personal elements. But our knowledge is nothing if not personal: it is
the knowledge which issues, and issues only, out of the personal
contact of life with life. And this is why it can afford to anticipate
the future. For a person is a consistent and integral whole: if you
know it at any one point, you know it in a sense at all points. The
one character, the one will, disclose themselves through every partial
expression, and passing gesture, and varying act. Therefore it is
that, when two personalities draw towards one another in the touch of
love, they can afford to plight their word. For love is the
instinctive prophecy of a future adherence. It is the assurance,
passing from soul to soul, that no new discovery of what is involved
in their after-life together can ever deny, or defeat, or destroy
their present mutual coherence in each other. That adhesion, that
adaptability, which has been proved at a few points, will necessarily
be justified throughout. The marriage-pledge expresses the absolute
conviction that the present experience is irreversible, except by
wilful sin. Whatever novelties the years bring with them, those two
characters will abide what they are to-day. Growth cannot radically
alter them.
Love, then, is this confident anticipation, which takes the future in
pledge. And where this anticipation breaks down, it must be through
human infirmity, wrong, misunderstanding.
And our knowledge of Christ is this knowledge of love; wherever it
exists, and so far as it exists, it issues out of personal contact,
personal inter-action. This is why, in its tested and certified form,
i.e. in the accumulated and historic experience of the Catholic
community, it can rationally justify its anticipation of an unbroken
adherence.
And it can do so with complete confidence, because, here, on the side
of Christ, there is no infirmity which can endanger the plighted
faith: there is no lapse, no decline possible. Christ must be loyal,
for He is sinless. And more: being sinless, He is consistent. Every
part of Him is in harmony with the whole: in Him there is no
unsteadiness, no insecurity. Such a flawless character is identical
with itself: wherever it is touched, it can be tested and approved.
What, then, can upset our trust in Him? What can disturb our knowledge
of Him? What fear of change can the years bring on? We may know but a
tiny fragment, a fringe of this love of His to us, yet that is enough:
to have felt it at all is to trust it for ever. We cannot hesitate to
commit ourselves to One Who, if we know Him in any way, is known to
be, by inward, personal, inherent necessity, the 'same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever.'
Yes!--but still it may be pleaded, that this anticipatory adherence,
which might justifiably be given to a person beloved, cannot be
pledged to dogmatic definitions. These, at any rate, are matters not
of love, but of reason: they must be liable to critical examination,
to intellectual revision. It is the pledge given to believe these
dogmas in the future, which is such an outrage on intellectual
morality.
Now, this protest, forcible and obvious as it looks at first sight, is
still guilty of confusing the criticism which belongs to one province
of knowledge with that which belongs to another. These dogmas of faith
do not the least correspond to the classifications and laws of
physical science; and for this reason, that the matter to which they
relate is wholly different in kind. Dogmas represent reason in its
application to a personal life: scientific generalisations represent
reason as applied to matter, from which the conditions of personality
have been rigorously and rightly excluded. The difference is vital;
and it affects the entire character of the working of reason.
The dogmatic definitions of Christian theology can never be divorced
from their contact in the personality of Christ. They are statements
concerning a living character. As such, and only as such, do they come
within the lines of faith. We do not, in the strict sense, believe in
them: for belief is never a purely intellectual act; it is a movement
of the living man drawn towards a living person. Belief can only be in
Jesus Christ. To Him alone do we ever commit ourselves, surrender
ourselves, for ever and aye. But a personality, though its roots lie
deeper than reason, yet includes reason within its compass: a
personality cannot but be rational, though it be more than merely
rational; it has in it a rational ground, a rational construction; it
could not be what it is without being of such and such a fixed and
organic character. And a personality, therefore, is intelligible; it
lays itself open to rational treatment; its characteristics can be
stated in terms of thought. The Will of God is the Word of God; the
Life is also the Light. That which is loved can be apprehended; that
which is felt can be named. So the Personality of the Word admits of
being rationally expressed in the sense that reason can name and
distinguish those elements in it, which constitute its enduring and
essential conditions. The dogmas now in question, are simply careful
rehearsals of those inherent necessities which, inevitably, are
involved in the rational construction of Christ's living character.
