THE RESTORATION OF BELIEF.

_The Restoration of Belief_. No. I. _Christianity in Relation to its

Ancient and Modern Antagonists_. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1852.

We have heard it quoted as the remark of a distinguished foreigner,

conversant with the choicest society in several of the capitals of

Europe, that nowhere is the alienation of the higher and professional

classes from all religious faith so widespread and complete as in

England. That the masses at the other end of the social scale are

indifferent or disaffected to the institutions which visibly embody the

Christianity of our age, can be no secret to any observant inhabitant of

a large English town. It is on the middle class alone that the various

forms of Protestant worship have any real hold. Removed alike from the

passionate temptations of the homeless artisan, and from the mental

activity of the statesman or man of letters, the rural gentry and the

urban tradespeople are detained under traditional influences, partly by

the wholesome conservatism of moral habit, partly by helpless

accommodation to conventional standards. Men of this class, if once

really touched and possessed by earnest conviction, are the best

defenders of a religion from _political_ assault. But a faith exposed to

an _intellectual_ struggle finds among them but a precarious shelter;

especially if their attachment to it is less a living persuasion than a

fear of the blank which its removal would create. Persecuted by the

magistrate, they know how to defend their worship from the oppression of

law. Assailed by the critic, they can offer but the resistance of a dumb

impenetrability; they cannot bring their sterling personal qualities to

bear upon the contest; they are obliged, for all active conduct in the

strife, to trust to a body of literary Swiss, engaged to protect the

Vatican of their faith, and accustomed never to report defeat. In

proportion as the methods of sceptical aggression become more

formidable, and its temper more earnest, it is found necessary to

improve the training of the band of Church defenders;--a measure at once

indispensable and fatal; for it lifts them into an intellectual

position, which spoils the blind singleness of their allegiance,

discloses the hopelessness of the task expected from them, and often

destroys their antipathy to the noble revolutionary foe. It is the

vainest of hopes, that a body of clergy, brought up to the culture of

the nineteenth century, can abide by the Christianity of the sixteenth

or of the second; if they may not preserve its essence by translation

into other forms of thought, they will abandon it, in proportion as they

are clear-sighted and veracious, as a dialect grown obsolete. The number

accordingly is constantly increasing, in every college capable of

training a rich intellect, of candidates for the ministry forced by

their doubts into lay professions, and carrying thither the powerful

influence, in the same direction, of learning and accomplishment. The

higher offices of education are, to no slight extent, in the hands of

these deserters of the Church; and through the tutor in the family, or

the master in the school, or the professor in the lecture-room, contact

and sympathy are established between the best portions of the new

generation, and a kind of thought and culture with which the authorized

theology cannot co-exist. College friendships, foreign travel, current

literature, familiarize all educated young men with the phenomenon of

scepticism, and in a way most likely to disenchant it of its terrors.

Thus by innumerable channels it enters the middle class at the

intellectual end of their life, assuming in general the form of historic

and critical doubt; while from below, from the classes born and bred

amid the whirl of machinery, and shaped in their very imagination by the

tyranny of the power-loom, it pushes up in the ruder form of material

fatalism. The intermediate enclosure, safe in the dull innocence of an

unsuspected creed, is growing narrower every day; and, though reserved

to the last for its hour of temptation, will be the least prepared to

win its victory.

No one who appreciates the real sources of a healthy national life,

and knows what to expect from the dissolution of ancient faiths, can

look without anxiety at a prospect like this; especially in a country

whose religious institutions, rigid with usage, overloaded with

interests, charged with the bequests of the past, are manifestly

unequal to the crisis, and, in their attempt to train the affections

of the Future, wield every power but the right one, and are indeed

already regarded, like the Court of Chancery with its wards, as a dry

nursery for grown babies. A people that reverences nothing--nothing at

least that stretches a common heaven over all--has lost its natural

unity. Incipient decay is spreading through the secret cement of its

civilization, which, far from bearing the weight of further growth,

precariously holds its existing mass together. So far we are entirely

at one with those who see something to deplore in the "Eclipse of

Faith," and something to desire in the "Restoration of Belief." They

do not overrate the evils of a state of society in which, if you think

with the wise, you must cease to believe with the vulgar. We would

join with them, heart and hand, in the effort to terminate this fatal

discrepancy, and find some language of devotion and aspiration,

veracious alike from the lips of the richest knowledge and the most

primitive simplicity. But when, like the author whose publication is

before us, they would abolish the discrepancy by simply reinstating

the taught in the creed of the untaught; when they insist on the

surrender without terms of modern philosophy and criticism to the

"unabated" authority of the Bible; when they pretend to wipe out from

calculation all the theological researches of the last half-century,

as if they were mere ciphers made in sport on the tablet of history,

and had no effect on our computed place at all,--we separate

sorrowfully from them, largely sympathizing with their wish, but

wholly despairing of their method. The received theory of the origin

of Christianity from agencies exclusively divine, and of the

infallible character of the canonical books, can no more be

"restored," than Roman history can be put back to its state before

Niebuhr's time, or Greek mythology be treated as if Heyne and Ottfried

Müller had never lived. The present age is not more distinguished by

its advance in the material arts, than by its astonishing progress in

the interpretation and true painting of the past; a Boeckh or a Grote

carries in his mind a picture of Athenian life in the days of Pericles

more perfect, it is probable, than could be formed by Plutarch or

Longinus; and it would be strange if the Christian era--certainly the

object of the most elaborated study--were the only one to escape the

work of reconstruction, or to undergo it without considerable change.

The limits of that change are at present definable by no consentient

estimate; but that they are such as to remove the old lines of

Christian defence, and require the choice of more open ground, can no

longer be denied, except by the astute consistency of a Romanist

hierarchy, and the innocent unconsciousness of English sects. When the

time shall come for a dispassionate history of the first two

centuries,--a history which, resolving the canon back into the general

mass of early Christian literature, shall find an original clew for

tradition, instead of accepting one from its posthumous hand,--which

shall detect opinions before they were heretic or orthodox, and trace

the several streams of tributary thought to their confluence in a

determinate Christianity,--the narrowness of our present polemic will

be apparent of itself; its fears and triumphs be regarded with a

smile; and many, both of its positive and negative results, will

vanish from the interests of religion, and be absorbed in a higher

view of the relation between the Divine and Human in this world.

We had hoped at first that the author of "The Restoration of Belief" was

about to take up the problem of Christianity with a real appreciation of

its altered conditions, and with unaffected justice towards those who

cannot solve it like himself. His present essay is but the commencement

of a series, designed to arrest the progress of educated scepticism, to

expose the sophistries of modern criticism, and re-establish the plenary

authority, as oracles of faith, of the Hebrew and the Christian

Scriptures. It would perhaps be unreasonable to complain that his

argument does not march very far in this first movement; and engages us

rather by the stateliness of its step, than by the clearness of its

direction. Nevertheless, we do think that the discursive license of

introductory exposition is carried by him to an extreme which promises

ill for the exactitude of his method. At the outset he declares that the

difficulties which embarrass modern faith go down to the very depths of

philosophy, and can be resolved only by reaching the ultimate roots of

thought. Yet he remains on the upper surface of history, and, without

once hinting how this is to lead him to the pith of the controversy,

dwells only on facts which are undisputed, and his conception of which

might be as readily gathered from Gibbon as from Neander. Like many

writers whose eye is caught by grandeur of effect, and whose imagination

is sensitive to wonder, he is fascinated by the moment in human affairs

when the Roman Empire was exactly poised between the forces of external

unity and of internal decay, and the political organism of the Past, so

august in its mass and its proportions, held no soul but the young

spirit of the Future. Of this crisis, assigned to the reign of Alexander

Severus, our author presents an impressive and, we believe, a faithful

sketch. Amid the splendor, the misery, the decay of belief and hope, the

universal incertitude of that period, there emerges into notice the

beautiful and beneficent phenomenon of a real Faith,--a Faith that can

live, a Faith that can die. The inevitable conflict between this new

power and the Pagan prerogatives of the Cæsars is well brought out by

the essayist; and the victory of Christianity is justly ascribed to the

peculiar character of the religion, as a feeling directed to a PERSON

rather than the simple assent to an IDEA. It was the force of this

personal feeling which first awakened in men the sentiment of obligation

in regard to religious truth, and substituted faithful veracity for

indifferentism and laxity of profession. The author thus sums up the

positions which he regards the present essay as establishing:--

"That the Christian communities did, during the period that we have had

in view, make and maintain a protest against the idol-worship of the

times, which protest, severe as it was in its conditions, at length won

a place in the world for a purer theology, and set the civilized races

free from the degrading superstitions of the Greek Mythology.

"That in the course of this arduous struggle, and as an unobserved yet

inevitable consequence of it, a New Principle came to be recognized,

and a New Feeling came to govern the minds of men, which principle and

feeling conferred upon the individual man, however low his rank,

socially or intellectually, a dignity unknown to classical antiquity;

and which yet must be the basis of every moral advancement we can

desire, or think of as possible.

"That the struggle whence resulted these two momentous consequences,

affecting the welfare of men for ever, was entered upon and maintained

on the ground of a definite persuasion, or Belief, of which a PERSON

was the object.

"That this belief toward a person embraced attributes, not only of

superhuman excellence and wisdom, but also of superhuman POWER and

AUTHORITY. If we take the materials before us as our guide, it will

not be possible to disengage the history from these ideas of

superhuman dignity."--p. 106.

