Produced by Clare Boothby, Keith Edkins and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Transcriber's note: A few typographical errors have been corrected: they
are listed at the end of the text.
* * * * *
Page numbers enclosed by curly braces (example: {25}) have been
incorporated to facilitate the use of the Table of Contents.
* * * * *
ESSAYS
UPON SOME
CONTROVERTED QUESTIONS
BY
THOMAS H. HUXLEY, F.R.S.
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1892
_All rights reserved_
* * * * *
{v}
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Page 1
I
THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF PALAEONTOLOGY
An Address delivered at the York Meeting of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science, 1881 55
II
THE INTERPRETERS OF GENESIS AND THE INTERPRETERS OF
NATURE
_Nineteenth Century_, December 1885 75
III
MR GLADSTONE AND GENESIS
_Nineteenth Century_, February 1886 98
_Note on the proper sense of the "Mosaic" narrative of the Creation_ 126
IV
THE EVOLUTION OF THEOLOGY: AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
_Nineteenth Century_, March and April 1886 131
V
SCIENCE AND MORALS
_Fortnightly Review_, November 1886 209
{vi}
VI
SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM
_Nineteenth Century_, February 1887 237
VII
SCIENCE AND PSEUDO-SCIENCE
_Nineteenth Century_, April 1887 265
VIII
AN EPISCOPAL TRILOGY
_Nineteenth Century_, November 1887 298
IX
AGNOSTICISM
_Nineteenth Century_, February 1889 329
X
THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS
_Nineteenth Century_, March 1889 378
XI
AGNOSTICISM: A REJOINDER
_Nineteenth Century_, April 1889 407
XII
AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY
_Nineteenth Century_, June 1889 449
XIII
THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND THE LIGHT OF SCIENCE
_Nineteenth Century_, July 1890 501
{vii}
XIV
THE KEEPERS OF THE HERD OF SWINE
_Nineteenth Century_, December 1890 535
XV
ILLUSTRATIONS OF MR. GLADSTONE'S CONTROVERSIAL METHODS
_Nineteenth Century_, March 1891 559
XVI
HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE
_Nineteenth Century_, June 1891 583
* * * * *
{viii}
I am indebted to the Editors of the _Nineteenth Century_ and of the
_Fortnightly Review_ for permission to reprint such of the following Essays
as have appeared in the pages of those periodicals: and so large a
proportion of the papers has been published in the _Nineteenth Century_
that my acknowledgments are especially due to Mr. Knowles.
T. H. H.
_May 4, 1892._
* * * * * {1}
PROLOGUE
Le plus grand service qu'on puisse rendre a la science est d'y faire
place nette avant d'y rien construire.--CUVIER.
Most of the Essays comprised in the present volume have been written during
the last six or seven years, without premeditated purpose or intentional
connection, in reply to attacks upon doctrines which I hold to be well
founded; or in refutation of allegations respecting matters lying within
the province of natural knowledge, which I believe to be erroneous; and
they bear the mark of their origin in the controversial tone which pervades
them.
Of polemical writing, as of other kinds of warfare, I think it may be said,
that it is often useful, sometimes necessary, and always more or less of an
evil. It is useful, when it attracts attention to topics which might
otherwise be neglected; and when, as does sometimes happen, those who come
to see a contest remain to think. It is necessary, when the interests of
truth and of justice are at stake. It is an evil, in so far as controversy
always tends to degenerate into quarrelling, to swerve from the great issue
of what is right and what is wrong to the very small question {2} of who is
right and who is wrong. I venture to hope that the useful and the necessary
were more conspicuous than the evil attributes of literary militancy, when
these papers were first published; but I have had some hesitation about
reprinting them. If I may judge by my own taste, few literary dishes are
less appetising than cold controversy; moreover, there is an air of
unfairness about the presentation of only one side of a discussion, and a
flavour of unkindness in the reproduction of "winged words," which, however
appropriate at the time of their utterance, would find a still more
appropriate place in oblivion. Yet, since I could hardly ask those who have
honoured me by their polemical attentions to confer lustre on this
collection, by permitting me to present their lucubrations along with my
own; and since it would be a manifest wrong to them to deprive their, by no
means rare, vivacities of language of such justification as they may derive
from similar freedoms on my part; I came to the conclusion that my best
course was to leave the essays just as they were written;[1] assuring my
honourable adversaries that any heat of which signs may remain was
generated, in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy, by the
force of their own blows, and has long since been dissipated into space.
