Perhaps this illustration may serve to shew how much,that is not obvious in the letter, may nevertheless be really contained in man's utterance of the Name of God.
III. But while the doctrines of the Church which her Creeds express are thus as simple as they are profound, it is no doubt true that there has grown up round about them a considerable body of theological teaching, more or less complicated, which is really of the nature of comment upon them, or explication of their nature and meaning. When we speak of the dogmas of Christianity, it is right to distinguish, with the clearest possible line of demarcation, between all this mass of explanatory teaching (more or less authoritative as it may from time to time appear to be) and the central truths themselves, which are our real certainties. The doctrine itself is one thing: the theories explicative of the doctrine are another. They may be of the highest value in their own time and place; but they are not the immutable principles of Church truth. To say this is not really to depreciate the work of theological writers and teachers of different ages; but it is to assign to their work its true position. The current mode of explaining a doctrine in one age, and bringing it home by illustrations to the imagination of men, may be discredited and superseded in another. When the current mode of statement or illustration begins to be more or less discredited, the minds of quiet people are apt to be distressed. This is because very few of us can distinguish between the truths themselves which we hold, and the (often mistaken) modes of expression by which we seem to explain our truths to ourselves. Even when our explanation is substantially true, the doctrine is still a different thing from our explanation of it; and if any imperfection is detected in our explanation of it, it is not truth which suffers; it is only that truth is being distinguished from our imperfect and unconscious glosses; and thereby in the end the truth can only be served. Perhaps no illustration of this can be more convincing than that which the history of the doctrine of Atonement supplies. That Christ died upon the cross for us, that He offered Himself as a sacrifice, and that we are redeemed through His blood, thisis a belief fundamental to Christianity; nor has the Church ever wavered for an instant in her strong faith in this. But when we go further, and come to the different illustrations that have been given to make the precise nature of Atonement clear to human logic, when in fact we enter upon the domain of explicative theories, we have not only left the sure ground of the Creeds, and embarked upon views which may or may not be correct, but we find, as a fact, that the modes of thought which seemed adequately to explain the doctrine to the conscience of some ages, have not only failed to satisfy, but have actually shocked and offended, others. The teaching that God was angry, but that Jesus, as a result of gentler mercy, and through His innocent blood, appeased, by satisfying, the wrath of the Father, and so reconciled God to us; the teaching that Satan had obtained a right over man, but that Jesus, by giving up Himself, paid a splendid ransom into the hands of Satan; the teaching that a debt was due from humanity to God, and that Jesus, clothed as man, alone could deliver man by discharging God's debt: these—be they popular blunderings, or genuine efforts of Theology—may, in their times, have both helped and wounded consciences; but whether they be to us as helps or hindrances, it is of the utmost importance that we should discriminate them, or others which may have succeeded to them as theories explanatory of the Atonement, from our cardinal belief in the Atonement itself. We may have rightly seen what is vicious in these statements, and we may have greatly improved upon them, but however much more helpful our modes of exposition may prove themselves to our own minds or those of our hearers, we may only be repeating the old error, and leading the way to fresh distresses in the future, if we confound our mode of explanatory comment with the truth of the doctrine itself, and claim that the mysterious fact of the Atonement means exactly that which is our own best approach to a statement, in illustrative words, of what it expresses to us.
But it may be asked, Are you not saying too much? Does not this seem to mean that the doctrines themselves are little better than unintelligible symbols, which need notindeed be changed for the simple reason that they can be made to mean whatever is necessary to suit the times? No, the truth of them does not change; and even the changeful modes of presenting them are less changeful, after all, than they seem. They cannot indefinitely vary; there is one thing which unites them all, and that is the truth itself which lies behind them all. The Atonement is a fact, whether I can adequately expound it or no. The Atonement is a fact, which my attempted expositions do indeed represent, more or less correctly, more or less clumsily, even when I seem most to have failed. Much as they may seem to differ, and inconsistent as they may appear with each other, yet not one of them really represents untruth but truth. Imperfect images they may be, and in respect of their imperfections, diverse and distorting; yet there is not one of the theories of Atonement referred to above—not even such as are now seen to contain most error—which did not, as seriously held, represent and convey some real image of the truth. It may be that the truth which they represented was conveyed in an inexact way; and that afterwards, when attention was concentrated on the points of inexactness, the statement became, and would have become, more and more misleading; it was no longer then a possible vehicle of truth; but what it had really conveyed to those to whom it was living, was a real soul-enlightening image of the truth of the Atonement. It was an imperfect image; it was even in part a distorted image,—as everything that I see through my window is in part distorted. But it was a real image of the real truth none the less.
Local and popular modes of exposition then are often as the medium through which dogmatic truth is seen and apprehended,—not always, certainly, without distortion. But the more catholic the truth, the more it retains its identity of form, however remote from each other, in place or time, the diverse types of mind which view and teach it, so much the purer must it be from accidental or temporary conditionings; so much the nearer, in rank, to a fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church.
