BOOKS.
DR. MARTINEAU'S ECCLESIASTICAL AND HISTORICAL ESSAYS.*
Tuts second volume of Dr. Martineau's Essays takes us back some fifty years, beyond the days when the Church of Rome re-established its regular hierarchy in England, and Dr. Martineau wrote in the Westminster Review that brilliant but too ad captandum paper on " The Battle of the Churches," which is the best specimen of what we may call his West- minster Review style, not, in our opinion, either his most characteristic or his best. There is a story that the late Cardinal Newman (long before he was a Cardinal) sent his sermon on the re-establishment of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, " The Second Spring," to one of his old Oxford friends, and said in effect : " I send you a sermon which I have just published, not because you will like it, for I do not like it myself,—it is too flashy,—but merely because you will take a kindly interest in it as mine." We rather agree with Dr. Newman that his sermon on " The Second Spring," with all its eloquence, was too " flashy." And we are inclined to think that Dr. Martineau's essay on the same occasion had the same defect. It too was " flashy," and in passages might even be called "smart," a quality which Dr. Martineau really dislikes, and has taught others to dislike.. But the literary atmosphere of the Westminster Review in those days was contagious. The paper is brilliant enough, and, as usual with Dr. Martineau, has plenty of hard thinking in it ; but it aims too much at catching the popular ear, and would give a very inadequate impression of the breadth of his sympathies and the depth of • Essays, Reviews, and Addresses. By James Martineau. Selected and revised by the Author. Yol. II.—Ecclesiastical; Historical. London; Longman and Co.
his religious faith. The essay on "Europe since the Re- formation," a review of Dr. Newman's Lectures on Anglican
Difficulties, which is a reply to Dr. Newman from the Pro- testant point of view, written for the Prospective Review, is a very much more satisfactory paper. It brings out the weak
side of the Roman Catholic Church with extraordinary ability, as the following short extract will sufficiently show :—
"This transference of both political and intellectual empire from Catholic to Protestant countries is the more remarkable, because it is the result of no deliberate aim, and is the unforeseen, incidental consequence of an irresistible development. All the advantage of well-defined purpose, of matchless organisation, of united will, of consistent theory, of practised skill in government, have been on the side of the old religion ; which accordingly has succeeded in maintaining and even extending its ground, only at the cost of letting slip the noblest elements of our world. It has gained its own ends, but they are eclipsed by higher, in which it has no share. It has consolidated itself, by loosening and debasing everything else. Protestantism, on the other hand, impulsive, inconsistent, divided; possessed by a spirit which it did not understand ; aiming at one thing and realising another ; resistless in attack, embarrassed in defence ; ever proposing to persecute, yet obliged to liberate and redeem ; scared by freedom, yet driven to be its foremost champion ; sworn to orthodoxy, yet the parent of every heresy, has been the manifest instrument, in the hands of Providence, for the unconscious achievement of the sublimest ends. Like all the grandest and least perishable powers in this world, it has failed of its own objects, but accom- plished better tasks of which it never dreamt. It has been ever loosening its own structure, but consolidating every society on which it acts. It has no self-knowledge ; has always mistaken its own nature and place in history : but it has a true eye for reading, the true hand for using, the facts of human life and the administration of God. It is veracious, and puts its trust, not in a system, but in the truth. It has a conscience, which it dis- ciplines to speak for itself, and will not part with to another, and so, with but guerilla forces both of men and thought, gathered from the untrodden mountains and retired homesteads of the earth, it defies the mighty legions which Rome has disciplined for ages ; and in their very face, wrests kingdoms from their grasp, and calls up a new and more human world, with a diviner spirit to rule over it. God therefore has pronounced that Sacerdotalism must cease to rule, and go out at the lower end of human life." (pp. 267-68.) Nothing could be more vigormis than that ; but we suspect that if Dr. Martineau were re-writing the essay now, he would hardly be able to ignore a good deal that may be said on the other side as to the apparently decomposing influence of the principle of private judgment on the moral as well as the intellectual convictions of the day. He would recognise, we think, that in almost all Protestant Churches, the loss of genuine faith and the progress of agnosticism has been very rapid, and that it has often resulted in a tendency to a relaxed morality, and a willingness to allow, and even justify, freedom of divorce, which is a very terrible set-off against the intellectual progress manifest amongst the ad- herents of the Protestant Churches in Germany, the United States, and even in England. And we think he would probably recognise also, that one of the most powerful antiseptics which has arrested the progress of this disintegration of moral conviction, has been the presence of those Catholic Churches which, though they have shown their worst side to the world in countries where they have had no real competitors, have shown their best side to the world where they have been surrounded on all sides by powerful Protestant rivals. Indeed, nothing seems to us more difficult than to deny that, while the tendency of the Roman Church, when left to itself, has been to Obscurantism and mental and literary petrifaction generally, the tendency of Protestantism, when left to itself, has been to Agnosticism, both spiritual and moral. Dr. Martineau shows a good deal of consciousness at times of this disintegrating process. In the interesting essay on "The New Affinities of Faith," where he shows himself so anxious to advocate a kind of federal Church in which all sorts of Christians, with many different private faiths, may yet worship together, in order that they may learn more accurately what religious sympathies they have with other Churches, he dilates on the danger of historical forms of worship as very apt to reconcile men to the habit of expressing convictions which they do not really hold : —" Language consecrated by ancient piety," he says, " and turned into music by tender and solemn memories, ceases to report distinctly to the mind its quality of truth or falsehood, and procures indulgence for prayers and propositions from which, if fresh, the same intelligence would at once recoil."
