seem to connect Prophecy with the facts of the origin and history
of Christianity,--some, embracing events too vast for hazardous
speculations and others, incidents too minute for it,--are purely
fortuitous; that all the cases in which the event seems to tally with
the prediction, are mere chance coincidences: and he must believe
this, amongst other events, of two of the most unlikely to which human
sagacity was likely to pledge itself, and yet which have as undeniably
occurred, (and after the predictions) as they were a priori improbable
and anomalous in the world's history; the one is that the Jews should
exist as a distinct nation in the very bosom of all other nations,
without extinction, and without amalgamation,--other nations and even
races having so readily melted away under less than half the
influence which have been at work upon them*; the other, and opposite
paradox,--that a religion, propagated by ignorant, obscure, and
penniless vagabonds, should diffuse itself amongst the most diverse
nations in spite of all opposition,--it being the rarest of phenomena to
find any religion which is capable of transcending the limits of race,
clime, and the scene of its historic origin; a religion which, if
transplanted, will not die, a religion which is more than a local or
national growth of superstition! That such a religion as Christianity
should so easily break these barriers, and though supposed to be cradled
in ignorance, fanaticism, and fraud, should, without force of arms,
and in the face of persecution, 'ride forth conquering and to conquer,'
through a long career of victories, defying the power of kings and
emptying the temples of deities,--who, but an infidel, has faith enough
to believe?+
____
* The case of the Gipsies, often alleged as a parallel, is a ludicrous
evasion of the argument. These few and scattered vagabonds, whose very
safety has been obscurity and contempt, have never attracted towards
them a thousandth part of the attention, or the hundred thousandth part
of the cruelties, which have been directed against the Jews. Had it been
otherwise, they would long since have melted away from every country in
Europe. We repeat that the existence of a nation for 1800 years in the
bosom of all nations, conquered and persecuted, yet never extinguished,
and the propagation of a religion amongst different races without force,
and even against it,--are both, so far as known, paradoxes in history.
+ 'They may say,' says Butler, 'that the conformity between the
prophecies and the event is by accident; but there are many instances in
which such conformity itself cannot be denied.' His whole remarks on the
subject, and especially those on the impression to be derived from the
multitude of apparent coincidences, in a long series of prophecies, some
vast, some minute; and the improbability of their all being accidental
are worthy of his comprehensive genius. It is on the effect of the
whole, not on single coincidences, that the argument depends.
____
Once more then; if, from the external evidences of this religion, we
pass to those which the only records by which we know any thing of its
nature and origin supplies, the infidel must believe, amongst other
paradoxes, that it is probable that a knot of obscure and despised
plebeians--regarded as the scum of a nation which was itself regarded as
the scum of all other nations--originated the purest, most elevated, and
most influential theory of ethics the world has ever seen; that a system
of sublimest truth, expressed with unparalleled simplicity, sprang
from ignorance; that precepts enjoining the most refined sanctity were
inculcated by imposture; that the first injunctions to universal love
broke from the lips of bigotry! He must further believe that these men
exemplified the ideal perfection of that beautiful system in the most
unique, original, and faultless picture of virtue ever conceived--a
picture which has extorted the admiration even of those who could not
believe it to be a portrait, and who have yet confessed themselves
unable to account for it except as such.* He must believe, too, that
these ignorant and fraudulent Galileans voluntarily aggravated the
difficulty of their task, by exhibiting their proposed ideal, not by
bare enumeration and description of qualities, but by the most arduous
of all methods of representation--that of dramatic action; and, what is
more, that they succeeded; that in that representation they undertook
to make him act with sublime consistency in scenes of the most
extraordinary character and the most touching pathos, and utter moral
truth in the most exquisite fictions in which such truth was ever
embodied; and that again they succeeded; that so ineffably rich in
genius were these obscure wretches, that no less than four of them were
found equal to this intellectual achievement; and while each has told
many events, and given many traits which the others have omitted, that
they have all performed their task in the same unique style of invention
and the same unearthly tone of art; that one and all, while preserving
each his own individuality, has, nevertheless, attained a certain
