A DUKE IN THE PULPIT.
THE Duke of Somerset has published hi a thin volume* a series of short Opposition speeches against the Christian theology, which are conceived too much in the same caustic Whig vein in which he has criticized Mr. Childers' policy at the Admi- ralty and Mr. Gladstone's general administration. The Duke is a
• Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism. By the Duke of Somerset, &Cf. London; James Bain.
well-read man in the modern criticism of the Bible, and has evidently paid a good deal of attention to the subject. His profession of faith in God is earnest and even solemn, and his reverence for the moral teaching of Christ is evidently hearty, and in relation to these two subjects he vents no crisp sarcasms ; but on all other subjects affecting the teaching of the Bible he is apt to be as flip- pant, light, and almost careless as if he were criticizing an antagonist in the Lords, instead of snipping away at the faith of millions. The Duke remarks (p. 161), in the course of his sceptical suggestions, that " Doubt tempers the mind to humility." Does it? We do not think the Duke's book shows it, and we question, as a matter of fact, if you could find half the humility among doubters that you can among believers. We are very far from putting this forward as a reason for belief without sufficient enquiry, for it would be quite as good a reason for false belief as for true. You may humiliate your intellect till you believe that a winding-sheet in the candle is an omen of death, or a duke's declaration against Christianity a sign of the end of the world. But looking at it simply as a matter of fact, you very seldom see the sort of humility amongst sceptics that you do among believers. Our author, for instance, writes on these great themes with an offhand epigrammatic flourish that will not compare for humility with the painstaking reverence of a brother Duke who sometimes treats these subjects,—the Duke of Argyll, though he has the Scotch dogmatizing fibre, which is not precisely humble, and probably an even greater pride of descent in him. No one would think of comparing Hume with Bishop Butler in point of humility, or even Strauss with Neander. If Doubt has a direct tendency to infuse humility into the mind, it certainly is very often and very conspicuously foiled by extrinsic influences, and it clearly has been thus foiled in the present case. A critic who ends a couple of clever pages about the Pauline philosophy with the remark, " Ne decipiamur per inanem philosophiam," who begins his sharp criticism on St. Paul's allegories by the quota- tion,—
" Qui talia legit Quid didicit tandem, quid scit, nisi somnia, nugas," and ends it with,—
" Insomnia vans valete," is certainly not overburdened with humility of feeling. Indeed, the Duke of Somerset treats the great Apostle of the Gentiles with hardly more reverence than he would pay to Lord Shaftesbury or the Duke of Marlborough in a debate in the Upper House. The duke in the pulpit is certainly a doubting duke, and may be a very humble duke ; but if he is, he shows his humility by an abundance of easy sarcasms, such as usually imply rather com- plete self-confidence than awe in the presence of a mystery.
The Duke's general line of argument is this :—He begins by insisting on the human errors and uncertainties of the Gospels, remarks on the demonology which modern ideas have, more or less, exploded, and on the doubt this demonology throws upon the first three Gospels, and upon the supposed preternatural testimonies given by the demons to our Lord's divinity. He points out the poetical character of the early chapters of Matthew and Luke, and the difficulty of connecting any real event with the story of the Star in the East ; he observes on the apparent difference of view, even within the limits of the New Testament, as to the date of the declaration of Jesus Christ's divinity, ascribing the oldest view to St. Paul, namely, that the resurrection was the first de- claration of his divine nature, the next to the Gospels which assign that declaration to the voice heard at the baptism, and the latest to the theory of a miraculous conception, which pushes back the date to a period before his birth. He remarks on the doubts cast upon the miracles by the fact that the Jewish people are stated to have believed John the Baptist, who did no miracle, to be a prophet, while they hesitated to acknowledge Jesus. He observes on the tendency of translation into imperfectly understood languages to alter the very basis of theological conceptions, hazard- ing a conjecture that the Trinity would never have been accepted had the word for ' spirit ' in Greek and Latin been of the feminine gender, as it is in Hebrew. And then he spends the rest of his strength on a destructive criticism of St. Paul's writings, taking strongly the Tubingen view that the Acts falsify St. Paul's doctrine, representing him as more of a Jew, and as more in accordance with the Jewish Apostles than he really was ; maintaining that nevertheless St. Paul's Christianity left him still under the influence of the general methods of the Jewish philosophy and theology, to which he had devoted so much study ; that that philosophy was vague and unscientific, that that theology was full of mystic errors, false idealism, and misleading analogies ; that faith, as St. Paul understood it,
'was a tendency full of danger, on which modern civilization has imposed so healthy and strong a restraint that faith has now almost
become "the heritage of the uneducated ;" and asserting in general that all St. Paul's teaching is so bound up with error that "a feeling of religious reverence" alone would force us to deny it the name of the Word of God. The Duke then points out that, as all revelation depends on these supremely uncertain sources for its authentication, there remains for us nothing but to guard for faith the one unassailable fortress, "Faith in God." "In this unapproachable sanctuary she will reign supreme."
