I had not forgotten that, in order to complete the brief discussion of
the miraculous element in the New Testament, it is necessary to give
some explanation of the origin of the accounts of the birth of Christ.
Your last letter reminds me of this necessity, and you put before me two
alternatives. “If,” you say, “Christ was born of a Virgin, then a
miracle is conceded so stupendous that it is absurd to object to the
other miracles: but if Christ was not born of a Virgin, then, unless the
honesty of the Gospel narratives is to be impeached, some account is
needed of the way in which the miraculous legend found its way into the
Gospels;” and you add that you would like to know what meaning, if any,
I attach to the statement in the Creed, that Jesus was “born of a
Virgin.”
As you probably anticipate, I accept the latter of your alternatives,
and I will therefore endeavour briefly to shew how the story of the
Miraculous Conception “found its way into the Gospels.” But first I must
protest against your expression as inexact. The story of the Miraculous
Conception, so far from having “found its way into _the Gospels_,” found
its way into only two out of the four, namely, St. Matthew’s and St.
Luke’s. And this fact, strong as it is, does not represent the strength
of the negative argument from omission. Of the _nine_ authors, or
thereabouts, of the different books in the New Testament, only two
contain any account, reference, or allusion to the Miraculous
Conception. No mention is made of it in any of the numerous Epistles of
St. Paul; nor in any of his speeches, nor in those of St. Peter,
recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, nor in any part of that book; nor
in the Epistles of St. John, St. James, St. Peter, St. Jude; nor in the
Apocalypse; nor in the Gospels of St. Mark and St. John! Even the two
Gospels that mention it contain no evidence that it was known to any of
the disciples during the life-time of Jesus, and one of these (Luke iii.
23) traces the genealogy of Jesus from Joseph and expressly declares
that He “was supposed” to be “the Son of Joseph.”[32] This negative
evidence becomes all the more weighty if you consider how very natural
it was, and I may almost say inevitable, that the story of a Miraculous
Conception should speedily find its way into the traditions of the early
Church. The causes that worked toward this result were, first, Old
Testament prophecy; secondly, traditions and expressions current among a
certain section of the Jews; thirdly, the preconceptions of pagan
converts.
Recall to mind what was said in a previous letter concerning the
importance attached by the earliest Christians to the argument from
prophecy. Now there is a prophecy in Isaiah which, _if separated from
its context_, might seem to point to nothing but the Miraculous
Conception of the Messiah: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign:
behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name
Immanuel.” But a careful study of the context puts the matter in a quite
different light. Isaiah (vii. 10-viii. 4) is promising to King Ahaz
deliverance from the kings of Syria and Samaria. As the king will not
ask for a sign, the prophet promises that the Lord will give him one; a
virgin shall conceive and bring forth a child and shall call his name
Immanuel (“God with us”): he shall “eat butter and honey” when he
arrives at the age of distinction between good and evil; for before he
arrives at that age, the land abhorred by Ahaz shall be “forsaken by
both her kings.” The meaning appears to be that, within the time
necessary for the conception and birth of a child, that is to say, in
less than a year, the prospects of deliverance for Judah from her
present enemies (Syria and Samaria) shall so brighten that a child shall
be born and called by a name implying the favour of God; afterwards,
before that child shall grow up to childhood, the two aggressive
countries of Syria and Samaria shall be themselves desolated, as well as
Judah, by the “razor” of Assyria which shall shave the country clean
from all cultivated crops. Amid the general desolation, the fruit trees
will be cut down, the corn will not be sown; bread there will be none;
there will be nothing to eat but “butter and honey;” it is not the
new-born child alone who shall eat “butter and honey;” “butter and honey
shall _every one eat that is left in the land_” (vii. 22).
In all this, even though we may suppose that there may have been some
Messianic reference, there is no prediction at all of a conception from
a virgin or of a miracle of any kind. Indeed, the prophecy appears to
find some sort of fulfilment in what happens immediately afterwards
(Isaiah viii. 1-4), when the prophet contracts a marriage, and calls the
son who springs from it by a name implying the vengeance imminent on
Samaria and Assyria: “Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz (_i.e._ booty,
quick, spoil, speedy): for before the boy shall have knowledge to cry my
father! my mother! the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall
be taken away before the king of Assyria.” No doubt it may be said that
this son was not called “Immanuel,” so that the prophecy was not
fulfilled in him. But the same argument might be urged against the
application to our Lord; for He also was not called “Immanuel,” but
received the old national name of “Joshua,” “Jeshua,” or “Jesus.”
Reviewing all the circumstances of the prophecy, I think we may say,
without exaggeration, first, that there are no grounds for seeing in it
any reference to a Miraculous Conception; secondly, that, when isolated,
it might easily be misinterpreted so as to convey such a reference.[33]
Even if no such prophecy had existed, the language and preconceptions of
the earliest Christians and their converts would almost necessarily have
introduced a belief in the Miraculous Conception. The language of
Philo—who represents not a mere individual eccentricity but the current
phraseology of the Alexandrine school of thought, and whose influence
may be traced in almost every page of the Fourth Gospel—consistently
affirms that, whenever a child is mentioned in the Old Testament as
having been born to be a deliverer in fulfilment of a divine promise,
that child is “begotten of God.” The words of Sarah, he says, indicate
that, in reality, “The _Lord begot_ Isaac.” God is also spoken of as
“the _husband of Leah_.” Zipporah is described as being “pregnant by _no
mortal_.” Samuel, in words that contain an implied belief that only his
maternal parentage was mortal, is declared to be “perhaps a man,” and
“born of a human mother.” I have already quoted one passage about Isaac
but another asserts that he is to be considered “_not the result of
generation_ but the work of _the unbegotten_.” Sometimes the language of
Philo is so worded as to convey even to a careful reader the impression
that he believed in a literally Miraculous Conception, as for example
when he says that “Moses introduces Sarah as being _pregnant when
alone_, and as being _visited by God_.” Elsewhere, he removes the
possibility of misunderstanding by saying that “the Scripture is
cautious, and describes God as the husband, not of a virgin, but of
virginity.” None the less, you can easily see how expressions of this
kind, current among Jewish philosophers a generation before the time of
St. Paul, might be very easily interpreted literally by ordinary people
unskilled in these metaphorical subtleties, and especially by Gentile
converts asking for a plain answer to a plain question, “What was the
parentage of this man whom you call the Son of God?”
