Part 14 (2/2)

That his faith is ”absolute,” his persuasion ”irresistible,” so far from furnis.h.i.+ng a vindication, only avows the fact that his ”confidence” is intense; whether it be ”overweening” too, must depend on the proportion between the cert.i.tude he feels and the grounds of just a.s.surance 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 could any 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 G.o.d, 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 ent.i.tled to rebuke its pride? How renounce it for himself, appeal to it for your _as_sent, abuse it for your _dis_sent, in the wayward course of two or three pages?

Our author stands, therefore, in spite of every effort to escape it, on the same logical ground as his opponents; and they, notwithstanding his objection to their companions.h.i.+p, are on the same footing of religious obligation with himself. He is offended to find such a one as Mr. Newman on the same sacred pavement, and to overhear from unbelieving lips the genuine tones of prayer; and, thanking G.o.d, apprises men that he ”is not as this publican.” He prosecutes for trespa.s.s all who, after rejecting his Christianity, can dare to profess allegiance to the ”truth of G.o.d,” and ”speak _as if they were conscience-bound towards G.o.d_.” Are they then _not_ so bound? Has no one a conscience except the approved historical believer? Is it not in others also a Divine voice,--a Holy Spirit,--which to resist and stifle were the true and only ”Infidelity”? Surely the faith in G.o.d, and the earnest acceptance of the laws of duty as the expression of his authority, are not forbidden to men who cannot a.s.sume the disciple's style. These sentiments, so far from waiting on revelation for their possibility, are the pre-requisite conditions of all revelation, the state of mind to which it speaks, the secret power by which it finds us out; and if men cannot be ”conscience-bound towards G.o.d” _before and without_ Christianity, never can they become so _after it and with it_. It does not take us up as atheists and brutes, and supply us with the faculties as well as the substance of faith; else were there no medium of suasion across the boundary of unbelief;--but it appeals to us as knowing much and aspiring to more,--as already before the face, only shrinking from the clear look of G.o.d,--as feeling the divine restraint upon us of justice, purity, and truth, but unable, without some emanc.i.p.ating power, to turn it into freedom and joy. This spirit of profound sympathy, not of arrogant insult, towards the highest faiths and affections of our nature, we recognize in the portraiture and teachings of Jesus Christ; and when we find one who, like our author, instead of rejoicing that the sacred embers of nature are yet warm, instead of kneeling over them to fan them with a breath of reverence into a flame, flings them with scattering scorn on the damp ground of his own moral scepticism to show how little they will burn,--we see reversed in the ”Restorer of Belief” the divine temper of the ”Author of Faith.” Such a teacher will vainly endeavor to recover by severity of warning the influence he forfeits by want of sympathy. He cannot frighten men like Parker, Newman, Greg, by appealing to fancied ”misgivings of their own hearts”

respecting the precariousness of their convictions, and uttering dismal prophecies about yawning gulfs; which, however alarming as a shudder of rhetoric, can disturb no quiet trust in reality. Let us hear the words, however:--

”Educated men should not wait to be reminded that those who, after abandoning a peremptory historic belief, endeavor to retain Faith and Piety for their comfort, stand upon a slope that has no ledges: Atheism in its simplest form yawns to receive those who there stand; and they know themselves to be gravitating towards it.

”It would be far more reasonable for a man to die as a martyr for Atheism,--a stage beyond which no further progress is possible,--than to do so at any point short of that terminus, knowing as he does that every day is bringing him nearer to the gulf. The stronger the mind is, and the more it has of intellectual ma.s.siveness, the more rapid will be its descent upon this declivity. Minds of little density, and of much airy sentiment, may stay long where they are, just as gnats and flies walk to and fro upon the honeyed sides of a china vase; they do not go down, but never again will they fly.”--p. 94.

