B OOKS.
MR. GOLDWIN SMITH ON MR. MANSEL'S THEQLOGY.*
Mn. GOLDWIN Saurn's native element appears to be controversy. The few Oxford lectures which he has as yet published have produced, at least, two considerable controversies, one on the philosophy of his- tory, and the present one on the theology which any such philosophy implies. There is an incisive haughtiness in the manner with which he flings aside false theories, or what he thinks false theories, which challenges something of a similar spirit in others. His treatment of Mr. Fronde has been ungenerous even where it has been intellectually most defensible. But be treats all his adversaries, and most of those with whom he disagrees, living or dead, much as he treats Mr. Froude ; and even poor Spinoza is branded, not only as the arch- pantheist, which he was, but as guilty of " Mephistophelic lan- guage," which he was not—no one less. This habit of clearing his way, sword in hand, through all obstacles, has gained for Mr. Goldwin Smith many bitter enemies, and some deserved reproach. But now and then he finds a victim worthy in every way of his trenchant sword-play, and we cannot but admit that Mr. Mansel is one such whom we do not in the least grudge to Mr. Goldwin Smith's piercing rapier. In one of his Oxford lectures on history, Mr. Smith found occasion to assert afresh his faith that human history is in perfect harmony with the true principles of Divine justice—that human nature is capable of apprehending and receiving gradually into itself the moral nature of God. Mr. Goldwin Smith asserted incidentally, but we think truly, and perhaps also characteristically, that any phi- losophy which denies this to man contains in itself the germs of absolute atheism. As a contrary doctrine had been developed at great length by Mr. Mansel in his Bawl:don Lectures for 1858, that learned gentleman felt called upon to reply, and Mr. Goldwin Smith's rejoinder to that reply fills the greater part of the present volume. It is very able, but very disjointed and rambling, containing passages of great and caustic power, and other passages of really noble and hearty faith, with not a little repetition and parade of dissection. Mr. Smith flourishes the scalpel with as much pleasure as an anatomical lecturer, and appears to have a profound conviction that ridicule is a powerful " test of truth." Our own impression is, that the attitude of mind in which ridicule becomes possible, is never one which is open to new truth, • Rational Religion, and the Ratios:414Ne OkiectIonz of the BoompOort Loohoroo for litb8. Bp Goldwin Smith. waitaamar.
and that Mr. Smith himself, when he seizes his favourite weapon, often compensates the pungency 'of his style by the blindness of his insight. But here we must make two admissions : first, that there' is no fitter—if there be any fit—subject for this method than such a thinker as Mr. Mansel, who applies it freely, harshly, and without pity himself ; the second is, that by far the most telling passages in this reply are those in which Mr. Smith speaks out his own deepest convictions, and abandons that playful habit of toying with thunder- bolts, which is suitable only to a self-worshipping Jupiter. Theology is a subject that can never lie beneath our feet; and even in treating a spurious theology it is well to preserve the attitude of spirit by which we are alone able to secure ourselves from plunging into the same track of spurious self-confidence. Mr. Goldwin Smith's theology is indefinitely more hearty, honest, and profound, than Mr. Mansel's; but even he often seems to us to miss a deep truth, both of reason and of revelation, from the temper of impatient and even angry certainty which so frequently persuades him that he has ex- hausted the subject and has nothing more to find. We have no intention to enter into the details of the controversy between Mr. Mansel and his critic, because we believe we can occupy the little space which is at our disposal more profitably in connecting the different positive theological hints which Mr. Goldwin Smith has thrown out; but we may say at once that no one who holds that knowledge of God is the vital principle of all human morality can hesitate for a moment between the antagonists. Mr. Mansel's method is the old one of driving man into a corner of hopeless inca- pacity, in order that he may surrender at discretion to a voice in the dark, which he assumes to be divine. Mr. Goldwin Smith, on the contrary, believes that tree knowledge of God is attainable, and