In truth the preconceptions of the Gentile converts must have played no
small part in preparing the way for the doctrine of the literal
Miraculous Conception. The Greeks and Romans who worshipped or honoured
Æsculapius son of Apollo, Romulus son of Mars, Hercules son of Jupiter,
and a score of other demi-gods, would be quite familiar with the notion
of a god or hero born of a human mother and of a divine father; they
would not only be prepared for it in the case of Jesus, whom they were
called on to adore as the Son of God, they would even demand and assume
it. They would argue much as Tertullian argued: “If he was the son of a
man, he was not the son of God; and if he was the son of God, he was not
the son of a man.” This argument ought to have been met by a flat
denial, thus: “The mere physical and carnal union by which, according to
your legends, the gods, assuming the forms of men, generated Æsculapius,
Romulus, and Hercules, is not to be thought of here. When we speak of
Jesus being the Son of God, we do not mean that His body was formed by
God descending from heaven and assuming human shape or functions, but
that His Spirit was spiritually begotten of God. It is therefore quite
possible that Jesus may have been the Son of God according to the Spirit
and yet the son of man according to the flesh.” But instead of that, the
whole truth, there came back this half-true answer. “The parentage was
divine, but not of the materialistic nature you suppose: God did not
assume human shape: the generation was spiritual.” By these words there
may have been meant at first, simply what Philo meant, that while the
spiritual parentage was divine, the material parentage was human: but
such an answer would leave many under the impression that the body as
well as the spirit of Jesus resulted from a spiritual generation in
which no human father participated. The Gentiles would naturally
interpret the Philonian doctrine literally and say of Mary, as Philo had
said of Sarah, that she was “pregnant when alone, and visited by God.”
From a very different point of view, the ritual and hymnals of some of
the Jews might facilitate the growth of the belief that Jesus was born
of a virgin. For they might naturally speak of their Messiah as being a
child of the virgin daughter of Sion, whose only husband was Jehovah.
And hence in the Apocalypse, a book imbued with Jewish feeling, we find
Jesus described (xii. 1-6) as the child of a woman who evidently
represents Israel: “A woman arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her
feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was _with
child_.... And she was delivered of a _son_, _a man child, who is to
rule all the nations with a rod of iron_.” This personification of the
daughter of Israel or of Jerusalem as representing the nation, the bride
of Jehovah, is very common in the prophets. You may find similar
personifications in the New Testament. The Apocalypse describes the
Church as the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, descending from Heaven “_as
a bride_ adorned for her husband.” St. Paul speaks of the New Jerusalem,
which is above (_i.e._ the spiritual Jerusalem, free from the law), as
being “the _mother_ of us all.” Sometimes the personification of the
Church is liable to be misinterpreted literally, as in St. Peter’s and
St. John’s Epistles, where “the elect lady” “thine elect sister” and
“the (lady) in Babylon” have been supposed by some to refer to
individuals, but are believed by Bishop Lightfoot to represent the
Churches of the places from which, and to which, the epistles were
written. The whole of St. Paul’s Epistles presuppose the metaphor of a
Virgin Church, and toward the end of the second century (177 A.D.) we
find a very curious passage (in an epistle from the Church of Lyons) in
which the repentance and martyrdom of some previous apostates are
described as a restoration to “the Virgin Mother” of her children,
“raised from the dead.” You see then how this personification runs
through all Jewish and all early Christian literature, so that the
Church, old or new, might be described as a woman; and I ought perhaps
not to have omitted the strange dream in the second book of Esdras (x.
44-46) where Israel is a woman and the Temple is the son: “This woman
whom thou sawest is Sion ... she hath been thirty years barren, but
after thirty years Solomon builded the city and offered offerings, and
then bare the barren a son.” Does not this continuous stream of thought
shew how natural it would be for the earliest Jewish Christians to adore
Christ in their hymns as the son of the daughter of Zion, the son of the
Virgin Mother? Add to this the prejudice among the Gentile converts
against a human paternity for the Son of God, the influence of the
Alexandrine Jewish philosophy and the still more powerful influence of
Isaiah’s prophecy about “the virgin,” and I think you will see that the
causes at work to produce the belief in the Miraculous Conception were
so strong that I may almost say a miracle would have been needed to
prevent it.
But it has been urged that St. Luke was a historian and a physician;
that he had great power of careful description—as may be seen from his
exact account of St. Paul’s shipwreck;—that he describes the
circumstances of the miraculous birth in a plain and simple manner: and
that he assures us that he had taken every pains to make himself
acquainted with the truth of the things which he records.[34] All this
may be: but because a man can describe exactly a comparatively recent
shipwreck, which he may have himself witnessed, or which at all events
may have been witnessed by some who told him the story, it does not
follow that he has exact information about a miraculous birth which
occurred (if at all) upwards of sixty years—more probably upwards of
seventy—before he wrote. The mother of Jesus had, in all probability,
passed away when St. Luke was writing. Such obscurities and variations
by this time attended the stories concerning the infancy of Jesus, that
we find even the compiler of St. Matthew’s Gospel apparently ignorant
that the home of the parents of Jesus was (if St. Luke is correct on
this point) not Bethlehem, but Nazareth. It is hardly possible to deny
his ignorance when we find in the First Gospel these words: “Now when
Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa ... And he arose and took the young
child and his mother and came into the land of Israel. _But_ when he
heard that Archelaus was reigning over _Judæa, he was afraid to go
thither; and being warned [of God] in a dream, he withdrew into the
parts of Galilee and came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth_.”
