The mistaken antithesis between temporal and spiritual things runs into the greatest excess, wherever the inherent pravity of human nature is most exaggerated. There are churches, however,—the Catholic and the Arminian,—in whose doctrines the natural condition of man is painted in colors far removed from the deepest shade; and which deem him not so much incapable of right moral discernment, as weakened for faithful moral execution. In this view, the function of Christianity is not to supersede and cancel, but to supplement and guide, the native energies of the soul; not to raise it from a mad trance, in which all thought and feelingare themselves but a false glare, but to apply a tonic and healing power, enabling it to do the right which it has already light enough to see. Professor Fitzgerald is an adherent to this doctrine, and justly contends that no lower estimate of human nature can consist with responsibility at all.
"I am not to be ranked," he says, "amongst those who assume that human corruption has notaffectedthe natural power of the moral sense. I think it has. No doubt sinful depravity, wherever it is indulged, is, as Aristotle long ago remarked, φθαρτικη των αρχων,—it tends to weaken or deprave the sentiment of moral censure, and to blunt the perception of moral evil.
"An eloquent but superficial French moralist has compared the conscience to a table-rock in the ocean, its surface, just above the ripple, bearing an inscription graven in the stone, which a genius, hovering over it, reads aloud. At times the waves arise and sweep over the tablet, concealing the mystic characters. Then the reader is compelled to pause. But after a while the wind is lulled, the waves sink back to their accustomed level, the inscription stands out clear and legible, and the genius resumes his interrupted task.
"This comparison might gain something in correctness if we imagine the inscription traced upon a softer substance. For the stormy waves of passion not only conceal, while they prevail, the sacred characters of virtue, but, as billow after billow passes over the tablet, they tend to obliterate the lines.
"But in making these large concessions, (which I do very willingly,) I do not feel that I am surrendering the cause. It is one thing to say that the discriminating power of the moral judgment isaffectedand impaired by human corruption, and quite another to say that it is destroyed. It is one thing to say that it sometimes goes wrong, and another that we canneverdepend on its decisions. Most men's experience has often brought them acquainted with persons who had impaired, in some way or other, their natural powers of perceiving truth or excellence in some respects, without losing either sound principles of reason or sound principles of honesty in others.And the way to correct such obliquities of intellectual or moral judgment is, not to tell men that they should distrust their natural faculties altogether, but to avail ourselves of so much as remains sound to discover the mistake or imperfection which we seek to remedy or supply. The appeal, in such cases, is from the reason or conscience perverted or impaired, to the same faculties in what physicians would call theirnormal state. When the effaced portions of the inscription are to be restored, the evidence of the correction results from its harmonizing with the part which has not been obliterated; and an interpolation may be detected by its disturbing the coherence of the context,—an omission by leaving it imperfect or unintelligible."—p. 26.
On this principle alone, unhappily but little congenial with the spirit and traditions of Protestant churches, can Christianity coexist with natural ethics. Faith adopts morals, purifies and sublimes them, and especially changes the character of their force;—for a law of compulsion from below, substituting a love of God above. The enmity ceases between the world and heaven; the physical earth is not more certainly afloat in space, and on the muster-roll of stars, than the present life is plunged in eternity, and not behind its chiefest sanctities. There is nothing to be ashamed of, nothing to be slurred over as an unmanageable necessity, in the natural constitution and relations of men; whatever acts they prescribe, whatever combinations they require, are within the scope and consecration of religion. The whole compass of the world and its affairs, all the gifts and activities of men, are brought within moral jurisdiction, and included in the embrace of a genial reverence. No narrow interpretation is longer possible of the province of human piety, and the true type of a noble goodness; as though they demanded a definite set of actions, rather than a certain style of soul, and denied a place to any affection or pursuit which can adorn and glorify existence. Divine things are not put away into foreign realms of being, and future reaches of time, attainable by no path of toil, no spring of effort, only by miraculous transport; but aremet with every day, shining through the substance of life and hid amid its hours. Whatever original endowments, whatever acquired virtues, enrich and elevate our immediate sphere,—the Thought which finds its truth, the Genius that evolves its beauty, the Honor that guards its nobleness, the Love which lightens the burden of its sorrows,—are not mere temporal embellishments indifferent to its sacredness, but attributes that bring men nearer to the sympathy and similitude of God. Art, literature, politics, employing the highest human activities, and constituting the very blossom and fruit of all our culture, are recognized as having an earnest root, and not being the light growth of secular gayety and selfishness. We have no sympathy with the sentimental and immoral propensity, which corrupts the newest Continental philosophy, to recognize whatever comes into existence asipso factodivine. But we do believe that the great change for which the secret religiousness of this age pines, and which it is sorely straitened till it can accomplish, is the deliberate adoption into "heavenly places" of this world, its faculties and affairs, just as God has made them, and man's unfaithfulness has not yet spoiled them. The products of human baseness, hypocrisy, and ambition,—letthemremain hateful, eternally contrary to God, things scarce safe to pity; but believe not that they have got this planet entirely to themselves, and have snatched it as theirpeculiumquite out of the Supreme Hand. Men are tired of straining their thought along the diameter of the universe to seek for a Holy of Holies in whatever is opposite to their life; they find a worship possible, even irresistible, at home, and on the road-side a place as fit to kneel as on the pavement of the Milky Way. The old antagonism between the world that now is, and any other that has been or is to come, has been modified for them, or has even entirely ceased. The earth is no place of diabolic exile, which the "prince of the power of the air" ever fans and darkens with his wing; and were it even, as was once believed, appointed to perish, this would be not because its failure was complete, but because its task was done. No vengeance burns in the sunshine whichmellows its fruits and paints its grass; no threatenings flash from the starry eyes that watch over it by night. It is not only the home of each man's personal affections, but the native country of his very soul; where first he found in what a life he lives, and to what heaven he tends; where he has met the touch of spirits higher than his own, and of Him that is highest of all. It is the abode of every ennobling relation, the scene of every worthy toil;—the altar of his vows, the observatory of his knowledge, the temple of his worship. Whatever succeeds to it will be its sequel, not its opposite, will resume the tale wherever silence overtakes it, and be blended into one life by sameness of persons and continuity of plan. He is set here to live, not as an alien, passing in disguise through an enemy's camp, where no allegiance is due, and no worthy love is possible, but as a citizen fixed on an historic soil, pledged by honorable memories to nurse yet nobler hopes.Hereis the spot,nowis the time, for the most devoted service of God. No strains of heaven will wake him into prayer, if the common music of humanity stirs him not. The saintly company of spirits will throng around him in vain, if he finds no angels of duty and affection in his children, neighbors, and friends. If no heavenly voices wander around him in the present, the future will be but the dumb change of the shadow on the dial. In short, higher stages of existence are not the refuge from this, but the complement to it; and it is the proper wisdom of the affections, not to escape the one in order to seek the other, but to flow forth in purifying copiousness on both.
