MR. FOOTMAN'S THEOLOGICAL PAPERS.* THESE are rather papers of hints,
than papers which work out the hints they contain, on the ethical and theological subjects of the day. But they are the papers of a very genuine man, who really faces the difficulties with which he deals, and does not attempt to evade them. Some of them are better than others, but all show a candid and a masculine mind, which is incapable of evading a serious difficulty, and which meets it with all the greater candour and seriousness, the more serious it is. The paper which, on the whole, seems to us the most effective, is the first, on the relation between ethics and theology. Nothing can be more just than Mr. Footman's assertion that Bishop Butler's repreeen-
• Ethics and Theology : Papers and Discourses in Aid of Spiritual Morality and Intelligent Faith. By Hoary Footman, M.A. London Fredeno Morgue. ma.
tation of the conscience as a regal faculty which imposes its law on the soul, contains only half the truth, since the more ardently we accept that point of view, the more embarrassed we are when we are called to explain the very common phenomenon of a perverted conscience which becomes more dogmatic and im- perious, the more it persuades itself that it is an absolute monarch,—while in reality it is the mere ear by which the voice of a truly absolute authority is more or less accurately conveyed to us. In truth, as Mr. Footman puts it, without regarding the conscience as in some sense subjective and liable to all the derangement to which subjective faculties are liable, we cannot
recognise that elasticity and capacity for enlargement of faculty which unquestionably distinguishes the conscience of man, as it does all his other capacities, and which of course must distinguish any finite being striving to fit himself for an infinite career. What the conscience really asserts is, no doubt, in the highest sense binding on us ; but the conscience, like all the rest of our faculties, must widen and deepen as we accumulate a wider and deeper moral experience; and this is inconsistent with the nature of a stereotyped faculty which is always saying the same thing in the same tone. What it really is, is an ear gifted with the power of recognising the divine accents; and the divine voice must necessarily differ and deepen as the range of human experience to which it speaks becomes larger and deeper too. What it says to the tribe which has just eman- cipated itself from a low form of idolatry, will be different from what it says to a nation educated by war and famine, by suffering and triumph, by Judges, Kings, sages, and prophets, to a far higher aptitude for moral teaching. And if the conscience did not grow with the compass of this divine voice, it would not keep pace with the needs of the people. Mr. Foot- man is quite right in pressing his point that iu order to make Butler's theory of the monarchical character of conscience true at all, we must ascribe that monarchical character rather to an infinite Being outside us who appeals to a growing faculty inside
us, than to that faculty itself. The conscience testifies to moral obligation ; but it testifies one thing when the experience is narrow, another thing of the same general tendency, but in a wider sense, when the experience has widened, and so forth as the upward development goes on. In other words, while the moral faculty bears witness to God, God is the inspirer of the moral faculty, and neither is explicable without the other. Mr. Footman urges with great force that the accusiag function of conscience, again, is inexplicable without the same theological key
It is just here, when conducting its inquisitions and issuing its searching sentences, that Conscience assumes a tone of the highest and most unlimited authority, and penetrates to the very quick and marrow of the inner man. Men who have evaded the Commanding Conscience have been made to quail before the Convincing Conscience, and to discover that its writ runs in every province of the soul, and is valid in season and out of season, with no statute of limitations to arrest its execution. No transaction within the mind of a man is more truly awful than that in which the Conscience—(it may be years, it may be decades, after the dote of the deed or the thought or the baser preference by which it was disobeyed)—compels him to realise the horror of what has been done and to pass sentence on himself, with inner self-reproaches ' not loud, but deep.' It is an awful moment, 'Eternity in time,' in which the Conscience awakens the memory which the 'drowsy syrups of the world' may have put to sleep for years, and in which, with an unsparing hand, it tears to pieces the veil of treacherous exteoustions by which a man may have tried to conceal himself from himself, and to divide his present from his past, as if the passage of time, which had changed his physical frame, had power to destroy his personal identity. Catch the tears which a man may shed, when Conscience thus ascends the judgment-seat, where it is more awful than it was upon the throne, and, as Kant somewhere reminds us, the Chemist, if he analyses those tears, may find in them nothing to distinguish them from the tears which a man may have shed in a spasm of physical pain, or in a moment of disappointed ambition, or of pecuniary embarrassment. But catch the mind of a man thus in court before his awakening and convincing Conscience, arrest that mind as it quivers beneath the felt and searching glance of this inexorable inquisitor, and you will never again be able to confuse the moral judgment with even the highest grade of the prudential motive, or to erase the line which divides the searchings of Conscience from any pains and troubles, dreadful though they be, is which there mingles no element of moral self-reproach.
What is really going on, in such a case, is not an operation in which one and the same person is judge and criminal, but one in which the Eternal Judge is accosting a man, and making manifest to him the nature of his deeds and of his condition. The sense of there being One infinitely above me and yet ' closer than breathing' and associating Himself with me intimately—of there being One personally related to me and yet authoritatively condemning met—the strange quivering of my soul as it feels that its very solitude helps to make it feel more sure than ever that it is not alone, and cannot get alone; —all this is not the result of an untrustworthy subjective dream, but of the Personal Presence of One Who sees me through and through-
of One before whose Jadgmeot.Seat I shall be made manifest (to myself at any rate) when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, and I shall know myself even as I am made now to feel that I am known."
Mr. Footman seems to us to have the soundest possible con- ception of the true relation between ethics and theology.
The paper which interests us most nest to this paper on the relation between ethics and theology, is that on " The Intellectual Trials of the Spiritual Life," which is, though perhaps still more of the nature of a succession of hints, full of significance. Mr. Footman's contention that the sceptical temper which dissolves the moral and spiritual authority of our highest beliefs into illusions, is of precisely the same origin as that which, by cling- ing to the senses as the most unassailable because the most original and unmannfactured experience, would make us regard the intellectual corrections of the senses as illusory,—for example, the intellectual disproof of the sensible impression that the sun goes round the earth,—is very strongly put. For it is quite as certain that the conviction of our moral freedom which appears to contradict our faith in the law of causation, is essential to the highest progress in moral civilisation, as it is that the conviction of the troth of scientific principles which appear to contradict the senses, is essential to the highest progress in in- tellectual culture and in material discoveries. Without the last we could not have had natural science; without the first, we could not have had moral beliefs. In the same sense is the paper on " Heredity and Freewill," a paper of the utmost wisdom, though too brief ; and this is the greatest fault in the paper on "Popular Positivism." Indeed, here the brevity sometimes assumes almost the air of mere jottings of points which needed elaboration in order to produce their effect at all. Nevertheless, this little book, though it errs, as books nowadays seldom err, by over-brevity, is a book which indicates the deepest convictions of a genuine Christian who finds his theology the only key to the realities of life.
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