We do not, of course, distinguish Catholic dogma from theological literature, as though the one were bare facts, and the other all explanations of the facts. But we may rightly confine the use of the word 'dogma' to the fundamental facts, together with such explanation of them as the Church has agreed, by universal instinct, or by dogmatic decree endorsed through ecumenical acceptance, to be essential to a reasonable apprehension of the facts.
It is the more important to guard with unfaltering clearness this distinction between dogma on the one hand, and theological literature on the other, because it is, no doubt, in the sphere of explanatory theories and expressions, that most of those controversies find their place, which distress quiet minds, and rouse hot battles of orthodoxy between sincere Christian combatants. If it could be recognised at the time how far the apparent innovators of successive generations were really questioning not the doctrines themselves, but certain traditional modes of thought and teaching which have wrongly adhered to the doctrines, there would be fewer accusations of heterodoxy, and less distress and perplexity amongst the orthodox. But it is natural enough that this should not be perceived by the defenders, when the innovators themselves are so often both blind and indifferent to it. And it is just herein that the different innovators are apt to make themselves indefensible. Too often they think that they are making real advance upon the doctrines of the Church and her Creeds, and they are elated, instead of being ashamed, at the thought. They make light of loyalty, they despise the birthright of their Churchmanship, and find their own self-exaltation in the very consciousness of offending their brethren. This, whether done under provocation or no, is to depart from the spirit of the Church of Christ, in temper and meaning at least,—even though their work in the long run should prove (as it must so far as there is truth in it) only to serve the interest and work of the Church.
It is easier to see this in retrospect than in struggle. But perhaps those who look back upon the struggles of the last generation within the Church, will recognise that the orthodoxthought of the present day has been not a little cleared and served, not merely by the work of orthodox defence, but in no small part by the work of the 'liberalizers' also. To say this, is by no means necessarily to acquit the liberalizers, or to cast a slur upon those who fought against them. Such condemnations or acquittals depend upon other considerations, which do not concern us here. But putting wholly aside as irrelevant all condemnation or acquittal of individuals, we may yet acknowledge that the work done has in the end served the cause of the truth and the Church. This is said, of course, of its real intellectual outcome; certainly not of the unsettling of souls by the way. And it is also to be noted that even when the fruit of their work has been in a real sense, after all, accepted and incorporated, it is hardly ever in the sense, and never quite with the results, which they, so far as they had allowed themselves to be malcontents, had supposed. But if whatever is good and true in their work becomes, after all, an element in the consciousness of the Church, might not the work itself have been done, all along, in perfect Church loyalty? In so far as different earnest writers of a generation ago, or of to-day, are really, whether consciously or not, making a contribution to one of the great theological tasks of our time, in so far (that is) as they are helping towards the correction of erroneous fancies of popular theology,—helping, for instance, to modify that superstitious over-statement about 'justification' which would really leave no meaning in 'righteousness;' or to limit the grossness of the theory often represented by the word 'imputation;' or to rebuke the nervous selfishness of religionists whose one idea of the meaning of religion was 'to be saved;' or to qualify the materialism or superstition of ignorant sacramentalists; or to banish dogmatic realisms about hell, or explications of atonement which malign God's Fatherhood; or the freezing chill and paralysis of all life supposed before now to be necessarily involved in the Apostolic words 'predestination' and 'election;' so far they are really, though it may be from the outside and very indirectly, doing the work of the Church. But the pity of it is that the men who dothis kind of service are so apt to spoil it, by overvaluing themselves and forgetting the loveliness and the power of perfect subordination to the Church. We may own that Church people and Church rulers have too often been the stumbling-block. It is they who again and again have seemed to fight against everything, and by intellectual apathy, and stern moral proscription of every form of mental difficulty (wherein oftentimes are the birth-throes of enlightenment) to drive living and growing intelligence out of the Church. It is true that the greatest of Churchmen would, if the badge of their work were submissiveness, have sometimes to wait awhile, and bear delay, and wrong from inferior minds, with the patience of humility. Yes; but that work of theirs, if it once were stamped with this seal of patient submissiveness, would be a glory to the Church for ever, like the work of her quiet confessors, the work of a Scupoli, a Ken, or a Fénelon; instead of being, as it more often seems to be, a great offending and perplexing of thousands of the very consciences which deserve to be treated most tenderly, and therefore also a wrong and a loss to the conscience and character of the writer.
