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 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 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 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 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." [9]
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 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 Nicæa, or to come
to an end in the time of Irenæus, or in that of Justin Martyr, are
knotty questions which can be decided, if at all, only by those critical
methods which the signatories 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
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 answered this
appeal, and has shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however
clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants,
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, Irenæus, to argue for the reception of this book
into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds,
"antiquity" admitted the whole principal of modern criticism. If Irenæus
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 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 infallibility of these depends upon 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 must rest on that of the Church to
which he belonged.[10]
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 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 region
in which the Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.
When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece
and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of authorship
of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific literary
criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the
geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself
to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling at
unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed
the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life
upon it to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and
importance had been; it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or
later, the Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in
the same manner; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the Gospels
would be as severely tested; and that the evidence in favour of the
veracity of many of the statements found in the Scriptures would have to
be strong indeed if they were to be opposed to the conclusions of
physical science. In point of fact, so far as I can discover, no one
competent to judge of the evidential strength of these conclusions
ventures now to say that the biblical accounts of the Creation and of
the Deluge are true in the natural sense of the words of the narratives.
The most modern Reconcilers venture upon is to affirm, that some quite
different sense may be put upon the words; and that this non-natural
sense may, with a little trouble, be manipulated into some sort of
non-contradiction of scientific truth.
My purpose, in an essay[11] which treats of the narrative of the Deluge,
was to prove, by physical criticism, that no such event as that
described ever took place; to exhibit the untrustworthy character of the
narrative demonstrated by literary criticism; and, finally, to account
for its origin by producing a form of those ancient legends of pagan
Chaldaea, from which the biblical compilation is manifestly derived. I
have yet to learn that the main proposition of this essay can be
seriously challenged.
In two essays[12] on the narrative of the Creation, I have endeavoured
to controvert the assertion that modern science supports, either the
interpretation put upon it by Mr. Gladstone, or any interpretation which
is compatible with the general sense of the narrative, quite apart from
particular details. The first chapter of Genesis teaches the
supernatural creation of the present forms of life; modern science
teaches that they have come about by evolution. The first chapter of
Genesis teaches the successive origin--firstly, of all the plants;
secondly, of all the aquatic and aerial animals; thirdly, of all the
terrestrial animals, which now exist--during distinct intervals of time;
modern science teaches that, throughout all the duration of an immensely
long past, so far as we have any adequate knowledge of it (that is far
back as the Silurian epoch), plants, aquatic, aerial, and terrestrial
animals have co-existed; that the earliest known are unlike those which
at present exist; and that the modern species have come into existence
as the last terms of a series, the members of which have appeared one
after another. Thus, far from confirming the account in Genesis, the
results of modern science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in
detail, hopelessly discordant with it.
Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient
Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and
friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter
themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the two
most important of all events, the origin of things and the palingenesis
of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any serious thinker
attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of the Fall, of the
commerce between the _Bene Elohim_ and the daughters of men, which lie
between the creational and the diluvial legends? And, if these are to
lose all historical worth, what becomes of the infallibility of those
who, according to the later scriptures, have accepted them, argued from
them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic conclusions upon their historical
accuracy?
It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try
to bide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable
connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The
question will still be asked, If the first nine chapters of the
Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the
remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of
the Exodus than of the Deluge, to belief? If God not walk in the Garden
of Eden, how we be assured that he spoke from Sinai?
In other essays[13] I have endeavoured to show that sober and
well-founded physical and literary criticism plays no less havoc with
the doctrine that the canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare
incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records." We are
told that the Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual
world--a proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I
should not think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to
signify that everything we are told about the world of spirits in these
books is infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology
which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess
belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive people--it
is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be unable to define
the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral
obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful
occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the
Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply three,
partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the
origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely nothing. But the
evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any
other.
