lecture to say but little, for I would willingly follow the example of my
Right Reverend antagonist, and entirely avoid those arguments which
savour of mere personal denunciation; but it is hard to forget that
during the 1800 years which, it was boasted, Christianity has endured it
was the policy and practice of priestly bigotry, first in the Church of
Rome, and afterwards, and not less, in the Church of England, to oppose,
and without mercy to seek to crush out all efforts at Freethought. If
to-day the Lord Bishop of Peterborough lifts his powerful and eloquent
voice in the Cathedral nave, if to-day we are charmed with his suasive
pleading and well-turned periods, we can scarcely forget that it is only
since the Church has been unable to strike with the arm of the law that
she has condescended to plead with the tongue.
I must assume to-night that those of you who are present were also
present at the Bishop’s discourse; but I speak with more freedom as it is
my intention to print this reply together with a _verbatim_ report of the
Lord Bishop’s sermon, so that they may stand side by side. I regret that
the learned and eloquent advocate of Church Christianity did not think it
right when talking of freedom, necessity, laws of nature, absolute
freedom, and so forth, to favour us with some explanation or definition
to guide us to the sense he intended to convey by their use; as I could
not help fancying that he more than once used the same words with quite
different meanings. Jonathan Edwards, whom I shall quote to you with
slight modification, thus in effect states the doctrine of
necessity:—“The whole universe exhibits a fixed, certain, and constant
succession of events, which bear to each other the relation of causes and
effects. This series of causes and effects, as they belong to
unconscious and involuntary subjects, is the physical order of the
material universe: of which order the phenomena are found by observation
to take place according to certain principles, which are usually called
the laws of nature. This series, as it applies to intelligent and
voluntary agents, consists of the fixed and invariable conjunction of
volitions and voluntary actions with antecedent motives. In every
instance that we know by experience, or that we can conceive, there is an
invariable and necessary conjunction of motives and volitions. We cannot
conceive a change in the volition without an antecedent change in the
motive; and the motives remaining the same, the volitions and the
voluntary acts will be correspondent. We are conscious that we never do,
and never can, perform any voluntary action without a motive.” While not
adopting entirely the words of Jonathan Edwards, I have given his view of
the doctrine of necessity, a view not contained in the sermon by Bishop
Magee; but each used the phrase laws of nature. Now, clearly, in the
mouth of the Bishop, law meant the expression of personal will. The Duke
of Argyll in his “Reign of Law,” says:—“In its primary signification a
‘law’ is the authoritative expression of human will enforced by power;”
but he gives five different senses in which the word “law” is used.
First, “We have law as applied simply to an observed order of facts;
secondly, to that order as involving the action of some force or forces
of which nothing more may be known; thirdly, as applied to individual
forces, the measure of whose operation has been more or less defined or
ascertained; fourthly, as applied to those combinations of force which
have reference to the fulfilment of purpose, or the discharge of
function; fifthly, as applied to abstract conceptions of the mind, not
corresponding with any actual phenomena, but deduced therefrom as axioms
of thought necessary to our understanding of them. Law, in this sense,
is a reduction of the phenomena, not merely to an order of facts, but to
an order of thought.” I use law only as denoting observed concurrence or
sequence of events. When it is said to be a law that water poured from
the glass shall fall to the ground, it is not, or should not, be meant
that the water falls by command emanating from personal will, but only
that this is the recorded experience of all competent observers without
exception. Jonathan Edwards, relying on Isaiah xlvi. 9 and 10, xiv. 27,
Acts xv. 18, Psalms xxxiii. 10 and 11, and other texts, declared that the
absolute and perfect foreknowledge of God, asserted in the Bible, was
inconsistent with freedom of volition, as it implied the certainty of the
happening of the events foreknown. The Duke of Argyll says, “There is
nothing to object to or deny in the doctrine that if we knew everything
that determines the conduct of a man, we should be able to know what the
conduct will be. That is to say, if we knew all the motives which are
brought by external agencies to bear upon his mind, and if we knew all
the other motives which that mind evolves out of its own powers, and out
of previously acquired materials, to bear upon itself; and if we knew the
character and disposition of that mind so perfectly as to estimate
exactly the weight it will allow to all the different motives operating
upon it, then we should be able to predict with certainty the resulting
course of conduct.” Sir William Hamilton, for I prefer to quote from
antagonists, says, “How the will can possibly be free, must remain to us,
under the present limitation of our faculties, wholly incomprehensible.
We are unable to conceive an absolute commencement, we cannot, therefore,
conceive a free volition. A determination by motives cannot, to our
understanding, escape from necessitation. Nay, were we even to admit as
true what we cannot think as possible, still the doctrine of a motiveless
volition would be only casualism; and the free acts of an indifferent,
are, morally and rationally, as worthless as the pre-ordered passions of
a determined will. How, therefore, I repeat, moral liberty is possible
in man or God, we are utterly unable, speculatively, to understand.”
