AIDS TO FAITH:*—MIRICLE AND PROPHECY. NE great divines of the
present day have not a very human style,— and in this respect we fear that Aids to Faith may be found even • A Series of Theological Essays by Several Writers. Edited by William Thomson, D.D., Lord Bishop of Gloucester and Bristo1 Murray.
more deficient than the book to which it is a reply. The cold Aris- totelian scepticism, indeed, of Mr. Baden Powell would only attract a few scientific Pantheists, and Mr. Wilson's sophistical morality would repel the healthy conscience of men accustomed to interpret, literally the contracts of actual life. But Dr. Temple and Mr. Jowett( approach a great deal nearer to the daily thoughts and inward life of practical humanity than most of the innumerable apologists who have come forward to answer them ; and we must say, that even the reply before us, which is the ablest that has yet come under our notice, gives us a dreary sense of the gulf between the positive theology of the English clergy and the doubts and conflicts which daily perplex the minds and hearts of English laymen. The Bishop of Gloucester has certainly done his work better than the Bishop of Oxford, who has contributed, to a work* which he admits that he has never read, a preface which will do much to prejudice it in the eyes of all candid Englishmen ; but the work before us, though it combines scholarship, acuteness, and much earnestness and piety, is conceived and executed in a thin professional tone, which marks it out at once as mere " divinity," and as little likely to take hold of men who read their Bible because it has so living a grasp of the problems of life, and blends with such wonderful power the world of divine truth with that of human action. Much as we differ from the Essayists and Reviewers, two or three of their number, at least, know more of the actual attitude of human spirits than even these, the most able of their opponents. In these columns it would be both idle and presumptuous to at- tempt to review, as a whole, a book which embodies the learning and ability of eight accomplished divines, every one of whom has mastered a field of research far beyond the reach of ordinary culture. But even a deficiency in technical divinity is no undesirable qualification (or dis- qualification) for those who attempt to give to the general public some impression of what this book can teach them, and where it may, per- haps, disappoint their hopes. That the Essayists and Reviewers sue- 1 ceeded more or less in expressing the real thoughts which agitated the minds of cultivated men there can be no doubt. And the first aim of those who are answering them should be to reach yet deeper, if possible, into the same world,,—instead of shrinking back into the dreary regions of apologetic divinity. There can be few greater' themes in this respect than Miracle and Prophecy. The difficulties of "modem thought" have their roots in the most stirring intellectual and moral life of the present generation. The miracles and prophe- cies of the Bible are represented as closely entwined with the deepest practical life of the days in which they were performed and uttered. It does, therefore, seem to us almost a confession of moral inability to deal adequately with the subjects, if the apologists of the present day discuss them in a way that inclines us to relegate the whole matter to professional divines.
Mr. Manses essay on Miracles is, from this point of view, not a satisfactory one. It is, like his previous works, thin, logical, unreal,— the work of a man who has had more to do with "the categories" and the understanding, than with the hearts and consciences of men. Yet it has at least the merit of taking its stand almost explicitly on ground which his previous efforts had done much to undermine. He admits that the whole discussion must proceed on the assumption "that we are justified in conceiving God as a Person, and in speaking of His nature and operations in the language we should employ in describing the analogous qualities and actions of men," and he is evidently aware that no one has done so much lately as himself to shake this assumption, for he says apologetically : "How any relation between the infinite and the finite can lie conceived as existing ;—how God can be contemplated as acting in time at all, whether in connexion with the phenomena of the material world, or with the thoughts and feelings of men :—questions of this kind are equally applicable to every positive conception of Divine Providence which we are capable of forming, and have no direct bearing on the peculiar claims of one class of such conceptions as compared with another. The general answer to such difficulties is to be found in the confession of our ignorance as regards the mystery from which they spring and on which their solution depends ; but this ignorance, arising as it does from the universal limits of human thought, has no special relation to one age or state of man's knowledge, more than to another, and is not removed by any advance in those departments which fall within his legitimate field. Pantheistic specula- tion has flourished with much the same result, or want of result, in the earliest and in the latest days of philosophy, in ancient India and in modern Germany ; and if any advance is to be expected in relation to the questions with which such speculation deals, it is probably to be looked for, not in the fuller solution of the questions themselves, but in the clearer appre- hension of the reasons why they are insoluble."