We have said that men are tired of having their earthly and their heavenly relations set up in sharp opposition to each other, and are eager to live here in a consecrated world. This tendency has already found expression in two remarkable and apparently dissimilar phenomena,—the partial success of the Anglican and Catholic reaction, and the vast influence on English society of the late Dr. Arnold's character. Both were virtual protests against that removal of God out of the common human life, that unreconciled condition of Law andGospel, which had made the evangelical theology sickening and unreal. A path had to be opened for the re-introduction of a divine presence into the sphere of temporal things. Newman resorted to the supernatural channel of Church miracle; Arnold to the natural course of human affairs, and the permanent sacredness of human obligation. Both restored to us a solemn mystery of immediate Incarnation; the one putting life, in order to its consecration, into contact with the sacraments; the other spreading a sacramental veneration over the whole of life. Arnold, especially, saw the great moral evils which have arisen from the evangelical depreciation of the "profane" world. The secular, he was well aware, has becometoosecular, the spiritual toomerelyspiritual. Human nature is permitted to have play with unchecked wilfulness in the one, and is allowed no place at all in the other. The obligations of natural law are held in light esteem, as if, in being social, they fell short of being sacred. The exercises of intellect, in the survey of nature or the interpretation of history, are often stigmatized as a mere earthly curiosity, permissible to reason, but neutral to the soul. The worst of it is, that these notions, once become habitual, fulfil their own predictions. As there is nothing which the heart cannot sanctify, so is there nothing which it may not secularize. Tell men that in their natural affections there is nothing holy, and their homes will soon be nests of common instinct. Assure them that in their business it is the unregenerate will, and the animal necessity, that labor for the bread which perisheth, and soon enough will an irreverent greediness and a cankered anxiety usurp the place. Persuade them that to study the order of creation or the records of past ages is but a "carnal" pursuit, and the student's prayer for light will become a mere ambition for distinction, the meditations of wonder be stifled in the dust of mental day-labor, and the tears of admiration drop no more on the page of ancient wisdom. This was what Arnold could not abide; to see religion flying off on wings of pompous pretence to other worlds, and leaving no heavenly glory upon the earth, but letting her very fieldsbe paved into a street. There was no attempt to save a spot for any earnest reality, except the poor little enclosure behind the altar rail. The Church will consecrate a graveyard for the dead, but leaves the market of the living still unblessed: you may dissolve away in benediction, when your years are over of toil and sweat beneath the curse. To one who acknowledges a natural conscience and a natural element in faith, there is areligion in littlein every part of life; it gives at least a note in the chords and melody of worship. Hence Arnold's curious doctrine of the Church as covering all human relations whatsoever, and including the whole organism of the State. He would have nothing which the laws of this universe imposed on the will of man done without a clear and pious recognition; it was not to be illicitly smuggled in, as if run ashore in a gale of confusion that could not be helped, but must be steadily accounted for and stored in open day.Ethically, this doctrine, though, from its adaptation to a permanent world, it is the least Apostolic in appearance, is, of all interpretations of Christianity, the most true; and if it were not for clinging ideas of extra-moral dogma and special priesthood, as limiting the conception of "the Church," would go far to repeat for our age the work of Socrates for his, and bring down our divine philosophy from heaven to earth. It gets rid entirely of the false spiritualism which has either withheld religious men from political affairs, or induced them to urge on statesmen rules applicable only where government can be dispensed with altogether. It rescues Christianity from the degradation of being hypocritically flattered as the great persuasive to peace by rulers whom it does not restrain from going to war, and relieves it of an oppressive weight of false expectation, as though it broke its promise to the world every time a new case of strife appeared. Nothing can well be more damaging to a religion, than to commit it to unqualified disapprobation of anything which must exist while human nature lasts, and to set it frowning with ineffectual sublimity on the passions and events which determine the whole course of history. The amiable enthusiasts who propose to conduct theaffairs of nations on principles of brotherly love, and who, till that consummation is reached, can only stand by and protest, do but weaken their country for purposes of justice and bring their faith into merited commiseration. It is commonly said that they are a harmless class, who may even form a useful counterpoise to the warlike susceptibilities of less scrupulous men. We have no belief, however, in the efficacy of falsehood and exaggeration, or in the attainment of truth and moderation by the neutralizing action of opposite extravagances. The reverence for human life is carried to an immoral idolatry, when it is held more sacred than justice and right, and when the spectacle of blood becomes more horrible than the sight of desolating tyrannies and triumphant hypocrisies. Life, indeed, is just the one thing—the reserved capital, the rest, the ultimate security—on whose disposability in the last resort, and on the free control over which, the very existence of society depends. The first and highest social bond is no doubt to be found in areligioussentiment, a common veneration for the same things as right and intrinsically binding on men that live side by side; and the worship, with its institutions, of every community, is its instinctive attempt to get these things spontaneously done by the force ofreverence. Could this point be really carried, nothing would remain to be accomplished; religion would complete and perfect the incorporation of mutual loyalty which it had begun. But there are some in whom the sentiment of common reverence fails, and for whose fidelity to the moral ends of the social union there is therefore no natural guaranty. To reach these cases, society has no resource but coercive methods, actual or threatened; the threat isLaw; the actuality isPunishment; the power to which both are committed is aGovernment; the commonwealth on whose behalf they exist is aState. The very constitution of a state thus presupposes thepossible violation of moral right, the partial failure of religion to secure its observance, and the determination toenforceon the reluctant an obedience refused of free will. Force, however, is applicable only to men's bodies; it is a restraint and pressure on thefunctions of their life; and if that life be sacred from infringement, the political existence of nations is itself an offence against the law of God. All law, all polity, is a proclamation that justice is better than life, and, if need be, shall override it and all the possessions it includes; and nothing can be weaker or more suicidal than for men who are citizens of a commonwealth to announce, that, for their part, they mean to hold life in higher esteem than justice. Moreover, there is a low-minded egotism often disguised in this doctrine of passive meekness. As an inducement to quiet endurance of wrong, we are reminded of the duty of "mutual forgiveness." Is all the wickedness, then, that I am doomed to witness, nothing but apersonal affront? When a rascal threatens to blow out my neighbor's brains, or to blast his character by infamous accusations, amIin a position to forbear and pardon? Must I not own myself under a solemn trust, to see the right done and the guilty punished? Nay, would not the injured man himself greatly mistake the nature of the crime, and measure it by a paltry standard, if he took it for a mere private offence which it was his prerogative to punish or to overlook? "Who is this that forgiveth sins also?" The eternal laws of justice are not of our enacting; and no will of ours has title to suspend or to repeal them. The real and only demand of Christian magnanimity is, that we visit them with no vengeance, but merely with moral retribution;—thatis, with no more severity when directed against ourselves, than when we see them at an impersonal distance. But to regard and treat the guilty as if he were an innocent,—that is given to no man, and is even inconceivable of God. Rulers, at all events, as trustees of rights other than their own,—and each generation of a people, as charged with the interests of successors in perpetuity,—have but a limited privilege of forbearance; the meekness of the saint would in them be treason to the world. Even in international disputes, where each party may have a conviction of right, the controversy, but for the possibility of force, could have no end. It is a delusion to rely on courts as a substitute for armies, and to suppose that judicial decisioncan supersede military. The judge would be of small avail without the constable; and the arbitrator between nations would need a European army to enforce his decrees. Where the stake is large and the feeling strong, it is notorious that the private disputant rarely acquiesces in an arbitration that goes against him; but carries his case to the last appeal, where it is stopped by a barrier of impassable force. You might as well pull down your jails in preparation for the assizes, as destroy your fleets and arsenals in quest of international arbitration. We speak only of the ultimate theory of this matter, and simply affirm, that wherever law and government exist, somewhere in the background force must lurk. It may, no doubt, be provided in excess, and paraded without need; and with the progress of a civilized order, the circle may be ever widened within which theideaof coercion, with the habits it creates, may be substituted for the obtrusive reality; till possibly a family of nations may be gathered, like a group of counties, into a common jurisdiction. But this only shifts the camp without disbanding it; and, after all, the tipstaffs of your supreme court could be no other than the legions of a grand army. We have, therefore, no more doubt that a war may be right, than that a policeman may be a security for justice, and we object to a fortress as little as to a handcuff. A religion which does not include the whole moral law; a moral law which does not embrace all the problems of a commonwealth; a commonwealth which regards the life of man more than the equities of God,—appear to us unfaithful to their functions, and unworthy interpreters of the divine scheme of the world. Quaker histories, written with omission of all the wars, are not less morbid as moral mistakes, than a doctrine of Providence, leaving out the whole realm of heathendom, is narrow as a religious theory; and the misuse of Scripture which has led to both, is most dangerous to its authority in an age remarkable for the breadth of its historical survey and the variety of its ethnological sympathies.
