BOOKS.
Pleadings for Christ. Three Discourses by William Connor, Lord Bishop of Peterborough. 1871.. strictly speaking, are sermons on the philosophy of faith. They are worthy of Dr. Magee. There is nothing of the common rhetoric of the pulpit in them. They touch only those preliminary and, in the main, philosophical difficulties which prevent a good many from even considering the question of Christianity who might otherwise be willing to enter on it, and with these preliminary difficulties the bishop deals honestly, earnestly, precisely, and with all the resources of a vigorous and comprehensive intellect. There are a few points on which, in our opinion, he pushes his argument somewhat beyond its true limit; but there can be no doubt of the anxious care he has devoted to it, or of the singleness of purpose, the freedom from any sort of episcopal or even clerical assumption, in the sermons them- selves. We can only hope that the course of lectures in Norwich Cathedral, of which these three were the commencement, may be continued by men as competent to interpret both the thoughts of sceptics and the answers which Christian faith gives to those thoughts, as is the Bishop of Peterborough. Of course, in such a notice as we can give here, we can only profess to touch one or two main points.
The first lecture is devoted to the consideration of the pre- liminary objection, that "free thought" cannot properly accept a system which makes us responsible for our own intellectual con- clusions, in the sense of suffering for erroneous conclusions. Dr. Magee points out that this objection is never taken by "tree thought" to scientific teaching, which yet always makes us responsible for our intellectual errors in that sense. There is more room for the exer- cise of a real intellectual freedom, argues the Bishop, and there is meant to be more room for it, in the world of morals and of faith, than there is in that of either human law or of natural science. Neither Law nor Nature takes much note of the excuses men may have for misunderstanding the facts of life, both one and the other punishing blunders without relation to such excuses ; but in the world of morals and faith there is far more consideration for human error and weakness,—though even there, error must expect to lose something by being error, as loss is of the very essence of error, and we must expect to suffer from coming into sharp collisions with the facts that in our blindness we have ignored. But as the Bishop appears to us to press this part of his argument somewhat beyond its fair limits, too much in the spirit of a rather bygone orthodoxy, we will 'quote a short passage and offer a criticism upon it :—
"Bat grant for a moment that all we can say is, Perhaps there is a God, perhaps there was an Incarnation ; we have a right to say, if that perhaps prove to be a certainty, if what we think possible is really the ease, then if you think wrongly about it, you will have to suffer the consequences of your erroneous thoughts. If when the man of science puts into your hands a book which tells yen of sanitary facts,—of the danger of infection,—if you say, as too many men do say, We do not believe your facts, we are sceptical about your teachings, we will go on as we have done, we will suspend our judgment at least till you give us clearer proof '—what will be his answer? cannot compel you to believe ; you may and must suspend your judgment if you do not believe, but meanwhile you will suffer ; it may be the proof will come to you in sickness and death, but you will not escape merely because you suspend your judgment.' And we say to you, not in anger, not in bitterness, not in denunciation of God's anger upon unbelievers,—(God forgive us if we ever speak so!) but we speak to you in the same tone of warning and not of threatening, in the same tone of reasoning and of entreaty and not of denunciation, as the matt of science does ; and we say to you, 'If you be doubtful, remember that while you are doubting, time is passing ; if these be facts, then you are imperilled if you think wrongly about them ; there is danger in darkness as well as in light ; if you toll us you are groping in the dark, then we say take heed how you grope—take heed lest these facts prove hurtful and dangerous to you, if you come into collision with them. We cannot alter these facts. If they are facts, they have a bearing upon your happiness, just as much as the facts in the natural world have.' You see, then, there is nothing incompatible with free-thought, there is no violation of free- thought in religion a whit more than there is in Nature or in science. All we say to you is this—that the consequences of thinking erroneously concerning the facts of God's nature may be as certainly perilous to you, as the consequences of thinking erroneously concerning the physical facts in your own nature, or in the world around you."
