Short Studies on Great Subjects

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

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We return then to the point from which we set out. The time is past for
repression. Despotism has done its work; but the day of despotism is
gone, and the only remedy is a full and fair investigation. Things will
never right themselves if they are let alone. It is idle to say peace
when there is no peace; and the concealed imposthume is more dangerous
than an open wound. The law in this country has postponed our trial, but
cannot save us from it; and the questions which have agitated the
Continent are agitating us at last. The student who twenty years ago was
contented with the Greek and Latin fathers and the Anglican divines, now
reads Ewald and Renan. The Church authorities still refuse to look their
difficulties in the face: they prescribe for mental troubles the
established doses of Paley and Pearson; they refuse dangerous questions
as sinful, and tread the round of commonplace in placid comfort. But it
will not avail. Their pupils grow to manhood, and fight the battle for
themselves, unaided by those who ought to have stood by them in their
trial, and could not or would not; and the bitterness of those
conflicts, and the end of most of them in heart-broken uncertainty or
careless indifference, is too notorious to all who care to know about
such things.

We cannot afford year after year to be distracted with the tentative
scepticism of essayists and reviewers. In a healthy condition of public
opinion such a book as Bishop Colenso's would have passed unnoticed, or
rather would never have been written, for the difficulties with which it
deals would have been long ago met and disposed of. When questions rose
in the early and middle ages of the Church, they were decided by
councils of the wisest: those best able to judge met together, and
compared their thoughts, and conclusions were arrived at which
individuals could accept and act upon. At the beginning of the English
Reformation, when Protestant doctrine was struggling for reception, and
the old belief was merging in the new, the country was deliberately held
in formal suspense. Protestants and Catholics were set to preach on
alternate Sundays in the same pulpit; subjects were discussed freely in
the ears of the people; and at last, when all had been said on both
sides, Convocation and Parliament embodied the result in formulas.
Councils will no longer answer the purpose; the clergy have no longer a
superiority of intellect or cultivation; and a conference of prelates
from all parts of Christendom, or even from all departments of the
English Church, would not present an edifying spectacle. Parliament may
no longer meddle with opinions unless it be to untie the chains which it
forged three centuries ago. But better than councils, better than
sermons, better than Parliament, is that free discussion through a free
press which is the best instrument for the discovery of truth, and the
most effectual means for preserving it.

We shall be told, perhaps, that we are beating the air--that the press
is free, and that all men may and do write what they please. It is not
so. Discussion is not free so long as the clergy who take any side but
one are liable to be prosecuted and deprived of their means of living;
it is not free so long as the expression of doubt is considered as a sin
by public opinion and as a crime by the law. So far are we from free
discussion, that the world is not yet agreed that a free discussion is
desirable; and till it be so agreed, the substantial intellect of the
country will not throw itself into the question. The battle will
continue to be fought by outsiders, who suffice to disturb a repose
which they cannot restore; and that collective voice of the national
understanding, which alone can give back to us a peaceful and assured
conviction, will not be heard.

FOOTNOTES:

[D] _Fraser's Magazine_, 1863.

CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.[E]

The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of
criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of
faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the
formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of
the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally
approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic
and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children,
are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or
qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of
teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has
formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for
the triumph of faith--which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted
like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion
follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating
confidence.

To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by
such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears
shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or
mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their
knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to
his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been
first gratified.

Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge,
teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of
the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and
refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again,
the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are
prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring
submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has
inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre
to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that
group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the
generous, and the enthusiastic--to those whose native and original
nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world--which belong
rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth
through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of
probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to
that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in
what it loves.

'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is
nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit--_der Geist der stets
verneint_--which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything
good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature,
has been made the special characteristic--we all feel with justice--of
the devil.

And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is
but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one
condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and
the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our
best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in
some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our
true welfare. To prove all things--to try the spirits whether they be of
God--is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called
progress in human things--religious as well as material--has been due
uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in
science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of
nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the
first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether
the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received
practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle
of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer,
and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.

Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics
a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in
religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies,
immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit
of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of
uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a
healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be
chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there
is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon
themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate
the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and
reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two
principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the
best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or
to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which
are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately
mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and
enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual
economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities
which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is
entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'

And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and
cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed
sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that
is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather
than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural
cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in
proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of
belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the
tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who
considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of
the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their
idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You
are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as
I am dust;' and then the huge mediaeval fabric crumbled down in ruin.

All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to
perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit,
but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of
times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things
which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed
once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer
acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the
action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with
unerring uniformity; and to the mediaeval stories of magic, witchcraft,
or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The
direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain
unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in
ordinary human things where the evidence is lost--as in some of our own
State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought
conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments--historians do not
hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely
that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud
or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been
committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value
of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less
certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like
every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not
by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own
sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or
improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general
knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was
more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been
worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a
shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds
upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the
malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses
could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse
him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on
the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find
a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the
intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of
marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of
truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.

