DR. MARTINEA17 ON SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY.
DR. MARTINEAU'S new book on "The Seat of Authority in Religion," published by Longmans, is not one that it is easy to read and master in a few days, or even in a few weeks. It has compressed into it the laborious studies of a long lifetime, all skilfully marshalled with the sharply outlined and masculine vividness, and the imperious confidence of a historical judgment singularly decisive, singularly keen, and, we should add, singularly and quite unreasonably sceptical. Indeed, nothing is more remarkable than the contrast between the vividly sceptical bias of Dr. Martineau's historical judgment and the still more vivid devoutness of his spiritual nature. In the region of conscience, there is no more truly religions writer in England, and certainly none at once so powerful and so devo- tionaL In the region of historical criticism, there is hardly any with so iconoclastic a bias towards pulling to pieces all that the religious sentiment of mankind has slowly built up. The scorn with which Dr. Martineau treats the beliefs of all the Christian ages is, we suspect, expressed with a force that he himself has no power to realise. It has never occurred to him, we should think, that the same spirit which inspired the spiritual and moral revelation of which he thinks so highly, may have guided with as much providential care the impres- sion produced on the mind of the universal Church by which that revelation was received. Is it not a very arbitrary treatment of history, to insulate the divine revelation as Dr. Martineau supposes it to have been given through Jesus Christ, and to ignore entirely, as if it were quite irrelevant and without any bearing on the divine meaning and purpose of that revelation, the impression produced by it on the minds of generation after generation, as if that were really no essen- tial part of the phenomena of Christianity P To us it seems an essential part of the supernatural course of the Christian religion that the theology of St. Paul took so profound a hold of the Church, and that the theology of St. Paul was so soon developed into the theology of St. John. It is about as strange a feat for a thinker of Dr. Martineau's force and rank to treat all these fresh and natural testimonies to the character of Christ's nature and teaching in the Church, as if they were mere refractions and exaggerations of human loyalty to an exceptionally pure human being,—a mere nimbus, as Dr. Martineau calls them, encircling his head in their imagination,—as it would be for an astronomer to treat the corona and the red prominences of the sun as if they were mere subjective phenomena that had no interest except as throwing light upon the mind of the observer. We can under- stand such a contention on the part of those who do not believe in Jesus Christ as a special revelation of God at all ; but for those who, like Dr. Martineau, do so believe, to treat the steady development of the mind of the Church concerning him as a mere growth of human error that bears no likeness at all to the divine significance of the real figure concerning whom all this halo of illusion (as Dr. Martineau holds it) sprang up, is like giving an explanation of the rainbow which dispenses with the sun. The real difference between Dr. Martineau's conception of spiritual authority in these matters and our own, is this, that Dr. Martineau attributes to God's revelation only the very few residual phenomena of Christ's life which his destructive and very arbitrary analysis leaves us after it has done its fatal work ; while we attribute to it not only the great majority of the facts of our Lord's life as recorded in the Gospels, but the great majority of the impressions produced upon the minds of his disciples and followers as they grew and shaped the traditions of the apostles and the disciples who constituted the Church of the primitive age. Dr. Martineau regards the divine revelation as limited to the life of him who first removed the veil. We regard it as extending to the minds and lives of those from whose eyes the veil was removed, and as shaping the growth of their faith and love. Nor can we conceive an authority limited as Dr. Martineau would seem inclined to limit it. He brings us to a great tree, tears away its leaves, hews down its branches, strips off its bark, and then tells us to regard the naked and fatally injured wreck as the true life of the whole. We say that we must look for the life of the whole in the collective phenomena ; not only those of Christ's life (though we regard Dr. Martinean's analysis of that life as one of the most wonderful achievements of destructive criticism with which, from a man of great genius, and,—in a sense too,—of great religions genius, we ever met), but also in the life of the com- munity chiefly affected by it, in the faith in which it flowered, in the actions in which it bore fruit, in the devotions which it generated, in the institutions to which it gave birth,—in a word, in the whole results which it evolved, though not in any thing which can be shown by reasonable criticism to be a mere excrescence on, or a parasitic growth upon, that life. It seems to us that Dr. Martineau's conception of authority, as limited to the conscience alone, is infinitely too narrow. The conscience, no doubt, is the centre of authority over the life of man. But the conscience lays hold, by all sorts of delicate filaments, of the tastes, of the imagination, of the affections, of the social system ; and in all these its manifestations, the divine inspiration appears to us as real a shaping power while it moulds the confessions and attitudes of the whole society towards Christ, as it is even when it first manifests itself through Christ himself. It would be as easy for a child to pick out everything in the conduct of its parents that it might safely disregard, and so to lay bare the only justification for true filial reverence, as for a critic to discharge historical Christianity, as Dr. Martineau does, of nine-tenths of its actual contents, and to fix upon the one-tenth which is supposed to give all its vitality to the remainder. He seems to forget that the same" authority" which appealed to the conscience of man through Chriet, spoke no leas in the gradual development of the Christian worship and the gradual growth of the confessions of the Chris- tian creed. We can hardly understand how a thinker so great as Dr. Martineau, was capable of writing down, for instance, such a canon of criticism as the following, which he calla "the rule for separating the