.Dr. Magee's analogy is perfectly just, so far as it illustrates the purely inevitable consequences of misunderstanding the world, whether moral or physical ; but it at least suggests a good deal be- yond this, and the Bishop takes no pains to guard against the popu- lar misapplication of the suggestion. If men die of a plague which they have unintentionally brought upon themselves through their ignorance of sanitary laws, their death is not in any degree made to depend on their previously unused means of knowledge. Men died of the same ignorance for centuries and centuries before they had the means of knowing any better. Even now hundreds and thousands die through the same ignorance who had never really had any oppor- tunity of knowing better. Does he mean to apply this to the spiritual consequences of unbelief? Does he mean to hint that similarly men will lose their spiritual life through ignorance for which they are not responsible ? If he does,—though we do not believe he does, — he destroys the power of the spiritual appeal which the Christian faith makes to the heart, which the Bishop elsewhere very justly describes as an appeal to the faith in an absolute Righteousness superior to and able to redress the apparent injustices of the severe and almost cruel rule of Nature. But if he does not, then his analogy so far fails, and he can no longer afford to speak of the dangers of spiritual misbelief as of the same sort as those of physical misbelief ; for the former can only be dangerous to the soul when they rest on a voluntary misuse or abuse of our spiritual freedom ; 'while the latter are quite as great, if not greater, dangers to the body 'when they spring from utter and " invincible " ignorance, as when they spring from carelessness that merits a penalty. The very drift of the spiritual appeal ought to be that the perfect Righteous- ness will inflict a spiritual chastisement only on the exact degree of voluntary spiritual shortcoming, whatever that may be, involved in unbelief ; but the Bishop's analogy suggests, if it suggests any- thing, that the spiritual evil to be incurred through unbelief will be quite independent of any moral failure of ours, will follow the analogy, in fact, of a physical plague, instead of that of a per- fectly divine retribution. Surely on this point the Bishop ought to have guarded his meaning better ? Surely he ought to have said expressly that though spiritual blindness must always be the most privative of all kinds of blindness, it can never be allowed to last for those who use well the moments of vision they may have, and will never be visited even on those who do not always use well those mo- menta, in penalties quite disproportionatein degree to their fault? At least, if he did not mean this, the spiritual revelation cannot be said to explain and soften the difficulties of the physical world, since, in that case, it would only take them up and repeat them in a higher sphere.
The finest of the three lectures is, perhaps, the second, on "Christianity and Scepticism,"—the subject of it being the true nature of moral and religious, as distinguished from scientific evi- dence, and the character of the moral certainty on which men stake all that is dearest to them, whether they happen to be Christians or not:-
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Are there any domains of knowledge and of certainty," asks the Bishop, "which cannot be reached by the sceptical intellect, and into which some other part of man's nature must enter, to decide as to his belief? Let us go back to that early childhood of which I have been speaking, in which the child who at first believes everything learns his first lesson of doubt. A child, as I have said, not only believes in appear- ances, but he believes in testimony. He believes in human nature. His intuitive belief is in the truthfulness of humanity. Every word that is said to a child at first he believes ; but he very soon learns his second great lesson of doubt and distrust ; learns that everyone who speaks to him is not true ; learns that it is not wise for him to believe everything that is said to him. Is that as happy a discovery as that other discovery of which we spoke? Does it lead to like happy results ? Does it make the discoverer feel better, wiser, happier? Would you say to the child, 'Go on, my child, in this progress of doubt and distrust. Believe no one until he has proved to you that you must believe him. Doubt every one, distrust everyone, refuse to accept any word of any human being until you have demonstration for it?' Would the man who grew up in that distrustful spirit be a happy man ? Would he be a wise man? Is it wisdom always to distrust human nature ? And yet, if it is not, I ask you what demonstration you can have of the truthfulness of every person whom you trust ? You are always trusting. Can you prove logically that you are right in any of those trusts ?"
