BOOKS.
THE ADVANCED BROAD CHURCH.*
THESE sermons, preached in the church which is, for many of us, indelibly associated with the teaching of Frederick Maurice, are full of interest and value on several accounts. They are thoughtful and instructive discourses, well worth perusal for their own sake, and they also present an interesting landmark of thought in the Church of England. It is chiefly from the latter point of view that we would now notice them ; but we would preface our re- marks by saying that the volume contains more valuable thought than we are able from this side fully to recognise. The title it bears—The Unknown God—will recall to some readers the most strenuous controversy on which Maurice ever entered. To preach an unknown God, he thought, was to invert the message of Paul, who uses the words only to bring out, by the force of contrast, the meaning of that revelation of which he felt himself the channel. That party' which is called the Broad Church is sometimes supposed to consist of Maurice's disciples, against his own emphatic protest ; yet Mr. Craufurd claims, not without right, to be its spokesman when he says (p. 12), "Most thoroughly do I agree with deep- souled Agnostics in believing that we have in this life no direct knowledge of God." It is a striking fact that the advanced teaching of the Church of England should occupy so different a position within so short an interval, and one which deserves more than the attention we have here space to claim for it.
The sentence we have quoted (by the side of which, had we space, we would gladly set many other extracts of a different tendency) seems to us marked by the hesitation characteristic of a party which finds its raison, d'gtre in compromise. To say that we have no direct knowledge of anything implies indirect knowledge of it ; but what is indirect knowledge P Science knows nothing of two grades of knowledge; if it did, we should all have to describe our knowledge of the earth's motion as in- direct, a tiresome and pedantic phraseology which would have no practical bearing whatever. Law—the other arbiter of evidence—is on its guard against the tendency to suppose that what is called indirect knowledge is knowledge at all; it will not even consider any second-hand evidence. In ordinary talk this tendency is allowed a certain place. "Although I have no direct knowledge of the Master of Balliol," some one might say, "never having read a line of his writings or seen his person, I seem to know him through his influence on my son." But even if we let this pass, one person must know directly before another can know indirectly. "Man can never in this life find God himself," says Mr. Craufurd, "but only traces of his working." What does he mean by finding God himself P Of course not the experience of some impression on eye or ear which should announce his presence,—that would be possible only in this life, and he is speaking of something he considers possible only in the next life. What is that contact of the spirit of man with the Infinite Spirit which is impossible now, and possible hereafter ? Perhaps the answer would be, that till we know God, it is impossible to say what knowing him is. Then, it is futile to say anything about him. Mr. Craufurd claims for the Broad Church that it "stands alone in teaching plainly and fearlessly the unchanging fatherhood of God." (p. 294.) A child's knowledge of his father is surely a direct knowledge ; yet this relation is given as the one fact we know of a being of whom we have no direct knowledge at all.
The truth is that Mr. Craufurd, and teachers like him, are trying to make Christianity inoffensive, at the cost of making it meaningless. They see that the dominant in- fluence of our day is that of physical science; and that with minds moulded under this influence the message of Christianity has failed. Forty or fifty years ago it would have been possible to explain this divergence by saying that scientific men had known Christianity only under an aspect in which it was their deadly foe. Up to that time it was closely asso- ciated with that superstitions reverence for the exceptional which is the very antithesis to the reverence for truth. The Bible must be unlike other books, the Son of Man must be unlike other men, the future of the saved must be separated by an infinite chasm from that of ordinary humanity, and so on. This was the view of the authorised exponents of Christianity, and was naturally identified with Christianity by * The INIceovn God, and other Hermon?. By the Rev. Alex. H. Craufurd, London : T. Fisher Unwin. those who had no discriminating attention at leisure to study the Bible for themselves. But about that time a group of teachers arose, of whom the best known was Frederick Maurice, to whom it was impossible to ascribe this superstition. They insisted, not that the Bible was written under any exceptional influence, but that it was a record of facts which stood in an intimate and indissoluble relation with the spirit of every human being, and that if it did nothing to explain the history of every being, then it was self-condemned as futile. This doctrine may be true or false ; but there is nothing in it difficult to reconcile with a single fact brought to light by a single man of science since investigation began. And yet it cannot be said that on the class of minds we are considering this teaching had any more effect than that to which it succeeded. Such men as Darwin and Tyndall, and the minds which were influenced by them, had no more sympathy with Maurice, or Erskine of Linlathen, than they had with Dr. Pusey, or any of the Evangelicals. A belief in Christ, which was disentangled from all that had seemed to set it in antagonism to science, was not more suc- cessful with scientific men than one which had anathematised, and as far as possible persecuted, them. "When Christianity seemed partly our friend and partly our enemy," says Mr. Cranfurd (p. 29), "then its reality was scarcely at all impugned, but now when genuine religion seemed about to cure our many infirmities, science threatens to wrench it away from us, and relegate it to the region of exploded fictions." In the endeavour to deal with this problem, it became clear that such men as Maurice failed to arouse attention among the class now addressed, not because any statement they made was in- compatible with any statement of physical science, but pertly because the statements they made concerned matters that were, to students of physical science, totally uninteresting; and also because, while scientific men meant by knowledge a certainty which was definite and transferable, something that occupied a distinct, unchangeable space in the mind, and could be trans- ferred to any mind which would take up the attitude of patient attention, theologians, on the other hand, understood by it something that was always capable of increase, and always in- capable of transference. The message, it seemed, if it were to be brought home to the class we speak of, must be changed both as to its subject-matter and its form.
