THE FAITH OF CENTURIES.*
THIS volume belongs to a class of literature characteristic of our own day. It treats of religious beliefs of vital importance, and of their groundwork, in a popular way, in a manner suited to the constantly increasing number of those students of the problems it handles, who are in no sense philosophical or theological specialists. And yet the names of its joint authors are a guarantee that, however popular the writing may be, there is no loose thinking. It may in this respect be classed with the Gifford lectures at Glasgow University, or with the Sunday lectures of the American Professor Cook, although the essays and addresses here collected are not (as in the instances referred to) written by one author or with a unity of plan, but are detached, and are contributed by many. Some of them—as Canon Scott Holland's suggestive address on " Faith in Jesus Christ "—are only corrected versions of the shorthand-writer's reports. They are of unequal value. The first essay on " Faith in God," by Mr. Chandler, strikes us as a really remarkable contribution to that informal philosophy of Religious Belief which John Henry Newman first sketched in his Oxford University Sermons, preached by him as Fellow of Oriel. Admirable also as a popular essay on a theme • The Faith of Centuries : Essays and Addresses on Subjects Connected with the Christian Raligion. By Various Writers. London ; J. Nisbet and Co. [7s. ed.] treated in Lux Mundi with greater fullness and precision, is the Bishop of Rochester's " Preparation in History for Christ." Less satisfactory are the contributions on " Faith in Immortality" and the "Knowledge of God." Archdeacon Sinclair in an essay called the " Kingdom of Heaven " writes on the Church of Christ. The Head-Master of Harrow gives us a speculation on the nature of "Heaven." Bishop Barry writes on "Christ in History." The writers belong to various schools of thought, and the book represents, on the whole, the common measure of belief among earnest and moderate members of the Church of England, rather than the distinctive tenets of any one party.
The essay on " Faith in God" appears to us to be inspired by a general conception of the nature of proof which M. Maurice Blondel has urged with much force upon Frenchmen in his great work, L'Action,—a thought which in a different form was exhibited by the late Dean Church in his lectures on the Psalms and the Vedas. This conception we will give in our own way before quoting Mr. Chandler's somewhat different exposition of it. It amounts to this :—that no purely speculative philosophy of Theism can be commensurate with any Theism worth the name. Theism is essentially a principle of action. And while it may claim a primd-facie probability regarded as merely a speculative explanation of the universe, material, mental, and moral, its true strength and its main justification lie in its concrete embodiments in the course of social evolution. It is the action of Theism as a living belief which has alike justified its claim, and gradually purified the doctrine itself, and defined what at first was a vague aspiration of the religious instinct. The deep trust in primitive religious impulses has led, in those who acted them out, to the gradual purification of their expression, and unveiled the truth which underlay them. The man of science has an unconquerable faith in uniformity,—in the fact that there is a law giving unity to phenomena, at first sight detached and disconnected. He is sensitively ready to note the most probable unifying hypotheses. If he has found a hypothesis which explains very much, be does not at once abandon it when it proves at variance with some freshly observed phenomena. On the contrary, this is to him only an indication that though on the right track he has not yet reached the exact limitations and scope of the hypothesis. He proceeds to amend it in the sight of fresh facts until it really corresponds with them, and proves to be the key to yet farther discoveries. This is a gradual process, parallel to a process which is almost instinctive in the primary laws of life. We act on the impulse given by the initial vital principle, which is in some degree adapted to surrounding conditions. But the habits of the organism, as life advances, become greatly modified by the environment. Energy learns to expend itself to the best account. Habits are formed which save useless expenditure of spontaneity. The direction of least resistance is learnt. The spontaneous impulses thus become gradually far more accurately adapted to the pur- poses of life. More methodically, the same process obtains with scientific inquiry. A pregnant, but not wholly adequate hypothesis, like that of Natural Selection, runs the gauntlet of fresh observations and is supplemented or amended in the light of our increasing knowledge of facts. In religion a similar process takes place partly instinctively, partly methodically. The justification in each case is in results. The moving impulse is faith. In the living organism action involves a faith that the instinctive energy and power of self•adaptation will justify themselves by results. Scientific insight gives a similar faith in respect to a fruitful hypothesis, and so does the religious impulse in respect of the primary religious beliefs. The growth of Theism as it is known to Christians, with its definite embodi- ment of the highest ethical ideals and of personal relations between God and the soul, out of the cruder forms of belief in the supernatural, has been the gradual development of the
primitive religious impulse acting on and reacted on by the facts of life. The tribal god, the divinities of doubtful morality, the distant god of the Vedas, have gradually given place in the most highly civilised nations to the One Holy God of the Christians, with those personal relations to the soul already contemplated in the noblest of the Psalms. We have stated the argument, as has already been said, in our own way, which is not quite identical with its statement in the work before us. Let us now hear Mr. Chandler :— " Faith, then, presents us with ideals of truth : knowledge is the realisation of these ideals. Take a simple instance. We see
a child playing with 'blocks,' square bits of wood, each painted with a fragment of something, a head of a man, a door of a house, a trunk of a tree, &c. He places them together in faith— that is, in the belief that there is some plan by which they can be connected into a satisfactory picture. In themselves they are meaningless and ridiculous ; but he works on with the conviction that they must fit in somehow. This conviction is inspired by faith, and realised in the picture which results at last. In this case, as in others, faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen' (Heb. xi. 1). When the hope is fulfilled, and the things are seen, knowledge takes the place of faith. Here, then, two truths would seem to emerge: (1) that faith, far from being irrational, is itself the source from which all rational inquiry springs ; and (2) that faith is temporary, stimulating effort, and superseded by achievement. All science has its roots in faith. Without faith men would have rested content with the bare facts' reported by the various senses; but faith insists that they shall be made subject to law and explanation, and hence comes science. Faith, then, must not be contrasted with reason, since it is rational to the core. It may profitably be contrasted with knowledge, as the process is contrasted with the result. Faith is the rational pur- suit of truth ; knowledge the rational attainment of truth. And so, as we look at the great men of science, we see that faith is the very breath of their life. They believe that there is some great rational law which connects and explains what are now mere dis- jointed items of truth. Their ideas as to the nature of that law are crude and unsatisfactory at first. Their theory will not work ; it does not explain things ; the facts reject it ; the tight-shut doors of truth do not fly open at their talisman But they do not despair ; their faith does not fail : they recast their hypothesis, modify, alter, enrich it. Again and again they manipulate their blocks with a clearer and more luminous picture before them, until at last the stubborn facts group and relate themselves ; the ideal of the mind is realised before the eyes ; the magic formula which induces order has been pronounced, and faith has given birth to new knowledge. Thus, Darwin believed in the kinship and common origin of species now quite separate and distinct, and set himself to find the law of their derivation. If their parentage was the same, how is it that the members of the family diverge so widely in after-ages ? ' Variation through natural selection ' is the answer, the hypothesis of faith, which by vast and patient labour is shown to fit and explain the most alien and discordant facts. It was only by unconquerable faith in system and order, and in the ultimate connectedness of things, that the greatest dis- covery of our age was won. Or we return to practical life and watch the philanthropist and the social reformer. Both are occupied with 'the substance of things hoped for.' The philanthropist has before his mind a glowing pic- ture of man's nature as it might be, pure and upright and unselfish ; and inspired by that, he sets to work upon his facts,' the men and women so unideal at present, in whose lives that picture has got to be reproduced. Again and again the facts reject him, defy him, laugh at him. He thought they would understand that he was sent to work their deliverance, but they understood it not. But at last if this faith holds out, it proves and substantiates itself. In the soul of at least some of his sub- jects calm succeeds to storm ; wild thoughts, incoherent impulses, passionate desires, come together and find their place ; the unity of a man's nature asserts itself ; the outlines of a ground-plan grow visible ; the ideal picture of an orderly human life is repro- duced on the fleshly tablets of the heart."
