BOOKS.
THE WORLD AND THE CHURCH.*
Tins volume forms an attempt, at once conciliatory and courageous in tone, to produce, on the side of modern thought opposed to Christianity that kind of argument which has done so much service for Christianity. "Whether or not you allow our Religion to be true," it has been said, "you cannot deny that it is eminently use- ful and consolatory." "Let us take that test," says the Septua- genarian "and we shall find that your Religion has hindered the welfare of the human race in the same sense as science has furthered it." We heartily welcome a controversial utterance so candid ; we regard much of its criticism on the mistakes of ecclesiasticism as valuable (specially with regard to education, p. 48) ; and we think the unquestionable truth contained in it,—that those whose attention is concentrated on a few aims will carry them out most effectually, though it seem a truism at first sight, is worth enforcing. But of course our author means more than this, and beyond this we think his argument as futile on the side of • 271e Problem olthe World and the Church Recoruidered in Three Letters to a Friend. By a Septuagenarian. London: Longmano. 1872. secular activity as it is generally conceded to be on that of any system of religion. When he tells us, "The Church has been rather a hindrance than a helper in the great work of humanity" (p. 6), he raises a double issue. There may be two opinions as to what is the great work of humanity, as well as to the part the Church has taken in hindering or helping it. Of course certain, aims are common to all, but the proportion which they oc- cupy in the whole of desire is so infinitely various, that you cannot from them alone construct the problem which our author- asserts the Church to have failed in solving. We all want to escape pain of body ourselves and remove it from others, and to live with those we love, but some among us have other desires. whichthrow even these into the shade, so that you need to consti- tute a hierarchy of aims before you settle what system has moat- furthered human desire. To us this double uncertainty seems a needless complication. The question, Is Christianity true ? may surely be made on the assumption that all truth is useful, while in- beginning at the other end we entangle ourselves in the further question,—Is Christianity valuable to those who are most valuable to their kind ? The present volume affords us several specimens. of the confusion entailed by this course. For instance, our- author says, "The evil that is the result of general laws may cause the same degree of suffering to the afflicted person" (as that which the sufferer supposes to be the direct result of the will of God), "but at least he has not the distress of thinking that his suffer- ing is intentionally inflicted by God." The discovery of design in the complex web of human suffering is so difficult that we are- never surprised to hear it pronounced impossible, but it is a start- ling novelty to us that any one should consider it undesirable. Again, when we are told (p. 87), "The pious notion that suffering- is of God's appointment has caused much pain to be- endured which might have been spared,"—so far as this refers to any habit of mind now prevalent among us, we cannot help. doubting the fact, while its influence on the general sum of human aims would remain to be proved after it was itself established.
However, it cannot be denied that this method of inquiry coin- cides much more fully with popular feeling than what we should consider a more logical plan, and as a pleasing and interesting specimen of a prominent phase of cultivated opinion at the present day, we can heartily recommend this volume. Even the incon- sistency, as it appears to us, of the author's using the expression "the scheme of the Divine Government" (p. 10) makes it perhaps a fitter representation of that opinion. It is the characteristic of popular views to stop short of their logical consequence, and the- Septuagenarian in supposing that, "for the individual man or society, all depends on our own efforts" (p. 14), and yet that it- should be part of those efforts "to know and do the Will of God,11-- is not more inconsistent with himself than a number of high-minded• and earnest persons in our day, who would have been Unitarians if- they had lived half-a-century ago, whose representatives fifty years hence will probably have learnt a frank renunciation of all but ignorance with regard to any past creator or future judge of this world. We do not believe that it will be possible to our- children to avoid seeing that the only alternative lies between re- cognizing an unseen person, acting upon us in the same manner- that seen persons do, and dropping as a useless surplusage of lan- guage all allusion to S Supreme Being. Any intermediate position grows daily weaker, and seems to us equally unworthy of fortifica- tion or of attack. Our present aim is a simpler one. We shall endea- vour to set forth that part of experience (call it knowledge or feel- ing) which such men as the Septuagenarian ignore, and urge upon- them that it is unphilosophical to pass by, without refutation or- admission, so large a part of what human beings assert themselves to have felt with just as much certainty as they say they have been. heated by the sun or chilled by an East wind. If their assertion be false, this should be plainly stated; and if it be true, such books- as this touch the mere outer film upon the convictions they assail.
