on the other hand, there may be belief, or at least assent, upon
sceptical principles. It is quite possible that a man may be firmly
persuaded of some of the truths of religion, and yet be in heart a
sceptic. If a man were to say I cannot believe in the existence of a
God till I have it demonstrated to me as clear as that the three
angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, then he is in
principle a sceptic, because it is clear that if he could not have
that sort of proof, he would begin to doubt of the existence of God.
All the time his assent to the existence of God would not have rested
upon any faith or trust, but upon demonstration. But when the idea
of God ceased to be a scientific certainty, it is clear that he would
be in heart a sceptic. And there is no doubt that the first belief
of the apostle Thomas was rendered upon sceptical principles. He
said, I will not believe till I put my finger in the print of the
nails, &c., as if he had said, I will believe nothing but the
evidence of my own senses. He believed only because he got this
evidence of his senses; and mark this, when our Lord gave him what he
asked, he pronounced no praise on his belief; he did not say to him
as he said to another, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjonas, for flesh
and blood has not revealed this to thee;” but flesh and blood had
revealed the fact to Thomas, and our Lord said, “Blessed are they
that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Thus it is possible to
doubt without being sceptical, and it is possible to assent, and to
be still sceptical. I want you to dwell on this point of belief,
doubt, and sceptical belief, because there are certain things that I
am going to point out in this way. I ask you to test for yourselves
what I am now going to say, and try the effect upon your own
feelings. We cannot demonstrate Christianity. It is utterly
impossible that I can give you a demonstration of Christianity, such
as will leave no possible room for doubt or question. When those who
have to follow me have said all they have to say; when they have put
before you all the evidences of Christianity in all their fulness and
variety; when they have shown how much more reasonable it is to
believe than to disbelieve, how many more difficulties there are in
the way of disbelief than of belief; when all this is done, there may
still be a doubt on your minds; there will be questions that cannot
be answered, there will be difficulties that cannot be explained, and
which no living man can explain. We can give the highest degree of
evidence, short of demonstration, for belief in Christ, but we cannot
demonstrate Christianity. Now what effect has that announcement on
your hearts? Possibly you have heard it with some disappointment.
You may have come to hear these sermons, expecting to have all your
doubts removed. You may say, “I thought you were going to answer all
the questions with mathematical certainty.” Our answer is, If we
could prove with as much certainty that there is a God as that two
and two make four, or as that this is a book [holding it up], then
our religion would do you as much good as the knowledge that two and
two make four. We would not in that case cultivate the quality of
faith in your souls, in spite of difficulties and doubts. We cannot
demonstrate Christianity, but we can give sufficient reason for our
belief in it, in spite of doubt.
What we have to say is this, that the evidences of Christianity are
weapons to put in the hands of every one of you, with which every man
and woman may fight out in his or her innermost soul the desolating
and besieging doubt that from time to time will assault it. This is
the real object of evidences of faith, but they are not meant to be
the outlying works of the citadel of the soul outside of which the
enemy is compelled to keep. The shield of faith in God you have to
carry on your own arm, and with it quench all the fiery darts of the
wicked one. Though your own arm tremble, you must carry it to repel
the darts that are aimed at your own heart.
There is another word of comfort we have to give you the really
distressed doubter. Christianity does not repel the doubter who
says, I believe, Lord help my unbelief. What Christianity is
intolerant of is not doubt, but the spirit of doubt, not unbelief,
but the demand for unreasonable, impossible conditions of belief. We
don’t tell you to stamp out every doubt before you can become a
Christian. We say if you believe but one point, you may come to
believe all the rest, and our message to you is, weary as you may be
of the load of doubt, the same as that of the Saviour who said “Come
unto me all you that are weary and heavy laden,” and you will find
rest to your souls.
And now I have clearly explained the difference between Christianity
and Scepticism. Let us briefly sum up again and show the points of
collision between Scepticism and Christianity. We saw last night
that the question between Christianity and Freethought was a dispute
as to the nature of liberty, so the question between Christianity and
Scepticism is a dispute as to the nature of certainty. Christianity
offers and gives certainty in the end; Scepticism demands certainty.
But the certainty of Christianity is partly the certainty of reason
and partly of faith and of experience. The certainty demanded by
Scepticism is the certainty of science only. The most extreme of
unbelievers will admit that there is something to be said for
Christianity; and that it is not unworthy of a hearing as regards its
evidences. The men who have believed in Christianity for the last
1800 years, have not been the greatest fools in the world. Liebnitz
and Butler were not drivellers, and not those only, but hundreds and
thousands of the greatest intellects that humanity has produced.
