THE KERNEL AND THE HUSK.* Tins work resolves itself on
examination into three connected parts, one of which is personal and biographical, one is philo- sophical and constructive, and one is critical and theological. The first tells how doubts arose, how the author partly fought and overcame them, and how some of them overcame him ; the second describes and justifies the method by which he has reached the goal, and sets forth the basis on whieli his belief rests ; and the third part criticises the ordinary belief in the miraculous, and seeks to substitute belief in the naturalness of the Divine for belief in the miraculous. The whole book is of great interest, apart from the vast issues discussed in it, because it affords us a curious insight into the working of an individual mind of unusual versatility and quickness of apprehension, and also of quite unusual culture. How difficult it is to get into language and express intelligently to others the true and real causes of our belief and of our unbelief! This reflection is forced on us by the strange union of belief and unbelief set forth in these letters. We have earnestly tried. to apprehend the grounds on which the author believes or disbelieves, and we have failed.. The grounds are personal, subjective, and arbitrary, and they present no basis on which men, apart from personal idiosyncrasies, can take their stand. This is a hard saying. We proceed to make it good.
In the letter—for the book professes to be a series of letters to a friend—entitled "Personal," we have a sort of history of the growth of the opinions of the author. Left almost without guidance in religion on the part of parents and friends, he may be almost said to have picked up his religion in a library !—
"Having read through nearly the whole of Adam Clarke'e com- mentary as a boy of ten or eleven, and having subsequently imbued
myself with books of Evangelical doctrine, I was perfectly or thought I was, in the Pauline scheme of salvation, and felt a most lively interest on Sundays, and in dull moments on week-days, and especially in times of illness—of which I bad plenty—in the salva- tion of my own soul. My religion served largely to intensify my natural selfishness."
This lively interest in the salvation of his own soul took the form and habit of never listening to the sermons of the Rector on Sundays. The sermons were dull, and the Rector was awkward in gesture, and had an impediment in his speech. "And as soon as the Rector gave out his text, I used to take up my Bible, and -read steadily away till the sermon was over." This went on till the author was about sixteen, and a new Rector came, who caused him to see that "a Christian was not a mercenary fighting for a reward, nor a slave fighting for fear of stripes, but a free soldier fighting out of loyalty to Christ and to humanity." The influence of the new Rector is de- scribed. As yet the author had no doubt about miracles, and up to the time of his ordination he was quite content to accept miracles as true. But soon,— " Before me rose day by day fresh facts and inferences, not only demonstrating the insufficiency of the usual evidence to prove that the miracles were true, but also indicating a very strong probability that they were false. Often as I studied the accounts of a miracle, I could see it, as it were, in the act of growing up, watch its first entrance into the Gospel Narrative, note its modest beginning, its enbsequent development, and then I was forced to give it up. Worst of all, that miracle of miracles which was most precious to me, the Resurrection of Christ, began to appear to be supported by the feeblest evidence of all. I had not at that time learned to dis- tinguish between the Resurrection of Christ's material body and the Resurrection of his spirit or spiritual body. Christ's Resurrection seemed to me, therefore, in these days, to be either a Resurrection of the material and tangible body, or no Resurrection at alL" (pp. 14-15.)
Being engaged in work which did not call for any "clerical qualifications," the author took time to reflect and inquire, and the result was a form of doctrine which has taken shape in the volume before us, and in other volumes :—
"The old beliefs of my youth and childhood remained or came back to me, exhibiting Jesus of Nazareth as the Incarnate Son of God, the Eternal Word triumphant over death, seated at the right band of the Father in Heaven, the source of light and life to all mankind. Like Christian in Pilgrim's Progress, I found myself suddenly freed from a great barden,—a burden of doubts, and
• The Kernel end the Husk. By the Author of Phllochristas," and Omni- mas." London Macmillan and Co.
provisos and conditions which, in old days, had seemed to forbid me from accepting Jesus as the Lord and Saviour of man- kind, unless I could strain my conscience to accept as true a number of stories many of whioh I almost certainly knew to be false. In order to believe in Christ, it was now no longer needful to believe in suspensions of the laws of Nature on the contrary, all Nature seemed to combine to prepare the way to conform humanity to that image of God set forth in the Incarnation. I did not, as some Christians do, ignore the existence of Satan (and almost of sin), which Christ himself most clearly recognised; but I seemed to see that evil W48 being gradually subordinated to good, and falsehood made the stepping-stone of troth." (pp. 18-19.)
In this account we are struck with the fact that the author's reli- gions beliefs were held by him after an external manner. It was mainly as an external system, as a scheme of salvation, that he looked on religion, and it seemed as if all his efforts were directed to fit himself somehow into that scheme. Religion apprehended in such an artificial manner can never be deep or permanent, and it is no wonder that it collapsed on the first shock of doubt.
