These are the central qualities of man's nature 
 — will, conscience, personality; the power to 
 love; a cluster of imperishable moral instincts. 
 Now we are sure — unless reason betrays us — that 
 
 H 
 
98 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the Cause which registers itself in these effects 
 must have something that corresponds to them. 
 How, then, can it be described as Unknown; 
 still more as Unknowable ? 
 
 And if the individual human life is a revelation 
 of the nature of the Cause from which it springs, 
 history — the life of the race — is yet another 
 revelation. For we are sure it is an evolution ; 
 a process shaped by definite forces ; an Epic 
 moving towards a definite goal, which the Force 
 behind history has chosen. 
 
 The revelation of the Cause behind all 
 phenomena thus given by nature, and man, and 
 history, is not perfect. It is the broken arc of a 
 circle ; a sheaf of splintered rays streaming 
 through imperfect media ; the twin, ascending 
 curve of an uncompleted arch. The arch needs 
 its key-stone, the splintered light the clear 
 medium, the broken circle the completing 
 segment. And this, Christian faith declares, is 
 to be found in a written revelation, or in an 
 Incarnation. But this is another line of thought, 
 and need not be discussed here. 
 
 The facts we have recited are plain and 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 99 
 
 unchallengeable ; they constitute a chain of 
 proofs, in which there is not a broken link, 
 that a revelation of the nature of the Ultimate 
 Cause is given in the system of things about us. 
 The logic proceeds on the supposition that the 
 acts of an agent are an interpretation of character. 
 We are sure of nothing if not of this. It is the 
 law by which we judge each other. Does it 
 fail when applied to God ? What should we 
 say of a science that asked us to believe that 
 the spectroscope is a sure guide as far as the 
 light of the smaller planets is concerned, but 
 becomes unreliable when applied to the sun ! 
 Science knows no such breach in the continuity 
 of law throughout the whole universe. 
 
 Now the admission of the argument thus 
 stated is fatal to agnosticism, for it proves 
 that what it dismisses as the Unknowable is 
 actually known. But the denial of the argument 
 is equally ruinous to the agnostic. It is certain 
 that the Ultimate Cause has put in the human 
 mind the instinct, the intellectual necessity, 
 which compels that mind to read the nature of 
 a cause in the character of its effects. That 
 
100 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 impulse is not born of chance ; it is part of the 
 system of things. And, if it is not trustworthy, 
 then it is planned to deceive ! The Ultimate 
 Cause has set a lie in the high places of the 
 human intelligence, and given it empire over 
 that intelligence. 
 
 But this, too, it must be insisted, is a reve- 
 lation of the character of that Unascertained 
 Something which is behind all phenomena ; a 
 revelation of its purpose ; of the instruments 
 it uses, of the end towards which it works. So, 
 that Unascertained Something comes within 
 the area of our knowledge, even on this theory, 
 and by that very fact is a disproof of agnosticism. 
 The Unknowable stands to this extent, at least, 
 in the category of the Known. 
 
 But how dreadful is the knowledge ! It is 
 not Good, but Evil, that planned the world. 
 And yet, strange to say, this Unknown Power 
 which has enacted a lie, and set it in authority 
 over the human intellect, has also planted in 
 man's nature the instinct which condemns lying 
 and counts truth noble and sacred ! 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PARADOX OF AGNOSTICISM 
 
 " The agnostic's position is as if Euclid worked out his 
 demonstration complete, and then turned round of a sudden 
 to dispute the Q.E.D. He is not reasoning, but simply 
 refusing to reason." — Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, 
 vol. i., p. 15. 
 
 "The whole system of our belief as to the intrinsic 
 reasonableness of conduct must fall, without a hypothesis 
 unverifiable by experience reconciling the individual with 
 the Universal Keason, without a belief, in some form or 
 other, that the moral order which we see imperfectly 
 realised in this actual world is yet actually perfect. If we 
 reject this belief . . . the cosmos of duty is reduced to a 
 chaos ; and the prolonged effort of the human intellect to 
 frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct is seen to have 
 been predoomed to inevitable failure." — Sidgwick, Method 
 of Ethics. 
 
 No attempt is made in these chapters to give 
 more than the briefest hints of the case against 
 agnosticism ; hints which might easily be drawn 
 out into a volume. But let this brief outline be 
 summed up in a few sentences. 
 
 Agnosticism affirms an ignorance too spacious 
 
 to be credible; an ignorance so wide, indeed, 
 
 101 
 
102 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 that, if it really exists, it destroys science as 
 well as religion. It casts an eclipse on this 
 world as deep and black as on the next. It 
 affirms that we know nothing, and can know 
 nothing, not only of the Ultimate Cause oi 
 things, but of ourselves, and of the things we 
 handle as tools every day. 
 
 Time, as we have seen, is one unknown ; 
 space is another ; the solar system is a third ; 
 we ourselves are unknown to ourselves. A 
 cobweb of metaphysics is spun that shuts out 
 not only the sun at noon-day, and the stars that 
 burn in the nightly heavens, but even the 
 familiar lights and landscapes of earth. Nothing 
 but the foolish awe of unmeaning words — the 
 cowardly dread of great names — forbids us to 
 treat the whole philosophy of the unknown as 
 a jest. 
 
 It must be remembered that Darwin himself 
 was not a Spencerian. " Such parts of Spencer 
 as I have read with care," he says, " impressed 
 my mind with the idea of his inexhaustible 
 wealth of suggestion, but never convinced me ! " * 
 * Life and Letters, vol. iii., p. 894. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 103 
 
 And in that fine and powerful book, " Naturalism 
 and Agnosticism," Professor Ward talks of 
 Spencer's philosophy of agnosticism in language 
 of great plainness. " His flimsy agnosticism,' ' he 
 says, " is only saved from being utter nonsense" 
 by " the inconsistent implications and admissions 
 of an idealistic character scattered through his 
 writings." 
 
 How can any one, indeed, contemplate without 
 a smile the spectacle of a philosopher sitting in 
 his study playing a few ingenious tricks with 
 logic ; and, on the authority of that performance, 
 giving the lie to the raptures of all the saints, 
 and the surest consciousness of the highest souls 
 of the race ! The answered prayers, the realised 
 deliverances, the transfigured lives, the historic 
 reformations of twenty centuries are dismissed 
 as foolish dreams on the strength of a few passes 
 of debating society logic. 
 
 And this is only part of the case. About 
 nine-tenths of agnostic philosophy, it may be 
 said that, true or false, we must forget it — we 
 must agree to act as if it were untrue — the 
 moment we step into practical life. We cannot 
 
104 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 mention it in the open air, or try to act on it 
 in the hurry of daily affairs, without making 
 ourselves ridiculous. We must assume that we 
 know force, motion, time, matter and the solar 
 system ; or what becomes of science ? How 
 could we build a bridge, or run a railway, or 
 sail a ship, if we really knew nothing of these 
 things ? Even the most convinced agnostic must 
 forget that time is unknowable when he has to 
 catch a train. 
 
 Why do men so conveniently forget nine- 
 tenths of the philosophy of agnosticism, and 
 remember only the final and dreadful tenth — 
 that which touches God and blots Him out? 
 May not the answer be that, in too many cases, 
 at least, this philosophy fits in with that 
 unconfessed bias of the human heart against 
 God on which the Divine Word puts its finger 
 and names it sin ? 
 
 Agnosticism, on the moral side, is an easy 
 creed. It might almost be described as a general 
 agreement about God that nobody shall so much 
 as ask what is His will concerning us. But 
 how profoundly this theory, if it at once 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 105 
 
 captured the world and shaped it to its own 
 evil image, would alfect the ethics of the race 
 is dear. It creates a totally new moral landscape. 
 The measureless horizons of eternity are gone; 
 there remains only the tiny curve of time. Its 
 moral code strikes a baser key than even that 
 of atheism. " There is no God I Let us act as 
 if there were none ! " the logic of that dreadful 
 deduction is at least courageous, and it is flaw- 
 less. " There is a God ; but He does not count. 
 Let us act as if He did not exist": that is a 
 conclusion that shocks reason as profoundly as 
 it disquiets the conscience. 
 
 And let it be remembered that there is no 
 such thing as an interregnum in morals. If 
 divine law as a rule of conduct is cancelled, 
 something must step into its place; and it is 
 melancholy to recall the attempts which have 
 been made from the agnostic side to find a 
 substitute for Christian ethics. " I will at least 
 live like a gentleman," said Leslie Stephen, when 
 he had definitely renounced his Christian faith ; 
 and he acted on that fine resolve. But what 
 about those who are not "gentlemen"? What 
 
106 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 about the wife-beater ? What about the children 
 of the slums, the savages bred in heathenism ? 
 
 Christianity can turn icicles into fire : and 
 this is the miracle for which the world waits. It 
 wants, in other words, a spiritual force which can 
 transfigure the brute ; which can regenerate wild 
 tribes, and transmute into beauty the human 
 waste of great cities. And the morality which 
 consists in " living like a gentleman " will not 
 work these miracles. 
 
 History is rich in what may be called literary 
 substitutes for a divine law of conduct ; the 
 " utility" of John Stuart Mill; the " persistent 
 instinct, innate or partly acquired/' of Darwin : 
 the test of " conduciveness to happiness " of 
 Herbert Spencer; the " utterance of the public 
 spirit of the race " of Leslie Stephen ; the " effect 
 of social rules enforced by penalty " of Professor 
 Bain. And, as restraints of the terrific forces of 
 sin, they are all mere cobwebs. 
 
 This, then, is the indictment of agnosticism. 
 It is intellectually a self-refuted paradox. It 
 escapes being dismissed as a jest only because 
 nine-tenths of its curious philosophy is forgotten. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 107 
 
 On the strength of a metaphysical refinement 
 which proclaims the invalidity of all knowledge, 
 and must therefore in practical life be forgotten, 
 the great procession of witnesses for God — 
 conscience within and nature without, the 
 written Word, the signature of religion on 
 history, the divine figure of Christ — all are 
 dismissed as dreams. God Himself becomes an 
 infinite, eternal, and omnipotent Irrelevancy in 
 His own universe. 
 
 daring, dreadful, monstrous creed ! And 
 we are asked to accept it as the result of 
 an analysis of knowledge which, the moment 
 practical affairs are touched, even the agnostic 
 himself must dismiss as untrue. What other 
 creed can be imagined which requires us to 
 believe so much, and offers us so little justifica- 
 tion for that belief ? 
 
 Theism, it may be frankly admitted, has its 
 difficulties — difficulties born of the mystery 
 inevitable when the finite mind strives to 
 conceive the Infinite. But where Theism has 
 difficulties its alternatives have incredibilities, not 
 to say impossibilities. Christian theism, more- 
 
108 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 over, is accredited by its ethics. It is the one 
 effective system of morals that human history 
 knows. Every sane man must wish it to be 
 true. But both atheism and agnosticism are 
 discredited by their morality — or, rather, by 
 their want of morality. If they conquered 
 the world it would only be to destroy it. An 
 impossible creed, in each case, is linked to an 
 intolerable morality; and we may say of each 
 that, wherever the truth lies, it cannot be here ! 
 i( One should hesitate," says a French wit, 
 " in giving one's opinion on philosophy when we 
 differ from the sages, and on religion when 
 we differ from the saints." But in this debate 
 nearly all the sages, and absolutely all the saints, 
 are on the side of Christianity ! It is a creed 
 which, unless perverted, certainly makes for 
 goodness. It keeps the golden chain of the 
 saints unbroken. Under every sky to-day, it is 
 creating pure lives and inspiring happy deaths. 
 " Our Father, which art in heaven " : this is the 
 creed that every good mother finds it sweet to 
 teach her child. It is a theology which is born 
 of love, and creates love. Its roots run down to 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 109 
 
 the heart. Its evidences are writ plain on the 
 very face of the universe. They are attested 
 by history. They are verified afresh in human 
 experience with every new day. 
 
 blessed faith ! And, hidden under many 
 disguises, are its inevitable alternatives : the 
 black, tremendous negation of Atheism; Pan- 
 theism which denies personality to man and 
 holiness to God ; the self-created and all- 
 including blindness of Agnosticism. 
 
 These rival creeds are not abstract theories, as 
 trivial as the coloured balls of a juggler, and, 
 like them, the mere sport of ingenious fingers. 
 Each is a formula of conduct. Each shapes life. 
 Each is a chart by which the ship must sail — is 
 sailing — towards an unseen port. Is there, for 
 the sane mind, room for doubt as to which chart 
 should be taken ? 
 
BOOK II 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVES TO BELIEF 
 IN CHRIST 
 
PART I 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH ABOUT CHRIST 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE PLACE OF CHRIST IN THE CHRISTIAN 
 CREED 
 
 "The religion of Christ goes mysteriously back to His 
 person." — Keiw. 
 
 "The historical fact of Christ, interpreted by faith, is 
 the central secret of the New Testament. It is ... a 
 great new Act of God, which constitutes a new world." — 
 Cairns, Christianity in the Modern World, p. 149. 
 
 The faith of Christendom finds its centre, not 
 in a book, or a creed, or a philosophy ; not in an 
 ethical code, or a many-centuried institution, but 
 in a Person. It stands or falls with the single 
 figure of Jesus Christ ; and it is worth while to 
 put, in untheological language, the general 
 Christian faith about Christ, taking what is 
 common to all varieties of Christian belief. For 
 if the differences of the Christian Churches 
 
 I 113 
 
1H THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 are strange and tragical, their agreements are 
 fundamental and eternal. 
 
 Jesus Christ, the general faith of Christendom 
 affirms, is not a far-off Figure, on the horizon of 
 history. He is not a creed in an Eastern gown, 
 a cluster of dogmas or of legends, which have 
 somehow gathered round a tiny kernel of truth 
 — nay, which have no kernel of fact at their 
 heart, but have crystallised round a mere vacuum. 
 He is a living Person, touching men to-day 
 with living hands, and searching the depths 
 of men's personality with living force. He trod 
 the earth's soil once, nineteen hundred years 
 ago; He shapes its life to-day. 
 
 Whether Christ once existed might be treated 
 as a question of documents and dates, a puzzle in 
 archaeology, a debate to be settled by a jury of 
 antiquarians. Christian faith affirms the historic 
 fact, but it affirms, too, the living fact. Christ 
 exists to-day ! This is the supreme truth for which 
 Christianity stands. So the debate about Christ 
 is to be waged not merely in the forum of history, 
 but of consciousness. And at this point an 
 appeal might well be made to Coleridge's test, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 115 
 
 "Do not talk to me," said Coleridge, "of the 
 evidences of Christianity. Try it. It has been 
 eighteen hundred years in existence, and nobody 
 who has tried it on its own terms has ever 
 challenged it as a failure." 
 
 But if the question has to be argued as one of 
 history, then the general faith of Christendom 
 declares that Jesus Christ is a person as real as 
 Alexander or Caesar, with a volume of evidence 
 as to His character and acts as much surer than 
 theirs, as His impress on the world is infinitely 
 deeper and more enduring. He lived, taught, 
 suffered, died, and rose from the dead, exactly as 
 described in the New Testament. And it is not 
 enough to say that the four Gospels are true 
 narratives ; it is inadequate to say, even, that 
 the whole New Testament is Christ's biography. 
 All history since is His biography. 
 
 The Gospels give the record of the few years 
 of His earthly life, and of His teaching, or of as 
 much of it as His immediate disciples could com- 
 prehend. The other books of the New Testament 
 show His impress on the generation that immedi- 
 ately followed. The history of the civilised world 
 
116 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 since is a record of the effect His life has produced 
 on the race. 
 
 The Christian Church holds Christ to be the 
 one sufficient ethical teacher mankind knows, 
 and after nineteen centuries the race still sits at 
 His feet. It has found nothing higher ; it can 
 imagine nothing higher. Interpreted by human 
 philosophy morality knows only two stages : the 
 earliest and rudest, the morality of definite rules ; 
 later — and loftier — comes the morality of prin- 
 ciples. But Christ lifts our ethics up to a 
 height beyond human philosophy. He teaches 
 a morality which is nothing else than love in 
 action. Rules, Principles, Love ; so the scheme 
 of morals is made complete. But it is Christ 
 who completes it. 
 
 And Christ gives us this new morality not 
 drawn out in a code, but embodied in human 
 terms, and linked to a victorious spiritual energy. 
 He is the supreme Example, as well as the one 
 authoritative Teacher, of the race. We judge 
 Him to-day by the new conscience He has Him- 
 self created, and so miss one-half of His unique 
 greatness. Only when He is tried by the ethical 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 117 
 
 standards of His own generation can His strange 
 separateness as a moral Teacher be realised. 
 
 But to say that Christ is the teacher of the 
 race, the one supreme expression of goodness it 
 knows, is insufficient. Christ cannot be classed 
 with men. He does not sit side by side with 
 even Plato or Marcus Aurelius. He is the 
 Eternal Word made flesh : the Eternal Word 
 dwelling amongst men, and full of grace and 
 truth. His birth was an incarnation. His life is 
 not an ascent — the crest of a wave of human 
 aspiration. It is a descent. We see, in it, God 
 stooping from heaven, not the daring spiritual 
 genius of man climbing to heaven. Christ 
 touches us with a kinsman's hands, tender as 
 none others ever were ; but the hands are those 
 that made us. 
 
 Christ, in brief, is more than a teacher about 
 God. He is God : God breaking out of the 
 spiritual realm, descending from the awful height 
 of His greatness, to rescue the souls He has 
 made from overwhelming peril; God taking 
 upon Himself human nature, that He may 
 redeem it 
 
118 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 So we do not come to Christ for dreams and 
 guesses about the First Cause of things. His 
 life is the supreme self-manifestation of the 
 personal God. " He that hath seen me " — it is 
 His own witness — " hath seen the Father." 
 
 And if the birth of Jesus Christ was an 
 incarnation, His death was more than a mar- 
 tyrdom. It was in some mysterious way an 
 expiation ; " a sacrifice for our sins," to use the 
 words of Scripture ; a sacrifice with mystery 
 above it, mystery beneath it, mystery about it ; 
 mystery which no theology can measure or 
 express. 
 
 Let there be put side by side Socrates taking 
 the cup of hemlock, with a touch of some- 
 thing like gaiety, and Christ taking His cup 
 with sweat of blood and mystery of anguish. 
 Plainly, in Christ's case there is an element no 
 ordinary human death knows : there are heights 
 to which our poor thoughts may not climb, and 
 depths for which we have no plummet. But it 
 is to Gethsemane, not to Athens, the race turns 
 in search of deliverance. Socrates, the Greek, 
 has never touched the world's conscience and 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 119 
 
 imagination as Christ, the Jew, has touched 
 it. 
 
 On the human side, as myriads know ex- 
 perimentally, from the death of Christ streams 
 a spiritual energy which transfigures the soul 
 surrendered to its influence. And in some dim, 
 mysterious way, beyond the range of our 
 thoughts, we are able to see that on the Divine 
 side His death was an event which — if only by 
 the effect that, as the overwhelming manifes- 
 tation of God's love, it produces on the human 
 soul — makes forgiveness possible. But from all 
 human speculations we come back to the brief, 
 plain words of Scripture for the meaning of 
 Christ's death — words overwhelming in their 
 significance when we remember their subject is 
 the Eternal Son of God : " He died for us." 
 
 What heights and depths are hidden in those 
 four words the human mind cannot guess. And 
 this not because God has His own secrets, and 
 keeps them, but because here is a deep beyond 
 our sounding. Yet on the Fact thus shrouded 
 in mystery, Christian faith — though it must be 
 confessed with much dimness and awe — rests with 
 
120 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 unshakable confidence ; remembering Pascal's 
 great saying : " The highest act of reason is to 
 recognise that there are things beyond its range." 
 
 And if Christ died as a sacrifice for our sins, 
 He rose again from the grave in sign of victory 
 over sin, and as pledge of final deliverance from 
 both sin and death for every soul that accepts 
 Him. 
 
 Christ, in a word, is accepted, not merely as a 
 Teacher, an Example ; He is a Saviour. He 
 offers us, not a speculation, but a Gospel, not a 
 philosophy, but a deliverance. He puts into our 
 hands, it is true, a code of perfect ethics ; but 
 He does vastly more. He touches our spirits 
 with a transfiguring moral energy. He not only 
 announces the Kingdom of God ; He creates 
 it. The words of the New Testament are 
 countersigned by the whole spiritual experience 
 of the race : "If any man be in Christ Jesus, 
 he is a new creation." 
 
 Christianity, we repeat, is not a philosophy, 
 but it has a philosophy, sublime in its height 
 and depth. Are we challenged to say what is its 
 innermost meaning ? On the Christian reading, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 121 
 
 God is building, afresh, into order and beauty, a 
 wrecked spiritual universe. It must, by the 
 necessity of things, be shaped by moral forces. 
 It is being built for love's ends, on love's 
 methods, and by love's energies. It is described 
 in the words of Scripture as "the kingdom of 
 His dear Son ? ; and, being translated into it we 
 become its subjects, live by its laws, dwell in its 
 security ; and in the climax of God's plans, shall 
 share its splendour. 
 
 Does all this seem a tale incredible ; a rose- 
 coloured myth ; a dream of dead and forgotten 
 poets, beautiful, no doubt, but vain as it is 
 beautiful? There are two things, it may be 
 replied, which make the Christian creed, with its 
 encirling rainbow of mysterious hopes, most 
 credible. 
 
 One is the character of God. "Nothing," 
 says Tertullian, "is so worthy of God as our 
 salvation/' We have only to reflect, indeed, 
 that if God is, in terms of morals, and on the 
 scale of His nature, what He expects us to be in 
 the scale of ours, then this vast and mysterious 
 redemption is not only credible, it is inevitable. 
 
122 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 It is exactly what God would do, ought to do, 
 must have done. 
 
 For let us imagine that in the palm of a 
 mother's hand lay the infinite wealth of God ; 
 that to the tenderness of a human mothers 
 heart were linked the wisdom and the omni- 
 potence of God. What son would then doubt 
 the possibility of there coming into his life a 
 redemption as rich in grace, as dazzling in scale 
 as that depicted in the Gospels? What hope 
 would be too great, what expectation too daring 
 for him to cherish ? A mother's love, linked to 
 omnipotence, would make everything possible. 
 