Elsewhere I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to
declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted
tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith,
and to destroy the foundations of morality: still less to brand them
with the question-begging vituperative appellation of "infidelity." The
point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether, from the point of
view of scientific method, they are irrefragably true. If they are they
will be accepted in time, whether they are wicked or not wicked. Nature,
so far as we have been able to attain to any insight into her ways,
recks little about consolation and makes for righteousness by very
round-about paths. And, at any rate, whatever may be possible for other
people, it is becoming less and less possible for the man who puts his
faith in scientific methods of ascertaining truth, and is accustomed to
have that faith justified by daily experience, to be consciously false
to his principle in any matter. But the number of such men, driven into
the use of scientific methods of inquiry and taught to trust them, by
their education, their daily professional and business needs, is
increasing and will continually increase. The phraseology of
Supernaturalism may remain on men's lips, but in practice they are
Naturalists. The magistrate who listens with devout attention to the
precept "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" on Sunday, on Monday
dismisses, as intrinsically absurd, a charge of bewitching a cow brought
against some old woman; the superintendent of a lunatic asylum who
substituted exorcism for rational modes of treatment would have but a
short tenure of office; even parish clerks doubt the utility of prayers
for rain, so long as the wind is in the east; and an outbreak of
pestilence sends men, not to the churches, but to the drains. In spite
of prayers for the success of our arms and _Te Deums_ for victory, our
real faith is in big battalions and keeping our powder dry; in knowledge
of the science of warfare; in energy, courage, and discipline. In these,
as in all other practical affairs, we act on the aphorism "_Laborare est
orare_"; we admit that intelligent work is the only acceptable worship;
and that, whether there be a Supernature or not, our business is with
Nature.
* * * * *
It is important to note that the principle of the scientific Naturalism
of the latter half of the nineteenth century, in which the intellectual
movement of the Renascence has culminated, and which was first clearly
formulated by Descartes, leads not to the denial of the existence of any
Supernature;[14] but simply to the denial of the validity of the
evidence adduced in favour of this, or of that, extant form of
Supernaturalism.
Looking at the matter from the most rigidly scientific point of view,
the assumption that, amidst the myriads of worlds scattered through
endless space, there can be no intelligence as much greater than man's
as his is greater than a blackbeetle's; no being endowed with powers of
influencing the course of Nature as much greater than his as his is
greater than a snail's, seems to me not merely baseless, but
impertinent. Without stepping beyond the analogy of that which is known,
it is easy to people the cosmos with entities, in ascending scale, until
we reach something practically indistinguishable from omnipotence,
omnipresence and omniscience. If our intelligence can, in some matters,
surely reproduce the past of thousands of years ago and anticipate the
future thousands of years hence, it is clearly within the limits of
possibility that some greater intellect, even of the same order, may be
able to mirror the whole past and the whole future; if the universe is
penetrated by a medium of such a nature that a magnetic needle on the
earth answers to a commotion in the sun, an omnipresent agent is also
conceivable; if our insignificant knowledge gives us some influence over
events, practical omniscience may confer indefinably greater power.
Finally, if evidence that a thing may be were equivalent to proof that
it is, analogy might justify the construction of a naturalistic theology
and demonology not less wonderful than the current supernatural; just as
it might justify the peopling of Mars, or of Jupiter, with living forms
to which terrestrial biology offers no parallel. Until human life is
longer and the duties of the present press less heavily, I do not think
that wise men will occupy themselves with Jovian, or Martian, natural
history; and they will probably agree to a verdict of "not proven" in
respect of naturalistic theology, taking refuge in that agnostic
confession, which appears to me to be the only position for people who
object to say that they know what they are quite aware they do not know.
As to the interests of morality, I am disposed to think that if mankind
could be got to act up to this last principle in every relation of life,
a reformation would be effected such as the world has not yet seen; an
approximation to the millennium, such as no supernaturalistic religion
has ever yet succeeded, or seems likely ever to succeed, in effecting.
THE VALUE OF WITNESS TO THE MIRACULOUS
[1889]