SECOND DISCOURSEOF THEBISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH.CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.

OnWednesday evening, March 29th, the Bishop of Peterborough preached his second sermon, on “Christianity and Scepticism,” before a large congregation in the nave of the Cathedral, Norwich. His text was from the Gospel according to St. John, xx. 25:—

“The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord. But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

His Lordship said:

My subject to-night is “Christianity, and Scepticism,” and I have chosen for my text these words of a sceptic, for as such St. Thomas has been regarded. His name has become proverbial in Church history for unbelief. Among the different characters that surround our Lord in the Gospel story, he has been regarded as the type of the doubter, and he is known as the doubting or the unbelieving Thomas. And yet at first sight we hardly see that he should be so called. It is quite true that he did doubt, and yet his doubt does not at first sight seem to be unreasonable, or so very obstinate that he should be called by way of distinction, the doubter, the unbeliever. It was not unreasonable. On the contrary, it was reasonable and natural that he should feel some doubt about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Others had doubts as well as he, and they were called fools and slow of heart to believe, and yet they did not inherit the name of the doubters. Again, his disbelief was not of a very obstinate kind. It seemed to have yielded almost instantaneously; and almost immediately after he was satisfied, he said more than others of the disciples, for he said “My Lord and my God.” He not only acknowledged the resurrection of Jesus, but his divinity, and yet he is called Thomas the doubter, the sceptic, and he is rightly so called.The Christian consciousness did not err when it gave the name, because when he uttered the words which I have just read to you, “Except I see I will not believe,” he uttered that which is the very essence of scepticism. He suspended his belief upon an absolutely impossible condition. He declaredthat he would not give his assent except on this condition, that it should be made absolutely impossible for him to doubt. What he said to his brother disciples amounts to this:—“You tell me that you have seen the Lord, but I cannot believe you. It does not matter to me how strong your testimony may be, or how truthful I believe you to be, I will not be satisfied till I see it for myself. I will not accept of any testimony but that of my own senses.” He said his assent was only to be had by absolute demonstration, and its being made impossible for him to have any doubt. I say the condition makes all belief absolutely impossible. Belief, in the proper sense of the word, is assent on an amount of trust. If we have absolute demonstration of anything, the result is not belief at all, it is demonstration. What we see with the eyes of our body or mind, we don’t properly believe in. We know it. We have the certainty, not of faith, but of science, and where doubt is impossible, belief or faith is impossible. You may have certainty, but it will be the certainty of knowledge, it will not be the certainty of faith. It is quite clear that if any man makes it a condition of his assent to truth of any kind, that it must first be demonstrated to him as clear as that two and two make four; it is clear that is if there be any class of truths which cannot be so proved as that two and two make four, the man who makes that proof or demonstration a condition of his assent, must always be in doubt about those truths, or that class of truths; he must always in respect of them be a sceptic or doubter.Again, one step further, it is clear that religion or Christianity is a truth, or class of truths that cannot be demonstrated scientifically. We cannot prove that there is a God, in the same way that we can prove that two and two make four. We cannot do this, because the idea of God is that he is invisible to us. The first utterance of religion is this: I believe in what I cannot see, I believe in an invisible God. Clearly he that says, I don’t believe anything I do not see, must be a sceptic or doubter about the truth of religion; and therefore it comes to pass, that though religion is by no means the only subject, or the only collection of truths that cannot be demonstrated, it is the principal one, and it has come to pass that though there are sceptics on other subjects, yet for this reason a sceptic is understood to be a man who doubts about religious subjects; a man who will not believe all the truths of Christianity, because they cannot be demonstrated to him in the way he thinks they should be demonstrated. You seenow what a sceptic is, and what scepticism, is. By the word sceptic we mean a disbeliever in the truths of religion. A man may disbelieve some of the truths of religion and not be a sceptic. A Jew does not believe in Christianity, but he is not a sceptic. It is because he believes in Moses that he does not believe in Christ. We don’t call the Pantheists or the Deists sceptics, because they have a fixed belief. Some of their beliefs I think monstrous; they make a greater demand on faith than those do who believe in religion. I think the man who says there is no God must believe more contradictions than the man who says there is a God. He has a perfectly monstrous creed, but it is a creed. He is not so much a disbeliever as a misbeliever, for he believes in something else than God. Again, we don’t call a doubter a sceptic; a sceptic is a doubter, but the doubter is not necessarily a sceptic. A man may doubt of the truths of religion, only because he has not had evidence of the proper kind. A sceptic asks for evidence of an unreasonable kind. A man may doubt the truth of any assertion in history; he may think that all the historians or witnesses of the facts are untruthful or ill informed, I should not call that man a sceptic; but if a man said, I don’t believe the facts you allege in history, because I deny all human testimony; you cannot deny that these men lived some time since, and that they may have been liars; you cannot give me proof to the contrary: that man I should call a sceptic, because in matters historical he was demanding an unreasonable amount of evidence. It is not doubt nor unbelief that makes the difference as to the sceptic. The sceptic is not such because he doubts, but on account of the reason of his doubt. He seeks for evidence that it is not proper or reasonable that he should have.Now I have shown you that there may be doubt without scepticism; and on the other hand, there may be belief, or at least assent, upon sceptical principles. It is quite possible that a man may be firmly persuaded of some of the truths of religion, and yet be in heart a sceptic. If a man were to say I cannot believe in the existence of a God till I have it demonstrated to me as clear as that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, then he is in principle a sceptic, because it is clear that if he could not have that sort of proof, he would begin to doubt of the existence of God. All the time his assent to the existence of God would not have rested upon any faith or trust, but upon demonstration.But when the idea of God ceased to be a scientific certainty, it is clear that he would be in heart a sceptic. And there is no doubt that the first belief of the apostle Thomas was rendered upon sceptical principles. He said, I will not believe till I put my finger in the print of the nails, &c., as if he had said, I will believe nothing but the evidence of my own senses. He believed only because he got this evidence of his senses; and mark this, when our Lord gave him what he asked, he pronounced no praise on his belief; he did not say to him as he said to another, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjonas, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to thee;” but flesh and blood had revealed the fact to Thomas, and our Lord said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Thus it is possible to doubt without being sceptical, and it is possible to assent, and to be still sceptical. I want you to dwell on this point of belief, doubt, and sceptical belief, because there are certain things that I am going to point out in this way. I ask you to test for yourselves what I am now going to say, and try the effect upon your own feelings. We cannot demonstrate Christianity. It is utterly impossible that I can give you a demonstration of Christianity, such as will leave no possible room for doubt or question. When those who have to follow me have said all they have to say; when they have put before you all the evidences of Christianity in all their fulness and variety; when they have shown how much more reasonable it is to believe than to disbelieve, how many more difficulties there are in the way of disbelief than of belief; when all this is done, there may still be a doubt on your minds; there will be questions that cannot be answered, there will be difficulties that cannot be explained, and which no living man can explain. We can give the highest degree of evidence, short of demonstration, for belief in Christ, but we cannot demonstrate Christianity. Now what effect has that announcement on your hearts? Possibly you have heard it with some disappointment. You may have come to hear these sermons, expecting to have all your doubts removed. You may say, “I thought you were going to answer all the questions with mathematical certainty.” Our answer is, If we could prove with as much certainty that there is a God as that two and two make four, or as that this is a book [holding it up], then our religion would do you as much good as the knowledge that two and two make four. We would not in that case cultivate thequality of faith in your souls, in spite of difficulties and doubts. We cannot demonstrate Christianity, but we can give sufficient reason for our belief in it, in spite of doubt.What we have to say is this, that the evidences of Christianity are weapons to put in the hands of every one of you, with which every man and woman may fight out in his or her innermost soul the desolating and besieging doubt that from time to time will assault it. This is the real object of evidences of faith, but they are not meant to be the outlying works of the citadel of the soul outside of which the enemy is compelled to keep. The shield of faith in God you have to carry on your own arm, and with it quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. Though your own arm tremble, you must carry it to repel the darts that are aimed at your own heart.There is another word of comfort we have to give you the really distressed doubter. Christianity does not repel the doubter who says, I believe, Lord help my unbelief. What Christianity is intolerant of is not doubt, but the spirit of doubt, not unbelief, but the demand for unreasonable, impossible conditions of belief. We don’t tell you to stamp out every doubt before you can become a Christian. We say if you believe but one point, you may come to believe all the rest, and our message to you is, weary as you may be of the load of doubt, the same as that of the Saviour who said “Come unto me all you that are weary and heavy laden,” and you will find rest to your souls.And now I have clearly explained the difference between Christianity and Scepticism. Let us briefly sum up again and show the points of collision between Scepticism and Christianity. We saw last night that the question between Christianity and Freethought was a dispute as to the nature of liberty, so the question between Christianity and Scepticism is a dispute as to the nature of certainty. Christianity offers and gives certainty in the end; Scepticism demands certainty. But the certainty of Christianity is partly the certainty of reason and partly of faith and of experience. The certainty demanded by Scepticism is the certainty of science only. The most extreme of unbelievers will admit that there is something to be said for Christianity; and that it is not unworthy of a hearing as regards its evidences. The men who have believed in Christianity for the last 1800 years, have not been the greatest fools in the world. Liebnitz and Butler were not drivellers, and not those only, but hundreds and thousands of thegreatest intellects that humanity has produced. They were not such utter fools that any man is entitled to dismiss Christianity with a wave of his hand. On the other hand, every reasonable Christian will admit that there is something fair and reasonable in some of the objections to Christianity. But the Christian says to the sceptic, It is unreasonable in you to ask that every difficulty should be got rid of and every question answered before you believe in Christianity. The sceptic replies, It is unreasonable in you to ask me to believe in Christianity till you have removed every doubt. I will ask you which is the reasonable demand—the demand of the Christian for faith upon probable evidence, or the demand of the sceptic for assent only upon scientific demonstration?Now in order to argue it fairly and without passion or prejudice, let us pass from the subject of religious doubt and let us consider the case of doubt in other matters than religion; we all know that men have doubted in other subjects. Try then to recall to your minds the first doubt; it was only a little later than the first belief. The first instinct of the child is to believe everything, that everything he sees and hears is true. All appearances to the child are realities. The sun is to him a ball of fire that climbs up the sky, the stars are little specks of light that shine at night. The earth is a flat plain. Very soon the child learns the first great lesson of doubt, learns that things are not what they appear to be, learns to distrust appearances, learns that under the appearances there is a reality. He gets his first teaching from doubt, and all-important is the instinct of doubt. Very soon is the awakening of the sceptical part of the mental nature of man, of his understanding. The nature of the understanding is ever to ask, What and why? The spirit of doubt leads the man from question to question, from step to step, till he gets answers to his questions; he goes on from doubt to belief, and from belief to doubt, and so on to greater knowledge. Thus doubt is the means of knowledge, the instrument of discovery. Without the instinct of doubt humanity would be stagnant; with it alone humanity progresses. I do not disparage doubt, I highly value it; but doubt is useful on one condition, and one only, that it starts from a first belief. What is the cause of all this doubt and pursuit of knowledge? The supreme instinctive belief, that under all appearances there is a reality, that something underlies and causes all being; and it is the search for this essence of existence thatleads the doubter on, the search of thisI am. If he had no faith in some underlying reality beneath these phenomena, there would be no progress, and so doubt is ever seeking for that which is below what appears, and yet never reaches it.Never yet has science reached to the great reason of all reasons, to the great cause of all causes, that underlies all knowledge; and yet ever as we seek for it we are advancing in knowledge. We do not reach it, but are ever reaching and passing on, through that which lies between us and it. Doubt is like the mainspring of a watch, it is ever seeking to uncoil itself and yet never entirely doing so. The result is that the hands of the watch move uniformly because there is an attachment of the mainspring. Cut the attachment, and the hands will give one wild whirl and all will be still, and the watch useless. It is just the same with doubt and faith. Doubt is attached to the primary belief that there is a cause of all things, but it is ever seeking to detach itself from that belief and never succeeds. The consequence is, that there is a constant and measured progress of the human mind. But we have to consider how much further the intellect which has thus been the rule and test of our belief might go. A child not only believes in appearances or facts, but he has an instinctive belief in the truthfulness of humanity. The child has not learned that it is not wise to believe everything that is said to him. Was that a happy discovery? Should we tell a child not to believe the word of any human being until he had demonstration about it? Is it wisdom always to distrust human nature? We are always trusting. Give a logical proof that we are right in any of our trusts. A wife may be false, a child may hate its parents, and a man may be robbed by a friend or a confidential servant; yet are we to distrust everybody? If a man were not to trust any one till it was proved by demonstration that he ought to do so, he would be put in a lunatic asylum; and rightly so, as a man one part of whose nature had got diseased and had mastered all the other parts of his nature. I defy any one to say logically that the man may not be right, or to give a logical demonstration that it is absolutely impossible that his wife, children, and friend were not in a conspiracy to wrong him. There is thus an absolute necessity for trust in the ordinary affairs of life, I hope you will see that life must be conducted on the principle of faith or trust.Let us ask if morality can exist without faith or trust, whether we can get a demonstrative or scientific basis for morality itself?I ask this, because those who ask for the destruction of our religion talk of the gain to morality. They say, Sweep away the influences of religion and morality will be stronger. Let us see how morality will bear the assaults of scepticism. Morality is that code or rule of action which we follow in questions of right or wrong, or it is that code of right and wrong which every man adopts for himself. To take the first definition. Have we got the universal sense of humanity upon any moral question of right or wrong? If the majority of mankind agree with us, can we prove logically that they must always be right and the minority wrong? Again, which morality will we have—that of to-day or that of a past generation? If we cannot settle the question by majority or minority, how are we to settle it? By asking the opinion of the wise and good. Before we know the wise and good we must know what wisdom and goodness are; and if we know what they are, what need have we to look to the wise and good to tell us? Who are the wise and good? Those who gave good opinions. Is that logical? Will it stand sceptical inquiry? If it is not to be settled by the appeal to the universal voice of humanity—which is simply illogical and preposterous, for this reason, that we are part of universal humanity, and if we differ from that verdict it is not the verdict of universal humanity, and if we agree with it, we might as well have taken our own in the first instance—then man must decide for himself what is right and wrong. What is it decides in a man what is right or wrong? Conscience. Why must a man submit to the decision of his own conscience? We are told that it is part of our moral nature. What demonstration is there that one part of our nature is to yield to another? Have we any logical demonstration as to what we are? I have a scientific demonstration that I am made of carbon, lime, phosphate, and certain other chemicals, but no man of science has ever demonstrated spirit or conscience. Why is it that a man is to obey the bidding of one convolution of his brain more than another? It cannot be made as clear as that two and two make four, that a man is to do to another man as he would be done unto. Duty and right are words of the spirit, of the soul, but science and logic never yet revealed the soul.Therefore the man who will believe nothing but what can be demonstrated to him, will deny at last the obligation of duty in obedience to his sceptical intellect, just as hebegan with denying the existence of God. How does he get out of this great difficulty? By calling up the instinct of faith. He wills to believe that he is something more than a bundle of material elements, that the conscience in his soul is something supreme and divine, that the man in him is something above the animal; and by an exercise of faith in his own higher and better self, he silences the eternalwhyof the sceptical intellect, the serpent more subtile than any other beast of the field, which if it had its way would make man a beast.There is only one more question to which I have to call your attention. Having shown you that the sceptical intellect is not the only judge, having shown you that there are domains of human knowledge and human life into which, if it comes at all, it must come as the servant and not as the master; having shown you that scepticism is really nothing else than the intrusion of the mere understanding into the province of the soul and the spirit, it remains to ask, Is religion, is Christianity, one of those subjects on which the understanding is not to be the only judge, but on which the spirit and soul and heart of man have something to say about his belief? Surely then if Christianity be what it professes to be, a life, like all human and temporal life, it must be conducted upon a principle of faith or trust. If we cannot live our ordinary human life without trust, where we cannot have certainty, neither can we live the spiritual life without trust, where we can neither prove nor demonstrate; then if we think of this life in close relationship with the divine and the infinite life, can it possibly be otherwise than that out of the meeting place of those two mysteries there shall grow mystery and difficulty? All that Christianity requires is, not that man shall not ask for reasonable proof, but that we should not deal with it in a different way from that in which we deal with human life and morality. We don’t ask you in religion to believe without evidence, but to require large evidence. Now my friends, still remember when we ask you to believe before you see all, it is that you may experience all. Christianity has a certainty, but it comes not as the proof, but as the reward of faith. There is a demonstration of the spirit, an evidence of divine life, in the soul of the Christian, that he cannot demonstrate to others, because it is as invisible as his own soul and spirit, and yet it fills the inner core of the spirit—it is the strengthener of the spirit. Christianity is a great experiment, a probable experiment, a reasonable experiment,but still it is an experiment, and you may try it. If you have a simple and earnest desire to ascertain its truth, try it, casting aside the trivial interests that the profligate man has in the disproof of it. Try it and see if there does not come into your soul that conviction not created by science, but springing from the inner life of the soul, that shall be like a well of water springing up to everlasting life. As in life so in religion, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

