YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

DEPOSITED BY THE

LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY

THE

WITNESS OF HISTORY
TO CHRIST.

Camfrri&ge:
PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

THE

WITNESS OF HISTORY
TO CHRIST,

FIVE SERMONS PREACHED BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY
OF CAMBRIDGE,
BEING THE HULSEAN LECTURES FOR THE
YEAR 1870.

BY THE
REV. Ff^. FARRAR, M.A, F.R.S.,
LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE;
MASTER OF MARLBOROUGH COLLEGE;'
HULSEAN LECTURER FOR 1870, AND HONORARY CHAPLAIN TO THE QUEEN.

Honlwm antr iEUfo |Btirfe:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1871.
[All Rights reserved.]

TO THE
REV. W. THOMPSON, D.D.
MASTER OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
THESE LECTURES
ARE GRATEFULLY AND RESPECTFULLY
DEDICATED.

PREFACE.

A SERIES of accidental circumstances has caused
the publication of these Lectures to be long de
layed, and renders it necessary to send them
forth, even now, in a condition much less com
plete than I had originally intended and hoped.
Among other things I had greatly wished to add,
by way of Preface or Introduction, some further
considerations upon the subjects with which the
Lectures severally deal ; but I am obliged to
forego this intention. The Lectures were written
while I was in a position which left me but little
leisure for thought or study ; but they are pub
lished amid the pressure of still more incessant
occupations. I can only pray that with all their
imperfections they may be accepted as a sincere
and honest effort to strengthen in the minds of
those who read them a faith in the great truths

viii PREFACE.
of Christianity; and their purpose will not have
wholly failed if they impart to but one single
soul a deeper conviction of the certainty of those
doctrines which were once found competent to
regenerate a diseased and perishing society, and
which have lost no single element of their power
to quicken, in the hearts of all those who faith
fully accept them, the desire to spend a noble
life, and the ability to bring that desire to good
effect. I have only to add that a great portion of
the proof-sheets was corrected while I had no
means of obtaining access to books, and another
portion while I was suffering from the effects of
a serious accident. I have done my best to ensure
accuracy, but it is only too probable that a few
errata — I hope not many — may have crept into
the following pages from these causes.
F. W. F.
Marlborough College,
April 20, 1871.

CONTENTS.

I. TAGE
The Antecedent Credibility of the Miraculous . i
II.
The Adequacy of the Gospel Records ... 47
III.
The Victories of Christianity  89
IV.
Christianity and the Individual . . . . 127
V.
Christianity and the Race  165
APPENDICES. Appendix A. On the Diversity of Christian Evidences 199
Appendix B. Confucius  201
Appendix C. Buddha  203
Appendix D. Comte  205

I.

THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY OF THE
MIRACULOUS.

Ta aSivara irapd &v0pwirois Svuard icrri irapa. t<J> 6e<j5.
Luke xviii. 17.
Ti awicTrov Kpivertu trap' ifuv, el b Oebs rois vetcpobs iyelpa;
Acts xxvi. 8.

F. H. L.

Heb. II. 4. '
God dho bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders
and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost,
according to His own will.
He, my brethren, who having been ordained to the
ministry of the Word, stands up to rkeach the gospel
which his Master taught, ought to do so on all occasions
with as little fear or misgiving as an ambassador in
delivering the message of a king. If he be telling of that
which by Faith he has heard and seen, and his hands
have handled, of the Word of Life— if he not only believe
in his inmost soul the truths he utters, but would be
ready, if need were, to die for them — then his heart
should not beat one throb the faster, though, like the
Apostles of old, he were standing before Philosophers at
Athens or Emperors at Rome. But the case of one who
stands here and in this office, of one who has rather
to argue than to apply, rather to defend than to enforce,
is not the same. The transcendant majesty and unut
terable value of the truths which he maintains — the oppres
sive sense of his own insufficiency — the knowledge that
many far better arid wiser and more learned than him-

4 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
self have been his predecessors, and that many far better
and wiser and more learned than himself will listen to
his words — all these considerations may well paralyse hi's
energy and chill his heart. And yet if he have no other
aim than to give a manly reason for the truth that is in
him; if, with single-hearted simplicity, he strive to set
forth some one fragment at least1 of those arguments
which have wrought in his own soul the strength of its
convictions and the security of its hopes, then he may at
once take courage. Happy he who, in an age which
has been described as "destitute of faith yet terrified at
• scepticism," can still say Manet immota Fides; happier
still is he, to whom, "having the witness in himself2," may
be given the high grace of labouring to strengthen the
faith of others; And if, after well-nigh two thousand
years of apologetic literature, but little room for origi
nality be left, on the other hand the arguments of those
two millenniums have established the truth upon a more
impregnable foundation3; if the lapse of centuries have
dimmed for us the historic brightness of the facts of our
religion, they have at least attested the permanence and
1 See Appendix A.
2 I John v. io. rty p-aprvpiav. i Cor. i. ii, 6 Kai atfipayurtifievos
ij,u2s Kai Soils rbv i.p"pa§wva rov irveiparos iv rats KapSlais rificiv.
3 It seems no exaggeration to say that our evidence for the truth
of Christianity is at least as strong as that of the earliest disciples. To
minds not yet familiar with the methods of God's working, the fear
ful apparent disproportion between the short period of our Lord's
ministry, and the apparent insignificance of its immediate visible
results when compared with His Divine claims, would have gone far
to outweigh a faith founded on His miracles in an age when miracles
were comparatively disregarded.

OF THE MIRACULOUS.

the beneficence of the system which rests upon them as
its base. And since, undeniably, trie rock on which
Christ built His Church has risen unshaken out of the
stormiest waves of past assault, we may well feel an
undaunted confidence, that even amid the decuman
billows of modern scepticism it shall remain immovable
as the granite bases of the world. It may be deluged
again and again by the fiercely recurrent surge, — it may
be hidden again and again from the eyes of the multitude
by the blinding spray, — but it is there; and so long as
the feet of the Church militant on earth be planted firm
upon that living rock, she may indeed be desolate, she
may be wounded, she may be oppressed, but so long we
believe and are sure that "the gates of Hell shall not
prevail against her1."
It was the direction of the pious founder of these
lectures 2 that they should deal with recent attacks upon
1 Matt. xvi. 1 8.
2 John Hulse, born 1 708, educated at Congleton Grammar School,
entered St John's College, Cambridge, at the age of 16. Owing to ill-
treatment by his father, he was mainly supported by his College. He
was ordained in 1732, and was for many years curate at Gostry.
On the death of his father in 1753 he succeeded to the family estate
Elworth Hall, where he lived in retirement till his death in 1790.
See Memoir of Hulse in Mr Parkinson's Hulsean Lectures, 1838.
In Mr Hulse's will he stated that the object of the Hulsean Lecturer
should be "to demonstrate in the most convincing and persuasive
manner the truth and excellence of Christianity, so as to include not
only the prophecies and miracles general and particular, but also any
other proper or useful arguments, whether the same be direct or collateral
proofs of the Christian religion, which he may think fittest to discoursi
upon, ...or else any particular argument or branch thereof, and chiefly
against notorious infidels whether Atheists or Deists." And he wished

6 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
the faith of Christians. In his day such attacks were
sufficiently rare to be easily distinguishable, sufficiently
definite to be separately resisted. It is not so now.
We are, as it were, in the very focus of the storm. It is
not that every now and then there is a burst of thunder,
and a glare of lightning; but the whole air is electric
with quivering flames. And what is the point around
which all the dangers of the storm converge? Not
around minor questions, the mere dSiafopa of Theology,
the things unessential respecting which there need be
only charity: but the storm now rages about the very
Ark of God. It is the Divinity of Christ himself which
is called in question, and we are challenged to prove
that the most sacred archives of our religion are not a
delusion or a lie. Nor is it any longer against this or that
treatise that we must defend the most vital principles of
Christian doctrine. It is against whole literatures; it is
against whole philosophies; it is against the vague doubts
of eminent thinkers; it is against the innumerable sneers,
the repeated assumptions, the ever-varying criticisms of a
powerful and intellectual press. It is impossible to deny
the fact, it is useless to deplore it. "Our duty," said
Spinosa, "is neither to ridicule the affairs of men, nor to
deplore, but simply to understand them." And meanwhile
it may fortify us to bear in mind that of these attacks we
the followingclause to be added by way of preface to the printed
Lectures. "And may the Divine blessing for ever go along with all
my benefactions, and may the Greatest and Best of Beings by His
all-wise Providence and gracious influence make the same effectual
to His own glory and the good of my fellow-creatures."

OF THE MIRACULOUS.

were from the first forewarned. "This child is set for a
sign which shall be spoken against1," said the aged
Simeon as he pressed the yet infant Saviour to his heart.
His cross from the first was to the Jews a stumbling-
block, and to the Greeks foolishness ; His earliest
Apostles were denounced as "pestilent fellows and ring
leaders of sedition2;" His Gospel was stigmatised by
haughty historians as an "exitiabilis superstitio3," and His
self-denying children in their purest and sweetest days
were distinguished by this fact only, that "everywhere
they were spoken against*." f
Eighteen hundred years have passed away, and,
side by side with a happy awakenment to life and
energy, we cannot deny that there is a wide-spread
1 Luke ii. 34.
8 Acts xxiv. 5, \otpi>v Kai Ktvovvra tsrdtnv. I Cor. iv. 13, tit
TrepiKaOdpfiara tov Koapiov t-yei'^0T]p^i>, rdvrav Trfplxpijpu.
3 See Tac. Ann. xv. 44, " quos perflagitia invisos vulgus Chris.
tianos appellabat...repressaque in prsesens exitiabilis superstitio
rursum erumpebat, non modo per Judseam, originem ejus mali, sed
per urbem etiam, quo cuncta undique atrocia sxApudenda confluunt."
Cf. Sueton. Ner. 16, Claud. 15. Plin. Epp. X. 97, "Nihil aliud
inveni quam supersfitionem pravam et immodicam."
4 Acts xxviii. 22; 1 Pet. ii. 12, iv. 14. In the expression "odio
humanigeneris convicti" (Tac. /. c), the genitive is objective, "their
hatred_/"w the human race." The Christians were confounded with
the Jews, and their absence from the games &c. was construed as
being mere moroseness. Cf. Tac. Hist. v. 5, where he says "adver-
sus omnes alios hostile odium." Among other things the Christians
were constantly charged with atheism, et ns &8eos 17 Xpttrnavfe $
'TUmKoipeios, Luc. Alex. Pseud, xxxviii. Mpe rois &$t-ovs was the
cry at the martyrdom of Polycarp. Cf. Dio Cass, lxvii. 14, "Homines
deploratse, illicit*, ac desperate factionis." Cascilius in Min. Fel.
Oct. viii.

8 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
defection from the faith which our fathers held; nor
does it require much insight to recognise that the causes
of this falling away are both moral and intellectual.
To enter briefly into those causes — to shew that neither
Philosophy nor Criticism have shaken one truth of
Christianity — to shew the extent and the glory of its
individual, social and political victories, and thus to
demonstrate the mighty Witness borne by History to
the faith of Christ — will be the object of these Lectures;
and I pray that with all their feeblenesses and imperfec
tions they may be blessed by His Holy Spirit to the
brightening of our hopes, and the deepening of our
charity, by the establishment and the increase of our
faith in the Son of God.
-— Now in attributing the spread of disbelief in part
to moral causes I would at the outset, and with deep
sincerity and earnestness, guard myself against a mis
conception. It has been a common, and I may add
a deplorable mistake among Christian controversialists,
to assume that error in the judgment must necessarily
be caused by depravity in the heart. Nothing has led
to deeper irritation, or more directly tended to harden
into an antichristian attitude the minds of men who
might have been won by less ungenerous arguments,
than this endeavour to suppress free inquiry under
the crushing and insulting charge of moral obliquity.
! To silence a. doubt, or slur a difference under tiae un
charitable haughtiness of " we know that this man is a
" is a mixture of religious Pharisaism with social
1 John ix. 24.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 9
impertinence'; and it is least of all excusable in an age
which has seen a doubtful or even an adverse position
towards the truths of our religion maintained by men
who have deepened our love for all that is great in I
conduct and pure in thought, and who in their stainless
lives and noble utterance give the unconscious testi
mony of "minds naturally Christian8." But. while we'.
utterly condemn in religious controversy the mixture of
moral inuendo with intellectual proof, we are justified
as a warning to our own hearts, no less than those of
others, in asserting the undeniable truth that sometimes,
though not necessarily, and in some, instances, though
not in all, the first rills ' of heresy have flowed from the
bitter fountains of a perverse will or a corrupted heart.
It remains as true now as in the days of the Apostles
that " the natural man receiveth not the things of the
Spirit of God3," and that "spiritual things must be
1 In a remarkable little book called The Modern Buddhist, trans
lated by Mr Alabaster from the Kitchanukit of Chao Phya
Ipipakon, foreign minister in Siam, we constantly find such com
plaints as the following, in answer to perfectly honest doubts and
remarks : " When I had said this the missionary became angry, and
saying, I was hard to teach, left me'' "The Missionary replied, If any
one spoke like this in European countries he would be put in prison."
And in reply to a question as to the doctrine of original sin, "the
Missionary answered, It is waste of time to converse with evil men
who will not be taught, and so left me;" pp. 29, 34, 35. This, it
need hardly be said, was not St Paul's method, but the very reverse
of it. 2 "O testimonium animje naturaliter Christianas!" Tert.
Apolog. 17.
3 1 Cor. ii. 14, ad fin., &c. " How can ye believe which receive
honour from men, and seek not the honour which cometh of God

io THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
spiritually discerned." The voice from heaven saying
"This is my beloved Son" sounded to most of those
who heard it but as the dull roll of the thunder; to
some only as the unintelligible voice of an angel; to
very few as the distinct and articulate utterance of God \
If it was a Christian historian who took for his motto
" Pectus est quod facit theologum"," it was a sceptical
poet3 who wrote "As are the inclinations so are the
opinions" it was an idealising philosopher who said
"that our system of thought was often only the history
of our heart*." Oh my brethren, we may lose our faith
in Christ from many causes, and from some which
it is not for fallible man to denounce or to condemn;
but it is well for us to know there is undoubtedly one
path which leads with dangerous frequency from prac-
only?" John v. 44. Compare such passages as Ps. xxv. 14; John
vii. 17; Rom. viii. 7, xiv. 17, &c. "II y a assez de lumiere pour
ceux qui ne desirent que de voir, et assez d'obscurit^ pour ceux qui
ont une disposition contraire." Pascal, Pensies, 11. 151, ed. Faugfere.
"Christian faith," says an American writer of genius, "is a grand
cathedral with divinely pictured windows. S tanding without, you see
no glory nor can possibly imagine any : standing within, each ray of
light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendour." Nath. Haw
thorne, Transformation, p. 262.
1 6 piv exuv T<Z Kpelrrova ura axotiet Oeov' 0 St KeKUtpuptvos rfy
ttjs *puxvs &Koijv dvtticrdTjTei \4yovros Qeov, Orig. c. Cels. II. 72.
8 Neander. Hence the nickname Pectoralisten given to his
followers. 3 Gothe.
* Fichte, Unser Denksystem ist sehr oft nur die Geschichte unseres
Herzen's. Similarly he says that "Truth is descended from con
science," and that "men do not will according to their reason, but
reason according to their will." Bestimmung der Menschen, p. 293, &c.

OF THE MIRACULOUS.

tical faithlessness to speculative infidelity; from the
"Yea, hath God said?" to the "Ye shall not surely
die1." Let us then at least beware that in us unholiness
do not cloud the spiritual eye and dull the spiritual
ear: for the rank mists which reek upward from the
sinful heart do tend most fatally to obliterate the Image,
the Memory, the Life of Christ — they end by hiding
from the human soul even the vision of its Creator
in fold on fold of a more and more impenetrable
night2. 1 Cf. Pascal, Pens. II. 108, "Nous connaissons la verite non
seulement par la raison, mais encore par le cceur." "Love God
and He will dwell with you ; obey God and He will reveal the
truth of his deepest teaching to you." Robertson, God's Revelations
of Heaven. But no one has expressed this truth in nobler language
than Clem. Alex., Strom. V. I. 13, Kai rovro ijv 0 -Qvi^aTo Strrit apa
$v iKeivos 6 iirtypaipas t% elo-bSt$ tov ev ''EiriSavpcp veto-
dyvbp XPV v-qolo 0vwSeos evros iovrtx
lp.p.evac ayvet-ij S' Icrrt tppoveiv Stria —
and then, after quoting Matt, xviii. 3, he continues, evravda yap 6
veds tov Qeov rpitrlv 7)5 pan p.iv OS 6efie\lois, irlcnei, ehrdSi., dydiriu tpal-
verai. Cf. id. VII. X. 57. A crowd of writers in all ages have testified
to the same fact. "Teneritas conscientice," says Tertullian, " obdu-
ratur in callositatem voluntarii erroris." Ad Nationes, II. 1. Shak.
speare has not suffered it to pass unnoticed :
"For when we in Qur viciousness grow hard,
Oh misery on't, the wise gods seal our eyes;
In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us
Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut
To our confusion."
" Wer es glaubt dem ist das Heilge nach" said Schiller; and so too
Schleiermacher, " Der Glaube ist in mir lebendig durch die That. "
3 Witness the historic filiation of such writers as La Mettraie to
•Voltaire ; of Strauss to Hegel, and of Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer to

12 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
In speaking, however, of the moral causes for pre^
valent disbelief, I am not alluding at all to single eases,
but to that subtler, more indefinable, more general
something which we may call the Spirit of the Age.
If pride and passion have often been fatal conspirators
against individual faith, so have wider but more specious
evils wrought a certain atrophy in the spiritual life of
nations and centuries. Ages of the most advanced refine
ment have not unfrequently been ages of the most open
unbelief. At the zenith of their civilisation nations have
often been at the nadir of their faith2. There has been
an absorbing luxury, and luxury makes the heait soft,
Strauss. In the old philosophy we may notice the same kind of
downward progress, from Protagoras to Diagoras of Melos.
1 "In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles for existence,
their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganisation, they
have higher hopes and nobler passions : out of the suffering comes the
serious mind ; out of the salvation, the grateful heart ; out of en
durance, fortitude; out of deliverance, faith.... But when they have
done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils
seem to arise out of their rest; evils that vex less and mortify
more, that suck the blood though they do not shed it, and ossify the
heart though they do not torture it." Ruskin's Mod. Painters, II. 5.
The whole of the noble passage of which this is an extract is well
worthy of study.
2 Bacon, in his Essay " Of Atheisme" after saying that " None
deny there is a God, but those for whom it maketh that there were
no God," adds among the causes of Atheism "Learned Times,
specially with Peace and Prosperity : for troubles and adversity doe
more bow mens mindes to Religion." Ess. XVI. "L'abus du savoir
produit l'incredulit6. Tout savant dddaigne le sentiment vulgaire';
chacun en veut avoir un & soi. L'orgueilleuse philosophie mene
a l'esprit fort comme l'aveugle devotion mene au fanatisme."
Rousseau. (This and other passages from Rousseau I quote from

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 13
¦fend, effeminate, and vulnerable: there has been an
eager race for wealth, and the love of wealth deadens
all the soul's finer sensibilities; there have been un
bounded means of gratification, and selfish pleasure
makes men earthly, and cruel, and coarse. Entangled
in complex interests, amused by incessant frivolities,
stimulated by restless excitements, beguiled by the
dazzling treacheries of a refined immorality, for such
ages the horizon of life has dwindled into an ever-
narrowing circle, and amid the dust and glare of
material interests, all heavenly hopes, all Godward as
pirations have faded utterly away. The spectacle is
full of warning for ourselves. It shews us that mate
rial advance may be moral retrogression, and that
widely-extended comfort, rapidly increasing knowledge,
vast literary activity may co-exist in Philosophy with a
dreary materialism, in morals with a corrupted selfish
ness, in religion with a blank negation. It proves to
us — and at this moment the white cliffs of England
seem to reverberate to us in echoing thunder the solemn 1
lesson — it proves to us that not on refinement, but on\
spirituality; not on selfishness, but on sacrifice; not on
knowledge, but on wisdom; not on intelligence, but
on faith, rests the entire superstructure of national
greatness and individual peace. Is it a true philosophy
which prides itself on a perfect impartiality between
the faith which in the fifteenth century produced a
Pensies ,et Maximes de J. J. Rousseau!) OSuvres Computes, Vol.
xxxvi. p. 45.

14 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
Picus of Mirandola, and in the eighteenth a Vincent
de Paul, and that immoral deism which culminated
in the one century in an Aretino and a Poggio, and in
the other in a Marat and a Robespierre1? My brethren,
let us beware lest, while the censer is in our hands,
the spot of leprosy be on our foreheads. There is but
one direction in which the disease can be developed;
there is but one remedy whereby it can be cleansed.
To these moral causes for the growth of unbelief
it will be needless to return; our task summons us to
deal with those which are more purely intellectual, and
have their seat in the understanding rather than in the
heart. There are assaults upon Christianity which have
their ground in philosophy, in science, and in historical
criticism. It is not easy to encounter them because once,
like the tents of the nomads, they were shifted from
day to day, but now the very frequency of their intru
sion has won for them, among too many, the position
of scattered indeed yet tolerated settlers. So that now
it seems as though against the doctrines, and above all
against the miracles of Christianity, there were, so to
speak, " a conspiracy of silence," an agreement of con^
1 I borrow the expression from De Lammenais, Ess. sur P Indif
ference en matiires de Religion, I. 250. " On s'enorgueillit de garder
la neutrality, de V ignorance entre la doctrine qui a produit Vincent de
Paul et celle qui a produit Mardt." Giovanni Pico della Mirandola
(b. 1463, d. 149 1 ) after his early period of exuberant display may
certainly be regarded as one of the most sincere and interesting
characters of the 15th century. Aretino, one of the vainest and
vilest of men, belongs in point of time rather to the 16th century,
having been born in 1491.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 15
temptuous indifference; as though forsooth it were too
late in the day to argue or to refute, and it were at once
more effectual and more courteous to ignore. For in
stance the central doctrine of Christianity is based upon
a miracle, and in no small realm of literature the im
possibility of miracles is calmly insisted upon as a
discovery which needs no demonstration. Their inven
tion is attributed to an imaginative reverence; their
reception to an ignorant credulity; the present belief
in them to the cant of an interested hypocrisy, or the
deficiencies of intellectual gifts1. And are we timidly
to admit these haughty assertions? are we meekly to
bow before the intolerant dogmatism of an ignorant
science? are we, the successors of those who overcame
1 Can anything be more insolent than the language used by
Strauss on this subject? He says "It certainly required no small
amount of assurance for any one to stand forth in the face of the
present age with an ostensibly sincere profession of implicit belief in
miracle...'When Gfrorer declares in relation to the treating of the
cripple &c. that he regards these cases simply as miraculous, this we
understand as a slap in the face administered to the scepticism of the
philosophical critic, or as a thump upon the taproom table on which he
made his peroration ; but we know how little he is in earnest from
the way in which he contrives to set aside other miracles." New Life
of Jesus (Authorised Transl. I. 38, 39). A little further on he says
that Meyer's acquiescence in the Gospel narratives as miraculous
"becomes in this instance an admission of his own imbecility;" and
that Ebrard's views upon this subject "bespeak the consummate inso
lence of orthodox reaction /'and that (p. 42) the "pompous and stunning
phraseology" of Ewald "sounds like a portentous sign of that last
stage of existence in which the whole of this style of theology may
be said to be awaiting its doom." This is a style of invective to
which we hope that theologians will never, under any provocation,
condescend to recur.

1 6 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
the world, to accept the patronising condescension
which is willing to spare our venerable prejudices? Nay,
unshaken amid the storm of contemptuous assertion,
we reply that it requires a loftier height of intelligence
to believe in miracles than to reject them1, because it
involves the realisation of loftier than mere material
verities, and the recognition of wider than purely phy
sical laws. And can it, we ask, be so decisive a sign
of contemptible inferiority, to hold a faith which was
dear to the heart and acceptable to the intellect, I
'will not say of a Milton only, or a Bossuet, but of
philosophers and mathematicians, of biologists and
astronomers, of a Leibnitz and a Descartes, of a Haller
and a Pascal, of a Copernicus and a Kepler, of a
Bacon and a Ray2? Have we in the last century dis
covered laws so far more general than the law of gravi
tation, that the belief in Prophecy and Miracle which
1 See Grau, Leber den Glauben als die hochste Vernunft, 1865.
"Nur wenige Menschen sind weise genug anzusehen dass es viel
mehr Geist dazu braucht um Wunder zu glauben als Verstand um
sie zu leugnen." Schenkel, Was ist Wahrheit, 20.
2 See a crowd of such testimonies quoted from Ritter, Agassiz,
Martius, Newton, Kepler, &c. in Uhlhorn, Die Modernen Darstel-
lungen der Lebens Jesu, pp. 143 sqq. For some account of the calm
and simple piety of Euler and Haller, see Hagenbach, Germ.
Rationalism, pp. 112— 115 {Engl. Tr.). The epitaph of Coperni
cus is well known :
"Non parem Pauli gratiam requiro
Veniam Petri neque posco; sed quam
In cruris ligno dederas latroni
Sedulus oro."
"It is true that a little Philosophy inclineth man's minde to

OF THE -MIRACULOUS. 17
was natural to a Newton should be so drivelling in us?
And with so many supreme intellects still among us,
so many over whom the grave has but recently closed,
who have humbly held our faith in all its breadth and
in all its simplicity, are we to regard the days as past
in which "Piety has found
Friends in the friends of Science, and true prayer
Has flown from lips wet with Castalian dews?"
Nay, but beside the graves of a Whewell and a Faraday
let all at least that is shallow and noisy in modern
Atheism, learn the humility of science, and the calm
dignity of unshaken Christian faith!
If we seek, my brethren, for the causes of this
rejection of the supernatural, we shall find them partly
in the recent tendency of metaphysical speculation,
partly in certain logical inferences, partly in the in
creasing strength of various scientific conceptions; and
each of these, as briefly as possible, we will consider in
order. I. However noble may have been the lives of
Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and their
lives were very noble ; however sincerely they may have
claimed — and most of them did claim — the position
Atheisme ; But depth in Philosophy bringeth mens mindes about
to Religion : For while the minde of man looketh upon Second Causes
scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and goe no further : But
when it beholdeth the chaine of them confederate and linked
together, it must needs flie to Providence and Deitie." Bacon, Essay
xvi. Of Atheisme. The same thought is repeatedly to be found in
Pascal. See Luthardt, Apolog. Vort. 262.
F. H. L. 2

1 8 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
of humble Christians1 and religious philosophers; how
ever magnificently they may have asserted — and some
of them did assert with unequalled force — the majesty
of the moral law within; above all, however little it may
be fitting for us to pass judgment upon men so good
and wise, with intolerant bigotry or austere condemna
tion, — yet certainly the total effect of their speculations
was to idealise, say rather, to evaporate the facts of
Christianity2, — -to substitute the supposed intuitions of a
1 Cicero had said "Eos qui philosophise operam dant, non
arbitrari Deos esse." De Invent. I. 29. But there is happily the
distinctest evidence that Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Jacobi, Hegel were
sincere Christians, although many passages of their philosophical
writings undoubtedly tended to a mere idealization of Christian
truths. See Hagenbach, Germ. Rationalism, ^96, 317, 405,
Engl. Tr.
2 Kant used indignantly to repel every word spoken in disparage
ment of the historic Saviour, and said that he bowed reverently before
His name, and regarding himself in comparison as a bungler interpret
ing Him as best he could (Vorowski's Life of Kant, p. 86, n.), yet no
doubt the immediate effects of l^sjstenj" were to destroy revelation
by leaving nothing to be revealed" (Rev. A. S. Farrar, Bampton Led.
p. 323). For Schelling's views, see Methode des Akad. Studium,
Varies. 9. In his old age however, as Heine scornfully says of him,
"dieser Mann est abtriinnig geworden von seiner eignen Lehre...er
ist zuriickgeschlichen in den Glaubenstall der Vergangenheit."
Salon, p. 275. That Strauss is the natural development of Hegel,
see his Glaubenslehre, II. 214, DieHalben und die Ganzen, p. 42, "Ich
machte meine Sache so gut als ich auf meinem damaligen Stand-
punkte konnte. Dieser Standpunkt war der der HegeVschen Philo
sophic" Sec. Feuerbach again is the natural successor of Strauss, who
in his Christian Mdrklin thanks him for "das Piinktchen das er
auf unser I gesetzt." "Feuerbach, will ich jetzt sagen, hat das
Doppeljoch, wohin bei Hegel Philosophie und' Theologie nodi
gingen, zerbrochen." Die Halb. und die Ganzen, p. 50. See too

OF THE MIRACULOUS, 19
natural1 for the firm truths of a revealed religion". In
their hands the simple faith in Christ was sublimated
into a mere religious Theosophy, and the doctrine
of His divinity furtively relegated from the light of
history into a misty region of intellectual subtleties.
And though understood only by the few, yet the
.effect of these systems extended to the many; and some
who would have been unable to comprehend a single step
of the arguments on which such views are founded, have
yet grown to regard God as a "mere form of thought,"
.and the belief in His objective existence as an imbecility
of the understanding. Now we must not only admit,

Schwartz, Gesch. d. Neuest. Theol. p. 24. Fichte says " Nur das
Metaphysische keineswegs aber das Historische, macht selig; das
letztere macht nur verstandig." Hegel expressed similar opinions,
Phdtiomenologie, pp. 568, 572., 574. Gesch, d. Philosophic, III. 249.
From Chalybaus, Historical Survey of Speculative Philosophy (trans
lated by Mr Tulke), from Mansel's Metaphysics, 299 sqq. 302 — 320, or
from Mr G. H. Lewes's brilliant Biog. Hist, of Philosophy, vol. II.,
the English reader may gain a"fair general conception of the views of
Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Even the slightest adequate „
.survey of their views will be sufficient to establish the proof of what '
is said in the text.
1 "La religion naturelle n'existe que dans les livres." Guizot,'
Meditations, II. 237. a
2 ' ' The Infinite and the Absolute are names of two counter im- 1
becilities of the human mind transported into properties of the nature
of things; subjective negatives converted into objective affirmations."
Sir W. Hamilton. "Fichte is compelled to confess that he knows
no other God than the moral order of things." Mansel, Metaph.
p. 306. "In its consequences the Philosophy of the Absolute admits
of no alternative but Atheism or Pantheism. . .Religion is equally
annihilated under both suppositions; for if there is no God, whom are
we to worship? and if all things are God, who is to worship Him?

20 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
but it may even prove to us a source of fresh insight if
we admit, that we cannot as arguments refute many of
the arguments of the Idealist Philosophy; that it may be
logically proved that Time, and Space, and Cause, are but
forms of the conditioned ; that they are conceivable only
as negations ; that all our conceptions of primary, no less
than of secondary qualities, are essentially subjective,
and that their synthesis in an imaginary substance is
purely mental1. And doubtless on these logical conces
sions some startling conclusions might be built. But
what is the result of all these concessions? Simply this,
that we reject the entire reasoning on which they are
founded as unpractical and trivial, and refuse to be led
into a quaking fen of infidelity by the mere ignes fatui
of metaphysical speculation2. It was Hume himself who
Morality is equally annihilated under both suppositions; for if I am
the Absolute [Fichte'], I create my own moral duties, and cannot
be required to conform to any standard independent of myself; and if
I am a mode of the Divine Being [Hegel, Schelling], my actions flow
from the self-determinations of the Deity, and are all equally neces
sary and equally Divine." Id. p. 322.
1 "We live once and for all in relations, and need nothing further."
Herbart, Allgem. Metaph. 11. 4T4. The logical proof of this is
given with admirable force and lucidity in Prof. Ferrier's Insti
tutes of Metaphysics. Yet in reading such books, with the highest
admiration for their intellectual power, one is sometimes reminded
of Gothe's words: "Ein Kerl, der speculirt,
Ist wie ein Vieh, auf durrer Heide
Von einem bosen Geist herumgefuhrt,
Und rings umher ist grime Weide."
2 "Que si vos facultes vibrant simultanement n'ont jamais rendu
ce grand son unique que nous appelons Dieu, je n'ai rien plus h dire-

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 21
said of such arguments that " they admit of no answer
and produce no conviction." What is denied to us as
an axiom we claim as a postulate; what is refused as a
deduction we assume as an intuition; if such trains of
thought be true for the understanding, we repudiate them
for the reason ; if they be logically impregnable, we declare
them to be spiritually false. We look at the rainbow,
and Kant, by a process of reasoning of the most delicate (
and subtle character, proves to us with 'irresistible con
viction that the colours, and the clouds, and the sun, and
the falling rain, are but 'subjective conceptions— are but
mere modifications of the Ego having no relation to 'any
thing real which may remain; nay more, that the very
time of their falling and the space in which they move,
are but "innate" forms of the understanding1; and yet

vous manquez de l'elernent essentiel et caracteristique de notre
nature," Renan, Et. d'Hist. Rel. p. 418. These metaphysical en
quiries may however have a salutary effect in checking the "fatal
ingenuity of the theologians," and in shewing the futility of an idle
dogmatism on subjects of such abysmal difficulty as the itepcx^P^tris,
the rpbiros dpriSoaecas, the trvvdcpeta, the xprjcris ttjs KT-qcrecas and
Kt-vucris ttjs xpitreas, and all those "parts of the ancient dogmatic
system which may be allowed silently to fall into disuse as beyond
the proper range of human thought and human language." Milman,
' Latin Christianity, VI. 634. Abundant evidence of this "fatal
ingenuity," may be seen in Oischinger, Die Christliche und Scholas-
tiche Theologie, Jan. 1869, or in Darner's celebrated work on the
Person of Christ.
1 " In the rainbow we shall indeed, according to the ordinary
mode of representation, first of all call the coloured arch a phenome
non present merely for us and for our visible sense, but shall regard
the . rain-drops as the actual and true thing in itself that lies at the
bottom of this phenomenon. But let us now consider that these

22 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
knowing all this and admitting it1, as a play of reasoning,
to be unanswerable, we yet gaze on the rainbow shining
there in its sevenfold perfection of divided light, and
we shall not only be undisturbed by its possessing a
merely subjective reality, but even more than this, we
shall accept it still as a symbol of mercy to a sinful and
stormy world, and shall joyfully recall that prophecy of
redemption, "the rainbow round about the throne in
sight like unto the emerald2." As the Predestinarian
may prove to us that we are but puppets of the divine
will, — clay foredoomed to dishonour by the potter's
hands, — but we shall still act as though we were absolutely
free ; even so when sceptical philosophies have shattered
the arguments from final causes, and tried to demonstrate
to us that neither from Scripture, nor from any primary
intuition, can we be sure of so much as the existence of
drops again, are only empiric phenomena, and then their round
form, nay even the space in which they are formed, are nothing in
themselves but a mere modification or principle of our sensuous in
tuition ; with all this, however, the object itself remains to us com
pletely unknown." Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, p. 45, quoted
by Chalybaus. 1 As even Dr Brown, the great opponent of Idealism, frankly
admits. We may say of metaphysical formula? and symbols, as
Prof. Huxley does of materialistic, that when they are taken for any
thing but formulse and symbols, they may "paralyse the energy and
destroy the beauty of a life." Lay Sermons, p. 161. For instance,
"the two Hegelian conclusions, that God is personal only in man,
and the soul immortal only in God, clearly imply that neither is
God personal, nor the soul immortal." Janet, Materialism, p. 5
(tr. Masson). Views like these led by a natural sequence of thought
to the autolatry of Max S timer with its motto, Quisque sibi Deus.
2 Rev. iv. 3.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 23
a God, we still simply refuse to be tormented from our
unshaken belief by the destructive ingenuity of our
own logic ; we quietly ignore these Antinomies of
Reason, and after listening to Spinoza telling us that " to
speak of God's assuming human nature is as absurd as
if we said that a circle had taken the nature of a square ;"
still, in a spirit as invincibly calm as the credo quia im-
possibile of the ancient Father, we kneel humbly on our
knees, and with eyes and hands upraised to heaven, pray
to that phantasmal Deity who they tell us is but an idol
of our own fancy,— pray to Him not as to a mere anima
mundi or cosmic life, not as to a mere transmutation of
matter1, not as to a mere "category of the ideal," least
of all, for the sake of some reflex action upon ourselves —
but pray to Him as to a living God and merciful Father;-
knowing by the earnest of the Spirit, knowing by a.
witness within ourselves, that we shall receive from Him,
through His Eternal and Incarnate Son, those daily
miracles in the very possibility of which they tell us it is
an imbecility to have believed 2.
1 Moleschott, who with Biichner and Karl Vogt represents the
most advanced school of Materialism, talks of the Allgewalt des
Stoffwechsels : " Der Gott Straussens ist der Naturgesetz ; der Gott
Hegels ist der Begriff; der Gott Feuerbachs ist der illusorische
Doppelganger der Menschen ; der Gott Moleschotts ist die Materie.
Nachdem diese Gcitter, die Gebilde den Menschenwitzes und des
Menschenwahns, sich,. ..in der Dammerung der Grauen Theorie
todtgescblagen. haben, darf auch ich den Wunsch hegen, dass. ..das
Morgenroth der Erlosung tagen moge?" Hafermann, Athen oder
Bethlehem? p. 125.
2 irdvres St 0euv xartovtr &v8pwirot.. Horn. Od. III. 48. "Deus
non est ^Eternitas vel Infinitas sed aeternus et infinitus : non est Dura-
tio vel Spatium sed durat et adest." Sir I. Newton. " J'aime Dieu,

24 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY

II. Nor are we surprised that metaphysicians them
selves should have shrunk back appalled from their own
conclusions, and found themselves compelled to rebuild
in the region of practical belief what they had demolished
in that of philosophical knowledge1. But the rejection

jen'aimepas 1'etre supreme," said a man of genius, Bungener, Voltaire
etses Temps, p. 241. Compare the admirably truthful and honest re
marks of Niebuhr, " As for that Christianity which is such according
to the fashion of modem philosophers and Pantheists, without a
personal God, without immortality  it maybe a very ingenious
and subtle philosophy, but it is no Christianity at all. Again and
again have I said that I know not what to do with u. metaphysical
God, and that I will have no other but the God of the Bible who is
heart and heart. Whoever can reconcile the metaphysical God
with the God of the Bible may try it. ..but he who admits the abso
lute inexplicability of the main point which can only be approached
by asymptotes, will never grieve at the impossibility of possessing
any system of religion." Leben Niebuhr's, 11. 344. "On my way
I found the God of the Pantheists, but I could make nothing of
him. This poor visionary creature is interwoven with, and grown
into the world, indeed is almost imprisoned in it, and yawns at you,
without voice, without power. To have will one must have per
sonality, and to manifest oneself, one must have elbow-room."
Heine (quoted Trench on Miracles, p. 71, 9th ed.). Claudius com
pared an ideal relation without personality, to a painted horse which
you can admire but not ride. Jacobi wanted to know nothing of a
God who made the eye but does not see, the ear but does not hear,
the understanding but neither knows, nor wills, and therefore is not.
Hagenbach, Germ. Rat. pp. 296, 298.
1 Chalybaus, Speculative Philosophy, Eng. Tr. p. 49. Strauss,
Leben Jesu, m. p. 144, seems aghast at the results of his own criti
cism, and endeavours "to re-establish dogmatically, what has been
destroyed critically." The best account of the manner in which
Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, &c. reconciled their theories with the
objective historical existence of Christ, may be found in Dorner's
Entwickelungsgesc'h. der Lehre der Person Christi.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 25
of the supernatural is due also in no small degree to
direct and often-repeated arguments founded on the
alleged inadequacy of all testimony and immutability of
all laws. And before dealing with these let us understand
that the issue before us is distinct and definite. How
ever skilfully the modern ingenuity of semT-belief may
have tampered with supernatural interpositions, it is clear
to every honest and unsophisticated mind that, if mira
cles be incredible, Christianity is false. If Christ wrought
no miracles then the gospels are untrustworthy; if Christ
rose not, which is a stupendous miracle — then is our
preaching vain, and your faith is vain, and ye are yet in
your sins, and we are found liars to God, and they —
however desolate, however heartrending the belief — they
that are fallen asleep in Christ are perished l. If the
Resurrection be merely a spiritual idea, or a mythicised
hallucination, then our religion has been founded on an
error and a sham. We accept the issue. Eliminate
miracles, and then though there still remain a moral
system singularly noble and singularly pure — yet it is a
moral Deism alone.. .A Christianity without its Re
deemer, without its; sanctions, without its hopes — a
Christianity dissevered from the promises of the future
and the history of the past — a Christianity based on
1 1 Cor. xv. 18. The last prayer of Thistlewood, the Cato Street
conspirator, " Oh God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a
soul," rings with the echoes of an intense despair ; but it is an abyss
far lower than this to affirm dogmatically that there is no soul, no
salvation, and no immortality. Strauss ends his Glaubenslekre with
the remark that the belief in a future life is the last enemy (!) which
speculative criticism has to overcome.