Such in still briefer outline is the Duke of Somerset's own very brief summary of the case of Scepticism against Christian Faith. It
amounts in one word to this,—that the moment you have admitted that the human media of any historical revelation and the records they have left behind them were subject to human error, and were really and gravely affected by such error, you have admitted what throws the whole matter so completely into doubt that no human intellect can pretend to discriminate the true from the false, and had better leave the whole matter alone. We confess that, whether it be due to the want of that proper humility which the Duke of Somerset thinks to be the natural fruit of Doubt, or to some more recondite cause, we cannot agree with him ; and we do not think that he is consistent with himself in the matter, for his argument, if true, would surely apply as much to his own residual faith in God, as it would to any article of the faith in the Christian Revelation. All that the radical defect of human faculties as shown in the errors of Apostles and the admitted defects of the Gospels proves, is that every man, however close he may he to God, or however devoted to the cause to which he believes him- self called by God, may misinterpret His message, and may overlay it with fancies and misconceptions of his own. Well, that is surely quite as true of human history as of the history of divine inspira- tion, though there are dangers in the one case which there are not in in the other ; and yet it does not induce us to ignore the leading out- lines of human history. It is equally true of that to which the Duke of Somerset still clings,—natural religion. The higher races of men have uniformly and in almost all ages attained to the conception of a spiritual essence free from the limitations of time and space, filled with love for all living beings, and the beneficent desire to set men free from moral pollution ; and on the strength of this spiritual unanimity among men of the higher calibre the Duke apparently thinks belief in God unassailable. But surely if no mind liable to error can be trusted to record even the general outlines of a direct revelation, it is impossible to hold that the con- lent of even a vast number of such minds will establish the being of God. It will only show that the errors run in the same direction, that the cracks repeat themselves in all the specimens. What you can never trust as the yield of one select and highly-favourable instance, you cannot trust as the yield of many less select and favourable. It is impossible to con- ceive a more astounding truth than the existence of an omnipresent spiritual Will, free from all taint of evil, independent of the limita- tions of time and space, and full of love to all finite beings. Such a truth is certainly not established by any such use of our faculties as is implied in (say) astronomical or chemical science. If it is intellectually established at all, it is through some mystical evidence of the touch of God on the soul, which we cannot define, and to which all developed minds are yet more or less sensi- tive. Well, but if not the less this great truth be " unassailable," as the Duke believes, it must be true that the race and the men through whom chiefly this faith was impressed upon the world were much more sensitive to such spiritual impressions than the mass of man- kind have been,—nor can it be unreasonable to attach a great deal more value to the testimony on such subjects which they give us than we attach to that of the mass of mankind. The race of which the Duke of Somerset's Order constitutes the aristocracy would ecrtainly have never given this belief to the world. Is it too much to say that we may rightly attach a great deal more value to the experience of the spiritual aristocracy of the Hebrews, than to that of English Peers ? Moreover, if the spiritual evidence of the prophets and apostles of the Jews not only explains and en- forces, as the Duke of Somerset himself seems to admit, the dim- mer spiritual experience of mankind, but so adds to the fruits of man's spiritual experience as to make the whole more credible, fuller of light, more potent to bring out the highest qualities of man, would it be other than childish scepticism to reject these additions to our knowledge, on the mere ground that we could show many flaws in the accuracy of their human facts and the relevancy of their human illustrations ? Suppose St. Paul and St. John to have blundered, as no doubt they have blundered, is it nothing that they grasped the truth on which the Duke of Somerset so earnestly insists, with a force that has made all history different from what it would have been without them ? —or that the new truth which helped them to grasp that older truth so powerfully was the revelation to them of their Lord as superior to death, and enjoying in the divine world the life from which he had descended to share with them the life of earth ? We maintain that the Duke of Somerset is right in the ardour with which he clings to the faith in God, but that this ardour is entirely inconsistent with his principle that sublime mysteries cannot be revealed through the medium of minds liable to grave error. But if he is right, it is not nearly so great a step from this spiritual Theism to the belief that Christ is the true revelation of God, that he came from God, and has revealed himself to man after passing again to God, as it is from blank Agnosticism to spiritual Theism. Christianity is the explanation and supplement of Theism. But if the manifold error to which human intellects are liable leaves God himself still apprehensible to us, surely that error does not compel us to reject the apostolic testimony which explains and expands that wonderful faith,— "Our earthly creed retouching hero and there, And deepening every line."
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