The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper

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On the whole, the miracle was very plain, very comprehensible, and very
probable. It had good cause: for Canaan felt more confidence in the
protection of his great and glorious Baal, than stiff-necked Judah in
his barely-seen divinity: and surely it was wise to vindicate the true
but invisible God by the humiliation of the false and far-seen idol.
This would constitute to all nations the quickly-rumoured proof that
Jehovah of the Israelites was God in heaven above as well as on the
earth beneath. And, considering the peculiar idolatries of Canaan, it
seems to me that no miracle could have been better placed and better
timed--in other words, anteriorly more probable--than the command of
obedience to the sun and to the moon. I suppose that few persons who
read this book will be unaware, that the circumstance is alluded to as
well in that honest heathen, old Herodotus, as in the learned Jew
Josephus. The volumes are not near me for reference to quotations: but
such is fact: it will be found in Herodotus, about the middle of
Euterpe, connected with an allusion to the analogous case of Hezekiah.

No miracles, on the whole (to take one after-view of the matter), could
have been better tested: for two armies (not to mention all surrounding
countries) must have seen it plainly and clearly: if then it had never
occurred, what a very needless exposure of the falsity of the Jewish
Scriptures! These were open, published writings, accessible to all:
Cyrus and Darius and Alexander read them, and Ethiopian eunuchs;
Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, with all other nations of the earth, had
free access to those records. Only imagine if some recent history of
England, Adolphus's, or Stebbing's, contained an account of a certain
day in George the Fourth's reign having had twenty-four hour's daylight
instead of the usual admixture; could the intolerable falsehood last a
minute? Such a placard would be torn away from the records of the land
the moment a rash hand had fixed it there. But, if the matter were
fact, how could any historian neglect it?--In one sense, the very
improbability of such a marvel being recorded, argues the probability of
it having actually occurred.

Much more might here be added: but our errand is accomplished, if any
stumbling-block had been thus easily removed from some erring thinker's
path. Surely, we have given him some reason for faith's due acceptance
of Joshua's miracle.

THE INCARNATION.

In touching some of the probabilities of our blessed Lord's career, it
would be difficult to introduce and illustrate the subject better, than
by the following anecdote. Whence it is derived, has escaped my memory;
but I have a floating notion that it is told of Socrates in Xenophon or
Plato. At any rate, by way of giving fixity thereto and picturesqueness,
let us here report the story as of the Athenian Solomon:

Surrounded by his pupils, the great heathen Reasoner was being
questioned and answering questions: in particular respecting the
probability that the universal God would be revealed to his creatures.
"What a glorious King would he appear!" said one, possibly the brilliant
Alcibiades: "What a form of surpassing beauty!" said another, not
unlikely the softer Crito. "Not so, my children," answered Socrates.
"Kings and the beautiful are few, and the God, if he came on earth as an
exemplar, would in shape and station be like the greater number."
"Indeed, Master? then how should he fail of being made a King of men,
for his goodness, and his majesty, and wisdom?" "Alas! my children," was
pure Reason's just rejoinder, "[Greek: oi pleiones kakoi], most men are
so wicked that they would hate his purity, despise his wisdom, and as
for his majesty, they could not truly see it. They might indeed admire
for a time, but thereafter (if the God allowed it), they would even hunt
and persecute and kill him." "Kill him!" exclaimed the eager group of
listeners; "kill Him? how should they, how could they, how dare they
kill God?" "I did not say, kill God," would have been wise Socrates's
reply, "for God existeth ever: but men in enmity and envy might even be
allowed to kill that human form wherein God walked for an ensample. That
they could, were God's humility: that they should, were their own
malice: that they dared, were their own grievous sin and peril of
destruction. Yea," went on the keen-eyed sage, "men would slay him by
some disgraceful death, some lingering, open, and cruel death, even such
as the death of slaves!"--Now slaves, when convicted of capital crime,
were always crucified.

Whatever be thought of the genuineness of the anecdote, its uses are the
same to us. Reason might have arrived at the salient points of Christ's
career, and at His crucifixion!