This is one of the conventional minatory arguments which betray the absence of security and repose from the heart of the received theology; whose teachers could never propound it, except from a position of conscious danger. They must imagine in their own case that, if they were to find the Gospels no longer oracular, they would plunge at once into endless depths of negation; and that, unless they can refute an interpretation of De Wette's, or correct a date of Baur's, there will be eternal night in heaven. They feel the universe, and life, and love, and sorrow, and the history of times and races unbaptized, to be all atheistic through and through,--profane to the core,--untraced by a vestige, untransfigured by a color, of divine significance. What they can think of a Being who creates all reality and lives in it on these blindfold terms, we will not attempt to decide; but it is no wonder that, having once brought themselves to believe in Him, they feel how a single move would overset them into disbelief. This thing, however, is true of their own state of mind alone; whose s.p.a.ces, dark throughout with scepticism but for one distant lamp, might easily be left without a ray. It is consistent neither with reason nor with experience to threaten with this rule men who have opened their souls to something else than doc.u.mentary authority. It is notoriously false that the career of historic doubt usually terminates in the loss of all faith in G.o.d; nor do we suppose that our author would have awarded to the atheist, for actually reaching this point, the praise of ”intellectual ma.s.siveness,” had he not wanted a heavy weight to slide down his metaphorical inclined plane,[57] and outstrip the slippery believers who try to stop half-way. The accusation against Theism, of being possible to the light-minded and superficial,--a mere sweet-bait to entrap the silly insects of the intellectual world,--is confuted by the whole history of philosophy and human culture; all whose grandest names have connected themselves with the recognition of a religion indigenous or accessible to the faculties of the soul. Let our author collect on one side of his library all the giants and heroes of utter disbelief, and on the other the literature of natural faith; nay, let him ransack for fresh names and forgotten suffrages Lalande's ”Dictionnaire des Athees”; and if, having weighed the various merits of Leucippus and Lucretius, of Baron d'Holbach and La Mettrie, of Robert Owen and Atkinson, he thinks them of more sterling ma.s.s than the pure gold of thought and life acc.u.mulated by Socrates, Plato, Antoninus,--by Anselm and Abelard, Descartes and Arnaud,--by the authors of the ”Theodicee,”

the ”Essay on the Human Understanding,” and the ”Principles of Human Knowledge,”--by Kant and Cousin,--by Butler and Paley and Arnold,--we can only profess a dissent from his intellectual taste, not less than from his moral judgment.

The few pages on which we have been commenting were the first--though they are near the end of the treatise--that fully opened our eyes to the author's theological _animus_. For a while, his large professions, and, no doubt, sincere purpose of fairness,--his apparent breadth of view, and his free hand in putting down his subject on the canvas,--secured our admiring confidence, and made us feel that here at length justice, earnestness, and accomplishment will go together.

One feature, indeed, we noticed as giving a suspicious appearance to his equity of temper; it displays itself more in censoriousness towards his friends, than in large-heartedness towards his antagonists. He readily allows faults in the advocates of his own side, but is never carried away into even a momentary appreciation of the other. This particular form of impartiality, which consists in detracting from the merits of allies, instead of delighting in those of opponents, is the ecclesiastic counterfeit of candor,--the half-shekel, which is alone payable in the temple-service, but which nowhere, save at the sacred money-table, is deemed equivalent to the good Roman coin of common life. Much as we dislike the c.h.i.n.k of this consecrated metal, we hoped that it would only ring for a pa.s.sing instant on the ear. But alas! it is an indication seldom deceptive; and we feel constrained to report that there are, in this tract, quotations from both Mr. Newman and Mr. Greg, which, if we were in the court of veracity, and not of theology, we would say are unconscientiously made. The quotations are made anonymously as well as unfaithfully, so that the reader, unless haunted by the checking impressions of memory, cannot correct the injustice of the writer. The ”Phases of Faith” describes, it will be remembered, the gradual course of Mr. Newman's defections from his original orthodoxy. His first movements of doubt were naturally timid and inconsiderable, bringing him only to the conclusion, that the genealogy in the first chapter of Matthew was copied wrong, and counted wrong, from the Old Testament.

On this step followed a second, and a third, each more important than the preceding, and necessitating a next more momentous than itself.

The latter stages of his progress included an inquiry into the evidence of the Resurrection, the miraculous gifts ascribed to the early Church, the claims to credit of the Apostle Paul, and other topics, undeniably affecting the very essence of Christian evidence.