In other ways than those which we have indicated has a mischievous direction been given to modern thought and feeling,by perverting the accidental and transient form of the primitive Christianity into essential and permanent doctrine. But our exposition must proceed no further. The alternation of ascetic spiritualism and worldly laxity, the indifference to natural affections and relations, the exclusiveness at once devout and selfish, the jealous denial of their rights to intellect and art, the false apprehension of the true dignity of law and true life of states, have been the more earnestly dwelt upon from the conviction that these ethical infirmities are producing a perilous reaction,—a distrust of all ethical laws whatsoever, a disposition to hold everything divine that finds strength to realize itself,—a worship of whatis, in place of an aspiration to whatought to be. To this we cannot consent. We cannot look on all forms of human life and character with the neutral eye of an equal admiration, as alike suitable products of formative nature. We cannot forego the right of judgment,—of embracing with reverence or spurning with abhorrence; or part with the ideal type of a perfect soul, to which all others rise as they approach. Neither do we believe with Luther, that human nature is a meredevilishanarchy, reducible only by supernatural irruption; nor with the newest school, that it is adivineanarchy, equally uncontrollable from within, and to be accepted as a wild fact; but that it is ahierarchy of powers, each having and knowing its rightful place, and appealing to us to maintain it there. To listen to that appeal, and, in answer to it, strive to harmonize thede factowith thede jureadministration of the soul, destroying the usurpation of mean errors, and restoring the sway of kingly truth, is the aim of morals in action and in philosophy.
The Restoration of Belief. No. I.Christianity in Relation to its Ancient and Modern Antagonists. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1852.
The Restoration of Belief. No. I.Christianity in Relation to its Ancient and Modern Antagonists. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1852.
We have heard it quoted as the remark of a distinguished foreigner, conversant with the choicest society in several of the capitals of Europe, that nowhere is the alienation of the higher and professional classes from all religious faith so widespread and complete as in England. That the masses at the other end of the social scale are indifferent or disaffected to the institutions which visibly embody the Christianity of our age, can be no secret to any observant inhabitant of a large English town. It is on the middle class alone that the various forms of Protestant worship have any real hold. Removed alike from the passionate temptations of the homeless artisan, and from the mental activity of the statesman or man of letters, the rural gentry and the urban tradespeople are detained under traditional influences, partly by the wholesome conservatism of moral habit, partly by helpless accommodation to conventional standards. Men of this class, if once really touched and possessed by earnest conviction, are the best defenders of a religion frompoliticalassault. But a faith exposed to anintellectualstruggle finds among them but a precarious shelter; especially if their attachment to it is less a living persuasion than a fear of the blank which its removalwould create. Persecuted by the magistrate, they know how to defend their worship from the oppression of law. Assailed by the critic, they can offer but the resistance of a dumb impenetrability; they cannot bring their sterling personal qualities to bear upon the contest; they are obliged, for all active conduct in the strife, to trust to a body of literary Swiss, engaged to protect the Vatican of their faith, and accustomed never to report defeat. In proportion as the methods of sceptical aggression become more formidable, and its temper more earnest, it is found necessary to improve the training of the band of Church defenders;—a measure at once indispensable and fatal; for it lifts them into an intellectual position, which spoils the blind singleness of their allegiance, discloses the hopelessness of the task expected from them, and often destroys their antipathy to the noble revolutionary foe. It is the vainest of hopes, that a body of clergy, brought up to the culture of the nineteenth century, can abide by the Christianity of the sixteenth or of the second; if they may not preserve its essence by translation into other forms of thought, they will abandon it, in proportion as they are clear-sighted and veracious, as a dialect grown obsolete. The number accordingly is constantly increasing, in every college capable of training a rich intellect, of candidates for the ministry forced by their doubts into lay professions, and carrying thither the powerful influence, in the same direction, of learning and accomplishment. The higher offices of education are, to no slight extent, in the hands of these deserters of the Church; and through the tutor in the family, or the master in the school, or the professor in the lecture-room, contact and sympathy are established between the best portions of the new generation, and a kind of thought and culture with which the authorized theology cannot co-exist. College friendships, foreign travel, current literature, familiarize all educated young men with the phenomenon of scepticism, and in a way most likely to disenchant it of its terrors. Thus by innumerable channels it enters the middle class at the intellectual end of their life, assuming in general the form of historic and criticaldoubt; while from below, from the classes born and bred amid the whirl of machinery, and shaped in their very imagination by the tyranny of the power-loom, it pushes up in the ruder form of material fatalism. The intermediate enclosure, safe in the dull innocence of an unsuspected creed, is growing narrower every day; and, though reserved to the last for its hour of temptation, will be the least prepared to win its victory.
No one who appreciates the real sources of a healthy national life, and knows what to expect from the dissolution of ancient faiths, can look without anxiety at a prospect like this; especially in a country whose religious institutions, rigid with usage, overloaded with interests, charged with the bequests of the past, are manifestly unequal to the crisis, and, in their attempt to train the affections of the Future, wield every power but the right one, and are indeed already regarded, like the Court of Chancery with its wards, as a dry nursery for grown babies. A people that reverences nothing—nothing at least that stretches a common heaven over all—has lost its natural unity. Incipient decay is spreading through the secret cement of its civilization, which, far from bearing the weight of further growth, precariously holds its existing mass together. So far we are entirely at one with those who see something to deplore in the "Eclipse of Faith," and something to desire in the "Restoration of Belief." They do not overrate the evils of a state of society in which, if you think with the wise, you must cease to believe with the vulgar. We would join with them, heart and hand, in the effort to terminate this fatal discrepancy, and find some language of devotion and aspiration, veracious alike from the lips of the richest knowledge and the most primitive simplicity. But when, like the author whose publication is before us, they would abolish the discrepancy by simply reinstating the taught in the creed of the untaught; when they insist on the surrender without terms of modern philosophy and criticism to the "unabated" authority of the Bible; when they pretend to wipe out from calculation all the theological researches of thelast half-century, as if they were mere ciphers made in sport on the tablet of history, and had no effect on our computed place at all,—we separate sorrowfully from them, largely sympathizing with their wish, but wholly despairing of their method. The received theory of the origin of Christianity from agencies exclusively divine, and of the infallible character of the canonical books, can no more be "restored," than Roman history can be put back to its state before Niebuhr's time, or Greek mythology be treated as if Heyne and Ottfried Müller had never lived. The present age is not more distinguished by its advance in the material arts, than by its astonishing progress in the interpretation and true painting of the past; a Boeckh or a Grote carries in his mind a picture of Athenian life in the days of Pericles more perfect, it is probable, than could be formed by Plutarch or Longinus; and it would be strange if the Christian era—certainly the object of the most elaborated study—were the only one to escape the work of reconstruction, or to undergo it without considerable change. The limits of that change are at present definable by no consentient estimate; but that they are such as to remove the old lines of Christian defence, and require the choice of more open ground, can no longer be denied, except by the astute consistency of a Romanist hierarchy, and the innocent unconsciousness of English sects. When the time shall come for a dispassionate history of the first two centuries,—a history which, resolving the canon back into the general mass of early Christian literature, shall find an original clew for tradition, instead of accepting one from its posthumous hand,—which shall detect opinions before they were heretic or orthodox, and trace the several streams of tributary thought to their confluence in a determinate Christianity,—the narrowness of our present polemic will be apparent of itself; its fears and triumphs be regarded with a smile; and many, both of its positive and negative results, will vanish from the interests of religion, and be absorbed in a higher view of the relation between the Divine and Human in this world.
