Keble's theological position in his later years. A more logical, or a
more plausible, but a less thoroughly real man might easily have
drifted into Romanism. There was much in the circumstances round him,
in the admissions which he had made, to lead that way; and his
chivalrous readiness to take the beaten or unpopular side would help
the tendency. But he was a man who gave great weight to his instinctive
perception of what was right and wrong; and he was also a man who, when
he felt sure of his duty, did not care a straw about what the world
thought of appearances, or required as a satisfaction of seeming
consistency. In him was eminently illustrated the characteristic
strength and weakness of English religion, which naturally comes out in
that form of it which is called Anglicanism; that poor Anglicanism, the
butt and laughing-stock of all the clever and high-flying converts to
Rome, of all the clever and high-flying Liberals, and of all those poor
copyists of the first, far from clever, though very high-flying, who
now give themselves out as exclusive heirs of the great name of
Catholic; sneered at on all sides as narrow, meagre, shattered, barren;
which certainly does not always go to the bottom of questions, and is
too much given to "hunting-up" passages for _catenas_ of precedents and
authorities; but which yet has a strange, obstinate, tenacious moral
force in it; which, without being successful in formulating theories or
in solving fallacies, can pierce through pretences and shams; and which
in England seems the only shape in which intense religious faith can
unfold itself and connect itself with morality and duty, without
seeming to wear a peculiar dress of its own, and putting a barrier of
self-chosen watchwords and singularities between itself and the rest of
the nation.
It seems to us a great advantage to truth to have a character thus
exhibited in its unstudied and living completeness, and exhibited
directly, as the impression from life was produced on those before
whose eyes it drew itself out day by day in word and act, as the
occasion presented itself. There is, no doubt, a more vivid and
effective way; one in which the Dean of Westminster is a great master,
though it is not the method which he followed in what is probably his
most perfect work, the _Life of Dr. Arnold_--the method of singling out
points, and placing them, if possible, under a concentrated light, and
in strong contrast and relief. Thus in Keble's case it is easy, and
doubtless to many observers natural and tempting, to put side by side,
with a strange mixture of perplexity and repulsion, _The Christian
Year_, and the treatise _On Eucharistical Adoration_; to compare even
in Keble's poetry, his tone on nature and human life, on the ways of
children and the thoughts of death, with that on religious error and
ecclesiastical divergences from the Anglican type; and to dwell on the
contrast between Keble bearing his great gifts with such sweetness and
modesty, and touching with such tenderness and depth the most delicate
and the purest of human feelings, and Keble as the editor of Fronde's
_Remains_, forward against Dr. Hampden, breaking off a friendship of
years with Dr. Arnold, stiff against Liberal change and indulgent to
ancient folly and error, the eulogist of patristic mysticism and Bishop
Wilson's "discipline," and busy in the ecclesiastical agitations and
legal wranglings of our later days, about Jerusalem Bishoprics and
Courts of Final Appeal and ritual details, about Gorham judgments,
_Essays and Reviews_ prosecutions, and Colenso scandals. The objection
to this method of contrast is that it does not give the whole truth. It
does not take notice that, in appreciating a man like Keble, the thing
to start from is that his ideal and model and rule of character was
neither more nor less than the old Christian one. It was simply what
was accepted as right and obvious and indisputable, not by Churchmen
only, but by all earnest believers up to our own days. Given certain
conditions of Christian faith and duty which he took for granted as
much as the ordinary laws of morality, then the man's own individual
gifts or temper or leanings displayed themselves. But when people talk
of Keble being narrow and rigid and harsh and intolerant, they ought
first to recollect that he had been brought up with the ideas common to
all whom he ever heard of or knew as religious people. All earnest
religious conviction must seem narrow to those who do not share it. It
was nothing individual or peculiar, either to him or his friends, to
have strong notions about defending what they believed that they had
received as the truth; and they were people who knew what they were
about, too, and did not take things up at random. In this he was not
different from Hooker, or Jeremy Taylor, or Bishop Butler, or Baxter,
or Wesley, or Dr. Chalmers; it may be added, that he was not different
from Dr. Arnold or Archbishop Whately. It must not be forgotten that
till of late years there was always supposed, rightly or wrongly, to be
such a thing as false doctrine, and that intolerance of it, within the
limits of common justice, was always held as much part of the Christian
character as devotion and charity. Men differed widely as to what was
false doctrine, but they did not differ much as to there being such a
thing, and as to what was to be thought of it. Keble, like other people
of his time, took up his system, and really, considering that the ideal
which he honestly and earnestly aimed at was the complete system of the
Catholic Church, it is an abuse of words to call it, whatever else it
may be called, a narrow system. There may be a wider system still, in
the future; but it is at least premature to say that a man is narrow
because he accepts in good faith the great traditional ideas and
doctrines of the Christian Church; for of everything that can yet be
called a religious system, in the sense commonly understood, as an
embodiment of definite historical revelation, it is not easy to
conceive a less narrow one. And, accepting it as the truth, it was
dearer to him than life. That he was sensitively alive to whatever
threatened or opposed it, and was ready to start up like a soldier,
ready to do battle against any odds and to risk any unpopularity or
misconstruction, was only the sure and natural result of that deep love
and loyalty and thorough soundness of heart with which he loved his
friends, but what he believed to be truth and God's will better than
his friends. But it is idle and shallow to confuse the real narrowness
which springs from a harsh temper or a cramped and self-sufficient
intellect, and which is quite compatible with the widest theoretical
latitude, and the inevitable appearance of narrowness and severity
which must always be one side which a man of strong convictions and
earnest purpose turns to those whose strong convictions and earnest
purpose are opposite to his.
