Short Studies on Great Subjects

J >> James Anthony Froude >> Short Studies on Great Subjects

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A few years ago, an Inspector of Schools--a Mr. Jellinger
Symonds--opening, perhaps for the first time, an elementary book on
astronomy, came on something which he conceived to be a difficulty in
the theory of lunar motion. His objection was on the face of it
plausible. The true motions of the heavenly bodies are universally the
opposite of the apparent motions. Mr. Symonds conceived that the moon
could not revolve on its axis, because the same side of it was
continually turned towards the earth; and because if it were connected
with the earth by a rigid bar--which, as he thought, would deprive it of
power of rotation--the relative aspects of the two bodies would remain
unchanged. He sent his views to the 'Times.' He appealed to the common
sense of the world, and common sense seemed to be on his side. The men
of science were of course right; but a phenomenon, not entirely obvious,
had been hitherto explained in language which the general reader could
not readily comprehend. A few words of elucidation cleared up the
confusion. We do not recollect whether Mr. Symonds was satisfied or not;
but most of us who had before received what the men of science told us
with an unintelligent and languid assent, were set thinking for
ourselves, and, as a result of the discussion, exchanged a confused idea
for a clear one.

It was an excellent illustration of the true claims of authority and of
the value of open enquiry. The ignorant man has not as good a right to
his own opinion as the instructed man. The instructed man, however
right he may be, must not deliver his conclusions as axioms, and merely
insist that they are true. The one asks a question, the other answers
it, and all of us are the better for the business.

Now, let us suppose the same thing to have happened when the only reply
to a difficulty was an appeal to the Astronomer-Royal, where the
rotation of the moon was an article of salvation decreed by the law of
the land, and where all persons admitted to hold office under the State
were required to subscribe to it. The Astronomer-Royal--as it was, if we
remember right, he was a little cross at Mr. Symond's presumption--would
have brought an action against him in the Court of Arches; Mr. Symonds
would have been deprived of his inspectorship--for, of course, he would
have been obstinate in his heresy; the world outside would have had an
antecedent presumption that truth lay with the man who was making
sacrifices for it, and that there was little to be said in the way of
argument for what could not stand without the help of the law. Everybody
could understand the difficulty; not everybody would have taken the
trouble to attend to the answer. Mr. Symonds would have been a Colenso,
and a good many of us would have been convinced in our secret hearts
that the moon as little turned on its axis as the drawing-room table.

As it is in idea essential to a reverence for truth to believe in its
capacity for self-defence, so practically, in every subject except one,
errors are allowed free room to express themselves, and the liberty of
opinion which is the life of knowledge, as surely becomes the death of
falsehood. A method--the soundness of which is so evident that to argue
in favour of it is almost absurd--might be expected to have been
applied, as a matter of course, to the one subject where mistake is
supposed to be fatal,--where to come to wrong conclusions is held to be
a crime for which the Maker of the universe has neither pardon nor pity.
Yet many reasons, not difficult to understand, have long continued to
exclude theology from the region where free discussion is supposed to be
applicable. That so many persons have a personal interest in the
maintenance of particular views, would of itself be fatal to fair
argument. Though they know themselves to be right, yet right is not
enough for them unless there is might to support it, and those who talk
most of faith show least that they possess it. But there are deeper and
more subtle objections. The theologian requires absolute certainty, and
there are no absolute certainties in science. The conclusions of science
are never more than in a high degree probable; they are no more than the
best explanations of phenomena which are attainable in the existing
state of knowledge. The most elementary laws are called laws only in
courtesy. They are generalisations which are not considered likely to
require modification, but which no one pretends to be in the nature of
the cause exhaustively and ultimately true. As phenomena become more
complicated, and the data for the interpretation of them more
inadequate, the explanations offered are put forward hypothetically, and
are graduated by the nature of the evidence. Such modest hesitation is
altogether unsuited to the theologian, whose certainty increases with
the mystery and obscurity of his matter; his convictions admit of no
qualification; his truth is sure as the axioms of geometry; he knows
what he believes, for he has the evidence in his heart; if he enquire,
it is with a foregone conclusion, and serious doubt with him is sin. It
is in vain to point out to him the thousand forms of opinions for each
of which the same internal witness is affirmed. The Mayo peasant
crawling with bare knees over the splintered rocks on Croagh Patrick,
the nun prostrate before the image of St. Mary, the Methodist in the
spasmodic ecstasy of a revival, alike are conscious of emotions in
themselves which correspond to their creed: the more passionate, or--as
some would say--the more unreasoning the piety, the louder and more
clear is the voice within. But these varieties are no embarrassment to
the theologian. He finds no fault with the method which is identical in
them all. Whatever the party to which he himself belongs, he is equally
satisfied that he alone has the truth; the rest are under illusions of
Satan.

