perceiving that even features of history which seem the darkest, and
moments the most perilous, bear witness to the presence of a benevolent
Creator, who overrules all for the improvement of man and the progress of
the church; it still claims to know what those limits are, where doubt
must expire in awe, and speculation in adoration. It longs to exercise
inquiry, and yet retain the Christian faith. It asks earnestly what does
the history teach us concerning the doubts that are most likely to meet us
in our lifetime, and what lessons are supplied by it in reference to the
best mode at once of maintaining our own faith, and of leading those who
doubt to the faith which we receive. The materials are supplied for an
answer to these questions; probably even the materials for the final
answer which the church can give to them.
We venture not to utter predictions in reference to the future; but the
thought is interesting and solemn, that there seems some reason to believe
that the weapons which doubt on the one hand, and religion on the other,
must use in the final adjudication of their claims, at least in reference
to all fundamental questions, are already in men’s hands. Though our
express denial that doubt perpetually recurs in cycles might cause it to
be supposed that we should be inclined to anticipate the existence of
future crises of faith; yet we have remarked that such crises are always
produced by the opening of some unexplored field of knowledge, the
introduction of a collection of new ideas or of a new spirit excited by
new ideas, on subjects traversed either by the Christian religion, or by
the Christian inspired books. A survey of the present state of knowledge
would probably lead us to think that no field lies unexamined from which
such new material can hereafter come. The physical sciences which, by the
discovery of an order of nature and general laws of causation, have
heretofore suggested difficulties in reference to miraculous
interposition, and, by means of the discoveries in astronomy and geology,
have come into conflict with the ancient Hebrew cosmogony, are not likely
to suggest fresh ones distinct in kind from the past. If there be not
ground for discouragement in science, nor for doubting that the present
state of it, which seems to offer employment for originality of mind
rather in tracking old principles into details than in ascending to new
ones,(1022) is merely a temporary one, destined to pass away when some
happy guess shall reveal the highest laws which now baffle inquiry; yet it
is not probable that such an advance will traverse the province of
religion. The survey of those regions where discovery seems most hopeful,
will explain the reason of this assumption.
If the present examination of some of the subtler forms of matter or of
force,(1023) and of their existence in other globes of the solar system
than our own, should hereafter lead to a generalization which shall extend
natural philosophy as widely beyond its present limits as the discovery
made by Newton beyond those of his predecessors, yet these discoveries can
have no bearing, favourable or unfavourable to religion, distinct in kind
from that of present ones. If even a still mightier stride should be
taken, and physiology be able to lay bare the subtle processes through
which mind acts on body;(1024) yet the difficulty would only be an
enhanced form of that which is already used to discredit the spirituality
and immortality of the soul.
If we pass from the physical to the moral or metaphysical sciences, there
is still less ground for expecting progress. True so far as they go, they
offer no opportunity for enlargement, unless perhaps a more careful
analysis, by means of the fertile principle of mental association,(1025)
should cast light on the sensational source of ideas and the physiological
side of mind; and even this would leave the independent evidence of the
mental data, moral and intellectual, of religion, on the same basis as at
present. Critical science again has attained such perfection, that there
is no possibility of an entirely new range of critical thought springing
up in reference to religion, such as arose when the German mind was
creating the science of historical criticism.
Thus, though each branch of science,—physical, metaphysical, and
critical,—offers grounds of hope to the labourer, there is no reason to
fear that sceptical difficulties will be generated by any of them,
distinct in kind from those which now exist. And a similar line of
argument will suggest, that there is little reason to hope, on the other
hand, for enlargement of the grounds of the evidence of natural and
revealed religion. If this be the case, the materials are accordingly
supplied, from which thoughtful students must make up their minds finally
on the questions at issue. Indeed the survey of modern thought which we
have already made, will have shown that men are already taking their place
in hostile array; and will have revealed differences so fundamental in
reference to religion, on subjects where no further evidence can be
offered, that there can be little reason to hope for the alteration of the
state of parties to the end of time. Never was there an age wherein
Christianity had so real, so potent an effect as the present; yet never
was there one which, while so largely moulded by it, was so really hostile
to it.(1026) It is the hostility, not of opposition which regards
Christianity as false, but of the criticism which views it as obsolete,
and considers it to be one phase of the world’s religious thought, the
eternal truths of which may be assimilated without the historic and
dogmatic basis under which its originators conceived it. Though the
special forms of doubt that now exist derive their lineage, philosophical
and historical, from the modern German and French sources, which we have
studied in the last two lectures; yet it is in an older age of European
history that the nearest general parallel to the present state of feeling
may perhaps be found; and there is a deep truth in the analogy which the
learned and excellent critic,(1027) who has recently made a special study
of the struggle of classical heathenism against Christianity, has pointed
out, between the feeling of philosophers in the second and third centuries
of the Christian era and in the present time.