Are statements like these a concession to the antidogmatist? If so, they are one to which, in the name of truth, he is heartily welcome. And perhaps, under the same high sanction we may add what will look, to some minds, like another. We claimed some time since that the Creed must be, to Christians, rather a complete and conclusive than a partial or a tentative statement of truth. Yet there is one sense in which we may own that even the definitions of the Creeds may themselves be called relative and temporary. For we must not claim for phrases of earthly coinage a more than earthly and relative completeness. The Creeds are temporary, in that they are a complete and sufficient statement of truth only for time. And therefore they are only quite perfectly adequate to express those truths which have their place in time. But we, in respect of truths which transcend time, if we cannot as yet be freed from the trammels and limits of earthly thought and expression, yet can recognise at least the fact,that we are, even in our Creeds, still labouring within those trammels. We may have ground for believing the Creeds of the Church to be the most perfectly balanced and harmonious expression of the truth whereof our earthly knowledge is, or will be, capable. Yet when we struggle, as in the language of the Athanasian Creed, to express the relations which have been exhibited to us in the eternal Godhead through the use of the words 'Person' and 'Substance,' or ὑπόσταστς and οὐσία; or when we thus profess our belief in the Person of the Holy Ghost, 'The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son: neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding,' need we fear to own that the instruments which, perforce, we make use of upon earth, even in the Creeds of the Church, are necessarily imperfect instruments; the power of conception imperfect; the power of phrase and imagery imperfect also; and that their sufficiency of truth (though not their correctness meanwhile) is so far temporary that it is limited to earth and to time; and that, in the perfect light and knowledge of the presence of God, the perfectest knowledge represented by them will be superseded and absorbed, while the glosses and materialisms with which, in various ways, we may have been unconsciously clothing them to our own imaginations, will be—not superseded only but corrected, and, it may be, reproved? Moreover, if the truths represented in the Creeds are wider and deeper than our conceptions of them, we can admit that there may possibly be particulars in which, even now, the experience of spiritual life may deepen and enlarge the meaning, to us, of our Creeds; as, for instance, the words heaven and hell may present to us ideas differing, in the direction of more correctness, from those which they presented to some of our forefathers. It is not that the Creeds will be some day corrected. It is not that we shall see hereafter how false they were, but how far the best conceptions which they opened to us,—the best, that is, that our earthly faculties were capable of, lagged in their clumsiness behind the perfect apprehension of the truths which they had, nevertheless, not untruly represented; but which we then shall have power to see andknow as they are. The truth which is dimly imaged for us in the Creeds, will never belie, but will infinitely transcend, what their words represented on earth.
But it will very naturally be asked by what right we speak thus of the Creeds. In the very moment of admitting, in one sense, their incompleteness and want of finality, by what right do we lay down still that they are final and complete to the end of time; that is, perhaps, through ages of human advance, of which we may have now no conception at all? Such a question does not apply to the strictly historical statements which constitute the foundation of our creed, but to those interpretations of historical fact, and to those assertions about the Divine Being and its relations, which necessarily transcend time and experience. And after all, perhaps, the answer is not difficult. We have to consider, first, that for the very reason that these beliefs do absolutely transcend time and experience, therefore no human development which belongs merely to time and experience, can, in itself, displace or improve upon them; and secondly, that our knowledge of these truths is really derived from a Divine revelation, which took place, as we believe, within time and experience. We may say, indeed, that the statements of this Divine revelation are corroborated to us, by such elements of thought as our reason (which we believe to be also in its reality Divine) is able to supply. It remains, however, that they can only really be proved or disproved, by arguments which go to prove or disprove the truth of the historical Incarnation, and of the revelations which it contains.
It follows from hence that we have a valid right to hold them not only true, but final in their statement of truth for this present world, exactly so far as we have a right to believe that our historical revelation is, for time, a final one. Should there, indeed, be a wholly fresh revelation, the amount of truth hitherto revealed might be superseded; but nothing short of a revelation can supersede it. The idea that any advance of human reason could be inconsistent with it, involves for the Christian who believes human reason to be divinely reflected and divinely implanted, nothing less thanan unthinkable contradiction. We may therefore believe it in any case to be final, till the coming of a further revelation: and so far as there is anything in the truth already revealed to us, which may warrant us in feeling confident that there is no fresh revelation in store, within the limits of time, by which the revelation of Jesus Christ will be superseded, just so far and no further are we justified in claiming for those clauses in the Creed, whose subject-matter transcends time and experience, that they are the completest expressions of their truths which can be reached in time.