Again, we hear--or we used to hear when the High Church party were more
formidable than they are at present--much about 'the right of private
judgment.' 'Why,' the eloquent Protestant would say, 'should I pin my
faith upon the Church? the Church is but a congregation of fallible men,
no better able to judge than I am; I have a right to my own opinion.' It
sounds like a paradox to say that free discussion is interfered with by
a cause which, above all others, would have been expected to further it;
but this in fact has been the effect, because it tends to remove the
grounds of theological belief beyond the province of argument. No one
talks of 'a right of private judgment' in anything but religion; no one
but a fool insists on his 'right to his own opinion' with his lawyer or
his doctor. Able men who have given their time to special subjects, are
authorities upon those subjects to be listened to with deference, and
the ultimate authority at any given time is the collective general sense
of the wisest men living in the department to which they belong. The
utmost 'right of private judgment' which anybody claims in such cases,
is the choice of the physician to whom he will trust his body, or of the
counsel to whom he will commit the conduct of his cause. The expression,
as it is commonly used, implies a belief that, in matters of religion,
the criteria of truth are different in kind from what prevail elsewhere,
and the efforts which have been made to bring such a notion into harmony
with common sense and common subjects have not been the least
successful. The High Church party used to say, as a point against the
Evangelicals, that either 'the right of private judgment' meant nothing,
or it meant that a man had a right to be in the wrong. 'No,' said a
writer in the 'Edinburgh Review,' 'it means only that if a man chooses
to be in the wrong, no one else has a right to interfere with him. A man
has no right to get drunk in his own house, but the policeman may not
force a way into his house and prevent him.' The illustration fails of
its purpose.

In the first place, the Evangelicals never contemplated a wrong use of
the thing; they meant merely that they had a right to their own opinions
as against the Church. They did not indeed put forward their claim quite
so nakedly; they made it general, as sounding less invidious; but nobody
ever heard an Evangelical admit a High Churchman's right to be a High
Churchman, or a Catholic's right to be a Catholic.

But secondly, society has a most absolute right to prevent all manner of
evil--drunkenness, and the rest of it, if it can--only in doing so,
society must not use means which would create a greater evil than it
would remedy. As a man can by no possibility be doing anything but most
foul wrong to himself in getting drunk, society does him no wrong, but
rather does him the greatest benefit, if it can possibly keep him sober;
and in the same way, since a false belief in serious matters is among
the greatest of misfortunes, so to drive it out of man, by the whip, if
it cannot be managed by persuasion, is an act of brotherly love and
affection, provided the belief really and truly is false, and you have a
better to give him in the place of it. The question is not what to do,
but merely 'how to do it;' although Mr. Mill in his love of 'liberty,'
thinks otherwise. Mr. Mill demands for every man a right to say out his
convictions in plain language, whatever they may be; and so far as he
means that there should be no Act of Parliament to prevent him, he is
perfectly just in what he says. But when Mr. Mill goes from Parliament
to public opinion--when he lays down as a general principle that the
free play of thought is unwholesomely interfered with by society, he
would take away the sole protection which we possess from the inroads of
any kind of folly. His dread of tyranny is so great, that he thinks a
man better off with a false opinion of his own than with a right opinion
inflicted upon him from without; while, for our own part, we should be
grateful for tyranny or for anything else which would perform so useful
an office for us.