 Now, we are sure that with the infinite God 
 the power and wisdom needed for redemption 
 are present. And shall we dare to think that at 
 the sublime point of love God is less than His 
 creatures ? " The power that produced Jesus 
 must at least be equal to Jesus." That is sound 
 logic ; though it has Unitarian theology behind 
 it, and it is a logic which runs far. It makes 
 all tenderness of even human love one of the 
 credentials of Christianity. 
 
 The root of all scepticism as to the Christian 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 123 
 
 scheme — the master doubt, hidden under a 
 thousand disguises — is the thought that it is 
 "too good to be true." "Would that it were 
 true ! F the human soul sighs. " Would that it 
 could be proved beyond all reach of doubt!" 
 
 But, somehow, this conception of a redemption 
 wrought out by the love of God — love that 
 stoops to us from heights so great to a depth so 
 low, love that reaches its end through suffering 
 — actually exists. Who invented or imagined 
 it ? " Not God," says doubt ; " it is beyond His 
 range ; " — for this is what " it is too good to be 
 true" means. "The conception awoke in some 
 dreaming human brain." And so we are asked 
 to believe this utterly incredible thing — that a 
 human dream is greater than any divine reality 
 can be. Christianity is not too good for man to 
 imagine, or invent ; but it is too good for God to 
 execute ! 
 
 Do our thoughts, it may be asked in reply, 
 outrun those of God's in any other realm ? Do 
 we imagine better things than He has created, 
 or can create, in the chambers of the material 
 universe ? Why should our dreams transcend 
 
124 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 God's realities in the loftiest realm when 
 they cannot do it in the lowest ? "As the 
 heavens are high above the earth so are my 
 thoughts above your thoughts and my ways 
 above your ways." This is God's own message 
 to us ; it is certainly true everywhere in the 
 material universe ; why should it not be true in 
 the spiritual realm ? And if it is true, then 
 doubt about Christianity — doubt based on its 
 too magnificent reading of divine grace, and of 
 human hope — is absurd. 
 
 Perhaps the single new weapon Christian 
 polemics in this generation have gained is that 
 yielded by the larger scale, the infinitely height- 
 ened glory, of the physical world, as interpreted 
 by modern science. Early generations saw only 
 the outposts of the innumerable armies of the 
 skies. We can at least guess, as they could not, 
 the height of the heavens, the scale of God's 
 hosts. Moreover, the homely earth itself, under 
 the lens of science, gleams with mysterious 
 splendour. A speck of radium hides marvels in 
 its tiny curve, more arresting to the imagination 
 than Saturn with its girdle of fire, or Jupiter 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 125 
 
 with its cohort of flying moons. We have 
 learned to track matter back to the point where 
 it ceases to be matter, and by some strange 
 transition becomes Force. • 
 
 So the pebble on the sea shore flung up by 
 the last wave, as science has learned to read it, 
 is a starry universe with a whole planetary 
 system in each atom : its atom-planets divided 
 from each other and from their suns by im- 
 mensities of space relatively as great as the 
 heavens themselves, and repeating incessantly 
 the pageantry of sunset and dawn. What may 
 be called the astronomy of dust is as dazzling as 
 the astronomy of the nightly skies. 
 
 A God "doing wonders " in every realm the 
 mind can read or the senses discern. This is the 
 lesson we are learning afresh, and with deeper 
 meaning with every sunrise. And in that high- 
 est realm, where God Himself dwells; in the 
 order of spiritual existence, and in those qualities 
 which belong to His own nature — in love and 
 righteousness — shall we dare to imagine that 
 God suddenly shrinks in scale, and becomes 
 commonplace ? Do His thoughts in those great 
 
126 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 heights move in smaller curves than those the 
 planets know ? The Incarnation and the Cross, 
 tried by the one test of their wonder, are the 
 fitting and transcendent climax to the trans- 
 cendent scale of God's lower works, as we are 
 beginning, at last, to discern it. 
 
 This, the scale on which, in every other realm, 
 God plans and works, is the second fact that 
 makes redemption, as Christian faith conceives 
 it, credible. The wonder of the physical uni- 
 verse — the wonder of its extent, its laws, its 
 energies — gives us, so to speak, the curve of the 
 ellipse. With this majesty of conception, God 
 works in the realm of matter. When He passes 
 into the kingdom of love, w T ill any one ask us to 
 believe that He becomes commonplace ? Is it 
 credible that God has narrower thoughts and 
 works on a meaner scale of splendour in the 
 spiritual realm than in unconscious matter? 
 
 For some the miracles ascribed to Christ seem 
 incredibilities that make the whole story suspect. 
 They are in quarrel with natural order. But 
 such miracles, it should be remembered, are ex- 
 actly in the key of Christ's history ag Christian 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 127 
 
 faith reads it. " If one/' says Dr. Storr, "walks 
 along the path, over many lands and through 
 darkened centuries, which Christianity has bright- 
 ened with glowing lights, and on which she has 
 strewn astonishing victories, he can hardly be 
 amazed when he finds at the outset the deaf 
 hearing, the blind seeing, the dumb made to 
 speak, and the poor hearing the word of life. It 
 will be to him harmonious as music, though 
 loftier than the chiming suns, to see the Lord 
 of this religion arising from the grave and ascend- 
 ing in illustrious triumph to heaven ! " 
 
 The manner in which Christianity has affected 
 the world corresponds to this great creed. It is 
 a scheme, it may be admitted, so incredible in 
 its grace that all our theologies are too small for 
 it. Our hymns are not sweet enough for its 
 music. It is fairer than our dreams, it rises 
 above our most daring hopes. Faith itself ap- 
 prehends it with a slowness so tragical, and 
 misapprehends it with a diligence so evil, that 
 the wonder is it has not perished, killed by the 
 narrowness and the quarrels of its professed 
 adherents. If it were not divine it must have died. 
 
128 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 But it lives ! It is a creed that creates saints. 
 Men in every age have died for it. Persecution 
 has striven in vain to kill it. It does what no 
 other creed known to history has done : it works 
 spiritual miracles. In every land where its tale 
 is told, and with every new sun that dawns, 
 drunkards may be found whom it has made 
 sober, thieves whom it has taught to be honest, 
 harlots whom it has lifted up to chastity, selfish 
 men who, touched by its breath, live by the 
 great law of self-sacrifice. It is the root whence 
 blossom infinite heroisms and charities. 
 
 It is of Jesus Christ that the writer of " Ecce 
 Homo " says : " All human sorrows hide in His 
 wounds ; all human self-denials lean on His 
 cross." That is but a picturesque way of saying 
 — what is a commonplace — that all that is 
 purest, and strongest, and sweetest in human life 
 to-day, takes its inspiration from Jesus Christ. 
 
 To this, one of the most famous of living 
 scientists adds his testimony : " At the foot of 
 the Cross," says Sir Oliver Lodge, " there 
 has been a perennial experience of relief and 
 renovation." 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 129 
 
 If a witness of another race is needed, let 
 those fine and oft-quoted words of Heine be 
 recalled : 
 
 " How great a drama is the Passion of 
 Christ ! And how finely it is justified by the 
 prophecies of the Old Testament ! It was 
 inevitable ; it was the red seal of faith ; tes- 
 tamentum. . . . How gracious a figure is 
 that of the Man-God ! Moses loved his people 
 with touching affection ; he cared for that 
 people's future as a mother would. But Christ 
 loved all humanity ; that Sun sent the flames 
 of its benevolent rays over all the world. His 
 words are a balm for all the wounds this world 
 can inflict, and the blood that was shed at 
 Golgotha became a healing stream for all that 
 suffer. . . . The white marble gods of the 
 Greeks were spattered with this blood, and they 
 sickened with inward terror, and could never 
 more regain their health." 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE FIRST ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN 
 FAITH: A DIVINE CHARACTER 
 
 "The simple record of three short years of Christ's 
 active life has done more to regenerate and soften man- 
 kind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the 
 exhortations of moralists." — Lecky, History of Morality, 
 vol. ii., p. 88. 
 
 What is the evidence on which this great faith 
 rests ? Putting aside all secondary and incidental 
 arguments it may be said with confidence that 
 the whole cause of Christian faith may be risked 
 on two Facts : the Fact of a divine Person, and 
 the Fact of a divine history. The fact, that is, 
 of Christ, and the fact of Christianity. 
 
 In a deep and most true sense, Jesus Christ 
 proves Himself. He who sees Mount Everest 
 does not need the poor argument of the foot-rule 
 and of the scales to persuade him that the sky- 
 piercing peak, with its white crown of dazzling 
 snows, actually exists. And to look at Jesus 
 
 130 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 131 
 
 Christ with uncoloured vision is to believe in 
 Him. He is like no other figure on the world's 
 stage. Uncounted hosts of human beings — 
 men of the loftiest intellect side by side with 
 men of the most lowly heart and the most saintly 
 life — have what may be scientifically described 
 as a personal verification of the existence and 
 of the divinity of Jesus Christ. 
 
 They are conscious of being saved by Him. 
 They feel, every moment, the pulse of a life 
 that beats direct from Him. They know Him 
 to be the living root from which all that is best 
 in their nature springs. Christ's great parable 
 of the vine and the branch is the exact transcript 
 of their experience. For them there is no 
 rebuke for sin like His purity, no comfort for 
 sorrow like His gentleness, no argument for hope 
 like the vision of His face. His name, for them, 
 is an open window into the very heart of God. 
 His words are the supreme interpretation of 
 duty. 
 
 By some strange compulsion, the very enemies 
 of Christ become His witnesses. " Never man 
 spake like this Man," was the testimony of the 
 
132 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 rude soldiers sent to arrest Him ; and that 
 witness is repeated afresh by every new generation 
 of sceptics. Unbelief, as little as belief, would 
 take the greatest of the world's poets and 
 thinkers, and set them, as equals, side by side 
 with Jesus of Nazareth. 
 
 " It is no use," says Mr. Campbell in that 
 strange book " The New Theology," a book which 
 might be described as metaphysical fog shot 
 through with gleams of piercing light — " It 
 is no use trying to place Jesus in a row along 
 with other religious masters. He is first and 
 the rest nowhere; we have no category for 
 Him." 
 
 There is a quality in the words of Christ, a 
 power to reach the human conscience, which no 
 poet or philosopher or scientist ever possessed. 
 He talks the language which the human soul 
 instinctively recognises to be divine. He interprets 
 Himself to us in strange, brief, deathless phrases 
 which on any other lips would sound extravagant 
 to the point of lunacy, but which on His lips 
 seem natural. 
 
 "/am," He says, "the light of the world" 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 133 
 
 Imagine Plato saying that, or Epictetus, or John 
 Stuart Mill! But on Christ's lips the words 
 shock nobody. They seem self-evident. They 
 are a self- verifying revelation, with profoundest 
 meaning in every syllable. Exactly as the light 
 shuts up in its white purity the whole scale of 
 colour — the beauty of all flowers, the purple of 
 far-off hills, the rainbow glories of sky and sea 
 and earth — so the character of Jesus Christ is 
 found to contain the elements of all goodness. 
 Nay, exactly like the light, it possesses an 
 energy which creates beauty in others. 
 
 As every hint of grace in sky, or flower, or 
 human face is born of the light, and lives by the 
 light, so all that is lofty, or pure, or gentle in 
 the world's life to-day can be traced, directly 
 or indirectly, to the teachings of Jesus Christ, 
 and to the spiritual energy that streams from 
 Him. 
 
 "7, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
 draw all men unto Me." Here is another of 
 the deep, bewildering sayings of Christ. What 
 merely human lips could speak such words 
 without kindling the laughter of the world ! In 
 
134 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the mouth of a Galilean peasant they sound like 
 the wildest extravagance. But looked back upon 
 across nineteen centuries, we see that these words 
 are an exact prophetic forecast of human history, 
 fulfilled afresh with every day that dawns. God 
 never hurries. Centuries with Him are but as 
 moments. And as seen in the perspective of 
 history, how clear it is that, from the moment 
 He hung on the cross, Christ, by some deep, 
 mysterious attraction, has been drawing all men 
 unto Himself. All the currents of the living 
 world are flowing Christ- ward, and must flow. 
 
 Or take another of the profound utterances of 
 Christ, words that overleap the boundaries of 
 time, and have in them the vibrations of eternity. 
 "When the Comforter is come, Whom I will 
 send unto you from the Father, ... He shall 
 bear witness of Me. ... If I go not away, the 
 Comforter will not come unto you; but if I 
 depart, I will send Him unto you. . . . When 
 He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, ... He shall 
 glorify Me, for He shall receive of Mine and shall 
 show it unto you." 
 
 No one can read these words without feeling 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 135 
 
 how profound a note they strike. Here is one 
 Who speaks as master of the spiritual world. 
 His authority runs into those dim regions which 
 lie beyond death. He declares that from beyond 
 the grave, with forces moving at His bidding, 
 and working to glorify Him, He will touch and 
 shape the world He has left. These are not 
 accents that fit human speech. But they are 
 natural on Christ's lips; and once more the 
 experience of nineteen centuries attests their 
 fulfilment. His words as reported by His 
 disciples have shaken thrones. They have 
 outlasted kingdoms and dynasties. 
 
 If a proof is wanted of the transcendent force 
 that dwells in Jesus Christ, we find it in the 
 impression He made on the men about Him. 
 He took a handful of Jewish fishermen, with the 
 ignorance of their day, the narrowness of their 
 race, and the prejudices native to their blood. 
 They were bits of very common clay, and He 
 touched them only for three brief years. To say 
 they only half understood His words is quite 
 insufficient; they visibly and grossly misappre- 
 hended them. And they witnessed what, to 
 
136 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 human eyes, must have seemed the shame and 
 defeat of His death. This, surely, was enough 
 to wreck faith ! 
 
 Yet the touch of Christ's hands made these 
 men not only saints — such saints as the world 
 to that hour had never seen ; it made them the 
 world's teachers. Not Plato talked like John, or 
 Socrates like Paul. What philosopher or ethical 
 teacher, up to the present moment, indeed, has 
 spoken with the accents of these men who caught 
 their message from Christ's lips ? 
 
 No one can pretend that it was by virtue of 
 any endowment of natural genius that these 
 Galilean peasants rose to a point so high. They 
 took their impulse from Christ. His Spirit, as 
 He had promised, wrought in them when He 
 Himself had left the earth; and we can watch 
 across nineteen hundred years, and see, like 
 crystals forming in some chemical solution, the 
 faith of the early Church in Christ taking shape. 
 
 The process is clear, definite, inevitable; an 
 evolution as plain as anything known to natural 
 science, but it is an evolution shaped by forces 
 that stream from the spiritual world. The area, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 137 
 
 in time, of Christ's ministry is very brief, only 
 three crowded years; but upon that little span 
 of time beats perhaps a fiercer light than upon 
 any other equal tract of human history. And, 
 watching the impression made by Christ on 
 those about Him, we see, first, the mere wonder 
 awakened by the miracles; the vague sense 
 kindled of Something great, half understood, 
 mysterious. This sense grows, but it is perplexed 
 by the shock to all the traditional expectations 
 of a Messiah. Guesses as to whom Christ is run 
 through the land. All men wonder, and the 
 wonder spreads to the court, to the Temple, as 
 well as to the streets of the city, and the villages 
 of Galilee. 
 
 The inner circle round Christ shares that 
 wonder; but faith there, at a fit moment, is 
 brought to a climax by Christ's challenge to 
 Peter — " Whom do ye say that I am?" Peter, 
 when first brought to Christ by his brother 
 Andrew, had been told, " We have found the 
 Messias, . . . the Christ ; " and no doubt he 
 was prepared to see in Jesus the Messiah of 
 Jewish expectation. But that expectation had 
 
138 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 been wrecked. Now, Peter has reached a loftier 
 reading of the truth, and so comes his historic 
 confession, " Thou art the Christ, the Son of the 
 living God." 
 
 The note here is personal, sure, lofty. In these 
 memorable syllables Faith makes its leap, its 
 spring on to the high levels of Christian truth. 
 And Christ seals the act with the great words, 
 " Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona : for flesh 
 and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but 
 My Father which is in heaven." On the truth 
 of this confession Christ declares He will build 
 His Church. 
 
 But Peter can keep on those great heights 
 only for a step; with almost the next breath 
 he is rebuking " the Son of the living God," 
 and undertaking to correct His plans. During 
 Christ's whole earthly ministry indeed His 
 disciples never reached higher than that point 
 of wondering, fitful, half- incredulous belief. " I 
 have many things to say unto you," said Christ 
 before He left them ; " but hitherto ye have not 
 been able to receive them ; neither yet can ye 
 understand them." 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 139 
 
 Then came the shock of what seemed the final 
 disaster and shame of the Cross, a shock that 
 threatened the whole wreck of faith. And the 
 very hour of that wreck, while they are stagger- 
 ing under its stroke, there broke in on the 
 disciples the amazement of the Resurrection, and 
 the wonder of the risen Christ. He is seen at 
 last in His true glory ; all that He has taught 
 about Himself falls into order ; it kindles into 
 clearness. And we can discern in the apostles, 
 the awakening vision of sublime truths, the 
 thrill of dawning intuitions. It is the spectacle 
 of great forces and emotions, in a word, trem- 
 bling into a Religion. 
 
 It is not yet a Theology, though a theology is 
 latent in it, and must soon come ; but in both 
 the Acts of the Apostles and the Epistles, we can 
 see the mind of the new-born Church adjusting 
 itself to a world of new ideas. A complete new 
 reading of the universe has broken in upon it. 
 Not Columbus, when he caught, through the 
 dark night, the gleam of light that streamed 
 from the new world he was seeking, knew such 
 wonder, Keats, in a famous sonnet, has pictured 
 
HO THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the emotions of " stout Cortez, when with eagle 
 eyes," he — 
 
 u Stared at the Pacific — and all his men 
 Looked at each other with a wild surmise — 
 Silent upon a peak in Darien." 
 
 The famous Spaniard had an unknown, uncharted 
 ocean spread at his feet, on which no European 
 ship had ever sailed. But the early Church had 
 a landscape nobler and fairer spread before it, a 
 universe of new spiritual conceptions. And the 
 key to it all was the realised personality of 
 Christ. 
 
 So when the new theology comes, it is a 
 Christology. The sense in the infant Church is 
 not that some new truth has been discovered, 
 but, as Cairns puts it in his " Christianity in the 
 Modern World," that " some new and amazing 
 thing has happened." The mind of the early 
 Church is preoccupied, not with the miracles of 
 Christ or with His parables, or with the Sermon 
 on the Mount, but with the personality of Christ 
 Himself. The master truth for the disciples was 
 that " God was in Christ " ; God, not a far-off 
 and dreadful being to be sought, but a redeeming 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 141 
 
 Saviour, seeking them. Kepler, when in a high 
 mood of feeling, explained his science by saying, 
 " I am thinking God's thoughts after Him, v and 
 the whole theology of the early Church consisted 
 in thinking Christ's thoughts after Him. 
 
 Great human discoveries, while they seem to 
 exalt, in a sense, dwan their discoverers. 
 Newton discovered the law of gravitation, and 
 so won fame; but, set against the truth he 
 discovered, how tiny is his scale. Darwin built 
 with patient industry the magnificent formula of 
 evolution, and in our exaggerated fashion we 
 call his name " immortal." But how much less 
 is the discoverer than the thing discovered. 
 Who can imagine Newton saying, "I am the 
 law of gravitation ; " or Darwin offering himself 
 to the world as being in his own person the 
 formula of evolution! 
 
 Now, Christ reveals great truths; but they 
 centre in Him, they have no existence apart 
 from Him. " I am the truth," He says ; and 
 this is exactly the vision the early Church has 
 of Him. The proof of this is found in the new 
 accent in which they speak of Him. Peter's 
 
142 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 " leap of faith " in the confession, " Thou art 
 the Christ, the Son of the living God," is an 
 impulse exhausted almost at a breath ; it is 
 a sudden dazzling vision of truth, on which at 
 the next moment falls an eclipse. 
 
 Compare this with the majestic verses with 
 which John's Gospel opens. There is a sound 
 in the very syllables as of the tread of some 
 victorious host : " In the beginning was the 
 Word, and the Word was with God, and 
 the Word was God. The same was in the 
 beginning with God. All things were 
 made by Him, and without Him was not 
 
 ANYTHING MADE THAT WAS MADE." Peter's 
 
 confession is a leap, and a stumble ; John walks 
 on the great heights of faith with surest step. 
 
 And the reading of Christ's nature which we 
 thus see taking possession of the consciousness 
 of the early Church, and kindling it to rapture 
 and power, is still the central truth of Christianity. 
 This is the faith that has re-made the world. 
 Many are willing to sit at the feet of Christ as a 
 Teacher, but they refuse to adore Him as a 
 Saviour. They are trying the melancholy 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 143 
 
 experiment of taking the spiritual ideas of Christ 
 and rejecting His Divine Personality. But 
 the divorce is impossible. It would be fatal 
 if it were possible. 
 
 Yes : in all the later writings of the New 
 Testament we can see the great conception of 
 Christian faith taking conscious shape, and 
 coming to its kingdom in the hearts of the 
 first generation of Christ's followers. And the 
 Spirit of Christ so interpreted Christ to His 
 followers, and enlarged their power to receive 
 Him, that as a result they became saints of a type 
 unknown in history, martyrs whose heroism is a 
 kindling memory, teachers at whose feet each 
 generation of the human race, in turn, is willing 
 to sit. 
 
 And Christ has still this strange power to 
 transform men ; a power which centuries, as they 
 pass, leave unexhausted. Men are sceptical as to 
 the miracles Christ wrought in the flesh nearly 
 two thousand years ago, but the miracles He works 
 to-day in the enduring field of human character are 
 beyond challenge. Suppose it be denied that He 
 turned water into wine at Cana. It is historically 
 
144 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 certain that He turned a handful of Galilean 
 peasants into the world's teachers. He trans- 
 formed Saul the persecutor into Paul the saint. 
 And He still keeps the key of all hearts; He 
 puts his stamp on each generation in turn. 
 