We had hoped at first that the author of "The Restoration of Belief" was about to take up the problem of Christianity with a real appreciation of its altered conditions, and with unaffected justice towards those who cannot solve it like himself. His present essay is but the commencement of a series, designed to arrest the progress of educated scepticism, to expose the sophistries of modern criticism, and re-establish the plenary authority, as oracles of faith, of the Hebrew and the Christian Scriptures. It would perhaps be unreasonable to complain that his argument does not march very far in this first movement; and engages us rather by the stateliness of its step, than by the clearness of its direction. Nevertheless, we do think that the discursive license of introductory exposition is carried by him to an extreme which promises ill for the exactitude of his method. At the outset he declares that the difficulties which embarrass modern faith go down to the very depths of philosophy, and can be resolved only by reaching the ultimate roots of thought. Yet he remains on the upper surface of history, and, without once hinting how this is to lead him to the pith of the controversy, dwells only on facts which are undisputed, and his conception of which might be as readily gathered from Gibbon as from Neander. Like many writers whose eye is caught by grandeur of effect, and whose imagination is sensitive to wonder, he is fascinated by the moment in human affairs when the Roman Empire was exactly poised between the forces of external unity and of internal decay, and the political organism of the Past, so august in its mass and its proportions, held no soul but the young spirit of the Future. Of this crisis, assigned to the reign of Alexander Severus, our author presents an impressive and, we believe, a faithful sketch. Amid the splendor, the misery, the decay of belief and hope, the universal incertitude of that period, there emerges into notice the beautiful and beneficent phenomenon of a real Faith,—a Faith that can live, a Faith that can die. The inevitable conflict between this new power and the Pagan prerogatives of the Cæsars is well brought out by the essayist; and the victoryof Christianity is justly ascribed to the peculiar character of the religion, as a feeling directed to apersonrather than the simple assent to anidea. It was the force of this personal feeling which first awakened in men the sentiment of obligation in regard to religious truth, and substituted faithful veracity for indifferentism and laxity of profession. The author thus sums up the positions which he regards the present essay as establishing:—
"That the Christian communities did, during the period that we have had in view, make and maintain a protest against the idol-worship of the times, which protest, severe as it was in its conditions, at length won a place in the world for a purer theology, and set the civilized races free from the degrading superstitions of the Greek Mythology.
"That in the course of this arduous struggle, and as an unobserved yet inevitable consequence of it, a New Principle came to be recognized, and a New Feeling came to govern the minds of men, which principle and feeling conferred upon the individual man, however low his rank, socially or intellectually, a dignity unknown to classical antiquity; and which yet must be the basis of every moral advancement we can desire, or think of as possible.
"That the struggle whence resulted these two momentous consequences, affecting the welfare of men for ever, was entered upon and maintained on the ground of a definite persuasion, or Belief, of which aPersonwas the object.
"That this belief toward a person embraced attributes, not only of superhuman excellence and wisdom, but also of superhumanpowerandauthority. If we take the materials before us as our guide, it will not be possible to disengage the history from these ideas of superhuman dignity."—p. 106.
These positions we certainly conceive to be unassailable. But they lie so completely out of the field of modern doubt and controversy, that we are at a loss to imagine what possible use the author can make of them. The general features of the Christian faith, and the character of the Church, had assumed in the third century a determinate form, about whichthere is no important question between believer and unbeliever. Who would deny that the disciples for whom Clement of Alexandria and Origen wrote, whom Tertullian and Minucius Felix defended, and to whose institutes Cyprian was a convert, believed in Jesus Christ as a person at once historical and divine, and were strengthened by that belief to the endurance of martyrdom? The real and only difficulties lie higher up, in the attempt to trace the sources and earlier varieties of this belief; and if our author can show that, in winding its way through two centuries, and traversing several distinct regions of thought, it dropped or rounded off no primitive facts, and became mingled with no foreign ideas,—if he can establish the essential constancy and uniformity, from the first, of the tradition and doctrine which obtained ascendency at last,—he will indeed reduce legitimate scepticism within very narrow limits, and deserve a niche in the Valhalla of critical renown. But if he contemplates clearing these centuries by an argumentative leap; if, from the martyr faith of an age later than the Antonines, he means to conclude the certainty of the Incarnation two hundred years before,—then we must say, he attempts a logical feat which puts to shame the cautious steps of such reasoners as Paley, Marsh, and Whately. The catena of well-linked testimonies, with its bridge of safe footing, which they have endeavored to sling across the chasm of the post-apostolic age, is but a paltry cowardice of ecclesiastic engineering to one who can pass the gulf upon the wing of inference. An advocate is intelligible, and proceeds upon admitted rules of evidence, who says with these earlier divines: "Here are the writings of Paul, of John, of Matthew, and of other men who were present at the events they relate or assume; whose lives were turned into a new channel by their influence; and who went to prison and to death rather than deny them. They positively declare that they witnessed the most stupendous miracles, and, after their Master had been visibly taken up through the clouds, themselves habitually exercised the same supernatural power. You must admit that the guaranties of testimony can go nofurther: surrender yourself therefore to the Gospel." This is an argument which accomplishes all that is possible with historical evidence in such a case; and were its allegations of fact sustainable, it would still be the best form into which the reasoning could be thrown. Unfortunately, we can no longer feel assured that any first-hand testimony exists, as a distinguishable element, in the narrative books of the New Testament; so that we can regard them only as monuments of the state of Christian tradition during a secondary period. Still, this flaw is not repaired by striking into the course of belief three or four generations lower down, and substituting the "Martyr literature" of the third century for the Evangelist memorials of the second or the first. And when our author transfers to Clement and Origen the praise of unaffected simplicity usually awarded to the Apostolic writers, and actually presents it as sufficient proof of divine attributes in Christ, we can only suppose that, in his opinion, some truths are too good to have any bad way to them. What else can be said of the following mode of inference?
"Much do we meet with in these writers that indicates infirmity of judgment or a false taste; yet does there pervade them a marked simplicity, a grave sincerity, a quietness of tone, whenHeis spoken of whom they acknowledge asLord. If there be one characteristic of these ancient writings that isuniform, it is the calm, affectionate, and reverential tone in which the Martyr Church speaks ofThe Saviour Christ!
"I am perfectly sure that, if you could absolutely banish from your mind all thought of the inferences and the consequences resulting from your admissions, you would not, after perusing this body of Martyr literature, fall into the enormity of attributing the notions entertained ofChrist, as invested with Divine attributes, to any such source as 'exaggeration,' or 'extravagance,' or to 'Orientalism,' or 'enlarged Platonism.' Exaggeration and inflation have their own style: it is not difficult to recognize it. No characteristic of thought or language is more obvious. You will fail in your endeavor to show that this characteristicdoesattach to the writings inquestion; and why should you make such an attempt? There can be no inducement to do so, unless it appears to be the only means of escaping from some consequence which we dislike."—p. 107.
