In the ordinary branches of human knowledge or inquiry,
the judicious questioning of received opinions has been
the sign of scientific vitality, the principle of scientific
advancement, the very source and root of healthy progress
and growth. If medicine had been regulated
three hundred years ago by Act of Parliament; if there
had been Thirty-nine Articles of Physic, and every
licensed practitioner had been compelled, under pains
and penalties, to compound his drugs by the prescriptions
of Henry the Eighth's physician, Doctor Butts, it
is easy to conjecture in what state of health the people
of this country would at present be found. Constitutions
have changed with habits of life, and the treatment of
disorders has changed to meet the new conditions.
New diseases have shown themselves of which Doctor
Butts had no cognizance; new continents have given
us plants with medicinal virtues previously unknown;
new sciences, and even the mere increase of recorded
experience, have added a thousand remedies to those
known to the age of the Tudors. If the College of
Physicians had been organized into a board of orthodoxy.
and every novelty of treatment had been regarded as a
crime against society, which a law had been established
to punish, the hundreds who die annually from preventible
causes would have been thousands and tens of thousands.
Astronomy is the most perfect of the sciences. The
accuracy of the present theory of the planetary move
merits is tested daily and hourly by the most delicate
experiments, and the legislature, if it so pleased, might
enact the first principles of these movements into a
statute, without danger of committing the law of
England to falsehood. Yet, if the legislature were to
venture on any such paternal procedure, in a few years
gravitation itself would be called in question, and the
whole science would wither under the fatal shadow.
There are many phenomena still unexplained to give
plausibility to scepticism; there are others more easily
formularized for working purposes in the language of
Ptolemy; and there would be reactionists who would
invite us to return to the safe convictions of our
forefathers. What the world has seen the world may
see again; and were it once granted that astronomy
were something to be ruled by authority, new Popes
would imprison new Galileos; the knowledge already
acquired would be strangled in the cords which were
intended to keep it safe from harm, and deprived of
the free air on which its life depends it would dwindle
and die.
A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr.
Jellinger Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time,
an elementary book on astronomy, came on something
which he conceived to be a difficulty in the theory of
lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are
universally the opposite of the apparent motions. Mr.
Symonds conceived that the moon could not revolve on
its axis, because the same side of it was continually
turned towards the earth; and if it were connected with
the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would
deprive it of power of rotation--the relative aspects of
the two bodies would remain unchanged. He sent
his views to the Times. He appealed to the common
sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be
on his side. The men of science were of course right;
but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious, had been
hitherto explained in language which the general reader
could not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation
cleared up the confusion: we do not recollect whether
Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not; but most of us who
had before received what the men of science told us
with an unintelligent and languid assent, were
set thinking for ourselves, and as a result of the
discussion, exchanged a confused idea for a clear one.
It was an excellent illustration of the true claims
of authority and of the value of open inquiry. The
ignorant man has not as good a right to his own opinion
as the instructed man. The instructed man, however
right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as
axioms, and merely insist that they are true. The one
asks a question, the other answers it, and all of us are
the better for the business.
Now let us suppose the same thing to have happened,
when the only reply to a difficulty was an appeal to the
Astronomer Royal, where the rotation of the moon was
an article of salvation decreed by the law of the land,
and where all persons admitted to hold office under the
State were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer
Royal--as it was, if we remember right, he was a little
cross about it--would have brought an action against
Mr. Symonds in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of
course, he would have been obstinate in his heresy;
the world outside would have had an antecedent presumption
that truth lay with the man who was making
sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in
the way of argument for what could not stand without
the help of the law. Everybody could understand the
difficulty; not everybody would have taken the trouble
to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have
been a Colenso, and a good many of us would have
been convinced in our secret hearts that the moon as
little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.
As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to
believe in its capacity for self-defence, so practically in
every subject except one, errors are allowed free room
to express themselves, and that liberty of opinion which
is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so
evident that to argue in favour of it is almost absurd--
might be expected to have been applied as a matter of
course to the one subject on which mistake is supposed
to be fatal, where to come to wrong conclusions is held
to be a crime for which the Maker of the universe has
neither pardon nor pity. Yet many reasons, not difficult
to understand, have long continued to exclude
theology from the region where free discussion is
supposed to be applicable. That so many persons have a
personal interest in the maintenance of particular views,
would of itself be fatal to fair argument. Though they
know themselves to be right, yet right is not enough for
them unless there is might to support it, and those who
talk most of faith show least that they possess it. But
there are deeper and more subtle objections. The
theologian requires absolute certainty, and there are no
absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of
science are never more than in a high degree probable;
they are no more than the best explanations of phenomena
which are attainable in the existing state of
knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws
only in courtesy. They are generalizations which are
not considered likely to require modification, but which
no one pretends to be in the nature of the cause
exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become
more complicated, and the data for the interpretation
of them more inadequate, the explanations offered are
put forward hypothetically, and are graduated by the
nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty
increases with the mystery and obscurity of his matter;
his convictions admit of no qualification; his truth is
sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows what he
believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he
inquire, it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious
doubt with him is sin. It is in vain to point out to him
the thousand forms of opinions for each of which the
same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant,
crawling with bare knees over the flint points on Croagh
Patrick, the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary,
the Methodist in the spasmodic extasy of a revival, alike
are conscious of emotions in themselves which correspond
to their creed: the more passionate--or, as some would
say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and
more clear is the voice within. But these varieties are
no embarrassment to the theologian. He finds no fault
with the method which is identical in them all. Whatever
the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under
illusions of Satan.
Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High
Church party were more formidable than they are at
present--much about "the right of private judgment."
Why, the eloquent Protestant would say, should I pin
my faith upon the Church? the Church is but a
congregation of fallible men, no better able to judge
than I am. I have a right to my own opinion. It
sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is
interfered with by a cause which, above all others,
would have been expected to further it; but this in
fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
grounds of theological belief beyond the province of
argument. No one talks of "a right of private judgment."
in anything but religion; no one but a fool
insists on his "right to his own opinion" with his
lawyer or his doctor. Able men who have given their
time to special subjects, are authorities upon it to be
listened to with deference, and the ultimate authority
at any given time is the collective general sense. Of the
wisest men living in the department to which they
belong. The utmost "right of private judgment" which
anybody claims in such cases, is the choice of the
physician to whom he will trust his body, or of
counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his
cause. The expression, as it is commonly used, implies
a belief that in matters of religion, the criteria of truth
are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere, and
the efforts which have been made to bring the notion
into harmony with common sense and common subjects,
have not been very successful. The High Church
party used to say, as a point against the Evangelicals,
that either "the right of private judgment" meant
nothing, or it meant that a man had a right to be in the
wrong. "No," said a writer in the Edinburgh Review
"it means only that if a man chooses to be in the wrong,
no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the
policeman may not force a way into his house and
prevent him." The illustration fails of its purpose. In
the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a
wrong use of the thing; they meant merely that they
had a right to their own opinions as against the Church.
They did not indeed put forward their claim quite so
nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious;
but nobody ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman
or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.
But, secondly, society has a most absolute right to
prevent all manner of evil--drunkenness, and the rest
of it, if it can--only in doing so, society must not use
means which would create a greater evil than it would
remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing
anything but most foul wrong to himself in getting
drunk, society does him no wrong, but rather does him
the greatest benefit if it can possibly keep him sober;
and in the same way, as a false belief in serious
matters is among the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive
it out of a man, by the whip, if it cannot be managed by
persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and affection,
provided the belief really and truly is false, and you
have a better to give him in the place of it. The
question is not what to do, but merely "how to do it;"
although Mr. Mill, in his love of "liberty," thinks
otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say
out his convictions in plain language, whatever they
may be; and so far as he means that there should be no
Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is perfectly just
in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
to public opinion, when he lays down as a general
principle that the free play of thought is unwholesomely
interfered with by society, he would take away the sole
protection which we possess from the inroads of any
kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that
he thinks a man better off with a false opinion of his
own than with a right opinion inflicted upon him from
without; while for our own part we should be grateful
for tyranny or for anything else which would perform
so useful an office for us.
Public opinion may be unjust at particular times
and on particular subjects; we believe it to be both
unjust and unwise on the matter of which we are at
present speaking: But on the whole, it is like the
ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure; much
in this world has to be taken for granted, and we cannot
be for ever arguing over our first principles. If a man
persists in talking of what he does not understand, he
is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy
of him, and he is not invited again; if he profess himself
a Buddhist, a Mahometan, it is assumed that he has not
adopted those beliefs on serious conviction but
rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make
themselves bores and nuisances; and the common sense
of mankind inflicts wholesome inconveniences on those
who carry their "right of private judgment" to any
such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as
that which operates so wholesomely in the Sciences.
Mere folly is extinguished in contempt; objections
reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are reasonably
met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition
to test their value, make their way into general reception.
A further cause which has operated to prevent theology
from obtaining the benefit of free discussion is the
interpretation popularly placed upon the constitution of
the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries of its
existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be
under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which
miraculously controlled its decisions, and precluded the
possibility of error. This theory broke down at the
Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
theological truth was in some way different from other
truth; and partly on grounds of public policy, partly
because it was supposed to have succeeded to the obligations
and the rights of the Papacy, the State took upon
itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
taught to the people. The distractions created by
divided opinions were then dangerous. Individuals did
not hesitate to ascribe to themselves the infallibility
which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat
of an opponent whom his arguments had failed to
convince. The State, while it made no pretensions
to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and
to prevent the nation from tearing itself in pieces, a
body of formulas was enacted, for the time broad and
comprehensive, within which opinion might be allowed
convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the
border.
It might have been thought that in abandoning for
itself, and formally denying to the Church its pretensions
to immunity from error, the State could not have
intended to bind the conscience. When this or that
law is passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he
is not required to approve of the law as just. The
Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine Articles, so far as
they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are as
much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to
conduct; it is not easy to see why they should be
more; it is not easy to see why they should have been
supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The
judge is not forbidden to ameliorate the law which he
administers. If in discharge of his duty he has to
pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same time
that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him
of dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The
soldier is asked no questions as to the legitimacy of the
war on which he is sent to fight; nor need he throw
up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad one.
Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war
was unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel
uncertain what to do, and would seek some other
profession rather than continue instruments of evil. But
within limits, and in questions of detail, where the
service is generally good and honourable, we leave
opinion its free play, and exaggerated scrupulousness
would be folly or something worse. Somehow or other,
however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the
clergyman. The idea of absolute inward belief has
been substituted for that of obedience; and the man
who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and accepts
the Prayer-Book, does not merely undertake to use the
services in the one, and abstain from contradicting to
his congregation the doctrines contained in the other;
but he is held to promise what no honest man, without
presumption, can undertake to promise, that he will
continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks
when he makes his engagement.
It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign,
and retire into lay communion. We are not prepared
to say that either the Convocation of 1562, or the
Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is
quite clear that they did not contemplate the alternative
of a clergyman's retirement. If they had, they would
have provided means by which he could have abandoned
his orders, and not have remained committed for life to
a profession from which he could not escape. If the
popular theory of subscription be true, and the Articles
are articles of belief, a reasonable human being, when
little more than a boy, pledges himself to a long series
of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt,
never to allow his mind to be shaken, whatever the
weight of argument or evidence brought to bear upon
him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man
living has a right to promise to do. He is doing, on
the authority of Parliament, precisely what the Church
of Rome required him to do on the authority of a
Council.
If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects
with which he has to deal, or unable to reconcile
some new-discovered truth of science with the established
formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen
and divines of the sixteenth century, which they themselves
disowned, there is an instant cry to have him
stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the
means on which life and limb can be supported, while
with ingenious tyranny he is forbidden to maintain
himself by any other occupation.
So far have we gone in this direction, that when
the Essays and Reviews appeared, it was gravely said
--and said by men who had no professional antipathy
to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such
subjects; clergymen were the hired exponents of the
established opinions, and were committed to them in
thought and word. It was one more anomaly where
there were enough already. To say that the clergy,
who are set apart to study a particular subject, are to
be the only persons unpermitted to have an independent
opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take
no part in the amendment of the statute-book, that
engineers must be silent upon mechanism, and if an
improvement is wanted in the art of medicine, physicians
may have nothing to say to it.
These causes would perhaps have been insufficient
to repress free inquiry, if there had been on the part
of the really able men among us a determination to
break the ice; in other words, if theology had preserved
the same commanding interest for the more powerful
minds with which it affected them three hundred years
ago. But on the one hand, a sense, half serious, haft
languid, of the hopelessness of the subject has produced
an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there
has been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion
the minds of the uneducated or half-educated, to whom
the established religion is simply an expression of the
obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
details of which they think little, and are therefore
unconscious of its difficulties, while in general it is the
source of all that is best and noblest in their lives and
actions.
This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the
force which it once possessed it possesses no longer.
The uncertainty which once affected only the more
instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by
day, is undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving;
and there is an unrest which will be satisfied only when
the sources of it are probed to the core. The Church
authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the
most serious grounds of perplexity as if they were
puerile and trifling; while it is notorious that for a
century past extremely able men have either not known
what to say about them, or have not said what they
thought. On the Continent the peculiar English view
has scarcely a single educated defender. Even in
England the laity keep their judgment in suspense,
or remain warily silent.
"What religion are you, Mr. Rogers?" said a lady once.
"What religion, madam? I am of the religion of
all sensible men."
"And what is that?" she asked.
"All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves."
If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he
would have said perhaps that when the opinions of
those best able to judge are divided, the questions at
issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are unable to
give them special attention withhold their judgment,
while those who are able, form their conclusions with
diffidence and modesty. But theologians will not
tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute assent, and will
take nothing short of it; and they affect therefore to
drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases
them. The Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of
punishment. The Archbishop of Canterbury refers us
to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
objections of the present generation of "infidels," he
says, are the same which have been refuted again and
again, and are such as a child might answer. The
young man just entering upon the possession of his
intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief,
and more anxious for truth than for success in life,
finds when he looks into the matter that the Archbishop
has altogether misrepresented it; that in fact,
like other official persons, he had been using merely a
stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no
definite meaning. The words are repeated year after
year, but the enemies refuse to be exorcised. They
come and come again from Spinoza and Lessing to
Strauss and Renan. The theologians have resolved no
single difficulty; they convince no one who is not
convinced already; and a Colenso coming fresh to the
subject, with no more than a year's study, throws the
Church of England into convulsions.
If there were any real danger that Christianity would
cease to be believed, it would be no more than a
fulfilment of prophecy. The state in which the Son of
Man would find the world at his coming he did not say
would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever
literally to come upon the earth, there are no present
signs of it. The creed of eighteen centuries is not
about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are the new
lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons
can look with comfort to exchanging one for the other.
Christianity has abler advocates than its professed
defenders, in those many quiet and humble men and
women who in the light of it and the strength of it
live holy, beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God
that answer by fire is the God whom mankind will
acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the Spirit
continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in
those graces which raise human creatures above
themselves, and invest them with that beauty of holiness
which only religion confers, thoughtful persons will
remain convinced that with them in some form or other
is the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on
poison, or the soul on falsehood; and as the vital
processes of health are too subtle for science to follow;
as we choose our food, not by the most careful chemical
analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the
system; so when a particular belief is fruitful in
nobleness of character, we need trouble ourselves very little
with scientific demonstrations that it is false. The
most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic
acid, we are told, is formed of the same elements,
combined in the same proportions, as gum-arabic.