 It is curious to note how each fresh student 
 finds some independent argument for worshipping 
 Christ, something different from what other men 
 see, and yet equally authoritative. A sceptic 
 like Theodore Parker is lost in wonder at the 
 human greatness of Christ : " The manliest 01 
 men, humane as a woman, pious and hopeful as 
 a prayer, brave as mans most daring thought. 
 He has led the world in morals and religion for 
 eighteen centuries, because He was the manliest 
 man in it : hence the most divine." A saint like 
 Phillips Brooks is most impressed by the sinless- 
 ness of Christ : "He is the one sinless man in 
 history, and even if He had done nothing else 
 for our salvation, this makes Him the most 
 saving Fact that the world ever saw." 
 
 A philosophic historian like Seeley declares that 
 "Christ is surely the most sublime image offered 
 to human imagination ; * but the secret of His 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 145 
 
 sublimity lies in the wedlock of measureless 
 power with inexpressible gentleness. "This," 
 says Seeley, " is the masterpiece of Christ." It 
 is "a sublime moral miracle superinduced upon 
 a physical one." 
 
 A theologian such as Bushnell, on the other 
 hand, finds the surest mark of Christ's divinity 
 in the strange union of perfect lowliness of spirit, 
 with the most solemn claims to supernatural 
 authority. " I," says Christ, " am meek and lowly 
 of heart ; " and no one doubts what may be 
 called His infinite humility. Yet what voice 
 that ever fell upon human ears uttered claims so 
 transcendent. He claims to be the very root of 
 our life : " I am the vine and ye are the branches." 
 He offers Himself to us as the one link betwixt 
 the human race and God. "No man cometh 
 unto the Father but by Me." He lays His hands 
 on the sweetest relationships of human life, and 
 claims the right to come before them all. " He 
 that loveth father or mother more than Me is 
 not worthy of Me." 
 
 Now the world is swift to discover conceit 
 and pitiless to scourge it. On any other lips 
 
 K 
 
H6 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 such words would kindle universal laughter. 
 But on Christ's lips they seem natural ; and on 
 this single point Bushnell challenges unbelief. 
 " Come now all ye that tell us in your wisdom of 
 the mere natural humanity of Jesus, select your 
 best and wisest character ; take the range, if you 
 will, of all the great philosophers and saints, and 
 choose out one that is most competent; or, if 
 perchance some one of you may imagine that 
 he is himself upon a level with Jesus (as we 
 hear that some of you do), let him come forward 
 in this trial and say, 'Follow me.' 'Be worthy 
 of me.' ' I am the light of the world.' ' Ye are 
 from beneath, i" am from above.' * Behold a 
 greater than Solomon is here.' Take on all these 
 transcendent assumptions, and see how your 
 glory will be sifted out of you by the detective 
 gaze, and darkened by the contempt, of man- 
 kind! Why not; is not the challenge fair? 
 Do you not tell us that you can say as divine 
 things as He ? Give us this one experiment, 
 and see if it does not prove to you a truth that 
 is of some consequence ; viz. that you are a man, 
 and that Christ Jesus is — more " 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE SECOND ARGUMENT FOR CHRISTIAN 
 FAITH: A DIVINE HISTORY 
 
 " If Christ had not been what He was, and stood where 
 He did, could anything in history be as it had been or as it 
 is? Is there any person necessary in the same sense as He 
 is to the higher history of man 1 May we not speak of Him 
 as the keystone of the arch which spans the gulf of time 1 
 But can we conceive that the keystone came there by 
 accident ; or otherwise than by the hand which built the 
 bridge, which opened the chasm, and determined the course 
 of the river that flows beneath 1 " — Fairbairn, Philosophy 
 of the Christian Religion, p. 567. 
 
 But let the other Fact which reinforces 
 Christian faith — the Christian system itself— be 
 considered. It is not a dream, an illusion, but 
 a Fact — visible, tangible, tremendous. This 
 far-off, untaught Jew, as those who deny His 
 divinity must describe him, is the Founder, the 
 Law-giver, the Judge of a new and divine 
 society ; and this society is not like the Atlantis 
 of Plato, or the Utopia of Sir Thomas More, a 
 dream : it is not like the heavenly city, the New 
 
 147 
 
H8 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Jerusalem which John saw in vision, a far-off 
 prophecy. It exists in history. It is part of the 
 living world. No revolution can shake its deep 
 foundations. Its citizens outnumber those of 
 any earthly empire that can be named. It has 
 survived the hates, the persecutions, the betray- 
 als and corruptions of nineteen centuries. No 
 human name is inscribed on its gates ; no human 
 genius has left its print on its fabric. It is 
 the creation of Jesus Christ. And for Christian 
 faith, at least, what is this but to say that, like 
 the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem John saw, 
 it has " descended out of heaven from God." 
 
 Putting this aside, it is certainly true that to- 
 day, nearly two thousand years after its Founder 
 died a death of shame, Christianity is literally the 
 biggest fact in the world. No other single force 
 that can be named touches so many lives, or 
 influences so profoundly the course of history. 
 History, indeed, is unintelligible without it. 
 
 What may be called its external scale — its 
 organised Churches, its innumerable temples, its 
 hymns, its charities, the music of its unceasing 
 worship, the saintly lives it creates, the great 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF H9 
 
 missionary societies it maintains, its impress on 
 literature, on politics — all this is nothing less 
 than wonderful. If any one looks round on the 
 civilised order of the world, and asks whose image 
 and superscription does it bear — no matter how 
 dimly — only one answer is possible. It were as 
 easy to untwist the light, destroy half the 
 primary colours, and leave the colour-scheme of 
 nature unaffected, as to take out of the literature, 
 the politics, the art, the domestic life of the 
 world what Christ gives to them, and leave them 
 undestroyed. 
 
 Christianity, in brief, is to the daily life of the 
 world what gravitation is in the kingdom of 
 matter, a force to be reckoned with everywhere. 
 It affects every interest as gravitation affects 
 every atom. Its theology, indeed, is still in the 
 stage of conflict; but its moral ideals, running 
 in advance of its doctrines, have captured the 
 world. Men who cannot accept the Christian 
 creed, yet acknowledge the authority and 
 supremacy of Christian ethics. 
 
 Here, then, is a fact which has to be explained. 
 It has been produced, let us say for the sake of 
 
150 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 argument, by some unknown Cause. Now, on 
 scientific grounds, we are sure that an effect so 
 stupendous in its range, and that persists through 
 so many centuries, must have a Force behind it 
 equal to it in scale. To say that the cause is a 
 delusion, born in the cradle of some dreaming 
 and undisciplined brain, is absurd. Realities are 
 not born of delusions. To take a dozen fishermen 
 and ttmt- makers, nineteen hundred years distant, 
 with a bundle of self-generated superstitions, 
 and offer them as an explanation of Christianity, 
 is like offering a box of matches as the force 
 which has lit the flame of Jupiter. 
 
 What human genius is capable of in states- 
 manship, in literature, in philosophical speculation, 
 in war, is known and can be measured. We 
 have only to take the great figures that from 
 time to time appear on the world's stage — Plato 
 in philosophy, Alexander in war, Caesar in the 
 arts of government — to get the curve which 
 measures, and limits, what is possible to human 
 genius. 
 
 But, for one thing, there is no Plato or 
 Alexander or Caesar in Christian history to 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 151 
 
 explain it. And can any one imagine that if 
 all the poets and metaphysicians, all the soldiers 
 and statesmen of all the ages — all the great 
 names of history, in a word, put together — had 
 been in the service of Christianity this would be 
 a sufficient explanation of the scale to which it 
 has grown, the persistency with which it endures, 
 and the place it fills in the lives of men ? 
 
 This far-off Jew alone has wrought this miracle; 
 and all the wonders, real or alleged, described in 
 the four Gospels, are trivial compared with the 
 miracle of contemporaneous Christianity itself. 
 It belongs to an order of things beyond the 
 power of human genius to imagine or accomplish. 
 
 We are sure on scientific grounds, again, that 
 the force behind Christianity, which explains its 
 existence, must be like it in character, as well as 
 equal to it in scale. If it is idle to offer a 
 delusion as the cause which explains Christianity, 
 it is even more absurd to offer a fraud. 
 
 Christianity, on any theory, as to its origin, 
 is a force making for truth, for righteousness, 
 for purity; and such a force is not generated 
 in the bosom of a lie. The moral energy which 
 
152 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 is slowly but visibly re-shaping the civilisation 
 of the world, which has created a new conscience 
 in the race, and is calling into existence new 
 ideals of beneficence and purity and goodness, 
 must flow from some pure and divine source. 
 
 But, it may be asked, may not the same thing, 
 in a lesser degree at least, be said of the other 
 religions of the world ; of Mohammedanism, of 
 Buddhism, etc. ? 
 
 It may be gladly admitted that there are 
 strange anticipations of Christ's teaching in 
 other and older books : in the Talmud, in the 
 sacred writings of Buddhism, or of Confucius; 
 though it is not quite true that the Sermon on 
 the Mount is, in Professor Clifford's words, "just 
 Rabbi Hillel recast." There are reflections of 
 Christ's teaching, again, in later books such as 
 the Koran. It might be a sufficient reply to ask 
 that the New Testament as a whole should be 
 compared with the sacred writings of other 
 religions as a whole; and to remember that 
 Professor Max Muller, when he published the 
 "Sacred Books of the East," in England, explained 
 that there were whole sections that he dared not 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 153 
 
 publish in English, lest he should lay himself 
 open to a criminal prosecution. Yet it may be 
 gladly acknowledged that— 
 
 " The prophets of the elder day, 
 The slant-eyed sages of Cathay, 
 Read not the riddle all amiss 
 Of higher life evolved from this.'* 
 
 These starry gleams in the dark literature of 
 earlier ages are broken rays of the divine light ; 
 but Christ is the sunrise. His teaching does 
 not contradict what is best in the writings of 
 the sages and teachers of heathenism. It moves 
 on the line of their best, but it runs into realms 
 to which they never come. Christ, in a word — 
 
 "Gathers in one sheaf complete, 
 The scattered blades of God's own wheat." 
 
 But Christ does more than merely add new 
 realms to the tiny area of truth the race possessed. 
 He has opened the gates into a new universe. 
 He has taught us that the cross on which the 
 Sinless One died for the sinful is the supreme 
 interpretation of God. This is more than a 
 revelation; it is a revolution. 
 
154 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount is to the best 
 things in heathen literature what the planet 
 Jupiter is to a street-lamp. Yet if the Sermon 
 on the Mount were all that Christ had given us, 
 He would only be a better sort of Plato, an 
 Epietetus with a finer accent. Christ, it must 
 be repeated, brings to the race not a new ethical 
 system, but a new and supreme ethical energy. 
 The system He founded not only proclaims the 
 doctrine of that central miracle of the spiritual 
 universe — the new birth ; it actually works that 
 miracle ; does it perennially ; does it in the ex- 
 perience of multitudes with every new day that 
 dawns. 
 
 Mohammedanism is one of the three great 
 monotheistic religions of the earth ; and the 
 single effective truth it possesses, the doctrine 
 that God is One, is borrowed from the Bible. 
 Hindooism, again, shows how deep and inde- 
 structible an element in human nature religion 
 is. Whoever made man drew the plan of his 
 nature on the lines of religion ; and Hindooism, 
 like every other form of heathenism, is a 
 melancholy illustration of what the religious 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 155 
 
 instinct is without a divine revelation such as 
 Christianity brings. Buddhism is merely the 
 moral reform of an idolatrous religion ; and it 
 is a reform which has failed. 
 
 These religions, when set beside Christianity, 
 and tried by the test of their moral scale, are 
 like the sand-heaps children have piled on the 
 beach, as compared with the steadfast hills that 
 girdle the far-off horizon. 
 
 But it may be asked, again, what about the 
 darker side of Christianity; its schisms, its 
 heresies, its persecutions, the ecclesiastical 
 quarrels which break it into fragments? 
 
 The existence of these things is not to be 
 denied. They show how stubborn are the forces 
 in human life which make for evil, and how 
 tragically slow the human mind is to comprehend 
 the true genius of Christianity. But that it is 
 so slow to understand and to assimilate the 
 Christian scheme, is another proof that it is 
 utterly incapable of inventing it. And what 
 more shining proof of the divine origin of 
 Christianity can be imagined than the fact 
 that it has survived, through all these cen- 
 
156 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 turies, the heresies and disloyalties of its own 
 followers ? 
 
 The strength of the argument for the separate 
 and divine character of Jesus Christ may be 
 brought out in another way. The story of the 
 death of Socrates is, in some senses, the high- 
 water mark not only of Greek, but of universal, 
 literature. The " Phaedo " has made it immortal. 
 It is the death scene of Socrates, as told by 
 Plato: and the tale has in it every element 
 of pathos and beauty; it is set, too, in an 
 atmosphere of profound feeling. 
 
 The sacred ship has just arrived from Delos. 
 It is the death signal, and Socrates, before he 
 drinks the hemlock, sits amongst his friends and 
 holds high debate on the great theme of immor- 
 tality. The sanest, if not the loftiest, intellect 
 the human race has produced, just as he passes 
 into the shadow and mystery of death, pauses to 
 tell us why he believes death cannot slay him 
 And the smile on his face as he talks, the serene 
 courage, the unfaltering accents, give strange 
 power to his logic. Never did a brave spirit 
 pass out of life more bravely ; and the art of the 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 157 
 
 story — with its occasional play of humour, its 
 points of homely incident — is nothing less than 
 exquisite. 
 
 Now let the immortal scene in the prison in 
 the Agora at Athens be contrasted with the 
 scene in the upper room at Jerusalem. If 
 Socrates and Christ are both men, and are to 
 be judged by human conditions, it cannot be 
 doubted that the Greek ought to surpass by 
 measureless degrees the Jew. Socrates repre- 
 sents the flower of Greek genius, in the very 
 climax of Grecian history. He is a philosopher, 
 familiar with great affairs and great men, wise 
 with the wisdom of seventy years, and wise in 
 the knowledge of all the schools. His life had 
 been one long intellectual discipline, and in that 
 last scene he has Plato for reporter. Christ, on 
 the other hand, is a Galilean peasant, with only 
 peasants for followers and friends. 
 
 And yet by what measureless degrees the 
 Galilean exceeds the Greek! The merely in- 
 tellectual note is incomparably higher. Let 
 there be recalled the account Socrates gives of 
 what may be called the geography of Hades — 
 
158 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Tartarus, with its tangle of dark rivers — some 
 of fire, and some of mud — its vague seas, its 
 troops of phantom spirits; the reincarnation of 
 the wicked as hawks and vultures, and of the 
 good as bees, wasps, ants, or — climax of bliss ! 
 — as philosophers. With this, compare the calm 
 words, the high and serene certainty of Jesus 
 Christ: "In My Father's house are many 
 mansions; if it were not so I would have told 
 you. I go to prepare a place for you." 
 
 The moral note, again, is not merely infinitely 
 higher, it belongs to another order. In the 
 scene in the Agora what is there which cor- 
 responds to that pathetic act when Christ girded 
 Himself with a towel and washed the disciples' 
 feet — the sublimest object-lesson imaginable as 
 to the law and habit of love up to which He 
 was lifting His followers ? The Greek sends 
 away his wife and children as irrelevant and 
 disturbing influences, or tools for which he has 
 no further use. The only moral advice he can 
 offer the little debating society in which he sits 
 is to neglect and despise the body ; like philo- 
 sophers, they are to believe that the invisible 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 159 
 
 soul is the only reality, and to treat everything 
 except it as shadows. The proofs of immortality 
 Socrates details are the arguments of a philo- 
 sopher, and are addressed to philosophers. They 
 are ingenious and subtle — often over-subtle. 
 
 But in spite of his high courage the Greek can 
 offer his listening friends nothing very certain. 
 He justifies his sketch of Hades by saying, " It is 
 well to find a charm for one's fears, and on this 
 account it is that I thus prolong my tale." Who 
 will be their teacher, lie is asked, when he is 
 gone ? Greece, he tells them, "is a wide place, 
 and there are in it many good men. There are, 
 besides, many races of Barbarians, all of whom 
 are to be explored " — in search of some one who 
 can supply such a charm as they are demand- 
 ing, a charm for death. Of himself he says, 
 " Whether I tried in the right way, and with 
 what success, I shall know certainly when I 
 arrive there ; " but not till then. 
 
 Let all this be compared with the accents of 
 Christ, " I go to prepare a place for you. . . . 
 I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; 
 that where I am, there ye maybe also." " When 
 
160 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the Comforter is come, Whom I will send unto 
 you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, 
 Which proceedeth from the Father, He shall 
 testify of Me." There speaks the Lord of life 
 and death — of this and of all other worlds ! 
 
 The contrast betwixt the two figures is over- 
 whelming. Socrates argues, Christ announces. 
 The one guesses, the other knows. Socrates 
 reasons and refines like a philosopher ; Christ 
 talks in the accents of a Redeemer. The last 
 words of Socrates are, " Crito, we owe a cock to 
 iEseulapius; discharge it, and do not neglect it." 
 Set beside this the last utterance of Christ: 
 " Father, into Thy hands I commend My 
 spirit;" or, " Father, forgive them, for they 
 know not what they do." 
 
 We repeat that, taking the purely human 
 elements, the Greek ought to move at a higher 
 level than the Jew ; and yet as the two 
 figures stand side by side, who will deny that 
 Christ belongs to a different order — to an 
 immeasurably loftier order — than Socrates ? 
 Whence did Christ get His unique scale ? 
 
 And let the impression that each has made on 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 161 
 
 the human race be contrasted. No human soul 
 turns back to Socrates for redemption. No 
 pillow under a dying head is made softer by 
 having the " Phaedo " beneath it. No mother 
 standing beside her child's grave tries to heal 
 her broken heart with the logic of the Agora. 
 But the supper in the upper room at Jerusalem 
 has become a sacrament for all time and for all 
 generations. The words of Christ in that scene 
 have changed the world's history. The contrast 
 betwixt Socrates and Christ in these parallel 
 scenes is undesirable and measureless. How is 
 it to be explained ? 
 
 One of two things is absolutely certain. Either 
 Christ was more than Socrates, and " more " in 
 the sense that He belonged to a different order 
 of being ; or else those who invented that story 
 of the upper room in Jerusalem were greater 
 than Plato. And as there were four of them, 
 this theory carries with it the belief that there 
 were four Jewish Platos, who, without any 
 touch of Greek genius, imagined more nobly 
 than the greatest genius Greece ever produced ; 
 and who, being themselves rogues — since they 
 
 L 
 
162 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 have forged the story — yet invented a tale so 
 rich in moral elements that it has given the 
 human race itself a new system of ethics. 
 
 We know, on the strength of an epigram 
 written to refute it, that somebody, centuries 
 afterwards, denied that Plato had written the 
 " Phaedo." " If Plato did not write it," ran the 
 epigram, "then there were two Platos." But, 
 as we have seen, the theory which rejects the 
 divinity of Jesus Christ requires us to believe in 
 four Platos ; all of them Jewish peasants, all of 
 them rogues ; all of them agreed in one invention, 
 exquisitely the same, yet exquisitely different; 
 and all of them, somehow, achieved the miracle 
 of making a lie a more effective instrument of 
 morality than all the truths of all the philo- 
 sophers history knows. The belief of unbelief 
 at this point leaves the faith of universal 
 Christianity dwarfed and microscopic. 
 
 For some the fundamental conception of 
 Christianity, the entrance of Christ as a new 
 and divine force in human history, is made 
 incredible by the fact that it seems in quarrel 
 with what they hold to be the master truth of 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 163 
 
 science, the theory of evolution. On the extreme 
 reading of the evolution theory the cosmos is a 
 sealed chamber. Nothing can appear at any 
 stage in the process which was not present at 
 the starting-point. Evolution tolerates no new 
 factors, still less one so revolutionary — so com- 
 pletely out of the natural order — as Christ, 
 interpreted by Christian faith, seems to be. 
 
 But the formula of evolution must find room 
 for new factors, or it is visibly inadequate as an 
 explanation of the system of things. The great 
 uniformities of nature know gaps which can only 
 be filled by new creative acts. 
 
 Evolution, for example, has no explanation 
 for the fact of life. Life, it is certain, cannot 
 be explained by its physical antecedents ; and it 
 is the circumstance that evolution can offer no 
 explanation of the appearance of life which still 
 keeps that great theory in the hypothetical stage. 
 "Spontaneous generation," says Huxley, "is a 
 necessary corollary from Darwin's views ; " but 
 it is a corollary which is unjustified by any 
 known evidence. The great teachers of evolution 
 have an almost invincible bias in favour of the 
 
164 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 doctrine that the gap betwixt the living and 
 the non-living can be bridged ; but no known 
 bridge exists, and they are too honest to deny 
 the facts. Almost every famous name in 
 modern science can be quoted in proof of the 
 doctrine that life cannot be explained merely by 
 its physical antecedents. " If the evolution hypo- 
 thesis is true," says Huxley, " living matter must 
 have arisen from not living matter." * But in his 
 address as President of the British Association 
 he declared the case against the production of 
 life from the non-living to be " victorious all along 
 the line." " The present state of knowledge," 
 he wrote, " furnishes us with no link between 
 the living and the not living." Darwin himself 
 wrote, " No evidence worth anything has as yet 
 been advanced in favour of a living being being 
 developed from inorganic matter." Tyndall and 
 Herbert Spencer are equally emphatic. " Life," 
 declares Spencer, "cannot be conceived in physico- 
 chemical terms." " I affirm," says Tyndall, " that 
 no shred of trustworthy experimental evidence 
 exists to prove that life in our day has ever 
 * Encyclopaedia Britannica, " Biology." 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 165 
 
 appeared independently of antecedent life." * 
 " Transubstantiation would be nothing to this," 
 says Huxley, " if it happened." 
 
