14 MAY 1864, Page 8

MR. SPURGEON'S BOTTLED APPLE.

NIR. SPURGEON made a speech at the recent meeting of the Bible Society which contains, as is usual with the speaker, a vigorous, effective, and frank illustration of the mode in which he would treat the modern difficulties concerning the Bible. It was not for him, he said, to meet the critical objections to the arithme- tical calculations of Exodus, or the authenticity of Deuteronomy. "For my part I do not undertake the task of refuting objections, because I believe that the logical faculty in me is too small, and that if I were to talk against arithmetical objections I should be like the boy who in the churchyard whistled to keep his courage up, and said, Who's afraid?" Mr. Spurgeon does not deny, then, that the criticisms puzzle and baffle him ; but in a spirit of evidently good and hearty, though blind and somewhat ignorant, faith, he adds in reference to Dr. Colenso and the other scholars who have recently criticized the Old Testament, "We want to cry out to-day, Lord, if thine adversaries doubt whether this be Thy sword, lay hold upon its hilt and cut to their very quick, and make them know that there is a God in Israel still, and that there is still God's Word.'" We do not doubt that this .is an honest prayer, and that it will receive an answer, not perhaps exactly such as Mr. Spurgeon expects, but still one vindicat- ing the power of the mighty arm which can wield that sword "to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit"- Mr: Spur- geon, however, did more than honestly confess his desire to evade rather than meet the modern difficulties about the Bible ; in the latter part of his address he illustrated with his usual home- liness and force the best mode of helping the masses to escape, not conquer, them also. "The way," he said, "to secure the masses would be to secure them when young,"—to put them very early, that is, through a strict catechetical course, in which the historical questions now raised about the early Hebrew history should be en- tirely ignored. And he illustrated the value of this strategy by a per- sonal reminiscence. Mr. Spurgeon's grandmother had on her mantel- piece a bottle which excited to scientific curiosity Mr. Spurgeon's infant mind. In this bottle resided an apple, which was just the size of the largest part of the bottle. Now, at that age Mr. Spurgeon was not only under the mantelpiece, but also under a law which forbade him to climb up to the mantelpiece and the things thereon. Nevertheless, such was the ardour of his spirit of discovery that whenever he could get alone, he took a chair, and got the bottle down, and endeavoured to discover how the apple could possibly have got down that small neck. His first theory on the subject was a little suspicious, and not wanting in analogies to that theological teaching of a fictitious and merely " imputed " foundation of righteousness for human character, in which he was brought up. "I thought the vial must have had a false bottom," ancUir. Spurgeon goes on to wonder how in his various scientific essays to find it he did not manage to break it, and "so get a sound thrashing." However, one day in the garden, while watching apples still uubottled, to him, as to Newton, the solution of the diffi- culty came. He saw that his grandmother must have put a bottle over the apple while it was still on the branch, and that it grew on inside the bottle till it reached the full dimensions that the bottle allowed. Mr. Spurgeon was reminded of his youthful essay in science while listening to the speeches of his predecessors against the modern critics. "We cannot," he says, "get men under Biblical influ- ences very readily after they are growing up ; but if we can put them inside the bottle when they are little oiler, / am sure we shall be following the analogy of nature." Now we are very sure that if we catch Mr. Spurgeon's drift aright,—and he means, we imagine, by "Biblical influences," the artificial vials in which narrow sects choose to cork up and label what they regard as the true Biblical influences,—this would by no means be following the "analogy of nature." Would it have been according to the analogy of nature if Mr. Spurgeon's grandmother had put a bottle round each of her apple-germs, so that every apple on the tree had been stunted to the dimensions of the object of Mr. Spurgeon's wonder ? What does Mr. Spurgeon imagine that the bottled apple would have been worth as an apple, if he had broken into its artificial shell and ventured on eating so marvellous a product ? Doubtless he is well aware that nothing would have induced him to consume that apple, that it would have been impossible even to regard it with appetite. The illustration suggests nothing less than the "analogy of nature." It suggests how we may avail ourselves of the weak- ness and ductility of infancy to arrest its growth at a certain stage, or, if it is to be continued at all, to oblige it to rend violently an artificial barrier of our own invention, and bruise itself no doubt in the process, before it can grow to its natural fulness of form and maturity. And to apply Mr. ;:purgeon's image, as we conceive that he, and many far more highly cultured men, really mean it to be applied, we believe that the rigid catechetical training by which be so strongly recommends that children's minds should be early moulded, is in fact a mode of preventing their growing up into "the fulness of the stature of Christ," by early penning them up in some confining sectarian theory which either arrests the spiritual growth at a certain point, or if that prove impossible, renders the shivering to atoms of all respect for its early creed the only condition of future growth,—a condition by the way only less injurious to the mind than its absolute arrest. Who cannot recall at once not only numberless instances of earnest minds still bottled in the creel of good though narrow parents, but many instances also of minds of too great inherent vital force to bdso cribbed, cabinned, and confined, which, though they have burst the glass at the weakest part, still retain bulbous fragments of it hanging around some portions, and in other portions show ugly protuberances where they have found themselves free to grow over the rough edges of the ragged and fractured creed?