What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus
so positively, it is less easy to divine. Religion from
the beginning of time has expanded and changed with
the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness
of heart of the Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel
set aside the Law; the creed of the early Church was
not the creed of the middle ages, any more than the
creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St.
Bernard and Aquinas. Old things pass away, new
things come in their place; and they in their turn grow
old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many
forms which Christianity has assumed in the world,
holy men have lived and died, and have had the witness
of the Spirit that they were not far from the truth. It
may be that the faith which saves is the something held
in common by all sincere Christians, and by those
as well who should come from the east and the west,
and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the children
of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the
true teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines;
and theology, when insisting on the reception of its
huge catena of formulas, may be binding a yoke upon
our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
to bear.
But it is not the object of this article to put forward
either this or any other particular opinion. The writer
is conscious only that he is passing fast towards the dark
gate which soon will close behind him. He believes
that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these
things is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely
diffident of his own power to find his way towards such
a conviction, he is both ready and anxious to disclaim
"all right of private judgment" in the matter. He wishes
only to learn from those who are able to teach him.
The learned prelates talk of the presumptuousness of
human reason; they tell us that doubts arise from the
consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
heart. The present writer, while he believes generally
that reason, however inadequate, is the best faculty to
which we have to trust, yet is most painfully conscious
of the weakness of his own reason; and once let the
real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared;
let those who are most capable of forming a sound
opinion, after reviewing the whole relations of science,
history, and what is now received as revelation, tell us
fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught they
conceive to be adequately established, how much to be
uncertain, and how much, if anything, to be mistaken;
there is scarcely perhaps a single serious inquirer who
would not submit with delight to a court which is the
highest on earth.
Mr. Mansell tells us that in the things of God reason
is beyond its depth, that the wise and the unwise are on
the same level of incapacity, and that we must accept
what we find established, or we must believe nothing.
We presume that this dilemma itself is a conclusion of
reason. Do what we will, reason is and must be our
ultimate authority; and were the collective sense of
mankind to declare Mr. Mansell right, we should submit
to that opinion as readily as to another. But the
collective sense of mankind is less acquiescent. He
has been compared to a man sitting on the end of a
plank and deliberately sawing off his seat. It seems
never to have occurred to him that, if he is right, he has
no business to be a Protestant. What Mr. Mansell says
to Professor Jowett, Bishop Gardiner in effect replied
to Frith and Ridley. Frith and Ridley said that
transubstantiation was unreasonable; Gardiner answered
that there was the letter of Scripture of it, and that the
human intellect was no measure of the power of God.
Yet the Reformers somehow believed, and Mr. Mansell
by his place in the Church of England seems to agree
with them, that the human intellect was not so wholly
incompetent. It might be a weak guide, but it was
better than none; and they declared on grounds of mere
reason, that Christ being in heaven and not on earth,
'it was contrary to the truth for a natural body to be in
two places at once.' The common sense of the country
was of the same opinion, and the illusion was at an
end.
There have been "Aids to Faitti" produced lately, and
"Replies to the Seven Essayists," "Answers to Colenso,"
and much else of the kind. We regret to say that they
have done little for us. The very life of our souls is at
issue in the questions which have been raised, and we
are fed with the professional commonplaces of the
members of a close guild, men holding high office in
the Church, or expecting to hold high office there; in
either case with a strong temporal interest in the defence
of the institution which they represent. We desire to
know what those of the clergy think whose love of truth
is unconnected with their prospects in life; we desire
to know what the educated laymen, the lawyers, the
historians, the men of science, the statesmen think; and
these are for the most part silent, or confess themselves
modestly uncertain. The professional theologians alone
are loud and confident; but they speak in the old angry
tone which rarely accompanies deep and wise convictions.
They do not meet the real difficulties; they
mistake them, misrepresent them, claim victories over
adversaries with whom they have never even crossed
swords, and leap to conclusions with a precipitancy at
which we can only smile. It has been the unhappy
manner of their class from immemorial time; they call
it zeal for the Lord, as if it were beyond all doubt that
they were on God's side, as if serious inquiry after truth
was something which they were entitled to resent. They
treat intellectual difficulties as if they deserved rather
to be condemned and punished than considered and
weighed, and rather stop their ears and run with one
accord upon any one who disagrees with them than
listen patiently to what he has to say.
We do not propose to enter in detail upon the
particular points which demand re-discussion. It is
enough that the more exact habit of thought which
science has engendered, and the closer knowledge of
the value and nature of evidence, has notoriously made
it necessary that the grounds should be reconsidered
on which we are to believe that one country and one
people was governed for sixteen centuries on principles
different from those which we now find to prevail
universally. One of many questions, however, shall
be briefly glanced at, on which the real issue seems
habitually to be evaded.
Much has been lately said and written on the authenticity
of the Pentateuch and the other historical books
of the Old Testament. The Bishop of Natal has thrown
out in a crude form the critical results of the inquiries
of the Germans, coupled with certain arithmetical
calculations, for which he has a special aptitude. He
supposes himself to have proved that the first five books
of the Bible are a compilation of uncertain date, full of
inconsistencies and impossibilities. The apologists have
replied that the objections are not absolutely conclusive,
that the events described in the book of Exodus might
possibly, under certain combinations of circumstances,
have actually taken place; and they then pass to the
assumption that because a story is not necessarily false,
therefore it is necessarily true. We have no intention of
vindicating Dr. Colenso. His theological training makes
his arguments very like those of his opponents, and he and
Dr. M'Call may settle their differences between themselves.