They are statements of what He must be, if He is what our hearts
assure us; if He can do that for which our wills tender Him their
lifelong self-surrender. Unless these rational conditions stand, then,
no act of faith is justifiable; unless His personality correspond to
these assertions, we can never be authorised in worshipping Him.
But, if so, then we can commit ourselves to these dogmas in the same
way, and degree, as we commit ourselves to Him. We can do so, in the
absolute assurance that He cannot but abide for ever, that which we
know Him to be to-day. We know Him indeed, but 'in part:' but it is
part of a fixed and integral character, which is whole in every part;
and can never falsify, in the future, the revelation which it has
already made of itself.
The real question, as to Christian dogma, lies in the prior
question--Is Christianity justified in claiming to have reached a
_final_ position? If the position is rightly final, then the
intellectual expression of its inherent elements is final also. Here
is the deep contrast between it and science. The scientific man is
forbidden, by the very nature of his studies, to assume finality for
his propositions. For he is not yet in command of his material. Far,
very far, from it. He is touching it on its very edge. He is engaged
in slowly pushing tentative advances into an unknown world, looming,
vast, dim, manifold, beyond his frontier of light. The coherence of
his known matter with that huge mass beyond his ken, can be but
faintly imaged and suspected. Wholly unreckoned forces are in
operation. At any moment he may be called upon to throw over the
classification which sums up his hitherto experience; he may have to
adopt a new centre; to bring his facts into a novel focus; and this
involves at once a novel principle of arrangement. In such conditions
dogma is, of course, an absurdity. But, if we are in a position to
have any faith in Jesus Christ, then we must suppose that we have
arrived at the one centre to all possible experiences, the one focus,
under which all sights must fall. To believe in Him at all is to
believe that, by and in 'this Man, will God judge the world.' In His
personality, in His character, we are in possession of the ultimate
principle, under which the final estimate of all things will be taken.
We have given us, in His sacrifice and mission, the absolute rule,
standard, test, right to the very end. Nothing can fall outside it. In
Him, God has summed up creation. We have touched, in Him, the 'last
days,' the ultimate stage of all development. We cannot believe in Him
at all, and not believe that His message is final.
And it is this finality which justifies dogma. If Christianity is
final, it can afford to be dogmatic; and we, who give our adhesion to
it, must, in so doing, profess our adhesion to the irreversible nature
of its inherent principles: for, in so doing, we are but re-asserting
our belief in the absolute and final sufficiency of His person.
Let us venture, now, to review the path that we have travelled, in
order that we may see at what point we have arrived. Faith, then, is,
from first to last, a spiritual act of the deepest personal will,
proceeding out of that central core of the being, where the self is
integral and whole, before it has sundered itself off into divided
faculties. There, in that root-self, lie the germs of all that appears
in the separate qualities and gifts--in feelings, in reason, in
imagination, in desire; and faith, the central activity, has in it,
therefore, the germs of all these several activities. It has in it
that which becomes feeling, yet is not itself a feeling. It has in it
that which becomes reason, yet is not itself the reason. It holds in
it imaginative elements, yet is no exercise of the imagination. It is
alive with that which desires, craves, loves; yet is not itself merely
an appetite, a desire, a passion. In all these qualities it has its
part: it shares their nature; it has kindred motions; it shows itself,
sometimes through the one, and sometimes through the other, according
to the varieties of human, characters. In this man, it can make the
feeling its main instrument and channel; in that man, it will find the
intellect its chief minister; in another, it will make its presence
known along the track of his innermost craving for a support in will
and in love. But it will always remain something over, and beyond, any
one of its distinctive media; and not one of these specialities of
gift will ever, therefore, be able to account wholly for the faith
which puts it to use. That is why faith must always remain beyond its
realised evidences. If it finds, in some cases, its chief evidences in
the region of feeling, it is nevertheless open to deadly ruin, if ever
it identifies itself with these evidences, as if it could rely on them
to carry it through. It may come into being by their help; but it is
never genuine faith, until it can abide in self-security at those dry
hours, when the evidences of positive feeling have been totally
withdrawn. And as with feeling; so with reason. Faith looks to reason
for its proofs: it must count on finding them; it offers for itself
intellectual justifications. It may arrive at a man by this road. But