The Christian consciousness did not err when it gave the name, because when he uttered the words which I have just read to you, “Except I see I will not believe,” he uttered that which is the very essence of scepticism. He suspended his belief upon an absolutely impossible condition. He declaredthat he would not give his assent except on this condition, that it should be made absolutely impossible for him to doubt. What he said to his brother disciples amounts to this:—“You tell me that you have seen the Lord, but I cannot believe you. It does not matter to me how strong your testimony may be, or how truthful I believe you to be, I will not be satisfied till I see it for myself. I will not accept of any testimony but that of my own senses.” He said his assent was only to be had by absolute demonstration, and its being made impossible for him to have any doubt. I say the condition makes all belief absolutely impossible. Belief, in the proper sense of the word, is assent on an amount of trust. If we have absolute demonstration of anything, the result is not belief at all, it is demonstration. What we see with the eyes of our body or mind, we don’t properly believe in. We know it. We have the certainty, not of faith, but of science, and where doubt is impossible, belief or faith is impossible. You may have certainty, but it will be the certainty of knowledge, it will not be the certainty of faith. It is quite clear that if any man makes it a condition of his assent to truth of any kind, that it must first be demonstrated to him as clear as that two and two make four; it is clear that is if there be any class of truths which cannot be so proved as that two and two make four, the man who makes that proof or demonstration a condition of his assent, must always be in doubt about those truths, or that class of truths; he must always in respect of them be a sceptic or doubter.

Again, one step further, it is clear that religion or Christianity is a truth, or class of truths that cannot be demonstrated scientifically. We cannot prove that there is a God, in the same way that we can prove that two and two make four. We cannot do this, because the idea of God is that he is invisible to us. The first utterance of religion is this: I believe in what I cannot see, I believe in an invisible God. Clearly he that says, I don’t believe anything I do not see, must be a sceptic or doubter about the truth of religion; and therefore it comes to pass, that though religion is by no means the only subject, or the only collection of truths that cannot be demonstrated, it is the principal one, and it has come to pass that though there are sceptics on other subjects, yet for this reason a sceptic is understood to be a man who doubts about religious subjects; a man who will not believe all the truths of Christianity, because they cannot be demonstrated to him in the way he thinks they should be demonstrated. You seenow what a sceptic is, and what scepticism, is. By the word sceptic we mean a disbeliever in the truths of religion. A man may disbelieve some of the truths of religion and not be a sceptic. A Jew does not believe in Christianity, but he is not a sceptic. It is because he believes in Moses that he does not believe in Christ. We don’t call the Pantheists or the Deists sceptics, because they have a fixed belief. Some of their beliefs I think monstrous; they make a greater demand on faith than those do who believe in religion. I think the man who says there is no God must believe more contradictions than the man who says there is a God. He has a perfectly monstrous creed, but it is a creed. He is not so much a disbeliever as a misbeliever, for he believes in something else than God. Again, we don’t call a doubter a sceptic; a sceptic is a doubter, but the doubter is not necessarily a sceptic. A man may doubt of the truths of religion, only because he has not had evidence of the proper kind. A sceptic asks for evidence of an unreasonable kind. A man may doubt the truth of any assertion in history; he may think that all the historians or witnesses of the facts are untruthful or ill informed, I should not call that man a sceptic; but if a man said, I don’t believe the facts you allege in history, because I deny all human testimony; you cannot deny that these men lived some time since, and that they may have been liars; you cannot give me proof to the contrary: that man I should call a sceptic, because in matters historical he was demanding an unreasonable amount of evidence. It is not doubt nor unbelief that makes the difference as to the sceptic. The sceptic is not such because he doubts, but on account of the reason of his doubt. He seeks for evidence that it is not proper or reasonable that he should have.

Now I have shown you that there may be doubt without scepticism; and on the other hand, there may be belief, or at least assent, upon sceptical principles. It is quite possible that a man may be firmly persuaded of some of the truths of religion, and yet be in heart a sceptic. If a man were to say I cannot believe in the existence of a God till I have it demonstrated to me as clear as that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, then he is in principle a sceptic, because it is clear that if he could not have that sort of proof, he would begin to doubt of the existence of God. All the time his assent to the existence of God would not have rested upon any faith or trust, but upon demonstration.But when the idea of God ceased to be a scientific certainty, it is clear that he would be in heart a sceptic. And there is no doubt that the first belief of the apostle Thomas was rendered upon sceptical principles. He said, I will not believe till I put my finger in the print of the nails, &c., as if he had said, I will believe nothing but the evidence of my own senses. He believed only because he got this evidence of his senses; and mark this, when our Lord gave him what he asked, he pronounced no praise on his belief; he did not say to him as he said to another, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjonas, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to thee;” but flesh and blood had revealed the fact to Thomas, and our Lord said, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Thus it is possible to doubt without being sceptical, and it is possible to assent, and to be still sceptical. I want you to dwell on this point of belief, doubt, and sceptical belief, because there are certain things that I am going to point out in this way. I ask you to test for yourselves what I am now going to say, and try the effect upon your own feelings. We cannot demonstrate Christianity. It is utterly impossible that I can give you a demonstration of Christianity, such as will leave no possible room for doubt or question. When those who have to follow me have said all they have to say; when they have put before you all the evidences of Christianity in all their fulness and variety; when they have shown how much more reasonable it is to believe than to disbelieve, how many more difficulties there are in the way of disbelief than of belief; when all this is done, there may still be a doubt on your minds; there will be questions that cannot be answered, there will be difficulties that cannot be explained, and which no living man can explain. We can give the highest degree of evidence, short of demonstration, for belief in Christ, but we cannot demonstrate Christianity. Now what effect has that announcement on your hearts? Possibly you have heard it with some disappointment. You may have come to hear these sermons, expecting to have all your doubts removed. You may say, “I thought you were going to answer all the questions with mathematical certainty.” Our answer is, If we could prove with as much certainty that there is a God as that two and two make four, or as that this is a book [holding it up], then our religion would do you as much good as the knowledge that two and two make four. We would not in that case cultivate thequality of faith in your souls, in spite of difficulties and doubts. We cannot demonstrate Christianity, but we can give sufficient reason for our belief in it, in spite of doubt.

