intelligent faith which God requires from his intelligent offspring,
may be fairly inferred to be such as we have already stated;--that the
evidence for the truths we are to believe shall be, first, such as our
faculties are competent to appreciate, and against which, therefore, the
mere negative argument arising from our ignorance of the true solution
of such difficulties, as are, perhaps, insoluble because we are finite,
can be no reply; and, secondly, such an amount of this evidence as shall
fairly overbalance all the objections which we can appreciate. This is
the condition to which God has obviously subjected us as inhabitants of
this world; and it is on such evidence we are here perpetually acting.
We now believe a thousand things we cannot fully comprehend. We may not
see the intrinsic evidence of their truth, but their extrinsic evidence
is sufficient to induce us unhesitatingly to believe, and to act
upon them. When that evidence is sufficient in amount, we allow it to
overbear all the individual difficulties and perplexities which
hang round the truths to which it is applied, unless, indeed, such
difficulties can be proved to involve absolute contradictions; for
these, of course, no evidence can substantiate. For example, in a
thousand cases, a certain combination of merely circumstantial evidence
in favour of a certain judicial decision, is familiarly allowed
to vanquish all apparent discrepancy on particular and subordinate
points;--the want of concurrence in the evidence of the witnesses on
such points shall not cause a shadow of a doubt as to the conclusion.
For we feel that it is far more improbable that the conclusion should be
untrue, than that the difficulty we cannot solve is truly incapable of
a solution; and when the evidence reaches this point the objection no
longer troubles us.
It is the same with historic investigations. There are ten thousand
facts in history which no one doubts, though the narrators of them may
materially vary in their version, and though some of the circumstances
alleged may be in appearance inexplicable, but the last thing a
man would think of doing, in such cases, would be to neglect the
preponderant evidence on account of the residuum of insoluble
objections. He does not, in short, allow his ignorance to control his
knowledge, nor the evidence which he has not got to destroy what he has;
and the less so, that experience has taught him that in many cases such
apparent difficulties have been cleared up, in the course of time,
and by the progress of knowledge, and proved to be contradictions in
appearance only.
It is the same with the conclusions of natural philosophy, when well
proved by experiment, however unaccountable for awhile may be the
discrepancy with apparently opposing phenomena. No one disbelieves the
Copernican theory now; though thousands did for awhile, on what they
believed the irrefragable evidence of their senses. Now, let us only
suppose the Copernican theory not to have been discovered by human
reason, but made known by revelation, and its reception enjoined on
faith, leaving the apparent inconsistency with the evidence of the
senses just as it was. Thousands, no doubt, would have said, that no
such evidence could justify them in disbelieving their own eyes,
and that such an insoluble objection was sufficient to overturn
the evidence. Yet we now see, in point of fact, that it is not only
possible, but true, that the objection was apparent only, and admits of
a complete solution. Thousands accordingly receive philosophy--this
very philosophy--on testimony which apparently contradicts their senses,
without even yet knowing more of it than if it were revealed from
heaven. This gives too much reason to suspect, that in other and higher
cases, the will has much to do with human scepticism. Nor do we well
know what thousands who neglect religion on account of the alleged
uncertainty of its evidence could reply, if God were to say to them,
'And yet on such evidence, and that far inferior in degree, you have
never hesitated to act, when your own temporal interests were concerned.
You never feared to commit the bark of your worldly fortunes to that
fluctuating element. In many cases you believed on the testimony of
others what seemed even to contradict your own senses. Why were you so
much more scrupulous in relation to ME?'
The above examples are fair illustrations, we venture to think, of the
conditions under which we are required to believe the far higher truths,
attended no doubt with great difficulties, which are authenticated in
the pages of the two volumes (Nature and Scripture) which God has put
into our hands to study; of the conditions to which He subjects us
in training us for a future state, and developing in us the twofold
perfection involved in the words 'a reasonable faith.' If the
considerations just urged were duly borne in mind, we cannot help
thinking that they would afford (where any modesty remained) all answer
to most of those forms of unbelief which, from time to time, rise up in
the world, and not least in our own day. These are usually founded on
one or more supposed insoluble objections, arising out of our ignorance.
The probability that they are incapable of solution is rashly assumed,
and made to overbear the far stronger probability arising from the
positive and appreciable evidence which substantiates the truths
involved in those difficulties: a course the more unreasonable inasmuch
as--first, many such difficulties might be expected; and, secondly,
in analogous cases, we see that many such difficulties have in time
disappeared. On the other hand, it is, no doubt much more easy to insist
on individual objections, which no man can effectually answer, than it
is to appreciate at once the total effect of many lines of argument, and
many sources of evidence, all bearing on one point. That difficulty was
long ago beautifully stated by Butler*, in a passage well worthy of the
reader's perusal; and as Pascal had observed before him, not only is it
difficult, but impossible, for the human mind to retain the impression
of a large combination of evidence, even if it could for a moment fully
realise the collective effect of the whole. But it cannot do even this,
any more than the eye can take in at once, in mass and detail, the
objects of an extensive landscape.