It is surely a very natural effort to make the most important subject that human thought can confront interesting to the most important class of the day. No one should turn away, as one is sometimes tempted to do, from the effort, as from a piece of intellectual snobbishness. It will be a vain effort ; but that is all the more reason we should speak of it with sympathy. It has led the new liberal school to avoid all subjects that secular men find tiresome, and also (and this is more especially applicable to the volume before us) to surrender the exclasive right to use the word knowledge to the intellectual aris- tocracy of our clay. There is surely much to be said for this exclusive right. Mr. Craufurd is well aware that if he goes and listens to a lecture at the Royal Institution, the question is simply whether he understands it ; but that if some member of the Royal Institution, who may be far more ignorant of theology than the preacher is of science, comes to listen to a sermon at Vere Street, the question will be whether he agrees with it. Science, it appears, can be known. Theology can be only opined. And yet even so, Mr. Craufurd urges in effect, are there not realities which, though they never can be known, are yet so interesting to humanity that probable opinions about them are of much value ? The modest form in which the question is asked, and the interesting thought with which it is associated, bring home to us more forcibly than before the conviction that its answer is a negative.
When opinions about the most important subject in the world come to be weighed against knowledge of the least important, the important opinions will, we are convinced, be found to kick the beam. Men who seek truth do not refuse, indeed, to investigate opinion, for it may be the ante-chamber to truth. But they less and less care to investigate, unless in a purely historic interest, opinion which proclaims itself ulti- mate. And, at any rate, they will refuse to make the effort when these opinions all centre in a person whose own words turn them to incoherence. Mr. Craufurd must surely think that it is by an error that Jesus is reported to have said,—" This is life eternal to know thee." No one could suppose that state- ment unimportant enough to be thrown out of the reckoning
when he was considering the claims of a teacher. But it is not on a single phrase that the association, of that belief and that teaching will be found to depend. If Mr. Craufard is prepared to say that the New Testament speaks of an unknown God, he will find that those are united in disagreement with him who are hardly united in anything else. Those Churchmen who undertake to defend their fortress against men who regard Christianity as a delusion, and also against men who regard it as something more than a plausible opinion, do not merely confront the double array of vigorous and fearless belief and unbelief ; they enable their foes to make the attack on common ground. It needs no sympathy with the teaching of Christ to see that he spoke of a God whom man might know, and those who think him mistaken will here be at one with those who think him divine. Where the two parties part com- pany it will be for energetic protest on the one hand, and on the other what is far more dividing,—entire neglect. Scientific men, in hearing of a deliverance from the burden of sin to be obtained through Christ,would acknowledge, if they were entirely unprejudiced, that that message might concern some persons, though it had nothing to do with them. But when they hear of a God whom man can never know directly—they, who need to be convinced that any God exists to be known—they will feel sure that this message has nothing particular to do with anybody. To preach to the contemporaries of men who have taught the least cultivated and thoughtful among us the wonderful powers that come of knowledge in the outer world that in the inner world we have no knowledge at all, is to strengthen their con_ viction that it is best to keep to the outer world. The stately fabric of modern science rises before the eyes of the men of our day, whether they seek it or no. Like some lofty edifice in a crowded city, its aspect is familiar to those who never enter its doors, and to forget its existence is impossible. Its revelations, indeed, were in the seventeenth century as great with regard to space as its revelations in the nineteenth century in regard to time, and to the seeker after truth the discoveries of that day were as impressive:as the discoveries of this. But it is before the multitude that Science has begun to work miracles in our day. The wonders of steam, of electricity, of photography, have brought home to the minds of the ignorant and the careless, not only that science is truth, but that it is power. The men of our time, if they are to be led to look steadily in any other direction, must begin by believing it a direction in which the mind is to come into a not less direct relation with truth, and to derive a not less certain accession of power.
The assurance that the convictions which in these regions correspond to the certainties of science, are of the same nature with them, forms no part of the needed promise. Of course, if any one begins by saying that there is no other kind of certi- tude than that of a fact, then there is an end of the matter. But it is not theology alone which is concerned to contest that decision. It is not less natural to say that we know a man than that we know a science. Some languages have synonyms for the verb to know, according as it is to be applied to facts or to persons, while our own verb itself, in its more archaic and familiar usage, as well as in its etymology, betrays its close alliance with the verb applicable to persons only. It is allied with that which is most intensely personal. Perhaps the distinctive characteristics of knowledge of character and know- ledge of things are best conveyed by saying that whereas in the world of physical investigation every certainty maps out a certain definite space in the mind which never expands or shrinks, in the world of character every certainty points to a centre of belief which shrinks into almost nothing, or expands to fill the whole field of view, according to the con- dition of the mind which is in contact with it. If there be any fact of which the student of nature might be more certain, he is not certain of it already. Bat in the human world the conviction which is incapable of increase does not exist ; and to say that all knowledge of character is imperfect, because it is capable of increase, is to give the word " knowledge " a new meaning. If we are not sure that a high-minded man will not be guilty of a mean action to secure some trivial gain, that a tender-hearted man will not be guilty of a cruel action to avenge some trivial slight, we are not sure of anything. To make this liability to fluctuation a negative test of certainty—to insist that knowledge should always be of facts, and never of character—is to say that it is impossible to know man. And in that sense we need not fear to allow that it is im-
possible to know God. The elevating thoughts scattered throughout the volume we have noticed assure us that it is only in this sense that its writer could intend the words to be understood ; but in addressing a generation ready to doubt whether the central reality of life be more than a dream, he could not have chosen to speak of God as 'unknown, unless he had forgotten some of his own warnings, with one of which we will close our notice of a volume we would heartily recommend to our readers :—
"Just as a dog knows of his master only a very little, and yet that little is of more real importance to hint than the large tracts of his master's nature which he cannot know, so that part of our Creator which we can dimly know is, in truth, a very small fragment ; and yet this fragment is to ua of inestimable value, and of more present importance than the vast unfathomable recesses of God's inner bidden being."
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