Part 14 (1/2)

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 sh.o.r.e in one lat.i.tude 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 wors.h.i.+pped in the days of Alexander Severus, to introduce us to the Proconsul's court and bid us witness their refusal of divine homage to Caesar's image, and then ask us whether a faith like this _could have had_ any origin but ONE,--this is not _history_, but the mere _evasion_ of history. We want to know, not what _must have been_ the source, but what _was_ the 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 partic.i.p.ation 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 can _first_ prove the historic truth of the Scriptures _in general_; and then get rid of the _difficulties 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 a.s.sumption 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, _after_ the 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 pa.s.sages, we shall undoubtedly encounter a crowd of perplexing disagreements; and we shall find employment enough for all our ac.u.men, 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 a.s.sumption, 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 his mind and the intensity of his influence; the inst.i.tutions 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 they _may be_ true, and do not forfeit, _ab initio_, their t.i.tle to examination by fundamental anachronism, misplacement, and moral incongruity. How far the existence of this _prima facie_ case falls short of ”establis.h.i.+ng 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 proved _in 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 had _not_ made 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 quant.i.ties 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 modern hypothesis 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 scholars.h.i.+p, 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 that _all_ the 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 be _now_ impossible, 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 the _venue_ of 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 a _Person_, instead of mere a.s.sent to an _Opinion_. 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 it belongs, not as a peculiarity, but in common with every faith whose Only G.o.d 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 const.i.tuting 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 n.o.bler than myself, lift me above the level of my actual mind by looking at my latent nature, and emanc.i.p.ate me into the captivity of wors.h.i.+p. In other words, reverence can attach itself exclusively to a _Person_; it cannot direct itself on what is _im_personal,--on physical facts, on unconscious laws, on necessary forces, on inanimate objects and their relations, on s.p.a.ce, though it be infinite, on duration, though it be eternal. These all, even when they rule us, are _lower_ than 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 G.o.d. 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 of _conduct_ from 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 pus.h.i.+ng personification to the verge of personality; uttering various warnings not to neglect the ”_intentions_ of Nature,” or insult the ”Relentless Veracities,” and inviting sundry offenders to _blush_ before ”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 G.o.d. 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 a.s.sert their power only where Manhood is the type of G.o.dhead. 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-wors.h.i.+p, 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 a.s.sembled 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 pa.s.sed; and the conquered tribes suffered a more fatal loss when the victorious city adopted their religion, than when she crushed their liberty. Removed to Rome, the rites of a provincial wors.h.i.+p expressed nothing except that its G.o.ds were G.o.ds 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 G.o.d wherever you ask him; and whose wors.h.i.+p a.s.serts 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 of _negation_”; it is all un.o.bstructed 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 wors.h.i.+p of Caesar 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 compet.i.tor of G.o.d. For _opposing realm_ there 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 Caesar, would have been, therefore, a desertion to the enemies of G.o.d, forbidden by every claim of faithfulness and veracity.

Thus we conceive that the moral conditions of the martyrs' protest against idol-wors.h.i.+ps 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 sanct.i.ty of conviction. True it is that the Gospel was qualified for this office by directing human faith upon a _Person_; and would have exercised no such power, had it been a mere philosophy presenting propositions for a.s.sent, 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 G.o.d 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, _was_ the object of the disciples' actual allegiance. We do not in the least question this as a _fact_, but only as a _necessity_, 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 the _obligations 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 t.i.tle 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, they _ought_ to 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 G.o.d”; and with Mr. Greg for saying that, in the process 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 astonis.h.i.+ng, 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d in the BOOK? 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 to PLUTARCH, to PORPHYRY, and to M. AURELIUS. A surrender must be made of the words CONSCIENCE, and TRUTH, and RIGHTEOUSNESS, and SIN; and, alas! modern unbelievers must be challenged to give me back that ONE awe-fraught NAME which they (must I not plainly say so?) have stolen out of the BOOK; when they have frankly made this large surrender, we may return to them the t? ?e??? of cla.s.sical 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 man _must_ do, 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 blaspheme CHRIST, 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 pa.s.sions and the perturbations of human nature to the immortal G.o.ds; 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 G.o.d,' and speak as if they were conscience-bound 'toward G.o.d,'

they must know that they not only borrow a language which they are not ent.i.tled 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 what _opinion_ they 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. How then 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 compa.s.s, 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 a.s.sured 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 G.o.d, 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 does _not_; if there be persons who, notwithstanding it, _may_ lie to G.o.d, 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 const.i.tution 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 pa.s.s 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 question _does_ hold 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 sanct.i.ty, 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 t.i.tle-page, would suffer neither thought nor prayer to dedicate itself to G.o.d! 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 words CONSCIENCE, and TRUTH, and RIGHTEOUSNESS, and SIN, and G.o.d, ”as _stolen_ from the BOOK”! 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 the _things_ are 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 healed _wist not who it was_.” As ”the Book”

does not, by its presence, _create_ the facts which it reveals, so neither does its absence or rejection _destroy_ them. Conscience, as an element of human nature, does not come or go,--G.o.d, 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 first _witness_ were in Scripture, _they themselves_ are 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 to ourselves, and bound up with the realities around us--pa.s.ses 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 us _no_ confirming experience, did it _nowhere_ link 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 no _natural_ ground on which to rest, and must wander as an _ipse dixit_ still. And if natural ground it has acquired, _that_ is 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 of _discerning_ the duty of religious veracity; he further claims the sole right to _practise_ it. He teaches that it is _not binding_ on 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 much _revealed_ as _const.i.tuted_ by 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 p.r.o.nounce this strange judgment. He evidently a.s.sumes that the duty of veracious profession is contingent partly on the _object-matter_ of belief; partly on the _degree of evidence_. If my faith is directed towards _a Person_, then, he implies, there is treachery, even blasphemy, in denying it; but if not, my disclaimer gives no one any t.i.tle 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 pa.s.sions to the G.o.ds. 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 about _things_, provided we are true to our sentiments about _persons_? 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 ingrat.i.tude, 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 person _spoken of_, that is a circ.u.mstance in no way requisite to const.i.tute 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 grat.i.tude 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 heightened by the presence of deep personal affection as its inspiration, this very circ.u.mstance 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 a.s.suredly a soul of higher prowess and more severely proved fidelity to G.o.d. 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 cert.i.tude attaching to ”the conclusions of mathematical and physical science”; and it would be folly to suffer on behalf of ”_undemonstrable_ religious feeling”! Are we then to lay it down as a canon in ethics, that intensity of a.s.surance 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 inc.u.mbent on us only within the limits of deductive science and of immediate personal observation; and in the great sphere of _human_ affairs, 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 have renounced 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 enn.o.bles 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 as _bearing witness_ to something,--which is indeed quite true; and supposes that the things to which he bears witness must be _the facts or doctrines_ held by him; and _this_ is not true at all. For that which we attest in the hour of persecution is simply _our 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 G.o.ds were well and truly painted by the poets as having pa.s.sions like mankind, the lie to which he was tempted would have been precisely of the same kind; and had it pa.s.sed 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 any _witness_, 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?