What is it which makes us certain of anything ? The evidence of the senses. But what is it that sight or touch makes us certain. of ? Strictly speaking, only an event in the past. "To what does- any evidence in natural science amount to beyond the expression of a probability ?" asked a lecturer on spectrum analysis, answer- ing by anticipation the suggestion that this latest and most marvellous achievement of science might amount to no more than. a probability ; and he went on to point out that all that a scientifie man meant by being sure that a particular substance contained iron, for instance, was being sure that a particular set of tests had been tried which had always previously distinguished a substance with that particular set of properties from any other. Of course it would be absurd to attempt to distinguish this kind of probabl-
lity from certainty, for practical results, all we would urge is that it differs from a kind of certainty which it is possible to feel with regard to some part of what experience makes known to us. For do we not all mean more than this when we say, "I know that man to be trustworthy "? Is the kind of confidence which we have in character no more than that which we feel as to the properties of any substance ? We could not doubt as to the answer to this question, if those who answered it would think of the concrete human beings they know and not of abstractions, and if we exclude the many who prolong through the whole of their sojourn in this world the simple outward experience of the child, and to whom, 'therefore, we cannot ascribe the right to decide on the charac- teristics of humanity. The forms of common speech bear witness -to this fundamental difference between our knowledge of things and of persons; we say, "I know this man or this woman,"—much snore rarely," this thing." The thing does not present the same unity to be known as the person does; in the whole outward world there .does not exist any oneness such as each one of us is aware of when he says "I." We may know the properties of a substance, but -what is a substance? No more than the hypothetical bond of certain qualities which we can never know except as the cause of sensa- tion in ourselves. Character, on the other hand, is something we -come in direct contact with apart from its effects. How indelible, -sometimes, is the recollection of a character which has left nothing but itself to remember ! Where the whole result has been poor, where the man's actions have to be apologized for, and his words, repeated by other lips, sound common-place and feeble,—still how unconquerable sometimes is the persuasion of having approached a great soul. He who has it can as little transfer it to another -mind as he can eradicate it from his own. And as those arguments by which he would endeavour to convey them to another mind represent the element in his knowledge which came from the senses, as whatever he has seen his friend do or heard him say can be repeated to others who are as capable as he is of drawing a true inference from it, and who yet from such information could Inver attain the absolute certainty with which he believes him to be incapable of meanness or cruelty,—so we are driven to believe that it must be possible to know character directly, and that this -direct knowledge is certain, in a sense which nothing else is.
And so far we venture to say that we have been describing the .experience of humanity. That it is an experience which many would abjure we are well aware, and we allow that the dissidents would not belong wholly to that numerous clams of grown-up children whose experience affords no specimen of human life ; nevertheless, we hold to our belief that if men's convictions were -really rooted in the whole of experience,—if they did not fence off a certain part of life as appropriate only to the msthetic faculty,— all
men and woman who had been allowed a sufficient respite from outward needs or sensations to know what it was to enter into any real intercourse with other hearts and minds would join -with us in the assertion that the domain of certainty is not the mature], but the personal world. But in asserting that just as the natural world manifests that which, to keep the etymo- logy of "person," "sounds through" it, so the personal world indicates the presence of something beyond itself, we allow that we cannot claim to express the latent convic- tions of all mature and thoughtful minds. Many great -names in the past, many noble and venerable characters in the present rise up against any attempt to describe as the inheritance a humanity an experience from which we must exclude them. Still we venture to claim for this experience, in a peculiar sense, the epithet human. We believe that those who are wanting in it, are wanting in the capacity which binds human beings together, lifting them above the idiosyncracies of position or character, and makes them aware of the possessions that are strictly common.
