Chapter I

Transcribed from the 1913 A. C. Fifield edition by David Price, email

ccx074@pglaf.org

The Fair Haven

_A Work in Defence of the Miraculous Element_

_in our Lord’s Ministry upon Earth_, _both as against_

_Rationalistic Impugners and certain Orthodox Defenders_,

_by the late John Pickard Owen_, _with a Memoir_

_of the Author by William Bickersteth Owen_.

By

Samuel Butler

Author of “Erewhon”

OP. 2

* * * * *

_Now Reset_; _and Edited_, _with an Introduction_,

_by R. A. Streatfeild_

* * * * *

London

A. C. Fifield, 13 Clifford’s Inn, E.C.

1913

* * * * *

WILLIAM BRENDON AND SON, LTD., PRINTERS, PLYMOUTH

Contents

Introduction by R. A. Streatfeild ix

Butler’s Preface to the Second Edition xv

Memoir of the late John Pickard Owen 1

CHAPTER

I. Introduction 61

II. Strauss and the Hallucination Theory 83

III. The Character and Conversion of St. Paul 105

IV. Paul’s Testimony considered 120

V. A Consideration of Certain Ill-judged Methods 134

of Defence

VI. More Disingenuousness 153

VII. Difficulties felt by our Opponents 170

VIII. The Preceding Chapter Continued 194

IX. The Christ-Ideal 230

X. Conclusion 255

Appendix 273

INTRODUCTION

By R. A. Streatfeild

THE demand for a new edition of _The Fair Haven_ gives me an opportunity

of saying a few words about the genesis of what, though not one of the

most popular of Samuel Butler’s books, is certainly one of the most

characteristic. Few of his works, indeed, show more strikingly his

brilliant powers as a controversialist and his implacable determination

to get at the truth of whatever engaged his attention.

To find the germ of _The Fair Haven_ we should probably have to go back

to the year 1858, when Butler, after taking his degree at Cambridge, was

preparing himself for holy orders by acting as a kind of lay curate in a

London parish. Butler never took things for granted, and he felt it to

be his duty to examine independently a good many points of Christian

dogma which most candidates for ordination accept as matters of course.

The result of his investigations was that he eventually declined to take

orders at all. One of the stones upon which he then stumbled was the

efficacy of infant baptism, and I have no doubt that another was the

miraculous element of Christianity, which, it will be remembered, was the

cause of grievous searchings of heart to Ernest Pontifex in Butler’s

semi-autobiographical novel, _The Way of All Flesh_. While Butler was in

New Zealand (1859–64) he had leisure for prosecuting his Biblical

studies, the result of which he published in 1865, after his return to

England, in an anonymous pamphlet entitled “The Evidence for the

Resurrection of Jesus Christ as given by the Four Evangelists critically

examined.” This pamphlet passed unnoticed; probably only a few copies

were printed and it is now extremely rare. After the publication of

_Erewhon_ in 1872, Butler returned once more to theology, and made his

anonymous pamphlet the basis of the far more elaborate _Fair Haven_,

which was originally published as the posthumous work of a certain John

Pickard Owen, preceded by a memoir of the deceased author by his supposed

brother, William Bickersteth Owen. It is possible that the memoir was

the fruit of a suggestion made by Miss Savage, an able and witty woman

with whom Butler corresponded at the time. Miss Savage was so much

impressed by the narrative power displayed in _Erewhon_ that she urged

Butler to write a novel, and we shall probably not be far wrong in

regarding the biography of John Pickard Owen as Butler’s trial trip in

the art of fiction—a prelude to _The Way of All Flesh_, which he began in

1873.

It has often been supposed that the elaborate paraphernalia of

mystification which Butler used in _The Fair Haven_ was deliberately

designed in order to hoax the public. I do not believe that this was the

case. Butler, I feel convinced, provided an ironical framework for his

arguments merely that he might render them more effective than they had

been when plainly stated in the pamphlet of 1865. He fully expected his

readers to comprehend his irony, and he anticipated that some at any rate

of them would keenly resent it. Writing to Miss Savage in March, 1873

(shortly before the publication of the book), he said: “I should hope

that attacks on _The Fair Haven_ will give me an opportunity of excusing

myself, and if so I shall endeavour that the excuse may be worse than the

fault it is intended to excuse.” A few days later he referred to the

difficulties that he had encountered in getting the book accepted by a

publisher: “— were frightened and even considered the scheme of the book

unjustifiable. — urged me, as politely as he could, not to do it, and

evidently thinks I shall get myself into disgrace even among

freethinkers. It’s all nonsense. I dare say I shall get into a row—at

least I hope I shall.” Evidently there is here no anticipation of _The

Fair Haven_ being misunderstood. Misunderstood, however, it was, not

only by reviewers, some of whom greeted it solemnly as a defence of

orthodoxy, but by divines of high standing, such as the late Canon

Ainger, who sent it to a friend whom he wished to convert. This was more

than Butler could resist, and he hastened to issue a second edition

bearing his name and accompanied by a preface in which the deceived elect

were held up to ridicule.

Butler used to maintain that _The Fair Haven_ did his reputation no harm.

Writing in 1901, he said:

“_The Fair Haven_ got me into no social disgrace that I have ever been

able to discover. I might attack Christianity as much as I chose and

nobody cared one straw; but when I attacked Darwin it was a different

matter. For many years _Evolution_, _Old and New_, and _Unconscious

Memory_ made a shipwreck of my literary prospects. I am only now

beginning to emerge from the literary and social injury which those two

perfectly righteous books inflicted on me. I dare say they abound with

small faults of taste, but I rejoice in having written both of them.”

Very likely Butler was right as to the social side of the question, but I

am convinced that _The Fair Haven_ did him grave harm in the literary

world. Reviewers fought shy of him for the rest of his life. They had

been taken in once, and they took very good care that they should not be

taken in again. The word went forth that Butler was not to be taken

seriously, whatever he wrote, and the results of the decree were apparent

in the conspiracy of silence that greeted not only his books on

evolution, but his Homeric works, his writings on art, and his edition of

Shakespeare’s sonnets. Now that he has passed beyond controversies and

mystifications, and now that his other works are appreciated at their

true value, it is not too much to hope that tardy justice will be

accorded also to _The Fair Haven_. It is true that the subject is no

longer the burning question that it was forty years ago. In the early

seventies theological polemics were fashionable. Books like Seeley’s

_Ecce Homo_ and Matthew Arnold’s _Literature and Dogma_ were eagerly

devoured by readers of all classes. Nowadays we take but a languid

interest in the problems that disturbed our grandfathers, and most of us

have settled down into what Disraeli described as the religion of all

sensible men, which no sensible man ever talks about. There is, however,

in _The Fair Haven_ a good deal more than theological controversy, and

our Laodicean age will appreciate Butler’s humour and irony if it cares

little for his polemics. _The Fair Haven_ scandalised a good many people

when it first appeared, but I am not afraid of its scandalising anybody

now. I should be sorry, nevertheless, if it gave any reader a false

impression of Butler’s Christianity, and I think I cannot do better than

conclude with a passage from one of his essays which represents his

attitude to religion perhaps more faithfully than anything in _The Fair

Haven_: “What, after all, is the essence of Christianity? What is the

kernel of the nut? Surely common sense and cheerfulness, with

unflinching opposition to the charlatanisms and Pharisaisms of a man’s

own times. The essence of Christianity lies neither in dogma, nor yet in

abnormally holy life, but in faith in an unseen world, in doing one’s

duty, in speaking the truth, in finding the true life rather in others

than in oneself, and in the certain hope that he who loses his life on

these behalfs finds more than he has lost. What can Agnosticism do

against such Christianity as this? I should be shocked if anything I had

ever written or shall ever write should seem to make light of these

things.”

R. A. STREATFEILD.

_August_, 1913.

Butler’s Preface to the Second Edition

THE occasion of a Second Edition of _The Fair Haven_ enables me to thank

the public and my critics for the favourable reception which has been

accorded to the First Edition. I had feared that the freedom with which

I had exposed certain untenable positions taken by Defenders of

Christianity might have given offence to some reviewers, but no complaint

has reached me from any quarter on the score of my not having put the

best possible case for the evidence in favour of the miraculous element

in Christ’s teaching—nor can I believe that I should have failed to hear

of it, if my book had been open to exception on this ground.

An apology is perhaps due for the adoption of a pseudonym, and even more

so for the creation of two such characters as JOHN PICKARD OWEN and his

brother. Why could I not, it may be asked, have said all that I had to

say in my own proper person?

Are there not real ills of life enough already? Is there not a “lo

here!” from this school with its gushing “earnestness,” it distinctions

without differences, its gnat strainings and camel swallowings, its

pretence of grappling with a question while resolutely bent upon shirking

it, its dust throwing and mystification, its concealment of its own

ineffable insincerity under an air of ineffable candour? Is there not a

“lo there!” from that other school with its bituminous atmosphere of

exclusiveness and self-laudatory dilettanteism? Is there not enough

actual exposition of boredom come over us from many quarters without

drawing for new bores upon the imagination? It is true I gave a single

drop of comfort. JOHN PICKARD OWEN was dead. But his having ceased to

exist (to use the impious phraseology of the present day) did not cancel

the fact of his having once existed. That he should have ever been born

gave proof of potentialities in Nature which could not be regarded

lightly. What hybrids might not be in store for us next? Moreover,

though JOHN PICKARD was dead, WILLIAM BICKERSTETH was still living, and

might at any moment rekindle his burning and shining lamp of persistent

self-satisfaction. Even though the OWENS had actually existed, should

not their existence have been ignored as a disgrace to Nature? Who then

could be justified in creating them when they did not exist?

I am afraid I must offer an apology rather than an excuse. The fact is

that I was in a very awkward position. My previous work, _Erewhon_, had

failed to give satisfaction to certain ultra-orthodox Christians, who

imagined that they could detect an analogy between the English Church and

the Erewhonian Musical Banks. It is inconceivable how they can have got

hold of this idea; but I was given to understand that I should find it

far from easy to dispossess them of the notion that something in the way

of satire had been intended. There were other parts of the book which

had also been excepted to, and altogether I had reason to believe that if

I defended Christianity in my own name I should not find _Erewhon_ any

addition to the weight which my remarks might otherwise carry. If I had

been suspected of satire once, I might be suspected again with no greater

reason. Instead of calmly reviewing the arguments which I adduced, _The

Rock_ might have raised a cry of _non tali auxilio_. It must always be

remembered that besides the legitimate investors in Christian stocks, if

so homely a metaphor may be pardoned, there are unscrupulous persons

whose profession it is to be bulls, bears, stags, and I know not what

other creatures of the various Christian markets. It is all nonsense

about hawks not picking out each other’s eyes—there is nothing they like

better. I feared _The Guardian_, _The Record_, _The John Bull_, etc.,

lest they should suggest that from a bear I now turned bull with a view

to an eventual bishopric. Such insinuations would have impaired the

value of _The Fair Haven_ as an anchorage for well-meaning people. I

therefore resolved to obey the injunction of the Gentile Apostle and

avoid all appearance of evil, by dissociating myself from the author of

_Erewhon_ as completely as possible. At the moment of my resolution JOHN

PICKARD OWEN came to my assistance; I felt that he was the sort of man I

wanted, but that he was hardly sufficient in himself. I therefore

summoned his brother. The pair have served their purpose; a year

nowadays produces great changes in men’s thoughts concerning

Christianity, and the little matter of _Erewhon_ having quite blown over

I feel that I may safely appear in my true colours as the champion of

orthodoxy, discard the OWENS as other than mouthpieces, and relieve the

public from uneasiness as to any further writings from the pen of the

surviving brother.

Nevertheless I am bound to own that, in spite of a generally favourable

opinion, my critics have not been unanimous in their interpretation of

_The Fair Haven_. Thus, _The Rock_ (April 25, 1873, and May 9, 1873),

says that the work is “an extraordinary one, whether regarded as a

biographical record or a theological treatise. Indeed the importance of

the volume compels us to depart from our custom of reviewing with brevity

works entrusted to us, and we shall in two consecutive numbers of _The

Rock_ lay before its readers what appear to us to be the merits and

demerits of this posthumous production.”

* * * * *

“His exhibition of the certain proofs furnished of the Resurrection of

our Lord is certainly masterly and convincing.”

* * * * *

“To the sincerely inquiring doubter, the striking way in which the truth

of the Resurrection is exhibited must be most beneficial, but such a

character we are compelled to believe is rare among those of the schools

of neology.”

* * * * *

“Mr. OWEN’S exposition and refutation of the hallucination and mythical

theories of Strauss and his followers is most admirable, and all should

read it who desire to know exactly what excuses men make for their

incredulity. The work also contains many beautiful passages on the

discomfort of unbelief, and the holy pleasure of a settled faith, which

cannot fail to benefit the reader.”

On the other hand, in spite of all my precautions, the same misfortune

which overtook _Erewhon_ has also come upon _The Fair Haven_. It has

been suspected of a satirical purpose. The author of a pamphlet entitled

_Jesus versus Christianity_ says:—

“_The Fair Haven_ is an ironical defence of orthodoxy at the expense of

the whole mass of Church tenet and dogma, the character of Christ only

excepted. Such at least is our reading of it, though critics of the

_Rock_ and _Record_ order have accepted the book as a serious defence of

Christianity, and proclaimed it as a most valuable contribution in aid of

the faith. Affecting an orthodox standpoint it most bitterly reproaches

all previous apologists for the lack of candour with which they have

ignored or explained away insuperable difficulties and attached undue

value to coincidences real or imagined. One and all they have, the

author declares, been at best, but zealous ‘liars for God,’ or what to

them was more than God, their own religious system. This must go on no

longer. We, as Christians having a sound cause, need not fear to let the

truth be known. He proceeds accordingly to set forth the truth as he

finds it in the New Testament; and in a masterly analysis of the account

of the Resurrection, which he selects as the principal crucial miracle,

involving all other miracles, he shows how slender is the foundation on

which the whole fabric of supernatural theology has been reared.”

