MR. JACKSON'S BAMPTON LECTURES.*
THE Will of John Bampton, Canon of S'alisbury, who gave and bequeathed his lands and estates to the Chancellor, Master, and Scholars of the University of Oxford for ever, for "the endow- ment of eight Divinity Lecture-sermons," directs and appoints that in order "to confirm and establish the Christian Faith, and to 'refute all heretics and schismatics,' the eight Divinity Lecture- sermons shall be preached upon either of the following subjects : —Upon the divine authority of the Holy Scriptures ; upon the authority of the writings of the primitive Fathers as to the faith and practice of the Primitive Church ; upon the divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ ; upon the divinity of the Holy Ghost ; upon the articles of the Christian faith, as comprehended in the Apostles' and Nicene Creed."
In carrying out the prescriptions of Canon Bampton's "last will and testament," the trustees for the time being have generally allowed to the lecturer selected by them a very wide interpreta- tion of the terms under which the alternative subjects of the lecture-sermons are designated. For example, it was supposed by Dr. Hampden, the Bampton Lecturer of 1832, that he could in no better way discharge the duties of the commission which was given to him for "establishing the Christian faith," than by an endeavour to show how ecclesiastical opinion, reflecting either the life or the philosophy of a particular age, had either obscured or materialised the spiritual significance of the great central facts which constitute the Christianity of Christ, and of the firstmissiona- ries who published his teaching to the world. And a similar latitude has been claimed by Mr. Jackson, for the ground on which he takes his stand, and on which, to our entire satisfaction, he holds his own, the point which he seeks to establish being that human nature has a "natural religion" of its own. Mr. Jackson would add, with Tertullian, that "the human soul is naturally Christian." It will at once occur to the reader who is acquainted with the Thirty-nine Articles to observe that Mr. Jackson has, in this assertion—a • The Dodrine of Retnbastion. Eight Lectures preached before the Univeraiw of Oxford in the Year 1875. By William Jackson, }LA., FBA. London: Hodder and Stoughton. fundamental one, be it noted, in his lectures—subjected himself to a much more serious charge of heresy than was produced even against Bishop Hampden. For it is affirmed in one of these, Article xviii., that "they also are to be had accursed that presume to say that every man shall be saved by the law or sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that law, mut to the light of Nature. For Holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the name of Jesus Christ whereby men must be saved." Mr. Jackson, however, has entirely protected himself against all righteous accusation touching his belief in our need of the higher aid which has been brought within the sphere of the human will and conscience by the mediation of Christ, by the simple fact that in his able and eloquent lectures, he is concerned, in the first instance, not so much with the dynamics of revelation, as with the statics of human nature. His contention, in the present volume, is not, so to speak, apologetic, but philosophic ; and his great question is not, "What is Christ- ianity ?" but, "What is the human nature to which it appeals ? "
In answering this question, Mr. Jackson, with his characteristic candour and width of vision, makes two great admissions. lie says that " evolution " may be the true hypothesis on which to account for man as he now is,—certainly "the paragon of animals ;."- and for us, Gentiles, he adds, it may be quite impossil.)10 to do more than estimate approximately the deepening, the heightening, the assuredness of the ethical judgments, which have become a. portion of our inheritance, or "heredity," since the Hebrew Gospel first found a home in the British consciousness. But as children of the Inductive Philosophy, our inquiry, first of all,. must be an interrogation of facts as they exist. And here, as the outcome of nature and of history, we find a phenomenon, humanity, a part of nature, yet intrinsically at variance with its merely mechanical or invariable sequences, and we are constrained to ask. what it is, whence it is, and whither it naturally tends, if any- whither ? But where, of whom, or of what, shall we make the inquiry? Mr. Jackson replies, begin with what is nearest. He says,. interrogate consciousness. But if you like, before concluding that you have obtained its final or legitimate award, subject the contents of consciousness itself to the necessarian sensationalism of Hume, to the freezing process of Paley, to the wizard fires of Schelling's doc- trine of identity, to the primitive and privative exhausted receiver of the nihilo:genetic absolutism of the Hegelian methodology, to the dogmatic nescience of the Positivists, represented by M. Littre—perhaps the most pronounced son of "the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church" in Europe—make the experiment all round, possessing your soul in patience the while, and Mr. Jack- son maintains, what Guizot* had previously affirmed in the em- phatic and eloquent words, which we venture here to quote, that "you may interrogate the human race in all time, and in all places, in all states of society, and in all grades of civilisation,. and you will find men everywhere, and always, believing spon- taneously in facts and causes beyond the sensible world, beyond this ever-operating system called Nature."
