MR. FROUDE ON BUNYAN.*
No thoughtful mind could fail to find matter of interest in this grim book, written by one who, in a sombre way, has thought deeply on the fundamental questions of human life. The con- sideration of an existence like Buuyan's will inevitably draw out of a man the sincerest thoughts he has in him ; and Mr.. Fronde, belonging neither to the ultra-scientific party on the one- hand, nor to the orthodox Churchmen on the other, but having an independent and serious stand-point of his own, has been sincere to some purpose. It cannot be affirmed, however, that he has approved himself an ideal biographer. He has not so- much thrown himself into his subject, as he has thrown his sub- ject into himself. Bunyan is there, but he is steeped in Froude; he emerges occasionally above the gloomy current of hin biographer's speculations ; but his lineaments, though recog- nisable enough, are more or less coloured and influenced by the hue and quality of his surroundings. Yet Mr. Froude's com- ments upon his hero possess real value and suggestiveness. Bunyan, during his unregenerate period, was an intellectual, not a sensual, reprobate, and half his sins were the offspring of a vivid imagination, acting upon an ingeniously sensitive conscience. His whole life was a gaze of terrible, concentrated, earnestness into the life to come ; a desperate- effort to make the tenets of the Puritan faith square with the goodness and justice of the Creator. He succeeded, after a fashion ; but it may be presumed that Providence mercifully withheld his eyes in some directions, and sharpened them in others. Bunyan's spiritual temptations are strange and in- structive. Mr. Froude does not believe in their positive reality.. "An intense belief in the moral government of the world creates what it insists upon," he thinks. Bunyan tells us of the warn- ing and prophetic voices that he heard at various critical stages of his career ; also of his vivid experiences of a satanic person- ality whispering doubt and chuckling damnation in his ear. All men who have become great, in the sense that Bunyan was great, have similar tales- to tell. We call it imagination or illusion, for several reasons; because we have not had the like experiences ourselves, or have forgotten that we had them ; be- cause we do not understand the nature of spirit, and therefore practically discredit it ; because "illusion " and " imagination us are a pair of useful vocables, which cover a multitude of ignor-. ances. "There is a truth of imagination and a truth of fact,' says Mr. Froude, "and religion, perhaps, hovers between them." What is the truth of imagination ? We take leave to think that it is a metaphysical expression, devoid of meaning. What is religion ? Mr. Froude says it is the- obligation which man owes to a superior Power ; and he adds.
that "all religion is paradoxical to reason." We should rather suppose that religion is the truth of doctrine, which the love of doing good causes to be applied to life, or enacted; and. we do not perceive anything paradoxical in it at all "Per- haps," remarks Mr. Froude, in another place, "the real trutla
of religion lies in the obligation to lead a moral life Morality rests upon a sense of obligation, implying a divine command." Mr. Herbert Spencer's device of mere utilitarian " duty " cannot be made to answer the purposes of this obliga- tion, because "every relief from outward restraint, if it be not attended with increased power of self-command, is simply. fatal." The fact is, we apprehend, that Mr. Froude is striving- to get at a conception of religion which shall not necessarily involve direct relations with a personal God. He might as well attempt to account for sunshine, without taking into account the sun. This is the age of machinery, both physical and meta- physical ; we fail to grasp many important matters, because we do not go at them simply enough. We do not require a
Bun yea. By James Anthony Froude. London: Macmillan and Co.
steam-engine to eat our dinners with, nor do we need the subtle devices of a Kant, a Hegel, or a Spencer to tell us that God is possible or impossible. When an educated man begins to be troubled by such questions as,—Why does an omnipotent and benevolent God allow sin to exist ? How is will free ? Why is not prayer an impertinence ? What is will How is God's wrath against mankind reconcilable with not his love merely, but his justice ?—when a man is assailed by these and the like doubts, what, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, does he do ? He goes, not to the Bible, but to the Commentators,—to the doctors and theologians. It may safely be affirmed that not a single dogma of the Christian Church capable of causing pain or perplexity to the tenderest heart or most enlightened conscience, can be traced to any statement in the Bible itself, properly understood. But people now-a-days are averse from reading the Bible, or they read it with minds previously warped by theological per- versities, and darkened by the elucidations of the Commentators. Bunyan himself, although he "knew his Bible by heart," owes most of his troubles to this practice, as have numberless other thoughtful and earnest men, down to Mr. Froude himself. Our children, if left to themselves, will generally manage this matter much better than we do.