We should be sorry to be so gravely misunderstood as to be sup- posed to wish that the child should not from its earliest years be taught the truths of revelation. Coleridge once answered Mr. Thelwall's theory that "it is very unfair to influence a child's mind by inculcating any opinions before it should have corn 3 to years of discretion and be able to choose for itself,"—by showing him his garden anfl telling bim it was his botanical garden. "[low so ?" said "it is covered with weeds." "Oh," replied Coleridge, "that is only because it is not jet come to its age of discretion and choice. The weeds, you see, have taken the liberty to grow, and I thought it unfair in me to prejudice the soil towards roses and straw- berries." The answer, though in form only an illustration, is really a perfect piece of moral and spiritual logic. But then the answer supposes that the mind of the instructor is clear in itself as to the distinction between moral flowers and Moral weeds: M. Spurgeon, on the contrary, as we understand him, is reeommending this early bottling in a specific creed as the best mole of antici- pating the real difficulties which modern criticism has discovered in the literature of the Bible, and which he himself admits that he does not know how to answer. It is not his function, he says, to answer such difficulties—he has not logic enough, or scholarship enough for it, and it would only be mock courage in him to at- tempt it. Yet he would escape the difficulties by moulding children's minds early to a creed which ignores them, and assumes as its basis the verbal infallibility of the Bible, in order that they may stiffen in that creed before the difficulties suggest themselves at all. This is not planting their minds with flowers, known to be flowers, to the exclusion of poisonous weeds, but overrunning their minds with a plant not indigenous—indeed confessedly exotic and of doubtful value, because its presence is often found the most convenient method of discouraging the growth of a trouble- some weel which it is too troublesome and difficult to extract separately and root by root. What we know in our hearts to be our own highest truth we ought of course to teach our children ; but when, like Mr. Spurgeon, we have to confess that we do not know the answer to a great set of difficulties, nothing can be less faithful to the spirit of Christian truth than to attempt to stifle the growth of those difficulties in children's minis by im- pressing early upon them a creed which assumes their non-existence. It is as great a duty to leave scope for the free growth of children's minds in directions in which we do not see light, as to enrich them by positive teaching in directions in which we do.

We have never joined in the cry against Mr. Spurgeon, for though narrow in creed, never refined, and not unfrequently vulgar, we hold him to be an earnest, vigorous, and manly preacher of a faith which is from the heart, and which has proved itself to be so by gradually raising the tone of his sermons, and infusing into them more and more of wide and generous Christian charity. He has not hesitated to protest in season against that wicked taking of God's name in vain which represented a terrib! e acci- dent to the Sunday excursionists as a divine judgment ag,ai.tst the breakers of the fourth commandment ; and more recently he has warmly deRnded the principle of the British and Foreign School Society, in which the Bible is read without any inculcation, on theory at least, of distinctive dogmas, on the ground that all true intellectual and moral discipline, however defective in theological complete- ness, must render children's minds more open to truth and more fit to receive it. Such positions show that Mr. Spurgeon's mind is not itself closed against new truth, and many parts of his recent speech read to us like the earnest expression of a strong and devout though coarse-grained faith. Let him reconsider the question whether early and strenuous inculcation on children of It half-believed doctrine of Biblical infallibility is either consistent with a true faith in God's revelation, or even desirable, in order to nourish that trust in the sharp and powerful "living Word" which Mr. Spurgeon can express with so much power. Is not free and natural faith better than bottled faith, after all ?