throughout Christendom, men of every age, temperament, character, and
antecedents, for whom this problem is practically solved: men who have
a personal conviction that their own past sins are done away with, and
the whole grasp of evil upon them loosened, and who in consequence
rise to heights of character and conduct, which they know that they
would never have otherwise attained. And all this they agree to
attribute, in however varying phrases, to the personal influence upon
them of Jesus Christ. Further, these men had a spiritual ancestry.
Others in the last generation believed and felt, and acted as they now
act and feel and believe. And so their lineage can be traced backward,
age by age, swelling into a great multitude whom no man can number,
till we come to the historic records of Him whom they all look back
to, and find that He claimed the power on earth to forgive sins. And
there the phenomenon ceases. Pre-Christian antiquity contains nothing
analogous to it. Consciousness of sin, and prayers for pardon, and
purgatorial penances, and sacrifices, and incantations, and magic
formulae are there in abundance; and hopes, among certain races, of
the coming of a great deliverer. But never the same sense of sin
forgiven, nor the consequent rebound of the enfranchised soul. Yet
neither a code of morality which was not essentially new, nor the
example of a life receding with every age into a dimmer past, would
have been adequate to produce this result. It has all the appearance
of being, what it historically has claimed to be, the entrance of an
essentially new life into the world, quickening its palsied energies,
as with an electric touch. And the more we realize in the bitterness
of our own experience, or that of others, the essential malignity of
moral evil, the more strictly supernatural does this energy appear.
When, therefore, we are told that miracles contradict experience, we
point to the daily occurrence of this spiritual miracle and ask
'whether is it easier to say thy sins be forgiven thee, or to say
arise and walk?' We meet experience with experience, the negative
experience that miracles have not happened with the positive
experience that they are happening now: an old argument, which so far
from weakening, modern science has immensely strengthened, by its
insistence on the intimate union between material and spiritual
things. For spirit and matter, as we call them, are now known to
intermingle, and blend, and fringe off, and fade into each other, in a
way that daily justifies us more in our belief that the possessor of
the key to one must be the possessor of the key to both, and that He
who can save the soul can raise the dead.
Here then is our answer to the negative criticism, or rather to the
negative hypothesis, by which many critics are misled. Of course we do
not expect for it unanimous assent. It is founded on a specific
experience; and strangers to that experience are naturally unable to
appreciate its force. But neither should they claim to judge it. For
the critic of an experience must be its expert. And the accumulated
verdict of the spiritual experts of all ages, should at least meet
with grave respect from the very men who are most familiar with the
importance of the maxim, 'Cuique in sua arte credendum.' Christianity
distinctly declines to be proved first, and practised afterwards. Its
practice and its proof go hand in hand. And its real evidence is its
power.
We now see why the Atonement has often assumed such exclusive
prominence in the minds of Christian men. They have felt that it was
the secret of their own regenerate life, their best intellectual
apology, their most attractive missionary appeal; and so have come to
think that the other aspects of the Incarnation might be banished from
the pulpit and the market-place, to the seclusion of the schools. But
this has proved to be a fatal mistake. Truth cannot be mutilated with
impunity. And this gradual substitution of a detached doctrine for a
catholic creed, has led directly to the charge which is now so common,
that Christianity is inadequate to life; with no message to ordinary
men, in their ordinary moments, no bearing upon the aims, occupations,
interests, enthusiasms, amusements, which are human nature's daily
food.
But we have already seen what a misconception this implies of the
Incarnation. The Incarnation opened heaven, for it was the revelation
of the Word; but it also reconsecrated earth, for the Word was made
Flesh and dwelt among us. And it is impossible to read history without
feeling how profoundly the religion of the Incarnation has been a
religion of humanity. The human body itself, which heathendom had so
degraded, that noble minds could only view it as the enemy and prison
of the soul, acquired a new meaning, exhibited new graces, shone with
a new lustre in the light of the Word made Flesh; and thence, in
widening circles, the family, society, the state, felt in their turn
the impulse of the Christian spirit, with its
touches of things common,
Till they rose to touch the spheres.