The question is at once wider and simpler than
any which has been raised in that controversy. Were it
proved beyond possibility of error that the Pentateuch was
written by Moses, that those and all the books of the 01d
and New Testaments were really the work of the writers
whose names they bear; were the Mosaic cosmogony in
harmony with physical discoveries; and were the supposed
inconsistencies and contradictions shown to have no
existence except in Dr. Colenso's imagination--we should
not have advanced a single step towards making good the
claim put forward for the Bible, that it is absolutely and
unexceptionably true in all its parts. The "genuineness
and authenticity" argument is irrelevant and needless.
The clearest demonstration of the human authorship of
the Pentateuch proves nothing about its immunity from
errors. If there are no mistakes in it, it was not the
workmanship of man; and if it was inspired by the
Holy Spirit, there is no occasion to show that the hand
of Moses was the instrument made use of. To the
most excellent of contemporary histories, to histories
written by eye-witnesses of the facts which they describe,
we accord but a limited confidence. The highest
intellectual competence, the most admitted truthfulness,
immunity from prejudice, and the absence of temptation
to mis-state the truth; these things may secure general
credibility, but they are no guarantee for minute and
circumstantial exactness. Two historians, though with
equal gifts and equal opportunities, never describe events
in exactly the same way. Two witnesses in a court of
law, while they agree in the main, invariably differ in
some particulars. It appears as if men could not relate
facts precisely as they saw or as they heard them. The
different parts of a story strike different imaginations
unequally; and the mind, as the circumstances pass
through it, alters their proportions unconsciously, or
shifts the perspective. The credit which we give to
the most authentic work of a man has no resemblance
to that universal acceptance which is demanded for
the Bible. It is not a difference of degree: it is a
difference in kind; and we desire to know on what
ground this infallibility, which we do not question, but
which is not proved, demands our belief. Very likely
the Bible is thus infallible. Unless it is, there can be
no moral obligation to accept the facts which it records:
and though there may be intellectual error in denying
them, there can be no moral sin. Facts may be better
or worse authenticated; but all the proofs in the world
of the genuineness and authenticity of the human handiwork
cannot establish a claim upon the conscience. It
might be foolish to question Thucydides' account of
Pericles, but no one would call it sinful. Men part with
all sobriety of judgment when they come on ground of
this kind. When Sir Henry Rawlinson read the name
of Sennacherib on the Assyrian marbles, and found
allusions there to the Israelites in Palestine, we were told
that a triumphant answer had been found to the cavils
of sceptics, and a convincing proof of the inspired truth
of the Divine Oracles. Bad arguments in a good cause
are a sure way to bring distrust upon it. The Divine
Oracles may be true, and may be inspired; but the
discoveries at Nineveh certainly do not prove them so.
No one supposes that the Books of Kings or the
prophesies of Isaiah and Ezekiel were the work of men
who had no knowledge of Assyria or the Assyrian
Princes. It is possible that in the excavations at
Carthage some Punic inscription may be found
confirming Livy's account of the battle of Cannae; but
we shall not be obliged to believe therefore in the
inspiration of Livy, or rather (for the argument
comes to that) in the inspiration of the whole Latin
literature.
We are not questioning the fact that the Bible is
infallible; we desire only to be told on what evidence
that great and awful fact concerning it properly rests.
It would seem, indeed, as if instinct had been wiser
than argument--as if it had been felt that nothing
short of this literal and close inspiration could preserve
the facts on which Christianity depends. The history
of the early world is a history everywhere of marvels.
The legendary literature of every nation upon earth
tells the same stories of prodigies and wonders, of the
appearances of the gods upon earth, and of their intercourse
with men. The lives of the saints of the
Catholic Church, from the time of the Apostles till the
present day, are a complete tissue of miracles
resembling and rivalling those of the Gospels. Some of
these stories are romantic and imaginative; some clear,
literal, and prosaic: some rest on mere tradition; some
on the sworn testimony of eye-witnesses; some are
obvious fables; some are as well authenticated as facts
of such a kind can be authenticated at all. The
Protestant Christian rejects every one of them--rejects
them without inquiry--involves those for which there
is good authority and those for which there is none
or little in one absolute, contemptuous, and sweeping
denial. The Protestant Christian feels it more likely,
in the words of Hume, that men should deceive or
be deceived, than that the laws of nature should be
violated. At this moment we are beset with reports of
conversations with spirits, of tables miraculously lifted,
of hands projected out of the world of shadows into
this mortal life. An unusually able, accomplished
person, accustomed to deal with common-sense facts, a
celebrated political economist, and notorious for
business-like habits, assured this writer that a certain
mesmerist, who was my informant's intimate friend,
had raised a dead girl to life. We should believe the
people who tell us these things in any ordinary matter:
they would be admitted in a court of justice as good
witnesses in a criminal case, and a jury would hang a
man on their word. The person just now alluded to is
incapable of telling a wilful lie; yet our experience of
the regularity of nature on one side is so uniform, and
our experience of the capacities of human folly on the
other is so large, that when they tell us these wonderful
stories, most of us are contented to smile; we
do not care so much as to turn out of our way to
examine them.
