MR. GLADSTONE ON AUTHORITY AND BELIEF.
IN the opening article of the Nineteenth Century, Mr. Glad- stone discusses a question which has probably a closer con- nection with the peculiarities of the nineteenth century than any other he could have raised,—we mean the weight that should be attached to the principle of authority in the formation of belief. He goes back to the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis's " Essay on the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion," and reminds us how much we owe of our beliefs and of our guidance in life to the principle of authority, and that it is just as bad sense to con- trast the habit of deferring to authority with the love for truth, as it would be to contrast the habit of deferring to sign-posts showing the way to London, with the love of London. Authority is but one way of finding out the truth, or at least what may be pre- sumed to be the truth for those who have no faculty or time for investigating the truth at first hand. And so far, at all events, Mr. Gladstone is certainly right. No traveller would plunge into the investigation of the competence of the persons who set up the various sign-posts on his way to tell him the truth about his road, and still less, into the question of the sincerity of their wish to tell him the truth. If he went to work in that sort of way with all the various sources • of his information, he would certainly never reach London at all in time for any such purpose as would ordinarily take him there. He must use the statements of the sign-posts and the oral information he might elicit, without scruple, if he is to make the best of his way. In other words, he must act on the principle of deferring to authority, even at the coat of sometimes being betrayed into a wrong turning, if he is to reach his destination with the least possible loss of time. Nevertheless, however, the limits of this trust are pretty clear. Supposing the traveller to be travelling, not to. London, but from it, and to be bending his way towards some remote and little-known place, to which few people are in the habit of going, he would probably think it needful to test any oral information he might receive as to his right way, by a few questions intended to satisfy himself that his informant was really acquainted with the place he was in search of, and had a practical acquaintance with the way. Hence he would distinguish at once between the authority for a route constantly followed, and the correctness or incorrectness of which must have been re- peatedly verified, and the authority for a route rarely or never practically tested. The same prirfciples apply to more recondite matters. We implicitly trust each man in his own special calling only so far as we have reason to believe that he has constantly found his means adequate to his ends, in other words, that he knows his way to attain a particular object, and is habitually suc- ceeding in attaining it. Directly we approach questions the answers to which do not admit of the same kind of direct veri- fication, we find it needful either to limit our confidence in the authorities who profess to conduct us, or to base it upon care- ful investigations of our own. So it is with our historians. It is very rarely possible to say generally that this historian has rendered the facts truthfully, while the other has rendered them falsely. Almost all judgments on such writers, to be true, must be qualified by a great number of reservations, till it becomes almost as much a matter of specific attainment and quali- fication to be a sound authority as to the relative merits of historians, as to be a sound historian yourself. Just as when the traveller's journey is to a little-known and out- of-the-way place, he takes care to ask questions before fol- lowing absolutely advice given him, so when he wants guidance about matters in which few are competent judges, he must him- self know enough to enable him, at the very least, to satisfy him- self that his informant in all probability knows more. It is in this sense that Sir G. C. Lewis points out that the choice of an authority is as much an exercise of the judgment as the adoption of an opinion on argumentative grounds ; indeed, it is the adoption of an opinion on argumentative grounds, — an opinion as to the trustworthiness of a counsellor. And of course it must be admitted that to choose guides at all in matters admitting of no direct verification is a matter of much more doubt and difficulty, than to choose guides whose capacity and trustworthiness is clearly verified or clearly disproved day after day. Mr. Gladstone concedes that the choice of an authority is almost, if not quite always, a judgment made on probable evidence alone ; and clearly, the probability on which we have to act is much less considerable, where it is difficult or impossible to verify the accuracy of the judgment on which we rely, than it is in cases where we can found our trust on clear evidence that others have placed their reliance on the same authority, and have found that reliance justified.