For those who feel what we attempt to describe would say that every particular relation has seemed to them to indicate some common relation. The sum of human agencies does not exhaust the influences which have moulded their lives ; when they have reckoned up all the human influences under which they have lived, there remains still something unaccounted for, which in its cha- racter is strictly personal. If they have been aware of that influence of character which we have spoken of as making itself felt apart from words or deeds, so still more have they felt an influence which is separate not only from words or deeds, but even from a visible presence. The sensations of self-condemna- tion which have been first roused by a look on some human face, are roused in a much more vivid and enduring degree by some in- fluence which does not leave on sense even that transient and subtle impression. The delight which has floated the soul above every pang and every need when a familiarvoice was heard in the distance has been
felt when no sound has come to the outward ear, and the flood of joy could only be connected with some personality which was made directly perceptible by theirs. Where they have loved most, they have been conscious of one near them who loved more. The deepest and most vital affections of their lives have seemed at times poor and pale by the side of this larger love, so that the one has to be rekindled from the other, as the candle from the fire. This is a part of experience, just as the sense of light or heat is a part of experience, and though we concede that it is not universal in the sense in which they are, yet we urge that it is in one sense universal, that you will find it excluded by no condition or idiosyncracy of mankind. It is felt where no want is unsatis- fied, and where almost every want is unsatisfied, it forms the sole solace of a forlorn life, and it outweighs the satisfactions of the most rich life. We are not urging now that this is good or desirable, we are not attempting to adjust the fact in harmony with our conceptions of what are called "general laws ;" we desire only to convince the reader that we speak of real experience when we say that it is.
"No," it may be said, "you fail to reach this aim by mere assertion. We have heard all this before, and it has passed by us, because it lacked the one criterion of all that we recognise as true experience,—that what is felt directly by one should be made de- monstrable to others through intellectual processes." In other words, it is denied that the distinction of transferable and untrans- ferable knowledge marking the line of what we know through the senses, and from elsewhere, is a reality. But how do we know the love of a friend? It seldom happens that we have any good arguments to prove it with,—life is not dramatic enough to afford scope for much obvious and useful self-sacrifice. And is it a more incredible thing that one invisible reality should be the evi- dence of another, than that this first reality should be made known to us by words or looks which to the logical intellect convey no evidence of it? We protest against the ready answer to such con- siderations,—that they are not reasoning, but rhetoric. It is most anphilosophical to affix this stigma, as it is now the habit of a certain school to do, on any attempt to express what is ultimate. Logic, which has no deadlier foe than rhetoric, takes its start from assertion. What you perceive directly you cannot translate into the language of inference. A substance which is elementary cannot be analysed. "But you mistake the character of these feelings," it will be said. "You take an aspiration for an event. The experience of the incompleteness of all human love raises a desire after a love which shall be complete, and this desire transmitted through many generations, with all the high and poetic associations which cluster round it, has created an object for its own satisfaction ; or rather, projected upon the clouds which gather round imaginative temperaments, it becomes its own satisfaction. The yearning after God, seen through its reflex effect upon a character which it has elevated and purified, is what you mean by God."
Never, surely, was an assumption of theologians more startlingly at variance with the ordinary conceptions of human beings than this,—that a desire could be mistaken for its own fulfilment. The feeling which approaches most closely to the yearning after God, the desire to know that the dead are near us, must be known to many of those whom we would address. We do not speak of the longing to have them again in life. We speak of desire, that which sets towards a goal, not of that " desiderium " which we must borrow a word from a foreign tongue to express. Wherever some human beings are, we cannot help feeling sure that they must still wish to be near us. No surmountable difficulty would have kept us apart in life ; may it not be that though Death re- moves all possibility of making the presence known to eye or ear, it leaves open for intense desire the wordless communion of soul with soul ? Of those who have felt the longing that arises from such a doubt, we ask, "Does this also create its own satisfaction? Can you wish back wife or son into unseen nearness, as you say that others wish into existence their unseen God ?"