majestic simplicity of style unlike any tiring else (not only in
any writings of their own nation, their alleged sacred writings,
and infinitely superior to any thing which their successors, Jews
or Christians, though with the advantage of these models, could ever
attain,) but, unlike any acknowledged human writings in the world, and
possessing the singular property of being capable of ready transfusion,
without the loss of a thought or a grace, into every language spoken by
man: he must believe that these fabricators of fiction, in common with
the many other contributors to the New Testament, most insanely added to
the difficulty of their task by delivering the whole in fragments and in
the most various kinds of composition,--in biography, history, travels,
and familiar letters; incorporating and interfusing with the whole
an amazing number of minute facts, historic allusions, and specific
references to persons, places, and dates, as if for the very purpose of
supplying posterity with the easy means of detecting their impositions:
he must believe that, in spite of their thus encountering what Paley
calls the 'danger of scattering names and circumstances in writings
where nothing but truth can preserve consistency,' they so happy
succeeded, that whole volumes have been employed pointing out their
latent and often most recondite congruities; many of them lying so deep,
and coming out after such comparison of various passages and collateral
lights, that they could never have answered the purposes of fraud,
even if the most prodigious genius for fraud had been equal to the
fabrication; congruities which, in fact, were never suspected to exist
till they were expressly elicited by the attacks of Infidelity, and were
evidently never thought of by the writers; he must believe that they
were profoundly sagacious enough to construct such a fabric of artful
harmonies, and yet such simpletons as, by doing infinitely more than
was necessary, to encounter infinite risks of detection, to no purpose;
sagacious enough to out-do all that sagacity has ever done, as shown
by the effects, and yet not sagacious enough to be merely specious: and
finally, he must believe that these illiterate impostors had the art
in all their various writings, which evidently proceed from different
minds, to preserve the same inimitable marks of reality, truth, and
nature in their narrations--the miraculous and the ordinary alike--and
to assume and preserve, with infinite case, amidst their infinite
impostures, the tone and air of undissembled earnestness.+
____
* To Christ alone, of all the characters ever portrayed to man, belongs
that assemblage of qualities which equally attract love and veneration;
to him alone belong in perfection those rare traits which the Roman
historian, with affectionate flattery, attributes too absolutely to the
merely mortal object of his eulogy: 'Nec illi, quod est rarissimum aut
facilitas auctoritatem, aut severitas amorem, deminuit.' Still more
beautiful is the Apostles description of superiority to all Human
failings, with ineffable pity for human sorrows: 'He can be touched with
the feelings of our infirmities, though without sin.' + Was there ever
in truth a man who could read the appeals of Paul to his converts, and
doubt either that the letters were real or that the man was in earnest?
We scarcely venture to think it.
____
If, on the other hand, he supposes that all the congruities of which
we have spoken, were the effect not of fraudulent design, but of happy
accident,--that they arranged themselves in spontaneous harmony--he must
believe that chance has done what even the most prodigious powers of
invention could not do. And lastly, he must believe that these same
illiterate men, who were capable of so much, were also capable of
projecting a system of doctrine singularly remote from all ordinary and
previous speculation; of discerning the necessity of taking under their
special patronage those passive virtues which man least loved, and found
it must difficult to cultivate; and of exhibiting, in their preference
of the spiritual to the ceremonial, and their treatment of many of the
most delicate questions of practical ethics and casuistry, a justness
and elevation of sentiment as alien as possible from the superstition
and fanaticism of their predecessors who had corrupted the Law--and the
superstition and fanaticism of their followers very soon corrupted the
Gospel; and that they, and they alone, rose above the strong tendencies
to the extravagances which had been so conspicuous during the past,
and were soon to be as conspicuous in the future.--These and a thousand
other paradoxes (arising out of the supposition that Christianity is
the fraudulent or fictitious product of such an age, country, and, above
all, such men as the problem limits us to), must the infidel receive,
and receive all at once; and of him who can receive them we can but once
more declare that so far 'from having no faith', he rather possesses
the 'faith' which removes 'mountains!'--only it appears that his faith,
like that of Rome or of Oxford, is a faith which excludes reason.