it is not itself reason; it can never confuse itself with a merely
intellectual process. It cannot, therefore, find, in reason, the full
grounds for its ultimate convictions. Ever it retains its own inherent
character, by which it is constituted an act of personal trust--an act
of willing and loving self-surrender to the dominant sway of another's
personality. It is always this, whether it springs up instinctively,
out of the roots of our being, anticipating all after-proof, or
whether it is summoned out into vitality at the close of a long and
late argumentative process. No argument, no array of arguments,
however long, however massive, can succeed in excusing it from that
momentous effort of the inner man, which is its very essence. Let
reason do its perfect work: let it heap up witness upon witness, proof
upon proof. Still there will come at last the moment when the call to
believe will be just the same to the complete and reasonable man as it
always is to the simplest child--the call to trust Another with a
confidence which reason can justify but can never create. This act,
which is faith, must have in it that spirit of venture, which closes
with Another's invitation, which yields to Another's call. It must
still have in it and about it the character of a vital motion,--of a
leap upward, which dares to count on the prompting energies felt astir
within it.
Faith cannot transfer its business into other hands to do its work for
it. It cannot request reason to take its own place, or achieve its
proper results. There is no possibility of devolution here; it cannot
delegate its functions to this faculty or to that. It is by forgetting
this that so many men are to be found, at the close of many arguments
of which they fully acknowledge the convincing force, still hovering
on the brink of faith, never quite reaching it, never passing beyond
the misery of a prolonged and nerveless suspense. They hang back at
the very crisis, because they have hoped that their reasoning powers
would, by their own force, have made belief occur. They are like birds
on a bough, who should refuse to fly until they have fully known that
they can. Their suspense would break and pass, if once they remembered
that, to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, they must always be as little
children. They must call upon the child within them. At the end, as at
the beginning, of all the argumentative work, it is still the temper
of a child which they must bring into play. There must still be the
energy of self-committal,--the movement of a brave surrender. Once let
them turn, enforced by all the pressure of reasonable evidence, to
this secret fount of life within the self, and back flows the strength
which was theirs long ago, when the inspiration of their innate
sonship moved sweetly in them, breeding confidence, secure of itself,
undaunted, and unfatigued. That sonship abides in us all, cumbered and
clouded though it be by our sin; it abides on and on, fed by the
succours of a Father Who can never forget or forsake, and Who is
working hitherto to recover and redeem. And while it abides, faith is
still possible. For its native motions are the spontaneous outcome of
that spiritual kinship which, if once alive and free, impels us
towards Him by Whose love we have been begotten. Reason and feeling,
proof and argument--these are means and instruments by which we can
invoke this sonship into action, and release it from much which
fetters and enslaves. But it is the actual upspringing force of the
sonship itself, which alone can be the source of belief. And as it is
given to all to be sons of God, through the eternal sonship of Christ,
therefore it is open to all to count upon possessing the conditions of
faith in God.
NOTE.--This essay has, for its sole aim, the reassurance of an
existing faith in face of temporary perplexities. It therefore takes
faith as a present and possible fact. It assumes man to be a
creature who believes. And it tries to show why such belief, if it
be there, should not be discouraged by difficulties which belong to
the very nature of its original grounds. For this it recalls the
depth and security with which the roots of faith run back into the
original constitution of man; which original constitution, however
broken, thwarted, maimed, polluted by sin, remains still in us as
the sole pledge and ground of our possible redemption in Christ, Who
comes to restore the blurred image of God in us, and Who must find
in us the radical elements of the supernatural nature which He
enters to renew. To its enduring existence in the heart of man
Christ always appeals. Men are still children of their Father Who is
in heaven; and therefore He can demand, as the sole and primal
condition of redemption, _Faith_, which is the witness of the unlost
sonship. That faith He still assumes to be possible, by the
invitation to man to believe and so be healed. He makes this
invitation just as if it were in man's own power to respond to it
without for the moment touching on the necessity which, through the
very effort to believe, man will discover for himself--i.e. the
necessity of God's gift of the Spirit to make such belief exist.
