A MERCHANTS FAITH.
THERE is one little-noticed but very formidable difficulty just now in the way of religious discussion considered as a useful instrument of diffusing thought, and that is the difficulty of discovering the general effect of particular arguments. There never was a time when interest in religious questions, and even in theology as a science, was so active, and pro- bably never one when the right of argument was so free. Any one with the slightest literary skill, just enough to avoid shocking unprepared minds, may express any doubt he pleases, and—which is a much more novel state of affairs—any conviction he may think worth the trouble of defending. Free- dom has been granted not only to scepticism—as it has been granted before—but to orthodoxy, as it never was granted before in sceptical times, and the preacher who has anything to say, whether in the pulpit or the press, never had a fairer field. Unfortunately, he is very often condemned to waste his strength. It is the constant perplexity as well of the sceptics as of the orthodox to discover what argument has told, whether they have met the actual thought in the mind of an opponent, or whether he is merely expressing deferential assent because he has not been hit. Earnest clergymen have always complained of that trouble, and it now, in the prevalence of free discussion, begins to impede earnest dissidents, who find that an argument from science which they think conclusive, can be met and evaded by a bow and a smile, or thrown away upon a prejudice, just as a text from a clergyman used to be. It is becoming "bad forth" to be very orthodox, till men with proclivities in that direction, unless shocked into speech, are tempted to keep their tendencies to themselves. There is plenty of orthodox writing, but it is written mainly by clergymen, and very often does not express either the conclusions, or the reasons for those conclusions, of equally orthodox laymen. The clergyman of professional necessity respects certain shibboleths, and, moreover, is so bound, or is so thought to be bound, to accept certain lines of argument as true, that it is often difficult to be sure from his writing what argument has really impressed him most. He may be sure of a personal Deity from intuitive perception, and yet think it more expedient to restate the feebler argument from design, or the feebler evidence still from the consensus of a human race which includes the Chinese. There are arguments which thinkers scarcely ever use, yet which, when employed, are found to hit some men very hard ; and others, of which they are proud, which never- theless pass through the minds of their hearers without making the slightest impression. It may be doubted, for instance, to use very simple illustrations, whether the argument from morals to the truth of a revelation—as, for example, that Munoo could net have been the organ of a new revelation, because in certain cases he made of lying a virtue — ever goes quite home to unread men ; whether in their hearts they do not hold that it is the command which creates the morality, and not the morality which educes the command ; while it is quite certain that the feeble line of evidence known in some Calvinistic societies as "the evidence of the types" takes upon certain minds an almost immovable hold. There is strong evidence, indeed, that a great quantity of argu- ment which even clergymen dislike to use, because it is so trite, has an unsuspected effect in keeping the Man of their readers orthodox—for example, this ie certainly true of the old statement that the continuance of the Jews as a sepa- rate people is proof positive of inspiration—and great reason to suspect that arguments which thoughtful agnostics have aban- doned—for example, the excessive unfairness of earthly arrange- ments—are among the strongest defences of the profound form of atheism sometimes to be traced among the uneducated. It will frequently be found that a lecturer who is defending the belief in a personal Deity is wasting his eloquence upon men who entirely agree with him, but think His intervention ceased with the act of creation ; while we have reason to think that the strange belief that there is a future life evolved of itself, and without God—a belief which scarcely any clergyman in the country would think of mentioning except as an impossibility—ie silently gaining -disciples. The notion that the good live again, while the bad die like flowers, is much more widely spread than is imagined, but is never seriously maintained or attacked in a discussion on immor- tality; and the correlative of that view, that immortality is Christ's reward to his followers, and to them only, is said to spread far and fast in America, under an absolute silence. The truth seems to be that the majority and the minority have changed Bides, and that while the few thinkers are publishing their thoughts, orthodox or unorthodox, in ever-increasing profusion, the many unthinking are holding their tongues, lest they should be put to shame. As the ultimate use of the thinkers is to benefit the many unthinking, that is not a good state of things, and we should welcome any occurrence which tempted people unlearned in theology to state their actual beliefs, and reasons for their beliefs, as an immense addition, not, indeed, to the thought of the world, but to the means by which thought may be directed towards the problems needing solution.