Take, for exam pie, the fundamental proposition that a Supreme Being exists. It is impossible to conceive of this Being as other than infinitely good and infinitely wise,—as love itself, and wisdom itself. The essential quality of love is to give itself—to have an object out of itself to love—and it also requires that the object loved shall return love for love. God, then, in creating man to be the object of his love, must also have created man with the ability to love him worthily in return. Now, liberty is essen- tial to love ; therefore, in order worthily to love God, man must have full and entire liberty either to love him, or not. But to love God is to live conformably to the laws of divine order, given in the Decalogue ; and not to love God is to contravene these laws, thereby giving birth to falsity and evil. Such dis- obedience is suggested, as Mr. Froude truly remarks, by man's lower nature, which, in the Bible, is symbolised by the serpent. It hence follows, not only that evil was introduced into the world by man, but that the liberty to so introduce it was a con- dition essential to the possibility of man's goodness. But why, asks Mr. Fronde, does Omnipotence permit the continued ex- istence of evil? It may be answered that if God could do everything, he would not be God. Man, subject to error, can indeed perfect his work only by revising and correcting it ; but this cannot be the case with God, w is wisdom itself, and therefore foreknowledge itself. He created the Universe, with all the laws which govern it, and which together constitute the divine order. If now he were to change a law of this divine order, it would be tantamount to a confession that he had been mistaken, and then what would become of his fore- knowledge ? So that, the liberty of man being one of the essential laws of divine order, the divine Omnipotence consists in not destroying, but maintaining it. There is nothing par- ticularly irrational in all this, and it is strictly Scriptural; and yet Mr. Froude declares that all religion is paradoxical to reason. His previous observation, that "reason starts at the expedients of Christian theology," is, perhaps, more to the point. But expedients are precisely what we do not want.
And why need Mr. Fronde give in to the current cant about the impossibility of accepting the Bible as the inspired Word of God ? It is objected that the geology, geography, and history of the Bible are not in accord with the results of modern re- search, and that its various assertions are inconsistent with each other. But history and geology are one thing, and divine revelation is another. A work on arithmetic, for instance, is written according to certain recognised rules, and is held erroneous if it departs from those rules. So, in order to prove the Bible wrong, we must first explain the rule according to which a divine revelation ought to be written, and then show that the Bible is not written according to that rule.
The fact that, as we have already intimated, Mr. Froude's philosophy makes quite as prominent an appearance in this book as does that of Bunyan, must be our excuse for offering the above suggestions. After noticing Bunyan's early life, and analysing the nature of his spiritual struggles, Mr. Froude takes up his books one by one, and criticises them with great thorough- ness, considering the limited space that was at his command; In alluding to Bunyan's system of nomenclature, giving to each character the name of that quality of which he is the repre- sentative, Mr. Froude remarks that Bunyan's invention in this
respect was never at a loss. We should be inclined to ascribe this fertility to a higher quality than that of inventiveness. It proves the almost unparalleled knowledge possessed by Bunyan of the structure of man's moral nature. He dissected it as few besides him have dissected it, and was able to keep steadily in view and to clearly characterise each one of its constituent parts. As regards the famous twelve years' imprisonment in Bedford Gaol, Mr. Froude shows that Bunyan was probably treated with much less severity than is popularly supposed ; he was allowed every indulgence compatible with a restraint scarcely more than nominal, and which a word from him could at any moment have brought to an end. Meantime, it had the accidental advantage of giving him time and leisure to produce the work which has made his name immortal. Bunyan's worldly circumstances were never otherwise than decently prosperous ; Providence would seem to have so arranged matters for Lim, that the whole energy of his nature could be given to an examination of the grounds of religious belief. And it is impressive to see how, while resolutely facing the awful doctrine of election by grace, Bunyan, nevertheless, con- trived to reconcile it (in his own mind, at least) with a faith in the infinite goodness of the Deity. It is a sort of miracle, but a sort of miracle not seldom vouchsafed to those who heartily and unflinchingly deny themselves for the sake of an un- seen, and perhaps uncomprehended, good.
Mr. Froude's closing words are eloquent, but full of a certain grim and stoical sadness. It is, he thinks, the profoundest of all moral truths that man himself is a poor creature, not worth thinking of, and that a recognition of this fact is essential to the first step towards excellence in anything that he undertakes. Man, perhaps, will always be trying to do better, and failing; yet he will hope not to be wholly cast away ; for though no conscientious man will claim merit for his acts, we cannot help knowing that there are degrees of demerit. And Mr. Froude's final answer to the question, "Will there be a final victory of good over evil ?" is a negative one : "There are no signs of it." Much of these conclusions is, doubtless, true ; but it seems to us that Mr. Fronde approaches his truths from the wrong side. Though the existence of evil is reconcilable with the idea of an all-powerful God, its permanent abode here would not be so. But having entered the world by the inalienable liberty of man, it is necessary that it should be removed by the same liberty. For human beings are not automatons ; life is a reality, and not a".farce, and God is not a tyrant, amusing himself with pulling the wires of puppets. A new Adam may one day find himself alive in a new Paradise, a heavenly state on earth, but not the less essentially a heaven. For if heaven be anything, it is the marriage of goodness and truth in the human mind, not some indeterminate region in space, behind the stars, whose inhabit- ants are chosen by lot and admitted by miracle, as Bunyan thought, and as Mr. Fronde seems to suppose. We may be doing him injustice on this point ; but what other inference can be drawn as to one who finds it possible to exclaim, as Mr. Froudedoes, "Better hell with an honest heart, than heaven with cowardice and insincerity" ?
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