LOSS AND GAIN IN RECENT THEOLOGY.

DR. MARTINEAU, whose genius has done more to mould the religious philosophy of the present day, especially in its conflict with empiricism and materialism, than that of any other thinker of our time, has just delivered an address to the students of Manchester New College, in which he estimates, from his own point of view, the "Loss and Gain" in recent Theological developments. His title reminds us of a very dif- ferent book, Cardinal Newman's estimate of the "Loss and Gain" which the hero of his remarkable tale had to balance when he left the English Church for that of Rome. Dr. Martineau, of course, in a very brief address, cannot go over the ground which his own mind must have travelled with any- thing like the elaboration of Dr. Newman, and only touches the heads of the great subject with which he deals. But it is obvious that the two estimates of "Loss and Gain" made by these two very different men of genius are nearly oppo- site; that nearly everything which Dr. Martineau regards as gain, Dr. Newman would have regarded as loss, and that nearly everything that Dr. Newman regarded as gain, Dr. Martineau would have regarded as loss. It is curious enough to contrast the general conclusions of the two men. "English- men," said Dr. Newman, through the mouth of one of his characters more than thirty years ago, when near his summing- up of the loss and gain of conversion, "have many gifts; faith they have not. Other nations inferior to them in many things still have faith. Nothing will stand in place of it ; not a sense of the beauty of Catholicism, or of its usefulness, or of its antiquity ; not an appreciation of the sympathy which it shows towards sinners; not an admiration of the martyrs and early Fathers and a delight in their writings. Individuals may dis- play a trusting gentleness or a conscientiousness which demands our reverence ; still, till they have faith, they have not the foundation, and their superstructure will fall. They will not be blessed, they will do nothing in religious matters till they begin by an act of unreserved faith in the word of God, whatever

it be,—till they go out of themselves ; till they cease to make. something within them their standard, till they oblige their will to perfect what reason leaves sufficient indeed, but incomplete. And when they shall recognise this defect in themselves and try to remedy it, then they will recognise much more ; they will be on the road very shortly to be Catholics." That, of course, is the form in which the case against the tendencies visible in recent theology would be presented by a Roman Catholic, but the Romanising element in it is not that with which we have any concern. Of course, Dr. Newman regarded the Catholic Church as the representative on earth of God's revealed will, but the argument we have quoted was not an argument for

trusting that or any other Church, but for trusting God's revelation as something higher and worthier than man's own sense of fitness, for fixing the mind on something outside men, and ceasing to make "something within them their standard." Dr. Martineau's estimate of loss and gain in recent theology, is a computation conducted on the most opposite principle conceivable as to what is loss and what gain. Ile con- gratulates his former pupils on "the disappearance from our branch of the Reformed Churches, of all external authority in matters of religion,"—and what he means by external authority, he tells us clearly enough. He goes so far, indeed, as expressly to condemn the attempt "to extract a proof of eternal life from the records of Christ's resurrection," which he speaks of as one of a class of mistakes justifying a feeling of moral "humilia-