But, however the polemical concomitants of these discussions may be
regarded--or better, {3} disregarded--there is no doubt either about the
importance of the topics of which they treat, or as to the public interest
in the "Controverted Questions" with which they deal. Or rather, the
Controverted Question; for disconnected as these pieces may, perhaps,
appear to be, they are, in fact, concerned only with different aspects of a
single problem, with which thinking men have been occupied, ever since they
began seriously to consider the wonderful frame of things in which their
lives are set, and to seek for trustworthy guidance among its intricacies.
Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's
stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the seeming
confusion, and that many events take place according to unchanging rules.
To this region of familiar steadiness and customary regularity they gave
the name of Nature. But, at the same time, their infantile and untutored
reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow of the imagination, led
them to believe that this tangible, commonplace, orderly world of Nature
was surrounded and interpenetrated by another intangible and mysterious
world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as they fancied, were the
thoughts and passions which coursed through their minds and seemed to
exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over their bodies. They
attributed to the entities, with which they peopled this dim and dreadful
region, an unlimited amount of that power of modifying the course of events
of which they themselves possessed a small share, and thus {4} came to
regard them as not merely beyond, but above, Nature.
Hence arose the conception of a "Supernature" antithetic to "Nature"--the
primitive dualism of a natural world "fixed in fate" and a supernatural,
left to the free play of volition--which has pervaded all later speculation
and, for thousands of years, has exercised a profound influence on
practice. For it is obvious that, on this theory of the Universe, the
successful conduct of life must demand careful attention to both worlds;
and, if either is to be neglected, it may be safer that it should be
Nature. In any given contingency, it must doubtless be desirable to know
what may be expected to happen in the ordinary course of things; but it
must be quite as necessary to have some inkling of the line likely to be
taken by supernatural agencies able, and possibly willing, to suspend or
reverse that course. Indeed, logically developed, the dualistic theory must
needs end in almost exclusive attention to Supernature, and in trust that
its over-ruling strength will be exerted in favour of those who stand well
with its denizens. On the other hand, the lessons of the great
schoolmaster, experience, have hardly seemed to accord with this
conclusion. They have taught, with considerable emphasis, that it does not
answer to neglect Nature; and that, on the whole, the more attention paid
to her dictates the better men fare.
Thus the theoretical antithesis brought about a practical antagonism. From
the earliest times of which we have any knowledge, Naturalism and {5}
Supernaturalism have consciously, or unconsciously, competed and struggled
with one another; and the varying fortunes of the contest are written in
the records of the course of civilisation, from those of Egypt and
Babylonia, six thousand years ago, down to those of our own time and
people.
These records inform us that, so far as men have paid attention to Nature,
they have been rewarded for their pains. They have developed the Arts which
have furnished the conditions of civilised existence; and the Sciences,
which have been a progressive revelation of reality and have afforded the
best discipline of the mind in the methods of discovering truth. They have
accumulated a vast body of universally accepted knowledge; and the
conceptions of man and of society, of morals and of law, based upon that
knowledge, are every day more and more, either openly or tacitly,
acknowledged to be the foundations of right action.
History also tells us that the field of the supernatural has rewarded its
cultivators with a harvest, perhaps not less luxuriant, but of a different
character. It has produced an almost infinite diversity of Religions.
These, if we set aside the ethical concomitants upon which natural
knowledge also has a claim, are composed of information about Supernature;
they tell us of the attributes of supernatural beings, of their relations
with Nature, and of the operations by which their interference with the
ordinary course of events can be secured or averted. It does not appear,
however, that supernaturalists have attained {6} to any agreement about
these matters, or that history indicates a widening of the influence of
supernaturalism on practice, with the onward flow of time. On the contrary,
the various religions are, to a great extent, mutually exclusive; and their
adherents delight in charging each other, not merely with error, but with
criminality, deserving an ensuing punishment of infinite severity. In
singular contrast with natural knowledge, again, the acquaintance of
mankind with the supernatural appears the more extensive and the more
exact, and the influence of supernatural doctrines upon conduct the
greater, the further back we go in time and the lower the stage of
civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed, there would
seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural and natural knowledge.
As the latter has widened, gained in precision and in trustworthiness, so
has the former shrunk, grown vague and questionable; as the one has more
and more filled the sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the
region of meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal
recognition.