Our author professedly opposes "Ancient Christianity" to modern scepticism, because "History," as he observes, "is solid ground," and no region of atmospheric phantasms, births from the refracted rays of metaphysic light. History, however, is solid ground only so far as it is really explored; and the trending of the land and curving of the shore in one latitude of time no more enables us to lay down the map of another, than an anchorage at the Ganges' mouth would enable us to paint the gorges of the Himalayas, and distinguish the real from the fabulous sources of the sacred stream. To take us into the basilicas and show us how Christians worshipped in the days of Alexander Severus, to introduce us to the Proconsul's court and bid us witness their refusal of divine homage to Cæsar's image, and then ask us whether a faith like thiscould have hadany origin butone,—this is nothistory, but the mereevasionof history. We want to know, not whatmust have beenthe source, but whatwasthe source, of the great moral power that rose upon the world as Rome declined. Whoever wishes to shut out human ideas and natural agencies from participation in the matter, must go patiently through the entire remains of the early Christian literature; must trace the conflict between the Hebrew and the Pauline Gospel; find a place for the peculiar version of the religion given by the Evangelist John; fix the limits of Ebionitism, of Chiliasm, of Docetism; and show that these modes and varieties of doctrine stop short of the substance of the early faith, and do not enter the canonical Scriptures with any disturbance of their historic certainty. Nothing of this kind do we expect from our author. For he entertains a conception, respecting the logic of Christian evidence, which, however prevalent among English divines, betrays in our judgment a mind not at all at home with the present conditions of the problem. He seems to think that we canfirstprove the historic truthof the Scripturesin general; and then get rid of thedifficulties in particular; and requires us, in obedience to this pedantic law of logical etiquette, to carry into our investigation of every successive perplexity the rigid assumption that the writings with which we deal are "inspired," and their contents of "Divine authority."
"When a collection of historic materials, bearing upon a particular series of events, is brought forward, it will follow, upon the supposition that those events have, on the whole, been truly reported, that any hypothesis, the object of which is to make it seem probable that no such events did take place, must involve absurdities which will be more or less glaring. But then,afterthe truth of the history has been established, and when the trustworthiness of the materials has been admitted, as we proceed to apply a rigid criticism to ambiguous passages, we shall undoubtedly encounter a crowd of perplexing disagreements; and we shall find employment enough for all our acumen, and trial enough of our patience, in clearing our path. And yet no amount of discouragements, such as these, will warrant our falling back upon a supposition which we have already discarded as incoherent and absurd."—p. 110.
We cannot call this a vicious canon of historical criticism; for it simply excludes historical criticism altogether. The critic's work is not a process which can go on generically, without addressing itself to any particular matters at all, and vindicate comprehensive conclusions in blindness towards the cases they comprise. The judgment that, on the whole, a certain book contains a true report of events, can only be a provisional assumption, founded on natural and childlike trust, and can claim no scientific character, till it comes out as a collective inference from an investigation in detail of the narrative's contents. No doubt, the bare fact of the existence of Christianity as a great social phenomenon in the age of the Antonines, may afford evidence enough that Jesus of Nazareth was no imaginary being; the genius of the religion, and the traditional picture of its author, may indicate the cast of hismind and the intensity of his influence; the institutions of the Church may betray its origin in Palestine, and the approximate date of its birth. But these conclusions, founded entirely on reasonings from human causation, can never carry us into the superhuman; or enable us to say more respecting the memorials of the life of Jesus, than that theymay betrue, and do not forfeit,ab initio, their title to examination by fundamental anachronism, misplacement, and moral incongruity. How far the existence of thisprimâ faciecase falls short of "establishing the truth of the history," and "the trustworthiness of the materials," we need not point out to any one accustomed to deal with questions of evidence. And as for the great proposition, that "the Gospel of Christ is a supernaturally authenticated gift," we cannot imagine how it is to be provedin general, without research into a single miracle. Is it indifferent to the fact of the Incarnation, that the only two accounts of the birth and infancy of Jesus are hopelessly at variance with each other? Is the evidence of the Resurrection unaffected by the discrepancies on which harmonists have spent a fruitless ingenuity? Are we as sure that, in reading the Apostles' works, we have to do with "inspired writers," as if they hadnotmade any false announcements about the end of the world? What does our author mean by admitting these things as "difficulties," yet denying them any just influence in abatement of our confidence? He may form one estimate of their weight, and his opponent another; but in neither case can they be postponed for treatment in a mere appendix to the discussion of Christian evidence: they are of the very pith of the whole question, and, so long as they lie in reserve as quantities of unknown magnitude and direction of influence, render historical belief and unbelief alike irrational.
Nor can we for a moment allow that the failure of ever so many "German theories" to give a satisfactory account of the origin of Christianity, is any good reason for contented acquiescence in the received doctrine. Our author insists, that we must make our definitive choice between some modernhypothesis and the Evangelical tradition; and either take the facts as they are handed down to us, or else replace them by some better representation. By what right does he impose on us such an alternative necessity? Is the critic disqualified for detecting false history, because he cannot, at his distance, write the true? Is it a thing unknown, as a product of scholarship, that fabulous elements disclose themselves amid the memorials of fact? and is it not an acknowledged gain to part with an error, though only in favor of an ignorance? If a modern hypothesis as to the mode in which the religion arose may "break down" by mere internal incoherence and improbability, why may not the ancient account, if it should be chargeable with similar imperfections, be liable to the same fate? It is surely conceivable thatallthe finished representations we possess,—Hebrew and Alexandrine, as well as German,—furnish, more or less, an ideal and conjectural history of the infancy of Christendom; and that the reproduction of that time may not only benowimpossible, but have already become so ere a hundred years were gone. The baffling of one solution implies therefore no triumph of another; and if the tradition on which we stand be insecure, our position is not improved by clipping the wings of every adventurous hypothesis on which we had thought to escape the common ground.
Our author cannot then change thevenueof the great Christian cause from the first century to the third, and, on the evidence present there, give even preliminary judgment. The conflict between the new religion and the old which characterized that period, he paints with striking and truthful effect; and, contrasting the severe and holy veracity of martyred disciples with the careless indifference of Paganism to religious truth, he rightly refers the superiority of the Christians to their faith in aPerson, instead of mere assent to anOpinion. Is it, however, correct to regard this as original and exclusive to the Gospel, and to set it on the forehead of the Church as the very mark of her distinctive divinity? We think not. The same feature is manifest in Judaism, to which again itbelongs, not as a peculiarity, but in common with every faith whose Only God is the apotheosis of humanity. It is the one grand moral characteristic of genuine Theism, as opposed to Pantheism; rendering it more than the enthusiasm of poetry, the earnestness of philosophy, the inspiration of genius, and constituting it, in the deepest sense, Religion. Nor is the ground of the distinction far to seek. Religion, in its ultimate essence, is a sentiment of Reverence for a Higher than ourselves. Higher than ourselves, however, can none be, that have not what is most august among our endowments; none, therefore, by reason of size, of strength, of duration; none simply by beauty or by skill; none even by largeness of discerning thought, but only by free and realizing preference of the most Just and Good. A Being of living Will can alone be nobler than myself, lift me above the level of my actual mind by looking at my latent nature, and emancipate me into the captivity of worship. In other words, reverence can attach itself exclusively to aPerson; it cannot direct itself on what isimpersonal,—on physical facts, on unconscious laws, on necessary forces, on inanimate objects and their relations, on space, though it be infinite, on duration, though it be eternal. These all, even when they rule us, arelowerthan ourselves; they may evade our knowledge, defy our power, overwhelm our imagination, but never rise to be our equals, or conspire to furnish even the symbol of our God. The mere deification of Nature, the recognition of oneness pervading her variety, the sense of an absolute ground abiding behind her transient phenomena, may supply a faith adequate to the awakening of wonder and the apprehension of ideal beauty, but not to the practical consecration of life; glorifying the universe as a temple of Art, but railing off within it no oratory of Conscience. In order to extract anything like a