(1876.)
In reviewing Mr. R. H. Hutton’s Essay on “Christian Evidences, Popular
and Critical,” I was obliged to follow his lead, joining issue on such
pleas as he put forward. Thus with regard to the resurrection of Jesus,
as Mr. Hutton adduced what he thought confirmatory evidence only from
the New Testament itself, I confined myself to showing or attempting to
show that such evidence is unsubstantial. But I could not consider this
argument adequate or conclusive, for there are large general
considerations of incomparably greater importance which it leaves out
altogether. It is as if a case ruled by broad principles of equity were
to be decided on the narrowest technical grounds. Therefore, while
confident that even on these grounds the case must go against the
Christian believer, I wish to add a few words on its wider relations, in
order that the decision may be established, not merely by the letter of
the law, but also by the spirit of justice.
We leave thus the torturing of texts in the dim cells of the theological
Inquisition, a process by which almost any confession required can be
and has been wrung from the unfortunate victims, and emerge into the
open daylight of common-sense and reason. And here I venture to assert
that if the story of the resurrection and ascension were recorded of any
other than Jesus in any other sacred book than the Bible, Mr. Hutton and
all other intelligent Christians would not only disbelieve it, but would
not even condescend to investigate it, condemning it offhand as too
preposterous to be worthy of serious attention. Thus, what Christian has
ever deigned to examine critically the marvels affirmed in the Koran,
such as Mohammed’s visit to heaven; although the Koran can be traced far
more surely to the Prophet of Islam than can the Gospels to their
reputed authors, and this Prophet bears a far higher character for
truthfulness than do the early Christians? Nay, what Bibliolater has
ever seriously weighed the evidence for the miracles of his fellow
Christian the great St. Bernard; such as those which are minutely
related and solemnly attested by ten eye-witnesses, men well known and
of unimpeached veracity, and which are thus infinitely better attested
than any miracle in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation?
Your enlightened Protestant simply shrugs his shoulders at all such
stories, and says with a superior smile: “Of course, mere imposture and
collusion, or superstition and delusion; no sensible man can afford to
waste his time in weighing that sort of stuff; we don’t think twice
before determining whether the impossible ever really occurred.” How,
then, can this enlightened Protestant receive without question the
miracles of the Jewish books while rejecting without question all
others? We have seen that it cannot be because of any superiority of
evidence for the former, since the evidence for the latter is in many
cases infinitely greater and better authenticated, and since he does not
attempt to weigh evidence before either accepting or rejecting, though
he may seek evidence and argument to confirm what he has already given
himself to believe. He accepts the Jewish miracles simply because they
have come down to him, through many generations of his forefathers,
invested with a glamor of sanctity, and he regards them with the eye of
faith which sees, and sees not, just what it wishes; he rejects miracles
not in the Bible because they come to him without any hallowed
associations, and he regards them with the eye of reason which beholds
the plain facts before it, and neither wishes nor is able to avoid
beholding them.
It is worth noting that while our Christian advocates insist with all
their might, such as it is, upon the resurrection of Jesus, they
willingly pass over as lightly as possible, if they do not altogether
ignore, a similar miracle guaranteed by the very same authority. In
Matt, xxvii., 52, 53, it stands recorded among the marvels following the
death of Jesus: “And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the
saints which slept arose, and came out of their graves after his
resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.” The
reader of Shakespeare will remember the prodigies anterior to the death
of Julius Cæsar when—
“The sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets.”