26 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
the credulity of superstitions, and disseminated by the
potency of lies, is not the Christianity of our convictions,
not a Christianity for which we care to retain the name.
If it be true that the growth of science and civilisation
are incompatible with a belief in the miraculous, then
must science and civilisation listen for the voice of some
new deliverer, for then Christianity is dead1.
i. Now as regards the inadequacy of testimony to
establish a miracle, modern scepticism has not advanced
one single step beyond the blank assertion. And it is
astonishing that this assertion should still be considered
cogent, when its logical consistency has been shattered to
pieces by a host of writers as well sceptical as Christian2.
For, as the greatest of our living logicians has remarked,
the supposed recondite and dangerous formula of Hume
— that it is more probable that testimony should be mis
taken than that miracles should be true — reduces itself
to the very harmless proposition that anything is incre-
1 "Strauss hat ganz Recht wenn er die Wunderfrage als die
Existensfrage des Christenthums behandelt." Uhlhorn, Die Mod.
Darstell. des Lebens Jesu, p. 106.
2 Mill's Logic, II. 157—160. Dr Whewell points out most clearly
that in Inductive inferences a new element is added to the combina
tion of facts, "a conception of the mind is superinduced on the
general proposition which did not exist in the observed facts." In
fact, as Mr Mill says, this kind of Induction is " merely a shorthand
registration of the facts known," and not an inference from facts
known to facts unknown. "Induction,'' to use Dr Whewell's
metaphor, "moves upwards and Deduction downwards, on the same
stair, but they move differently. Deduction descends steadily and
methodically step by step ; Induction mounts by a leap beyond the
reach of method, and bounds to the top of the stair."

OF THE MIRACULOUS.. 27
dible which is contrary to a complete induction. It is
in fact a flagrant petitio principii, used to support an
wholly unphilosophical assertion. As regards the petitio
principii, we shall meet it hereafter by testing the co
gency of the Christian evidences; as regards the asser
tion that no amount of evidence could establish the
supernatural, we ask in amazement on what it is philo
sophically based? Does it rest on anything higher than
the idle habit of mind induced by the observation of
constant recurrences? Is it anything more than the in
tensified essence of the old faithless question, " Where is
the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell
asleep, all things continue as they were from the begin
ning of the creation1." Even were the induction on
which it is founded an exhaustive one, so far from pro
ducing any conviction, it would, as Bishop Butler pointed
out more than 100 years ago, merely prove the common
place truism, that it is probable that things should con
tinue as they are, except in cases in which there is
reason to think that they will be changed. In fact the
Inductive process cannot prove absolute conclusions; the
first stage of it, as has been well said, is not reasoning
but observation; the second is not reasoning but instinct.
Under the best of circumstances it can only be used to
establish an universal by thrusting imagination into the
province of logic2. When used to deny the possibility
1 2 Pet. iii.- 4 ; cf. Luke xii. 45 ; Is. v. 19. " What is disturbed
by a. miracle is the mechanical expectation of a recurrence."
Mozley, Bampl. Lect. p. 56.
2 "It is very convenient to indicate that all the conditions of
belief have been fulfilled in this case [gravitation] by calling the

28 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
of miracles, it is abused in identically the same way that
an inhabitant of the Great Sahara might abuse it to deny
the reality of snow, or as the French Academy actually
did abuse it to deny the existence of meteorites. A
comet moving in an hyperbolic orbit may have been
visible but once during millions of terrestrial years, would
it therefore be philosophical to deny its possibility? No.
It has been unanswerably said that " the Inductive prin
ciple is in its very nature only an expectation. It is as
radically incompetent to pronounce an universal propo
sition, as the taste or smell is to decide on matters of
sight. Its function is practical not logical. Transmuted
into an Universal, the inductive principle issues out of
the metamorphosis a fiction not a truth: a weapon of
air which, even in the hand of a giant, can inflict no
blow, because it is itself a shadow1."
ii. But let us admit that the disbelief in miracles
does not rest on this imperfect induction, and imagina
tive fallacy alone, but still more on the magnificent dis
covery of those general laws which have tended to im
press the minds of men with a sense, not only of the
order, beauty, and harmony, but also of the immutability
statement that unsupported stones will fall to the ground " a law of
nature." But when, as commonly happens, we change will into
must, we introduce an idea of necessity which assuredly does not lie
in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I can discover
elsewhere. For my part I utterly repudiate and anathematise the
intruder. Fact I know, and Law I know; but what is this necessity
but an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?" Huxley on the
Physical Basis of Life. Lay Sermons, p. 158.
¦ L Mozley, on Miracles, Bampton Lectures, 1865, p. 6r.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 29
of nature 1. Spinoza asserted that God and nature were
not two but one; that the laws of the latter are the will
of the former in its constant realisation; and that to be
lieve in God's doing anything against the observed order
of the universe is to believe in His acting contrary to His
own nature2. Now since the days of Spinoza science
has made gigantic strides, and all her discoveries have
tended to obliterate apparent exceptions and anomalies,
and to inspire an ardent hope that her ultimate victory
will be to prove that all material phenomena are due to
the working of one vast law. And hence — partly from
the narrowness which has led to a suspicion of science
among Christian teachers-^— partly from the counter nar
rowness which has confined the attention of physicists
to some limited speciality — partly from the mutual an
tagonisms thus generated, and the apparent stationari-
ness of religious thought amid the vast progress of sci
entific discovery — Science has grown more and more
material in its conceptions, and the alleged immutability
of natural laws, though it be but a mere idol of the
theatre which has been promoted into an idol of the
tribe, has been suffered more and more to usurp the very
throne of the living God. Henceforth it seems we are
to believe that the Creator has abdicated in favour of
1 Rousseau said of the question as to the possibility of miracles,
"cette question serait seneusement traitee impie, si elle n'^tait pas
absurde." Lettres de la Montagne, III. See Lange, Leben Jesu, 11.
iii. 9. Strauss, Christi. Glaubensl. I. 229.
2 See Baden Powell's Order of Nature, and Essay in Essays and
Reviews, which have been ably answered by Dean Mansel in Aids to
Faith.

3° THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
His own dead laws1; that, impotent, or else indifferent,
He has withdrawn into the far depths of His own eter
nity; that instead of seeking Him we must henceforth
only ask the sun about His wisdom, and the sea about
His love ; and that to pray to Him is as futile a superstition
as to bid the hurricane furnish us with courage to meet
our daily difficulties, to ask the pestilence to excuse our
frailties, or the earthquake to forgive our sins 2 !
But after all, though we hear so much of the reign of
Law, what is a Law3? Is it anything in the world beyond
that act of apprehension by which, because of our limited
understandings, we make "one act a phantom of suc
cession"? Is it anything but an observation of recur
rences, and a colligation of many observed recurrences
under one single category which we call a cause? Even
in stating it the nature of the thing defined escapes us;
1 This would be indeed the "Deus unicus, solitarius, destitutus,"
which the ancient Christians were taunted with worshipping. Min.
Felix, Octav. x. See Gothe, Sprikke in Reimen; Werke, in. 3.
Was war ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse? &c.
2 "ReMgue' au fond de son e'ternitG sourde et obscure, si nous
l'interrogeons, si nous le supplions, si nous crions vers lui, il ne peut
pas nous r^pondre, suppose toutefois qu'il puisse nous repondre, Que
voulez-vous? J'ai fait des lois, demandez au soleil et aux etoiles,
demandez h la mer et aux sables de ses rivages, pour moi mon sort
est accompli, je ne suis plus rien que le repos et le serviteur con-
templatif des ceuvres de ma droite." Lacordaire, Confirmee, 1S46,
P- 33- 3 "Die Naturgesetze sind ein unbekanntes X : kein Mensch
kennt sie, man hat von ihrem Wesen kaum eine Ahnung." Hafer
mann, Athen oder Bethlehem? p. 35.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 31
it flies as it were with wings beyond that adamantine
wall of mystery which surrounds every step we take into
the region of the unseen? "that," says Hooker, "which
doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth
appoint the form and measure the working, the same we
term a law." And when we talk of the Laws of Nature,
do we not merely add one vagueness to another? For
what is Nature? if it be not a mere reverend synonym for
God, what is it but the sum total of observed pheno
mena, — the active powers impressed on matter by some
unknown cause "brought into a form of unity for the pur
poses of science, and impersonated for the convenience
of language1"? It was the immortal glory of Newton to
have discovered a law — perhaps even here we ought in
absolute strictness to say — to have framed an hypothesis,
which -reduced under one set of conditions the most imr
mense diversity of phenomena; which referred to the
same cause alike the fall of a rose-leaf, nay even of each
impalpable germ in the summer air, and the inconceiv
able velocities of comets as they rush among the orbs of
heaven. But yet what is gravitation? by what incon
ceivable means does one atom act upon another through
intervening space? Does the term explain one whit
more of the nature of the action than the terms la-
pidity or aureity explain of the natures of stones or
gold2? Nay, the very value of the term which facilitated
1 -Green, Vital Dynamics. In point of fact the word "Nature"
is but" the substitution, in the metaphysical stage of the human
-understanding, of one unknown entity for the many which are sup
posed in the stage of Fetisch-worship.
a "No further insight into why the apple falls is acquired by

32 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
its introduction1 was that it expressed a simple fact with
out involving any hypothesis. Surely to place mere
" relations of succession and resemblance" between our
selves and God, to imagine or to observe a connecting
link in the chain of apparent causes, and then, idolising
and idealising this helpless inconceivable thing, to attri
bute to it the- physical and moral government of the uni
verse, — is to tighten, not to lift the veil of Isis2; it is tp
blur the crystal glass of nature till it can neither transmit
nor reflect the light of heaven.
And is it not amazing that this antagonism to the
supernatural, this denial of the divine should come so
often from the students of nature? Strange that any
should disbelieve in God who have so deeply studied
His works, and that they should deny His special inter
positions who see most of His daily miracles3. The
saying it is forced to fall, or falls by the force of gravitation ; by the
latter expression we are able most usefully to relate it to other
phenomena ; but we still know no more of the particular pheno
menon, than that under certain circumstances the apple does fall."
Grove, On the Correlation of Physical Forces, p. 18. See Janet,
Materialism, p. 68.
1 Comte, Phil. Posit. II. iii. § 2 (in Miss Martineau's Transl. I.
p. 183). " This term has every merit. It expresses a simple fact
without any reference to the nature or cause of this universal action.
It affords the only explanation which positive science admits; i. e. the
connection between certain less known facts and other better known
facts." 2 ' ' Isis is the ^Egypto-Greek symbol of the unconditioned. On
her temple at Sais was inscribed, iycli elpu irdv to 7eyo>'ds Kai ov Ktd
icropevov Kai tpov irtir^ov ovSels iru Bv-rfrhs direitd\v\j/e." Sir W.
Hamilton, Disc, on Philosophy, p. 22.
<* "Quotidiana Dei miracula ex assiduitate viluerunt," Gregory,

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 33
greatest interpreters of science have ever been the hum
blest, because alike, " in the choir of heaven and the fur
niture of earth," they have recognized the immensity of
human ignorance1. "The eternal silence of those un
known spaces fills me with dread," said Pascal; but
" The heavens declare no longer the glory of God, but
that of Newton and Kepler2," is the flippant blasphemy
of modern arrogance. Kant said that two things " filled
his soul with awe, — the starry heaven above and the
moral law within;" but Hegel in one passage of his
writings speaks of the world of stars with a studied
Horn. XXVI. xnEvatig. Lucret. II. 1027 (quoted Trench, On Miracles,
P-9)- " Und wunderbar erscheint ihm ungewohntes nur
Der unbewundert sieht das Wunder der Natur." Riickert.
1 The greatest minds have all been most deeply convinced of
this ; Bp. Butler builds his entire system upon it. Gothe abounds in
such sentences as " We are all walking among mysteries and marvels, "
"The world is full of enigmas." Gesprache mit Eckermann, III.
200, &c. The view of the ancient Greek Fathers was that all the
universe was a hymn and a harmony in which to us there might
appear to be discordant notes though all made sweet accord in the
ears of God. See a truly magnificent burst of eloquence in Clemens
Alexandrinus, beginning tovtS toi teal to irdv iKotrp-i\ctev ippeXcds xal
tcSv o-toixc^u" rty Siatpuviav els Tdfyv ivirecve avptpuvlas, tva B% SXos
6 Kocrpos airy dppovia ye'vTjrat. Clem. Alex. Protrept. I. 5 .
2 " Les cieux ne racontent plus la gloire de Dieu, mais celle des
Kepler et des Newton." Semerie, Positivistes et Catholiques, p. 12
(Paris, 1870). La Place said, "In my heaven I find no God;" and
Lalande, " I have peered through the heavens for 60 years and have
never seen him yet" See Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel, 248.
"Trace Science, then, with Modesty thy guide;
First strip off all her equipage of pride."
Pope, Ess. on Man, II. 433.
F. H. L. 3

34 THE ANTECEDENT. CREDIBILITY
indifference, — almost with ostentatious contempt; —
which is the truer, the nobler, the seemlier utter
ance? There is a little flower not uncommon in our
gardens, and found wild in some places, the geranium
striatum, or " pencilled geranium." It has a small and
insignificant blossom, but its pale and tender petals are
interveined, as though with some monogram of the Di
vine artist, with delicate and exquisite reticulations of
purpling lines. Pluck it, and the botanist will tell you
its name, its species, its genus, the class to which it be
longs, its habitat, its history, its variations; but could he
produce so much as one fibre of its tissue, or one freak
of purple jet upon its leaf? can he tell you the cause of
but one vein in the exquisite design upon the corolla of
that tiny and tender weed ? or look through the micro
scope at any one of the forms of life which it reveals1; at
some diatom, fluted and enchased with radiant tracery of
more fantastic loveliness than any Moorish arabesque; or
at some desmid gleaming like an animated opal with living
iridescence, and ask the man of science what he knows2?
1 Ehrenberg found that a cubic inch of tripoli contained
41,000,000 siliceous shells of fossil infusoria. Truly, as Linnaeus said,
" Natura prozstat in minimis." Compare the exquisite lines of
Tennyson : " See what a lovely shell
Small and pure as * pearl,
Lying close to my feet,
Frail, but a work divine,
Made so fairily well
With delicate spire and whorl, &c."
2 "Science also is mute in reply to these questions. But if the
materialist is confounded and science is dumb, who else is entitled
to answer? To whom has the secret been revealed? Let us lower

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 35
Not only can he not, — with all the elements for his ma
terials, and all the world for his laboratory, — not only
can he not create or evoke the very humblest, meanest,
clumsiest form of life, — not one bacterium, not one ani
malcule, not one film of protoplasm1, — but he cannot
even, with all his vaunted knowledge, discriminate be
tween spontaneous activity and living will2, nor with all
the rich and innumerable and multiplex varieties of life
around him, can he so much as flatter himself that he
has even approximated to the most distant definition of
what life may really be3.
our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, one and all." Prof.
Tyndall, Address at Norwich, 1868.
1 The supporters of spontaneous generation have, as Janet ob
serves, been driven to take refuge in the sphere of the invisible. Up to
the present time, at any rate, the delicate and exquisite experiments
of M. Pasteur may be regarded as decisive.
2 The ^Ethalium Septicum, which occurs on decaying vegetable
substances, is, in another condition, actively locomotive, and appears
to feed on solid matters. "Is this a plant? or is it an animal? is it
both? is it neither? Some decide in favour of the last supposition
and establish an intermediate kingdom, a sort of biological 'no
man's land' for all these questionable forms. But as it is admittedly
impossible to draw any distinct boundary line between this 'no
man's land' and the vegetable world on the one hand, or the animal
on the other, it appears to me that the proceeding merely doubles
the difficulty which before was single." Huxley, Lay Sermons, p. 14.
' The various definitions of life are all of the nature of definitions
which define nothing, "mere paraphrases of the thing to be defined,"
e. g. ' Life is the result of organization,'' Stahl. ' The double in
terior motion, general and continuous, of composition and decomposi
tion,' De Blainville. 'The sum of all the functions by which death is
resisted? Bichat. 'Polarity is the form of its process, and the tendency
to progressive individuation the law of its direction," Coleridge, Idea
of Life, &c
3—2

$6 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
Thus then "'omnia exeunt in mysterium" and the
antecedent probability of miracles can only be settled
by the known and indisputable evidence that they have
been performed. For, unless the Man of Science be an
absolute atheist, or a believer in the eternity of matter,
can he deny that God has taken direct miraculous part
in the construction of the Universe? He may accept
the nebular hypothesis, but even then must he not admit
that the fluid haze was not automatous, and did not
spontaneously evolve its rolling planets and flaming suns?
He may accept the Darwinian theory, but even then he
must account for the intervention which nucleated the
first particle of protoplasm, or quickened the primeval
cell with that all-producing principle of development
which was to end in the million diversities alike of
• • microscopic and colossal life1. If he admit that matter
was not eternal, then he must also admit that some
thing material had an immaterial cause. Here then are
miracles, and miracles the most stupendous; breakages
in the unbroken continuity; mutations in the imagined
immutability. And if there have been one such inter-
1 A. von Humboldt, in one of his letters to Varnhagen von Ense
(p. 117), complains of the "scientific levity" with which Strauss
finds no difficulty in deriving the organic from the inorganic.
Franz Hoffman calls this kind of materialism "a massive con
glomerate of intrinsic contradictions.. ..Here change is said to
originate from the unchangeable, motion from absolute rest, life
from the dead, sense from the senseless, purpose from blindly-actinc
causes, intelligence from the unintelligent, spirit from the unspiritual"
.(quoted by Hettinger, Apolog. des Christenthums, p. 171). For
some very forcible remarks on Materialism, see Mazzini's Letter on the
QZcumenical Council (Fortnightly Review, June, 1870).

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 37
vention, why not — since obviously time is no element in
the consideration — why not a myriad? If the chain of
apparent causations began, why may it not end, why
may it not be indefinitely modified? If there were an
immediate exercise of the divine power to create, why
may there not have been to save? If God evoked the
agency of laws to produce the stasis, why should it be
deemed impossible for Him to supervene in remedy of
the apostasis? Contradiction to His own nature there
can be none, for the term nature is Confessedly unin
telligible if it do not include the idea of its originator1.
And if He allows the will and the genius of man to modify
so largely the action of. His elemental forces, and to
change so enormously the- aspect of His creation, shall
He not reserve the same privilege for Himself? It may
be -said truly that man's will never yet reversed a law of
nature; no, but it subjects' these laws to modifications,
it combines them with the action of other forces, it
superinduces on them new conditions. It is the nature
of things to gravitate towards the centre of the earth, and
yet a balloon of vast weight and containing many persons
will rise majestically and rapidly to the clouds, and
burst every impediment which would keep it down. To
a savage the result might well appear to be miraculous,
nor would it be easy to make him understand that the
balloon rises in virtue of the very same .law which makes
1 See Lange, Leben Jesu, II. iii. 9, Mozley, Bampton Led. p. 24.
' ' The existence of a God assumed, the law of the Divine Nature is
as much a law of nature as the law which it suspends. " This is. a
complete answer to the objection of Spinoza, Tract. Theol. Polit. VI.
De Miraculis;

38 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
the pebble fall. May it not be so with the acts of God?
It was pointed out long ago by an English metaphysician
that in a miracle the same cause does not produce differ
ent effects, but new effects are due to wholly new causes :
no law of nature is violated, no proportion in the cosmic
harmony disturbed; but each, preserving its own full
effect and influence, combined with a fresh influence,
produces a miraculous result.
You find yourself face to face with one of the great
miracles of Christianity; you try to imagine that scene
in which the intensity of one potent voice thrilled into
the dim infinitudes of death, and the soul of him who
heard it reanimated his lifeless frame, and bound hand
and foot in grave-clothes he came forth once more a living
man : — or you try to realise how once, on a low Judean
hill, in the full blaze of an oriental morn, one who had
been crucified, ascended visibly into heaven, and "a
cloud received him out of their sight;" and you dwell on
these till you are staggered by their impossibility, and
half disbelieve their truth. You recall all that you have
observed of the uniformity of nature — you remember the
unvarying continuity of its majestic phenomena, and then
remembering that man is fallible, and evidence often
weak, you are tempted— but before you are led into that
conclusion, pause! Do not be like those whose ears
because they live by the margin of the cataract are deaf
to the roaring of its waves. You are approaching the
contemplation of miracles by a wrong avenue, you are
gazing at them under a delusive light. These are not
common facts, but signs and powers wrought, not accord-

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 39
ing to man's experience, but according to God's will;
they belong not to the same order as the sunrise and the
sunset, but to the series of events in which are included
the creation of matter, and the origin of life. They
cannot be excluded by an induction, or rejected by
an analysis; they belong not to the physical, but to the
spiritual domain. And therefore they must be approach
ed from below upwards, not from above downwards.
" Quousque hunii defixa tua meus erit1 ?" may Theology
ask of her sister Science. He whose eyes are for ever
on the dust cannot see the stars. If the inorganic
crystal does not confute the presumptuous arrogance
which can measure its angles but throw no light on the
laws of its accretion, then rise from the inorganic to the
organic2. The path of the lightning which shineth from
the east even unto the west you can determine, and you
can bind your messages upon the flaming wings where
with at your bidding it will girdle the habitable globe;
even of the wind which bloweth where it listeth you can
catalogue the causes and trace the course; but can you
set the lark's song to determinate music as it flickers into
1 Cic. Somn. Scip. ad init. "Sacrilegii enim vel maximi instar
est humi quaerere quod in sublimi debeas invenire." Min. Felix,
Octav. xvn. He who would see Christ transfigured, must, as
Origen says, climb the hill ; below are crowds, demoniacs, and faith
less disciples. Orig. c. Cels. VI. 77 ; cf. Bacon, DeAugm. Scient. x. 1 :
"Animus ad amplitudinem mysteriorum pro modulo suo dilatetur,
non mysteria ad angustias animl constringantur."
" Say what the use were finer optics given,
7*' inspect a mite, not comprehend the heaven ? "
Pope, Ess. on Man. I. 196.
2 Lange, Leben Jesu, II. iii. 9.

4° THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
' the blue, or predict the beating of the eagle's wings as it
soars upwards amid the storm? You may number every
bone and muscle of the ox or the elephant, but can you
tell how, as the magic eddy of transformation weaves its
unseen agency, the grass and the flower are transmuted
1 indifferently into the juicy pulp or the solid ivory1?
That a dead man should come back to life you arrogantly
declare to be inconceivable, — is it more conceivable how
from the void of non-existence a living soul was drawn2?
You pronounce it impossible that, after the rigour of
death and the flaccidity of corruption, the veins should
flush once more into healthy life ; how is it more possible
that, in the womb of her that is with child, should begin
the systole and the diastole of the beating heart, and
the unapproachable individuality of the living soul? The
event is in no respect greater, it is only different. And
are all God's actions uniform and homogeneous even in
the visible sphere? do you really believe that man is
nothing more than thinking matter, or that, as modem
materialism expresses it, "he is only what he eats3?"
Consider yourself, — the "abysmal deeps" of your person
ality—the electrical rapidity of your thoughts — the iron
1 Coleridge, Aids to Reflection.
2 Quid novi tibi eveniet ? Qui non eras, factus es ; quum iterum
non eris fies." Tert. Apolog. xlviii. ; cf. Eccl. xi. 5.
3 "Was der Mensch isst, das ist er." Feuerbach, Gottheit,
Freiheit, und Unsterblichkeit. Thus, as Luthardt observes, Apologet.
Vortrage (Engl. Tr. p. 130), "Morality ceases to exist, Ethics are
converted into a bill of fare." The natural consequence of such a doc
trine is that there is no such thing as sin, and therefore no justice in
punishment. "A non-sensuous being," says Moleschott, "is non
sense." Physiol, de Stoffwechsels, xii.

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 41
determination of your purpose — the subtle influences of
your intellect — the unutterable mystery of your free will
—the unimaginable realms to which you rise in the ex
altation of faith, and hope, or even in the phantasies of
dreaming sleep ; yourself the most stupendous of miracles,
will you deny their possibility1? If your volition counts
for so much in the course of events, shall God's count
for nothing? or will you not rather exclaim with our own
great Bacon, " The soul of man was not produced by heaven
or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so the
ways and dealings of God with spirits are not included in
nature, that is in the laws of heaven and earth, but are
reserved to the law of his secret will and grace1"?
And so, at last — even if, as in the vision of the poet,
each step crumble behind us into the darkness3— still,
" springing from crystal step to crystal step," we are
caught up into the heaven of heavens,- and see things
which it is not possible for man to utter; we spring upon
the wings of faith over the boundless gulf, and pass from
man to God4. And there, in those infinite abysses;
there, in that white radiance of an unstained eternity;
there, with Him to whose vision the whole starlit sky is
1 See a fine passage in Mozley, Bampton Lectures, p. 90. " Le
premier des miracles c'est Dieu. II y en a un second, c'est
l'homme." Guizot, Meditations sur I'Ess. de la Rel. Christ, p. 257.
2 Bacon, A Confession of Faith, quoted by Mozley, Bampton
Lectures, p. 90.
3 Cf. Tennyson, Idylls of the King, Sir Galahad.
4 " ' Par deli tous ces cieux le Dieu des cieux reside,' a dit
Voltaire, et ce Dieu...n'est pas la nature personifie'e, c'est le sur-
naturel en personne." Guizot, L'Eglise et la Soc. Chritienne, p. 14,

42 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY

but as one white gleam in the intense inane; there,
where time and death are not; where the wings of
thought sink powerless amid the void; where, safe in His
invisible keeping, rest the unnumbered myriads of the
dead; there, what is man? and what is a miracle, that
we should deny the possibility thereof to God? Are we
there in a region in which we can breathe so securely,
walk so confidently, reason so audaciously, impose so
confidently upon the Infinite, the Unseen, the Eternal
Creator, the petty forms of our limited imbecility1?
Nay, rather let us abhor ourselves in ashes; let us adore
Him in the dust,
And yet think not, my brethren, that Christianity
fosters a tone of abjectness2 in the minds of men. Oh!
surely if we had no other God save those great ele
mental forces which are infinite as compared with man —
which are " stern as fate, absolute as tyranny, merciless
as death — which are too vast to praise, too inexorable
1 " Wunder auf Erden sind Natur im Himmel." J. P. Richter.
2 Celsus made against Christianity the counter-charge, that it
ridiculously over-exalted mankind. Clemens Alex, reproaches Pa
ganism with its contempt for man, and says that Christianity only
humbles him that it may afterwards exalt, Protrep. X. 114. This
is a favourite theme of the Greek Fathers. Orig. c. Cels. iv. 25.
The charge of fostering abjectness of mind may possibly be more
true of Roman Catholicism: "Catholicism, says Dr Ward, regards
Christian virtue as consisting of the will's abject prostration before
Almighty God : but these Christians [Protestants generally] con
demn such an attitude of the mind as degrading and unmanly ; and
since they happen to be our fellow-countrymen they further brand
it as un-English." Ess. on Rel. and Lit. ed. by Archbishop
Manning, p. 36 ; and at p. 40 he speaks of the duty of " struggling
to live in a constant sense of abject dependence upon God."

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 43
to propitiate — which have no ear for prayer, no heart for
sympathy, no arm to save1" — then indeed what could we
be but abject? But is it to be abject to know that our
being places us far above all these forces in majesty;
that the God who wields them all as a very little thing is
our God, and shall be our guide unto death ; that we are
His people and the sheep of His pasture; that we may
approach Him and ask for His forgiveness;- that we may
pray to Him and be certain of His love? And how do
we know this? only because the only-begotten Son
which is in the bosom of the Father, He hath declared
Him. And this we know alike by the lessons which He
taught, and the deeds He did. And here comes in the
true force and meaning of miracles, the immense im
portance of their evidential purpose2, They were no
1 Holyoake ; cf. Tennyson, In Memoriam :
"Who trusted God was Love indeed,
And Love creation's final law;
Though Nature, red in beak and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed."
2 Luthardt, Ueber die Heilswahrheiten des Christenthums, p. 202,
sqq. collects several similar testimonies : " Die Natur predigt den
erdruckendsten Fatalismus, die unerbittlichste Consequenz," Roper,
Der Friede in der SchSpfung, &c. "Die Natur ist grausam,"
Auerbach, Auf der Hike, in. 234. " La Nature ne m'offre rien
qui ne soit matiere de doute et d'inqui&ude," Pascal. See too the
wonderful Aphorisms on Nature, by GBthe (translated by Professor
Huxley, Nature, Nov. 4, 1869). " She tosses her creatures out of
nothingness, and tells them not whence they came or whither they
go  She wraps man in darkness and makes him for ever long
for light. She creates him dependent upon the earth, dull and
heavy ; and yet is always shaking him until he attempts to soar
above it." It seems inevitable that the study of nature alone,. an4

44 THE ANTECEDENT CREDIBILITY
mere objectless prodigies, no mere thaumaturgic feats
intended to astound the feeble understanding; but they
were the Divine proofs of a tender and condescending
love1. Had they never been performed, we should long
ago have been left " having no hope, and without God
in the world2;" long ago, oppressed by the unbroken
silence, we might well have believed that there was no
living and personal God, or no God for us; and that be
hind the vail of the blue heavens, as behind the temple-
vail through which the rash Roman burst into the Holy
of Holies, there were vacua omnia. Shut up in the
prison-house of imperfect and delusive sense, — denizens
of a universe, which being abandoned to dead laws is but
" a machine worn by the dust of its own grinding," — strug
gling with irresistible forces, the least of which might at
any moment annihilate our race, — haunted by ghastly
imaginings which spring from the certainties of misfor
tune, the agonies of suffering, the grinning irony of
death, — what, without a knowledge of God, would life
have been, or man have been? Surely then
"Dragons of the prime
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music matched with him."
But from all this — which, as all history shews, would
to the exclusion of religious truth, should lead to the most despair
ing pessimism.
1 "Miracula sunt doctrinal tesserae ac sigilla, &c." Gerhard,
quoted in Abp. Trench On the Miracles, p. 35.
2 Eph. ii. 12. The denial of miracles has led Strauss and all
his school to the denial of Immortality and a personal God. See
extracts from Strauss's various works in Christlieb, Moderne Zweifd
am Christ. Glauben, p. 456,

OF THE MIRACULOUS. 45
have been the inevitable result of a Science apart from
Revelation — God saved us. To admit us, as it were, into
the very bosom of the Infinite, to quench for us the
hopeless terror of the unknown, not to render us abject,
but, on the contrary, to make us the sons of God, pos
sessors of all that is strong and beautiful in the visible
creation, heirs of all that is bright and glorious in the
hopes of Immortality and Heaven, God sent His Son.
If God made, if God loved, if He would redeem us, was
there not here a dignus vindice nodus? Yes; His mi
racles were but the watchwords and seals of saving truth.
For our sakes He gave not the Spirit by measure unto
Him; "The very God, — think Abib!— dost thou think?
So the All-Great were the All-Loving too ;
So through the thunder comes a human voice,
Saying, 'Oh heart I made, a heart beats here.
Face my hands fashioned, see it in myself;
Thou hast no strength, nor may'st conceive of mine ;
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee1.'"
1 Browning, Men and Women (Ep. of Karshish).

II.
THE ADEQUACY OF THE GOSPEL RECORDS.

"...Which he may read that binds the sheaf,
Or builds the house, or digs the grave,
And those wild eyes that watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef." Tennyson, In Memoriam.

2 Pet. I. 1 6.
For we have not followed cunningly devised fables when
we made known unto you the power and coming of
our Lord fesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his
majesty.
" Not on the false track of myths, artificially elabo
rated" — ov yap o-ccro^to-fici'ois fj.v6oi<s l£a.K.o\ov6i]o-a.vTes1 .
In such words more than 1800 years ago did St Peter2
anticipate and reject the gnostic theories which began
so early to trouble the Church, and which have sprung
up in modern times, thick and rank as grass upon the
housetops. The expression agrees with the calm decla
ration of St Paul, that they, the Apostles, were not as the
many who trafficked with, who adulterated (in one place
ov KaTrriXevovrK, in another juiySe SoAowres), i.e. who
falsified, mutilated, misrepresented the word of God, —
but as of sincerity, but as of God, in the sight of God,
1 to l£ errorem notat. Bengel.
2 I may be allowed incidentally and en passant to quote this
Epistle as having been written by St Peter, without entering into the
controversy about its genuineness.
F. H. L. 4

SO THE ADEQUACY OF
so spake they in Christ1. Such were the deliberate
claims of men preeminently holy, preeminently truth
ful, preeminently soberminded; of men so widely dif
ferent that the one was but a simple provincial fisher
man with no power or inspiration save what he had
derived from the Holy Spirit of God, and the other was
a man whose boyhood had been passed in the most learn
ed of heathen, and his youth in the most sacred of Jewish
cities; and yet both of whom, having given their clear
testimony to facts for which both suffered a martyr's
death, are now, on no grounds save those of an unphi-
losophical prepossession, contemptuously waived aside
as idle dreamers whose fictions were only, if at all,
excusable on the score of idealising mysticism or super
stitious credulity.
A second step, then, in our enquiry awaits us, no
less needful than the last.
If it be our object, my brethren, in these Lectures,
to test as it were the strength of those buttresses on
which leans the great edifice of historic Christianity,
then the enquiry which occupied us last Sunday was not
only important but indispensable. For the Divinity of
our Blessed Lord is the central question of modern
theology, and it is chiefly denied by those whose aban
donment of all belief in the supernatural has been due
to the very prepossessions which we endeavoured to
remove. Strauss, the coryphaeus of modern scepticism,
on the one hand avows that his standpoint was the
1 2 Cor. ii. 17, ov KairrjXeiovTes tov Xbyov tov GeoC cf. iv. 2
p-qSt SoXovvres t6V Xiyov tou Qeov.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 5 1
philosophy of Hegel1, and on the other starts with the
emphatic dogma — a dogma which he assumes as un
worthy of further demonstration — that whatever Christ
was or did, he can have done nothing which was super
human or supernatural2.
If then we have seen that an a priori rejection of the
miraculous is unphilosophical, and that it is absurd to
attempt " the settlement of historic problems by philo
sophic categories," we arrive at this point — that the
credibility of miracles is in each instance simply and
solely a question of evidence, and consequently that our
belief or rejection of the Christian miracles must mainly
depend on the character of the Gospels in which they
are recorded. Now into the question of the genuine-
1 The relation of Strauss to the Philosophy of Hegel was this :
Hegel had left undefined the relation of the historical Jesus to the
idea of God-in-man ; his orthodox followers had endeavoured to fill
up this blank by shewing that the Idea, being necessary, must have
found its fulfilment in a real person, namely in Jesus of Nazareth.
Strauss, by the application of historical criticism, shewed how essen
tial were the differences between dogma and speculation, between
the presentation and the notion. See Schwarz, Gesch. der Neuesten
Theologie, p. 21. "Strauss erklart die Geschichte Jesu fur falsch ;
Hegel erklart sie fur irrelevant, fur vollig gleichgiiltig." Hafer
mann, Athen oder Bethlehem ? 103.
a "'Wir wissen gewiss was Jesus nicht war und nicht gethan hat ;
namlich, nichts Uebermenschliches und Uebernatiirliches." "In the
person and acts of Jesus no supernaturalism shall be suffered to remain ;
nothing which shall press upon the souls of men with the leaden weight
of arbitrary, inscrutable authority [how much does that sentence re
veal!].. .for we can plainly perceive this — that no single gospel, nor
all the gospels together, can claim that degree of historical reliability
which would be required in order to make or debase our reason to the
point of believing miracles." Strauss; New Life of Jesus, XII. (Eng.Tr.)'.
4—2

52 THE ADEQUACY OF
ness and authenticity of the Gospels we need not enter,
because for our present purpose it has been sufficiently
admitted by the most strenuous opponents of the truths
which they reveal1. The schemes indeed which have
been proposed by rival critics with so much arrogant
confidence and mutual contempt, have succeeded to
each other in such bewildering multitudes, like waves
rushing over waves, that we know not whether most to
be astonished at their rapidity or to despise their evanes
cence2. But that the three earliest Gospels at any rate,
in some form or other, existed before the siege of Jeru
salem, and that they had before the middle of the second
century acquired a sacred authority, may be regarded
1 "The review of evidence with regard to the first three gospels
gives this result, that soon after the beginning of the second century
certain traces are found of their existence, not indeed in their present
form, but still of the presence of a considerable portion of their
contents, and with every indication that the source of these contents
is derived from the country which was the theatre of the events in
question." Strauss, New Life of Jesus, ed. I. ioo. "Qu'il me
suffise de dire que plus j'ai refle'chi, plus j'ai e'te anient a croire que
les quatre textes reconnus pour canoniques nous conduisent tris pr'cs
del'dge du Christ, sinon par leur redaction dernifere du moins par les
documents qui les composent." Renan, Et. d'Hist. Rel. p. 172.
2 "New hypotheses about the three first gospels. ..follow each
other so rapidly, and are asserted and attacked with so much eager
ness, that we almost forget that there is anything else to be con
sidered, and the controversy threatens to be so endless, &c." Strauss,
New Life of Jesus, Pref. XI. (Engl. Tr.). The main discordance
shews itself in the views respecting the Gospel of St John, which
many regard as the most competent of thp four testimonies and
others reject as late Alexandrian forgeries. Pansetius, who declares
that the Phaedo was spurious, was held to have been sufficiently
answered by the line, E? pe UXdruv oi ypd\j/e Sva iyt-vovro UXdruve.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 53
as a conclusion which has been wrung from the inevit
able candour of reluctant adversaries; and even were it
otherwise, the genuineness of four at least of St Paul's
greatest epistles is undisputed and indisputable, and is
not only admitted by Baur himself, but is made the
basis for his reconstruction of historical Christianity.
We may start therefore with the unchallenged certainty
that respecting the Person and the Resurrection of our
Lord we possess the contemporary evidence of men
who desired to know the truth, who had ample oppor
tunities for ascertaining it, who were ready to die in
confirmation of it, who were intellectually incapable of
having imagined, morally incapable of having invented
it. The world' has never refused its assent to any other
facts supported by evidence so cogent as are those of
the Gospel History ; it has given unhesitating assent to
many a strange fact which rests on infinitely less. Rous
seau was a professed 'sceptic, yet even Rousseau, car
ried beyond himself, emphatically declared that the
Gospel has characters of truthfulness so striking, so per
fectly inimitable that its inventor would have been more
astonishing than its hero1. Niebuhr was the founder
of the acutest and most independent school of historical
criticism; yet Niebuhr said, "the man who does not hold
Christ's earthly life, with all its miracles, to be as pro-
3 Rousseau, Emile, Liv. 4. "Jamais les auteurs juifs n'eussent
trouv^ ni ce ton ni cette morale ; et l'evangile a des caracteres de
vdritd si frappans, si parfaitement inimitables, que 1'inventeur en
serait plus ^tonnant que les heros" (CEuvres Compl. 1793, Vol.
xxxvi. 39).

54 THE ADEQUACY OF
perly and really historical as any event in the sphere of
history, I do not consider to be a Protestant Christian1."
To the blank atheism and credulous incredulity of
those recent controversahsts who deny to religion all
objective truth, and are not ashamed to accuse the
Evangelists of deliberate and conscious fraud, we need
not reply. The dignity of controversy is lost if she
condescend to enter the arena with the coarse gladiators
of an offensive infidelity. Their mere existence serves
but to illustrate the dangerous tendency of a scepticism
\ which, beginning by the rejection of Christ, rapidly de
veloped into the denial of a God, and upon the ruins
of religion built a system which, while it promised liberty
and illumination, ended by preaching the Apotheosis
of selfishness and the gospel of Eternal Death. Nor
again need we trouble ourselves with any of the exploded
attacks upon Christianity, from Celsus and Porphyry,
down to Woolston and Voltaire2. It were lost labour
to slay the slain. Only as we advance to the battle-
1 Leben Niebuhrs, II. 344. In another passage (Lebensnachrichten,
I. 470) he points out the totally different spirit to be found in the
gospel miracles and in the legends and pseudo-miracles of other
religions. 2 How many could say who was the author or what the date of
the Epitre & Uranie (Voltaire's first assault on Christianity, 1728).
His ridicule which was once thought so dangerous, and his merri
ment over the Bible has been compared to a schoolboy "exciting the
cheap laughter of his associates by painting a moustache on some
fine antique." Hagenbach, Germ. Rational, p. 47 (Engl. Tr.). "Pour
s'^gayer avec Voltaire du dessein d'Ezechiel ou de G&ifese, il faut
reunir deux choses qui rendent cette galt<5 assez triste, la pli.s
profonde ignorance, et lafrivoliti la plus deplorable.'' Benj. Constant,
De la Religion, 11. 210.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 55
ments and bulwarks of the yet untaken Sion, let us mark
how the hills that girdle them are scattered with the
ruined enginery of assaults unblessed by God; and when
we have in imagination entered the Holy City and taken
our stand upon her shining walls, we may address the
mighty leaders of scepticism, and all their intellectual
hosts, in the exultant imagery of the Prophet — "The
Virgin, the daughter of Sion, hath despised thee, and
laughed thee to scorn; the daughter of Jerusalem hath
shaken her head at thee. Whom hast thou reproached
and blasphemed? and against whom hast thou exalted
thy voice and lifted up thine eyes on high? Even
against the Holy One of Israel !"
There are but four systems then of rationalism,
which, in their general principles can be regarded as
still retaining, if indeed they do still retain, an inde
pendent vitality; viz. the rationalism of Paulus, the
naturalism of Schleiermacher, the development-system of
Baur, and the mythicism of Strauss. I say, 'if they
still retain,' for Paulus can scarcely be said to have ever
had a following; the influence of Schleiermacher, power
ful as it was, was less the influence of a system than
of an intense and glowing mind; Strauss reckons a
greater number of adherents in other countries than in
his own ; and at Tubingen, the university of Baur, there
is a Tubingen school no more1. But though the sys
tems have perished, the general effects remain. And
therefore, however painful it may be for the hearts of
1 See Ewald, Gesch. Christus, Vorrede, xxvii. (3rd ed.); Christ-
^ieb, Moderns Zweifd, 626.

56 THE ADEQUACY OF
those who believe and adore, and who feel a necessary
shock to their moral sense when they see their Lord
and Saviour arraigned, as it were, before the tribunal of
human criticism, yet the constant re-examination and re
jection of the faith once delivered to the saints, has
rendered it an imperative duty to look these reasonings
in the face. A duty, alas, even before an audience like
this. Better indeed it would have seemed, above all on
this day, when " Lo the clouds begin to shine
About the coming of the Lord,"
to endeavour, by God's grace, rather to move the heart
than to convince the intellect ; better to have set forth with
such clearness as might have been vouchsafed some of
those lessons, weighty with the solemn issues of death, judg
ment and eternity, which have been taught by the sweet
and bitter experience of advancing life; better to have
shewn that though no voice from heaven may ever have
uttered them in pulses of articulated air, yet in the laws
of nature, in the revelation of conscience, in the history
of nations, in the fate of individuals — no less clearly than
in the lessons of Scripture, no less clearly than though
He had written them in fire amid the stars of heaven— -
" God spake these words, and said." But all this is not
our duty now ; and when, on the other hand, I remem
ber how in a short year or two many of those who hear
me will be scattered for hallowed ministrations among
the towns and villages of England ; when I recall the
inevitable certainty with which ere long these doubts
will be arrayed before their minds with all the splendour of

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 57
eloquence and all the majesty of erudition; when I think
that there is no worse symptom of national dissolution
than when the faith of her priests has been eaten away
by the long corrosion of Unacknowledged doubt ; then
it seems to me that a few moments will not be wasted if
the voice of even the feeblest may be heard declaring,
why, having earnestly considered what has- been urged by
those who have argued that Christ rose not, and that
His dust yet lies in the Syrian town, he still sees in Him
"the brightness of the Father's glory and the express
image of His Person, upholding all things by the word of
His power1."
I. Paulus may be regarded as the founder of ra
tionalism, though he did but extend to the New Testa
ment the Euhemerising principles which Eichhorn had
applied to the Old. Accepting as historical the records
of Christ's life, he yet eliminated the supernatural by dis
tinguishing between an objective and a subjective ele
ment, between fact and judgment, between the events
which really happened and the miraculous tinge which
they received from the admiration of the Evangelists.
They were, he said, credulous exaggerations of fortunate
coincidences, or superstitious views of a certain medi
cinal success2. The star of the shepherds was a me-
1 Heb. i. 3.
2 St Paul's claim to miraculous powers (2 Cor. xii. J 2 ; Rom. xv.
19 ; Gal. iii. 5 ; Heb. ii. 4) is alone sufficient to overthrow this
theory. See Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel, p. 464. Renan criticises
Paulus with his usual delicate tact and discrimination in Et. d'Hist.
Rel. 140—146: "Jamais," he says, "ne s'&ait mieux realisee l'in-
genieuse allegorie des filles de Min^e changees en chauyes-souris pour

THE ADEQUACY OF

teoric exhalation, or a lamp upon the road; the miracle
of Cana was a bridal jest; Christ walked not upon the
sea but along its marge; the Transfiguration was but the
spectral refraction of a mountain haze; the angels in the
tomb were two whiterobed Essenes, or the gleam of the
cerements laid aside by one who had been but in a
swoon. The absurdity of the system was its sufficient
refutation. The floating principles of rationalistic inter
pretation were rendered ludicrous by being gathered into
a focus. It was easier to believe in miracle itself than
in the wholly unnatural combination of ecstacies, light
ning-flashes, dreams, storms, and mists evoked by the
Rationalists in support of their hypothesis. Paulus in
deed may be regarded as the destroyer of rationalism
no less than its founder; it simply dissolved under the
scornful analysis to which Strauss subjected it1, and the
inseparability of the supernatural from the records of
Christ's life was conclusively demonstrated by the argu
ments of those who rejected their authority.
II. The refutation extends far beyond the naive
rationalism of Paulus; it is equally conclusive against the
naturalism of Schleiermacher, and of that very eminent
school of German theologians, who, without absolutely
avoir critique comme choses serieuses les doctrines vulgaires,"
p. 147. 1 " Here in trying to grasp the pure fact under his guidance we
tumble right into the mire; and assuredly dross, not gold, is the
issue to which his interpretation generally leads  If the gospels
are really and truly historical, it is impossible to exclude miracles from
the life of Jesus; if, on the other hand, miracles are incompatible
with history, then the gospels are not really historical records."
Strauss, New Life of Jesus, p. 19 (Engl. Tr.).

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 59
denying the possibility of miracles, reduce those of our
Lord in great measure to the ascendancy of a sweet and
powerful individuality over the nervous and the insane.
Against the noble character and venerable name of
Schleiermacher1 I would not say a word ; but it is abun
dantly clear that he could only mark a transitional
epoch. The eclectic Christologies which date from him
may be, and often are, morally noble and imaginatively
beautiful; but they can have neither a scientific nor a
theological value. They are like pieces of subtle jewelry
exquisitely specious, and for their ingenuity quite admi
rable; but which, after admiring their workmanship, we
cast aside when we are convinced of the spuriousness of
the separate stones out of which they have been wrought.
Half views about miracles are no longer possible. They
must either be frankly accepted or honestly rejected.
Now even if it were admitted that some miracles of heal
ing were conceivably of this character, what would be
gained as against the hypothesis of the supernatural?
Should we have advanced a single step towards account-
1 It is almost impossible to exaggerate the profound influence
exercised by Schleiermacher and his mediation-system (Vermittelungs
Theologie) throughout the entire domain of German Theology.
Schwarz mentions Twesten, Nitzsch, J. Miiller, Neander, Ullmann,
Umbreit, Liicke, Olshausen, Hageubach ; and in another direction
De Wette, Baumgarten-Crusius, Hase, Bleek, Thilo, Gieseler,
Credner, Schweizer; and again in other directions, Hofmann
and others — all more or less impregnated with his methods and
formula?. In fact, the impulse which he gave to Theology extended
in one extreme to Kliefoth and ecclesiasticism, in the other to
Baur and Strauss with their destructive criticism. Gesch. d. Neuest.
Theolog. p. 27.

6o THE ADEQUACY OF
ing for the miracles of power1, for the feeding (for in
stance) of the multitudes, or the changing of the water
into wine? And what should we then say of the mighty
central miracle of the Resurrection from the dead? The
hazy, wavering manner in which this is slurred over by
theologians who still claim the name of Christian — their
disappearance from the discussion in a cloud of vague
generalities and nebulous mysticism — the impression
which they leave of being unable to deny, yet unwilling
to admit, is deeply painful and hardly straightforward;
but surely the question before us is one in which it is
impossible "Idly to finger some old Gordian knot,
Unskilled to sunder yet too weak to cleave,
And with much toil attain to half-believe'* '."
For he who has persuaded himself to reject the Resur
rection of Christ, need have no hesitation in rejecting all
His other miracles; and if, on the other hand, we heartily
believe that Christ's soul was not left in hell, neither did ¦
His flesh see corruption, then the reverent acceptance
of all His other miracles becomes a simple and an easy
faith. III. So that in fact all these half-rationalistic schools
being crushed by the logical consistency of a bolder
scepticism, we must either with Baur degrade the Gos
pels into ideal fictions, or with Strauss, sublimate them
into credulous myths.
1 See some forcible remarks in Prof. Westcott's Characteristics
of the Gospel Miracles, pp. 15 — 20.
2 Clough's Poems, p. 6S.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 6 1
The. scheme of Ferdinand Christian von Baur1, the
Porphyry of modern criticism, treated the Gospels as
representing not the reality of events, but the objectising
of imaginations and tendencies. He aimed at proving
that the history of Christ's life was the necessary result
of Greek speculation, Jewish monotheism, and Roman
Empire. Surely there, are some very simple principles
which at once throw discredit on such a scheme in spite
of his immense industry and wealth of erudition. In the
first place, it assumes the strange doctrine that great
national tendencies find their satisfaction not in events
corresponding to them, but in the mere elaboration of
self-conscious fictions : and next, it conspicuously fails in
the attempt to prove that the fiction had any resem
blance to known and definite expectations. In the firs{
place, Christianity, so far from being a system of doc
trine, is so purposely unsystematic, that men have de^
duced from it the most widely different truths; in the
next place, it barely alludes, and that not favourably,
1 The most important critical enquiries of Baur were subsequent
to the first publication of Strauss's Leben Jesu in 1835; but they
modified the views of Strauss in several important particulars, and
on the whole unfavourably. Strauss himself rightly points out how
entirely untenable is Baur's notion that his system was the less de
structive of the two. Schwarz thus sums up Baur's views : "Das
Christenthum ist nicht ein von vornherein fertiges, ein volkommenes
und himmlisches Product ; es ist vielmehr, ein sich allmdhlig
entwickelndes. Und der Boden, aus welchem es sich entwickelte, war
das Judenthum." Gesch. d. Neuest. Theol. p. 156. Comte's view was
somewhat similar. See a paper by Prof. Westcott on " Comte and
Christianity," in the Contemp. Rev. VII. 404 sqq., which, like all that
comes from his pen, is of permanent value.

62 THE ADEQUACY OF
either to Greek philosophy or to Roman Empire, — of all
that is noble in which it was the heir, but not the issue1.
But further than this it was in flagrant disaccord with the
ideal of the society in the bosom of which it rose. So
far from satisfying the tendencies of the age or the na
tions which watched it dawn, it united them in a con
spiracy of common detestation2. As a Teacher, the
bearing of Christ was in violent contrast with that of the
stately priests and scrupulous Pharisees who possessed
the unbounded confidence of the people3, but on whose
1 With all its historic research and criticism, Baur's theory is
utterly unsubstantial; it is not too much to say that it breaks down
at every point. As to the Greeks, the humility and childlikeness
demanded by Christianity cut at the very root of their philosophic
pride ; its perfect openness rebuked their esoterism ; its obscure and
barbarous origin repelled their patriotic feelings; its stern purity
branded even a Zeno or a Diogenes with shame. In fact a Rabbi
and a Sophist were the interlocutors in the deadly polemic of Celsus.
To them the preaching of the cross was foolishness, and a stumbling-
block; it was neither a sign nor wisdom. See i Cor. i. 18 — 23.
Is. viii. 14 ; Acts xvii. 18. See Arnob. adv. Gent. 1. 40, "Sed
patibulo affixus interiit!" cf. 36, "crucis supplicio intiremptum et
Deum fuisse contenditis /"
a See iEsch. Prom. V; Plato, Alcib. II. 150; Rep. pp. 271 — 275;
Phaedo, p. 85 ; Virg. Ed. IV. (Cf. Aug. de Civ. Dei, x. 27.) AUn.
vi. 27; Suet. Vesp. 4. 5; Dio, Vesp. 64; Tac. H. v. 13, 1. 10; Jos.
de B. Jud. v. 3.
3 Jos. Antt. XIII. ro. 6. vbpcpa 7ro\\a' nva -irapiSotrav rtp S-ripcf,
id. 15. 5, SvvacrBat St iroXb vapa rois 'lovSaiois (tpatrKe fsXaTfiai re
piaovvras Kai tplXovs SiaKeiptvovs uxpeXijo-at, k.t.X. A modem Rabbi
(Geiger, Ueber das Judenthum und d. Gesch. 1865) has made the
astounding remark that Jesus was a Pharisee of the School of
Hillel! On this subject see Salvador, Jesus Christ et sa Doctrine,
passim. For the bearing &c. of Rabbis, see Sepp, Leben Christi,
11. 47.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 63

guilty heads He kindled the scathing flame of His ten
fold malediction. As a Prophet, He claimed the creden
tials of miracles, which, in others of the very greatest
prophets, had been considered superfluous, and He re
fused the very miracles which were demanded at His
hands1. As a Messiah, He reversed and violated the
most cherished expectations of His land and age2. In
the Memorabilia of Xenophon, in the Eclogues of Virgil, we
may see the type of Deliverer for whom the Gentiles
yearned, — a Philosopher who should resolve all questions,
a princely Infant before whom the rocks should flow with
honey, and the briars bloom with rose. In Judas the
Gaulonite, — a man of traditional belief, of dazzling elo
quence, of burning patriotism, of undaunted courage, —
in Barkokebas, an impetuous boaster, a lying sorcerer,
1 That he did so was another objection of Celsus, Orig. c. Cels.
1.68, see Matt. xvi. 1 ; Luke xvii. 20, 21.
5 Even his most chosen disciples rejected with horror the first
announcement of his approaching, sufferings, Matt. xvi. 22. Bruno
Bauer attempts to prove that there was no Messianic conception ;
Gfrorer that there were four types of Messiah. Both exaggerations at
least shew how little ground there is for the supposition that the
history of our Lord was a romance founded on d priori beliefs.
The subject has been examined with profound learning by Schottgen,
J lorn Hebr. et Talmudictz, 1733; Hilgenfeld, Messias Judtzorum;
Nork, Rabbinische Quellen, 1839. Gfrorer, Das Jahrhundert des
Heils, 1838. An analysis of the chief certain conclusions may be
found in Prof. Westcott's Introd. to the Study of the Gospels, pp.
86 — 151. Dorner, after examining the Talmudic notions about
Adam Kadmon, Memra (=X6yos), Shechinah, Metatron, &c. ends:
' ' Zu der Idee einer Incarnation der wirklich Gottlichen aber haben es
a lie diese Theologumene insgesammt nie gebracht." Entwickelungs-
gesch. von der Person Christi, 1. 60 (1845). That the Jews expected
the Messiah to be a man is clear from Justin c. Tryph. c. 48.

64 THE ADEQUACY OF
and an iron-handed chief, we may see the type of the
Messiah for whom the Jews had looked1. They ex
pected "a more victorious Joshua, a more magnificent
Herod, a wider-ruling Caesar, a wiser Moses, a holier
Abraham2," not the Nazarene, the carpenter, the cruci
fied; not one in whom the glorious passion of their
poet-prophets became a perfect simplicity, and the fire
which had burnt before them a lambent flame. The
path that "nobly desired to descend," — the greatness,
not of self-assertion, but of self-sacrifice3, — the light
which would not blaze with noonday splendour, but
shone quietly in the uncomprehending darkness, — the
glory which was greater than the glory of Solomon,
though it chose not the purple of sovereignty, but the
form of a servant, — what did they know of these ? The
idea of one who was crowned indeed, but only with a
crown of thorns, — uplifted, but only on the tiirone of the
1 The name Barkokab (3313 "13) means "son of a star."
In the Jewish Sibylline oracles (circ. A.I). 140) the Messiah de
scends from the sun. Compare the fine lines of Heber :
"He comes, but not in regal splendour drest,
The haughty diadem, the Tyrian vest;
Not armed in flame, all glorious from afar,
Of hosts the Captain, and the Lord of War," &c.
One of the Talmudic legends was that he should force the sea to
empty at his feet on the shore at Joppa all its pearls and all its
hidden treasures; which, with all the wealth of the world since the
days of Pharaoh, should be divided among the Jews. Sepp, Leben
Jesu, % 3, ch. xxv.
2 Milman, History of the Jews, I. 80.
3 piyas ivdnrtov tov Kvplov, Luke i. 15, 32. 56*av irapi.
avBpiinruv ov Xapfldvoi, John v. 41, vi. 15.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 65
accursed tree1, — exalted, but only by a sinless inno
cence — the idea of One who blessed the world with arms
outstretched. upon the cross — was created solely by the
living fact; and He in whom it was realised, so far from
being formed by popular conceptions or secular ten
dencies, won for Himself during His lifetime only a mere
handful of obscure and timid followers, and perished
under the banded obloquies of the nations and of His age.
IV. The views of Strauss, in approaching whom we
are attacking the very citadel of modern scepticism2,
1 It only needs to consult Tertullian's Ad Judceos, or Justin
Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (see espec. p. 249), to see that
Christ's humiliation was to the Jew a most decisive disproof of His
Messiahship : the ttTTavpcSiBij yap was the indignant and horrified
clinching of all controversy. See some very interesting notes and
quotations in Bp. Pearson On the Creed, Art. II. and iv. pp. 124, 261
(ed. 21) ; yet, after all the learning which has been expended on the
subject, it is clear from John vii. 2 ; Acts xvi. 22 ; Luke xxiv. 21 ;
Acts xvii. 3, xxvi. 23, viii. 32, that the idea of a suffering Messiah
resulted from the teaching of Christ himself, and was not believed
till he had risen. In Enoch vii. 29, it is indeed declared that the
Christ should die, but only after a splendid reign of 400 years. The
idea of a second suffering Messiah, the Son not of David, but
of Joseph or of Ephraim (Buxtorf, Synag, Jud. p. 717), is only
found in later Jewish writings which had been subjected to un-
consciousChristian influences, but not earlier than the Babylonian
Gemara, A. D. 498. As for the Sepher ha Zohar, it is not earlier
than the 13th century, nor is it certain that its author was not a
Christian. 2 It has been the fashion in Germany to call Strauss's book ein
epochesmachendes Werk, but Schwarz truly observes that it marked
"nicht sowohl eine Epoche als eine Krise, nicht sowohl einen
Anfangs- als einen Schlusspunkt." Gesch. Neuest. Theolog. p, 3.
Even Strauss had received his impulse from Schleiermacher, in order
to hear whose lectures he went in 1831 from Tubingen to Berlin. .
F. H. L. .5

66 THE ADEQUACY OF
were somewhat different. He regarded the miracles not
with Paulus, as legends founded on fact, — nor with
Schleiermacher as the natural effects of an unusual as
cendancy, — nor with Baur as fictions developed out of a
tendency, — but as myths generated by the idea; as the
crown of supernatural fancies with which, under the in
fluence of Messianic conceptions and religious enthu
siasm, the early disciples encircled the brow of their
beloved Lord1. If He were represented as the Son of a
Virgin, it was from the misconception of a passage of
Isaiah; if as feeding the multitudes, it was because Mo
ses had fed the Israelites with manna in the wilderness;
if as missed by His parents in the Temple, it was — will
it be believed?- — because the Emperor Augustus as a
child, having been searched for, high and low, had been
discovered reposing at the eastern summit of the house2.
1 See Strauss, Leben Jesu, Introd. § XV. (Ed. 4) and passim.
In the Introd. to the New Life of Jesus (Eng. Tr. 1. 142) he defines
myths as 'investitures, resembling history, of original Christian
ideas, fashioned in the legend which unconsciously invented them.'
Baur, in his Krit. Untersuch. iiber die canonischen Evangel, p. 121,
said that the 'mythical theory has been already rejected by every
man of education up to the present day.' Strauss, who always
speaks of him in terms of the deepest respect, without accepting the
idea of Tendency which Baur strove to substitute for that of myth,
yet "mainly in consequence of Baur's hints, allowed more room
than before to the hypothesis of conscious and intentional fiction."
New Life, I. 213. And in the Latin Pref. to the Engl. ed. of his
first work, he says that Baur first convinced him that the author of
the 4th Gospel " hand raro merasfabulas scientem confinxisse."
2 Strauss, New Life of Jesus (Eng. Tr.), 11. p. 95. Sueton.
Octav. 94. The analogies forced into parallelism with gospel
incidents are very far-fetched; e.g., the song of the angels is com-

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 67
And to these stories Strauss gave the unfortunate name
of myths. We know what myths are; they are attempts
to explain the forgotten accidents of language, or to alle
gorise the great phenomena of nature; they belong for
the most part to an early and uncritical age, and deal
with the cloudy, the mysterious, the vast. In their ori
gin, in their dissemination, in their characteristics, they
offer no analogy to the Gospel records. If other theories
are true, the Apostles must have been either untruthful
or credulous ; if this theory be true, they must have been
both: in the one case, how can we account for their lofty
morality? how, in the other, for their unequalled wis
dom? They have long been dead, and nations have for
ages bent with reverence over their hallowed cenotaphs,
but we can imagine with what high authority and burn
ing indignant eloquence they would have shrivelled into
nothing these insulting theories to which we listen with
such a tame and impartial courtesy. Yes, as they heard
them, since they lived not in an age in which generous
passion was branded as deficient self-control, — nor yet in
their times had the volcanic fires of a strong 'enthusiasm
been stifled under the chill white ashes of a fastidious
cynicism, — must we not believe that St John would have
been once more the Son of Thunder, and St Paul would
have burst into words which are " half battles," and the
brow of St Peter would have been clothed with that
stern majesty which "strook Simon Magus with a curse;"
and if I may have leave to adopt the mighty words of
pared to the voice heard at the birth of Osiris. Plut. De Isid. et
Osir. xiii.

68 THE ADEQUACY OF
the poet to whom this University looks with reverence
as her loftiest son — 'the invincible warrior Zeal, whose
substance is ethereal, armed in complete diamond, would
have ascended his fiery chariot, and, shaking loosely the
slack reins, have driven over the heads of these insulting
theories, bruising their stiff necks under his flaming
wheels1.' But supposing with Strauss that the Gospels are
myths, supposing with Baur that they are the results of
tendency, who, we ask, were their inventors? Not Jewish
Christians certainly of the so-called Petrine faction; for
then, even if the myths of their development had not
been characterised by all the exclusiveness and fanati
cism of the Book of fubilees, yet on Baur's own shewing
1 Milton, Apology for Smectymnus; but I must apologize for
altering a few words of that splendid outburst. With the words of
my text may be compared the strong language of St Paul in Tit. i.
16; 1 Tim. iv. 7; -t Tim. iv. 4. The ^i§-qKot koI ypadSeis pvdot
might have- been still more indignantly described had they been so
insultingly delusory as those to which Baur and Strauss would
reduce the gospel narratives. The feeblest intellect must see the
strangeness of supposing "that the holiest of men was a deceiver,
his disciples either deluded or liars, and that deceivers should have
preached a holy religion of which self-denial is the chief duty,"
Niebuhr, Lebensnachr. I. 470. "The idea of men writing mythic
histories between the time of Livy and Tacitus, and St Paul mistaking
such for realities!" Arnold, Life, II. 58. "Ce Christ t\ priori, on le
divine bien, n'est pas encore le Christ historique....La Vie de Jttsus
(of Strauss) n'est au fond que la philosophie du chef de l'ecole
allemande contemporaine, appliqude aux recits <5vang<$liques, " Renan,
Et. d'Hist. Rel. 157, 158. "Ist es je in der Welt erhbrt worden,
dass eine ganze Gemeinschaft ein Lebensbild mit einer Fiille
einzelner Ztige zusammcngedichtet hatte?" Ullman, DU Siindlosigk.
Jesu, p. 60.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 69
they would have had a deeply Ebionitic tinge; nor yet
Gentile proselytes of the imaginary Pauline faction1, for
they would never have represented Christ as sent mainly
and primarily, and in His own personal mission all but
exclusively, to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
These theories revolve indeed in a vicious circle; they
make the Church account for the religion, and the re
ligion for the Church 2; and as though we should invoke
the world to account for the existence of God, they ex
plain the miracles and character of the Redeemer by the
society which He founded. Even in the Apocalypse,
1 If Baur's theory of the deep antagonism and hatred between
the Pauline and Petrine schools were true, it would be indeed
amazing that one Ideal so pure, so homogeneous, and so perfect
should have emanated from their conflicting beliefs. But although
undoubtedly the Clementines shew that the doctrines of St Paul did ,
cause him to be regarded as 6 ix^pos dvBpavos by some Elcesaites,
yet the attempts to identify him with the Balaam of the Apocalypse,-
&c, are simply a large inverted pyramid of inferences resting on an
excessively small apex, and can only be accepted by those who regard
the Acts of the Apostles and much of the Epistles as deliberately
untrustworthy. 2 "Ce qu'il laisse subsister des Evangiles est insuffisant pour
motiver la foi des Apdtres, et 1'on a beau admettre chez eux la dispo
sition a- se contenter d'un minimum de preuve, il faut que ses preuves
aient &6 bien fortes pour vaincre les doutes navrants occasionnes par
la mort sur la croix." Renan Et. d'Hist. Rel. 168. This has also been
pointed out with great force by Ullmann, Historich oder Mythisch f
His two strongest points are the belief of St Paul in the Resurrec
tion, and the permanent, undeniable Fact of the existence of the
Christian Church. Even Bruno Bauer well remarks: "Diese mys-
teriose Substantialitiit der christlichen Gemeinde hat keine Evan-
gelien hervorbringen konnen, denn sie hat keine H&nde zu schreiben,
keinen Geschmack zu componiren, keine Urtheilskraft das zusam-
mengehorende zu vereinen." Kritik d. Synoptiken.

7° THE ADEQUACY OF
and in those four Epistles of St Paul, the genuineness
of which the Tubingen school admit, Christ appears
plainly as God and King1. Whence then came a re
verence so absorbing, a devotion so unbounded? from
His teaching? witness the deep offence taken by His
very disciples, and the stones which the Jews took up to
stone Him 2. But had His teaching been ever so deeply
admired, why on that account should a Jew worship
Him, more than His awful Moses, or princely David? or
a Greek, more than his subtle Pythagoras and blameless
Socrates? or a Roman, more than his stern Cato and
many-minded Cicero? And afterwards, when there arose
a Marcus Aurelius, the beautiful, noble, warlike emperor
of the civilized world, with his exquisite candour and
almost faultless morality, and the white flower of his
blameless life, — was he worshipped3? Apollonius of
Tyana was not only a favourite teacher but an accredited
thaumaturge; yet, as Tertullian says, "Nemo Apollonium
1 Acts vii. 59; Rev. xix. 13, xxii. 20; 1 Cor. i. 2, ii. 8, viii. 6,
xv. 47; 2 Cor. iv. 4, cf. Plin. Epp. x. 96; Euseb. Hist. ix. 14, 21.
Eccl. v. 28.
2 Is. viii. 14; Matt. xiii. 57; Acts xiii. 45. Schelling ends a
fine passage on this subject with "Nicht die Evangelien sind
nothwendig um die Hoheit Christi zu erkennen, sondern umge-
kehrt, die Hoheit Christi ist nothwendig um diese Erzahlungen, um
die Evangelien zu begreifen." Pliilos. d. Offenbarung, quoted in
Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel, 4 80.
3 On the contrary, it is clear from the Meditations that he was
conscious of being personally disliked because of his very virtues.
In one melancholy passage he tells us that in spite of his loving,
paternal, unselfish care for all about him, yet when he died he was
quite aware that they would say amongst themselves, " Thank goodness
we have now got rid of this schoolmaster."

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 71
pro Deo colit." Or was Christ worshipped as a God
because of His sufferings? My brethren, if this were
all, as far as mere physical anguish is concerned, many
of the martyrs suffered more. Yet no Christian wor
shipped the martyrs, though the Jews and the heathen
falsely charged them with doing so1. No, the Gospels
do not account for Christ; but the reality and the gran
deur of Christ are the sole explanation of the possibility
of the Gospels. And if, with these facts in view, wi
read the pages of Strauss, based as they are on an A
priori assumption, crowded as they are with captious
frivolities and arbitrary criticisms, even the scribe, who
is least instructed in the kingdom of Heaven, may face
them without dismay, and may lay them down, not in
deed without sadness, yet with a strong conviction that-
God's own hand smites with unconscious paralysis the
strength of those whose labour and genius — like dese
crated incense upon unhallowed altars — is expended in
the cause of unbelief2.
1 " We adore Christ as the Son of God," wrote the Christians of
Smyrna to the Christians of Pontus; "the martyrs, as followers and
disciples of our Lord, we love." Euseb. Hist. Eccl. iv. 15,
quoted by Cave, Prim. Christianity, 1. 5, cf. Aug. de Civ. Dei, viii.
27 : "We set apart no temples, nor priests, nor divine services, nor
sacrifices to martyrs, because they are not God."
2 Lacordaire, after describing in his powerful and impassioned
style, the effect of Strauss's Life of Jesus on his mind (une sorte de
frayeur involontaire, causee par l'abundance de I'druditiori, &c),
adds, "Eh bien! apart trois ou quatre passages il ne m'a jamais
fallu plus de dix minutes pour dissiper la charme d'une vaine
science, et sourire au dedans de moi de l'impuissance,& laquelle Dieu
a, condamn^ l'erreur." Conferences, 1846^ p. 155.

72 THE ADEQUACY OF
II. But leaving these more special considerations,
it seems to me that there are three broad grounds on
which we may safely meet the assaults of Rationalism
and Mythicism in any one of the forms which they assume.
i. The first of these is the nature and character of
the miracles themselves. An assertion of unlimited mi
raculous power is so difficult to substantiate that, apart
from Christianity, I scarcely know a single instance in
which it has been put forward. Prophets of the most
splendid reputation did not claim them; St John the
Baptist, intensely and powerfully as he swayed the in
most hearts of his nation, was never accredited with
them. Founders of great religions — Confucius, Sakya
Mouni1, Zoroaster, Mahomet3 — even in obscure ages,
even amid barbarous surroundings, — made no pretence to
them. If, in a few instances, Christian saints have pro
fessed to be endowed with them, it has been only in
virtue of Christ's power, nor even in their legends do
they occur in contemporaneous evidence, or in any but
instances of a dubious kind3. Yet Christ — surrounded
1 See The Modern Buddhist (by a Siamese Minister) translated
by Mr Alabaster, p. 217.
2 Mahomet distinctly disclaimed miracles, and appealed to the
Koran in lieu of them, so that the paragraphs of the Koran are
called aidt= sign or miracle. The miracles attributed to him in later
legends, e.g., that the moon after seven times going round the Kaaba,
saluted him, entered his right sleeve, and, slipping out at the left,
split into two halves, which reunited after having retired to the
extreme east and west, were truly signs from heaven ! see Tholuck,
Vermischte Schrifter, I. 2 7.
6 The arguments in favour of the genuineness of the ecclesiastical
and mediseval miracles may be found sketched by the hand of a

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 73
as he was by the " immense publicity" of furious Jews,
and haughty Romans, and sneering Greeks — not only
claimed them, but his claim was undisputed by his
deadliest enemies. Neither the Pharisees, nor the mul
titudes, nor Caiaphas, nor Herod, nor Celsus, nor Por
phyry, nor Hierocles, nor Julian dreamt of denying that
He had wrought deeds apparently supernatural; and it
is an insult to the understanding to compare the evi
dence on which they rest, either with the vulgar travesty
of a miracle alleged to have been wrought by a coarse
soldier before the rabble of Alexandria', or with the
posthumous plagiarisms in the heavy romance of the
sophist Philostratus. And yet observe that the Gospel
miracles are no mere senseless wonders, no soarings on
the wondrous Borak, as in the legend of Mahomet, no
sitting on fiery cushions in the air as in the Lalitavistara,
but calm and noble, each involving a deed of mercy,
each conveying a lesson of truth2. Subservient to the
master in Dr Newman's two celebrated Essays which have just
been reprinted. Most of them lying in the ambiguous region of
ill-understood pathological facts may safely be accepted when the
evidence in their favour is at all reasonable. The supposed
thaumaturgic power of St Francis Xavier received no countenance
from any claim of his own, and he makes very light indeed of a
case in which he was supposed to have resuscitated a dead infant.
The contemporary evidence in favour of cures wrought, or said to
have been wrought at La Salette, and by the cure' d'Ars throws
fresh light on the nature of such facts.
1 Pere Cassell, in his little book Le Roi te Touche, shews good
reasons Jbr believing that this so-called miracle (!) of Vespasian's;
was itself due to a widespread belief in the miracles of Christ.
See Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel, 473.
2 See Rowland Williams, Christianity and Hinduism^ pp. 16 1

74 THE ADEQUACY OF
Life of Christ, deriving their greatness from it, treated
^s insignificant in comparison to that submission of
which they were but a single evidence, promised (which
is surely most unlike a myth) in yet larger abundance
to the immediate followers who believed in Him1, — mi
racles such as these are indisputably unique in the
world's history; they are the glory and the evidence of
Christianity alone. Notice too that they were sternly
and invariably refused to a gaping curiosity, or a clamor
ous unbelief2. No mythicist surely could have made
what has been called the damaging admission that faith
was an essential to their operation; he would have repre
sented them as displayed before competent savansa, so
public always as to exclude denial, so powerful always
as to enforce assent. But God, while He tenderly helps
even the feeblest faith, does not condescend to force the
reluctant and external assent of those who would not
believe though one rose from the dead. It is not too
— 164. "On voit dans 1'Evangile que les miracles de J&us
e"taient tous utiles, mais ils ftaient sans ^clat, sans apprSt, sans
pompe; ils e'taient simples comme ses discours, comme sa vie,
comme toute sa conduite." Rousseau, Lettres de la Montagne, I. 3. '
1 John xiv. 12, "Neque quicquam est ab illo gestum.. .quod non
omne donaverit faciendum parvulis Mis et rusticis et eorum sub-
jecerit potestati." Arnobius adv. Gentes, I. 50, cf. II. 12.
2 Orig. c. Cels. I. 68.
3 Mons. Renan insists on this as a necessary criterion of miracles.
But how much chance would a miracle have had of recognition
before the French Academy, for instance, which rejected the use of
lightning-conductors, vaccination, the existence of meteorites, &c.
Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel, 360. It is a strange demand, that if
God requires His mighty works to be believed He must submit
them to a committee of competent savans 1

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 75
much to say that this reserve of miraculous interfer
ence1, — this dislike of its exercise for any purposes but
those of tenderness, — this stern and positive refusal to
employ it either in silencing the insults of the inimical,
or in gratifying the curiosity of the commonplace, — this
frank admission that many of Christ's miracles were
calumniated or denied, — are marks of truth and of sim
plicity such as are found in no similar records of a
nascent faith, and such as are so utterly alien from the
annals of imposture, that they are alone sufficient, when
fully and impartially considered, to crumble the mythical
theory of miracles into the dust?
ii. A second general but no less convincing fact
is the entire style and character of the Gospels. Written
by fishermen and taxgatherers, who were unlearned and
ignorant men, they have yet thrown all other histories
into the shade. Only consider, my brethren, what they
are to us. In the dim hours of sorrow and bereavement ;
in the hours when, like a grotto of icicles under the
noonday beam, all our vain hopes, all our cherished
aspirations are melting into a rain of tears ; in the hours
of painful lassitude, when we hear
"Time flowing through the middle of the night;"
in the hour when, like an uncertain echo in the lonely
corridors of some haunted house, we hear far off the
1 We may get a true measure of the difference between inven
tion and fact by placing the prodigality of miracles attributed to
the infant Saviour in the apocryphal gospels side by side with the
"This beginning of miracles did Jesus in Cana of Galilee" in the
very gospel which is asserted to have been expressly forged in proof
of His Godhead!