Such a gift belonged to the original condition of unfallen man, when
his _nature_ was itself supernaturally endowed with its adequate and
sustaining grace. Such a gift had to be renewed, after the ruin
wrought by sin, both by the restoration of the broken sonship within
the man through the beloved Son, as well as by the renewal of the
evoking and sustaining Spirit that should lift up, from within the
inner sonship, its living cry of Abba, Father. The right to believe,
and the power to believe, had both to be re-created.
But all that was so re-created has, for its preliminary ground, the
original constitution of man's sinless nature; and, in all our
treatment of redemption, we must begin by recalling what it was
which Christ entered to restore. That original condition was the
pledge of the recovery which God would bring to pass; and,
throughout the interval between fall and rescue, it could anticipate
the coming Christ by the faith which rejoiced to see His Day, and
saw His Glory, and spake of Him. Therefore the faith which Christ
raises to its new and higher power by concentrating it upon His own
Personality, is still, at core, the old faith which was the
prophetic witness given, under the conditions of the earlier
covenant, by that great army of the Faithful which is marshalled
before us by the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who most
certainly considers it possible and justifiable to emphasise the
continuity that holds between the faith of Abraham and the faith of
the redeemed.
[53] Cf. on all this, an excellent statement in Mark Pattison's
_Sermons_, Serm. 7.
[54] It is not intended to deny that the mind can ever know itself,
but only that such knowledge can ever be won by methods of empirical
observation.
[55] The word 'super-natural' is obviously misleading, since it seems
to imply that the higher spiritual levels of life are _not_ 'natural.'
Of course, the higher the life, the more intensely 'natural' it is;
and the nature of God must be the supreme expression of the natural.
But the word 'super-natural' is, in reality, only concerned with the
partial and conventional use of 'nature,' as a term under which we sum
up all that constitutes this present and visible system of things.
[56] It is this point of arrest which is reached and revealed by the
process of Evolution, under the pressure of Natural Selection.
[57] Faith is spoken of, here and elsewhere, in its perfect and true
form, as if unthwarted by the misdirection, and hurt of sin.
[58] Cf. pp. 105-107.
II.
_THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF GOD._
AUBREY MOORE.
I. The object of this essay is not to discuss the so-called 'proofs'
of the existence of God, but to shew what the Christian doctrine of
God is, and how it has grown to be what it is, out of the antagonisms
of earlier days; and then to ask--What fuller realization of God's
revelation of Himself is He giving us through the contradictions and
struggles of to-day? If it is true that 'the only ultimate test of
reality is persistence, and the only measure of validity among our
primitive beliefs the success with which they resist all efforts to
change them[59],' it is of first importance to discover what it is
which, through all the struggles of past history, the religious nature
of man has persistently clung to. Much which was once dear to the
religious consciousness, and which seemed at the time to be an
integral part of the religious idea, has been given up. A former age
abandoned it with regret, and looked forward with gloomy foreboding. A
later age looks back with thankfulness, and recognises 'the good Hand
of our God' leading us to truer knowledge of Himself.
It would be idle to deny, after all due allowance has been made for
the natural tendency to believe that the present is the critical
moment, not only for us, but for the world at large, that the crisis
of the present day is a very real one, and that the religious view of
God is feeling the effects of the change, which is modifying our views
of the world and man. When such a fundamental idea is challenged, men
are naturally tempted to adopt one of two equally onesided attitudes,
to commit themselves either to a policy of unintelligent protest, or
to a policy of unconditional surrender. And if the one is needlessly
despairing, the other is unwarrantably sanguine. The one asks,--'How
much must I give up, of what religion has always been to me, that a
little of the old may survive amidst the new?' The other asks,--'How
little of the old need I keep, so as not to interfere with the ready
acceptance of the new?' The one view is pessimist, the other optimist.