* * * * *

“As told by our author the whole affords an exquisite example of the

natural growth of a legend.”

* * * * *

“If the reader can once fully grasp the intention of the style, and its

affectation of the tone of indignant orthodoxy, and perceive also how

utterly destructive are its ‘candid admissions’ to the whole fabric of

supernaturalism, he will enjoy a rare treat. It is not however for the

purpose of recommending what we at least regard as a piece of exquisite

humour, that we call attention to _The Fair Haven_, but &c. &c.”

* * * * *

This is very dreadful; but what can one do?

Again, _The Scotsman_ speaks of the writer as being “throughout in

downright almost pathetic earnestness.” While _The National Reformer_

seems to be in doubt whether the book is a covert attack upon

Christianity or a serious defence of it, but declares that both orthodox

and unorthodox will find matter requiring thought and answer.

I am not responsible for the interpretations of my readers. It is only

natural that the same work should present a very different aspect

according as it is approached from one side or the other. There is only

one way out of it—that the reader should kindly interpret according to

his own fancies. If he will do this the book is sure to please him. I

have done the best I can for all parties, and feel justified in appealing

to the existence of the widely conflicting opinions which I have quoted,

as a proof that the balance has been evenly held, and that I was

justified in calling the book a defence—both as against impugners and

defenders.

S. BUTLER.

_Oct._ 8, 1873.

Memoir of

The late John Pickard Owen

Chapter I

THE subject of this Memoir, and Author of the work which follows it, was

born in Goodge Street, Tottenham Court Road, London, on the 5th of

February, 1832. He was my elder brother by about eighteen months. Our

father and mother had once been rich, but through a succession of

unavoidable misfortunes they were left with but a very moderate income

when my brother and myself were about three and four years old. My

father died some five or six years afterwards, and we only recollected

him as a singularly gentle and humorous playmate who doted upon us both

and never spoke unkindly. The charm of such a recollection can never be

dispelled; both my brother and myself returned his love with interest,

and cherished his memory with the most affectionate regret, from the day

on which he left us till the time came that the one of us was again to

see him face to face. So sweet and winning was his nature that his

slightest wish was our law—and whenever we pleased him, no matter how

little, he never failed to thank us as though we had done him a service

which we should have had a perfect right to withhold. How proud were we

upon any of these occasions, and how we courted the opportunity of being

thanked! He did indeed well know the art of becoming idolised by his

children, and dearly did he prize the results of his own proficiency; yet

truly there was no art about it; all arose spontaneously from the

wellspring of a sympathetic nature which knew how to feel as others felt,

whether old or young, rich or poor, wise or foolish. On one point alone

did he neglect us—I refer to our religious education. On all other

matters he was the kindest and most careful teacher in the world. Love

and gratitude be to his memory!

My mother loved us no less ardently than my father, but she was of a

quicker temper, and less adept at conciliating affection. She must have

been exceedingly handsome when she was young, and was still comely when

we first remembered her; she was also highly accomplished, but she felt

my father’s loss of fortune more keenly than my father himself, and it

preyed upon her mind, though rather for our sake than for her own. Had

we not known my father we should have loved her better than any one in

the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my father spoiled us for

any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I remember my mother’s

telling me, with many tears, how jealous she had often been of the love

we bore him, and how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all

scolding or repression to her, so that he might have more than his due

share of our affection. Not that I believe my father did this

consciously; still, he so greatly hated scolding that I dare say we might

often have got off scot free when we really deserved reproof had not my

mother undertaken the _onus_ of scolding us herself. We therefore

naturally feared her more than my father, and fearing more we loved less.

For as love casteth out fear, so fear love.

This must have been hard to bear, and my mother scarcely knew the way to

bear it. She tried to upbraid us, in little ways, into loving her as

much as my father; the more she tried this, the less we could succeed in

doing it; and so on and so on in a fashion which need not be detailed.

Not but what we really loved her deeply, while her affection for us was

unsurpassable still, we loved her less than we loved my father, and this

was the grievance.

My father entrusted our religious education entirely to my mother. He

was himself, I am assured, of a deeply religious turn of mind, and a

thoroughly consistent member of the Church of England; but he conceived,

and perhaps rightly, that it is the mother who should first teach her

children to lift their hands in prayer, and impart to them a knowledge of

the One in whom we live and move and have our being. My mother accepted

the task gladly, for in spite of a certain narrowness of view—the natural

but deplorable result of her earlier surroundings—she was one of the most

truly pious women whom I have ever known; unfortunately for herself and

us she had been trained in the lowest school of Evangelical literalism—a

school which in after life both my brother and myself came to regard as

the main obstacle to the complete overthrow of unbelief; we therefore

looked upon it with something stronger than aversion, and for my own part

I still deem it perhaps the most insidious enemy which the cause of

Christ has ever encountered. But of this more hereafter.

My mother, as I said, threw her whole soul into the work of our religious

education. Whatever she believed she believed literally, and, if I may

say so, with a harshness of realisation which left very little scope for

imagination or mystery. Her plans of Heaven and solutions of life’s

enigmas were direct and forcible, but they could only be reconciled with

certain obvious facts—such as the omnipotence and all-goodness of God—by

leaving many things absolutely out of sight. And this my mother

succeeded effectually in doing. She never doubted that her opinions

comprised the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; she

therefore made haste to sow the good seed in our tender minds, and so far

succeeded that when my brother was four years old he could repeat the

Apostles’ Creed, the General Confession, and the Lord’s Prayer without a

blunder. My mother made herself believe that he delighted in them; but,

alas! it was far otherwise; for, strange as it may appear concerning one

whose later life was a continual prayer, in childhood he detested nothing

so much as being made to pray and to learn his Catechism. In this I am

sorry to say we were both heartily of a mind. As for Sunday, the less

said the better.

I have already hinted (but as a warning to other parents I had better,

perhaps, express myself more plainly), that this aversion was probably

the result of my mother’s undue eagerness to reap an artificial fruit of

lip service, which could have little meaning to the heart of one so

young. I believe that the severe check which the natural growth of faith

experienced in my brother’s case was due almost entirely to this cause,

and to the school of literalism in which he had been trained; but,

however this may be, we both of us hated being made to say our

prayers—morning and evening it was our one bugbear, and we would avoid

it, as indeed children generally will, by every artifice which we could

employ. Thus we were in the habit of feigning to be asleep shortly

before prayer time, and would gratefully hear my father tell my mother

that it was a shame to wake us; whereon he would carry us up to bed in a

state apparently of the profoundest slumber when we were really wide

awake and in great fear of detection. For we knew how to pretend to be

asleep, but we did not know how we ought to wake again; there was nothing

for it therefore when we were once committed, but to go on sleeping till

we were fairly undressed and put to bed, and could wake up safely in the

dark. But deceit is never long successful, and we were at last

ignominiously exposed.

It happened one evening that my mother suspected my brother John, and

tried to open his little hands which were lying clasped in front of him.

Now my brother was as yet very crude and inconsistent in his theories

concerning sleep, and had no conception of what a real sleeper would do

under these circumstances. Fear deprived him of his powers of

reflection, and he thus unfortunately concluded that because sleepers, so

far as he had observed them, were always motionless, therefore, they must

be quite rigid and incapable of motion, and indeed that any movement,

under any circumstances (for from his earliest childhood he liked to

carry his theories to their legitimate conclusion), would be physically

impossible for one who was really sleeping; forgetful, oh! unhappy one,

of the flexibility of his own body on being carried upstairs, and, more

unhappy still, ignorant of the art of waking. He, therefore, clenched

his fingers harder and harder as he felt my mother trying to unfold them

while his head hung listless, and his eyes were closed I as though he

were sleeping sweetly. It is needless to detail the agony of shame that

followed. My mother begged my father to box his ears, which my father

flatly refused to do. Then she boxed them herself, and there followed a

scene and a day or two of disgrace for both of us.

Shortly after this there happened another misadventure. A lady came to

stay with my mother, and was to sleep in a bed that had been brought into

our nursery, for my father’s fortunes had already failed, and we were

living in a humble way. We were still but four and five years old, so

the arrangement was not unnatural, and it was assumed that we should be

asleep before the lady went to bed, and be downstairs before she would

get up in the morning. But the arrival of this lady and her being put to

sleep in the nursery were great events to us in those days, and being

particularly wanted to go to sleep, we of course sat up in bed talking

and keeping ourselves awake till she should come upstairs. Perhaps we

had fancied that she would give us something, but if so we were

disappointed. However, whether this was the case or not, we were wide

awake when our visitor came to bed, and having no particular object to

gain, we made no pretence of sleeping. The lady kissed us both, told us

to lie still and go to sleep like good children, and then began doing her

hair.

I remember that this was the occasion on which my brother discovered a

good many things in connection with the fair sex which had hitherto been

beyond his ken; more especially that the mass of petticoats and clothes

which envelop the female form were not, as he expressed it to me, “all

solid woman,” but that women were not in reality more substantially built

than men, and had legs as much as he had, a fact which he had never yet

realised. On this he for a long time considered them as impostors, who

had wronged him by leading him to suppose that they had far more “body in

them” (so he said), than he now found they had. This was a sort of thing

which he regarded with stern moral reprobation. If he had been old

enough to have a solicitor I believe he would have put the matter into

his hands, as well as certain other things which had lately troubled him.

For but recently my mother had bought a fowl, and he had seen it plucked,

and the inside taken out; his irritation had been extreme on discovering

that fowls were not all solid flesh, but that their insides—and these

formed, as it appeared to him, an enormous percentage of the bird—were

perfectly useless. He was now beginning to understand that sheep and

cows were also hollow as far as good meat was concerned; the flesh they

had was only a mouthful in comparison with what they ought to have

considering their apparent bulk—insignificant, mere skin and bone

covering a cavern. What right had they, or anything else, to assert

themselves as so big, and prove so empty? And now this discovery of

woman’s falsehood was quite too much for him. The world itself was

hollow, made up of shams and delusions, full of sound and fury signifying

nothing.

Truly a prosaic young gentleman enough. Everything with him was to be

exactly in all its parts what it appeared on the face of it, and

everything was to go on doing exactly what it had been doing hitherto.

If a thing looked solid, it was to be very solid; if hollow, very hollow;

nothing was to be half and half, and nothing was to change unless he had

himself already become accustomed to its times and manners of changing;

there were to be no exceptions and no contradictions; all things were to

be perfectly consistent, and all premises to be carried with extremest

rigour to their legitimate conclusions. Heaven was to be very neat (for

he was always tidy himself), and free from sudden shocks to the nervous

system, such as those caused by dogs barking at him, or cows driven in

the streets. God was to resemble my father, and the Holy Spirit to bear

some sort of indistinct analogy to my mother.

Such were the ideal theories of his childhood—unconsciously formed, but

very firmly believed in. As he grew up he made such modifications as

were forced upon him by enlarged perceptions, but every modification was

an effort to him, in spite of a continual and successful resistance to

what he recognised as his initial mental defect.

I may perhaps be allowed to say here, in reference to a remark in the

preceding paragraph, that both my brother and myself used to notice it as

an almost invariable rule that children’s earliest ideas of God are

modelled upon the character of their father—if they have one. Should the

father be kind, considerate, full of the warmest love, fond of showing

it, and reserved only about his displeasure, the child having learned to

look upon God as His Heavenly Father through the Lord’s Prayer and our

Church Services, will feel towards God as he does towards his own father;

this conception will stick to a man for years and years after he has

attained manhood—probably it will never leave him. For all children love

their fathers and mothers, if these last will only let them; it is not a

little unkindness that will kill so hardy a plant as the love of a child

for its parents. Nature has allowed ample margin for many blunders,

provided there be a genuine desire on the parent’s part to make the child

feel that he is loved, and that his natural feelings are respected. This

is all the religious education which a child should have. As he grows

older he will then turn naturally to the waters of life, and thirst after

them of his own accord by reason of the spiritual refreshment which they,

and they only, can afford. Otherwise he will shrink from them, on

account of his recollection of the way in which he was led down to drink

against his will, and perhaps with harshness, when all the analogies with

which he was acquainted pointed in the direction of their being

unpleasant and unwholesome. So soul-satisfying is family affection to a

child, that he who has once enjoyed it cannot bear to be deprived of the

hope that he is possessed in Heaven of a parent who is like his earthly

father—of a friend and counsellor who will never, never fail him. There

is no such religious nor moral education as kindly genial treatment and a

good example; all else may then be let alone till the child is old enough

to feel the want of it. It is true that the seed will thus be sown late,

but in what a soil! On the other hand, if a man has found his earthly

father harsh and uncongenial, his conception of his Heavenly Parent will

be painful. He will begin by seeing God as an exaggerated likeness of

his father. He will therefore shrink from Him. The rottenness of

stillborn love in the heart of a child poisons the blood of the soul, and

hence, later, crime.

To return, however, to the lady. When she had put on her night-gown, she

knelt down by her bedside and, to our consternation, began to say her

prayers. This was a cruel blow to both of us; we had always been under

the impression that grownup people were not made to say their prayers,

and the idea of any one saying them of his or her own accord had never

occurred to us as possible. Of course the lady would not say her prayers

if she were not obliged; and yet she did say them; therefore she must be

obliged to say them; therefore we should be obliged to say them, and this

was a very great disappointment. Awe-struck and open-mouthed we listened

while the lady prayed in sonorous accents, for many things which I do not

now remember, and finally for my father and mother and for both of

us—shortly afterwards she rose, blew out the light and got into bed.

Every word that she said had confirmed our worst apprehensions; it was

just what we had been taught to say ourselves.