The Bible is equally a record of miracles; but as
from other histories we reject miracles without hesitation,
so of those in the Bible we insist on the universal
acceptance: the former are all false, the latter are all
true. It is evident that, in forming conclusions so
sweeping as these, we cannot even suppose that we are
being guided by what is called historical evidence.
Were it admitted that as a whole the miracles of the
Bible are better authenticated than the miracles of the
saints, we should be far removed still from any large
inference, that in the one set there is no room for
falsehood, in the other no room for truth. The writer or
writers of the Books of Kings are not known. The
books themselves are in fact confessedly taken from older
writings which are lost; and the accounts of the great
prophets of Israel are a counterpart, curiously like, of
those of the mediaeval saints. In many instances the
authors of the lives of these saints were their
companions and friends. Why do we feel so sure that what
we are told of Elijah or Elisha took place exactly as we
read it? Why do we reject the account of St. Columba
or St. Martin as a tissue of idle fable? Why should
not God give a power to the saint which he had given
to the prophet? We can produce no reason from the
nature of things, for we know not what the nature of
things is; and if down to the death of the Apostles the
ministers of religion were allowed to prove their
commission by working miracles, what right have we, on
grounds either of history or philosophy, to draw a clear
line at the death of St. John, to say that before that
time all such stories were true, and after it all were
false?
There is no point on which Protestant controversialists
evade the real question more habitually than on
that of miracles. They accuse those who withhold that
unreserved and absolute belief which they require for
all which they accept themselves, of denying that
miracles are possible. That they assume to be the
position taken up by the objector, and proceed easily to
argue that man is no judge of the power of God. Of
course he is not. No sane man ever raised his narrow
understanding into a measure of the possibilities of the
universe; nor does any person with any pretensions to
religion disbelieve in miracles of some kind. To pray
is to expect a miracle. When we pray for the recovery
of a sick friend, for the gift of any blessing, or the
removal of any calamity, we expect that God will do
something by an act of his personal will which otherwise
would not have been done--that he will suspend
the ordinary relations of natural cause and effect; and
this is the very idea of a miracle. The thing we pray
for may be given us, and no miracle may have taken
place. It may be given to us by natural causes, and
would have occurred whether we had prayed or not.
But prayer itself in its very essence implies a belief in
the possible intervention of a power which is above
nature. The question about miracles is simply one of
evidence--whether in any given case the proof is so
strong that no room is left for mistake, exaggeration,
or illusion, while more evidence is required to establish
a fact antecedently improbable than is sufficient for a
common occurrence.
It has been said recently by "A Layman," in a letter
to Mr. Maurice, that the resurrection of our Lord is as
well authenticated as the death of Julius Caesar. It is
far better authenticated, unless we are mistaken in
supposing the Bible inspired; or if we admit as evidence
that inward assurance of the Christian, which would
make him rather die than disbelieve a truth so dear to
him. But if the layman meant that there was as much
proof of it, in the sense in which proof is understood in
a court of justice, he could scarcely have considered
what he was saying. Julius Caesar was killed in a
public place, in the presence of friend and foe, in a
remarkable but still perfectly natural manner. The
circumstances were minutely known to all the world, and
were never denied or doubted by any one. Our Lord,
however, seems purposely to have withheld such public
proof of his resurrection as would have left no room for
unbelief. He showed himself, "not to all the people"
--not to his enemies, whom his appearance would have
overwhelmed--but "to witnesses chosen before;" to
the circle of his own friends. There is no evidence
which a jury could admit that he was ever actually dead.
So unusual was it for persons crucified to die so soon,
that Pilate, we are told, "marvelled." The subsequent
appearances were strange, and scarcely intelligible.
Those who saw him did not recognize him till he was
made known to them in the breaking of bread. He
was visible and invisible. He was mistaken by those
who were most intimate with him for another person;
nor do the accounts agree which are given by the
different Evangelists. Of investigation in the modern
sense (except in the one instance of St. Thomas, and
St. Thomas was rather rebuked than praised,) there
was none, and could be none. The evidence offered
was different in kind, and the blessing was not to those
who satisfied themselves of the truth of the fact by a
searching inquiry, but who gave their assent with the
unhesitating confidence of love.
St. Paul's account of his own conversion is an
instance of the kind of testimony which then worked
the strongest conviction. St. Paul, a fiery fanatic on a
mission of persecution, with the midday Syrian sun
streaming down upon his head, was struck to the
ground, and saw in a vision our Lord in the air. If
such a thing were to occur at the present day, and if a
modern physician were consulted about it, he would
say without hesitation, that it was an effect of an
over-heated brain, and that there was nothing in it
extraordinary or unusual. If the impression left by the
appearance had been too strong for such an explanation
to be satisfactory, the person to whom it occurred,
especially if he was a man of St. Paul's intellectual
stature, would have at once examined into the facts
otherwise known, connected with the subject of what
he had seen. St. Paul had evidently before disbelieved
our Lord's resurrection, had disbelieved it fiercely and
passionately; we should have expected that he would at
once have sought for those who could best have told
him the details of the truth. St. Paul, however, did
nothing of the kind. He went for a year into Arabia,
and when at last he returned to Jerusalem, he rather
held aloof from those who had been our Lord's
companions, and who had witnessed his ascension.