IV. It may, perhaps, be a matter of prudence to refer for a moment to what are called the 'damnatory clauses' of the Athanasian Creed; though it would not be necessary to do so for the purpose of any positive statement or explanation of Christian doctrine. These clauses, however, to the positive statement add a negative. It is easy to misunderstand them, and even, by misrepresenting, to make them appear grotesque. But if the question be as to what they really mean, they are, after all, to the Christian, an obvious and necessary corollary of the Creed which is his life. There is but One God, and One Heaven, and One Salvation; not a choice of alternative salvations, or heavens, or gods. There is One Incarnation, One Cross, One Divine restoring and exalting of humanity. There is One Spirit of God, One Church—the fabric and the method of the working of the Spirit,—One Spiritual Covenant with man. Man must have part in this One, or he has part in none; for there is no other. Man must have knowledge of this One, belief in this One; or there is none for him to believe in or to know. God's covenant is with His Church on earth; and the statements of the Creed are the representation in words of that knowledge of the truth which the Church possesses, the possession of which is her life. The Athanasian Creed is not addressed to outsiders, but to those who are within the Church. For encouragement, or (if necessary) for warning, it insists to them on the uniqueness of their faith. To have hold on God is to have hold on Life. To revolt from God is to revolt from Life. This is so, tothose who have or ought to have learnt that it is so, both in fact and in thought. Thus, in fact, to drop out of communion with the Incarnation of Christ, is to drop out of communion with the inner realities and possibilities of humanity. But the mind, and its convictions and meanings, cannot wholly be separated from the facts of the life. There comes, at least in most lives, a time when the man's own allegiance to the facts is a necessary condition of his identification with them. 'If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.' There comes a point at which the mind's refusal of the doctrines of religion is the man's revolt from the facts; andsucha revolt is repudiation of the One revelation of God, the One Incarnation, the One Salvation, the One Church or Covenant. This must be broadly true, true in the abstract, as principle, unless truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are fundamentally false distinctions, and every man is to be equally good, and equally compelled to heaven. At what point any individual person, or class of persons, does, or does not, in the sight of the Judge who knows the whole inward history, and tries the most secret motive, fall within the scope of this principle, and incur the final condemnation of rebellion against the one light and hope of all humanity, is another question altogether. Any such application of the principle to the case of individuals belongs only to God the Judge, and would be an arrogant impiety in any man. Even when such a question may have to be determined ecclesiastically, the ecclesiastical condemnation and sentence, though expressly representing in shadow the eternal sentence, is none the less quite distinct, and indeed in its ultimate motive even contrasted with it. But however unchristian it may be to say that A or B will perish everlastingly, the principle nevertheless is true, that the truth which the Creed embodies, the truth of which Christ's Incarnation is the pivot and centre, isthe onlydeliverance from everlasting perishing; and that whole-hearted union and communion with this truth, is that true state of Church life which alone has the certain seal of the covenant of God. This broad truth it is, the necessary complement of any holding of the Christian creed as true, which these clauses affirm.If it be said, 'your Athanasian Creed is simple and trenchant; it has no qualifications such as you admit'; our reply would be threefold. First, the Creed is part of our heritage from the past, and its phraseology is not our handiwork; but we know that the necessary qualifications with which we understand its phraseology have been generally recognised by the Church from which we inherit it. Secondly, theQuicunque vultis, strictly, not so much a creed as a canticle; it has never been used as a test of Church communion; and it speaks, on a point like this, as theTe Deumwould speak, in the language not of judicial award but of devotional loyalty. Thirdly, the qualifications with which we say that any generalisation about man's responsibility for belief, whether in this 'canticle' or in scripture, must necessarily be understood, are only such as all men apply to any similar generalisation about responsibility for conduct. 'If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins,' is paralleled by 'They which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.' We claim only to interpret the one as rationally as all men understand the other.
It has seemed to be desirable, while insisting upon the claims of dogma, not indeed in the name of allegiance to imposed authority, but in the name of truth, and on the ground of its simple identity with truth, to try to state, with the utmost possible plainness, whatever could be truly admitted in the way of apparent qualification of those claims. Truth is supreme, and eternal; and dogma, so far as it coincides with truth, is, of course, all that truth is. For the dogmatic position of the Church and her Creeds, we claim that it is the true and simple expression upon earth of the highest truth that is, or can be, known. But dogmatic theologians are not infallible, and so far as the name of dogma has been claimed for mistaken presumption or misleading statement of truth, so far may dogma have seemed to fight against truth. The words, indeed, 'dogmatic' and 'dogmatism' have acquired a bad reputation. But this is not the fault of dogma. A dogmatist, in the invidious sense of the word, does not mean one who studies dogma, but rather one who foolishly utters what arenot dogmas as if they were. The dogmatic temper is the temper of one who is imperiously confident that he is right when he is not. That is to say, the words dogma, dogmatic, dogmatize, etc., are commonly used of something which is the mere abuse and travesty of their proper meaning. It is hard that dogma itself should be prejudiced by this caricaturing misuse of its name.