Mr. Keble, saintly as was his character, if ever there was such a
character, belonged, as we all do, to his day and generation. The
aspect of things and the thoughts of men change; enlarging, we are
always apt to think, but perhaps really also contracting in some
directions where they once were larger. In Mr. Keble, the service which
he rendered to his time consisted, not merely, as it is sometimes
thought, in soothing and refining it, but in bracing it. He was the
preacher and example of manly hardness, simplicity, purpose in the
religious character. It may be that his hatred of evil--of hollowness,
impurity, self-will, conceit, ostentation--was greater than was always
his perception of various and mingled good, or his comprehension of
those middle things and states which are so much before us now. But the
service cannot be overrated, to all parties, of the protest which his
life and all his words were against dangers which were threatening all
parties, and not least the Liberal party--the danger of shallowness and
superficial flippancy; the danger of showy sentiment and insincerity,
of worldly indifference to high duties and calls. With the one great
exception of Arnold--Keble's once sympathetic friend, though afterwards
parted from him--the religious Liberals of our time have little reason
to look back with satisfaction to the leaders, able and vigorous as
some of them were, who represented their cause then. They owe to Keble,
as much as do those who are more identified with his theology, the
inestimable service of having interpreted religion by a genuine life,
corresponding in its thoroughness and unsparing, unpretending
devotedness, as well as in its subtle vividness of feeling, to the
great object which religion professes to contemplate.
XVIII
MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS[21]
[21]
_Theological Essays_. By F.D. Maurice. _Guardian_, 7th September 1853.
The purpose of this volume of essays is to consider the views
entertained by Unitarians of what are looked upon by Christians
generally as fundamental truths; to examine what force there is in
Unitarian objections, and what mistakes are involved in the popular
notions and representations of those fundamental truths; and so,
without entering into controversy, for which Mr. Maurice declares
himself entirely indisposed, and in the utility of which he entirely
disbelieves, to open the way for a deeper and truer, and more serious
review, by all parties, of either the differences or the misunderstandings
which keep them asunder. It is a work, the writer considers, as
important as any which he has undertaken: "No labour I have been
engaged in has occupied me so much, or interested me more deeply;"
and with his estimate of his subject we are not disposed to disagree.
We always rise from the perusal of one of Mr. Maurice's books with the
feeling that he has shown us one great excellence, and taught us one
great lesson. He has shown us an example of serious love of truth, and
an earnest sense of its importance, and of his own responsibility in
speaking of it. Most readers, whatever else they may think, must have
their feeling of the wide and living interest of a theological or moral
subject quickened by Mr. Maurice's thoughts on it. This is the
excellence. The lesson is this--to look into the meaning of our
familiar words, and to try to use them with a real meaning. Not that
Mr. Maurice always shows us how; but it is difficult for conscience to
escape being continually reminded of the duty. And it is in these two
things that the value of Mr. Maurice's writings mainly consists. The
enforcing of them has been, to our mind, his chief "mission," and his
most valuable contribution to the needs of his generation.
In this volume they are exhibited, as in his former ones; and in this
he shows also, as he has shown before, his earnest desire to find a way
whereby, without compromising truth or surrendering sacred convictions
of the heart, serious men of very different sides might be glad to find
themselves in some points mistaken, in order that they might find
themselves at one. This philosophy, not of comprehension but of
conciliation, the craving after which has awakened in the Church,
whenever mental energy has been quickened, the philosophy in which
Clement of Alexandria and Origin, and, we may add, St. Augustine, made
many earnest essays, is certainly no unworthy aim for the theologian of
our days. He would, indeed, deserve largely of the Church who should
show us a solid and safe way to it.