tion." And he explains himself further as follows :—

" The Catholic prediction, so often made when Luther threw off the restraints of ecclesiastical Tradition, has at last come true ; and the yoke of the Bible follows the yoke of the Church. The phrases which we have heard repeated with enthusiasm,—that 'the Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of- Protestants,'—that 'Scripture is the rule of faith and practice,'—are, indeed, full of historical interest, but for minds at once sincere and exact, have lost their magic power. I need not remind you how innocently, and how in- evitably, this has come about ; how completely the conception of a Canonical literature that shall for ever serve as a Divine statute- book, belongs to a stage of culture that has passed away; how widely discrepant are the types of doctrine and the conceptions of morals and the recitals of fact, in different parts of this supposed uniform manual ; and how, if you disown these human inequalities and insist on artificially filling up its valleys and levelling its hills, you destroy a region glorious in beauty, and doom its running waters to stagnate in unwholesome fens. It is simply a fact that dictated faith and day are no longer possible, and that, by way of textual oracle, you can carry to the soul no vision of God, no contrition for sin, no sigh for righteousness. The time is past when a doctrine could save itself from criticism by taking refuge under an apostle's word, or a futurity authenticate itself by a prophet's forecast, or a habit become obliga- tory by evangelical example. To our function, as witnesses for divine things, this seems at first a disastrous change, little short of a loss of both the credentials and the instructions which legitimate our message. We naturally think how easy was the preacher's task when he had only to exhibit the sacred seal, and make clear the sentences it covered, and the reason of men would accept them as troth and the will would bow before them; when doubts of Providence fled from the sufferer at the mere sound of the words, The hairs of your head are all numbered ;' and the shadows of death vanished before the voice, 'This mortal must put on immortality ;' and the guilty conscience shuddered to hear, 'There shall in nowise enter therein anything that is unclean, or that maketh abomination and a lie.' In our moments of weakness, when we cry, ` Ah, Lord God, behold I cannot speak, for I am a child !' we may long for some infallible support which may bear our burden, and relieve the strain of thought and love. But it is jag in order to bear this burden, to sift out the eternally true and good from transient and tempting semblances, and make the divine light glow amid human things, that we have girded up our wills and set apart our lives for spiritual service. And if there were a book-theology ever so perfect, the verbal quintessence of all transcendent truth, the more we spared our own souls and depended upon it, the less should we pierce to the seats of conviction, and rekindle sight for the blind. Religion is not the truth of any stereotyped propositions, but the highest life of the moving spirit, nor can it be conveyed from mind to mind, except by the vibration of harmonic chords."

So that the very tendency which Dr. Newman, when he left the Anglican Church, selected for special condemnation,—the ten-

dency, we mean, to lean on a purely human and subjective standard of truth, Dr. Martineau selects, thirty-three years later, as a matter for special satisfaction,—and, if so, no

doubt one in respect of which the modern Unitarians are justly entitled to very special congratulation.

How are we to explain this absolute and violent contradic- tion between two men of high religious genius, each of whom has done much to fortify the religious spirit of the age

against the materialism of the day, in Churches far removed from the sphere of their own special influence ? Or shall we infer that one at least of the two was entering on a wholly false and misleading track P No doubt, the one had entered defitii- tively on the track which led to a recognition of an infallible authority for the definition of divine truth, while the other has long ago chosen that track which leads to an ideal and religions rationalism indeed, but still to pure rationalism,—in other words, the recognition of the human conscience and reason as the final and only index of the law and reason of God. But what we want o consider is this, whether either of them is, so far as we can judge, wholly wrong or wholly right. And the answer we should give is this,—that while Dr. Newman and the Catholics go much,—we might almost say demonstrably,—too far, in assuming for those elements of revelation which stretch beyond the verge of our utmost " verifying faculties," 'whether of reason or conscience, the same degree and kind of authority which belongs to those elements reflected and echoed in our own minds, Dr. Martineau goes quite as much too far in congratulating himself and his brethren on their having thrown off the yoke of external authority altogether, and having learnt to limit revelation by the area of the strictly natural religion in their own hearts and minds, and to deny it all extension and all authority beyond that which those hearts and minds can give. We will explain our meaning rather more at length.

