PROFESSOR WACE ON BELIEF.
WE drew attention rather more than three months ago (January 6) to a striking but very misleading essay of Professor Clifford's in the Fortnightly Review on the sin of Cre- dulity, and pointed out the great blunder of supposing that the structure of human society could be held together at all on the assumption that legitimate beliefs are founded solely on ade- quate investigation of the evidence bearing upon them, inde- pendently of those affections and half-reasoned, but often not the less, rather the more, trustworthy prepossessions of the mind, which are at the root of our deepest, and we will venture to say also of our truest, faiths. Professor Wace, of King's College, and Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, took up the same subject a few days ago, in a very thoughtful paper read at the Victoria Institute, in which he showed that the fundamental methods of science, though they may sometimes lead to beliefs first, and then to knowledge, are not at all the most commonly-used or available avenues to those personal trusts which are, as we maintained in January, the binding cement of our human society. Trust, he says very justly, is at best as much an efficient cause of truthfulness, as truthfulness is a cause of trust. In other words, instead of founding trust on careful intellectual investigation, the need for such careful intellectual investigation is often dispensed with altogether by the blind power of trust. "If it is the duty of my neighbour to speak the truth, it is equally my duty to believe that he does speak it. I have no right to suspect him of violating this obligation, and to do so is, in practice, to suggest the idea of falsehood to him, and to sow the seeds of it. A corrupt society is, above all things, marked by two characteristics,—a' universal' habit ' of questioning' all that is said, and an equally universal habit of saying what is not true. On the contrary, in a healthy society like that of England, habits of trust and of truth equally support each other; and it has now become, for instance, a principle of education that the best way to evoke truthfulness in boys is uniformly to
believe them, even when appearances are against them. In place, therefore, of Professor Clifford's assertion that the credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat,—he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no wonder he should become even as they are,' we should be much nearer the experience of practical life, if we alleged this of the suspicious men." At least as regards human testimony, then, trust is natural and almost instinctive, distrust the harsh teaching of special experience ; and what we ought to feel is rather that it needs specific evidence of untrustworthiness to justify suspicion, than that it needs specific evidenee of trustworthiness to justify belief. We do not, even in ordinary cases of well-grounded confidence, believe because we have calculated the probabilities, and find a great balance in favour of the testimony we are weighing, but we :accept that testimony at once, so long as there are no strong warnings of its positive untrustworthiness. It is, in any wholesome state of society, unbelief on all matters involving personal testimony for which we need explicit evidence rather than belief. The instincts and affections are the true basis of trust. On all matters of personal confidence, recourse is had to an intellectual estimate of probabilities, only when there is some warning of experience given us to distrust those instincts and affections,—i.e., that they are in danger of being abused. The initiative lies properly with those who would sap confidence ; and unless that initiative be taken, trust once established, whether by a tong experience of trustworthiness, or by the far more rapid process of personal affinities and insights, remains legitimately in possession of the field.
Now, what we want to call attention to to-day is the bearing of this principle on religious confidence. The root of all religion is, of course, a personal trust in God, founded on the teaching of the • conscience and those spiritual impressions of care and tender- ness which appear to pour in upon us from a source beyond our- selves. The root of all Christian belief is a similar personal trust in and affection for Christ, as the very incarnation of God's being and the illustration of his attributes. Again, all historical .belief in the Christian story depends on a similar sort of confidence in the evangelists and letter-writers of the New Testa- ment,—a confidence which may obviously be partly shaken, with- cat any break-down of moral trust, by anything which goes to show that these witnesses were not intellectually qualified to discriminate between what they had witnessed or derived from cthers, and their own inferences from such testimony. How does all this affect the absoluteness of religious trust ? Must we say that till the whole armoury of scepticism has been turned against that trust, and shown to be inadequate, our trust can be only ,provisional, and therefore hesitating? Professor Clifford would say that a faith is not good for anything, but even evil, unless it represents well-calculated probabilities which yield a strong balance of evidence in its favour. This is clearly erroneous, but even substituting for it the truer rationale of faith, reli- gious belief turns out to be this,—a trust in superhuman beings and in those who had closer relations than we have with such -superhuman beings, which is either, in some important respects, • only preliminary and provisional, or else one which has not been successfully impaired by, but has survived, a frank and full con- sideration of the various objections and arguments in arrest of belief forced on us by competent criticism. Is anything like absolute .confidence to be founded on either state of mind, and especially on
• the former? May it not be said that, since we shall never be able to anticipate the new objections which new ages and new investiga- tions may bring against our faith, even those who have examined all they have fallen in with, must not regard their faith as anything more than provisional ? Still more, may it not be said that those whose learning, time, and opportunity have not enabled them to do even as much as that, have no right to ignore the difficulties which they have not even gauged ? Should not both classes limit them- selves to saying, ' Our mind is possessed with a belief which further knowledge might weaken or remove, and therefore, even while clinging to it, we must never forget to remind ourselves that some day it may vanish, and be succeeded by an equally legitimate unbelief?' Perhaps the true reply to these questions will best bd indicated by first putting another. Would it be right for one who feels the deepest and most intimate love and rever- ence for a parent or friend, to try and qualify that feeling by representing to himself the possibility that, under certain cir- cumstance-s, the impressions on which those feelings are grounded might be wholly changed, and his love and reverence be succeeded by complete indifference or even dislike? Of course such changes are always possible. "What has happened to others may happen to us, and in the case of feelings which depend on the mutual conduct of two or more variable creatures, no one can be absolutely certain that they will never change. But is it true that the habitual realising of this possibility,— the practice of giving it a substantial weight in our minds apart from any sign that the anticipation is likely to be fulfilled would make us better friends or better sons and daughters ? What we think any wise man would say of such a proposal is this, —' These affections are the best and noblest part of human nature ; they lead to the life which is best worth living ; they cannot exist in an atmosphere of constant distrust and suspicion ; therefore the habitual contemplation of these abstract possibilities, even if it be solely due to the desire for intellectual completeness and a full survey of all contingencies, is a folly which endangers what is best in us, for the sake of a fanciful width of view which can never come near being a full survey of the horizon of possibilities. It is a waste of the highest life,—whether joy or sorrow, as the case may be,—for the sake of a trivial diminution of the intellec- tual inadequacy of a survey which cannot in any case even approach exhaustiveness. Let, then, the trust produced by the growth of the affections, remain unchallenged by any habit of dwelling on abstract possibilities of change simply because theyare possibilities. It would be just as wise to diminish the energy with which you undertake any one of life's duties by saturating yourself with the fancy that if you were to die, as you might, in the middle of it, it would not much matter how it had been begun.' If that be good-sense and good- faith too, as we think it is, the applicability of the considerations it involves to the case of religious faith is obvious enough. Of course, it is true that, as there are many who, from passionately believing in God, have come to be deniers of God, we, not fully knowing ourselves, may come to be counted amongst them. Of course, it is true that, as there are very many who from passionate love for and faith in Christ have come to hold the whole Christian story a fable, we, not fully knowing the drifts and tendencies of our own nature, may some day find ourselves amongst them. But it is not wisdom, but folly, to discount this bare possibility by dwelling on it, while the love, and reverence, and trust are living affections within us, filling us with a loyalty to which such anticipations are a treason. But then such loyalty as this does not imply—indeed is as far as possible from implying—that we should obstinately refuse to take in and examine fully, so far as we are competent to do so, all the facts, or even alleged facts, which are advanced by men who have ceased to be believers, as their reasons for ceasing to believe. A man who was afraid to look into the reasons alleged by another for his casting off a friendship with a common friend, would really have ceased to be loyal in his heart to his own friendship. We cannot retain our trust in God and Christ, and yet admit to ourselves that we are afraid to examine the grounds of those who have ceased to put trust in God and Christ, —unless indeed these grounds be beyond our capacity for judgment. Of course it is quite right to refuse to examine what we could not understand. But even so, how should the knowledge that certain statements which are quite beyond our grasp, are believed by many to be relevant to their disbelief, affect our belief ? So far as these statements bear upon questions of scholarship and history, we think they should always inspire a certain_ amount of real reserve. It is an obvious rule that those who have not examined and cannot examine the true issue of a controversy, ought not to feel the confidence which is the result of examination. They must necessarily balance authority by authority, and keep room for either conviction on matters which superior learning must decide. But within all these questions of scholarship and learning, the existence of the personal life of a divine inspirer of conscience, and of the personal spell and imposing spiritual majesty of Christ, remain as clear of either history or philosophy as the existence of our own friends is clear of either history or philosophy. Some people would tell us that the existence of other beings than ourselves is a question of philosophy,—that if we could disprove the existence of an external world, we should. have no reason to believe in the existence of any conscious being but ourselves. But we all know that this is trash,—that cer- tainty has no meaning at all, if we are not as certain of our friends' existence as we are of our own. Such philosophical cavils should weigh no more than the abstract doubts which may always be suggested, that life may turn out to be an illusion altogether, —a dream which we have been dreaming, and from which we shall waken up to find that all the assumptions on which we supposed we were acting were as fictitious as the actions them- selves. The true attitude, we take it, towards the arguments by which we know others to have been made sceptics, is to sound and gauge them thoroughly, if we can ; and if we cannot, to hold our belief in reserve on any point which we can see must be seriously affected by considerations which are beyond us ;—but not to concede for a moment that the attestations of our conscience and affections to the existence of that righteousness which is the ' ground of all righteousness, and that love which is the fountain of all love, and their highest manifestation in human life, should be shaken by the mere knowledge that other men exist who dispute that attestation, and who do not feel these affections. That would be to paralyse the life we have, in deference to those who have it not.
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