Public opinion may be unjust at particular times and on particular
subjects; we believe it to be both unjust and unwise on the matter of
which we are at present speaking: but, on the whole, it is like the
ventilation of a house, which keeps the air pure. Much in this world has
to be taken for granted, and we cannot be for ever arguing over our
first principles. If a man persists in talking of what he does not
understand, he is put down; if he sports loose views on morals at a
decent dinner party, the better sort of people fight shy of him, and he
is not invited again; if he profess himself a Buddhist or a Mahometan,
it is assumed that he has not adopted those beliefs on serious
conviction, but rather in wilful levity and eccentricity which does not
deserve to be tolerated. Men have no right to make themselves bores and
nuisances; and the common sense of mankind inflicts wholesome
inconveniences on those who carry their 'right of private judgment' to
any such extremities. It is a check, the same in kind as that which
operates so wholesomely in the sciences. Mere folly is extinguished in
contempt; objections reasonably urged obtain a hearing and are
reasonably met. New truths, after encountering sufficient opposition to
test their value, make their way into general reception.

A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining
the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed
upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries
of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the
immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its
decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. This theory broke
down at the Reformation, but it left behind it a confused sense that
theological truth was in some way different from other truth; and,
partly on grounds of public policy, partly because it was supposed to
have succeeded to the obligations and the rights of the Papacy, the
State took upon itself to fix by statute the doctrines which should be
taught to the people. The distractions created by divided opinions were
then dangerous. Individuals did not hesitate to ascribe to themselves
the infallibility which they denied to the Church. Everybody was
intolerant upon principle, and was ready to cut the throat of an
opponent whom his arguments had failed to convince. The State, while it
made no pretensions to Divine guidance, was compelled to interfere in
self-protection; and to keep the peace of the realm, and to prevent the
nation from tearing itself in pieces, a body of formulas was enacted,
for the time broad and comprehensive, within which opinion might be
allowed convenient latitude, while forbidden to pass beyond the border.

It might have been thought that in abandoning for itself, and formally
denying to the Church its pretensions to immunity from error, the State
could not have intended to bind the conscience. When this or that law is
passed, the subject is required to obey it, but he is not required to
approve of the law as just. The Prayer-Book and the Thirty-nine
Articles, so far as they are made obligatory by Act of Parliament, are
as much laws as any other statute. They are a rule to conduct; it is not
easy to see why they should be more; it is not easy to see why they
should have been supposed to deprive clergymen of a right to their
opinions, or to forbid discussion of their contents. The judge is not
forbidden to ameliorate the law which he administers. If in discharge of
his duty he has to pronounce a sentence which he declares at the same
time that he thinks unjust, no indignant public accuses him of
dishonesty, or requires him to resign his office. The soldier is asked
no questions as to the legitimacy of the war on which he is sent to
fight; nor need he throw up his commission if he think the quarrel a bad
one. Doubtless, if a law was utterly iniquitous--if a war was
unmistakably wicked--honourable men might feel uncertain what to do, and
would seek some other profession rather than continue instruments of
evil. But within limits, and in questions of detail, where the service
is generally good and honourable, we leave opinion its free play, and
exaggerated scrupulousness would be folly or something worse. Somehow or
other, however, this wholesome freedom is not allowed to the clergyman.
The idea of absolute inward belief has been substituted for that of
obedience; and the man who, in taking orders, signs the Articles and
accepts the Prayer Book, does not merely undertake to use the services
in the one, and abstain from contradicting to his congregation the
doctrines contained in the other; but he is held to promise what no
honest man, without presumption, can undertake to promise--that he will
continue to think to the end of his life as he thinks when he makes his
engagement.