____
* 'The truth of our religion, like the truth of common matters, is to
be judged of by all the evidence taken together. And, unless the whole
series of things which may be alleged in this argument, and every
particular thing in it, can reasonably be supposing to have been by
accident (for here the stress of the argument of Christianity lies),
then is the truth of it proved. . . . It is obvious how much advantage
the nature of this evidence gives to those persons who attack
Christianity, especially in conversation. For it is easy to show in
a short and lively manner that such and such things are liable to
objection, but impossible to show, in like manner, the united force of
the whole argument in one view.'--Analogy, part II. chap. vii.
____
Let us now be permitted briefly to apply the preceding principles to
two of the greatest controversies which have exercised the minds of men;
that which relates to the existence of God, and that which relates to
the truth of Christianity; in both of which, if we mistake not, man's
position is precisely similar--placed, that is, amidst evidence
abundantly sufficient to justify his reasonable faith, and yet attended
with difficulties abundantly sufficient to baffle an indocile reason.
Without entering into the many different sources of argument for the
existence of a Supreme Intelligence, we shall only refer to that proof
on which all theists, savage and civilised, in some form or other,
rely--the traces of an 'eternal power and godhead' in the visible
creation. The argument depends on a principle which, whatever may be its
metaphysical history or origin, is one which man perpetually recognises,
which every act of his own consciousness verifies, which he applies
fearlessly to every phenomenon, known or unknown; and it is this,--That
every effect has a cause (though he knows nothing of their connexion),
and that effects which bear marks of design have a designing cause. This
principle is so familiar that if he were to affect to doubt it in any
practical case in human life, he would only be laughed at as a fool, or
pitied as insane. The evidence, then, which substantiates the greatest
and first of truths mainly depends on a principle perfectly familiar and
perfectly recognised. Man can estimate the nature of that evidence; and
the amount of it, in this instance, he sees to be as vast as the sum of
created objects;--nay, far more, for it is as vast as the sum of their
relations. So that if (as is apt to be the case) the difficulties of
realising this tremendous truth are in proportion to the extent of
knowledge and the powers of reflection, the evidence we can perfectly
appreciate is cumulative in an equal or still higher proportion. Obvious
as are the marks of design in each individual object, the sum of proof
is not merely the sum of such indications, but that sum infinitely
multiplied by the relations established and preserved amongst all these
objects; by the adjustment which harmonises them all into one system,
and impresses on all the parts of the universe a palpable order and
subordination. While even in a single part of an organised being (as a
hand or an eye) the traces of design are not to be mistaken, these are
indefinitely multiplied by similar proofs of contrivance in the
many individual organs of one such being--as of an entire animal or
vegetable. These are yet to be multiplied by the harmonious relations
which are established of mutual proportion and subserviency amongst all
the organs of any one such being: And as many beings even of that one
species or class as there are, so many multiples are there of the same
proofs. Similar indications yield similar proofs of design in each
individual part, and in the whole individual of all the individuals
of every other class of beings; and this sum of proof is again to
be multiplied by the proofs of design in the adjustment and mutual
dependence and subordination of each of these classes of organised
beings to every other, and to all; of the vegetable to the animal---of
the lower animal to the higher. Their magnitudes, numbers, physical
force, faculties, functions, duration of life, rates of multiplication
and development, sources of subsistence, must all have been determined
in exact ratios, and could not transgress certain limits without
involving the whole universe in confusion. This amazing sum of
probabilities is yet to be further augmented by the fact that all these
classes of organised substances are intimately related to those great
elements of the material world in which they live, to which they are
adapted, and which are adapted to them; that all of them are subject to
the influence of certain mighty and subtle agencies which pervade all
nature,--and which are of such tremendous potency that any chance error
in their proportions of activity would be sufficient to destroy all, and
which yet axe exquisitely balanced and inscrutably harmonised.
The proofs of design, arising from the relations thus maintained between
all the parts, from the most minute to the most vast, of our own world,
are still to be further multiplied by the inconceivably momentous
relations subsisting between our own and other planets and their common
centre; amidst whose sublime and solemn phenomena science has most
clearly discovered that everything is accurately adjusted by geometrical
precision of force and movement; where the chances of error are
infinite, and the proofs of intelligence, therefore, equal. These proofs
of design in each fragment of the universe, and in all combined, are
continually further multiplied by every fresh discovery, whether in the
minute or the vast--by the microscope or the telescope; for every fresh
law that is discovered, being in harmony with all that has previously
been discovered, not only yields its own proof of design, but infinitely
more, by all the relations in which it stands to other laws: it yields,
in fact, as many as there are adjustments which have been effected
between itself and all besides. Each new proof of design, therefore, is
not a solitary fact; but one which entering as another element into a
most complex machinery, indefinitely multiplies the combinations, in any
one of which chance might have gone astray. From this infinite array
of proofs of design, it seems to man's reason, in ordinary moods, stark
madness to account for the phenomena of the universe upon any other
supposition than that which docs account, and can alone account, for
them all,--the supposition of a Presiding Intelligence, illimitable
alike in power and in wisdom.