Obviously the writer is ignorant that “a city called Nazareth” was the
original home of the parents of Jesus, and that they had no reason for
returning to “Judæa;” his whole narrative assumes that Bethlehem in
Judæa was the home, and that the parents of Jesus were only prevented
from returning thither by the fear of Archelaus, which forced them to
leave their native city and to take up their abode in “_a city_ called
Nazareth.” Now it is probable that St. Luke’s account is here the
correct one, and that the erroneous tradition found in the First Gospel
was a mere inference from the prophecy that “from Bethlehem” there
should “come forth a governor.” But what a light does this discrepancy
throw upon the uncertainty of the very earliest traditions about the
infancy of Jesus when we find _the only two Evangelists who say anything
about it, differing as to the place where the parents of Jesus lived at
the time when they were married_! I have no doubt that St. Luke did his
best, in the paucity, or more probably in the variety, of conflicting
traditions, to select those which seemed to him most authoritative and
most spiritual. Even the most careless reader of the English text must
feel, without knowing a word of Greek, that St. Luke’s first two
chapters—which contain the stories of the infancy—are entirely different
from the style of the preface (i. 1-4), and from that of the rest of the
Gospel. The two chapters sound, even in English, like a bit out of the
Old Testament; and any Greek scholar, accustomed to the LXX, would
recognize that they were either a close translation from the Aramaic, or
written by some one who wrote in Greek, modelling his style on the LXX.
It is probable that they represent some traditions of Aramaic origin,
the best that St. Luke could find when he began to write of the wonders
that had happened more than sixty or seventy years ago. To those who can
form the least conception of the extent to which Oriental tradition in
the villages of Galilee might be transmuted after an interval of sixty
or seventy years, it must seem quite beside the mark to assert the
historical accuracy of the tradition concerning the Miraculous
Conception which St. Luke has incorporated in his Gospel, on the ground
that he was a physician; that he took pains to get at the truth; and
that he has written a masterly and exact account of a shipwreck which
he, or some friends of his, may have witnessed in person.
The very sobriety of his own preface ought to put us on our guard
against attaching to St. Luke’s history such weight, for example, as we
attach to the history of Thucydides. He says, it is true, that he had
“traced the course of all things accurately from the first, _i.e._ from
the commencement of Christ’s life:” but this amounts to much less than
the statement of Thucydides, who tells us that he had personally
inquired from those who knew the facts, besides having seen some of the
facts himself (Thuc. i. 22). He does not say that “the eye-witnesses and
ministers of the word” had given _him_ any special information: on the
contrary he mentions himself only as one of many who had received
“traditions” from eye-witnesses, and he implies that a good many of the
existing narratives, _based upon these very traditions_, were at least
so far unsatisfactory that they did not dispense with an additional
narrative from him. The emphasis which St. Luke lays on the fact that he
has traced things “from the first,” and that he writes “in
order,”—combined with the mention of “many” predecessors who have “taken
in hand” the work which he intends to do over again—makes it almost
certain that some of these Evangelists had omitted all account of our
Lord’s birth; others had not regarded chronological order; others had
not written “accurately.” All these deficiencies indicate a great and
general difficulty in obtaining exact information; and the mere honesty
of a new attempt, under circumstance so disadvantageous, cannot justify
us in attaching a very high authority to a tradition in this new Gospel,
of a miraculous character, and in a style that appears to be not St.
Luke’s own, referring to an incident supposed to have occurred upwards
of sixty years before. This digression about St. Luke’s Gospel will not
be without its use if it leads you to perceive that history, and
experience, and criticism, while they tend to make us believe more, tend
also to make us know less, about Christ’s life and doctrine; I mean,
that we find we know a little less about the historical facts of
Christ’s life than we supposed we knew, while we are led to believe a
great deal more in the divine depth and wisdom of His ideas.
I pass to the second question which you put to me, “What sense, if any,
do you yourself attach to the statement in the Creed that Christ was
born of a Virgin?” Before I tell you what sense I attach to it, or
rather what sense seems to me the only one compatible with the facts, I
must honestly express my doubt whether any sense that is compatible with
the facts, is also compatible with the words. To speak plainly, the
statement appears to be so obviously literal that I shrink from
interpreting it metaphorically; and yet, if taken literally, it appears
to me to be false. The word “Virgin” is perhaps the only word in the
service and ritual of the Church of England (if the Athanasian Creed be
left out of consideration, owing to the non-natural and humane
interpretations of it which have been sanctioned by high authority)
which has made me doubt at times whether I ought to do official work as
a minister in that Church. As regards the “resurrection of the body,”
asserted in one of the Creeds, I feel little or no difficulty: for St.
Paul’s use of the term “spiritual body” allows great latitude to those
who would give a spiritual interpretation to the phrase in the Creed;
and I trust that I have made it clear to you that I accept Christ’s
Resurrection as a reality, though a spiritual reality.[35] But the words
implying the birth from the Virgin stand on a different footing. In the
Resurrection of Jesus I believe that there was a unique vision of the
buried Saviour, apparent to several disciples at a time; but in the
conception and birth of Jesus I have no reason for thinking that there
was anything unusual apparent to the senses. What can I mean then by
saying that Jesus is “born of a Virgin”?
All that I can mean is this. Human generation does not by any means
account for the birth of a new human spirit. So far as we are righteous,
we all owe our righteousness to a spiritual seed within us; “we are
not,” as Philo would say, “the result of generation but the work of the
Unbegotten.” So far as we are righteous, we are “born not of blood, nor
of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John i.