Amid very wide differences in tone and learning, there is this fundamental
agreement between the age which was enriched with the accumulated learning
of the old civilization, and the present, enriched with that of the new.
There is the same spirit of naturalism; the same indisposition to rise to
the belief of the interference of Deity; the same feeling of contempt for
positive religions; the same sensation of heart-weariness,—the utterance
as it were of the desponding feeling, “Who will show us any good?” the
same lofty theory of stoic morality, and disposition to find perfection in
obedience to nature’s laws, physical and moral; the same approximation to
the Christian ideal of perfection, while destroying the very proof of the
means by which it is to be acquired. And if it be true that the state of
intellectual men presents so marked a parallel, so in like manner the
study of the arguments by which the early fathers in their apologetic
treatises met the doubts of such minds, becomes a question of great
practical as well as literary interest.(1028)
What then are the doubts which are most likely to meet us, either
insinuating themselves into our own minds, or offering their difficulty to
those who intend to become ministers of Christ? and what are the means by
which they may be most effectually repelled?
The main difficulties may be summed up as three:—
(1) The question of the relation of religion, and more particularly of
Christianity, to the human soul; whether religion is anything but
morality, and Christianity its highest type.
(2) The question of the relation of the work of Christ to the human race,
whether it involves a secret mystery of redemption known only to God, and
hidden from the ken of man, except so far as revealed; or whether it is to
be measured by the human mind, and reduced to the proportions which can be
appropriated or understood by man.
(3) The question of the relation of the Bible to the human mind, whether
it is to be that of a friend or a master; and its religious teaching to be
a record or an oracular authority.
The history of recent doubt has brought before us some whose minds doubt
wholly of the supernatural. In the case of a few of these, but only of a
few, the doubt has passed into positive unbelief; their convictions have
become so fixed that they manifest a fierce spirit of proselytism, and can
dare to point the finger of scorn at those who still believe in the unseen
and supernatural relations of God to the human soul. Between these and
religious men the struggle is internecine. We can have no sympathy with
them: we can rejoice that they retain a moral standard, where they have
rejected many of the most potent motives which support it; but must
tremble lest their unbelief end in thorough animalism; lest Epicureanism
be their final philosophy. But there are many more whose tone is that of
sadness, not of scorn; the temper of Heracleitus, not Democritus; whose
souls feel the longing want which nothing but communion with a Father in
heaven can supply, but who are so clouded with doubt, and retain so faint
a hold on the thought of God’s interference, and on the reality of the
supernatural, that they are unable to soar on the wings of faith beyond
the natural, either material or spiritual, up to the throne of God.
The history of such men generally tells of some mighty mental convulsion,
which has driven them from their anchor-ground of belief. Sometimes the
study of science, as it is seen gradually to absorb successive ranges of
phenomena into the regular operation of universal law, until it removes
God far away, and creation seems to move on without His interference, has
been the cause:—in other cases philanthropic pity, musing on the sad
catastrophes which daily occur, when the happiness and lives of innocent
human beings are for ever destroyed by the stem unyielding action of
nature’s laws, leading the heart to doubt God’s nearness, and the fact of
a special Providence:—in other cases again, the study of the human mind in
history, and the perception of the manner in which the gradual growth of
knowledge seems to lessen the region of the supernatural, until the mind
doubts whether the supernatural itself is not the mere _idolum tribûs_, a
mere giving objective being to a subjective idea, a truth relative merely
to a particular stage of civilization. Such causes as these, producing a
convulsion of feeling, may form the sad occasion from which the soul dates
its loss of the grasp which it has heretofore had over the belief of God’s
nearness, and of religion; and mark the moment from which it has gradually
doubted whether anything exists save eternal law; or whether a personal
Deity, if he exist, really communes with man; whether, in short, religion
be anything but duty, and Christianity anything but the noble type of it
to which one branch of the Semitic people was happy enough to attain.
Doubts like these, where they exist in a high-principled and delicate
mind, are the saddest sight in nature. The spirit that feels them does not
try to proselytise; they are his sorrow: he wishes not others to taste
their bitterness. Any one of us who may have ever felt chilled, as the
thought insinuated itself, of the remote possibility of the perception of
the machine-like sweep of universal law removing our belief of the
guardian care of Him to whom alone we can fly for refuge when heart or
flesh faileth, as to a Father as infinite in tenderness as in
condescension, the friend of the friendless:—whoever has known the
bitterness of the thought of a universe unguided by a God of justice, and
without an eternity wherein the cry of an afflicted creation shall no
longer remain unavenged, has known the first taste of the cup of sorrow
which is mournfully drunk by spirits such as we are describing. And who
that has known it would grudge the labour of a life, if by example, by
exhortation, by prayer, he might be the means of rescuing one such soul?