Whether this difference of the fortunes of Naturalism and of
Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress, or of the regress, of
humanity; of a fall from, or an advance towards, the higher life; is a
matter of opinion. The point to which I wish to direct attention is that
the difference exists and is making itself felt. Men are growing to be
seriously alive to the fact that the historical evolution of humanity,
which is generally, and I venture to {7} think not unreasonably, regarded
as progress, has been, and is being, accompanied by a co-ordinate
elimination of the supernatural from its originally large occupation of
men's thoughts. The question--How far is this process to go?--is, in my
apprehension, the Controverted Question of our time.
Controversy on this matter--prolonged, bitter, and fought out with the
weapons of the flesh, as well as with those of the spirit--is no new thing
to Englishmen. We have been more or less occupied with it these five
hundred years. And, during that time, we have made attempts to establish a
_modus vivendi_ between the antagonists, some of which have had a
world-wide influence; though, unfortunately, none have proved universally
and permanently satisfactory.
In the fourteenth century, the controverted question among us was, whether
certain portions of the Supernaturalism of mediaeval Christianity were
well-founded. John Wicliff proposed a solution of the problem which, in the
course of the following two hundred years, acquired wide popularity and
vast historical importance: Lollards, Hussites, Lutherans, Calvinists,
Zwinglians, Socinians, and Anabaptists, whatever their disagreements,
concurred in the proposal to reduce the Supernaturalism of Christianity
within the limits sanctioned by the Scriptures. None of the chiefs of
Protestantism called in question either the supernatural origin and
infallible authority of the Bible, or the exactitude of the account of the
{8} supernatural world given in its pages. In fact, they could not afford
to entertain any doubt about these points, since the infallible Bible was
the fulcrum of the lever with which they were endeavouring to upset the
Chair of St. Peter. The "freedom of private judgment" which they
proclaimed, meant no more, in practice, than permission to themselves to
make free with the public judgment of the Roman Church, in respect of the
canon and of the meaning to be attached to the words of the canonical
books. Private judgment--that is to say, reason--was (theoretically, at any
rate) at liberty to decide what books were and what were not to take the
rank of "Scripture"; and to determine the sense of any passage in such
books. But this sense, once ascertained to the mind of the sectary, was to
be taken for pure truth--for the very word of God. The controversial
efficiency of the principle of biblical infallibility lay in the fact that
the conservative adversaries of the Reformers were not in a position to
contravene it without entangling themselves in serious difficulties; while,
since both Papists and Protestants agreed in taking efficient measures to
stop the mouths of any more radical critics, these did not count.
The impotence of their adversaries, however, did not remove the inherent
weakness of the position of the Protestants. The dogma of the infallibility
of the Bible is no more self-evident than is that of the infallibility of
the Pope. If the former is held by "faith," then the latter may be. If the
latter is {9} to be accepted, or rejected, by private judgment, why not the
former? Even if the Bible could be proved anywhere to assert its own
infallibility, the value of that self-assertion to those who dispute the
point is not obvious. On the other hand, if the infallibility of the Bible
was rested on that of a "primitive Church," the admission that the "Church"
was formerly infallible was awkward in the extreme for those who denied its
present infallibility. Moreover, no sooner was the Protestant principle
applied to practice, than it became evident that even an infallible text,
when manipulated by private judgment, will impartially countenance
contradictory deductions; and furnish forth creeds and confessions as
diverse as the quality and the information of the intellects which
exercise, and the prejudices and passions which sway, such judgments. Every
sect, confident in the derivative infallibility of its wire-drawing of
infallible materials, was ready to supply its contingent of martyrs; and to
enable history, once more, to illustrate the truth, that steadfastness
under persecution says much for the sincerity and still more for the
tenacity, of the believer, but very little for the objective truth of that
which he believes. No martyrs have sealed their faith with their blood more
steadfastly than the Anabaptists.