On the other hand, to him who accepts Christianity, none of these
paradoxes present themselves. On the supposition of the truth of
the miracles and the prophecies, he does not wonder at its origin
or success: and as little does he wonder at all the literary and
intellectual achievements of its early chroniclers--if their elevation
of sentiment was from a divine source, and if the artless harmony, and
reality of their narratives was the simple effect of the consistency of
truth, and of transcription from the life.
Now, on the other hand, what are the chief objections which Reconcile
the infidel to his enormous burden of paradoxes, and which appear to the
Christian far less invincible than the paradoxes themselves? They
are, especially with all modern infidelity, objections to the a priori
improbability of the doctrines revealed, and of the miracles which
sustain them. Now, here we come to the very distinction on which we
have already insisted, and which is so much insisted on by Butler. The
evidence which sustains Christianity is all such as man is competent to
consider; and is precisely of the same nature as that which enters into
his every-day calculations of probability; While the objections are
founded entirely on our ignorance and presumption. They suppose that we
know more of the modes of the divine administration--of what God may
have permitted, of what is possible and impossible to the ultimate
development of an imperfectly developed system, and its relations to the
entire universe,--than we do or can know.*
___
* The possible implications of Christianity with distant regions of the
universe, and the dim hints which hints which Scripture seems to throw
out as to such implication, are beautifully treated in the 4th, 5th,
and 6th of Chalmer's 'Astronomical Discourses;' and we need not tell the
read of Butler how much he insists upon similar considerations.
____
Of these objections the most widely felt and the most specious,
especially in our day, is the assumption that miracles are an
impossibility+; and yet we will venture to say that there is none more
truly unphilosophical. That miracles are improbable viewed in relation
to the experience of the individual or of the mass of men, is granted;
for if they were not, they would, as Paley says, be no miracles; an
every-day miracle is none. But that they are either impossible or so
improbable that, if they were wrought, no evidence could establish them,
is another matter. The first allegation involves a curious limitation of
omnipotence; and the second affirms in effect, that, if God were to work
a miracle, it would be our duty to disbelieve him!
___
+ It is, as we shall see, the avowed axiom of Strauss; he even
acknowledges, that if it be not true, he would not think it worth while
to discredit the history of the Evangelists; that is, the history
must be discredited, because he has resolved that a miracle is an
impossibility!
____
We repeat our firm conviction that this a priori assumption against
miracles is but a vulgar illusion of one of Bacon's idola tribus. So
far from being disposed to admit the principle that a 'miracle is an
impossibility,' we shall venture on what may seem to some a paradox, but
which we are convinced is a truth,--that time will come, and is coming,
when even those who shall object to the evidence which sustains the
Christian miracles will acknowledge that philosophy requires them to
admit that men have no ground whatever to dogmatise on the antecedent
impossibility of miracles in general; and that not merely because if
theists at all, they will see the absurdity of the assertion, while
they admit that the present order of things had a beginning; and, if
Christians at all, the equal absurdity of the assertion, while they
admit that it will have an end;--not only because the geologist will
have familiarised the world with the idea of successive interventions,
and, in fact, distinct creative acts, having all the nature of
miracles;--not only, we say, for these special reasons, but for a
more general one. The true philosopher will see that, with his limited
experience and that of all his contemporaries, he has no right to
dogmatise about all that may have been permitted or will be permitted
in the Divine administration of the universe; he will see that those
who with one voice denied, about half a century ago, the existence of
aerolites, and summarily dismissed all the alleged facts as a silly
fable, because it contradicted their experience,--that those who refused
to admit the Copernican theory because, as they said, it manifestly
contradicted their experience,--that the schoolboy who refuses to admit
the first law of motion because, as he says, it gives the lie to all
his experience,--that the Oriental prince (whose scepticism Hume vainly
attempts, on his principle, to meet) who denied the possibility of ice
because it contradicted his experience,--and, in the same manner, that
the men who, with Dr. Strauss, lay down the dictum that a miracle
is impossible and a contradiction because it contradicts their
experience,--have all been alike contravening the first principles of
the modest philosophy of Bacon, and have fallen into one of the most
ordinary illusions against which he has warned us namely, that that
cannot be true which seems in contradiction to our own experience. We
confidently predict that the day will come when the favourite argument
of many so called philosopher in this matter will be felt to be the
philosophy of the vulgar only; and that though many may, even then, deny
that the testimony which supports the Scripture miracles is equal to
the task, they will all alike abandon the axiom which supersedes the
necessity of at all examining such evidence, by asserting that no
evidence can establish them.