They were not such utter fools that any man is entitled to dismiss
Christianity with a wave of his hand. On the other hand, every
reasonable Christian will admit that there is something fair and
reasonable in some of the objections to Christianity. But the
Christian says to the sceptic, It is unreasonable in you to ask that
every difficulty should be got rid of and every question answered
before you believe in Christianity. The sceptic replies, It is
unreasonable in you to ask me to believe in Christianity till you
have removed every doubt. I will ask you which is the reasonable
demand—the demand of the Christian for faith upon probable evidence,
or the demand of the sceptic for assent only upon scientific
demonstration?
Now in order to argue it fairly and without passion or prejudice, let
us pass from the subject of religious doubt and let us consider the
case of doubt in other matters than religion; we all know that men
have doubted in other subjects. Try then to recall to your minds the
first doubt; it was only a little later than the first belief. The
first instinct of the child is to believe everything, that everything
he sees and hears is true. All appearances to the child are
realities. The sun is to him a ball of fire that climbs up the sky,
the stars are little specks of light that shine at night. The earth
is a flat plain. Very soon the child learns the first great lesson
of doubt, learns that things are not what they appear to be, learns
to distrust appearances, learns that under the appearances there is a
reality. He gets his first teaching from doubt, and all-important is
the instinct of doubt. Very soon is the awakening of the sceptical
part of the mental nature of man, of his understanding. The nature
of the understanding is ever to ask, What and why? The spirit of
doubt leads the man from question to question, from step to step,
till he gets answers to his questions; he goes on from doubt to
belief, and from belief to doubt, and so on to greater knowledge.
Thus doubt is the means of knowledge, the instrument of discovery.
Without the instinct of doubt humanity would be stagnant; with it
alone humanity progresses. I do not disparage doubt, I highly value
it; but doubt is useful on one condition, and one only, that it
starts from a first belief. What is the cause of all this doubt and
pursuit of knowledge? The supreme instinctive belief, that under all
appearances there is a reality, that something underlies and causes
all being; and it is the search for this essence of existence that
leads the doubter on, the search of this _I am_. If he had no faith
in some underlying reality beneath these phenomena, there would be no
progress, and so doubt is ever seeking for that which is below what
appears, and yet never reaches it.
Never yet has science reached to the great reason of all reasons, to
the great cause of all causes, that underlies all knowledge; and yet
ever as we seek for it we are advancing in knowledge. We do not
reach it, but are ever reaching and passing on, through that which
lies between us and it. Doubt is like the mainspring of a watch, it
is ever seeking to uncoil itself and yet never entirely doing so.
The result is that the hands of the watch move uniformly because
there is an attachment of the mainspring. Cut the attachment, and
the hands will give one wild whirl and all will be still, and the
watch useless. It is just the same with doubt and faith. Doubt is
attached to the primary belief that there is a cause of all things,
but it is ever seeking to detach itself from that belief and never
succeeds. The consequence is, that there is a constant and measured
progress of the human mind. But we have to consider how much further
the intellect which has thus been the rule and test of our belief
might go. A child not only believes in appearances or facts, but he
has an instinctive belief in the truthfulness of humanity. The child
has not learned that it is not wise to believe everything that is
said to him. Was that a happy discovery? Should we tell a child not
to believe the word of any human being until he had demonstration
about it? Is it wisdom always to distrust human nature? We are
always trusting. Give a logical proof that we are right in any of
our trusts. A wife may be false, a child may hate its parents, and a
man may be robbed by a friend or a confidential servant; yet are we
to distrust everybody? If a man were not to trust any one till it
was proved by demonstration that he ought to do so, he would be put
in a lunatic asylum; and rightly so, as a man one part of whose
nature had got diseased and had mastered all the other parts of his
nature. I defy any one to say logically that the man may not be
right, or to give a logical demonstration that it is absolutely
impossible that his wife, children, and friend were not in a
conspiracy to wrong him. There is thus an absolute necessity for
trust in the ordinary affairs of life, I hope you will see that life
must be conducted on the principle of faith or trust.