76 THE ADEQUACY OF
monotonous footfall of approaching death; what is it
that calms, and comforts, and soothes us then? Is it
any discovery of science ? is it any scheme of philoso
phy? is it even the sublime vision of Dante, or the
lordly eloquence of Milton ? is it anything that orator has
uttered and poet sung ? Nay, when the melody of lyric
songs has lost its charm, and the music of memory and
her siren daughters has been brought low, we still listen
¦ — when we can listen to nothing else — to the Beatitudes
which Christ spake to the multitudes as they sat listening
among the mountain lilies, or to those last words, more
precious than archangel's utterance, which on the same
night that He was betrayed He spake to his beloved
ones, when the traitor had gone out and it was night.
And yet the Evangelists are men who frankly describe
the tardiness, the imperfection, the vacillations of their
own faith ; men who in their noble humility do not con
ceal the strength of their prejudices, the slowness of
their enlightenment, the cowardice of their behaviour,
the carnality of their belief, and who yet express a sober
intensity of conviction, which can find no other expla
nation than the reality of the events to which they
witness. On every page they write is the simplex vert
sigillum1. The paroxysms of excited eulogy, the blush
1 "Jamais la vertu n'a parld un si doux langage; jamais la plus
profonde sagesse ne s'est exprime' avec tant d'energie et de sim
plicity... Voyez les livres des philosophes avec toute leur pompe ; qu'ils
sontpetits auprls de celui-la!" Rousseau (Pensdes et Maximes, p. 36).
"Jamais les auteurs juifs n'eussent trouv£ ni ce ton ni cette morale :
et l'evangile a des caracteres de verity si frappans, si parfaitement
inimitables, que I'inventeur en seroit plus tttonnant que le hSros"

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 77
as it were of self-conscious exaggeration, so common
in the late thaumaturgic biographies of mediaeval saints,
find no place in these sweet and noble narratives. Their
minute differences establish their independence ; their
undesigned coincidences attest their truth. And in
every case in which it has been possible to vindicate
their historical accuracy by confronting their evidence
with that of Pagan historians, it has been found to stand
the minutest and most searching tests. In the case,
for instance, of St Luke, who is invariably treated by
rationalists as a mere careless compiler, the minute
jealousy of sceptical inquisition combined with the
truth-loving labour of Christian research has only tended
to establish his historical value and accuracy in the
most insignificant details. Sergius, the Proconsul of
Cyprus, was believed to have been a Propraetor till
St Luke's authority was finally confirmed by the evi-
Id. p. 39. Origen dwells very powerfully on this simplicity of the
style of the gospels — those IScwtckoI Xoyoi — so unlike the fiery and
magnificent eloquence of the Prophets, yet possessing a magic
infinitely more potent than the words of Plato ; a magic leamt not
in the schools but by heavenly inspiration. He compares them, not
to unwholesome and highly-spiced dainties for the rich, but to good
food accessible to the very poorest, c. Cels. in. 68, vii. 59, 60.
"Truth in closest words shall fail
When truth embodied in a tale
Shall enter in at lowly doors,
Which they may read who bind the sheaf,
Or build the house or dig the grave,
Or those wild eyes which watch the wave
In roarings round the coral reef."
Tennyson, In Memoriam.

78 THE ADEQUACY OF
dence of coins1. Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene, was ridi
culed as a clumsy invention, till even Renan has the
candour to admit that his recent examination of the
inscription of Zenodorus at Baalbek has led him to
believe that the Evangelist was not so gravely wrong2.
The taxing in the time of Cyrenius, had long been
branded as a flagrant and damaging anachronism, till
the industry of Zumpt demonstrated that it was an
historical datum implied though not recorded by other
historians3. And yet this is held up to us as the loosest
of those documents ; so calm, so simple, so accurate, so
detailed, so harmonious, in which we are asked to see
specimens of boundless credulity or wilful fraud. Had
they been such, we are happily able to see conclusively
the form they would have assumed. The apocryphal
Gospels actually were such mythical forgeries. In the
meanness, absurdity, and malignity, in the debased style
and defective morality, of these worthless Hagadoth, we
may see what the Gospels would have resembled had the
theories of Baur and Strauss been true. The Gospels
are as little like them as the sun in heaven is like the
mephitic gleam of the vapour in a mine. We are only
1 ' kv6<m-a.Tos, Acts xiii. 7. Ackermann's Numismatic Illustra
tions to the N.T. p. 41 ; Dio Cass. Llv. 4.
2 Renan, Vie de Jisus, Introd. xnr.
3 Before the true explanation was known, Wetstein had simply
said, " Epocha tam Celebris non potuit Lucam latere." But Zumpt's
remarkable treatise, Das Geburtsjahr Christi; Geschichtlich-chrono-
logische Untersuchungen, Leipzig, Teubner, 1869, leaves no doubt
in candid minds that St Luke was right. (What little may still be said
on the other side by those who are too biassed to be convinced may
be seen in Strauss, Die Halbenund die Ganzen, 70  79.)

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 79
glad that they should have lingered on in obscure con
tempt, because- they offer so providential a contrast to
the true Sibylline utterance, which, in the words of the
ablest and perhaps the greatest of Greek philosophers,
"with inspired lip speaking things simple, and unper-
fumed, and unadorned, reacheth over ten thousand years
because of God."
^#" iii. But one proof more, and that the most irresis
tible, remains. It is the transcendent, commanding cha
racter, the unique sovereign splendour of the personality
of Christ; on every action the stamp of eternity, in
every utterance the inspiration of truth. It is strange
and touching to see how this character with the winning
love of its irresistible tenderness, by the moral sorcery
of its infinite self-sacrifice, pervades, astonishes, over
whelms, subdues. Like the armed band who came to
seize him in the garden, His very enemies seem to fall in "*~
admiration before His feet, and even the metaphysicians
who explain away the divinity of His being, see in
Him the best and truest symbol of heavenly wisdom1,
or of ideal perfection2, or of the union between the
human and the divine". And so far has the many-
sidedness and richness of His character transcended the
thoughtful analysis of the closest observers, that scarcely
1 Spinoza. 2 Kant.
3 Hegel. See Luthardt, Apolog. Vortrdge iiber die Grund-
wahrheiten des Christenthums, X. (Engl. Tr. p. 284). The desire
to be considered Christians seems to remain strongly even in those 4
who would utterly overthrow historical Christianity. Strauss says :
"Wir finden unsere heutige Weltanschauung christlicher als die
urchristliche selbst." Zwei friedliche Blatter, 1839.

So THE ADEQUACY OF
any man, or section of men, has been able to appreciate
more than one of its purely human aspects1. The
Knights of old saw in him the mirror of all chivalry :
1 To Strauss he is a wise Galilsean Rabbi ; to Schenkel a sort of
party-demagogue, the representative of political and theological
progress ; to Renan a moral teacher whose dreamy mysticism
ended in uncontrolled fanaticism and even conscious deceit. "Ein
mysterium," "ein unicum," are phrases used of Him by others, as
Hase, Weisse, Schenkel, &c, who do not accept His divinity.
" Between Him and whoever else in the world," said Napoleon with
profound truth, "there is no possible term of comparison!" "Jesus
en tout est unique et rien ne saurait lui toe compart." Renan, Et.
d'Hist. Rel. 175. "Ce Christ ^vangelique est la plus belle in
carnation de Dieu dans la plus belle des formes, qui est l'homme
moral;. ..Dieu dans l'Homme.'' Id. 213. "II est roi pour long-
temps encore... Sa beauts est ^ternelle, son regne n'aura pas de
fin...Tandis qu'un cceur noble aspirera a la beauts morale, tandis
qu'une ame ^levfe tressaillera de joie devant la realisation du
divin, le Christ aura des adorateurs par la partie vraiment &ernelle
de son £tre." Id. 214. Even Strauss speaks of Him as "the
highest object we can possibly imagine with respect to religion,
the Being without whose presence in the mind perfect piety is im
possible" Vergangl. und Bleibende in Christenthum, 132. How so,
if He claimed to be sinless, claimed even to be a God, and was
not? It is, however, delightful thus to see His enemies fall on
their knees while they gaze at him. This awful and transcendent
beauty of His Life overawed even the insolent and flippant soul
of Voltaire. See the remarkable vision in Did. Philosophique,
Art. Religion. "He bids us — when we least expect it
Take back our faith...
Go home and venerate the myth
I thus have experimented with,
This Man, continue to adore Him
Rather than all who went before Him,
And all who ever followed after  "
Browning, Christmas Eve and Easter Day.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 81
the Monks, the pattern of all asceticism ; the Philoso
phers, *the enlightener in all truth. To a Fenelon he
has seemed the most rapt of mystics ; to a Vincent de
Paul, the most practical of philanthropists ; to an English
poet, "The best of men
That ere wore earth about him was a sufferer,
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed1."
A sceptical historian, accidentally taking up the New
Testament, suddenly finds in Christ the explanation of
all History2; a fiery demagogue tells a nation, crushed
by long oppression, that he was a child of the people,
" le bon sans-culotte3 ;" a victorious Emperor, the last
great man of secular History, contrasting his own utter
evanescence with Christ's eternal rule, declares that he
understands and recognizes men, and that Jesus Christ
was not a man4; a prophet of anarchy and naturalism, in
1 Decker.
2 See a remarkable letter of Johann v. Miiller to Karl Bonnet :
/' In all my study of the ancient times I have always felt the want of
/something, and it was not till I knew our Lord that all was clear to
j me ; with Him there is nothing that I am not able to solve." Quoted
| by Luthardt, Apologet. Vortr. (Engl. Tr. p. 353.)
3 Camille Desmoulins. The irreverence of the expression is only1
in appearance. 4 Napoleon, in a most remarkable conversation with General
Bertrand, repeated by the Comte de Montholon (Rgcit. de la Captiv.
de I'Emp. NapoUon; see Napoleon, Table Talk, Bayard series, pp.
112 sqq.): "I know men, and Jesus Christ is not a man. Super
ficial minds see a resemblance between Christ and the founder of
empires, and the gods of other religions. That resemblance does not
exist. There is between Christ and all other religions whatsoever the
distance of infinity; from the first day to the last He is the same—
F. H. L. 6

82' THE ADEQUACY OF
the mid confession of his faith, suddenly bursts into elo
quent admiration, and " with a hand as firm as 4hat of
a martyr," writes that " if the life and death of Socrates
are those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those
of a God."
Yes, the life of Christ is indeed an example, a vTroypapi~
/U.0V1, over which the loveliest of saints' lives have been
but faintly traced ; a glory, of which all that is bright among
Christians has been but " a pale image and faint reflec
tion2," Beautiful indeed has been the life of the saints
always the same, majestic and simple, infinitely firm and infinitely
gentle." There is every reason to believe, both from its authentica
tion by competent witnesses and from internal evidence, that the
conversation is genuine.
1 vpiv imoXipirdvciiv vnoypappov, ha iiraKoXov8-rjcniTe rots
txyecnv avrov, i Pet. ii. 21. See other instances in Schleusner, Lex.
s. v. It would be indeed a marvel if He who was so meek and
lowly should yet have been the only Saint who claimed, both by
word and deed, to be free from all sin (John viii. 46). It should be
definitely understood that if Christ were not sinless and divine, he
would be lower not higher than all who have lived holily on earth ;
for then His claims would be false, and His personality stained with
the. poor vice of self-satisfaction. But His sinlessness is beyond all
dispute, not only in His entire tone, but even in His prayers, in
which there is not the slightest trace of consciousness of sin and
petition for forgiveness (see Steinert, Dissert, de peculiari indole
precum Domini, 1817. Stier, Reden Jesu, iv. 427). There are many
touches in His individuality which simply could not have been
imagined or invented: they bear on the face of them the most
certain stamp of historic truth.
2 Tpotpta, ic-aripa, StSdcTKdKov, uip^ovXov, larpov, vovv, tpas,
np^v, 5dja>', Icrxiv, Sutjc, Ep. ad Diognet. c. IX. O seterna Veritas,
et vera caritas, et cara a^ternitas, tu es Deus meus, Aug. " Christ is,
the Light, let us receive the light ; Christ is the Truth, let us believe
the truth ; Christ is the Way, let us follow the way. And because

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 83
of God, and one has been full of charity, and one of
purity, and one of zeal ; but this life is not a type of any
one excellence, but a radiation of them all ; not virtuous
but Virtue; not truthfulness', bat Truth. What inind even
of saint or martyr has been large enough, lofty enough,
noble enough to comprehend its glorious contradictions,—
its clinging friendship and sublime independence, its
tender patriotism and humanitarian breadth, its pas
sionate emotion and perfect peace, its unapproachable
majesty and childlike sweetness, — the meekness of the
Lion of Judah and the wrath of the Lamb that was slain ?
Even his enemies bore witness to his sinlessness '. The
He is our only Master, our only Teacher, our only Shepherd, and
chief Captain ; therefore let us become His servants, His scholars,
His sheep, and His soldiers." Sermon on the Nativity, Homiliss, II.
12. "The more truly you serve Christ," says Dr Congreve, the
Priest of the English Comtists, " the more thoroughly you mould
yourselves into His image, the more keen will be your sympathy and
admiration." 1 Even a Francis of Assissi and a Vincent de Paul, and many of
the sweetest and purest of the saint% did not escape the pestilent
breath of slander; yet, though He lived in familiar intercourse with
publicans and harlots, His worst enemies never dared to breathe
suspicion on the spotless innocence of Christ. See De Lammennais,
Ess. sur Vlndiff. IV. 201. On the other hand, no heathen ever
claimed to be sinless, Soph. Ant. 10 ; Hor. Sat. 1. 3. 68 : Nam
vitiis nemo sine nascitur optimus ille est Qui minimis nascetur.
Etpcu dvSpa dyaBhv dSvvarov Kai ovk dvOpdireiov, dXXd Beds povos tovto
?X« ™ y£pah Simonides. These and other similar passages are
quoted by Schneider, Christliche Kldnge aus dem griech. und r'om.
Klassikern, 133 sqq. : cf. Cic. Tusc. II. 22., In quo. vero erit perfecta
sapientia (quern adhuc nos quidem vidimus neminem; sed philoso-
phorum sententiis, qualis hie futurus. sit, si modo, aliquando fuerit,
exponetur), &c.r and, as the Fathers so often point out, some of the
greatest philosophers were personally very base. 6— a

84 THE ADEQUACY OF
Toldoth feschu is filled with blasphemies against him,
and yet dare charge him with no sin save his claim to be
the Son of God. " Have thou nothing to do with that
just man," said the Roman lady1. "I find no fault in
this man," witnessed the blood-stained Pilate2. "This
man hath done nothing amiss3," exclaimed the dying
malefactor. "I have shed innocent blood4," shrieked the
miserable Judas. His most eager accusers stammered
into self-refuting lies ; the witnesses of his uttermost hu
miliation, as they returned smote upon their breasts
with despairing agony and assented to the cry of the
heathen centurion, "Truly this was the Son of God5."
And therefore, not because he was a Prophet and
a Teacher so great that he could address even a St Peter
and a St John as "my little children6;" not because He
1 Matt, xxvii. 19. 2 Matt, xxvii. 23; Luke xxiii. 14.
s Luke xxiii. 40; I Pet. ii. 22. * alpa dBwov. Matt, xxvii. 4.
5 Matt, xxvii. 54; Luke xxiii. 47. 48; 1 Cor. i. 19; Heb. vii.
26, 27; 1 Cor. v. 91, &c.
6 TeKvla In ptKpov pe$' 6p.cSv elpt, John xiii. 33 ; iratSia, id. xxi.
16. See the beautiful treatise of Ullmann, Die Sundlosigkeit Jesu,
38 — 71. Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel, 489. Very few (Weber
Bretschneider, Fritzsche) have been found to deny this dvapapr-qoia
of Christ. Even Strauss admits that " In all those natures which
were only purified by struggles and violent disruptions (think only
of a Paul, an Augustine, 01- Luther), the shadowy colour of this
remains for ever, and something hard and severe and gloomy clings
to them all their lives ; but pf this in Jesus no trace is found."
Strauss indeed ventures to criticise as weakness the agony in
the garden, but no Christian will wish that argument should be
wasted on such a. reproach. The mere fact, however, that the
Evangelists, who knew so well how to describe a fearless death
(Acts vii.), have described this "weakness " — if Strauss can call it so
—of an heroic soul, is an overwhelming argument against the

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 85
was a Son of God, but because He was the Son of God,
tlierefore we worship him. For, if not being divine,
I He yet claimed divinity, we should shrink back from
Him revolted and appalled. The meanest capacity can
• recognize the unutterable distance which separates man
from God ; and how could we respect one, who, not
being God, yet even in the feebleness of His obscurity,
even in the depth of His nameless humiliation, even in
the utter impotence of His human infirmity, made Him
self equal with God ? Oh would not this have been the
very blasphemy of imposture, the very insanity of self-
deception, the very fatuity of arrogance in one whom all
have recognized as the wisest, humblest, holiest of the
sons of men? Truly, if we reject His Godhead, then
though we took not up stones to stone Him, we might
well turn from Him with agonies of wrath and tears.
There is in such a case 'but one step from the Capitol
to the Tarpeian rock;' but one step from our adoring
devotion to our indignant shame. But because they
mythical theory (see Pascal, Pens. II. 323). Christ's distinct separa
tion of His Sonship from that of all others appears far more clearly
in the Greek Testament than in the English version ; e. g. of his
own prayers to God he uses the word tpturav (John xiv. 16, xvi. 26,
xvii. 9, 15, 20), "familiarem petendi modum notat, qualis inter col-
loquentes solet esse. Scepius de precibus Jesu occurrit, semel tantum de
precibus fiddium." Lampe. Again, he says, dvafSalvca irpos tov Tart-pa
pov from Kai irartpa ipav, John xx. 17, " I ascend unto the Father
of me and Father of you. First of me and then of you ; not therefore
his because ours, but therefore ours because his." Bp. Pearson on
the Creed, Art. I. "Dicimur et filii Dei, sed ille aliter filius Dei."
Aug. on Psalm. Iii. Again, men are never bidden dya-rav, but tpiXetv
tov Biov, but 6 Tarrjp tpiXel tov vlbv.- John v. 20.

86 THE ADEQUACY OF
believed as we believe, that He was God in the form of
a servant, and in the likeness of sinful men, therefore
the Jews accepted a martyred Galilean as their Messiah,
the Greeks and Romans a crucified Jew as their God,
and the fierce northern hordes exchanged their warrior
deities for the peaceful suffering humiliation of the
White Christ. And what is it tbat the modem theorists
ask us to believe1? They ask us to believe that, 1800
years ago, there lived in the most despised village of
the most despised province of a conquered land, a
man (and here may I be pardoned for that which a
Christian may well shudder to repeat) — a man unlearn
ed and ignorant and not free from sin — the son of
peasant parents who, after having lived thirty years in
the deepest obscurity, as a village carpenter, came
forth for three years to preach a doctrine which had
no originality, a doctrine which is often self-contradic
tory, always defective, exaggerated and unpractical, and
that when this fantastic pietist, half-dreamer, half-deceiver,
1 See De Lamennais, Essai sur I' Indifference, iv. 458. "Que la
philosophic est . ingenieuse et profonde dans ses conjectures !
Comme les ev&iemens qui paraissaient les plus extraordinaires
deviennent simples des qu'elle daigne les expliquer !...Les Ap6tres
ont dit, Nous vous annongons l'Evangile au nom de l'Etemel et vous
devez nous croire car nous somnies doues de pouvoir miraculeux....
A ce discours le peuple est accouru de toutes parts, pour 6tre
temoin des miracles promis avec tant de confiance. Les malades
n'ont point &6 gu&is, les perclus n'ont pas march^, les aveugles
n'ont point vu...Alors transport^ d'admiration le peuple est tombe1
aux pieds des Apotres, et s'est ticrid Ceux-ci sont manifestement les
envoyfe de Dieu ! " I am sorry to spoil by abridgement the fine
scorn of this magnificent passage.

THE GOSPEL RECORDS. 87
made claims so violently opposed to his own clearest
teachings that he suffered a slave's death for treason and
blasphemy, his followers grossly falsified the events of
his ordinary life; and though they were men whose lives
and teaching shewed that they would " rather die than
lie" yet, suddenly transformed by his utter failure and
shameful death from coward fugitives into dauntless
; missionaries, they either invented or imagined an igno
rant story about His resurrection, in attestation of which
they were ever ready, with demented enthusiasm, to
face the wild beast and stand undaunted in the flame:
and that, on this empty teaching and this invented
tale, was built a Church which, after eighteen centuries, is
still invincible in proportion to its purity and its faith ;
and were founded the institutes of a new kingdom of
God, which, " with the unresistible might of weakness,"
rising up between an effete Judaism and a guilty
heathendom, revolutionized and overcame the world. Is
there no cleft here, no broad chasm, no unbridgeable
abyss, between the real effect and the imaginary cause ?
Of the Christian consciousness, of the inward witness
of the Spirit, of spiritual things being spiritually dis-
Icerned, of doing the will and so knowing the doctrine,
I say nothing1: but I ask whether as a mere matter
Of criticism and history, this whole structure of ration-
! alism does not, at the mere touch of the Gospels, totter
before our eyes, and crumble into a vast incongruous
1 "Philosophia veritatem quarit, Theologia invenit, Religio
possidet." Pic. Mirand. Opp. 359 (Raumer, Gesch. d. P&dagogik,
I- 54)-

88 THE ADEQUACY OF THE GOSPEL RECORDS.
heap of absurdities and impossibilities1 ? Oh that each
one of us, standing on the mound that makes this
ruined Babel of false philosophy, even if he have asked
with Nathanael, "can any good thing come out of
Nazareth ?" even if he have said with the unbelieving
Jews, "we know this man whence he is;" nay, even if
he have doubted as Thomas once doubted ; even if he
have denied as Peter once denied ; yet, feeling at length
that " God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto
himself," feeling that in Him his yearnings are satisfied,
by Him his sins forgiven, may be enabled to raise his
eyes to heaven and exclaim from the depths of an
adoring and believing heart,
" MY LORD AND MY GOD." ^
1 Really no hypothesis seems too absurd or gratuitous for the
exigencies of Rationalism. Comte, for instance, eminent as he is
both for the candour, the power, and the historical acuteness of his
mind, makes Paul the founder of Christianity, and supposes that
he — he "the fusile Apostle," — he, the a and u of whose teaching
was the^to of the Resurrection, — looked out for, and with sublime
self-sacrifice subordinated himself to "one of the many adventurers
who were naturally led at that time to attempt the inauguration of
Monotheism by aspiring, like their Greek predecessors, at divinisa-
tion!!" He looked out for another, because "he could not give
himself out for an incarnation of the divine without a mixture of
hypocrisy and fanaticism incompatible with real superiority of heart
and spirit." He thus, i.e. by merely propagating instead of
actually inventing a falsehood— " saved himself from all personal
degradation, and afterwards got really to venerate a type which he
idealized." Comte, Politique Positive, III. 409, 410. And this is a
philosophic view of the origin of Christianity ! St Paul, we may be
sure, would have wished himself plunged in the lowest abyss of
"personal degradation" rather than utter one word capable of any
interpretation which should thus blaspheme his Lord.

III.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.

• iva peivy rd p.i\ aaXevopeva.
'Br. trpbs "E/3/>. (xii. 27).

Acts V. 39.
But if it be of God, ye Cannot overthrow it.
Matt. XV. 13.
Every plant, which my heavenly Father hath not planted,
shall be rooted up.
i Cor. I. 25.
The foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weak
ness of God is stronger than men.
I have ventured, my brethren, to throw together these
three passages — uttered, under memorable circumstances
by our Blessed Lord, by the wise Rabbi of the Jews, by
the great Apostle of the Gentiles — as an authoritative
prophecy, as a deeply-seated conviction, as an adequate
explanation, of the series of majestic facts, which we
shall, with God's blessing, pass in review to-day. For
having seen the antecedent reasonableness of our Chris
tian faith, and having examined the value of its records,
to-day we must consider the evidence of its history; and
that evidence — extending as it does over a continuous
period of 1800 years — must be to us decisive. Little as
the thought may have been familiar to the ancient world,

92 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
we who accept as indisputable the formula — " DivinA
Providentia agitur mundus et homo" — with which the
Christian Orosius begins his summary of history, — we,
who know that God reveals His will not by sudden
catastrophes and violent revolutions, but by the steady
and secular shining of eternal principles and unhasting
laws — we who regard the story of nations as a study
scarcely less sacred than Theology itself, because we
look on it as a vast drama in which God's purposes to
wards our race are irresistibly evolved in slow but un
broken sequence, — we, I say, must consider the witness
of history as decisive respecting the claims of our belief.
If its pretensions were fictitious, if its doctrines were
erroneous, we should be certain that in the long run it
would present a history of decadence and failure, of per
nicious influences and inevitable decline; if it be of God,
we know beforehand that its course will have been vic
torious and beneficent, — rising like a Sun of righteous
ness with healing in its wings. That Sun may be ob
scured by clouds and storms; its rays may be sometimes
hidden by disastrous eclipse or wintry night; but, whether
shrouded by temporary darkness or dimmed by passing
mist, its light is never quenched; and, breaking forth
again from the uttermost part of the heavens, it " run
neth about unto the end of it again; and there is nothing
hid from the heat thereof1."
1 "Cette eglise qui adore celui qui -a. toujours e'te" adore a sub
sists sans interruption. Et ce qui est admirable, incomparable, et
tout h fait divin, est que cette religion qui a toujours dur<S a
toujours 4t6 combattue. Mille fois die a ittt .t% la veille d'une

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 93
In rudest outline, then, suffer me rapidly to sketch
what the progress of Christianity has been, and when
you have heard it, judge for your own selves whether
men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles;
judge whether Error would thus have had a healing in
fluence, and Imposture a regenerative power; and if you
believe that there is indeed a Divinity in the affairs of
men, judge whether He who is the True, the Faithful,
the Righteous, the Unchangeable, would have deceived
His own truest children and falsified His own inmost
nature, by thus giving blessing to an hallucination, and
triumph to a lie !
When that one word1 was uttered on the cross which
told that the great work was done,-— nay, even when the
Twelve had seen the risen Christ, — nothing could have
appeared more deplorable than the weakness of the new
religion. It numbered but a handful of timid followers,
of whom the boldest had denied his Lord with blas
phemy, and. the most devoted had forsaken Him and
fled. They were poor, they were ignorant, they Were
helpless2. They could not claim a single synagogue, or
a single sword. If they spoke their own language it
bewrayed them by its mongrel dialect; if they spoke the
destruction universelle; ettoutes lesfoisqu'elle a titi en cd tttat, Dieu I'a
relevee par des coupes extraordinaires de sa puissance." Pascal, Pens,
II. 200. 1 TeTtXetTT'ai, John xix. 30;
2 See the names of contempt heaped upon them by Pagans, e.g.,
by Ca:cilius the Pagan interlocutor in the dialogue of Minucius
Felix, See too. Amob. adv. Gent. I. 28, 29, II. 5, &c. "hebetes,"
"stolidi," "fatui," "infausli," "athei," &c.

94 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
current Greek, it was despised as a miserable patois1.
And of their two doctrines — the Crucifixion and the Re--
surrection — the one inspired indignant horror2, the other
unbounded scorn3. But when they were weak, then
were they strong. They had been consecrated for their
mighty work by no earthly chrism ; they had been bap
tised with the Holy Ghost and with fire; each faithless
heart had been dilated with celestial courage ; each lowly
forehead mitred with Pentecostal flame !
Well might they have shuddered at that conspiracy
of hatred with which they were confronted. So feeble
were they and insignificant, that it would have looked
like foolish partiality to prophesy for them the limited
existence of a Galilaean sect4. Had any one seen Paul
the aged as, in all the squalor of poverty and all the
emaciation of disease, he sat chained to some coarse
soldier in the praetorium at Rome; or that Galilsean fisher
man, who, under the shadow of the great Temple of
1 " Sed ab indoctis hominibus et rudibus scripta sunt....Trivialis
et sordidus sermo est...Barbarismis, soloecismis obsitse sunt," &c.
Arnob. adv. Gent. I. 58, 59. Non eloquimur magna sed vivimus.
Min. Fel. Odav. 8. Ecclesia Christi non de AcademiS, et Lycseo, sed
de viii plebecula congregata est. Jerome, Com. inEp. ad Gal. in. 3.
2 Arnob. adv. Gent. I. 36, 40. airoSetKvvpev oi Xbyov KaBapbv
Kai ayiov dXXa avBpa-rov aTiporarov (cat iiroTvpvavio-BtvTO,
Orig. c. Cels. 11. $1.
3 Id. II. 8.
4 This may partly be the reason for the all but total silence of the
Jewish writers. It is, however, probable that the celebrated passage
of Josephus, Ant. XVIII. 4, is not so much spurious as largely inter
polated. See Salvador, JSsus Christ d sa Doctrine, I. 157. Jahn,
Heir. Commonwealth, § 125.

THE- VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY* 95-
Artemis, ministered to a handful of poor converts in the,
splendid capital of Asia, — would it not have seemed the.
very fanaticism of credulity to prophesy that their names,
should be honoured for ever by the inhabitants of cities;
more magnificent than Ephesus, and empires more vast
than Rome? St Paul died; they dragged, it may be, his
corpse from the arena, and — sprinkling the white dust.
oyer the stains of his feeble blood — ^looked for a more
interesting victim than the aged and nameless Jew;
St John died we know* not where or how, and no me
morial marks his forgotten tomb1; yet, to this day, over
the greatest of modern cities towers the vast dome of the-
cathedral dedicated to the name of Paul; and the shape-.
less mounds which once were Ephesus, bear witness, in
their name of Agiotzeologo,, to no other fact than that,
they once were trodden by the weary feet of him who
saw the Apocalypse, and whose young head had rested
on the bosom of His Lord [
Consider how colossal were the- powers arrayed
against this nascent faith2, ^-how vast the forest-trees,
1 " Das Andenken an Johannes wird (nach Tournefort) noch in
dem Namen des Ortes Ajasoluk erhalten, welcher aus 07105 SeoXoyos'
(Seologos von den Griechen gesprochen) corrumpirt ist." Winer,
Bibl. RealwSrt. s. v. Ephesus, Fellowes, however (Exc. in Asia
Minor), and Arundell (Seven Churches) derive it from, a Turkish
root, meaning City of the Moon, certainly on no convincing grounds.
2 "Tout ce qu'il y a de grand sur la terre s'unit, les savants,. les
sages, les rois, les uns fcrivent, les autres condamnent, les autres tuent._
Et non-obstant toutes ces oppositions, ces gens simples et sans force
resistent a- toutes ce puissances... et Qtent l'idola-trie de toute la
terre." Pascal, Pens. II. 319. ed. Faugere. " Coming to set right
and to govern the world,' it has ever been, as it ought to be, in'

9° THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
which overshadowed with their dense umbrage, and welP
nigh crushed under their deciduous leaves, this smallest
of all seeds. First, Judaism both within and without the
fold. Judaism within, — half suggesting to the minds of
more than one Apostle that, unless they conformed to
its outward observances, they were little better than a
schismatic sect; Judaism without, with its fifteen hundred
years of gorgeous worship and holy faith. The Jewish
Rabbi — such an one as he into whose mouth Celsus has
placed some of his bitterest rebukes — might, with plau
sibility, taunt them as traitorous apostates, as he recalled
to some young proselyte that long and splendid history,
rolling back from the heroic Asmonsean struggles to the
magnificence of Solomon, — nay, backward to the day
when, with uplifted spear, Joshua had bidden the sun
to stand still upon Gibeon, and Abraham, obeying the
mysterious summons, had abandoned the gods of his
fathers in Ur of the Chaldees. The rod of Moses,
the harp of David, the ephod of Samuel, the mantle of
Elijah, the graven gems on Aaron's breast, — all these
were theirs; theirs, too, the granite tables of Sinai, theirs
the living oracles of God; and who were these children
of yesterday, these miserable Galilaeans with their cruci
fied Nazarene, in whom none of the rulers or the Pha
risees had believed? were they not beneath contempt;
a people that "knew not the law," and were accursed?
Conflict with great masses of men, with the civil power, with
physical force, with adverse philosophies ; it has had successes, it
has had reverses, but it has had a grand history, and has effected
great things, and is as vigorous in its age as in its youth."
Newman, Gram, of Assent, p. 425.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 97
It needed no mean force of character, no ordinary in
tensity of conviction, — it needed, let us say, the divine
vision of a Peter, and the inspired eloquence of a Paul,
to burst the intolerable yoke of these long-venerated ob
servances, and to plant the standard of Christian free
dom upon the ruins of Levitical form1. And Jews, as
they were by birth, Jews as they were in great measure
by religion, keeping as they did the Jewish Sabbath,
worshipping in the Jewish Temple, venerating the Jew
ish books, the struggle against Jewish detestation might
have been far longer and more terrible but for a Divine
interposition. Forty years after the imprecation of
priests and people, the blood of the King whom they
had crucified fell like a rain of fire from heaven upon
them and on their children2. The storm of Roman in
vasion consumed Jerusalem to ashes, and shook the
whole fabric of Judaism into the dust. The race be
came despised and persecuted, wanderers with the brand
1 Acts xv. 10; Gal. v. 1.
2 "Dispersi, palabundi, et cceli et soli sui extorres vagantur per
orbem sine nomine, sine Deo," &c. Tert. adv. Jud. 15. See a
passage of terrible and almost savage power in De Lamennais :
" Peuple incomprehensible, cesse un moment le travail dont tu te
consumes sous le soleil, rassemble-toi des quatre vents, on le souffle
de Dieu t'a disperse, viens et re'ponds...Juif, tu n'as pas fait en
vain cette demande (gue son sang soit sur nous d sur nos enfants),
ton souhait est accompli, le sang est sur toi, il y sera toujours, va,
retourne a- ton supplice, que le monde entier en soit temoin jusqu'au
jour, ou reconnaissant et detestant ton crime, ce sang, ce m&me
sang que tu as versed I'effacera." Ess. sur I Indifference, IV. 199.
It is said that a chaplain of Frederic William I. of Prussia, having
been ordered to give the briefest possible proof of the truth of
Christianity, replied, "The Jews, your Majesty."
T. H. L. 7

98 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
of God upon their brow. The frantic hatred of a false
Messiah at length taught the Pagan world that Chris
tians were something more than a Jewish1 sect; but
when Bether had been taken, and Akiba slain in prison,
and Barkokeba had fallen before the sword of Julius
Severus2, the material power of the Jews, and therewith
the main hopes of the Semitic race, were broken for
ever; and, without an effort of its own, the first great
obstacle to the spread of Christianity had been irrevo
cably swept away.
II. Harder, deadlier, more varied, more prolonged
was the contest of Christianity with Paganism. From,
the first burst of hatred in the Neronian persecution
till the end of the third century the fierce struggle con
tinued; fierce, because — meek, unobtrusive, spiritual, as
the Christians were — they yet roused the hatred of every
single class. Paganism never troubled itself to be
angry with mere philosophers who aired their elegant
doubts in the shady xystus or at the luxurious feast,
but who with cynical insouciance did what they de
tested, and adored what they despised. They were
unworthy of that corrosive hatred which is3 the tribute
1 Afterwards the Christians were contemptuously called "genus
tertium," or nondescript body.
2 See Jahn, Hebr. Commonwealth, Eng. Tr. p. 196. He was
afterwards called Bar Koziba (SOniS 13) "son of lie."
3 Had the Christians even remotely countenanced the prevalent
spirit of eclecticism they might have received very different treat
ment, as may be seen from the story that the Emperor Alexander
Severus admitted an image of Christ into his lararium. Similar
stories, but more improbable, are told of Tiberius and Hadrian.
Tert. Apolog. 29 ; Euseb. Hist. Ecc. II. 2 ; Kaye, Eccl. Hist. p. 1 1 1 ;

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 99
paid to the simplicity of Virtue by the despair and
agony of Vice. But these Christians, who turned away
with aversion from temples and statues, who refused to
witness the games of the amphitheatre, who would die
rather than fling into the altar-flame a pinch of incense
to the genius of the Emperors1; who declined even to
wear a garland of flowers at the banquet, or pour a
libation at the sacrifice2; whose austere morality was a
terrible reflection on the favourite sins which had eaten,
Lamprid. Vit. Alex. Sev. 29. See Gibbon, 1. 370 (Milman, ed.).
Pyrrho, although an open and notorious Atheist, had died a priest of
Elis. Augustine, after quoting a fragment of Seneca, in which he
says that philosophers, as a matter of indifference, will worship all
that ignoble crowd of gods which long superstition has accumulated;
adds, " Colebat quod reprehendebat, agebat quod arguebat, quod culpa-
bat adorabat," De Civ. Dei, vi. 10. The same general indifference
characterises the dead selfishness of modern sceptics; to them
applies what Plutarch says of the epicurean: "He hypocritically
enacts prayer for fear of the many; he utters words directly
opposed to his philosophy. While he sacrifices, the ministering
priest seems to him no more than a cook, and he departs uttering
the line of Menander : ' I have sacrificed to the gods in whom I
have no concern.'" Voltaire's characteristic excuse was : "II y a des
gens qui craignent des araigndes, il y en a d'autres qui les avalent."
1 Tert. Apolog. it) — 34, passim.
2 Id. De Corona Militis, and De Spedaculis, passim. Only those
who are ignorant of what Christianity was, and what battle it had to
fight, can join Gibbon in sneering at their resolute determination to
break with Paganism ; see Kaye, Eccl. Hist. p. 389. " Nihil est nobis
dictu, visu, auditu cum insanid circi, cum impudicitid theatri
cum atrocitate arence, cum vanitate xysti." Tert. Apol. 38. "Non
spectacula visitis, non pompis interestis... non floribus caput nectitis,
non corpus odoribus honestatis...pallidi, misericordia digni et
nostrorum deorum." Minuc. Fel. Oct. 8. "Latebrosa et lucifuga
natio, in publicum muta, in angulis garrula." Id. 12.
7—2

ioo the victories of Christianity.
like a spreading cancer, into the very heart of the nation's
life; these Christians, with their unpolished barbarism,
their unphilosophic ignorance1, their stolid endurance,
their detestable purity, their intolerable meekness, kindled
against themselves alike the philosophers whose pride
they irritated, the priests whose gains they diminished,
the mob whose indulgences they thwarted, the Emperors
whose policy they disturbed2- Yet, unaided by any,
opposed by all, Christianity won. Without one earthly
weapon she faced the legionary masses, and, tearing
down their adored eagles, replaced them by the sacred
monogram of her victorious labarum ; she made her in
strument of a slave's agony a symbol more glorious
than the laticlave of consuls or the diadem of kings ;
without eloquence she silenced the subtle dialectics of
the Academy, and without knowledge the encyclo
paedic ambition of the porch. The philosopher who
met a Christian Bishop on his way to the Council of
Nicsea, stammered into a confession of belief, and
1 "Indodis, impolitis, rudibus, agrestibus, quibus non est datum
intelligere civilia, multo magis denegatum est disserere divina."
Minuc. Fel. Oct. 12. pdppapov Soy pa. Aug. c. Cels.l. 12. pdpfiapos
tpiXoaotpla. Tatian, Apol. 20.
2 St Augustine has most powerfully expressed the deadliest
causes of this hatred, which lay in the check given by Christianity to
the favourite vices of the heathens, De Civ. Dd, II. 20. petrel koX
Xpitmavois 6 Kocrpos pfjStv dStKovpevos Sn rats rjdovacs diriTaVowrai.
Ep. adDiognet. vi. See a beautiful passage to the same effect in
the Protreptikon of Clemens : tpeiyapev ei crvvvavTai, tpeAyupev rb
Kvpa tovto, irvp tpevyerat, vrjerbs Ictti irovnpa, StTTOts Kai veKpdis
o-etrwpevpthri, 4Set St iv avrrj wopvtSiov wpatov, JiSovlj. Protrept XI
2. § 118.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 101
the last of Pagan Emperors died prematurely in the
wreck of his broken powers, with the despairing
words, "Vicisti Galilsee !" "Oh Galikean1, thou hast
conquered ! "
i. In its terror and hatred, Paganism essayed a
triple resistance. First, it tried the experiment of an
eclectic revival. For the old humanistic worship, with its
frank and sunny anthropomorphism, it substituted a natu
ralistic cult, which, for an age of decaying faith, had a
horrible fascination. From Egypt it imported the im
posing mysteries of Isis; from Persia the worship of
Mithras, with its painful initiations and ritual splendour;
from Phrygia the orgiastic rites of Cybele with their
brutal mutilations and nameless infamies2. And this
Neopaganism, welded out of archaic superstitions, in
spired the most frenzied enthusiasm by appealing to the
most degraded tastes. But the revival, with all its para
phernalia of mathematicians and jugglers, lustrations and
oracles, weird exorcisms and ghastly taurobolia, was all
in vain ; it never succeeded in galvanising into even the
1 Julian had ordered that the Christians should be always called
Galilseans, and forbad the instruction of their children in classic
literature. Socrates, II. t6, Theodoret. III. 8.
2 Among other rites were the disgusting taurobolium and criobo-
lium, which marked, as Gieseler says, "the extreme sensuality of
superstition;" see Dbllinger, The Gentile and the Jew (tr. Darvell),
II. 1 79. In this learned, but very painful book, may be found a full
account of the Eclectic Revival of Paganism; as also in De
Pressens^, Hist. " des Trois Prem. Silcles, II. I — 60 ; Neander,
Church History (E. T.) I. pp. 14 — 18, 40 — 43, &c. ; Gieseler,
Compend. § 37 (E. T. I. 47), &c.