"All this," it may still be said, "is no more than the justification of a vague Theism, which would be accepted and even urged by many of those with whom you are attempting to reason, and is implied in the volume which has given occasion for these remarks. What you have to show, in order to justify any body calling itself the Church, is the historical foundation for such a body,—not merely a mystical conviction of individual communion with some super- natural being, but some unmistakable token of his action on human beings in their corporate attitude. You cannot suffuse the ques- tions raised at every step of the way in examining the history of Christianity in a vague cloud of generalities as to the spiritual life. You must take your stand on certain facts as definitely true or
definitely false, and be prepared to defend your position on the ordinary principles of evidence, if you mean to bridge over the in- terval between such assertions as these and any historical Christi- anity." To arguments such as these we should accord only a partial assent. It is not altogether true that a thinker has no alternative except that of engaging in controversies on the authorship of St. John's Gospel or falling back on "Religion as a Fine Art." The true question is, as to the existence here and now of an unseen agent. The chasm dividing those who recognise such an agent, and those who merely think they see arguments for a bene- ficent Creator, who made the world long ago, and leaving it mean- while under the regime of "general laws," will perhaps judge its in- habitants by and bye, goes far below any division that connects itself with questions of history ; and when we are seeking for com- mon ground, it is enough to trace out the deeper divisions by which human beings are at once separated and united.
Such an answer, we believe, might be extended to a length far beyond our present limits. But we allow that something has to be said on the other side, and that there is in our day a real temptation to that indolent sentimentality which unfits us equally to contemplate the history of a particular Jew as a real event, whether it dispose us to deal with that history as the source of pictures or of sermons. But the first step necessary towards a true apprehension of Christ's claims from a historical point of view seems to us one of strange simplicity. Two distinct questions— Are these events supernatural? and,—Is the narrative through which we know them miraculously accurate ?—have been BO closely associated, that it needs some logical power to perceive their in- dependence. Perhaps the statement thus baldly made will seem almost absurd, but we are convinced that the more anyone will examine either attacks upon or defences of Christianity, the more he will be struck by the influence, in the background of the mind, of this illogical sequence :—" These events, being miraculous, must have had an infallible reporter," or else in its inverted form, "This narrative, being palpably inaccurate, must have taken its rise in events which were not miraculous." The first condition of any honest methodical examination of the life of Jesus is that this illogical union should be dissolved. We must try to find out what really happened without hampering ourselves by any hypothesis that Matthew, the tax-gatherer, or Mark, the fisherman's interpreter, had any help in passing on their recollections which is not granted to every honest bio- grapher. We must be ready to grant, if the evidence goes to prove it, that the being whom we have learnt to know dissociated from any outward form appeared once in an outward form in Judasa, and yet that his history, as we have it in the four narra- tives which seem to have been preserved that their discrepancies might save us from the delusion into which we have fallen, are fall of all those mistakes of omission and commission which you would naturally expect from uncultivated men who write down their impressions of what has happened long ago. And the more we study what they have left us of his words, the more we shall be convinced that we are not meant to be dependent on them for our knowledge of him. The events they narrate are receding, if not beyond the reach of our critical glasses, at all events to so great a distance that we must begin to ask ourselves what did Christ intend to be the state of mind of those who lived at a dis- tance from his appearance on earth at which all historical images must grow dim. They are not, most assuredly, to be at any dis- advantage in judging of the truth of his words. As we lose that nearness to his action on earth which enables us to judge of ques- tions of fact in that action, we gain a wider scope for watching its results in the course of history. From this point of view, his answer to the messengers of John the Baptist seems specially his answer to our contemporaries. "Art thou he that should come ?" they are asking, "or shall we find in Comte, or the teachers of physical science, or the leaders of political reform some better guide to freedom and to truth ?" The world, they think, as John may have thought in his dungeon, does not seem much the better for the appearance of this supposed deliverer. And yet if we take a sufficiently wide view, is there not evidence of a new influence in the world since he came to it, an influence unfelt by the noblest of his predecessors, and reaching with beneficent result the sick and the poor, the diseased in body and mind, and those whose whole being seems need ? Why should we seek any other answer to doubt than that which he gave and history surely echoes ? It may not satisfy our doubters, we are not told that it satisfied his forerunner. But when we have learnt his sympathetic patience with doubt, we shall discern how much of our present eager hurry to deal with it arises from its presence within us.
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