These positions we certainly conceive to be unassailable. But they lie

so completely out of the field of modern doubt and controversy, that

we are at a loss to imagine what possible use the author can make of

them. The general features of the Christian faith, and the character

of the Church, had assumed in the third century a determinate form,

about which there is no important question between believer and

unbeliever. Who would deny that the disciples for whom Clement of

Alexandria and Origen wrote, whom Tertullian and Minucius Felix

defended, and to whose institutes Cyprian was a convert, believed in

Jesus Christ as a person at once historical and divine, and were

strengthened by that belief to the endurance of martyrdom? The real

and only difficulties lie higher up, in the attempt to trace the

sources and earlier varieties of this belief; and if our author can

show that, in winding its way through two centuries, and traversing

several distinct regions of thought, it dropped or rounded off no

primitive facts, and became mingled with no foreign ideas,--if he can

establish the essential constancy and uniformity, from the first, of

the tradition and doctrine which obtained ascendency at last,--he will

indeed reduce legitimate scepticism within very narrow limits, and

deserve a niche in the Valhalla of critical renown. But if he

contemplates clearing these centuries by an argumentative leap; if,

from the martyr faith of an age later than the Antonines, he means to

conclude the certainty of the Incarnation two hundred years

before,--then we must say, he attempts a logical feat which puts to

shame the cautious steps of such reasoners as Paley, Marsh, and

Whately. The catena of well-linked testimonies, with its bridge of

safe footing, which they have endeavored to sling across the chasm of

the post-apostolic age, is but a paltry cowardice of ecclesiastic

engineering to one who can pass the gulf upon the wing of inference.

An advocate is intelligible, and proceeds upon admitted rules of

evidence, who says with these earlier divines: "Here are the writings

of Paul, of John, of Matthew, and of other men who were present at the

events they relate or assume; whose lives were turned into a new

channel by their influence; and who went to prison and to death rather

than deny them. They positively declare that they witnessed the most

stupendous miracles, and, after their Master had been visibly taken up

through the clouds, themselves habitually exercised the same

supernatural power. You must admit that the guaranties of testimony

can go no further: surrender yourself therefore to the Gospel." This

is an argument which accomplishes all that is possible with historical

evidence in such a case; and were its allegations of fact sustainable,

it would still be the best form into which the reasoning could be

thrown. Unfortunately, we can no longer feel assured that any

first-hand testimony exists, as a distinguishable element, in the

narrative books of the New Testament; so that we can regard them only

as monuments of the state of Christian tradition during a secondary

period. Still, this flaw is not repaired by striking into the course

of belief three or four generations lower down, and substituting the

"Martyr literature" of the third century for the Evangelist memorials

of the second or the first. And when our author transfers to Clement

and Origen the praise of unaffected simplicity usually awarded to the

Apostolic writers, and actually presents it as sufficient proof of

divine attributes in Christ, we can only suppose that, in his opinion,

some truths are too good to have any bad way to them. What else can be

said of the following mode of inference?

"Much do we meet with in these writers that indicates infirmity of

judgment or a false taste; yet does there pervade them a marked

simplicity, a grave sincerity, a quietness of tone, when HE is spoken

of whom they acknowledge as LORD. If there be one characteristic of

these ancient writings that is _uniform_, it is the calm,

affectionate, and reverential tone in which the Martyr Church speaks

of THE SAVIOUR CHRIST!

"I am perfectly sure that, if you could absolutely banish from your

mind all thought of the inferences and the consequences resulting from

your admissions, you would not, after perusing this body of Martyr

literature, fall into the enormity of attributing the notions

entertained of CHRIST, as invested with Divine attributes, to any such

source as 'exaggeration,' or 'extravagance,' or to 'Orientalism,' or

'enlarged Platonism.' Exaggeration and inflation have their own style:

it is not difficult to recognize it. No characteristic of thought or

language is more obvious. You will fail in your endeavor to show that

this characteristic _does_ attach to the writings in question; and

why should you make such an attempt? There can be no inducement to do

so, unless it appears to be the only means of escaping from some

consequence which we dislike."--p. 107.

Our author professedly opposes "Ancient Christianity" to modern

scepticism, because "History," as he observes, "is solid ground," and no

region of atmospheric phantasms, births from the refracted rays of

metaphysic light. History, however, is solid ground only so far as it is

really explored; and the trending of the land and curving of the shore

in one latitude of time no more enables us to lay down the map of

another, than an anchorage at the Ganges' mouth would enable us to paint

the gorges of the Himalayas, and distinguish the real from the fabulous

sources of the sacred stream. To take us into the basilicas and show us

how Christians worshipped in the days of Alexander Severus, to introduce

us to the Proconsul's court and bid us witness their refusal of divine

homage to Cæsar's image, and then ask us whether a faith like this

_could have had_ any origin but ONE,--this is not _history_, but the

mere _evasion_ of history. We want to know, not what _must have been_

the source, but what _was_ the source, of the great moral power that

rose upon the world as Rome declined. Whoever wishes to shut out human

ideas and natural agencies from participation in the matter, must go

patiently through the entire remains of the early Christian literature;

must trace the conflict between the Hebrew and the Pauline Gospel; find

a place for the peculiar version of the religion given by the Evangelist

John; fix the limits of Ebionitism, of Chiliasm, of Docetism; and show

that these modes and varieties of doctrine stop short of the substance

of the early faith, and do not enter the canonical Scriptures with any

disturbance of their historic certainty. Nothing of this kind do we

expect from our author. For he entertains a conception, respecting the

logic of Christian evidence, which, however prevalent among English

divines, betrays in our judgment a mind not at all at home with the

present conditions of the problem. He seems to think that we can _first_

prove the historic truth of the Scriptures _in general_; and then get

rid of the _difficulties in particular_; and requires us, in obedience

to this pedantic law of logical etiquette, to carry into our

investigation of every successive perplexity the rigid assumption that

the writings with which we deal are "inspired," and their contents of

"Divine authority."

"When a collection of historic materials, bearing upon a particular

series of events, is brought forward, it will follow, upon the

supposition that those events have, on the whole, been truly reported,

that any hypothesis, the object of which is to make it seem probable

that no such events did take place, must involve absurdities which

will be more or less glaring. But then, _after_ the truth of the

history has been established, and when the trustworthiness of the

materials has been admitted, as we proceed to apply a rigid criticism

to ambiguous passages, we shall undoubtedly encounter a crowd of

perplexing disagreements; and we shall find employment enough for all

our acumen, and trial enough of our patience, in clearing our path.

And yet no amount of discouragements, such as these, will warrant our

falling back upon a supposition which we have already discarded as

incoherent and absurd."--p. 110.

We cannot call this a vicious canon of historical criticism; for it

simply excludes historical criticism altogether. The critic's work is

not a process which can go on generically, without addressing itself to

any particular matters at all, and vindicate comprehensive conclusions

in blindness towards the cases they comprise. The judgment that, on the

whole, a certain book contains a true report of events, can only be a

provisional assumption, founded on natural and childlike trust, and can

claim no scientific character, till it comes out as a collective

inference from an investigation in detail of the narrative's contents.

No doubt, the bare fact of the existence of Christianity as a great

social phenomenon in the age of the Antonines, may afford evidence

enough that Jesus of Nazareth was no imaginary being; the genius of the

religion, and the traditional picture of its author, may indicate the

cast of his mind and the intensity of his influence; the institutions

of the Church may betray its origin in Palestine, and the approximate

date of its birth. But these conclusions, founded entirely on reasonings

from human causation, can never carry us into the superhuman; or enable

us to say more respecting the memorials of the life of Jesus, than that

they _may be_ true, and do not forfeit, _ab initio_, their title to

examination by fundamental anachronism, misplacement, and moral

incongruity. How far the existence of this _primâ facie_ case falls

short of "establishing the truth of the history," and "the

trustworthiness of the materials," we need not point out to any one

accustomed to deal with questions of evidence. And as for the great

proposition, that "the Gospel of Christ is a supernaturally

authenticated gift," we cannot imagine how it is to be proved _in

general_, without research into a single miracle. Is it indifferent to

the fact of the Incarnation, that the only two accounts of the birth and

infancy of Jesus are hopelessly at variance with each other? Is the

evidence of the Resurrection unaffected by the discrepancies on which

harmonists have spent a fruitless ingenuity? Are we as sure that, in

reading the Apostles' works, we have to do with "inspired writers," as

if they had _not_ made any false announcements about the end of the

world? What does our author mean by admitting these things as

"difficulties," yet denying them any just influence in abatement of our

confidence? He may form one estimate of their weight, and his opponent

another; but in neither case can they be postponed for treatment in a

mere appendix to the discussion of Christian evidence: they are of the

very pith of the whole question, and, so long as they lie in reserve as

quantities of unknown magnitude and direction of influence, render

historical belief and unbelief alike irrational.