In dealing with “Freedom as opposed to Necessity,” Dr. Magee declared
“that a man is free to think in one way or another, that it is not
absolutely necessary for him always to think in one way or another.”
This declaration is so obscure, that I should have had to abandon all
attempt to solve the Bishop’s meaning but for the added explanation—viz.,
“that is to say, his thought is not the necessary product of physical
constitution, that his thoughts do not grow out of him, as the blade
grows out of the seed or the flower out of the plant, that it is not
mechanical or necessary, but that a man has the power to choose how he
will think.” I do not imagine that Dr. Magee used the word “thought” as
limited by Sir William Hamilton; or that he intended in the loose words
he uttered on this head to examine the doctrine as to evolution of
thought put forward by German thinkers. I assume that the Lord Bishop
regarded brilliancy of speech as preferable to profundity of argument,
and fancied that he would best clear the way for the other Christian
advocates who are to follow him, by piling well-sounding but often
perfectly unmeaning phrases in their pathway. When the Bishop of
Peterborough urges that thought is not the necessary product of physical
constitution, we answer by opening before him an ethnical map; and
pointing to the Australian as probably the lowest human type, the Bushman
of the Cape, the Esquimaux, the Negro, the Teuton, we ask whether
physical constitution has not something to do with thought-ability? Nay,
taking a mal-formed cranium or a diseased brain from a lunatic asylum, we
demand further whether the unhealthy and inaccurate thought is not there
alleged in precise terms to be the “necessary product of physical
constitution?” The assertion “that a man has the power to choose how he
will think,” may be met by the query—When? Has the old man, partly deaf,
partly blind, with failing memory, the power to choose how he will think?
Has the drunken man, while intoxicated, the power to choose how he will
think? Has the untaught Norfolk farm labourer with Sir W. Hamilton’s
“Philosophy of the Unconditioned” before him, the power to choose how he
will think in opposition to or in support of Cousin or Kant? Has the man
to whom Church of England Christianity was taught as a child, whose
intellect was bent and bound while yet pliable and scarce resisting,
whose scope of inquiry has always been restrained by that line where
reason applied becomes blasphemy, has he the power to choose what he will
think? Let the wretched subterfuges with which even thinkers above the
average—as your Essayists and Reviewers, your Dunbar Heaths, your Drs.
Giles and Irons, your Colensos and your Voyseys—try to reconcile
orthodoxy and Freethought, be examined, and you will have fuller answer
than any I can give. Has man the power to choose how he will think? It
may be fairly presumed, that under the words “to think,” Dr. Magee
included all phases of mental activity, perception, recollection of
perception, comparison of perception, judgment, reason, volition. Any
word by which any condition of mental activity could be fairly described
is, I take leave to submit, included by Dr. Magee under the head of
“thought.” But is it true that a man can choose his perceptions? Are
they not first limited by his perceptive ability, and, next, by the range
within which that ability can be exercised, and its development in
exercise? And if perception be compulsory, if a man cannot refuse to
perceive that which is within the range of his ability, if he cannot
elect to perceive that which is not within its range, then how can the
thought-processes—all related to, and more or less based upon, the
primary perceptions, modified or enlarged as these may afterwards be—how
can these be free? And will Dr. Magee contend that a man has the power
to choose what he will remember, or what he will forget?
“Christianity,” says Dr. Magee, “teaches that man is free, and terribly
free, to will his own belief;” but the tenth article of Dr. Magee’s own
Church, an article which binds him in this argument, declares that “The
condition of man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and
prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and
calling upon God;” nay, the very Litany in which the Lord Bishop took
part proceeds on the assumption that all are miserable sinners, who may
desire to escape, but cannot escape, from sin without God’s help. And
the ninth article of the Church of England positively declares that every
man “is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh always
lusteth contrary to the spirit.” “Where there is absolute freedom,” says
my Lord Bishop of Peterborough, “there cannot be authority.” But man is
absolutely, “terribly free” to choose his belief, therefore this is a
subject upon which God can have no authority. This is a point upon which
the power of the Omnipotent is limited. This being monstrously absurd,
it was natural that the acute advocate for a falling Church should make
some effort to retreat with the honours of war, and he, admitting the
difficulty in religion, says that you find precisely the same difficulty
in politics in fact, and in law, medicine, and morality, as to opinion.
Arguments from analogy are dangerous at best, but here there is no
analogy. Dr. Magee should at least read the “Contrat Social” of Jean
Jacques Rousseau, and the exhaustive essay on Liberty by John Stuart
Mill. No one but a madman would contend in politics either for the
absolute liberty of the individual, or for the absolute supremacy of
authority. Even Guizot’s views of government might have saved Bishop
Magee from an illustration so faulty. And as to the opinions on law and
medicine which we receive submissively from lawyer and doctor, their
authority is usually the measure of our ignorance. We swallow the drugs
of Dr. Pangloss, and bow to the dictum of Justice Shallow, it is true;
but the more we know of physiology, the more we learn of jurisprudence,
the less is our acquiescence a mere submission to authority.