Meanwhile, if real charges be brought against any part of our dogmatic creed, we are willing most honestly to examine into them. In so far as they are made against current suppositions, which are separable from our essential belief,—separable as, for example, we now see various details of traditional belief about the first chapter of Genesis to be separable—we join our critics in the examination with a mind as open as they could desire. And it must, in simple candour, be admitted further, that upon the appearance of any new form of thought, Churchmen have not generally been quick of mind to discriminate the essential from the non-essential, so as to receive at first, with any openness of mind, what they had afterwards to admit that they might have received from the first. But not even this admission must prevent us from claiming, that when that to which exception is taken does really belong to the essential truths of our creed, which to us are more absolutely established certainties than anything in heaven and earth besides, they must pardon us if, while we are still willing to give the most candid hearing possible to everything that they have to urge, we yet cannot, if we would, divest ourselves of the deepest certainties of our existence;—cannot therefore pretend to argue with more openness of mind than would scientific professors—say with a champion who undertook to prove that the globe was flat, or that the sun went round the earth. We are ready to listen to everything. We are fully prepared to find that the champion may produce in evidence some phenomena which we shall be unable to account for. We have found it before; we are not unaccustomed to finding it (though, in good time, the perplexity always unravels itself); and we shall be in no way disconcerted if we find it again. But we cannot pretendmeanwhile to hold all the truth which our consciences have known in suspense.
V. What was said just now about the Creeds will not, it is hoped, appear to any minds to fail in the entire respect which is due to them. Yet it makes it, perhaps, the more incumbent upon us to take notice of another form of attack upon dogma, which connects itself with an attitude about the Creeds, such as may seem at first sight to be not wholly dissimilar; though presently all the foundations of dogma are dissolved by it. But in point of fact, if we admit that what the Creeds mean on earth, is less than what the same truths will mean in heaven, or that there may be, even here, a clumsier, and a completer, understanding of them; this is a position essentially different from maintaining that what the Creeds both say and mean, is not only less than, but (if strictly taken) inconsistent with, the real truth; and that not in any transcendent sense, as celestial beings, with wholly other faculties, may conceivably have power of apprehending it in heaven, but as the more intelligent among us may, and do, see it now. This is not only to admit that the Creeds are built up, perforce, of materials which belong to this earth; but to treat them as mere serviceable fictions for the teaching of the uncivilized or the young. The deliberate unbeliever, indeed, assumes that the Creeds mean what they say, and that the Church understands the Creeds. Assuming this, he parts company with the Church, because he holds that the statements of her Creeds are, in fact, fictitious. But it may surprise us to find that there is another form of this view of the fictitiousness of Creeds, and that here the critic speaks, not at all in the character of an unbeliever, but rather in that of an enlightened Churchman. All Christian truth, he says, is true. Even the Creeds in a real sense represent the truth. But the Church's understanding and expression of Christian truth in the Creeds, is, none the less, strictly, a misrepresentation of the truth. Though the truth of Christ lies behind the Church's Creeds, yet they have so overlaid, and thereby, in strict speech, misstated it, that it is only the patience of criticism, whichcutting bravely adrift from the authority of traditional interpretation, has succeeded in discriminating between the Creeds and the meaning of the Creeds, and behind what are practically the fictions of dogmatic Christianity, has re-discovered the germs of Christian truth. Neither the facts of the life of Jesus Christ, nor His teaching, nor His consciousness in regard of Himself, were as we have been taught, but were something different. He never thought nor taught of Himself as personally God, nor did He perform any miracles, nor did He rise on the third day from the dead. Whatever scriptures state these things explicitly, are proved by that very fact to be glosses or errors. And yet, all the while, everything is true spiritually. The record of the Incarnate Life is true literally, it may be, at comparatively few points; certainly not the story of the Birth; certainly not the story of the Resurrection; certainly not any incident which involves, or any expression which implies, miracle. But the Birth, the Resurrection, the miracles, every one of them, represent, in the most splendid of imaginative language and portraiture, essential spiritual truths. They are fictions, but vivid representations, in fiction, of fact; splendid truths, therefore, so long as they are understood to be literally fictitious, but perversions of truth, if taken for truth of fact.
It is this conception which was set forth not long ago with a singular power and persuasiveness by the author ofThe Kernel and the Husk. The lofty level of thought, the restraint and felicity of language, above all the deeply religious spirit of the author, invest his arguments with a charm of unusual attractiveness. The arguments are not such as it is wholly pleasant to see thus recommended. He deals in detail, in the course of the volume, with much of the narrative of Scripture, with the purpose of shewing how one by one the various records, including of course the Birth and Resurrection, have grown to their present form out of realities which contained no miracle, and which therefore differed essentially from the historical scriptures and faith of the Church.
It is no part of our task to enter upon such details. Noris it necessary. The struggle against such a theory of Christianity will not be fought out on details. It may be conceded that many of the miracles, taken singly, can easily be made to fall in with conjectural theories as to a mythical origin,if only the antecedent convictionagainst their reality as miraclesbe cogent enoughreally to require that the necessary force should be put upon the evidence. Some indeed may lend themselves to the process with a facility which fairly surprises us. Others seem still to be very obstinate, and force the rationalizer into strange hypotheses. But after all, the real question, through one and all, is not how easily this or that miracle can be made, by squeezing of evidence, to square with a rationalizing hypothesis; but what is the strength of the argument for the rationalizing hypothesis itself, which is the warrant for squeezing the evidence at all.