He saw Peter, he saw James; "of the rest of the
apostles saw he none." To him evidently the proof of
the resurrection was the vision which he had himself
seen. It was to that which he always referred when
called on for a defence of his faith.
Of evidence for the resurrection in the common
sense of the word there may be enough to show that
something extraordinary occurred; but not enough,
unless we assume the fact to be true on far other
grounds, to produce any absolute and unhesitating
conviction; and inasmuch as the resurrection is the
keystone of Christianity, the belief in it must be something
far different from that suspended judgment in which
history alone would leave us.
Human testimony, we repeat, under the most
favourable circumstances imaginable, knows nothing of
"absolute certainty;" and if historical facts are bound
up with the creed, and if they are to be received with
the same completeness as the laws of conscience, they
rest, and must rest, either on the divine truth of
Scripture, or on the divine witness in ourselves. On human
evidence, the miracles of St. Teresa and St. Francis of
Assisi are as well established as those of the New
Testament.
M. Ernest Renan has recently produced an account
of the Gospel story which, written as it is by a man of
piety, intellect, and imagination, is spreading rapidly
through the educated world. Carrying out the principles
with which Protestants have swept modern
history clear of miracles to their natural conclusions,
he dismisses all that is miraculous from the life of our
Lord, and endeavours to reproduce the original Galilean
youth who lived, and taught, and died in Palestine
eighteen hundred years ago. We have no intention of
reviewing M. Renan. He will be read soon enough by
many who would better consider their peace of mind
by leaving him alone. For ourselves we are unable
to see by what right, if he rejects the miraculous part
of the narrative, he retains the rest; the imagination
and the credulity which invent extraordinary incidents
invent ordinary incidents also; and if the divine
element in the life is legendary, the human may be
legendary also. But there is one lucid passage in the
introduction which we commend to the perusal of
controversial theologians:--
No miracle such as those of which early histories are full
has taken place under conditions which science can accept.
Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur
only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed
in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to
believe them. No miracle has ever been performed before
an assemblage of spectators capable of testing its reality.
Neither uneducated people, nor even men of the world,
have the requisite capacity; great precautions are needed,
and a long habit of scientific research. Have we not seen
men of the world in our own time become the dupes of the
most childish and absurd illusions? And if it be certain
that no contemporary miracles will bear investigation, is it
not possible that the miracles of the past, were we able to
examine into them in detail, would be found equally to
contain an element of error? It is not in the name of this
or that philosophy, it is in the name of an experience which
never varies that we banish miracles from history. We do
not say a miracle is impossible, we say only that no miracle
has ever yet been proved. Let a worker of miracles come
forward to-morrow with pretensions serious enough to
deserve examination. Let us suppose him to announce
that he is able to raise a dead man to life. What would be
done? A committee would be appointed, composed of
physiologists, physicians, chemists, and persons accustomed
to exact investigation; a body would then be selected which
the committee would assure itself was really dead; and a
place would be chosen where the experiment was to take
place. Every precaution would be taken to leave no
opening for uncertainty; and if, under those conditions, the
restoration to life was effected, a probability would be
arrived at which would be almost equal to certainty. An
experiment, however, should always admit of being repeated.
What a man has done once he should be able to do again,
and in miracles there can be no question of ease or difficulty.
The performer would be requested to repeat the operation
under other circumstances upon other bodies; and if he
succeeded on every occasion, two points would be established:
first, that there may be in this world such things as
supernatural operations; and, secondly, that the power to
perform them is delegated to, or belongs to, particular
persons.
But who does not perceive that no miracle was ever
performed under such conditions as these?
We have quoted this passage because it expresses
with extreme precision and clearness the common-sense
principle which we apply to all supernatural stories of
our own time, which Protestant theologians employ
against the whole cycle of Catholic miracles, and which
M. Renan is only carrying to its logical conclusions in
applying to the history of our Lord, if the Gospels are
tried by the mere tests of historical criticism. The
Gospels themselves tell us why M. Renan's conditions
were never satisfied. Miracles were not displayed in
the presence of sceptics to establish scientific truths,
When the adulterous generation sought after a sign,
the sign was not given; nay, it is even said that in the
presence of unbelief our Lord was not able to work
miracles. But science has less respect for that
undoubting and submissive willingness to believe; and it
is quite certain that if we attempt to establish the truth
of the New Testament on the principles of Paley, if
with Professor Jowett "we interpret the Bible as any
other book," the element of miracle which has
evaporated from the entire surface of human history will
not maintain itself in the sacred ground of the Gospels,
and the facts of Christianity will melt in our hands like
a snow-ball.
Nothing less than a miraculous history can sustain
the credibility of miracles, and nothing could be more
likely if revelation be a reality and not a dream than
that the history containing it should be saved in its
composition from the intermixture of human infirmity.
This is the position in which instinct long ago taught
Protestants to entrench themselves, and where alone
they can hope to hold their ground: once established
in these lines, they were safe and unassailable, unless it
could be demonstrated that any fact or facts related in
the Bible were certainly untrue.
Nor would it be necessary to say any more upon the
subject. Those who believed Christianity would admit
the assumption; those who disbelieved Christianity
would repudiate it. The argument would be narrowed
to that plain and single issue, and the elaborate
treatises upon external evidence would cease to bring
discredit upon the cause by their feebleness. Unfortunately--
and this is the true secret of our present distractions--it
seems certain that in some way or other
this belief in inspiration itself requires to be revised.