Last, but not least, the Protestant principle contained within itself the
germs of the destruction of the finality, which the Lutheran, Calvinistic,
and other Protestant Churches fondly imagined they had reached. Since their
creeds were professedly based {10} on the canonical Scriptures, it followed
that, in the long run, whoso settled the canon defined the creed. If the
private judgment of Luther might legitimately conclude that the epistle of
James was contemptible, while the epistles of Paul contained the very
essence of Christianity, it must be permissible for some other private
judgment, on as good or as bad grounds, to reverse these conclusions; the
critical process which excluded the Apocrypha could not be barred, at any
rate by people who rejected the authority of the Church, from extending its
operations to Daniel, the Canticles, and Ecclesiastes; nor, having got so
far, was it easy to allege any good ground for staying the further progress
of criticism. In fact, the logical development of Protestantism could not
fail to lay the authority of the Scriptures at the feet of Reason; and, in
the hands of latitudinarian and rationalistic theologians, the despotism of
the Bible was rapidly converted into an extremely limited monarchy. Treated
with as much respect as ever, the sphere of its practical authority was
minimised; and its decrees were valid only so far as they were
countersigned by common sense, the responsible minister.
The champions of Protestantism are much given to glorify the Reformation of
the sixteenth century as the emancipation of Reason; but it may be doubted
if their contention has any solid ground; while there is a good deal of
evidence to show, that aspirations after intellectual freedom had nothing
whatever to do with the movement. Dante, who struck the Papacy {11} as hard
blows as Wicliff; Wicliff himself and Luther himself, when they began their
work; were far enough from any intention of meddling with even the most
irrational of the dogmas of mediaeval Supernaturalism. From Wicliff to
Socinus, or even to Muenzer, Rothmann, and John of Leyden, I fail to find a
trace of any desire to set reason free. The most that can be discovered is
a proposal to change masters. From being the slave of the Papacy the
intellect was to become the serf of the Bible; or, to speak more
accurately, of somebody's interpretation of the Bible, which, rapidly
shifting its attitude from the humility of a private judgment to the
arrogant Caesaro-papistry of a state-enforced creed, had no more hesitation
about forcibly extinguishing opponent private judgments and judges, than
had the old-fashioned Pontiff-papistry.
It was the iniquities, and not the irrationalities, of the Papal system
that lay at the bottom of the revolt of the laity; which was, essentially,
an attempt to shake off the intolerable burden of certain practical
deductions from a Supernaturalism in which everybody, in principle,
acquiesced. What was the gain to intellectual freedom of abolishing
transubstantiation, image worship, indulgences, ecclesiastical
infallibility; if consubstantiation, real-unreal presence mystifications,
the bibliolatry, the "inner-light" pretensions, and the demonology, which
are fruits of the same supernaturalistic tree, remained in enjoyment of the
spiritual and temporal support of a new infallibility? One does not free a
{12} prisoner by merely scraping away the rust from his shackles.
It will be asked, perhaps, was not the Reformation one of the products of
that great outbreak of many-sided free mental activity included under the
general head of the Renascence? Melanchthon, Ulrich von Hutten, Beza, were
they not all humanists? Was not the arch-humanist, Erasmus, fautor-in-chief
of the Reformation, until he got frightened and basely deserted it?
From the language of Protestant historians, it would seem that they often
forget that Reformation and Protestantism are by no means convertible
terms. There were plenty of sincere and indeed zealous reformers, before,
during, and after the birth and growth of Protestantism, who would have
nothing to do with it. Assuredly, the rejuvenescence of science and of art;
the widening of the field of Nature by geographical and astronomical
discovery; the revelation of the noble ideals of antique literature by the
revival of classical learning; the stir of thought, throughout all classes
of society, by the printers' work, loosened traditional bonds and weakened
the hold of mediaeval Supernaturalism. In the interests of liberal culture
and of national welfare, the humanists were eager to lend a hand to
anything which tended to the discomfiture of their sworn enemies, the
monks, and they willingly supported every movement in the direction of
weakening ecclesiastical interference with civil life. But the bond of a
common enemy was the only real tie between the humanist {13} and the
protestant; their alliance was bound to be of short duration, and, sooner
or later, to be replaced by internecine warfare. The goal of the humanists,
whether they were aware of it or not, was the attainment of the complete
intellectual freedom of the antique philosopher, than which nothing could
be more abhorrent to a Luther, a Calvin, a Beza, or a Zwingli.