We must postpone Mr. Jackson's great interrogation of con- sciousness for a little, in order that, first of all, we may observe his results in the light of John Stuart Mill's verdict on "this ever-operating syetern called Nature." Mr. Mill did not find. "Nature" at all to his liking. In fact, though he does not gay so much in express terms, he looked on the savagery of many. of Nature's procedures, which certainly have "no respect of persons," with the eyes of Marcion, whose heresy consisted in the affirma- tion that Christ had come to deliver us from the malevolence and the maleficence of the Demiurge, who created the material world. To live according to Nature—an expression which will remind our readers of the fixed idea of the philosopher in Johnson's Rasselats —would be, in Mr. Mill's estimate, to commit crimes for which men are hanged every day. There is no discrimination, no pity in Nature. The Lisbon earthquake engulphed saint and sinner alike, and the barbarian theology of the inhabitants of Melita, who concluded, when the viper fastened on St. Paul's hand, that he was a murderer whom, though he had escaped the sea, yet vengeance suffered not to live, but who changed their mind when they saw no harm come to him, and straightway said that he was. aged, is confuted by daily experience. There is no morality in Nature apart from man, though, as Mr. Jackson demonstrated in his Philosophy of Natural Theology, which we reviewed recently in these columns, there are tokens of mind everywhere.
In the second place, if phenomenal nature supplies no accept- able ethical principle for human meditation or human action— though we know that to the mind of Christ, the great providential
laws symbolised or evidenced in "the lilies of the field" and in "the fowls of the air," were suggestive of profoundest trust in the care of the Almighty Law-giver for His human children— let us see whether we can safely dispense with Mr. Jackson's findings, by substituting in their place, as the motive and sanction for the highest life of man, the principle of the greatest happiness, or that of general utility.
Of course it is sell-evident that the means ordained by a per- fectly wise and perfectly righteous Creator for accomplishing the end, which was eternally purposed in initiating, by an act of un- -constrained will, the evolution of the world, must have been the best possible. It is equally sell-evident that from the Great Husbandman of "force," to whom the end is involved in the beginning, and in the development of whose world-programme all means must be consentaneous, each effect utilising the impact of its immediate cause, and itself become a cause in turn, passing on
" transigent," yet "conservative," energy to the proximate sequence, no moral mandate could issue the fulfilment of which -entailed a fruitless, much less a pernicious, combination of cir- -cumstances. And consequently there is a meaning attachable to the expression "Utilitarian," which entitles a moral philosophy which claims it as the expression of its own differentia to a respectful ,considetation. The man who, before accepting an invitation to &—Tler, or ordering a new suit of clothes, or " proposing " to a young lady, or playing a game with his children, or writing an article, or going to church, or plunging into a roaring flood to save a drowning drunkard, would, as a matter of course, first ask himself the question whether he was about to contribute to the utilities of the universe, would doubtless, though a great bore both to himself and to all others, be a " reverend " person in the eyes of Lord Cairns, though not accorded the designation by the Bishop of Lincoln. But it so happens that simply we are not omniscient. We can predict in spheres in relation to which we have no conscious moral obligation, and no power whatever, of modifying action, what will happen to-morrow or millions of years from the present date—if all things should "continue as they are" now—which is just the question, however, which Science at present decides in the negative—but in the region which touches most closely, in Bacon's words, "our bosom and our business," and in which fore- sight might seem to be fraught with so many advantages, we are stone-blind as to futurities ; and if we were to be guided in our activities only by deliberate estimate of the consequences likely, or all but certain, to ensue from our conduct—consequences, that is, not primarily affecting our own sense of truth, of righteous- ness, of purity, of honour, in a word, of manhood,—the mens conscia recti—but the world at large—so many "considerations" would give us "pause," that in the end we should all become Hamlets, freely speculating upon all things, whether dreamed of or not, in our varied philosophies, but doing nothing. Now it is Mr. Jackson's contention that, in our ignorance of what, with re- ference to the highest utility, it would be most conducive to the welfare of society, for us at any given moment to undertake, there is "a sure word of prophecy" in the human soul itself, "a light that shineth in a dark place," and that in giving heed to this natural, but, at the same time, supra- natural illumination, we can advance boldly, and do the duty which lies nearest to us, with all our hearts, not, indeed, knowing whither we go, so far as any outside considerations are con- sidered, but assured by the