divine from the human in the origin of our religion :"—" The former will be found, if anywhere, in what Jesus of Nazareth himself was, in spiritual character and moral relation to God. The latter will be found in what was thought about his person, functions, and office. It was the Providence of history that gave us him : it was the men of history that dressed up the theory of him : and till we compel the latter to stand aside, and let us through to look upon his living face, we can never seize the permanent essence of the gift?' That is a canon conceived just as if God did not kindle the faith, as truly as present the object of faith. There is no real antithesis corresponding to Dr. Martineau's. No doubt we must look, as earnestly as we may, at the living face, but does it appear a likely mode of doing so, to pre- possess ourselves, as Dr. Martineau does, with the strongest possible prejudice against the legacy left us in the life and teaching and traditions of those who were the earliest gazers on the living face ? And if looking at the living face means, as it means in Dr. Martineau's book, looking at a Christ who never once predicted his death and resur- rection, though it is admitted that he must have had sad forebodings of the former, who never claimed to be the Messiah at all, but only imposed a stern veto on Peter's dis- position so to proclaim him, instead of solemnly pronouncing him blessed in having received God's own revelation of the truth, who, in fact, claimed nothing further than to continue John the Baptist's message of an approaching kingdom of God of which he himself was not to be the central figure, who never worked a miracle, and after his death on the Cross, never com- municated to his disciples anything but a spiritual impression of his resurrection, who had no sort of connection with the mythical Christ, as Dr. Martineau regards him, of the Fourth Gospel,—a figure, according to Dr. Martineau, first conceived in the middle of the second century,—and, in a word, who can be safely credited only with such acts and words "as plainly transcend the moral level of the narrators,"—if this is what "looking at the living face" is to signify, we would just as soon look at the living face in a dark room, and fancy ourselves after doing so vastly more familiar with its features than those who had only studied them in a well-lighted mirror.
As a specimen of Dr. Martineau's scepticism, we may take his reasons for believing that Christ only professed to repeat and continue the message of John the Baptist, an assumption contradicted by every Gospel we have, and of which Dr. Martineau persuades himself on the slenderest conjectural evidence which it is possible to imagine. This evidence is derived from the statement in the Acts of the Apostles that upwards of twenty years after the Crucifixion, a body of disciples was found at Ephesus under the teaching of Apollos, who had "taught carefully the things concerning Jesus, knowing only the baptism of John." This Dr. Martineau interprets as meaning that "for neither prophet did the Baptist's sect assert a higher claim than that of herald of the kingdom, but regarded both as warning messengers to prepare the world for meeting its Judge." That is a fair conjecture, though it is little more, and the fact might be susceptible probably of twenty different explanations, if we had fuller knowledge of the history; but how does it show that the Baptist sect which held this, if they did hold it, knew anything adequate of the teaching of the disciples of Christ ? We know, if we know anything, that John the Baptist, before his own death, either for his own sake or for that of his disciples, sent messengers from his prison to elicit from Christ what his own claim was ; and it is easy to suppose that disciples who had been separated from John the Baptist by his imprisonment, and who had afterwards migrated to Ephesus, would have gone on teaching that, as Jesus had accepted John's baptism, he was merely one of the greatest of his followers, and had never even claimed to be the Messiah. Yet Dr. Martineau builds upon it the astounding inference that all the express assertions of the Gospels in a different sense are ea post facto inventions, and that before the visionary appearance of Christ to his disciples after his crucifixion, they had never heard from him of any claim to be the founder of the new kingdom, and that that claim rested wholly on the inferences whioh they drew from their newly formed impression of his spiritual existence and restored energy. Surely it is hard to find an instance of any great man's more credulous incredulity. When would Dr. Martineau have put into the mouth of Jesus as the reply to John's messengers ? Surely it would have been this: Go and show John again the things which ye do hear and see : the blind do not receive their sight ; the lame do not walk ; the lepers are not cleansed ; the deaf do not hear ; the dead are not raised up ; and least of all have the poor had the Gospel preached to them' P—for such an edition of the Gospel as Dr. Martineau alone authenticates, a Gospel of beauty without power, of promise without performance, would have had as chance of startling, or eliciting blessings from, the poor.
To our mind at least, Dr. Martineau's conception of divine authority as manifested in the whole development of the Jewish and Christian revelations, seems a conception of failure to express itself adequately, instead of a concep- tion of revealing power. If there is one thing more certain than another in that history, it is that the belief in God's supernatural power, as manifested both in the sharp struggles and conquests of the inner life and in the wonderful signs given in the external fields of history and nature, was the one connecting thread of their history, and moulded the steadily expectant character of their anticipations of the future. If Christ's life, death, and resurrection did not fit into this long line of supernatural manifestation, it was not the future for which the people of Israel had been dis- ciplined and prepared ; it was only a half-and-half super- naturalism, and not of a piece with the long traditional de- velopment of which, in almost all Christians' belief, it forms the consummation and the crown. Divine authority which is shut up in the conscience exclusively, and extends to no other part of life, may snit a purely philosophical system like Dr. Martineau's, but it does not represent in any sense the drift of the teaching of either the Hebrew or the Christian Church.
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