The key to the comprehension of the conduct of Erasmus, seems to me to lie
in the clear apprehension of this fact. That he was a man of many
weaknesses may be true; in fact, he was quite aware of them and professed
himself no hero. But he never deserted that reformatory movement which he
originally contemplated; and it was impossible he should have deserted the
specifically Protestant reformation in which he never took part. He was
essentially a theological whig, to whom radicalism was as hateful as it is
to all whigs; or, to borrow a still more appropriate comparison from modern
times, a broad churchman who refused to enlist with either the High Church
or the Low Church zealots, and paid the penalty of being called coward,
time-server and traitor, by both. Yet really there is a good deal in his
pathetic remonstrance that he does not see why he is bound to become a
martyr for that in which he does not believe; and a fair consideration of
the circumstances and the consequences of the Protestant reformation seems
to me to go a long way towards justifying the course he adopted.
Few men had better means of being acquainted {14} with the condition of
Europe; none could be more competent to gauge the intellectual shallowness
and self-contradiction of the protestant criticism of catholic doctrine;
and to estimate, at its proper value, the fond imagination that the waters
let out by the Renascence would come to rest amidst the blind alleys of the
new ecclesiasticism. The bastard, whilom poor student and monk, become the
familiar of bishops and princes, at home in all grades of society, could
not fail to be aware of the gravity of the social position, of the dangers
imminent from the profligacy and indifference of the ruling classes, no
less than from the anarchical tendencies of the people who groaned under
their oppression. The wanderer who had lived in Germany, in France, in
England, in Italy, and who counted many of the best and most influential
men in each country among his friends, was not likely to estimate wrongly
the enormous forces which were still at the command of the Papacy. Bad as
the churchmen might be, the statesmen were worse; and a person of far more
sanguine temperament than Erasmus might have seen no hope for the future,
except in gradually freeing the ubiquitous organisation of the Church from
the corruptions which alone, as he imagined, prevented it from being as
beneficent as it was powerful. The broad tolerance of the scholar and man
of the world might well be revolted by the ruffianism, however genial, of
one great light of Protestantism, and the narrow fanaticism, however
learned and logical, of others; and to a cautious thinker, by whom,
whatever his shortcomings, the {15} ethical ideal of the Christian evangel
was sincerely prized, it really was a fair question, whether it was worth
while to bring about a political and social deluge, the end of which no
mortal could foresee, for the purpose of setting up Lutheran, Zwinglian,
and other Peterkins, in the place of the actual claimant to the reversion
of the spiritual wealth of the Galilean fisherman.
Let us suppose that, at the beginning of the Lutheran and Zwinglian
movement, a vision of its immediate consequences had been granted to
Erasmus; imagine that to the spectre of the fierce outbreak of Anabaptist
communism, which opened the apocalypse, had succeeded, in shadowy
procession, the reign of terror and of spoliation in England, with the
judicial murders of his friends, More and Fisher; the bitter tyranny of
evangelistic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland; the long agony of
religious wars, persecutions, and massacres, which devastated France and
reduced Germany almost to savagery; finishing with the spectacle of
Lutheranism in its native country sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism,
before it was a century old; while Jesuitry triumphed over Protestantism in
three-fourths of Europe, bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the
corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to abolish; might not he have
quite honestly thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay for
Protestantism; more especially, since no one was in a better position than
himself to know how little the dogmatic foundation of the new confessions
was able to bear the light {16} which the inevitable progress of humanistic
criticism would throw upon them? As the wiser of his contemporaries saw,
Erasmus was, at heart, neither Protestant nor Papist, but an "Independent
Christian"; and, as the wiser of his modern biographers have discerned, he
was the precursor, not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth
century "enlightenment"; a sort of broad-church Voltaire, who held by his
"Independent Christianity" as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism.
In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which bore Erasmus along, left
Protestantism stranded amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds:
while its true course became visible to all men, two centuries later. By
this time, those in whom the movement of the Renascence was incarnate
became aware what spirit they were of; and they attacked Supernaturalism in
its Biblical stronghold, defended by Protestants and Romanists with equal
zeal. In the eyes of the "Patriarch," Ultramontanism, Jansenism, and
Calvinism were merely three persons of the one "Infame" which it was the
object of his life to crush. If he hated one more than another, it was
probably the last; while D'Holbach, and the extreme left of the
free-thinking host, were disposed to show no more mercy to Deism and
Pantheism.