13). But of the Lord Jesus Christ we are in the habit of saying and
believing that He was uniquely and entirely righteous; and therefore we
say that He was uniquely and entirely born of God. In all human
generation there must be some congenital divine act, if a righteous soul
is to be produced; and in the generation of Christ there was a unique
congenital act of the Holy Spirit. That Word of God which in various
degrees inspires every righteous human soul (none can say how soon in
its existence) did not inspire Jesus, but was (to speak in metaphor)
totally present in Jesus from the first so as to exclude all
imperfection of humanity. Human unrighteousness—such as we are in the
habit of attributing to human generation—there was, in this case, none.
Therefore we say that the generation of Jesus was not human but divine.
So much I can honestly say because I heartily believe it. How far one is
justified in putting so strained an interpretation on the words “born of
the Virgin Mary”—even in the Church of England, where simultaneous
conservatism and progress have been bought at the cost of many strained
interpretations—is a question on which I may perhaps hereafter say a
word or two, but not now. Meantime let me merely add my conviction that
there may have been a time when this illusion of the Miraculous
Conception did more good than harm. In former days, that spiritual truth
which we can now disentangle from the story of the Miraculous Conception
may have been conveyed by means of it to hearts which would have
otherwise never recognized that Jesus was the Son of God. It was surely
better then, and it is better now, that men should believe the great
truth that Jesus is the Son of God, at the cost of believing (provided
they can honestly believe) the untruth that Jesus was not the son of
Joseph, than that they should altogether fail to recognize His divine
Sonship, because they were alive to the fact that He was born of human
parents in accordance with the laws of humanity. But in these days the
doctrine of the Miraculous Conception seems to me fraught with evil;
partly because the weakness of the evidence makes the narrative a
stumbling-block for many who are taught to consider this doctrine
essential and who cannot bring themselves to believe it; partly because
it tends to sanction a false and monastic ideal of life; to separate
Jesus from common humanity and from human love and sympathy; and to
encourage false notions about a material Resurrection of the body of
Jesus, which naturally result in a false, bewildering, and disorderly
expectation of a material Resurrection for ourselves.
Footnote 32:
Yet I have heard it said, “_So far as evidence goes_, you have no more
reason for rejecting the Miraculous Conception than for rejecting the
story that Jesus washed the feet of the Apostles: for two witnesses
attest the former; but only one, the latter. Your objection is _a
priori_.” Such arguments seem to me to fail to recognize the first
principles of evidence. The omission of a stupendous marvel, an
integral part (and is not the parentage an integral part?) of a
biography, by biographers who have no motive for omitting it and every
motive for inserting it, is a _strong proof that they did not know
it_. For a similar instance, see above, p. 167.
Footnote 33:
You remember that the two accounts of the Miraculous Conception differ
in respect of the “annunciation”; which St. Matthew describes as being
made to Joseph, St. Luke as being made to Mary. It is interesting to
note how these two variations correspond to two variations in the
ancient prophecy.
In the LXX the name is to be given to the child, not by the mother,
but by the future _husband_: “The virgin shall be with child and bring
forth a son, and _thou shalt_ call his name Immanuel”. In the Hebrew,
the “virgin,” or “maiden,” is _herself_ to name the child; “A _virgin_
shall ... bring forth and _shall_ call, &c.” Adopting the former
version, a narrator would infer that the announcement of the birth was
to be made to Joseph, as the first Gospel does: “She shall bring forth
a child and _thou_ (Joseph) shalt call his name Jesus.” Adopting the
latter version, and changing the third into the second person for the
purpose of an “annunciation,” the narrator would infer that since the
name was to be given _by the mother_, the announcement was made _to
the mother_, as the third Gospel does; “_Thou shalt_ be with child,
and shalt bring forth a son, and _shalt_ call his name Jesus.”
Note also that afterwards, when St. Matthew actually quotes the whole
prophecy with the name “Immanuel” (i. 23), he alters the verb into the
_third person plural_: “That it might be fulfilled which was spoken of
the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold the virgin shall be with
child, and shall bring forth a child, and _they shall_ call his name
Immanuel.” The reason is obvious. It would not be true to say that
_Mary_ called her son “Immanuel”; it would only be possible to suggest
that _men in general_ (“they”), looking on the Child as the token of
God’s presence among them, might bestow on him some such title (not
name) as “God with us.” Consequently St. Matthew here alters “thou”
into “they”.
Footnote 34:
_Contemporary Review_, Feb. 1886, p. 193.
Footnote 35:
I must admit that a more serious difficulty is presented to Sponsors
by the interrogative form of the Creed in the Baptismal service, to
which they are expected to reply in the affirmative: “Dost thou
believe in the Resurrection of the _flesh_?” But I can hardly think
that many clergymen would wish to reject an otherwise eligible Sponsor
who confided to them that he could only accept “flesh” in the sense of
“body,” and that too in the Pauline sense of “spiritual body.”
XXVI
PRAYER, HEAVEN, HELL
You ask me whether one who has seceded from miraculous to non-miraculous
Christianity still finds himself able to pray as before. But towards the
end of your letter you amend your question. You are “quite sure,” you
are pleased to say, from what you know of me, that I shall “answer this
question affirmatively, though in defiance of all logic:” and therefore,
anticipating my answer, you state your objection to it beforehand, and
ask me how I can meet your objection, which is to this effect: “If the
laws of nature are never suspended, then it is absurd, or perhaps
impious, to pray for that which implies their suspension. For example, a
friend of mine may be in a stage of disease so fatally advanced that,
without a suspension of the laws of nature, it is no more possible that
he should recover from the disease than that his body should rise from
the grave. According to the tenets of your non-miraculous Christianity,
must I not abstain from praying that he may recover?”