religion ofconductfrom this type of belief, its hierophants are obliged to approach as near as they can to the language of proper Theism, and not even despise typographical aid for pushing personification to the verge of personality; uttering various warnings not to neglect the "intentionsof Nature," or insultthe "Relentless Veracities," and inviting sundry offenders toblushbefore "the Eternal Powers." The whole force of such expressions is evidently due to the false semblance of living thought and will with which they clothe the conceptions of mere abstract relations or physical tendencies. These rich tints are no self-color, but a borrowed light reflected from a grander Presence studiously withdrawn from view; and when their gloss is gone, no positive residuum is found, but a doctrine of hope and fear, without any element of Duty. It were a mockery, an inanity, to bid a man spend his affections on hypostatized laws that neither know nor answer him. In his crimes, it is not the heavy irons of his prison, but the deep eye of his judge, from which he shrinks; and in his repentance he weeps, not upon the lap of Nature, but at the feet of God. In his allegiance, his vow is made, not to the certainty of facts, but to the majesty of Right, and the authority of an Infinitely Just; and his acts of trust are directed by no means to the steadiness of creation's ways, but to the faithfulness of a perfect Mind. In short, all the sentiments characteristic of religion presuppose a Personal Object, and assert their power only where Manhood is the type of Godhead. This condition was imported, or rather continued, from the Hebrew to the Christian system; and brought with it the devout loyalty of heart, the singleness of service, the incorruptible heroism of endurance, which had encountered Antiochus Epiphanes at Jerusalem, as it now met Pliny in Bithynia, and Quadratus at Smyrna. The Paganism of the Empire, on the other hand, failed entirely of this condition. It was a mere nature-worship, expressive of the political dynamics by which, through the award of a mysterious necessity, Rome had become the centre of the world. If, among the deities whose congress was now assembled on the Tiber, there were any which once, in their indigenous seats, had commanded the full moral faith, and touched the true theistic devotion, of a people, that time had passed; and the conquered tribes suffered a more fatal loss when the victorious city adopted their religion, than when she crushed their liberty. Removed toRome, the rites of a provincial worship expressed nothing except that its gods were gods no more, but had descended from divine monarchic rights to a place among a pensioned hierarchy. Vanquished divinities inevitably become delegated powers of nature, and resign their sceptre to the sovereign they are compelled to own. As the administration of the Empire embraced a congeries of checked nationalities, so did its pantheon include a collection of extinguished religions. While as Imperator the head of the state was the embodiment of its unity by natural force, as Divus he represented its unity by preternatural sanction; and the divine honors paid to him were the acknowledgment of a necessity more than human in the culminating majesty of Rome. These honors would be freely rendered to him by those who looked on all realized existence, on everything charged with force enough to come up and be, as equally decreed by "the Eternal Powers,"—equally divine. Such homage would appear to them the mere expression of a fact, and a graceful owning of mysterious fates in its production; and no scruple could withhold them from an act which contradicted nothing in their mind, and did but fling a breath of pious incense around the thing that veritably was. It were absurd to expect the protest of a martyr from a man whose religion you cannot contradict; who will see a God wherever you ask him; and whose worship asserts nothing but that, a phenomenon being there, an occult power is behind it. A faith of this sort is deficient, as an Hegelian would say, "in the moment ofnegation"; it is all unobstructed affirmation, and can strike no light because it thus finds nothing to dash itself against. But let the divine element in the universe cease to be impersonal and impartially coalescent with the whole, let it live an Individual Mind, and the requisite antagonism immediately appears. To the Jew, the worship of Cæsar would be no other than high treason to Jehovah, whose tool, whose whip of lightning, and whose cup of consolation the Pagan Emperor might become; but whose emblem and incarnation he could so little be, that he rather stood defiantly at the head of the opposing realm,and, even when forced to be the organ, did not cease to be the competitor of God. Foropposing realmthere must be, wherever proper Theism exists. Man feels that his personal attributes, his will, his character, his conscience, demand conflict for their condition, and without the possibility of ill could never be; and when he carries them out into the infinite region, to serve as his image of the Highest, they bear with them the inseparable shadow of evil, and give it place in the universe, as the darkness in whose absence light would want its distinction, the privative without which the beauty of holiness were nothing positive. Hence, expressed or unexpressed, a dualism mingles with all genuine theistic faith. All is not divine for it. It has a devil's province somewhere. Face to face, as Ebal to Gerizim, the frown of blighted rock to the smile of verdant heights,—hostile as the priest of falsehood to the true prophet,—there stand contrasted in this creed two domains of the world,—one surrendered to insurgent powers, the other reserved as the nursing ground from which right and truth shall be spread. To the Hebrew, the Pagan world was given over to a false allegiance, and inspired with diabolical delusions. For him to sacrifice to the genius of Cæsar, would have been, therefore, a desertion to the enemies of God, forbidden by every claim of faithfulness and veracity. Thus we conceive that the moral conditions of the martyrs' protest against idol-worships were complete within the limits of Judaism before the mission of Christ; and that the essence of it lies, not in the exclusive characteristics of the Gospel, but in the difference between Theistic reverence for a Personal Being, and the Pantheistic acknowledgment of an impersonal divineness. The peculiar function of Christianity in this respect was to become missionary to the world of this heroic fidelity transmitted from the parent faith, and hitherto bounded by its limits; and to find a place in the universal conscience of civilized nations for the duty of bearing testimony, though with tortures and death, to the pricelessness of truth and the sanctity of conviction. True it is that the Gospel was qualified for this office by directing human faith uponaPerson; and would have exercised no such power, had it been a mere philosophy presenting propositions for assent, instead of a Living Mind for trust and reverence. But this condition would have been attained by the simple extension of the Jewish Theism. The Personality, which is needed as a centre of intense fealty and affection, is found in the God of Hebrew tradition, and, for its effects in kindling a martyr courage and constancy, did not require to be sought in the historical Jesus of Nazareth. He, no doubt, as the mediate expression of the Supreme Will, as the Being with whom the Church stood in direct contact, as the presence of the Divine in the Human,wasthe object of the disciples' actual allegiance. We do not in the least question this as afact, but only as anecessity, ere we can account for the moral features of a martyr age.
In singling out, as one of the grandest practical results of Christianity, the recognition it has obtained for theobligations of religious truth, our author has rightly seized a characteristic distinction of modern from ancient society. The principle is a real agency of the first order in history; we do not accuse him of overrating its importance, but of mistaking its genealogy. And now we must add, that if we differ from him as to the source whence it comes, we differ still more as to the issues whither it conducts. So inconsiderately does he allow himself to be borne away by his evangelical zeal, that he claims for the Gospel, not only the glory of first revealing, but the exclusive right of ever practising, the duties of religious veracity. None but historical believers have the least title to attach any sacredness to their convictions, or to feel any hesitation about denying them. What business have the authors of the "Phases of Faith," and the "Creed of Christendom," to any better morality of belief than Gallio or Lucian? If they have not fallen back into the Pagan indifferentism, theyoughtto have done so, and our author will continue very indignant till they do. He is offended with Mr. Newman for asking judgment on his "argument and himself, as before the bar of God"; and with Mr. Greg for saying that, in theprocess of changing cherished beliefs, "the pursuit of truth is a daily martyrdom," and for giving "honor to those who encounter it, saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still!" And he is not ashamed to declare that the guileless veracity which in himself would be a martyr's constancy, would be in another an overweening conceit. So astonishing, logically and ethically, are his statements on this subject, and so curiously do they determine his intellectual position, that we must present them in his own words:—
"We Christian men of this age, along with our venerated martyr brethren of the ancient Church, in making this profession,—that we may not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in matters of religion; we (as they did) affirm that which is consistent within itself, and which, in the whole extent of its meaning, is certain and is reasonable, grant us only our initial postulate, that Christianity is from heaven.
"But how is it, when this same solemn averment comes from the lips of those who deny that postulate, and who scorn to recognize the voice of God in theBook? It is just thus; and those whom it concerns so to do, owe it to the world and to themselves to make the ingenuous avowal.