102 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
semblance of life the corrupting corpse of the old reli
gion. Great Pan was dead1.
ii. Then, secondly, they tried the experiment of
argument2. Lucian, in his Peregrinus, which is a travesty
of martyrdom, and his Philopseudes, which is a pa
rody on miracles, confronted them with his degrading
laughter and Epicurean sneer3. Philostratus in his life
of Apollonius4, Jamblichus in his life of Pythagoras,
tried to emulate their gospels with the false miracles
of a late sophist and an antique philosopher. Porphyry
and Hierocles met them with haughty mysticism and
intellectual theosophy. Celsus opened upon them the
battering violence of his impassioned rhetoric. But on
this field, too, Christianity matched them. It repelled
argument with argument; it repaid scorn with scorn5.
1 Hdv b piyas riBv^Ke. See the strange and beautiful story of
the grammarian Epithyrsis told by Plut. De Orac. Defectu, alluded
to in Milton's Ode to the Nativity, and on which Mrs Barrett Browning
has founded her beautiful poem.
* Neander, Ch. Hist. n. 214 seqq. E. Tr.
3 It would be difficult to name any writer more hopelessly,
essentially, cynically immoral than Lucian. He is the type of athe
istic selfishness. He believes in nothing and no one ; ' ' men please
him not, nor women neither." Evaporating from heathen mythology
both its poetry and its imaginativeness, he leaves it hideously bare.
He contemplates not the loveliness or the sorrows of Helen, but her
skull; not the courage or generosity of Achilles, but his rage and
lust. He reminds us of Tennyson's Vivienne, whose tongue
"Ran fire at will among the noblest names."
4 " Apollonius demeure toujours le Christ d'icledkisme pan-
tMiste, de la gnose orientale, la flottante personnification de ses
reves varies et ind<5cis." De Pressens<5, Hist, des Trois Prem.
Slides, 11. 148.
5 Bunsen, Gott. in d. Gesch. v. 5.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 103
Sarcasm and invective were indeed unchristian imple
ments, which the Apologists had better have disdained
to wield : yet the Raillery of Philosophers by Hermias was
full of delicate irony, and even Pagan hatred never sur
passed the pitiless denunciations of Tatian, the concen
trated anger of Arnobius, the deep gloom and scorching
glare of the intense Tertullian. But far better and
nobler than these were the lofty Apologies of the Alex
andrian Fathers, who by their breadth and profundity
wrought for the Church an imperishable service. It
was well indeed that a Celsus and a Porphyry could
be matched with such noble specimens of spiritual intui
tion and exhaustive learning as the Protreptikon of a
Clemens, and the eight books of an Origen1. Models
for the best and most Christian school of controversy,
they refute indeed the calumnies of their opponents; but,
better than this, for each refuted error they offer a beau
tiful and convincing truth; and, recognizing the divine
spark which glimmered even in the white embers of
heathen wisdom, summon their adversaries to drink with
them of the living fountain, and share with them the
Eternal Light2. Man was to them no " warped slip of
1 It should be a warning to the Church that this most memorable
of all the Apologies, ancient and modern, was written by one who ,
was under the ban of excommunication ! See De Pressense, Hist.
de I'Eglise, II. 364.
2 What a fine passage is that in S. Clemens of Alexandria
summoning the blind Tiresias of heathendom to gaze with him upon
the living light : trirevtrov Teipetrla, iritrTevtrov, f^ec Xpicrrbs tTiXapret.
tpaiSpbrepov rjXlov, SC Sv btpBaXpol rvtpXcSv dvapXiirovcrtv, vb% ere tpev£e-
Tai...6^ei robs ovpavobs, & yipov, b Q^as py pXtirav. Protrept. XII.
§»9-

104 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
wilderness," but a tpvrdv ovpdviov, " a heavenly plant ;"
and in every heathen inscription their enlightened eye
read a prayer to the Unknown God. Neither Stoicism,
with its unnatural apathy and utter hopelessness1, nor
Neoplatonism with its cold Pantheism and esoteric pride,
had a chance against these living and loving truths. The
Enchiridion of Epictetus, the Meditations of Aurelius are
full of beautiful counsel, yet they are too sad and too weak
to reach the multitude or even to sway the few ; and as
for the Enneads of Plotinus, and the Commentaries of
Proclus, with all their gorgeous invocations and volumi
nous mysticism, they have ever been to mankind but as
the small dust of the balance compared to one verse of
the Sermon on the Mount2.
iii. But, though argument and philosophy failed,
though revivals and eclecticism failed, Pagans might
1 The sentiment, ' ' Know that whatever thou hast been,
'Tis something better not to be,"
is a common one in philosophic literature, Bunsen, Gott. in d.
Gesch. v. 9. Some quotations from Marcus Aurelius in my Seekers
'after God, pp. 301, 308, will shew the English reader the deep
sadness of the later Stoicism. See Id. pp. 49 — 51.
* It is strange and sad to know that during the reign of Julian
all social advance was checked. ' ' Parmi les nornbreuses constitu
tions eman^es de Julien, et recueillies par le code Th6odosien —
il n'en est pas une seule qui s'associe au mouvement d' emancipation
du droit naturel et de l'equitg. Tant il est vrai que le christianisme
e"tait d^sormais le mobile des grandes ameliorations sociales." Trop-
long, De I'infi. du Christian, sur le Droit Civil, p. 128. Strauss
might have been supposed to sympathize with Julian, but in his life
of him he says " dass seine Ideale ruckwarts liegen, dass er das Rad
der Geschichte ruckwarts zu drehen unternimmt."

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 105
always rely for victory upon brute force and crushing
violence. Even Nero had driven through the gardens
of his Golden House between lines of torches of which
each one was a martyr in his shirt of fire1 ; but Nero's
assault was as nothing in extent or virulence compared
with those of a Decius or a Diocletian2. Christianity
spent her first three centuries in one long, legalized,
almost unbroken persecution. Some of her holiest
bishops— an Ignatius, a Polycarp, an Hippolytus ; some
of her greatest writers — a Justin, an Athanasius, an
Origen; even her poor female slaves — a Blandina, a
Felicitas, a Potamiaena, endured the rack or the prison,
perished by the sword or flame. " Yet they stood safe,"
said Cyprian, " stronger than their conquerors ; the
beaten and lacerated members conquered the beating
and lacerating hooks3." "The nearer I am to the
sword," said Ignatius4, "the nearer to God." "We
were condemned to the wild beasts," wrote the youth
ful St Perpetua, "and with hearts full of joy returned
1 The "tunica molesta," or " incendialis." See Juv. Sat. 1. 15S,
viii. 235 ; Tert. adv. Nat. I. 18; Ad Mart. 5, &c.
2 See Cave, Prim. Christianity, 11. ch. vi. vii.
3 The unguis were "a kind of iron pincers, made with sharp
teeth, with which the flesh was by piecemeal pulled and torn off their
backs." Cave, Prim. Christianity, II. 7. One was found in the
Vatican cemetery. Rom. Subter. n. 4, p. 149. Prudentius calls them
"bisulca?." Hepl creep. I. 44. See other passages in Forcellini,
s. v. * Ep. ad Smyrn. 4. The reader will be reminded of the re
markable dypacpov Sbypa attributed to our Lord b iyyis pov iyyis
tov irvpbs. Dr Newman has finely translated another passage of
Ignatius in his Grammar of Assent, 472.

106 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
to our prison1." " Call us," said the fervent Tertullian,
"call us Sarmenticii and Semaxii, names derived from the
wood wherewith we are burned, and the stakes to which
we are bound ; this is the garment of our victory, our
embroidered robe, our triumphal chariot2." Such was
their "tremendous spirit;" and when the very execu
tioners were weary, when vast holocausts had been
offered to the expiring divinities, then finding, as has
been finely said, that she had to deal with " a host of
Scaevolas," ' the proudest of earthly powers arrayed in
r the plenitude of material resources humbled herself be
fore a power founded on a mere sense of the unseen3.'
Yes, it was of God, and they could not overthrow it4:
1 Ada SS. Perpdum et Felicitatis (which are referred to by Tert
De Anima, 55.). For an account of their martyrdom, see Alban
Butler, Lives of the Saints, March 7. The reader will be reminded
of "magis damnati quam absoluti gaudemus," Tert. Ad Scap. 1.
2 "Licet nunc sarmenticios et semaxios appelletis, quia ad
stipitem dimidii axis revincti sarmentorum ambitu exurimur. Hie
est habitus victorias nostrse, hsec palmata vestis, tali curru trium-
phamus," Tert. Apolog. § so. And again " Si denotatur gloriatur;
si accusatur non defendit ; interrogatus vel ultro confitetur ; damna-
tus gratias agit," Id. § 1. In fact the "martyrii praarogativa "
is one of his favourite subjects, Adv. Valent. 4 ; De Resur. Carnis,
43; Scorpiace, 12, and passim. "The angels of martyrdom and
victory are brothers," says Mazzini (Works, VI. 746), " both extend
their protecting wings over the cradle of future life."
3 Newman, Grammar of Assent, 472. See the grand conclu
sion of Mr Browning's Instans Tyrannus.
4 Christianity was never stronger than when Diocletian and
Galerius symbolised it on their medals as a strangled hydra with the
haughty inscription, Deldd Christiand religione. Two such inscrip
tions have been found at Clunia, in Spain, on one of which are the
words "Nomine Christianorum deleto qui rempublicam cvei-tebant."

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 07
the catacomb triumphed over the Grecian temple ; the
cross of shame over the wine-cup and the Salian ban
quet, the song of the siren and the wreath of rose.
These obscure sectaries, — barbarians, orientals, Jews as
they were, — fought against the indignant world and won.
" Not by power, nor by might, but by my Spirit, saith
the Lord of Hosts;'' by heroic endurance, by stainless
innocence, by burning zeal, by inviolable truthfulness,
by boundless love'. The world's seductive ideals and
intoxicating joys, the world's enchanting mythologies and
dissolute religions — young Dionysus,
"As he burst upon the East
A jocund and a welcome conqueror,
And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea
She rose, and floated in her pearly shell
A laughing girl — "
all fled before a cross of wood! Yes, my brethren, be
cause that cross was held by the bleeding hands of the
world's true King, who perfected the strength of his
Gruter, Inscript. p. 210 ; Lardner, Credibility, VII. 548. It is usual,
with Augustine, to count ten persecutions (De Civ. Dei, XVII. 52 ;
Sulpic. Sev. Hist. 11. 33), but only eight can really be made out;
viz. those of Nero (A.D. 64), Trajan (no), Marcus Aurelius (177),
Sept. Severus (194), Maximin (238), Decius (249), Valerian (257),
Diocletian (303). De Pressense', Hist, des Trois Prem. Slides, I.
297. The firmness of the Christians under torture both amazed
and disgusted the Stoics. The jealousy with which they viewed it
finds its echo in Lucian's Peregrinus, and the prj Kara tyCX-riv irapd-
Taiiv cos ol Xpicrriavoi, which is the only notice taken of them by
Marcus Aurelius, XI. 3.
1 This subject has been magnificently developed by De Lamen-
nais, Ess. sur V Indifference. "For 300 years spirit struggled
against the brutality of sense, the conscience against despotism,

io8 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
followers in weakness ; and, having been lifted up, drew
all men unto him.
III. But worse trials remained. It was a Divine
Providence which ordained that, not till after three cen
turies of unaided struggle, victorious not because of
princes, but in spite of them,- — when Diocletian had
retired smitten with a vague disease, and Galerius, eaten
of worms, had revoked his cruel edicts1, and Maximin,
terrified by famine and pestilence had restored their
plundered goods, and Licinius and Maxentius had
perished miserably in prison or in battle, — that the terri
fied world flung itself at the feet of the oppressed, and
Christianity mounted the imperial throne. It did not
succeed because Constantine became a Christian, but
Constantine became a Christian because it had suc
ceeded2. Long before the battles of Adrianople or the
Milvian bridge, Christianity had carried the day. " We
are but of yesterday," said Tertullian, "and we have filled
all that belongs to you — the cities, the fortresses, the
free towns, the very camps, the palace, the senate, the
the soul against the body, virtue against all the vices... Every
where Christians fell, and everywhere they triumphed." Napoleon,
Table Talk, p. 18. "Athenes et Rome l'adopterent, les barbares
tombferent \ ses pieds ; et aujourf'hui encore le rationalisme n'ose
le regiJrder un peu fixement qu'a- genoux devant lui." Oui qu'il ait
did sa fortune a 6t6 plus ftonnante encore que lui-m&ne." Renan,
Et. d'Hist. Rel. 198.
1 Lactant. De Mort. Persec. xxxiv.
2 See some excellent remarks of De Pressense", Hist, des Trois
Prem. Siecles, u. 524. " II fallait que la religion nouvelle fut bien
d^cidement alors le soleil levant, pour qu'un homme comme Con
stants 3*inclinat devant elle." Cf. 1. 296.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 109
forum; we leave to you the temples only1." Little,
indeed, did Christianity owe to that trimming'Emperor
and unbaptized catechumen,— that strange Christian in
deed ! — who placed his own bust on the statues of Apollo,
who thought the nails of the true cross a fitting ornament
for the bridle of his charger, and on whose extraordi
nary figure the robes so besmeared with gold and crusted
with jewels, could not conceal the Neronian stains of a
son's and a consort's blood". But it was in this the
supreme hour of her external triumph that the Church
was attacked in a new form, by the growth of heresies
which threatened more effectually than any persecution
to sap her very existence. The rival religion of Mani
1 "Hesterni sumus et vestra omnia implevimus, urbes, insulas,
castella, municipia, conciliabula, castra ipsa, tribus, decurias, pala-
tium, senatum ipsum; sola vobis reliquimus templa." Tert. Apol.
37. " Tanta multitudo, pars psene major civitatis." Id. Ad Scapu-
lam, 5.
2 " De Maistre a fait tres bien sentir que dans la celfebre transla
tion & Bysance, Constantin ne fuyait pas moins moralement devant
l'Eglise que politiquement devant les Barbares." Comte, Phil. 1.
Pos. v. 363. Constantine made the very futile attempt to serve two
masters. In the same year he published two decrees, of which one
commanded the observance of Sunday, and the other directed the
consultation of aruspices. Troplong, De I'influence du Christianisme
sur le Droit Civil, p. 7. In judging of Constantine, it is impossible
not to believe that Zosimus and Julian were nearer the truth than
Eusebius. Never perhaps was there a more bitter satire than that
written on Constantine ItrairbcrToXos (surely the strangest saint even
in the Greek calendar !) by his prime minister Ablavius : —
" Saturni aurea ssecla quis requirat
Sunt hsec gemmea sed Neroniana."
gidon. Apollinar. v. 8. See Gibbon, 11. 68 (ed. Milman).

no THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
with its Zoroastrian doctrines, the long succession of
Gnostics' with their notions from the Jewish Cabbala and
oriental fancy, could hardly be said to disturb her inward
peace. The fierce schism of the Donatists, stained as
it was with the intolerant fury of the circumcelliones, had
been mainly confined to a single province. But it is
now that we hear for the first time that fatal name of
Arianism, which for centuries kindled the most un
quenchable hatred in the Church's bosom. The omi
nous discussions of Patripassians and Sabellians had
already prepared the way for the wider heresy of the
Alexandrian presbyter. There is no more humiliating
period in Christian History. Even an orthodox Chris
tian historian, Socrates1, compares these frenzied contro
versies about the Homoousion to a night battle, in which
the combatants could neither see each other nor under
stand. Yet, even in this dark period, we may admire
the venerable charity of Hosius of Cordova, the splendid
faithfulness of Athanasius the Great Arianism might
infect the court2, and invade the camp, but it was never
1 'SvKTopo.xlas St oiStv direTxe to. yiyvbpeva, ovre yap dXXijXous
icpaivovTo voovvTes dtp' tov dXX-ijXovs fiXacrtp-qpeiv i-weXdpfiavov. So
crates, t. 23 (quoted by Dean Milman, Hist, of Christianity, 11.
369). The most significant comment on this fact is the remark of
St Jerome, "vel certe antequam in Alexandria quasi Demonium
meridianum Arras nasceretur, innocenter qucedam et minus caute
locuti sunt, et quae non possint perversorum hominum calumnias
declinare." Apol. -2, contr. Ruff. See DailliS, On the Right Use of
the Fathers, ch. V.
•2 The partiality of kings for Arianism rose from their instinctive
sense that it necessarily involved the diminution of sacerdotal au
thority, and destroyed the independence of the spiritual from the

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. Ill

true, ¦ except in semblance, that Athanasius was alone
against the world. There were thousands of knees
that had not bowed to Baal, and mouths that had not
kissed him. The great heart of the Christian multitude
was sound1. Amid the unintelligible precision of theo
logical technicalities, which professed to define the
indefinable, their instinct told them that the various
heresiarchs were taking away their Lord. And mean
while the defeat of Arianism shews that the" Divinity
of Christ was no new dogma which had crept unchal
lenged into the Christian faith; but that, although de
nied by men of powerful intellects in the highest places,
it was yet by the Catholic Church deliberately accepted,
solemnly affirmed. At four great councils, against
four great heresies, the Church promulgated her four
great formulas on the existence of her Lord — aAij0<3s,
reXetas, d.Siaipertu's, davyxvTti>s — truly, perfectly, indivisibly,
distinctly — truly God, perfectly man, indivisibly God and
man, distinctly God and man2.
IV. Then arose a fresh danger from without. It
might well have been thought that in the wild storm of
northern barbarian invasion the Church must perish.
temporal power; see Comte, Pol. Pos. v. 383. "Les historiens
Catholiques ont justement not£ que toutes les h&dsies du quelque
importance, se trouvaient habituellement acompagnees de graves
aberrations morales ou politiques." Id. 387.
1 Newman, Grammar of Assent, 479.
2 Svo tpvtriKt\s BeXTjcreis 171-ex BeXripara iv Xpicrnp Kai Svb tpvcrwds
ivepyelas dSiaipiras, aTpiwrcas, dpipicrTois, dcrvyxvTUS...KTipvTTopev.
Act. Cone. Const, (in Dorner, Entwikelungsgesch. der Lehre von der
Person Christ, p. 103, ed. 1839). Every one will remember the
beautiful passage of Hooker, Eccles. Polit. Bk. v. liv. 10.

112 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
But it was not so written in the book of God's Provi
dence. Those hero-hearts, refined by a true faith, were
the necessary basis for modern civilization1. The
Church's attitude toward them is best symbolized by
those majestic scenes in which the violence of Attila
the Hun was overawed by Leo III. at Ponte Molino,
and of Genseric the Vandal at the gates of Rome2.
Already they had heard the name of Christ; already
courageous missionaries had penetrated their savage
forests and traversed their gloomy hills; and thus the
fury of their onset was softened by the recognition of
virtues more elevated than courage, and blessings more
to be desired than strength. And thus Christianity was
not only saved, but became herself the bulwark of all
that was valuable in the ancient civilizations. When
the degenerate Romans had melted down the statue of
Virtus3 to pay their ransom to Alaric, her bishops earned
the title of Defensores Civitatis*. She saved the van-
1 Comte, Phil. Pos. v. 401.
2 "Awed by his majesty the savage who came to plunder and
slay abandoned his purpose. . . ; and Totila himself listened patiently
to the rebukes and predictions of Benedict." Cox, Lot. and Tent.
Christianity, p. 137. "The progress of Christianity has been
marked by two glorious and decisive victories over the learned and
luxurious civilization of the Roman Empire, and over the warlike
barbarians of Scythia and Germany, who subverted the Empire,
and embraced the religion of the Romans." Gibbon, m. 358 sqq.
(ed. Milman).
3 Zosimus, Hist. v. 38. This is one of those ironical and typical
accidents (?) of which history is, to every observant eye, so full.
4 e.g. at Carthage. " It was they," said Mr Mill (and I pur
posely quote testimonies that will be unsuspected of any bias),
" who treated with the invaders in the name of the natives; it was

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 113
quished from extirpation, the victors from decay. Bar
barians who had seen such types of noble excellence
as an Ulphilas or a Severinus, or in later times a Boni
face or an Olaf, saw in the priesthood an institution for
which they felt a genuine reverence ; and this veneration
was the means of fusing all that was valuable in two
violently conflicting elements into one splendid, perma
nent, and progressive society. The churches of Chris
tian Rome, built out of the marble of heathen temples,
which had been levelled by barbarian hands, are at
once a history and a symbol of the work which the
Church did for the world1."
V. One more external danger, and one alone re
mained — the sudden and overwhelming growth of Mo-
their adhesion which guaranteed the general obedience ; and after
the conversion of the conquerors, it was to their sacred character
that the conquered were indebted for whatever mitigation they
experienced of the fury of conquest." Dissertations, II. 243. "In
the face of the brute force of the corrupt and tottering Empire,"
says Mazzini, "whose frontiers echoed to the threatening footsteps
of the barbarians, those Bishops raised the banner of a moral idea,
of a spiritual power, destined to win over the barbarians to its rule."
Fortnightly Rev., June, 1870. See too Comte, Phil. Pos. vi. ch. 9,
which is full of just and noble thoughts.
1 Ozanam, Hist, of Civilisation in the Fifth Century (Eng. Tr.),
1. p. 14, also Vol. n. chap, vi., in which he shews how much the
world is indebted to the happy inspiration — miscalled optimism by
those who knew it not — which enabled the Church to abstain from
declaring herself menacingly and absolutely against the barbarians,
and "enables her to regard those difficult times with a firm and
calm glance," and distinguish "the real property of the past amidst
the trembling destinies of the future." II. p. 170 seqq. "Two
nations owed to Gregory the Great their faith, and with it thdr.
civilization." Cox, Lat. and Teut. Christianity, -o. 140.
F. H. I. 8

"4 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
hammedanism. On religious grounds, indeed, the Church
of Christ had nothing — and less than nothing — to fear.
Strong only as a military theocracy, Islam as a creed
was a mixture of fatal apathy with sensual hopes, and
did but repeat the same mechanical formula? with lips of
death1. Checked in Europe by a long line of Christian
heroes from Charles Martel to John Hunniades, and
from Hunniades to Sobieski, its aggressive power was
broken. It now acts only as a gradual decay in every
nation over which it dominates. The traveller in Pales
tine may be shocked to see even the fair hill of Nazareth
surmounted by the white-domed wely of an obscure Mo
hammedan saint2; but he will be reassured as he notices
that in every town and village where Christians are there
is activity and vigour, while all the places which are
purely Islamite look as though they had been smitten,
as with the palsy, by some withering and irreparable
curse. VI. From this time forward Christianity had no
external enemy to fear. From the 5th to the 13th cen
tury, the Church was engaged in elaborating the most
1 Mohammedanism, when considered as following Christianity,
is a mere anachronism and retrogression; besides which it con
tained absolutely nothing original. Mohammed had, in his youth,
lived much with Jews ; the very name Koran is borrowed from the
Biblical title mikra, ' reading, ' and it is very largely indebted both to
the Pentateuch and the Talmud. See Salvador, Jesus Christ et sa
Doctrine, I. 288 ; Herzog, Realencyd. xviii. 815. "We think Islam
neither more nor less than Judaism adapted to Arabia, plus the
apostleship of Jesus and Mahomet." Dr Deutsch, Art. Islam, in
Quarterly Review, Vol. CXXVII. No. 2=4.
2 Neby Ismail.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. I IS
splendid organization which the world has ever seen.
Starting with the separation of the spiritual from the
temporal power, and the mutual independence of each
in its own sphere, Catholicism worked hand in hand
with feudalism for the amelioration of mankind. Under
the influence of feudalism slavery became serfdom, and
aggressive was modified into defensive war. Under the
influence of Catholicism the monasteries preserved learn
ing, and maintained the sense of the unity of Christen
dom. Under the combined influence of both, grew up
the lovely ideal of chivalry, moulding generous instincts
into gallant institutions, — making the body vigorous and
the soul pure, — and wedding the Christian virtues of
humility and tenderness to the natural graces of courtesy
and strength. During this period the Church was the
one mighty witness for light in an age of darkness, for
order in an age of lawlessness, for personal holiness in
an epoch of licentious rage. Amid the despotism of
kings and the turbulence of aristocracies, it was an ines
timable blessing that there should be a power which, by
the unarmed majesty of simple goodness, made the
haughtiest and the boldest respect the interests of jus
tice, and tremble at the thought of temperance, right
eousness, and the judgment to come.
i. But in the last three of these nine centuries, when
the Church had achieved her destiny, the germs of new
peril were insidiously developed. Faith and intellect
began to be sundered, and violence was used for the
repression of independent thought. The relations be
tween the spiritual and temporal authorities were dis-
8—2

Il6 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
turbed. Kings warred to the death with popes. Popes
struggled to put their feet upon the necks of kings. The
' Avignonese captivity, followed as it was by the great
schism of the papacy, shook to the ground the fabric so
toilfully erected. Princes and nations successfully re
sisted a spiritual power which, by becoming ambitious,
had become corrupt. Nations outgrew their spiritual
nonage. The marks of that blow upon the cheek which
William de Nogaret inflicted on Boniface the VHIth
were ineffaceable, and they typified the final rebellion of
States against the political dominance of Churches, — the
final liberation of thought and science from the shackles
of ecclesiastical dogma, — the final victory of the Civil
over the Canon law.
ii. Then came the revival of learning, and that
epoch which we call the Renaissance. Never, perhaps,
was the Faith of Christ in more terrible danger than in
the 15th century. It was a state of society remarkably
glittering and surpassingly corrupt — radiant with outward
splendour, rotten with internal decay. Christendom had
practically ceased to be Christian. Priests, turned athe
ists, made an open scoff of the religion they professed ;
scholars filled their writings with blasphemy and foul
ness1; a semi-heathen classicalism degraded even the
1 To students of history the mere names of Delia Casa, Folengo,
Bandello, Filelfo, Bibbiena, Bembo, Pomponatus and Poggio are
enough. Some of these men abused each other through folio pages
of a scurrility wholly untranslateable — "qua? etiam prostituti ut
meretricarii verentur verbis proferre." The disgusting Facetia of
Poggio passed through twenty editions between 1470 and 1500.
See K. v. Raumer, Gesch. d. Padagogik, pp. 37 — 65, Burckhardt,

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 117

most sacred phrases into a sickening travesty of Pagan
idioms1; the tenth Lateran Council found it necessary
to repromulgate the doctrine of immortality2; and a
Die Kultur d. Renaissance in Italien, ] 860. He shews that, as usual,
corruption went hand in hand with the grossest superstition. "II
y avait a- cette epoque une peroersite raisonnie et scientifique, une
magnifique ostentation de sc&eratesse ; disons tout d'un mot, le
pretre ath^e se croyait roi du monde." Michelet, Mem. de Luther,
I. 13. For other quotations, see Luthardt, Apolog. Vortrdge, 244
(6te Aufl.). Aretino, an atheist, a libeller, a coward, a man of
disgraceful immorality, and yet the friend of Titian, and the terror
of Kings and Popes who flattered him, is the consummation of all
that is worst in the epoch :
" Chi giace 1'Arefin poeta tosco,
Che dice mal d'egnun fuor che di dio,
Scusandosi col dire, 'Non lo conosco.'"
The pride, corruption, worldliness, hollowness, and greed of
this age are often unveiled in the writings of Mr Ruskin, and are .
wonderfully pictured in Mr Browning's poem, " The Bishop or
ders his tomb in St Praxed."
1 Cardinal Bembo — he of the forty portfolios, through which he
passed every sentence till it had attained the requisite amount of
polish — talks of the Holy Spirit as "aura Zephyri Celestis" (Epp.
Leonis nomine Scripts, III. 21); the Blessed Virgin as Dea Ipsa,
(Id. viii. 17.) ; saints as relati inter divosj Christ as Minerva
sprung from the head of Jupiter, and so on. Pulci writes in his
Morgante : "O giusto, O sante, O eterno Monarca,
O Sommo giove per noi crocifisso 1"
Michelet, MSm. de Luther, 1. 1 7, quotes many other instances. See
too Bunsen, Gott in d. Geschichte, v. 9. He quotes the remarkable
testimony of Petrarch's Sounds, cvi. evil.
* In 15 13 Bembo thought all the worse of Melancthon because
he believed in the immortality of the soul. Leo X. allowed the
question to be discussed in his presence, and openly protected
Pomponatius, whose work, De immortalitate Anima, seemed ex-

118 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
Pope jested with his secretary on the profitableness to
them of the fable of Christ'. All seemed to be lost and
dead, when the voice of Luther's indignation shook the
world. The strength of the Reformers lay not only in
their intrinsic grasp of the truths which they set forth,
but also in the corruption, the avarice, the infidelity
which they exposed. The greed of Clement V., the
haughtiness of Boniface VIII., the frantic violence of
Urban VI., the unutterable degradation of John XXIII.,
the glittering insincerity of Leo X., — these were what
added the roll of vindictive thunder to Luther's words2.
The heroic devotion of Ignatius Loyola came an age
too late. The Romish hierarchy fell, but Christian truth
was saved. Sacerdotalism was ruined for ever; but the
paramount authority of Scripture, the indefeasible right
of individual judgment, the duty and the dignity of pro
gress, the ultimate sovereignty of the race over the in-
pressly designed to make the doctrines of Christianity ridiculous.
Roscoe, Leo X. II. 248 (ed. Bohn), Bayle, Did., Art. Leo X.
"Politianus totam sacram lectionem aspernabatur.'' Lud. Vives.
1 See Roscoe, Leo X. 11. pp. 388, 1488. Roscoe inclines to
disbelieve the story, but as Raumer says (Gesch. des Pddagogii, p.
59 sql), there is no internal evidence of its improbability. In
Milman's Latin Christianity the reader may see what kind of things
not only John XXIII., but even such Popes as Boniface VIII. and
Urban VI. are sworn to have said about Christianity.
2 Such names as Alexander VI., Sixtus IV., Innocent VIII.,
Julius II., &c, might well be added to the r61e. " In the 15th and
j 6th centuries," says Mr Lecky, "the intellectual influences which
had long been corroding the pillars of the Church had done their
work, and a fearful moral retrogression, aggravated by the newly-
acquired ecclesiastical wealth, accompanied the intellectual ad
vance." Hist, of Rationalism, I. 61.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 19
dividual, the national independence from all centralized
spiritual authority, were established on bases which, so
long as the world lasts, can never be removed1. The
hollow majesty of an artificial unity was replaced by the
vigour, freshness, and intensity of an individual faith.
But, once more, the pendulum oscillated too far, and
individualism brought its own perils. Carrying to an
extreme this revolt against authority, and license of
personal judgment during the 17th century, Hobbes
in England, Spinoza in Holland, Bayle in France2 in-
'augurated the movement, which, in the 18th century,
produced that second crisis of infidelity in which it
seemed as though the Church must be lost for ever.
And what was the issue ? How did the world prosper
without religion? What need to dwell on that age-
of " the trifling head, and the corrupted heart "? When,
in the chambers of St Louis, a worse than Sardanapalus
suffered adulteresses to toy with the crown of France ;
when a worse than Messalina befouled with lust and
assassination the throne of Russia3; when in Saxony an
1 " Of what avail are the pigmy hands stretched forth to arrest
the progress of the human race? What can they accomplish?"
Lamennais. 2 Roman Catholic writers constantly assert that Scepticism was
the offspring of Protestantism. But was Voltaire a Protestant? or
Bayle? or the Encyclopaedists? or Comte? or Renan? or Littrg,
Ste Beuve, and so many of the French litterateurs? or again the
French school of very advanced materialists ?
* Catherine II.: " That foul woman of the north
The lustful murderess of her wedded lord."
Coleridge, Rel. Musings.

I zo THE .VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
Augustus the Strong well-nigh equalled the infamies of
a Commodus ', and in Prussia a Frederic II. made
his court the propaganda of anti-Christian thought, and
in England — alas ! even in England— an English arch
bishop complimented an English queen on her placid
indifference to her husband's sins2; in a word, when
effeminacy and blasphemy were the all-but-universal
concomitants of an all-but-universal disbelief3; in that pic
ture we see what the 18th century was, what the 15th
had been, and — quod Deus omen avertat — what the 19th
may become 4. If literature be a fair test of a nation's"
1 A sketch of this disgraceful person may be found in Carlyle's
Frederic the Great.
2 Blackbourne, Archbishop of York, told Queen Caroline that
he had been talking to her minister Walpole about the new mistress,
" and was glad to find that Her Majesty was such a sensible woman
as to like her husband should divert himself." Cave, in the Dedica
tion of his Primitive Christianity, says, " I beheld religion gene
rally laid waste, and Christianity ready to draw its last breath, stifled
and oppressed with the vice and impietie of a debauched and pro
fligate age."
3 See a very clever book by L. F. Bungener, Voltaire et son
Tt.mps, Etudes sur le Dixhuit. Siecle. Lacordaire has described
this epoch in one of his finest bursts of eloquence (Conferences, 1846),
but chiefly with reference to France. For the state of England
the reader may consult Massey, Hist. II. 38 — 44, 49 — 89, with the
references, or Miss Wedgwood's Life of Wesley; for Germany,
Carlyle's Frederic the Great, passim.
4 Witness Mazzini's description of this age ( Works, VI. p. 69).
" Belief is extinct, there is only its pretence ; prayer is no more,
there is only a movement of the lips ; true love is no more, desire
has taken its place ; the holy warfare of ideas is abandoned, the
conflict is that of interests. The worship of great thoughts has
passed away. That which is raises the tattered banner of some

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 12 1
condition, is there any literature — not excepting a few vile
and recent specimens in England, America, and France —
much more revolting than the foul poetry of the cinque-
centisti, or the corrupt and enervating fiction that dates
from Diderot and Voltaire ? The very wit and genius
of these men is like a jewel of gold in a swine's snout,
or a diamond on the mouldering forehead of a skull.
To pass from them to those who held the faith which,
forsooth, they affected to despise, — to pass from a Poli-
tian and an Aretino to a Fenelon or a Melancthon,
from Voltaire to Bossuet, or from Tom Paine to
Leighton — is like stepping from a dark charnel-house
into a glorious cathedral, and from thence into the
pure air of the sunny or starlit sky. And was the
world better for thus throwing overboard its faith in
Christ? did the world succeed when it had tried to
get rid of Christianity? Aye, my brethren', if it be
success to boast of liberty and end in a reign of terror ;
of humanity and end in Robespierre; of virtue, and
to end in the worship of a harlot on the polluted altars
of Notre Dame '.
corpse-like traditions ; that which would be hoists only the standard
of physical wants, of material appetites." Materialism is the real
danger of this age ; but when " theology has been converted into
anthropology," which Feuerbach calls " the task of modern. times"
(Grundsdtze d. Philosophic d. Zukunft, II. 269), then, there being no
God left and no doctrine of Immortality, men "may continue illo-
gically to utter the holy words progress and duty, but they have
deprived the first of its basis, and the second of its source'' See much
more very powerfully argued to the same effect in Mr Mazzini's
paper, Fortnightly Rev., June, 1870, p. 727—730.
. a " Culture without religious consciousness is nothing but

122 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
VII. But when this plague of irreligion was foulest
throughout society, once more God took pity on an
apostate civilization, and purged the pestilence from
the reeking atmosphere with fire and storm. He awoke,
and his enemies were scattered. The great earthquake-
shock of the French Revolution shook the minds of
men from their frivolous and atheistic dreams. The
finger of God wrote His Mene and Tekel in flame
upon the guilty palace-walls, and, when His judgments
were abroad in the world, the children of men learnt
wisdom. Let us then take warning, for indeed in what we
have seen there is warning both for the world and
for the Church. For the world, because it shews what
diseases are virulent when men prefer the vapours of
the death-vault to the incense of the cathedral: for
the Church, because, even from this rough survey, it
is abundantly clear what makes her unassailable and
what makes her weak. Wealth, luxury, ambition, world-
liness, vice ; these have wounded her well-nigh to death,
civilized barbarism and disguised animalism." Bunsen, Gott in d.
Gesch. VI. 5. No one has stated more clearly than Gothe — whose
testimony will be unsuspected — that epochs of faith are epochs of
fruitfulness ; and that epochs of unbelief, however glittering, are
barren of all permanent good. See Wcst-ostliche Divan (Werke, iv.
264). It may be interesting to some readers to know that the
unfortunate "goddess of reason," who had been adored with
bacchanalian dances, as she sat in white robes, blue mantle and red
cap with a. pike in her hand on the altar of Notre Dame, died so
late as Sept. 30, 1863, ninety years old, idiotic, blind, and a beggar
in Alsace. See Christlieb, Moderne Zweifel am christlichen Glauben,
s. 1? 2.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 123
when she' has been invincible against the scimitar of
Mahommedan or the violence, of Hun. So far back as
the complaints of Clemens and the denunciations of
Chrysostom against the gorgeous iniquities of Alexandria
and Constantinople1, we hear the warning note of peril2,
and learn that " golden priests who use wooden chalices
are stronger than priests of wood with chalices of gold."
" You see that the day is past when the Church could
say, ' Silver and gold have I none,' " said Innocent IV.
complacently to St Thomas of Aquinum, as he pointed
to the masses of treasure which were being carried into
the Vatican. " Yes, holy father," was the saint's reply ;
"and the day is also past when she could say to the
paralytic, 'Take up thy bed and walk.'" But from
age to age God left not Himself without witness,
and from age to age the most mighty apology for
Christianity has been in the lives of her saints. These
have averted from guilty nations the rain of fire. Other
religions have withered into dishonoured decrepitude;
but she, with continuous rejuvenescence, has renewed
her strength like the eagle; has run and not been weary,
has walked and not been faint. If ever, through her
own faithlessness, she has fallen before her enemies, she
has risen Antaeus-like, with new vigour, "and shaken
her invincible locks." How many of her witnesses have,
in ages of corruption, exclaimed like the Maccabees
of old, "Let us die in our integrity." And never,
though she seemed to be dying, never in her worst
days has she lacked " the viaticum of good examples.''
1 Clem. Alex. Pa-dag. 11. Cap. iii. iv. §§ 35— 44-

124 THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY.
The tenth century was dark, yet it produced an Anselm
and a Bernard; the 15th was corrupted, yet in it lived
a Savonarola and a Huss ; martyrs, hermits, monks;
schoolmen, like St Bonaventura and St Thomas ; kings,
like Alfred and St Louis ; noble ladies, like St Theresa
and St Elizabeth of Hungary ; bishops, like St Edmund
of Canterbury and St Carlo Borromeo ; dissenters, like
Bunyan and Whitfield ; country pastors, like Oberlin and
Lavater ; modern statesmen, like Wilberforce and Mpnt-
alembert ; modern clergymen, like Robertson and La-
cordaire ; these are her best defenders. The " Nos soli
innocentes ' " has ever been her best appeal. The
sword of her power may be beaten down, but what
fiery dart shall pierce the silver shield of her innocence?
There, my brethren, there is an Apology in which, to
the grave, we may all take part; for that shield may
be upheld by the weakest and meanest 'arm. It may
not be ours to utter convincing arguments, but it may
be ours to live holy lives. It may not be ours to be
subtle and learned and logical, but it may be ours to
be noble and sweet and pure. Oh ! believe me, not
to the diadem of Constantine, not to the tiara of
Gregory, not to the gorgeousness of Leo, not to the
faggots of Torquemada, not to the sword of the Cru
saders, not to the logic of the schoolmen, does Chris-
1 oiK iv Xbyois dXX' iv tpyois rd rrjs -qpertpas 6eoo-efietas
irpdypara. Just. Mart. Partznes. ad Grcec. p. 33 ; Athenagoras,
Legatio, p.. 11; Tert. Apolog. 45. "Ah! quel argument contre
l'incre'dule que la vie du Chretien !... Non l'homme n'est pas ainsi
par lui-meme ; quelque chose de plus qu'humain rfegne ici !" Rous-
bcau.