So it has been that throughout history, as between individuals among
ourselves, we trace two habits of thought, one of which has given us
churches, creeds, and the knowledge of God; the other has given us
freedom and science, has pruned the luxuriance of imaginative reverence,
and reminds piety of what it is too ready to forget--that God is truth.
Yet, essential as they are to one another, each keeps too absolutely to
the circle of its own convictions, and, but half able to recognise the
merit of principles which are alien to its own, regards the other as its
natural enemy.

To the warm and enthusiastic pietist the enquirer appears as a hater of
God, an inveterate blasphemer of holy things, soiling with rude and
insolent hands what ought only to be humbly adored. The saint when he
has the power calls the sword to his aid, and in his zeal for what he
calls the honour of God, makes war upon such people with steel and fire.
The innovator, on the other hand, knowing that he is not that evil
creature which his rival represents him as being, knowing that he too
desires only truth--first suffers, suffers in rough times at stake and
scaffold, suffers in our own later days in good name, in reputation, in
worldly fortune; and as the whirligig of time brings round his turn of
triumph, takes, in French revolutions and such other fits of madness,
his own period of wild revenge. The service of truth is made to appear
as one thing, the service of God as another; and in that fatal
separation religion dishonours itself with unavailing enmity to what
nevertheless it is compelled at last to accept in humiliation; and
science, welcoming the character which its adversary flings upon it,
turns away with answering hostility from doctrines without which its own
highest achievements are but pyramids of ashes.

Is this antagonism a law of humanity? As mankind move upwards through
the ascending circles of progress, is it for ever to be with them as
with the globe which they inhabit--of which one hemisphere is
perpetually dark? Have the lessons of the Reformation been thrown away?
Is knowledge always to advance under the ban of religion? Is faith
never to cease to dread investigation? Is science chiefly to value each
new discovery as a victory gained over its rival? Is the spiritual world
to revolve eternally upon an axis of which the two poles are materialism
and superstition, to be buried in their alternate occultations in
periods of utter darkness, or lifted into an icy light where there is
neither life nor warmth?

How it may be in the remote future it is idle to guess; for the present
the signs are not hopeful. We are arrived visibly at one of those
recurring times when the accounts are called in for audit; when the
title-deeds are to be looked through, and established opinions again
tested. It is a process which has been repeated more than once in the
world's history; the last occasion and greatest being the Reformation of
the sixteenth century; and the experience of that matter might have
satisfied the most timid that truth has nothing to fear; and that
religion emerges out of such trials stronger and brighter than before.
Yet Churchmen have not profited by the experience; the pulpits and the
religious press ring again with the old shrieks of sacrilege; the
machinery of the law courts is set creaking on its rusty hinges, and
denunciation and anathema in the old style take the place of reasoning.
It will not answer; and the worst danger to what is really true is the
want of wisdom in its defenders. The language which we sometimes hear
about these things seems to imply that while Christianity is
indisputably true, it cannot stand nevertheless without bolt and
shackle, as if the Author of our faith had left the evidence so weak
that an honest investigation would fail to find it.

Inevitably, the altered relation in which modern culture places the
minds of all of us towards the supernatural, will compel a
reconsideration of the grounds on which the acceptance of miracles is
required. If the English learned clergy had faith as a grain of mustard
seed, they would be the first to take possession of the field; they
would look the difficulty in the face fearlessly and frankly, and we
should not be tossing as we are now in an ocean of uncertainty, ignorant
whether, if things seem obscure to us, the fault is with our intellects
or our hearts.

It might have been that Providence, anticipating the effect produced on
dead testimony by time and change, had raised religion into a higher
sphere, and had appointed on earth a living and visible authority which
could not err--guided by the Holy Spirit into truth, and divinely
sustained in the possession of it. Such a body the Roman Catholic Church
conceives itself to be; but in breaking away from its communion,
Protestant Christians have declared their conviction that neither the
Church of Rome, nor they themselves, nor any other body of men on earth,
are exempt from a liability to error. It is no longer competent for the
Anglican communion to say that a doctrine or a fact is true because it
forms a part of their teaching, because it has come down to them from
antiquity, and because to deny it is sin. Transubstantiation came down
to the fathers of the Reformation from antiquity; it was received and
insisted upon by the Catholic Church of Christendom; yet nevertheless it
was flung out from among us as a lie and an offence. The theory of the
Divine authority of the Church was abandoned in the act of Protestantism
three centuries ago; it was the central principle of that great revolt
that the establishment of particular opinions was no guarantee for their
truth; and it becomes thus our duty as well as our right to examine
periodically our intellectual defences, to abandon positions which the
alteration of time makes untenable, and to admit and invite into the
service of the sanctuary the fullest light of advancing knowledge. Of
all positions the most fatally suicidal for Protestants to occupy is the
assumption, which it is competent for Roman Catholics to hold, but not
for them, that beliefs once sanctioned by the Church are sacred, and
that to impugn them is not error but crime.

