BOOKS.
MISS COBBE'S TELEOLOGY.*
THE difficulty we feel in reviewing Miss Cobbe's survey of the theological tendencies of the day consists chiefly in this, —that while we fully understand, for the most part, her negative views, her rejection of what is called 'authority' in religion, her disbelief in miracle, her naif wonder at the Trinitarian theology, her exultation over the disappearance of the Devil from the practical faith of even orthodox persons, and her vigorous repudiation of the doctrine of everlasting punishment, we have not even after much study been able to grasp with anything like equal distinctness the theism which she believes that it is the inevitable tendency of the development of modern ideas to substitute for it. Miss Cobbe is a sincere believer in a natural conscience, and in God as the inspirer of the natural conscience ; she holds strongly and tenaciously the freedom of the human will ; she believes, as a consequence, in the reality of sin, and laments eloquently over the tendency of the busy and distracted intellectual world in which we live to diminish the vitality of human horror for sin ; and she has at the same time a very profound belief in what she calls "natural laws" as to the drift of which, except that they are opposed to all ascetic discipline of body or mind, and to all indiscriminate charity, and favourable to political economy, and to a greater joyousness of temperament than any Christian Church has yet been found to promote, she is not very clear. But when, after reading her book very carefully, and many parts of it more than once, we come to ask ourselves how far, apart from her rejection of the miraculous side of Christianity and the belief of Christians concerning the person of Christ, her view of the nature of God, of human perfection, of the meaning of spiritual life, differs from that of the New Testament, which she seems to think so antiquated, we find it very difficult to reply. She would say, we gather, that in the view of God given to us by Christ there is no emphasiloon those of His modes of action which have been laid open to us by modern science,—that He is pictured exclusively as the centre of holiness and love, and not as the author of that infinite network of laws and arts which is the chief characteristic of the new era ; she would also infer that primitive Christianity claimed too much time for direct communion with God, and necessarily assigned too high a value to prayer in regions of life in which, according to her view, prayer can have no effect, as, for example, in praying for daily bread, or for the life of those attacked by physical disease ; she would say that as a consequence of this too great concentration of thought on one aspect of life, Christianity contracted a certain morbidness, exaggerated the symptoms of moral corruption, and lost sight of the natural beauty and joys of existence in the exclusive ardour with which it sought after a purification of heart. She tells us that we must make " lopsided " saints and heroes our ideal no longer ; that we must regard as the perfect man the man whose whole nature is equally developed on all sides, and so forth.
But when we come to ask what practically she looks to as the theological ideal of the future, we are as unable to sketch it as when we began her book. How much verge arc we to give to this idea of hers of "natural laws" as supplementing if not supplanting the sense of dependence upon God? As Miss Cobbe forbids us to pray for any physical benefit, because it is on the whole clear, she says, that no physical laws can be altered by any wish or prayer of ours,—and yet encourages us to pray for moral good, because then we are only asking God to fulfil His own laws, which must be in accordance with His will, we conclude that she thinks that the physical laws of creation are less adapted to unfold the will and purposes of God than His moral laws; yet the chief ground of her attack on both Catholicism and Puritanism is that these do not recognize the divine law of respect for the human body and the natural instincts and appetites of that body as in themselves good. Now, here there seems to us an inconsistency. If it is a 'natural' law, and a divine law because a natural law,—(say) that man should have as much food as is necessary to keep his body in health, or that he should seek and desire health,—why may he not pray for food and health ? Is not that praying that God should fulfil His own laws, which Miss Cobbe says it is right to do? If, on the contrary, it be not certain that God does will us to have as much food as is good for the body, or that He does will us to have health, can she call it a natural law (in any sense in which men are to be reproached for not identifying the natural with the divine) that the body ought to be supplied
with goad and wholesem• . fool, and that the preservation of health is one of the first of duties? It seems to us that if Miss Cobbe is right in refusing to let us pray for these things, she is wrong in dignifying them with the position she gives them as elements of natural religion hitherto neglected by Christian theory. If she is right in reproaching Christians with their neglect of these natural laws, she is wrong in excluding them from the domain of prayer. Miss Cobbe would, perhaps, say that as far as we can trace physical laws, though they are much interwoven with moral laws, yet they exist, on the whole, in a different plane,—a plane of necessity, —while the latter belong to the plane of moral freedom. We are not sure she would say this, because it is obvious that though freedom affects our moral condition, it cannot affect God's law and will as to what that condition should be, which is entirely unalterable by any prayer of ours. If, then, she excludes prayer for physical benefits only on the ground that the granting of those physical benefits is determined by laws which our prayers cannot change.—we are not sure that this does not apply even more strongly to prayers for moral benefits. Man cannot alter or increase God's will to make him good by asking God to make him good. That will of God's is surely more unalterable than any physical law whatever ? Well, then, why suppose that one prayer (for moral good) is more causative than the other (for physical good)? But if not more causative,—if we must come back to the old ground, that in spite of all difficulties, physical or metaphysical, where love is mutual, intercourse is natural, and pouring-out of the soul is natural,—why, that brings us back to prayer for everything that we sincerely deem to be good, with reserve of deference to God's better knowledge. And that is precisely what we want to get at.