THE VICTORIES OF CHRISTIANITY. 1 25
tianity owe one half-hour of her dominion over any
human heart; but to the majesty of her self-denials,
to the beauty of her holiness, to the meekness of her
saints, to the truth, the zeal, the faithfulness of those
who asked for nothing better than to follow His ex
ample who died as a malefactor to save the world.
And these lessons are open to us no less than to them.
"They ask me for secrets for attaining to perfection,"
said St Francis de Sales ; " for my part I know no other
secret than this : to love God with all one's heart, and
one's neighbour as oneself1." This was the great lesson
of Christianity, but Christianity was not only a doctrine
but a Life. Oh, let us strive to imitate that Life ; take
it with you, my young brethren, into the dust and
glare of the busy world ; amid the struggles and duties
of this place of learning now, amid the temptations of
great cities and eager lives hereafter, into the country
parsonage and the lawyer's chambers, the merchant's
counting-house and the soldier's tent; take but this
with you, and — pure, happy, noble, confident — you may
smile hereafter when men tell you that Christianity is
dead. Do this, and it shall never die ; it shall grow
younger with years ; it shall deepen in faith and wisdom,
in dominion and power, in purity and peace ; the dew
of its birth shall be as the womb of the morning 2, and
all they who believe and live thereby shall shine as
the brightness of the firmament, and as the stars for
ever and ever".
1 Maxims of St Francois de Sales.
2 Psalm ex. 3. 3 Dan. xii. 3.

IV.
CHRISTIANITY AND THE INDIVIDUAL.
'Ev aircpydp £t2;xev Kai KivovpeBa Kai itrpev. Acts xvii. 28.

i Thess. V. 23.
And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray
God your whole spirit, and soul, and body be preserved
blameless unto the coming of our Lord fesus Christ.
The reasonableness, the historic evidence, the victorious
progress of our faith — these are the considerations which
have occupied us hitherto. But the Witness of History
to Christ would have been imperfect did it not also
prove that this steady triumph was the greatest of all
blessings to the world. It remains therefore, so far as'
our brief limits will allow, to shew, by clear facts, the!
nature of that faith, its beneficence, its universality, its!
occupation of the entire realm of human intelligence, its
satisfaction of man's deepest yearnings, its adaptation to
his loftiest aims. To-day we shall be occupied mainly1
with its relations to the individual life; and we shall hope
to shew how infinitely Christ transcends all other teachers :
how infinitely Christianity transcends all other truths.
The Cross conquered, as we have seen; but what
did the doctrine of the Cross effect for those among
whom it prevailed? My brethren, we know alas! — well,
perhaps, could it be known no more — what was the con
dition of the civilized world when the true Light first
dawned upon its darkness. We know its haughty power,
F. h. l. 9

130 CHRISTIANITY
_ . - - _
its brilliant refinement, its unutterable shame. Arrayed
like the Apocalyptic harlot in gems and purple, its heart
was stony with cruelty and diseased with lust. Robed
like the blaspheming Herod in tissue of silver, within it
was eaten of worms1. Its literature — so elaborate, so
sad, so stained — is a true reflex of its state. Would we
see its emperors — priests, atheists, and gods2? — a Sue
tonius and a Seneca will point us to specimens of them
in a Tiberius at Capri or a Nero at Puteoli3. Would we
know its patricians? — we may read in the compressed
and haughty page of Tacitus the intensity of their terror
and the agony of their despair. Would we learn some-
1 Compare the beautiful lines of Mr Matthew Arnold:
" On that hard Pagan world disgust
And sated loathing fell;
Deep weariness and sated lust
Made human life a hell.
In his cool hall with haggard eyes
The Roman noble lay,
He drove abroad in furious guise
Along the Appian way.
He made a feast, drank fierce and fast,
And crowned his hair with flowers ;
No easier, nor no quicker passed
The impracticable hours."
See too the grand passage in Milton's Par. Regained, iv. 132 :
"That people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal," &c.
2 "Les Romains (Staient Claire's; cependant ces m&nes Ro-
jnains ne furent pas choques de voir reunir dans la personne de
C&ar, un dieu, un prtitre, et un athje." Gibbon, Miscell. Works,
iv. 61.
1. 3 Tac. Ann. iv. 6j> and passim.

AND - THE ¦ INDIVID UAL. V&
thing of its populace?-^. Petronius and an Apuleius
paint for us their sinful amusements, their gluttonous.
debaucheries, their sanguinary rage. Arid if we would
fain believe that these atrocities of the circus, and pol
lutions of the theatre, were but the thick scum on the".
surface of a guilty capital, — that too would be an idle-
hope. It was not only the hills of Rome, or the double
beach of Corinth, ox the sweet grove of Daphne by.
Orontes that witnessed the degrading worship of Tham-
muz or Laverna, of Cotytto or Cybele: no, the same
poison had infected each sweet rural village and seaside
town; and he who has seen amid the ruins of Pompeii
the fragments of the secret staircase, in the little Temple,
up which the priests of Isis crept to ventriloquise behind
the deceptive statue their lying oracles, — or those cham
bers of the Gynseceum glowing with the unclean imagery
of a prostituted art, — he who has realized how, amid
such surroundings, the curse of a Paganism which had
lost all reverence for man's chastity or woman's honour,
must have been imbreathed with the first lessons of con
sciousness even by innocent childhood1, — he may almost
wonder that it did not please God to rebaptise that
1 How could it be otherwise in a little town where there were
obscene symbols on well-nigh every wall, door, and vessel; .and.
where the odiously-degraded inscriptions betray what a German
writer well calls "dieser game grassliche htidnische Quark von-
Sodom und Gomorrha." The Museo Borbonico at Naples contains
the most. hideous visible proofs of the abject infamy of a dying
Paganism. The common Pompeian inscriptions shew an abysmal
degradation which could not tyve been exceeded even by the Cities,
of the Plain. „. . .. J
9 — 2

132 CHRISTIANITY
world in another flood, which should have submerged'
for ever the dead traces of its turpitude, — or at least to
calcine under the fiery lava the memorials of a degrada
tion which might have made the very marble blush. It
is an awful thing — this preservation of a witness against
themselves by those who have long mingled with the
common dust — this exhumation of forgotten iniquities
and unveiling of their most secret receptacles into the
cold revealing glare of day. But think not that it was
for no purpose that the Erinys of the dawn has been
thus suffered to avenge the crimes of night. No: God
willed that we should see by palpable proofs how amid
all its boasted wisdom, the heart of the heathen world
was darkened into foolishness1, and that the condition
which some would gloss over with the name of a healthy
animalism was in reality a sick and sickening putrescence.
But it is dangerous to gaze even for a moment down the
abysses into which the nature of man may fall; nor
ought we even for purposes of instruction* to forget the
true and manly lesson which a heathen has taught us
— Scelera ostendi oportet dum puniuntur ; abscondi fla-
1 ipaTau!)8i)crav Iv rois SiaXoyio-poTs avrwv Kai laKOTto-Bi) i] dtri-
veros abrwv icapSla. tpdtrKovres eXvai trotpol iptapdvBrjtrav. Rom. i.
21, 22.
2 " Many accounts there are in History scandalous... even unto
humanity, and -whose not only verities but relations honest men do
deprecate. We desire no record of suck enormities; in things of this
nature silence commendeth History." Sir Thos. Browne, Vulgar
Errors. I cannot forbear adding that I do not think Christian
teachers have been by any means sufficiently careful to keep this
fact in mind.

AND- THE INDIVIDUAL. '1 33
gitia1. For us, let it have been enough to glance with
a shudder, and to pass by not unwarned; let it be enough
to note how, in his Epistle to the Romans, the great
Apostle who was its contemporary seized, as it were,
that haughty, glittering, abominable civilization, and
with firm hand, in letters which are indelible, branded
upon its insolent and shameless brow the festering
stigma of his stern and terrible rebuke2.
Such then was the world into which — not to destroy
but to revivify, — not to annihilate but to ennoble, — the
Apostles of Christ passed forth to preach His doctrine.
1 Tac. Germ. 12. " We can but stand at the cavern's mouth and
cast a single ray of light into its dark depths. Were we to enter,
our lamp would be quenched by the foul things which would cluster
round it," Seekers after God, p. 38, where I have endeavoured to give
a slight sketch of the state of Roman society at this period. One
sentence from Seneca will be enough : " Omnia sceleribus et vitiis
plena sunt . . . certatur ingenti quodam nequitiae certamine . . . nee
furtiva jam scelera sunt; prseter oculos eunt. Adeoque in 'publi
cum missa nequitia est, et .in omnium pectoribus evaluit, ut inno-
centia non rara sed. nulla sit." De Ira, II. 8; cf. Juv. Sat. xm.
26 — 30 ; Marc. Aurel. Comment, passim.
2 Rom. i. 21 — 32. All that can be said on heathen morality
— (and far too much has been said on many phases of it, of which
it would have been better to say with Dante (Inferno, III. 51),
"Non ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa")—
is but a commentary on this awful paragraph. Notice the play of
words, almost untranslateable in English, in v. 28. " And as they
did not choose (or reprobated) to keep God in their knowledge, God
gave them over to a mind that could not choose (or reprobate) so
that they did things not convenient." T.he paronomasia turns on
the double meaning of SoKipdfa, and it implies, as a recent commen
tator has remarked, "a rdributive justice in kind, beginning even in
this life."

"134 •' ' " CHRISTIANITY

Silently, insensibly, but with certain transformation, like
the leaven in the meal, that doctrine made its way. We
have seen how the heathens emptied upon it the vials of
their fury and their scorn ; how Rabbi and Sophist, Pon-
tifex and Emperor joined hand in hand for its destruction;
and yet, long before Christians were known as anything
but a strange sect, who could stand in the fire without a
tremor, and face the Libyan tiger with a smile, — long
before they had won the shadow of a material victory, —
the truths which they taught had largely moulded -the
. opinions of their persecutors. We catch the echo of
them in a Seneca, we listen to their very accents in an
Aurelius. The vernal breeze of this new religion breathed
health and hope into a decrepit Paganism for many a
long year before the spring itself had dawned; the morn
ing was spread upon the mountains for two centuries
before its glory reached the plains.
It is not — :and to this point I would ask attention —
it is not that we claim a mere antecedence and origi
nality for the Separate precepts of Christianity. Their
victory, their beneficence, their unique superiority were
not due to this. Many of those precepts, viewed as
mere literary utterances, had been enounced in the world
before. No small portion even of the Lord's prayer
may be found, it is believed, in Hebrew writings1. To
us there is absolutely no point in the sneer of sceptics2
1 See Ecclus. xxviii. 1—9, &c ; Grotius, De Verit. Relig. Christ.
I. 10, &c, ad Matt. vi. 9.
2 To the foolish attempts to attribute these to plagiarism, and to
the curious combinations to which it has given rise, I have alluded
elsewhere. See Seekers after God, pp. 181, 182, 320. To the

AND- THE INDIVIDUAL. 13S
that the most distinctive rules of Christianity may be
paralleled from secular sources. On the contrary, we
have always rejoiced to know that God left not Himself
without witness, and that what St Paul so finely describes
as His richly-variegated wisdom, had long been visible in
part by that light which lighteth every man that is born
intp the world1. It is perfectly true that, if from east to
instances there given, may be added the attempt to insinuate that
Philo, in his old age, had seen some of the Apostles during his
visit to Rome and borrowed from them. The idleness of such
charges may be measured by the countercharge of Celsus, that
Christianity had plagiarized from the philosophers. Almost the
whole of the Vlth book of Origen against Celsus is devoted to a
refutation of this charge. Christian Wolff was actually expelled
from his Chair at Halle by the King of Prussia, and forbidden to
return "under penalty of death," for an eulogy on the ethical
teachings of Confucius! Hagenbach, Germ. Ration. (E. tr.), p. 35.
"I must consider it wrong and robbery in you," wrote Gothe
playfully to Lavater, "to pluck all the various feathers of the
beautiful birds under heaven and adorn your bird of Paradise exclu
sively with them." The great Greek fathers took a far nobler line
(see next note). On the other hand, we should be perfectly open to
receive evidence, where it actually exists,, of the direct action of
Christianity on philosophies and religions. It is, for instance, by
no means impossible that the legend of Krishna may have been in
part developed out of confused reminiscences of Gnostic writings.
The Gospel of the Infancy was very popular in the East. Lassen
admits a possibility of Christian influence on the Puranas. See
Wilson, Hindu Sects, and R. Williams, Christianity and Hinduism,
p. 295. For the possibility of such influence on Chinese Buddhism,
see Travels of Fah Hian (tr. Beal), lxxii., Ixxiii. Many of the
Jewish books, again, are now thought to belong to a very much
later date than was originally believed.
1 "Taceo de Philosophis quos...nonnullus etiam afflatus veri-
tatis adversus Deos erigit." Tert. Ad Nat. I. 10. "Encore que
les Philosophes soient les protecteurs de l'erreur," says Bossuet,

136 CHRISTIANITY

west we ransack the literature and the philosophy of the
habitable globe, we may here and there cull some me
morable aphorism resembling those which we too rever
ence in our heritage of moral truths; and, at epochs
separated from each other by thousands of years, it is
possible to catch now and then a glimpse of those pris
matic hues which may be combined into the pure white
ray of Christian doctrine. Not only in the writings of
the later Stoicism, when already through the despairing
twilight a luminous haze had been diffused1, — not only
"toutefois ils ont frappi & la parte de la virile. (Veritatis fores
pulsant, Tert.) S'ils ne sont pas entres dans son sanctuaire,
s'ils n'ont pas eu le bonheur de le voir et de l'adorer dans son
temple, ils se sont quelquefois prdsentes a- ses portiques, et lui ont
rendu de loin quelque homage." Panig. de Ste Catherine. On this
subject, however, the Latin Fathers are rhetorical, and confused, and
insincere ; e.g. we find Tertullian in other places positively coarse
in his attacks on the philosophers (Apol. 46), &c. ; on one page we
find Mimic. Felix contemptuously calling Socrates " Scurra At-
ticus," Oct. 38, while a little before he says : " Ut quivis arbitretur
aut nunc Christianos philosophos esse, aut philosophes fuisse jam
Christianos." Id. 20. On the other hand, while such writers as
Tatian and Athenagoras take the violent and unjustifiable line —
Tatian descending to such an abyss of absurdity as to say that
the Greek language itself is one great plagiarism (wcrirep 6 KoXoibs
ovk ISlois iiriKotrpoipevos irrepots !) — the great Alexandrian Fathers,
Justin Martyr, Origen and Clement, write in the noblest and most
charitable spirit, e.g. d ptv Kivoipevot, elp-iJKao-iv, Clem. Alex. Strom.
VI- 7i § 55- ol vdvres ri. qpirepa pipoipevoi Xiyovtrt, Just. Mart.
Apol. I. 51, II. 93. '0 Bebs ptv airois raCra Kol Sera KaXus XiXeKTai
itfiavipoitrev, Orig. c. Cels. VI. 9, VII. 28 — 30.
1 ttjs XpetTTiaviKTJs BeoXoyias iroXAa -rots ofcelois dvipt^av Ai-yois.
Theodor. de Cur. Grcsc. affect. II. We believe this to be in a
great extent true of the later Stoics, although in all probability they
were themselves wholly unconscious of the fact, and would have

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 137
in the open plagiarisms of the Koran spoiled so often in
the plagiarising, — but, even centuries before Christ, in the
Dialogues of Socrates, in the Republic of Plato, in the
Analects of Confucius, in the Laws of Manou, in the
Sutras of the Buddhists, in the Vedas of the Brahmins,
in the Zend Avesta of the Parsis, in the Pirke Avoth1 of
the Rabbis, there are unquestionably precepts which
might be combined into a very pure and noble code"
indignantly denied it. But we do not say this because we value
these truths " as the miser values his pearls and precious stones,
thinking their value lessened if pearls and precious stones of the
same kind are found in other parts of the world." Max Miiller,
Chips, I. That the Neoplatonists borrowed from Christianity is clear,
though they misunderstood its very essence. Some have believed
that Ammonius Saccas, the founder of Neoplatonism, was an apostate
Christian. 1 Specimens may be found in Otho, Lex. Rabb. pp. 39, 163,
410, sq.
s The two following passages will express the truest aspect of
this matter. Top Xpiarbv toO 6eov irptcrbTOKOv elvai iSiSdxBypev,
Kai irpoeprpiiaapev lis Abyov 6vra ov -irdv yivos dvBpib-ircov pireerx6
Kai ol peril Abyov fiuIicravTes Xpiernavol elai k&v dBeoi ivo-
pltsBr\aav, lis iv"EXXr\tri ptv Zwk/jotijs koI 'HpaKXeiTos Kai ol bpoioi
avrois. ..ol Si p.era Ao'you piiitravres xal fiiovvres Xpiesriavol Kai
tlipofioi Kai drdpaxoi VTrdpxovtriv. Just. Mart. Apol. I. 46. "H5i7 St
Ktd KaBoXixep Xbyep irdvra dvayKaia Kai XvtrtTeXi) Tip fttiji BeoBev
iJKeiv els ripas Xiyovres ovk dv dpdproipev, t\v Si tpiXocrotpiav Kai
/iSXXov "EXXijcriv dtov StaB-qKrjv oUelav avrois SeSoerBai viroflddpav
ovtrav ttjs Kara Xpicrrbv tpiXocrotptas. Clem. Alex. Strom. VI. 8, § 67
(and passim). See Jam. i. 1 7. The passages in which the heathen
writers approved the truths of Christian morality have often been
collected. See Ackermann, Das Christliche in Plato, Hamburg,
1835 ; Schneider, Christliche Klange aus dem Griech. und Rom.
Classik. 1865 ; Martha, Les Moralistes Remains ; Aubertin, Sitniqu:
et St Paul, &c.

138 - CHRISTIANITY

Yet what candid reasoner, even were he an unbeliever
in Christianity, could dream of comparing any one of
these sacred books, or the men who originated them, or
the systems in which they issued, with the Gospels, or
with Christianity, or with Christ? With every desire to
admit their services, with no temptation to depreciate
their worth, what is the calm and deliberate judgment
which History forces us to pronounce? Confucius was
a sage, yet he correctly described himself as " a trans
mitter, not a maker;" his example, in more than one
respect, was distinctly questionable; he reduced religion
to a reflexive ceremony of empty proprieties; he gave no
impulse to holiness; he had no sympathy with progress;
and to him, beyond all question, in the opinion of close
and candid witnesses, is due, in great measure, the
falsity, the senility, the atrophy, moral and intellectual^
of the vast race which chose him as their ideal1. The
Buddha Sakya Mouni, so far as we can disentangle his
real life from a mass of monstrous and often senseless
traditions2, is one of the noblest and purest figures in
History; yet there was a needless and uncleanly abject
ness in several of his precepts; his religion is a blank
and dreary atheism; his morality a narrow selfishness;
his heaven an extinction of sentient existence; his loftiest
social action a perverted bodily service3. Mohammed,
though we may smile at the ignorant bigotry which in
1 See Appendix B, Confucius.
2 Some have even questioned his real existence, but this seems
to be an excess of scepticism. See Wilson, Hindu Sects.
3 See Appendix C, Buddha. . . .

AND" ]THE INDIVIDUAL. 13d

the Middle Ages made his name synonymous with that
of Satan, yet not only by the authentic voice of tradition,
but also in his own book1, stands, self-condemned of im
moderate passions and wavering will, and the modified
Judaism which he attempted to revivify2 has proved to
be a fatal legacy to most of the nations who have adopt
ed it. And what shall we say of Socrates and Plato?
There have been many who have ventured to place
Socrates by the side of Christ;— and Socrates was great,
and noble, and wise, and his death is one of the most
moving scenes of ancient history; let us not breathe
one word against that holy and high-souled sage,- — but
the truth is dearer to us even than Socrates; and when
we think of Socrates conversing with Theodota3, or
feasting with Agathon4, — when we remember the min
gled leniency and coarseness with which he spoke of the
sins of Critias, — when we recall his cold and almost im
patient dismissal of his wife and children at his hour of
approaching death5, — and then, with bowed head, think
1 e.g. His conduct towards the wife of Zaid, Koran, xxxin.
36 (RodwelFs Koran, p. 567), and his Paradise with its flowing
winecups that cause no headache, and its Houris with large dark
eyes like pearls hidden in their shells. Koran, Sura lvi. 22 (Rod-
well, p. 61).
. 2 See Dr Deutsch on 'Islam,', in the Quarterly Review ; Lane's
Modern Egyptians; Palgrave's Arabia; and any modern book of
travels in countries under the Turkish rule bears out this assertion.
The success of Mohammedanism, such as it was, was due in no
small measure to the lower tone it took, — to its almost cynical spirit
of accommodation to the infirmities of nature. Imagine St Paul to
have written such paragraphs as those quoted in the last note ! '
3 Xen. Mem. II. 11. * Plato, Symposium, § 4.
6 Plato, Phted. § 9, dirayaythu ns Tabrrjv ofeaSe.

140 CHRISTIANITY
of Him who talked by the well-side with the woman of
Samaria, or stood alone by that guilty adulteress as she
sobbed upon the Temple floor, — or who, as He hung
upon the Cross between the thieves, chose out the ten-
derest-hearted of His disciples and in the midst of His
anguish said to His mother, " Woman, behold thy Son," —
then, indeed, if our spiritual sense be not utterly blunt
and dead, we may see how infinite is the gulf which
separates the teacher of Athens from the Son of God1.
And Plato — the " divinus ille Plato" of Arnobius — the
Plato of whom Clement said that he touched the very
gates of truth2 — the Plato whom Jerome carried with
him under his hermit mantle, and Augustine under his
bishop's3 robe — the Plato whom our own Coleridge
called " A plank from the wreck of Paradise, cast upon
the shores of idolatrous Greece" — we all know the
depth of his insight, the subtlety of his reasoning, the
splendour of his imagination, the magic of his style; and
1 It is needless to point out that in the Greek yivai there is none
of the bluutness of the English "woman;" it was an address per
fectly tender and courteous to the highest and best beloved. "Quels
prtijuges, quel aveuglement ne faut-il point avoir pour oser com
parer le fils de Sophronisque au fils de Marie ! Quelle distance
de l'un h, 1' autre!" Rousseau, Emile, II. no. See Rougemont,
Socrate et J4sus Christ. Neander, Wissenschaft Abhandl. (ed. Jacobi,
1851, p. 140, sqq.).
2 Ackermann, Das Christliche in Plato, 8.
3 Augustine goes so far as to say that he could have pardoned
the pagans if, instead of raising a temple to Cybele, they had reared
a shrine in which the books of Plato should be read. De Civ. Dd,
ad fin. Numenius asked ti ydp itrri Wkdrtov r\ Mwuotjs 'ArriKlty>v ;
Theodoret, De Cur. Grmc. affect. 11. p. 37 ; Sylb. Plato qui omnium
sapientissimus judicatur; Lactant. Div. Inst. I. £, 23.

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 141
yet, when we think how overwhelming would have been
the shock to our moral sense, how fatal the overthrow of
our distinctions between right and wrong, had he been
accepted as the world's teacher; — when we place the Phce-
drus or the Symposium with all their poetic eloquence
and all the subtly dangerous poison of their perfumed
but unwholesome air, beside the sweet, pure, simple
books of the humble fishermen of Galilee; — when we com
pare his ideal republic with its community of women, its
destruction of the family, its degradation of the multi
tude, its exposition of children, its tolerated, and worse
than tolerated, crimes1, with the Kingdom of Heaven as
ypreached*\>y Christ, — then must we not see in such a :
comparison, unless made by way of contrast, I will not
say a gross injustice, but I will say — for so it is — an
unwarrantable blasphemy against the simple truth? Aye,
my brethren, the most golden idol of Pagan excellence
stands but on feet of clay. There is flagrant intellectual
error in their very wisest; there is fearful moral aberra
tion in their very best. Over their graves, as in the sigh
of the wailing wind, we hear the words, " The world by
wisdom knew not God1." They were the foremost men
of all ages in brilliant Greece, in stately Rome, in imme
morial China, in imperial Persia, in free Arabia, in so
lemn Hindostan: the Buddha was a prince, wealthy, and
beautiful, and strong; and Confucius was a descendant
1 De Rep. V. 14, Charmides, x. Xen. Mem. I. 3. 14; vi. 14.
Athen. v. p. 187. Dollinger, The Gentile and the Jew (tr.
Oxenham), 1. 357, "• P- *38. sqq. Zeller, Philos. d. Griechen, II.
s,6g, and a chapter in Grote's Plato,
a 1 Cor. i. 21.

142 - Christianity
of nobles and a counsellor of kings-; and Plato, with his
haughty aristocratic genius, so towered over the greatest
of his time, that they could only reach to lay their gar
lands of admiration at his feet; — yet to compare any one
of these with Him who spent all but three years of His
humble life as the carpenter of Nazareth1, is to match a
dim and uncertain twilight with the sun at noon; and the
least in the kingdom of heaven — the least who obeys
and loves his Lord — the most unlettered, the most igno:
rant, the most obscure — not perhaps in man's judgment,
but in the judgment of the Angels and of God — the least
in the kingdom of heaven is greater than these.
And why? not only because there was in the pre
cepts of Christianity a reality, which, as precepts, they
had never possessed before, not only because they rang
more true, but also because they alone were active,
living, efficacious, self-renewing2. The very best sys-
1 oxrx ovrbs ierriv 6 riKTav; Mark vi. 3. That one word is
almost the only ray of light shed on the personal history of our
Lord's life, during its first 30 years.
2 An Ovid, no less than a St Paul, had felt the struggle between
an intellect which knew what was right and a life that practised what
was wrong; but Christianity alone revealed the secret which would
heal the moral impulses of a perverted will. It would be easy to
parallel Rom. vii. 14 — 2 4 from many pagan sources; but the next verse
(25) and the whole of Rom. viii. remain unique and unapproachable
by the loftiest exponents of heathen wisdom. See this argument
powerfully stated by Tertullian, Apolog. 46; Lactant. Div. Inst.
in. 26. Perhaps I may venture to quote one passage from a
chapter which I have elsewhere devoted to the subject. "The
morality of Paganism was, on i,ts own confession, insufficient. It
was tentative where Christianity is authoritative; it was dim and
partial where Christianity is bright and complete;, it was inadequate

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. ^43
tems of human philosophy were stricken with a fatal im
potence. Like the gathered blossoms stuck in the care
less garden of a child, they may look lovely for a time,
but because they have no root they wither away. End
ing mostly in high-sounding conversations among an
illuminated few, they were powerless amid the general
degradation either to awaken the conscience or to
guide the. life. Even when the truths of Christianity had
insensibly pervaded the moral atmosphere, and the
books and the lives which it inspired were in the
hands and before the eyes of men, the very best and
greatest of the heathen not only failed to surpass, but
failed even at an immeasurable distance to rival them.
Barely could they cast out the devil from their own
Souls1; they never aspired, in their hopelessness, to
exorcise it from the society which it tormented. There
is an eloquent wisdom and subtle charm in the writ
ings of the Neronian minister, the crippled slave, the
blameless Emperor; but in the Gospels and the Epistles
to rouse the sluggish carelessness of mankind, where Christianity came
with an Imperial and awakening power; it gives only a rule where
- Christianity supplies a principle ; and even where its teachings were
absolutely identical with those of Scripture, it failed to ratify them
with a sufficient sanction; it failed to, announce them with the same
powerful and contagious ardour; it failed to furnish an absolutely
faultless and vivid' example of their practice; it failed to inspire
them with an irresistible motive; it failed to support them with a,
powerful comfort under the difficulties which were sure to be
encountered in the aim after a consistent and holy life." Seekers-
after God, p. 319.
i "Nemo per se satis valet ut emergat, oportet manum aliquis-
porrigat, aliquis educat." Sen. Ep. 52.

144 CHRISTIANITY

we find no deep drawback, like the haughty apathy of
the one, the concentrated egotism of the second, the
unbroken sadness of the third1. And we to,o, in this
century, have seen the attempted outline of a new reli
gion. The Philosopher who founded it was a man of
singular goodness and varied erudition. The records of
every belief, the truths of every philosophy, the disco
veries of every science, the memorials of every life, the
moral treasury of every land and age were at his dis
posal. He sketched a system which has won for
him the adherence of eminent thinkers, and the love
of many who glory " in the wide thought and the vast
hope2." Some of those followers are known and hon
oured by many among us, and yet after careful study of
this religion it seems to me incontestible that its wisest
precepts are not original, and its most original are not
wise. Its motto, " Live for others," is a grand motto,
but is "altruism" a sweeter, or better word than charity3?
or, has the bare and naked formula, " Vivre pour autrui"
1 There was a deep tone of pride, sadness, and egotism through
out all the later systems of philosophy. Totaflebilis vita est, Sen.
De Const, ad Marc. x. 5. Cf. Herod. VII. 46. Mar. Aurel. Epicl.
But Minucius Felix says, "Christianus miser videri potest, in-
veniri non potest." Oct. 37. On this subject see Dean Merivale's
Conversion of the Empire, Lect. v.
2 See Appendix D, Comte.
3 Comte was a devoted admirer of the Imitatio Christi, which he
daily studied, and which he recommended all his followers to study,
substituting only Humanity for God ! He does not pretend that his
motto was original. "I sum up," he says, "all my wishes for
personal perfection in the admirable form by which the sublimest of
mystics was led to prepare, in his own manner, the moral mottj of
Positivism, "Amem te plus quam me, nee me nisi propter te."

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 145
a charm which has been lost from the old command
ment, " Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself"'}. And
by putting this forth, "not as the second Command
ment," but as "the first to which there is no second2,"
the religion of Positivism degrades it from a living
principle to an oratorical precept. For, dissevered from
belief in God, such a precept is inoperative ; dissociated
from faith and prayer, it is impossible. And what, in
fact, does Positivism offer us for the truths which it
would sweep ruthlessly away? For Immortality, the
impersonal absorption in a collective idea; for Prayer,
the hollow sham of an imaginary petition poured into
a non-existent ear3 : for the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit — oh cocas hominum mentes ! — a new Trinity
Catech. ofPos. Rel. One of the Comtist mottoes is, "Diis extindis, 1
Deoque, successit Humanitas." I
1 Precepts not wholly dissimilar may be found in heathen
writers, e.g., Hes. Opp. I. 284, 303, 312; and in Confucius Chung
Yung (Doctrine of the Mean, ch. XX. ) ; and still better in the
Analects, when Tze Kung asks if there be one word which may
serve as a rule of practice for all one's life, and is answered,
"Is not reciprocity (altruism) such a word ? What you do not want
done to yourself, do not do to others'' Anal. XV. 23 in Legge's
Confucius. In Anal. v. 1 1, he tells Tze that he has not attained
to this. So too, to return good for evil, or something like it, may
be found in the Laws of Manou (see Michelet, Bible de I'HumaniU,
p. 437). For Buddha's moral precepts, see Barth. St Hilaire,
Le Bouddha, pp. 92 — 119. Yet unquestionably Confucianism and
Buddhism are, in their social influence, gigantic failures ; and in these
cases, M. Renan says, " Success is a decisive criterion." Mr Mozley.
has forcibly pointed out that the heathen world failed not in know-
_; but in action. Bampt. Led. p. 171— 173.
2 Dr Bridges, Unity of Comic's Life and Doctrine, p. g.
3 "We adore her (Humanity). ..in order to serve her better by'
F. H. L. IO

146 CHRISTIANITY
consisting of Humanity, the World and Space1! And
oh, my brethren, is this all, which, after 3000 years of
disputation, the latest Philosophy can offer as its substi
tute for a religion which makes man at peace with the
world, at peace with his own conscience, at peace with
God ; which offers a Redeemer to the sinful, a Saviour
to the suffering, a Deliverer to the enslaved; which
inspires life with the present sense of Eternity, and the
future hope of Heaven ; which opens to guilt and peril
the vision of safety, to despair and suffering the gates of
hope2?
bettering ourselves ;" thus prayer is for the Positivist "a work of
art." Comte, Cat. of Pes. Rd. p. 106 sqq.
1 "Thus we complete the Trinity of our Religion — Humanity,
the World, and Space." Dr Congreve, The New Religion in its
attitude to the Old, p. 18. The same idea is repeated in the follow
ing passage : "We recal with gratitude the services which have
hitherto been only unconsciously received from her coeval institution,
Space — services of which we now consciously avail ourselves....
We commemorate the services of our common mother the Earth,
the planet on which we dwell. ...We commemorate the services of
Humanity, the great organism of which we are inseparable parts."
Id. The Propagation of the New Religion. One of the mottoes of
Positivism is, Reorganiser sans Dieu ni roi. "Vous pretendezque
tout va mal parceque Dieu n'est pas assez parmi nous, tandisque
nous affirmons que tout irait bien mieux s'il n'y e'tait pas du tout."
De S6m6rie, Posit, et Catholiques, p. 5.
2 See Guizot, Meditations sur I' Essence de la Rd. Chretienne,
pp. 65 — 67, one of the most remarkable passages in a book well
worth studying. Speaking of Confucius, Buddha, &c, he says " Ont
ils reellement change l'e'tat moral et social des peuples? Ont ils
imprim^ k l'humanite' un grand progrfes et ouvert devant elle des
horizons qu'avant eux elle ne courait pas? Nullement...'Ea dehors
du christianisme il y a eu de grands spectacles d'action et de force, de
brillants phenornfenes de g^nie et de vertu, de gc5n6reux essais de

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 1 47
Since then such is the superiority of Christianity, since
it comes before us not as a mere collection of dogma's,
or series of aphorisms, but as a living faith able to bridge
over the broad gulf between knowledge and action, be
tween our ideal and our life ; we hardly care to waste
time in proving its originality. It is indeed incontrover-
tibly original, in that it united what others had isolated ;
it concentrated what others had scattered; it harmonised
what others had opposed ; and, more than this, were it
our object to maintain the claim, its mere vocabulary
establishes its entire and noble independence. Where
were the Greek or Latin words for "charity" till Chrisr
tianity created them, and stamped them with her own
divine image, and made them current amid the coins of a
debased mintage, like pure andgsolid gold ? "Epws, indeed,
and Amor were words which Greek and Latin did possess,
but they so reeked with heathen associations that Chris
tianity could not rescue them from the mire in which they
lay; but dyainj1 and "caritas," with all the mighty revo
lution which they have effected, and all the angelic utter
ances which they have inspired, are the glory of Christianity

rdforme, de savants systfemes philosophiques, et de beaux poemes
mythologiques ; point de vraie, profonde, et f&onde regeneration
de l'humanite et de la socie'te'."
1 " 'Ayairri tota Christianorum est," Ipus, epav, epaerr^s, unknown
to the N. T. See Archbp. Trench (N. T. Synonyms, First series,
s. v.) ; and, on the other hand, if the reader will look out dyawij in
Liddell and Scott's Lexicon, he will merely see 'Ayairij 'brotherly
love,' Eccl.; shewing, that for classical purposes, the word had no
existence. The Latin word caritas is indeed perfectly classical, but is
connected with a wholly different range of conceptions from 'charity.'
10 — 2

148 CHRISTIANITY
alone. Or take Humilitas1 ; to the Christian it was one
of the sweetest and saintliest of virtues, to the heathen
one of the most pusillanimous of faults. Or again, take
Humanitas ; previous to the spread of Christianity it
means chiefly human nature, or refined culture2; it is
Christianity alone which breathed into it all that it con
notes, and made it mean love to the whole brotherhood
of man, united to the Universe by natural laws, united
to God by the common mysteries of Creation and Re
demption ; united to all the dead by the continuity, to
all the living by the solidarity of life. We do not con
cede, then, that Christianity is unoriginal even as a
moral system3; and we besides maintain that no faith has
ever been able, like it, to sway the affections and hearts
of men. Other religionsjare defective and erroneous,
ours is perfect and entire; their systems were esoteric,
ours is universal4; theirs temporary and for the few, ours
1 The classical humilitas is a term of strong contempt, 'abjectness,'
e.g. "Malorum turba qujedam paupertas, ignobilitas, humilitas," &c.
Cic. Tusc. Disp. v. 10, cf. in. 13. A Greek would have been
amazed to find Taireivotppoervvi] reckoned among the virtues ;  yet
St Peter bids Christians tie it on themsdves like a knotted robe
(iyKop§ebcraerBe) 1 Pet. v. 5.
2 Being mainly equivalent to the two Greek words, tpeXavBpomla -
and wcudtia. V. Forcellini, j. v.
3 See on this subject some excellent remarks of Renan. He
says, with perfect candour and justice, that in spite of all real and
supposed parallels, "II y a dans la doctrine du Christ un esprit
nouveauetun cachet original." Et. d'Hist. Rel. 188. "What the
soul is to the body," says the author of the beautiful and striking
Epistle to Diognetus, "that Christianity is to the world."
4 Origen nobly reproaches Philosophy with its exclusiveness,
and pretended monopoly of truth— (offroi to koivuvikov els KoptSrj

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 149
eternal and for the race ; a handful read the philoso
phers, myriads would die for Christ1 ; they in their
popularity could barely found a school, Christ from His
cross rules the world; they could not even conceive
the ideas of a society without falling into miserable error;
Christ established an eternal and glorious kingdom,
whose theory for all, whose history in the world, prove
it to be indeed, what it was from the first proclaimed to
be — the kingdom of Heaven, the kingdom of God.
Since then, my brethren, the individual virtues are
the only true and solid bases of moral perfection, since
they offer the most natural and decisive exercise for the
ascendancy of reason over the passions, let us devote the
short remainder of our time this morning to testing the
truth of what we have advanHd, by comparing the doc
trines of Christianity with other systems, in their influ
ence upon the individual life ; nor can we do this more
briefly or decisively than by considering the nature and
effect of the truths which it enforces in their relation to
the Body, the Intellect, and the Soul of man.
1. On the exquisite workmanship of this tabernacle
not made with hands, on the delicate and subtle ha'r-
arevov Kai fipaxb ervv/ryayov, c. Cels. VI. 1) ; and with its arrogance—
(oiSi to 'E/itol -rrpoakxere Kav StSderKoipiv tpapev, c. Cels. v. 76).
1 " Quotusquisque nunc Aristotelem legit? Quanti Platonis vel
libros novere, vel nomen? vix in angustiis otiosi eos senes recolunt.
Rusticanos vero et piscatores nostros totus orbis loquitur, universus
mundus sonat." Jerome, ad Ep. ad Gal. iiil 3. "Let the human
mind be expanded as much as it please," said Gothe, in one of his^
last, conversations with Eckermann, "it will never transcend the
height and morality of Christianity as it shines in the Gospel."