that revelation is the answer to our yearning for such knowledge. We do not know whether he also holds with us that the Incarnation is the central principle of that revelation, and is the one disclosure which gives us a deep and firm grasp on the eternal realities. But whether he does or not, we confess we would rather cling to the root-prin- ciple of all true theology, with Mr. Goldwin Smith, even if we had not yet succeeded in apprehending its fuller developments, than assent to its most elaborate developments with Mr. Mansel, cut off, as they are in his writings, from the living principle which alone can give them life and power. Mr. Mansel's running apology for the reduelio ad desperationem which he applies so relentlessly to the human spirit, is that it is an argument in the spirit of Bishop Butler. There is a colour of truth in this assertion with a mass of falsehood ; and we can adopt with so little reserve Mr. Goldwin Smith's estimate of that justly revered but unhappily idolized thinker, that we will extract his eloquent criticism as supplying the fairest conception of Mr. Goldwin Smith's own starting-point :
"One word on the authority of Butler. I have lived in a University where he is worshipped almost as a fetish; on which his authority has weighed like an incubus; and where, through the weak side of his system, he has become the unhappy parent of a pedagogic philosophy which is always rapping people on the knuckles with the ferule of analogous diffi- culties,' instead of trying to solve the doubts and satisfy the moral instincts of mankind. Yet I would not willingly yield to any one in rendering him that free and rational homage which alone would be acceptable to his great- ness; for men of his mark do not care, either in the political or intellectual world, to reign over slaves. In dry intellect he was mighty, and in the annals of moral science his name will, no doubt, be memorable for ever; but he was wanting in feeling and the power of sympathy, and his religious philosophy is grievously marked with this defect. He could even commit the cruel platitude of pointing to the waste of seeds as a parallel to the waste of souls. We know, unfortunately, almost as little of his life as we know of the life of Shakspeare ; and we cannot tell exactly what it was in him that gave rise to his partiality for Roman Catholic ceremonialism : but we may be sure that the audacious scepticism of his age must have pro- duced in his mind a strong reaction towards the side of awe, and a tendency rather to rebuke human presumption, than to cheer human effort, enter into human perplexities, and console human weakness. Coleridge approached the great questions touching man's estate with less power indeed, and less soundness of understanding, but with an ampler and deeper nature, with a more entire humanity. And Coleridge, rather than Butler, has been the anchor by which the religions intellect of England has ridden out, so far as it has ridden out, the storms of this tempestuous age."
That Butler was wanting' in religious feeling we do not believe ; that he was wanting in geniality of religious sympathy we admit, and ascribe it, with Mr. Goldwin Smith, to the repelling and flippant negations of that evil time. But no one who has read the almost unequalled burst of awe and love with which his noble sermon on the Love of God concludes,. and remembers that this is not the pero- ration of a great rhetorician, but the hidden fire bursting through a nature externally dry and cautious even to excess, can doubt that there was a deep and central heat within him of which only one of our contemporary theologians has given the least sign. But for the rest, we acquiesce entirely in Mr. Goldwin Smith's criticism, and heartily wish that instead of darting aside continually to let fly new shafts into Mr. Mansel's exceedingly penetrable armour, he had developed gravely and continuously the leading thoughts of his own theology. There are many scattered hints of much depth and beauty which he would have done good service to the world by weaving into a con- tinuous whole. And such a course would have been fir more effec- tive for his particular purpose. Mr. Mansel trades on human fear and scepticism. A simple exposition of a deep positive faith—such as Mr. Maurice gave in his two remarkable replies to that gentle- man, and such as Mr. Goldwin Smith might have given from a dif- ferent, and to laymen, perhaps, more accessible point of view—would have been the most telling refutation.