Literature revived; art flamed into fuller life; even science in its
early days owed more than men often think, to the Christian temper and
the Christian reverence for things once called common or unclean.
While the optimism, the belief in the future, the atmosphere of
hopefulness, which has made our progress and achievements possible,
and which, when all counter currents have been allowed for, so deeply
differentiates the modern from the ancient world, dates, as a fact of
history, from those buoyant days of the early church, when the creed
of suicide was vanquished before the creed of martyrdom, Seneca before
S. Paul. It is true that secular civilization has co-operated with
Christianity to produce the modern world. But secular civilization is,
as we have seen, in the Christian view, nothing less than the
providential correlative and counterpart of the Incarnation. For the
Word did not desert the rest of His creation to become Incarnate.
Natural religion, and natural morality, and the natural play of
intellect have their function in the Christian as they had in the
pre-Christian ages; and are still kindled by the light that lighteth
every man coming into the world. And hence it is that secular thought
has so often corrected and counteracted the evil of a Christianity
grown professional, and false, and foul.
Still, when all allowance for other influence has been made; and all
the ill done in its name admitted to the full; Christianity remains,
the only power which has regenerated personal life, and that beyond
the circle even of its professed adherents, the light of it far
outshining the lamp which has held its flame. And personal life is
after all the battle-ground, on which the progress of the race must be
decided. Nor ever indeed should this be more apparent than in the
present day. For materialism, that old enemy alike of the Christian
and the human cause, has passed from the study to the street. No one
indeed may regret this more than the high-souled scientific thinker,
whose life belies the inevitable consequences of his creed. But the
ruthless logic of human passion is drawing those consequences
fiercely; and the luxury of the rich, and the communistic cry of the
poor, and the desecration of marriage, and the disintegration of
society, and selfishness in policy, and earthliness in art, are
plausibly pleading science in their favour. And with all this
Christianity claims, as of old, to cope, because it is the religion of
the Incarnation. For the real strength of materialism lies in the
justice which it does to the material side of nature--the loveliness
of earth and sea and sky and sun and star; the wonder of the mechanism
which controls alike the rushing comet and the falling leaf; the human
body crowning both, at once earth's fairest flower and most marvellous
machine. And Christianity is the only religion which does equal
justice to this truth, while precluding its illegitimate perversion.
It includes the truth, by the essential importance which it assigns to
the human body, and therefore to the whole material order, with which
that body is so intimately one; while it excludes its perversion, by
shewing the cause of that importance to lie in its connection,
communion, union with the spirit, and consequent capacity for endless
degrees of glory.
And though its own first vocation is to seek and save souls one by
one, it consecrates in passing every field of thought and action,
wherein the quickened energies of souls may find their scope. It
welcomes the discoveries of science, as ultimately due to Divine
revelation, and part of the providential education of the world. It
recalls to art the days when, in catacomb and cloister, she learned
her noblest mission to be the service of the Word made Flesh. It
appeals to democracy as the religion of the fishermen who gathered
round the carpenter's Son. It points the social reformer to the
pattern of a perfect man, laying down His life alike for enemy and
friend. While it crowns all earthly aims with a hope full of
immortality, as prophetic of eternal occupations otherwhere. And
however many a new meaning may yet be found in the Incarnation,
however many a misconception of it fade before fuller light; we can
conceive no phase of progress which has not the Incarnation for its
guiding star; no age which cannot make the prayer of the fifth century
its own--
'O God of unchangeable power and eternal light, look favourably on Thy
whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; and by the tranquil
operation of Thy perpetual Providence, carry out the work of man's
salvation; and let the whole world feel and see that things which were
cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are
being made new, and all things are returning to perfection through
Him, from whom they took their origin, even through our Lord Jesus
Christ[214].'
[195] Irenaeus.
[196] S. Thom. Aq. _c. Gent._ iv. 13.
[197] H. de Boseham (Migne) v. 190. p. 1353.
[198] Scot. Er. (Migne) v. 122. p. 302.