Next morning we compared notes and drew the most painful inferences; but

in the course of the day our spirits rallied. We agreed that there were

many mysteries in connection with life and things which it was high time

to unravel, and that an opportunity was now afforded us which might not

readily occur again. All we had to do was to be true to ourselves and

equal to the occasion. We laid our plans with great astuteness. We

would be fast asleep when the lady came up to bed, but our heads should

be turned in the direction of her bed, and covered with clothes, all but

a single peep-hole. My brother, as the eldest, had clearly a right to be

nearest the lady, but I could see very well, and could depend on his

reporting faithfully whatever should escape me.

There was no chance of her giving us anything—if she had meant to do so

she would have done it sooner; she might, indeed, consider the moment of

her departure as the most auspicious for this purpose, but then she was

not going yet, and the interval was at our own disposal. We spent the

afternoon in trying to learn to snore, but we were not certain about it,

and in the end regretfully concluded that as snoring was not _de rigueur_

we had better dispense with it.

We were put to bed; the light was taken away; we were told to go to

sleep, and promised faithfully that we would do so; the tongue indeed

swore, but the mind was unsworn. It was agreed that we should keep

pinching one another to prevent our going to sleep. We did so at

frequent intervals; at last our patience was rewarded with the heavy

creak, as of a stout elderly lady labouring up the stairs, and presently

our victim entered.

To cut a long story short, the lady on satisfying herself that we were

asleep, never said her prayers at all; during the remainder of her visit

whenever she found us awake she always said them, but when she thought we

were asleep, she never prayed. It is needless to add that we had the

matter out with her before she left, and that the consequences were

unpleasant for all parties; they added to the troubles in which we were

already involved as to our prayers, and were indirectly among the

earliest causes which led my brother to look with scepticism upon

religion.

For a while, however, all went on as though nothing had happened. An

effect of distrust, indeed, remained after the cause had been forgotten,

but my brother was still too young to oppose anything that my mother told

him, and to all outward appearance he grew in grace no less rapidly than

in stature.

For years we led a quiet and eventless life, broken only by the one great

sorrow of our father’s death. Shortly after this we were sent to a day

school in Bloomsbury. We were neither of us very happy there, but my

brother, who always took kindly to his books, picked up a fair knowledge

of Latin and Greek; he also learned to draw, and to exercise himself a

little in English composition. When I was about fourteen my mother

capitalised a part of her income and started me off to America, where she

had friends who could give me a helping hand; by their kindness I was

enabled, after an absence of twenty years, to return with a handsome

income, but not, alas, before the death of my mother.

Up to the time of my departure my mother continued to read the Bible with

us and explain it. She had become deeply impressed with the millenarian

fervour which laid hold of so many some twenty-five or thirty years ago.

The Apocalypse was perhaps her favourite book in the Bible, and she was

imbued with the fullest conviction that all the threatened horrors with

which it teems were upon the eve of their accomplishment. The year

eighteen hundred and forty-eight was to be (as indeed it was) a time of

general bloodshed and confusion, while in eighteen hundred and sixty-six,

should it please God to spare her, her eyes would be gladdened by the

visible descent of the Son of Man with a shout, with the voice of the

Archangel, with the trump of God; and the dead in Christ should rise

first; then she, as one of them that were alive, would be caught up with

other saints into the air, and would possibly receive while rising some

distinguishing token of confidence and approbation which should fall with

due impressiveness upon the surrounding multitude; then would come the

consummation of all things, and she would be ever with the Lord. She

died peaceably in her bed before she could know that a commercial panic

was the nearest approach to the fulfilment of prophecy which the year

eighteen hundred and sixty-six brought forth.

These opinions of my mother’s were positively disastrous—injuring her

naturally healthy and vigorous mind by leading her to indulge in all

manner of dreamy and fanciful interpretations of Scripture, which any but

the most narrow literalist would feel at once to be untenable. Thus

several times she expressed to us her conviction that my brother and

myself were to be the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh chapter of

the Book of Revelation, and dilated upon the gratification she should

experience upon finding that we had indeed been reserved for a position

of such distinction. We were as yet mere children, and naturally took

all for granted that our mother told us; we therefore made a careful

examination of the passage which threw light upon our future; but on

finding that the prospect was gloomy and full of bloodshed we protested

against the honours which were intended for us, more especially when we

reflected that the mother of the two witnesses was not menaced in

Scripture with any particular discomfort. If we were to be martyrs, my

mother ought to wish to be a martyr too, whereas nothing was farther from

her intention. Her notion clearly was that we were to be massacred

somewhere in the streets of London, in consequence of the anti-Christian

machinations of the Pope; that after lying about unburied for three days

and a half we were to come to life again; and, finally, that we should

conspicuously ascend to heaven, in front, perhaps, of the Foundling

Hospital.

She was not herself indeed to share either our martyrdom or our

glorification, but was to survive us many years on earth, living in an

odour of great sanctity and reflected splendour, as the central and most

august figure in a select society. She would perhaps be able indirectly,

through her sons’ influence with the Almighty, to have a voice in most of

the arrangements both of this world and of the next. If all this were to

come true (and things seemed very like it), those friends who had

neglected us in our adversity would not find it too easy to be restored

to favour, however greatly they might desire it—that is to say, they

would not have found it too easy in the case of one less magnanimous and

spiritually-minded than herself. My mother said but little of the above

directly, but the fragments which occasionally escaped her were pregnant,

and on looking back it is easy to perceive that she must have been

building one of the most stupendous aerial fabrics that have ever been

reared.

I have given the above in its more amusing aspect, and am half afraid

that I may appear to be making a jest of weakness on the part of one of

the most devotedly unselfish mothers who have ever existed. But one can

love while smiling, and the very wildness of my mother’s dream serves to

show how entirely her whole soul was occupied with the things which are

above. To her, religion was all in all; the earth was but a place of

pilgrimage—only so far important as it was a possible road to heaven.

She impressed this upon both of us by every word and action—instant in

season and out of season, so that she might fill us more deeply with a

sense of God. But the inevitable consequences happened; my mother had

aimed too high and had overshot her mark. The influence indeed of her

guileless and unworldly nature remained impressed upon my brother even

during the time of his extremest unbelief (perhaps his ultimate safety is

in the main referable to this cause, and to the happy memories of my

father, which had predisposed him to love God), but my mother had

insisted on the most minute verbal accuracy of every part of the Bible;

she had also dwelt upon the duty of independent research, and on the

necessity of giving up everything rather than assent to things which our

conscience did not assent to. No one could have more effectually taught

us to try _to think_ the truth, and we had taken her at her word because

our hearts told us that she was right. But she required three

incompatible things. When my brother grew older he came to feel that

independent and unflinching examination, with a determination to abide by

the results, would lead him to reject the point which to my mother was

more important than any other—I mean the absolute accuracy of the Gospel

records. My mother was inexpressibly shocked at hearing my brother doubt

the authenticity of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and then, as it appeared

to him, she tried to make him violate the duties of examination and

candour which he had learnt too thoroughly to unlearn. Thereon came pain

and an estrangement which was none the less profound for being mutually

concealed.

This estrangement was the gradual work of some five or six years, during

which my brother was between eleven and seventeen years old. At

seventeen, I am told that he was remarkably well informed and clever.

His manners were, like my father’s, singularly genial, and his appearance

very prepossessing. He had as yet no doubt concerning the soundness of

any fundamental Christian doctrine, but his mind was too active to allow

of his being contented with my mother’s child-like faith. There were

points on which he did not indeed doubt, but which it would none the less

be interesting to consider; such for example as the perfectibility of the

regenerate Christian, and the meaning of the mysterious central chapters

of the Epistle to the Romans. He was engaged in these researches though

still only a boy, when an event occurred which gave the first real shock

to his faith.

He was accustomed to teach in a school for the poorest children every

Sunday afternoon, a task for which his patience and good temper well

fitted him. On one occasion, however, while he was explaining the effect

of baptism to one of his favourite pupils, he discovered to his great

surprise that the boy had never been baptised. He pushed his inquiries

further, and found that out of the fifteen boys in his class only five

had been baptised, and, not only so, but that no difference in

disposition or conduct could be discovered between the regenerate boys

and the unregenerate. The good and bad boys were distributed in

proportions equal to the respective numbers of the baptised and

unbaptised. In spite of a certain impetuosity of natural character, he

was also of a matter-of-fact and experimental turn of mind; he therefore

went through the whole school, which numbered about a hundred boys, and

found out who had been baptised and who had not. The same results

appeared. The majority had not been baptised; yet the good and bad

dispositions were so distributed as to preclude all possibility of

maintaining that the baptised boys were better than the unbaptised.

The reader may smile at the idea of any one’s faith being troubled by a

fact of which the explanation is so obvious, but in truth my brother was

seriously and painfully shocked. The teacher to whom he applied for a

solution of the difficulty was not a man of any real power, and reported

my brother to the rector for having disturbed the school by his

inquiries. The rector was old and self-opinionated; the difficulty,

indeed, was plainly as new to him as it had been to my brother, but

instead of saying so at once, and referring to any recognised theological

authority, he tried to put him off with words which seemed intended to

silence him rather than to satisfy him; finally he lost his temper, and

my brother fell under suspicion of unorthodoxy.

This kind of treatment might answer with some people, but not with my

brother. He alludes to it resentfully in the introductory chapter of his

book. He became suspicious that a preconceived opinion was being

defended at the expense of honest scrutiny, and was thus driven upon his

own unaided investigation. The result may be guessed: he began to go

astray, and strayed further and further. The children of God, he

reasoned, the members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of Heaven,

were no more spiritually minded than the children of the world and the

devil. Was then the grace of God a gift which left no trace whatever

upon those who were possessed of it—a thing the presence or absence of

which might be ascertained by consulting the parish registry, but was not

discernible in conduct? The grace of man was more clearly perceptible

than this. Assuredly there must be a screw loose somewhere, which, for

aught he knew, might be jeopardising the salvation of all Christendom.

Where then was this loose screw to be found?

He concluded after some months of reflection that the mischief was caused

by the system of sponsors and by infant baptism. He therefore, to my

mother’s inexpressible grief, joined the Baptists and was immersed in a

pond near Dorking. With the Baptists he remained quiet about three

months, and then began to quarrel with his instructors as to their

doctrine of predestination. Shortly afterwards he came accidentally upon

a fascinating stranger who was no less struck with my brother than my

brother with him, and this gentleman, who turned out to be a Roman

Catholic missionary, landed him in the Church of Rome, where he felt sure

that he had now found rest for his soul. But here, too, he was mistaken;

after about two years he rebelled against the stifling of all free

inquiry; on this rebellion the flood-gates of scepticism were opened, and

he was soon battling with unbelief. He then fell in with one who was a

pure Deist, and was shorn of every shred of dogma which he had ever held,

except a belief in the personality and providence of the Creator.

On reviewing his letters written to me about this time, I am painfully

struck with the manner in which they show that all these pitiable

vagaries were to be traced to a single cause—a cause which still exists

to the misleading of hundreds of thousands, and which, I fear, seems

likely to continue in full force for many a year to come—I mean, to a

false system of training which teaches people to regard Christianity as a

thing one and indivisible, to be accepted entirely in the strictest

reading of the letter, or to be rejected as absolutely untrue. The fact

is, that all permanent truth is as one of those coal measures, a seam of

which lies near the surface, and even crops up above the ground, but

which is generally of an inferior quality and soon worked out; beneath it

there comes a layer of sand and clay, and then at last the true seam of

precious quality and in virtually inexhaustible supply. The truth which

is on the surface is rarely the whole truth. It is seldom until this has

been worked out and done with—as in the case of the apparent flatness of

the earth—that unchangeable truth is discovered. It is the glory of the

Lord to conceal a matter: it is the glory of the king to find it out. If

my brother, from whom I have taken the above illustration, had had some

judicious and wide-minded friend to correct and supplement the mainly

admirable principles which had been instilled into him by my mother, he

would have been saved years of spiritual wandering; but, as it was, he

fell in with one after another, each in his own way as literal and

unspiritual as the other—each impressed with one aspect of religious

truth, and with one only. In the end he became perhaps the widest-minded

and most original thinker whom I have ever met; but no one from his early

manhood could have augured this result; on the contrary, he shewed every

sign of being likely to develop into one of those who can never see more

than one side of a question at a time, in spite of their seeing that side

with singular clearness of mental vision. In after life, he often met

with mere lads who seemed to him to be years and years in advance of what

he had been at their age, and would say, smiling, “With a great sum

obtained I this freedom; but thou wast free-born.”

Yet when one comes to think of it, a late development and laborious

growth are generally more fruitful than those which are over-early

luxuriant. Drawing an illustration from the art of painting, with which

he was well acquainted, my brother used to say that all the greatest

painters had begun with a hard and precise manner from which they had

only broken after several years of effort; and that in like manner all

the early schools were founded upon definiteness of outline to the

exclusion of truth of effect. This may be true; but in my brother’s case

there was something even more unpromising than this; there was a

commonness, so to speak, of mental execution, from which no one could

have foreseen his after-emancipation. Yet in the course of time he was

indeed emancipated to the very uttermost, while his bonds will, I firmly

trust, be found to have been of inestimable service to the whole human

race.

For although it was so many years before he was enabled to see the

Christian scheme _as a whole_, or even to conceive the idea that there

was any whole at all, other than each one of the stages of opinion

through which he was at the time passing; yet when the idea was at length

presented to him by one whom I must not name, the discarded fragments of

his faith assumed shape, and formed themselves into a consistently

organised scheme. Then became apparent the value of his knowledge of the

details of so many different sides of Christian verity. Buried in the

details, he had hitherto ignored the fact that they were only the

unessential developments of certain component parts. Awakening to the

perception of the whole after an intimate acquaintance with the details,

he was able to realise the position and meaning of all that he had

hitherto experienced in a way which has been vouchsafed to few, if any

others.

Thus he became truly a broad Churchman. Not broad in the ordinary and

ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is as little able

to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen and Dissenters, as

these are with himself—he is only one of a sect which is called by the

name broad, though it is no broader than its own base), but in the true

sense of being able to believe in the naturalness, legitimacy, and truth

_quâ_ Christianity even of those doctrines which seem to stand most

widely and irreconcilably asunder.