Both have their representatives in our day, and each party is
profoundly conscious of the danger to which the other is exposed. The
advocates of the one view, finding themselves 'in a place where two
seas meet,' think it safer to 'run the ship aground'; those of the
other 'seeing they cannot bear up against the wind' prefer to 'let her
drive.' But if the spirit of the one is merely protestant, the spirit
of the other is certainly not catholic.
In contrast with these one-sided views, we propose to approach the
question in the full conviction that the revelation of God in Christ
is both true and complete, and yet that every new truth which flows in
from the side of science, or metaphysics, or the experience of social
and political life, is designed in God's providence to make that
revelation real, by bringing out its hidden truths. It is in this
sense that the Christian revelation of God claims to be both final and
progressive; final, for Christians know but one Christ and do not
'look for another'; progressive, because Christianity claims each new
truth as enriching our knowledge of God, and bringing out into greater
clearness and distinctness some half-understood fragment of its own
teaching. There are, no doubt, always to be found Christians, who are
ready to treat new knowledge as the Caliph Omar treated the books in
the library of Alexandria,--'they agree with the Koran and are
unnecessary, or they disagree with it and must be destroyed.' But an
intelligent Christian will not ask, 'Does this new truth agree with or
contradict the letter of the Bible?' but 'How does it interpret and
help us to understand the Bible?' And so with regard to all truth,
whether it comes from the side of science, or history, or criticism,
he adopts neither the method of protest nor the method of surrender,
but the method of assimilation. In the face of new discoveries, the
only question he is anxious to answer is this,--'What old truth will
they explain, or enlighten, or make real to us? What is this new world
of life and interest which is awaiting its consecration? "Truth is an
ever-flowing river, into which streams flow in from many sides[60]."
What is this new stream which is about to empty itself, as all
knowledge must, into the great flood of Divine truth, "that the earth
may be filled with the glory of the Lord, as the waters cover the
sea"?'
Such a hopeful attitude does not, indeed, imply that the assimilation
of the new truths will go on as a matter of course. The Christian
knows that the acceptance of truth is a moral, as well as an
intellectual, matter, and in the moral world there is no place for
_laisser faire_. He expects to be called upon to struggle; he expects
that the struggle will need his utmost effort, moral and intellectual.
His work is both to keep and to claim; to hold fast the faith 'once
for all delivered to the saints,' and yet to see in every fragment of
truth a real revelation of the mind and will of God. He has no cut and
dried answer to objections; he does not boast that he has no
difficulties. But he does claim to look out upon the difficulties of
his day, not only fearlessly, but with hope and trust. He knows that
Christianity must triumph in the end, but he does not expect all
difficulties to be removed in a moment. And he is strong enough, if
need be, to wait.
II. Whether anyone is really guilty of what Hume calls the 'multiplied
indiscretion and imprudence' of dogmatic atheism, whether positivism
can rightly be so classed, whether agnosticism is not atheism to all
intents and purposes, are questions which fortunately lie outside the
scope of the present enquiry. As for polytheism it has ceased to exist
in the civilised world. Every theist is, by a rational necessity, a
monotheist. But we find ourselves, in the present day, face to face
with two different views of God, which though they constantly, perhaps
generally, overlap, and even sometimes coincide, yet imply different
points of view, and by a process of abstraction can be held apart and
contrasted with one another. Many devout Christians are philosophers
and men of science; many men of science and philosophers are devout
Christians. But the God of religion is not the God of science and
philosophy. Ideally, everyone will allow that the religious idea of
God, and the scientific and philosophical idea of God must be
identical, but in actual fact it is not so, and in the earlier stages
of the development of both, there is a real antagonism. To accept this
antagonism as absolute is, by a necessary consequence, to compel one
to give way to the other. We cannot long hold two contradictory
truths. We find ourselves compelled to choose. We may have Religion or
Philosophy, but not both.