The Evangelists say that Jesus taught in the synagogue at Capernaum. Our author takes for granted that He did so. The Evangelists say that Jesus miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes in the wilderness. Our author takes for granted that He did not so. Now why this contrast? Incidentally, indeed, it may be remarked that on the author's own general method, this multiplication of loaves ought to be one of the most certain facts in the life of Christ, as it is emphasized in every Gospel. But this is by the way. The real ground of the contrast in the treatment of the same evidence is a certain prior conviction with which the evidence is approached. Now we are not contending that any such sifting of evidence in the light of prior tests is inadmissible. On the contrary, there is hardly anyone who does not, on a similar principle, explain the differences (for example) in the accounts of the title upon the Cross, or the difficulty as to whether Jesus healed one blind man or two, on the way into, or out from, Jericho; but we do say that the admissibleness of such a method of interpreting absolutely depends upon the certainty of the correctness of the prior conviction itself.
The various details of ingenuity, then, with which he explains away particular incidents, are to us of quite subordinate interest. Everything depends upon the cogency ofthe grounds for explaining away at all. A large part of the book is occupied in explaining away the facts of Christianity, as the Christian Church has hitherto understood them; an explaining away which may be more or less necessary, more or less satisfactory, if the premisses which require it are once admitted; but which certainly is wholly unnecessary, and wholly unsatisfactory, if those premisses are denied.
The prior conviction in the book in question is that miracles neither do, nor did, happen in fact, and therefore that any narrative which involves them is incredible. All the ingenuities of conjecture on individual points become relevant subsequently to, and in reliance upon, this underlying principle. Admit this, and they are forthwith interesting and valuable. Deny this, and they lose their importance at once. It is the pressure of this prior conviction which seems to give life and force to a number of suggestions, about other stories, and particularly about that of the Resurrection, which, apart from this animating conviction, would be felt to be very lifeless; and to a total experiment of subjective reconstruction, which, but for the strength of the antecedent conviction, would have been impossible to men of reverent thought and modest utterance. The teaching of the book will therefore really be accepted or the reverse, precisely according as the minds of its readers do, or do not, incline to admit the hypothesis upon which it depends.
It is probable, indeed, that the author would demur to this statement, at least when put so simply; on the ground that, though he avows the conviction, yet he has reached the conviction itself by noà prioriroad, but as the result of wide observation and unprejudiced scrutiny of evidence. Now it is not at all meant to be asserted that the conviction against miracle is itself reached merely by anà priorimethod. No doubt it has, in fact, been arrived at, in those minds which have fully arrived at it, notà priori, but as the result of a great induction from experience; practically indeed, as it seems to them, from experience as good as universal. The weight of the evidence in this direction is neither denied nor forgotten. Yet even when it most impresses us, of course itis obvious still to reply to ourselves that however powerful this array of experience may appear so long as there are no instances to the contrary, yet any one contrary instance will break at once the cogency of the induction. The case of Jesus Christ is put forward as being unique. Its uniqueness is not really qualified by the fact that some others, among those nearest to Himself, were by Him enabled—avowedly inHispower, not their own,—to do acts which were impossible to other men. This is only a wider extension of His unique power, not a qualification of it. Against such a case, put forward on evidence definite and multiform, and put forward as essentially unique, an argument from induction is no argument at all. It is a misnomer to call the induction an argument. The induction, in fact, is merely an observation that other persons did not perform similar miracles; and that, if Jesus Christ did so, He was unique. But this is no answer to the Christian position. It is part of the position itself.
And so the matter must be referred for settlement to the evidence that is actually forthcoming about Jesus Christ. But it is plain that the inductive presumption against miracle, derived from experience of other men, must not come in to warp or rule this evidence. It may be present indeed as a sort of cross-examining counsel, as a consideration requiring that the evidence should be most minutely scrutinized, and suggesting all sorts of questions with a view to this. But into the evidence itself, it cannot be permitted to intrude.
Now, it is part of our complaint against such writers as the author ofThe Kernel and the Husk, that however much their general presumption against miracle may have been inductively and patiently reached; yet when they come to deal with the evidence about Jesus Christ, this conviction (which ought to stand on one side inquiringly) becomes to them an underlying postulate; it is settled beforehand; it is present with them in their exegesis, not simply as a motive for sifting the evidence carefully, but as a touchstone of truth by which it may all be tried. Probably the author would believe that he has reached his conviction against the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely from a generalinduction as to the absence of miracle in the lives of others, but also from an unprejudiced scrutiny of the evidence of the life of Jesus Christ Himself. But this is just what we are not at all prepared to concede. On the contrary, we maintain that his scrutiny is wholly prejudiced. Examine the evidence with a bias sufficiently powerful against belief in miracle; and you may end in the result which this author reaches. Examine it without such a bias; and you will find yourself at every turn protesting against his mode of treating the evidence. It is a scrutiny of the evidenceon the basis of the inadmissibleness of miracles, which gives him that coherent theory about the growth of the Christian tradition, and those consequent principles of interpretation of the text of the Gospels, which he appears to regard as the simple result of the evidence itself.