Chapter II

BUT it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have gone over

so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same position as that

from which it started.

So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of his maturer

life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those who belong to any

of the more definite or precise schools of theological thought. He was

as one who has made the circuit of a mountain, and yet been ascending

during the whole time of his doing so: such a person finds himself upon

the same side as at first, but upon a greatly higher level. The peaks

which had seemed the most important when he was in the valley were now

dwarfed to their true proportions by colossal cloud-capped masses whose

very existence could not have been suspected from beneath: and again,

other points which had seemed among the lowest turned out to be the very

highest of all—as the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the

centre of the Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is

high and far off.

Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the New

Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means accurate

records of the events which they profess to chronicle. This, which few

English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to him so much of an

axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound theological structure raised

until it was universally recognised.

And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced

thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he stood

alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in having ordained

the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies of doctrine and

character which we find assigned to Christ in the Gospels, and as finding

his faith confirmed, not by the supposition that both the portraits drawn

of Christ are objectively true, but _that both are objectively

inaccurate_, _and that the Almighty intended they should be inaccurate_,

inasmuch as the true spiritual conception in the mind of man could be

indirectly more certainly engendered by a strife, a warring, a clashing,

so to speak, of versions, all of them distorting slightly some one or

other of the features of the original, than directly by the most

absolutely correct impression which human language could convey. Even

the most perfect human speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very

gross and imperfect vehicle of thought. I remember once hearing him say

that it was not till he was nearly thirty that he discovered “what thick

and sticky fluids were air and water,” how crass and dull in comparison

with other more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceived

him, seeming, as it did, to be such a perfect messenger of thought, and

being after all nothing but a shuffler and a loiterer.

With most men the Gospels are true in spite of their discrepancies and

inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from a bare

belief in the objectively historical character of each part of the

Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as his conceptions

of the Divine manner of working became wider, the very forces which had

at one time shaken his faith to its foundations established it anew upon

a firmer and broader base. He was gradually led to feel that the ideal

presented by the life and death of our Saviour could never have been

accepted by Jews at all, if its whole purport had been made intelligible

during the Redeemer’s life-time; that in order to insure its acceptance

by a nucleus of followers it must have been endowed with a more local

aspect than it was intended afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of

its subsequent universal value, the destruction of that local complexion

was indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from _vivâ voce_

communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the

Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth which

could not be otherwise obtainable—and that thus the value of the ideal

was indefinitely enhanced, and _designedly enhanced_, alike by the waste

of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain by a certain

amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill in the details

according to his own spiritual needs, and that no ideal can be truly

universal and permanents unless it have an elasticity which will allow of

this process in the minds of those who contemplate it; that it cannot

become thus elastic unless by the loss of no inconsiderable amount of

detail, and that thus the half, as Dr. Arnold used to say, “becomes

greater than the whole,” the sketch more preciously suggestive than the

photograph. Hence far from deploring the fragmentary, confused, and

contradictory condition of the Gospel records, he saw in this condition

the means whereby alone the human mind could have been enabled to

conceive—not the precise nature of Christ—but _the highest ideal of which

each individual Christian soul was capable_. As soon as he had grasped

these conceptions, which will be found more fully developed in one of the

later chapters of his book, the spell of unbelief was broken.

But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he could allow

himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues from which one

whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk. He was free of

the enemy’s camp, and could go hither and thither whithersoever he would.

The very points which to others were insuperable difficulties were to him

foundation-stones of faith. For example, to the objection that if in the

present state of the records no clear conception of the nature of

Christ’s life and teaching could be formed, we should be compelled to

take one for our model of whom we knew little or nothing certain, I have

heard him answer, “And so much the better for us all. The truth, if read

by the light of man’s imperfect understanding, would have been falser to

him than any falsehood. It would have been truth no longer. _Better be

led aright by an error which is so adjusted as to compensate for the

errors in man’s powers of understanding_, _than be misled by a truth

which can never be translated from objectivity to subjectivity_. In such

a case, it is the error which is the truth and the truth the error.”

Fearless himself, he could not understand the fears felt by others; and

this was perhaps his greatest sympathetic weakness. He was impatient of

the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations of Scripture were

defended, and of the disingenuousness of certain harmonists; indeed, the

mention of the word harmony was enough to kindle an outbreak of righteous

anger, which would sometimes go to the utmost limit of righteousness.

“Harmonies!” he would exclaim, “the sweetest harmonies are those which

are most full of discords, and the discords of one generation of

musicians become heavenly music in the hands of their successors. Which

of the great musicians has not enriched his art not only by the discovery

of new harmonies, but by proving that sounds which are actually

inharmonious are nevertheless essentially and eternally delightful? What

an outcry has there not always been against the ‘unwarrantable licence’

with the rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken

through any of the trammels which have been regarded as the safeguards of

the art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and how gratefully

have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted the innovation.”

Then would follow a tirade with illustration upon illustration,

comparison of this passage with that, and an exhaustive demonstration

that one or other, or both, could have had no sort of possible foundation

in fact; he could only see that the persons from whom he differed were

defending something which was untrue and which they ought to have known

to be untrue, but he could not see that people ought to know many things

which they do not know.

Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from his

own standpoints? Can any of us do so? The force of early bias and

education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of natural

timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could appreciate and

make allowance for in any other age, and among any other people than his

own; but as belonging to England and the Nineteenth Century they had no

place in his theory of Nature; they were inconceivable, unnatural,

unpardonable, whenever they came into contact with the subject of

Christian evidences. Deplorable, indeed, they are, but this was just the

sort of word to which he could not confine himself. The criticisms upon

the late Dean Alford’s notes, which will be given in the sequel, display

this sort of temper; they are not entirely his own, but he adopted them

and endorsed them with a warmth which we cannot but feel to be

unnecessary, not to say more. Yet I am free to confess that whatever

editorial licence I could venture to take has been taken in the direction

of lenity.

On the whole, however, he valued Dean Alford’s work very highly, giving

him great praise for the candour with which he not unfrequently set the

harmonists aside. For example, in his notes upon the discrepancies

between St. Luke’s and St. Matthew’s accounts of the early life of our

Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quite beyond his purpose to

attempt to reconcile the two. “This part of the Gospel history,” he

writes, “is one where the harmonists, by their arbitrary reconcilement of

the two accounts, have given great advantage to the enemies of the faith.

_As the two accounts now stand_, it is wholly impossible to suggest any

satisfactory method of _uniting them_, every one who has attempted it has

in some part or other of his hypothesis violated probability and common

sense,” but in spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting

both the accounts. With reference to this the author of _The Jesus of

History_ (Williams and Norgate, 1866)—a work to which my brother admitted

himself to be under very great obligations, and which he greatly admired,

in spite of his utter dissent from the main conclusion arrived at, has

the following note:—

“Dean Alford, N.T. for English readers, admits that the narratives as

they stand are contradictory, but he believes both. He is even severe

upon the harmonists who attempt to frame schemes of reconciliation

between the two, on account of the triumph they thus furnish to the

‘enemies of the faith,’ a phrase which seems to imply all who believe

less than he does. The Dean, however, forgets that the faith which can

believe two (apparently) contradictory propositions in matters of fact is

a very rare gift, and that for one who is so endowed there are thousands

who can be satisfied with a plausible though demonstrably false

explanation. To the latter class the despised harmonists render a real

service.”

Upon this note my brother was very severe. In a letter, dated Dec. 18,

1866, addressed to a friend who had alluded to it, and expressed his

concurrence with it as in the main just, my brother wrote: “You are wrong

about the note in _The Jesus of History_, there is more of the

Christianity of the future in Dean Alford’s indifference to the harmony

between the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew than there would have

been _even in the most convincing and satisfactory_ explanation of the

way in which they came to differ. No such explanation is possible; both

the Dean and the author of _The Jesus of History_ were very well aware of

this, but the latter is unjust in assuming that his opponent was not

alive to the absurdity of appearing to believe two contradictory

propositions at one and the same time. The Dean takes very good care

that he shall not appear to do this, for it is perfectly plain to any

careful reader that he must really believe that one or both narratives

are inaccurate, inasmuch as the differences between them are too great to

allow of reconciliation by a supposed suppression of detail.

“This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is yet

virtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which could by

any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurred to

human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt was that

the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for not being in

strict accordance with the other; that the objective truth lies somewhere

between them, and is of very little importance, being long dead and

buried, and living in its results only, in comparison with the subjective

truth conveyed by both the narratives, which lives in our hearts

independently of precise knowledge concerning the actual facts.

Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps be inaccurate, yet that

_a very little_ natural inaccuracy on the part of each writer would throw

them apparently very wide asunder, that such inaccuracies are easily to

be accounted for, and would, in fact, be inevitable in the sixty years of

oral communication which elapsed between the birth of our Lord and the

writing of the first Gospel, and again in the eighty or ninety years

prior to the third, so that the details of the facts connected with the

conception, birth, genealogy, and earliest history of our Saviour are

irrecoverable—a general impression being alone possible, or indeed

desirable.

“It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford had

expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would have

read his book? Where would have been that influence in the direction of

truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent during the last

twenty years? As it was, the freedom with which the Dean wrote was the

cause of no inconsiderable scandal. Or, again, he may not have been

fully conscious of his own position: few men are; he had taken the right

one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct than by conscious and

deliberate exercise of his intellectual faculties. Finally, compromise

is not a matter of good policy only, it is a solemn duty in the interests

of Christian peace, and this not in minor matters only—we can all do this

much—but in those concerning which we feel most strongly, for here the

sacrifice is greatest and most acceptable to God. There are, of course,

limits to this, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in

the present instance, but it is very transparent. The narrowness which

leads the author of _The Jesus of History_ to strain at such a gnat is

the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of our

Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of the life

and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion.”

It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have

shown himself so little able to apply his own principles. He seems to

have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting spirits—at

one time writing as though there were nothing precious under the sun

except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing fire and smoke

against even very trifling deviations from the path of exact criticism—at

another, leading the reader almost to believe that he disregarded the

value of any objective truth, and speaking of endeavour after accuracy in

terms that are positively contemptuous. Whenever he was in the one mood

he seemed to forget the possibility of any other; so much so that I have

sometimes thought that he did this deliberately and for the same reasons

as those which led Adam Smith to exclude one set of premises in his

_Theory of Moral Sentiments_ and another in his _Wealth of Nations_. I

believe, however, that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother

was inclined to underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth

of any other individual features in the life of our Lord than his

Resurrection and Ascension. All else seemed dwarfed by the side of these

events. His whole soul was so concentrated upon the centre of the circle

that he forgot the circumference, or left it out of sight. Nothing less

than the strictest objective truth as to the main facts of the

Resurrection and Ascension would content him; the other miracles and the

life and teaching of our Lord might then be left open; whatever view was

taken of them by each individual Christian was probably the one most

desirable for the spiritual wellbeing of each.

Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatly value

the detail. Provided these facts were so established that they could

never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the less detail the

broader and more universally acceptable would be the effect. Hence, when

Dean Alford’s notes seemed to jeopardise the evidences for these things,

he could brook no trifling; for unless Christ actually died and actually

came to life again, he saw no escape from an utter denial of any but

natural religion. Christ would have been no more to him than Socrates or

Shakespeare, except in so far as his teaching was more spiritual. The

triune nature of the Deity—the Resurrection from the dead—the hope of

Heaven and salutary fear of Hell—all would go but for the Resurrection

and Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would remain except a sense of the

Divine as a substitute for God, and the current feeling of one’s peers as

the chief moral check upon misconduct. Indeed, we have seen this view

openly advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in the very plainest

terms. My brother did not live to see it, but if he had, he would have

recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies as to what must be the

inevitable sequel of a denial of our Lord’s Resurrection.

It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carried away

by a “pet theory.” Where light and definition were essential, he would

sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous for his highest light,

and felt “that the whole effect of the Christian scheme was indefinitely

heightened by keeping all other lights subordinate”—this at least was the

illustration which he often used concerning it. But as there were limits

to the value of light and “finding”—limits which had been far exceeded,

with the result of an unnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of

garishness and unreality—so there were limits to the as yet unrecognised

preciousness of “losing” and obscurity; these limits he placed at the

objectivity of our Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension. Let there be light

enough to show these things, and the rest would gain by being in

half-tone and shadow.

His facility of illustration was simply marvellous. From his

conversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted with all

manner of arts and sciences of which he knew little or nothing. It is

true, as has been said already, that he had had some practice in the art

of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the masterpieces of

Raphael, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; but he could never have

been called a painter; for music he had considerable feeling; I think he

must have known thorough-bass, but it was hard to say what he did or did

not know. Of science he was almost entirely ignorant, yet he had

assimilated a quantity of stray facts, and whatever he assimilated seemed

to agree with him and nourish his mental being. But though his

acquaintance with any one art or science must be allowed to have been

superficial only, he had an astonishing perception of the relative

bearings of facts which seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the

range of one another, and of the relations between the sciences

generally; it was this which gave him his felicity and fecundity of

illustration—a gift which he never abused. He delighted in its use for

the purpose of carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of

another, but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration for

argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating but

irrelevant simile. The subtlety of his mind was a more serious source of

danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by it in

comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of distinctions was

so fine that it would sometimes distract his attention from points of

infinitely greater importance in connection with his subject than the

particular distinction which he was trying to establish at the moment.

The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retaining the

unhistoric passages of Scripture. Would he wish to see them sought for

and sifted out? Or, again, what would he propose concerning such of the

parables as are acknowledged by every liberal Churchman to be immoral,

as, for instance, the story of Dives and Lazarus and the Unjust

Steward—parables which can never have been spoken by our Lord, at any

rate not in their present shape? And here we have a remarkable instance

of his moderation and truly English good sense. “Do not touch one word

of them,” was his often-repeated exclamation. “If not directly inspired

by the mouth of God they have been indirectly inspired by the force of

events, and the force of events is the power and manifestation of God;

they could not have been allowed to come into their present position if

they had not been recognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of

indirect service to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by

these parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of

other and objective truths which they could not else have grasped.