It is said that if his opinions change, he may resign, and retire into
lay communion. We are not prepared to say that either the Convocation of
1562, or the Parliament which afterwards endorsed its proceedings, knew
exactly what they meant, or did not mean; but it is quite clear that
they did not contemplate the alternative of a clergyman's retirement. If
they had, they would have provided means by which he could have
abandoned his orders, and not have remained committed for life to a
profession from which he could not escape. If the popular theory of
subscription be true, and the Articles are articles of belief, a
reasonable human being, when little more than a boy, pledges himself to
a long series of intricate and highly-difficult propositions of abstruse
divinity. He undertakes never to waver or doubt--never to allow his mind
to be shaken, whatever the weight of argument or evidence brought to
bear upon him. That is to say, he promises to do what no man living has
a right to promise to do. He is doing, on the authority of Parliament,
precisely what the Church of Rome required him to do on the authority of
a Council.

If a clergyman--in trouble amidst the abstruse subjects with which he
has to deal, or unable to reconcile some new-discovered truth of science
with the established formulas--puts forward his perplexities; if he
ventures a doubt of the omniscience of the statesmen and divines of the
sixteenth century, which they themselves disowned, there is an instant
cry to have him stifled, silenced, or trampled down; and if no longer
punished in life and limb, to have him deprived of the means on which
life and limb can be supported, while with ingenious tyranny he is
forbidden to maintain himself by any other occupation.

So far have we gone in this direction, that when the 'Essays and
Reviews' appeared, it was gravely said--and said by men who had no
professional antipathy to them--that the writers had broken their faith.
Laymen were free to say what they pleased on such subjects; clergymen
were the hired exponents of the established opinions, and were committed
to them in thought and word. It was one more anomaly where there were
enough already. To say that the clergy, who are set apart to study a
particular subject, are to be the only persons unpermitted to have an
independent opinion upon it, is like saying that lawyers must take no
part in the amendment of the statute-book; that engineers must be silent
upon mechanism; and if an improvement is wanted in the art of medicine,
physicians may have nothing to say to it.

These causes would, perhaps, have been insufficient to repress free
enquiry, if there had been on the part of the really able men among us a
determination to break the ice; in other words, if theology had
preserved the same commanding interest for the more powerful minds with
which it affected them three hundred years ago. But on the one hand, a
sense, half serious, half languid, of the hopelessness of the subject
has produced an indisposition to meddle with it; on the other, there has
been a creditable reluctance to disturb by discussion the minds of the
uneducated or half-educated, to whom the established religion is simply
an expression of the obedience which they owe to Almighty God, on the
details of which they think little, and are therefore unconscious of its
difficulties, while in general it is the source of all that is best and
noblest in their lives and actions.

This last motive no doubt deserves respect, but the force which it once
possessed it possesses no longer. The uncertainty which once affected
only the more instructed extends now to all classes of society. A
superficial crust of agreement, wearing thinner day by day, is
undermined everywhere by a vague misgiving; and there is an unrest
which will be satisfied only when the sources of it are probed to the
core. The Church authorities repeat a series of phrases which they are
pleased to call answers to objections; they treat the most serious
grounds of perplexity as if they were puerile and trifling; while it is
notorious that for a century past extremely able men have either not
known what to say about them, or have not said what they thought. On the
Continent the peculiar English view has scarcely a single educated
defender. Even in England the laity keep their judgment in suspense, or
remain warily silent.

'Of what religion are you, Mr. Rogers?' said a lady once.

'What religion, madam? I am of the religion of all sensible men.'

'And what is that?' she asked.

'All sensible men, madam, keep that to themselves.'

If Mr. Rogers had gone on to explain himself, he would have said,
perhaps, that where the opinions of those best able to judge are
divided, the questions at issue are doubtful. Reasonable men who are
unable to give them special attention withhold their judgment, while
those who are able, form their conclusions with diffidence and modesty.
But theologians will not tolerate diffidence; they demand absolute
assent, and will take nothing short of it; and they affect, therefore,
to drown in foolish ridicule whatever troubles or displeases them. The
Bishop of Oxford talks in the old style of punishment. The Archbishop of
Canterbury refers us to Usher as our guide in Hebrew chronology. The
objections of the present generation of 'infidels,' he says, are the
same which have been refuted again and again, and are such as a child
might answer. The young man just entering upon the possession of his
intellect, with a sense of responsibility for his belief, and more
anxious for truth than for success in life, finds, when he looks into
the matter, that the archbishop has altogether misrepresented it; that
in fact, like other official persons, he had been using merely a
stereotyped form of words, to which he attached no definite meaning. The
words are repeated year after year, but the enemies refuse to be
exorcised. They come and come again, from Spinoza and Lessing to Strauss
and Renan. The theologians have resolved no single difficulty; they
convince no one who is not convinced already; and a Colenso coming
fresh to the subject with no more than a year's study, throws the Church
of England into convulsions.