"In the first place, the style and the very terms employed by these writers in enouncing the fact of the martyrdom they are undergoing, are all a flagrant plagiarism, and nothing better! A claim, in behalf of the Gospel, must be made of what is its own, and which these writers, without leave asked, have appropriated. As to every word and phrase upon which the significance of this their profession turns, it must be given up, leaving them in possession of so much only of the meaning of such phrases as would have been intelligible toPlutarch, toPorphyry, and toM. Aurelius. A surrender must be made of the wordsConscience, andTruth, andRighteousness, andSin; and, alas! modern unbelievers must be challenged to give me back thatoneawe-fraughtNamewhich they (must I not plainly say so?) have stolen out of theBook; when they have frankly made this large surrender, we may return to them the το θειον of classical antiquity.
"Yet this plagiarism, as to terms, is the smaller part of that invasion of rights with which the same persons are chargeable. It is reasonable, and it is what a good manmustdo, to suffer anything rather than deny a persuasion, which is such that he could not, if he would, cast it off. So it was with the early Christian martyrs; their persuasion of the truth of the Gospel had become part of themselves; it was faith absolute, in the fullest sense of the word. The same degree of irresistible persuasion attaches to the conclusions of mathematical or physical science; but it can never belong to an opinion, or to an undefined abstract belief. A man may indeed choose to die rather than contradict his personal persuasion of the truth of an opinion; but in doing so he has no right to take to himself the martyr's style. So to speak is to exhibit, not constancy, but opinionativeness, or an overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty.
"Polycarp could not have refused to die when the only alternative was to blasphemeChrist, his Lord; but Plutarch could not have been required to suffer in attestation of his opinion,—good as it was,—that the poets have done ill in attributing the passions and the perturbations of human nature to the immortal gods; nor Seneca, in behalf of those astronomical and meteorological theories with which he entertains himself and his friend Lucilius.
"When those who, after rejecting Christianity, talk of suffering for the 'truth of God,' and speak as if they were conscience-bound 'toward God,' they must know that they not only borrow a language which they are not entitled to avail themselves of, but that they invade a ground of religious belief whereon they can establish for themselves no right of standing. They may indeed profess whatopinionthey please as to the Divine attributes; but they cannot need to be told that which the misgivings of their own hearts so often whisper to them, that all such opinions are, at the very best, open to debate, and must always be indeterminate, and that at this time their own possession of the opinion which just now they happen to cling to, is, in the last degree, precarious. Howthen can martyrdom be transacted among those whose treading is upon the fleecy clouds of undemonstrable religious feeling?"—pp. 92-94
If, being orthodox, you die at the stake, you are a martyr; if, being heretic,—why, then you are a man burnt;—a doctrine which Robert Hall compressed within the narrowest compass, when he said, "It is the saint which makes the martyr, not the martyr the saint." This is the very Gospel of intolerance; and whoever preaches it may feel assured that he can lend no help in any worthy "Restoration of Belief"; for he is himself infected with the most profound and penetrating of scepticisms,—scepticisms of moral realities. The rule, "that we may not lie to God, nor deny before men our inward conviction in matters of religion," is, in our author's view, the gift and glory of Christianity. Be it so. This rule either holds for all men at all times, or it doesnot; if there be persons who, notwithstanding it,maylie to God, and deny their inward conviction, then the Scriptures, in communicating it, have revealed no universal principle of duty, no obligation having its seat in the nature of things and the constitution of the human soul, but a mere sectional by-law, an arbitrary precept for the security and good ordering of one exclusive community. Then must we talk of it no more so exceedingly proudly, as if it were a hidden truth revealed, a latent beauty opened; it is no part of the holy legislation of the universe, but a statutory enactment under which we fall, or from which we escape, as we pass in or out at the door of a certain historical belief. Need we say that this side of the alternative strips Christianity of every pretension to be a moral revelation at all? If, to take the other side, the rule in questiondoeshold for all men, then it is no less binding on Mr. Newman and Mr. Greg than on our author; and in bowing to its authority and owning its sanctity, they render a homage as devoutly true as his, only different in this, that, while they feel no disturbance from his kneeling in the sanctuary at their side, he cannot be at peace till he has sprung to his feet and hurled them from the place. They are guilty of"plagiarism" forsooth! And in what? In knowing their duty, without knowing where they learned it! O shame upon this greediness, that would turn moral truth itself, and struggling aspiration, into a property! As if Christ were one to stand upon the copyright of revelation, and, unless his name were in the title-page, would suffer neither thought nor prayer to dedicate itself to God! Our author, as public prosecutor in the Supreme Court, demands that the defendants shall empty themselves out of every earnest sentiment, and surrender back the wordsconscience, andtruth, andrighteousness, andsin, andGod, "asstolenfrom theBook"! What then was "the Book" given for, but that it might freely furnish these?—and how better can it fulfil its end, than by opening for them a sacred welcome wherever thethingsare which they disclose? Let their spirit breathe where it listeth; it will not be less a Holy Spirit that we know not "whence it cometh": nor let it be forgot how old a feature of evangelic blessing it is, that "he that was healedwist not who it was." As "the Book" does not, by its presence,createthe facts which it reveals, so neither does its absence or rejectiondestroythem. Conscience, as an element of human nature, does not come or go,—God, as reality in the universe, does not live or perish,—according as the Bible is kept in the pocket or laid upon the shelf; even if their firstwitnesswere in Scripture,they themselvesare in the world,—as active, as near, as certain, in the transactions of to-day, as in the affairs of distant history. Scientific truth, once well ascertained, can take care of itself, without being everywhere attended by the report of its first discovery; it is in the safe keeping of the objects on which it writes a new meaning, and the phenomena amid which it introduces a fresh symmetry. And moral truth, when once embodied and revealed, is not less independent of its earliest expression; it finds its response in human consciousness, its reflection from human life, and weaves itself up into the very fabric of many souls, whose pattern bears no motto of its origin. Thus "revelation"—just in proportion as it is revelation, and tells us what is cognate toourselves, and bound up with the realities around us—passes of necessity into "natural religion"; and precisely according to the measure in which it does so, will it acquire strength and permanence, and dispense with evidence by merging into self-evidence. Did it awaken in usnoconfirming experience, did itnowherelink itself with the visible system of things,—then, solving nothing, glorifying nothing, missed by all the moving indices of nature and Providence, it would sit apart, and become incredible. That could hardly be a truth at all, which, after roaming the world and searching the soul for eighteen centuries, has found nonaturalground on which to rest, and must wander as anipse dixitstill. And if natural ground it has acquired,thatis surely a proper basis for its present support; it may innocently cease to be held on mere authority; the very "plagiarism" so vehemently denounced is rather the fulfilment than the destruction of the faith, for it is only that men no longer resort to an oracle for things which the oracle has enabled them to see for themselves.