And Dr. Magee argues from this that, just as it is in human affairs, "doubt is useful upon one condition, and one only,—that it start from a first belief. For what is the source of all this doubt
and this thirst after knowledge ? It is the supreme instinctive belief that beneath all appearances there is a reality,—that some- thing underlies and causes all being. And it is the search after this (if I may so speak of it) Essence of Existence,—the search after this I Aar,—that still leads on the doubter." We are no more
meant to be independent of acts of trust,—as distinguished from knowledge,—in the domain of religion, than we are in the domain of human affairs, argues the Bishop of Peterborough. In both we are liable to an indefinite amount of error, but in both it is the spirit of trust, the spirit of large and generous reliance on what is higher than ourselves, of faith in what goes deeper than the understanding or the reason, which most surely leads to truth.
If we take up the spirit of universal distrust, if we begin to judge by the understanding and the reason only, even in human affairs, we lose far more than we gain ; we misapprehend human
nature more and more, and madden ourselves at last. By adopting the same principle in religion, we get to scepticism, which is, in Dr. Magee's estimation, precisely as reasonable, neither more nor less, than the cynical spirit in judging of human affairs which is disposed to disbelieve everything of which it has not sensible evidence.
The only criticism we have to make on this fine lecture is a
speculative one. We should infer from it (perhaps erroneously) that Dr. Magee does not think that any part of religious faith is properly speaking religious knowledge. He compares the kind of trust required by God to the kind of trust required in humeri affairs, and which, as he admits, may be mistakenly given. "There may be circumstances and facts in natural life that may make- the most trustful and unsuspicious man lawfully suspicious," he- says, "and it is conceivable that there may be circumstances or- facts in Christianity that should make even Christians suspicious. or distrustful" And he might have gone further ; he might have said that there are, sometimes, no circumstances and facts in, natural life to make us suspicious, when, nevertheless, it turns out. afterwards that we have been actually deceived ; and so even though we may be unsuspicious and trustful in religious faith, if we are to- follow the same analogy, it might turn out eventually that we might yet be deceived. Is that what the bishop intends to teach ? Does- he think that Christian faith, though unquestionably due to trust in what is above us and diviner than ourselves, is open to the same- doubt as similar trust in human affairs ? Does he think such faith only infinitely the highest and noblest assumption on which it is- possible to live, but still an assumption which is (speculatively speaking) open to doubt ? We ask, not as wishing to suggest that the Bishop is not orthodox, but because we really desire to know to which of the two great schools of philosophy in regard to re- ligion he belongs,—that which deems that in all faith there is some- thing of an ultimate moral risk or venture,—something of a, noble leap in the dark,—or that which believes that the ulti- mate grounds of faith can be based on knowledge, or at least, on authoritative moral attestation carrying as much certainty as any intellectual knowledge. For our own parts, we should rather infer that the Bishop belongs to the former school, were we- disposed to construe strictly all he says in these sermons. And. yet a teacher who has so finely shown that the explanation of the dignity of doubt itself is to be found in a faith that lies deeper- than doubt, can hardly mean to convey that that very faith has in it something of uncertainty and risk. Yet the course- of the Bishop's argument is so generally sound and so clear- that we wish he had left this fundamental point less ambiguous._ We suspect that what he means is this, and that it is not very far- from the truth,—that in creatures of a nature so complex as men, living on so many different levels of existence, as it were,—the levet of the senses, the level of the emotions, the level of the conscience, —the assertion of one element of our nature may seem inconsistent. with the assertion of another element in it, and that where this is the case, we are liable to blunder as to which part of us. it is wisest to trust ; but that if in such cases we trust 'to the highest part, that part which the divine faculty of conscience- teaches us to be the highest, though we may go wrong in our human affairs through such an exercise of trust, we cannot go. wrong in relation to him who constituted our nature and gave us- the faculty by which to discriminate the higher from the lower,— that which is most like him, from that which is most different from him ;—in other words, that in things human, the true judgment of, the conscience may lead us into error, but that in things divine, the true judgment of the conscience,—so far as it is quite true and simple,—is as infallible as God himself. We trust that the Bishop.. may himself explain to us in further lectures how he would illus- trate his philosophy of faith in relation to the facts of historical revelation.
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