I will add another topic: How should the God on earth arrive there? We
have shown that His form would probably be such as man's; but was he to
descend bodily from the atmosphere at the age of full-grown perfection,
or to rise up out of the ground with earthquakes and fire, or to appear
on a sudden in the midst of the market-place, or to come with legions of
his heavenly host to visit his Temple? There was a wiser way than these,
more reasonable, probable, and useful. Man required an exemplar for
every stage of his existence up to the perfection of his frame. The
infant, and the child, and the youth, would all desire the human-God to
understand their eras; they would all, if generous and such as he would
love, long to feel that He has sympathy with them in every early trial,
as in every later grief. Moreover, the God coming down with supernatural
glories or terrors would be a needless expense of ostentatious power.
He, whose advent is intended for the encouragement of men to exercise
their reason and their conscience; whose exhortation is "he that hath
ears to hear, let him hear;" that pure Being, who is the chief preacher
of Humility, and the great teacher of man's responsible
condition--surely, he would hardly come in any way astoundingly
miraculous, addressing his advent not to faith, but to sight, and
challenging the impossibility of unbelief by a galaxy of spiritual
wonders. Yet, if He is to come at all--and a word or two of this
hereafter--it must be either in some such strange way; or in the usual
human way; or in a just admixture of both. As the first is needlessly
overwhelming to the responsible state of man, so the second is
needlessly derogatory to the pure essence of God; and the third idea
would seem to be most probable. Let us guess it out. Why should not this
highest Object of faith and this lowest Subject of obedience be born,
seemingly by human means, but really by divine? Why should there not be
found some unspotted holy virgin, betrothed to a just man and soon to be
his wife, who, by the creative power of Divinity, should miraculously
conceive the shape divine, which God himself resolved to dwell in? Why
should she not come of a lineage and family which for centuries before
had held such expectation? Why should not the just man, her affianced,
who had never known her yet, being warned of God in a dream of this
strange, immaculate conception, "fear not to take unto him Mary his
wife," lest the unbelieving world should breathe slander on her purity,
albeit he should really know her not until after the Holy Birth. There
is nothing unreasonable here; every step is previously credible: and
invention's self would be puzzled to devise a better scheme. The
Virgin-born would thus be a link between God and man, the great
Mediator: his natures would fulfil every condition required of their
double and their intimate conjunction. He would have arrived at humanity
without its gross beginnings, and have veiled his Godhead for a while in
a pure though mortal tenement. He would have participated in all the
tenderness of woman's nature, and thus have reached the keenest
sensibilities of men.

Themes such as these are inexhaustible: and I am perpetually conscious
of so much left unsaid, that at every section I seem to have said next
to nothing. Nevertheless, let it go; the good seed yet shall germinate.
"Cast thy bread upon the waters, and thou shall find it after many
days."

It may to some minds be a desideratum, to allude to the anterior
probability that God should come in the flesh. Much of this has been
anticipated under the head of Visible Deity and elsewhere; as this
treatise is so short, one may reasonably expect every reader to take it
in regular course. For additional considerations: the Benevolent Maker
would hardly leave his creatures to perish, without one word of warning
or one gleam of knowledge. The question of the Bible is considered
further on: but exclusively of written rules and dogmas, it was likely
that Our Father should commission chosen servants of his own, orally to
teach and admonish; because it would be in accordance with man's
reasonable nature, that he should best and easiest learn from the
teaching his brethren. So then, after all lesser ambassadors had failed,
it was to be expected that He should send the highest one of all,
saying, "They will reverence my Son." We know that this really did occur
by innumerable proofs, and wonderful signs posterior: and now, after the
event, we discern it to have been anteriorly probable.

It was also probable in another light. This world is a world of
incarnations; nothing has a real and potential existence, which is not
embodied in some form. A theory is nothing; if no personal philosopher,
no sect, or school of learners, takes it up. An opinion is mere air;
without the multitude to give it all the force of a mighty wind. An
idea is mere spiritual light; if unclad in deeds, or in words written or
spoken. So, also, of the Godhead: He would be like all these. He would
pervade words spoken, as by prophets or preachers: He would include
words written, as in the Bible: He would influence crowds with
spirit-stirring sentiments: He would embody the theory of all things in
one simple, philosophic form. As this material world is constituted, God
could not reveal himself at all, excepting by the aid of matter. I mean;
even granting that He spiritually inspired a prophet, still the man was
necessary: he becomes an inspired man; not mere inspiration. So, also,
of a book; which is the written labour of inspired men. There is no
doing without the Humanity of God, so far as this world is concerned,
any more than His Deity can be dispensed with, regarding the worlds
beyond worlds, and the ages of ages, and the dread for ever and ever.

MAHOMETANISM.

It seems expedient that, in one or two instances, I should attempt the
illustration of this rule of probability in matters beyond the Bible. As
very fair ones, take Mahometanism and Romanism. And first of the former.