Nor can we for a moment allow that the failure of ever so many "German

theories" to give a satisfactory account of the origin of

Christianity, is any good reason for contented acquiescence in the

received doctrine. Our author insists, that we must make our

definitive choice between some modern hypothesis and the Evangelical

tradition; and either take the facts as they are handed down to us, or

else replace them by some better representation. By what right does he

impose on us such an alternative necessity? Is the critic disqualified

for detecting false history, because he cannot, at his distance, write

the true? Is it a thing unknown, as a product of scholarship, that

fabulous elements disclose themselves amid the memorials of fact? and

is it not an acknowledged gain to part with an error, though only in

favor of an ignorance? If a modern hypothesis as to the mode in which

the religion arose may "break down" by mere internal incoherence and

improbability, why may not the ancient account, if it should be

chargeable with similar imperfections, be liable to the same fate? It

is surely conceivable that _all_ the finished representations we

possess,--Hebrew and Alexandrine, as well as German,--furnish, more or

less, an ideal and conjectural history of the infancy of Christendom;

and that the reproduction of that time may not only be _now_

impossible, but have already become so ere a hundred years were gone.

The baffling of one solution implies therefore no triumph of another;

and if the tradition on which we stand be insecure, our position is

not improved by clipping the wings of every adventurous hypothesis on

which we had thought to escape the common ground.

Our author cannot then change the _venue_ of the great Christian cause

from the first century to the third, and, on the evidence present there,

give even preliminary judgment. The conflict between the new religion

and the old which characterized that period, he paints with striking and

truthful effect; and, contrasting the severe and holy veracity of

martyred disciples with the careless indifference of Paganism to

religious truth, he rightly refers the superiority of the Christians to

their faith in a _Person_, instead of mere assent to an _Opinion_. Is

it, however, correct to regard this as original and exclusive to the

Gospel, and to set it on the forehead of the Church as the very mark of

her distinctive divinity? We think not. The same feature is manifest in

Judaism, to which again it belongs, not as a peculiarity, but in common

with every faith whose Only God is the apotheosis of humanity. It is the

one grand moral characteristic of genuine Theism, as opposed to

Pantheism; rendering it more than the enthusiasm of poetry, the

earnestness of philosophy, the inspiration of genius, and constituting

it, in the deepest sense, Religion. Nor is the ground of the distinction

far to seek. Religion, in its ultimate essence, is a sentiment of

Reverence for a Higher than ourselves. Higher than ourselves, however,

can none be, that have not what is most august among our endowments;

none, therefore, by reason of size, of strength, of duration; none

simply by beauty or by skill; none even by largeness of discerning

thought, but only by free and realizing preference of the most Just and

Good. A Being of living Will can alone be nobler than myself, lift me

above the level of my actual mind by looking at my latent nature, and

emancipate me into the captivity of worship. In other words, reverence

can attach itself exclusively to a _Person_; it cannot direct itself on

what is _im_personal,--on physical facts, on unconscious laws, on

necessary forces, on inanimate objects and their relations, on space,

though it be infinite, on duration, though it be eternal. These all,

even when they rule us, are _lower_ than ourselves; they may evade our

knowledge, defy our power, overwhelm our imagination, but never rise to

be our equals, or conspire to furnish even the symbol of our God. The

mere deification of Nature, the recognition of oneness pervading her

variety, the sense of an absolute ground abiding behind her transient

phenomena, may supply a faith adequate to the awakening of wonder and

the apprehension of ideal beauty, but not to the practical consecration

of life; glorifying the universe as a temple of Art, but railing off

within it no oratory of Conscience. In order to extract anything like a

religion of _conduct_ from this type of belief, its hierophants are

obliged to approach as near as they can to the language of proper

Theism, and not even despise typographical aid for pushing

personification to the verge of personality; uttering various warnings

not to neglect the "_intentions_ of Nature," or insult the "Relentless

Veracities," and inviting sundry offenders to _blush_ before "the

Eternal Powers." The whole force of such expressions is evidently due to

the false semblance of living thought and will with which they clothe

the conceptions of mere abstract relations or physical tendencies. These

rich tints are no self-color, but a borrowed light reflected from a

grander Presence studiously withdrawn from view; and when their gloss is

gone, no positive residuum is found, but a doctrine of hope and fear,

without any element of Duty. It were a mockery, an inanity, to bid a man

spend his affections on hypostatized laws that neither know nor answer

him. In his crimes, it is not the heavy irons of his prison, but the

deep eye of his judge, from which he shrinks; and in his repentance he

weeps, not upon the lap of Nature, but at the feet of God. In his

allegiance, his vow is made, not to the certainty of facts, but to the

majesty of Right, and the authority of an Infinitely Just; and his acts

of trust are directed by no means to the steadiness of creation's ways,

but to the faithfulness of a perfect Mind. In short, all the sentiments

characteristic of religion presuppose a Personal Object, and assert

their power only where Manhood is the type of Godhead. This condition

was imported, or rather continued, from the Hebrew to the Christian

system; and brought with it the devout loyalty of heart, the singleness

of service, the incorruptible heroism of endurance, which had

encountered Antiochus Epiphanes at Jerusalem, as it now met Pliny in

Bithynia, and Quadratus at Smyrna. The Paganism of the Empire, on the

other hand, failed entirely of this condition. It was a mere

nature-worship, expressive of the political dynamics by which, through

the award of a mysterious necessity, Rome had become the centre of the

world. If, among the deities whose congress was now assembled on the

Tiber, there were any which once, in their indigenous seats, had

commanded the full moral faith, and touched the true theistic devotion,

of a people, that time had passed; and the conquered tribes suffered a

more fatal loss when the victorious city adopted their religion, than

when she crushed their liberty. Removed to Rome, the rites of a

provincial worship expressed nothing except that its gods were gods no

more, but had descended from divine monarchic rights to a place among a

pensioned hierarchy. Vanquished divinities inevitably become delegated

powers of nature, and resign their sceptre to the sovereign they are

compelled to own. As the administration of the Empire embraced a

congeries of checked nationalities, so did its pantheon include a

collection of extinguished religions. While as Imperator the head of the

state was the embodiment of its unity by natural force, as Divus he

represented its unity by preternatural sanction; and the divine honors

paid to him were the acknowledgment of a necessity more than human in

the culminating majesty of Rome. These honors would be freely rendered

to him by those who looked on all realized existence, on everything

charged with force enough to come up and be, as equally decreed by "the

Eternal Powers,"--equally divine. Such homage would appear to them the

mere expression of a fact, and a graceful owning of mysterious fates in

its production; and no scruple could withhold them from an act which

contradicted nothing in their mind, and did but fling a breath of pious

incense around the thing that veritably was. It were absurd to expect

the protest of a martyr from a man whose religion you cannot contradict;

who will see a God wherever you ask him; and whose worship asserts

nothing but that, a phenomenon being there, an occult power is behind

it. A faith of this sort is deficient, as an Hegelian would say, "in the

moment of _negation_"; it is all unobstructed affirmation, and can

strike no light because it thus finds nothing to dash itself against.

But let the divine element in the universe cease to be impersonal and

impartially coalescent with the whole, let it live an Individual Mind,

and the requisite antagonism immediately appears. To the Jew, the

worship of Cæsar would be no other than high treason to Jehovah, whose

tool, whose whip of lightning, and whose cup of consolation the Pagan

Emperor might become; but whose emblem and incarnation he could so

little be, that he rather stood defiantly at the head of the opposing

realm, and, even when forced to be the organ, did not cease to be the

competitor of God. For _opposing realm_ there must be, wherever proper

Theism exists. Man feels that his personal attributes, his will, his

character, his conscience, demand conflict for their condition, and

without the possibility of ill could never be; and when he carries them

out into the infinite region, to serve as his image of the Highest, they

bear with them the inseparable shadow of evil, and give it place in the

universe, as the darkness in whose absence light would want its

distinction, the privative without which the beauty of holiness were

nothing positive. Hence, expressed or unexpressed, a dualism mingles

with all genuine theistic faith. All is not divine for it. It has a

devil's province somewhere. Face to face, as Ebal to Gerizim, the frown

of blighted rock to the smile of verdant heights,--hostile as the priest

of falsehood to the true prophet,--there stand contrasted in this creed

two domains of the world,--one surrendered to insurgent powers, the

other reserved as the nursing ground from which right and truth shall be

spread. To the Hebrew, the Pagan world was given over to a false

allegiance, and inspired with diabolical delusions. For him to sacrifice

to the genius of Cæsar, would have been, therefore, a desertion to the

enemies of God, forbidden by every claim of faithfulness and veracity.

Thus we conceive that the moral conditions of the martyrs' protest

against idol-worships were complete within the limits of Judaism before

the mission of Christ; and that the essence of it lies, not in the

exclusive characteristics of the Gospel, but in the difference between

Theistic reverence for a Personal Being, and the Pantheistic

acknowledgment of an impersonal divineness. The peculiar function of

Christianity in this respect was to become missionary to the world of

this heroic fidelity transmitted from the parent faith, and hitherto

bounded by its limits; and to find a place in the universal conscience

of civilized nations for the duty of bearing testimony, though with

tortures and death, to the pricelessness of truth and the sanctity of

conviction. True it is that the Gospel was qualified for this office by

directing human faith upon a _Person_; and would have exercised no such

power, had it been a mere philosophy presenting propositions for assent,

instead of a Living Mind for trust and reverence. But this condition

would have been attained by the simple extension of the Jewish Theism.

The Personality, which is needed as a centre of intense fealty and

affection, is found in the God of Hebrew tradition, and, for its effects

in kindling a martyr courage and constancy, did not require to be sought

in the historical Jesus of Nazareth. He, no doubt, as the mediate

expression of the Supreme Will, as the Being with whom the Church stood

in direct contact, as the presence of the Divine in the Human, _was_ the

object of the disciples' actual allegiance. We do not in the least

question this as a _fact_, but only as a _necessity_, ere we can account

for the moral features of a martyr age.