“There can be no question that the communistic utterances of the third

gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew’s more spiritual and doubtless

more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been of inestimable

service to Christianity. Christ is not for the whole only, but also for

them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and what we are pleased to

call ‘dangerous’ classes, as well as for the more sober thinkers. To how

many do the words, ‘Blessed be ye poor: for your’s is the kingdom of

Heaven’ (Luke vi., 20), carry a comfort which could never be given by the

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ of Matthew v., 3. In Matthew we find,

‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their’s is the kingdom of Heaven.

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are

the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do

hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed

are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in

heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they

shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are

persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for their’s is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall

say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be

exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted

they the prophets which were before you.’ In Luke we read, ‘Blessed are

ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled. Blessed are ye that weep

now: for ye shall laugh. . . . But woe unto you that are rich! for ye

have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall

hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe

unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did _their_

fathers to the false prophets,’ where even the grammar of the last

sentence, independently of the substance, is such as it is impossible to

ascribe to our Lord himself.

“The ‘upper’ classes naturally turn to the version of Matthew, but the

‘lower,’ no less naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely that the

ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had not this

provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of the Saviour,

but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were seen by the

Almighty to be necessary for the full development of the highest ideal of

which mankind was capable. All that we have in the New Testament is the

inspired word, directly or indirectly, of God, the unhistoric no less

than the historic; it is for us to take spiritual sustenance from

whatever meats we find prepared for us, not to order the removal of this

or that dish; the coarser meats are for the coarser natures; as they grow

in grace they will turn from these to the finer: let us ourselves partake

of that which we find best suited to us, but do not let us grudge to

others the provision that God has set before them. There are many things

which though not objectively true are nevertheless subjectively true to

those who can receive them; and subjective truth is universally felt to

be even higher than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty

of obeying our consciences (which is the right _to us_) rather than any

dictate of man however much more objectively true. It is that which is

true _to us_ that we are bound each one of us to seek and follow.”

Having heard him thus far, and being unable to understand, much less to

sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which I had heard

elsewhere, I said to him, “Either our Lord did say the words assigned to

him by St. Luke or he did not. If he did, as they stand they are bad,

and any one who heard them for the first time would say that they were

bad; if he did not, then we ought not to allow them to remain in our

Bibles to the misleading of people who will thus believe that God is

telling them what he never did tell them—to the misleading of the poor,

whom even in low self-interest we are bound to instruct as fully and

truthfully as we can.”

He smiled and answered, “That is the Peter Bell view of the matter. I

thought so once, as, indeed, no one can know better than yourself.”

The expression upon his face as he said this was sufficient to show the

clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxious to get to

the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord never uttered these

words their being attributed to him must be due to fraud; to pious fraud,

but still to fraud.

“Not so,” he answered, “it is due to the weakness of man’s powers of

memory and communication, and perhaps in some measure to unconscious

inspiration. Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have had its

share in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to our Saviour,

yet their removal now that they have been consecrated by time would be a

still greater wrong. Would you defend the spoliation of the monasteries,

or the confiscation of the abbey lands? I take it no—still less would

you restore the monasteries or take back the lands; a consecrated change

becomes a new departure; accept it and turn it to the best advantage.

These are things to which the theory of the Church concerning lay baptism

is strictly applicable. _Fieri non debet_, _factum valet_. If in our

narrow and unsympathetic strivings after precision we should remove the

hallowed imperfections whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon

the gospels as well as upon all other aged things, not for twenty

generations will they resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which

our fussy meddlesomeness will have disturbed. Let them alone. It is as

they stand that they have saved the world.

“No change is good unless it is imperatively called for. Not even the

Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it, as I do in

anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction of many

generations of my countrymen. It is sanction which sanctifieth in

matters of this kind. I would no more undo the Reformation now than I

would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century. Leave the

historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together until the

harvest: that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticed when it

has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has done this. Note

how the very passages which you would condemn have died out of the regard

of any but the poor. Who quotes them? Who appeals to them? Who

believes in them? Who indeed except the poorest of the poor attaches the

smallest weight to them whatever? To us they are dead, and other

passages will die to us in like manner, noiselessly and almost

imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth of November died out of the

Prayer Book. One day the fruit will be hanging upon the tree, as it has

hung for months, the next it will be lying upon the ground. It is not

ripe until it has fallen of itself, or with the gentlest shaking; use no

violence towards it, confident that you cannot hurry the ripening, and

that if shaken down unripe the fruit will be worthless. Christianity

must have contained the seeds of growth within itself, even to the

shedding of many of its present dogmas. If the dogmas fall quietly in

their maturity, the precious seed of truth (which will be found in the

heart of every dogma that has been able to take living hold upon the

world’s imagination) will quicken and spring up in its own time: strike

at the fruit too soon and the seed will die.”

I should be sorry to convey an impression that I am responsible for, or

that I entirely agree with, the defence of the unhistoric which I have

here recorded. I have given it in my capacity of editor and in some sort

biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain that it is likely,

or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any considerable number of

Christians. But, surely, in these days of self-mystification it is

refreshing to see the boldness with which my brother thought, and the

freedom with which he contemplated all sorts of issues which are too

generally avoided. What temptation would have been felt by many to

soften down the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Gospels. How

few are those who will venture to follow the lead of scientific

criticism, and admit what every scholar must well know to be

indisputable. Yet if a man will not do this, he shows that he has

greater faith in falsehood than in truth.

Chapter III

ON my brother’s death I came into possession of several of his early

commonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some of these are

more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary. I do

not think that the reader will fail to be interested with the insight

into my brother’s spiritual and intellectual progress which a few

extracts from these writings will afford, and have therefore, after some

hesitation, decided in favour of making them public, though well aware

that my brother would never have done so. They are too exaggerated to be

dangerous, being so obviously unfair as to carry their own antidote. The

reader will not fail to notice the growth not only in thought but also in

literary style which is displayed by my brother’s later writings.

In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to, he had

written during his time of unbelief:—“Why are we to interpret so

literally all passages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist upon the

historical character of every miraculous account, while we are indignant

if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the precepts

concerning human conduct? He that hath two coats is not to give to him

that hath none: this would be ‘visionary,’ ‘utopian,’ ‘wholly

unpractical,’ and so forth. Or, again, he that is smitten on the one

cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the offender

over to the law; nor are the commands relative to indifference as to the

morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to be taken as they stand; nor

yet the warnings against praying in public; nor can the parables, any one

of them, be interpreted strictly with advantage to human welfare, except

perhaps that of the Good Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in

such passages as were already the common property of mankind before the

coming of Christ. The parables which every one praises are in reality

very bad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal

Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish

Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, are all

either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimate of the

character of God—an estimate far below the standard of the best earthly

kings; where they are not immoral, or do not tend to degrade the

character of God, they are the merest commonplaces imaginable, such as

one is astonished to see people accept as having been first taught by

Christ. Such maxims as those which inculcate conciliation and a

forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) are certainly good, but

the world does not owe their discovery to Christ, and they have had

little place in the practice of his followers.

“It is impossible to say that as a matter of fact the English people

forgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we will say in

the time of Augustus. The value of generosity and magnanimity was

perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these qualities assume

any nobler guise in the teaching of Christ than they did in that of the

ancient heathen philosophers. On the contrary, they have no direct

equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology. They are heathen words

drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with the same heathen ideas

of high spirit and good birth as belonged to them in the Latin language;

they are no part or parcel of Christianity, and are not only independent

of it, but savour distinctly of the flesh as opposed to the spirit, and

are hence more or less antagonistic to it, until they have undergone a

certain modification and transformation—until, that is to say, they have

been mulcted of their more frank and genial elements. The nearest

approach to them in Christian phrase is ‘self-denial,’ but the sound of

this word kindles no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of

generosity and nobility of conduct. At the thought of self-denial we

feel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of performing

some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to pretend to like, but

which we do not like. At the thought of generosity, we feel as one who

is going to share in a delightfully exhilarating but arduous pastime—full

of the most pleasurable excitement. On the mention of the word

generosity we feel as if we were going out hunting; at the word

‘self-denial,’ as if we were getting ready to go to church. Generosity

turns well-doing into a pleasure, self-denial into a duty, as of a

servant under compulsion.

“There are people who will deny this, but there are people who will deny

anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have

condemned the Falstaff plays, _Twelfth Night_, _The Tempest_, _A

Midsummer Night’s Dream_, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever

wrote; but there is no arguing against this. ‘Every man,’ said Dr.

Johnson, ‘has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right

to knock him down for it.’ But even granting that generosity and high

spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ, allowance must

be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during which time it is only

reasonable to suppose that an advance would have been made in

civilisation—and hence in the direction of clemency and

forbearance—whether Christianity had been preached or not, but no one can

show that the modern English, if superior to the ancients in these

respects, show any greater superiority than may be ascribed justly to

centuries of established order and good government.”

* * * * *

“Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, about which

so much has been written; is it one which would meet with all this

admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time? Surely it

offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison with that

offered by other highest ideals—the old Roman and Greek ideals, the

Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal.”

* * * * *

“As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount—where it is not

commonplace it is immoral, and _vice versâ_; the admiration which is so

freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to be but of

the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers, who have made

great reputations by telling people what they perfectly well knew; and

were in no particular danger of forgetting. There is, however, this

excuse for those who have been carried away with such musical but

untruthful sentences as ‘Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be

comforted,’ namely, that they have not come to the subject with unbiassed

minds. It is one thing to see no merit in a picture, and another to see

no merit in a picture when one is told that it is by Raphael; we are few

of us able to stand against the _prestige_ of a great name; our self-love

is alarmed lest we should be deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we

should be considered to be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded

person whether the world considered him to be of good taste or not, in

comparison with the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.

“But if this holds good about things which are purely matters of taste,

how much more does it do so concerning those who make a distinct claim

upon us for moral approbation or the reverse? Such a claim is most

imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: are we then content to

answer in the words of others—words to which we have no title of our

own—or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived opinion, and come to the

question with minds that are truly candid? Whoever shrinks from this is

a liar to his own self, and as such, the worst and most dangerous of

liars. He is as one who sits in an impregnable citadel and trembles in a

time of peace—so great a coward as not even to feel safe when he is in

his own keeping. How loose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is

worthless, how aspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out

and hurt him for communing truthfully with himself!

* * * * *

“That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something

considerable—this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing, or

whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in comparison with

the allowing oneself to be deceived. So in like manner with being bored.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the

bore. He who puts up with shoddy pictures, shoddy music, shoddy

morality, shoddy society, is more despicable than he who is the prime

agent in any of these things. He has less to gain, and probably deceives

himself more; so that he commits the greater crime for the less reward.

And I say emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold

as a Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash

nor wear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and blunders,

and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of Nessus.

“Oh! if men would but leave off lying to themselves! If they would but

learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, and exercise their

moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves what it is that they

really love and venerate. There is no such enemy to mankind as moral

cowardice. A downright vulgar self-interested and unblushing liar is a

higher being than the moral cur whose likes and dislikes are at the beck

and call of bullies that stand between him and his own soul; such a

creature gives up the most sacred of all his rights for something more

unsubstantial than a mess of pottage—a mental serf too abject even to

know that he is being wronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason,

whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the

most secret chambers of his heart!

“We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that he

was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving. He has

done wrong—still we can understand it, and he may yet have some useful

stuff about him—but what can we feel towards one who for a small motive

tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he is lying? What

useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thing be made of, and what

lies will there not come out of it, falling in every direction upon all

who come within its reach. The common self-deceiver of modern society is

a more dangerous and contemptible object than almost any ordinary felon,

a matter upon which those who do not deceive themselves need no

enlightenment.”

* * * * *

“But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of one part of

the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of the passages which

inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which all had agreed upon as

early as the days of Solomon and probably earlier? We have cut down

Christianity so as to make it appear to sanction our own conventions; but

we have not altered our conventions so as to bring them into harmony with

Christianity. We do not give to him that asketh; we take good care to

avoid him; yet if the precept meant only that we should be liberal in

assisting others—it wanted no enforcing: the probability is that it had

been enforced too much rather than too little already; the more literally

it has been followed the more terrible has the mischief been; the saying

only becomes harmless when regarded as a mere convention. So with most

parts of Christ’s teaching. It is only conventional Christianity which

will stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianity will never

do so. Men have tried it and found it fail; or, rather, its inevitable

failure was so obvious that no age or country has ever been mad enough to

carry it out in such a manner as would have satisfied its founders. So

said Dean Swift in his _Argument against abolishing Christianity_. ‘I

hope,’ he writes, ‘no reader imagines me so weak as to stand up in

defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times’ (if we may

believe the authors of those ages) ‘to have an influence upon men’s

beliefs and actions. To offer at the restoring of that would be, indeed,

a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow

all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom, to break the entire

frame and constitution of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and

sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts of

exchange and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the

proposal of Horace where he advises the Romans all in a body to leave

their city, and to seek a new seat in some remote part of the world by

way of cure for the corruption of their manners.

“‘Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogether unnecessary

(which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of cavilling),

since every candid reader will easily understand my discourse to be

intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the other having been

for some time wholly laid aside by general consent as utterly

inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and power.’

“Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world would relapse

into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which have created and

preserved civilisation. And what if some unhappy wretch, with a serious

turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all this talk about

Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act upon it? Into what

misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-long errors may he not

embitter the lives of his children!