The only difficulty is justly to appreciate such an argument to obtain a
sufficiently vivid impression of such an accumulation of probabilities.
This very difficulty, indeed, in some moods, may minister to a temporary
doubt. For let us catch man in those moods,--perhaps after long
meditation on the metaphysical grounds of human belief,--and he begins
to doubt, with unusual modesty, whether the child of dust is warranted
to conclude anything on a subject which loses itself in the infinite,
and which so far transcends all his powers of apprehension; he begins
half to doubt, with Hume, whether he can reason analogically from the
petty specimens of human ingenuity to phenomena so vast and so unique;
a misgiving which is strengthened by reflecting on all those to him
incomprehensible inferences to which the admission of the argument leads
him, and which seem almost to involve contradictions. Let him ponder for
awhile the ideas involved in the notion of Selfsubsistence, Eternity,
Creation; Power, Wisdom, and Knowledge, so unlimited as to embrace at
once all things, and all their relations, actual and possible,--this
'unlimited' expanding into a dim apprehension of the 'infinite';--of
infinitude of attributes, omnipresent in every point of space, and
yet but one and not many infinitudes;--let him once humbly ponder such
incomprehensible difficulties as these, and he will soon feel that
though in the argument from design, there seemed but one vast scene of
triumph for his reason, there is as large a scene of exertion left for
his faith. That faith he ordinarily yields; he sees it is justified by
those proofs of the great truth he can appreciate, and which he will
not allow to be controlled by the difficulties his conscious feebleness
cannot solve; and the rather, that he sees that if he does not
accept that evidence, he has equally incomprehensible difficulties to
encounter, and two or three stark contradictions into the bargain. His
reason, therefore, triumphs in the proofs, and his faith triumphs over
the difficulties.
It is the same with the doctrine of the Divine government of the world.
In ordinary states of mind man counts it an absurdity to suppose
that the Deity would have created a world to abandon it; that, having
employed wisdom and power so vast in its construction, he would leave
it to be the sport of chance. He feels that the intuitions of right and
wrong; the voice of conscience; satisfaction in well-doing; remorse for
crime; the present tendency, at least, of the laws of the universe,--all
point to the same conclusion, while their imperfect fulfilment equally
points to a future and more accurate adjustment. Yet let the man look
exclusively for awhile on the opposite side of the tapestry; let him
brood over any of the facts which seem at war with the above conclusion;
on some signal triumph of baseness and malignity; on oppressed virtue,
on triumphant vice; on 'the wicked spreading himself like a green bay
tree;' and especially on the mournfull and inscrutable mystery of the
'Origin of Evil,' and he feels that 'clouds and darkness' envelope the
administration of the Moral Governor, though 'justice and judgment are
the habitation of his throne.' The evidences above mentioned for the
last conclusion are direct and positive, and such as man can appreciate;
the difficulties spring from his limited capacity, or imperfect
glimpses of a very small segment of the universal plan. Nor are those
difficulties less upon the opposite hypothesis: and they are there
further burdened with two or three additional absurdities. The
preponderant evidence, far from removing the difficulties, scarcely
touches them,--yet it is felt to be sufficient to justify faith, though
most abundant faith is required still.
Are the evidences, then, in behalf of Christianity less of a nature
which man can appreciate? or can the difficulties involved in its
reception be greater than in the preceding cases? If not, and if,
moreover, while the evidence turns as before on principles with which we
are familiar, the more formidable objections, as before, are such that
we are not competent to decide upon their absolute insolubility, we
see how man ought to act; that is, not to let his ignorance control his
knowledge, but to let his reason accept the proofs which justify his
faith, in accepting the difficulties. In no case is he, it appears,
warranted to look for the certainty which shall exclude (whatever the
triumphs of his reason) a gigantic exercise of his faith. Let us briefly
consider a few of the evidences. And in order to give the statement a
little novelty, we shall indicate the principal topics of evidence, not
by enumerating what the advocate of Christianity believes in believing
it to be true, but what the infidel must believe in believing it to
be false. The a priori objection to Miracles we shall briefly touch
afterwards.