[199] S. Bonav. _In Eccles._ ci. t. ix.
[200] H. de S. Victor. (Migne) v. 177. p. 580.
[201] S. Thom. Aquinas.
[202] S. Bonav. _de Reduct._ sub fin.
[203] S. Thom. Aq. _de Verit._ 22. 2. 1.
[204] S. Bonav. _Lum. Eccles._ S. 12.
[205] Id. _Lum. Eccles._ S. 5.
[206] Mark Pattison.
[207] _Mag. Mor._ ii. 12.
[208] S. Thom. Aq. ii. _Sent._ i. 1.
[209] _In Act. Apost._ c. 17. v. 28.
[210] Cp. p. 64.
[211] S. Aug. _de Magist._ 38. t. i. p. 916.
[212] S. Thom. Aq. _cont. Gent._ iv. 13.
[213] Thomassin, _Incarn._ i. 15.
[214] Gelasian, quoted by Bright, _Ancient Collects_, p. 98.
VI.
_THE INCARNATION AS THE BASIS OF DOGMA._
R. C. MOBERLY.
I. Many years ago, in undergraduate days, I was speaking once to a
friend of my hope of beginning some little acquaintance with Theology.
I well remember the air of nicely mingled civility and contemptuousness,
with which my friend, wishing to sympathize, at once drew a
distinction for me between speculative and dogmatic Theology, and
assumed that I could not mean that the mere study of dogmatic Theology
could have any sort of attractiveness. I do not think that I accepted
his kindly overture; but it certainly made me consider more than once
afterwards, whether the 'mere study of dogmatic Theology' could after
all be so slavish and profitless an employment as had been implied. On
the whole, however, I settled with myself that his condemnation,
however obviously candid and even impressive, must nevertheless
remain, so far as I was concerned, a surprise and an enigma. For what,
after all, did the study of dogmatic Theology mean, but the study of
those truths which the mind of Christ's Church upon earth has believed
to be at once the most certain and the most important truths of man's
history, nature and destiny, in this world and for ever?
It is impossible, however, not to feel that my friend, in his
objection, represented what was, and is, a very widespread instinct
against the study of dogma. Some think, for instance, that to
practical men exactnesses of doctrinal statement, even if true, are
immaterial. Others think that any exactness of doctrinal statement is
convicted, by its mere exactness, of untruth; for that knowledge about
things unseen can only be indefinite in character. If, indeed,
religious knowledge is a process of evolution simply, if it means only
a gradual development towards ever-increasing definiteness of
religious supposition, then no doubt its exactness may be the
condemnation of dogma. But then, no doubt, to make room for such a
view, the whole fact of historical Christianity must be first
displaced.
Is it put as an impossibility, that there _cannot_ be any definite or
certain Theology? Can there, then, be a Revelation? Can there be an
Incarnation? Those only are consistent, who assert that all three are
impossible, and who understand that in so doing they are limiting the
possibilities, and therefore _pro tanto_ questioning the reality of a
Personal God. But if there be a Personal God, what are the adequate
grounds on which it is nevertheless laid down that He _cannot_
directly reveal Himself? Or, if He can reveal Himself, on what ground
can the _à priori_ assertion rest, that theological truth must be
uncertain or indefinite? The Christian Church claims to have both
definite and certain knowledge. These claims can never be met by any
_à priori_ judgment that such knowledge is impossible. Such a judgment
is too slenderly based to bear the weight of argument. To argue from
it would be to commit the very fault so often imputed to the
dogmatist. It would be a flagrant instance of dogmatic assertion (and
that for the most important of argumentative purposes) of what we
could not possibly know.