* * * * *

“Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our eyes if they

offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of these sayings at our

will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, and should be

inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; we do gather up

riches, and indeed we do most things which the experience of mankind has

taught us to be to our advantage, quite irrespectively of any precept of

Christianity for or against. But why say that it is Christianity which

is our chief guide, when the words of Christ point in such a very

different direction from that which we have seen fit to take? Perhaps it

is in order to compensate for our laxity of interpretation upon these

points that we are so rigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which

make no demand upon our comfort or convenience? Thus, though we

conventionalise practice, we never conventionalise dogma. Here, indeed,

we stickle for the letter most inflexibly; yet one would have thought

that we might have had greater licence to modify the latter than the

former. If we say that the teaching of Christ is not to be taken

according to its import—why give it so much importance? Teaching by

exaggeration is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a being

higher than man; it might have been well once, and in the East, but it is

not well now. It induces more and more of that jarring and straining of

our moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable in the existing complex

condition of affairs, but of which the less the better. At present the

tug of professed principles in one direction, and of necessary practice

in the other, causes the same sort of wear and tear in our moral gear as

is caused to a steam-engine by continually reversing it when it is going

it at full speed. No mechanism can stand it.”

The above extracts (written when he was about twenty-three years old) may

serve to show how utter was the subversion of his faith. His mind was

indeed in darkness! Who could have hoped that so brilliant a day should

have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust? Yet as upon a winter’s

morning in November when the sun rises red through the smoke, and

presently the fog spreads its curtain of thick darkness over the city,

and then there comes a single breath of wind from some more generous

quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines again, and the gloom is gone;

or, again, as when the warm south-west wind comes up breathing kindness

from the sea, unheralded, suspected, when the earth is in her saddest

frost, and on the instant all the lands are thawed and opened to the

genial influences of a sweet springful whisper—so thawed his heart, and

the seed which had lain dormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew,

ripened, and brought forth an abundant harvest.

Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feel that

his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should have given the

greatest ground for hope. He was a genuine lover of truth in so far as

he could see it.

His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according to them,

and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in later life they

served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and to such only—the

enormity of his own mistakes. Better that a man should feel the

divergence between Christian theory and Christian practice, that he

should be shocked at it—even to the breaking away utterly from the theory

until he has arrived at a wider comprehension of its scope—than that he

should be indifferent to the divergence and make no effort to bring his

principles and practice into harmony with one another. A true lover of

consistency, it was intolerable to him to say one thing with his lips and

another with his actions. As long as this is true concerning any man,

his friends may feel sure that the hand of the Lord is with him, though

the signs thereof be hidden from mortal eyesight.

Chapter IV

DURING the dark and unhappy time when he had, as it seems to me, bullied

himself, or been bullied into infidelity, he had been utterly unable to

realise the importance even of such a self-evident fact as that our Lord

addressing an Eastern people would speak in such a way as Eastern people

would best understand; it took him years to appreciate this. He could

not see that modes of thought are as much part of a language as the

grammar and words which compose it, and that before a passage can be said

to be translated from one language into another it is often not the words

only which must be rendered, but the thought itself which must be

transformed; to a people habituated to exaggeration a saying which was

not exaggerated would have been pointless—so weak as to arrest the

attention of no one; in order to translate it into such words as should

carry precisely the same meaning to colder and more temperate minds, the

words would often have to be left out of sight altogether, and a new

sentence or perhaps even simile or metaphor substituted; this is plainly

out of the question, and therefore the best course is that which has been

taken, _i.e._, to render the words as accurately as possible, and leave

the reader to modify the meaning. But it was years before my brother

could be got to feel this, nor did he ever do so fully, simple and

obvious though it must appear to most people, until he had learned to

recognise the value of a certain amount of inaccuracy and inconsistency

in everything which is not comprehended in mechanics or the exact

sciences. “It is this,” he used to say, “which gives artistic or

spiritual value as contrasted with mechanical precision.”

In inaccuracy and inconsistency, therefore (within certain limits), my

brother saw the means whereby our minds are kept from regarding things as

rigidly and immutably fixed which are not yet fully understood, and

perhaps may never be so while we are in our present state of probation.

Life is not one of the exact sciences, living is essentially an art and

not a science. Every thing addressed to human minds at all must be more

or less of a compromise; thus, to take a very old illustration, even the

definitions of a point and a line—the fundamental things in the most

exact of the sciences—are mere compromises. A point is supposed to have

neither length, breadth, nor thickness—this in theory, but in practice

unless a point have a little of all these things there is nothing there.

So with a line; a line is supposed to have length, but no breadth, yet in

practice we never saw a line which had not breadth. What inconsistency

is there here, in requiring us to conceive something which we cannot

conceive, and which can have no existence, before we go on to the

investigation of the laws whereby the earth can alone be measured and the

orbits of the planets determined. I do not think that this illustration

was presented to my brother’s mind while he was young, but I am sure that

if it had been it would have made him miserable. He would have had no

confidence in mathematics, and would very likely have made a furious

attack upon Newton and Galileo, and been firmly convinced that he was

discomfiting them. Indeed I cannot forget a certain look of bewilderment

which came over his face when the idea was put before him, I imagine, for

the first time. Fortunately he had so grown that the right inference was

now in no danger of being missed. He did not conclude that because the

evidences for mathematics were founded upon compromises and definitions

which are inaccurate—therefore that mathematics were false, or that there

were no mathematics, but he learnt to feel that there might be other

things which were no less indisputable than mathematics, and which might

also be founded on facts for which the evidences were not wholly free

from inconsistencies and inaccuracies.

To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the “Sed tu vera

puta” argument of Juvenal. I greatly fear that an attempt may be made to

misrepresent him as taking this line; that is to say, as accepting

Christianity on the ground of the excellence of its moral teaching, and

looking upon it as, indeed, a superstition, but salutary for women and

young people. Hardly anything would have shocked him more profoundly.

This doctrine with its plausible show of morality appeared to him to be,

perhaps, the most gross of all immoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the

ground from under the feet of truth, luring the world farther and farther

from the only true salvation—the careful study of facts and of the safest

inferences that may be drawn from them. Every fact was to him a part of

nature, a thing sacred, pregnant with Divine teaching of some sort, as

being the expression of Divine will. It was through facts that he saw

God; to tamper with facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance of

the Almighty. To say that such and such was so and so, when the speaker

did not believe it, was to lead people to worship a false God instead of

a true one; an ειδωλον; setting them, to quote the words of the Psalmist,

“a-whoring after their own imaginations.” He saw the Divine presence in

everything—the evil as well as the good; the evil being the expression of

the Divine will that such and such courses should not go unpunished, but

bring pain and misery which should deter others from following them, and

the good being his sign of approbation. There was nothing good for man

to know which could not be deduced from facts. This was the only sound

basis of knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made

to stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand.

He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all the intensity of

his nature. It was because he believed that the Resurrection and

Ascension of our Lord were just as much matters of actual history as the

assassination of Julius Cæsar, and that they happened precisely in the

same way as every daily event happens at present—that he accepted the

Christian scheme in its essentials. Then came the details. Were these

also objectively true? He answered, “Certainly not in every case.” He

would not for the world have had any one believe that he so considered

them; but having made it perfectly clear that he was not going to deceive

himself, he set himself to derive whatever spiritual comfort he could

from them, just as he would from any noble fiction or work of art, which,

while not professing to be historical, was instinct with the soul of

genius. That there were unhistorical passages in the New Testament was

to him a fact; therefore it was to be studied as an expression of the

Divine will. What could be the meaning of it? That we should consider

them as true? Assuredly not this. Then what else? This—that we should

accept as subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious, and

be at liberty to leave all the rest alone—the unhistoric element having

been introduced purposely for the sake of giving greater scope and

latitude to the value of the ideal.

Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective truth of the

Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of danger of relapsing

into infidelity as long as his reason remained. During the years of his

illness his mind was clearly impaired, and no longer under his own

control; but while his senses were his own it was absolutely impossible

that he could be shaken by discrepancies and inconsistencies in the

gospels. What small and trifling things are such discrepancies by the

side of the great central miracle of the Resurrection! Nevertheless

their existence was indisputable, and was no less indisputably a cause of

stumbling to many, as it had been to himself. His experience of his own

sufferings as an unbeliever gave him a keener sympathy with those who

were in that distressing condition than could be felt by any one who had

not so suffered, and fitted him, perhaps, more than any one who has yet

lived to be the interpreter of Christianity to the Rationalist, and of

Rationalism to the Christian. This, accordingly, was the task to which

he set himself, having been singularly adapted for it by Nature, and as

singularly disciplined by events.

It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two parties

understand one another—a thing which had never yet been done, but which

was not at all impossible. For Protestantism is raised essentially upon

a Rationalistic base. When we come to a definition of Rationalism

nothing can be plainer than that it demands no scepticism from any one

which an English Protestant would not approve of. It is another matter

with the Church of Rome. That Church openly declares it as an axiom that

religion and reason have nothing to do with one another, and that

religion, though in flat contradiction to reason, should yet be accepted

from the hands of a certain order as an act of unquestioning faith. The

line of separation therefore between the Romanist and the Rationalist is

clear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement between the

two. Not so with the Protestant, who as heartily as the Rationalist

admits that nothing is required to be believed by man except such things

as can be reasonably proved—i.e., proved to the satisfaction of the

reason. No Protestant would say that the Christian scheme ought to be

accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason; we say that

Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn to follow as the

necessary consequence of using our reason rightly. We should be shocked

at being supposed to maintain otherwise. Yet this is pure Rationalism.

The Rationalist would require nothing more; he demurs to Christianity

because he maintains that if we bring our reason to bear upon the

evidences which are brought forward in support of it, we are compelled to

reject it; but he would accept it without hesitation if he believed that

it could be sustained by arguments which ought to carry conviction to the

reason. Thus both are agreed in principle that if the evidences of

Christianity satisfy human reason, then Christianity should be received,

but that on any other supposition it should be rejected.

Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the main

principle of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we all readily

admit, and with which we and our fathers have been as familiar for

centuries as with the air we breathe. Every Protestant is a Rationalist,

or else he ought to be ashamed of himself. Does he want to be called an

“Irrationalist”? Hardly—yet if he is not a Rationalist what else can he

be? No: the difference between us is one of detail, not of principle.

This is a great step gained.

The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the view which

the other took concerning the position which they had agreed to hold in

common. There was no work, so far as he knew, which would be accepted

both by Christians and unbelievers as containing a fair statement of the

arguments of the two contending parties: every book which he had yet seen

upon either side seemed written with the view of maintaining that its own

side could hold no wrong, and the other no right: neither party seemed to

think that they had anything to learn from the other, and neither that

any considerable addition to their knowledge of the truth was either

possible or desirable. Each was in possession of truth already, and all

who did not see and feel this must be either wilfully blinded, or

intensely stupid, or hypocrites.

So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement was

possible between them? Yet where, upon the Christian side, was the

attempt to grapple with the real difficulties now felt by unbelievers?

Simply nowhere. All that had been done hitherto was antiquated. Modern

Christianity seemed to shrink from grappling with modern Rationalism, and

displayed a timidity which could not be accounted for except by the

supposition of secret misgiving that certain things were being defended

which could not be defended fairly. This was quite intolerable; a

misgiving was a warning voice from God, which should be attended to as a

man valued his soul. On the other hand, the conviction reasonably

entertained by unbelievers that they were right on many not

inconsiderable details of the dispute, and that so-called orthodox

Christians in their hearts knew it but would not own it—or that if they

did not know it, they were only in ignorance because it suited their

purpose to be so—this conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to

infidels, as though they must be right in the whole because they were so

in part; they therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental

arguments in support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had

been put forward in the front rank, and been far too obstinately

defended. They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had

erred even more through pride of intellect and conceit than their

opponents through timidity.

What then was to be done? Surely this; to explain the two contending

parties to one another; to show to Rationalists that Christians are right

upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of their

allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and Ascension

of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the most imperious

demands of modern criticism. This would form the first and most

important part of the task. Then should follow a no less convincing

proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the historical accuracy

of much which has been too obstinately defended by so-called orthodox

writers. This would be the second part. Was there not reason to hope

that when this was done the two parties might understand one another, and

meet in a common Christianity? He believed that there was, and that the

ground had been already cleared for such mutual compromise as might be

accepted by both sides, not from policy but conviction. Therefore he

began writing the book which it has devolved upon myself to edit, and

which must now speak for itself. For him it was to suffer and to labour;

almost on the very instant of his having done enough to express his

meaning he was removed from all further power of usefulness.

The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken place some

three or four years before my return from America. With it had also come

that sudden development of intellectual and spiritual power which so

greatly astonished even those who had known him best. The whole man

seemed changed—to have become possessed of an unusually capacious mind,

instead of one which was acute, but acute only. On looking over the

earlier letters which I received from him when I was in America, I can

hardly believe that they should have been written by the same person as

the one to whom, in spite of not a few great mental defects, I afterwards

owed more spiritual enrichment than I have owed to any other person. Yet

so it was. It came upon me imperceptibly that I had been very stupid in

not discovering that my brother was a genius; but hardly had I made the

discovery, and hardly had the fragment which follows this memoir received

its present shape, when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a

state little better than idiocy. His originally cheerful spirits left

him, and were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing could

disturb. He became incapable either of mental or physical exertion, and

was pronounced by the best physicians to be suffering from some obscure

disease of the brain brought on by excitement and undue mental tension:

in this state he continued for about four years, and died peacefully, but

still as one in the profoundest melancholy, on the 15th of March, 1872,

aged 40.

Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I never

ventured to propose that I should edit his book during his own life-time.

On his death I found his papers in the most deplorable confusion. The

following chapters had alone received anything like a presentable

shape—and these providentially are the most essential.

A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a fulfilment which

bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt of. No one now believes

that the Book of Revelation is to be taken as foretelling events which

will happen in the same way as the massacre, for instance, of St.