While on this subject, we may notice a certain fantastical tone of
depreciation of miracles as an evidence of Christianity, which is
occasionally adopted even by some who do not deny the possibility or
probability, or even the fact, of their occurrence. They affirm them to
be of little moment, and represent them--with an exquisite affectation
of metaphysical propriety--as totally incapable of convincing men of any
moral truth; upon the ground that there is no natural relation between
any displays of physical power and any such truth. Now without denying
that the nature of the doctrine is a criterion, and must be taken into
account in judging of the reality of any alleged miracle, we have but
two things to reply to this: first, that, as Paley says in relation
to the question whether any accumulation of testimony can establish a
miraculous fact, we are content 'to try the theorem upon a simple case,'
and affirm that man is so constituted that if he himself sees the blind
restored to sight and the dead raised, under such circumstances as
exclude all doubt of fraud on the part of others and all mistake on
his own, he will uniformly associate authority with such displays of
superhuman power; and, secondly, that the notion in question is in
direct contravention of the language and spirit of Christ himself, who
expressly suspends his claims to men's belief and the authority of
his doctrine on the fact of his miracles. 'The works that I do in my
Father's name, they bear witness of me.' 'If ye believe not me, believe
my works.' 'If I had not come among them, and done the works that none
other man did, they had not had sin; but now they have no cloak for
their sin.'
We have enumerated some of the paradoxes which infidelity is required
to believe; and the old-fashioned, open, intelligible infidelity of the
last century accepted them, and rejected Christianity accordingly. That
was a self-consistent, simple, Ingenuous thing, compared with those
monstrous forms of credulous reason, incredulous faith, metaphysical
mysticism, even Christian Pantheism--so many varieties of which have
sprung out of the incubation of German rationalism and German philosophy
upon the New Testament. The advocates of these systems, after
adopting the most formidable of the above paradoxes of infidelity, and
(notwithstanding the frequent boast of originality) depending mainly
on the same objections, and defending them by the very same critical
arguments*, delude themselves with the idea that they have but purified
and embalmed Christianity; not aware that they have first made a mummy
of it. They are so greedy of paradox, that they, in fact, aspire to be
Christians and infidels at the same time. Proclaiming the miracles of
Christianity to be illusions of imagination or mythical legends,--the
inspiration of its records no other or greater than that of Homer's
'Iliad,' or even 'Aesop's Fables;'--rejecting the whole of that
supernatural clement with which the only records which can tell us
any thing about the matter are full; declaring its whole history
so uncertain that the ratio of truth to error must be a vanishing
fraction;--the advocates of these systems yet proceed to rant and
rave--they are really the only words we know which can express our
sense of their absurdity--in a most edifying vein about the divinity
of Christianity, and to reveal to us its true glories. 'Christ,' says
Strauss, 'is not an individual, but an idea; that is to say, humanity.
In the human race behold the God-made-man! behold the child of the
visible virgin and the invisible Father!--that is, of matter and of
mind; behold the Saviour, the Redeemer, the Sinless One; behold him who
dies, who is raised again, who mounts into the heavens I Believe in this
Christ! In his death, his resurrection, man is justified before God!'+
____
* The main objection, both with the old and the new forms of infidelity,
is, that against the miracles; the main argument with both, those which
attempt to show their antecedent impossibility; and criticism directed
against the credulity of the records which contain them. The principal
difference is, that modern infidelity shrinks from the coarse imputation
of fraud and imposture on the founders of Christianity; and prefers the
theory of illusion or myth to that of deliberate fraud. But with this
exception, which touches only the personal character of the founders
of Christianity, the case remains the same. The same postulates and the
same arguments are made to yield substantially the same conclusion.