Having traced the successive advances of his doubts, Mr. Newman, in a recapitulary ”Conclusion,” makes a solemn appeal to his readers, to say at what point he could have stopped, and to lay a finger distinctly on the place at which the guilt of his scepticism began.

One by one he counts out the steps by which he had proceeded, and asks, ”Was this the sinful one?” The whole effect of the appeal is certainly an impression that the series, if not an inevitable sequence, is very difficult to break; and that, small as the beginnings were, they linked themselves, by close connection, with very momentous results. From this chapter our author cites a sentence or two, but in such a way as immediately to conjoin the small initial steps of doubt with the great ultimate conclusion, and to make it appear that Mr. Newman renounced Christianity because he could not make out the pedigree of Jesus to his satisfaction. The genealogical difficulty is the only one which he quotes, and as to which Mr. Newman is permitted to speak for himself. Presenting this as a specimen, and suppressing all the rest, he says that he could have shown ”this writer” a course far better ”than, on account of difficulties _such as these_, to renounce Christianity”! His citation from Mr. Greg is introduced as follows:--

”Let another witness be heard; and in hearing him one might think that his words are an echo that has come softly travelling down, through sixteen centuries, from some field of blood, or some forum, or some amphitheatre, where Christian men were witnessing a good confession in the midst of their mortal agonies! _This_ witness is one who a.s.sures us that 'he can believe no longer, he can wors.h.i.+p no longer; he has discovered that the creed of his early days is baseless, or fallacious.' Yet he too takes up the MARTYR TRUTH, that we must not lie to G.o.d.”--p. 91.

Here, then, Mr. Greg (with concealment of his name) is represented as one who, by his own confession, _can neither believe nor wors.h.i.+p any more_. Turning to the preface of ”The Creed of Christendom,” we find the following original to this quotation:--

”The pursuit of truth is easy to a man who has no human sympathies, whose vision is impaired by no fond partialities, whose heart is torn by no divided allegiance. To him the renunciation of error presents few difficulties; for the moment it is recognized as error, its charm ceases. But the case is very different with the Searcher whose affections are strong, whose a.s.sociations are quick, whose hold upon the Past is clinging and tenacious. He may love Truth with an earnest and paramount devotion; but he loves much else also. He loves errors, which were once the cherished convictions of his soul. He loves dogmas which were once full of strength and beauty to his thoughts, though now perceived to be baseless or fallacious. He loves the Church where he wors.h.i.+pped in his happy childhood; where his friends and his family wors.h.i.+p still; where his gray-haired parents await the resurrection of the Just; but where _he_ can wors.h.i.+p and await no more. He loves the simple old creed, which was the creed of his earlier and brighter days; which is the creed of his wife and children still; but which inquiry has compelled him to abandon. The past and the familiar have chains and talismans which hold him back in his career, till every fresh step forward becomes an effort and an agony; every fresh error discovered is a fresh bond snapped asunder; every new glimpse of light is like a fresh flood of pain poured in upon the soul. To such a man the pursuit of Truth is a daily martyrdom,--how hard and bitter let the martyr tell.

Shame to those who make it doubly so; honor to those who encounter it saddened, weeping, trembling, but unflinching still.”--p. xvi.

Our author would s.n.a.t.c.h from Mr. Greg the right to say, we must not lie to G.o.d. Which has the better right to say, ”Thou shalt not lie to men”?

The more ingenuously the modern Orthodoxy lays bare its essence, the more evident is it that a profound scepticism not only mingles with it, but const.i.tutes its very inspiration. The dread of losing G.o.d, the impression that there is but one patent way, not of duty, but of thought, of meeting him, haunt the minds of men, driving some to Anglicanism to compensate defect of faith by excess of sacrament, some to Rome in quest of the Lord's body, and prompting others to conservative efforts of Bibliolatry, conducted with ever-decreasing reason and declining hope. We have seen, however, no such exemplification of this radical distrust as in the treatise before us.