Yet no task is so hard; argument well nigh fails, because the doubts refer
to those very ultimate facts which are usually required as data for
argument. If intellectual means are sought for remedy, it is philosophy to
which we must look to supply it;—the philosophy which recalls man to the
natural realism of the heart, to the simple unsophisticated trust in the
reality of the spiritual intuitions, not as derived from sense only, nor
merely as necessary forms of thought, but as the vision of a personal God
by the human soul.
If however there is any field which requires the presence of moral means,
it is this: and we who believe in a God who careth so much for man that He
spared not His own Son for our sakes, may well look upwards for help in
such instances; in hope that the infinite Father, whose love overlooks not
one single solitary case of sorrowing doubt, will condescend to reveal
himself to all such hearts which are groping after Him, if haply they may
find Him. The soul of such doubters is like the clouded sky: the warming
beams of the Sun of righteousness can alone absorb the mist, and restore
the unclouded brightness of a believing heart.
The instances however are rare, where we meet with a chaos of faith, half
pantheism, half atheism, such as that which we have just described. The
great majority of doubters are persons who not only retain a tenacious
grasp over monotheism, but even possess a love for Christianity. Their
love is however for a modified form of it, different from that which the
apostles taught. They cordially believe that God cares for man, and that
He has spoken to man through His Son. They accept the superhuman, perhaps
the divine, character of Christ; but they consider his life to be a mere
example of unrivalled teaching, and of marvellous self-sacrifice; his
death the mere martyrdom that formed the crowning act of majestic
self-devotion. God’s gift of His son is accordingly, in their view, to
reconcile man to God; to remove the obstacle of distrust which prevented
man from coming to God, by showing forth the love which God already bore
to the world; not to remove obstacles, known or unknown, which prevented
God from showing mercy to man. Christ is accepted as a teacher, and as a
king, but not as a priest. His work is viewed as having for its purpose,
to inculcate and embody a higher type of morality, not to work out a
scheme of redemption. The ethical element of Christianity becomes elevated
above the dogmatic. The sermon on the mount is regarded as the very soul
of Christ’s teaching. And in looking forward to the future of
Christianity, the Christian religion is considered likely to become the
religion of the world, merely because it will have ceased to be the
religion of form and dogma, and become the highest type of ethics.
Views like these are common, and their compatibility with Christianity is
defended in different ways:—sometimes by the bold attempt, as in the
speculations of the Tübingen school, to prove that primitive Christianity
was such a religion as that just described; that the dogmatic Christianity
of the early fathers was the addition made by philosophy to the first
doctrine, the _idola theatri_, which haunted the minds of the early
teachers; and that the books of the New Testament, to which we appeal to
prove the contrary, belong to a later date than that usually
assigned:—sometimes, with less consistency, admitting the antiquity of the
dogmas, by representing that we can penetrate into the philosophy of the
apostolic doctrine, and express in modern phrase, more clearly than in the
ancient, the meaning which was intended to be conveyed:—at other times, by
regarding all truth as relative to its age, and supposing that Christ’s
work was seen by the light of the sacrificial and Messianic ideas common
in the apostolic times.
Connected with this fundamental disagreement with the ordinary teaching of
the Christian church, on the central question of Christ’s work and the
nature of Christianity, is the cognate question concerning the relation of
the Bible as a rule of faith. Its superiority to ordinary books is
admitted, as cordially as the superiority of Christ’s work to that of
ordinary beings; but the religious contents of it, not to speak of the
literary, are criticised, not indeed in a polemical, but in an independent
spirit; and are measured in the manner just described, and approved or
rejected in accordance with it.
Thus these two questions,—the atoning work of Christ, and the authority of
the scriptures,—are the two forms of doubt which are most likely to meet
us in the present age.
The expression of them in the clergy of any particular church may of
course, if it be deemed necessary, be prevented by political means. A
church, if regarded merely in a worldly point of view, is a political as
well as a spiritual institution, where the members cede somewhat of
individual freedom for the good of the whole; a compact where certain
privileges and remunerations are granted, in return for the communication
of certain kinds of instruction, and the performance of certain offices:
and no one can object that the terms of a treaty be maintained; but the
prevention of the expression of doubt is not the extinction of the
feeling. And such acts of repression cannot reach the laity of the church,
even if they touch the clergy. The inquiry accordingly here intended, as
to the means for repressing such doubts, does not descend to the political
question, but is a spiritual one; viz. if these doctrines are contrary to
Christ, how can such thinkers be directed by moral means to the truth
which we believe? or what reason can we give for the hope that is in us,
which leads us to decline yielding up one iota of dogmatic Christianity to
them?