At the commencement of the seventh century, or a little previously to
that era, we know that a fierce religion sprang up, promulgated by a
false prophet. I wish briefly to show that this was antecedently to have
been expected.

In a moral point of view, the Christian world, torn by all manner of
schisms, and polluted by all sorts of heresies, had earned for the human
race, whether accepting the gospel or refusing it, some signal and
extensive punishment at the hands of Him, who is the Great Retributor as
well as the Munificent Rewarder. In a physical point of view, the
civilized kingdoms of the earth had become stagnant, arguing that
corrupt and poisonous calm which is the herald of a coming tempest. The
heat of a true religion had cooled down into lukewarm disputations about
nothings, scholastical and casuistic figments; whilst at the same time
the prevalence of peaceful doctrines had amalgamated all classes into a
luxurious indolence. Passionate Man is not to be so satisfied; and the
time was fully come for the rise of some fierce spirit, who should
change the tinsel theology of the crucifix for the iron religion of the
sword: who should blow in the ears of the slumbering West the shrill
war-blast of Eastern fervencies; who should exchange the dull rewards of
canonization due to penance, or an after-life voluntary humiliation
under pseudo-saints and angels, for the human and comprehensible joys of
animal appetite and military glory: who should enlist under his banner
all the frantic zeal, all the pent-up licentiousness, all the
heart-burning hatreds of mankind, stifled either by a positive
barbarism, or the incense-laden cloud of a scarcely-masked idolatry.

Thus, and then, was likely to arise a bold and self-confiding hero,
leaning on his own sword: a man of dark sentences, who, by judiciously
pilfering from this quarter and from that shreds of truth to jewel his
black vestments of error, and by openly proclaiming that Oneness of the
object of all worship which besotted Christendom had then, from undue
reverence to saints and martyrs, virgins and archangels, well nigh
forgotten; a man who, by pandering to human passions and setting wide as
virtue's avenue the flower-tricked gates of vice; should thus, like
Lucifer before him, in a comet-like career of victory, sweep the
startled firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars of
heaven from their courses.

Mahomet; his humble beginnings; his iron perseverance under early
probable checks; his blind, yet not all unsublime, dependence on
fatality; his ruthless, yet not all undeserved, infliction of fire and
sword upon the cowering coward race that filled the western
world;--these, and all whatever else besides attended his train of
triumphs, and all whatever besides has lasted among Moors, and Arabs,
and Turks, and Asiatics, even to this our day--constitute to a thinking
mind (and it seems not without cause) another antecedent probability.
Let the scoffer about Mahomet's success, and the admirer of his hotchpot
Koran; let him to whom it is a stumbling-block that error (if indeed,
quoth he, it be more erroneous than what Christendom counts truth)
should have had such free course and been glorified, while so-called
Truth, _pede claudo_, has limped on even as now cautiously and
ingloriously through the well-suspicious world; let him who thinks he
sees in Mahomet's success an answer to the foolish argument of some, who
test the truth of Christianity by its Gentile triumphs; let him ponder
these things. Reason, the God of his idolatry, might, with an
archangel's ken, have prophesied some Mahomet's career: and, so far from
such being in the nature of any objection to Faith, the idea thus thrown
out, well-mused upon, will be seen to lend Faith an aid in the way of
previous likelihood.

"There is one God, and Mahomet is his prophet!" How admirably calculated
such a war-cry would be for the circumstances of the seventh century.
The simple sublimity of Oneness, as opposed to school-theology and
catholic demons: the glitter of barbaric pomp, instead of tame
observances: the flashing scimetar of ambition to supersede the cross: a
turban aigretted with jewels for the twisted wreath of thorns. As human
nature is, and especially in that time was, nothing was more expectable
(even if prophetic records had not taught it), than the rise and
progress of that great False Prophet, whose waving crescent even now
blights the third part of earth.

ROMANISM.

We all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event: but it would be
uncandid and untrue to confound this remark with another, cousin-germane
to it; to wit: how easy it is to discern of any event, after it has
happened, whether or not it were antecedently likely. When the race is
over, and the best horse has won (or by clever jockey-management, the
worst), how obviously could any gentleman on the turf, now in possession
of particulars, have seen the event to have been so probable, that he
would have staked all upon its issue.

Carry out this familiar idea; which, as human nature goes, is none the
weaker as to illustration, because it is built upon the rule "_parvis
componere magna_." Let us sketch a line or two of that great
fore-shadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Romanism.

