Essays in Literature and History Part 12

They were to take it into their system, a pure material substance, to leaven the old natural substance and a.s.similate it to itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death, but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had no power. Circ.u.mcision availed nothing, nor uncirc.u.mcision--but a new creature--this new creature, which the child first put on in baptism, being born again into Christ of water and the spirit.

In the Eucharist he was fed and sustained and going on from strength to strength, and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to render a more complete obedience, he would at last pa.s.s away to G.o.d through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would necessarily cling to him, the Christian's mortal eye on earth cannot see Him. Hedged in by "his muddy vesture of decay,"

his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last victory of evil, in virtue of His submission to it, became its own destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed away and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of G.o.d.

The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling difficulty, what could He be but G.o.d? G.o.d Himself! Who but G.o.d could have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking world believed to be His coequal and coeternal adversary. He was G.o.d.

He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the second starting point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the substance which He a.s.sumed; and being Himself sinless, He showed in the nature of His person, after His resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St.

Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the penitential scourgings, and life-long austerities which have been alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They would overcome their animal bodies, and antic.i.p.ate in life the work of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the destruction of the flesh which lay as a veil between themselves and Him.

And such, I believe, to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed which, for 1800 years, has tuned the heart and formed the mind of the n.o.blest of mankind.

From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common detail of the common life of all of us. Like the seven lamps before the Throne of G.o.d, the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed over us a never ceasing stream of blessed influence.

First there are the priests, a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, representing Christ and administering his gifts. Christ, in his twelfth year, was presented in the temple, and first entered on His father's business; and the baptized child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what it undertakes, and receives again sacramentally a fresh gift of grace to a.s.sist it forward on its way. In maturity it seeks a companion to share its pains and pleasures; and, again, Christ is present to consecrate the union. Marriage, which outside the church only serves to perpetuate the curse and bring fresh inheritors of misery into the world, He made holy by His presence at Cana, and chose it as the symbol to represent His own mystic union with His church.

Even saints cannot live without at times some spot adhering to them. The atmosphere in which we breathe and move is soiled, and Christ has antic.i.p.ated our wants.

Christ did penance forty days in the wilderness, not to subdue His own flesh, for that which was already perfect did not need subduing, but to give to penance a cleansing virtue to serve for our daily or our hourly ablution.

Christ consecrates our birth; Christ throws over us our baptismal robe of pure unsullied innocence. He strengthens us as we go forward. He raises us when we fall. He feeds us with the substance of His own most precious body. In the person of His minister he does all this for us, in virtue of that which in His own person he actually performed when a man living on this earth. Last of all, when all is drawing to its close with us, when life is past, when the work is done, and the dark gate is near, beyond which the garden of an eternal home is waiting to receive us, His tender care has not forsaken us. He has taken away the sting of death, but its appearance is still terrible; and He will not leave us without special help at our last need. He tried the agony of the moment; and He sweetens the cup for us before we drink it. We are dismissed to the grave with our bodies anointed with oil, which He made holy in His last anointing before his pa.s.sion, and then all is over. We lie down and seem to decay--to decay --but not all. Our natural body decays, the last remains of which we have inherited from Adam, but the spiritual body, that glorified substance which has made our life, and is our real body as we are in Christ, that can never decay, but pa.s.ses off into the kingdom which is prepared for it; that other world where there is no sin, and G.o.d is all in all! Such is the Philosophy of Christianity. It was worn and old when Luther found it. Our posterity will care less to respect Luther for rending it in pieces, when it has learnt to despise the miserable fabric which he st.i.tched together out of its tatters.

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PLEA FOR THE FREE DISCUSSION OF THEOLOGICAL DIFFICULTIES

In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or inquiry, the judicious questioning of received opinions has been the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress and growth. If medicine had been regulated three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every licensed pract.i.tioner had been compelled, under pains and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor b.u.t.ts, it is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people of this country would at present be found. Const.i.tutions have changed with habits of life, and the treatment of disorders has changed to meet the new conditions.

New diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor b.u.t.ts had no cognizance; new continents have given us plants with medicinal virtues previously unknown; new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded experience, have added a thousand remedies to those known to the age of the Tudors. If the College of Physicians had been organized into a board of orthodoxy.

and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a crime against society, which a law had been established to punish, the hundreds who die annually from preventible causes would have been thousands and tens of thousands.

Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The accuracy of the present theory of the planetary move merits is tested daily and hourly by the most delicate experiments, and the legislature, if it so pleased, might enact the first principles of these movements into a statute, without danger of committing the law of England to falsehood. Yet, if the legislature were to venture on any such paternal procedure, in a few years gravitation itself would be called in question, and the whole science would wither under the fatal shadow.

There are many phenomena still unexplained to give plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily formularized for working purposes in the language of Ptolemy; and there would be reactionists who would invite us to return to the safe convictions of our forefathers. What the world has seen the world may see again; and were it once granted that astronomy were something to be ruled by authority, new Popes would imprison new Galileos; the knowledge already acquired would be strangled in the cords which were intended to keep it safe from harm, and deprived of the free air on which its life depends it would dwindle and die.

A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr.