We shall very likely be surprised to find that, after all, the abstract impossibility of miracle is not laid down,—nay, is expressly disclaimed,—by him. Miracle (if we rightly understand) is not impossible absolutely,—not even, he adds,à prioriimprobable; yet it isequivalent toan impossibility, because the will of the Father indwelt wholly in Jesus, and because the perfect uniformity of natural processes as we have experienced them, is,in fact, and with no exceptions, the will of the Father[215]. No general reflections upon our dependence, in ordinary life, on the good faith of an uniform nature, ought to blind us to the fact that this last position neither has, nor can have, any adequate ground at all. It is surprising that with so weak a statement of the impossibility of miracle, the principle of the impossibility of miracle should have to bear the extraordinary weight that is put upon it. Nothing short of a demonstration of this impossibility would fully justify the critical position that is adopted. For it is, in fact, upon this impossibility that the whole re-reading of the history is based.
It is probably true that if once the hypothesis of the impossibility of miracle be accepted as practically certain, an earnest mind, penetrated with this as its overruling principle,and dwelling upon the Gospels always and only in the light of this, will be compelled gradually to re-read in one place and re-interpret in another, until the whole has been, by steps that upon the hypothesis were irresistible, metamorphosed into a form as unlike as possible, indeed, to what it wore at first, but still one which can be felt to be precious and beautiful. But we are entitled to point out how absolutely this re-reading of the evidence depends upon the truth of the principle which underlies it. For the sake of this, all sorts of violence has to be done to what would otherwise be, in one incident after another, the obvious meaning of words, the obvious outcome of evidence. Without the certainty of this, the new method of reading must be critically condemned as baseless and arbitrary. This alone makes it rationally possible. Without the strong cogency of this it falls instantly to pieces.
Now orthodox Christians are sometimes accused of reading their historical evidence in the light of a preconception. They begin with the doctrine of the Creed, and read all records of fact with the conviction of that doctrine in their hearts and consciences. We need not be altogether concerned to combat this statement. Perhaps few records are read, or would ever be read intelligently, except in the light of the reader's preconceptions. But our point is to see clearly that at all events the new reading of the Gospel history is itself so entirely the outcome and creature of its antecedent principle, that it cannot without that hold together for an instant.
Let us be content, for the moment, to view the orthodox Christian and the new rationalist as both alike really reading the Gospel narrative in the light of a preconceived principle; the one viewing everything on the basis of the perfect Divinity of the historical Jesus Christ (with the corollary that it is impossible for us to determineà prioriwhat power His perfect Humanity—for which we have no precedent—would, or would not, naturally and necessarily exhibit); the other viewing everything on the basis of the absolute impossibility, or at least the incredibleness, of miracle. We might point out that the former in his hypothesis has aprinciple which absolutely fits and perfectly accounts for every part of the evidence which confronts him; while the latter is compelled, by the cogency of his principle, to reconstruct for himself almost every chapter of the evidence. And if we go one step further back, and ask, what is the antecedent reasonableness of the one hypothesis, or of the other? from what source is each derived? We must claim it as simple fact, that the former hypothesis is itself the direct outcome of the evidence,—the inevitable outcome, indeed, so long as the evidence stands: while the other is at bottom, an assumption, held absolutely in the teeth of the evidence actually existing in respect of the life and consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth, and itself on other grounds not merely unproved, but essentially incapable of proof[216].
But if our hypothesis is itself the outcome of the evidence, and fits with perfect exactness into all its intricacies, then we yield far too much if we treat it as on the level of a mere preconception. To persist in reading the New Testament by the light of the preconception of the dogma of Christ's Godhead (with the corollary that no miracle is incredible as miracle), is to be prejudiced only in the same sense in which the scientist is prejudiced who persists in studying the records of astronomy in the light of certain preconceptions as to the parabola or the law of gravitation.
But what is the case with the other hypothesis? By it the historical Jesus Christ is swept away; and another personality, which does not exist in the history at all, but which the history has suggested to certain earnest-minded critics of our own day, is substituted in His place. All those who witnessed of His words and deeds to the Church, all those whose witness the Church has accepted and sealed, are thoroughly mistaken, mistaken in the very points which to them were fundamental. However honest they may have been in their superstitious ignorance, they certainly bore to the world what was, in fact, false testimony. It is impressive, with astrange impressiveness, to follow this hypothesis through the story of Christ's life; and see with what ingenuity, often plausible, often pathetic, the old facts are refashioned to meet the new principle.