 Science, then, has no explanation to offer of 
 the sudden emergence in the process of evolution 
 of the phenomenon of life. Wallace, who shares 
 with Darwin the honour of the discovery of 
 evolution, declares " there are at least three 
 stages in the development of the organic world 
 where some new cause or power must necessarily 
 have come into action." f The first is in the 
 change from inorganic to organic. "The first 
 vegetable cell was a new thing in the world, 
 possessing altogether new powers." This was 
 life, but still life without consciousness. The 
 next stage " still more completely," says Wallace, 
 " beyond all possibility of explanation, by matter, 
 its laws and forces, is sensation or conscious- 
 ness ; the distinction betwixt the vegetable and 
 the animal." The third gap in the process of 
 evolution is the appearance of self-conscious 
 mind. 
 
 * Nineteenth Century, 1898, p. 507. 
 f Darwinism, p. 474. 
 
166 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 If the formula of evolution, therefore, is so 
 narrowly construed that the entrance of any new 
 factor is forbidden, these three great facts are 
 left unexplained. Christian faith can accept 
 evolution as the mode in which God has admin- 
 istered His universe ; but God cannot be con- 
 ceived as touching His universe only at the 
 starting-point, and then emigrating from it for 
 ever. These gaps in the process of evolution are, 
 as Christian faith reads the problem, bridged by 
 creative acts ; and there is an order in the 
 entrance of these new factors. They rise step 
 above step ; and each new factor in turn uses the 
 realm beneath it as its servant. Life, conscious- 
 ness, personality — this is the order of time in 
 which they make their appearance ; but this is 
 also the order of thought. It represents a true 
 ascent in values. The outlines of some great 
 pyramid, rising to an apex, are visible. 
 
 And if at some point above human personality 
 there breaks into the process a Personality which 
 is divine, what is this but the philosophic and 
 scientific, as well as the religious, apex of the 
 great pyramid of the universe ? Christ's entrance 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 167 
 
 into the evolutionary process on this reading does 
 not arrest or destroy the process. It is its con- 
 summation. It is not a discord striking across 
 the music of the universe ; it is the perfection of 
 its harmony. 
 
 It must be remembered that, by the admission 
 of Huxley himself, the great protagonist of the 
 evolution theory, that theory does not extend to 
 morals. We can only reach what is ethically 
 best by inverting its principles. " The practice 
 of that which is ethically best — what we call 
 goodness or virtue — involves," writes Huxley, " a 
 course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed 
 to that which leads to success in the cosmic 
 struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self- 
 assertion, it demands self-restraint ; its influence 
 is directed, not so much to the survival of the 
 fittest, as to the fitting of as many as possible to 
 survive. It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of 
 existence." He sums up the position by saying : 
 " Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical 
 progress of society depends, not on imitating the 
 cosmic process, still less in running away from it, 
 but in combating it." Now if the practice of 
 
168 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 morality in its highest terms puts aside the prin- 
 ciples on which the evolution theory is built, 
 does any one wonder that the highest expression, 
 in living and personal terms, of the highest ethics 
 should be, not the product of evolution, but the 
 entrance into it of a new force, from still higher 
 levels of life ? On scientific principles, in a 
 word — on the principles of the evolution theory 
 itself — human history in the moral realm needs 
 an Incarnation. 
 
 On such a basis of proof as is here, in the 
 briefest fashion suggested, the Christian faith 
 stands. And in a world where men, every hour 
 of the day, and in every concern of secular life, 
 have to act on imperfect knowledge — on evidence 
 which stops short of mathematical certainty — 
 what faintest justification can there be for putting 
 Christianity aside as a thing it is safe to ignore ? 
 
 The Christian does not risk life and death on a 
 guess. He does not wander in a realm of dim 
 uncertainties. The sunshine lies about him. 
 The ground under his feet is firm, the skies above 
 are radiant. Bushnell puts very happily the 
 conclusion of the whole argument : 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 169 
 
 " The world itself is changed ; it has never 
 been the same since Jesus left it. The air is 
 charged with heavenly odours, and a kind of 
 celestial consciousness, a sense of other worlds, is 
 wafted on us in its breath. Let the dark ages 
 come, Jet society roll backward, and Churches 
 perish in whole regions of the earth; let in- 
 fidelity deny, and, what is worse, let spurious 
 piety dishonour, the truth. Still, there is some- 
 thing here that was not, and something that has 
 immortality in it. Still our confidence remains 
 unshaken, that Christ and His all-quickening life 
 are in the world, as fixed elements, and will be 
 to the end of time. For Christianity is not so 
 much the advent of a better doctrine as of a per- 
 fect character ; and how can a perfect character, 
 once entered into life and history, be separated 
 and finally expelled? Look ye hither all ye 
 blinded and fallen mankind, a better nature is 
 among you ; a pure heart, out of some pure 
 world, is come into your prison, and walks it 
 with you. Do you require of us to tell you who 
 He is, and definitely expound His person ? We 
 may not be able. Enough to know that He is 
 
170 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 not of us — some strange being out of nature and 
 above it, whose name is Wonderful. Enough 
 that sin has never touched His hallowed nature, 
 and that He is a friend. In Him dawns a hope — 
 purity has not come into our world, except to 
 purify. ' Behold the Lamb of God, Who taketh 
 away the sins of the world ! • Light breaks in, 
 peace settles on the air, and lo ! the prison walls 
 are giving way — rise, let us go." 
 
PART II 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVES TO FAITH 
 IN CHRIST 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE THEORY THAT CHRIST NEVER EXISTED 
 
 u It is no use to say that Christ, as exhibited in the 
 Gospels, is not historical. Who amongst His disciples, or 
 amongst their proselytes, was capable of inventing the 
 sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and 
 character revealed in the Gospels'? Certainly not the 
 fishermen of Galilee; as certainly not St. Paul, whose 
 idiosyncrasies were of a totally different sort." — John 
 Stuart Mill, Three Essays on Religion t p. 253. 
 
 " Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived — that their 
 story is a lie — but who did their works and thought their 
 thoughts ] It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What 
 man could have fabricated a Jesus 1 None but a Jesus." 
 — Theodore Parker, Discourses on ReUgion> p. 276. 
 
 We have now reached the point at which we 
 can ask what, if this faith about Christ be 
 rejected, are the substitutes which must take its 
 place. To criticise is not enough; we have to 
 
 171 
 
172 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 explain. Christ certainly cannot be dismissed 
 as an idle problem that calls for no explanation : 
 a Figure so remote, or so insignificant, that we 
 may treat it as non-existent. His very name is 
 a solvent. It is a test both for men and nations. 
 " What shall I do with Jesus who is called 
 Christ ? " asked the perplexed Roman Governor 
 nearly two thousand years ago, and every man, 
 in turn, stands where Pilate stood, and must ask, 
 and answer, his question. 
 
 And if Christ be dismissed as a dream, or as 
 an impostor, it is certain that Someone, or Some- 
 thing, must take His place. The soul, like 
 Nature, abhors a vacuum. Doubt about Christ 
 is itself a creed about Him. Who dismisses 
 Christ from his life affirms by that act that he 
 has a creed about Him more satisfying, better 
 authenticated by evidence, and burdened with 
 fewer difficulties than the accepted belief of 
 Christianity. Where is such an alternative 
 creed to be discovered ? 
 
 The direct alternatives to Christian faith, as 
 a matter of fact, are few in number, and perfectly 
 definite in character. The difficulties they raise, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 173 
 
 the weight of evidence on their side, can be 
 easily assessed. Plain sense can judge their value, 
 when cast in the scale against the general belief 
 about Christ. 
 
 There is, first of all, the theory that Jesus 
 Christ never existed. He is the dream of a 
 forgotten poet, or even the invention of a 
 perished rogue — a rogue who has somehow 
 succeeded in tricking the world for nineteen 
 centuries, but whose name, curiously enough, 
 nobody has ever succeeded in discovering. The 
 name of Christ is, on this theory, nothing better 
 than the label of a fraud, or of an aggregation of 
 frauds, which have gathered round mere vacancy. 
 Christ's feet never trod the soil of Palestine. His 
 face is an illusion : His miracles are fables : His 
 whole story is a fiction ; behind His teaching 
 there is no real voice. 
 
 The world, we are asked to believe, dates its 
 chronology from an event which never happened, 
 and Christianity is that scientific impossibility, 
 an effect without a cause ; a chain that has no 
 first link; a geometrical progression of which 
 the starting-point is a cipher. 
 
174 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 This is an explanation of Jesus Christ it is 
 impossible to take seriously. No scholar would 
 make himself responsible for it; no historian 
 will lend it the shelter of his name. 
 
 The Higher Critics of the more reckless school 
 have whittled down Christ's sayings to the 
 vanishing point. Only twelve poor words, we 
 are asked to believe, survive their performances. 
 But even these twelve words imply that Christ 
 existed. The lonely, mutilated syllables must 
 have behind them a Life, and the teachings of 
 a Life. These teachings as a whole, we are 
 assured, have somehow slipped from human 
 memory ; but they must have been in keeping 
 with the divine words which even a Schmeidel 
 admits undoubtedly came from Christ's lips. 
 The notion, in a word, that there never was 
 a Christ is an incredibility which requires a 
 hundred times more faith for its acceptance than 
 belief in all the creeds of all the Churches. 
 
 Christ, on the theory that He never existed, 
 is only a portrait, and a portrait with no face 
 behind it. And yet, somehow, this imaginary 
 Face has changed the world's history. How did 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 175 
 
 a cluster of Jewish peasants and fishermen paint 
 a face beyond the reach of any skill known to 
 the genius of Michael Angelo or Raphael ? Nay, 
 they painted four such portraits, and they all 
 agree, in spite of a score of differences : they are 
 all charged with the same mysterious power. It 
 is surely more credible, to quote Rousseau, that 
 such a Person actually existed, than that four 
 men should independently invent Him. 
 
 The Jew of the time of Augustus Caesar, it 
 may be added, was perhaps the one figure in the 
 human race least disposed to attempt such an 
 invention. His virtues, as well as his limitations, 
 disqualified him. The stubborn monotheism of 
 his faith predisposed him to reject an Incarna- 
 tion ; the cast-iron quality of his morality made 
 the spiritual teaching of Jesus Christ to him not 
 only incredible but unthinkable. He was jealous 
 in temper; caste pride burned in him like a 
 flame ; for all other nations he had the scorn a 
 Brahmin feels for the pariah. Was he likely to 
 welcome, still more to invent, a religion that 
 claimed to be universal, and whose generous 
 appeal overleaped all race distinctions? 
 
176 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 And if the Jews were incapable of drawing the 
 portrait of Christ, certainly the first generations 
 of Christians were equally incapable of the task. 
 All that the Christians of after time could do 
 with the original delineation of Christ, says 
 Henry Rogers, was — "to spoil it." 
 
 The proof of the existence of any great 
 character in history — say of Homer, or of 
 Alexander, or Caesar — does not consist in a legal 
 certificate of birth, or the formal verdict of a 
 jury of their contemporaries. It is found in the 
 signature on literature, or history, these men 
 have made. 
 
 What is the evidence that Shakespeare lived ? 
 He is not, like Christ, nineteen centuries distant ; 
 less than four hundred years parts him from us. 
 And yet how little of first-hand and detailed 
 evidence we have as to Shakespeare's existence, 
 or as to the facts of his life. The dates of the 
 principal events in his history — of his birth, of 
 his marriage, and of his plays — are all matters of 
 dispute. His biography is for the most part a 
 catalogue of guesses. There are sixteen different 
 ways of spelling his very name. Only five 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 177 
 
 autographs, with more or less of highly doubtful 
 evidence as to their genuineness, survive. A 
 controversy, which has created a vast literature 
 of its own, as to whether he really wrote the 
 plays that bear his name, still rages. 
 
 But who asks for a certificate of Shakespeare's 
 birth, and a complete biography, with verified 
 dates, before believing there was a Shakespeare ? 
 His plays are his credentials. Nobody will 
 believe that a myth wrote Hamlet. Shake- 
 speare or Bacon are only labels for the subtle, 
 magnificent genius that gave us Macbeth and 
 A Midsummer Night's Dream. The labels 
 may be shifted ; but it is not possible to deny 
 that someone lived, with the imagination of a 
 Shakespeare, who created these masterpieces of 
 literature. The English language itself is the 
 evidence that Shakespeare lived. No myth 
 will explain the museum at Stratford. 
 
 And these arguments, multiplied a hundred- 
 fold, constitute the evidence that Jesus Christ 
 was a real Person. It is not merely that the 
 almanac, in which all civilised time is dated from 
 His birth, proves that Christ existed. History, 
 
178 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 taken as a whole, is unintelligible without Him ; 
 the living world is unintelligible. "It is Christ 
 who rules British India," says Keshab Chunder 
 Sen, the greatest spiritual genius modern India 
 has produced, when trying to explain the puzzle 
 of 294,000,000 of the human race governed by 
 40,000,000 on the other side of the planet. 
 And Christ is the key to all the puzzles of the 
 living world. When any one undertakes to 
 prove that Christ did not exist nineteen hundred 
 years ago, he may well be asked to attempt a 
 feat much nearer at hand. Let him prove that 
 He does not exist to-day ! 
 
 Shakespeare touched, and still touches, only 
 one realm of human life. Christ touches all 
 races and generations. Time, for Him, has no 
 arresting force : space has no separating power. 
 We know that He exists as we know that there 
 is a force like gravitation, or an energy like 
 electricity. The pull of every atom of matter 
 proves the one ; the tinkle of every telephone- 
 bell is witness to the other. 
 
 This, in the last analysis, is the supreme evi- 
 dence of the existence of Christ. His hand is 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 179 
 
 visibly on the world's life to-day. There are / 
 myriads of living men and women who know 
 that He touches their sin to rebuke it, their grief 
 to comfort it, their conscience to quicken it. He 
 is working these miracles now, exactly as He 
 did in the days of His flesh nineteen hundred 
 years ago ; the only difference is that to-day His 
 miracles are wrought in spiritual terms. 
 
 And, it may be repeated, the appeal is not to 
 the subjective experiences of individual men and 
 women merely. It is to the changed curve in 
 the history of the race. 
 
 The discovery of the planet Neptune is one of 
 the romances of astronomy. A scientific observer 
 studying the orbit of Uranus found that at one 
 point the planet swung from its true path. What 
 force was it which, across measureless leagues of 
 space, touched the planet with some strange dis- 
 turbing energy, and drew it into a new course ? 
 It was scientifically certain that some unknown 
 body was calling to its sister planet, and attract- 
 ing it with an energy sufficient to change its 
 orbit. And following the clue of that calling 
 force — measuring the strength, and following 
 
180 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the line, of its pull — Neptune, the loneliest and 
 remotest planet in the group, spending a hundred 
 and sixty-five solar years in its mighty curve 
 round the sun, was discovered. 
 
 And who looks at the history of the human 
 race sees that at a certain moment the curve of 
 its orbit is suddenly changed. Up to a certain 
 point the course of history is a straight line, and 
 a line, alas ! that runs downwards. But at a 
 given moment — a moment perfectly ascertainable 
 — the line of history is deflected ; it turns up- 
 ward ; it runs upward still ! And at the point 
 of the curve stands one Figure. It is the figure 
 of the Galilean ! 
 
 Whatever theory men may hold as to His 
 nature, or His character, or His teaching, it is a 
 fact beyond all serious challenge that Christ has 
 changed the entire course of human history. He 
 has set the race moving on a new curve, and 
 under the action of new forces. And as a mute 
 and impressive witness of that fact civilised 
 mankind reckons its time from His birth. 
 To deny that He existed is to say that the 
 planet Uranus moved on a new ellipse with- 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 181 
 
 out the action of any force to explain the 
 change. 
 
 Suppose that some lunatic astronomer denied 
 the existence of the sun. Its light, he might 
 contend, is quite insufficient as a proof of the 
 sun's existence. What is light but a vibration 
 in the ether acting on the optic nerve, and pro- 
 ducing a certain change in the grey matter of the 
 brain? If the optic nerve behind the pupil of 
 the eye be snapped or diseased, is it not certain 
 that, for the owner of that nerve, the glory of the 
 sun perishes ? 
 
 But the whole solar system, it might be replied, 
 is a proof that the sun exists. Its order, its bal- 
 ance, the silent unceasing rhythm of the planets 
 constitute the evidence that the sun is a reality. 
 The "pull" of the sun is needed to explain the 
 mathematics of the solar system. And in exactly 
 the same way the history, the civilisation, the 
 very life of the actual world about us are 
 unintelligible apart from the Fact of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE THEORY THAT CHRIST WAS AN IMPOSTOR 
 
 " Christ pours out a doctrine beautiful as the light, 
 sublime as heaven, and true as God." — Theodore Parker, 
 Discourses on Religion, p. 303. 
 
 It must be taken as certain that Christ existed; 
 but it may be argued that at least His claim to 
 be divine is false ; and if false it must represent 
 the fraud of an impostor, a trick played on the 
 imagination of an unscientific age. If Christ was 
 a man exactly like the rest of His race, and with 
 the qualities and limitations of other men, He 
 must have known this, assuming Him to be sane; 
 and when He claimed to be more than man He 
 was — to put it in plain words — a conscious de- 
 ceiver. He is not the creation, but the creator, 
 of a fraud. 
 
 His miracles, on this theory, were nothing 
 better than tricks ; and He knew it. His pre- 
 tensions to supernatural authority were either 
 
 182 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 183 
 
 lies, or flights of lunacy. His sayings about Him- 
 self, indeed, on the supposition that He was only 
 a man, are in exactly the accents of lunacy. " I," 
 he says, " am the Light of the World." When 
 He spoke those words, did He know Himself to 
 be an unlettered man, the son of a peasant, His 
 only school of philosophy the village carpenter's 
 shop ? " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and 
 are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Be- 
 hind that strange call, that arrogant promise, was 
 there nothing but a human consciousness, such as 
 we possess ? "I am the bread of life : he that 
 cometh to Me shall never hunger ; he that be- 
 lieveth on Me shall never thirst." What man 
 has the right to speak such words to his 
 fellow-men ? 
 
 If the speaker was only an ignorant, undis- 
 tinguished Jew, no different from any other Jew 
 of his time, a Galilean peasant in the days when 
 Palestine was a province of the Caesars, then He 
 was not merely an impostor, He was the most 
 ridiculous impostor the race has produced. And 
 what is curious, He was an impostor without 
 the motives of one. For Christ never deceived 
 
184 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Himself. He knew that at the end of his brief 
 ministry the cross waited for Him. 
 
 An impostor I Then the one effective moral 
 teacher human history knows, a rogue who 
 spent his life — nay, who laid down his life — to 
 enforce on others maxims he did not himself 
 obey. The theory is the most insane of 
 paradoxes ! 
 
 It is usual to wrap up this theory in soft 
 words, to hang round it a nimbus of polite 
 generalities. No one will put it in plain speech. 
 Those who contend in the loudest tones that 
 Christ was a man, on the same level of nature 
 with all other men, are yet eager to adorn Him 
 with compliments. They vie with His most 
 devoted followers in ascribing every virtue to 
 Him. He was the highest and noblest of men. 
 
 But if Christ had no other than a human 
 consciousness — if he knew Himself to be only a 
 man at the moment He claimed to be infinitely 
 more than man — there is no room for compli- 
 ments. A man talking in Christ's accents, 
 making Christ's claims, uttering Christ's promises, 
 assuming Christ's attitude to the rest of his race, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 185 
 
 is, it must be repeated, the most stupendous 
 impostor on record. 
 
 Where else can be found an example of claims 
 so wild, made in tones so calm and assured ? 
 " Before Abraham was, I am." " He that eateth 
 My flesh and drinketh My blood hath eternal 
 life, and I will raise him up at the last day." If 
 these words have not behind them a divine con- 
 sciousness, and a divine authority, they are, must 
 be, pronounced either the wildest lunacies, or 
 the most extravagant, and, it may be added, 
 the most meaningless imposture to be discovered 
 in history. From that conclusion there is literally 
 no escape. 
 
 But to state some charges is to refute them. 
 Who would not treat it as a jest if asked to 
 believe that behind "Paradise Lost" there was 
 the brain of an idiot ; that the imagination of a 
 rogue gave birth to the " Imitatio Christi"; or 
 that the appetites of swine created " In Me- 
 moriam " ? And to put the soul of a conscious 
 impostor behind the face of Christ ; to trace the 
 Sermon on the Mount to the vanity of a diseased 
 intellect; to find the root of what is, on any 
 
186 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 theory as to its origin, the profoundest spiritual 
 teaching the race knows, in the arts of a rogue, 
 the falsehood of a deceiver — this is a vaster folly 
 still. 
 
 Whatever is true, this cannot be ! It is an 
 incredibility so vast, that to believe it requires a 
 more stupendous effort of faith . than the accept- 
 ance of all the fables of the Talmud, or of King 
 Arthur's Round Table. 
 
 We have thus got a step further. Christ 
 certainly existed. To doubt this is to quarrel 
 with history. It were as reasonable to doubt 
 whether Alexander existed, or Caesar, or Napo- 
 leon Buonaparte. And accepting the fact that 
 Jesus Christ existed, He cannot be set in the 
 pillory of human scorn as an impostor. He must 
 have believed in Himself, and in what He claimed 
 for Himself. If any words that ever fell from 
 human lips ring with the accents of sincerity they 
 are His. So those who reject His divinity are 
 driven to the theory that He was a pure-minded 
 but self-deluded dreamer, Who took Himself 
 seriously. He did not try to deceive the world. 
 He deceived Himself. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 187 
 
 This, however, is to save Christ's honesty at 
 the expense of His sanity. He believed in His 
 own miracles, though they never existed. He 
 was able to describe Himself as the " Light of 
 the World," and He actually mistook Himself 
 for that light, when He was really an unlettered 
 Jewish peasant, the head of a tiny Jewish sect. 
 This is to say, as a matter of fact, that Jesus 
 Christ must be dismissed from consideration as a 
 lunatic. Only under the roof of a lunatic 
 asylum is such language as His found on merely 
 human lips. Those who deny the divinity of 
 Jesus Christ ought to have the courage of their 
 logic. They ought to be prepared to sign a 
 certificate of lunacy for Jesus Christ ! 
 