But while we are far from denouncing or suspecting the wish or the
design, we are bound to watch jealously and criticise narrowly the
execution. For we all know what such plans have come to before now. And
it is for the interest of all serious and earnest people on all sides,
that there should be no needless and additional confusion introduced
into theology--such confusion as is but too likely to follow, when a
design of conciliation, with the aim of which so many, for good reasons
or bad ones, are sure to sympathise, is carried out by hands that are
not equal to it. With the fullest sense of the serious truthfulness of
those who differ from us, of the real force of many of their objections
and criticisms on our proceedings, our friends, and our ideas, it is
far better to hold our peace, than from impatience at what we feel to
be the vulnerable point of our own side, to rush into explanations
before we are sure of our power adequately to explain.
And to this charge it seems to us that Mr. Maurice is open. There is
sense and manliness in his disclaimer of proselytism; and there is a
meaning in which we can agree with his account of truth. "If I could
persuade all Dissenters," he says, "to become members of my Church
to-morrow, I should be very sorry to do it. I believe the chances are
they might leave it the next day. I do not wish to make them think as I
think. But I want that they and I should be what we pretend to be, and
then I doubt not we should find that there is a common ground for us
all far beneath our thinkings. For truth I hold not to be that which
every man troweth, but to be that which lies at the bottom of all men's
trowings, that in which those trowings have their only meeting-point."
He would make as clear as can be that deep substructure, and leave the
sight of it to work its natural effect on the honest heart. A noble
aim; but surely requiring, if anything can, the clear eye, the steady
hand, the heart as calm as earnest. Surely a work in which the greatest
exactness and precision, as well as largeness of thought, would not be
too much. For if we but take away the "trowings" without coming down to
the central foundation, or lose ourselves, and mistake a new "trowing"
of our own for it, it is hardly a sufficient degree of blame to say
that we have done no good.
And in these qualities of exactness and precision it does seem to us
that Mr. Maurice is, for his purpose, fatally deficient. His criticisms
are often acute, his thrusts on each side often very home ones, and
but too full of truth; his suggestions often full of thought and
instruction; his balancings and contrasts of errors and truths, if
sometimes too artificial, yet generally striking. But when we come to
seek for the reconciling truth, which one side has overlaid and
distorted, and the other ignorantly shrunk back from, but which, when
placed in its real light and fairly seen, is to attract the love and
homage of both, we seem--not to grasp a shadow--Mr. Maurice is too
earnest and real a believer for that--but to be very much where we
were, except that a cloud of words surrounds us. His positive
statements seem like a running protest against being obliged to commit
himself and come to the point; like a continual assertion of the
hopelessness and uselessness of a definite form of speaking about the
matter in hand. Take, for instance, the following short statement:--
"My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as
the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with
which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most
objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception
I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about
that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the
word '_miraculous_,' which we _ordinarily connect with it, suggests
an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed to us
most safely in the simple language of the Evangelists_; and because
that language taken in connection with the rest of their story,
offers itself, I suspect, to a majority of those who have taken
in the idea of an Incarnation, as the _only natural and rational_
account of the method by which the eternal Son of God could have
taken human flesh."
Now, would not Mr. Maurice have done better if he had enounced the
definite meaning, or shade of meaning, which he considers short of, or
different from, our _ordinary_ meaning of _miraculous_, as applied to
this subject, and yet the same as that suggested by the Gospel account?
We have no doubt what Mr. Maurice does believe on this sacred subject.
But we are puzzled by what he means to disavow, as an "_untrue
meaning_" of the word _miraculous_, as applied to what he believes.
And the Unitarians whom he addresses must, we think, be puzzled too.
We have quoted this passage because it is a short one, and therefore a
convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting
indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a
position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same
as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or
formalism; and which shall give to the Unitarian what he aims at by his
negation of the popular article, without leaving him any longer a
reason for denying it. The essay on Inspiration is an instance of this.
Mr. Maurice says very truly, that it is necessary to face the fact that
important questions are asked on the subject, very widely, and by
serious people; that popular notions are loose and vague about it; that
it is a dangerous thing to take refuge in a hard theory, if it is an
inconsistent and inadequate one; that if doubts do grow up, they are
hardly to be driven away by assertions. He accepts the challenge to
state his own view of Inspiration, and devotes many pages to doing so.
In these page's are many true and striking things. So far as we
understand, there is not a statement that we should contradict. But we
have searched in vain for a passage which might give, in Mr. Maurice's
words, a distinct answer to the question of friend or opponent, What do
you mean by the "Inspiration of the Bible?" Mr. Maurice tells us a most
important truth--that that same Great Person by whose "holy
inspiration" all true Christians still hope to be taught, inspired the
prophets. He protests against making it necessary to say that there is
a _generic_ difference between one kind of Inspiration and the other,
or "setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may be
lawfully called Inspiration." He looks on the Bible as a link--a great
one, yet a link, joining on to what is before and what comes after--in
God's method of teaching man His truth. He cares little about phrases
like "verbal inspiration" and "plenary inspiration"--"forms of speech
which are pretty toys for those that have leisure to play with them;
and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them
should not be checked. But they do not belong to business." He bids us,
instead, give men "the Book of Life," and "have courage to tell them
that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into all truth."