Now, this is the point at which we find the application of Mr. Gladstone's authoritative principle to the subject of religion, unsatisfactory. It is exceedingly difficult to test the trustworthiness of living authorities, as authorities, in matters of religion, and therefore very difficult to choose them with any large presumption in our favour. Yet can a religious conviction held merely on a slight balance of probability be regarded as a genuinely religious conviction at all A working-man has, as Sir Cornewall Lewis at least held, hardly any time to go into the moral and intellectual basis of opinion, and must, more or less, trust to authority. The religious authority he happens to be brought in contact with by his parents is, say, a somewhat ignorant Methodist preacher, great in the Apocalypse, eloquent on the mil- lennium, a fervent believer in sudden " judgments " on sceptics and sinners, and in the doctrine of "conversion." What, if the working-man be shrewd, should he think the probability to be that in following such a guide he would do right? And what will be the worth of religious exercises and devotions undertaken on the strength of a presumption so trifling ? Can you pray on an hypothesis which you regard as only just more likely to be true than not, and yet pray with all your heart? Nay, it would be, sometimes at least, nearer the mark, we suspect, if we asked whether a religious man could pray on an hypothesis which he thought less likely to be true than not, though he knew of none other which he thought, individually, so likely to be true ? To our minds, the introduction of the principle of presumptions and pro- babilities into the religious life is a very confusing one. We would not deny that the often-quoted apostrophe, "Oh, God, if there be a God, save my soul, if I have a soul," is a prayer, or at least a passionate cry into the darkness, which God would treat as a prayer. But when the probability and the doubt affect not merely the question of the reality of the Being prayed to, but of His nature too, when the prayer is based on a 'presumption' not only in relation to the existence of its object, but His character and the mode of government which He pursues, the doubts and hesita- tions which envelope it on all sides must, we take it, sti undermine it as to rob it of all religious meaning. It is a very different thing to act in human affairs on a minute probability,—say, to insure your life for a railway journey,—from acting upon it in matters in which the heart must go with the will, if it is to be of any value at all. What Mr. Gladstone and the school of religions probabilists re- commend, namely, to choose our religious authorities on the balance of such presumptions—small or large—as are accessible to us, and then believe what these authorities lay down, is a course encum- bered by this peculiar difficulty,—that if we do not forget the very hazardous nature of the presumptions on which we are acting, the religious life built up on such presumptions is apt to be too uncertain and unsteady to be genuinely religions, while if we do forget it, we corrupt the honesty of our own inward life. The upshot of these remarks is undoubtedly to question the high value of authority in matters of religious conviction,—mat- ters on which the nature must "move altogether, if it move at all," —for the very simple reason that the determination of the best religious authority is apt to be even more of a delicate intellectual operation, requiring the finest weights and measures, than the determination of a religious truth itself. While you are in the region in which relative ecclesiastical authorities are weighed and compared, you are where it is hardly possible for nine-tenths of mankind—even of civilised Europeans—to have an opinion of any assignable value. But when you go into the region of reli- gious truth itself, the case is often very different. Not, of course, that questions of the scholarship of the Bible, or even of the rationale of miracles, or of the scientific origin of Nature, are amongst those which ordinary men can judge with any profit ; but that the questions of the relation of a living God to the conscience, of the supernaturalness of Christ's character, of the searching nature of the Gospel morality, and of the power of Christianity as a whole to put a new soul into human life, are within the reach of popular judgments, and that these once decided on the Christian side, the question of the best authority for our intellectual guidance in relation to the view we may take of Christian doctrines, is relatively a very secondary one. We should go so far as this with Mr. Gladstone, that having once decided that there is a spiritual world above men, and that Christ came from that spiritual world, and embodied its highest life for us, it is irrational to reject the authority of history and tradition as to what he revealed. Once let us believe entirely that he brought something quite new into this world from the world above us, and it becomes absurd to attempt to limit the revelation he brought us by any- thing but a careful study of the recorded and the traditional facts. But it is the belief in God and in the divine character of Christ which gives the importance to the authorities as to revelation, not the belief in these authorities which warrants the belief in God and in the divine character of Christ. To our minds, 'authority' in matters of religious opinion is, after all, the second thing, and not the first ;—the first is the war- rant given by the conscience and the affections for the existence of God and the divine nature of Christ. And this view puts the estimate of probabilities in its right place. You can be certain of the existence of a divine ruler and judge, because that is attested in the very life of the heart and will ; you can be certain of the unearthly majesty and divine essence of Christ, on grounds in- finitely more certain and simple than those on which you are certain of the glory of the universe, and its infinite superiority to the devices of man. But these things once assured, you can only judge with more or less probability of the historical accessories, and the doctrinal significance of these supernatural facts. There you are dependent on history, on authorities of various kinds, on scholarship, on a comparison of various statements, on the commentary written in the life of the believers. As soon as authority in the intellectual sense comes in, doubts and probabilities come in with it, and the devotional life which is mixed up with these doubts and probabilities becomes less important, and may also well be less earnest. But the main and central faith does not depend, with any one who really has it, on what Sir Cornewall Lewis and Mr. Gladstone mean by ' authority ' at all. Authority pieces out and outlines the significance of that divine vision which has somehow burned itself in upon the soul, but it cannot give that vision ; and the further it goes from the centre of the spiritual light which makes itself felt in us, the further it goes from the certainty which is of the very life of religion. It is quite true that in ordinary life we very commonly act on authority to which we attach a very trivial value, though it is quite of enough value to influence our actions. But we deny altogether that on small probabilities of this kind any genuine religious life can be founded. Probabilities are at the mathematical basis of every policy of assurance. But no sooner does reli- gion attempt to persuade us to take out a policy of assurance for the soul, than she loses her influence, and ceases in fact to justify the name she bears.
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