First, then, in relation to the Miracles of the New Testament, whether
they be supposed masterly frauds on men's senses committed at the time
and by the parties supposed in the records, or fictions (designed
or accidental) subsequently fabricated--but still, in either case,
undeniably successful and triumphant beyond all else in the history
whether of fraud or fiction--the infidel must believe as follows: On
the first hypothesis, he must believe that a vast number of apparent
miracles--involving the most astounding phenomena--such as the instant
restoration of the sick, blind, deaf, and lame, and the resurrection
of the dead--performed in open day, amidst multitudes of malignant
enemies--imposed alike on all, and triumphed at once over the strongest
prejudices and the deepest enmity:--those who received them and those
who rejected them differing only in the certainly not very trifling
particular--as to whether they came from heaven or from hell. He
must believe that those who were thus successful in this extraordinary
conspiracy against men's senses and against common sense, were Galilaean
Jews, such as all history of the period represents them; ignorant,
obscure, illiterate; and, above all, previously bigoted, like all
their countrymen, to the very system, of which, together with all other
religions on the earth, they modestly meditated the abrogation; he must
believe that, appealing to these astounding frauds in the face both of
Jews and Gentiles as an open evidence of the truth of a new revelation,
and demanding on the strength of them that their countrymen should
surrender a religion which they acknowledged to be divine, and that all
other nations should abandon their scarcely less venerable systems
of superstition, they rapidly succeeded in both these very probable
adventures; and in a few years, though without arms, power, wealth,
or science, were to an enormous extent victorious over all prejudice,
philosophy, and persecution; and in three centuries took nearly
undisputed possession, amongst many nations, of the temples of the
ejected deities. He must farther believe that the original performers,
in these prodigious frauds on the world, acted not only without
any assignable motive, but against all assignable motive; that they
maintained this uniform constancy in unprofitable falsehoods, not only
together, but separately, in different countries, before different
tribunals, under all sorts of examinations and cross-examinations, and
in defiance of the gyves, the scourge, the axe, the cross, the stake;
that these whom they persuaded to join their enterprise, persisted like
themselves in the same obstinate belief of the same 'cunningly
devised' frauds; and though they had many accomplices in their singular
conspiracy, had the equally singular fortune to free themselves and
their coadjutors flout all transient weakness towards their cause and
treachery towards one another; and, lastly, that these men, having,
amidst all their ignorance, originality enough to invent the most pure
and sublime system of morality which the world has ever listened to,
had, amidst all their conscious villany, the effrontery to preach it,
and, which is more extraordinary, the inconsistency to practise it!*
____
* So far as we have any knowledge from history, this must have been the
case; and Gibbon fully admits and insists upon it. Indeed, no infidel
hypothesis can afford to do without the virtues of the early Christians
in accounting for the success of the falsehoods of Christianity. Hard
alternatives of a wayward hypothesis!
____
On the second of the above-mentioned hypothesis, that these miracles
were either a congeries of deeply contrived fictions, or accidental
myths, subsequently invented, the infidel must believe, on the former
supposition, that, though even transient success in literary forgery,
when there are any prejudices to resist, is among the rarest of
occurrences; yet that these forgeries--the hazardous work of many minds,
making the most outrageous pretensions, and necessarily challenging the
opposition of Jew and Gentile were successful beyond all imagination,
over the hearts of mankind; and have continued to impose, by an
exquisite appearance of artless truth, and a most elaborate mosaic of
feigned events artfully cemented into the ground of true history, on
the acutest minds of different races and different ages; while, on the
second supposition, he must believe that accident and chance have given
to these legends their exquisite appearance of historic plausibility;
and on either supposition, he must believe (what is still more
wonderful) that the world, while the fictions were being published, and
in the known absence of the facts they asserted to be true, suffered
itself to be befooled into the belief of their truth, and out of its
belief of all the systems it did previously believe to be true; and
that it acted thus notwithstanding persecution from without, as well
as prejudice front within; that strange to say the strictest historic
investigation bring this compilation of fictions or myths-even by the
admission of Strauss himself--within thirty or forty years of the very
time in which all the alleged wonders they relate are said to have
occurred; wonders which the perverse world knew it had not seen, but
which it was determined to believe in spite of evidence, prejudice, and
persecution! In addition to all this, the infidel must believe that the
men who were engaged in the compilation of these monstrous fictions,
chose them as the vehicle of the purest morality; and, though the most
pernicious deceivers of mankind were yet the most scrupulous preachers
of veracity and benevolence! Surely of him, who can receive all these
paradoxes--and they form but a small part of what might be mentioned--we
may say, 'O infidel, great is thy Faith!'
On the supposition that neither of these theories, whether of fraud
or fiction, will account, if taken by itself, for the whole of the
supernatural phenomena, which strew the pages of the New Testament, then
the objector, who relies on both, must believe, in turn, both sets of
the above paradoxes; and then, with still more reason than before, may
we exclaim, 'O infidel, great is thy Faith!'