For, all that is supernatural in Christianity and all credibility in
its records, vanish equally on either assumption. Nor is even the modern
mode of interpreting many of the miracles (as illusions or legends)
unknown to the older infidelity; only it more consistently felt that
neither the one theory nor the other, could be trusted to alone. Velis
et remis was its motto. + Such is Quinet's brief statement of Strauss's
mystico-mythical Christiantity, founded on the Hegelian philosophy.
For a fuller, we dare not say a more intelligible, account of it in
Strauss's own words, and the metaphysical mysteries on which it depends,
the reader may consult Dr. Beard's translation;--pp. 44, 45. of his
Essay entitled 'Strauss, Hegel, and their Opinions.
____
Whether it be the Rationalism of Paulus, or the Rationalism of
Strauss--whether that which declares all that is supernatural in
Christianity (forming the bulk of its history) to be illusion, or that
which declares it myth,--the conclusions can be made out only by a
system of interpretation which can be compared to nothing but the
wildest dreams and allegorical systems of some of the early Fathers#;
while the results themselves are either those elementary principles of
ethics for which there was no need to invoke a revelation at all,
or some mystico-metaphysical philosophy, expressed in language as
unintelligible as the veriest gibberish of the Alexandrian Platonists.
In fact, by such exegesis and by such philosophy, any thing may be made
out of any thing; and the most fantastical data be compelled to yield
equally fantastical conclusions.
____
# Of the mode of accounting for the supernatural occurrences in the
Scriptures by the illusion produced by mistaken natural phenomena,
(perhaps the most stupidly jejune of all the theories ever projected
by man), Quinet eloquently says, 'The pen which wrote the Provincial
Letters would be necessary to lay bare the strange consequences of this
theology. According to its conclusion, the tree of good and evil was
nothing but a venomous plant, probably a manchineal tree, under which
our first parents fell asleep. The shining face of Moses on the heights
of Mount Sinai was the natural result of electricity; the vision of
Zachariah was effected by the smoke of the chandeliers in the temple;
the Magian kings, with their offerings of myrrh, of gold, and of
incense, were three wandering merchants, who brought some glittering
tinsel to the Child of Bethlehem; the star which went before them a
servant bearing a flambeau; the angels in the scene of the temptation, a
caravan traversing the desert, laden with provisions; the two angels in
the tomb, clothed in white linen, an illusion caused by a linen garment;
the Transfiguration, a storm.' Who would not sooner be an old-fashioned
infidel than such a doting and maundering rationalist?
____
But the first and most natural question to ask is obviously this: how
any mortal can pretend to extract any thing certain, much more divine,
from records, the great bulk of which he has reduced to pure frauds,
illusions, or legends,--and the great bulk of the remainder to an
absolute uncertainty of how little is true and how much false?* Surely
it would need nothing less than a new revelation to reveal this sweeping
restriction of the old; and we should then be left in an ecstasy of
astonishment-first, that the whole significance of it should have
been veiled in frauds, illusions, or fictions; secondly, that its true
meaning should have been hidden from the world for eighteen hundred
years after its divine promulgation; thirdly, that it should be revealed
at last, either in results which needed no revelation to reveal them,
or in the Egyptian darkness of the
allegorieo-metaphysico-mystico-logico-transendental, 'formulae' of the
most obscure and contentious philosophy ever devised by man; and lastly,
that all this superfluous trouble is to give us, after all, only the
mysteries of a most enigmatical philosophy: For of Hegel, in particular,
we think it may with truth be said that the reader is seldom fortunate
enough to know that he knows his meaning, or even to know that Hegel
knew his own.
____
* Daub naively enough declares that, if you except all that relates
to angels, demons, and miracle, there is scarcely any mythology in the
Gospel.' An exception which reminds one of the Irish prelate who, on
reading 'Gulliver's Travels,' remarked that there were some things in
that book which he could not think true.
____