No doubt it is so ; but which of the two is really in fault here, the intelligence which would recoil from the language in which Christian piety formerly expressed itself, if the same thoughts were put into fresh words, or the in- telligence which accepts reverently, as from the piety of the past, a legacy of meaning which it could not formulate for itself unless it had the authority of the past to guide it P Surely if there was any true Christian revelation, in even Dr. Martineau's somewhat limited sense of the term, it is true and not false that there is a great deal in the past which ought to dominate the convictions of the present, a great deal of truth which we could not put into words now half as good or effective as those which were chosen for it when the Church was fresh from our Lord's teaching. Does not Dr. Martineau virtually admit this when he says ?—
" Explain it as we may, there would seem to be something transient, and incapable of passing into institution, in the higher action of God's Spirit in history. Again and again religious movements, springing from an impulse truly Divine, and pro. claiming the purest spiritual trusts, prove unable to sustain themselves at the height of their first inspiration, and, like Quakerism and Methodism, descend to a lower ground,—a ground which, with or without the originating fervour, they can permanently command,—viz., that of a specific creed and an established discipline. And so, that which is born of the spirit' dies down into a theological school, or a philanthropic habit, or an ecclesiastical organisation." (p. 506.) Surely that is a lesson against trusting the present to reject all the faith of the past that it cannot at once, from its own limited experience, verify and attest, and not in favour of that disintegrating process. And at times Dr. Martineau appears to feel this, and protests his deep sympathy with tendencies in religion, which theologically he finds himself compelled to reject. But that is just where we find him inconsistent with himself. We cannot think that the impressive symbolism of things divine which he finds in a theology which he rejects, is really any adequate explanation of the influence which he admits that theology to have exerted over the human spirit ; and though we heartily agree in his protest against the attempt to frighten the soul into believing what it cannot heartily believe, by holding up before it the terrible prospect of pure atheism, we hold that his own rationalistic explanations of the deeper Christian theology are no explanations at all. Nothing can be better or more powerfully put than the pro- test to which we have just referred :— " Far worse, however, than this abuse of hypothesis,—to which all researches are more or less exposed,—is the favourite argument of theologians,—the appeal to fear. Either Catholic or Atheist, take your choice, says Dr. Newman. Either the Incarnation or Pantheism, as you may see in Renan, says M. Guizot. The men of newer science too faithfully imitate the tone, and say in their turn, You must either come over to Darwin and us, or go to church with the rest, while churches remain.' Come whence it may, this threat of consequences betrays a mind estranged alike from philosophy and faith ; a mind struggling in the currants of partisan opinion and not surrendered to the ultimate reality of things. Why try to frighten us with images of terror, which, if we have to embrace them, will be terror no more, and if we blindly
fly them, will send us to no security of truth ? If there were no God, would you have us still believe in him ? Ware he no more than the impersonal order of the universe, would you have us think
of him as personal ? If Christ were simply Man, would you have us suppose him God, for fear of resembling Ronan ? And if
eternal things should actually be as the Church prayers say, would you, young naturalists, shame us out of our response, simply to make a louder shout that Darwin has explained it all ? There is no more certain indication of a vitiated intellect, bereft of its natural trust and reverence, than this attempt to regulate belief by antipathy and alarm." (p. 468.)
But there is no appeal to fear in asserting that if the logic of rationalism leaves no firm basis for Christian faith at all, and the mind yet springs to meet Christ's revelation as some- thing which comes from above, we are right in rejecting the logic of rationalism, and accepting from the theology of revelation its own principles and methods as well as its central truth. No one can deny the great power of this volume of Dr. Martineau's Essays, but it seems to us the power of a great mind more or less at war with itself, and constantly justify- ing at one and the same time a most spiritual faith, and yet a most sceptical reason that dissolves away the story of the Christian revelation till it becomes a mere buoy to mark the site of a sunken wreck.
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