The sceptical insurrection of the eighteenth century made a terrific noise
and frightened not a few worthy people out of their wits; but cool judges
might have foreseen, at the outset, that the efforts of the later rebels
were no more likely {17} than those of the earlier, to furnish permanent
resting-places for the spirit of scientific inquiry. However worthy of
admiration may be the acuteness, the common-sense, the wit, the broad
humanity, which abound in the writings of the best of the free-thinkers;
there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the
adequate treatment of a grave and difficult investigation. I do not think
any impartial judge will assert that, from this point of view, they are
much better than their adversaries. It must be admitted that they share to
the full the fatal weakness of _a priori_ philosophising, no less than the
moral frivolity common to their age; while a singular want of appreciation
of history, as the record of the moral and social evolution of the human
race, permitted them to resort to preposterous theories of imposture, in
order to account for the religious phenomena which are natural products of
that evolution.
For the most part, the Romanist and Protestant adversaries of the
free-thinkers met them with arguments no better than their own; and with
vituperation, so far inferior that it lacked the wit. But one great
Christian apologist fairly captured the guns of the free-thinking array,
and turned their batteries upon themselves. Speculative "infidelity" of the
eighteenth century type was mortally wounded by the _Analogy_; while the
progress of the historical and psychological sciences brought to light the
important part played by the mythopoeic faculty; and, by demonstrating the
extreme readiness of men {18} to impose upon themselves, rendered the
calling in of sacerdotal co-operation, in most cases, a superfluity.
Again, as in the fourteenth and the sixteenth centuries, social and
political influences came into play. The free-thinking _philosophes_, who
objected to Rousseau's sentimental religiosity almost as much as they did
to _L'Infame_, were credited with the responsibility for all the evil deeds
of Rousseau's Jacobin disciples, with about as much justification as
Wicliff was held responsible for the Peasants' revolt, or Luther for the
_Bauern-krieg_. In England, though our _ancien regime_ was not altogether
lovely, the social edifice was never in such a bad way as in France; it was
still capable of being repaired; and our forefathers, very wisely,
preferred to wait until that operation could be safely performed, rather
than pull it all down about their ears, in order to build a philosophically
planned house on brand-new speculative foundations. Under these
circumstances, it is not wonderful that, in this country, practical men
preferred the gospel of Wesley and Whitfield to that of Jean Jacques; while
enough of the old leaven of Puritanism remained to ensure the favour and
support of a large number of religious men to a revival of evangelical
supernaturalism. Thus, by degrees, the free-thinking, or the indifference,
prevalent among us in the first half of the eighteenth century, was
replaced by a strong supernaturalistic reaction, which submerged the work
of the free-thinkers; and even seemed, for a time, to have arrested the
naturalistic movement of {19} which that work was an imperfect indication.
Yet, like Lollardry, four centuries earlier, free-thought merely took to
running underground, safe, sooner or later, to return to the surface.
My memory, unfortunately, carries me back to the fourth decade of the
nineteenth century, when the evangelical flood had a little abated and the
tops of certain mountains were soon to appear, chiefly in the neighbourhood
of Oxford; but when, nevertheless, bibliolatry was rampant; when church and
chapel alike proclaimed, as the oracles of God, the crude assumptions of
the worst informed and, in natural sequence, the most presumptuously
bigoted, of all theological schools.
In accordance with promises made on my behalf, but certainly without my
authorisation, I was very early taken to hear "sermons in the vulgar
tongue." And vulgar enough often was the tongue in which some preacher,
ignorant alike of literature, of history, of science, and even of theology,
outside that patronised by his own narrow school, poured forth, from the
safe entrenchment of the pulpit, invectives against those who deviated from
his notion of orthodoxy. From dark allusions to "sceptics" and "infidels,"
I became aware of the existence of people who trusted in carnal reason; who
audaciously doubted that the world was made in six natural days, or that
the deluge was universal; perhaps even went so far as to question the
literal accuracy of the story of Eve's temptation, or of {20} Balaam's ass;
and, from the horror of the tones in which they were mentioned, I should
have been justified in drawing the conclusion that these rash men belonged
to the criminal classes. At the same time, those who were more directly
responsible for providing me with the knowledge essential to the right
guidance of life (and who sincerely desired to do so), imagined they were
discharging that most sacred duty by impressing upon my childish mind the
necessity, on pain of reprobation in this world and damnation in the next,
of accepting, in the strict and literal sense, every statement contained in
the protestant Bible. I was told to believe, and I did believe, that doubt
about any of them was a sin, not less reprehensible than a moral delict. I
suppose that, out of a thousand of my contemporaries, nine hundred, at
least, had their minds systematically warped and poisoned, in the name of
the God of truth, by like discipline. I am sure that, even a score of years
later, those who ventured to question the exact historical accuracy of any
part of the Old Testament and _a fortiori_ of the Gospels, had to expect a
pitiless shower of verbal missiles, to say nothing of the other
disagreeable consequences which visit those who, in any way, run counter to
that chaos of prejudices called public opinion.