ISO CHRISTIANITY

monies of this harp of a thousand strings, the Scrip
tures say but little '. For that task Science is abun
dantly competent ; and, for the still loftier task of con
firming by decisive evidence those solemn warnings of
Holy Writ that men must possess in manhood the sins
even of their youth 2; that if they sow to the flesh they
shall of the flesh reap corruption8; that the punishment
of sensuality, working not by special interventions but
by general laws, bears a fearful resemblance to the sin
itself4; that the Nemesis of a desecrated body is an
enfeebled understanding and a tormented and darkened
soul. Much of this the heathen saw ; and yet, even in
a doctrine so simple and elementary as the relation
of man to his own body, how egregiously even their
best teachers went astray !* On the one hand, to adore
and pamper it, to treat it as all in all, to devote the
whole life with frantic eagerness to the gratification of
its evanescent pleasures or the flattery of its carnal
pride5; on the other, to despise and vilify it as the
clog, and chain, and prison of the soul6, and so to
master and crush it with hideous mutilations and ex-
1 See, however, Ps. cxviii. 14, Eccl. xi. 5.
2 Job xiii. 26, xx. 1J.
» Gal. vi. 8.
4 See the remarkable chapter in Wisdom of Solom. xi.
5 1 Cor. xv. 32.
• Plato, Phced. xxiv. § 16; Virg. y£«. VI. 733^ Cic. Tusc.
Disp. I. 30 ; Sen. Ep. 65. " Corpus hoc animi pondus ac poena est"
See Brucker, Hist. Phil. 1. 1222, " Corpus contemnendum et stercore
vilius judicandum." Similar was the mistake of Buddhism— to
regard the body as an enemy to be subjugated, not as a friend to be
ennobled. B. St Hilaire, Le Bouddha, p. 146,

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 15*
travagant self-torture, — these were the counter-errors of
heathen philosophy and heathen life; these were the
ethics of corporal duties as taught by an Aristippus,
an Antisthenes, a Sakya Mouni, a Mani. Nay more,
Christian men, and eminent saints, with the example
of Christ before them, and His Gospels in their hand,
could degenerate into some of these conceptions. There
is nothing more remarkable than the way in which
the teaching of Christ towers not only over the aber
rations of Paganism, but even over the sins, negligences,
and ignorances of Christian sects and Christian saints \
The sensuality of the Hedonists might be matched by
the fanaticism of the Antinomians. The absurdity of
Plotinus, who blushed that he had a body, may be
paralleled by the extravaganfe of Vianney, who spoke
of his body as a corpse2. The self-renunciation of the
Buddhists may be matched by the fanatic literalism of
Origen. Hedonism, Materialism, Asceticism, Mysticism,
— what a dominance of error, over what a space of ages
do those words imply ! and, amid them all, how calm,
1 "The greatest honour is due to Christianity for continually
proving its pure and noble origin by coming forth again, after the
great aberrations into which human perversity has led it, more
speedily than was expected, with its primitive special charm as a
mission.. .for the relief of human necessity." Gothe (Stirm, Apol.
d. Christentkums, p. 193).
2 " I have sinned against my brother the ass" (i.e. against my
body), said St Francis of Assisi. " J'ai un bon cadavre, je suis dur, "
was the reply of Vianney, the remarkable cur<5 d'Ars, when his
servant remonstrated with him for eating grass ( Vie, par l'Abbe'
Mounin). "Whoever would reside here must bring his soul only "
wrote De Ranee1, the restorer of La Trappe.

152 CHRISTIANIT Y
how true, how noble, how simple are the few holy and
natural principles which Christ revealed. The body is
not to be degraded by vile affections, but to be won
and possessed in sanctification and honour ] ; not to
be crushed by violent asceticism 2, but to be controlled
by quiet discipline ; not to be desecrated as a prison,
but to be honoured as a shrine. Yes, truly, Christ is
also "the Saviour of the body3." Consider how His
1 I Thess. iv. 4, elStvai iKatrrov ipuv rb iavrov aKevos KrdtrBai
iv ayiaerpip koX Tipr).
2 The monks were often wiser in their precepts than in their
practice. "If thou art really a servant of Christ," said Benedict
to a brother who had chained himself to a rock, "restrain thyself
not by a chain of iron, but by the chain of Christ." The reader
will be reminded of the reply of the Jesuit father to a weak brother,
" Mangez un bceufi et soyez Chretien." More than one beautiful
tale of saints and hermits shews that they recognized the same
truths (see, in Kingsley's Hermits, the stories of St Anthony and
St Macarius, pp. 97, 147). It is even recognized theoretically in
Buddhist Theology. In Captain Rogers' translation of the parables
in Buddhaghosha's Commentary on the Dhamnapada, occurs this
passage. " Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting or
lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can
purify a mortal who has not overcome desires." Yet Asceticism had
its proper function once. Heine (no prejudiced witness), says " It
was necessary as a healthy reaction against the awful materialism...
which threatened to destroy all spiritual nobleness. ..We recognize
the wholesomeness of ascetic discipline when we read Petronius
or Apuleius, works which may be regarded as the pieces justifica-
fives of Christianity" (quoted by Dr Ward, Manning's Essays,-
I. p. 114). Comte held a similar view, Philos. Pos. v. 436, Catech.
ofPos. Religion (tr. Congreve), p. 55. Dr Bridges, Unity of Comte' s
Life and Doctrine, p. 6. Dollinger, First Age of the Church (E. tr.),
pp. 344 — 346. Lecky's/Krf. of European Morals, 1. [17, II. 108, and
passim. See Col. ii. 21—23.
3 Eph. v. 23.

AND THE- INDIVIDUAL. 153
revelation ' of the saeredness of life has put an end to
the dangerous sophisms of the ancient world on the
subject of suicide1. Consider how His revelation of
its dignity has inspired the spirit of tenderness and
care. When travelling in the disguise of a beggar, the
scholar Muretus had fallen sick in the hands of strange
physicians; they said, jestingly to one another, "Fiat
experimentum in corpore viii;" " Vilemne animam appellas,"
he indignantly exclaimed to his astonished auditors :
" Vilemne animam appellas pro qua Christus non dedig-
natus est moriV "For whom Christ died I" — what mortal
intellect shall measure the full persuasiveness of that
appeal ; an appeal for tenderness from others, an appeal
of intense moral force to our own selves ! In how dif
ferent a light does it place those sins against the body
which are the most potent enemies of the dignity of
man! How does our Blessed Lord's innate Divinity
shine forth transcendantly in his dealing with sins like
these ! The words of human teachers have been too
often like the Pharos-lights which deceived and wrecked
the vessels they were meant to save; but what infinite
delicacy and yet what heart-searching directness, what
uncompromising purity: yet what infinite forbearance is
there in the words of Christ; how sternly inexorable
His requirements, how tenderly infinite His love ! The
same lips which said, " Blessed are the pure in heart"
1 See Dbllinger, Gentile and Jew, I.. 357, II. 283, who collects
many passages to which many more might easily be added. Comte
recognizes the happy and essential service of Christianity in branding
successfully this most anti-social crime. Phil. Pos. v. 348.

154 CHRISTIANITY
said also, " Her sins which are many are forgiven her ; "
the same which uttered, " If thy right eye offend thee,
pluck it out," said also, " Neither do T condemn thee; go
and sin no more*." Yes, He who was purer than the
heavens was the most gentle too; and He taught the
two doctrines which are more efficacious than all others
to cleanse the heart — the Resurrection of the Body,
the Indwelling of God's Spirit in the Soul. If, in
comparison with the ancient world, or with heathen
lands, the society of Christendom be pure ; if it be
in Christian lands alone that tens of thousands live
lives which are healthy and happy and noble because
they are uncontaminated by deadly sin, is it not because
Christianity, and Christianity alone, can say, Sin not,
because the body is for the Lord and the Lord for
the body; sin not, because you breathe the air of
the Eternal, and live under your Father's eye ; sin not,
because ye are Temples of the Holy Ghost Who
dwelleth in you ; sin not, because, as with His mortal
body Christ arose, so shall ye also rise ; and in those
bodies whatsoever things ye have done, those same
things and not others shall ye receive"? Truly, in
the words of our great Puritan poet: "He that holds
himself in due esteem both for the dignity of God's
image upon him, and for the price of his redemption
1 Matt. v. 8; Luke vii. 47; Matt. v. 29; John viii. 11.
2 1 Cor. vi. 13; 2 Cor. v. 10; 1 Cor. iii. 16, 17, vi. 19, &c.
See Tert. De Pudicitid, passim. " Non corpus Christi, non membra
Christi, non templum Dei vocabatur, cum veniam mcechia: conse-
quebatur," 6 ad fin.

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 155

which he thinks is visibly marked upon his forehead,
accounts himself both a fit person to do the noblest
and godliest deeds, and much better worth than to
deject and defile, with such a debasement and pollution
as sin is, himself so highly ransomed and ennobled
to a new friendship and filial relation with God '."
2. Of the Intellect and of the Soul I will speak
but briefly. Scripture, my brethren, does not contain
any regular Psychology, nor were the Gospels intended
in any sense to be a formal moral system. We must
bear this in mind when we hear the common dis
paragement that, in the inculcation of this or that
virtue, the teaching of Christ was incomplete2. It is
often, for instance, argued that Christianity gives no
special encouragement to the culture of the Intellect3.
When, as in my text, the Scriptures sum up under
1 Milton, Reas . of Church Government.
2 Prof. F. W. Newman has published a recent pamphlet en
titled Defective Morality of the New Testament. After carefully
reading it, I would say, without meaning any disrespect to the
sincere and learned author, that the answer seems to me so simple
as to be safely left to every unbiassed Christian reader of ordinary
intelligence. Such remarks as those of Strauss, New Life of Jesus,
I. 438, so far as they have any truth in them at all, are simply
refuted by the consideration that Christianity is not, and was never
meant to be, a formal system.
3 This is a very old accusation against Christianity. Celsus
charged Christians with saying KaKbv r] iv rtf Kbtrptp crotpla dyaBov
Si ^ piopla. Orig. c. Cels. I. p. 8, and vi. p. 282 (ed. 1604), and iri
several other passages. See Cave, Prim. Christianity, I. s> an<I
Pref. Here and there, the language of the Imitatio Christi lies open td
this charge, e.g. I. 2. See a remarkable passage in Dr Newman's
Loss and Gain, pp. 177, 178,

1 5 6 CHRISTIANITY

I

Body, Soul, and Spirit the totality of our being, no
prominence is given to the mental faculties. Undoubt
edly and wisely— nor do I hesitate to say it before
a great University, where learning is so justly dear, —
Scripture reverses the judgment of the world in making
mental culture wholly incommensurate in importance
with spiritual growth. The language of St Augustine,
"Unhappy the man who knows all those things but
is ignorant of these ;'' the question of the Imitatio,
"Scientia sine timore Dei quid importat1}" the judgment
that to have tended on the leper is a higher title to
canonization than to have written the Summa Theologia
itself2, are eminently Christian. To exalt genius would
, 1 Infelix homo qui sciat ista omnia, te autem nescit; beatus
autem qui te scit, etiamsi ista nesciat. Qui vero et te et ilia
novit, non propter ilia beatior, sed propter te solum beatus est."
...Aug. Conf. v. 4. "Melior est humilis rusticus qui Deo servit
quam superbus philosophus qui se neglecto, cursum coeli considerat."
Imit. Christi, I. 82. See Renan, Etude d'Hist. Rel. p. 344.. Every
one will be reminded of Cowper's comparison between Voltaire and
the cottager :
' ' Oh happy peasant ! oh unhappy bard !
His the mere tinsel, her's the sure reward," &c.
"Dieune nous demande pas d'etre des gens d'esprit, de grandes
intelligences, mais il nous demande d'etre des hommes de cceur, de
grands cceurs." Dupanloup, Hist, de N. S. Jesus Christ, p. 6.
Among modern philosophers, Kant is conspicuous for his recogni
tion of this truth ; and he used to say that he placed the happiness of
future life far more in the intercourse with honest souls — were they
even as ignorant as his servant Lampe — than with great minds.
All that I have here said finds the strongest and most remarkable
confirmation in the views of Comte. See Pos. Phil. ; Miss Marti-
neau, 11. 237, 288; Catech. of Pos. Rel. p. 9 (tr. Congreve).
2 Sir J. Stephen, Eccl. Biogr. I. 102.

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. ig;

have been superfluous, because the world was too prone
already to that idolatry. On that altar enough of in
cense had been already heaped. Since the abounding
knowledge of the world had, in itself, but served to
inflate with insolent self-sufficiency and to dry up with
sensual pride1; since, without erudition, the heart may
be of saintly purity, and without intellectual culture
may attain to immortal bliss; to stimulate the intellect
was needless, to magnify it would have been pernicious.
Not over the portals of Christianity as over the doors
of the Academy was ascribed, M^Sels a-yeco/x-eTn^Tos elo-iTta. "^
Wisdom, not knowledge; goodness, not genius; moral
deliverance, not material discovery ; the regeneration of
the multitude, not the exalting of the few — these were
the aims of Christian teaching. The knowledge of
mankind needed to be sanctified ; it needed to be
baptised; it needed to be transfigured from a haughty
Philosophy to a humble wisdom, from impotent self-
assertion to fruitful life2. And, in doing this, Chris-
1 "I am free to confess, my daughter," says Comte, "that
hitherto the Positive spirit has been tainted with the two moral evils
which peculiarly wait on knowledge. It puffs up and it dries the
heart, by giving free scope to pride and by turning it from love."
Catech. of Pos. Rel. p. 72.
2 There is u sense in which the maxim, Philosophia ancilla
Theologice, is profoundly true. In the Vision of Boethius (De Const.
Phil, ad in) a noble lady with glowing eyes visits him. On the
lower skirt of her garment was the letter II, on the upper part of it
0. " There seemed letters between them which rose like the steps
of a ladder from one to the other. But the garment had been
torn apparently by violence, and some fragments of'it carried away.*'
Maurice, Moral and Metaph. Phil. II. 17.

158 CHRISTIANITY

tianity by no means degrades the intellect, but subor
dinates, controls, and so inspires. There have, indeed,
been eminent Christians who have spoken of all know
ledge with an irritating and an ignorant contempt ; but
from them and their erring judgments we turn to
Christ's own Gospel, which is alone " always true,
always sure, always unique, and always consistent with
itself." And there we recognize in intellect a talent
to be used, in wisdom a blessing to be sought. There
echoes the high and loving message, "Son go work
to-day in my vineyard;" there the gentle reproach,
"Why stand ye here all the day idle1." You therefore,
my brethren, who are wise enough to be diligent stu
dents, you who are noble enough to feel the charm
of high thinking and plain living — and I know that I
am speaking to many such — work on with high purpose
and fearless faith. Be sure that the "intellectum valde
ama " of St Augustine expresses the true spirit of your
faith. Listen not, my brethren, either to those siren
voices which would betray you to the death of self-
indulgence, or to the silly sophisms which would stifle
your best faculties in the leaden sheet of ignorance.
God's vineyard, wherein we are labourers, needs all our
toil. God's treasury, wherein we must cast our gifts,
needs every mite as well as every talent we possess.
We read in an old chronicler a legend of how the
Virgin Mother rose clasping a white dove out of a martyr
student's tomb, and he ends with the words, "Scho
lars too are martyrs if they live in purity, and labour
1 Matt. xx. 3, 6, xxi. 2S.

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 139
with courage1." The knowledge which gratifies curi
osity, the knowledge which flatters vanity, the know
ledge which pushes for precedence, the knowledge which
is degraded into a stepping-stone for ambition, — these
are unblessed of God 2 ; but His own spirit will aid the
knowledge which is the sister of humility, the handmaid
of religion, the counsellor of virtue, the champion of
truth. Christianity wrought for the thankless Intellect
this high service: she saved it from being paralysed
by selfishness, or intoxicated by conceit; she saved it
by putting it lower than moral excellence, by depriving
it of political supremacy, by opening before it the mag
nificent arena of social service, by inspiring it with the
magnificent enthusiasm of universal love. "You must
not only listen but read, you must not only read but
think ; knowledge," it has been said, "without common
sense is folly, without method it is waste, without
kindness it is fanaticism, without religion it is death3;"
aye, but — and every page of the New Testament con-
1 Quoted by Lecky, Hist, of Eur. Morals, II. 218.
2 Sunt. ..qui scire volunt eo tantum fine ut sciant — et turpis
curiositas est; et sunt qui scire volunt ut sciantur ipsi, et turpis
vanitas est ; et sunt item qui scire volunt ut scientiam suam vendant,
verbi caus&, pro pecunia, pro honoribus, et turpis quaestus est.
Sed sunt quoque qui scire volunt ut aedificent, et charitas est, et item
qui scire volunt ut asdificentur, et prudentia est." S. Bernard, Serm.
xxxvi. super Cant. p. 604.
a From a speech by the late Bp. of Manchester (Dr J. Prince
Lee), at the opening of the Bury Athenaeum. Cf. S. Bernard, " Ut
legeret intelligendi fecit cupiditas; ut intelligeret oratio impetravitj
ut impetraret vitse sanctitas promeruit. Sic cupiat, sic oret, sif
vivat qui se.proficere velit"

f6o CHRISTIANITY

firms the lesson — with common sense it is wisdom ; with
method it is power ; with charity it is beneficence ; with
religion it is virtue, and life, and peace.
3. But in one last word, let me add that there
is something far beyond the well-being of the body,
far beyond the cultivation of the mind, it is the salva
tion of the soul. Here was the greatest part of that
finished work. "He resloreth our souls; he leadeth
us in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake V
And to shew that this is all in all, how often have
the despised been among his holiest servants, the
weakest among his chosen saints; how often have we
seen his hand strew dust and ashes over the unhallowed
genius, and guilty glory of mankind. The world of
heathendom, after centuries of philosophy, was em
phatically "a world without souls." Now our Blessed
Saviour stooped to no idle and degrading discussion
whether man had a soul or not; nor did he attempt
any futile analysis of what the soul may be. He did
not tell us with Empedocles that it was the blood
about the heart, or with Aristotle that it was an
Entelechy, or with Parmenides that it was the nature
of limbs 2. No ; but, simply appealing to the intuitive
1 Ps. xxiii. 3.
2 Or (it may be added), with modern materialists, that it is a
\ secretion of phosphorus or the grey substance of the brain. " Die
Seelc.ist ein Produkt der Entwickelung des Hirns." Vogt, Phy-
siolog. Briefe. "Der Gedanke ist eine Bewegung des Stoffes...ohne
Phosphor kein Gedanke — audi das Bewusstsein ist nichts als eine
Eigenschaft des Stoffes." Moleschott, Der Kreislauf des Lebens.
See similar passages in Christlieb, Moderne Zwdfel, 160.

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 161

sense of men, he told them of the soul's immortality ¦,
of its accountability, of its divine origin, of its complete
redemption, of its Heavenly Father, of its Eternal Life.
He uttered to them those solemn words which have
rolled to us across the centuries with ever-increasing
significance, " What shall it profit a man, if he shall
gain the whole world, and lose his own soul2?" And
that word failed not, because it rested not only on a
doctrine which men could believe, but on the Life of
One whom all could love3. It was ardor for His
service which kindled the glorious devotion of those
saints who shine like a river of stars athwart the

1 This doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul is claimed also by
natural religion. But among the philosophers it was but a wavering
hope, a dim imagination, a splendid guess ; at best but the uncer
tain esoteric fancy of a chosen few, not the intense and energetic
faith of an entire society. This has been proved too often to need
further proof. It will be sufficient here to refer to Archbishop
Whately's Essay On the Revelation of a Future State (" On Some
Peculiarities of the Christian Religion," Ess. i.). And as ancient
philosophers did not discover it, so modern philosophers have
given it up. Lsi Mettraie thought that the only chance for the
human race lay in materialistic atheism. Cabanis defined the brain
as "un estomac qui digfere et s&rfete des id&s." "Mon corps
souffre beaucoup," wrote Voltaire to d'Argental (1773) ; "mon &me
s'il y en a une, ce qui est fort douteuse, vous est tendrement at
tache." 5 Mark viii. 36.
3 The "categorical imperative" (Duty, Conscience, Thoumust),
as Schiller points out, will fail to command even the obedience of
slaves ; but thousands will be won to filial obedience and self-
renunciation by "Be ye holy as I am holy;" " Learn of me, for I
am meek and lowly of heart."
F. H. L. II

1 62 CHRISTIANITY

Church's firmament. They are the true glory of Chris
tendom, — lucentes et ardentes — the Cherubim of know
ledge, and the Seraphim of love. One celebrated col
lection alone contains the lives of 25,000 of these
heroes of unselfishness1; and how high and grand, how
full of poetry and nobleness they are ! And if, as many
tell us, — and as seems, alas, too true, — if, in our refine
ment and perplexities,- — if in our luxury and mammon
worship, — if in our despair and faithlessness — the race of
these hero souls be past, yet at least the race of the
humbler children in God's great family abides. They,
thank God, may be counted in their myriads still,
and henceforth as heretofore shall the world for which
Christ died abound with these beautiful and holy souls.
And as the moon can shine only by reflection of the
sun, so do these, as they borrow their life and light
from the Sun of Righteousness, become the clearest
evidence, the predestined issue, the living illustration
of their Saviour's work. And while these remain it
shall always be believed. Yea, Lord, the enemy may
reproach, and the foolish people blaspheme thy name,
but that name shall be exalted for ever above every
name, for —
" The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
1 The Bollandist collection. Renan, Et. d'Hist. Rel. 306. 313.
Compare the men whom Christianity has canonised with those
who won the apotheosis of heathendom, and we shall have some
plummet to sound the moral abyss which yawns between the two
religions.

AND THE INDIVIDUAL. 163

" The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
" The noble army of Martyrs praise thee.
"The holy Church throughout all the world doth
acknowledge thee.
"Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ: Thou art
the Everlasting Son of the Father."

11— a

V.

CHRISTIANITY AND THE RACE.

"Nous tenons a- tout, parceque nous venons de Dieu qui
est en tout ; rien ne nous est etranger, parceque Dieu n'est stranger
nulle part." Lacordaire.

i Cor. III. 22, 23.
"All are yours; and ye are Christ's; and Christ is God's."
Thus far, my brethren, we have watched the material
and moral victories of Christianity, and have endea
voured to interpret the powerful and noble witness borne
by the full voice of History to Christ the Son of God.
But a religion must be judged by its total influences, no
less than by its external successes or the virtues of its
individual believers; and therefore it still remains to
shew — in a manner however imperfect and fragmentary,
— that Christianity has rendered clearer and brighter the
whole atmosphere of life ; that it has been to Christian
nations a blessing no less inestimable than it has been to
Christian men.
And this is all the more necessary, because, but for
an overruling Providence, the absorbing intensity of
religious convictions not only might, but undoubtedly
would have restrained, or even nullified the political and
social influence of our faith. We can indeed hardly
wonder that, under the strong dominion of personal
religion, the minds of many have been unable to think

i6S CHRISTIANITY

of anything beyond, — have failed to realise the existence
of any entity except their souls and God. Mere isolated
fragments of religious truth have covered their limited
vision, even as the entire horizon may be concealed by
the smallest object held close to the pupil of the eye.
We are told of an illiterate hermit named Pambos, that,
coming to be taught a Psalm, he learnt the single verse,
" I said I will take heed to my ways that I offend
not with my tongue ;" and when asked six months, and
again many years afterwards, why he did not come to
learn another, he replied that he had never been able
truly to master this'. It has been the same with other
truths; nor is it strange that when men contemplated
exclusively the awe-inspiring thoughts of Immortality and
the Judgment to come, they could have been ready to
take refuge from themselves in fiery deserts or seaside
caves, and to abandon every object and every interest
except the salvation of their individual souls2. Espe-
1 Socrates, H. E. IV. 23, quoted by Lecky, Hist, of Europ.
Morals, 11. 123.
2 "The Church," says Dr Newman, "regards this world and
all that is in it as a mere shade, as dust and ashes, compared with
the value of one single soul. She holds... that it were far better for
sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all
the many millions who are on it tp die of starvation in extremest
agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will
not say, should be lost, but should commit one single venial sin."
Anglican Difficulties, p. 48. It is a useless exercise of the imagina
tion to put such impossible hypotheses ; and, at any rate, to reckon
the heinousness of sin by this kind of calculus is wholly unscriptural.
It is like the exaggerated language of Jerome — that it was better that
Rome should be devastated with sword and flame by the barbarians
than that one Christian should lose her virginity.

AND THE RACE. 169

daily was this the case, when, to the solemnity of such
beliefs, was added the remorse and anguish of a guilty
conscience. " A spotless child' sleeps on the flowery moss :
Tis well for him — but when a guilty man,
Envying such slumber, may desire to put
His guilt away — can he return to rest
At once by lying there? our sires knew well
The fitting way for such; — dark cells, dim lamps,
A stone floor one may writhe on like a worm,
No mossy pillow blue with violets1."
The gloomy heresies of Gnostic and Manichee, the un
natural and maddening penances of hermit and Stylite,
the entire impulse to asceticism and monastic Christian
ity, had their origin in this absorbing aim at personal deli
verance. And to this day large sections of the Christian
Church, in the words of- their formula? — though to a less
extent, thank God, in the lives of their children — dwell
too prominently and persistently on the doctrine that
man's one object in this world is to save his soul2. Take
even the Imitatio Christi; who has not benefited by the
1 Browning, Paracelsus.
2 "Why did God make you? To know Him, love Him, and
serve Him in this world and be happy with Him in the next."
Rom. Cath. Catech. "Homo creatus est ut laudet Deum, eique
serviat, et per hsec salvet animam suam." St Ignat. Exercises.
(Manning, Essays, 2nd Series, p. 29.) This is, of course, true ; but
it is a pity that the definition of service to God is not made de
finitely to include the service to man. The passage in Dr Newman's
Apologia, in which he says that the effect of " early" teaching on
his mind had been to deepen mistrust of material phenomena,
and "to make him rest in the thought of two, and two only, supreme
and unanimously self-evident beings— myself and God," has be
come famous. Dr Westcott has shewn how scepticism at once

1 7 ° CHRISTIANITY
light and heat, the glowing beauty and intense devotion
of that unrivalled Epos of the Soul's love? And yet,
as has forcibly been pointed out, never was there a more
glaring misnomer than the title of the book. It was Christ's
glorious originality that He went about doing good ; it
was His New Commandment, "Ye must love one ano
ther :" yet both His continual practice, and His strongest
precept, are, in this book, all but totally ignored1. • Yes,
the Imitatio Christi is a book, which in its pictures of
personal holiness, of absolute self-denial, of passionate
devotion, no other religion but Christianity could have
produced ; and yet had Christianity been no more than
this, it would indeed have been amenable to the charge,
now falsely brought against it, that its views are anti-
industrial, its tendency antisocial, its motives egotistic2.
It might, here and there, have inspired some pure and
devoted solitary, but it could never have reformed
society, or civilized the world. It would have perished
in some lonely laura of desert coenobites, or some dead
sect upon the Dead Sea shore.
But Christianity is more and greater than the Imi-
seizes the abandoned ground of Society and Science. Aspects of
Positivism in Rel. to Christianity; Contemp. Rev. VIII. 371.
1 This fact is admirably developed in Milman, Lai. Christianity,
vi. 484. His language, however, requires some slight modification,
2 This charge "infructuosi in negotiis dicimur," is constantly
refuted in the Fathers. Orig. c . Cels. viii. 73 ; Tert. Apol. 42 ; Lactant.
Div. Inst. v. 22 ; Arnobius, Adv. Nat. 11. adf. " The Roman rulers,"
says Comte, " felt no hesitation in rejecting, as the enemy of the
human race, a provisional religion which considered perfection as
consisting in an entire concentration upon heavenly objects." Cat. of
Pos. Rel,

AND THE RACE. 171

tatio, and the Apostles set before mankind a grander
object than even personal salvation. " Perish my name,"
cried Danton, " but . let France be free." Men have
admired the splendid self-sacrifice of the utterance, who
forgot to -admire the Source whence that spirit came.
Moses was never greater, never more worthy to be an
heroic lawgiver, than when from that giant heart of his
burst forth the cry, " If thou wilt forgive their' sin — and
if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of the book that thou
hast written." St Paul was never nobler, never more
like his Lord, than when, in language which ever since
has been the stumbling-block of all feeble Christians,
he exclaimed that he wished himself accursed from God
for his brethren)" his kinsmen according to the flesh.
The love which Christ taught, was a love not inspired
by individual prudence, but destined for social use.
Reversing the narrow intolerance of an ambitious theo
logy, he valued charity far above orthodoxy1, and placed
a tender nature far higher than a correct belief. And
hence the motto, ' No man for himself, every man for
all2,' expresses the very ideal of .a Christian society; it
will abound in purity, charity, devotion, conquest of
self, activity for others ; its true members will be " not
slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord."
And this is why Christianity achieved not only an
individual deliverance but a social restitution; this is
1 "Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way'; first
be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift."
Matt. v. 24.
a Herder.

172 CHRISTI ANIT Y
why it became the Palingenesia of a dead and miserable
world. For Antiquity had never honoured man as man,
but only as he was adorned by the accidents of wealth
or beauty, intellect or rank. That intensified definition
of the tyrant's creed, the
"Humanum paucis vivit genus"
of Lucan, expressed their steady conviction ; humanity
in their eyes had no higher destiny than to be the foot
stool for a few. But Christ came to love, as none had
ever loved, those whom none had ever loved as yet.
He was the protector of children, the healer of the sick,
the friend of the sinful, the teacher of the ignorant, the
seeker of the wandering, the Saviour of the lost. Seen
in the light of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, all
life, even the humblest, was transfigured as by a glory
from heaven. Man as man, and apart from every adventi
tious or ennobling circumstance, became a holy and a
royal thing1. Paganism degraded woman; Christ found
among women, even the fallen and the sinful, his chosen
ministers. Paganism had neglected children univer
sally, had degraded them in myriads, had murdered
them wholesale ; Christ made them the types of loving
humility, and " flung the desecrator of their innocence,
with a millstone round his neck, into the sea2." Pa
ganism had oppressed the people with shameful bondage
1 "Tu, Homo, tantum nomen si te scias." Aug.
2 Infanticide and similar crimes are still rife throughout the
East. Modern philosophers, from Voltaire down to the Comtists,
are fond of pointing China to us as an example of what civilisation
without Christianity can do. The Comte de Beauvoir ( Voy. autour

AND THE RACE. 173
and sneered at them with insolent contempt : Christ
sprang from the midst of them, and made the meanest
of them who believed on Him children of God and
inheritors of Heaven. Paganism, criminal itself, was
yet to the criminal most pitilessly cruel : Christ was to
sinners a Saviour and a friend1. The two beneficent
spirits of Love and Liberty at once sprang into life
from his teaching — two spirits which became the guar
dian angels of suffering humanity, and sheltered it more
and more beneath their healing wings.
1. The Pagan world laboured under a triple curse —
the curse of corruption, the curse of cruelty, the curse I
of slavery. At its corruption we have glanced already.
But lust, as usual, was hard by hate, and the spirit of
cruelty also had pervaded every region of its life:
du Monde), in one evening walk out of Canton, found seven aban
doned babies, some purposely wounded, all blue and dying of cold.
The Sisters of Charity go out with a great basket to save all they
can ; in one year they picked up 4000, most of them too far gone to
be revived !
1 " Ces faiblesses sont la force de l'Eglise, qui a fait alliance
avec elles, et les a prise sous sa protection en se mettant sous la
leur. Cette alliance a chang^ la face de la soci<5t&" Lacordaire,
Conferences, 1846, p. 356. "Tous les systemes les plus vastes, les
plus progressifs que la sagesse humaine a mis au jour, et qu'elle a
voulu substituer a- la religion, n'ont jamais pu inUresser que les
savants, ou ambitieux ou tout au plus les heureux du monde. Mais
la grande majority du genre humaine ne sera jamais dans ces cate
gories. La grande majority des hommes est souffrante, souffrante des
douleurs morales autant que de maux physiques.... or lequel de ces
systemes a jamais console un coeur afnigiS, peuple" un cceur desert?
lequel de ces docteurs a jamais enseigne" a- essuyer une larme?"
Montalembert, SteEliz.dHongroie, I. 155.

1 7 4 CHR1STIANIT Y-
but, from the hour when through the starlight rang the
first angelic carol which told that Christ was born,
from that hour began the death-knell to every Satanic
tyranny and every tolerated crime. It was the glory
of Athens that she alone had reared a solitary altar
to Pity; but Christ raised an altar to Pity in every
Christian heart. The philosophers had derided as foi
bles both compassion and alms-giving; but to feed the
hungry, to clothe the naked, to teach the ignorant, to
bring light into the prison, to strike the fetters off the
slave — these had been among the simplest and earliest
lessons of the Christian's faith. That chord of pathos
which the Gospel had struck, vibrated into a noble
music. " For the first time," says the historian of Ra
tionalism, "the aureole of sanctity encircled the brow of
sorrow, and invested it with a mysterious charm 1." The
hardness which had enabled even women to gloat over
the agonies of the dying gladiator or the tortures of the
slave, became now a sign of exceptional degradations
and when the obscure monk, Telemachus, had faced
the furious populace, and bought by his death the
abolition of those cruel sports2, the amphitheatres —
whose circle had been reddened so often with the
blood of martyrs — were suffered to crumble into un
interrupted decay. But, side by side with the damning
1 Lecky, Hist of Eur. Rational. II. 266.
2 Jan. 1, A.D. 404, at the celebration of the 6th consulship of
Honorius. Theodoret. HE. v. 26; Gibbon, m. 70, 71 (ed.
Milman). The fathers and Christian writers had vainly uttered
against these games their strongest denunciations. Lact. Div. Instt.
vi. 20; Prudent, c. Symm. ii. 1121.

AND THE RACE.

175

witness of their huge ruins, there arose ornaments more
splendid than if there had been a Coliseum in every
valley and a Parthenon on every hill— the Retreats
and Asylums, the Hospitals and Orphanages, of which
heathen selfishness had never dreamed. Who can sum
up the amount of misery which these institutions have
alleviated or removed? He who has sat, on some
quiet evening, among the shattered seats at the summit
of the Coliseum, and heard, stealing upwards through
the calm air, the hymns of the Fratres Misericordia;,
as they perform in that enormous area the touching
service of the Via Cruris, — he who, on that sod which
once reeked with the blood of 10,000 gladiators 1, has 1
seen the Roman Princesses kneeling humbly side by|
side with the peasant women on the green grass before
the painted records of their Saviour's agony, — can best
realise, by one startling contrast, the gulf which yawns
between the brutalities of a sanguinary Paganism and
the tender mercy of the religion of our Lord.
2. Hardly less memorable was the service which
Christianity achieved by wiping out the curse of slavery.
1 The number said to have been displayed by Trajan on 123
holidays. See Lecky, Hid. of Eur. Morals, is 37, 104, 287, &c.
It is needless to quote any further testimonies on a subject so
well known, but it is worth while to quote the oath of gladiators
— sublime in its atrocity — preserved in Petronius: "In verba
Eumolpi sacramentum juravimus, uri, vinciri, verberari, ferroque
necari, et quicquid aliud Eumolpus jussisset, tanquam legitimi gla-
diatores, domino corpora animasque religiosissime addicimus." Cf.
Sen. Ep. 7, " mera homicidia sunt." The letter contains a terrible
picture. See Chastel, Sur V influence de la Charitd durant des pre
miers Siecles— (crowned by the French Academy in 1852).

t 7 6 CHRISTIAN1T Y
Philosophers with pernicious ingenuity had not only
tolerated slavery as inevitable, but had defended it as
right. Plato had not condemned, Aristotle had sup
ported, Cicero had excused it ; centuries afterwards Li-
banius argued in its favour, and Julian — however com
passionate — had not taken one step to put it down.
And yet nothing can be more certain than that slavery
has been the disgrace and ruin of every nation that
practised it, crushing the enslaved masses, weakening
the tyrannous minority *, corrupting both. Stigmatising
labour, it fostered a dissolute sloth ; destroying the mid
dle classes, it avenged itself by rendering most liable
to unpitied slavery the nations that have most multi
plied their slaves. Hence, as the Roman historian said
of Greece, and as the Gothic historian might no less
truthfully have said of Rome, Introisse victoria fuit.
Now Christianity did not at once abolish slavery2 —
1 Among the 1,200,000 inhabitants of Rome in Cicero's time,
there were scarcely 2000 proprietors. " Vix esse duo millia hominum
qui rem habent" Cic. de Off. II. 21. It is reckoned that in the
entire empire there must have been 60,000,000 slaves. Le Maistre,
Du Pape, I. 283. There is scarcely one Roman writer who does
not furnish some fatal evidence as to the treatment and estimation
of slaves from Plautus down to Ammianus Marcellinus, xiv. 6. It
is summed up in the one sentence of Seneca, ' ' In servos superbissi-
mi, crudelissimi, contumeliosissimi sumus." Ep. 47. See too Cic.
de Rep. 14, 23; Juv. Sat. III. 14, and the curious debate in Tac.
Ann. XIV. 43. See too Waller, Hist, de VEsclavage dans V Anti
quity. 2 This was an old reproach against Christianity, and was an
swered by Chrysost. ad 1 Cor. Horn. xix. "Through the vista
of history we see slavery and its pagan theory of two races fall
before the holy word of Jesus — All men are the children of God."

AND THE RACE. 177
which would have been revolutionary and impossible: —
but, by sapping its very foundations, rendered certain
its final abolition. For the Church interpreting the
deeds and words of her divine founder, declared, with
a voice of unmistakeable majesty, that the tp-iuei, SoSXot
were fictions of man's tyrannous and selfish pride ',
and that each man is just as great as he is in God's
sight, and never greater2. It is true that self-interest
has attempted to wrest the New Testament in its own
favour, but so futile has been the effort that the most
prejudiced historians do not deny that to Christianity
mainly the abolition of slavery was due. It preached
emancipation as a duty, and rewarded it as a privilege ;
it elevated the slave into a serf, ennobled by the sense
of mutual obligations between his seigneur and himself,
and then, flinging over him a shield of adamant, it told
the proudest baron who dared to do him wrong that
he did so at the peril of his soul3. And thus it re
moved from labour, both manual and agricultural, the
unworthy brand of shame. Greeks and Romans spoke
Mazzini, Works, vi.gg; Lecky, Hist, of Rational. 11.258; Troplong,
Del'infiuence du Christ, sur le Droit Civil, p. 10 ; Ozanam, Hist, of
Fifth Cent. I. 147 (E. tr.); M. H. Reynald, Rec/i. sur ce qui man-
quait & la liberli dans les rip. anc. p. 177 ; Bunsen, Gott in d. Gesch.
V- 3- 1 tpiaei ptv ovv SubpurTai to BrjXv Kai to SovXov. Arist. comp.
Politics, I. 2, with Col. iii. 11. -iroXipioi tpieei. Plat. Rep. v. p. 47c*
See a remarkable passage in Plutarch. Defort. Alex., and Merivale,
Conv. of Rom. Emp. p. 48. 2 St Francis of Assisi.
3 " In an age when the weak were prostrate at the feet of the
strong, who was there but the Church to plead to the strong for the
weak?" Mill, Dissert. II. 155.
F. H. L. 13

1 7 8 CHRISTIANITY

of artisans and barbarians with contemptuous disgust;
but Christians never forgot that their Lord and Master
had chosen the earthly position of a barbarian and an
artisan1. And hence the fathers preached in their
noblest tones the duty and the dignity of honourable
toil. The proudest Bishops were not ashamed to dig;
a Benedict worked six hours a day with hoe and spade;
a Becket helped regularly to reap the fields. The monks
at once practised labour, and ennobled and protected
it 2. The towns and the middle classes grew up under
their shelter. Laborare et orare became the motto of
Christian life. " Work" said De Ranee", to his poverty-
stricken and disheartened followers at La Trappe, "work
will subdue all regrets ;" and the crock of gold which
in a few moments tinkled under his vigorous spade
did but typify the blessing and the usefulness of toil.
To teach that blessedness has ever been the Church's
duty; nor will that duty cease till she has trained all
her sons to the belief that a life of mere amusement
is dishonourable and disgraceful; that "to consume
much and to produce little, to sit down at the feast of
1 The constant taunt against Christianity as to the humility and
obscurity of its origin (SiKa vavras Kai reXebvas robs i^aXetrrdTcvs
pbvovs etXe, Orig. c. Cels. II. 46; peepdxia Kai olKorplftttiv SxXov
Kai dvo^Tiav avBpeinrtov SpiXov, Id. III. 50), was in reality at once its
glory and its evidence.
2 "They knew," says Mr Mill, of the Benedictines, "and taught
that temporal work may be a spiritual exercise ; and, protected by
their sacred character from depredation, they set the first example
to Europe of industry conducted on a large scale by free labour."
Mill, Dissertations, 11. 154. See too Lecky, Hist, of Rational, n.
261 seqq.

