MR. MALLOCIC ON AMATEUR CHRISTIANITY.
MR. MALLOCK is an able writer, with one great take-off, that he is too indolent and self-confident to get his facts right. In the current number of the Fortnightly Review, he has an elaborate article on the difference between that Christianity of the heart which derives its only sanction from human preference for the religion of the Cross, and that Christianity of the intellect which clinches, as it were, and sometimes even imposes on us, this preference of the Cross from the conviction that a divine being came down from Heaven, and took human nature upon him in order to show us that this religion of the Cross has its spring in eternal good- ness and eternal power. The difference is very great, much greater, as we think, than even Mr. Mallock himself seems to be aware. We have endeavoured for some thirty years past to impress that difference on our readers with all the force of which we were capable, and to take, on the whole, Mr. Mallock's view of that difference, though, as we have said, with a great deal deeper conviction of the very wide gulf which lies between the two views than Mr. Mallock evinces, and yet he knows so little about this journal that he takes it as one of his leading illustrations of the confusion between them. We have succeeded, he says, in gaining the ear of the public for the view that "miracles do not happen." He might almost as well say that the Times has succeeded in gaining the ear of the public for the view that Home-rule for Ireland is the first necessity of the 'United Kingdom ; or that Mr. Gladstone has succeeded in gaining the ear of the public for the view that there should be no tampering with the Act of Union. We do not, of course, mean that the former mistake is as flagrant as the two latter. There is no reason in the world why Mr. Mallock should know our conviction on these subjects, if he did not undertake to write about it. He might very well be ignorant, and no one would reproach him for his ignorance. But when he does hold up this journal to the world as a wonderful illustration of the vogue which Mrs. Hum- phry Ward's theology has obtained, one would suppose he had taken some little pains to know whether or not we agree with Mrs. Humphry Ward, or differ from her in toto. The reading of a single review of "Robert Elsmere " or "David Grieve," or of our criticism on almost any of her essays, would have enabled him to ascertain this ; but Mr. Mallock is too indolent to take even that trouble. He appears to think that he knows our theology by intuition, and that because we happen to differ from him as to the reality at the heart of Christian theology, we must also differ from him as to the logic on which he founds his attack on Mrs. Humphry Ward.
There is another great blunder in his article which seems to us still more inexplicable, as he appears to have taken some little trouble in studying Mrs. Humphry Ward, and not to be in such total and blank ignorance of her writings as he is of this journal. He says : "The school she belongs to and with which she is in spiritual sympathy is a school which is dis- tinctly the outcome of English middle-class Nonconformity." That is a very grave historical error. Mrs. Humphry Ward's heterodoxy is of a totally different type. It takes its origin in French mysticism and German criticism, and it would be as absurd to say that the theological works of the poet Matthew Arnold, her uncle, are in sympathy with English middle-class Nonconformity,—which be was always attacking and con- trasting with the sweet reasonableness of Christ,—as that the writings of Mrs. Humphry Ward, who began her literary career with a translation of Amiel's "Journal Intime " and who has based the greater part of her theology on a study of Baur and the later German critics, are the outcome of English middle-class Nonconformity. The obvious fact is, that Mr. Mallock wished to make a sharp attack on English middle-class Nonconformity, so that it suited him to assume, what is quite contrary to the fact, that Mrs. Ward's heterodoxy is of that type and origin.
But, after all, Mr. Mallock's very wilful and unnecessary blunders are of the slightest possible importance, except to his own reputation for literary carefulness. We hold with him, or rather, a great deal more earnestly than he does, that it is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of the distinction between a religion of the Cross acccepted out of the mere preference of human sentiment, and the religion of the Cross revealed by a divine life and incarnation. And we could not find a better illustration of the value of this distinction than Mr. Mallock's own essay. He very justly maintains that the value placed upon Christ's Gospel of self-denial, if it rests on human sentiment, and is divorced from the belief that it reveals a divine history and a manifestation of eternal purpose, is not properly to be called Christianity, because it gives to Christ the authority of human approbation, instead of accepting from Christ the authority of divine example. But while be maintains this difference, he seeks to make out that a good deal at least of the Christian ethics will remain, though it will remain without any of the unity or cohesion of Christian doctrine, even if we give up the supernatural origin of Christianity altogether. Yet nothing can better show how little this remainder will be, than his own essay. If we understand him rightly, the Christian doctrine of marriage will vanish at once with the divine authority for Christ's
teaching. Not only will the Christian doctrine of marriage go, but a great deal of the old pagan spirit of light- heartedness without peace, will return to the earth, and we shall have once more that eagerness to catch the joy of every moment as it flies, and that deep sense of its trawl- toriness and of the feeling of irrecoverable loss it leaves behind, which makes the effort at once so passionate and so hopeless.