Taking his stand thus on a faith which he thinks that he has himself in part invalidated, Mr. Mansel's whole essay vibrates with a sense of insecurity derived from the tottering ground on which the reason- ing is reared. If modern Englishmen are to believe in miracles, it can never be merely as marvel's. It is no longer astonishment which inspires faith. Science has at least succeeded in inspiring a deeper and truer wonder than any mere prodigy ; and where we see a rup- ture in the order of Nature, as we had conceived it, it can only sub- due our consciences and our hearts, if through the rift is unfolded a deeper, and sublimer, and higher kind of order—the supernatural order of the Divine spirit. Yet Mr. Mansel's sense of insecurity as to the limits of human knowledge of God, prevents him necessarily from appealing to this state of mind. He dares not claim for Miracle that it unfolds to us the inner life of God—the very purposes which underlie the order of nature. He only claims that it is superhuman; that it should establish a certain authority for him who works it ; that it should make us defer to the doctrines connected with it. "It * Replies to " Essays and Reviews." With a Preface by the Lord Bishop of Oxford. 3. H. and James Parker. is not the truth of the doctrines, but the authority of the teacher, that miracles are employed to prove, and the authority being established, the truth of the doctrine follows from it." Such is the old dreary Paleyan thesis which will scarcely convince Englishmen again. So purely does Mr. Mansel regard the miracles as acts of startling power —mere instruments of belief—that when he discusses the three origins assignable for them, a superhuman but diabolical origin—a lumen atld natural—a superhuman and divine—he rejects the first as inconsistent with the general effects and influences of Christian doctrine ; but never apparently thinks of rejecting it on account of the actual moral colouring of the miracles themselves. It does not occur to him that the miracles are directly revealing acts; that they witness to the root of all order ; that they manifest the very spirit of God ; that they are themselves deeper than doctrines, the direct overflow of the divine love. To him they are mere supernatural gongs to attract attention to a discourse. And if any one chose to assert that, besides evil angels and ministers of God, there are innumerable spirits of a mixed character, partly good and partly evil, we do not know how Mr. Man.sel—apparently seeing himself no direct divine revelation in Miracle at all—would dispose of the suggestion that to such beings the Christian miracles might be due. His Inference that they are of divine origin entirely depends on the exclusion, first, of diabolical agency as disproved by the result, next, of human agency as inadequate to the occasion. Their divine source is only a negative conclusion from the assumption that there is no third alternative, and is not derived from any intrinsic evidence in themselves.
There is the same sort of thin divinity in the essay on Prophecy. That. coming events were occasionally foreseen by the prophets, often many years, sometimes generations, before they happened, Dr. McCaul re-establishes. But he seems to think that this predicting power is in itself, and not in the source from which it springs, the evidence of the divine inspiration. Now the prophets were the living and acting politicians of their day. Even where they did predict, they often did not live to see their predictions fulfilled. At all events, they exercised their divinest influence before any one could prove that they had been fulfilled or would be fulfilled. Many of the greatest prophets seldom predicted events in detail at all. Certainly it was not in the marvel of minute anticipation that their power consisted. Their vision of the future was a marked characteristic of the prophet, but not as a vision of the future. The "second sight," where it existed, was a characteristic which others, by no means divine prophets—Highland seers for ex- ) ample—have probably shared with them. It was in the personal communion with God, the knowledge of His nature, and purposes, and will,—the insight into His present life, that the power of Isaiah, or Micah, or Amos consisted. Of course this knowledge did imply a knowledge of the future. To know Him who is "the same yester- day, to-day, and for ever," is to discern moral laws which will operate long after the seer has left the earth, to discern a glory which will shine more and more even to the perfect day. But the essence of it . is not in its anticipation but in its insight. The true type of the t prophet's knowledge of the future is Jonah's prophecy of destruction to Nineveh. He saw the guilt and the cloud of divine justice. He knew that the latter must break over the former, if it continued.
I And he prophesied unconditionally that which was only conditionally true. The condition was falsified, and therefore the prophecy was not fulfilled. Still it remained a true prophecy though a false prediction. It was founded on a true communion with God ' and knowledge of his nature. It was not fulfilled because the wills of men were changed. And Dr. MeCaul would have had more chance of convincing men of our own century that the , Jewish prophets were inspired by God, if he had worried him- ' self less about the eventual fall of Tyre, and the death of Je- hoiakim, and had ,,,riven us a clearer insight into the moral and spi- ritual sources of that independence of time, that power to read the great volume of the Ages, which' the prophets of Israel surely pos- sessed. We are sorry to find the same meagre and an even more fretful divinity overlaying the Dean of Exeter's (Dr. Ellicott's) learned essay on "Inspiration." It takes the Erne objection to Mr. Jowett's canon that the meaning of Scripture must be strictly limited to the special meaning attached to it by the individual writer,—a canon, by the way, which would eat half the life out of the greater secular poets, out of ..tEschylus, Dante, Milton, and Shak- speare, as well as out of the Bible,—but it applies the truth discerned in a shrill scolding tremulous treble, and overlays it with a false and artificial system of exegetical caveats, that half neutralize the value of the principle. The style of the essay is, indeed, unworthy of its aim, and ought not to have been adopted in answer to Mr. Jowett's, which, whatever its errors, bears at least as many tokens of a deep love of truth as that of any of his opponents.
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