That our blessed Master, even in His state as man, beheld its evil
characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone from both
His human keenness and His divine omniscience, but from here and there a
hint dropped in his biography. Why should He, on several occasions, have
seemed, I will say with some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His
virgin mother.--"Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--"Who are my
mother and my brethren?"--"Yea--More blessed than the womb which bare
me, and the paps that I have sucked, is the humblest of my true
disciples." Let no one misunderstand me: full well I know the just
explanations which palliate such passages; and the love stronger than
death which beat in that Filial heart. But, take the phrases as they
stand; and do they not in reason constitute some warning and some
prophecy that men should idolize the mother? Nothing, in fact, was more
likely than that a just human reverence to the most favoured among women
should have increased into her admiring worship: until the humble and
holy Mary, with the sword of human anguish at her heart, should become
exaggerated and idealized into Mother of God--instead of Jesus's human
matrix, Queen of heaven, instead of a ransomed soul herself, the joy of
angels--in lieu of their lowly fellow-worshipper, and the Rapture of the
blessed--thus dethroning the Almighty.

Take a second instance: why should Peter, the most loving, most
generous, most devoted of them all, have been singled out from among the
twelve--with a "Get thee behind me, Satan?"--it really had a harsh
appearance; if it were not that, prophetically speaking, and not
personally, he was set in the same category with Judas, the "one who was
a devil." I know the glosses, and the contexts, and the whole amount of
it. Folios have been written, and may be written again, to disprove the
text; but the more words, the less sense: it stands, a record graven in
the Rock; that same Petra, whereon, as firm and faithful found, our Lord
Jesus built his early Church: it stands, a mark indelibly burnt into
that hand, to whom were intrusted, not more specially than to any other
of the saintly sent, the keys of the kingdom of heaven: it stands, along
with the same Peter's deep and terrible apostacy, a living witness
against some future Church, who should set up this same Peter as the
Jupiter of their Pantheon: who should positively be idolizing now an
image christened Peter, which did duty two thousand years ago as a
statue of Libyan Jove! But even this glaring compromise was a matter
probable, with the data of human ambitions, and a rotten Christianity.

Examples such as these might well be multiplied: bear with a word or two
more, remembering always that the half is not said which might be said
in proof; nor in answering the heap of frivolous objections.

Why, unless relics and pseudo-sacred clothes were to be prophetically
humbled into their own mere dust and nothing-worthiness, why should the
rude Roman soldiery have been suffered to cast lots for that vestment,
which, if ever spiritual holiness could have been infused into mere
matter, must indeed have remained a relic worthy of undoubted worship?
It was warm with the Animal heat of the Man inhabited by God: it was
half worn out in the service of His humble travels, and had even, on
many occasions, been the road by which virtue had gone out; not of it,
but of Him. What! was this wonderful robe to work no miracles? was it
not to be regarded as a sort of outpost of the being who was Human-God?
Had it no essential sacredness, no _noli-me-tangere_ quality of shining
away the gambler's covetous glance, of withering his rude and venturous
hand, or of poisoning, like some Nessus' shirt, the lewd ruffian who
might soon thereafter wear it? Not in the least. This woven web, to
which a corrupted state of feeling on religion would have raised
cathedrals as its palaces, with singing men and singing women, and
singing eunuchs too, to celebrate its virtues; this coarse cloth of some
poor weaver's, working down by the sea of Galilee or in some lane of
Zion, was still to remain, and be a mere unglorified, economical, useful
garment. Far from testifying to its own internal mightiness, it probably
was soon sold by the fortunate Roman die-thrower to a second-hand shop
of the Jewish metropolis; and so descended from beggar to beggar till it
was clean worn out. We never hear that, however easy of access so
inestimable relic might then have been considered, any one of the
numerous disciples, in the fervour of their earliest zeal, threw away
one thought for its redemption. Is it not strange that no St. Helena was
at hand to conserve such a desirable invention? Why is there no St.
Vestment to keep in countenance a St. Sepulchre and a St. Cross? The
poor cloth, in primitive times, really was despised. We know well enough
what happened afterwards about handkerchiefs imbued with miraculous
properties from holy Paul's body for the nonce: but this is an inferior
question, and the matter was temporary; the superior case is proved, and
besides the rule _omne majus continet in se minus_ there are differences
quite intelligible between the cases, whereabout our time would be less
profitably employed than in passing on and leaving them unquestioned.
Suffice it to say, that "God worked those special miracles," and not the
unconscious "handkerchiefs or aprons." "Te Deum laudamus!" is
Protestantism's cry; "Sudaria laudemus!" would swell the Papal choirs.