Mr. Goldwin Smith's deepest belief is evidently in the community of human and Divine character—the great truth that man is created and rooted in God. How he connects that faith with the necessity for, and power of, Revelation, will best be understood by the follow- ing fine passage :
"The idea of Deity is formed in the human mind, in which and in its instinctive operations, however, we may rationally suppose its Maker to be as present as He is in the rest of the universe. It follows of necessity that the morality contained in the idea must be that which is present in the human mind; in other words, it must be human morality idealized and personified in God. The idea is at once perfected and verified by every- thing that Man, from age to age, learns of himself, and of the world around him, by his scientific discoveries, and still more by his moral experience. But its highest and only complete verification is the Manifestation of the Divine Nature which is recorded in the Gospels, and which, recognized and embraced by the whole Nature of Man, as the diviner part of himself, and the key to the enigma of his being, has transmuted the whole subsequent history of mankind. Revelation might possibly be rendered needless by reason, if it were a set of speculative propositions in theology. It might then be truly said that the highest praise to which Revelation could aspire was that of coinciding, partially or wholly, with the independent conclusions of Philosophy,' and it would follow that so far as Philosophy extended, Revelation would become superfluous.' But Revelation is not a set of propositions in Theology. It is a manifestation of the Divine Nature. It may be said to be superseded by Philosophy only if the longing super- sedes the fulfilment, if the recognition supersedes the thing recognized, if the capacity for adoration supersedes the object which is adored, if the thirst for the water of life supersedes the fountain from which that water flows. Does Philosophy supersede the manifestation of character, and the influence of veneration and affection, even between man and man?"
We think the tendency of Mr. Goldwiu Smith's theology is,—not to lay too much stress on the manifestation of Divine character—for that is impossible—but to forget that the knowledge of certain facts about God's eternal life,—facts which profess to be, and we believe are, essential portions of flis revelation to us, is so entirely bound up with that character, that we could lay no real or vivid grasp upon the character without knowing and clinging to the facts. He tells us, for instance, most nobly and truly, that in the latest chapters of St. John's Gospel, we have a pure exposition of Divine morality apart from all relation to transitory human circumstances :
" If Mr. Mansel desires me to show him how Divine and human love can be the same, I can only refer him, as a Christian and a philosopher, to the concluding chapters of the Gospel of St. John. There he will find also framed for him what he challenges me to prove, a clear conception of the essence of morality apart from all relation to the constitution of the human mind on the circumstances of human life,' if by that constitution and those circumstances he means anything which will pass away with the transitory order of this world. It is dangerous, when you are constructing a philo- sophical theory of Christianity, to be too fresh from the study' of those divines of the eighteenth century, whose religions philosophy sometimes is little better than heathenism without freedom of thought, and Christianity without Christ."
But would this revelation carry the meaning to us that it does, had we not also in the earlier chapters of St. John's Gospel that expo- sition of the incarnation as a Divine fact, grounded on the eternal love between the Father and the Son, and of both towards the human world, which realizes to us the working power of the Divine morality ? Is it not in the fact that Christ was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us, and that lie died upon the cross to complete for us the trans- figuration of our human lot by an Eternal Son of God, that we can alone read what the love of the Father who sent Him to suffer for us really was ? It is rather in his losing sight of the necessary relation between the Eternal Acts and the Eternal character to all human minds, that we alone find any missing link in Mr. Goldwin Smith's hinted theology. Nor are we sure that this is more than the accident of a destruc- tive rather than a constructive treatise. There is one little sentence of great beauty and depth, which seems to imply that Mr. Smith does hold the faith that all men are really united, in the divine humanity of Christ :
"The difficulty which stands last in the list—'the tardy appearance and partial distribution of moral and religious knowledge in the world'—is a terrible difficulty indeed. I believe, if there were no other philosophy than that of the Bampton Lectures, it would overwhelm the heart of man with darkness and despair. But just as, from the great awakening of specula- tion, and the extension of our sympathies beyond the pale of Christendom to the whole human race, this difficulty begins to press severely upon us, there arises, to countervail it, the healing conviction that the community of mankind is a community indeed, and that what is given to one member of it is, though as yet we know not how, given to all."
We heartily wish Mr. Goldwin Smith had developed this last hint. It seems to us the root of St. Paul's Gospel, and the centre of all truly Christian thought. It would be a great gain for our generation if thinking laymen like Mr. Goldwin Smith would not merely ex- press their dissent from the cold and cruel theology of such writers as Rogers and Mansel, but detail the positive convictions by which such theology can alone be really undermined. This would be infinitely better than pungent satire—masterly as Mr. GoldwinSmith's satire often is.
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