There is an attempt at a production of this kind in the present number of the Contemporary. Mr. F. Peek,who is,we presume, iden- tical with the gentleman mentioned in the Vice-Chancellor's Court as a principal proprietor of the magazine, there states with great clearness and some eloquence his view of "a reasonable faith," the view which can be accepted by" a British merchant,"—that is, by a man presumably of fair capacity, but who has not made a special study of theology, or even paid great attention to the sub- ject. The paper is curiously interesting, not because the writer has anything novel to say, or any contribution to offer to the sum of knowledge, but because he frankly indicates the arguments which have to him appeared the most conclusive, and because the arguments which seem to have led him right are often almost childish in their simplicity. He uses, of course, arguments of all sorts, some bad, some weak, and some good ; but such as they are, they are all put forward frankly, with an obvious idea that they are very reasonable indeed, and with entire naivete in the admission that they have influenced Mr. F. Peek very much, so much that he thinks the incredulity of other people occasionally a little perverse. Mr. Peek has arrived —probably by some process of absorption—at conclusions with which we certainly shall not quarrel, conclusions not differing in any essential from those of Mr. Maurice's followers ; but he main- tains them by arguments some of which may make reasoners de- spair, and ask themselves for the hundredth time whether it is not the doctrines which must be trusted to make their own way, and whether argument is not surplusage. This, for instance, is his argument for miracle :—
" Let ;is grant that all our objectors assert upon this point is correct, —and that the Creator of the universe, having founded the world upon certain laws, would not introduce confusion by violating them. Yet, if properly considered, the assent to this proposition will in no way affect the credibility of miracles, or even their compatibility with the law of continuity. It was stated by the late celebrated Mr. Babbage that it was quite possible to construct a machine which, after having worked for a long time according to one method of procedure, should suddenly manifest a single breach of this method, and then resume and ler ever afterwards keep to its original law. If human skill can thus control an instrument which may make a single and apparently an isolated variation from its original principle of action, without changing tlae law of its design, how fatal is the assertion that any faith is false because it claims that the Infinitely Wise and Mighty Designer of the
world had provided for such variations in the ordinary procedure of His plan of government !"
We venture to say that very few of the writers who have denied or maintained the possibility of miracles ever thought of that argument, which seems, nevertheless, quite conclusive to Mr. Peek. He had evidently read somewhere that Babbage's cal- culating-machine, with its recurrent deviation from its own apparent law, was a perfect illustration of the great speculation that laws may exist unperceived, which modify, on occasion, the laws perceived ; that a law, as it were, may be per- fect till in its action it impinges on another law ; or to drop metaphor, that an apparent miracle may be fully in accord with unapparent law—but that illustration was too subtle for him. He imagined that Mr. Babbage had arranged a seeming miracle— for the feat attributed to him would be nothing less, if designed and unrepeatable—and therefore argued a fortiori that God could do the same thing, which, granting the premiss, is true enough, only nobody grants the premiss. Professor Clifford would no more grant that a machinist could make a machine disobey the law of its being than he would grant that God could, and would never have dreamt of himself that any- body would make such an assertion. Yet it is remarkable that an argument almost identical with Mr. Peek's had great weight with the late Mr. Samuel Warren, who, though no doubt a pre- tender in one sense, had great knowledge, and a ray of genius in him besides. His infidel, in the "Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician," is converted toj the idea of a governing Will by the failure of a chemical compound to evolve the precipitate which it naturally ought to produce. There must be will, he thought, to produce the aberration, quite forgetting that the incident, being recurrent and invariable whenever the combination is made, must occur in obedience to some law outside the experience from which the experimenter had deduced his theory. Our object, however, is not in the least to argue with Mr. Peek, but merely to point out the scarcely suspected and often mistaken line of thought which may, and as we believe constantly does, lead men quite equal to the average in ability to very momentous conclusions, and the excessive force which they attach to an illustration. There is a still stronger instance in his argument for the existence of a God. He has got a fair hold of the ancient argument from design, which is no doubt a good argument in its way, and has convinced a great many,—indeed, it is possibly the most effective of all the known popular arguments—but he has allowed it to take such possession of his mind, that nothing farther seems necessary, and he is inclined to indulge in very British but extremely unphilo- sophical peremptoriness. He says :—
"To those who accept the faith that the world was made by the power of God, every science brings confirmatory evidence of the strongest kind—whether it be that which reveals the course of the stem; or that which shows how the wayside flowers, trees, and plants, growing in beauty for our use and enjoyment, draw their nourishment from carbonic acid gas that has been given off as waste by the animal ores- tion, and restore it again in forms necessary for man's life and susten- ance; but it would indeed be vain to expect to convince by words those who can calmly contemplate these and the other wonders of the creation, and yet accept the irrational suggestion that they came into existence and arranged themselves into the exquisite and perfect order in which we find them by fortuitous combination' and 'natural selection.' One thing is beyond doubt—that no sane man would accept such reasoning regarding the phenomena and occurrences of daily life, or would look upon any person who could do so as a reasonable being."