Let such considerations as these then are in sample serve to show how
evidently one might prove from anterior circumstances, (and the canon of
Scripture is an anterior circumstance,) the probability of the rise and
progress of the Roman heresies. And if any one should ask, how was such
a system more likely to arise under a Gentile rather than a Jewish
theocracy? why was a St. Paul, or a St. Peter, or a St. Dunstan, or a
St. Gengulphus, more previously expectable than a St. Abraham, a St.
David, a St. Elisha, or a St. Gehazi? I answer, from the idea of
idolatry, so adapted to the Gentile mind, and so abhorrent from the
Jewish. Martyred Abel, however well respected, has never reached the
honours of a niche beside the altar. Jephtha's daughter, for all her
mourned virginity, was never paraded, (that I wot of,) for any other
than a much-to-be-lamented damsel. Who ever asked, in those old times,
the mediation of St. Enoch? Where were the offerings, in jewels or in
gold, to propitiate that undoubted man of God and denizen of heaven, St.
Moses? what prows, in wax, of vessels saved from shipwreck, hung about
the dripping fane of Jonah? and where was, in the olden time, that
wretched and insensate being, calling himself rational and godly, who
had ventured to solicit the good services of Isaiah as his intercessor,
or to plead the merits of St. Ezekiel as the make-weight for his sins?

It was just this, and reasonably to have been expected; for when the Jew
brought in his religion, he demolished every false god, broke their
images, slew their priests, and burnt their groves with fire. But, when
a worldly Christianity came to be in vogue, when emperors adorned their
banners with the cross, and the poor fishermen of Galilee, (in their
portly representatives,) came to be encrusted with gems, and rustling
with seric silk; then was made that fatal compromise; then it was likely
to have been made, which has lasted even until now: a compromise which,
newly baptizing the damned idols of the heathen, keeps yet St. Bacchus
and St. Venus, St. Mars and St. Apollo, perched in sobered robes upon
the so-called Christian altar; which yet pays divine honours to an
ancyle or a rusty nail; to the black stones at Delphi, or the
gold-shrined bones at Aix; which yet sanctifies the chickens of the
capitol, or the cock that startled Peter; which yet lets a wealthy
sinner, by his gold, bribe the winking Pythoness, or buy dispensing
clauses from "the Lord our God, the Pope."

There is yet a swarm of other notions pressing on the mind, which tend
to prove that Popery might have been anticipated. Take this view. The
religion of Christ is holy, self-denying; not of this world's praise,
and ending with the terrible sanction of eternity for good or evil: it
sets up God alone supreme, and cuts down creature-merit to a point
perpetually diminishing; for the longer he does well, the more he owes
to the grace which enabled him to do it.

Now, man's nature is, as we know, diametrically opposite to all this:
and unable to escape from the conviction of Christian truth in some
sense, he would bend his shrewd invention to the attempt of warping
that stern truth to shapes more consistent with his idiosyncrasies. A
religious plan might be expected, which, in lieu of a difficult, holy
spirituality, should exact easy, mere observances; to say a thousand
Paters with the tongue, instead of one "Our Father," from the heart; to
exact genuflections by the score, but not a single prostration of the
spirit; to write the cross in water on the forehead often-times, but
never once to bear its mystic weight upon the shoulder. In spite of
self-denial, cleverly kept in sight by means of eggs, and pulse, and
hair-cloth, to pamper the deluded flesh with many a carnal holiday; in
contravention of a kingdom not of this world, boldly to usurp the
temporal dominion of it all: instead of the overwhelming
incomprehensibility of an eternal doom, to comfort the worst with false
assurance of a purgatory longer or shorter; that after all, vice may be
burnt out; and who knows but that gold, buying up the prayers and
superfluous righteousness of others, may not make the fiery ordeal an
easy one? In lieu of a God brought near to his creatures, infinite
purity in contact with the grossest sin, as the good Physician loveth;
how sage it seemed to stock the immeasurable distance with intermediate
numia, cycle on epicycle, arc on arc, priest and bishop and pope, and
martyr, and virgin, and saint, and angel, all in their stations, at due
interval soliciting God to be (as if His blessed Majesty were not so of
Himself!) the sinner's friend. How comfortable this to man's sweet
estimation of his own petty penances; how glorifying to those "filthy
rags," his so-called righteousness: how apt to build up the hierarchist
power; how seemingly analogous with man's experience here, where clerks
lay the case before commissioners, and commissioners before the
government, and the government before the sovereign.