I do not see any great difficulty here. Change the hypothesis for a
moment. Suppose your friend to be no longer living, but dead. Are you
willing—would you be willing, even were you the most orthodox believer
in miraculous Christianity—to pray that the body of your dead friend
might arise revivified from the grave a week after he had been laid in
it? You know you would not be willing. Why not? You cannot say “Because
it is impossible,” for you would admit (on the supposition of your being
a believer in the miraculous) not only that it is possible, but that it
has actually been done in times past. But you would feel, I am sure,
that you dare not, and ought not, to pray for this object, because such
a prayer would be a revolt against that established order of things
which you recognize to be a manifestation of God’s present will. I say
“God’s present will,” because you do not (if you agree with me) regard
death as being in accordance with God’s future will: it is an evil,
sprung, not from God, but from evil, out of which God is working good.
But He bids us acquiesce in it during our present imperfect state of
existence; and hence, though you believe He will ultimately destroy
death, you do not feel justified in praying that its present operation
may be neutralized by a suspension of the laws of nature.
Now to return to your own supposition that your friend is not dead, but
merely in danger of death. Health and life are dependent upon many
complex causes, among which (it will be admitted by all) are those
mysterious fluctuations of the thoughts and emotions, which I believe in
many cases to proceed—I speak in a metaphor—straight from God Himself.
To one who believes that the spirits of men are in constant communion
with the all-sustaining Spirit of the Creator, the thoughts of men may
well seem to be as dependent upon their divine Origin as the air in my
little room is at this moment dependent upon the changes of the
circumambient atmosphere. Of course, if you are a thorough-going,
scientific hope-nothing and trust-nothing, such a belief as this appears
to you an idle dream. From your point of view, you are a machine; your
friend is a machine; all men are machines; the world is a machine; the
action and inter-action of all these animate and inanimate machines is
predetermined, even to the minutest movement of a limb, or most fleeting
shade of thought, in each one of the myriads of human mechanisms called
men.
The thorough-going materialist, when he rebukes his son and tells him
that he “ought not to have” told a lie, knows perfectly well that his
son could not possibly help telling that lie, and that he was bound by
all the laws of nature to tell it. The materialist father is, in fact,
telling a lie himself; only more deliberately than the little son. He is
using words which have no true meaning for him, as a kind of oil to
grease the wheels of the little machine before him, having learned by
accumulated experience that this lying phrase, “You _ought_ to have,”
has for many thousands of years proved a very effective kind of oil, and
that the true and scientific phrase, “It would have been better if you
could have, but you could not,” would be wholly inefficacious. But since
it is obvious that this view of existence converts all moral language,
and almost all the higher relations of life, into one gigantic lie, I
make no apology at all for putting it by with contempt as being beneath
the consideration of a child of ten at which age, as far as I remember I
grappled with this question of predestination, and settled it (so far as
I was concerned, for ever) by coming to the conclusion that “it does not
_work_.” Now when you have once given up, as unworkable, the theory that
all our thoughts and emotions spring necessarily from antecedent
material causes, you have bidden good-bye to Knowledge, so far as
concerns the origin of human thought, and you are thrown back upon
Faith. I believe therefore, and I make no apology for my belief, that
the mysterious fluctuations of human thought and will may sometimes
proceed from God without the intervention of material causes, perhaps in
virtue of the existence of some invisible law of union by which the
souls of men are united to God and to one another. This being my
belief—which at all events does not contain so many and such
perpetually-recurring inconsistencies as the belief of your
thorough-going materialist—you will understand, without much further
explanation, when and why I should pray even for those of whom the
physician is inclined to despair. Faith and hope, have, before now,
worked such wonders in healing, that “while there is life there is hope”
has passed into a proverb. I cannot be sure that my prayers might not
have some kind of direct power—by a kind of brain-wave such as we have
heard of lately—in affecting the emotions and spirits of the sufferer.
It is seldom that even a physician can speak with certainty about the
immediate issue of a disease: and whatsoever is uncertain is (if it be
also right) a reasonable subject for prayer. But if I were myself
absolutely convinced that there was no chance of my friend’s recovery
without a suspension of the laws of nature, I should feel that prayer
rightly and naturally gave way to resignation.
No one however who is in the habit of praying will think it necessary to
spend much time or thought in discriminating exactly between that which
may be, and that which cannot possibly be. He must know that, very
often, where his prayer trenches on the province of the material, the
line cannot be drawn except by an expert in science, which he may not
happen to be; and besides, in the mood of prayer, he will feel that the
scientific and discriminating spirit is out of place. He is not thinking
of things scientifically, but spiritually, putting his wishes before the
Father in heaven, and content to couple each wish with an “If it be
possible.” Sometimes he learns, after constant repetition, that the
prayer is an unfit one, and he discontinues it; in that case he has
gained by his prayer a closer insight into, and conformity with, the
will of God. In other cases he continues his prayer and receives an
answer to it—either the answer that he himself desires, or some other
perhaps, quite different from that which he expected, but one which he
ultimately recognizes to be the best. But there will be cases where he
will continue his prayer, feeling it to be right and natural, although
he receives no answer to it at all, so far as he can discern. For he
will feel quite certain that no genuine prayer is wasted. Our spirits,
or our angels—to use the language of metaphor—are not on earth: they sit
together in heaven, that is to say, in the heart of God; and whenever
one of us can conceive a genuinely unselfish and righteous wish for a
brother spirit and wing it with faith so that it flies up to heaven—a
flight by no means so easy or so common as we suppose, and probably not
often flown, unless the arrow is feathered by deeds and pains as well as
words—then it not only brings back a blessing upon the wisher but also
thrills through the spiritual assembly above and comes back as a special
blessing to the person prayed for. But need I add that this is not a
process to be performed mechanically? There is no recipe for effectual
prayer.
But, to come down from metaphors, let me attempt to answer your
question, “What difference of attitude in prayer will there be between
the believer in natural, and the believer in miraculous, Christianity?”