Already has the writer declared that the moral side of the universe sends in, with regard to religion, an empty report. And now he hastens to tell us that, on the physical side, the watchmen from every observatory of nature cry out, ”No G.o.d.” He represents the natural sciences as a huge t.i.tanic, resistless ma.s.s of knowledge, perfectly demonstrable, and completely irreligious; descending, like a glacier, from the upper valleys of frozen thought; sure to sc.r.a.pe away the wild pine woods and the green fields of natural religion, yet considerate enough, for some reason unexplained, to spare the foundations of the village church. Designating every faith except his own by such phrases as ”theosophic fancies,” and ”pietistic notions,” he a.s.sures us that they will all be put ”right out of existence” by ”our modern physical sciences”; and he borrows from the ”Positive Philosophy” (apparently by unconscious sympathy) the following maxim to justify his prediction:--

”In any case, when that which on any ground of proof takes full hold of the understanding, (such, for example, are the most certain of the conclusions of Geology,) stands contiguous to that which, in a logical sense, is of inferior quality, and is indeterminate, and fluctuating, and liable to retrogression,--in any such case there is always going on a silent encroachment of the more solid ma.s.s upon the ground of that which is less solid. What is SURE will be pressing upon what is uncertain, whether or not the two are designedly brought into collision or comparison. What is well defined weighs upon, and against, what is ill defined. Nothing stops the continuous involuntary operation of SCIENCE in dislodging OPINION from the minds of those who are conversant with both.

”A very small matter that is indeed determinate, will be able to keep a place for itself against this incessantly encroaching movement; but nothing else can do so. As to any of those theosophic fancies which we may wish to cling to, after we have thrown away the Bible, we might as well suppose that they will resist the impact of the mathematical and physical sciences, as imagine that the lichens of an Alpine gorge will stay the slow descent of a glacier.”--p. 97.

Here it is alleged that Science and Opinion cannot coexist,--that the demonstrable will banish the probable. And be it observed, this is to take place, not simply where contradiction arises between the two orders of belief, but in _all cases_, from the mere _distaste_ which quant.i.tative studies produce towards everything which evades their rules. In this allegation there is, we believe, with much exaggeration, a certain small amount of truth,--a truth, however, which, so far from supporting our author's plea against natural religion, offers it a conclusive refutation. It may be admitted that the exact and mixed sciences _do_ disincline their votary to put trust in the processes by which judgments of probability are formed, and alienate him from thinkers who read off the meaning of the universe by another key than his. Accustomed to deal with Number and s.p.a.ce, with Motion and Force alone,--to reason upon them by a Calculus which is helpless beyond their range,--to exercise Faculties involving nothing beyond the interpretation of mensurative signs and the conception of relative magnitudes,--he owes it to something else than his peculiar discipline, if he has either the instruments or the apt.i.tudes for moral and philosophical reflection. He carries into the world, as his sole means of representing and solving its phenomena, the notion of physical necessity and linear sequence, secretly defining the universe to himself as Leibnitz defined an organized being,--”a machine, whose smallest parts are also machines,”--and naturally grows impatient when he finds himself in fields of thought over which this narrow imagination opens no track. With respect, therefore, to a certain cla.s.s of minds, rendered perhaps increasingly numerous by the long neglect of the moral sciences in England, it may be quite true, that a spirit of utter disbelief towards everything beyond the range of necessary matter may more and more prevail. Let us further grant to our author, for the moment, three things a.s.sumed by him, all of them, however, false:--1. That this tendency of the ”demonstrable sciences” is their _only_ one having a bearing on ”theosophic systems.” 2. That it is so _new_, at least in degree, as to give ”opinion” a worse chance for the future than it has had in the past. 3. That it is a _good_ tendency, favorable to human knowledge and character. Still we must ask, How is the _oracular authority of the Bible_ to escape the fate predicted for all probabilities? Our author a.s.sures us that it _will_ escape; but he gives no faintest hint of a reason for so singular an exception to his own canon. It cannot be contended that the evidences of Christianity and Judaism belong to any of the ”demonstrable” or ”physical” sciences. It cannot be denied that they lie wholly within the limits of contingent knowledge, and terminate only in ”probabilities”; that the authors.h.i.+p, for instance, of the fourth Gospel, the credibility of the introductory chapters of Matthew, the correctness of the prophecies about the second advent, are matters which, ”standing contiguous” to the laws of refracted and reflected light, occupy the position of the _less sure_ in relation to the _more sure_; that the _relative_ chronology of the Scripture books is more indeterminate than that of the geologic strata, and their _actual_ dates more uncertain than those of the eclipses fatal to Nicias and to Perseus. What, then, is to exempt these judgments of verisimilitude from being pushed ”right out of existence” by the ”silent encroachment of the more solid ma.s.s” of knowledge beside it? Nothing can be plainer than that all testimonial knowledge whatsoever, all history, criticism, and art, the whole system of moral and political sciences, must fall under our author's fatal sentence; and how the propositions which sustain the infallible authority of the canonical books are to hold their ground against the huge glacier on which Herschel, Airy and De Morgan, Comte and Leverrier, triumphantly ride, it is not easy to conceive. Amid the universal crash of probabilities, may not the Mosaic tables of stone, broken once, be pulverized at last? With the abrasion of all the alluvial soil in which the growths of wonder strike their roots, will the garden of Eden, will the blighted fig-tree, remain to mark a verdant and a barren spot in history? Will these riding philosophers from their cold observatory find Paul's ”third heaven”? May not their icy mountain slip into ”the abyss” whence all the demons came, and fill it up? These questions, indeed, are answered for us in experience. It is notorious that, whenever an unbounded devotion to science has produced a prevalent tendency to disbelief, Revelation, so far from being spared, has been usually the first object of attack; and, both at the origin of modern science in the sixteenth century, and during its accelerated advance towards the close of the eighteenth, the widening conception of determinate Law was found to threaten nothing so decisively as the faith in supernatural dispensations. The greater scepticism includes the less; and the habit of mind which lets slip all beliefs not legitimated by the canons of natural science, cannot possibly retain Christianity.