And again :— " It is difficult to realise the fact that any reasonable man, not utterly blinded by prejudice, can study the most elementary book of science— say, on physiology—that he can contemplate the human frame in its wonderful structure of bone, sinew, and muscle, all arranged on the most perfect mechanical principles, trace the numberless contrivances necessary to make the body available to the possessor--such as the ex- quisitely arranged system of blood-vessels, veins, and capillaries, the nerves and glands, and those seemingly complicated contrivances con- nected with the digestion and the action of the heart ; with all the curious arrangements by which the separation of exhausted blood is accomplished, and the numberless valves, muscles, and membranes necessary for the work ; and hold an atheistic theory."
Mr. Peek is evidently wholly unaware that on a seientille dis- believer, and on almost any Continental believer, his sufficient answer has absolutely no force whatever, that the Darwinian hypothesis, if held to be sufficient, totally disposes of it ; leaving nothing unaccounted for but the original monad, and as we deem the existence of that special quality in the human mind which certainly differentiates it from animal mind of any sort, and that the atheistic tendency of Darwin's teaching—a tendency wholly alien to its author's objects—arises from the extinction of the argument from design and the consequent revulsion in minds chiefly moved to worship by that form of evidence. Mr. Peek, in fact, puts forward as his sole reason for faith in the existence of God an argument so narrow, that if the Darwinian hypothesis were shown to him to be universally true, he would be compelled either to give up his faith altogether or rest it on intuitive cer- tainty. The strength of his belief is, however, most instructive, and shows that the clergy, in surrendering the argument from design, as they are doing, are giving up an instrument which, though not sufficient for victory by itself, is in certain stages of human knowledge quite irresistible. Mr. Peek gives this illustration as evidence of a future state :—
" First, science has proved that nothing, at least in the inanimate creation, can be destroyed ; and it would indeed be strange if animate nature in its noblest form—the mind and spirit of man—were the only exceptions to a law which governs the universe. But science goes farther, teaching us that in most cases in which a body becomes in- visible and is apparently lost, it disappears only to reappear afterwards in a more beauteous form Example offers itself as we walk along the wayside path and glance at the pools of water which, a short time since, came from above in a number of glistening drops, and now form a discoloured, foul, and ugly mass. We return to these pools in a few days and find them gone, and at our feet is only that which, being earthy, was mixed with the purer element But the water has not been destroyed, it has only become invisible, and still exists around us, though we may not see it. It requires only a slight change of tempera- ture, and again it will become visible to us, not in the impure connec- tions with which it was before deformed, but in the dazzling beauty of the limpid hoar-frost, or reflecting every ray of light in the purity of the glistening snow. "
The fact that this illustration is an argument for the continuous existence of spirit, but not for its continuous identity—which is what he wants to prove—does not strike Mr. Peek, who, never- theless, would not be quite contented if asked to quench his thirst by gulps of boiling steam. The historian has often argued that one great argument for Christianity is its extension in spite of obstacles, but we do not think he would have hoped to succeed, as obviously some one has succeeded with Mr. Peek, by so very crude a statement of his proposition RS this, the inner thought of which is nevertheless sufficiently true :— "In regard to the question of the historical truth of Christ- ianity, it would evidently be impossible to deal fully with it within the limits of such an article as this, even if all the objections had not been anticipated already by the works of Paley, Butler, Chal- mers, and other great writers. It must suffice to observe : that the Christian religion does at present exist; that it is a religion professed in all the most civilised countries in the world; that it arose 1877 years ago in an obscure part of Palestine; that without resorting to force, and notwithstanding the opposition of the secular power, it overthrew all the religions existing at the time of its appearance ; that those who first promulgated it suffered severe persecution on account of their faith—a faith of which one fundamental doctrine is, that truth is of God, that no liar has any part in God's kingdom; and if this religion be not true, we are justified in asking our opponents to give some reasonable account of the miracle of its existence."
We do not suppose that Mr. Peek thinks Hindooism and Buddhism younger than Christianity, but he forgot them, and forgets also that the religion geographically nearest to Christianity did not perish after its birth. Judaism survived, and its professors have borne in different times and at various places a good deal of persecution for its sake. Nevertheless, arguments like these have led Mr. Peek to what we believe to be quite accurate conclusions,—those conclusions, again, to complete the intellectual curiosity of the whole affair, not being such as be could possibly have been taught as a child, but having been reached by an independent and self- sustained process of his mind. He has accepted a most reasonable faith for no reasonable reason.
Previous page