The claim of the Church to knowledge through the Incarnation can only
be rationally met, and only really answered, when the claim itself,
and its evidence, are seriously examined. Herein lies, and will always
lie, the heart of the struggle for or against the dogmatic character
of the Church. Anything else is only the fringe of the matter. Any
rebutting of _à priori_ presumptions against dogma is a mere clearing
of the way for battle. Thus it is said, perhaps, that the objection is
to the degree of definiteness, or to the tone of authority. It is
fancied that dogma in its very nature, quite apart from its contents,
is a curtailment of the rights, and a limitation of the powers, of
mind. Is dogma, the most definite and authoritative, fettering to the
freedom of intellect? We can see in a moment the entire unreality of
the objection, by simply substituting for it another question. Is
truth fettering to intellect? Does the utmost certitude of truth limit
freedom of mind? Because, if not, dogma, so far as it coincides with
truth, cannot fetter either. If perfect knowledge of truth could
paralyse the intellect, what (it is worth while to ask) do we mean by
intellect? Do we mean something which must for ever be struggling with
difficulties which it cannot overcome? Is it necessary for the idea of
mind that it should be baffled? Is it a creature only of the tangle
and the fog? And if ever the day should come, when after struggling,
more or less ineffectually, with the tangle and the fog, man should
emerge at last in clear sunshine upon the mountain top, will mind
cease to have any faculty or place, because the knowledge of truth has
come? At least, if we understand this to be the conception of mind, it
need not frighten us quite so much as it did, to be told that dogma
interferes with mind. But if, however different from our experience
the employment of mind would be in the presence of perfect knowledge,
we cannot so conceive of mind as to admit that truth could possibly be
its enemy or its destruction, then we may certainly insist that no
amount of dogma, so far as it is true, can limit or fetter the freedom
of intellect. But then we are at once thrown back upon the question;
is the dogmatic teaching of the Church true? No statement which
absolutely coincides with truth can hurt the freedom of mind. But
mistaken presumption of truth can, and does, limit it; and so does
authority, if it prevents the examination of truth. Dogma, then, is,
as dogma, a wrong to mind, just so far as it can be convicted of
either of these things; so far as it forbids examination, or so far as
it asserts what is not strictly true.
As to the first of these two suggestions against dogma, it is quite
enough simply to deny it. The Church, as a teacher of dogmatic truth,
does not forbid the freest and completest inquiry into the truths
which she enunciates. The question is not whether dogmatic theologians
have ever dreaded inquiry into truth; but whether the dogmatic Church,
as such, precludes or forbids it. True, she enunciates some truths as
true; and holds those, in different measures, unwise and wrong, who
contradict her truths. But she does not, therefore, forbid the fullest
exercise of intellect upon them; nor tremble lest intellect, rightly
wielded, should contradict them. Indeed for eighteen centuries she has
been engaged, and will be engaged to the end, in examining with a
power and discipline of intellect, which she alone ever has, or could
have, evoked, into the meaning and exactness of her own knowledge. But
she does warn inquirers that successful inquiry into her truths is no
work of merely ingenious disputation, but needs the exactest
discipline and balance of all the faculties of our human nature.
We return, then, to the second suggestion; and I repeat that the
question has for us become, not whether dogma in the abstract is
desirable or undesirable, but whether the dogmas of the Christian
Church are true or not true. Dogma that is true can only be
undesirable in so far as truth is undesirable.
Whether the dogmas of the Church are true or not true, is itself a
question of evidence.
Before, however, making any remark upon the nature of this evidence in
the case of religion, we may remember that the possession of dogma is
in no way peculiar to religion. There is no region of research or
knowledge which does not present to the student its own 'dogmata,' or
truths ascertained and agreed upon; nor does any one, in the name of
freedom of intellect, persist in treating these always as open
questions.
But perhaps if we venture thus to claim the ascertained truths of any
science as dogmas, the scientific answer will be ready. They differ,
it will be felt, from the nature of religious dogmas, in two important
respects. The first difference is, that they are offered for
acceptance with their full proofs, from the first moment that they are
offered at all. The student could not, it may be, have discovered for
himself the law of gravitation, or the circulation of the blood; but
he can, when these discoveries are once set before him by another, see
forthwith not only the coherency of the principles, but the cogency of
their proof. The second difference is, that when they have been
accepted by the student, proof and all, they still claim no allegiance
beyond what his intelligence cannot but freely give; he is still free
to supersede or upset them, if he can. He accepts them indeed
provisionally, as identical with the truth so far as the truth on the
subject is yet known; yet not necessarily as final truth. He accepts
them as truths which all his further study will comment upon;
presumably indeed in the way of continual illustration and
corroboration,--so that what he accepts for study will be more and
more certainly proved by the study--but also, if you please, in the
way of correction; for if his study can supersede, or even in any
measure correct or alter them,--why, so much the better both for
science and for him! Why should not this be equally true of Theology?