Cardinal, of course, in difficulty as in importance, is the narrative of the Resurrection; that plain statement of fact, to testify whereto was the primary qualification, and primary function, of Apostleship; and which, from S. Peter and S. Paul downwards, has always been recognised as cardinal to the faith of the Church.
Now given; first, the certain conviction that no miracle occurred; and secondly, a working hypothesis as to the growth of the Christian Scriptures, which not only enables, but requires, you to set aside, on grounds of subjective criticism, all such evidence as seems to you to be improbable; and it follows that, if you are still of a very religious mind, you will probably have to take refuge in what may yet be to you the beautiful story of a Resurrection exclusively spiritual.
You must, of course, deal very violently with the direct evidence. But that is already covered by the general theory you have reached as to the historical genesis and value (or lack of value) of the books of the New Testament. And, of course, in adopting such a view of the books of the New Testament, you are reducing to a phantasm the reality of your belief in the Holy Catholic Church, which has enshrined and consecrated, as perfectest truth, what are really at best only fables,—capable, indeed, of clumsily representing the truth to the childish or the stupid, but beginning to be absolutely pernicious to minds which have reached a certain point of intelligent education.
Tolerating these things, however, you may admit the truth of the Resurrection (as you may admit every proposition of the Creed) in words; only in a sense so refined, so exclusively spiritual, that no bodily reality of resurrection is left. There is no resurrection in your creed correlative to the dying. There is no resurrection more, or more demonstrable, than what we believe to be true of men in general. Thereis no resurrection which enters within the ordinary sphere of human history, or admits any direct contact with the normal methods of human evidence or human proof. The question raised is not whether current imaginations of the Resurrection may possibly be more or less exaggerated in the way of materialism, but whether there was any corporeal reality of resurrection at all. And the question is settled in the negative. The foundation fact of the Creed is etherealized away; and all the rest, with it, becomes together impalpable and subjective.
We do not say that there is not a large element which is true, in the thought of such a writer as we have been considering. Where the mind is so devoutly in earnest, it is no hard task to believe that it too must be animated originally by truth. We need not say, therefore, that the work of this earnestness may not serve us all, and contribute to the thought of us all. It may well be true that in our bald understanding of the doctrine of the Resurrection,—or indeed of the whole Incarnation, from beginning to end,—we have, many of us, too little imagined the scope and depth of its spiritual import. If our orthodoxy has been so well content with insisting mechanically upon the literal fact, as not only to forget, but to disdain or disown in any measure, the vast spiritual realities which it ought to express to us; then our stupidity, or narrowness, in orthodoxy, is in part to blame, for the distaste which they have created towards orthodoxy in some natures more sensitive than our own. In so far as they can, in this respect, return good for evil, we will not be slow to acknowledge our debt to them. We will be grateful for any new suggestion they can discover, as to the moral beauty or import of the Resurrection, or of the Incarnation, or of any or every other miracle considered upon its moral side as allegory. Some ways at least there may be, in which their insistance may tend to deepen for us our understanding of truths, whose more spiritual aspects we had dwelt upon perhaps, in some cases,—perhaps had even imagined,—far too little. But doubtless that true element of their work, which the mind of the Catholic Church will assimilate, willbe greatly modified from the form in which it now presents itself—to them as to others. It will, to say the least, be positive rather than negative; stimulating spiritual sensibilities, but not by explaining away the facts of the body; widening (it may be) our insight into the divineness of history, and the depth of the meaning of certain events which happened in it,—but not shattering both it and them, by dissolving their historical truth.
Meanwhile of the one-sided aspect we can but say that no doubt transcendental spiritualism has a great attractiveness. The Magian aspiration always was fascinating. Individuals, indeed, of enthusiastic sympathies, trained themselves in dogmatic truth, and indulging their freest speculations always on a background of inveterate dogmatic instinct, may fancy the 'spiritualized Christianity' to be in itself a stable and a living completeness; but as a system, it will neither produce life nor perpetuate it. It is an attempt to improve upon the Church of Christ, upon the conditions of human nature, upon the facts of history. The Church of Christ is not so. The Church of Christ does not ignore the fundamental conditions of human experience. The Church of Christ is balanced, harmonious, all-embracing, all-adjusting. The Incarnation was the sanctifying of both parts of human nature, not the abolition of either. The Church, the Sacraments, human nature, Jesus Christ Himself, all are twofold; all are earthly objective, as well as transcendental spiritual. And so long as this world is real as well as the next; so long as man is body as well as soul; so long all attempts to evaporate the body and its realities are foredoomed to a necessary and a salutary failure. The religion, which attempts to be rid of the bodily side of things spiritual, sooner or later loses hold of all reality. Pure spiritualism, however noble the aspiration, however living the energy with which it starts, always has ended at last, and will always end, in evanescence.