My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of
a remarkable document,[2] {21} signed by as many as thirty-eight out of the
twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It does not appear
that the signataries are officially accredited spokesmen of the
ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to take
their word for it, that they are "stewards of the Lord, who have received
the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept this memorial as evidence that,
though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed from its place of
power, though so many of the colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate
the title of Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes
as it did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses
to offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to God,"
imperilling his salvation.
It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they
discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They are
awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been discovered
"not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the supernatural
itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate myself upon such
weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have had the fortune to
anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the courage, than
to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight that they should go on to proclaim
that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments "declare
incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records, both of past
events and of the delivery of predictions {22} to be thereafter fulfilled,"
must be left to the coming generation to decide.
The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be
based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which it
is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a
counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on the
part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore
have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves "stewards of the
Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the stream of tendency
towards Naturalism, the course of which I have briefly traced, has, of late
years, flowed so strongly, that even the Churches have begun, I dare not
say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing at their moorings. Within the pale
of the Anglican establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment,
there are as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as
there were timid questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago.
Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual
historical truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University
professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that the
Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as author
or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be; highly
placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture narratives may be
ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a patriotic romance of
{23} the second century B.C.; that the words of the writer of the fourth
Gospel are not always to be distinguished from those which he puts into the
mouth of Jesus. Conservative, but conscientious, revisers decide that whole
passages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are
interpolations. An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of Biblical
infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing tendency once more
to substitute the authority of the "Church" for that of the Bible. In my
old age, it has happened to me to be taken to task for regarding
Christianity as a "religion of a book" as gravely as, in my youth, I should
have been reprehended for doubting that proposition. It is a no less
interesting symptom that the State Church seems more and more anxious to
repudiate all complicity with the principles of the Protestant Reformation
and to call itself "Anglo-Catholic." Inspiration, deprived of its old
intelligible sense, is watered down into a mystification. The Scriptures
are, indeed, inspired; but they contain a wholly undefined and indefinable
"human element"; and this unfortunate intruder is converted into a sort of
biblical whipping boy. Whatsoever scientific investigation, historical or
physical, proves to be erroneous, the "human element" bears the blame;
while the divine inspiration of such statements, as by their nature are out
of reach of proof or disproof, is still asserted with all the vigour
inspired by conscious safety from attack. Though the proposal to treat the
Bible "like any other book" which caused so much {24} scandal, forty years
ago, may not yet be generally accepted, and though Bishop Colenso's
criticisms may still lie, formally, under ecclesiastical ban, yet the
Church has not wholly turned a deaf ear to the voice of the scientific
tempter; and many a coy divine, while "crying I will ne'er consent," has
consented to the proposals of that scientific criticism which the
memorialists renounce and denounce.
A humble layman, to whom it would seem the height of presumption to assume
even the unconsidered dignity of a "steward of science," may well find this
conflict of apparently equal ecclesiastical authorities
perplexing--suggestive, indeed, of the wisdom of postponing attention to
either, until the question of precedence between them is settled. And this
course will probably appear the more advisable, the more closely the
fundamental position of the memorialists is examined.
"No opinion of the fact or form of Divine Revelation, founded on literary
criticism [and I suppose I may add historical, or physical, criticism] of
the Scriptures themselves, can be admitted to interfere with the
traditionary testimony of the Church, when that has been once ascertained
and verified by appeal to antiquity."[3]
Grant that it is "the traditionary testimony of the Church" which
guarantees the canonicity of each and all of the books of the Old and New
Testaments. Grant also that canonicity means infallibility; yet, according
to the thirty-eight, this "traditionary {25} testimony" has to be
"ascertained and verified by appeal to antiquity." But "ascertainment and
verification" are purely intellectual processes, which must be conducted
according to the strict rules of scientific investigation, or be
self-convicted of worthlessness. Moreover, before we can set about the
appeal to "antiquity," the exact sense of that usefully vague term must be
defined by similar means. "Antiquity" may include any number of centuries,
great or small; and whether "antiquity" is to comprise the Council of
Trent, or to stop a little beyond that of Nicaea, or to come to an end in
the time of Irenaeus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are knotty questions
which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical methods which the
signataries treat so cavalierly. And yet the decision of these questions is
fundamental, for as the limits of the canonical scriptures vary, so may the
dogmas deduced from them require modification. Christianity is one thing,
if the fourth Gospel, the Epistle to the Hebrews, the pastoral Epistles,
and the Apocalypse are canonical and (by the hypothesis) infallibly true;
and another thing, if they are not. As I have already said, whoso defines
the canon defines the creed.