Bartholomew, indeed it is doubtful how far the whole is not to be

interpreted as an allegory, descriptive of spiritual revolutions; yet

surely my mother’s dream as to the future of one, at least, of her sons

has been strangely verified, and it is believed that the reader when he

lays down this volume will feel that there have been few more potent

witnesses to the truth of Christ than John Pickard Owen.

The Fair Haven

Chapter I

Introduction

IT is to be feared that there is no work upon the evidences of our faith,

which is as satisfactory in its completeness and convincing power as we

have a right to expect when we consider the paramount importance of the

subject and the activity of our enemies. Otherwise why should there be

no sign of yielding on the part of so many sincere and eminent men who

have heard all that has been said upon the Christian side and are yet not

convinced by it? We cannot think that the many philosophers who make no

secret of their opposition to the Christian religion are unacquainted

with the works of Butler and Paley—of Mansel and Liddon. This cannot be:

they must be acquainted with them, and find them fail.

Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain wilful and

prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can overcome, and granting

also that men very much preoccupied with any one pursuit (more especially

a scientific one) will be apt to give but scant and divided attention to

arguments upon other subjects such as religion or politics, nevertheless

we have so many opponents who profess to have made a serious study of

Christian evidences, and against whose opinion no exception can be fairly

taken, that it seems as though we were bound either to admit that our

demonstrations require rearrangement and reconsideration, or to take the

Roman position, and maintain that revelation is no fit subject for

evidence but is to be accepted upon authority. This last position will

be rejected at once by nine-tenths of Englishmen. But upon rejecting it

we look in vain for a work which shall appear to have any such success in

arresting infidelity as attended the works of Butler and Paley in the

last century. In their own day these two great men stemmed the current

of infidelity: but no modern writers have succeeded in doing so, and it

will scarcely be said that either Butler or Paley set at rest the many

serious and inevitable questions in connection with Christianity which

have arisen during the last fifty years. We could hardly expect one of

the more intelligent students at Oxford or Cambridge to find his mind set

once and for ever free from all rising doubt either by the _Analogy_ or

the _Evidences_. Suppose, for example, that he has been misled by the

German writers of the Tübingen school, how will either of the above-named

writers help him? On the contrary, they will do him harm, for they will

not meet the requirements of the case, and the inference is too readily

drawn that nothing else can do so. It need hardly be insisted upon that

this inference is a most unfair one, but surely the blame of its being

drawn rests in some measure at the door of those whose want of

thoroughness has left people under the impression that no more can be

said than what has been said already.

It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute towards

establishing Christian evidences upon a more secure and self-evident base

than any upon which they are made to rest at present, so far, that is to

say, as a work which deliberately excludes whole fields of Christian

evidence can tend towards so great a consummation. In spite of the

narrow limits within which I have resolved to keep my treatment of the

subject, I trust that I may be able to produce such an effect upon the

minds of those who are in doubt concerning the evidences for the hope

that is in them, that henceforward they shall never doubt again. I am

not sanguine enough to suppose that I shall be able to induce certain

eminent naturalists and philosophers to reopen a question which they have

probably long laid aside as settled; unfortunately it is not in any but

the very noblest Christian natures to do this, nevertheless, could they

be persuaded to read these pages I believe that they would find so much

which would be new to them, that their prejudices would be greatly

shaken. To the younger band of scientific investigators I appeal more

hopefully.

It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and devoted a

life-time to writing an exhaustive work? The answer suggests itself that

the believer is in no want of such a book, while the unbeliever would be

repelled by its size. Assuredly there can be no doubt as to the value of

a great work which should meet objections derived from certain recent

scientific theories, and confute opponents who have arisen since the

death of our two great apologists, but as a preliminary to this a smaller

and more elementary book seems called for, which shall give the main

outlines of our position with such boldness and effectiveness as to

arrest the attention of any unbeliever into whose hands it may fall, and

induce him to look further into what else may be urged upon the Christian

side. We are bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have a

better chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offer them

a short and pregnant book than if we come to them with a long one from

which whole chapters might be pruned. We have to bring the Christian

religion to men who will look at no book which cannot be read in a

railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most deplorable that this should

be the case, nevertheless it is indisputably a fact, and as such must be

attended to by all who hope to be of use in bringing about a better state

of things. And let me add that never yet was there a time when it so

much behoved all who are impressed with the vital power of religion to

bestir themselves; for the symptoms of a general indifference, not to say

hostility, must be admitted to be widely diffused, in spite of an

imposing array of facts which can be brought forward to the contrary; and

not only this, but the stream of infidelity seems making more havoc

yearly, as it might naturally be expected to do, when met by no new works

of any real strength or permanence.

Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action, it seemed

best to take the most overwhelming of all miracles—the Resurrection of

our Lord Jesus Christ, and show that it can be so substantiated that no

reasonable man should doubt it. This I have therefore attempted, and I

humbly trust that the reader will feel that I have not only attempted it,

but done it, once and for all so clearly and satisfactorily and with such

an unflinching examination of the most advanced arguments of unbelievers,

that the question can never be raised hereafter by any candid mind, or at

any rate not until science has been made to rest on different grounds

from those on which she rests at present.

But the truth of our Lord’s resurrection having been once established,

what need to encumber this book with further evidences of the miraculous

element in his ministry? The other miracles can be no insuperable

difficulty to one who accepts the Resurrection. It is true that as

Christians we cannot dwell too minutely upon every act and incident in

the life of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have to deal with those who

are not Christians, and must consider rather what we can get them to take

than what we should like to give them: “Be ye wise as serpents and

harmless as doves,” saith the Saviour. A single miracle is as good as

twenty, provided that it be well established, and can be shewn to be so:

it is here that even the ablest of our apologists have too often failed;

they have professed to substantiate the historical accuracy of all the

recorded miracles and sayings of our Lord, with a result which is in some

instances feeble and conventional, and occasionally even unfair (oh! what

suicidal folly is there in even the remotest semblance of unfairness),

instead of devoting themselves to throwing a flood of brilliancy upon the

most important features and leaving the others to shine out in the light

reflected from these. Even granting that some of the miracles recorded

of our Lord are apocryphal, what of that? We do not rest upon them: we

have enough and more than enough without them, and can afford to take the

line of saying to the unbeliever, “Disbelieve this miracle or that if you

find that you cannot accept it, but believe in the Resurrection, of which

we will put forward such ample proofs that no healthy reason can

withstand them, and, having accepted the Resurrection, admit it as the

manifestation of supernatural power, the existence of which can thus no

longer be denied.”

Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and candour about

this which must carry more weight with an opponent than any strained

defence of such a doubtful miracle as the healing of the impotent man at

the pool of Bethesda? We weight ourselves as against our opponents by

trying to defend too much; no matter how sound and able the defence of

one part of the Christian scheme may have been, its effect is often

marred by contiguity with argument which the writer himself must have

suspected, or even known, to be ingenious rather than sound: the moment

that this is felt in any book its value with an opponent is at an end,

for he must be continually in doubt whether the spirit which he has

detected here or there may not be existing and at work in a hundred other

places where he has not detected it. What carries weight with an

antagonist is the feeling that his position has been mastered and his

difficulties grasped with thoroughness and candour.

On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitter experience. I

say that want of candour and the failure to grasp the position occupied,

however untenably, by unbelievers is the chief cause of the continuance

of unbelief. When this cause has been removed unbelief will die a

natural death. For years I was myself a believer in nothing beyond the

personality and providence of God: yet I feel (not without a certain

sense of bitterness, which I know that I should not feel but cannot

utterly subdue) that if my first doubts had been met with patient

endeavour to understand their nature and if I had felt that the one in

whom I confided had been ready to go to the root of the matter, and even

to yield up the convictions of a life-time could it be shewn that they

were unsafely founded, my doubts would have been resolved in an hour or

two’s quiet conversation, and would at once have had the effect, which

they have only had after long suffering and unrest, of confirming me in

my allegiance to Christ. But I was met with anger and impatience. There

was an instinct which told me that my opponent had never heard a syllable

against his own convictions, and was determined not to hear one: on this

I assumed rashly that he must have good reason for his resolution; and

doubt ripened into unbelief. Oh! what years of heart-burning and utter

drifting followed. Yet when I was at last brought within the influence

of one who not only believed all that my first opponent did, but who also

knew that the more light was thrown upon it the more clearly would its

truth be made apparent—a man who talked with me as though he was anxious

that I should convince him if he were in error, not as though bent on

making me believe whatever habit and circumstances had imposed as a

formula upon himself—my heart softened at once, and the dry places of my

soul were watered.

The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its introduction here,

yet the experience is one which should not be without its value to

others. Its effect upon myself has been to give me an unutterable

longing to save others from sufferings like my own; I know so well where

it is that, to use a homely metaphor, the shoe pinches. And it is

chiefly here—in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel as though we

really wanted to understand him. This feeling is in many cases

lamentably well founded. No one likes hearing doubt thrown upon anything

which he regards as settled beyond dispute, and this, happily, is what

most men feel concerning Christianity. Again, indolence or impotence of

mind indisposes many to intellectual effort; others are pained by coming

into contact with anything which derogates from the glory due to the

great sacrifice of Christ, or to his Divine nature, and lastly not a few

are withheld by moral cowardice from daring to bestow the pains upon the

unbeliever which his condition requires. But from whichever of these

sources the disinclination to understand him comes, its effect is equally

disastrous to the unbeliever. People do not mind a difference of

opinion, if they feel that the one who differs from them has got a firm

grasp of their position; or again, if they feel that he is trying to

understand them but fails from some defect either of intellect or

education, even in this case they are not pained by opposition. What

injures their moral nature and hardens their hearts is the conviction

that another could understand them if he chose, but does not choose, and

yet none the less condemns them. On this they become imbued with that

bitterness against Christianity which is noticeable in so many

free-thinkers.

Can we greatly wonder? For, sad though the admission be, it is only

justice to admit that we Christians have been too often contented to

accept our faith without knowing its grounds, in which case it is more by

luck than by cunning that we are Christians at all, and our faith will be

in continual danger. The greater number even of those who have

undertaken to defend the Christian faith have been sadly inclined to

avoid a difficulty rather than to face it, unless it is so easy as to be

no real difficulty at all. I do not say that this is unnatural, for the

Christian writer must be deeply impressed with the sinfulness of

unbelief, and will therefore be anxious to avoid raising doubts which

will probably never yet have occurred to his reader, and might possibly

never do so; nor does there at first sight appear to be much advantage in

raising difficulties for the sole purpose of removing them; nevertheless

I cannot think that if either Butler or Paley could have foreseen the

continuance of unbelief, and the ruin of so many souls whom Christ died

to save, they would have been contented to act so almost entirely upon

the defensive.

Yet it is impossible not to feel that we in their place should have done

as they did. Infidelity was still in its infancy: the nature of the

disease was hardly yet understood; and there seemed reason to fear lest

it might be aggravated by the very means taken to cure it; it seemed

safer therefore in the first instance to confine attention to the matter

actually in debate, and leave it to time to suggest a more active

treatment should the course first tried prove unsatisfactory. Who can be

surprised that the earlier apologists should have felt thus in the

presence of an enemy whose novelty made him appear more portentous than

he can ever seem to ourselves? They were bound to venture nothing

rashly; what they did they did, for their own age, thoroughly; we owe it

to their cautious pioneering that we so know the weakness of our

opponents and our own strength as to be able to do fearlessly what may

well have seemed perilous to our forefathers: nevertheless it is easy to

be wise after the event, and to regret that a bolder course was not taken

at the outset. If Butler and Paley had fought as men eager for the fray,

as men who smelt the battle from afar, it is impossible to believe that

infidelity could have lasted as long as it has. What can be done now

could have been done just as effectively then, and though we cannot be

surprised at the caution shewn at first, we are bound to deplore it as

short-sighted.

The question, however, for ourselves is not what dead men might have done

better long ago, but what living men and women can do most wisely now;

and in answer to it I would say that there is no policy so unwise as fear

in a good cause: the bold course is also the wise one; it consists in

being on the lookout for objections, in finding the very best that can be

found and stating them in their most intelligible form, in shewing what

are the logical consequences of unbelief, and thus carrying the war into

the enemy’s country; in fighting with the most chivalrous generosity and

a determination to take no advantage which is not according to the rules

of war most strictly interpreted against ourselves, but within such an

interpretation showing no quarter. This is the bold course and the true

course: it will beget a confidence which can never be felt in the

wariness, however well-intentioned, of the old defenders.

Let me, therefore, beg the reader to follow me patiently while I do my

best to put before him the main difficulties felt by unbelievers. When

he is once acquainted with these he will run in no danger of confirming

doubt through his fear in turning away from it in the first instance.

How many die hardened unbelievers through the treatment which they have

received from those to whom their Christianity has been a matter of

circumstances and habit only? Hell is no fiction. Who, without bitter

sorrow, can reflect upon the agonies even of a single soul as being due

to the selfishness or cowardice of others? Awful thought! Yet it is one

which is daily realised in the case of thousands.

In the commonest justice to brethren, however sinful, each one of us who

tries to lead them to the Saviour is bound not only to shew them the

whole strength of our own arguments, but to make them see that we

understand the whole strength of theirs; for men will not seriously

listen to those whom they believe to know one side of a question only.

It is this which makes the educated infidel so hard to deal with; he

knows very well that an intelligent apprehension of the position held by

an opponent is indispensable for profitable discussion; but he very

rarely meets with this in the case of those Christians who try to argue

with him; he therefore soon acquires a habit of avoiding the subject of

religion, and can seldom be induced to enter upon an argument which he is

convinced can lead to nothing.

He who would cure a disease must first know what it is, and he who would

convert an infidel must know what it is that he is to be converted from,

as well as what he is to be led to; nothing can be laid hold of unless

its whereabouts is known. It is deplorable that such commonplaces should

be wanted; but, alas! it is impossible to do without them. People have

taken a panic on the subject of infidelity as though it were so

infectious that the very nurses and doctors should run away from those

afflicted with it; but such conduct is no less absurd than cruel and

disgraceful. _Infidelity is only infectious when it is not understood_.