But our author has only _half_ described the mental effect of studies purely scientific. They do not, in the nature of things they _cannot_, simply push out of the mind all contingent judgments. Human life and action are one continuous texture of such judgments, with some interweaving, no doubt, of mathematic forms, which could not be picked out without spoiling the symmetry of its pattern; but were you to withdraw the threads of probable opinion, still more, to cut the warp of primitive a.s.sumptions that stretches through it, the web would simply fall to pieces. No youth can decide on a profession, no man appoint an agent in his business, no physician prescribe for a patient, no judge p.r.o.nounce a sentence, no statesman answer a despatch, without a constant resort to ”surmises,” a reliance on slender indications, often even a deliberate adoption of very doubtful hypotheses. All men are driven from hour to hour into positions demanding combinations of thought which can be borrowed from no natural science; where not the laws of matter and motion, not the equilibrium of forces, not the properties of things, are chiefly concerned, but the feelings and faculties of persons, the action and reaction of human affairs. Mathematicians and natural philosophers, being in no way exempt from these conditions, are obliged to have just as many ”opinions” and ”guesses” as other men; they cannot, if they are to keep their footing on this world at all, have a smaller stock than their neighbors of this ”logically inferior” order of persuasions. They are unable to abdicate the necessity of having these persuasions; and their only peculiarity is, that they sometimes import into contingent affairs the methods with which habit has rendered them familiar in another sphere, and so find the conditions of belief unsatisfied; and at others, from consciousness that their own clew will not serve, yet inapt.i.tude for seizing a better, surrender themselves to the fortuitous guidance of ill-balanced faculties and external solicitations. Hence their judgments are frequently fantastic, frequently sceptical,--not less liable to be too easy from one cause than to be too reluctant from another; and were a history to be written of the most remarkable extravagances, positive as well as negative, by which religion and philosophy have sprung aside from the centre of common sense and feeling, it would contain more names of great repute in the exact sciences than from any other intellectual cla.s.s whatever. From Pythagoras to Swedenborg, the eccentricities of mathematical and physical imagination have been the chief disturbers of a natural and healthy faith. Harmonic theories of the universe, Ideal Numbers, Geometric Ethics, Rosicrucian fraternities, Vortices and Monads, Apocalyptic studies, New Jerusalems, and Electrob

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