 Yet who not being himself insane would 
 put his name to such a certificate ! In the 
 whole compass of human literature, where is 
 speech to be found shining with the pure white 
 radiance of perfect reason in an equal degree 
 with the teachings of Jesus Christ ? In all 
 recorded human thinking, whose thoughts move 
 with a flight so steady, and in a realm so high, 
 as His ? The homely speech of Socrates himself 
 
188 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 has not more of the salt of reason; the philo- 
 sophy of Plato is not so serenely luminous. The 
 wisest in every generation since He was born sit 
 at His feet to learn ; the saintliest stand rebuked 
 before His purity. 
 
 If a plebiscite of the human race were 
 taken, would a single vote be cast in favour of 
 the theory that Jesus Christ was either an 
 impostor — or a madman ? If such a vote were 
 cast, the owner of it would find no hole into 
 which he could creep and hide himself from 
 the contempt of mankind. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE THEORY THAT CHRIST IS ONLY A MYTH 
 
 " You have to account for a man born in the imagination 
 of some other man, and who, as a creature of imagination, 
 has risen to the supreme place in human history, and who 
 to-day rules innumerable millions of human lives and 
 ministries and destinies. It is easy to call Him and His 
 work mythical, romantic, fabulous, but that does not 
 account for the profound moral influence, the beneficent 
 results, and the whole ministry that is represented by the 
 term Christ." — Dr. Parker, The People's Bible ; Matthew, 
 p. 386. 
 
 So far, the doubts about Christ — the direct 
 alternatives to belief in His divinity can be 
 shown, one by one, to be incredible. He actu- 
 ally existed. He was not a shameless and con- 
 scious impostor. He was not a lunatic. The 
 Sermon on the Mount did not find its cradle in 
 a diseased brain, and the parables of Christ are 
 not the creations of a disordered mind. 
 
 There remains, as an alternative to Christian 
 faith, and as a positive creed about Christ, only 
 
 189 
 
190 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 one theory which is so much as thinkable. 
 He was a beautiful character, half mystic, half 
 poet, and whole dreamer ; " a beautiful but in- 
 effectual angel," to quote Max Gohre, " beating 
 in the void his luminous wings in vain." He 
 lived a life so blameless, and yet so pathetic, 
 that it has seized the imagination of the race ; 
 and round it, as the centuries pass, there has 
 naturally and inevitably gathered a world of 
 touching myths. The gospels are to be read 
 with pitying and respectful tenderness as the 
 records of a beautiful delusion ; a dream which 
 has solidified into a myth, or a group of myths. 
 
 Christ was not responsible for these myths; 
 He did not invent them. They simply gathered 
 — a sort of shining poetic dew — about His 
 memory. He is thus to be regarded as the 
 unconscious human kernel to a cloud of rose- 
 coloured fables — fables born of superstition, or of 
 imagination — and which have hardened with the 
 process of time into something that resembles 
 history. 
 
 Just as amber gathers round some accidental 
 substance — a straw, or a fly — and embalms it, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 191 
 
 wraps it in perfume, makes it imperishable, so 
 the dreams and the superstitions of the race 
 have gathered round Jesus Christ. He is a 
 butterfly who, in this way, has been transformed 
 into a jewel. 
 
 This is an explanation of Christ which allows 
 the sceptic to be polite to Him, or even to 
 admire Him, while yet dismissing His claims 
 as so much idle vapour. * 
 
 But to this theory some very obvious and 
 fatal criticisms apply. We are asked to regard 
 the Sermon on the Mount, the story of the 
 miracles, the matchless tragedy of the betrayal 
 and the agony and the cross, as forms of crys- 
 tallised superstition. Now, human superstition 
 is an ignoble thing, intellectually lower than 
 philosophy or poetry. And yet, on this theory, 
 it has done what philosophy or poetry could 
 never accomplish. It has given birth to con- 
 ceptions which have not merely coloured the 
 life of the world ; they have ennobled that life. 
 They have transfigured to a new pattern the 
 civilisations in which the life of the race ex- 
 presses itself. They are doing it still, though the 
 
192 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 superstitions from which they come have been 
 exposed and renounced. This, surely, is the last 
 of incredibilities. 
 
 It is more plausible, perhaps, to describe the 
 story of Christ as the crystallised imagination — 
 rather than the concrete superstition — of the 
 race. Out of that imagination has been evolved 
 the dream — the poet's vision — of a perfect life ; 
 a life untouched by the evil of the world, the 
 ideal of what every man might wish himself to 
 be. And picturesque traditions, and more or 
 less plausible dogmas, have grown naturally from 
 this dream, or have been attracted to it. So 
 we get the radiant, but imaginary figure of 
 Jesus Christ, a myth born of the dreaming 
 human imagination. And this theory, it may 
 be claimed, at least does not insult Christ. 
 
 But " imagination " is not a vague, diffused 
 element — say, like gravitation — a homeless force 
 which operates everywhere, but finds its centre 
 nowhere. It is a personal quality, the endow- 
 ment of some single intellect. Now, if Christ 
 — the Christ of the Church's faith — did not 
 exist, but is the creation of the human mind, 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 193 
 
 the question arises, of whose imagination is He 
 the child ? What nameless Shakespeare — or 
 procession 01 Shakespeares — invented Him, and 
 equipped Him with a story so wonderful, teach- 
 ing so profound, a philosophy so lofty ? A 
 geometrical progression with a cypher for its 
 starting-point is a sufficiently startling con- 
 ception ; and if Christianity is such a pro- 
 gression, the puzzle arises : " Who was the 
 unknown inventor of that amazing cypher 
 which, being nothing, has yet yielded a sum- 
 total so stupendous ? " 
 
 For this is a " myth •' which to this very day 
 has in it an energy as of dynamite. It turned 
 the group of Christ's immediate disciples — who 
 were visibly commonplace men — into forces 
 which have affected the history of the race 
 more profoundly than any of the memorable 
 figures in war, or statesmanship, or science, or 
 philosophy that can be named. "The men who 
 have turned the world upside down," is the 
 description of their alarmed contemporaries ; and 
 the men who thus changed the very order of 
 society are Peter, who denied his Lord ; Paul, 
 
 N 
 
194 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 who persecuted His followers ; John a"nd James, 
 with their companions, who fled from Him at 
 the moment of His arrest. But they recovered 
 their faith in Christ, and the recovery trans- 
 formed them into human forces without parallel 
 in human history ! 
 
 We know what is possible in the way of 
 creation to the human imagination. Shake- 
 speare is its high-water mark, so far as the 
 English-speaking race is concerned. But who 
 could suppose one of the imaginary characters 
 created by his genius — say, Hamlet or Titania — 
 stepping off the stage — turning all history, in- 
 deed, into a stage for itself — creating a new 
 literature of its own, vaster than its own author 
 was able to create for himself; re-shaping civil- 
 isation, giving a new standard to duty, evolving 
 martyrs, inspiring saints, putting hymns on 
 countless lips, building ten thousand places of 
 worship ! And we are asked to believe that 
 the " imagination''" of some obscure and forgotten 
 dreamer, a compound of rogue and lunatic, using 
 the figure of a Jewish peasant as its raw material, 
 has performed this -miracle ! This would be a 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 195 
 
 greater wonder than any recorded in the four 
 gospels. 
 
 It may be added that this particular " myth " 
 is burdened with a special incredibility. For the 
 mythologies of Greece and Eome, or of Eastern 
 lands, the notion of an incarnation, or of many 
 incarnations, was easy. But to the Jews, and to 
 the faith of the Jewish people, the idea was 
 abhorrent. They sent Christ, as a matter of 
 fact, to His death for claiming to be the Son 
 of God. The Jewish mind, whatever other 
 element of religious faith it had lost, still kept 
 possession of the doctrine of the unity of God ; 
 and that doctrine, as Jewish thought interpreted 
 it, was in utter hostility to the very notion of 
 an incarnation. And to explain the Christian 
 doctrine of the incarnation as a myth generated 
 in the brains of half-a-dozen Jewish fishermen — 
 this is an incredibility greater than the Incar- 
 nation itself. 
 
 It is clear, again, that no single intellect is 
 concerned with the invention of the fable — 
 if it be a fable — on which Christianity is built. 
 A whole procession of dreamers and rogues, 
 
196 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 scattered over a period of many years and an 
 area of many lands, must have been engaged in 
 the process. Now the notion of the composite 
 authorship of the " Iliad " was killed by the 
 argument that it was easier to believe in one 
 Homer than in a dozen; and the suggestion, 
 it may be added, that no Homer ever existed, 
 may fitly enough be killed by the consideration 
 that somebody who, not being Homer, invented 
 him, and wrote the " Iliad " for him, would be a 
 vastly more astonishing person than Homer 
 himself. 
 
 But if we reject the notion of an historic 
 Christ, a real person, who spoke the words and 
 performed the deeds described in the four gospels, 
 then we have to believe in the existence of an 
 unknown number of forgotten geniuses, of name- 
 less poets and unrecorded Shakespeares, who 
 conspired to produce the character of Jesus. 
 They invented His history, forged His parables ; 
 and, though acting without concert with each 
 other, have produced an absolutely harmonious 
 conception. 
 
 For no harmony known to music is more per- 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 197 
 
 feet than the harmony of qualities which make 
 up the character of Christ, as painted in the 
 gospels. And wrought into the beautifully- 
 simple story and character of Christ, are mean- 
 ings and truths the race masters only slowly, 
 and has not, even yet, mastered fully. The 
 history thus invented resembles, as a matter 
 of fact, a record in cipher. Generation after 
 generation spells out some new syllable of the 
 cipher, and so the revelation grows ; but always 
 it is self- consistent, and always it is in advance 
 of the highest thought straining to interpret 
 it. 
 
 Here, then, is something without parallel in 
 literature ; a character so noble in conception, so 
 pure in teaching, so profound and sustained in 
 its influence, that it has changed the story of 
 the world. To-day it kindles the worship, and 
 colours the lives, of countless multitudes. 
 
 Now that the conception of such a character 
 is the work of a committee of unknown rogues ; 
 of rogues without any intelligible motive, who 
 belonged to different ages and worked without 
 concert or common plan ; this, surely, is a theory 
 
198 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 no sane mind can accept. It overtaxes human 
 credulity. 
 
 When we are told, moreover, that Christ 
 is simply an accidental human centre to an 
 equally accidental collection of myths, it is 
 worth while to remember that even a myth 
 needs an explanation. It has its own laws and 
 limitations. 
 
 What may be called the natural history of 
 myths is quite intelligible. Like certain fungoid 
 growths, they need a special atmosphere for their 
 development. They grow rankly in the darkness. 
 Light kills them as it kills some microbes. 
 
 Now it is certain that no such atmosphere lies 
 about the birth of Christianity. It did not arise 
 in a dim and remote antiquity when fables came 
 easily into birth. Christ was born more than 
 four centuries after Plato. His cradle stands in 
 the very centre of what is known as the " Golden 
 Age " of Eoman literature. Pliny was twenty- 
 three years old when the angels sang the first 
 Christmas "Adeste" ; Juvenal was born seven 
 years after the Crucifixion ; Seneca's epistles are 
 contemporary with those of St. Paul. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 199 
 
 A generation which saw Augustus on the 
 throne, which had Tacitus for historian, and 
 Juvenal for poet and satirist, was certainly not 
 credulous or superstitious. It was a wearied and 
 sceptical age. It had tried every experiment, 
 exhausted every pleasure, stripped itself of every 
 belief. Such an age is as unfavourable to the 
 evolution of myths as an acid solution is to the 
 growth of weeds. 
 
 Myths, again, need much time for their 
 evolution. A human figure must grow dim and 
 vague from mere distance ; close personal know- 
 ledge — the knowledge that disillusionizes — must 
 perish, before a nimbus of myths can gather 
 about it. As no man can be a hero to his valet, 
 so no man with the limitations of his kind can 
 be glorified and vapourised into a myth while 
 his contemporaries live. 
 
 But Christ came to His full estate in the 
 belief of His followers almost at a single step. 
 Paul's letters are the final proof of this. They 
 were written within less than thirty years of 
 the Crucifixion, and are the earliest and most 
 authentic of Christian documents. They are 
 
200 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 admitted by the highest critical authorities to 
 be genuine. And in these letters Christ emerges 
 full-statured and divine, with the faith concern- 
 ing Him as clear cut as a cameo, as definite 
 as a steel die. Less than thirty years after 
 the Roman whips had scourged Him and the 
 Roman soldiers cast lots for His garments, Christ 
 stands revealed in these letters, the world's 
 Redeemer — exactly as He stands to-day, after 
 nineteen centuries have gone. 
 
 Paul, it must be remembered, was not a 
 narrow-brained fanatic, an enthusiast careless of 
 logic. He was a scholar, a thinker, one of the 
 great intellects of the race. He has made a 
 deeper impress on history than Caesar or Shake- 
 speare. His philosophy touches a higher note 
 than that of Socrates; his moral teaching is 
 of a more practical fibre than that of Marcus 
 Aurelius. He is the most impressive witness as 
 to the person of Christ that can be put in the 
 box, and nothing can be more absolute and 
 decisive than his testimony. 
 
 He not only believes, on the authority of an 
 amazing personal experience., in the resurrection 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 201 
 
 of Christ; he remembers and numbers the 
 witnesses who saw the risen Saviour. No belief 
 can be more confident, and no teaching about 
 Christ more definite or positive in character, 
 than his. We are justified, he declares, by His 
 grace. The race is put into a new relationship 
 with God by His incarnation. All men are to 
 stand at His judgment seat. Not to love Him 
 is to be anathema maranatha. 
 
 We are not called at this point to discuss 
 whether these teachings are true or not; they 
 at least prove that the Figure of Jesus Christ 
 cannot be classed as a myth. It stands, as 
 seen by His contemporaries, and in the light of 
 that first generation, exactly as it does to-day 
 after nineteen centuries have passed. 
 
 Myths, again, if they are easily evolved are 
 easily slain. Time is cruel to them. Science is 
 fatal. Mere increase of knowledge kills them, 
 as light destroys certain low forms of life. But 
 the "myth" of Jesus Christ has survived the 
 passage of nearly two thousand years, and stands 
 undissolved in the white light of the twentieth 
 century. 
 
202 THE BELIEFS OP UNBELIEF 
 
 This statement, indeed, is inadequate. The 
 story of Christ satisfies the demands of science 
 by gathering to itself an ever more triumphant 
 verification, born of that final test of any creed, 
 the test of actual human experience. For the 
 gospel of Jesus Christ, it must be remembered, 
 is not a philosophy; it is not a collection 
 of legends and poems. It has a philosophy, 
 indeed, nobler than the schools of Athens or of 
 Rome ever heard, and poems sweeter than any 
 Homer or Virgil ever sang. But it does not 
 pretend to be a mere form, no matter how stately 
 and noble, of literature. It is a statute-book, 
 and has the functions of a statute-book. " The 
 question," says Bacon, " is to be settled not by 
 argument, but by trying." And men — genera- 
 tion after generation — have actually " tried " 
 Christ's laws, and find that they work. 
 
 It might be possible to wrangle indefinitely 
 over the symbols which make up a chemical 
 formula; but science accepts the test of the 
 laboratory as final. If every chemist who puts 
 together the elements in the formula produces 
 the same solution, what room is left for doubt ? 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 203 
 
 And the test of the validity of Christ's teaching 
 lies near at hand and within every man's reach. 
 It is a rule of life. It has for every-day affairs 
 the office of chart, and compass, and nautical 
 almanac to the seaman. 
 
 Imagine a sea captain being told that his 
 compass was a cheat, his chart an idle picture, 
 his nautical almanac a collection of myths ! He 
 would not attempt to defend the methods of his 
 art by syllogisms. " I have sailed by compass 
 and chart for forty years," he would say, " and 
 they have brought me to port." What logic 
 can be simpler ; or what proof more absolute ? 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 CONTRASTED CREEDS 
 
 " I esteem the gospels to be thoroughly genuine, for 
 there shines forth from them the reflected splendour of a 
 sublimity proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ of so 
 divine a kind as only the divine could ever have manifested 
 on earth." — Goethe, Conversations with Eckermcmn, iii., 
 p. 371. 
 
 " Either God has thus finally spoken, or there is no God, 
 and man is the incomprehensible creation of chance and the 
 sport of the chance that created him." — Pope, Theology, 
 vol. i., p. 61. 
 
 In this list, thus briefly discussed, all the 
 visible alternatives to the accepted faith about 
 Christ are compressed. They confront each 
 other. They challenge the verdict of every 
 man's reason. They put the general human 
 conscience on its trial. Some choice betwixt 
 them is instant, urgent, inevitable. And which 
 of them can for a moment compare, not merely 
 for credibility, but for sanity, with the general 
 faith of the Christian Church ? 
 
 To say that Christ never existed is a suffici- 
 
 204 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 205 
 
 ently positive creed. But to undertake to 
 explain Christianity ivithout Christ is a per- 
 formance which can only kindle intellectual 
 contempt. " It is of no use," to quote Mill 
 once more, " to say that Christ as exhibited in 
 the gospels is not historical." It is " of no use," 
 because the history of nineteen centuries makes 
 such a denial idle. To say, again, that He 
 existed, but was a self-conscious impostor, is an 
 offence to reason almost greater. It is to say that 
 the one effective religion the world knows had its 
 cradle in the brain of a rogue. 
 
 To say that Christ was a blameless dreamer 
 — a dreamer with the general limitations of the 
 race, and the special limitations of the age in 
 which He lived — round whom the human imagin- 
 ation has hung an accidental garment of myths, 
 is, again, a definite and intelligible creed. But it 
 argues a greater miracle than is to be found 
 within the covers of the Bible. This belief 
 clothes that vague thing imagination — the 
 imagination of nobody in particular — the general 
 unowned imagination of mankind — with a power 
 of noble and sustained creation beyond all the 
 
206 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 writers and thinkers and poets the race has ever 
 produced. It is like saying that Cologne 
 Cathedral had no particular architect, and was 
 built on no specific plan. The vague " imagin- 
 ation " of the nameless hut-dwelling crowd, 
 amongst whom it rose, produced it. 
 
 Any one of these theories about Jesus Christ 
 is an offence to plain reason. But it may be 
 asked, How do these alternative creeds — these 
 rivals to the Christian faith — affect morality? 
 Do they carry with them any ethical results ; 
 and if so, what is their nature ? 
 
 The answer is that if they stained through to 
 the imagination, and captured the belief of the 
 race, they would profoundly shake the very 
 foundations on which morality stands. 
 
 If the race suddenly became convinced that 
 Christ never existed, all that Christianity means 
 would perish. The one effective system of ethics 
 the race knows would be cancelled. Morality 
 itself would be discredited. Here is a moral 
 code, it would be argued, which has emerged 
 from nothing, which has meant nothing, but 
 which has somehow for ages cheated the intellect 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 207 
 
 and enslaved the conscience of mankind. All 
 codes as a result would grow suspect. 
 
 What effect on the world's morality would be 
 produced, again, by the discovery that Christ 
 was an impostor? The one Figure which the 
 race had agreed to accept as its highest ideal of 
 goodness suddenly proved to be a cheat, a dis- 
 sembler, a rogue plus a pious mask — who shall 
 measure the moral disaster of such a discovery ? 
 It would mean the instant and universal wreck 
 of conscience ! Goodness itself might well be 
 hated, since what had been adored for nineteen 
 centuries as its most perfect embodiment, turned 
 out to be only a veil covering the face of a lie. 
 In the same way, the discovery that Christ was 
 nothing better than a myth would go far to 
 resolve morality itself into a myth. 
 
 These are not arguments for continuing to 
 believe in Christianity in spite of all disproof; 
 but they may justly enough serve to make us 
 hate the theories which, without any such 
 disproof, would wreck the moral ideals of the 
 race, and turn the highest conception of Good- 
 ness which has ever broken upon human vision, 
 
208 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 into an imposture. This, surely, is not only a sin 
 against the Holy Ghost, but a sin against the 
 human race. 
 
 No ! the saints and martyrs of all the Christian 
 centuries have not been deceived. The deepest 
 experiences of so many generations of godly men 
 and women are not a delusion. Christ's great 
 words about Himself are true. He is the Light 
 of the World. He is the eternal Word made 
 flesh. He is a Force that draws all men unto 
 Himself. Above the wrecks of all opposing 
 theories, and calm with all the peace of the stars, 
 the Christian faith about Christ rises, like some 
 soaring mountain peak — stately, strong unshak- 
 able. It is buttressed with cliffs of granite, and 
 white with unstained snows. The theories that 
 would overthrow it are like the low huts, the 
 insect-haunted scrub, at its base. 
 
BOOK III 
 THE BIBLE 
 
PART 1 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN FAITH ABOUT 
 THE BIBLE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 THE PUZZLE OF THE BIBLE 
 
 " The Bible is a book which man could not have written 
 if he would, and would not have written if he could." — 
 Henry Rogers. 
 
 " If an inhabitant of another planet were to visit our 
 sphere and should ask to see the most significant, victorious, 
 and precious object now known to man, I, for one, should 
 unhesitatingly show him the Bible." — Joseph Cook. 
 
 The Bible, as seen by Christian faith, is not a 
 
 book of speculations and guesses, a book which 
 
 represents the groping of the human mind after 
 
 God. It is a revelation : the discovery God has 
 
 made of Himself to man. It is the statute-book 
 
 of the human race. There is a revelation of God 
 
 in nature, and in secular history. But language 
 
 is the fundamental distinction betwixt man and 
 
 the beasts. It is the Eubicon, to quote Max 
 
 211 
 
212 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Miiller, on the hither side of which men alone 
 are found. " Man is man," says Humboldt, 
 " only through speech/' And it was fitting that 
 God, Who has bestowed on us this great faculty 
 of language, should make the highest disclosure 
 of Himself through that channel. 
 