The Catholic Church, as it seems to us, accustoms her children to look habitually for a degree of certainty in relation to the most incidental and, as we may say, arbitrary regions of reli- gious speculation, which is not really to be got, if only for this reason,—that if you lay down your dogmas in these matters so absolutely, they react on you so as to suggest doubt as to the authority of the organisation which speaks so confidently and pre- cisely on questions on which our reason and conscience do not speak confidently at all. For instance, in the very conversation from which we have quoted, Dr. Newman makes his Roman priest say, "I understand what a Catholic means by going by the voice of the Church ; it means, practically, by the voice of the first priest he meets. Every priest is the voice of the Church." Now, that view is, we think, a very natural consequence of the exces- sive importance attached by the Catholic Church to external authority. But the effect of it is that the Church in all ages has spoken through priests what in the next age it has had to correct as false. In one of the earliest centuries, numberless priests of high authority maintained that no layman, still less a heathen, could baptize effectually ; and yet soon that opinion was formally condemned. In century after century, up to our own time, priests of the highest authority have preached, with the most earnest belief in their own absolute authority to declare divine truth, and have even_ published to the world " consensn superiorum," doctrines of Hell which are now declared by equally high authorities to be quite unauthorised by the Church, and which it is at least not impossible that within our own time the Pope may ex cathedra condemn. No wonder, then, that Protest- ants distrust a Church which has so accustomed her children to rely on infallible external tests of truth, that the very organs of the Church preach century after century, without in the least doubting their own right to do so, dogmas which the Church herself, on reflection, finds herself compelled to modify, to soften, to limit, in reality and substantially, to retract and deny. Full of the sense of her own infallibility, the Roman Church thinks that on all points of theology she ought to have' a clear judgment, and the consequence is that her priests have often declared as truths of revelation what were not even decisions of the Church, but, only their own private opinions, moulded in the atmosphere of a particular country and par- ticular age. This results, in our opinion, from relying too much on the Church's power of understanding and interpreting those aspects of revelation whiGh range far beyond the scope of the reason and moral apprehension of man.

On the other hand, we cannot in the least enter into Dr. Martineau's position that there is, and can be, nothing in reve- lation worthy of our reverence and acceptance which does not demonstrate itself to our moral and religions intuitions, —in other words, that natural and revealed religion must in effect mean the same thing, since a truth once revealed to the reason and conscience becomes virtually a truth of natural religion, while a truth not so revealed cannot be, to the man whose moral or intellectual faculties have not grasped it as truth, a truth at all. What we should say is this,—that all who believe in God at all as a Being whose ways are not as our ways, nor his thoughts as our thoughts, ought to expect to find, in his revela- tions to us, first, that which we can discern to be absolutely true; next, that which we can discern to be fall of difficulty, but still, on the whole, impressing us as coming from above, and not from beneath us ; and lastly, that which we could not discern to be true at all, did it not come in close connection with truths which encompass and overwhelm us, and from that close connection, derive an authority of its own, to which it is only right to accord a definite share of influence on the conduct of our lives. We do not think that the authority of these different classes of truths can ever be identical, for this simple reason,— that the moment we get out of our depth in the world of truth, that moment we are in danger of defining wrongly, if we define too much at all,—are in danger, in fact, of undermining the very evidence on which we accept all divine truth, if we insist on translating into our definite human dialect the mysteries of God. That revelation which reason and con- science clearly understand and accept, is necessarily of the highest possible authority, because we know exactly what it is, where it begins and where it ends. That which reason and con- science only recognise as coming from above, though lying, more or less, beyond our grasp, is of less authority, so far, and only so far, as there are a great many different ways of inter- preting its significance, and the character of its divine origin. That which derives its authority solely from its close association with what really controls and rules us, has necessarily an authority of a vaguer and less definite kind. But it is to us almost unintelligible how a theologian who believes as strongly as Dr. Martineau in a self-revealing God, should seem to identify all authority in religion with that which has fully and finally incorporated itself with human nature, so that it involves a direct disloyalty to reason and conscience to doubt of it at all. This seems to us just as unreasonable as for a child to take nothing on its father's authority, except what that father can demon- strate to the undeveloped reason and conscience of its tender age. When, for instance, Dr. Martineau writes as follows, he seems to us to take for granted at one and the same time, first, that -Christ was so immeasurably our moral and spiritual superior as to be able to regenerate our nature ; and next, that we are so immeasurably his intellectual superiors, that we can disentangle all his illusions from his truths, can see through his dream of supernatural power, and strip him of all the disguises in which partly his own and partly his disciples' imagination dressed him ;—