Great and salutary lessons. But we must say that they have been long in
the world, and, it must be said, are as liable to be misunderstood as
any other "popular" notions on the subject. If there is nothing more to
say on the subject--if it is one where, though we see and are sure of a
truth, yet we must confess it to be behind a veil, as yet indistinct
and not to be grasped, let us manfully say so, and wait till God reveal
even this unto us. But it is not a wise or a right course to raise
expectations of being able to say something, not perhaps new, but
satisfactory, when the questions which are really being asked, which
are the professed occasion of the answer, remain, in their Intellectual
difficulty, entirely unresolved. Mr. Maurice is no trifler; when he
throws hard words about,--when at the close of this essay he paints to
himself the disappointment of some "Unitarian listener, who had hoped
that Mr. Maurice was going to join him in cursing his enemies, and
found that he had blessed them these three times,"--he ought to
consider whether the result has not been, and very naturally, to leave
both parties more convinced than before of the hollowness of all
professions to enter into, and give weight to, the difficulties and the
claims of opposite sides.
Mr. Maurice has not done justice, as it seems to us, in this case, to
the difficulty of the Unitarian. In other cases he makes free with the
common belief of Christendom, and claims sacrifices which are as
needless as they are unwarrantable. If there is a belief rooted in the
minds of Christians, it is that of a future judgment. If there is an
expectation which Scripture and the Creed sanction in the plainest
words, it is that this present world is to have an end, and that then,
a time now future, Christ will judge quick and dead. Say as much as can
be said of the difficulty of conceiving such a thing, it really amounts
to no more than the difficulty of conceiving what will happen, and how
we shall be dealt with, when this familiar world passes away. And this
belief in a "_final_ judgment, _unlike any other that has ever been in
the world_," Mr. Maurice would have us regard as a misinterpretation of
Bible and Creed--a "dream" which St. Paul would never "allow us" to
entertain, but would "compel" us instead "to look upon everyone of what
we rightly call 'God's judgments' as _essentially resembling it in kind
and principle_." "Our eagerness to deny this," he continues, "to make
out an altogether peculiar and unprecedented judgment at the end of the
world, has obliged us first _to practise the most violent outrages upon
the language of Scripture_, insisting that words cannot really mean
what, according to all ordinary rules of construction, they must mean."
It really must be said that the "outrage," if so it is to be called, is
not on the side of the popular belief. And why does this belief seem
untenable to Mr. Maurice? Because it seems inconsistent to him with a
truth which he states and enforces with no less earnestness than
reason, that Christ is every moment judging us--that His tribunal is
one before which we in our inmost "being are standing now--and that the
time will come when we shall know that it is so, and when all that has
concealed the Judge from us shall be taken away." Doubtless Christ is
always with us--always seeing us--always judging us. Doubtless
"everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its
fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing
sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and
discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to
be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over
his meaning and will." Granted, also, that men have, in their attempts
to figure to themselves the "great assize," sometimes made strange
work, and shown how carnal their thoughts are, both in what they
expected, and in the influence they allowed it to have over them. But
what of all this? Correct these gross ideas, but leave the words of
Scripture in their literal meaning, and do not say that all those who
receive them as the announcement of what is to be, under conditions now
inconceivable to man, _must_ understand "the substitution of a mere
external trial or examination" for the inward and daily trial of our
hearts, as a mere display of "earthly pomp and ceremonial"--a
resumption by Christ "of earthly conditions"; or that, because they
believe that at "some distant unknown period they shall be brought into
the presence of One who is now" not "far from them," but out of
sight--how, or in what manner they know not--therefore they _must_
suppose that He "is not now fulfilling the office of a Judge, whatever
else may be committed to Him."
Mr. Maurice is aiming at a high object. He would reconcile the old and
the new. He would disencumber what is popular of what is vulgar,
confused, sectarian, and preserve and illustrate it by disencumbering
it. He calls on us not to be afraid of the depths and heights, the
freedom and largeness, the "spirit and the truth," of our own theology.
It is a warning and a call which every age wants. We sympathise with
his aim, with much of his positive teaching, with some of his aversions
and some of his fears. We do not respect him the less for not being
afraid of being called hard names. But certainly such a writer has
need, in no common degree, of conforming himself to that wise maxim,
which holds in writing as well as in art--"Know what you want to do,
then do it."
XIX
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE[22]
[22]
_Saturday Review_, 6th April 1872.