" IF THE GOSPEL NARRATIVES ARE MYTHICAL, WHAT THEN ?" 1 *
Tins is a striking little essay. It is an attempt to show that something like the philosophy of the Christian Gospel would be forced upon us by the facts of our spiritual nature, whether or not we had any reason to believe in the supernatural history of revelation. The anonymous author contends that the truths of Christianity are not properly speculative truths,—i.e., truths which can be mastered in your study,—at all, but practical truths, the " lie" and specific character of which the ordinary moral experience of ordinary men tends to elicit and impress upon them. As stonehewers and sculptors learn the direction in which various stones will split and flake off quicker than mineralogists,—as physicians learn to detect at a glance the connection of specific diseases with specific expressions of distress on the countenance,—so precisely, says our author, ordinary men learn the chief tendencies at least of Christian teaching, not from any contemplative study or critical research, but from their own inward history in the attempt to gain spiritual peace of mind, that is, inward tranquillity as regards their own moral condition. Christian truth is not the result of intense intellectual thought, but of moral self-knowledge and experience in the endeavour to satisfy oneself with one's own moral condition. it is the knowledge which every man acquires of the stratification and cleavages of his own nature, if we may so speak, in the course of his attempt to be what the numberless contradictions between his inward nature and his outward circumstances forbid him to be. This assertion our author justifies after the following manner. He observes that the pursuit of inward spiritual perfection differs specifically from every other pursuit in this,—that, while in ordinary practical pursuits, professional or otherwise, the disappointments and obstacles which beset our path tend to disappear and
become fewer as we persevere further, and accumulate effort upon, them,— "In the pursuit of goodness, in attempts to elevate oar own moral character, experience gives a totally different result. Not only is the success we meet with in no way commensurate to the efforts we make,. but it actually appears as if in endeavouring to become bettor than we are, we simply rouse the strength of the evil principle within us ; and tho effect is that our character deteriorates rather than improves under the process of attempted reformation. This may sewn paradoxical. But if wo attend carefully to what takes place in our minds whenever we prevail upon ourselves to abstain from the indulgence of some evil propensity, which we have previously allowed to have its way, we shalt find that our nature immediately revenges itself upon us by lapsinginto some degree of stolidity, or moroseness, or bitterness of temper. If we perform some acts of goodness because our conscience approves, though our inclination recoils, it becomes speedily apparent, too, that our minds aro losing their truthfulness and unity ; that the soul is utterly unchanged, whatever the outward acts may be, and that our inward feelings and outward life and conduct are at variance with each other, and the result is a course of self-deception and hypocrisy."
And elsewhere our author expresses his meaning by saying that our power of free self-control appears to be a very limited and finite quantity, any approach to which comes very near setting the whole nature in revolt, and any attempt to overdraw which actually does so ; " though we may consent therefore to put fetters upon some of our inclinations—those of them particularly which are most indolent and therefore less sensible of the curb,— the very nature of things makes any additional act of self-restraint more difficult, renders goodness more and more a matter of complication, and brings us ever nearer and nearer to that extreme limit of the power of control over ourselves beyond which nothing but revolt can ensue. Every fresh act of self-restraint becomes, in fact, more difficult than that which preceded it." Hence, while self-reliance is gained by every fresh step in an ordinary practical pursuit,. self .reliance is lost by every first step in the attempt to set our hearts right with our own consciences ; we loathe ourselves the more for every " virtuous " act while the virtue is attributed to ourselves and is in any sense the result of our volition ;—the more we obey the law the farther we seem from the true spirit of the law, until we reach the condition of hopeless conflict so powerfully described by St. Paul, of the spirit lusting against the flesh, and the flesh against the spirit, and the inward life becomes a hopeless paradox. Then, when " this collision has reached its. maximum," when " the spirit is convulsed to its inmost depths and its ruin in some form or other is apparently imminent, inevitable," then " suddenly, quite unexpectedly, and without any appreciable cause, a great change takes place within us. Doubt and difficulty seem to vanish, and the whole horizon of our thoughts is cleared. What wo had so long thirsted for seems to have come at last." And the whole change arises from ceasing to trust in ourselves, in our own virtue, from being utterly disenchanted of that, from abolishing our own efforts and leaving some other power to work in us, which power reconciles our will with our aspirations. And our author maintains that this change is so entirely independent of mere intellectual belief, that " if it can even be supposed that we should have doubted of God's existence before this change took place within us, it is not to be imagined that anything has now been disclosed to demonstraft it." " We have not received," he says, " theassurance of a future state of existence, nor has it been proved to us by any additional arguments that the wicked will be punished and the righteous rewarded in the next world. In short, no recondite problems of any kind have been solved for us." The only difference is that the moral suffering of doubt has been removed, because we have found the power of which we were in search which identifies our will with our highest desires. We know no more than we did before, but we seek less passionately, because our whole peace does not depend on the result, as it seemed to do ; it seemed that without finding out more, we could not be at peace with ourselves ; now we are at peace with ourselves, and can bear even doubt better, in that self-loss, that gain of some hidden power of good over us, which has rendered the gropings of our souls less momentous to us. Hence our author's conclusion is, that even though we have no firmer assurance that the story of Christianity is true than before, we have a firm practical knowledge that its rationale of the inward life is true,—that " the power of the Cross," the power of self-abnegation, the power of something good over us which is not our own will,—which St. Paul calls "not I, but Christ that dwelleth in me,"--exists, and does give peace when it is attained. Even though we could not believe the facts narrated in the Gospel, even though we could have doubts of God's own life and love for us, we should still know the truth of what the New Testament teaches,—that man must surrender the attempt to set himself right by inward struggle, before he can get set really right, by whatever mysterious power that is finally effected.