We are compelled to examine more precisely what we
mean by the word. The account of the creation of
man and the world which is given in Genesis, and
which is made by St. Paul the basis of his theology,
has not yet been reconciled with facts which science
knows to be true. Death was in the world before
Adam's sin, and unless Adam's age be thrust back to a
distance which no ingenuity can torture the letter of
Scripture into recognizing, men and women lived and
died upon the earth whole millenniums before the Eve
of Sacred History listened to the temptation of the
snake. Neither has any such deluge as that from which,
according to the received interpretation, the ark saved
Noah, swept over the globe within the human period.
We are told that it was not God's purpose to anticipate
the natural course of discovery: as the story of the
creation was written in human language, so the details
of it may have been adapted to the existing state of
human knowledge. The Bible it is said was not intended
to teach men science, but to teach them what
was necessary for the moral training of their souls. It
may be that this is true. Spiritual grace affects the
moral character of men, but leaves their intellect
unimproved. The most religious men are as liable as atheists
to ignorance of ordinary facts, and inspiration may be
only infallible when it touches on truths necessary to
salvation. But if it be so, there are many things in
the Bible which must become as uncertain as its geology
or its astronomy. There is the long secular history of
the Jewish people. Let it be once established that there
is room for error anywhere, and we have no security for
secular history. The inspiration of the Bible is the
foundation of our whole belief; and it is a grave matter
if we are uncertain to what extent it reaches, or how
much and what it guarantees to us as true. We cannot
live on probabilities. The faith in which we can live
bravely and die in peace must be a certainty, so far as
it professes to be a faith at all, or it is nothing. It may
be that all intellectual efforts to arrive at it are in vain;
that it is given to those to whom it is given, and withheld
from those from whom it is withheld. It may be that
the existing belief is undergoing a silent modification,
like those to which the dispensations of religion have
been successively subjected; or, again, it may be that to
the creed as it is already established there is nothing to
be added, and nothing any more to be taken from it.
At this moment, however, the most vigorous minds
appear least to see their way to a conclusion; and
notwithstanding all the school and church building, the
extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a
general doubt is coming up like a thunderstorm against
the wind, and blackening the sky. Those who cling
most tenaciously to the faith in which they were
educated yet confess themselves perplexed. They know
what they believe; but why they believe it, or why they
should require others to believe, they cannot tell or
cannot agree. Between the authority of the Church
and the authority of the Bible, the testimony of history
and the testimony of the Spirit, the ascertained facts
of science and the contradictory facts which seem to
be revealed, the minds of men are tossed to and fro,
harassed by the changed attitude in which scientific
investigation has placed us all towards accounts of
supernatural occurrences. We thrust the subject aside;
we take refuge in practical work; we believe perhaps
that the situation is desperate and hopeless of
improvement; we refuse to let the question be disturbed. But
we cannot escape from our shadow, and the spirit of
uncertainty will haunt the world like an uneasy ghost,
till we take it by the throat like men.
We return then to the point from which we set out.
The time is past for repression. Despotism has done
its work; but the day of despotism is gone, and the
only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things
will never right themselves if they are let alone. It
is idle to say peace when there is no peace; and the
concealed imposthume is more dangerous than an open
wound. The law in this country has postponed our
trial, but cannot save us from it; and the questions
which have agitated the Continent are agitating us at
last. The student who twenty years ago was contented
with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican
divines, now reads Ewald and Renan. The Church
authorities still refuse to look their difficulties in the
face: they prescribe for mental troubles the established
doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous
questions as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace
in placid comfort. But it will not avail. Their
pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by
them in their trial, and could not or would not; and
the bitterness of those conflicts and the end of most of
them in heart-broken uncertainty or careless indifference,
is too notorious to all who care to know about
such things.
We cannot afford year after year to be distracted
with the tentative scepticism of essayists and reviewers.
In a healthy condition of public opinion such a book as
Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or rather
would never have been written, for the difficulties with
which it deals would have been long ago met and disposed
of. When questions rose in the early and middle
ages of the Church, they were decided by councils of
the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived
at which individuals could accept and act upon. At
the beginning of the English Reformation, when
Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and the
old belief was merging in the new, the country was
deliberately held in formal suspense. Protestants and
Catholics were set to preach on alternate Sundays in
the same pulpit; the subject was discussed freely in the
ears of the people, and at last, when all had been said
on both sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied
the result in formulas. Councils will no longer answer
the purpose; the clergy have no longer a superiority of
intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments
of the English Church, would not present an
edifying spectacle. Parliament may no longer meddle
with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
forged three centuries ago. But better than Councils,
better than sermons, better than Parliament, is that
free discussion through a free press which is the best
instrument for the discovery of truth, and the most
effectual means for preserving it.
We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the
air, that the press is free, and that all men may and
do write what they please. It is not so. Discussion
is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their
means of living; it is not free so long as the expression
of doubt is considered as a sin by public opinion and as
a crime by the law. So far are we from free discussion
that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion
is desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial
intellect of the country will not throw itself into the
question. The battle will continue to be fought by
outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose which they
cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful
and assured conviction, will not be heard.
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