In singling out, as one of the grandest practical results of

Christianity, the recognition it has obtained for the _obligations of

religious truth_, our author has rightly seized a characteristic

distinction of modern from ancient society. The principle is a real

agency of the first order in history; we do not accuse him of

overrating its importance, but of mistaking its genealogy. And now we

must add, that if we differ from him as to the source whence it comes,

we differ still more as to the issues whither it conducts. So

inconsiderately does he allow himself to be borne away by his

evangelical zeal, that he claims for the Gospel, not only the glory of

first revealing, but the exclusive right of ever practising, the

duties of religious veracity. None but historical believers have the

least title to attach any sacredness to their convictions, or to feel

any hesitation about denying them. What business have the authors of

the "Phases of Faith," and the "Creed of Christendom," to any better

morality of belief than Gallio or Lucian? If they have not fallen back

into the Pagan indifferentism, they _ought_ to have done so, and our

author will continue very indignant till they do. He is offended with

Mr. Newman for asking judgment on his "argument and himself, as before

the bar of God"; and with Mr. Greg for saying that, in the process of

changing cherished beliefs, "the pursuit of truth is a daily

martyrdom," and for giving "honor to those who encounter it, saddened,

weeping, trembling, but unflinching still!" And he is not ashamed to

declare that the guileless veracity which in himself would be a

martyr's constancy, would be in another an overweening conceit. So

astonishing, logically and ethically, are his statements on this

subject, and so curiously do they determine his intellectual position,

that we must present them in his own words:--

"We Christian men of this age, along with our venerated martyr

brethren of the ancient Church, in making this profession,--that we

may not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in

matters of religion; we (as they did) affirm that which is consistent

within itself, and which, in the whole extent of its meaning, is

certain and is reasonable, grant us only our initial postulate, that

Christianity is from heaven.

"But how is it, when this same solemn averment comes from the lips of

those who deny that postulate, and who scorn to recognize the voice of

God in the BOOK? It is just thus; and those whom it concerns so to do,

owe it to the world and to themselves to make the ingenuous avowal.

"In the first place, the style and the very terms employed by these

writers in enouncing the fact of the martyrdom they are undergoing,

are all a flagrant plagiarism, and nothing better! A claim, in behalf

of the Gospel, must be made of what is its own, and which these

writers, without leave asked, have appropriated. As to every word and

phrase upon which the significance of this their profession turns, it

must be given up, leaving them in possession of so much only of the

meaning of such phrases as would have been intelligible to PLUTARCH,

to PORPHYRY, and to M. AURELIUS. A surrender must be made of the words

CONSCIENCE, and TRUTH, and RIGHTEOUSNESS, and SIN; and, alas! modern

unbelievers must be challenged to give me back that ONE awe-fraught

NAME which they (must I not plainly say so?) have stolen out of the

BOOK; when they have frankly made this large surrender, we may return

to them the το θειον of classical antiquity.

"Yet this plagiarism, as to terms, is the smaller part of that invasion

of rights with which the same persons are chargeable. It is reasonable,

and it is what a good man _must_ do, to suffer anything rather than deny

a persuasion, which is such that he could not, if he would, cast it off.

So it was with the early Christian martyrs; their persuasion of the

truth of the Gospel had become part of themselves; it was faith

absolute, in the fullest sense of the word. The same degree of

irresistible persuasion attaches to the conclusions of mathematical or

physical science; but it can never belong to an opinion, or to an

undefined abstract belief. A man may indeed choose to die rather than

contradict his personal persuasion of the truth of an opinion; but in

doing so he has no right to take to himself the martyr's style. So to

speak is to exhibit, not constancy, but opinionativeness, or an

overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty.

"Polycarp could not have refused to die when the only alternative was

to blaspheme CHRIST, his Lord; but Plutarch could not have been

required to suffer in attestation of his opinion,--good as it

was,--that the poets have done ill in attributing the passions and the

perturbations of human nature to the immortal gods; nor Seneca, in

behalf of those astronomical and meteorological theories with which he

entertains himself and his friend Lucilius.

"When those who, after rejecting Christianity, talk of suffering for the

'truth of God,' and speak as if they were conscience-bound 'toward God,'

they must know that they not only borrow a language which they are not

entitled to avail themselves of, but that they invade a ground of

religious belief whereon they can establish for themselves no right of

standing. They may indeed profess what _opinion_ they please as to the

Divine attributes; but they cannot need to be told that which the

misgivings of their own hearts so often whisper to them, that all such

opinions are, at the very best, open to debate, and must always be

indeterminate, and that at this time their own possession of the opinion

which just now they happen to cling to, is, in the last degree,

precarious. How then can martyrdom be transacted among those whose

treading is upon the fleecy clouds of undemonstrable religious

feeling?"--pp. 92-94

If, being orthodox, you die at the stake, you are a martyr; if, being

heretic,--why, then you are a man burnt;--a doctrine which Robert Hall

compressed within the narrowest compass, when he said, "It is the

saint which makes the martyr, not the martyr the saint." This is the

very Gospel of intolerance; and whoever preaches it may feel assured

that he can lend no help in any worthy "Restoration of Belief"; for he

is himself infected with the most profound and penetrating of

scepticisms,--scepticisms of moral realities. The rule, "that we may

not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in matters

of religion," is, in our author's view, the gift and glory of

Christianity. Be it so. This rule either holds for all men at all

times, or it does _not_; if there be persons who, notwithstanding it,

_may_ lie to God, and deny their inward conviction, then the

Scriptures, in communicating it, have revealed no universal principle

of duty, no obligation having its seat in the nature of things and the

constitution of the human soul, but a mere sectional by-law, an

arbitrary precept for the security and good ordering of one exclusive

community. Then must we talk of it no more so exceedingly proudly, as

if it were a hidden truth revealed, a latent beauty opened; it is no

part of the holy legislation of the universe, but a statutory

enactment under which we fall, or from which we escape, as we pass in

or out at the door of a certain historical belief. Need we say that

this side of the alternative strips Christianity of every pretension

to be a moral revelation at all? If, to take the other side, the rule

in question _does_ hold for all men, then it is no less binding on Mr.

Newman and Mr. Greg than on our author; and in bowing to its authority

and owning its sanctity, they render a homage as devoutly true as his,

only different in this, that, while they feel no disturbance from his

kneeling in the sanctuary at their side, he cannot be at peace till he

has sprung to his feet and hurled them from the place. They are guilty

of "plagiarism" forsooth! And in what? In knowing their duty, without

knowing where they learned it! O shame upon this greediness, that

would turn moral truth itself, and struggling aspiration, into a

property! As if Christ were one to stand upon the copyright of

revelation, and, unless his name were in the title-page, would suffer

neither thought nor prayer to dedicate itself to God! Our author, as

public prosecutor in the Supreme Court, demands that the defendants

shall empty themselves out of every earnest sentiment, and surrender

back the words CONSCIENCE, and TRUTH, and RIGHTEOUSNESS, and SIN, and

GOD, "as _stolen_ from the BOOK"! What then was "the Book" given for,

but that it might freely furnish these?--and how better can it fulfil

its end, than by opening for them a sacred welcome wherever the

_things_ are which they disclose? Let their spirit breathe where it

listeth; it will not be less a Holy Spirit that we know not "whence it

cometh": nor let it be forgot how old a feature of evangelic blessing

it is, that "he that was healed _wist not who it was_." As "the Book"

does not, by its presence, _create_ the facts which it reveals, so

neither does its absence or rejection _destroy_ them. Conscience, as

an element of human nature, does not come or go,--God, as reality in

the universe, does not live or perish,--according as the Bible is kept

in the pocket or laid upon the shelf; even if their first _witness_

were in Scripture, _they themselves_ are in the world,--as active, as

near, as certain, in the transactions of to-day, as in the affairs of

distant history. Scientific truth, once well ascertained, can take

care of itself, without being everywhere attended by the report of its

first discovery; it is in the safe keeping of the objects on which it

writes a new meaning, and the phenomena amid which it introduces a

fresh symmetry. And moral truth, when once embodied and revealed, is

not less independent of its earliest expression; it finds its response

in human consciousness, its reflection from human life, and weaves

itself up into the very fabric of many souls, whose pattern bears no

motto of its origin. Thus "revelation"--just in proportion as it is

revelation, and tells us what is cognate to ourselves, and bound up

with the realities around us--passes of necessity into "natural

religion"; and precisely according to the measure in which it does so,

will it acquire strength and permanence, and dispense with evidence by

merging into self-evidence. Did it awaken in us _no_ confirming

experience, did it _nowhere_ link itself with the visible system of

things,--then, solving nothing, glorifying nothing, missed by all the

moving indices of nature and Providence, it would sit apart, and

become incredible. That could hardly be a truth at all, which, after

roaming the world and searching the soul for eighteen centuries, has

found no _natural_ ground on which to rest, and must wander as an

_ipse dixit_ still. And if natural ground it has acquired, _that_ is

surely a proper basis for its present support; it may innocently cease

to be held on mere authority; the very "plagiarism" so vehemently

denounced is rather the fulfilment than the destruction of the faith,

for it is only that men no longer resort to an oracle for things which

the oracle has enabled them to see for themselves.

Our Christian advocate, however, is not content with reserving to his

side the sole power of _discerning_ the duty of religious veracity; he

further claims the sole right to _practise_ it. He teaches that it is

_not binding_ on all men at all times; and that its obligation is in

any case conditional on the "initial postulate, that Christianity is

from heaven." He thinks, apparently, that the duty is not so much

_revealed_ as _constituted_ by the Gospel, so as to have no existence

beyond the pale. We can collect from his words two considerations,

under whose influence he seems to pronounce this strange judgment. He

evidently assumes that the duty of veracious profession is contingent

partly on the _object-matter_ of belief; partly on the _degree of

evidence_. If my faith is directed towards _a Person_, then, he

implies, there is treachery, even blasphemy, in denying it; but if

not, my disclaimer gives no one any title to complain, and I cannot be

expected to die on behalf of a proposition. Polycarp must not renounce

Christ, his Lord; but Plutarch might very properly recant, without at

all altering, his judgment against the poets, for ascribing passions

to the gods. Is it so, indeed? Then there is no harm in a lie, unless

some one is betrayed or insulted by it besides the hearers whom we

deceive,--and we may report as falsely as we please our persuasion

about _things_, provided we are true to our sentiments about

_persons_? With full recollection of the questionable verdicts, on

problems of veracity, which are given by Xenophon and Plato, Aristotle

and Cicero, we doubt whether any Pagan moralist can be quoted in favor

of a doctrine so unworthy as this. The author seems to imagine that

the obligation to speak the truth is a mere duty of personal

affection; and that in the absence of this element, its claims

altogether disappear. Identifying falsehood with detraction and

ingratitude, he concludes that, since an abstract theory is insensible

to what people say about it, and can have no services owing to it, it

may be blamelessly repudiated by those who really believe it. This is

tantamount to an expunging of veracity from the list of human duties

altogether; for it gives importance to what is purely accidental, and

slights what is alone essential to it. The conditions of a lie, in all

its full-blown wickedness, are quite complete, when there is a person

to speak it, a person to hear it, and a social state to be the theatre

of the deception; should there be also a person _spoken of_, that is a

circumstance in no way requisite to constitute the guilt, but a

supplementary condition, flinging in a new element of pravity, and

turning falsehood into faithlessness. The introduction of this

additional person into the case may doubtless render the offence much

more flagrant, especially if he be one who has acknowledged claims on

gratitude and reverence. Calumny and perfidy are justly held in deeper

abhorrence than equivocation unstained with malignity. But to be

unaffected by the criminality till it kindles with this diabolical

glare, and not even to believe in it unless it smells sulphurous and

burns red, betrays a perception too much accustomed to melodramatic

contrasts of representation to appreciate the more delicate tints and

finer moral lights of the real and open day. And so far from the glory

of martyrdom being heightened by the presence of deep personal

affection as its inspiration, this very circumstance renders the act a

less arduous sacrifice; just as to fall in the hot blood of battle may

need less heroism of will, than to die under the knife upon the

surgeon's table. In proportion as the denial of Christ in the hour of

trial would be the more intolerable blasphemy, must the temptation to

it be less overwhelming, and the merit of a good confession less

amazing. And those who, in matters touching no such deep affection,

can yet be true,--those who, in simple clearness of conscience, can

dispense, if need be, with the help of enthusiasm, and so shut their

lips against a lie, that not the searing iron can open them,--those

who do not want a grand occasion, but just as certainly use the

smallest, to fling back the thing that is not,--have assuredly a soul

of higher prowess and more severely proved fidelity to God. And it is

a heartless thing to turn round upon these men, and taunt them with

having no one at whose feet to lay their offering, and no popular

sympathy to redeem their uprightness from the imputation of conceit.

There is, however, another consideration which weighs with our author in

granting to "modern unbelievers" a dispensation from the duty of

religious veracity. They have only a "personal persuasion" resting on

precarious grounds, and not the certitude attaching to "the conclusions

of mathematical and physical science"; and it would be folly to suffer

on behalf of "_undemonstrable_ religious feeling"! Are we then to lay it

down as a canon in ethics, that intensity of assurance is the measure of

our obligation to speak the truth,--so that we are to state our

certainties correctly, but may tell lies about our doubts? If so,

scrupulous fidelity is incumbent on us only within the limits of

deductive science and of immediate personal observation; and in the

great sphere of _human_ affairs, in matters of historical, moral, and

political judgment, nay, in the incipient stage of all knowledge, we may

say and unsay, may play fast and loose with our convictions, according

as the favor or the fear of men hangs over us. Newton was bound to stand

by his "Principia"; but Locke might have renounced his treatise on

Government and taken his oath to the divine rights of kings! Were he

indeed to refuse so easy a compliance, it would be a great reflection

upon his modesty; for if a man, on being threatened with death, will not

belie his own persuasion of probable truth, he is chargeable with

"overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty"! It is happy for

the world that it does not always except the morals of the Church, but

brings an unperverted feeling to correct the twisted logic of belief.

"Opinion," a wise man has said, "is but knowledge in the making"; and

how little knowledge would get made, if opinion were emptied of its

conscience, and looked on itself as an egotism rather than a trust! If

there is one fruit of intellectual culture which more than another

dignifies and ennobles it, it is the scrupulous reverence it trains for

the smallest reality, its watchfulness for the earliest promise of

truth, its tender care of every stamen in the blossoming of thought,

from whose flower-dust the seed of a richer futurity may grow. To cut

against this fine veracious sense with the weapons of unappreciating

sarcasm, and crush its objects into the ground as weeds with the heel of

orthodox scorn, is a feat which can advance the step of Christian

evidence only by betraying the Christian ethics. Our author has

entangled himself in the metaphor indicated by the word "_martyrdom_";

he thinks of the confessor as _bearing witness_ to something,--which is

indeed quite true; and supposes that the things to which he bears

witness must be _the facts or doctrines_ held by him; and _this_ is not

true at all. For that which we attest in the hour of persecution is

simply _our own state of mind; our belief_, and not the object believed.

We are required to utter words, or to perform acts, that shall give

report of our persuasion; this persuasion is a fact in our personal

psychology about which there is no ambiguity; which, as a presence in

our consciousness, is wholly unaffected by the question how it got

there, and by what logical tenure it holds its seat. Whether we have

demonstrated it into the mind or fetched it thither in a dream, whether

we had it yesterday or shall continue to have it to-morrow, are matters

in no way altering the fact that it is there; and if we say "No" to it,

while conscious of a "Yes," the sin is neither greater when the belief

concerns the properties of a geometric solid, nor less when it touches

some indeterminate problem of metaphysics. The logical ground of our

judgments is various without end,--perception, testimony, reasoning, in

every possible combination. But the persuasion, once attained, is a

simple phenomenon, whose affirmation, or denial, being always positively

true, cannot change its moral complexion with every shade in the

evidence now left behind. It is plain that, in our author's favorite

case of martyrdom, no testimony could be borne by the Christian to

anything but his own conviction. Polycarp and Cyprian could only answer

in the face of death, that they were Christians; it was not "on behalf

of" any outward fact, but simply because they would not belie their

inward belief, that they laid down their lives. And had Plutarch been

dragged before some anthropomorphist inquisition, and been called on

publicly to declare his belief that the immortal gods were well and

truly painted by the poets as having passions like mankind, the lie to

which he was tempted would have been precisely of the same kind; and had

it passed his lips, would have made him despicable as an apostate. He

had no power, nor had the Church confessor, over the truth or evidence

of his opinion; neither of them had any _witness_, in the strict sense,

to bear; but both might veraciously scorn to deny a fact unambiguously

present to their self-knowledge. If the heathen's firmness is an example

of "overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty," by what

favoring difference does the Christian's escape the same imputation?

That his faith is "absolute," his persuasion "irresistible," so far from

furnishing a vindication, only avows the fact that his "confidence" is

intense; whether it be "overweening" too, must depend on the proportion

between the certitude he feels and the grounds of just assurance he

possesses. But at all events it is a confidence--in this case as in the

other--undeniably reposed "_in his own reasoning faculty_." How else

could any belief--except a groundless belief--reach the convert's mind

at all? It is vain to pretend that the receivers of an historic doctrine

plant their reliance piously on God, while its rejecters proudly trust

themselves. There is no less subjective action of the mind on the

positive side than on the negative; and on the soundness of that action

does the worth of the result in either instance depend. The evidence on

both sides comes into the same court of criticism; and pleading and

counter-pleading must ask a hearing from the same judicial intelligence.

If our author refers the Gospels to the first century, and his opponents

to the second; if he finds a miracle in the gift of tongues, they a

delusion; if he thinks that the reasoning out of the Old Testament in

the New is exegetically and logically sound, they that it is in both

respects unsound;--is he not concerned with the same topics, conducting

the same processes, liable to the same mistaken estimates, as they? How

then can he flatter himself that the same thing is believed on one

tenure, and disbelieved on quite another? How affect, even while playing

the advocate, to be raised above the contingencies of the "reasoning

faculty," and entitled to rebuke its pride? How renounce it for himself,

appeal to it for your _as_sent, abuse it for your _dis_sent, in the

wayward course of two or three pages?

Our author stands, therefore, in spite of every effort to escape it,

on the same logical ground as his opponents; and they, notwithstanding

his objection to their companionship, are on the same footing of

religious obligation with himself. He is offended to find such a one

as Mr. Newman on the same sacred pavement, and to overhear from

unbelieving lips the genuine tones of prayer; and, thanking God,

apprises men that he "is not as this publican." He prosecutes for

trespass all who, after rejecting his Christianity, can dare to

profess allegiance to the "truth of God," and "speak _as if they were

conscience-bound towards God_." Are they then _not_ so bound? Has no

one a conscience except the approved historical believer? Is it not in

others also a Divine voice,--a Holy Spirit,--which to resist and

stifle were the true and only "Infidelity"? Surely the faith in God,

and the earnest acceptance of the laws of duty as the expression of

his authority, are not forbidden to men who cannot assume the

disciple's style. These sentiments, so far from waiting on revelation

for their possibility, are the pre-requisite conditions of all

revelation, the state of mind to which it speaks, the secret power by

which it finds us out; and if men cannot be "conscience-bound towards

God" _before and without_ Christianity, never can they become so

_after it and with it_. It does not take us up as atheists and brutes,

and supply us with the faculties as well as the substance of faith;

else were there no medium of suasion across the boundary of

unbelief;--but it appeals to us as knowing much and aspiring to

more,--as already before the face, only shrinking from the clear look

of God,--as feeling the divine restraint upon us of justice, purity,

and truth, but unable, without some emancipating power, to turn it

into freedom and joy. This spirit of profound sympathy, not of

arrogant insult, towards the highest faiths and affections of our

nature, we recognize in the portraiture and teachings of Jesus Christ;

and when we find one who, like our author, instead of rejoicing that

the sacred embers of nature are yet warm, instead of kneeling over

them to fan them with a breath of reverence into a flame, flings them

with scattering scorn on the damp ground of his own moral scepticism

to show how little they will burn,--we see reversed in the "Restorer

of Belief" the divine temper of the "Author of Faith." Such a teacher

will vainly endeavor to recover by severity of warning the influence

he forfeits by want of sympathy. He cannot frighten men like Parker,

Newman, Greg, by appealing to fancied "misgivings of their own hearts"

respecting the precariousness of their convictions, and uttering

dismal prophecies about yawning gulfs; which, however alarming as a

shudder of rhetoric, can disturb no quiet trust in reality. Let us

hear the words, however:--

"Educated men should not wait to be reminded that those who, after

abandoning a peremptory historic belief, endeavor to retain Faith and

Piety for their comfort, stand upon a slope that has no ledges:

Atheism in its simplest form yawns to receive those who there stand;

and they know themselves to be gravitating towards it.

"It would be far more reasonable for a man to die as a martyr for

Atheism,--a stage beyond which no further progress is possible,--than

to do so at any point short of that terminus, knowing as he does that

every day is bringing him nearer to the gulf. The stronger the mind

is, and the more it has of intellectual massiveness, the more rapid

will be its descent upon this declivity. Minds of little density, and

of much airy sentiment, may stay long where they are, just as gnats

and flies walk to and fro upon the honeyed sides of a china vase; they

do not go down, but never again will they fly."--p. 94.

This is one of the conventional minatory arguments which betray the

absence of security and repose from the heart of the received

theology; whose teachers could never propound it, except from a

position of conscious danger. They must imagine in their own case

that, if they were to find the Gospels no longer oracular, they would

plunge at once into endless depths of negation; and that, unless they

can refute an interpretation of De Wette's, or correct a date of

Baur's, there will be eternal night in heaven. They feel the universe,

and life, and love, and sorrow, and the history of times and races

unbaptized, to be all atheistic through and through,--profane to the

core,--untraced by a vestige, untransfigured by a color, of divine

significance. What they can think of a Being who creates all reality

and lives in it on these blindfold terms, we will not attempt to

decide; but it is no wonder that, having once brought themselves to

believe in Him, they feel how a single move would overset them into

disbelief. This thing, however, is true of their own state of mind

alone; whose spaces, dark throughout with scepticism but for one

distant lamp, might easily be left without a ray. It is consistent

neither with reason nor with experience to threaten with this rule men

who have opened their souls to something else than documentary

authority. It is notoriously false that the career of historic doubt

usually terminates in the loss of all faith in God; nor do we suppose

that our author would have awarded to the atheist, for actually

reaching this point, the praise of "intellectual massiveness," had he

not wanted a heavy weight to slide down his metaphorical inclined

plane,[57] and outstrip the slippery believers who try to stop

half-way. The accusation against Theism, of being possible to the

light-minded and superficial,--a mere sweet-bait to entrap the silly

insects of the intellectual world,--is confuted by the whole history

of philosophy and human culture; all whose grandest names have

connected themselves with the recognition of a religion indigenous or

accessible to the faculties of the soul. Let our author collect on one

side of his library all the giants and heroes of utter disbelief, and

on the other the literature of natural faith; nay, let him ransack for

fresh names and forgotten suffrages Lalande's "Dictionnaire des

Athées"; and if, having weighed the various merits of Leucippus and

Lucretius, of Baron d'Holbach and La Mettrie, of Robert Owen and

Atkinson, he thinks them of more sterling mass than the pure gold of

thought and life accumulated by Socrates, Plato, Antoninus,--by Anselm

and Abelard, Descartes and Arnaud,--by the authors of the "Theodicée,"

the "Essay on the Human Understanding," and the "Principles of Human

Knowledge,"--by Kant and Cousin,--by Butler and Paley and Arnold,--we

can only profess a dissent from his intellectual taste, not less than

from his moral judgment.

The few pages on which we have been commenting were the first--though

they are near the end of the treatise--that fully opened our eyes to

the author's theological _animus_. For a while, his large professions,

and, no doubt, sincere purpose of fairness,--his apparent breadth of

view, and his free hand in putting down his subject on the

canvas,--secured our admiring confidence, and made us feel that here

at length justice, earnestness, and accomplishment will go together.

One feature, indeed, we noticed as giving a suspicious appearance to

his equity of temper; it displays itself more in censoriousness

towards his friends, than in large-heartedness towards his

antagonists. He readily allows faults in the advocates of his own

side, but is never carried away into even a momentary appreciation of

the other. This particular form of impartiality, which consists in

detracting from the merits of allies, instead of delighting in those

of opponents, is the ecclesiastic counterfeit of candor,--the

half-shekel, which is alone payable in the temple-service, but which

nowhere, save at the sacred money-table, is deemed equivalent to the

good Roman coin of common life. Much as we dislike the chink of this

consecrated metal, we hoped that it would only ring for a passing

instant on the ear. But alas! it is an indication seldom deceptive;

and we feel constrained to report that there are, in this tract,

quotations from both Mr. Newman and Mr. Greg, which, if we were in the

court of veracity, and not of theology, we would say are

unconscientiously made. The quotations are made anonymously as well as

unfaithfully, so that the reader, unless haunted by the checking

impressions of memory, cannot correct the injustice of the writer. The

"Phases of Faith" describes, it will be remembered, the gradual course

of Mr. Newman's defections from his original orthodoxy. His first

movements of doubt were naturally timid and inconsiderable, bringing

him only to the conclusion, that the genealogy in the first chapter of

Matthew was copied wrong, and counted wrong, from the Old Testament.

On this step followed a second, and a third, each more important than

the preceding, and necessitating a next more momentous than itself.

The latter stages of his progress included an inquiry into the

evidence of the Resurrection, the miraculous gifts ascribed to the

early Church, the claims to credit of the Apostle Paul, and other

topics, undeniably affecting the very essence of Christian evidence.

Having traced the successive advances of his doubts, Mr. Newman, in a

recapitulary "Conclusion," makes a solemn appeal to his readers, to

say at what point he could have stopped, and to lay a finger

distinctly on the place at which the guilt of his scepticism began.

One by one he counts out the steps by which he had proceeded, and

asks, "Was this the sinful one?" The whole effect of the appeal is

certainly an impression that the series, if not an inevitable

sequence, is very difficult to break; and that, small as the

beginnings were, they linked themselves, by close connection, with

very momentous results. From this chapter our author cites a sentence

or two, but in such a way as immediately to conjoin the small initial

steps of doubt with the great ultimate conclusion, and to make it

appear that Mr. Newman renounced Christianity because he could not

make out the pedigree of Jesus to his satisfaction. The genealogical

difficulty is the only one which he quotes, and as to which Mr. Newman

is permitted to speak for himself. Presenting this as a specimen, and

suppressing all the rest, he says that he could have shown "this

writer" a course far better "than, on account of difficulties _such as

these_, to renounce Christianity"! His citation from Mr. Greg is

introduced as follows:--

"Let another witness be heard; and in hearing him one might think that

his words are an echo that has come softly travelling down, through

sixteen centuries, from some field of blood, or some forum, or some

amphitheatre, where Christian men were witnessing a good confession in

the midst of their mortal agonies! _This_ witness is one who assures

us that 'he can believe no longer, he can worship no longer; he has

discovered that the creed of his early days is baseless, or

fallacious.' Yet he too takes up the MARTYR TRUTH, that we must not

lie to God."--p. 91.

Here, then, Mr. Greg (with concealment of his name) is represented as

one who, by his own confession, _can neither believe nor worship any

more_. Turning to the preface of "The Creed of Christendom," we find

the following original to this quotation:--

"The pursuit of truth is easy to a man who has no human sympathies,

whose vision is impaired by no fond partialities, whose heart is torn by

no divided allegiance. To him the renunciation of error presents few

difficulties; for the moment it is recognized as error, its charm

ceases. But the case is very different with the Searcher whose

affections are strong, whose associations are quick, whose hold upon the

Past is clinging and tenacious. He may love Truth with an earnest and

paramount devotion; but he loves much else also. He loves errors, which

were once the cherished convictions of his soul. He loves dogmas which

were once full of strength and beauty to his thoughts, though now

perceived to be baseless or fallacious. He loves the Church where he

worshipped in his happy childhood; where his friends and his family

worship still; where his gray-haired parents await the resurrection of

the Just; but where _he_ can worship and await no more. He loves the

simple old creed, which was the creed of his earlier and brighter days;

which is the creed of his wife and children still; but which inquiry has

compelled him to abandon. The past and the familiar have chains and

talismans which hold him back in his career, till every fresh step

forward becomes an effort and an agony; every fresh error discovered is

a fresh bond snapped asunder; every new glimpse of light is like a fresh

flood of pain poured in upon the soul. To such a man the pursuit of

Truth is a daily martyrdom,--how hard and bitter let the martyr tell.

Shame to those who make it doubly so; honor to those who encounter it

saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still."--p. xvi.

Our author would snatch from Mr. Greg the right to say, we must not lie

to God. Which has the better right to say, "Thou shalt not lie to men"?

The more ingenuously the modern Orthodoxy lays bare its essence, the

more evident is it that a profound scepticism not only mingles with it,

but constitutes its very inspiration. The dread of losing God, the

impression that there is but one patent way, not of duty, but of

thought, of meeting him, haunt the minds of men, driving some to

Anglicanism to compensate defect of faith by excess of sacrament, some

to Rome in quest of the Lord's body, and prompting others to

conservative efforts of Bibliolatry, conducted with ever-decreasing

reason and declining hope. We have seen, however, no such

exemplification of this radical distrust as in the treatise before us.

Already has the writer declared that the moral side of the universe

sends in, with regard to religion, an empty report. And now he hastens

to tell us that, on the physical side, the watchmen from every

observatory of nature cry out, "No God." He represents the natural

sciences as a huge Titanic, resistless mass of knowledge, perfectly

demonstrable, and completely irreligious; descending, like a glacier,

from the upper valleys of frozen thought; sure to scrape away the wild

pine woods and the green fields of natural religion, yet considerate

enough, for some reason unexplained, to spare the foundations of the

village church. Designating every faith except his own by such phrases

as "theosophic fancies," and "pietistic notions," he assures us that

they will all be put "right out of existence" by "our modern physical

sciences"; and he borrows from the "Positive Philosophy" (apparently by

unconscious sympathy) the following maxim to justify his prediction:--

"In any case, when that which on any ground of proof takes full hold

of the understanding, (such, for example, are the most certain of the

conclusions of Geology,) stands contiguous to that which, in a logical

sense, is of inferior quality, and is indeterminate, and fluctuating,

and liable to retrogression,--in any such case there is always going

on a silent encroachment of the more solid mass upon the ground of

that which is less solid. What is SURE will be pressing upon what is

uncertain, whether or not the two are designedly brought into

collision or comparison. What is well defined weighs upon, and

against, what is ill defined. Nothing stops the continuous involuntary

operation of SCIENCE in dislodging OPINION from the minds of those who

are conversant with both.

"A very small matter that is indeed determinate, will be able to keep

a place for itself against this incessantly encroaching movement; but

nothing else can do so. As to any of those theosophic fancies which we

may wish to cling to, after we have thrown away the Bible, we might as

well suppose that they will resist the impact of the mathematical and

physical sciences, as imagine that the lichens of an Alpine gorge will

stay the slow descent of a glacier."--p. 97.

Here it is alleged that Science and Opinion cannot coexist,--that the

demonstrable will banish the probable. And be it observed, this is to

take place, not simply where contradiction arises between the two orders

of belief, but in _all cases_, from the mere _distaste_ which

quantitative studies produce towards everything which evades their

rules. In this allegation there is, we believe, with much exaggeration,

a certain small amount of truth,--a truth, however, which, so far from

supporting our author's plea against natural religion, offers it a

conclusive refutation. It may be admitted that the exact and mixed

sciences _do_ disincline their votary to put trust in the processes by

which judgments of probability are formed, and alienate him from

thinkers who read off the meaning of the universe by another key than

his. Accustomed to deal with Number and Space, with Motion and Force

alone,--to reason upon them by a Calculus which is helpless beyond their

range,--to exercise Faculties involving nothing beyond the

interpretation of mensurative signs and the conception of relative

magnitudes,--he owes it to something else than his peculiar discipline,

if he has either the instruments or the aptitudes for moral and

philosophical reflection. He carries into the world, as his sole means

of representing and solving its phenomena, the notion of physical

necessity and linear sequence, secretly defining the universe to himself

as Leibnitz defined an organized being,--"a machine, whose smallest

parts are also machines,"--and naturally grows impatient when he finds

himself in fields of thought over which this narrow imagination opens no

track. With respect, therefore, to a certain class of minds, rendered

perhaps increasingly numerous by the long neglect of the moral sciences

in England, it may be quite true, that a spirit of utter disbelief

towards everything beyond the range of necessary matter may more and

more prevail. Let us further grant to our author, for the moment, three

things assumed by him, all of them, however, false:--1. That this

tendency of the "demonstrable sciences" is their _only_ one having a

bearing on "theosophic systems." 2. That it is so _new_, at least in

degree, as to give "opinion" a worse chance for the future than it has

had in the past. 3. That it is a _good_ tendency, favorable to human

knowledge and character. Still we must ask, How is the _oracular

authority of the Bible_ to escape the fate predicted for all

probabilities? Our author assures us that it _will_ escape; but he gives

no faintest hint of a reason for so singular an exception to his own

canon. It cannot be contended that the evidences of Christianity and

Judaism belong to any of the "demonstrable" or "physical" sciences. It

cannot be denied that they lie wholly within the limits of contingent

knowledge, and terminate only in "probabilities"; that the authorship,

for instance, of the fourth Gospel, the credibility of the introductory

chapters of Matthew, the correctness of the prophecies about the second

advent, are matters which, "standing contiguous" to the laws of

refracted and reflected light, occupy the position of the _less sure_ in

relation to the _more sure_; that the _relative_ chronology of the

Scripture books is more indeterminate than that of the geologic strata,

and their _actual_ dates more uncertain than those of the eclipses fatal

to Nicias and to Perseus. What, then, is to exempt these judgments of

verisimilitude from being pushed "right out of existence" by the "silent

encroachment of the more solid mass" of knowledge beside it? Nothing can

be plainer than that all testimonial knowledge whatsoever, all history,

criticism, and art, the whole system of moral and political sciences,

must fall under our author's fatal sentence; and how the propositions

which sustain the infallible authority of the canonical books are to

hold their ground against the huge glacier on which Herschel, Airy and

De Morgan, Comte and Leverrier, triumphantly ride, it is not easy to

conceive. Amid the universal crash of probabilities, may not the Mosaic

tables of stone, broken once, be pulverized at last? With the abrasion

of all the alluvial soil in which the growths of wonder strike their

roots, will the garden of Eden, will the blighted fig-tree, remain to

mark a verdant and a barren spot in history? Will these riding

philosophers from their cold observatory find Paul's "third heaven"? May

not their icy mountain slip into "the abyss" whence all the demons came,

and fill it up? These questions, indeed, are answered for us in

experience. It is notorious that, whenever an unbounded devotion to

science has produced a prevalent tendency to disbelief, Revelation, so

far from being spared, has been usually the first object of attack; and,

both at the origin of modern science in the sixteenth century, and

during its accelerated advance towards the close of the eighteenth, the

widening conception of determinate Law was found to threaten nothing so

decisively as the faith in supernatural dispensations. The greater

scepticism includes the less; and the habit of mind which lets slip all

beliefs not legitimated by the canons of natural science, cannot

possibly retain Christianity.