The only criticism which we wish to pass upon this thoughtful and subtle little essay is this,—that the writer appears to us to generalize too absolutely in giving us what we may call his natural history of the soul, and in assuming that it would continue to be the same even if all faith in God and Christ were to disappear. That, whether we believe in Him or not, God will continue to haunt the mind of man with a deep unrest so long as we do not give up our wills to His, we believe ; but it is also true that if once we become blind to God's presence, the struggle which our author describes will not and cannot be carried on with the same ardour or intensity on the better side of us, as it is while we recognize the awfulness and authority of the voice which forbids our yielding to evil. In a word, while we believe that nothing can ever satisfy man with the life of inclination, we believe that the struggle against that life will be from the first much more vivid and animated in one who recognizes that the protest against it is God's protest, than in one who has not that faith, and who has to learn, by long experience of the opposite condition, that there is no rest for the soul out of God. The conflict which our author describes, and which St. Paul so passionately depicted, is the struggle of one who recognizes that God besets him "behind and before." With regard to those in whom faith may have disappeared, we think the accuracy of our author's natural history of the soul would be very questionable. They are beset' by God, as the Psalmist calls it, only from behind, pot also from before, i.e., not consciously, not intellectually, and consequently their struggle with evil is far less keen and trenchant in the beginning. For them there is a longer and wearier experience in store before they reach the rest which our author describes ; some of them may even have to pass into what Browning makes his Broad-Church Pope so finely call In a word, we believe that while our author's rationale of the process by which peace is reached, is generally true, it is much more accurate for those who have had faith to quicken them, than for those who have not and all of whose moral history is probably slower of development, more languid at first, and far later in reaching the same end. It is clear that to identify the higher side of our nature with God and Christ must give it a new chance of conquest,—a new sensitiveness and vigilance. Were it not so, the moral life would be the only department of human nature in which blindness is no loss. We believe, then, that more or less our author's natural history of the inward life is really the natural history of a Christian inward life,—at least, of one affected historically and socially by a thousand indirect influences by the faith derived from the Christian history and Gospels. It is a true natural history, but we doubt whether it would be true if that faith could be eliminated. In other words, it is not so independent of historic fact as it seems. Could the historic facts of theology ever be disproved, we doubt whether a great descent in the average level of this inward moral struggle would not necessarily take place. The battle which now culminates early, would in that case be a blind, groping, lingering, languid contest, which would not culminate till late, after much terrible experience of the worse alternative. Just as the experience which our author so eloquently describes of a power of good which converts the will directly the will has given up striving to be virtuous for itself,—just as that experience is, to our minds, the most striking of all testimonies to what St. Paul calls " Christ that worketh in me," so any knowledge, however derived, of that inward power of Christ, is a new guarantee for the right end of the conflict. We do not think our author shows that a diffused doubt of the existence of the Spirit of God and of the Incarnation of Christ would not affect the natural history of the soul of man. We believe it would affect it ; and very much for the worse ;—that under the prevalence of such doubt our author's description of it would no longer be authentic. But, nevertheless, we think he does show that the life of the conscience bears a more or less independent witness to the truth of the Gospel, though it is also true that the Gospel has tended to form and quicken that life. In truth, when once a great influence like Christianity is introduced into the world, you can never again find, within the circle of its reach, any absolutely independent evidence to its teach. ing. It has done so much to form the witness who speaks to its truth, that his testimony cannot be truly and absolutely independent If it could, it would indirectly testify also to the weakness of the influence to which it testified.
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