Why should religious dogmas be received without these conditions, as
certainly and finally true?
To begin with, then, some exception may be taken to the statement that
the student who accepts a scientific doctrine, has the full evidence
before him from the beginning. That it is not altogether so is evident
from the simple consideration, just mentioned, that his work is a
progressive one; and that the whole course of his experience tends,
and will tend, to deepen the certainty of his first principles. But in
so far as the proof of any leading principle is being deepened and
strengthened by the student's daily work, so far it is clear that the
amount of certainty about his principles with which at first he began,
must be less than that with which he ends at last; and therefore that
the proof presented to him at the beginning, however much it may have
been adequate to the purpose, (even though it may have been the
completest proof capable of being presented in the way of exposition
from the lip to the ear) was nevertheless most incomplete in
comparison with the fulness of attainable proof. And further, it may
certainly be said also, that in the convincingness of this evidence as
at first presented, authority, whether more or less, had an undoubted
part. At the very least it had a negative place, as a guarantee to the
young mind rejoicing in the ingenuity of the apparent demonstration,
that the apparent demonstration was not vitiated by some unseen
fallacy, or that there was not a series of other considerations
behind, which would rob the lesson just learnt of its practical
usefulness. Often, indeed, the degree of authority in the first
scientific convictions would be very much higher. Often, however
helpful the arguments or illustrations of a principle may seem, the
really overruling consideration will at first be this, that the whole
scientific world has absolutely accepted the principle as truth. So
much is this the case, that if an average student should find himself
unable in any point to receive the ascertained truths of his science
with intelligent agreement, he would not hesitate to assume that the
whole fault lay with himself; he would really be convinced in his soul
that the dicta of his scientific teachers were right, and that he
himself would see the certainty of them by and by.
Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious dogma is
not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with that of
scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in its first
acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to authority, nor is it
stagnant and unprogressive after it is accepted. However different in
other ways the leading truths of the Creed may be from scientific
principles; in this respect at least they are not different,--that not
one of them is ever brought for the acceptance of men without some
really intelligent evidence and ground for acceptance. If any man is
asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground for the
acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would be his duty
to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself be a large part
of his intelligent ground; a larger part or a smaller according to
circumstances. But then there is no proper antithesis between
believing in deference to authority, and believing in deference to
reason, unless it is understood that the authority believed in was
accepted at first as authority _without reason_, or maintained in
spite of the subsequent refusal of reason to give confirmatory witness
to its assertions. Even in the cases in which there seems to be least
use of reason, the case of a young child learning at his mother's
knee, or of a man whose spirit has suffered and been broken, and who
gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a friend or a
teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted on grounds
essentially reasonable. The child's reasoning may differ in quality
from the prodigal's; but the child trusts father or mother on grounds
which are wholly, if unconsciously, a product of the strictest reason;
and the prodigal has felt in his inmost soul alike the deadness of his
own spiritual being, and the power and the beauty which are in the
life of the teacher upon whom he throws himself. And this is not the
only point; for the reasonable mind in one is not a thing different in
nature from the reasonable mind in another, or from the eternal reason
which is in God. The truths, therefore, which we are taught about God,
and man, and Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the
heaven of holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of not
unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend themselves, in
some shape or measure, even to the callow mind from its earliest
immaturity. There is that in the very consciousness of child, or of
criminal, with which they are in essential harmony. That in him with
which they are in essential correspondence bears witness of them. Nor
is anyone, in his acceptance of them, wholly insensible of this
witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven upon his own
conscious being.