But our author has only _half_ described the mental effect of studies

purely scientific. They do not, in the nature of things they _cannot_,

simply push out of the mind all contingent judgments. Human life and

action are one continuous texture of such judgments, with some

interweaving, no doubt, of mathematic forms, which could not be picked

out without spoiling the symmetry of its pattern; but were you to

withdraw the threads of probable opinion, still more, to cut the warp

of primitive assumptions that stretches through it, the web would

simply fall to pieces. No youth can decide on a profession, no man

appoint an agent in his business, no physician prescribe for a

patient, no judge pronounce a sentence, no statesman answer a

despatch, without a constant resort to "surmises," a reliance on

slender indications, often even a deliberate adoption of very doubtful

hypotheses. All men are driven from hour to hour into positions

demanding combinations of thought which can be borrowed from no

natural science; where not the laws of matter and motion, not the

equilibrium of forces, not the properties of things, are chiefly

concerned, but the feelings and faculties of persons, the action and

reaction of human affairs. Mathematicians and natural philosophers,

being in no way exempt from these conditions, are obliged to have just

as many "opinions" and "guesses" as other men; they cannot, if they

are to keep their footing on this world at all, have a smaller stock

than their neighbors of this "logically inferior" order of

persuasions. They are unable to abdicate the necessity of having these

persuasions; and their only peculiarity is, that they sometimes import

into contingent affairs the methods with which habit has rendered them

familiar in another sphere, and so find the conditions of belief

unsatisfied; and at others, from consciousness that their own clew

will not serve, yet inaptitude for seizing a better, surrender

themselves to the fortuitous guidance of ill-balanced faculties and

external solicitations. Hence their judgments are frequently

fantastic, frequently sceptical,--not less liable to be too easy from

one cause than to be too reluctant from another; and were a history to

be written of the most remarkable extravagances, positive as well as

negative, by which religion and philosophy have sprung aside from the

centre of common sense and feeling, it would contain more names of

great repute in the exact sciences than from any other intellectual

class whatever. From Pythagoras to Swedenborg, the eccentricities of

mathematical and physical imagination have been the chief disturbers

of a natural and healthy faith. Harmonic theories of the universe,

Ideal Numbers, Geometric Ethics, Rosicrucian fraternities, Vortices

and Monads, Apocalyptic studies, New Jerusalems, and Electrobiological

Metaphysics, have all borne testimony to the aberrant fancy of eminent

proficients in the sciences. It is, therefore, far from being

universally true, that disputable theosophies and conjectural systems

of the universe are distasteful to minds schooled in the "demonstrable

sciences." If to men of this order we owe the successive dislodgement

of one such hypothesis after another, to them also do we owe their

continual reproduction. Whether the unsoundness of judgment which is

contracted in the absence of historical, moral, and metaphysical

studies shall show itself in an excessive slowness or an excessive

facility of belief, will depend on accidents of personal character and

social position. But of this we may be sure;--if the _sceptical_

temper be the direction taken, the Bible will not be spared; if the

_credulous_, "theosophic fancies" will be copiously saved.

Can there, after all, be a more paradoxical spectacle than that of a

religious writer allying himself with the sceptical propensities of

science, in order to get rid of gainsayers of the Bible? It is the

counterpart in logic of the Italian game in politics,--the Pope

appealing to Parisian swords to drive out the Republic, and save the

head of Christendom. Is it possible that our author can _approve_ the

agency which he thus invokes? that he can really wish to see it in the

intellectual ascendant, and garrisoning every sacred fortress of the

world? Does he remember what are the fundamental canons of its

logic,--that we know nothing but Phenomena,--that Causation is nothing

but phenomenal priority,--or else, that Force is the prior datum of

which Thought is a particular and posterior development? And what, on

the other hand, are the "theosophic fancies" against which he would

plant this barbaric artillery of Fate? They are such as these,--that our

faculties give us trustworthy reports, not of phenomena only, but of

their abiding ground,--Soul within, God without;--that the moral Law of

Obligation in the one is the expression of Holy Will in the other;--that

faithfulness in the Human mind to its highest aspirations, brings it

into communion with the Divine;--that as the Soul is the free Image, so

is Nature the determinate Handiwork of God. If these doctrines, spurned

by our author with so rude a flippancy, _were_ to surrender to the

hostility on which he relies, is he unaware of the character the

conflict would assume, and of the dynasty of thought which would reign

undisputed at the close? Fighting by the side of such allies against

"theosophic fancies," _he_ may skirmish with the "fancies," but _they_

will bear right down upon the "Theism" in the centre; and when the day

is over, the standard they will plant upon the conquered towers will

be, not the sacred dove he took into the field, and lost to the defeated

foe, but their own blind black eagle of necessity. How strange is the

perversion of instinctive sympathies, when a theologian disparages the

sciences of reflection and self-knowledge, and takes his stand on the

evidence of sense and measurement alone!--when he proposes to sweep out

beliefs that trouble him with their neighborhood, by a general crusade

against all probabilities,--and when, with this design, he violates the

just balance of power among the kingdoms of human knowledge, and

flatters, as if it were a virtue, the pretensions of a mental habit,

which, out of its own province, is one of the most incapacitating, yet

destructive, of intellectual vices! There is, however, a certain secret

affinity of feeling between a Religion which exaggerates the functions

and overstrains the validity of an external authority, and a Science

which deals only with objective facts, perceived or imagined. The point

of sympathy is found in a common distrust of everything internal, even

of the very faculties (as soon as they are contemplated as such) by

which the external is apprehended and received. And between this sort of

faith and the mathematics there is another analogy, which may explain so

curious a mutual understanding. Both rest upon _hypotheses_, which it is

beyond their province to look into, but after the assumption of which,

all room for opinion is shut out by a rigid necessity. _Once get_ your

infallible book, and (supposing the meaning unambiguous) it settles

every matter on which it pronounces; and once allow the first principles

and definitions in geometry to express truths and realities, and you can

deny nothing afterwards. It is the business of philosophy to go _below_

the mathematics, and determine whether they are _more than hypothetical_

science,--whether their assumptions are a mere play of subjective

necessity, or are objectively trustworthy. It is the business of both

reflective philosophy and historical criticism to go below "the BOOK,"

and determine whether it has _more than hypothetical_

infallibility,--whether the conditions, inner and outer, of such a

claim, are or are not satisfied. If even the Mathematics, which have

little to fear from the investigation of their basis, have not been on

the best terms with Metaphysics, it is hardly surprising that a Religion

of mere external authority should feel antipathy for the studies which

pry into its foundations, with the inevitable effect of showing that

what is _certainty_ above ground is _opinion_ below. Nor is it wonderful

that both sets of beliefs are fond of forgetting their hypothetical

origin, contemplating only their acquired semblance of security, and

speaking as if they disowned contingency altogether, and despised the

detractors who could suspect such a taint in their blood. Hence the

fellow-feeling which occasionally unites a rigid theology, and an

exclusive physical and mathematical science. It is founded on their

joint antipathy to the sources of _moral_ knowledge,--their common

blindness to one half of human culture. Like all alliances resting on

antipathy alone, it is neither honorable nor durable. It is the function

of Religion to occupy a tranquil seat above the contests of partial

pursuits and narrow interests; as, in the world of action, to hold the

balance of Right, so, in the world of intellect, to preserve the

equities and the equilibrium of Truth; and her trust is betrayed by any

one who flings himself, as her representative, into the civil wars of

the sciences, and in her name signs away whole provinces of thought, and

abandons them to outrage and confiscation as conquered lands. Human

faith has nothing to fear from the unity and perfection of all the

sciences; but much from the blind ambition of each one. It is from this

persuasion alone, and not from any defective appreciation of physical

studies, that we have spoken freely of their tendency, when the mind is

entirely enclosed within them. The undoubted source of inestimable

blessings to mankind, and an indispensable element of culture to the

individual, they are mischievous only when they grow dizzy with success,

and propound schemes of universal empire. The moment they undertake

either to create or destroy a religion, the sign is unmistakable that

this intoxicated ambition has begun to work.

The relation of Religion to History our author appears to us to

conceive much more correctly than its relation to Science. On this

great topic, however, our limits forbid us to enter. One remark only

we will make. The author misconceives the objection of Theodore Parker

and others to the ordinary doctrine of historical revelation. They do

not, as he affirms, "disjoin religion from history," or in the least

decline the "travelling back to ages past" on its account. It is not

the _presence_ of God in antiquity, but his presence _only_

there,--not his inspiration in Palestine, but his withdrawal from

every spot besides,--not even his supreme and unique expression in

Jesus of Nazareth, but his absence from every other human

medium,--against which these writers protest. They feel that the usual

Christian advocate has adopted a narrow and even irreligious ground;

that he has not found a satisfactory place in the Divine scheme of

human affairs for the great Pagan world; that he has presumptuously

branded all history but one as "profane"; that he has not only read it

without sympathy and reverence, but has used it chiefly as a foil to

show off the beauty of evangelic truth and holiness, and so has dwelt

only on the inadequacy of its philosophy, the deformities of its

morals, the degenerate features of its social life; that he has

forgotten the Divine infinitude when he assumes that Christ's

plenitude of the Spirit implies the emptiness of Socrates. In their

view, he has rashly undertaken to prove, not _one positive_ fact,--a

revelation of divine truth in Galilee,--but an _infinite

negative_,--no inspiration anywhere else. To this _negation_, and to

this alone, is their remonstrance addressed. They do not deny a

_theophany_ in the gift of Christianity; but they deny two very

different things, viz.:--1. That this is the _only_ theophany; and, 2.

That this is theophany _alone_;--that is, they look for _some_ divine

elements elsewhere; and they look for _some_ human here. It is not

therefore a smaller, but a larger, religious obligation to history,

which they are anxious to establish; and they remain in company with

the Christian advocate, so long as his devout and gentle mood

continues; and only quit him when he enters on his sceptical

antipathies. This, in spite of every resistance from the rigor of the

older theology, is an inevitable consequence of the modern historical

criticism. Its large and genial apprehension opens for us new

admirations, new sympathies, clearer insight into human realities,

throughout the nations and ages of the past. It melts away from our

ancient moral geography the ideal contrasts of coloring which made the

world the scene of an unnatural dualism, and reinstates the great

families of man in unity. It is doing for our conception of the moral

world what science has already done for our conception of the natural:

it is expanding our notion of Divine agency within it. As, in

reference to physical nature, we have learned to think that God did

not enact creation but once, and cease; so are we beginning to

perceive, in relation to the human mind and life, that he did not

enter history only once, and quite exceptionally. Whoever opens his

heart to this great thought will find in it, not the uneasiness of

doubt, but the repose of faith. He will no longer fancy that, in order

to keep Christianity as the divinest of all, he must fear to feel

aught else divine. He will worship still at the same altar, and sing

his hymn to the same strain; only with a richer chorus of consentient

voices, and in a wider communion of faithful souls.