This prodigal multiplicity and superfluity of resurrections seems to
have been not a little embarrassing to modern Christian champions,
though doubtless it did not in the least trouble the primitive
non-scientific believers, to whom nothing was more natural than the
unnatural, including the supernatural and the infranatural. An apologist
of our days who _must_ affirm the one resurrection, seeing that his
whole religion is based upon it, and who, though valiantly defying
science, seeks to conciliate historical possibility, finds his task
quite heavy enough in accounting for the facts that the risen Jesus “was
seen of above five hundred brethren at once,” and yet that no record of
his rising can be found beyond the limits of the New Testament. But the
difficulties of the poor apologist are enormously increased if he must
further contend that many bodies of the saints came out of their graves,
and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many, and still there is
no external evidence. We are surely at the utmost limits of the possible
in conceiving that Jesus could appear unto five hundred of the brethren
at once (there is no hint elsewhere that he had so many permanent
followers in his lifetime; in Acts i., 15, we find that there were about
one hundred and twenty gathered after the ascension), without the
priests and the Roman officials hearing of the apparition and
investigating it. But if many others rose from their graves and appeared
to many, it is absolutely impossible that anyone in Jerusalem could be
ignorant of the miracle; equally impossible that Pilate and his officers
did not investigate it, and equally impossible that finding it real he
did not report it with the evidence to Rome, for the Empire was a
thoroughly organised State, and the Romans were a thoroughly practical
and business-like people. Once in the imperial archives, the record of
the miracle would have spread everywhere; all subsequent historians
would have related it, all subsequent writers referred to it. So it is
no wonder that, recoiling from these manifold impossibilities, the
Christian advocates prefer to dwell on the one resurrection as if it
were unique, and avoid dwelling on the others that by the very same
testimony immediately followed it. It is very significant that neither
in the Acts nor in the Epistles is there any allusion to these
resurrections. When Peter and the others were preaching the resurrection
of Christ, why did they not adduce and produce some of these many, risen
saints, whose visible, tangible, living and speaking evidence would have
been irresistible?
Just as the resurrection of Jesus could be accepted without misgiving by
the non-scientific early Christians, to whom miracles appeared among the
most frequent occurrences of life, so could the ascension. Their earth
was a plane, vaulted by the sky, lamped by the little sun and moon and
stars; above this vault was Heaven, where their God dwelt enthroned;
they knew nothing of the law of gravitation; their Christ, standing in
the flesh on the Mount of Olives, floated up through this vault to sit
enthroned beside his Father in the most natural supernatural manner. We
can conceive and sympathise with this simple faith; but it is hard to
conceive and sympathise with the blind faith, which seems wilfully
blind, of the modem educated Christians. It has been often remarked that
Copernicus and Kepler and Newton have destroyed all the old mythologies,
including of course the mythology of both the Old and New Testaments.
With the earth no longer the universe of mortal life, between a Heaven
above its domed firmament and a Hades like a vast dungeon beneath, but a
quite infinitesimal grain of sand involved by an infinitesimal drop of
dew, floating and revolving in an ocean of space boundless in heighth
and depth and breadth, amidst innumerable other spherules, most of which
visible are very much greater than itself, and at inconceivable
distances from it; with man no longer the lord of the creation, for
whose service all things were made, but an animalcule inexpressibly
small, living for a moment inexpressibly brief, with limitless time
before his beginning and limitless time beyond his end; the Christian
mythology and system, among others, because ineffably absurd. Where is
the Heaven for its God? where the Hell for its Devil? Where is above?
Where beneath? Whence came the winged angels, with their wrings which
would not enable them to fly?
If Jesus had ascended and continued to ascend with the speed of light,
he might be ascending now and go 011 ascending for millions and millions
of years, and still not reach a heavenly region beyond the range of our
telescopes I And think of the scheme of the Atonement in the system of
the universe, as we are learning to know it now—try to conceive an
infinite and eternal God of this infinite and eternal Whole sacrificing
his only son for the salvation of us most insignificant insects on our
most insignificant earth! The immense conceptions of science dwarf these
petty conceptions of mythology to a littleness which reduces them
beneath consideration, which in our days reduces them even beneath
contempt.
Naturally the churches have always hated and resisted science, and the
theologians have seldom dared to face its conclusions. They ignore the
immensities, and confine their vision to the pages of a single book, to
a history whose chronology counts not six thousand years. But, as I have
remarked, even this minute field they cannot hold against the sceptic,
who has made them abandon all the rest of the universe. Why did their
risen Lord only slink about among his own disciples, appearing to these
but at flying instants: why did he not, with his well-known features and
with the wounds of the nails and the spear in his body, confront the
chief priests and Pilate and the whole of Jerusalem, and compel them to
acknowledge and bear enduring witness to his resurrection? Why did he
not summon all the people from the highest to the lowest to the solemn
spectacle of his ascension, securing multitudinous and permanently
recorded evidence such as none of us could doubt? We might go on asking
Why? and Why? and Why? in this fashion on a hundred points, confident
that to not one of our questions could the Christian apologist give a
straightforward and satisfactory answer. As the scheme of the Atonement
is presented to us, God sacrificed his only son that all mankind might
be saved through belief in him; yet not merely neglected to secure
trustworthy evidence and certain record of this supreme fact and the
miracles attesting it, but adopted every means possible to make the
evidence untrustworthy, the record uncertain, the miracles and the
sacrifice incredible.