As far as my experience goes, there will be very little; except that the
former will be rather more disposed to ask, before uttering a prayer,
how far the granting of it might indirectly affect others. Logically and
theoretically there ought to be a great deal of difference; for if the
believer in the miraculous were consistent, he might naturally pray that
a miracle might be performed for him, as it has been for others, for a
good purpose. As a matter of fact, the prayers of children trained in
orthodoxy are thus sometimes consistent. I dare say one might find a
child who has prayed that the sun might stand still that he might have a
longer holiday. And why not now from the child’s point of view as well
as formerly? But I suppose few men in England, now, even of the strictly
orthodox, are in this puerile stage. Almost all full-grown English
Protestants recognize that, although miracles were freely performed from
the year 4004 B.C. to, say A.D. 61 or thereabouts—when St. Paul shook
off the serpent and took no harm—yet “the age of miracles is now past.”
Yet I have heard of men of business who make a point of praying
earnestly on the subject of commercial speculations, the rise and fall
of consols, the price of sugar and the like. Will any one maintain that
people are not the worse for such prayers as these, or that the believer
in natural Christianity is not a gainer by losing the desire and the
power to utter them? On the whole, I see but one subject of prayer
mentioned in our English Prayer-book, as to which natural Christianity
would probably dictate silence: I mean the weather. It might be argued
that, “since the weather is affected by human action (by the clearing of
forests, draining of marshes, and so on), and since prayers affect human
action, therefore they _do_ affect the weather _indirectly_, and _may_
affect it _directly_.” But from “indirect” to “direct” is a great leap;
and I am moved toward resignation rather than prayer, by the thought
that, in revealing to us more and more of the extent of the causes and
effects of meteorological phenomena, God seems to be shewing us that, in
asking for weather that suits ourselves, we may be asking for weather
that may not suit others. I should be sorry to see harvest prayers
excluded from our Church service; but I think they should express our
hope and trust in God’s orderly government of the seasons, beseeching
Him to bestow on the husbandman patience and skill so as to meet and
improve adversity, and on the nation thrift and frugality so as to avoid
waste.
Since writing the last paragraph I was interrupted; and now, returning
to my letter, I feel strongly inclined to cancel the last two or three
pages of apologetic argumentation; arguing about prayer seems so
absurdly useless. Yet perhaps my remarks may weigh for something with
you in your present oscillation. They may possibly prevent you from
giving up, in a moment of virtuous logic, a habit which, once
discontinued, is not easily resumed. Let them pass then; but let them
not pass without a protest that they by no means express my sense of the
vital necessity of prayer for a Christian. To me it seems the very
breath of our spiritual life, as needful for peace and union with God as
communion between children and parents is needful for domestic concord.
Without it, faith must speedily vanish. Even a comparatively dull and
lifeless petition at stated intervals has some value as a sign-post,
indicating the road on which we ought to be travelling though our feet
may be straying elsewhere. But in truth real Christian prayer (mostly
silent) should be, as St. Paul says “without ceasing;” for prayer is but
aspiration and desire, emerging into shape. When a man has reached such
a height that he has ceased to wish to be something better than he is,
then and then only may he cease to pray.
One kind of prayer at all events I have felt able to retain which seems
to me of far more value than the prayer for fair weather—I mean prayer
for the dead. I do not deny that, when coupled with superstitious views
about heaven and hell, the custom of praying for the dead may result in
superstition, and even in the encouragement of immorality; and the hired
and conventional prayers for the dead prevalent in the sixteenth century
appear to me to have constituted an abuse against which our English
Reformers did well to protest. But these abuses and corruptions seem to
me accidental, and quite insufficient to deter us from use of the most
helpful of spiritual habits. I do not propose to argue about it, but you
may like to know the sort of accident by which I was led to form this
habit, and the practical reasons for which I clung to it, and still
cling to it, with the deepest conviction that it is not only spiritually
useful, but also based on spiritual truth.
Many years ago a brother of mine was drowned at sea through the sudden
capsizing of a vessel by night. When the news came, I was at first
distracted between an intense desire to pray as before, and a kind of
instinctive and general repugnance to all prayers for the dead as being
“a Romanist practice.” All the books I had read, and all the notions I
had formed, about the fixed future of the dead, suggested that such
prayers were useless, if not blasphemous. On the other side there was no
argument at all, nothing but a vague strong desire to pray. The painful
conflict of that night—a conflict, as it seems to me now, between true
natural religion and the false appearance of revealed religion—is still
present to my recollection. At last it occurred to me that more than a
month had elapsed between the death and our knowledge of the death, and
throughout all those thirty days my prayers had gone up to God for one
whose soul was no longer upon earth. Were those prayers wasted? I could
not believe it. Besides, we had not yet received full details of the
loss of the vessel. It was just possible that my brother might have been
saved in one of the ship’s boats: he might be still living, and in sore
need of help: how monstrous, if it were so, that I should in such a
crisis cease to pray for him! So with doubt and trembling I still
continued my custom, fashioning some kind of prayer to suit the
emergency. While I was in this oscillating state of mind, news came that
a second boatful, and almost immediately afterwards that a third, had
been picked up at sea. My brother was not in either: but why might there
not be a fourth? For some time, with less doubt than before, I continued
to pray. Days, weeks, months rolled on, and now all hope had slipped
away; but the habit was now fixed. I could not, or would not, break it.
Praying day and night for one who was possibly living; just possibly
living; probably not living; certainly dead—I had learned to realize the
presence of my brother’s spirit, as very near and close to me, as one
with whom I was still in some kind of communion; and now to drop his
name out of my prayers, simply because I should never touch his hand
again in this world, seemed a faithless, a wicked, a cruel act. The
prayer could not indeed remain the same in circumstances so completely
changed; I could of course no longer pray that the dead might be
restored to me on earth; but it was still open to me to make mention of
his name, and to beseech God that he and I might meet again in heaven:
and thus, with a curious kind of compromise, worthy of a less youthful
theologian, I circumvented my own orthodoxy by still praying in reality
for my brother while I appeared to be praying for myself. More than
seven-and-twenty years have now passed away, but not a night or morning
has passed without the mention of that familiar name; and I entreat you
to believe me that, next to the power of Christ Himself upon the soul, I
have not found, nor can I imagine, any influence so potent as this habit
of praying for the dead, to detach the mind from petty and visible
things, to unlock the spiritual world, to carry the soul up to the very
source and centre of spiritual life, and to bring us into faithful
communion with the Father of the spirits of all flesh.