The smallest reflection should suffice to remind us that a faith which

has satisfied the most brilliant and profound of human intellects for

nearly two thousand years must have had very sure foundations, and that

any digging about them for the purpose of demonstrating their depth and

solidity, will result, not in their disturbance, but in its being made

clear to every eye that they are laid upon a rock which nothing can

shake—that they do indeed satisfy every demand of human reason, which

suffers violence not from those who accept the scheme of the Christian

redemption, but from those who reject it.

This being the case, and that it is so will, I believe, appear with great

clearness in the following pages, what need to shrink from the just and

charitable course of understanding the nature of what is urged by those

who differ from us? How can we hope to bring them to be of one mind in

Christ Jesus with ourselves, unless we can resolve their difficulties and

explain them? And how can we resolve their difficulties until we know

what they are? Infidelity is as a reeking fever den, which none can

enter safely without due precautions, but the taking these precautions is

within our own power; we can all rely upon the blessed promises of the

Saviour that he will not desert us in our hour of need if we will only

truly seek him; there is more infidelity in this shrinking and fear of

investigation than in almost any open denial of Christ; the one who

refuses to examine the doubts felt by another, and is prevented from

making any effort to remove them through fear lest he should come to

share them, shews either that he has no faith in the power of

Christianity to stand examination, or that he has no faith in the

promises of God to guide him into all truth. In either case he is hardly

less an unbeliever than those whom he condemns.

Let the reader therefore understand that he will here find no attempt to

conceal the full strength of the arguments relied on by unbelievers.

This manner of substantiating the truth of Christianity has unhappily

been tried already; it has been tried and has failed as it was bound to

fail. Infidelity lives upon concealment. Shew it in broad daylight,

hold it up before the world and make its hideousness manifest to

all—then, and not till then, will the hours of unbelief be numbered.

_We_ have been the mainstay of unbelief through our timidity. Far be it

from me, therefore, that I should help any unbeliever by concealing his

case for him. This were the most cruel kindness. On the contrary, I

shall insist upon all his arguments and state them, if I may say so

without presumption, more clearly than they have ever been stated within

the same limits. No one knows what they are better than I do. No one

was at one time more firmly persuaded that they were sound. May it be

found that no one has so well known how also to refute them.

The reader must not therefore expect to find fictitious difficulties in

the way of accepting Christianity set up with one hand in order to be

knocked down again with the other: he will find the most powerful

arguments against all that he holds most sacred insisted on with the same

clearness as those on his own side; it is only by placing the two

contending opinions side by side in their utmost development that the

strength of our own can be made apparent. Those who wish to cry peace,

peace, when there is no peace, those who would take their faith by

fashion as the take their clothes, those who doubt the strength of their

own cause and do not in their heart of heart believe that Christianity

will stand investigation, those, again, who care not who may go to Hell

provided they are comfortably sure of going to Heaven themselves, such

persons may complain of the line which I am about to take. They on the

other hand whose faith is such that it knows no fear of criticism, and

they whose love for Christ leads them to regard the bringing of lost

souls into his flock as the highest earthly happiness—such will admit

gladly that I have been right in tearing aside the veil from infidelity

and displaying it uncloaked by the side of faith itself.

At the same time I am bound to confess that I never should have been able

to see the expediency, not to say the absolute necessity for such a

course, unless I had been myself for many years an unbeliever. It is

this experience, so bitterly painful, that has made me feel so strongly

as to the only manner in which others can be brought from darkness into

light. The wisdom of the Almighty recognised that if man was to be saved

it must be done by the assumption of man’s nature on the part of the

Deity. God must make himself man, or man could never learn the nature

and attributes of God. Let us then follow the sublime example of the

incarnation, and make ourselves as unbelievers that we may teach

unbelievers to believe. If Paley and Butler had only been _real

infidels_ for a single year, instead of taking the thoughts and

reasonings of their opponents at second-hand, what a difference should we

not have seen in the nature of their work. Alas! their clear and

powerful intellects had been trained early in the severest exercises;

they could not be misled by any of the sophistries of their opponents;

but, on the other hand, never having been misled they knew not the thread

of the labyrinth as one who has been shut up therein.

I should also warn the reader of another matter. He must not expect to

find that I can maintain everything which he could perhaps desire to see

maintained. I can prove, to such a high degree of presumption as shall

amount virtually to demonstration, that our Lord died upon the cross,

rose again from the dead upon the third day, and ascended into Heaven:

but I cannot prove that none of the accounts of these events which have

come down to us have suffered from the hand of time: on the contrary, I

must own that the reasons which led me to conclude that there must be

confusion in some of the accounts of the Resurrection continue in full

force with me even now. I see no way of escaping from this conclusion:

but it seems equally strange that the Christian should have such an

indomitable repugnance to accept it, and that the unbeliever should

conceive that it inflicts any damage whatever upon the Christian

evidences. Perhaps the error of each confirms that of the other, as will

appear hereafter.

I have spoken hitherto as though I were writing only for men, but the

help of good women can never be so precious as in the salvation of human

souls; if there is one work for which women are better fitted than

another, it is that of arresting the progress of unbelief. Can there be

a nobler one? Their superior tact and quickness give them a great

advantage over men; men will listen to them when they would turn away

from one of their own sex; and though I am well aware that courtesy is no

argument, yet the natural politeness shewn by a man to a woman will

compel attention to what falls from her lips, and will thus perhaps be

the means of bringing him into contact with Divine truths which would

never otherwise have reached him. Yet this is a work from which too many

women recoil in horror—they know that they can do nothing unless they are

intimately acquainted with the opinions of those from whom they differ,

and from such an intimacy they believe that they are right in shrinking.

Oh, my sisters, my sisters, ye who go into the foulest dens of disease

and vice, fearless of the pestilence and of man’s brutality, ye whose

whole lives bear witness to the cross of Christ and the efficacy of the

Divine love, did one of you ever fear being corrupted by the vice with

which you came in contact? Is there one of you who fears to examine why

it is that even the most specious form of vice is vicious? You fear not

infection here, for you know that you are on sure ground, and that there

is no form of vice of which the viciousness is not clearly provable; but

can you doubt that the foundation of your faith is sure also, and can you

not see that your cowardice in not daring to examine the foul and

soul-destroying den of infidelity is a stumbling-block to those who have

not yet known their Saviour? Your fear is as the fear of children who

dare not go in the dark; but alas! the unbeliever does not understand it

thus. He says that your fear is not of the darkness but of the light,

and that you dare not search lest you should find that which would make

against you. Hideous blasphemy against the Lord! But is not the sin to

be laid partly at the door of those whose cowardice has given occasion

for it?

Is there none of you who knows that as to the pure all things are pure,

so to the true and loyal heart all things will confirm its faith? You

shrink from this last trial of your allegiance, partly from the pain of

even seeing the wounds of your Redeemer laid open—of even hearing the

words of those enemies who have traduced him and crucified him afresh—but

you lose the last and highest of the prizes, for great as is your faith

now, be very sure that from this crowning proof of your devotion you

would emerge with greater still.

Has none of you seen a savage dog barking and tearing at the end of his

chain as though he were longing to devour you, and yet if you have gone

bravely up to him and bade him be still, he is cowed and never barks

again? Such is the genius of infidelity; it loves to threaten those who

retreat, yet it shrinks daunted back from those who meet it boldly; it is

the lack of boldness on the part of the Christian which gives it all its

power; when Christians are strong in the strength of their own cause

infidels will know their impotence, but as long as there are cowards

there will be those who prey upon cowardice, and as long as those who

should defend the cross of Christ hide themselves behind battlements, so

long will the enemy come up to the very walls of the defence and trouble

them that are within. The above words must have sounded harsh and will I

fear have given pain to many a tender heart which is conscious of the

depth of its own love for the Redeemer, and would be shocked at the

thought that anything had been neglected in his service, but has not the

voice of such a heart returned answer to itself that what I have written

is just?

Again, I have been told by some that they have been aware of the

necessity of doing their best towards putting a stop to infidelity, and

that they have been unceasing in their prayers for friends or husbands or

relations who know not Christ, but that with prayers their efforts have

ended. Now, there can be no one in the whole world who has had more

signal proofs of the efficacy of prayer than the writer of these pages,

but he would lie if he were to say that prayer was ever answered when it

was only another name for idleness, a cloak for the avoidance of obvious

duty. God is no helper of the indolent and the coward; if this were so,

what need to work at all? Why not sit still, and trust in prayer for

everything? No; to the women who have prayed, and prayed only, the

answer is ready at hand, that work without prayer is bad, but prayer

without work worse. Let them do their own utmost in the way of sowing,

planting, and watering, and then let them pray to God that he will

vouchsafe them the increase; but they can no more expect the increase to

be of God’s free gift without the toil of sowing than did the blessed

Apostle St. Paul. If God did not convert the heathen for Paul and

Apollos in answer to their prayers alone, how can we expect that he will

convert the infidel for ourselves, unless we have first followed in the

footsteps of the Apostles? The sin of infidelity will rest upon us and

our children until we have done our best to shake it off; and this not

timidly and disingenuously as those who fear for the result, but with the

certainty that it is the infidel and not the Christian who need fear

investigation, if the investigation only goes deep enough. Herein has

lain our error, we have feared to allow the unbeliever to put forth all

his strength lest it should prove stronger than we thought it was, when

in truth the world would only have known the sooner of its weakness; and

this shall now at last be abundantly shewn, for, as I said above, I will

help no infidel by concealing his case; it shall appear in full, and as

nearly in his own words as the limits at my disposal will allow. Out of

his own mouth shall he be condemned, and yet, I trust, not condemned

alone; but converted as I myself, and by the same irresistible chain of

purest reason; one thing only is wanted on the part of the reader, it is

this, the desire to attain truth regardless of past prejudices.

If an unbeliever has made up his mind that we must be wrong, without

having heard our side, and if he presumes to neglect the most ordinary

precaution against error—that of understanding the position of an

opponent—I can do nothing with him or for him. No man can make another

see, if the other persists in shutting his eyes and bandaging them: if it

is a victory to be able to say that they cannot see the truth under these

circumstances, the victory is with our opponents; but for those who can

lay their hands upon their heart and say truly before God and man that

they care nothing for the maintenance of their own opinions, but only

that they may come to know the truth, for such I can do much. I can put

the matter before them in so clear a light that they shall never doubt

hereafter.

Never was there a time when such an exposition was wanted so much as now.

The specious plausibilities of a pseudo-science have led hundreds of

thousands into error; the misapplication of geology has ensnared a host

of victims, and a still greater misapplication of natural history seems

likely to devour those whom the perversion of geology has spared. Not

that I have a word to say against _true_ science: true science can never

be an enemy of the Bible, which is the text-book of the science of the

salvation of human souls as written by the great Creator and Redeemer of

the soul itself, but the Enemy of Mankind is never idle, and no sooner

does God vouchsafe to us any clearer illumination of his purposes and

manner of working, than the Evil One sets himself to consider how he can

turn the blessing into a curse; and by the all-wise dispensation of

Providence he is allowed so much triumph as that he shall sift the wise

from the foolish, the faithful from the traitors. God knoweth his own.

Still there is no surer mark that one is among the number of those whom

he hath chosen than the desire to bring all to share in the gracious

promises which he has vouchsafed to those that will take advantage of

them; and there are few more certain signs of reprobation than

indifference as to the existence of unbelief, and faint-heartedness in

trying to remove it. It is the duty of all those who love Christ to lead

their brethren to love him also; but how can they hope to succeed in this

until they understand the grounds on which he is rejected?

For there _are_ grounds, insufficient ones, untenable ones, grounds which

a little loving patience and, if I may be allowed the word, ingenuity,

will shew to be utterly rotten; but as long as their rottenness is only

to be asserted and not proved, so long will deluded people build upon

them in fancied security. As yet the proof has never been made

sufficiently clear. If displayed sufficiently for one age it has been

necessary to do the work again for the next. As soon as the errors of

one set of people have been made apparent, another set has arisen with

fresh objections, or the old fallacies have reappeared in another shape.

It is not too much to say that it has never yet been so clearly proved

that Christ rose again from the dead, that a jury of educated Englishmen

should be compelled to assent to it, even though they had never before

heard of Christianity. This therefore it is my object to do once and for

ever now.

It is not for me to pry into the motives of the Almighty, nor to inquire

why it is that for nearly two thousand years the perfection of proof

should never have been duly produced, but if I dare hazard an opinion I

should say that such proof was never necessary until now, but that it has

lain ready to be produced at a moment’s notice on the arrival of the

fitting time. In the early stages of the Church the _vivâ voce_

testimony of the Apostles was still so near that its force was in no way

spent; from those times until recently the universality of belief was

such that proof was hardly needed; it is only for a hundred years or so

(which in the sight of God are but as yesterday) that infidelity has made

real progress. Then God raised his hand in wrath; revolution taught men

to see the nature of unbelief and the world shrank back in horror; the

time of fear passed by; unbelief has again raised itself; whereon we can

see that other and even more fearful revolutions {82} are daily

threatening. What country is safe? In what part of the world do not men

feel an uneasy foreboding of the wrath which will surely come if they do

not repent and turn unto the Lord their God? Go where we will we are

conscious of that heaviness and oppression which is the precursor of the

hurricane and the earthquake; none escape it: an all-pervading sense of

rottenness and fearful waiting upon judgment is upon the hearts of all

men. May it not be that this awe and silence have been ordained in order

that the still small voice of the Lord may be the more clearly heard and

welcomed as salvation? Is it not possible that the infinite mercy of God

is determined to give mankind one last chance, before the day of that

coming which no creature may abide? I dare not answer: yet I know well

that the fire burneth within me, and that night and day I take no rest

but am consumed until the work committed to me is done, that I may be

clear from the blood of all men.