Let us ask if morality can exist without faith or trust, whether we
can get a demonstrative or scientific basis for morality itself? I
ask this, because those who ask for the destruction of our religion
talk of the gain to morality. They say, Sweep away the influences of
religion and morality will be stronger. Let us see how morality will
bear the assaults of scepticism. Morality is that code or rule of
action which we follow in questions of right or wrong, or it is that
code of right and wrong which every man adopts for himself. To take
the first definition. Have we got the universal sense of humanity
upon any moral question of right or wrong? If the majority of
mankind agree with us, can we prove logically that they must always
be right and the minority wrong? Again, which morality will we
have—that of to-day or that of a past generation? If we cannot
settle the question by majority or minority, how are we to settle it?
By asking the opinion of the wise and good. Before we know the wise
and good we must know what wisdom and goodness are; and if we know
what they are, what need have we to look to the wise and good to tell
us? Who are the wise and good? Those who gave good opinions. Is
that logical? Will it stand sceptical inquiry? If it is not to be
settled by the appeal to the universal voice of humanity—which is
simply illogical and preposterous, for this reason, that we are part
of universal humanity, and if we differ from that verdict it is not
the verdict of universal humanity, and if we agree with it, we might
as well have taken our own in the first instance—then man must decide
for himself what is right and wrong. What is it decides in a man
what is right or wrong? Conscience. Why must a man submit to the
decision of his own conscience? We are told that it is part of our
moral nature. What demonstration is there that one part of our
nature is to yield to another? Have we any logical demonstration as
to what we are? I have a scientific demonstration that I am made of
carbon, lime, phosphate, and certain other chemicals, but no man of
science has ever demonstrated spirit or conscience. Why is it that a
man is to obey the bidding of one convolution of his brain more than
another? It cannot be made as clear as that two and two make four,
that a man is to do to another man as he would be done unto. Duty
and right are words of the spirit, of the soul, but science and logic
never yet revealed the soul.
Therefore the man who will believe nothing but what can be
demonstrated to him, will deny at last the obligation of duty in
obedience to his sceptical intellect, just as he began with denying
the existence of God. How does he get out of this great difficulty?
By calling up the instinct of faith. He wills to believe that he is
something more than a bundle of material elements, that the
conscience in his soul is something supreme and divine, that the man
in him is something above the animal; and by an exercise of faith in
his own higher and better self, he silences the eternal _why_ of the
sceptical intellect, the serpent more subtile than any other beast of
the field, which if it had its way would make man a beast.
There is only one more question to which I have to call your
attention. Having shown you that the sceptical intellect is not the
only judge, having shown you that there are domains of human
knowledge and human life into which, if it comes at all, it must come
as the servant and not as the master; having shown you that
scepticism is really nothing else than the intrusion of the mere
understanding into the province of the soul and the spirit, it
remains to ask, Is religion, is Christianity, one of those subjects
on which the understanding is not to be the only judge, but on which
the spirit and soul and heart of man have something to say about his
belief? Surely then if Christianity be what it professes to be, a
life, like all human and temporal life, it must be conducted upon a
principle of faith or trust. If we cannot live our ordinary human
life without trust, where we cannot have certainty, neither can we
live the spiritual life without trust, where we can neither prove nor
demonstrate; then if we think of this life in close relationship with
the divine and the infinite life, can it possibly be otherwise than
that out of the meeting place of those two mysteries there shall grow
mystery and difficulty? All that Christianity requires is, not that
man shall not ask for reasonable proof, but that we should not deal
with it in a different way from that in which we deal with human life
and morality. We don’t ask you in religion to believe without
evidence, but to require large evidence. Now my friends, still
remember when we ask you to believe before you see all, it is that
you may experience all. Christianity has a certainty, but it comes
not as the proof, but as the reward of faith. There is a
demonstration of the spirit, an evidence of divine life, in the soul
of the Christian, that he cannot demonstrate to others, because it is
as invisible as his own soul and spirit, and yet it fills the inner
core of the spirit—it is the strengthener of the spirit.
Christianity is a great experiment, a probable experiment, a
reasonable experiment, but still it is an experiment, and you may try
it. If you have a simple and earnest desire to ascertain its truth,
try it, casting aside the trivial interests that the profligate man
has in the disproof of it. Try it and see if there does not come
into your soul that conviction not created by science, but springing
from the inner life of the soul, that shall be like a well of water
springing up to everlasting life. As in life so in religion,
“blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”
SECOND REPLY
OF
MR. C. BRADLAUGH.
CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
ON Tuesday evening, April 4th, Mr. Bradlaugh delivered his second lecture
on “Christianity and Scepticism,” before a very crowded audience, in the
Free Library. He commenced by observing: