MR. VAUGHAN ON CHRISTLLN EVIDENCES.* Tins little volume is a
model of that honest and reverent criticism of the Bible which it is not only the right but the duty of English clergymen in such times as these to put forth from the pulpit. We do not hesitate to say that the hold of our Church over the people of England depends more at the present moment on teaching the people the true attitude of honest, learned, and disciplined minds towards the letter of the Bible, than on any other work which is one of human judgment at all. If they are left to believe, as Canon MacNeile and his school would have them believe, that his- torical error, or human passion, or scientific ignorance, once detected in the Bible, overthrows the whole credibility of Revelation, we shall have to pass through another period of universal scepticism, turd then perhaps another reaction towards credulous literalism, before the minds of practical Englishmen can hit the truth that Revelation is the shining of a divine light through a semi-trans- parent human medium, which sometimes distorts, and sometimes dis- colours, and here and there even wholly eclipses that light, but which only shows its need of light the more, the more it has this power to bedim the divine lustre and refract its rays. Whatever may be the condition of our country parishes, in large towns, like Leicester where Mr. Vaughan's duty lies, it is absurd to suppose the more intelligent of all classes are not aware of the general nature of the objections now freely urged against the Christian creed, many of them freely admitted by all thinking Christians though not by them believed to be objections, indeed often regarded as confirmations of their faith. It is far too common to suppose that criticism is not possible in popular sermons,—even criticism which takes up the real intellectual and moral difficulties in the minds of unlearned people, and treats them with complete sincerity and thorough- ness. Mr. Vaughan has shown in this volume that it is not so. Simpler sermons we have never read ; sermons fuller of that faith in a living Word of God speaking to us directly no less than through the Bible we have never read ; nor have we often met with any which seem to us to speak more to the purpose of the nature of the actual imperfections of the Bible, their significance, and their insignificance,—their great significance as teaching us not
• Christian Evidences and the Bak. Being Sermons presched is St. Martin's Church, Leicester, with a Preface and Notes, by the Bev. David James Vaughan, M.A. London: Mactaillau. to rely on any Christianity short of the living Christ, and their insignificance as tending in any degree to upset the great cardinal revelation of the Bible which was completed as an historical act— though it can never be completed as a spiritual act—in the Incar- nation.
Mr. Vaughan describes with great simplicity and beauty and, as we believe, with perfect fidelity, the immense chasm between what is now called orthodoxy and the faith which made all things new to the fast Christians.
"First, as to the great simplicity of the primitive faith. The early Church received the materials of its faith from those who had seen Jesus ;—bad lived with him, walked with him, talked with him, had seen him die, seen him (as they affirmed) after his resurrection, seen him ascend into heave; seen the fiery tongues which attested the descent of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. The first Apostles of Christ were, above everything else, witnesses of his resurrection ;' and the faith of their first converts was, above everything else, a faith in certain definite facts ; those facts all gathering around, and centering in, the person of a Man who was known amongst his cotemporaries as 'Jesus the prophet of Nazareth of Galilee.' The cardinal fact, upon which everything else hinged, was His resurrection. They believed that, having died upon the cross and having been laid in the grave, He did actually and positively rise again from the dead. And mainly from this fact, harmonizing as it did with every other fact relating to Him, they drew the great inference that He was indeed that Christ or Messiah of whom the ancient Jewish prophets had spoken,—the true everlasting King and Priest of me; the Son of the living God. Having attained to this standing-point, and being thus, in a manner of speaking, to use St. Paul's pregnant phrase, ' in Christ,' they looked above them, and they looked around them, with altered eyes. It was a new creation.' The old things had passed away ; and, behold, all things had become new, and all things of God." In the face of Jesus Christ' they found, as St. Paul says in our text, 'the light of the knowledge of the glory of God.' Jesus Christ, the Son of God, had revealed the Father. It was God himself who had shined in their hearts.' The darkness had passed away, and the true light had come. They beheld in Jesus the glory of God's own grace ; righteousness, and love. They saw how good and just He was ; how He was seeking his human creatures ; seeking them at infinite cost, and with unwearied pains ; seeking them in order to recon- cile them, heart and soul, to himself. 'God himself,' they saw and said, ' was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.' The Will, that ruled the Universe, was a reconciling Will ; a Will that was everlastingly at war with the sin and the ignorance that degrade and corrupt and are the curse of men, and was seeking to save them from all these and to bring them into blessed peace and harmony with Itself. The message, of which they found themselves the bearers, expressed itself in such touch- ing words as these Now then weave ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us : we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye recon- ciled to God.' Thus their faith in Christ brought a new heaven around. them ; or, rather, opened the true kingdom of heaven to them. But the same faith transfigured earth as well as opened heaven. Henceforth,' St. Paul writes, we know no man after the flesh :' we cannot shut our eyes any longer to the fact that as surely as we stand in fleshly relations to some, so surely do we stand in spiritual relations to all ;—that as surely as God is our Father, so surely are men our brothers. It was the true doctrine of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity ; which, however much it might have been prostituted by designing demagogues or degraded into an excuse for licence and riot, is true sti1L Tlie Christian watch- word is still Liberty, Equality, Fraternity :—Liberty ; liberty not to please ourselves, but to serve God and do his will :—Equality; for God is no respecter of persons, and in his sight all men are equal :—Fraternity; for all men are brothers, and must live accordingly, not in selfish isola- tion, but in kindly mutual helpfulness."
And Mr. Vaughan very truly infers that if this be the true ac- count of the first reception of Christ's Gospel, its authority in all times must be founded on the same fact,—its gladdening and liberating influence over the soul of man. " If the Gospel of Christ," he says, "fails to meet that joyful acceptance which is its due, so far from saying, as some men are saying now, Oh it must stand upon authority ; it cannot stand, it was never intended to stand, upon its own merits,' we shall feel bound most solemnly to consider whether, after all, the fault does not lie mainly, if not entirely, in our manifestation or presentment of it. Certainly SL Paul lends no countenance to the notion that we must first receive the Gospel on authority, however much it may contra- dict our natural instincts, our reason, our conscience. Had it. been so, his own Apostolical mission must have been an utter failure, and all our efforts to spread the Gospel now must fail also." Accordingly Mr. Vaughan lays it down as the true task of Christian criticism not to browbeat or overrule, but to inves- tigate thoroughly and remove by satisfying, the intellectual and moral scruples which intervene between the spirit of man and the faith it longs to accept ; and admirably does he treat one or two typical cases of those difficulties in this little book. He does not hesitate, as no candid and educated man can, to admit discrepan- cies and errors in the historical and scientific matter of the Bible, nor, on the other hand, to recognize the obvious moral short- comings of some of the poems, such as Deborah's Song and several of the Psalms, in weaving the vindictive feelings (excusa- ble in them) with the diviner substance of their inspiration. " Prophets and Psalmists," he says, " were men of like passions with ourselves, and the light which they had was not the light of
the glorious Gospel of Christ, but a light less and lower than that. We must judge their actions and their words, as actions and words, by the standard of the Gospel, and commend or withhold our commendation accordingly. But we have no right to judge the actors and speakers themselves by a standard which had not yet been given." With the more serious class of difficulties, where the Scripture writers attribute directly feelings and commands to God which seem to contradict that perfect revelation of Him which we have in Jesus Christ, — he deals more individually. Every such case, he says, requires minute investigation, and he believes that in most cases it will be found that we have either misinterpreted the sacred writer or put unauthorized inferences of our own into the narrative. By way of illustration he examines minutely the story in 2 Samuel xxi. 1-14, concerning the exe,cu- tion of Saul's innocent sons at the demand of the Gibeonites simply to stay a famine, —an execution which is generally supposed to have been authorized by God, on the ground of the passage, "Then there was a famine in the days of David three years, year after year. And David inquired of the Lord, and the Lord answered,—' It is for. Saul and for his bloody house, because he slew the Gibeonites.' " Mr. Vaughan shows reason to believe that this was the regular inquiry officially addressed through the high priest, that the high priest of the time was Abiathar, who had alone escaped from Saul's massacre of the priests, " and who would bo almost sure to entertain feelings of the bitterest hatred and truly Oriental revenge towards Saul and his house," so that the answer may have been dictated by these feelings, and not have been really received from God. But whatever be the true account of the matter, he points out the absolute impossibility of attributing to God any authority for "the greatest abomination of heathendom, human sacrifice."
But while Mr. Vaughan is an honest and plain speaker con- cerning such difficulties as these, there is none of that morbid appetite for difficulties, that tendency to decide really doubtful points against the Bible, which is observable in many Chris- tian scholars who have been revolted by the insincerity of the apologists. He discusses the question of the predictive character of prophecy, for instance, with perfect fairness, deciding that there are at least one or two unquestionable cases of predictive prophecy, though many of the alleged instances may be prophetic without being predictive. With regard to the greatest instance, our Lord's prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem, Mr. Vaughan points out that it depends not merely on the chapters directly describing it, and which the German critics say had assumed their present form after the event, but on the whole tissue of the connected parables, in all of which it is stated that the wicked men who put to death the Lord's Son were destroyed by His armies, and their place and nation taken away.
We have met with no sermons which have seemed to us better adapted to prepare the mind of intelligent people to replace that exaggerated worship of the Bible which has hitherto been too much identified with piety by the orthodox, by a profound rever- ence for it as the record of events the true meaning and proportion of which can, nevertheless, be taught to our spirits only by the living Spirit of Christ.
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