What we have to say is this, that the evidences of Christianity are weapons to put in the hands of every one of you, with which every man and woman may fight out in his or her innermost soul the desolating and besieging doubt that from time to time will assault it. This is the real object of evidences of faith, but they are not meant to be the outlying works of the citadel of the soul outside of which the enemy is compelled to keep. The shield of faith in God you have to carry on your own arm, and with it quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. Though your own arm tremble, you must carry it to repel the darts that are aimed at your own heart.

There is another word of comfort we have to give you the really distressed doubter. Christianity does not repel the doubter who says, I believe, Lord help my unbelief. What Christianity is intolerant of is not doubt, but the spirit of doubt, not unbelief, but the demand for unreasonable, impossible conditions of belief. We don’t tell you to stamp out every doubt before you can become a Christian. We say if you believe but one point, you may come to believe all the rest, and our message to you is, weary as you may be of the load of doubt, the same as that of the Saviour who said “Come unto me all you that are weary and heavy laden,” and you will find rest to your souls.

And now I have clearly explained the difference between Christianity and Scepticism. Let us briefly sum up again and show the points of collision between Scepticism and Christianity. We saw last night that the question between Christianity and Freethought was a dispute as to the nature of liberty, so the question between Christianity and Scepticism is a dispute as to the nature of certainty. Christianity offers and gives certainty in the end; Scepticism demands certainty. But the certainty of Christianity is partly the certainty of reason and partly of faith and of experience. The certainty demanded by Scepticism is the certainty of science only. The most extreme of unbelievers will admit that there is something to be said for Christianity; and that it is not unworthy of a hearing as regards its evidences. The men who have believed in Christianity for the last 1800 years, have not been the greatest fools in the world. Liebnitz and Butler were not drivellers, and not those only, but hundreds and thousands of thegreatest intellects that humanity has produced. They were not such utter fools that any man is entitled to dismiss Christianity with a wave of his hand. On the other hand, every reasonable Christian will admit that there is something fair and reasonable in some of the objections to Christianity. But the Christian says to the sceptic, It is unreasonable in you to ask that every difficulty should be got rid of and every question answered before you believe in Christianity. The sceptic replies, It is unreasonable in you to ask me to believe in Christianity till you have removed every doubt. I will ask you which is the reasonable demand—the demand of the Christian for faith upon probable evidence, or the demand of the sceptic for assent only upon scientific demonstration?

Now in order to argue it fairly and without passion or prejudice, let us pass from the subject of religious doubt and let us consider the case of doubt in other matters than religion; we all know that men have doubted in other subjects. Try then to recall to your minds the first doubt; it was only a little later than the first belief. The first instinct of the child is to believe everything, that everything he sees and hears is true. All appearances to the child are realities. The sun is to him a ball of fire that climbs up the sky, the stars are little specks of light that shine at night. The earth is a flat plain. Very soon the child learns the first great lesson of doubt, learns that things are not what they appear to be, learns to distrust appearances, learns that under the appearances there is a reality. He gets his first teaching from doubt, and all-important is the instinct of doubt. Very soon is the awakening of the sceptical part of the mental nature of man, of his understanding. The nature of the understanding is ever to ask, What and why? The spirit of doubt leads the man from question to question, from step to step, till he gets answers to his questions; he goes on from doubt to belief, and from belief to doubt, and so on to greater knowledge. Thus doubt is the means of knowledge, the instrument of discovery. Without the instinct of doubt humanity would be stagnant; with it alone humanity progresses. I do not disparage doubt, I highly value it; but doubt is useful on one condition, and one only, that it starts from a first belief. What is the cause of all this doubt and pursuit of knowledge? The supreme instinctive belief, that under all appearances there is a reality, that something underlies and causes all being; and it is the search for this essence of existence thatleads the doubter on, the search of thisI am. If he had no faith in some underlying reality beneath these phenomena, there would be no progress, and so doubt is ever seeking for that which is below what appears, and yet never reaches it.

Never yet has science reached to the great reason of all reasons, to the great cause of all causes, that underlies all knowledge; and yet ever as we seek for it we are advancing in knowledge. We do not reach it, but are ever reaching and passing on, through that which lies between us and it. Doubt is like the mainspring of a watch, it is ever seeking to uncoil itself and yet never entirely doing so. The result is that the hands of the watch move uniformly because there is an attachment of the mainspring. Cut the attachment, and the hands will give one wild whirl and all will be still, and the watch useless. It is just the same with doubt and faith. Doubt is attached to the primary belief that there is a cause of all things, but it is ever seeking to detach itself from that belief and never succeeds. The consequence is, that there is a constant and measured progress of the human mind. But we have to consider how much further the intellect which has thus been the rule and test of our belief might go. A child not only believes in appearances or facts, but he has an instinctive belief in the truthfulness of humanity. The child has not learned that it is not wise to believe everything that is said to him. Was that a happy discovery? Should we tell a child not to believe the word of any human being until he had demonstration about it? Is it wisdom always to distrust human nature? We are always trusting. Give a logical proof that we are right in any of our trusts. A wife may be false, a child may hate its parents, and a man may be robbed by a friend or a confidential servant; yet are we to distrust everybody? If a man were not to trust any one till it was proved by demonstration that he ought to do so, he would be put in a lunatic asylum; and rightly so, as a man one part of whose nature had got diseased and had mastered all the other parts of his nature. I defy any one to say logically that the man may not be right, or to give a logical demonstration that it is absolutely impossible that his wife, children, and friend were not in a conspiracy to wrong him. There is thus an absolute necessity for trust in the ordinary affairs of life, I hope you will see that life must be conducted on the principle of faith or trust.

Let us ask if morality can exist without faith or trust, whether we can get a demonstrative or scientific basis for morality itself?I ask this, because those who ask for the destruction of our religion talk of the gain to morality. They say, Sweep away the influences of religion and morality will be stronger. Let us see how morality will bear the assaults of scepticism. Morality is that code or rule of action which we follow in questions of right or wrong, or it is that code of right and wrong which every man adopts for himself. To take the first definition. Have we got the universal sense of humanity upon any moral question of right or wrong? If the majority of mankind agree with us, can we prove logically that they must always be right and the minority wrong? Again, which morality will we have—that of to-day or that of a past generation? If we cannot settle the question by majority or minority, how are we to settle it? By asking the opinion of the wise and good. Before we know the wise and good we must know what wisdom and goodness are; and if we know what they are, what need have we to look to the wise and good to tell us? Who are the wise and good? Those who gave good opinions. Is that logical? Will it stand sceptical inquiry? If it is not to be settled by the appeal to the universal voice of humanity—which is simply illogical and preposterous, for this reason, that we are part of universal humanity, and if we differ from that verdict it is not the verdict of universal humanity, and if we agree with it, we might as well have taken our own in the first instance—then man must decide for himself what is right and wrong. What is it decides in a man what is right or wrong? Conscience. Why must a man submit to the decision of his own conscience? We are told that it is part of our moral nature. What demonstration is there that one part of our nature is to yield to another? Have we any logical demonstration as to what we are? I have a scientific demonstration that I am made of carbon, lime, phosphate, and certain other chemicals, but no man of science has ever demonstrated spirit or conscience. Why is it that a man is to obey the bidding of one convolution of his brain more than another? It cannot be made as clear as that two and two make four, that a man is to do to another man as he would be done unto. Duty and right are words of the spirit, of the soul, but science and logic never yet revealed the soul.

Therefore the man who will believe nothing but what can be demonstrated to him, will deny at last the obligation of duty in obedience to his sceptical intellect, just as hebegan with denying the existence of God. How does he get out of this great difficulty? By calling up the instinct of faith. He wills to believe that he is something more than a bundle of material elements, that the conscience in his soul is something supreme and divine, that the man in him is something above the animal; and by an exercise of faith in his own higher and better self, he silences the eternalwhyof the sceptical intellect, the serpent more subtile than any other beast of the field, which if it had its way would make man a beast.

There is only one more question to which I have to call your attention. Having shown you that the sceptical intellect is not the only judge, having shown you that there are domains of human knowledge and human life into which, if it comes at all, it must come as the servant and not as the master; having shown you that scepticism is really nothing else than the intrusion of the mere understanding into the province of the soul and the spirit, it remains to ask, Is religion, is Christianity, one of those subjects on which the understanding is not to be the only judge, but on which the spirit and soul and heart of man have something to say about his belief? Surely then if Christianity be what it professes to be, a life, like all human and temporal life, it must be conducted upon a principle of faith or trust. If we cannot live our ordinary human life without trust, where we cannot have certainty, neither can we live the spiritual life without trust, where we can neither prove nor demonstrate; then if we think of this life in close relationship with the divine and the infinite life, can it possibly be otherwise than that out of the meeting place of those two mysteries there shall grow mystery and difficulty? All that Christianity requires is, not that man shall not ask for reasonable proof, but that we should not deal with it in a different way from that in which we deal with human life and morality. We don’t ask you in religion to believe without evidence, but to require large evidence. Now my friends, still remember when we ask you to believe before you see all, it is that you may experience all. Christianity has a certainty, but it comes not as the proof, but as the reward of faith. There is a demonstration of the spirit, an evidence of divine life, in the soul of the Christian, that he cannot demonstrate to others, because it is as invisible as his own soul and spirit, and yet it fills the inner core of the spirit—it is the strengthener of the spirit. Christianity is a great experiment, a probable experiment, a reasonable experiment,but still it is an experiment, and you may try it. If you have a simple and earnest desire to ascertain its truth, try it, casting aside the trivial interests that the profligate man has in the disproof of it. Try it and see if there does not come into your soul that conviction not created by science, but springing from the inner life of the soul, that shall be like a well of water springing up to everlasting life. As in life so in religion, “blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

OnTuesday evening, April 4th, Mr. Bradlaugh delivered his second lecture on “Christianity and Scepticism,” before a very crowded audience, in the Free Library. He commenced by observing:

In continuing this course of lectures, I naturally follow the same wording of the subjects as that taken by the Bishop of Peterborough; and I may say that those who charge me with misquoting the Bishop, will probably think differently when I say that I have taken fair pains to be accurate in my representation. I took careful and almost verbatim notes, and I hold in my hand a transcript of the notes of an independent shorthand writer, and where these have disagreed, which has been very seldom, I have checked them by so much of the lecture as appeared summarised in theDaily Press. It appeared to me to be accurate, and I think there was no ground for saying that I misrepresented the Bishop. You who think so, had better leave that for him to say, if he thinks it necessary. He took the instance of Thomas as that of a representative Sceptic. He was good enough to tell us that the unbelief of Thomas was not unreasonable, that, on the contrary, it was reasonable and natural that he should feel some doubt about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I propose to examine that position. Was it reasonable that Thomas should doubt? Thomas was a disciple selected by Jesus. He had been present at the whole of the miracles of Jesus. If the Bishop’s case be true, he had seen Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, he had heard Jesus say he came to die, and to rise again; and I ask you, if it was reasonable for Thomas to doubt after he had seen a hundred miracles performed, then how much more reasonable for me to doubt? I have never seen any miracles. But, said the Bishop, Thomas is a fair example of the Sceptic, for Thomas said, I will not believe unless I see, &c. This, the Bishop said, is the very essence of scepticism. Now I don’t know where my Lord Bishop got his notion of scepticism; I am sure that there is no writer on the side of the party which permits me to speakfor it, who defines scepticism in that manner. I have here the explanation of Buckle, which I take as that of a man occupying a position independent of the prejudices attaching to my extreme heresy. “By Scepticism, I merely mean hardness of belief, so that an increased Scepticism is an increased perception of the difficulty of proving assertions, or, in other words, it is an increased application and an increased diffusion of the laws of evidence. This feeling of hesitation and of suspended judgment, has in every department of thought been the invariable preliminary to all the intellectual revolutions through which the human mind has passed, and without it there could be no progress, no change, no civilisation. In physics it is the necessary precursor of science, in politics of liberty, in theology of toleration.” Now I take leave to say that there is no sceptical writer, neither Hobbes, nor Hume, nor Locke, nor Berkeley, no sceptical writer either upon my own side or upon the side of theology, unless you take the ravings of some wretched madman, who defines Scepticism as my Lord Bishop defined it. I say it was either a false definition within the knowledge of the Bishop, or that Dr. Magee was imperfectly acquainted with the views he proposed to answer. The definition conveys a false notion of Scepticism, which is really but a word for investigation. The Bishop draws a distinction, and a correct distinction, between knowledge and belief, and in that very distinction he annihilated his own definition of Scepticism. He said, and rightly, When once the senses have taken cognizance of any phenomenon, that is no longer a matter of belief but a matter of knowledge. If I sensate any condition of existence, I have passed the stage of belief and arrived at the stage of knowledge. I now come to a marvellous position—marvellous as advanced by a bishop—viz., that religion or Christianity must be taken as incapable of scientific demonstration; because, if that be true, what becomes of the arguments of the Paleys, of the Pye Smiths, and of the Gillespies? Are the volumes of proofs of the existence of Deity all waste paper? What becomes of the huge mass yearly issued from the press to prove the truth of Christianity? I take it that in the opinion of the Bishop every one of these has hitherto failed, for he says we cannot demonstrate the existence of a Deity or the truth of the Christian religion so as to leave no doubt. A demonstration so complete that it leaves no doubt, is admitted to be impossible; that is an admission for which I thank the Lord Bishop, because it is ajustification to doubters. We have two admissions, one that the doubt of Thomas is a reasonable doubt, and another, that Christianity under no circumstances can be rendered free from doubt. I will thank you to bear those two positions in mind. The Bishop says we cannot demonstrate the existence of God, and I am inclined to accept his position, but he gives reasons of the strangest description to justify his conclusions. He says we cannot prove the existence of God because he is invisible. Does the Bishop mean that only the things cognised by sight can be proved? Is it true that he believes in an invisible God? What say the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church? They say that Jesus, with body, flesh, and bones, ascended to heaven. Were these invisible? The Bishop believes what is pictured in the Bible. Does the Bible teach an invisible God? We read in the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus, 9, 10, 11: “Then went up Moses, and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel; and they saw the God of Israel; and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand; also they saw God, and did eat and drink.” I want to know if this God is an invisible God? I want to know whether the Bishop is on this point an infidel, and whether he here disbelieves the Bible? The Bible says that God is not invisible. Which are we to believe?—the Bishop, the Bible, or the Thirty-nine Articles? We are forbidden to deny either the Bible or the Thirty-nine Articles under penalty of prosecution. The Bishop said a Jew is not a sceptic, and the reason given is certainly equally a marvellous one, for he said the Jew believes in Moses, and therefore cannot believe in Jesus. Is it logical that any body who believes in Moses cannot believe in Jesus? Surely the Bishop contradicted himself, for it is to Moses and the prophets he appeals. It is not true, even from the Church of England stand-point, that a man disbelieves in Jesus because he believes in Moses. It is not true that if I believe in the authenticity of the Pentateuch, it necessarily excludes my belief in the Gospel, and yet this is the reasoning indulged in by the able and learned confuter of modern infidelity. The Bishop said that the Deist and the Pantheist are not sceptics, for they have a belief, nor, he said, are even those sceptics who say there is no God. I never read, except in tracts and sermons, and religious essays, of any who say there is noGod. Some persons talk about the fools who say there is no God, and bishops preach against them, but an Atheist does not say there is no God. The Atheist says the term “God” conveys no idea to his mind. I have never yet heard a definition of God from any living man, nor have I read a definition by dead or living man that was not self-contradictory. I don’t deny the word “God,” because I don’t know anything about its meaning. Denial like affirmation must refer to some proposition that is understood. But the moment you tell me you mean the God of the Bible, or the God of the Koran, or the God of any particular church, I am prepared to tell you that I deny that God. So long as the term means your absence of knowledge as to particular phenomena, and represents the undiscovered, I am not “fool” enough to say there is no God; and I say the Bishop should have known that no modern Atheist ever propounded such a proposition to any one. It is when you tell me of God distinct from the universe, creating the universe different from himself, and adding to his own existence, that I am compelled to deny that God. The Bishop said the sceptic is not only one who denies, but one who asks for evidence of an unreasonable kind. Suppose myself; am I a sceptic as to the Bible, according to the Bishop’s notion? When I examine the Bible, I find it is admitted that the common version is so bad that a better is now in hand. I find when I refer to the sources of this version there are only three sources—the Hebrew, the Samaritan, and the Septuagint. When I examine the Septuagint I find the Protestant writers such as Fulke and Whittaker, writing against Bellarmine and others, declaring that the Septuagint is corrupt from beginning to end. Dr. Irons says no one knows where the so-called Septuagint version was written, when it was written, nor by whom it was written, and it is clearly the work of different generations. When I examine the Greek of the Septuagint as against the Hebrew, I find words and verses in the one that are not in the other. As a sceptic is it unreasonable for me to ask the Bishop how he knows that one is better than the other? When I go to the Hebrew the difficulty is still greater. I say that not even the Bishop knows enough of the Hebrew to guide us with reasonable explanation. It is not enough to say that mere ignorant infidels do not know it. I find Spinoza, writing 200 years ago, declaring that Hebrew was a language utterly dead, that its grammars and lexicons were lost, that time,the great consumer, had blotted out the meaning of many words from the memory of man. Suppose that I have recourse to those professing some knowledge of Hebrew. Gesenius, Bellamy, Parkhurst, Newman, Eichorn, Bresslau, Ginsburg, give me different meanings for many of the same words on important points of theology. How am I to be satisfied? What objections will be reasonable? Suppose I try to be content with the ordinary Hebrew version, what then? I find that it is a version written with points, which points have not existed more than 1250 or 1300 years; and the text itself is of two characters. That which is written is not always read, and that which is read is not written. I find a clergyman of the Church like Dr. Irons admitting that the traditional reading of the Hebrew text is often of more value than the text. I find Christians saying this Hebrew is an ancient language, and when I try to trace it I find that before 2500 years back there is no trace of it at all. Moses could not have written in the Hebrew we have, for what to-day we call the Hebrew did not then exist. Who is to decide on this point as to the reasonableness of my scepticism? Am I to decide or my Lord Bishop? Let us consider this a little more. We have a Samaritan, a Septuagint, and Hebrew Bible, but in the Samaritan we have only the Pentateuch, and I find words and verses in the Samaritan not in the Septuagint, and not in the Hebrew, and I find words and verses in the Hebrew and Septuagint, which are not in the Samaritan. Is it unreasonable for me to ask how so many blunders have got into this book, if it contains a revelation from God? Then I come to try to get a clue from the Gospels, and I find again that no man knows when they were written, where they were written, or by whom they were written. Clergymen of the Church have invented arguments from the first century fathers for the existence of the Gospels. I used to believe that such testimony existed; I could not suppose that writers like Dr. Paley had invented testimony of the fathers, but when I went to the great libraries to verify authorities, and I found that he manufactured evidence, I ask, was I, as a sceptic, a reasonable man in challenging the Church? The Bishop says a Sceptic is not to be attacked because he doubts, but because of his reason for the doubt. I doubt because I cannot help it. Is that a good reason or not? Is the Church entitled to say “It is not true, you might believe if you like?” And mark, the Bishop had the audacity to declarethat Christianity is not intolerant of the doubter, but of the spirit of doubt. The Church used to burn the doubter, and then it burnt his books, and locked him up in prison. It now gathers 3,000 people into the nave of the Cathedral to hear the attack on the doubter, and refuses to grant the use of any place for a reply. It is not intolerant to the doubter, it is only intolerant of the spirit of doubt! I learned from the Bishop that a man might be a religious believer, and at the same time a sceptic, and in explaining this he used language of an astounding character. He said if a man were to say,Icannot believe in the existence of God till I have it demonstrated to me as clearly as that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, then he is in principle a sceptic, because if he had not that sort of proof, he would begin to doubt of the existence of God; all this time his assent to the existence of God would have rested on a sceptical foundation. This was one of the most marvellous pieces of nonsense that any one could talk. How can any one, while assenting to God’s existence, say, I cannot believe in God till it is proved to demonstration? He makes the true believer commence by saying he cannot believe in God till it is proved. If anyone here had used that language, I should have said that he did not understand what he was talking about; but when a Bishop, a learned Bishop, the paragon of eloquence and logic, brought here as more competent than your own Bishop, talks such nonsense, how am I to reply? Let us take a startling contrast which the Bishop thought right to give us. He contrasted Thomas the doubter with Simon Peter the believer. I have read the Bible a little, and I think that of all the cowardly rascals of whom I ever read, the greatest rascal was Simon Peter. He was called under great advantages; he had been out fishing, and he caught nothing, and the Lord helped him to a good catch of fish; Simon Peter’s wife’s mother was cured of a fever; Simon Peter was with Jesus when he fed the people with a few loaves and fishes, and he took part in the collection of the fragments. He was present at the transmigration. It was to him that Jesus said, “To thee I give the keys of the kingdom of heaven.” Simon Peter was with the Lord all through his life; and when Jesus came to trouble, he was the first who abandoned him and denied him, even with oaths, “I know not the man;” and that Peter is the model of faith whom the Bishop presents to you. Of the two I rather prefer Thomas to Peter. Certainly Peter came back to theChurch when he caught more fish. When Jesus rose from the dead, Peter did not or would not know him, but when Jesus said “Throw in your net,” and he did so, and caught more fish, then he knew Jesus directly. I will ask what lesson the Lord Bishop meant to convey by the contrast between those two? In what sort of way is Peter put in contrast? Simon Peter was true enough when any profit was to be got by it; he ran away when danger came. This is the model which the Lord Bishop puts before you to copy. But Dr. Magee said that Christianity could not be demonstrated. Christian evidences were of some use as weapons when believers were exposed to assaults on their faith. If I thought he had intended to preach a comic sermon instead of a serious one, I could have heartily laughed at this. He says that the evidences of Christianity are weapons to put in the hands of every man and woman when his or her innermost soul is assailed by the enemy with desolating doubt. Is it true that God permits an enemy to reduce man to the level of the beast, and to be continually besieging the soul of man? Is it true that the subtle devil tempts man from the faith? If it be true, then the devil exists either because God cannot help it, or will not prevent it; and if he exists because God is powerless to prevent, then God is not omnipotent; if God wills it, then God consents to—nay, strives to procure man’s damnation. But, says the Bishop, Christianity does not repel the doubter, and he even admits the utility of doubt, subject only to one condition. Before I deal with the Bishop’s condition, permit me to quote what Buckle has said on the effect of doubt, and I quote him because he stands in a position entitling him to the attention of the extreme heterodox, as well as of the extreme orthodox. He says:

“Although the acquisition of fresh knowledge is the necessary precursor of every step in social progress, such acquisition must itself be preceded by a love of inquiry, and therefore by a spirit of doubt, because without doubt there will be no inquiry, and without inquiry there will be no knowledge, for knowledge is not an inert and passive principle which comes to us whether we will or no; but it must be sought before it can be won; it is the product of great labour, and, therefore, of great sacrifice. And it is absurd to suppose that men will incur the labour and make the sacrifice for subjects respecting which they are already perfectly content. They who do not feel the darkness, will never look for the light. If on any point we have attained to certainty, we make nofurther inquiry on that point, because inquiry would be useless or perhaps dangerous. The doubt must intervene before the investigation can begin. Here, then, we have the act of doubting as the originator, or at all events the necessary antecedent of all progress. Here we have that scepticism, the very name of which is an abomination to the ignorant, because it disturbs their lazy and complacent minds; because it troubles their cherished superstitions; because it imposes on them the fatigue of inquiry; and because it rouses even sluggish understandings to ask if things are as they are commonly supposed, and if all is really true which they from their childhood have been taught to believe. The more we examine this great principle of scepticism, the more distinctly shall we see the immense part it has played in the progress of European civilisation. To state in general terms, what in this introduction will be fully proved, it may be said that to scepticism we owe that spirit of inquiry which, during the last two centuries, has gradually encroached on every possible subject, has reformed every department of practical and speculative knowledge; has weakened the authority of the privileged classes, and thus placed liberty on a surer foundation; has chastised the despotism of princes; has restrained the arrogance of the nobles, and has even diminished the prejudices of the clergy. In a word, it is this which has remedied the three fundamental errors of the olden time, errors which made the people in politics too confiding, in science too credulous, in religion too intolerant. We have thus seen the rise of that scepticism which in physics must always be the beginning of science, and in religion must always be the beginning of toleration. There is, indeed, no doubt that in both cases individual thinkers may by a great effort of original genius, emancipate themselves from the operation of this law. But in the progress of nations no such emancipation is possible. As long as men refer the movements of the comets to the immediate finger of God, and as long as they believe that an eclipse is one of the modes by which Deity expresses his anger, they will never be guilty of the blasphemous presumption of attempting to predict such supernatural appearances. Before they could dare to investigate the causes of these mysterious phenomena, it was necessary that they should suspect that the phenomena themselves were capable of being explained by the human mind. In the same way until men are content in some degree to bring their religion before the bar of their own reason, they never can understandhow it is that there should be a diversity of creeds, or how any one can differ from themselves without being guilty of the most enormous and unpardonable crime.”

Chillingworth says, “Reason gives us knowledge, while faith only gives us belief, which is a part of knowledge, and is, therefore, inferior to it. It is by reason, and not by faith, that we must discriminate in religious matters, and it is by reason alone that we can distinguish truth from falsehood.” He solemnly reminds his readers that in religious matters no one ought to be expected to draw strong conclusions from imperfect premises, or to credit improbable statements upon scanty evidence; still less, he says, was it ever intended that men should so prostitute their reason as to believe with infallible faith that which they are unable to prove with infallible arguments. The Bishop, agreeing in the utility of doubt, which he expressed in language nearly as strong as that of Buckle, says there is one condition without which doubt cannot be useful, and this condition, being in truth an entire hindrance to doubt, is utterly unreasonable and impossible. He says the condition on which doubt can be accepted as useful is that it starts on a certain basis of religious belief. Now a doubt so based is only a fictitious doubt, a sham doubt, a hypocritical pretence of doubt. When the Bishop said it was possible to have a doubt based on belief in the proposition to be doubted, he said what he could not defend on any platform where reply was permitted. I feel that in talking of a man in his absence I may be under the imputation of saying harsh things. The manner in which this debate has gone on is not one of my fashioning. The Church has taken the pains to give lectures in the Cathedral where no reply could be offered; but I promise you that I will endeavour to carry the war into Peterborough, and see whether the Bishop will attempt an answer under the shadow of his own cathedral.

I have now to complain of something still worse than that the Bishop should have forgotten his Bible, entirely ignored the Thirty-nine Articles, and occasionally in the hurry of rapid speech contradicted his previous sentences. All these are matters at which in even an extraordinary man burdened with a bishop’s dignity, we need not wonder at all; but when we find him blundering in metaphysics, when we find him making mistakes which a man versed in the merest student’s rudiments of Mill or the Scotch and German metaphysicians, would not make, when we find the Bishop so blundering, either wilfully or ignorantly, it puts me in aposition of extreme difficulty. He distinguished between the Sceptic and the Christian, and said the Christian had a faith in something underlying all phenomena. The Christian’s faith is nothing of the kind. I will explain my position, and then that of the Christian. The position of the Naturist is that there is only one existence. I can only know that existence as conditioned, as phenomenal. What we call “things” are modes or conditions of existence, known or distinguished from other conditions by various characteristics or qualities; we only know substance or existence as conditioned. We only know the phenomenal or the conditioned. We affirm one existence, and that all we know is condition of that one existence. But that is not the Christian’s position. The Christian says there are two existences, the one what he calls the material universe, and the other the Deity, distinct and differing in essence, who is the creator of that universe out of nothing, and who can be the destroyer of it. When the Bishop tried to make these two opinions into one, he either did not know what he was talking about, or he supposed that the people to whom he was talking had not the time to study. The Bishop defined faith as trust or assent, and he declared that not only in religion but in all other matters we have faith. He said, for example, and his illustration appeared to me most unfortunately chosen, that we trusted in our wives, and children, and friends, that it was possible that our wives might all the time be unfaithful, our children unloving, and our friends treacherous. These are not the words, but they give the exact sense of the words. Now I will explain the difference between religious faith and the ordinary faith. Our ordinary faith in one another in every-day life is a confidence founded upon our own experience and the experience of others; and it is because we find the unfaithful wives are the fewest in number, and the treacherous friends the fewest in number, that we trust in our wives and our friends. But religious faith is something entirely different, it is not only not founded on experience, but it contradicts experience. Religious belief is the prostration of the intellect; ordinary every-day trust is the result of the exercise of the intellect. The Bishop spoke of morality. He said morality was based upon faith, and he asked, supposing you did not go to faith, where were you to get your standard of morality? What is morality, the Bishop did not tell you. With me that is moral which tends to the greatest happiness of the greatestnumber, which inflicts the least injury on any. What is moral the Bible does not tell you, the Thirty-nine Articles do not tell you, the Creeds do not tell you, the Nicene Creed does not tell you, the Apostles’ Creed does not tell you. They say that it is moral not to steal, but you must not say this with the Bible in your hand, where you find a thief protected and rewarded. And as to adultery, David got to heaven though he committed adultery, and planned the most treacherous murder of the dishonoured husband. It is moral to speak the truth, but Jacob, who lied, got to heaven, and was loved by God, while his brother was hated, though he appears to have been the better man of the two. What is the morality of the Athanasian Creed? You are to believe in a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, three persons in one God, and if you do not believe in this, without doubt you are to perish everlastingly. Is that your morality? He that believes and is baptised, shall be saved. Is faith in Christ morality? Here it is moral to eat beefsteaks, but on the banks of the Ganges it is immoral. Where will you get your guide to morality? No one man, no one book, no one church, can give it you. Your guide to morality can only be got by gathering from the wisdom, and availing yourself of the experience of the greatest minds of past ages and the present times, and thus you may learn to be moral. I don’t speak to annihilate the Bible. No man can annihilate a book. If Moses or Isaiah wrote, no man can sweep their work away from the page of history, but I say that no book should dominate the world. I am a sceptic, for I deny the absolute authority of one book to dominate all people. I find among the Brahmins, among the Buddhists, among the Chinese and Japanese, phases of human truth which in other lands are almost entirely forgotten, which your Jew books do not contain.

If you want to know how I would make a code of morality, I would make it as you would a bouquet of flowers: from one plot in a garden you cull the rose, from another other flowers of sweet perfume, from another the flowers of brilliant hue, until colour blending with colour and fragrance aiding, your bouquet presents beauty to the eye and sweet perfume to the scent; so I would take from Shakspere the fruit of his wide grasping brains, from Swift his brilliant wit, from Montesquieu his great power of generalisation, from Voltaire his grand irony, from Rabelais his biting thought, from Spinoza his grand logic, from John Locke his wise reason, I would takefrom Dr. Magee his eloquence, and bring them and the thoughts of the world’s poets and philosophers together. I would make my bouquet of thought. I say the Bible is not a book to cast away, but to place on our shelves beside the Koran, the Vedas, and other old-world books, to mark how the thought of the world has grown. We know that religion has a hold upon the mass, but I claim for scepticism a higher morality. The belief in religion is the wearing the old clothes of a former age, the swaddling clothes adopted in the childhood of humanity, but scepticism is the bursting out from these old swaddling clothes. It is the effort of buried brain to burst its grave and stand out alive for human deliverance.

OnThursday evening, March 30th, 1871, the nave of the Cathedral, Norwich, was much crowded with the citizens of all classes, to hear the third sermon of the Bishop of Peterborough, on “Christianity and Faith.” Before the sermon the Bishop prayed specially for the conversion of the infidels present. He selected his text from the Gospel according to St. John, xx. 29,

“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

His Lordship said:

Last night, I endeavoured to show you what scepticism is, and what it leads to. We saw that scepticism is not simply doubt, but that it is doubt of a particular kind. It is that state of doubt which arises from insisting on referring every question for solution to one part, and one only, of our nature, to the sceptical understanding. It is that state of doubt which arises from refusing to believe until it has been made scientifically and mathematically impossible to doubt. And we saw what this leads to; we saw that it necessarily leads to the destruction of all belief properly so-called, to the destruction of every kind of assent, except assent to scientific and demonstrated facts; that it puts an end to all belief which rests upon moral certainty, as distinguished from scientific certainty, and therefore it puts an end to all belief that appeals to any part of our nature except the understanding; all belief with which the heart and spirit of man have anything to do; all belief of the higher and nobler kind; all belief that arises out of the higher and nobler part of our nature; all belief that is in character and essence moral, and all the higher and nobler life which arises out of such belief. We saw that scepticism was essentially fatal to morality; that there is no scientific demonstration of morality, and that in order to be moral it is necessary to exercise an act of faith; that morality cannot justify itself to the sceptical understanding; as we saw that as religion is not capable of scientific demonstration, as it does appeal to something else than the logical faculty, as it does appeal to man’s heart and spirit, it cannot justify itself to the scepticalintellect; and that scepticism is necessarily as fatal to religion as it is to morality, and to all belief except scientific belief.I hope you saw what a waste of time it is to endeavour to satisfy the consistent sceptic; we have absolutely nothing in common. It is impossible that religion can silence scepticism, unless it ceases to be religion. It is just as absurd to object to religion that it is not science, as to object to science that it is not religion. It is the wisest course we can take in dealing with sceptics to begin, and for the most part to end the discussion, by asking this plain question: You tell us that you are sceptical, and you demand all your doubts to be satisfied before you believe; we ask you, Do you believe in anything, and if so, what do you believe in the proper sense of the word? Do you assent to anything on trust? Do you believe in anything you cannot demonstrate? If so, you have no right to say to us that we should not believe a religion. If you say, I believe in nothing but what can be demonstrated, then we have nothing to answer, we must leave you to be refuted by the common sense of mankind, and by every act of your daily life which is based on trust. It would save a vast deal of wasted time were we to take this course. Let me advise all Christians; before you allow a sceptic to put you to the proof, ask, What is it you believe? Do you believe anything in the matter of religion? and if so, remember you should not bring any objection against our faith which applies equally to yours. We cannot allow of faith for all the difficulties of your belief, while you ask demonstration for all the difficulties of our belief. Faith for both, or faith for neither; but not faith for one and demonstration for the other. We seek not to get a logical victory over our opponents; that is the poorest of all ambitions; but we recommend such a course for this reason, that you may see that the very same objections which are brought against our belief, lie against any belief, and all belief, and so be strengthened in your faith; for after all man must believe something. There is a necessity of belief in the soul of man. We ask for the sake of our opponents, if we throw them back upon considering the basis of their own belief, and ask them if they are not unconsciously to themselves in some degree believers while they call themselves sceptics?And now, while I have endeavoured thus clearly to show you that religion, like morality, has no answer, properly speaking, to scepticism—but that it rests upon an act of faith in answer to what is ever saying, How, what, and why?—let us come backthen to that point at which we left it last night. That is the point at which we saw, that in order to be moral, and to believe in morality, we must exercise an act of faith, we must trust in ourselves, in our own higher and better nature. It must be an act of faith which never can justify itself to the understanding. Submit the understanding to the soul, elevate the conscience above the merely logical and questioning faculty; say by the exercise of a higher faculty, say by the power of that instinct of faith, which is given us for the very purpose that we may rise above the instinct of doubt—say, I know that this is right and this is true, while I have a soul. There is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal, and the soul which we Christians believe we specially derive from God; and these two are opposite the one to the other. That in us which says, This must be so, this shall be so so, is a higher faculty than that which in us inquires, Why is it so, how can this be so? And that act of faith in us on which our morality, our religion, and our higher forms of being rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one above the other. We are not always conscious, nor often conscious, of this contradiction in our innermost nature, of the opposition between the spiritual part of our nature and the mere fleshly man. There are times, however, when we feel conscious of it. There are times when to each one of us comes some dire and deadly temptation, when we find ourselves in the presence of some coveted object, when the animal craves for its gratification, and the spirit trembles at the thought of the unlawful thing; and then we find the serpent intellect pleading in an ingenious way that there is no law against it. I say, there is not in this church a single man or woman who has not felt the eternal opposition between the spirit and the flesh; who has not felt that his deliverance from temptation, the mastery over the evil thing that was leading him on to evil, lies not in any logic or demonstration, but in the submission of the logical faculty to the spiritual, in saying to the animal part of our nature, Be silent, submit, I will be righteous, I will not sin. I say, in that moment we do become conscious of the opposition that exists between the intellectual and spiritual part of our nature. It is then that the great billows of our souls are ebbing and flowing in the agony of ourtemptation. It is at that time we feel the innermost parts of our being, the fountains of the great deep broken up; and then the spirit says, I will be righteous. And though we are not conscious of it, though the animal has been accustomed to obey the man, there is this secret opposition between the two. It is in the nature of what oculists tell us. They tell us, that the image of an object is inverted on the retina of the eye, and that it is only by constant habit of correction of the impression that we see things truly. So there is the natural inversion of the nature of the man; the animal gets the upper hand in the man, and it is only by the unconscious training of the man in Christian society that the supremacy of the moral part of the man is strongly established; and we are not conscious of the act of faith, but still that act of faith underlies all morality, and it is true in morality as in religion, “The just shall live by faith.” There is no righteous deed that any one of us has done that we did not do by virtue of this act of faith; “The just shall live by faith.”Now let us pass on to another question, for if the whole moral and religious life is based upon the act of faith, there doubtless must be a good reason for it. We Christians believe that God made us so for a good reason. Can we see any reason why we should live our moral life by faith? That faith is not a mere assent to propositions, it is trust in a person, in a nature, a belief that we are better, nobler, than our understanding would persuade us we are. Every time this opposition which I have described arises within a man, he is given a choice; he has to pass through a probation, or a test as to whether he will or will not believe in his better self, whether he will rise up to the idea of his spiritual nature, or sink down to the depths of his animal nature. There is a trial for him, and a discipline in the trial, and a culture and a growth of his moral nature if he stands firm in the trial. We cannot believe, in such a moment of trial, in our nobler and better selves, without becoming in the very act of believing, nobler and better out of such strife; and the man comes out stronger every time he wrestles with his baser self; his purer and nobler self comes out of the trial nobler and purer.There is a deep meaning in the temptation of our Saviour, when he is said to have been with the wild beasts, in that hour when the man is wrestling with the wild beasts, or the brute part of his nature, and his spiritual nature comes strong out of the struggle; just as the waving of thebranches of the trees in the wind, makes the sap circulate to the tiniest leaflet, and brings the life-blood of the plant to every part. This is the use and object of the act of faith; to train, discipline, and elevate the man. Further, I have said, in every case in which a man believes in his better self, he becomes better; but we have to deal not only with our better selves, we have to come constantly in contact with other natures and other personalities than our own. Now, what happens when we encounter a higher or more moral nature than our own? Just the very same trial and discipline; because if a man comes to deal with a higher and better nature than his own, there is always a trial to the lower nature. If a higher nature could be easily understood by a lower nature, then the two natures would be equal. It is the very essence of a higher and purer nature to be something of a mystery to a lower nature. Some of the sayings or the doings of that higher nature, will always appear strange and puzzling to the lower nature, just because it is a lower nature. There is always the possibility of the lower nature saying of the higher nature, This nature is no better than mine, I do not believe in its higher or greater goodness. But are these cynical, worldly-wise men who disparage others, generally speaking, the most improving and valuable of our acquaintances? Do we not generally find these cynical, bitter, disparaging men to be men of low tone? They have lowered their moral nature in the hour of probation and trial; they have sunk lower than themselves, because they have refused to believe in something higher and better than themselves. If these men could have risen to the higher natures they had to deal with, then in that very hour, their own nature would have grown purer, nobler, and higher. So we see again, the act of faith would be an act of probation, an act of discipline, an act of moral culture and growth. Therefore we say it is true, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”But now let us go one step further. We have seen that in all morality there is an act of faith, and we believe in our own higher nature and the higher nature of others, and in so doing we ourselves grow better; but is there not something better still? We that believe in higher natures than our own, is there not in our hearts an instinctive belief that there must be somewhere perfect righteousness, perfect truth, perfect holiness? We seek for it, believe in it; do we ever find it? The more we know of men, though we mayknow more of their excellencies, we are compelled to know something more too of their imperfections. The result of this discovery is that one of two things happens, according as we listen to our understanding or our will. The sceptical understanding says, There is no such thing as perfection anywhere. That answer is unanswerable if we look only to experience. Is that the answer of the soul and heart of man? No, the soul and the heart rebel against this cheerless teaching. The soul has ever been uttering its protest against this despairing creed, ever speaking its belief in the reality of a perfect righteousness, a perfect truth, a perfect holiness; but can never attain to it. It may be a dream, but it is a dream that has haunted humanity from the first hour of its existence. We thus have faith in humanity, and the value of this faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it; a faith which cannot justify itself to the understanding, a faith as deep as the human heart, and as old as the hills.There is in very deed, in a very true sense, although it may be a low sense comparatively, a religion of humanity; a creed and an act of faith; and that religion has for its creed these articles: man is pure; he is not a bundle of passions merely; man is responsible, he has to answer for his beliefs; man may yet be perfect. There is no article in this creed that can be justified to the sceptical intellect, and yet there is not a single article in it that the loving heart of man, and that his soul in his highest and best moments, does not cling to as the very life of its life. The heart of man believes in the perfectibility of humanity, in spite of sin and misery and oppression. The long litany of man’s [imperfections?] comes down with a wail of despairing denial of the possibility of perfection. Remedy after remedy has been tried, scheme after scheme has been invented, and have been borne away like the bubbles on the wave; but still the heart of man clings to the belief that there is a perfect goodness somewhere, even when civilisation fails to produce it, even in spite of what we have seen in the last three months when the most civilised nations of Europe have banded themselves together for mutual destruction; in spite of all this disproof of perfection, the heart of man clings to it still. We do have faith in humanity, and the value of the faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it. This belief in the possibility of perfection, in the possibility of delivering men from sin and sorrow, this is not merely the dream of the poet, it is not merely the Utopia of the philosopher, but itis the instinctive might in the heart of the earnest worker, that gives strength to him who does his duty amid the haunts of sin and sorrow; it is this that sends the Christian worker into the back streets and lanes of our great cities; it is this that sends the Christian minister to the bedside of the dying; it is this that makes men toil and suffer for their fellow men, like him whom we worship, who saw in his dying hour of the travail of his soul and was satisfied.And now we take one step further. We have seen that there is a faith which underlies all morality as well as religion, and that this faith is the discipline of the soul, and without it the soul cannot grow in morality or religion. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, let us suppose that for this yearning of the soul after an infinite perfection, there is a corresponding reality—an absolutely perfect, a supremely righteous and true and holy Being. And let us suppose that it pleased him to make a revelation of himself to man; what should we expect beforehand respecting that revelation? Should we not expect that it would follow the analogy of all other revelations to the higher and better part of man’s nature, and that inasmuch as morality needs faith, so this manifestation of the Perfect One would come in some way or other so as to call out the act of faith? Should we not expect that if this were the only absolutely perfect nature, it would appear to our lower and inferior nature in some respects unintelligible, in some respects mysterious, in some respects contradictory? For all mysteries, everything we cannot understand, must come to our understanding in the shape of contradictory propositions. We must expect that this higher nature, this perfect nature, should try our faith. If it would be unreasonable to suppose that an inferior man to himself should understand a man, so also it would be unreasonable to suppose that our nature should not find some difficulty in perfectly appreciating and understanding the absolutely perfect nature of a supremely perfect Being. Should we not expect from analogy that we should have some more difficulty in understanding God, than we have in understanding man? We must expect the same trial of our faith, the same probation and discipline of our spiritual nature, when it is brought into contemplation of this perfect nature. Surely we should beforehand expect that this would be the case; surely we might say that the God who was perfectly understood could not be the true God. When a man says, I want a God that is not a mystery; I ask, Do youknow a man who is without a mystery? Are you not a mystery yourself? Is there one fellow being whom you understand? And yet you say, I have not faith in a God whom I cannot understand. Who can comprehend him who dwells in ineffable light, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning? If there be revelation from God at all, it must try the faith of man. In the next place, we should expect that it would be a revelation of a righteous person; because we know that the highest tendencies of our nature at their best moments are ever to find a righteous person, and our faith that has been cultivated in our brother man naturally looks for a person. Faith has ever been trusting in a person, in a nature, and therefore we should expect beforehand that if there came a revelation of this God, it would not come in the shape of a revelation of doctrines or creeds, but that it would be a revelation of a person. We Christians say there is made to us a revelation of the working of the Divine Will, and the purpose of the Divine Designer, in the works of his hands. We say the invisible things of God are revealed by the things that are made. There is that in the world which testifies to a creator and designer. This we believe because there is that in us which instinctively, when it finds a work of art, supposes an artist; and finding a work requiring design, has belief in a designer. We say, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handy work.”But this revelation must follow the law of all other manifestations. There must be a possibility of denying it; a discipline here, as in the other case, in which faith is called into play; and therefore, though the world reveals its maker, it does not demonstrate its maker. “Day unto day is uttering speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge;” but the speech is like the speech for things spiritual, the utterance is for all who choose to believe it. If men will, they may put it aside; and some deny it in the face of the world. God has willed that there shall be nothing in this world to demonstrate his existence; but it is now as of old, inasmuch as men did not choose to retain God in their knowledge, he gave them over to a reprobate mind. There is a possibility, there is a necessity, in the manifestation of God, that it should try the faith of man. Once more, we Christians believe not only that God has revealed himself in his works, but also in his word, in his Incarnate Word; that, in answer to the craving desire of the soul of man to look upon humanperfection, this earth has once been walked upon by a perfect man; that in the story of the Gospels we possess that which no imperfect souls could ever have imagined, the lineaments of a perfect being. I am not saying that it is so, but it is our belief. But before we opened the Gospels, we should expect according to the analogy of all other holy and righteous lives that we know of, that it should not demonstrate itself, should not make itself an impossibility to the sceptical mind to find fault with it, and should reveal itself to those whose lives were like it, so that wisdom should justify herself by her children. We should not expect, judging from analogy of what we see in the world, that this life should in all respects silence all opposition, and be understood by every mind that it came in contact with. We should expect to hear that he was despised and rejected of men, and some people besought him to depart from their coasts. If the revelation of a divine and perfect nature is to follow the analogy of all revelations of a lower degree of perfection, and all manifestations of inferior natures, then we must expect the same law will govern this case as all others; there will be a possibility of doubt, and a trial of faith, and to those who conquer the doubt and exercise the faith, will the promise be realised, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Ah, it was not with faith in a series of propositions only, nor in a set of dogmas—though we believe the propositions and hold the dogmas, but in the light of faith in this person—that the disciples of the Perfect One went out to convert the world. They did not preach Christ’s teaching, but Christ.Did it ever occur to you to read the Acts of the Apostles? if so, you will have seen how little of the words of Christ, how little of the teachings of Christ, appears there. When we read in the Acts, how the Apostles went out to preach Christ, do we read that they gathered the multitude in the forum? Did they say, Listen to the morality of the Gospels? You will not find a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount. What did they do? They gathered the multitude together, and preached not the words of Christ, but Christ. They said, Come and believe in this man; it was the personality, it was the life and death, and resurrection and ascension of him, that they preached. It was a person in whom they asked the people to believe; and the result is this extraordinary and singular fact, that Christ is the only teacher among men whose life is greater than his teaching. All other teachershave faded into insignificance in comparison with their teaching. Who cares about the life of Euclid? but everybody believes in his teaching. Men are fond of comparing Christ with Socrates. Let us take it so. Did any man ever hear a person say, I am dead with Socrates; I am buried with Socrates; the life that I live is by faith in Socrates? Were such words ever heard of any heathen teacher? How comes it that men said this of Christ? The faith of the soul went out to the nature and work of Christ. The faith of man triumphed in the discovery of the perfect man.Now we have reached the last point to which I have desired to bring you in this series of sermons. We have reached the historical fact, as to which others will follow me who will take up the subject, and who will show the evidence arising from history and prophecy. My task ends in removing the stumbling-blocks which would prevent your coming to hear them. It has been my part to lead you to the steps, to the threshold of the temple. We have found difficulties that have kept many away from the entrance to the temple. The first is the belief that Christianity is opposed to Freethought. And I have endeavoured to show you that Christianity does not deny it, but asserts it; that where Christianity does deny it, law and society deny it. The second difficulty is that of scepticism. We have seen that it is fatal to morality, and to all the higher forms of human life, and that the sceptical understanding should submit to the soul. Christianity only requires what morality has done. I have answered the objection that Christianity must appeal to faith, and must do so because it cannot find demonstration. Our answer is that it has all the demonstration that is possible for the supernatural or for history. Christianity does make demands on faith, but it acts in accordance with the analogy of human life; and Christianity in claiming faith justifies its claim to be a religion.Now the time comes to close this discourse, in which from my inmost soul I have set the truth before you. I will ask you in all sincerity, Why do you suppose I am here? Some may say because we are priests and bigots. To me, if I must put it so, it makes no difference whether I come here or not. Why do I come here? Do you really, honestly believe, that I have come here to deceive you? Will you not give me credit, that to the best of my ability and in all earnestness and honesty, I have endeavoured to put before you the reasons that seem to me sufficient for my belief? Hear us, then,for this reason if for no other, that we desire your souls for our Lord and Master, that it is in his name we come among you, and because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and came down from heaven to save men. It is for this reason, and this only, that we are here to speak to you, that we may with the help of God deepen your faith or shake your unbelief. We come with his word, that calls on you to follow the higher and not the lower part of your nature. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and ye shall be saved.” There are some who don’t believe in the first part of this message, there are few who do not believe that men need to be saved, saved in this world, and saved in the next, saved from some of the sin and misery in this world. I ask, is there no need of faith, is there no desire for the objects of faith? Among men have we not some need of faith? The world is growing old and sick at heart. All the remedies that have been tried for the evils of society, have been tried in vain. Idol after idol has been set up, has been rocked on its basis, and shivered. The gods of mankind have been taken away, and the cry of despondency has been raised, We have no humanity. Is there any evidence that there shall be a perfection of humanity? Is it from faith in men of science? Did science ever comfort the afflicted, or allay human sorrows? Faith in civilisation? Can it remedy the evils that are conquering society? Civilisation now means the gathering of men in great masses, to live the luxurious, the voluptuous life of great towns; it means the weary, toilful, haggard life of others in these same towns; it means the rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer every day. Civilisation throws its dark shadows in its track. Civilisation and science, have they arrested war, or softened the heart of humanity, or prevented strife between nations? Civilisation, science and art have invented mitrailleuses, and invented destructive methods of wholesale murder. Where will you find in all these things a substitute for faith? Some speak of the millennium, and of the natural state of man being remedied in this world. We believe in the final perfection of man, but not in this world. We believe in the reign of righteousness, but it is in the eternal world. It is in that faith that we gain courage to look on the scenes and sorrows that afflict humanity. It is in the strength of that faith that we look down on the graves of the departed, and believe all is not dust of the earth; but we take up the song of Christian triumph over death, and thank God for the message “Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