The history of evidences offers a series of experiments, in which we may
find an answer to these questions, by studying the different methods
adopted in various centuries for spreading Christianity.
In the earliest age of the church, previous to the establishment of
Christianity as the state religion, we observe the unaided appeal to
argument, and especially the abundant use made of the internal evidence,
or philosophical argument concerning the excellence of Christianity, as a
means for arresting attention, preparatory to the presentation of the
external and historic proof.(1029) In the long interval of the middle
ages, the church was able to supplement or supersede argument by force;
yet it must be admitted that the political and intellectual condition of
the European mind was then, to a large extent, such as to receive benefit
from the imposition of an external rule of religious authority and
doctrine, in the same manner that individuals, when in a state of
childhood, need a rule, not a principle; a law, not a reason.(1030) This
method however was unsuited when the mind of Europe awoke, and when free
thought could no longer be suppressed by force.
The history of evidences since the spread of modern unbelief exhibits not
only the return to the ancient Christian weapon of argument instead of
force; but not unfrequently to the ancient mode of presenting the
philosophical proof prior to the historical.
An attempt of this kind was intermingled with the English school of
evidences of the last century; and the argument of analogy used by Butler,
if viewed as constructive, and not refutative, may be considered to have
for its object to prepare the mind for accepting revealed religion, by
first showing the probability of it on the ground of its similarity to
nature. (48) And in the German movement, where the doubt thrown by
criticism over the historical evidences even still more compelled the
resort to the philosophical argument on the part of those who strove to
defend the faith, we have seen various attempts to reconstruct
Christianity from the philosophical side.(1031) Both methods, the
philosophical and the historical, have had their place; but their use has
varied with the wants of the age. In proportion as the pressure of doubt
left less opportunity for the constraining force of the latter, the
persuasiveness of the _à priori_ moral argument has been used.
The history of the means which have been successful in removing doubts
lends little support to the opinion which would save the faith by the
sacrifice of the reason, or would imperil the truth of religion by
throwing discredit on the immutability of moral distinctions, perceived by
the conscience which Providence has placed in the human mind; to which the
great writers on evidence have been wont to make their appeal; and which
they have justly perceived must lie at the basis of the evidences
themselves. “If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that
darkness!”
The two periods in church history among those here named, which offer most
instruction to us in consequence of affording examples of the same class
of difficulties as those which we encounter, are, the struggle in the
early centuries, and that in Germany during the present. The line of
argument which was used in the former of these crises is seen in the
Alexandrian school of the fathers in the third century, and that used in
the latter, in the school of Schleiermacher. The study of the life and
mental development of Schleiermacher’s disciple, Neander, would be in this
view one of the most valuable in history.(1032) He was himself led by the
mercy and providence of God to the knowledge of Christ; his own spirit was
rescued from doubts such as we describe; his life was spent in trying to
save others from the like difficulties, and to plant their feet upon the
rock upon which he himself stood: and it is only the secrets of the great
day that will declare the number of the souls that were led by his
teaching to find Christ and salvation.
In both these periods the method adopted for recommending Christianity
was, to carry out the plan used by St. Paul at Athens,(1033) to lay a
basis for the proof of it by developing the moral and philosophical
argument.
In the Alexandrian period the method used was, to show that all former
religions, all former philosophies, were not unmixed error, but contained
the germ of truth, which Christianity gathered into itself; to exhibit
Christianity as the fulfilment in the field of history of the world’s
yearnings, and thus to awaken the response of the heart to the narrative
of its message.(1034) Reasons, to which allusion has before been
made,(1035) may have lessened the utility at that period of the positive
evidence, which proves the fact that a Redeemer had been given; but we
cannot doubt that, independently of this circumstance, a deep
philosophical reason suggested the stress which was laid on the moral
argument, on account of its suitability for convincing the opponent;—a
reason indeed to which the history of some of the fathers gave a personal
force in the fact that it was by this manner that they had themselves been
led to accept of Christianity.(1036)
In the German period the same method has been adopted, with the
corresponding alterations suggested by modern philosophy. Not to mention
the instructive attempts of the school of Kant to find a philosophy from
the subjective side of religion, in the denial of its possibility if
attempted on the objective, and to exhibit the limitations of the human
mind in speculating on the subject of religious method; nor again to
mention the bold attempt of Hegel, to which we have previously taken
exception as opposing the simplicity that is in Christ, to work out this
forbidden problem, and find a philosophy for Christianity on the objective
side: we allude to that which has marked the disciples of Schleiermacher
to find it on the subjective as a life, and fact, and doctrine, which
fulfils the yearnings of the individual heart.