If Miss Cobbo could say' physical laws are beyond God's government altogether,' she might then bid us leave physical benefits out of our prayers. But she does not say this. She only tries to express her sense of the difference between 'natural laws' and 'moral laws,' by excluding physical benefits from the domain of prayer. But, in fact, that seems to us to be in direct contradiction of her general indictment against Christian faith, that it makes too little of natural laws. It is she, rather than the Christian faith, who really makes little of them. In her effort to give them a sort of equal but separate. standing-ground from spiritual laws, she really shuts them out of the sphere of religious feeling, and Providential will, altogether,—an I this, though she is anxious to raise their dignity as a medium for revealing God instead of to depress it. She appears to adinit that the physical and the spiritual are so intertwined that God's spiritual Providence may possibly alter the working even of His physical laws. And yet she defers so much to the superficial physical science of the day that she wishes us to exclude all themes bearing re, physical good frotn the region of prayer, and so to make science a sort of extra-religious world, while upbraiding theologians for their half-confidence in it. In point of fact, it is certain that all which is really excluded from our prayers must be excluded from our religion. That we know less clearly what is good for us in physical than in spiritual matters, is, we believe, true. And this is the very reason why Christ, who did not come to reveal to us natural wants, says so much less than Miss Cobbe would like about natural laws.' Natural laws really have less intimate relations with the spiritual life of the soul than moral laws. But such relations as they have,—and they have of course relations of the first importance,—to the spiritual life of the soul, are surely subjects for the Providence of God, and therefore for human prayer. Besides, it is not only in the physical, but also often in the spiritual region that we "know not what we ask." God knows our "necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in
asking," in both regions alike. And if for want of true and perfect knowledge we are to be debarred from praying for physical things, we do not see why, for the very same reason, we should not be debarred from praying for spiritual things. Miss Cobbe's theology—as we understand it—would do away with all the religious faith in Providence,—i.e., with all belief in the divine adaptation of the physical events of individual lives to their moral and spiritual needs,—altogetber. Whether, after so much is taken from the religious view of life, after once God is limited to the sphere of the conscience and the soul, and the external lot is referred to Him only in a very differ rent sense, and one quite independent of His individual pro
vision for the spiritual wants of the individual character, enough would remain to feed the religious nature, seems to us
very doubtful. Miss Cobbe's view seems to us to open a sort of chasm between what she calls the physical and the moral side of our nature ; in the former, God acts by laws which have no individual message to us ; in the latter, He consoles us for the external
world of systematic and iron necessity in which He has placed us, and teaches us how to make the best individual use of the outward calamities we may happen to encounter, or to maintain the deepest humility in the midst of the blessings we may happen to receive. In other words, God helps 11.3 by His spirit in our conscience to make the best of a lot which has been determined by other and much wider and more general considerations than any bearing upon our private needs.