Mr. Mallock sums up his view of the great difference between the moral standard of man when freed from all the supernatural authority of Christ's life, and the moral standard of revelation as such, in the following terse and striking passage :—" Looking thus at life, on the supposition that miracles do not happen, and judging of the future from the past, we may safely say that the tendency of moral development will be towards a morality in many ways different from the Christian, and in some ways doubtless shocking to the Christian judgment ; but not towards any grotesque saturnalia of cruelty, injustice, or debauchery. It will be a tendency, on the contrary, towards some new type of excellence, differing from the Christian not in the way in which a Tiberius differs from Christ, but rather in the way in which a Goethe differs from a Spurgeon." Now, if Mr. Mallock had said, "as a Goethe differs from l'6n6lon, or Bishop Wilson, or Cardinal Newman, or the late Dean Church, or the late Dr. Liddon," that would have fairly repre- sented the true difference. In choosing Mr. Spurgeon, be chose a very good man, whose ethical standard seems to us as much higher than Goethe's as an ethical standard not permeated by any moral or intellectual refinement can well be, but for that very reason not in that one respect Christlike. If ever there were perfect moral and intellectual refinement, it was in the life of our Lord, and Mr. Mallock, in his anxiety to gain for his paganised type of self-denying ethics the imaginary advantage of embodying in it the refinement which Mr. Spurgeon's manly Christian ethics lacked, unfairly ignores the refinement which our Lord's ethical teaching unques- tionably had in the highest possible degree. It is easy enough to see through the significance of this little bit of astute suggestion in Mr. Mallock, that Christianity is essentially un- refined. Nevertheless, except so far as this misleading imputa- tion goes, we should quite accept his summary of the difference he wishes to delineate. And we hold that it really disposes of his conception that there is a deep-rooted tendency in human nature to adopt the Christian temper without accepting the authority of Christ. What could be more self- complacent and unlike the Christian temper, than the temper of the great German poet to whom he appeals ? No doubt Goethe, like every man of refinement, understood the value of a carefully qualified element of artistic self-denial as lending a new flavour to the enjoyments of life, and especially a basis for that self-respect without which the pagan ideal of character is itself impossible. Goethe could be generous and magnanimous. He could take considerable trouble to relieve the troubles of others. But this is one of the essentials of the type of character which Stoic and Epicurean alike held up to admiration. Goethe mingled the pleasures of sense, and the pleasures of intellect, and the pleasures of condescension, and the pleasures of generosity, and the pleasures of dignity, with the greatest skill and insight. Like Mr. Mallock, he thought very little of Christ's authority, and probably never gave a thought to his authority on the subject on which Mr. Mello& evidently thinks that there is most need for breaking it down, —the law of marriage. Goethe was one of those who have the deepest possible sense of the necessity of a due economy in the conduct of life, so as to make the most of its pleasures and the least of its pains. But no ethical ideal that takes its type from Goethe, can be said to bear any analogy to the Christian ideal of self-denial, even in Mr. Mallock's reduced and limited sense. The vast gulf between Goethe's conception of life and Christ's conception of life, has its root, indeed, in the difference between the conception of life as fugitive and the conception of life as eternal. We do not mean, of course, that Goethe denied immortality. On the contrary, he admitted it with an air of amused impatience, anticipating how often he might have to be bored in the future state by persons meeting him and saying to him : Did I not tell you so, did I not assure you we should have a future beyond the gravel" But he looked upon the possibilities of the future state as hardly worth taking into account in regulating the conduct of life here. He did not look upon it as leading up to the beatific vision, as leading up to the knowledge of God. Hence his eagerness to husband and rationalise human enjoyments was entirely of the old Hellenic type. It had no spiritual element in it; and if this is the ideal to which the progress of humanity is tending, we may fairly say that it is tending to the old creed that life is a fine art of which human experience alone teaches us the secret; and that those who know best how to mix its ingredients skilfully, take least account of the rumours of divine self-sacrifice and divine passion. If Mr. Mallock had really wished to demonstrate that the natural creed of humanity includes a value for self-denial in the higher sense, he would have referred, not to the creed of Goethe, but to that of Sakya- Muni. The Buddhists, no doubt, do really preach self-denial in some thoroughly transcendental sense, without, so far as we know, preaching anything approaching at all closely to a revelation of God. But Buddhism takes no hold of the mind of the West for that very reason. The creed of self-extinction,- and self-extinction Nirvana seems to us,—is not a creed which takes hold of men in whom the will has been powerfully developed. And it is probable, too, that there is more of true theism and true revelation in the original and highest form of the Buddhist creed, than the genius of Europe and America has yet managed to fathom. Mr. Mallock's suggestions, how- ever, for the creed of the future contain no mystic element. If he can save self-denial at all, it is only as a comparatively insignificant element in a life of Aristotelian moderation; and so far from justifying loyalty of any kind to Christ, his teaching would condemn at once the enthusiasm and the faith of Christ as founded in illusion and doomed to disappointment.
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