 But if we consider the literary form through 
 which these high offices are fulfilled, the Bible can 
 only be described as a paradox, the disappoint- 
 ment of all human expectation. To look at, 
 it is a book of scraps ; a planless cluster of 
 pamphlets, representing the literature of the 
 most unliterary of nations. Here are sixty-six 
 booklets of the most diverse character, some of 
 them of unknown, some of doubtful, authorship, 
 scattered thinly over sixteen centuries. They 
 are made up of biographies, hymns, episodes of 
 tribal history; laws of a social system which 
 no longer exists ; genealogies of men in whom 
 nobody is interested ; letters to Churches dead 
 for centuries; tales of old, far-off, forgotten 
 things, and battles long ago. One book is an 
 Eastern love story ; another is an episode in 
 Persian history which has not the name of God 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 213 
 
 in it; yet another is the letter carried by an 
 escaped slave who was being sent back to his 
 master; yet another is a collection of proverbs 
 of the " Poor Richard " order. 
 
 Sixty-six pamphlets, written without concert, 
 by a scattered line of unknown men, and 
 preserved, we hardly know how, packed with 
 mysteries, full of what seem insignificant or 
 irrelevant details. And yet this Book is the 
 greatest literary possession of the race, the 
 enduring revelation of God to man. It con- 
 stitutes the title deeds of Christian institutions. 
 It is the lesson book of Christian faith, the final 
 code of human conduct. " We have no other 
 Christian religion/' says Dr. Pope, "than that 
 which is one with its documents and records. 
 The character of Christianity is the character of 
 the Bible." 
 
 If asked to describe in advance what the Bible 
 of the human race should be, certainly no one 
 would have guessed this particular form. " Might 
 we not easily have had," it is natural to ask, " a 
 book with fewer mysteries and digressions, a 
 book that left nothing untold, that could be 
 
214 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 demonstrated like a proposition in Euclid, and 
 which no Higher Critics could dissolve into a 
 mist of wavering dates ? " A revelation given to 
 all, given simultaneously, and given adequately : 
 this is what seems to be needed. 
 
 Let us imagine a committee of philosophers — 
 or of poets, or lawyers, or historians, or news- 
 paper editors — employed to draw up in advance 
 a plan for a Bible. It is highly probable, of 
 course, that such a committee would never have 
 agreed amongst themselves ; but it is certain that 
 if they had, they would have given us a Bible 
 quite unlike that it has pleased God to bestow. 
 
 The lawyers would have given us a code ; 
 the theologians a catechism ; the philosophers a 
 volume of metaphysics. A committee of news- 
 paper editors would have provided for us an 
 " up-to-date " book, all " cross-heads M and sen- 
 sations and picturesque descriptions. The poets 
 would have given us an epic embroidered with 
 sonnets. The scientists would have made science 
 itself unnecessary by preparing a compendium 
 of all knowledge, the natural history of things in 
 general, a book which would have left the planet 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 215 
 
 without a secret, and the human intellect with 
 nothing to interest it. 
 
 And all of them would have insisted on a 
 library instead of a simple book. For consider 
 the scale on which uninspired human literature is 
 planned. Hodder's " Life of the Earl of Shaftes- 
 bury " — to take the first book on the shelf — con- 
 tains some 360,000 words. Mr. Morley writes 
 the " Life of Gladstone " on a still ampler scale, 
 in two stupendous volumes. But for the life of 
 Christ we have four thin pamphlets no bigger 
 than tracts. Matthew tells the amazing story in 
 23,000 words, Mark in 15,000 words. 
 
 When we remember how many volumes King- 
 lake takes to describe a third-rate war which 
 settled nothing ; and what space Macaulay 
 requires to tell the tale of only six years of 
 British history, what a stupendous book — or 
 library of books — a committee of uninspired 
 editors would require to tell the whole story of 
 the planet, and of the religious history of the 
 human race ! The Bible that the human mind 
 would have invented is something to meditate 
 over. 
 
216 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 And yet this amazing Book, that affronts all 
 expectation, that seems, in literary form, to be 
 utterly unfitted for the great offices of a Bible, 
 has influenced the imagination of the world, and 
 the history of the race, not only more than any 
 other book that can be named, but more than all 
 other books put together. It has determined — or 
 is visibly determining — the morality of the race. 
 Nations live by it, or die by quarrelling with it. 
 This tiny collection of Hebrew books not only 
 lies on every pulpit lid in Christendom ; it is the 
 shaping force in human affairs everywhere. 
 
 Theodore Parker was by no means an orthodox 
 Christian, but he had a touch of true spiritual 
 genius, and of the insight which spiritual genius 
 gives ; and his testimony to the Bible is a classic. 
 The sun, he says, never sets on its gleaming page. 
 It goes to the castle of the king and the cottage 
 of the peasant. It colours the talk of the street, 
 it is woven into the web of universal literature. 
 It talks to us in our solitude, consoles our grief, 
 rebukes our baseness, gives new ideals to our con- 
 science. The aching head finds a softer pillow 
 when the Bible lies underneath. This Book 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 217 
 
 blesses us when we are born, gives names to half 
 Christendom, adds a sanctity to the marriage tie, 
 writes an inscription of hope on the graves of the 
 dead. " Our best of uttered prayer," writes Theo- 
 dore Parker, " are in its storied speech wherewith 
 our fathers and the patriarchs prayed. Men who 
 believe nothing else that is spiritual believe the 
 Bible all through." 
 
 Generation after generation arises, each with 
 its separate ideals and needs, each with its own 
 language. The literature of yesterday is not 
 the literature of to-day. Famous books go 
 out of fashion, and are read only by scholars 
 and antiquarians. But this immortal Book 
 is the contemporary of all ages. It talks in 
 the speech, and with the accents of each genera- 
 tion in turn. The silver cord of the Bible is not 
 loosed nor its golden bowl broken as centuries 
 slip by, like beads on the thread of time. " The 
 Bible," says Theodore Parker, " is the master of 
 the soul, wiser than reason, truer than consci- 
 ence, greater and more trustworthy than the 
 religious instinct itself." 
 
 The scale on which it is perpetually multiplied 
 
218 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 is only one proof of the stupendous force of the 
 Bible. One English society alone has translated 
 it into 400 languages, and prints 6,000,000 
 copies of it annually. This tiny volume, more- 
 over — the work of nameless men, and, taken 
 humanly, the annals of a perished race — has 
 somehow created a vaster literature about itself 
 than any other book that can be named. No 
 other book has called into existence — for attack, 
 for defence, for illustration, for proof, and for 
 disproof — so many volumes. The sixty-six 
 pamphlets which make it up are, in mass, 
 about one-three-hundredth part of extant Greek 
 and Roman literature ; works which, taken intel- 
 lectually, are the classics of all time. Yet the 
 Bible has given birth to a vaster literature than 
 all the Greek and Roman classics put together, 
 and yet is not itself submerged. It rises high 
 above the literature devoted to its exposition like 
 the oak above the leaves of last year's spring. 
 " The little ark of Jewish literature/' says Henry 
 Rogers, " floats upon the surges of time, while 
 the wrecked archives of huge Oriental empires 
 are turned into mere flotsam and jetsam." 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 219 
 
 How often this Book has been torn to rags, 
 refuted, destroyed. But the anvil outlasts all the 
 hammers that smite it. The men who attack the 
 Bible, the volumes written to disprove it, are 
 forgotten, while the immortal Book lives on. 
 The Bible, too, survives its friends as well as its 
 enemies. The Psalms have outlived Tate and 
 Brady, Sternhold and Hopkins. The histories of 
 the Bible are cut into fragments by the dissecting 
 knives of scholars, and yet, somehow, they keep 
 the unity that belongs to life. 
 
 Some strange gift of indestructible life is 
 hidden in this volume. History is strewn with 
 the wrecks of a hundred perished literatures ; 
 but time has no destroying office for the Biblical 
 records. Great nations are only remembered, 
 indeed, as embalmed in them. " Some nations 
 and empires," writes Henry .Rogers, " are not 
 forgotten, only because the Bible has occasion 
 to mention them." Some element not born of 
 human genius, but which outshines genius, lies 
 in its pages. Other books have their day and 
 they die. Their language grows obsolete. The 
 world's thought runs in new channels, and 
 
220 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 they are left mere stranded wrecks on Time's 
 shore. But this Book belongs to all the centuries, 
 and outlives them all. 
 
 " A planless book," a "book of scraps," men 
 call it. And yet it has the indestructible unity 
 which life alone gives. If tried only as a poem 
 is tried, and by purely literary tests, the Bible is 
 a great epic, with the unity of plan that belongs 
 to an epic. It has a lost Paradise at the be- 
 ginning, a Paradise regained at the end, with a 
 divine, redeeming process running through thou- 
 sands of years, linking both visions together. 
 One sublime idea shines behind the many books 
 of the Bible. It is the recovery of a fallen race ; 
 the rebuilding of the kingdom of God in human 
 life. And the instrument of this great process 
 is Jesus Christ. The Bible is nothing but a 
 frame of historical events in which Christ is set. 
 All the early books of the Bible prepare for Him, 
 whisper of Him, point to Him ; all the later 
 books look back to Him. Under all its forms the 
 Bible is thus the servant of one idea. 
 
 And the unity which is thus revealed, it must 
 be repeated, is the product of human elements 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 221 
 
 which seem in utter discord with each other. 
 Here is an unknown number of writers, belong- 
 ing to different races, born under different skies, 
 parted by centuries from each other, with no 
 common plans, and most of them visibly without 
 any notion that what they write is to be part of 
 the Bible of the human race. These are the 
 elements not of unity but of discord. 
 
 Imagine sixty-six compositors scattered over 
 the world, each man setting up some solitary 
 word, without any knowledge of what the other 
 sixty-five were to produce. And lo ! the sixty- 
 six words when put together fall into what may 
 be called lyrical relations with each other. They 
 make not merely an intelligent sentence, but a 
 poem, with linked sweetness of rhythm, and 
 chiming harmonies; a poem of which the sense 
 is not only clear, but rises to a sublime climax. 
 Could anything less than a miracle produce the 
 rhythm of a perfect sonnet from a number of 
 words set up independently ? There must be 
 a single controlling Mind behind the words to 
 explain the poem. 
 
 Or, to vary the figure, the Bible is a portrait. 
 
222 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 The face of Christ looks out, tender, pure, divine, 
 if with varying clearness, from every page. Is it 
 credible that sixty-six chance daubs, of chance 
 colours, made without agreement betwixt them- 
 selves by a number of chance men, could produce 
 a Face that arrests the attention, and stirs the 
 love of the world? 
 
 The Bible, tried by ordinary tests, is thus the 
 great puzzle of all literature. What is the explan- 
 ation of the puzzle? To give the answer of 
 Christian faith in Christian terms, the secret of 
 the Bible lies in the fact that it is not the pro- 
 duct of human genius, it does not reflect the 
 mind or record the discoveries of man. It reflects 
 the mind of God. It is a channel through which 
 runs a stream of spiritual force. It is not a dis- 
 covery, but a revelation. It is, to use terms of 
 theology, a divinely-inspired book. 
 
 About the inspiration of the Bible there are 
 many theories and many perplexities. The 
 notion of a mechanical inspiration, a force which 
 blotted out the individuality of the writers, and 
 used them as unconscious pens — mere pipes 
 through which the divine stream flowed — is not 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 223 
 
 necessary to Christian faith, and is not, as a 
 matter of fact, held by any large section of the 
 Christian Church. 
 
 A verbal inspiration, co-extensive with the 
 Bible, is unnecessary for the ends of the Bible, 
 and is inconsistent with the facts of the Bible. 
 Such an inspiration would be useless to us to- 
 day ; for if it were given to the original 
 documents of Scripture it is cancelled by the 
 fact that these have long since perished. It 
 is discredited by the fact that there is in the 
 Bible visibly no great care taken to ensure 
 an exact verbal uniformity in different reports 
 of the same event. When the four evangel- 
 ists give some memorable saying of Christ, 
 each one records it with some slight variation of 
 incident and phraseology. There are variations 
 in the reports of some of the most solemn words 
 uttered by Christ, such, for example, as the words 
 employed in the Last Supper. The records, it is 
 true, are absolutely uniform in spirit and mean- 
 ing : the variations only prove the independency 
 of the writers. 
 
 A verbal inspiration governing every word of 
 
224 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the Bible is discredited, again, by the fact that, 
 while there are some 263 direct quotations from 
 the Old Testament in the New Testament, scarcely 
 any one of these is verbally accurate. " It has 
 not pleased God," says Dr. Pope, " to bind up 
 His eternal truth absolutely and inseparably for 
 good and evil in documents which perish in the 
 using." 
 
 What the general faith of the Christian Church 
 holds is the plenary inspiration of Scripture ; an 
 inspiration which, w T hen necessary, is verbal, but 
 which always is sufficient to ensure the full and 
 accurate conveyance of the truth to be revealed. 
 
 This divine element in the Bible explains that 
 strange and separate note of tranquil certainty 
 which runs through it. It does not argue, it 
 announces. It is not concerned to prove the 
 foundation truths of religion, the existence and 
 holiness of God, the eternal authority of righteous- 
 ness, the moral nature of man, the fact of sin, 
 and of a redemption from sin, the final judgment 
 that awaits all human deeds. It assumes these 
 truths ; it proclaims them. They are not matters 
 for debate, they are not to be justified by anxious 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 225 
 
 syllogisms. They are certainties, certainties that 
 find their attestation in the soul itself. The 
 Bible, in a word, offers us not a philosophy or 
 an argument, but a Message. Its accent is not 
 that of a human teacher catching the broken 
 vision of truths far off and dimly seen, and 
 striving to utter and prove them. What it 
 offers us is not man's thoughts about God, but 
 God's thoughts about man. So the note is 
 always one of authority; its accent that of a 
 divine revelation, not of a human discovery. 
 
 The force in the Bible we call inspiration 
 explains, again, the indestructible power of the 
 Book ; a power of which the writers themselves 
 were unconscious, and which certainly cannot be 
 accounted for by any genius in them. No one 
 can pretend that a handful of untaught Jews — 
 herdsmen, fishermen, peasants — outscale in intel- 
 lectual literary power all the great names not 
 only of Greek and Latin literature, but of the 
 literature of all races and of all ages. Who will 
 compare, as far as natural genius is concerned, 
 David with Homer, or John with Plato, or Peter 
 with Marcus Aurelius ? There was only one 
 
226 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 scholar and man of genius — Paul — in the group 
 of New Testament writers. 
 
 But to take the personal and intellectual ele- 
 ments in the writers and try to explain the Bible 
 by them is like taking the dead wire, the metal 
 switch, the loop of calcined fibres, which are the 
 machinery of an electric lamp, and offering them 
 as an explanation of the electric light itself. 
 These things are but the channel of the subtle, 
 invisible force running back into mystery, that 
 we call electricity. When anybody can explain 
 the electric light without an electric current then 
 we may explain the Bible without a divine in- 
 spiration. Visibly there is something more in 
 the Book than there was in the men who wrote 
 it, and this mysterious and magnificent plus is 
 the divine energy we call inspiration. 
 
 And this has to be said about the Bible — this 
 is too commonly the forgotten thing about it; 
 its inspiration is not something lying far back 
 in distant centuries when the books were first 
 written. It is a fact in the present tense ! 1% 
 is a force affecting the readers of to-day as well 
 as the writers of yesterday. For the man who 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 227 
 
 reads it with believing eyes the Bible is still 
 flooded from cover to cover with inspiration. It 
 thrills in every syllable with more than elemental 
 forces ; forces which penetrate to the very heart 
 of the reader and stir all its deeper emotions as 
 the moon stirs the sea-tides. Something is in 
 the Book which breaks out — now in one place, 
 now in another — with pulses of spiritual energy, 
 gleams of unearthly light. It is as though first 
 one cluster of words and then another become 
 suddenly and strangely luminous. For the 
 devout soul the Bible is always a book of 
 divinest magic. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE LOGIC OF THE BIBLE 
 
 " The Word of God is the book of the common people ; 
 it is the working-man's book; it is the child's book; it is 
 the slave's book ; it is the book of every creature that is 
 downtrodden ; it is the book that carries with it the leaven 
 of God's soul ; it is a book that tends to make men larger 
 and better, and sweeter, and that succours them all through 
 life ; and do you suppose it is going to be lost out of the 
 world? When the Bible is lost out of the world, it will 
 be because there are no men in it who are in trouble, and 
 need succouring; no men who are oppressed and need 
 release ; no men who are in darkness and need light ; no 
 men who are hungry and need food ; no men who are 
 sinning and need mercy ; no men who are lost and need 
 the salvation of God." — Henry Ward Beecher. 
 
 Where shall we discover a logic wide and deep 
 and lofty enough to justify Christian faith as to 
 the Bible ? There are a thousand proofs which 
 professional apologists recite and array in scientific 
 order — its survival through so many ages, its ful- 
 filled prophecies, its profound agreement with 
 history, its supremacy over all purely human 
 literature, the miracles of yesterday which it 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 229 
 
 records, and the miracles, also, of to-day which 
 it works. But an instructed Christian would be 
 content to risk the whole case of the Bible on 
 three facts which are beyond all successful 
 challenge. 
 
 The first is the fact that the Bible is the one 
 key which unlocks the puzzle of the world. Its 
 interpretation of the spiritual history of the race 
 is true. No other covers all the facts, no other 
 is so much as thinkable. 
 
 If we grasp the underlying meaning of the 
 Bible we shall see that it assumes to be the 
 record of a great spiritual process, a process 
 older than itself, wider than itself, and one still 
 in operation. That great and divine process is 
 the religious education of the race. And who 
 looks at history in the light of this philosophy 
 sees that beneath all outward events, this is 
 exactly what has taken place, and is taking place. 
 God, by His spirit touching the spirits of men, 
 by His providence shaping the lives of men, has 
 from the beginning been leading the race to " a 
 divine, far-off event," and is still leading it. The 
 process is a spiritual education ; and human 
 
230 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 history is unintelligible, it lacks both plan and 
 goal, it is an epic without either a law or a climax, 
 except on this theory. 
 
 Now the lines of a moral evolution, a true 
 spiritual education, shine clear in the history of 
 the race. It begins with the first pair, placed in 
 that fit scene for human childhood — a garden. 
 The first lesson is that of obedience in its simplest 
 terms, a single prohibition suited to what may be 
 called the kindergarten stage of morals ; " Don't 
 touch that fruit ! " as it might be expressed. 
 Whether this story is truth in the form of 
 parable, or truth in the form of history, it is 
 equally convincing. 
 
 The lesson is not learned, the law is broken ; 
 the penalty is a lost paradise; and the first 
 human pair come out — it is true, with a myste- 
 rious and uncomprehended promise in their 
 hands — but it is to have the old lesson repeated 
 under new and sterner conditions. They have 
 sinned. They have now to be taught what sin 
 is, and what it costs ; a bitter truth, to be learned 
 only through suffering. And history must be 
 the schoolmaster. 
 
THE BELIEFS OP UNBELIEF 231 
 
 Sin, it is shown, destroyed that first paradise ; 
 it wrecks the first home ; it goes on to corrupt 
 the world, till God washes His earth clean with 
 the flood, and starts the race afresh with a single 
 family; a family who have the sign of hope 
 shining in the skies above them, and one 
 tremendous tradition, as to the cost of sin, 
 behind them. 
 
 But a new stage has been reached, and a new 
 lesson has now to be learned ; the race is to be 
 purged of idolatry, and is to be taught the truth 
 that lies at the root of all religion, that God is 
 One, and that He is a Spirit. To us this seems 
 to belong to the very alphabet of religion, for we 
 are the heirs of uncounted centuries of religious 
 teaching ; but to the race, and at the outset, it 
 was the most difficult of truths, to be learned 
 only through long ages of discipline. So a race 
 has to be trained — trained by the lessons and 
 sufferings of centuries — which shall be the 
 channel and witness of this truth to the whole 
 human family ; and the Divine method of doing 
 this is visible in characters of light in the 
 Bible. 
 
232 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Abraham is chosen as a starting-point. We 
 have, in orderly succession, a trained man, a 
 trained family, a trained nation ; a nation whose 
 history is to be the religious text-book of the 
 world. The whole process is an evolution, and 
 we see the chosen people — a people chosen for 
 the service of the world, not for themselves — 
 passing from one schoolroom to another. 
 
 Egypt is a schoolroom ; and for four hundred 
 years the Israelites are in it, until a group of 
 Bedouins and nomads has become a nation, a 
 nation fused and welded into unity by suffering, 
 and rich in civilised arts. They come out from 
 Egypt through the drama of the ten plagues, ten 
 shattering blows struck at all the towering 
 shapes of Egyptian idolatry ; and that memory 
 of overthrown gods is part of the equipment of 
 the Israelites for their great office. The desert 
 is a school, with its flaming Mount — its law of 
 the Ten Words — a great advance on the single 
 prohibition of paradise — its sufferings, its 
 chain of miraculous deliverances, its mysterious 
 tabernacle worship. 
 
 Palestine, again, is a school-house, a little land 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 233 
 
 no bigger than Wales, but shut in on every side 
 from foreign invasion. And here for nearly 
 1400 years the educational process goes on, fit- 
 ting this people to be the channel of religious 
 truths for the race. 
 
 It must be remembered that the very language 
 of religion had to be created. Its great ideas of 
 God, and of the character of God, of sin and 
 of righteousness, and of the deep and eternal 
 divorce betwixt them, had to be made visible 
 and articulate. It took two thousand years to 
 root the doctrine of one God — a truth lying at 
 the foundation of religion — in the human con- 
 science ; and before the process was complete, of 
 the twelve tribes ten had perished, or dis- 
 appeared from human sight, because they refused 
 to learn that truth. 
 
 Does this process, as recorded in the Bible, 
 seem strangely and incredibly long ? It is suffi- 
 cient to reply that towards the end of another 
 two thousand years — in the twentieth century 
 of Christian civilisation — not one half of the 
 human race has even yet learned that primary 
 truth. In the British Empire itself, the most 
 
234 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Christian of States, three of its subjects out of 
 every five are still idolaters. The resisting 
 power of human nature to Divine truth, the 
 slowness with which that truth is assimilated, is 
 fatally under-estimated. 
 