We have insisted on this point of the chasm which Miss Cobbe evidently sees between the physical shell of the world and its spiritual kernel, because it seems to us to pervade her book. There is a permanent and unresolved dualism in all her lines of thought. She provides Us no bridge from her "natural laws" to her moral laws. Her moral theology is fine and true, but she avowedly gives up the attempt to connect it with natural theology,—Le., theology derived from the study of nature and natural laws. Her feeling about the immeasurable sinfulness of sin is fine and true, but she tries to balance it with an inculcation of lightheartedness which is, in fact, inconsistent with it, and is scarcely found except amongst peoples who are either in the childish stage, or artificially kept so by throwing all their moral responsibilities on priests. She seems always to throw in something on the natural side to balance what she has said on the spiritual side, from a sort of fear of the consequence of subordinating the natural to the spiritual, and dread of not being perfectly evenhanded. We should scarcely like to say that Miss Cobbe's religious worship is divided equally between Nature and God, because, in some sense, she refers nature also to God. But then, as she never shows us how she identifies the God of the conscienae with the God of the universe, and as the two always seem to demand wholly different acts of service, it comes to the same thing.
From her doctrine of the growing tendency to ignore authority in matters of faith, we only differ in so far as we cannot at all agree with her as to the sense in which ' authority ' should be defined. She opposes ' authority ' to consciousuess,'—makes it that which overrules consciousness by signs of external power, or the prestige of tradition. In this sense authority is, no doubt, on the wane. But we deny that in this sense it ever had any existence in the primitive Christian revelation. The signs and wonders of Christidnity, such as they were, were never appealed to to overpower, but only to draw out the consciences and spirits of men. They were appealed to by our Lord to show that spiritual power was at the source not only of prophecy, but of law ; at the source not only of religion, but of society ; not only of the Church, but of the State. The sense in which ' authority ' remains, even for us, a true justification of religious conviction, is not that of a positive statement by people who profess to have access to special sources of information, but that of the evidently deep and inward conviction of minds which we feel ourselves to be full of an infinitely deeper and finer and fuller knowledge of God than any which we possess. When, for instance, our Lord says that the world of natural law is so entirely the outcome of God's special care and love that "not a sparrow falleth to the ground without your Father," we should be utterly staggered if we judged this assertion by our own experience of the wasteful negligence and cruelty of man. Can we really believe that all the hosts of wantonly slaughtered birds and insects fall not without satisfying some individual and deliberate intention of the Almighty? We could not, but for an intense and growing conviction that Christ was and is at the source of the mystery in a sense in which we are not, and that the study of His acts and sayings is a study always opening some fresh lights, some deeper knowledge of religious truth. That is what we mean by authority ;' and in this sense authority is as true a source of religious knowledge now as it was in the days of His life on earth. We believe that there is a religious fascination in true revelation which testifies to its own inexhaustible character, and keeps the eye of man attracted to it as containing the true secret behind nature, even at the very time when we are learning that the methods of nature mustbe got at by quite other modes of study. We believe in miracle, after receiving what seems to us overpowering external evidence that one miracle at least (the resurrection) really took place, not solely on this merely historical ground, but just for the same kind of reason for which, after evidence of the actual historical existence of our Lord, we believe in
because there is something in us which springs to meet the teaching. Miracle asserts the ultimate power of the spiritual to control the natural, and there is something in man which springs to meet that assertion, even in the face of all modern science ; just as Miss Cobbe herself believes that there is something in the mind of man which persists in clinging to the belief in a divine and intuitive morality in the face of all modern demonstrations of the development of an experience-morality as the natural fruit of the struggle for existence between race and race. We believe that 'authority,' in the sense of the fascination wielded by revelation over the conscience and spiritual life of man, will never pass away, and that authority,' in the sense of the bald domination of mere self-authenticated seers, never had any existence in the primitive revelation at all. What we miss in Miss Cobbe is any true unification of the various threads of her religious belief. She says much that is fine, bold, and true, but she leaves us without any help as to the ultimate unity of what she means by "nature" and "spirit," and it seems to us that the rather bald character of her theism is due to her utter indifference to finding the point of union between the parallel lines of her natural and spiritual laws.
Previous page