I hope you saw what a waste of time it is to endeavour to satisfy the consistent sceptic; we have absolutely nothing in common. It is impossible that religion can silence scepticism, unless it ceases to be religion. It is just as absurd to object to religion that it is not science, as to object to science that it is not religion. It is the wisest course we can take in dealing with sceptics to begin, and for the most part to end the discussion, by asking this plain question: You tell us that you are sceptical, and you demand all your doubts to be satisfied before you believe; we ask you, Do you believe in anything, and if so, what do you believe in the proper sense of the word? Do you assent to anything on trust? Do you believe in anything you cannot demonstrate? If so, you have no right to say to us that we should not believe a religion. If you say, I believe in nothing but what can be demonstrated, then we have nothing to answer, we must leave you to be refuted by the common sense of mankind, and by every act of your daily life which is based on trust. It would save a vast deal of wasted time were we to take this course. Let me advise all Christians; before you allow a sceptic to put you to the proof, ask, What is it you believe? Do you believe anything in the matter of religion? and if so, remember you should not bring any objection against our faith which applies equally to yours. We cannot allow of faith for all the difficulties of your belief, while you ask demonstration for all the difficulties of our belief. Faith for both, or faith for neither; but not faith for one and demonstration for the other. We seek not to get a logical victory over our opponents; that is the poorest of all ambitions; but we recommend such a course for this reason, that you may see that the very same objections which are brought against our belief, lie against any belief, and all belief, and so be strengthened in your faith; for after all man must believe something. There is a necessity of belief in the soul of man. We ask for the sake of our opponents, if we throw them back upon considering the basis of their own belief, and ask them if they are not unconsciously to themselves in some degree believers while they call themselves sceptics?

And now, while I have endeavoured thus clearly to show you that religion, like morality, has no answer, properly speaking, to scepticism—but that it rests upon an act of faith in answer to what is ever saying, How, what, and why?—let us come backthen to that point at which we left it last night. That is the point at which we saw, that in order to be moral, and to believe in morality, we must exercise an act of faith, we must trust in ourselves, in our own higher and better nature. It must be an act of faith which never can justify itself to the understanding. Submit the understanding to the soul, elevate the conscience above the merely logical and questioning faculty; say by the exercise of a higher faculty, say by the power of that instinct of faith, which is given us for the very purpose that we may rise above the instinct of doubt—say, I know that this is right and this is true, while I have a soul. There is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal, and the soul which we Christians believe we specially derive from God; and these two are opposite the one to the other. That in us which says, This must be so, this shall be so so, is a higher faculty than that which in us inquires, Why is it so, how can this be so? And that act of faith in us on which our morality, our religion, and our higher forms of being rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one above the other. We are not always conscious, nor often conscious, of this contradiction in our innermost nature, of the opposition between the spiritual part of our nature and the mere fleshly man. There are times, however, when we feel conscious of it. There are times when to each one of us comes some dire and deadly temptation, when we find ourselves in the presence of some coveted object, when the animal craves for its gratification, and the spirit trembles at the thought of the unlawful thing; and then we find the serpent intellect pleading in an ingenious way that there is no law against it. I say, there is not in this church a single man or woman who has not felt the eternal opposition between the spirit and the flesh; who has not felt that his deliverance from temptation, the mastery over the evil thing that was leading him on to evil, lies not in any logic or demonstration, but in the submission of the logical faculty to the spiritual, in saying to the animal part of our nature, Be silent, submit, I will be righteous, I will not sin. I say, in that moment we do become conscious of the opposition that exists between the intellectual and spiritual part of our nature. It is then that the great billows of our souls are ebbing and flowing in the agony of ourtemptation. It is at that time we feel the innermost parts of our being, the fountains of the great deep broken up; and then the spirit says, I will be righteous. And though we are not conscious of it, though the animal has been accustomed to obey the man, there is this secret opposition between the two. It is in the nature of what oculists tell us. They tell us, that the image of an object is inverted on the retina of the eye, and that it is only by constant habit of correction of the impression that we see things truly. So there is the natural inversion of the nature of the man; the animal gets the upper hand in the man, and it is only by the unconscious training of the man in Christian society that the supremacy of the moral part of the man is strongly established; and we are not conscious of the act of faith, but still that act of faith underlies all morality, and it is true in morality as in religion, “The just shall live by faith.” There is no righteous deed that any one of us has done that we did not do by virtue of this act of faith; “The just shall live by faith.”

Now let us pass on to another question, for if the whole moral and religious life is based upon the act of faith, there doubtless must be a good reason for it. We Christians believe that God made us so for a good reason. Can we see any reason why we should live our moral life by faith? That faith is not a mere assent to propositions, it is trust in a person, in a nature, a belief that we are better, nobler, than our understanding would persuade us we are. Every time this opposition which I have described arises within a man, he is given a choice; he has to pass through a probation, or a test as to whether he will or will not believe in his better self, whether he will rise up to the idea of his spiritual nature, or sink down to the depths of his animal nature. There is a trial for him, and a discipline in the trial, and a culture and a growth of his moral nature if he stands firm in the trial. We cannot believe, in such a moment of trial, in our nobler and better selves, without becoming in the very act of believing, nobler and better out of such strife; and the man comes out stronger every time he wrestles with his baser self; his purer and nobler self comes out of the trial nobler and purer.

There is a deep meaning in the temptation of our Saviour, when he is said to have been with the wild beasts, in that hour when the man is wrestling with the wild beasts, or the brute part of his nature, and his spiritual nature comes strong out of the struggle; just as the waving of thebranches of the trees in the wind, makes the sap circulate to the tiniest leaflet, and brings the life-blood of the plant to every part. This is the use and object of the act of faith; to train, discipline, and elevate the man. Further, I have said, in every case in which a man believes in his better self, he becomes better; but we have to deal not only with our better selves, we have to come constantly in contact with other natures and other personalities than our own. Now, what happens when we encounter a higher or more moral nature than our own? Just the very same trial and discipline; because if a man comes to deal with a higher and better nature than his own, there is always a trial to the lower nature. If a higher nature could be easily understood by a lower nature, then the two natures would be equal. It is the very essence of a higher and purer nature to be something of a mystery to a lower nature. Some of the sayings or the doings of that higher nature, will always appear strange and puzzling to the lower nature, just because it is a lower nature. There is always the possibility of the lower nature saying of the higher nature, This nature is no better than mine, I do not believe in its higher or greater goodness. But are these cynical, worldly-wise men who disparage others, generally speaking, the most improving and valuable of our acquaintances? Do we not generally find these cynical, bitter, disparaging men to be men of low tone? They have lowered their moral nature in the hour of probation and trial; they have sunk lower than themselves, because they have refused to believe in something higher and better than themselves. If these men could have risen to the higher natures they had to deal with, then in that very hour, their own nature would have grown purer, nobler, and higher. So we see again, the act of faith would be an act of probation, an act of discipline, an act of moral culture and growth. Therefore we say it is true, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

But now let us go one step further. We have seen that in all morality there is an act of faith, and we believe in our own higher nature and the higher nature of others, and in so doing we ourselves grow better; but is there not something better still? We that believe in higher natures than our own, is there not in our hearts an instinctive belief that there must be somewhere perfect righteousness, perfect truth, perfect holiness? We seek for it, believe in it; do we ever find it? The more we know of men, though we mayknow more of their excellencies, we are compelled to know something more too of their imperfections. The result of this discovery is that one of two things happens, according as we listen to our understanding or our will. The sceptical understanding says, There is no such thing as perfection anywhere. That answer is unanswerable if we look only to experience. Is that the answer of the soul and heart of man? No, the soul and the heart rebel against this cheerless teaching. The soul has ever been uttering its protest against this despairing creed, ever speaking its belief in the reality of a perfect righteousness, a perfect truth, a perfect holiness; but can never attain to it. It may be a dream, but it is a dream that has haunted humanity from the first hour of its existence. We thus have faith in humanity, and the value of this faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it; a faith which cannot justify itself to the understanding, a faith as deep as the human heart, and as old as the hills.