 The unhurrying development of this process is 
 in harmony with God's methods in other realms. 
 He did not call the earth into existence with 
 a gesture ; it had its beginning in some far-off 
 fire mist, and has reached its present state under 
 a law of secular and slow evolution. Whole 
 ages are hidden in every bit of chalk ; the light 
 of suns that shone uncounted centuries ago, 
 shines in the gas-jet that lights the pages of this 
 book. If the school-house took so long to build, 
 surely it is for an education which is to be on 
 the same time-scale. 
 
 But when this primary doctrine that God is 
 One — that He is holy, that His character is 
 the reflex of the standard of duty — has been 
 mastered by the one selected race, and is begin- 
 ning to stain through from it to the general 
 conscience of the world, then it is plain a new 
 stage in the great educational process has been 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 235 
 
 reached; and who looks at secular history, at 
 that moment, will see in it a curious arrest and 
 pause. It is visibly one of the supreme moments 
 of time. The civilisation of the world is 
 breaking down. Heathenism is bankrupt ; 
 Judaism itself is arrested. The race seems to 
 stand 
 
 "... between two worlds : one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born." 
 
 Then Christ comes, and Judaism, like a de- 
 cayed and broken husk which once held a grain 
 of wheat, a grain which has now germinated, 
 dies. 
 
 Now, this process, thus sketched in barest 
 outline, is an interpretation of history which 
 is intelligible, consistent, and which fits all the 
 facts. What we see is a spiritual evolution, a 
 process shaped on a single plan, and moving to 
 a far-off and adequate goaL The human parties 
 to it, it is true, are unconscious of the plan ; but 
 this is only one more proof of the fact that there 
 is a Divine Mind behind the whole process. The 
 plan, as a matter of fact, only becomes visible 
 through the cloud of obscuring events, as we 
 
236 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 look bach upon it in the perspective of many 
 centuries. 
 
 This is visibly the true reading of human 
 history. No other covers all the facts. No 
 other reveals one golden thread of intelligible 
 purpose running through the darkness. It is 
 the story of the race as the Bible alone gives it ; 
 and so the Bible is the key, the only key, to the 
 history of the world. 
 
 It is true that the record, as given in the 
 Bible, is incomplete. It is only a book of what 
 may be called samples, and the key to each 
 separate book in the Bible itself is the ray of 
 light it sheds on some part of the great process. 
 God's providence, for example, is illustrated in 
 such books as Ruth and Esther. The evolution 
 of a language for religion is clearly the end of 
 the whole ritual of the Jewish temple. The 
 book of Psalms shows the ferment of spiritual 
 life stirring in men's souls, and uttering itself in 
 lyrics of worship and aspiration. The Bible is 
 unintelligible on any other reading than that 
 here given : but so is human history. 
 
 The writers of the Bible, to turn to a new 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 237 
 
 argument, were not philosophers, but somehow 
 they discovered the whole philosophy, both of 
 duty and happiness ; and this is the second fact 
 which serves as the very watermark of divinity 
 in the Bible. The secret of a living morality, 
 the one effective formula for human conduct, is 
 found in its pages, and is found nowhere else in 
 literature. 
 
 What may be called the philosophy of a true 
 morality is — as we now see it — sufficiently clear. 
 It must have an adequate ideal as a standard ; 
 it must possess a sufficient spiritual energy as a 
 driving force. In the Bible, morality finds its 
 sufficient ideal in the character of God, its 
 effective energy in the love of God. 
 
 Now, to a degree which is unrealised and for- 
 gotten, the Bible, at this point, stands apart 
 from all the religions of the world. We might 
 naturally expect to find the highest levels of 
 non-Christian morality in Greece, the land of 
 art and literature, the home of the race that 
 has given to the world the greatest masterpieces 
 of literature, whose language was the mother 
 tongue of iEschylus and Plato ; or in Rome, 
 
238 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 with its august conception of law, and its 
 capacity for government. 
 
 But in both Greece and Rome morality had 
 no relation to religion, and did not even pre- 
 tend to find any standard or sanction in the 
 character of the gods. Morality was the busi- 
 ness of the philosophers ; religion, of the priests ; 
 and neither class meddled with the affairs that 
 belonged to the other. Perhaps the subtlest 
 and profoundest analysis of duty in Greek 
 literature is supplied by Aristotle ; and he does 
 not even mention God as a factor in it ! This, 
 one might suggest, was fortunate for morality, 
 for if all the divinities of Greece and Rome 
 appeared in flesh and blood to-day, and per- 
 formed the feats ascribed to them as gods and 
 goddesses, they would be promptly handed over 
 to the police. 
 
 The complete divorce of morality and religion 
 is the characteristic of non- Christian faiths under 
 every sky and in every age. A Greek philo- 
 sopher was much occupied in discovering God 
 and the Universal Cause ; but, to quote Mosley,* 
 
 * Bampton Lecture, p. 76. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 239 
 
 of all questions there was not one which could 
 make less practical difference to the philosopher 
 himself, or, in his view, to anybody else, than 
 whether there was, or was not, a God. Nothing 
 would have astonished him more than, when he 
 had proved, in the lecture-hall, the existence of 
 a God, to be told to worship Him. "Worship 
 Him ! " he would have exclaimed ; " worship 
 what, worship how ? " Men might uphold, in 
 argument, an infinite abstraction ; they could 
 not worship it. The mythological hero was 
 much better fitted for worship than the Uni- 
 versal Cause. He, at least, might be decently 
 moral — if only in patches. 
 
 The Brahminism of India, to-day, is another 
 example of this complete absence of any relation 
 betwixt human duty and the character of the 
 gods. The Supreme Being of Brahminism is, 
 in the words of Mosley, " a characterless, im- 
 personal essence, without action, without will." 
 He is the substratum of everything, but himself 
 is nothing. The rank and file of Hindoo gods 
 are nothing less than vile. The criminal code 
 of India expressly exempts Hindoo temples from 
 
240 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 the law against obscene pictures and carvings. 
 If enforced, it would dismantle half the temples 
 in India. 
 
 Now, the worship of corrupt gods must 
 poison all the wells of morality. But it is 
 equally true, though not so readily recog- 
 nised, that morality divorced from a personal 
 God, Himself the standard and guard of 
 morality, inevitably perishes. Phillips Brooks, 
 in one of his sermons, asks us to imagine 
 everything that belongs to the thought of God 
 to be taken away, and to consider what must 
 be the consequence. " Either the conscience," 
 he says, "would be swept away, unable to 
 stand alone, and mankind become a race of 
 devils ; or else conscience, in its sore need, 
 would reach out its hands in the darkness, 
 and find for itself a religion." 
 
 Presently he goes on to say, " As when before 
 the sunrise millions of half-awakened particles 
 of air are filled with dim suspicions of the 
 coming sun, there would grow up, in countless 
 hearts, perhaps as a misgiving, perhaps as a 
 hope, the thought that the impulse towards 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 241 
 
 righteousness in them — the force we call con- 
 science — was but the echo of the will of some 
 great Power that stood for righteousness; and 
 conscience in its trouble would begin to guess 
 at forgiveness. She could not tell its methods, 
 she could not invent for herself the divine 
 wonder of the Cross ; but, somehow, somewhere, 
 she must hope that pardon and repair were wait- 
 ing, and in the dim smoke of some altar she 
 would send up her hope toward heaven for a 
 God and Saviour." 
 
 Now, in the Bible the sun is risen. We have 
 a spiritual reading of duty. We have first the 
 doctrine of one God, a doctrine that after so 
 many ages finds its reflex in the latest and 
 surest conception of science, that the physical 
 universe is a unit. This God, we next learn, 
 is a Person ; is Himself of infinite righteousness ; 
 and human duty is but the reflex of His will. 
 And duty, when thus set in relation to a 
 personal God, Himself of infinite righteousness, 
 is seen to be measureless in range. It shuts 
 round us with the insistent pressure of the 
 atmosphere. It is lofty as the height of the 
 
242 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 heavens themselves, since it finds its law and 
 pattern in the character of God. 
 
 Then comes the crown of all revelation, the 
 supreme inspiration of all duty. This God loves 
 us; His love for us is expressed in mysterious 
 suffering borne for us. He takes our flesh, that 
 He may set us an example of obedience. He dies 
 in a mysterious partnership with the consequences 
 of our disobedience that He may deliver us. 
 
 Here is the spiritual energy which constitutes 
 the driving force of duty. Here is the supreme 
 argument for the hate of sin. 
 
 No one can deny that duty, as thus inter- 
 preted, and as thus reinforced, is the one effec- 
 tive formula of conduct for the race. And it 
 is found alone in the Bible ! True or false, the 
 book offers to mankind the one solution of 
 the supreme problem of human life. How did 
 this little cluster of Jewish peasants discover 
 what escaped all the sages and teachers of the 
 most intellectual races in the world? The 
 answer is, They did not discover it; it comes 
 by revelation; and this revelation is found in 
 the pages of the Bible. 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 243 
 
 The third fact which proves the Bible to be 
 divine is that, somehow, it holds the secret, it 
 teaches the art, of happiness. The supreme 
 end of the Bible, of course, is not enjoyment, 
 but character. It treats happiness as one of 
 the by-products of character. And alike for 
 the individual and for the race, its philosophy 
 of happiness somehow works. Happiness is 
 to be found in the laws the Bible teaches, and 
 nowhere else. 
 
 There never has been a Golden Age in the 
 stormy history of the human race; but one 
 would arrive within the next twenty-four 
 hours if the Bible suddenly became the uni- 
 versal rule of action. At present, it is only 
 half-understood, and less than half-assimilated. 
 But what of happiness the troubled earth 
 knows comes from those laws of conduct taught 
 in the Bible. And if we track back to their 
 origin what may be called the running sores 
 of civilisation — the inequalities of social con- 
 dition, the hatred of class against class, the 
 cruelties of a social order built, not on brother- 
 hood, but on selfishness, the mistrust betwixt 
 
244 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 civilised nations which finds expression in ever- 
 expanding fleets and armies, the vices that 
 blacken the life of the world as with fire, and 
 waste it as with famine — each of these will be 
 found to spring from some latent or open dis- 
 cord with the teachings of the Bible. Each 
 would be healed if that tragical discord were 
 hushed. 
 
 Let there be imagined one city on earth built 
 absolutely on Christ's teaching, with brotherhood 
 linking class to class, the Golden Rule the 
 foundation of all business, and the law of love 
 accepted as the sole statute-book. It would 
 resemble nothing so much as the city John saw, 
 in vision, descending out of heaven from God. 
 
 No other religious text-book in human litera- 
 ture would survive this test. Imagine the world 
 shaped on the pattern of the Koran, with 
 woman disrated and degraded ; imagine the 
 Atlantis of which Plato dreamed, with slavery 
 as its base, the brothel elevated into a State 
 institution, and children taught, "like young 
 whelps, to scent carnage and be inured to 
 slaughter ! 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 245 
 
 How did Peter and John succeed where Plato 
 and Aristotle have failed ? Where did the 
 writers of the Bible learn the great secret which 
 has puzzled the wit and baffled the wisdom of 
 all ages? They were not philosophers; yet 
 somehow they mastered a profounder wisdom 
 than philosophy can teach. The answer is : It 
 came to them, not as a human discovery, but as 
 a divine revelation. He Who drew the plan of 
 man's nature, alone knows the secret of man's 
 happiness ! He has told that secret in the Bible. 
 And " if the Bible, so attested by universal Pro- 
 vidence under the law of the survival of the 
 fittest, is not on the whole a trustworthy religious 
 guide, then," says Joseph Cook, " God has put 
 around the orb of human experience a Saturn's 
 ring of coruscating falsehood. " 
 
CHAPTEK III 
 
 THE DIFFICULTIES OF THE BIBLE 
 
 " In divinity, many things must be left abrupt and 
 concluded with this : * Oh, the depth ! ' . . . For the 
 inditer of Scripture did know four things which no man 
 attains to know — the mysteries of the kingdom of glory ; 
 the perfection of the law and of nature ; the secrets 
 of the heart of man ; and the future succession of all 
 ages."— Bacon. 
 
 There are, of course, a thousand difficulties in 
 the Bible ; mysteries that puzzle the intellect, 
 and limitations that vex it; ethical crudities 
 that startle the conscience, imperfections of 
 knowledge which distress faith. So far from 
 any instructed faith denying the existence of 
 these difficulties, it accepts them as constituting 
 part of the very evidence that the Bible is 
 divine. How could a book which undertakes to 
 give, in the speech and thought of finite men, a 
 revelation of the Infinite, be without mysteries ? 
 A sea in which a child could safely wade is not 
 the water on which great ships can sail. 
 
 246 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 247 
 
 Do we covet a revelation which would explain 
 all mysteries ? That it proposed to achieve such 
 a task would prove it to be in quarrel with the very- 
 plan of our earthly life. If it succeeded in its 
 task it would overwhelm the human mind with 
 knowledge too large for comprehension, too vast 
 for use. Man's intellect, beneath such a revela- 
 tion, would be destroyed, killed by mere excess 
 of light, as the human eye might be destroyed, 
 scorched into blindness by a flame too intense. 
 
 Butler's profound argument, based on the 
 analogy betwixt the Bible and the constitution 
 of the world, is still triumphant ; no answer to 
 it is thinkable. The material world and the 
 written Word are both God's instruments for the 
 training of the race, and they have the same 
 characteristics ; for God's system of government 
 is a unit. The spiritual world is on the same 
 plan with the material. Each is constructed for 
 ends of character, each seeks its ends by methods 
 of discipline. 
 
 A world without a puzzle, where everything 
 was known, and no truth was hidden so deep 
 that only toil could find it, would enervate the 
 
248 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 reason. A world without a hardship, that had 
 no whip of need for sloth, no call for sweat of 
 brain and muscle, where food came without toil, 
 and pleasure without effort, would be fatal to 
 the body. Man under such conditions, would 
 resemble nothing so much as a shell-fish glued 
 to a rock, and drowned in a sea of supply. 
 
 We need the spur of want in nature, the sting 
 of pain, the challenge of mystery, to make us 
 men. The world is a grindstone, and in a 
 grindstone roughness is a merit. A grindstone 
 of jelly would sharpen no knife. 
 
 And all this can be translated into spiritual 
 terms, and applied to the Bible. That it is a 
 revelation, limited and partial, a revelation that 
 yields its light only to earnest search, that it is 
 capable of being misread, nay, that it will be 
 misread, if looked at with a bias bred of dislike, 
 or even with merely careless eyes — all this is 
 only to say that the Bible, like nature, is an 
 instrument shaped by God for ends of discipline. 
 It is a Book written, not to save the human 
 mind from effort, but to rouse it to effort. 
 
 The ethical difficulties of the Bible are due, in 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 249 
 
 part, to the fact that the Bible represents an 
 educational process, and its lessons are in an 
 ascending scale. Eules come first, principles 
 next; love, as both the energy and the inter- 
 pretation of duty, last of all. This is the 
 philosophical order ; it is, in the Bible, the order 
 of history. This explains why the morality of 
 the Jewish times and of the Jewish race was not, 
 and could not be, the morality of the twentieth 
 Christian century. David, in the Psalms, no 
 doubt, sometimes expresses what we should 
 to-day call non-Christian sentiments, but then 
 David belonged to the eighth century before 
 Christ, not the twentieth century after Him. 
 
 It is sometimes asked, with a certain note of 
 triumph by those who hate the Bible, and in 
 disquieted accents by those who love it, does it 
 not include some errors of fact, or of science ? 
 But the very form of the question is misleading. 
 Suppose it be asked, " Are there errors in 
 Shakespeare ? " The obvious answer would be 
 that Shakespeare's writings are dramatic and 
 pictorial ; they reproduce ancient forms of speech, 
 obsolete habits of thought, lives set under other 
 
250 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 conditions of knowledge than exist to-day. And 
 in the degree in which the dramatist is true to 
 life, he will depict his characters as speaking and 
 acting according to the conditions of their own 
 time. 
 
 But Butler's great argument may be carried 
 further. The personal Word — the Word made 
 flesh — and the written word — the Bible, have 
 profound resemblances. Each, in turn, is a 
 paradox, the disappointment of all natural ex- 
 pectations ; each has the same difficulties, the 
 same apparent limitations. If a committee of 
 philosophers had been appointed to imagine an 
 incarnation — the entrance into a race fallen into 
 discord with the laws of the Maker of that 
 race — in what terms would such a committee 
 have pictured the incarnate God making His 
 appearance ? 
 
 Would they have guessed that He would come 
 as a Jew, a peasant, a Galilean carpenter, with- 
 out wealth or learning, with a ministry stretching 
 through only three brief years? Would they 
 have supposed that, coming as a Teacher, He 
 would have left not a single written sentence 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 251 
 
 of His teaching behind Him ? Above all, would 
 they have guessed that He would come into 
 life by the door of the manger, and go out of it 
 by the sad gate of the cross ? What a bundle 
 of incredibilities such an Incarnation would — in 
 advance — have seemed ! Yet the ministry of 
 Christ, under exactly these conditions, has re- 
 made — and is re-making — the world. 
 
 And all this is true of the Bible. In form, 
 as we have seen, it is a paradox. It hides 
 amazing energy under a mask of weakness, just 
 as a speck of radium, microscopic in dimensions, is 
 a fire-fountain, pouring forth energies that are the 
 puzzle of science. It is a Book that challenges 
 curiosity, but refuses to satisfy it ; that tells us 
 little where we think it might tell us much. It 
 is saturated with mysteries. 
 
 But the Bible, it must be repeated, is meant 
 to be a discipline for reason, not a substitute 
 for it. It has no treasures for idle hands, no 
 truth for careless brains, no light for eyes that 
 love darkness, and want only darkness. 
 
 The Bible, it may be added, is perhaps the 
 worst-used book in literature. What other 
 
252 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 volume has been turned to such sad uses ; has 
 had such strange meanings read into it, or 
 wrung out from it. What was meant to be a 
 medicine has been turned into a weapon, not to 
 say a poison. The Book, intended to be the 
 garden of the Lord, has been transfigured into a 
 human battlefield. What evil fires have raged 
 over its pages, fires that might well blacken the 
 whole landscape ! But the fires pass, and, scarred 
 by no blackness, the divine landscape of the 
 Bible emerges afresh with its blossoming flowers, 
 its sound of running waters, its majesty of 
 purple hills rising to the sky. The souls of ever- 
 new generations drink of its clear streams, and 
 lie down in its green pastures. 
 
PART II 
 
 THE ALTERNATIVES TO CHRISTIAN 
 FAITH ABOUT THE BIBLE 
 
 CHAPTEE I 
 
 IS THE BIBLE A FORGERY? 
 
 " The integrity of the records of the Christian faith is 
 substantiated by evidence, in a tenfold proportion, more 
 various, copious, and conclusive than that which can be 
 adduced in support of any other ancient writings." — Isaac 
 Taylor. 
 
 To attack the Bible is easy; to discover 
 doubts about it is a business which does not 
 greatly tax the intellect. But those who reject 
 the Bible are bound to supply an explanation 
 for it. Doubt about the Bible is itself, of 
 course, an explanation, for every denial is but 
 an affirmation reversed. When the proposition, 
 " The Bible is true," is rejected, there must be 
 some rival proposition, latent or expressed, 
 which is affirmed to be more credible. What, 
 
 253 
 
254 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 then, are the alternatives to the Christian faith 
 about the Bible ? They are curiously few, and 
 are perfectly definite. 
 
 The first is the theory that the whole Book 
 is a forgery. It represents nothing better than 
 the invention of rogues. The events it describes 
 never happened. There never was a Jewish 
 nation ; prophets and psalmists and evangelists 
 are mere fictions. No Christ ever lived who 
 spoke the parables and wrought the miracles of 
 the gospel; no Churches existed to whom the 
 Epistles were actually addressed. The Bible is 
 an unhistoric Grimm's " Fairy Tales " or "Alice 
 in Wonderland." 
 
 This, every one will admit, is a very clumsy 
 and stupid explanation of the Bible. No scholar 
 will make himself responsible for it. Any one 
 with the faintest touch of the historic sense will 
 smile at it. The smallest acquaintance with the 
 Book itself, or with the history of the world, 
 makes this theory ridiculous. It is, in fact, an 
 incredibility so vast that its acceptance is the 
 master effort of human credulity. 
 
 We are asked to believe that the Book which 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 255 
 
 in every sentence rebukes falsehood is itself the 
 product of a scheme of fraud — a fraud without 
 a motive — stretching through ages, running from 
 land to land, from race to race, from century to 
 century. Its writers are the most stupendous 
 procession of liars that ever marched through 
 history. What spectacle can be imagined more 
 amazing than this, of a vast and unknown 
 company of rogues, toiling like missionaries, and 
 dying as martyrs, to palm off on the human 
 race a Book which whips lying with sternest 
 penalties through this world and the next ? 
 
 If the writers were good men, it is incredible 
 that they should try to beguile the race into 
 goodness by the arts of rogues. But if they were 
 bad men, it is still more wildly incredible that 
 they should invent a book intended to persuade 
 men into goodness, by any means whatever. If 
 the Bible be a forgery, too, we may well reflect 
 in speechless wonder on the miraculous cleverness 
 of the forgery. For this is a fraud interwoven 
 with history, and running all the risks to which 
 a lie is exposed when it touches history. It is 
 knitted, at a hundred points, to actual events ; 
 
256 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 it is interwoven with the doings of real men and 
 women by coincidences so deep and so hidden 
 that to-day — nearly two thousand years after this 
 great literary lie was finished, and the liars who 
 invented it are dead — we are only just finding 
 them out. 
 
 The Bible as a forgery must be pronounced 
 not only the most audacious and circumstantial, 
 but the most miraculously successful fraud in 
 history. For, somehow, it is attested by inde- 
 pendent evidence, witnessed by great institutions, 
 authenticated by monuments only just dug out 
 of the sand of centuries. It has created the 
 Christian religion. 
 