As to so much of the Bishop’s sermon as deals with the authority of
revelation and miracles, and which in effect declares that, on the
authority of a revelation not made to me, I may be required to believe in
Jesus Christ as the “only son” of God, while that very revelation tells
me that God had more than one son—(Job i. 6, ii. 1)—and which on the
authority of miracles disbelieved by the mass of the people who are
supposed to have seen them, requires me to believe that Jesus, “very God
of very God,” having descended into hell, afterwards ascended into heaven
with “his body, flesh, and bones, and all things appertaining to man’s
nature,” and there sits at the right hand of God—(Article four and Nicene
Creed)—my answer is a very simple one. The Bishop’s declaration that
here no tyranny is attempted over Freethought is not a fair and honest
declaration. The revelation does not submit its proof to Freethought,
but, on the contrary, my Lord Bishop of Peterborough, as the spokesman of
his Church, is bound to tell us in the words of his own horrible creed,
that the man who will not submit to acknowledge the dogmas of his Church,
without doubt shall perish everlastingly.
When the Bishop says that men are continually submitting to authority,
and that if they did not they would never learn anything, he is woefully
inaccurate in his analogy. It is perfectly true that Humboldt, Lyell,
Huxley, Darwin, Lewes, Spencer, Mill, and such men’s names are names of
authority, and that our experience is supplemented and aided by the
recorded experiences of such men. But our confidence is not an unlimited
one, their authority is not supreme. It is limited by the measure of our
own experience in the first place, and by our acquaintance with the
experience of other men than these in the next; both of these, too,
modified and affected by our general intellectual ability. But all that
our scientific teachers say is, We have learned such and such things, we
learned them in such a fashion, you may if you have leisure and means
verify our experiments, we show you the road we have travelled, we have
mapped and scaled it for you. But in religion there is no such teaching,
the authority of the Church dominates, denies, and annihilates experience
with a graveyard resurrection for lack of living verification. Nothing
could more fittingly be denounced as a trick of pulpit advocacy had it
come from the mouth of any other man, than the supposition of an
impossible event in a graveyard as evidence on some equally impossible
doctrine. It would be far more natural in thought to suppose deception
in the alleged graveyard conjuring, than to suppose anything else. For
decomposing bodies, fleshless skeletons, forms in which the vital
organisation had been destroyed, and disappearing for days, weeks,
months, or years, to suddenly break through coffins, which living they
would have been unable to burst, to get through a superincumbent mass of
earth, and to stand out in flesh, alive, the blood circulating through
newly manufactured veins—a man who saw this instead of crying “A
miracle,” had far better believe himself subject to delirium, and make
his straightway to the nearest physician for medicine to cool his
disordered brain. But the Bishop’s case is weaker still; his graveyard
opened 1800 years ago, the men who saw it have ever rejected it, and we
who have not even seen it are required to believe it, and are told, that
in this there is no tyranny over our thought. When the Bishop talks of
the “soulless and merciless machinery of law,” and declares that “there
are no laws so merciless as those of nature,” we must not forget that by
the very terms of his sermon, and by the creed of his Church, he asserts
all law as the expression of the “personal will” of Deity; and the
soulless and merciless law is, according to the Lord Bishop of
Peterborough, the manifested will of the merciful God who is infinite
soul and love. Reading to us a portion of the Apostles’ Creed, Dr. Magee
said, All these are assertions of facts, and “you are bound to think
right about them under penalties,” but not more so than about other
alleged matters of fact. This is untrue. What other alleged matters of
fact are men required to believe under Act of Parliament? What other
alleged facts are there which if a man deny he may be sent to gaol, lose
civil rights, be denied the guardianship of his children, and be made an
outlaw in the State? Where of an alleged fact in astronomy or geology is
your investigation prefaced with the declaration that if you deny it you
shall be sent to a bottomless pit filled with brimstone and fire, and
prepared for the Devil and his angels?
SECOND DISCOURSE
OF THE
BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH.
CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ON Wednesday evening, March 29th, the Bishop of Peterborough preached his
second sermon, on “Christianity and Scepticism,” before a large
congregation in the nave of the Cathedral, Norwich. His text was from
the Gospel according to St. John, xx. 25:—
“The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord.
But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of
the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust
my hand into his side, I will not believe.”