Jellinger Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the opposite of the apparent motions. Mr.

Symonds conceived that the moon could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was continually turned towards the earth; and if it were connected with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain unchanged. He sent his views to the Times. He appealed to the common sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious, had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the confusion: we do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not; but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us with an unintelligent and languid a.s.sent, were set thinking for ourselves, and as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea for a clear one.

It was an excellent ill.u.s.tration of the true claims of authority and of the value of open inquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers it, and all of us are the better for the business.

Now let us suppose the same thing to have happened, when the only reply to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer Royal, where the rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer Royal--as it was, if we remember right, he was a little cross about it--would have brought an action against Mr. Symonds in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso, and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.

As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its capacity for self-defence, so practically in every subject except one, errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and that liberty of opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue in favour of it is almost absurd-- might be expected to have been applied as a matter of course to the one subject on which mistake is supposed to be fatal, where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity. Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in courtesy. They are generalizations which are not considered likely to require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he inquire, it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant, crawling with bare knees over the flint points on Croagh Patrick, the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the spasmodic extasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in themselves which correspond to their creed: the more pa.s.sionate--or, as some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarra.s.sment to the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of Satan.

Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more formidable than they are at present--much about "the right of private judgment."

Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it; but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one talks of "a right of private judgment."

in anything but religion; no one but a fool insists on his "right to his own opinion" with his lawyer or his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are authorities upon it to be listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense. Of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The utmost "right of private judgment" which anybody claims in such cases, is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression, as it is commonly used, implies a belief that in matters of religion, the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere, and the efforts which have been made to bring the notion into harmony with common sense and common subjects, have not been very successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the Evangelicals, that either "the right of private judgment" meant nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. "No," said a writer in the Edinburgh Review "it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not force a way into his house and prevent him." The ill.u.s.tration fails of its purpose. In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions as against the Church.

They did not indeed put forward their claim quite so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but n.o.body ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.

But, secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of evil--drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can--only in doing so, society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but rather does him the greatest benefit if it can possibly keep him sober; and in the same way, as a false belief in serious matters is among the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of a man, by the whip, if it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do, but merely "how to do it;"

although Mr. Mill, in his love of "liberty," thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament to public opinion, when he lays down as a general principle that the free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion inflicted upon him from without; while for our own part we should be grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful an office for us.

Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of which we are at present speaking: But on the whole, it is like the ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure; much in this world has to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist, a Mahometan, it is a.s.sumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious conviction but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome inconveniences on those who carry their "right of private judgment" to any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which operates so wholesomely in the Sciences.

Mere folly is extinguished in contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to test their value, make their way into general reception.

A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed upon the const.i.tution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted, for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be allowed convenient lat.i.tude, while forbidden to pa.s.s beyond the border.

It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is pa.s.sed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of his duty he has to p.r.o.nounce a sentence which he declares at the same time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad one.

Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war was unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman. The idea of absolute inward belief has been subst.i.tuted for that of obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and accepts the Prayer-Book, does not merely undertake to use the services in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise, that he will continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his engagement.

It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of 1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If they had, they would have provided means by which he could have abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt, never to allow his mind to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament, precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of a Council.

If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.

So far have we gone in this direction, that when the Essays and Reviews appeared, it was gravely said --and said by men who had no professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.

Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no part in the amendment of the statute-book, that engineers must be silent upon mechanism, and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine, physicians may have nothing to say to it.

These causes would perhaps have been insufficient to repress free inquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a sense, half serious, haft languid, of the hopelessness of the subject has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty G.o.d, on the details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and n.o.blest in their lives and actions.

This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once possessed it possesses no longer.

The uncertainty which once affected only the more instructed extends now to all cla.s.ses of society. A superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or remain warily silent.

"What religion are you, Mr. Rogers?" said a lady once.

"What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men."

"And what is that?" she asked.

"All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves."

If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said perhaps that when the opinions of those best able to judge are divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty. But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute a.s.sent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect therefore to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The objections of the present generation of "infidels," he says, are the same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more anxious for truth than for success in life, finds when he looks into the matter that the Archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be exorcised. They come and come again from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming fresh to the subject, with no more than a year's study, throws the Church of England into convulsions.

If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look with comfort to exchanging one for the other.

Christianity has abler advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives. The G.o.d that answer by fire is the G.o.d whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful chemical a.n.a.lysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system; so when a particular belief is fruitful in n.o.bleness of character, we need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told, is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as gum-arabic.

What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is less easy to divine. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the early Church was not the creed of the middle ages, any more than the creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St.

Bernard and Aquinas. Old things pa.s.s away, new things come in their place; and they in their turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms which Christianity has a.s.sumed in the world, holy men have lived and died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of G.o.d, when the children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able to bear.

But it is not the object of this article to put forward either this or any other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is pa.s.sing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious to disclaim "all right of private judgment" in the matter. He wishes only to learn from those who are able to teach him.

The learned prelates talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason, however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared; let those who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain, and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely perhaps a single serious inquirer who would not submit with delight to a court which is the highest on earth.

Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of G.o.d reason is beyond its depth, that the wise and the unwise are on the same level of incapacity, and that we must accept what we find established, or we must believe nothing.

We presume that this dilemma itself is a conclusion of reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our ultimate authority; and were the collective sense of mankind to declare Mr. Mansell right, we should submit to that opinion as readily as to another. But the collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He has been compared to a man sitting on the end of a plank and deliberately sawing off his seat. It seems never to have occurred to him that, if he is right, he has no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied to Frith and Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that transubstantiation was unreasonable; Gardiner answered that there was the letter of Scripture of it, and that the human intellect was no measure of the power of G.o.d.

Yet the Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell by his place in the Church of England seems to agree with them, that the human intellect was not so wholly incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was better than none; and they declared on grounds of mere reason, that Christ being in heaven and not on earth, 'it was contrary to the truth for a natural body to be in two places at once.' The common sense of the country was of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an end.

There have been "Aids to Faitti" produced lately, and "Replies to the Seven Essayists," "Answers to Colenso,"

and much else of the kind. We regret to say that they have done little for us. The very life of our souls is at issue in the questions which have been raised, and we are fed with the professional commonplaces of the members of a close guild, men holding high office in the Church, or expecting to hold high office there; in either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence of the inst.i.tution which they represent. We desire to know what those of the clergy think whose love of truth is unconnected with their prospects in life; we desire to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and these are for the most part silent, or confess themselves modestly uncertain. The professional theologians alone are loud and confident; but they speak in the old angry tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.

They do not meet the real difficulties; they mistake them, misrepresent them, claim victories over adversaries with whom they have never even crossed swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at which we can only smile. It has been the unhappy manner of their cla.s.s from immemorial time; they call it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond all doubt that they were on G.o.d's side, as if serious inquiry after truth was something which they were ent.i.tled to resent. They treat intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather to be condemned and punished than considered and weighed, and rather stop their ears and run with one accord upon any one who disagrees with them than listen patiently to what he has to say.

We do not propose to enter in detail upon the particular points which demand re-discussion. It is enough that the more exact habit of thought which science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of the value and nature of evidence, has notoriously made it necessary that the grounds should be reconsidered on which we are to believe that one country and one people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles different from those which we now find to prevail universally. One of many questions, however, shall be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue seems habitually to be evaded.

Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity of the Pentateuch and the other historical books of the Old Testament. The Bishop of Natal has thrown out in a crude form the critical results of the inquiries of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical calculations, for which he has a special apt.i.tude. He supposes himself to have proved that the first five books of the Bible are a compilation of uncertain date, full of inconsistencies and impossibilities. The apologists have replied that the objections are not absolutely conclusive, that the events described in the book of Exodus might possibly, under certain combinations of circ.u.mstances, have actually taken place; and they then pa.s.s to the a.s.sumption that because a story is not necessarily false, therefore it is necessarily true. We have no intention of vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes his arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and Dr. M'Call may settle their differences between themselves.

The question is at once wider and simpler than any which has been raised in that controversy. Were it proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was written by Moses, that those and all the books of the 01d and New Testaments were really the work of the writers whose names they bear; were the Mosaic cosmogony in harmony with physical discoveries; and were the supposed inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should not have advanced a single step towards making good the claim put forward for the Bible, that it is absolutely and unexceptionably true in all its parts. The "genuineness and authenticity" argument is irrelevant and needless.

The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of the Pentateuch proves nothing about its immunity from errors. If there are no mistakes in it, it was not the workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand of Moses was the instrument made use of. To the most excellent of contemporary histories, to histories written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe, we accord but a limited confidence. The highest intellectual competence, the most admitted truthfulness, immunity from prejudice, and the absence of temptation to mis-state the truth; these things may secure general credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and circ.u.mstantial exactness. Two historians, though with equal gifts and equal opportunities, never describe events in exactly the same way. Two witnesses in a court of law, while they agree in the main, invariably differ in some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate facts precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The different parts of a story strike different imaginations unequally; and the mind, as the circ.u.mstances pa.s.s through it, alters their proportions unconsciously, or shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to the most authentic work of a man has no resemblance to that universal acceptance which is demanded for the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is a difference in kind; and we desire to know on what ground this infallibility, which we do not question, but which is not proved, demands our belief. Very likely the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it is, there can be no moral obligation to accept the facts which it records: and though there may be intellectual error in denying them, there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better or worse authenticated; but all the proofs in the world of the genuineness and authenticity of the human handiwork cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of Pericles, but no one would call it sinful. Men part with all sobriety of judgment when they come on ground of this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name of Sennacherib on the a.s.syrian marbles, and found allusions there to the Israelites in Palestine, we were told that a triumphant answer had been found to the cavils of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired truth of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause are a sure way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine Oracles may be true, and may be inspired; but the discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them so.

No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the prophesies of Isaiah and Ezekiel were the work of men who had no knowledge of a.s.syria or the a.s.syrian Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at Carthage some Punic inscription may be found confirming Livy's account of the battle of Cannae; but we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument comes to that) in the inspiration of the whole Latin literature.