You see I have kept my promise of not arguing on this matter. I have
simply told you how I have longed and doubted; how my doubts were
dissipated by practice; and what strength I have personally derived from
the practice. Probably this will seem to you, if interesting, at all
events inadequate. “Logically,” you will perhaps say to yourself, “he
ought to have attempted first to convince me that the eternal state of
the dead is not finally determined at the moment of death; so that
prayer may reasonably be expected to have some power to change their
condition. He ought to have told me whether he believes in a Purgatory,
or in a limited Hell; whether he is a Universalist; or whether he
believes in the annihilation of all who are not to be saved. In a word,
he ought to have given me a full account of his theory about the
condition of the dead, before he commends to me the habit of praying for
them.”
Here I fear I shall terribly disappoint you; but, at the risk of
whatever disappointment, I will confess to you the whole truth. This
part of my Manual of Theology has large print, large margin, and several
blank pages. I believe some things with such force and clearness that I
prefer to say I do not believe them. I _see_ them: but about many other
things which most people believe, I know little or nothing. Do I believe
in a Hell? Yes, as firmly as I believe in a Heaven; but not in your Hell
perhaps, and certainly not in the ordinary guide-books to Hell and
Heaven. Perhaps some would call my Hell “merely retribution,” or “an
illogical and ill-defined Purgatory;” and from their point of view they
could be right in complaining of its indefiniteness; for they profess to
know all about it and to be able to define it. But from my point of view
I am equally right in speaking indefinitely; for I profess to have only
a glimpse of it. Of the principles of Hell and Heaven I am certain, but
of the details I am entirely ignorant. I know nothing whatever, and I
know that no one else knows anything whatever, about the state of the
dead; except that they are just as much in God’s hand when dead as when
living, and that He will ultimately do the best thing for each; but what
that “best thing” may be I cannot tell in detail, although I am very
sure that it will be one thing for St. Francis and quite another for
Nero. For the rest, all the elaborate structures and fancy-fabrics of
Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, Limbo, and other regions, whether
theologians or poets be the architects, appear to me built upon the
flimsiest foundations, tags of texts, fragments of words, quagmires of
metaphor, quicksands of hyperbole. No; such real knowledge—or shall we
say such conviction?—as we have about the eternal future of the dead, is
to be based, not upon argument or inference from minute and disputable
interpretations of small portions of Scripture, but mainly upon our
faith in the divine righteousness and power. You will not, I hope,
misunderstand my words that “God will do the best thing for each,” or
draw from them the inference, “Then he is a Universalist after all.” I
took for granted—I hope I was not wrong—that you would remember the
definition of justice which you have read in Plato. In fact therefore I
merely expressed in those words my conviction that God would be “just”
to us after death.[36] Might we not also define the highest mercy, in
the same terms in which we define the highest justice, as being the
feeling that prompts us to “do what is best for each”? And, if so, does
it not seem to follow that in Hell God will not cease to be merciful,
and in Heaven God will not cease to be just? And hence are we not
brought close to the conclusion that Heaven and Hell are not really
places, but the diverse results of the operation of the Eternal—the just
Mercy, the merciful Justice—upon the diverse dead? But here the question
widens and deepens into expanses and depths altogether too vast and
profound for me, and I give up the problem. All that I know is, that
there will be hereafter a just retribution.
Yet if I am to tell you my own conjectural imaginations—for who can help
at times imagining what the infinite unknown may be, however loth he may
be to insist or dogmatize about it, or even to bestow much attention on
it, when the urgent present presses its superior claims?—I will say for
myself that I cannot believe I shall have served all my apprenticeship
to righteousness in my brief life upon this earth, or that I shall be
fit immediately after death, for that closest communion with God which
appears to me the Heaven of Heavens. Some cleansing retribution, some
further purification, seems to me necessary and likely for myself—and, I
must add, for the greater number of those human beings with whom I have
had to do—before we attain to that blessed consummation.
“So you believe in a Purgatory then?” How do I know? Say rather, I
conjecture there may be many heavens. In any case, I find it very easy
to imagine a retribution and a purification that shall be purely
spiritual, without having recourse to any material flames or physical
horrors. Some people find a difficulty in this notion: they consider it,
but deliberately put it aside; as if mere remorse, sorrow, and
self-condemnation, could never be bitter enough to constitute a just
Hell. I do not think they have ever realized—perhaps they have never
tried to realize—the pain that may be felt by a spirit sitting alone,
away from this familiar world and every well-known face, and quietly
judging and condemning itself. A mere accident, a ludicrous accident,
once gave me a moment’s experience of this feeling, and I have never
been able to forget it, never been able to put aside the conviction that
that feeling, intensified, might constitute Hell.