 If it be a forgery it must have lain open, 
 at the very moment of its publication, to 
 instant and scornful detection. How, in fact, 
 could such a fable have crept out into the 
 light, and escape being branded as a lie on 
 the spot? How could the Apostles, for ex- 
 ample, tell in Jerusalem itself the story of 
 Christ's miracles and teaching ; of the trial in 
 Pilate's hall, of the scene on Calvary — when 
 everybody in the city must have known the 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 257 
 
 whole tale to be an invention? And from its 
 very nature — its pretensions to be history, and 
 to be the explanation of history — the chances 
 of detection must have multiplied against the 
 Bible with every day that passed. And yet it 
 has escaped detection ! It challenges all disproof ! 
 Suppose some historian produced a book 
 designed to show that the Norman Conquest 
 never took place ; that William the Conqueror 
 was a myth, Hastings a fable, the Doomsday 
 Book a forgery, etc. Such a theory would 
 leave modern England, itself, unintelligible. 
 The social life, the institutions, the legal code, 
 the very landscape of England are the witnesses 
 of that far-off historical event. And it may be 
 said with confidence that the social life, the laws, 
 the literature, the very landscape of the civilised 
 world, are witnesses against the theory that the 
 Bible is a mere forgery. " If Christ," says 
 Fairbairn,* " had not been what He was, and 
 stood where He did, could anything in history 
 be as it has been, or as it is ? May we not 
 speak of Him as the keystone of the arch which 
 
 * Philosophy of tlis Christian Religion, p. 567. 
 
258 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 spans the gulf of Time? But can we conceive 
 that the keystone came there by accident, or 
 otherwise than by the hand which built the 
 bridge, which opened the chasm, and determined 
 the course of the river that flows beneath ? " 
 
 The theory which dismisses the Bible as a 
 literary fraud, a book of fables, deserves nothing 
 but intellectual contempt. It asks more credulity 
 for its acceptance than the whole Christian 
 scheme requires of sober faith. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 IS THE BIBLE ONLY ONE OF THE SACRED 
 BOOKS OF THE RACE? 
 
 "These non-Christian Bibles are all developments in the 
 wrong direction. They begin with some flashes of true 
 light, and end in utter darkness." — Professor Monier 
 Williams. 
 
 The second alternative, a little less visibly and 
 instantly absurd than the theory of forgery, is 
 that the Bible is only one of the many Sacred 
 Books of the world, a little better than others, 
 perhaps, but belonging to the same general class. 
 There is a whole library of these ethnic Bibles — 
 the Mohammedan Koran, the Buddhist Canon 
 of Sacred Scriptures, the Zendavesta, the Vedas, 
 etc. The study of comparative religions has, in 
 fact, grown to a science. These " Bibles " express 
 the spiritual life, the aspirations, the superstitious, 
 the guesses of the nation to which they belong ; 
 and the Christian Bible, it may be contended, 
 
 259 
 
260 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 belongs to this class. It is only a page — or even 
 a single column — in a great biblical polyglot. 
 
 No inspiration need be postulated for it on 
 this theory, any more than for the Vedas or for 
 the Koran. No divine authority is hidden in its 
 syllables. The conscience owes it no allegiance, 
 and faith no surrender. It is simply one of the 
 many forms in which the religious impulse, which 
 forms an indestructible part of human nature, 
 has found historic expression. The Christian 
 Bible, perhaps, is better in some respects than 
 the other ethnic Bibles; but it has a similar 
 origin. The whole question is one of scientific 
 classification. 
 
 No one who knows the facts would hesitate 
 to risk the whole case for the Bible on this single 
 point. Classification is a question of science. 
 It is determined by a study of structure, of 
 agreements and differences in the things com- 
 pared. And no instructed science can possibly 
 put the Bible in the same category with the so- 
 called Sacred Books of other religions. Not 
 only does it breathe another atmosphere and talk 
 another language than they; it is built on 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 261 
 
 another plan. Alike by what it omits and by 
 what it includes, it is unique. 
 
 It is not like the " Bibles" of other races, a 
 mass of clotted superstition, a nightmare of 
 insane dreams, saturated with immorality — in 
 which only stray passages that show a gleam of 
 truth can be discovered. 
 
 The Bible resembles an inhabited landscape. 
 It is human, ordered, rational ; it shows every- 
 where the characters of mind, and of mind 
 working on plan. But the Sacred Books of 
 heathen nations resemble the world of pre- 
 historic times, with dragons tearing each other 
 in the slime, and strange shapes splashing through 
 the hot and shallow seas, and dimly visible through 
 the stifling mists. Who would dare to dwell in 
 such a scene, or to wander in such companionship ? 
 
 If we judge the Bible, again, not by what it 
 omits, but by what it includes, we find that it is 
 parted from the " Bibles " of heathendom by at 
 least three profound differences. 
 
 It is, for one thing, the only monotheistic 
 Bible known to history — allowing for the Koran, 
 which, in a sense, is its offspring. And science, 
 
262 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 which has learned that the material system of 
 things is a unit, can only smile at the polytheistic 
 extravagances, the multiple creators and creations 
 of the other Sacred Books of the world. The 
 Bible, again, is a Book knitted together through 
 all its parts by a single great idea — the idea of a 
 divine salvation being wrought out for men. 
 And, finally, it links religion, at every point, to 
 morality. It is monotheistic, it is ethical, it is 
 structurally a unit; here are three fundamental 
 differences betwixt the Bible and all its rivals. 
 
 The intellectual interval betwixt the Bible and 
 all the other so-called Sacred Books, is vast ; but 
 the moral interval is past measuring. No one, 
 for example, would dare to print in English an 
 unexpurgated edition of the Sacred Books of the 
 East ; their " sacredness " includes some very vile 
 elements. 
 
 Professor Monier Williams is one of the 
 greatest authorities on these ethnic Bibles, and he 
 has given his opinion of them in memorable 
 words: "These non-Christian Bibles," he says, 
 " are all developments in the wrong direction. 
 They begin with some flashes of true light, 
 
THE BELIEFS OP UNBELIEF 263 
 
 and end in utter darkness. . . . Pile them, 
 if you will, on the left side of your study table ; 
 but place your Holy Bible on the right side, 
 all alone, and with a wide gap between." * 
 
 No scholar of modern times, again, more com- 
 pletely saturated himself with the literature of 
 these ethnic Bibles than did Professor Max Miiller; 
 but he brought from the experience a reinforced 
 faith in Christianity. " Christ," he writes, " spoke 
 a new language, a language no doubt liable to 
 be misunderstood as all language is, but a 
 language which has imparted a new glory to 
 the whole face of the world. Christianity in- 
 volves a complete change in the spiritual 
 condition of mankind; it marks the great 
 turning point in the history of the world." f 
 
 " Christ," declares Max Miiller, " is the fulfil- 
 ment of all the world has been longing for and 
 striving after." 
 
 "How shall I describe," he says, writing to 
 a friend, " what I found in the New Testament ? 
 
 * Speech in London, before the English Church Mission- 
 ary Society, 1887. 
 
 t Anthropological Beliyion, p. 380. 
 
264 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 I had not read it for many years, and was pre- 
 judiced against it before I took it in hand. The 
 light which struck Paul with blindness on his 
 way to Damascus was not more strange (than 
 that which fell on me) when I suddenly 
 discovered the fulfilment of all hopes, the 
 highest perfection of philosophy, the key to 
 all the seeming contradictions of the physical 
 and moral world. The whole world seemed to 
 me to be ordered for the sole purpose of further- 
 ing the religion of the Redeemer; and if this 
 religion is not Divine, I understand nothing 
 at all. In all my studies of the ancient times, 
 I have always felt the want of something, and 
 it was not until I knew our Lord that all was 
 clear to me. With Him, there is nothing I am 
 unable to solve." 
 
 When concluding a lecture at Manchester on 
 the Vedas he said, " No one who has not 
 examined patiently and honestly the other 
 religions of the world can know what Christi- 
 anity really is, or can join with such truth and 
 sincerity in the words of St. Paul, 'I am not 
 ashamed of the gospel of Christ/ " When 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 265 
 
 Max Miiller himself was dying, a friend bent 
 over him and whispered in his ears the com- 
 pletion of that great verse — " For it is the power 
 of God unto salvation to every one that 
 believeth." " Yes," said the dying man, trying 
 to raise his voice, " and from that I have never 
 wavered." Almost his last words were a 
 fragment of one of the psalms: "Thou wilt 
 keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed 
 on Thee because he trusteth in Thee." The 
 translator of the Sacred Books of the East 
 turned from them to the Christian Bible in 
 search of a charm that could sweeten his 
 own life, and rob his own dying hour of 
 darkness. 
 
 The theory that the Bible is simply one of the 
 many Sacred Books known to history, with no 
 greater pretensions to divine authority than 
 they possess, cannot be sustained for a moment. 
 The attempt to put the Bible in the same cate- 
 gory, say, with the Zendavesta or the Vedas, is 
 like trying to place Canterbury Cathedral in the 
 same class with the grass hut of an African 
 savage. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 IS THE BIBLE A BOOK OF DREAMS t 
 
 11 1 know that the Bible is God's book because it is man's 
 book, because it fits into every fold and turn of human 
 experience. " — Arthur Hallam. 
 
 It is impossible to dismiss the Bible as having 
 been forged by a committee of rogues; it is equally 
 impossible to put it aside as being merely the 
 crystallised superstitions and aspirations of a 
 particular race. But there is a third explanation 
 possible, much more respectful, if not plausible, 
 than either of these. The Bible, on this theory, 
 represents the dreams of a band of enthusiasts. 
 It is a record of what a succession of good but 
 deluded men wished to be true, imagined to be 
 true, and ended by believing to be true. It is 
 thus a book of delusions, with gleams of real 
 truth shining here and there through the mist ; 
 but it is uninspired and unhistoric. It has many 
 valuable elements which a wise man will select, 
 and the rest he may at pleasure reject. 
 
 266 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 267 
 
 This theory does not quarrel with science by- 
 classing unlike things together; and, further, it 
 escapes — or seems to escape — the absurdity of 
 holding that the one Book in the world which 
 is the servant and teacher of truth came into 
 existence as the invention of a conspiracy of 
 liars. But does it really escape from this 
 incredible folly ? 
 
 The truth is that the Bible, like Christ, shuts 
 men up to a definite and inevitable choice. It is 
 certain that no half-way judgment about Christ 
 is possible. He cannot be attenuated into a 
 dream, or be politely waved off the stage of 
 history as an interesting, harmless but deluded 
 enthusiast. If Christ is not God, He is not even 
 a good man. He must be a lunatic or a knave : 
 a dilemma that shocks both commonsense and 
 natural feeling, but from which there is no 
 escape. 
 
 It is exactly so with the Bible, and the men 
 who wrote the Bible. The writers of this Book 
 are not poets dwelling in a realm of the 
 imagination ; they are not philosophers weaving 
 some more or less ingenious explanation of the 
 
268 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 universe ; they are not advocates arguing for 
 victory. They claim to be witnesses to plain 
 facts. 
 
 They walk on the common earth ; they bring 
 us not arguments, but a personal experience. 
 " That which we have heard, which we have seen 
 with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and 
 our hands have handled, of the Word of life " — 
 this is the substance of their message. They 
 claim to offer us, it must be repeated, not specu- 
 lations, but facts ; not syllogisms, but a history ; 
 and they do this with the accents and the authority 
 of personal witnesses. 
 
 Now, either the story is true, or the witnesses 
 lie. There is no half-way stage betwixt these 
 two positions. And the writers of the New 
 Testament, it may be added, give the strongest 
 proof of their sincerity. They lived only to tell 
 their story, they died as martyrs for their story. 
 And if the facts are not as they describe them — 
 facts which they themselves say they have seen 
 with their eyes, and their hands have handled — 
 then they are simply a procession of liars, and of 
 the most wonderful liars that ever defiled through 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 269 
 
 history. For they were liars not only without a 
 motive and without a reward, but without a 
 purpose. 
 
 Those who hold this remarkable theory may 
 well be asked to answer two plain questions : 
 First, why should the writers of the New Testa- 
 ment have invented this story ? It did not 
 bring them riches. It did nob open the pathway 
 to power. The only earthly reward it brought 
 them was the scourge, the sword, the stake. 
 
 It is sometimes argued that what may be called 
 the Messianic hopes of the Jews explain the fable 
 of Christ. The Jews expected a Messiah; and 
 as he failed to appear, they invented one. But 
 Christ, it is clear, was, from the Jewish point of 
 view, the ivrong Messiah ; He disappointed every 
 hope, insulted every tradition, and shocked every 
 expectation of the Jewish mind. A committee 
 of Jewish peasants, who set about either imagin- 
 ing or inventing a concrete Messiah, would 
 certainly have produced quite another figure to 
 that of Jesus Christ. 
 
 But it may be asked not only why should, but 
 how could, the Jews of that day invent the 
 
270 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 matchless gospels, with their radiant beauty and 
 lofty ethical ideals? It takes a Jesus to imagine 
 a Jesus. That a company of Jews — of Galilean 
 Jews, of Jews in the time of Nero — the narrowest 
 group of the most bigoted race, in its darkest 
 hour — could invent a story which, if it be only 
 a poem or a dream, leaves the whole literature 
 of the world surpassed, this is the last of 
 incredibilities. 
 
 How does it come to pass, it may be asked, 
 that where Plato and Aristotle failed, Peter the 
 fisherman and Paul the tent-maker succeeded ? 
 For they have certainly given us a system of 
 ethics, and even a philosophy of ethics, which is 
 to all others known to literature what Alpine 
 snows are to the mud of city streets. How 
 do they come, again, to give us a religion so 
 generous in its spirit that it overleaps all the 
 separating gulfs of race, and climate, and speech ? 
 This is not Jewish, but the antithesis of 
 everything Jewish. 
 
 An attempt is sometimes made to explain the 
 Bible by an easy and spacious generalisation. 
 What Greek intellect was in philosophy, and 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 271 
 
 Koman genius in the art of government, the 
 Hebrew mind is in religion. So, it is customary 
 to say, the Bible is simply the expression in 
 literature of the Hebrew mind. But the explan- 
 ation will not, for a moment, hold good. The 
 Hebrew mind is in the world to-day ; it is quick 
 and fertile in art, daring in politics, grasping in 
 business; but it is, perhaps, the least spiritual 
 type of mind the race knows. The Hebrew 
 mind, for one brief, golden hour, was the channel 
 through which the Spirit of God flowed into 
 human history; but the channel is not the 
 river. 
 
 We have in the Talmud the measure of what 
 Hebrew genius, unassisted, can do in the realm 
 of religion. Paley dismissed the contention that 
 the early Christian writers invented the gospels 
 by the consideration that, judged by their other 
 known writings, it is perfectly certain they could 
 not have performed that feat. And how could 
 the men who wrote the Talmud have possibly 
 written the gospels ? A perfectly competent 
 authority, Professor Margoliouth, says : " The 
 fatal want of the Jewish mind, judged by the 
 
272 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 Talmud, is a want of originality. They can 
 borrow, they cannot invent. The moment Jew- 
 ish literature separates itself from the Bible, 
 originality perishes. 
 
 " How," he asks, " are we to reconcile with 
 this most patent want of originality the ex- 
 traordinary phenomenon of such a race having 
 produced a literature which, after having once 
 taken its place at the head of the literature of 
 the world, has no intention of quitting that post ? 
 The lost literatures that come to light rarely 
 have any value of their own. Egypt and 
 Assyria produced monuments which were long 
 lost, but now are found and deciphered. Who 
 reads them except out of mere curiosity, or to 
 aid him in some other study ? Indian literature 
 is now as easy of access as Greek ; but who cares 
 for it? One or two isolated morsels, perhaps, 
 are known beyond professional circles, but 
 nothing else. 
 
 "The Bible itself explains this problem by 
 the theory that the best of Israelitish litera- 
 ture was communicated to its authors from 
 without — that it was the result of special 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 273 
 
 favours conferred on privileged members of the 
 race. ' Men spake as they were moved/ The 
 nation, which of itself could do nothing for 
 science or philosophy, which could not observe 
 and could not experiment, which could not 
 compile a grammar nor invent a metre, produced 
 the books which, owing to the profundity of 
 their contents, ' the first man did not fully 
 know, and the last man has not sounded to the 
 bottom/ Truly this is the Lord's doing, and it 
 is marvellous in our eyes. ,, * 
 
 * Lines of Defence of the Biblical Revelation, p. 254. 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 Where does this course of argument leave 
 us ? At the lowest reading of the evidence, the 
 Christian faith, it may be claimed, with absolute 
 confidence, emerges from the debate undestroyed. 
 It has mysteries which must wait for other light 
 than earthly skies know before they disappear. 
 It has difficulties which only a larger wisdom 
 than that the mind now possesses can solve; 
 but the general faith of Christendom certainly 
 suffers no disproof. The most eager critic will 
 not claim that it can be so disproved, that it is 
 safe to disregard it. And it is madness to forget 
 that the moral obligations of Christianity survive 
 until the point of final disproof is attained. 
 
 That point, it must be repeated, is not reached ; 
 it cannot be reached; and so the authority of 
 Christianity as a scheme of life remains. For 
 the amplest doubt, while yet it is only a doubt, 
 
 275 
 
276 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 is no discharge from action ; while even an 
 imperfect faith challenges an instant obedience. 
 
 But as a study in alternatives, what room is 
 left to a sane mind for hesitation betwixt the 
 Christian faith and the rival creeds, disguised 
 as " doubts,'' which claim its place ? We try to 
 escape choice betwixt these opposites ; we think 
 we do escape. But we can only do this by 
 shutting our eyes to the beliefs behind our 
 unbelief. They exist ; they claim — they seize, 
 as by right — the place in our lives we deny to 
 Christianity. We criticise, we speculate; and 
 think this is the sum of what we do. But all 
 the while we do something else. We live ; we 
 act; and life and action must have a creed 
 behind them. 
 
 And, thank God, there are multitudes who 
 walk in the gloom, and even live in the very 
 anguish, of doubt, and yet keep the ethics of 
 faith. They are in the kingdom of God, 
 though they know it not. " Blessed are they," 
 said Christ, "that have not seen and yet have 
 believed." And surely He would say, too, 
 " Blessed are they who lack the clear light 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 277 
 
 of faith, and yet yield the obedience of 
 faith." 
 
 But what about those who cherish doubt as 
 a sort of luxury ; or try to evade the certainty 
 of faith as if it were a bondage ? What about 
 those who, with an unconfessed moral or in- 
 tellectual cowardice, try to escape giving any 
 verdict on the great issues of religion ? These 
 need to be reminded that their very doubts are 
 verdicts. They are creeds in disguise. What 
 men need to see — and too commonly refuse to 
 see — is the affirmatives of their doubts. 
 
 On the great question of God the alterna- 
 tives, as we have seen, are atheism, pantheism, 
 agnosticism ; but how faint are the proofs which 
 justify these theories considered as positive 
 creeds ! How thick and slab they are with 
 difficulties ! How insecure is the standing ground 
 they offer ! Who builds his life — and risks those 
 issues larger than life which hang on faith — on 
 the evidences for atheism, or for pantheism, or 
 for agnosticism, is taking risks that may well 
 appal the reason. Where Christianity asks a 
 sober faith, these rival creeds owe their acceptance 
 
278 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 either to a desperate credulity which is the 
 scandal of reason, or to metaphysical sophistries 
 which bewilder reason. 
 
 Or take, again, the inevitable alternatives to 
 the Christian faith about Christ. Is it sane to 
 risk all the tremendous issues of character and 
 destiny on the theory that the loftiest and most 
 potent Figure in human history was nothing 
 better than a shadow, the dream of poets, or 
 even the invention of knaves ? If Christ be 
 only a dream, is not the dream fairer than all 
 reality ? This is a dream, too, which somehow 
 has changed the face of the world. Do dreams 
 work such miracles ? Has the Face — the ima- 
 ginary Face — of a Galilean peasant, affected the 
 world more profoundly than the speculations of 
 all philosophers, the swords of all warriors, the 
 genius of all statesmen ? Looked at as a creed, 
 this theory is the wildest unreason. 
 
 We do not dwell on the more shocking theory 
 still that Christ was a lunatic, or even an impostor. 
 No sane person will make himself responsible for 
 such an assertion. But take the theory that 
 Christ is nothing better than the name of a 
 
THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 279 
 
 myth, the symbol of an accidental cluster of 
 superstitions and fancies that, somehow, have 
 clustered round this particular name ; — it is to 
 be noted that even Strauss, before he died, gave 
 up the myth theory ; — and any one who realises 
 the part Christianity has played, and is yet to 
 play, in history — any one who behind all the 
 dust and tumult of the world can hear "the 
 mighty waters rolling evermore " that make up 
 the stream of Christian influence, must reject as 
 the idlest folly the explanation that resolves the 
 source of that stream into a myth. 
 
 Christ cannot be dismissed without a verdict. 
 If He be not the Teacher and the Redeemer of 
 mankind, the question clamours for answer, 
 " What is He ? " Is He dream, myth, or im- 
 postor ? Each of these theories, when considered 
 as a definite creed, with its own evidences and 
 difficulties, and its own ethics — is absolutely 
 incredible. 
 
 All this may be said, in turn, of the Bible. 
 Here is a book by which the best spirits of 
 our race have lived and died. It is visibly 
 the root of the best things in the world. Dying 
 
280 THE BELIEFS OF UNBELIEF 
 
 hands cling to it. Multitudes would join in de- 
 claring it to be " the fountain light of all their 
 day," the "master light of all their seeing." 
 And what are the alternatives to Christian faith 
 in the Bible ? Is it to be dismissed as the 
 imagination of untaught peasants, the crystal- 
 lised superstition of dark ages and perished 
 races ? It would need a very courageous logic, 
 indeed, to attempt the proof of these theories 
 as definite and positive creeds. 
 
 We cannot subsist on negatives. The busi- 
 ness of the sane and honest intellect is to look 
 at each doubt in turn as a positive creed ; to try 
 its evidences as those of Christianity are tried ; to 
 cast its difficulties into the same scales with the 
 difficulties of Christianity ; and then to extract 
 from the whole process a sane law of conduct. 
 
 That law of conduct will assuredly be found 
 to run in the path where the feet of Christ, and 
 of all the saints of all the ages since Christ came, 
 have trodden. 
 
 Printed by Cassell & Company, Limited, La Belle Sauvage, London, E.G. 
 
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