testimony of our own consciousness that the attributes of the Right, and the True, and the Neigh- bourly are indefeasible, and that in thinking, in willing, and doing the very best which is apparent to us, we are rendering obedience to the very law of our lives. Natural religion, i.e., the religion which has its sanction in the deepest recesses of human nature, speaks in this wise : "This do, and thou shalt live." Natural religion, according to Mr. Jackson, proclaims with unfaltering emphasis that that which is born of the flesh is flesh, and flesh only, but that there is a spirit in man which can and ought to defy the flesh, to buffet it, to keep it under, and he adduces many illustrations, which he elaborates with great earnestness and great eloquence, to show that in order to be true to himself and to the law which constitutes him a free, rational, and responsible creature, man has triumphed over all the appeals of his lower oature—nay, more, over those of love and life itself—consenting to torture, to death, rather than forfeit the approval of his own conscience. But if it is replied that the claims of conscience are altogether transcendental, and must be repudiated by the science which can only legitimately take note of phenomena which appeal mainly to the senses, Mr. Jackson makes answer,—(1st), "Was it from the senses that we gained our incontestable geometrical axioms ? (2nd) was it from the senses that we gained our un- deniable law of the contradictory in logic ? (3rd) was it from the senses that we formed our induction of the inevitable uni- formity of Nature's sequences, seeing that while experiment veri- fies the belief, we have had no experience wide enough to justify us in holding it? And on the basis of these analogical instances of supra-sensuous but verifiable first principles of the human reason, he claims for the affirmations of the will and conscience a similar acceptance in their pronouncement that Eight and Wrong are eternally at variance, that each must have, and prophesies, its Retribution,—that is, must have its own paid back to it in full measure, subject, however, to the condition unveiled by Christ, that mercy is sovereign over all law. In his eight lectures, which treat of the "Subject in Perspective," of the "Answer of Conscience," of "Scepticism when Thorough," of "First Principles" (this, as we think, the ablest of all), of the "Prerogative of Humanity," of "Man's Inner Law and Life," of "Growth, Trial, and Triumph," of "Absolute Truth, and the Solemn Hereafter," Mr. Jackson has supplied us with one of the ablest defences of the ChristiAn Faith, by his careful consideration of the human nature to which that Faith brings its message. We rise from his pages with a freshened and deepened sense of our responsibilities, our duties, and our hopes as men, and if here and there a somewhat florid rhetoric is just a trifle incongruous in the case of a writer who possesses so remark- ably, as Mr. Jackson does, the faculty of delicate metaphysical analysis, of stating psychological and ethical problems in their very severest, abstract form ; of Rembrandt-like representation of character, as evidenced in his admirably-contrasted portraits of David Hume and Emmanuel Kant, both as men and as moral teachers; and of diligently hunting a fallacy into its inmost den, as exhibited in his masterly and original treat- ment of the "easy philosophy" of David Hume, it must be remembered, in qualification, that, it was especially young Oxford to which, in the first instance, he addressed himself. Mr. Jackson, of set purpose, made his homilies lecture-sermons; and while be has, in many passages of rigid logic, discussed, as only a subtle and practised dialectician could do, the critical questions which arise between the sceptic or the positive dog- matist on the one baud, and the believer in the facts and laws of the human consciousness on the other, his chief anxiety was to awaken his under-graduate hearers to the earnest study of pure philosophy—a study which, to judge from the latest accounts, is not much in favour on the banks of the Isis—and to make patent to them by illustration, as well as by argument, that if "the proper study of mankind is man," man's nature itself is utterly inexplic- able, is a solecism in a world of law, and order, and cause ; that the heroic deeds of martyrs, and all self-sacrificing men, are utterly enigmatic, nor less so the great moral lessons, "writ large," in letters of fire and blood," as in the first French Revo- lution, without reference to a spiritual Creator, who made man in his own image, and whose laws, in the cases alike of individuals and nations, not only vindicate of themselves their own divine and dynamical authority now, and work so potently that, as Macbeth says, we still "have judgment here,—here, on this bank and shoal of Time," but by their uncompromising aloofness from all limita- tions of space and time, proclaim themselves to be eternal. Be- cause they live, man must live also, while, being ultimate and sovereign in their claims, they must reign, and at last bring all humanity under loving subjection to their sway. Mr. Jackson's lectures are a truly reconstructive contribution to British philosophy, and his genial, manly, and impressive exhortations to the youth of Oxford command our sincere sympathy.
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