It happened in this way. Some years ago, before nitrous oxide had come
into very general use among dentists, I went to have a tooth extracted,
and determined to try the gas. Perhaps I had some misgivings that it was
a little cowardly; perhaps I was a little nervous; in any case I
remember at the last moment thinking that I should like to be conscious
of the precise moment when unconsciousness came; I remember struggling
to retain consciousness—even when a tell-tale throbbing in the temples
shewed that something new was going on—protesting to myself that the gas
had “no power,” “no power at all yet,” “I don’t believe it’s going to
have any power”—till the portcullis came down. I suppose the consequence
was that I inhaled rather more than was usual; and when I came to myself
I heard the voices of the dentist and the physician—a long way off, as
it seemed to me, but with perfect distinctness saying that “he was a
long time coming to” and they did not “quite like the look of things,”
and so on. Meantime I lay motionless and without power either to move or
speak, but perfectly conscious. I took in the whole situation at once. I
was dead. I had passed into another state of existence. I could think
more clearly than before. I was a spirit. And then the thought came
pressing in upon me, as I reviewed my whole life and the manner of my
death, that to avoid a little pain I had done a wrong thing and had
deserted those who needed me and would miss me. No fear possessed me,
not the slightest fear, of any external punishment for the fault which I
thought I had committed: but in a detached solitude I seemed to be
quietly and coldly sitting in judgment upon myself, impartially hearing
what I had to say in self-defence, rejecting it as inadequate, and
passing against myself the verdict of Guilty. Painful, increasingly
painful, the burden of this self-condemnation seemed to press and crush
me down more and more past power of bearing, so that at last, when in
one moment I recovered both power of motion and knowledge that I was
alive again, I leapt up from the dentist’s arm-chair, and, without
taking the least notice of the two operators, I gave vent to my feelings
by shouting aloud the well-known words from Clarence’s dream
“—and for a space
Could not believe but that I was in hell.”
I shall not easily forget the look of mingled humour and horror with
which the dentist replied, “Well, sir, considering you are a clergyman,
I should have hoped it might have been the other place.” I tried to
explain. I assured him that it was a quotation from Shakespeare; that I
had not really believed that I was in the place commonly called Hell;
and so on. But I am quite sure my explanations were utterly ineffectual;
and to this day I probably labour under the suspicion, in the minds of
at least two worthy persons, of having committed some horrible crime by
which my conscience is racked with agony. In reality, however, it was a
small offence, if any, for which I suffered that bad quarter of a
minute; and I have often since thought that, if the mind is capable of
inflicting such pain upon itself for a venial error, those pangs must be
terrible indeed with which our sinful souls may be forced to scourge
themselves when we judicially review the actions of a selfish life with
a compulsory knowledge of all the evil, direct and indirect, which we
have wrought, and when we realize at last—ah, how differently from the
dull, decorous, conventional contrition with which we droned out the
words on earth, kneeling on the hassocks in the family pew—that “we have
left undone those things which we ought to have done, and done those
things which we ought not to have done.”
But why do I thus discourse in detail upon a subject about which I have
admitted that I know no details? It is in order to shew you that though
I do not know much, the little I do know greatly influences me. The
thought of a material Hell has probably contributed largely to insanity,
and has exercised a baneful influence upon many women and children; but
the majority of healthy men who profess to believe in a pit of flame are
little influenced by it. It is so horrible, so unnatural, so unjust,
that in their heart of hearts they feel sure the good God cannot mean
it; He will let them off; or they will get off somehow—by absolution, by
forensic justification, by baptism, by uncovenanted mercies, or what
not. This is but natural. How can it not be natural to believe that an
unnatural and arbitrary Hell may be dispensed with by an unnatural and
arbitrary indulgence? I have no such consolations. With me, Hell is a
different thing altogether: it is natural, it is inevitable, it is just,
it is merciful. Not a day passes but I think of it and anticipate it in
some sort for myself and my friends. _Tout sepayera_: this act, I say,
or this neglect, was wrong, and must have been injurious: the doers
cannot escape from the consequences of it; I do not wish to escape from
the consequences of it. God will work good out of evil; but He will be
just, not indulgent. I do not want Him to be indulgent. Thus Heaven and
Hell, impending over the routine of my every-day life, become to me
practical and potent realities; but they are real to because the
conceptions I have formed of them are in accordance with the profound
laws of spiritual nature, and quite independent of the conflicting
fancies of theologians.
Ask me what I trust to be in Heaven, and I can give you no answer save
that one which I have often given you before—a being capable of loving
and of serving God. Ask me the nature of Hell and Heaven, and my only
reply is that they will be God’s retribution. Ask me whether all will be
hereafter “saved,” and I am silent, or merely answer that God is good,
and that I believe a time will come when we, in Him, shall look back,
and around, and forward, and shall see that His work has been “very
good.” Enough for me to work and fight on the side of God and against
Evil, that His righteous Kingdom may come and bring with it the time
when His work will be seen to have been “very good.” As for other
details, I know nothing and delight in knowing nothing. I do not know
whether I shall live again on earth or elsewhere; whether I shall be a
being of three dimensions, or four, or of no dimensions at all; whether
I shall be in space or out of space. It is far better to give up
speculations about accidental trifles such as these: for accidents they
are, as compared with the essence of the second life, which consists in
Love. Do not give up the belief in that, at any cost; least of all, at
the cost of a little banter. “But surely it is possible that our very
highest and purest conceptions of Heaven may fall short of the reality.”
Granted: but we must hold fast to the belief that there is at all events
a proportion between our best terrestrial aspirations and their
celestial equivalents. We must reject, as from Satan, the suggestion
(was it Spinoza’s?) that there is no more likeness between God and our
conception of God than between the constellation Canis and a dog. “God
may not be Love:” I do not believe you: but if He is not Love, He will
be some celestial form of Love, corresponding to our Love, only
infinitely better. “You will not retain your individuality:” possibly
not, but certainly we shall have something corresponding to
individuality, only better. And so of the rest. We shall talk humbly, as
beseems our microcosmic faculties; we are but the transitory tenants of
a little world, which is to the Universe but as a dew-drop to the ocean:
yet even a dew-drop exhibits the same infrangible laws of light and the
same divine glories that are manifested in the rainbow and the sunset.
So it is with a human soul: there are laws in it of righteousness and
justice and retribution—laws which cannot be broken by the fictions and
illusions of theology, but must be manifested in all places and in all
time, now and for all eternity, on earth, in Heaven, in Hell.
Footnote 36:
Has not some confusion of thought arisen from a habit of confusing
“just” with “severe”? I believe some men would feel more reverently
towards God, if they would speak, not of His “justice,” but of His
“fairness.”
XXVII
PAULINE THEOLOGY