Our Christian advocate, however, is not content with reserving to his side the sole power ofdiscerningthe duty of religious veracity; he further claims the sole right topractiseit. He teaches that it isnot bindingon all men at all times; and that its obligation is in any case conditional on the "initial postulate, that Christianity is from heaven." He thinks, apparently, that the duty is not so muchrevealedasconstitutedby the Gospel, so as to have no existence beyond the pale. We can collect from his words two considerations, under whose influence he seems to pronounce this strange judgment. He evidently assumes that the duty of veracious profession is contingent partly on theobject-matterof belief; partly on thedegree of evidence. If my faith is directed towardsa Person, then, he implies, there is treachery, even blasphemy, in denying it; but if not, my disclaimer gives no one any title to complain, and I cannot be expected to die on behalf of a proposition. Polycarp must not renounce Christ, his Lord; but Plutarch might very properly recant, without at all altering,his judgment against the poets, for ascribing passions to the gods. Is it so, indeed? Then there is no harm in a lie, unless some one is betrayed or insulted by it besides the hearers whom we deceive,—and we may report as falsely as we please our persuasion aboutthings, provided we are true to our sentiments aboutpersons? With full recollection of the questionable verdicts, on problems of veracity, which are given by Xenophon and Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, we doubt whether any Pagan moralist can be quoted in favor of a doctrine so unworthy as this. The author seems to imagine that the obligation to speak the truth is a mere duty of personal affection; and that in the absence of this element, its claims altogether disappear. Identifying falsehood with detraction and ingratitude, he concludes that, since an abstract theory is insensible to what people say about it, and can have no services owing to it, it may be blamelessly repudiated by those who really believe it. This is tantamount to an expunging of veracity from the list of human duties altogether; for it gives importance to what is purely accidental, and slights what is alone essential to it. The conditions of a lie, in all its full-blown wickedness, are quite complete, when there is a person to speak it, a person to hear it, and a social state to be the theatre of the deception; should there be also a personspoken of, that is a circumstance in no way requisite to constitute the guilt, but a supplementary condition, flinging in a new element of pravity, and turning falsehood into faithlessness. The introduction of this additional person into the case may doubtless render the offence much more flagrant, especially if he be one who has acknowledged claims on gratitude and reverence. Calumny and perfidy are justly held in deeper abhorrence than equivocation unstained with malignity. But to be unaffected by the criminality till it kindles with this diabolical glare, and not even to believe in it unless it smells sulphurous and burns red, betrays a perception too much accustomed to melodramatic contrasts of representation to appreciate the more delicate tints and finer moral lights of the real and open day. And so far from the glory of martyrdom being heightenedby the presence of deep personal affection as its inspiration, this very circumstance renders the act a less arduous sacrifice; just as to fall in the hot blood of battle may need less heroism of will, than to die under the knife upon the surgeon's table. In proportion as the denial of Christ in the hour of trial would be the more intolerable blasphemy, must the temptation to it be less overwhelming, and the merit of a good confession less amazing. And those who, in matters touching no such deep affection, can yet be true,—those who, in simple clearness of conscience, can dispense, if need be, with the help of enthusiasm, and so shut their lips against a lie, that not the searing iron can open them,—those who do not want a grand occasion, but just as certainly use the smallest, to fling back the thing that is not,—have assuredly a soul of higher prowess and more severely proved fidelity to God. And it is a heartless thing to turn round upon these men, and taunt them with having no one at whose feet to lay their offering, and no popular sympathy to redeem their uprightness from the imputation of conceit.
There is, however, another consideration which weighs with our author in granting to "modern unbelievers" a dispensation from the duty of religious veracity. They have only a "personal persuasion" resting on precarious grounds, and not the certitude attaching to "the conclusions of mathematical and physical science"; and it would be folly to suffer on behalf of "undemonstrablereligious feeling"! Are we then to lay it down as a canon in ethics, that intensity of assurance is the measure of our obligation to speak the truth,—so that we are to state our certainties correctly, but may tell lies about our doubts? If so, scrupulous fidelity is incumbent on us only within the limits of deductive science and of immediate personal observation; and in the great sphere ofhumanaffairs, in matters of historical, moral, and political judgment, nay, in the incipient stage of all knowledge, we may say and unsay, may play fast and loose with our convictions, according as the favor or the fear of men hangs over us. Newton was bound to stand by his "Principia"; but Locke might haverenounced his treatise on Government and taken his oath to the divine rights of kings! Were he indeed to refuse so easy a compliance, it would be a great reflection upon his modesty; for if a man, on being threatened with death, will not belie his own persuasion of probable truth, he is chargeable with "overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty"! It is happy for the world that it does not always except the morals of the Church, but brings an unperverted feeling to correct the twisted logic of belief. "Opinion," a wise man has said, "is but knowledge in the making"; and how little knowledge would get made, if opinion were emptied of its conscience, and looked on itself as an egotism rather than a trust! If there is one fruit of intellectual culture which more than another dignifies and ennobles it, it is the scrupulous reverence it trains for the smallest reality, its watchfulness for the earliest promise of truth, its tender care of every stamen in the blossoming of thought, from whose flower-dust the seed of a richer futurity may grow. To cut against this fine veracious sense with the weapons of unappreciating sarcasm, and crush its objects into the ground as weeds with the heel of orthodox scorn, is a feat which can advance the step of Christian evidence only by betraying the Christian ethics. Our author has entangled himself in the metaphor indicated by the word "martyrdom"; he thinks of the confessor asbearing witnessto something,—which is indeed quite true; and supposes that the things to which he bears witness must bethe facts or doctrinesheld by him; andthisis not true at all. For that which we attest in the hour of persecution is simplyour own state of mind; our belief, and not the object believed. We are required to utter words, or to perform acts, that shall give report of our persuasion; this persuasion is a fact in our personal psychology about which there is no ambiguity; which, as a presence in our consciousness, is wholly unaffected by the question how it got there, and by what logical tenure it holds its seat. Whether we have demonstrated it into the mind or fetched it thither in a dream, whether we had it yesterday or shall continue to have it to-morrow,are matters in no way altering the fact that it is there; and if we say "No" to it, while conscious of a "Yes," the sin is neither greater when the belief concerns the properties of a geometric solid, nor less when it touches some indeterminate problem of metaphysics. The logical ground of our judgments is various without end,—perception, testimony, reasoning, in every possible combination. But the persuasion, once attained, is a simple phenomenon, whose affirmation, or denial, being always positively true, cannot change its moral complexion with every shade in the evidence now left behind. It is plain that, in our author's favorite case of martyrdom, no testimony could be borne by the Christian to anything but his own conviction. Polycarp and Cyprian could only answer in the face of death, that they were Christians; it was not "on behalf of" any outward fact, but simply because they would not belie their inward belief, that they laid down their lives. And had Plutarch been dragged before some anthropomorphist inquisition, and been called on publicly to declare his belief that the immortal gods were well and truly painted by the poets as having passions like mankind, the lie to which he was tempted would have been precisely of the same kind; and had it passed his lips, would have made him despicable as an apostate. He had no power, nor had the Church confessor, over the truth or evidence of his opinion; neither of them had anywitness, in the strict sense, to bear; but both might veraciously scorn to deny a fact unambiguously present to their self-knowledge. If the heathen's firmness is an example of "overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty," by what favoring difference does the Christian's escape the same imputation? That his faith is "absolute," his persuasion "irresistible," so far from furnishing a vindication, only avows the fact that his "confidence" is intense; whether it be "overweening" too, must depend on the proportion between the certitude he feels and the grounds of just assurance he possesses. But at all events it is a confidence—in this case as in the other—undeniably reposed "in his own reasoning faculty." How else couldany belief—except a groundless belief—reach the convert's mind at all? It is vain to pretend that the receivers of an historic doctrine plant their reliance piously on God, while its rejecters proudly trust themselves. There is no less subjective action of the mind on the positive side than on the negative; and on the soundness of that action does the worth of the result in either instance depend. The evidence on both sides comes into the same court of criticism; and pleading and counter-pleading must ask a hearing from the same judicial intelligence. If our author refers the Gospels to the first century, and his opponents to the second; if he finds a miracle in the gift of tongues, they a delusion; if he thinks that the reasoning out of the Old Testament in the New is exegetically and logically sound, they that it is in both respects unsound;—is he not concerned with the same topics, conducting the same processes, liable to the same mistaken estimates, as they? How then can he flatter himself that the same thing is believed on one tenure, and disbelieved on quite another? How affect, even while playing the advocate, to be raised above the contingencies of the "reasoning faculty," and entitled to rebuke its pride? How renounce it for himself, appeal to it for yourassent, abuse it for yourdissent, in the wayward course of two or three pages?