There is in very deed, in a very true sense, although it may be a low sense comparatively, a religion of humanity; a creed and an act of faith; and that religion has for its creed these articles: man is pure; he is not a bundle of passions merely; man is responsible, he has to answer for his beliefs; man may yet be perfect. There is no article in this creed that can be justified to the sceptical intellect, and yet there is not a single article in it that the loving heart of man, and that his soul in his highest and best moments, does not cling to as the very life of its life. The heart of man believes in the perfectibility of humanity, in spite of sin and misery and oppression. The long litany of man’s [imperfections?] comes down with a wail of despairing denial of the possibility of perfection. Remedy after remedy has been tried, scheme after scheme has been invented, and have been borne away like the bubbles on the wave; but still the heart of man clings to the belief that there is a perfect goodness somewhere, even when civilisation fails to produce it, even in spite of what we have seen in the last three months when the most civilised nations of Europe have banded themselves together for mutual destruction; in spite of all this disproof of perfection, the heart of man clings to it still. We do have faith in humanity, and the value of the faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it. This belief in the possibility of perfection, in the possibility of delivering men from sin and sorrow, this is not merely the dream of the poet, it is not merely the Utopia of the philosopher, but itis the instinctive might in the heart of the earnest worker, that gives strength to him who does his duty amid the haunts of sin and sorrow; it is this that sends the Christian worker into the back streets and lanes of our great cities; it is this that sends the Christian minister to the bedside of the dying; it is this that makes men toil and suffer for their fellow men, like him whom we worship, who saw in his dying hour of the travail of his soul and was satisfied.

And now we take one step further. We have seen that there is a faith which underlies all morality as well as religion, and that this faith is the discipline of the soul, and without it the soul cannot grow in morality or religion. Let us suppose, for argument’s sake, let us suppose that for this yearning of the soul after an infinite perfection, there is a corresponding reality—an absolutely perfect, a supremely righteous and true and holy Being. And let us suppose that it pleased him to make a revelation of himself to man; what should we expect beforehand respecting that revelation? Should we not expect that it would follow the analogy of all other revelations to the higher and better part of man’s nature, and that inasmuch as morality needs faith, so this manifestation of the Perfect One would come in some way or other so as to call out the act of faith? Should we not expect that if this were the only absolutely perfect nature, it would appear to our lower and inferior nature in some respects unintelligible, in some respects mysterious, in some respects contradictory? For all mysteries, everything we cannot understand, must come to our understanding in the shape of contradictory propositions. We must expect that this higher nature, this perfect nature, should try our faith. If it would be unreasonable to suppose that an inferior man to himself should understand a man, so also it would be unreasonable to suppose that our nature should not find some difficulty in perfectly appreciating and understanding the absolutely perfect nature of a supremely perfect Being. Should we not expect from analogy that we should have some more difficulty in understanding God, than we have in understanding man? We must expect the same trial of our faith, the same probation and discipline of our spiritual nature, when it is brought into contemplation of this perfect nature. Surely we should beforehand expect that this would be the case; surely we might say that the God who was perfectly understood could not be the true God. When a man says, I want a God that is not a mystery; I ask, Do youknow a man who is without a mystery? Are you not a mystery yourself? Is there one fellow being whom you understand? And yet you say, I have not faith in a God whom I cannot understand. Who can comprehend him who dwells in ineffable light, in whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning? If there be revelation from God at all, it must try the faith of man. In the next place, we should expect that it would be a revelation of a righteous person; because we know that the highest tendencies of our nature at their best moments are ever to find a righteous person, and our faith that has been cultivated in our brother man naturally looks for a person. Faith has ever been trusting in a person, in a nature, and therefore we should expect beforehand that if there came a revelation of this God, it would not come in the shape of a revelation of doctrines or creeds, but that it would be a revelation of a person. We Christians say there is made to us a revelation of the working of the Divine Will, and the purpose of the Divine Designer, in the works of his hands. We say the invisible things of God are revealed by the things that are made. There is that in the world which testifies to a creator and designer. This we believe because there is that in us which instinctively, when it finds a work of art, supposes an artist; and finding a work requiring design, has belief in a designer. We say, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handy work.”

But this revelation must follow the law of all other manifestations. There must be a possibility of denying it; a discipline here, as in the other case, in which faith is called into play; and therefore, though the world reveals its maker, it does not demonstrate its maker. “Day unto day is uttering speech, and night unto night showeth forth knowledge;” but the speech is like the speech for things spiritual, the utterance is for all who choose to believe it. If men will, they may put it aside; and some deny it in the face of the world. God has willed that there shall be nothing in this world to demonstrate his existence; but it is now as of old, inasmuch as men did not choose to retain God in their knowledge, he gave them over to a reprobate mind. There is a possibility, there is a necessity, in the manifestation of God, that it should try the faith of man. Once more, we Christians believe not only that God has revealed himself in his works, but also in his word, in his Incarnate Word; that, in answer to the craving desire of the soul of man to look upon humanperfection, this earth has once been walked upon by a perfect man; that in the story of the Gospels we possess that which no imperfect souls could ever have imagined, the lineaments of a perfect being. I am not saying that it is so, but it is our belief. But before we opened the Gospels, we should expect according to the analogy of all other holy and righteous lives that we know of, that it should not demonstrate itself, should not make itself an impossibility to the sceptical mind to find fault with it, and should reveal itself to those whose lives were like it, so that wisdom should justify herself by her children. We should not expect, judging from analogy of what we see in the world, that this life should in all respects silence all opposition, and be understood by every mind that it came in contact with. We should expect to hear that he was despised and rejected of men, and some people besought him to depart from their coasts. If the revelation of a divine and perfect nature is to follow the analogy of all revelations of a lower degree of perfection, and all manifestations of inferior natures, then we must expect the same law will govern this case as all others; there will be a possibility of doubt, and a trial of faith, and to those who conquer the doubt and exercise the faith, will the promise be realised, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Ah, it was not with faith in a series of propositions only, nor in a set of dogmas—though we believe the propositions and hold the dogmas, but in the light of faith in this person—that the disciples of the Perfect One went out to convert the world. They did not preach Christ’s teaching, but Christ.

Did it ever occur to you to read the Acts of the Apostles? if so, you will have seen how little of the words of Christ, how little of the teachings of Christ, appears there. When we read in the Acts, how the Apostles went out to preach Christ, do we read that they gathered the multitude in the forum? Did they say, Listen to the morality of the Gospels? You will not find a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount. What did they do? They gathered the multitude together, and preached not the words of Christ, but Christ. They said, Come and believe in this man; it was the personality, it was the life and death, and resurrection and ascension of him, that they preached. It was a person in whom they asked the people to believe; and the result is this extraordinary and singular fact, that Christ is the only teacher among men whose life is greater than his teaching. All other teachershave faded into insignificance in comparison with their teaching. Who cares about the life of Euclid? but everybody believes in his teaching. Men are fond of comparing Christ with Socrates. Let us take it so. Did any man ever hear a person say, I am dead with Socrates; I am buried with Socrates; the life that I live is by faith in Socrates? Were such words ever heard of any heathen teacher? How comes it that men said this of Christ? The faith of the soul went out to the nature and work of Christ. The faith of man triumphed in the discovery of the perfect man.

Now we have reached the last point to which I have desired to bring you in this series of sermons. We have reached the historical fact, as to which others will follow me who will take up the subject, and who will show the evidence arising from history and prophecy. My task ends in removing the stumbling-blocks which would prevent your coming to hear them. It has been my part to lead you to the steps, to the threshold of the temple. We have found difficulties that have kept many away from the entrance to the temple. The first is the belief that Christianity is opposed to Freethought. And I have endeavoured to show you that Christianity does not deny it, but asserts it; that where Christianity does deny it, law and society deny it. The second difficulty is that of scepticism. We have seen that it is fatal to morality, and to all the higher forms of human life, and that the sceptical understanding should submit to the soul. Christianity only requires what morality has done. I have answered the objection that Christianity must appeal to faith, and must do so because it cannot find demonstration. Our answer is that it has all the demonstration that is possible for the supernatural or for history. Christianity does make demands on faith, but it acts in accordance with the analogy of human life; and Christianity in claiming faith justifies its claim to be a religion.

Now the time comes to close this discourse, in which from my inmost soul I have set the truth before you. I will ask you in all sincerity, Why do you suppose I am here? Some may say because we are priests and bigots. To me, if I must put it so, it makes no difference whether I come here or not. Why do I come here? Do you really, honestly believe, that I have come here to deceive you? Will you not give me credit, that to the best of my ability and in all earnestness and honesty, I have endeavoured to put before you the reasons that seem to me sufficient for my belief? Hear us, then,for this reason if for no other, that we desire your souls for our Lord and Master, that it is in his name we come among you, and because we believe that Jesus is the Son of God and came down from heaven to save men. It is for this reason, and this only, that we are here to speak to you, that we may with the help of God deepen your faith or shake your unbelief. We come with his word, that calls on you to follow the higher and not the lower part of your nature. “Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and ye shall be saved.” There are some who don’t believe in the first part of this message, there are few who do not believe that men need to be saved, saved in this world, and saved in the next, saved from some of the sin and misery in this world. I ask, is there no need of faith, is there no desire for the objects of faith? Among men have we not some need of faith? The world is growing old and sick at heart. All the remedies that have been tried for the evils of society, have been tried in vain. Idol after idol has been set up, has been rocked on its basis, and shivered. The gods of mankind have been taken away, and the cry of despondency has been raised, We have no humanity. Is there any evidence that there shall be a perfection of humanity? Is it from faith in men of science? Did science ever comfort the afflicted, or allay human sorrows? Faith in civilisation? Can it remedy the evils that are conquering society? Civilisation now means the gathering of men in great masses, to live the luxurious, the voluptuous life of great towns; it means the weary, toilful, haggard life of others in these same towns; it means the rich growing richer, and the poor growing poorer every day. Civilisation throws its dark shadows in its track. Civilisation and science, have they arrested war, or softened the heart of humanity, or prevented strife between nations? Civilisation, science and art have invented mitrailleuses, and invented destructive methods of wholesale murder. Where will you find in all these things a substitute for faith? Some speak of the millennium, and of the natural state of man being remedied in this world. We believe in the final perfection of man, but not in this world. We believe in the reign of righteousness, but it is in the eternal world. It is in that faith that we gain courage to look on the scenes and sorrows that afflict humanity. It is in the strength of that faith that we look down on the graves of the departed, and believe all is not dust of the earth; but we take up the song of Christian triumph over death, and thank God for the message “Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed.”

Back to Index Next