After the personal chapter, we receive from the author a series of philosophical letters, which contain the ground on which his view is based. The most prominent feature of his philosophy is the part played in it by imagination. The author has a nomenclature of his own, and now and then some sus- picion sweeps across his mind that his way of stating the case will not commend itself to students who know philosophy. "Perhaps," he nays in a footnote, " ' some ' might give the name of 'higher reason' to what I call imagination." He might have said so without a "perhaps." He has not distinguished between imagination as usually described by psychologists, and the faculty whereby we form conceptions. "Like the ideas of force, cause, effect, necessity, so the idea of 'I '—though pro- duced with the aid of experience, and tested by appeal to experience and reason—appears to be nothing but a child of the Imagination, and a foster-child of Faith." The philosophy con- tabled in these chapters is of the most innocent kind,—the kind which placidly passes on, ignoring the discussions with regard to knowledge and experience which have occupied the thoughts of men since the time of Hume, or rather, since the time of Plato. How is experience possible ? How is knowledge possible? And the answer is,—They are possible in virtue of the binding effect of these ideas, which the author takes to be children of the imagination. Imagination, like other faculties, is a function of the self, and to speak of the idea of " I " as a product of the imagination is somewhat curious. Nor is this the only curious result we have in these philosophical chapters. Having called the constructive power of the human mind by the name of "imagination," the author has the advantage of using it and its correlatives in various meanings, and can quietly make things real or illusory at his pleasure. "Laws of Nature are," he tells us, "mere ideas of the imagina- tion." They are hypotheses which have been found to work, and they are based on a belief of which we can give no rational account. Here the author is in essential agreement with Canon Mozley, who, however, makes use of this argument to find room for miracle. Mozley says that "the logic of unbelief wants a universal, but no real universal is forthcoming," and. he consequently infers that there is no antecedent improbability against the miraculous. Our author, however, affirms that the laws of Nature are only working hypotheses, are "mere ideas of the imagination ;" yet these "ideas" have somehow grown BO sacred, and become so inviolable, that a statement involving anything contrary to them is at once to be dismissed as incredible. There is no explanation of the process by which these "ideas " have attained to such power and such irresistible cogency. To our thinking, the true and logical inference to be drawn from the pre. misses common to both is drawn by Canon Mozley. It is precisely the antecedent probability against the "miraculous" which is the source of all our author's trouble, and yet how readily he flings it overboard when he does not need it. "Where we have history and evidence to guide us as to what Jesus said and did, it seems to me we ought to be guided by evidence and not 'antecedent probabilities,' especially when these probabilities are derived from nothing but metaphysical considerations." We cordially say, "Amen !" and heartily wish he had remembered this safe maxim always. If he had, the greater part of his book would never have been written.
Into the lengthened argument and analysis of the miraculous element in the Gospels, and the account of the testimony of Paul, we cannot enter into detail. There is really nothing new in the argument. The only matter worth consideration is the
distinction drawn between the "mighty works" of Christ, and the miraculous. By this distinction, our author appears to conserve the words and sayings of Christ, which undoubtedly came out of and followed on the mighty works of healing which Christ confessedly did. But the distinction breaks down in a number of instances, and is untenable whenever there is no direct con- tact between Jesus and the person healed, and whenever a person is healed by Jesus on the intercession of another or others. Nor is it necessary to criticise the attempts to reduce the Gospels to a non-miraculous residuum. The author refers to the article "Gospels," in the Encyclopedia Britannia. That article contains the mere private opinion of Dr. Abbott, and its theory has not been adopted by any scholar of note, so far as we have heard.
But the most carious part of this strange book is that in which our author deals with the teaching of the Apostle Paul about the Resurrection of Jesus. To us, his position is unintelligible. He admits so much, his belief about Jesus is so high, and his esti- mate of the historical influence of Jesus so great, that we are perpetually surprised at his adoration of the laws of Nature. He believes in a spiritual resurrection, and in a spiritual body, which turns out to be no "body." But the root from which has sprung the utter misconception of the meaning of Paul, appears to be the following :—" To my mind, the manifestation of the Resurrection of Christ appears not as an isolated fact, but as apart, and a central part, of the great revelation of the immortality of the soul conveyed by God to man, in accordance with the laws of human nature, from the beginning of the creation of the world by the medium of imaginative Faith." There is nothing in the teaching of Paul which can be construed into a doctrine of the immortality of the soul. There is no trace of an argument like that of Plato. He teaches an immortality ; but it is an im- mortality of the whole man, as an organic whole, and he looks on man, risen from the dead, as an organic unity of body, soul, spirit. Our space will not permit us to argue the question ; but a true exegesis has reached this conclusion, and it is almost uni- versally held by exegetes of authority. Nor can there be any question as to what Paul's belief was with regard to the Resurrection of Christ. The author is conscious that he has here a weak case. For he says, in a somewhat defiant humour: —"To speak honestly, I must add that, even if I found St. Paul had committed himself repeatedly to any theory of a material or semi-material Resurrection, consonant with the feelings of his times, I should not have felt bound to place a belief in a materialistic detail of this kind upon the same high and authoritative level as the belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or any other general and spiritual article of faith." Here the subjectivity of the author's method comes into clear view, and where history and evidence fail him or are against him, he casts them aside.
It is a marvellous thing that the author should be able to retain so many of the verities of the Christian faith, after having cast away so much. But this also is subjective and arbitrary. Few other persons can maintain a footing on this slippery inclined plane, nor is there here any ground for a common faith. Nor will the author be able to persuade many of the tenableness of his view. For the old dilemma confronts us with unchanged aspect. Either accept Christ and the miraculous, or reject both. There is no middle ground, and the whole argument of this book is built on the sand. What the writer calls " husk " is part of the kernel.
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