" Take the measure of another great change which, though gradual and timid in its advance, has for us reached its completion within our own memory,—the disappearance from our faith of the entire Messianic mythology. I speak not merely of the lost argument from prophecy,' now melted away by better understanding of the Hebrew writings, or of the interior relation, under any aspect, of the Old Testament and the New, but of the total discharge from our re- ligious conceptions of that central Jewish dream which was always asking, 'Art thou he that should come, or look we for another ?' and of all its stage, its drama, and its scenery. It no longer satisfies us to say that Jesus realised the divine promise in a sense far transcend- ing the national preconception, and revealed at last the real meaning of the Spirit which spake in Isaiah. Such forced conforming of the Jewish ideal to the Christian facts, by glorifying the one and theorising on the other, was inevitable to the first disciples, and could not but colour all that they remembered and thought and wrote; and the imagination of Christendom, working with audiscriminating faith on these mixed materials, has drawn upon its walls a series of sacred pictures, from which art has loved to reproduce whatever is tender and sublime, and which have broken silence in the Divine Comedic, in the Paradise Lost and Regained, in plaintive Passion Music, and the kindling popular hymn. All this is of intense interest to us as literature, as art, as the past product of devout genius; nor will I too rigorously question those elements of it which fairly admit of symbolic use in setting forth the truths we really mean and the affections we deeply feel. Bat, as objective reality, as a faithful re- presentation of our invisible and ideal universe, it is gone from us ; gone therefore from our interior religion, and become an outside mythology. From the person of Jesus, for instance, everything official, attached to him by evangelists or divines, has fallen away : when they put such false robe upon him, they were but leading him to death. The pomp of royal lineage and fulfilled prediction, the prerogatives of King, of Priest, of Judge, the Advent with retinue of angels on the clouds of heaven, are to us mere deforminginvestitures, misplaced like court-dresses on 'the spirits of the just ;' and he is simply the Divine flower of humanity, blossoming after ages of spiritual growth,—the realised possibility of life in God. And if he is this, he has no consciously exceptional part to play, but only to be what he is, to follow the momentary love, to do and say what the hoar may bring, to be quiet under the sorrows which pity and purity incur, and die away in the prayer of inextinguishable trust. And, to see him thus, we go to his native fields and the village homes of Gali- lee, and the roads of Samaria, and the streets and courts of Jeru- salem, where the griefs and wrongs of his time bruised him and brought out the sublime fragrance of his spirit. All that has been added to that real historic sceue,—the angels that hang around his birth, and the fiend that tempts his youth ; the dignities that await his future,—the throne, the trumpet, the great assize, the bar of judgment; with ell :the apocalyptic splendours and terrors that ensue, Hades and the Crystal sea, Paradise and the Infernal gulf ; nay, the very boundary-walls of the kosruic panorama that contains these things,—bace for us utterly melted away, and left us amid tile infinite space and silent stars."

If all this Messiardc side of Christ is mythology, where is his truth ? M. Havet is far more reasonable from this point of view than Dr. Martineau. He strips off all that Dr.

Martineau strips off ; but then, after doing so, he does not hesitate to speak frankly of the narrow and ignorant Judaism

which he finds beneath. Those who see what Dr. Martineau sees in Christ are surely marvelously rash in assuming that no true supernatural power over nature, and no true vision of the eternal past from which, in our Lord's own belief, he issued, and of the eternal future into which he passed, was combined with

that marvellous spiritual might. It seems to us one of the most wonderful characteristics of religious rationalism, that while

it finds what. it truly finds in our Lord's history, it is so much offended as it is at finding other tokens of divine life and power, andother visions of truth which are not accorded to ordinary meu To pare away revelation to the dimensions of natural religion, seems to us to imply something like a latent doubt that it is revelation,— i.e., truth revealed to us by one above us at all,— and not rather the spontaneous divination of the human mind, opening by its own intrinsic energies to a sudden augury of its origin and destinies.