With a hope, then, that this reproach may be taken away from us; that,
in this most wealthily-endowed Church of England, where so many of the
most gifted and most accomplished men among us are maintained in
well-paid leisure to attend to such things, we may not be left any
longer to grope our way in the dark, the present writer puts forward
some few perplexities of which it would be well if English divinity
contained a clearer solution than is found there. The laity, occupied in
other matters, regard the clergy as the trustees of their spiritual
interests; but inasmuch as the clergy tell them that the safety of their
souls depends on the correctness of their opinions, they dare not close
their eyes to the questions which are being asked in louder and even
louder tones; and they have a right to demand that they shall not be
left to their own unaided efforts to answer such questions. We go to our
appointed teachers as to our physicians; we say to them, 'We feel pain
here, and here, and here: we do not see our way, and we require you to
help us.'

Most of these perplexities are not new: they were felt with the first
beginnings of critical investigation; but the fact that they have been
so many years before the world without being satisfactorily encountered
makes the situation only the more serious. It is the more strange that
as time passes on, and divine after divine is raised to honour and
office for his theological services, we should find only when we turn to
their writings that loud promises end in no performance; that the chief
object which they set before themselves is to avoid difficult ground;
and that the points on which we most cry out for satisfaction are passed
over in silence, or are disposed of with ineffectual commonplaces.

With a temperament constitutionally religious, and with an instinctive
sense of the futility of theological controversies, the English people
have long kept the enemy at bay by passive repugnance. To the
well-conditioned English layman the religion in which he has been
educated is part of the law of the land; the truth of it is assumed in
the first principles of his personal and social existence; and attacks
on the credibility of his sacred books he has regarded with the same
impatience and disdain with which he treats speculations on the rights
of property or the common maxims of right and wrong. Thus, while the
inspiration of the Bible has been a subject of discussion for a century
in Germany, Holland, and France; while even in the desolate villages in
the heart of Spain the priests find it necessary to placard the church
walls with cautions against rationalism, England hitherto has escaped
the trial; and it is only within a very few years that the note of
speculation has compelled our deaf ears to listen. That it has come at
last is less a matter of surprise than that it should have been so long
delayed; and though slow to move, it is likely that so serious a people
will not now rest till they have settled the matter for themselves in
some practical way. We are assured that if the truth be, as we are told,
of vital moment--vital to all alike, wise and foolish, educated and
uneducated--the road to it cannot lie through any very profound
enquiries. We refuse to believe that every labourer or mechanic must
balance arduous historical probabilities and come to a just conclusion,
under pain of damnation. We are satisfied that these poor people are not
placed in so cruel a dilemma. Either these abstruse historical questions
are open questions, and we are not obliged under those penalties to hold
a definite opinion upon them, or else there must be some general
principle accessible and easily intelligible, by which the details can
be summarily disposed of.

We shall not be much mistaken, perhaps, if we say that the view of most
educated English laymen at present is something of this kind. They are
aware that many questions may be asked, difficult or impossible to
answer satisfactorily, about the creation of the world, the flood, and
generally on the historical portion of the Old Testament; but they
suppose that if the authority of the Gospel history can be well
ascertained, the rest may and must be taken for granted. If it be true
that of the miraculous birth, life, death, and resurrection of our Lord,
we have the evidence of two evangelists who were eye-witnesses of the
facts which they relate, and of two others who wrote under the direction
of, or upon the authority of, eye-witnesses, we can afford to dispense
with merely curious enquiries. The subordinate parts of a divine economy
which culminated in so stupendous a mystery may well be as marvellous as
itself; and it may be assumed, we think, with no great want of charity,
that those who doubt the truth of the Old Testament extend their
incredulity to the New; that the point of their disbelief, towards which
they are trenching their way through the weak places in the Pentateuch,
is the Gospel narrative itself.[F] Whatever difficulty there may be in
proving the ancient Hebrew books to be the work of the writers whose
names they bear, no one would have cared to challenge their genuineness
who was thoroughly convinced of the resurrection of our Lord. And the
real object of these speculations lies open before us in the now
notorious work of M. Renan, which is shooting through Europe with a
rapidity which recalls the era of Luther.

To the question of the authenticity of the Gospels, therefore, the
common sense of Englishmen has instinctively turned. If, as English
commentators confidently tell us, the Gospel of St. Matthew, such as we
now possess it, is undoubtedly the work of the publican who followed our
Lord from the receipt of custom, and remained with Him to be a witness
of His ascension; if St. John's Gospel was written by the beloved
disciple who lay on Jesus' breast at supper; if the other two were
indeed the composition of the companions of St. Peter and St. Paul; if
in these four Gospels we have independent accounts of our Lord's life
and passion, mutually confirming each other, and if it can be proved
that they existed and were received as authentic in the first century of
the Christian Church, a stronger man than M. Renan will fail to shake
the hold of Christianity in England.

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