Now it is quite certain with respect to some of these books, such as the
Apocalypse and the Epistle to the Hebrews, that the Eastern and the Western
Church differed in opinion for centuries; and yet neither the one branch,
nor the other, can have considered its judgment infallible, since they
eventually agreed to a transaction, by which each gave up its {26}
objection to the book patronised by the other. Moreover, the "fathers"
argue (in a more or less rational manner) about the canonicity of this or
that book, and are by no means above producing evidence, internal and
external, in favour of the opinions they advocate. In fact, imperfect as
their conceptions of scientific method may be, they not unfrequently used
it to the best of their ability. Thus it would appear that though science,
like Nature, may be driven out with a fork, ecclesiastical or other, yet
she surely comes back again. The appeal to "antiquity" is, in fact, an
appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly, to
determine what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity; thirdly, to
prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science, largely in the
shape of the abhorred "criticism," has done this, and has shown that
"antiquity" used her own methods, however clumsily and imperfectly, she
naturally turns round upon the appealers to "antiquity," and demands that
they should show cause why, in these days, science should not resume the
work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it out efficiently.
But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius, Origen,
Tertullian, Irenaeus, to argue for the reception of this book into the canon
and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds, "antiquity" admitted the
whole principle of modern criticism. If Irenaeus produces ridiculous reasons
for limiting the Gospels to four, it was open to any one else to produce
good reasons (if he had them) for cutting them down to three, or increasing
them to {27} five. If the Eastern branch of the Church had a right to
reject the Apocalypse and accept the Epistle to the Hebrews, and the
Western an equal right to accept the Apocalypse and reject the Epistle,
down to the fourth century, any other branch would have an equal right, on
cause shown, to reject both, or, as the Catholic Church afterwards actually
did, to accept both.
Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own
petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a
round-about way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of which
they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian supernaturalism
on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnished the elephant with
standing ground on the tortoise of "antiquity," they, like their famous
Hindoo analogue, have been content to look no further; and have thereby
been spared the horror of discovering that the tortoise rests on a
grievously fragile construction, to a great extent the work of that very
intellectual operation which they anathematise and repudiate.
Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course true
that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not, depends on
the connotation of the definite article) existed before the Christian
scriptures; and that the infallibility of these depends upon the
infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the books, of
which they are composed, out of the mass of literature current among the
early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine showed him that the
authority of the Gospel he preached {28} must rest on that of the Church to
which he belonged.[4] But it is no less true that the Hebrew and the
Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of the Old Testament books existed
before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; and that their divine authority is
presupposed by, and therefore can hardly depend upon, the religious body
constituted by his disciples. As everybody knows, the very conception of a
"Christ" is purely Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic
prophecies vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a
matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the
writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised as
the highest court of appeal of the Christian.
The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the
infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority
vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are
erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if a
claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should offer
his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the will. And, even
were not such a circular, or rather rotatory, argument, that the
infallibility of the Bible is testified by the infallible Church, whose
infallibility is testified by the infallible Bible, too absurd for serious
consideration, it remains permissible to ask; Where and when the Church,
during the period of its infallibility, as {29} limited by Anglican
dogmatic necessities, has officially decreed the "actual historical truth
of all records" in the Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he
denied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father
Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that
he was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal to
that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part, to say
so.
Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view with
delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of Supernaturalism which
manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged along the whole flight of
steps, which, in this case, separates the sublime from the ridiculous--from
Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things,
not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my poor
opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often greatly
over-estimated. The extant forms of Supernaturalism have deep roots in
human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days,
they have to cope with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning
to be put out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are
hemming them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation
of systematised natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries,
has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is
confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every {30} region in which the
Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.