If there were any real danger that Christianity would cease to be
believed, it would be no more than a fulfilment of prophecy. The state
in which the Son of Man would find the world at his coming he did not
say would be a state of faith. But if that dark time is ever literally
to come upon the earth, there are no present signs of it. The creed of
eighteen centuries is not about to fade away like an exhalation, nor are
the new lights of science so exhilarating that serious persons can look
with comfort to exchanging one for the other. Christianity has abler
advocates than its professed defenders, in those many quiet and humble
men and women who in the light of it and the strength of it live holy,
beautiful, and self-denying lives. The God that answers by fire is the
God whom mankind will acknowledge; and so long as the fruits of the
Spirit continue to be visible in charity, in self-sacrifice, in those
graces which raise human creatures above themselves, and invest them
with that beauty of holiness which only religion confers, thoughtful
persons will remain convinced that with them in some form or other is
the secret of truth. The body will not thrive on poison, or the soul on
falsehood; and as the vital processes of health are too subtle for
science to follow; as we choose our food, not by the most careful
chemical analysis, but by the experience of its effects upon the system;
so when a particular belief is fruitful in nobleness of character, we
need trouble ourselves very little with scientific demonstrations that
it is false. The most deadly poison may be chemically undistinguishable
from substances which are perfectly innocent. Prussic acid, we are told,
is formed of the same elements, combined in the same proportions, as
gum-arabic.

What that belief is for which the fruits speak thus so positively, it is
less easy to define. Religion from the beginning of time has expanded
and changed with the growth of knowledge. The religion of the prophets
was not the religion which was adapted to the hardness of heart of the
Israelites of the Exodus. The Gospel set aside the Law; the creed of the
early Church was not the creed of the Middle Ages, any more than the
creed of Luther and Cranmer was the creed of St. Bernard and Aquinas.
Old things pass away, new things come in their place; and they in their
turn grow old, and give place to others; yet in each of the many forms
which Christianity has assumed in the world, holy men have lived and
died, and have had the witness of the Spirit that they were not far from
the truth. It may be that the faith which saves is the something held in
common by all sincere Christians, and by those as well who should come
from the east and the west, and sit down in the kingdom of God, when the
children of the covenant would be cast out. It may be that the true
teaching of our Lord is overlaid with doctrines; and theology, when
insisting on the reception of its huge catena of formulas, may be
binding a yoke upon our necks which neither we nor our fathers were able
to bear.

But it is not the object of this paper to put forward either this or any
other particular opinion. The writer is conscious only that he is
passing fast towards the dark gate which soon will close behind him. He
believes that some kind of sincere and firm conviction on these things
is of infinite moment to him, and, entirely diffident of his own power
to find his way towards such a conviction, he is both ready and anxious
to disclaim 'all right of private judgment' in the matter. He wishes
only to learn from those who are able to teach him. The learned prelates
talk of the presumptuousness of human reason; they tell us that doubts
arise from the consciousness of sin and the pride of the unregenerate
heart. The present writer, while he believes generally that reason,
however inadequate, is the best faculty to which we have to trust, yet
is most painfully conscious of the weakness of his own reason; and once
let the real judgment of the best and wisest men be declared--let those
who are most capable of forming a sound opinion, after reviewing the
whole relations of science, history, and what is now received as
revelation, tell us fairly how much of the doctrines popularly taught
they conceive to be adequately established, how much to be uncertain,
and how much, if anything, to be mistaken; there is scarcely, perhaps, a
single serious enquirer who would not submit with delight to a court
which is the highest on earth.

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