His Lordship said:
My subject to-night is “Christianity, and Scepticism,” and I have
chosen for my text these words of a sceptic, for as such St. Thomas
has been regarded. His name has become proverbial in Church history
for unbelief. Among the different characters that surround our Lord
in the Gospel story, he has been regarded as the type of the doubter,
and he is known as the doubting or the unbelieving Thomas. And yet
at first sight we hardly see that he should be so called. It is
quite true that he did doubt, and yet his doubt does not at first
sight seem to be unreasonable, or so very obstinate that he should be
called by way of distinction, the doubter, the unbeliever. It was
not unreasonable. On the contrary, it was reasonable and natural
that he should feel some doubt about the resurrection of Jesus
Christ. Others had doubts as well as he, and they were called fools
and slow of heart to believe, and yet they did not inherit the name
of the doubters. Again, his disbelief was not of a very obstinate
kind. It seemed to have yielded almost instantaneously; and almost
immediately after he was satisfied, he said more than others of the
disciples, for he said “My Lord and my God.” He not only
acknowledged the resurrection of Jesus, but his divinity, and yet he
is called Thomas the doubter, the sceptic, and he is rightly so
called.
The Christian consciousness did not err when it gave the name,
because when he uttered the words which I have just read to you,
“Except I see I will not believe,” he uttered that which is the very
essence of scepticism. He suspended his belief upon an absolutely
impossible condition. He declared that he would not give his assent
except on this condition, that it should be made absolutely
impossible for him to doubt. What he said to his brother disciples
amounts to this:—“You tell me that you have seen the Lord, but I
cannot believe you. It does not matter to me how strong your
testimony may be, or how truthful I believe you to be, I will not be
satisfied till I see it for myself. I will not accept of any
testimony but that of my own senses.” He said his assent was only to
be had by absolute demonstration, and its being made impossible for
him to have any doubt. I say the condition makes all belief
absolutely impossible. Belief, in the proper sense of the word, is
assent on an amount of trust. If we have absolute demonstration of
anything, the result is not belief at all, it is demonstration. What
we see with the eyes of our body or mind, we don’t properly believe
in. We know it. We have the certainty, not of faith, but of
science, and where doubt is impossible, belief or faith is
impossible. You may have certainty, but it will be the certainty of
knowledge, it will not be the certainty of faith. It is quite clear
that if any man makes it a condition of his assent to truth of any
kind, that it must first be demonstrated to him as clear as that two
and two make four; it is clear that is if there be any class of
truths which cannot be so proved as that two and two make four, the
man who makes that proof or demonstration a condition of his assent,
must always be in doubt about those truths, or that class of truths;
he must always in respect of them be a sceptic or doubter.
Again, one step further, it is clear that religion or Christianity is
a truth, or class of truths that cannot be demonstrated
scientifically. We cannot prove that there is a God, in the same way
that we can prove that two and two make four. We cannot do this,
because the idea of God is that he is invisible to us. The first
utterance of religion is this: I believe in what I cannot see, I
believe in an invisible God. Clearly he that says, I don’t believe
anything I do not see, must be a sceptic or doubter about the truth
of religion; and therefore it comes to pass, that though religion is
by no means the only subject, or the only collection of truths that
cannot be demonstrated, it is the principal one, and it has come to
pass that though there are sceptics on other subjects, yet for this
reason a sceptic is understood to be a man who doubts about religious
subjects; a man who will not believe all the truths of Christianity,
because they cannot be demonstrated to him in the way he thinks they
should be demonstrated. You see now what a sceptic is, and what
scepticism, is. By the word sceptic we mean a disbeliever in the
truths of religion. A man may disbelieve some of the truths of
religion and not be a sceptic. A Jew does not believe in
Christianity, but he is not a sceptic. It is because he believes in
Moses that he does not believe in Christ. We don’t call the
Pantheists or the Deists sceptics, because they have a fixed belief.
Some of their beliefs I think monstrous; they make a greater demand
on faith than those do who believe in religion. I think the man who
says there is no God must believe more contradictions than the man
who says there is a God. He has a perfectly monstrous creed, but it
is a creed. He is not so much a disbeliever as a misbeliever, for he
believes in something else than God. Again, we don’t call a doubter
a sceptic; a sceptic is a doubter, but the doubter is not necessarily
a sceptic. A man may doubt of the truths of religion, only because
he has not had evidence of the proper kind. A sceptic asks for
evidence of an unreasonable kind. A man may doubt the truth of any
assertion in history; he may think that all the historians or
witnesses of the facts are untruthful or ill informed, I should not
call that man a sceptic; but if a man said, I don’t believe the facts
you allege in history, because I deny all human testimony; you cannot
deny that these men lived some time since, and that they may have
been liars; you cannot give me proof to the contrary: that man I
should call a sceptic, because in matters historical he was demanding
an unreasonable amount of evidence. It is not doubt nor unbelief
that makes the difference as to the sceptic. The sceptic is not such
because he doubts, but on account of the reason of his doubt. He
seeks for evidence that it is not proper or reasonable that he should
have.