B OOKS.
TRACTS FOR PRIESTS AN]) PEOPLE.*
" ESSAYS and Reviews" seem destined to overcome a great deal of the characteristic reserve which seals up at once the faith and the unbelief of Englishmen, whether laity or clergy. If they had done pure harm in every other respect, which we do not believe, yet by the frankness of their own disclosures they would at least have done good in this, that by provoking a universal candour, far from usual on ground touching the deeper questions of theology, they have broken up a very oppressive and threatening condition of the reli- gious atmosphere. The present series of tracts promises to be one of the best and deepest results of their publication. We gather from the two now before us that it will be their general aim to drive home the conviction that divine revelation is a living fact, infinitely deeper than any or all the human arguments by which it is usually pro- posed to "sustain" it, of course far deeper also than any or all the arguments by which it is usually proposed to overthrow it. The writers evidently believe that God's revelation of Himself is a reality, the meaning of which is often quite as completely lost sight of by those who profess to support, as by those who attempt or appear to undermine the belief in it ; nay, that the false and heartless pleas often advanced on behalf of faith, by men who have, in fact, ceased to hold that God does ever manifest His own life to man, though they retain the impression that ecclesiastics and a certain class of learned men are supplied with satisfactory technical proofs by which they may manifest it for Him, are often far more really dangerous and destructive than the sceptical reasonings which drive men to God Himself to find answers. The contributors to this series further think, that the volume of "Essays and Reviews," which has startled so profoundly the supine and dogmatic intellect of a large portion of the English church, may become the instrument of leading men back to a far truer and more personal faith, if it teach them not to lean on the broken reeds of any fondly trusted "line of argument," but to "feel after and find" for themselves the light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world; in other words, the self-manifested and self-manifesting Word of God.
This we believe to be the main purpose of the series here so ably and nobly commenced. It is at once a protest against the most sceptical portions of "Essays and Reviews," and against the still more sceptical, though nominally orthodox, replies of many of their assailants. Again, it is at once a generous welcome to the deeper and most real portions of "Essays and Reviews," and to the deeper and most real portions of the replies which that volume has called forth. It is an attempt, in short, to discriminate what is real and human in the tendencies both of the essayists and of their opponents from what is unreal and merely dogmatic, to indicate where the seven reviewers have got closer to the heart of a divine problem than modern orthodoxy, and where they have missed the true track in deference to the mere intellectual dogmatism of "enlightened opinion?' Something of this kind is greatly wanted. We have beheld with wonder and dismay the helpless knots of sectarian partizanship into which these essays have driven English Christians. Men are chal- lenged as to their belief as if the truth were no deeper and no wider than the seven offending essays, or the seventy times stieii indignant replies which they have called forth ; as if it were impossible to hold that in some directions the writers have approached much more nearly to the living Truth than the popular faith of modern England, and yet in others wandered wildly away from it; as if, in short, they must be regarded as either apostles of a higher truth, or apostates proclaiming diabolic falsehoods. The writers in the present series remind us in good time that this is not so. They see in the essayists men who have lost their grasp of some divine realities that are dearer to themselves than life, but at the same time men proving that they are in search of truth, and often misled by a generous hatred of cor- ruptions which have marred and do still mar the divine features of that truth as it is presented by many of their opponents. Mr. Hughes and Mr. Maurice see in the essayists, thinkers fearlessly disowning what they know to be evil, but often, at the same time, disowning with it what true Christians will hold as the divinest gifts of God to the human race. And both of them believe, in the true spirit of faith, that where the essayists have laid bare a falsehood or brought out a truth their work will abide ; where they have simply proved them- selves blind to the divine Light, their blindness will not prevent its penetrating the dark places of other hearts.
Mr. Hughes's essay, as its title in part implies, is an attempt to bring home to unlearned English laymen the absolute need of a di- vine revelation as the foundation for all true human life. He makes us feel that many who profess to accept that revelation do not realize their own need of it half as truly as some at least who throw doubts upon or even reject it. He makes us feel that to accept it for our- selves, and yet to limit its depth and breadth by our own narrow prejudices, is often a sign of deeper distrust than the dreariest un- belief. He sympathizes deeply with the protest of the essayists, against the limitations which human thought has put both upon the love of God and the love of man. He rejects utterly that salvation • Tracts for Priests and People. No. I. Religio Laid By Thomas Hughes, Author of " Tom Brown's School Days." No. II. The Mote and the Beam : a Clergy- man's Lessons from the Present Panic. By Bev. F. D. Maurice. Cambridge : by scholastic learning, or by accurate tenets, which is implied in so many orthodoxies. But he feels keenly, also, the missing elements in the belief of the essayists—the absence of any distinct faith in those great Acts by which the divine light has been manifested to the outward eyes as well as to the inward conscience of 'the human race. He holds firmly by the Incarnation as the great Act by which God has brought home to us the eternal life of a Father and a Son existing independently of man, and before all manifestation to man, and yet for that very reason containing the secret of man's true de- pendence upon them and organic union with them. He holds firmly by the Cross as the great Act by which the whole depth of divine love and of human need are alone realized to our hearts. These great divine Acts, Mr. Hughes feels to be, more than any words, the keys which open to us the divine realities—the windows, so to say, through which we, living in time, gain the only satisfying glimpses
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of Eternal being. And in words which show how truly he has rea- lized these truths in his own daily experience, Mr. Hughes tells us how utterly unable he is, with some of the essayists, or rather with the interpretation which has, perhaps falsely, been put upon their words, to substitute Law for God. Law he accepts heartily, but only as revealing, not as supplanting the divine will in which it is rooted. Miracle he believes to be the key to the divine purposes which are at the root of all natural laws, instead of arbitrary and capricious infractions of it; the healing, life-giving, and tempest_ subduingmiracles of Christ, revealing, once for all, the healing, life- giving, orderly, and peace-bestowing purposes which are the true divine roots of all the uniform order of nature, even when least dis- coverable in it. Mr. Hughes feels that to put Law above God, is necessarily (as the Positive Philosophy proves) to put Law above Man, and cannot.but issue in the subordination of Man to Nature, the drowning of all the highest human purposes in a stream of physi- cal necessity, which is the inevitable precursor of a descending.civi. lization. One of the highest works of man, Mr. Hughes sees, is to subdue Nature to human and moral and spiritual purposes ; to make use of natural laws for divine ends, instead of to surrender himself a captive to them. And he sees clearly that the tendency of this apo- theosis of Law is to abdicate that spiritual power over the machinery of natural Law which has been conferred upon man for his own highest discipline.
Such is the general drift of Mr. Hughes's pamphlet. It seems to us a true Raliyio Laid. The only criticism upon it -which we should wish to offer is, that he seems scarcely aware of the inextricable mingling of disturbing human elements with divine in every act of God's revelation to man and education of man. Both Mr. Hughes and Mr. Maurice appear to have some reserved belief that divine power overrules even the absolute evil of human sin to a higher end than any which could otherwise have-been attained. To us this seems attended with all the difficulties of optimism. We cannot admit the fact of human freedom to err and sin, without admitting all its con- sequences. In almost every act of the divine education of the human race, are there not discernible threads of human weakness and infirmity mingling with and often marring the divine wisdom ? And when, for instance, Mr. Hughes speaks of the canon of scripture as determined entirely by God's providence, does he not concede too little to this disturbing power of human instrumentality, especially when we con- sider the age and the agencies by which the canon of scripture was determined ?
Mr. Maurice's tract is addressed rather to clergymen than to lay- men, and hence, though it has a lesson for us all, demands a less-ex- tended notice from a literary journal. It is divided into three por- tions,—the first of them commenting on the Comtist or positivist view of "Essays and Reviews" developed in the Westminster; the second, on the philosophic view developed in the National; the third, on the dogmatic, and we may say termagant, view developed in the Quarterly. On each of these divisions of his subject, Mr. Maurice has something deep to say. We can only afford to draw attention to one very deep and true criticism. Mr. Maurice says, and says most truly, that the points in Dr. Temple's and Mr. Jowett's essays which are really calculated to substantiate the Westminster Reviewer's charges, are not those which their orthodox assailants have princi- pally fixed upon. It is not where they have spoken out their own deepest convictions, but where they have expressed an opinion which is common to them with many of their most orthodox assailants, that they have really strengthened the hands of the sceptic. For example, where Dr. Temple teaches us, with Lessing, that God has been in all ages educating the human race for a deeper knowledge of Himself, he says only what every true Christian holds with all his heart. But when he adds that it was the purpose of the Jewish dispensation to teach " Monotheism," instead of to teach a knowledge of the living God, he flattens down the infinite depth of the divine truth into a faint abstrac- tion, solslaying into the hands of the Comtist, and leading his readers to think of the uniform progress of the "Colossal man" of which he speaks, as of some such empty and abstract Pantheistic necessity as it is usually conceived to be in the religions of the East. Mr. Mau- rice's essay will seem to most readers most obscure and unsatisfactory, not to say transcendental, in those portions in which he insists on the tendency of articles of belief to protect the freedom of those who subscribe them. We confess that we are unable to follow his line of thought.
If this series of tracts is continued with as much depth and ear- nestness as are shown in the first two numbers, we shall have reason to rejoice that the Seven Essayists and their critics have drawn forth the avowal of so much deep, hearty, and deliberate faith which is en- tirely untainted by any narrow, dogmatic, or cowardly spirit.
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