MR. GLADSTONE'S LOVE OF THE " DEFLNITE." and especially great
in negotiating the fair compromise between the different principles they contain. He is great in finance, which involves precisely the same class of balanced considera- tions. But he is not great on the cardinal principles of politics ; he is not great in general supervision, which implies more consideration of those principles than of the details ; if he interests himself deeply in any subject, he craves details to which his imagination and fancy chiefly attach themselves.
And so with religious subjects. Few more profoundly religious minds than Mr. Gladstone's in its way exist, but there is a want of largeness and simplicity of principle in his treatment of these subjects, a crave for definiteness of detail which is hardly intellectually justifiable, except on such a basis of authority as the Roman Church boasts,— a basis from which he justly recoils as one threatening perpetual war against the progress and movement of the human mind. And yet Mr. Gladstone was careful on Tuesday to explain that, though true Science and Reli- gion are not and cannot be at war, Science has done a good deal to modify the religious conceptions of men ; and surely what it has done in this direction is precisely to blur definite outlines which were not really given us by Revelation at all, but which the great eagerness of men for undue definition has engrafted upon Revelation. " It is not," said Mr. Gladstone, " that I mean to insinuate that knowledge or science has done harm to religion. They never have done it. They never can do it—for, if harm arise, if conflict take place, between the professors of science and the professors of religion, the fault lies not in the thing that they profess, but in those who profess it. It lies in their want of truth to their professions. It lies in their promulgating as science that which is not science, and as religion that which is not religion. For my own part, my lord Archbishop, I believe that the researches of science and history, and a sound and just criticism, so far from tending to shake the founda- tions of belief, have afforded an infinitude of evidence to support it, and to sustain also the authenticity and to embrace an estimate of the value of its sacred records. But if we speak not of things as they are in themselves, but as they are conceived by man, we must not disguise from ourselves that a state of things prevails in which many, distracted perhaps by the cares of life, unable to give themselves to a deep in- vestigation of the subject, are either in distrust or even despair upon the matter of this alliance between science and religion, and are disposed in some evil moment to give up all attempts at its solution." And why has this " distraction " arisen, except that science has really attacked the very definiteness of out- line which Mr. Gladstone declares to be so essential to true religious teaching ? Surely if the age of man's first existence on the earth has been pushed indefinitely further back by science, this has struck out one of the most definite bits of the old religious teaching as to Creation ; if the possibility of man's specific affinity to some of the lower animals has been, if not established, at least rendered probable by science, this has altered a great many of the most definite moral conceptions of the relation of man to the lower animals ; if the existence of a Stone Age, in which men were far more barbarous than the lowest savages now, has been rendered all but certain by Science, this has undermined some of our most definite dogmas as to the genesis of that divine conscience by which God speaks in man ; if scientific criticism has shaken the evidence for some books of the Bible, while establishing that for others, this has altered altogether the definiteness of our conception of the doctrine of inspiration. Can any one say, then, that the effect of the growth of science has not been precisely this,—greatly to modify and even blur the definite forms in which our faith had previously clothed itself,—to throw doubt on the sharp, anecdotic forms into which catechetical religion threw almost all religious truths, —to expand indefinitely our views of " Creation," and make both " the fall " and " the redemption " of man mean some- thing much larger than they mean- in either the " Shorter " Catechism or even the Catechism of the English Church ? Surely Mr. Gladstone's love for " the definite and positive," though it may be at times a great strength and at times a weakness to him in his capacity of statesman, is almost pure weakness in his capacity of religious thinker. The craving for detail in relation to religion is certain to be not unfrequently a craving for false detail. If science has taught us anything at all, it has taught us that the cosmogony both of the world and of that smaller world, human nature, has been narrowed, cribbed, confined' by the positiveness and definiteness of our earlier systems. The most just orthodox thinkers are begin- ning to see this, and to speak of Heaven and Hell as states, not places ; of Creation as a process, not an event ; of moral deterioration and redemption as of long stages in the story of humanity. We cannot help thinking that Mr. Gladstone's most characteristic feature, his love of " the definite," not in principle, but in that middle region which stands half-way between principle and action, has misled him from the first in his intellectual treatment of ecclesiastical questions, and is not unlikely to mislead him in his political treatment of them. His fear of the vagueness of " unsectarian " Christianity, and his half-sympathy with the Denominationalist cry for either no religions teaching at all, or the teaching of the most elaborate religious formulae, are in no small degree due to his, as we think, mistaken notion that the more "positive and definite " a Church's teaching is, the more deeply it implants the germs of religious life.
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