AND THE RACE. 179

life, and to depart without paying the reckoning l," is
a sin too deeply-seated to be successfully gilded over
by the mere profession of a Christian faith.
If then we look — not at the Christianity of feeble
practices and superstitious formulas— but at Christianity
in its freest action and purest essence, we see that
it wiped out the worst curses of Heathendom. Nor was
this the only way in which, beyond all dispute, it laid
the very foundation of that system to which, with its
magnificent inheritance of progressive institutions and
settled aims,' we give the vague name of Modern Civili
zation2. I trust that one rapid final glance will deter
mine our conviction that Intellectually, Socially, Poli
tically it was and is the aim, and by God's especial
blessing the successful aim of Christianity, to guide
and to glorify the present and the future destinies of
man. I. Intellectually her work was less direct and im
mediate than in the other spheres; and yet how vast
1 Lord Derby, Speech at Glasgow.
2 " Toutes les diverses branches essentielles de la morale uni-
verselle ont recu du catholicisme (M. Comte means from Chris
tianity, but prefers the other term) des ameliorations capitales..."
Comte, Phil. Pos. V. 435. "Le Christianisme a €t6 sur tous les
points le puissant auxiliaire des idfes de civilisation et de progrfes."
Troplong, p. 145. " Wir sind mit unserer ganzen Zeit aus den
Boden des Christenthums niedergestellt und von ihm ausgegangen.
Fichte, Anweisung zum seligen Leben. See too Schmidt, Sur la
societe civile dans le monde Romain, 1853. " Among the improvers
of the ideal of humanity," even Strauss admits, "Jesus stands at all
events in the first class." New Life of Jesus, 11. 437. "Catholi
cism laid the very foundations of modern civilization." Lecky, Hist.
of Rat. II. 32. 12 — 2

i So CHRISTIANITY

it was. To begin with Language itself, how has Chris
tianity enriched, preserved, inspired it. How many
languages, like the Gothic, Cornish, Old Prussian,
Saxon and Bulgarian, are solely preserved in frag
ments of scriptural and ecclesiastical documents ; how
many more, like the German and the English, have
been fixed and elevated by versions of the Bible ; how
many more, of the deepest interest for the student of
humanity, have been solely made known to us, in every
region of the globe, by missionary research1? In Art
again, which Greece and Rome had elaborated to such
perfection of beauty, but degraded by such immorality
of aim2, how deep and salutary was the influence of
our faith. Recall, however slightly, the greatest names
of art — in Painting, a Tintoretto and a Raphael; in
Architecture, a Brunelleschi and a Giotto ; in Sculpture,
a Ghiberti and a Michael Angelo; in Music, a Handel
and a Mozart :— recall the loveliest creations of artistic
genius, the resplendent mosaics of the great Italian
basilicas, the Transfiguration, or the Madonna di San
Sisto, the great cathedrals of Normandy and of
England, the dome of Michael Angelo or the Cam
panile of Florence, the statues of Moses at Rome,
or the Apostles at Copenhagen, the musical notation,
and the development of harmony, and the invention
1 " Elle est traduite en plus de cent trente cinq langues, et
comme jadis chez les Goths d'Ulphilas, e lie a cre4 chez plus d'un
peuple Palphabet, la lecture, et l'ecriture." Reville (quoted Luthardt,
Heilswahrheiten, p. 239).
2 See Plin. H. N. 36. 5 ; Aug. Civ. Dei, II. 7 ; Clem. Strom, v.
5 ; Protrept. 11 ; Phil. Pos. v. 465 ; Ozanam, II. ch. viii.

AND THE RACE. iSl

of the organ to. lend new majesty to holy worship,
and you will see at once the sesthetic influence of
Christian faith. Or again, in. Literature, enumerate the
very greatest glories of eighteen Christian centuries,
and consider whether they be not the certain and the
natural outcome of purely Christian influences1. The
Civitas Dei, the Divina Commedia, the Summa Theo
logia, the Imitatio Christi, the Novum Organum, the
Plays of Shakespeare, the Paradise Lost, the Pilgrim's
Progress, the In Memoriam — are not these severally
matchless in their kind, and are they not works of
which any one would have been impossible to Paganism,
and to which heaven and earth have alike contributed2?
Is there one work in all immoral, in all unchristian
literature which you would match with these? Will
you set the Confessions of Rousseau3 side by side with
the Confessions of St Augustine, or compare Paine's Age
1 It is almost superfluous to allude to the services of the Re
formers in favour of schools and classical learning. " That the
clergy were the preservers of all letters and all culture, of the
writings and even the traditions of literary antiquity, is too evident
to have been ever disputed. But for them there would have been
a complete break in Western Europe between the ancient and
modern world." Mill, Dissert. II. 154.
2 Ozanam (Civiliz. in Vth Cent. II. 44) calls the Divina Com
media " a poem that rang with the groans of earth and the hymns of
heaven " — "Poema sacro
A cui ha porto man cielo e terra."
3 Rousseau has uttered many wise and noble sentiments ; but his
political negativism would have led to a most deplorable and anti
social retrogression; and morally it did lead to a brutal preponder
ance of the passions over the reason. Comte, Phil. Pos. v. 772.

I S 2 CHRISTIANITY

of Reason with Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity 1 Eoes not
the history of all literature prove that not even the
brightest wit or the keenest genius— not even the
stately eloquence of Bolingbroke, or the universal learn
ing of Diderot, or the glowing imagination of Byron,
or the flashing witticisms of Voltaire — can save the
writings of men, however gifted, from perishing of in
evitable decay, if they sin against the rules of morality,
or are aimed against the principles of faith ?
II. Yet Socially the work of ChristianityVas more
inestimable still. The vast moral revolution which it
wrought may be summed up in this sentence, — that
it founded the entire relations between man and man
not, as heathendom had done, on selfishness, but on
the new basis of universal love. The ideal of the
Christian family, an ideal lovelier and happier than
any which the world has ever known, is the direct
creation of Christianity. 'Familia' to the ear of a
Roman, meant a multitude of idle, corrupt, and cor
rupting slaves, kept in subjection by the cross and the
ergastulum, ready for any treachery, and reeking with
every vice. It meant a despot who could kill, his
slaves when they were aged, and expose his children
when they were born ; it meant matrons among whom
virtue was rare, divorces frequent, remarriage easy, and
who, from no stronger motive than that of vanity, would
sacrifice the lives of their infants yet unborn ; it meant,
children spectators from their- infancy of insolence and
cruelty, servility and sin. But the new faith, while it
sanctioned the authority of parents, checked their des-i

AND THE RACE.

potism ; it made marriage sacred and indissoluble ; it
encircled the position of womanhood with all that
was pure and divine, and tender, in the names of
mother and of wife. Well might the Pagan orator
exclaim with envy, "What women these Christians
have ' ! " A Phcebe and a Priscilla, a Fabiola and a
Pulcheria, a Paula and a Eustochia, a Monica and
a Perpetua, a Placilla and a Gorgonia were new
phenomena to the Pagan world. For families in which,
like sheltered flowers, spring up all that is purest and
sweetest in human lives ; for marriage exalted to an
almost sacramental dignity ; for all that circle of hea
venly blessings which result from a common self-sa
crifice; for that beautiful unison of noble manhood,
stainless womanhood, joyous infancy, and uncontami-
nated youth; in one word, for all that there is of
divinity and sweetness in the one word Home; for this —
to an extent which we can hardly realise — we are in
debted to Christianity alone 2-
III. Again, Politically, how immense and how
1 See Chrys. ad Vid. Jun. ; Cave, Prim. Christianity, ii. 5.
What Pagan women were may be seen from Juv. Sat. IV. ; Tac.
Ann. xv. 32, 37, XII. 53, 11. 85. Seneca draws a beautiful pic
ture of his mother Helvia, but he ascribes to her as virtues the
absence of many common and atrocious vices. Their best ideal was
of the somewhat poor "domi mansit, lanam fecit" type; and it
was clear that the Greeks admired an Ismene more than an An
tigone. See the Speech of Pericles, Thuc. 11. 45.
2 This entire subject has been admirably treated by Comte,
"Cesoin preponderant du catholicisme pour la morale domestique
a. eu tant d'admirables r&ultats que leur analyse sommaire ne saurait
e\re indiquee ici. Phil. Pos. v. 4:9.

184 CHRISTIANITY
beneficent was its direct action1, i. Consider how
great was the problem solved by the fundamental sepa
ration, yet co-ordinate action of Church and State. The
old Greek Utopias were here realized, not by a Pedant-
ocracy of unpractical philosophers, but by a due subor
dination of the intellect to social activity, and by render
ing the entire commonwealth of empires amenable to
a central spiritual power. It was thus that morality,
which is ever growing in political force, was first defi
nitely infused into civil governments2, and its immediate
effect was to mollify all anarchical elements, to interpose a
truce of God between the oppressor and the oppressed,
1 To Mr Church's remark that "during the first ten centuries
Christianity had hardly leavened society at all," I oppose Mr Lecky,
Hist, of Rational. II. 32, 255, 2S8, and Comte, Phil. Pos. v. 335 —
341. He says that during ten centuries, from St Paul to Hilde-
brand, the elaboration of the ecclesiastical system — the chefd'a-uvre
of human wisdom — was aided by all the greatest men of those cen
turies (the Augustines, Jeromes, Gregories, &c), and that if some
times interrupted "par 1'ombrageuse m^diocrit^ des rois, fut presque
toujours hautement second^e par tous les souverains doufe d'un vrai
g&iie politique." v. 388. "The separation of temporal and spi
ritual," says M. Guizot, "is founded on the idea that material
force had no right, no hold over the mind, over civilization, over
truth." "Enormous as have been the sins of the Catholic Church,"
adds Mr Mill, " in the way of intolerance, her assertion of this
truth has done more for human freedom than all the fires she en
kindled to destroy it." Dissert. II. 243.
2 " Le Christianisme donna son caractfere a- la jurisprudence,
car l'Empire a toujours eu du rapport avec le sacerdoce. On pent voir
le code Thiodosien qui n'est qu'une compilation des ordonnanccs des
empereurs chritiens.'' Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, XIII. 21; Trop
long, Influence du Christianisme sur le Droit Civil, p. 10; Ozanam,
'Hist, of Civil, in Vth Cent. 1. 154 (E. tr.).

AND THE RACE. 183
and in an age of blood and iron to make the sword
fall before the cross, ii. Again, consider the great idea
of Unity — the Solidarity of Peoples — the strong bond
between the members of a common Christendom. The
great fabric of International Law was built upon the
conception that all nationalities, however isolated or
antagonistic, were fused into the higher unity of a domi
nant Church, of which even the barbarous tribes of
unexplored continents were regarded as the natural
subjects. " Sirs, ye are brethren," was the voice of
Christendom to warring kings. It was a magnificent
faith. Henceforth the contemptuous exclusiveness of
Greece, the cunning, cruel, tortuous policy of Rome1, fell
absolutely under the ban. Henceforth there were no
"natural enemies;'' no treating of conquered barbarians
like animals or plants ; no selfish sacrifice of the igno
rant many to the illuminated few. Priests had begun
their sacrifices with the cry "Procul este profani" but the
true voice of Christianity was " Come unto me." The
Philosophers had never dreamed of it, but the real
Unity of Mankind, revealed by the Incarnation of the
Son of God, had been first proclaimed, amid a thousand
perils, by the wandering tent-maker; and the full Univer
sality of the Gospel had been first revealed to the Gali
lean fisherman as he slept at noonday on the tanner's
roof. To realize this Unity, to effect this Universality,
was the great mission of the Church. She did not dis
courage Patriotism, but by supplementing it with the
1 Nowhere more acutely exposed than in Montesquieu, Gran
deur et Decadence.

i 8 5 CHRISTIANITY

conception of our common humanity she rendered it
intenser and more sublime1. The ancients had had
mysteries and secret doctrines, but the whole of Chris
tianity was open to her very meanest son : the heathen
had adored local divinities and gods of the profession
and the class, but the Saviour whom Christians worship
ped was the Saviour of the world, iii. Once more, con
sider what the Church did for Education. Her ten thou
sand monasteries kept alive and transmitted that torch
of learning which otherwise would have been extin
guished long before. A religious education, incompa
rably superior to the mere athleticism of the noble's hall,
was extended to the meanest serf who wished for it2.
This fact alone, by proclaiming the dignity of the Indi
vidual, elevated the entire hopes and destinies of the
race. The humanizing machinery of Schools and Uni-
1 Unam omnium rempublicam agnoscimus, munduvi. Tert.
Apol. 34. Similarly the higher-minded even of the Jews held that
the high priest's sacrifices were offered for the whole world. Philo,
De Monorchia, II. 825.
2 Christianity has often been accused of discouraging Patriotism ;
the charge would be infinitely more true of Philosophy. Hegel,.
taking the MS. of his first book to the printer on the day of the battle
of Jena; Humboldt calmly working in his study while a revolution was
raging in the streets ; Gothe apparently undisturbed by, and indiffe
rent to, the invasion of his country — does any one think their con
duct more Christian than that of Fichte in rousing his audience to
fight for fatherland? " The artist Gothe looked on unmoved: his
heart knew no responsive throb to the emotion that shook his coun
try." Mazzini, Works, VI. 99. Christianity has never been an
enemy to national feeling, though she has infused into Christendom
" a bond of unity which is superior to the divisions of nationhood. "
Lacky, Hist, of Rat. II. 32.

AND THE RACE. 1 87
versities, the civilizing propaganda of missionary zeal,
were they not due to her? And, more than this, her
very existence was a living education : it shewed that
the successive ages were not sporadic and accidental
scenes, but were continuous and coherent acts in the
one great drama. In Christendom the yearnings of the
past were fulfilled, the direction of the future deter
mined. In dim but magnificent procession, " the giant
forms of empires on their way to ruin" had each ceded
to her their sceptres, bequeathed to her their gifts.
There was no cleft between Pagan and Christian; no
break between Jerusalem and Rome. The Poetry, the
Patriotism, the Tolerance of Heathendom, were incor
porated with the Holiness, the Universality, the Hopes
of the one true faith1. Life became one broad rejoin
ing river, whose tributaries, once severed, were now
united; and whose majestic stream, without one break
in its continuity, flowed on, under the common sunlight,
from its Source beneath the Throne of God.
Thus then does History " set to her seal that God
is true." And whence, my 'brethren, in the face of
these. glorious facts, and a thousand more on which it
is impossible to dwell — whence then arises the strange
antagonism to Christianity? In reading works hostile
to our faith2, I find that, besides the disbelief in the
1 See Ozanam, 1. 68 ; Comte, v. 350.
2 It has never been a. tradition among Christians to ignore the
criticism of objectors. Aug. Civ. Dei. Pref. " Verumtamen cog
nosce quid eos contra moveat, atque rescribe ut vel epistolis vel
libris, si adjuverit Deus, ad omnia respondere curemus."

1 8 3 CHRISTIANITY
Supernatural, and the consequent rejection of the Divi
nity of Christ — most of their criticisms may be summed
up under the three broad calumnies, that Christianity
is irreconcileable with Science, opposed to Liberty, and
superseded by Civilization. It would be an easy task,
my brethren, did time permit, to rend these charges to
pieces and fling them to the four winds. All that
can now be said is this, that, (i) as regards Science, if,
above all things, it requires courage, honesty, enthu
siasm, we too exclaim with all the emphasis of impas
sioned and believing prayer iv Se tpdei nal oXecrtrov.
To all true Religion, as to all true Science, the Universe
is an open book of revelation, whose divine hierogly
phics are decipherable by toil, and every fresh discovery
is but a fresh fact to be recorded and co-ordinated with
those which we already know. But Science and Faith
must ever be united, they are the two wings whereby
alone we can soar to the knowledge of God. And,
believe me, if there be a theological, there is also
such a thing as a scientific narrowness J : there is a noble
Science, and there is a Science inflated and ignorant,
and, little as their authors knew of the sublimest laws
of nature, yet this kind of Science is a thing as much
lower than the Pentateuch or the Book of Psalms, as a
treatise of Astronomy, however accurate, is a smaller
thing than the midnight with all its stars.
1 " Which denies the power of revelation innate in man, in order
to date the discovery of truth from the meagre labours upon a frag
ment of creation studied by one single faculty of the mind." Maz-
zini, Fortu. Rev. p. 730 (June, 1870).

AND THE RACE. 189
(2) And who dares to say that our faith is an enemy
to Liberty ? To that liberty indeed which is but an ill-
disguised name for brutal licence — to that liberty which
holds in her right a civic wreath, in her left a human
head — to that liberty which has "for her lullaby the
carmagnole, and for her toy the guillotine," she is an
enemy. But not even in the men of Marathon, or of
Thermopylae, did genuine Freedom find firmer or more
unflinching friends than in the Church of Christ1.
Athens had her slaves, Sparta her Helots, Rome her
proletariat, Hindostan her Pariahs, but to the Church
all men were brothers, and in her language alone the
greatest Queen is but " this woman," and the lordliest
Emperor "this man;" nor did she ever alter one single
syllable of her funeral offices, whether they were read
over the open grave of a pauper or of a Prince. And
did Harmodius or Timoleon, did a Scaevola or a Brutus
ever face despots more bravely than her sons? St
John before Herod, St Paul before Nero; Lucifer of
Cagliari telling Constantine that he could not respect
his diadems, earrings, and bracelets when it was a ques
tion of duty towards God ; St Ambrose repulsing Theo-
1 In the Middle Ages the Church was ' ' the chief refuge and
hope of oppressed humanity." Mill, Dissert. II. 293. "The
liberties of the Church in that age were the liberties of mankind."
Michelet, Hist, de France, 11. 343. We owe to the Church "the
idea of the Unity of the human family, and of the equality and
emancipation of souls." Mazzini, Letter to tEcumen. Council (Fortn.
Rev. June, 1870, p. 737). In this letter Mazzini sums up with
remarkable eloquence and candour the past services of the
Church.

ir-o CHRISTIANITY

dosius from the cathedral gates of Milan, St Columbanus
rebuking King Thierry for his incontinence, St Anselm
braving the anger of the violent and haughty Rufus;
these scenes, and a hundred like them, are the grandest
comment on the true and noble words of Melancthon,
Tyrannis est inimica Ecclesice1.
1 Melancthon, De abusibus emendandis. On the other hand,
sceptics have been among the most selfish flatterers of tyrants —
witness the conduct of Hobbes to Charles IL, and Voltaire telling
Catharine II. his regret that she has "a name which is also in
scribed in the vulgar calendar ! " Hard indeed would be the lot
of the people if the universal selfishness of disbelief prevailed.
Voltaire called them " un composi d'ours d de singes," and he even
advised Frederic II. to condescend to leave religion to "la
canaille, qui n'estpas digne d'ttre eclair&e et a laquelle tous les jougs
sont propres." Far different has been the conduct and the lan
guage of that Church to which the people have often been sq
ungrateful. In was in the Church alone that a serf's son might rise
not only to be the equal of barons, but to be the superior of kings ; in
English history Longchamps, Grostete, Wolsey and others were
all sons of peasants ; and in Papal history Gregory VII., Celestine V.,
John XXII., and others.. ..The league of French seigneurs in 1246
against the clergy, justified themselves on the ground that they
were the sons of serfs. Michelet, Hist, de France, II. 615. "Not
Christians, but Freethinkers, have been the best friends of despotism"
Lecky, Hist, of Rat. II. 243. Renan has remarked on the demo
cratic sympathies of many of the saints. Even the elective prin
ciple of representative government— which surely is the strongest
bulwark of liberty — is due to the Church. " The 320 Bishops who
met at Nice did lawfully represent the multitude of believers, they
were the issue of a democratic inspiration." Mazzini, Letter to
CEcumen. Coun., Fortn. Rev., 1870. " L'organisation catholique
a d'une part attribu^ graduellement au principe &ectif une pleni
tude d'extension jusqu' alors entiferement inconnue... ; d'une part,
sous un aspect moins apprecie^ mais non moins capital, elle a
radicalement perfection^ la nature de ce principe politique, en le

AND THE RACE. 1 01

(3) And lastly, as to Christianity being superseded
by Civilization, the words are meaningless, or if .not
meaningless, are false. For Civilization means either
appliances of comfort, increase of knowledge, refine- I
ments of Art, discoveries of Science, diffusion of wealth,
and all that may be summed up in the one word — mate
rial improvement ; — and to these, except that she scorns
comfort, frowns on luxury, and discourages the greed for
gold — which things are the dangers of civilization and
not its blessings — the Church, as we have seen, is the
loftiest aid :— or else Civilization means purer happiness, I
greater nobleness, clearer and surer wisdom1; and if in-/
rendant plus rationnel, par cela seul qu'elle substituait essentiellement
d&ormais le choix r^el des inferieurs par les superieurs," modified
however by "les legitimes reclamations des subordonnfe." Comte,
Phil. Pos. v. 346.
1 See Mill, Dissert. II. 161. It is impossible to find in the
ideals of any philosophy, even the latest, a single point which is not
anticipated and ennobled in Christianity. Does Secularism aim
that " all material discoveries should result in the increase of moral
force?" (Michelet, Hist, de France, II. 622.) Christianity does
more, for it furnishes the only means. Or, take any of the Comtist
formulEe : is "love their principle, order their basis, progress their J
end?" so also it is ours: do they impress the noble conceptions/
of the solidarity, continuity, and totality of life? we add to them
Infinity (Comte, Phil. Pos. V. passim; Westcott, "Aspects of Positiv
ism," in Cont. Rev. VIII. 381). The "liberty that comes sponr
taneously through nobleness of life " (Bridges, Unity of Comic's Life
¦and Doctrine, p. 54), the "sacrifice of self for the good of others"
(Congreve, The Propagation of the New Religion, p. 21),— "the
public and personal care of bodily health, intellectual force, and
moral obedience" (Id. p. 19),— the "reconcilement of the law of
duty to the law of happiness" (Comte, Catechism of the Pos. Rel.
p. 310),— is there anything here which is lacking to Christianity?

192 CHRISTIANITY

deed it means these things, then to us it seems that
Civilization is but a secular phrase for Christianity itself.
Look, my brethren, at your own hearts, their needs and
yearnings, their sins and sorrows, their low impulses
and heavenly aspirations, and ask whether material pro
gress can do anything to satisfy them, to assuage, to
repress, to stimulate ; ask whether material improvement
would be anything better than a glistering misery, un
less it were guided, interpreted, ennobled by the faith of
Christ? Surely then, to conclude, these were services which,
even had their power been exhausted, would deserve our
deepest gratitude, and we may exclaim in a very dif
ferent sense from that of the French Philosopher, "Reli
gion of Christ, behold thy consequences1 !" But, so far
from being exhausted, the realization of these principles
is as yet but partial, their power as yet but inchoate.
"We live," says Prof. Huxley, "in a world which is full of misery
and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try and
make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable, and
somewhat less ignorant, than it was before he entered it." — The
sentence might come from a sermon of Archbishop Manning, or
Canon Liddon, or Mr Newman Hall. — "To do this effectually,"
he adds, "it is necessary to be fully possessed of only two beliefs, —
the first, that the order of nature is ascertainable by our faculties to
an extent which is practically unlimited ; the second, that our volition
counts for something as a condition of the course of events." If
we should demur to this exposition, it would not be on religious
grounds ; we should desire to modify and supplement, not to super
sede it.
1 "Religion chrStienne, veild tes effets!" Voltaire, after an in
genious calculation that Christianity has cost the lives of some
10, ceo, coo of men !

AND THE RACE. 193
For, by the promise of Inspiration, all is ours : all the
Universe, whether height or depth ; all Science, whether
she labour in the starry spaces or the microscopical
abyss ; all History, whether things present or things
to come ; all Humanity, whether Greek or barbarian,
whether bond or free; all the wealth of past Wisdom, all
the treasuries of future Hope : ours to study now, ours to
possess hereafter; they have been prepared for us
through the infinite past, entrusted to us for the brief
present, promised to us, in their perfect restitution, for
the illimitable future. Whatever Christianity may be, it
is at least no narrow dogma, no evanescent influence.
As we have seen, it dilates our whole being — corporal,
mental, spiritual; it consecrates our whole influence —
domestic, social, political; to our partial successes, if
they be honourable, it promises future completion; to
our total failures, if they be undeserved, it is the pledge
of undreamt success. It unites us to Nature, by whose
conditions we are bounded, but whose forces we direct.
It unites us to the Dead — all saints whom we reverence,
all souls whom we commemorate; it unites us to the
Living, all whom we love and know not, all whom we
love and know ; it unites us to Posterity, for which, sus
tained by Faith, inspired by Hope, we labour with patient
unselfishness and active love; above all, and more
than all, it unites us to the Infinite by making us the
children of God and joint-heirs with Christ, if so be
that we suffer with Him. Is this a limited horizon?
is this an inadequate consolation? is this an unsatisfy
ing hope? is there nothing here which assures us that
f. H. l. 13

.194 CHRISTIANITY

we are greater than we know? Is there anything, any
religion or irreligion, any philosophy or any ignorance
which can in a greater degree than this
"Give grandeur to the beatings of the heart"?
And is this then a religion to be rejected as obsolete,
or despised as immature ? No ! my brethren, but let us
confess with shame, that if any have thought so, the
fault has been largely ours. We, alas ! have been igno
rant and intolerant, we have been narrow and violent,
we have been divided and cold. Too little have we
understood Christ's doctrine, too little practised His law.
Christendom has too often been Christian in name
alone. And thus have our idols, as all idols are, been
to our own decay. The idol of Power, set up by the
ambition of ecclesiastics ; the idol of System, to which
were reared the vast temples of Scholasticism ; the idol
of - Intellectual Tyranny, to which the altars of the
Inquisition smoked with blood ; the idol of Self-will,
worshipped in common by so many divided sects —
these idols have so usurped the Holy Places that they
have made the Lord's House to be abhorred. A jealous
orthodoxy, a dull letter-worship, a sectarian narrowness,
an empty iteration of formulas, an irritating obtrusion
of ceremonies — these things have been the foes of faith.
The Pharisees have been worse enemies to it than the
Sadducees ; the Inquisition than the Infidel. But now,
thank God, our Church is more awake to these dangers,
and she seeks to remedy the failings alike of her sup
porters and her foes. Paganism too much obliterated

. AND THE RACE. 1 95
the Individual \' Catholicism''overlooked too much the
element of the World ; Science and Philosophy had ob
scured the conception of God : but it is the duty of our
Church, and it is her aim, to reconcile the Individual, the
World, and God1 ; to unite, to further, to consecrate the
work of her every child. She hails the emancipation of
the Intellect ; she longs for the Progress of Society ; she
would hallow both to the glory of God. Oh, as, at this
blessed season, we listen in fancy to the Angel-songs,
as we lean in fancy with the simple shepherds by the
manger-cradle — as there, with the Eastern Magi, we are
humbly emulous to lay our choicest gifts — may we pray
more and more earnestly from our inmost hearts, that
the Kingdom of that beloved Saviour whose birth we
commemorate, may indeed come in all its fulness, in all
its universality ; and may it be given us, like "a deep
peace in the heart of a mighty agitation," to realize
that, if we be true to ourselves and true to God, no
thing can separate us from the love of Christ; that
all things are ours, whether the world, or life, or
death, or things present, or things to come — all are
ours, and we are Christ's, and Christ is God's.
1 " God, nature, and man— three Cantos in the gigantic religious
epopeia, which has the ideal for its subject and the generation for its
poet." Mazzini.

13—2

APPENDICES.

Appendix A. Page 4.
On the Diversity of Christian Evidences.
The Evidences of Christianity are not only numerous,
but dissimilar, and independent. "If man's contrivance, or
if the favour of accident, could have given to Christianity any
of its apparent testimonies, either its miracles or its prophe
cies, its morals or its propagation, or, if I may so speak, its
Founder, there would be no reason to believe, nor even to
imagine, that all these appearances of great credibility could
be united together by any such causes. If a successful craft
could have contrived its public miracles, or so much as the
pretence of them, it required another reach of craft and new
resources to provide and adapt its prophecies to the same
object. Further, it demanded not only a different art but a
totally opposite character, to conceive and propagate its ad
mirable morals. Again, the achievement of its propagation,
in defiance of the powers and terrors of the world, implied a
new energy of personal genius, and other qualities of action
than any occurring in the work before. Lastly, the model
of the Life of its Founder, in the very description of it, is a
work of so much originality and wisdom as could be the off
spring only of consummate powers of invention.... But the
hypothesis sinks under its incredibility. For each of these
suppositions of contrivance being arbitrary, as it certainly is,
and unsupported, the climax of them is an extravagance.
And if the imbecility of Art is foiled in the hypothesis, the
combinations of Accident are too vain to be thought of...."
" The whole compass and system of the Christian Evi
dence unquestionably has nothing like it, nor approaching

APPENDIX A.

to it, in the annals of the world. It is a phenomenon
standing alone. I assert this on the concession of those
who have exalted it, beside their intention, by the impotent
comparison by which they have sought to slander and tra
duce it. For what has been done ? Its miracles have been
forced into a sort of parallel with some wild unauthenticated
relations in the cloudy romance of a Pagan sophist (in the
case of Apollonius Tyaneus) ; or with the vague and insu
lated pretences of a better history (in the case of Vespasian) ;
or the mask of a detected and defeated imposture among
a Roman Catholic sect. Its prophecies have undergone the
violence of a similar comparison with the oracles of Hea
thenism, long ago put to silence, or the legends of a more
recent superstition. Its divine morals have been represented
as little better than might be derived from the philosophy of
a Grecian or Eastern teacher, Socrates or Confucius. Its
wonderful progress and propagation, carried without any of
the instruments of human power, and in opposition to them,
have been matched with the success of the Mahometan heresy
effected by the power of the sword. Thus all ages and
countries and creeds have been explored with an industry
even greater than the success, to furnish the separate mate
rials of such comparisons as the objectors have been able
to produce : while the conspicuous and uncontested fact that
Christianity unites within itself the signs and indications
which no other system, philosophic or religious, does, nor
pretended to do, leaves it in possession of a character which
repels the indignity of all comparison by the distant and in
commensurate pretensions of the things attempted to be put
in resemblance with it." Davison On Prophecy, pp. 31, 32.
" The conspiring probabilities of a subject run together
into a perfect conviction." Ibid. p. 28.

Appendix B. Page 133.
Confucius.
The recent valuable' work of Dr Legge on the Life and
Teachings of Confucius, contains a translation of the Ana
lects, and enables us to form some conception of the great
K'ung Foo-tsze.
A few extracts will shew how modest were his own claims
compared with those which his followers and worshippers
have set up for him.
" The sage and the man of perfect virtue — how dare I
rank myself with them? It may be simply said of me that I
strive to become such without satiety, and teach others with
out weariness." Analects, VII. 33.
" In letters I am perhaps equal to other men ; but the
character of the perfect man, carrying out in his conduct
what he professes, is what I have not yet attained to"
Ibid. 32.
He deliberately placed himself below many of the old
sages of China.
" A transmitter," he said, " and not a maker, believing in
and loving^ the ancients, I venture to compare myself with
our old P'ang."
He avoided the subjects of God and Immortality, and
this is why his influence has been unfavourable to the growth
of religion in China.
"He. sacrificed to the dead as if they were present; he
sacrificed to the spirits as if the spirits were present." Ibid.
III. 12.
His general method was to evade the entire subject, e.g.,
" Ke Loo asked about serving the spirits of the dead, and

APPENDIX B.

the master said, ' While you are not able to serve men, how
can you serve their spirits?' The disciple added, ' I venture
to ask about death;' he was answered, 'While you do not
know about life, how can you know about death.'" Ibid.
XI. II.
"Tsze-Kung asked him, ' Do the dead have knowledge?'
The master said, ' You need not wish to know, Tsze, whether
the dead have knowledge or not There is no present ur
gency about the point. Hereafter you will know it for your
self.' " " I incline to think," adds Dr Legge, " that he doubted
more than he believed." And if so to what a dreary sham
his whole religious prescriptions are reduced!
Two or three further passages will shew the opinions of
Dr Legge — and we could have no more competent authority
— on his character and teaching.
"There is a want of freedom about the philosopher.
Somehow he is less a sage to me, after I have seen him
at his table, in his undress, in his bed, in his carriage."
Ibid. 90.
" As by his frequent references to ' Heaven,' instead of
following the phraseology of the older sages, he gave occa
sion to many of his followers to identify God with a principle
of reason and the course of nature, so... he has led them to
deny, like the Sadducees of old, the existence of any spirit
at all, and to tell us that their sacrifices to the dead are but
an outward form, the mode of expression which the principle
of filial piety requires them to adopt when its objects have
departed this life." Ibid. 102.
" I must now leave the sage. I hope I have not done
him injustice. After long study of his character and opi
nions, I am unable to regard him as a great man. He was
not before his age, though he was above the great mass of
the officers and scholars of his time. He threw no new
light on any of the questions that have a world-wide interest.
He gave no impulse to religion. He had no sympathy with
progress? Ibid. 115.

Appendix C. Page 138.
Buddha.
The life of Sakya Mouni was singularly noble : " Je n'hesite
pas a ajouter," says M. Barthelemy St Hilaire (La Buddha
et sa Religion, Paris, i860) : "que sauf le Christ tout seul
il n'est point parmi les fondateurs de religion, de figure plus
pure, ni plus touchante que celle du Bouddha. Sa vie n'a
point de tiche. Son constant heroi'sme egale sa conviction :
et si la thfiorie qu'il preeonise est fausse, les exemples per
sonnels qu'il donne sont irreprochables." p. v.
Speaking of the noble missionary Hiouen-thsang — the
St Francis Xavier of Buddhism — Prof. Max Miiller says
that for four nights and five days he travelled through
the desert without a drop of water. " He had nothing
to refresh himself except his prayers, and what were they ?
Texts from a work which taught that there was no God,
no Creator, no creation — nothing but mind, minding itself.
It is incredible in how exhausted an atmosphere the divine
spark within us will glimmer on, and even warm the
dark chambers of the human heart." Max Miiller, Chips,
p. 269. Buddhism, as a religion, is Atheism fast merging into
Idolatry. " II n'y a pas trace de l'idee de Dieu dans le Boudhisme
entier ni au debut ni au terme." B. St Hilare, p. iv.
" The attribution to a Buddha of power and sanctity,
infinitely superior to that of the gods is only a development
of the notion that the gods could be made subject to the
will of a mortal by his performance of superhuman auste
rities.. ..The notion of Buddha's supremacy once established,

204 APPENDIX C.

the worship of the gods became superfluous ; but as the
mass of mankind are in need of sensible objects to which
their devotions are to be addressed, Buddha came to be
substituted for the gods, and his statues to usurp their altars."
— Wilson, Essays on the Religion of the Hindoos.
" In this respect Buddhism was a degeneration from the
previous Brahminism, of which in other respects it was a
reform." — B. St Hilaire, p. 164.
It is " a spiritualism without soul, a virtue without duty,
a moral without liberty, a charity without love, a world with
out nature and without God." — Ib. p. 182.
"Insufficient for time and rejecting eternity, the utmost
triumph of his religion is to live without fear and to die with
out hope." — Sir J. Em. Tennant's Christianity in Ceylon,
p. 227. The general social effects of Buddhism seem to be purely
disastrous. " There are some peculiar features in the teaching of
Sakya and his disciples which render it more surprising that
it could ever have been successful, than that its success should
have been of temporary duration. Its object is not the good
of the people in their social condition. It no doubt enjoins
the observance of moral duties... but to whom are these in
junctions addressed... to Bhikshas... persons who have sepa
rated themselves from the world, and who, besides profess
ing faith in Buddha, engage to lead a life of self-denial,
celibacy, and mendicancy, and to estrange themselves from
all domestic and social obligations."..." In this spirit is the
whole of the Vinaya or Buddhist discipline conceived : it is a
set of rules for individuals separated from society in whom
all natural feeling is to be suppressed, all passions and
desires extinguished, consistently enough with the doctrine
that life is the source of all evil, and that one means of
counteracting it is by checking the increase of living things."
— Wilson, Essays, I. 360.

Appendix D. P. 144.
Comte.
The subject of the relations of Comtism to Christianity
have been handled in so masterly and admirable a manner
by Professor Westcott in the Contemporary Review (VI. 399,
vm. 371), that it might be sufficient to refer to those two
papers in confirmation of what I have said. I will, however,
add a few quotations :
One of the mottoes of Positivism is Reorganiser sans
Dieu ni roi.
"Vous pretendez," says Dr Semerie, "que tout va mal
parceque Dieu n'est pas assez parmi nous, tandis que nous
affirmons que tout irait bien mieux s'il n'y 6tait pas du tout."
— Positivistes et Catholiques, p. 13
" Humanity," says Comte, is " an immense eternal Being,
destined by sociological laws to constant development under
the preponderating influence of biological and cosmological
necessities. This the real Great Being, on whom all, whether
. individuals or societies depend, as the prime mover of
their existence, becomes the centre of our affections." —
Catechism of Positive Religion (translated by Dr Congreve),
p. 64. His definition of Prayer, which he calls " a work of art,"
is as follows : " We adore her (Humanity) not as his wor
shipper adored God with vain compliments, but in order to
serve her better by bettering ourselves." — Id. 106.
"The future of the world," says Dr Congreve, "will
justify the faith.. .that man can be a providence to himself, in

206 APPENDIX D.

a more practical and beneficial sense than any of the various
providences he created in his earlier existence ; that Huma-
I nity will be found the real, God but the imaginary source of
' blessings hitherto attained, or in the future attainable ; and,
as such source, the legitimate object of our worship in the
Positive sense of that term when freed from theological
associations." — The Propagation of the New Religion (ad.
fin.). One of the passages alluded to in the text may be found
in another Sermon of Dr Congreve's : The New Religion in
its attitude to the Old.
" We take in connection the sum of the conditions of
existence, and we give them an ideal being and a definite
home in space, the second great creation, which completes
the central one of Humanity. In the bosom of space we
place the World; and we conceive of the World and this our
mother Earth as gladly welcomed to that bosom with the
simplest and purest love, and we give our love in return...
Thus we complete the Trinity of our Religion — Humanity,
the World, Space? P. 18.
Aivos fiacriXevei rbv At' et;e\rj\aKtos ! Ar. Nub. 828.
In the same Sermon Dr Congreve says, " We accept ;
so have all men. We obey ; so have all men, We venerate ;
so have some in past ages and in other countries. We add
but one other term — we love."
It is strange that this should be regarded as a new
addition to the religious sense of the world; and it is in
singular contrast to Comte's own remark :
" I am free to confess, my daughter, that hitherto the
Positive Spirit has been tainted with the two moral evils
which peculiarly wait on knowledge. // puffs up and it
dries the heart, by giving free scope to pride and by turning
it from love." — Catechism of Positive Religion, p. 72.
The religious depth and earnestness of Comte's own
spirit was the direct result of Christian teaching, and was
probably due in no small degree to his favourite book, the

APPENDIX D. 207

object of his daily study, the Imitatio Christi. He says, " I
sum up all my wishes for personal perfection in the admi
rable form by which the sublimest of mystics was led to
prepare in his own manner the moral motto of Positivism :
Amem te plus quam me, nee me nisi propter te."

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