Our space will not allow us to comment on the missing links—as they seem to us—in this suggestive argument. Let us pass to what is, in some respects, the most striking essay in the book,—the Bishop of Rochester's. If Mr. Chandler's argument suggests to us Theism as a great truth gradually reached by the evolution of human knowledge, the Bishop of Rochester sketches with great power those developments in the history of the civilised world which led up to Christianity. There is, in fact, a curious unity of argument suggested in various departments at the present moment by the evolution theory. On the one hand, the fact of evolution becomes more and more plain,—the fact that the present world, material, social, religions, is the outcome of definable antecedents, gradually leading up to the existing condition of things. On the other hand, it becomes more and more evident that we cannot find in the earlier and the lesser the full explanation of the later and the greater. The non-rational primitive nebula cannot give us the adequate cause of rational man, though we may believe the inorganic, the organic, the sentient, and the rational to follow on each other by a gradual process without any startling break. We may believe that something like fetichism gradually developed in some races into the Theism of St. Augustine; yet we entirely decline to regard fetichism as oontaining the full potentiality of Theism. So, too, we may trace the history which led up to Christ, and yet be all the more confident that his ante. cedents in history never could have produced him. This is the Bishop's argument, and we must allow ourselves space in conclusion for a striking passage in which he illustrates one of his main positions
"The Graeoo-Roxuan preparation is brilliant and majestic,
adorned with noble discernment, with marvellous power ; but yet just when we should say that the progress had grown com- plete, and run through its stages, there comes a ghastly corruption. It has lost all the seeds of liberty ; it has no conviction of truth ; it is even beginning to lose all political power, for all power has been drawn from the provinces and centred in Rome ; and even the heart, which had gathered all to itself, begins in its turn to show signs of weakness. And then on the other side, the great Hebrew history has ended in this obscure and squalid and despised Jew, with some mystery yet of spiritual truth about him. These two, side by side, have each their own expectation. But how unlike in result ! The Roman expects that the empire will be eternal, and the Greek mind within the Roman world is for ever looking for some new thing, seeking after wisdom,' but in its own narrow way, by the experiments, tried so often and so often failing, of merely intellectual speculation. On the Jewish side there is the expectation of the permanence of the Law, which they regarded, because it was Divine, as eternal ; and along with it the hope of some king- dom which should give glory to Israel, which should be ushered in by a sign from heaven of a palpable and material kind, which should take the shape of a conquering monarchy before which the nations should bow down, and which should make the sons of the Gentiles ministers to the triumphant Jews- And these two, side by side. have Listed long enough to show what they could both do ; they have been in full contact with each other long enough to defeat any suggestion which might be made to us, that though Christ is not the result of the Gentile world, nor the result of the Jewish world, Ho is the result of the wedlock and blending between the two. No ; this, too, had been tried, and had had no small results. The preface to St. John's Gospel, with its deep Hebrew faith influenced by Greek knowledge and borrowing language from Greek thought, is one witness which you will at once recall. The presence in the synagogues of the fringe of inquirers, of searchers after truth, of convinced believers (like Cornelius the Cen- turion) in a God of righteousness, were the work of that con. tact of Jew and Gentile in the Roman world. These results were valuable building material, but they were neither a Gospel nor a Christ. Both sides of the world, with all that they had, were palpably dying and failing. They both needed something of life to enter into them, to organise what of itself has no motive power, to make a new beginning, to build up, as life does so- wonderfully build up, the material which is found to hand. They want a touch from God. And then at that moment comes some- thing wholly unlike what either expected ; there comes a lowly One who is made high; there comes One, who, declaring Himself the Way, the Truth, and the Life—the Way which perfects all that the Jew had sought in the Law, the Truth which satisfies all that the Greek had aimed at in his philosophy, but also that which was neither Jew nor Greek : the Life. There comes a Divine Saviour — a mustard-seed, 'smallest of all seeds,' the mustard-seed, which becomes the great tree, and fills with its branches the whole earth. And in Him the Jews, who were Jews indeed, the best of the nation,. find their spiritual representative, recognise their King, and see the fulfilment, beyond all their hopes, of the glory of their prophecies. On the other side the Greek witnesses, for example, Justin Martyr, who had himself begun with Greek philosophy, open their eyes to a light which to their own feeling (and we must take from them their testimony, for it is a testi- mony of experience) illuminates all their minds and consciences with joy and light : ' Christ, the wisdom of God ; Christ, the power of God.' Then, when He has come, there pass but a very few years, and by a judgment which is typical to all time of the judgment of God upon the guilty and upon the apostate, and amid terrors which appal the world, Jerusalem falls. Then,. too, after the lapse of a somewhat longer time (three or four centuries), because that was the time needed for the leaven to work in the lump, for the tree to spread out its branches, for the mustard-seed to grow in the world in spite of every perse- cution—then the Roman Empire breaks up and passes away like a shadow, but the word of the Lord abideth for ever."
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