MR. MAURICE :—THEOLOGIAN OR HUMANIST?
IT is remarkable enough that no great teacher can teach, without a controversy immediately springing up as to what it is that he has taught, —and this often in his own life-time, and in the very midst of those who are the witnesses of his teaching. Nay, we would almost go so far as to say that it is one 'note' of a great teacher to be thus misinterpreted,—that it is the necessary consequence of the tendency in his teaching to touch many separate springs in the minds of those to whom it is addressed, so that each interprets it in the sense of the separate phase of truth to which it has happened to awaken him. That this is true, not merely of philosophic teachers like Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel, of whose teaching there are a variety of radically different interpretations,—the last of these, Hegel, having, for instance, asserted, according to the tradition, that only one pupil ever understood him, and he misunderstood him,—but also of moral teachers like Socrates, and theological teachers like St. Paul, and Augustine, and Luther, and Butler, and Coleridge, the history of commentary sufficiently shows. And we have seldom had a more instructive instance of it than in the com- mentary supplied by an able writer in the Pall Mall of Thursday week on the teaching of the greatest of the Anglican divines of this generation (forDr.Newman must now be accounted aRomanist divine),—we mean Mr. Maurice. In discoursing on Mr. Maurice's farewell to London, where, formerly in the afternoon services of Lincoln's Inn Chapel, and latterly in Vere Street, Mr. Maurice has poured forth his whole heart Sunday after Sunday for upwards of twenty years, the Pall Mall gives its own summary of the drift and outcome of Mr. Maurice's teaching. And it was in effect this,—that the theological form of Mr. Maurice's thought is, as it were, accidental and external,—perfectly genuine and sincere, of course, in him,—but so separable from its essence that any man who might agree, say, with M. Comte, could drink in his addresses with almost perfect sympathy at the cost of a very trivial change of nomenclature. At least, if this is not the drift of such a passage as the following (supported as it is by the whole tone of the article, and the complete silence of the editor when he gives insertion to a protest against this interpretation addressed to him by Sir E. Strachey last Tuesday), we must be reading the Pall Mall with eyes even more undiscerning than those with which the Pall Mall reads Mr. Maurice :—"Why Mr. Maurice has told on such men as Sterling and Tennyson, is simply because he has thrown into theologic shape and embodied in earnest words the simple creed which, in the wreck of patristic and mediEeval theologies, most men of sense are quietly agreed to accept. A belief in a divine order or, in other words, in a universe of law, in the progress and development of man as a part of that system of law, in those modes of human think- ing and action which are summed up in the phrase the moral life,' as the necessary conditions of such a development; a belief that in such a natural progress man will find ample scope for his energies and aims, and that it is wiser and healthier to concentrate those aims and energies on what can be known and done rather than to fritter and dissipate them on guesses and speculations,— this is in effect the religion of modern society, and this is in effect what Mr. Maurice has preached." The words which we have itali- cized, and, indeed, those of the whole passage, enforced and ampli- fied as they are by every other criticism of the article,—which insists repeatedly on the fortunately theological phraseology in which Mr. Maurice has clothed his own thoughts, and helped clergymen in search of more freedom to clothe theirs without betraying even to themselves the essentially human origin and character of their creed, —clearly mean that Mr. Maurice has helped to reconcile the imper- sonal conception of the universal order with the personal. Mr. Maurice has, implies the writer,—no doubt without knowing it him- self, but not the less effectually,—attenuated not only the distinc- tions between Christianity and Theism, but the distinctions between Theism and Humanism ; he has helped us to realize how little sub- stantial difference there is between the phrases "divine order" and "universe of law ;" has suggested how the life of man may be regarded as one phase only of the life of nature ; and has shown us how "the convictions of men who have thrown aside theology" may be "blended with" his own, which are still couched in theologic phrase. That is the thesis of Mr. Maurice's critic in the Pall Mall, and it is in protest against this thesis that Sir Edward Strachey wrote his letter published in the same paper on Tuesday last.
Now, of course, no critic so able as the writer of whom we speak could write out of all relation to truth and fact, and we shall explain almost directly what we conceive the true excuse for this marvellous feat of interpretation to be. But in order to illustrate the ingenious erroneousness of the Pall Mall scholiast, we will state what we conceive to be a certainly much truer account of the drift of Mr. Maurice's thirty years' teaching. We conceive, then, that Mr. Maurice's uniform teaching, draw- ing its inspirations from the Bible, has depicted the universe, —both the greater universe which includes all Being, and the less which includes only the individual soul,—as the scene of an incessant personal conflict between powers of good and evil, a conflict in which God, who is essentially the Righteous Will and the uniting Love, must eventually triumph, though Ile leaves the most mysterious power to evil wills and spirits of hatred and disunion to tempt to sin and create chasms between soul and soul, for periods of which we can never limit the duration ; that his teaching has uniformly depicted the mind of man as enslaved and degraded by captivity to any "system of law" whatever ; that it has proclaimed without ceasing that men can find their only true life in the recognition (by way of partial, and often apparently irreconcilable, but not the less needful and mutually supplementary, glimpses) of a divine Life, far too wide and complex for them to grasp and systematize at all; that it has decyphered for us the traces of this infinite Life, as disclosed in the training by God of the Jewish people, as concen- trated in the story of the Son of God made man, as distributed through history, and as cropping out perpetually in the sharp cries of modern society for regeneration, and in the clash of modern dogmatising and modern doubts ; again, that it has represented all human life as finding its true meaning, its true centre of unity, its true strength, and its true holiness in the life of the head of Humanity, Christ,—and as wandering into error, isolation, weak- ness, and sin whenever it sets up for itself and pursues any end of individual and selfish happiness ; finally, one of the most marked and emphatic features of Mr. Maurice's teaching has always been the recognition that all the higher human relations are but faint echoes of relations already existing in an infinitely more perfect form in the divine mind,—that human love betrays in its very essence that it takes its origin in an inexhaustible spring of divine love,—that every ray of truth which enters and suffers refraction or dispersion from the human intellect brings with it implicit evidence of a multitude of brighter and diviner rays still excluded by the limits of our paltry intelligence and imperfect fidelity to the truth we have. We do not hesitate to say, from a continuous study of Mr. Maurice's writings of some seventeen years' standing at least, that such an account as this goes far nearer to the core of his teaching than that of the highly transforming interpretation suggested by the writer in the Pall Mall, who is, whether involun- tarily or voluntarily, blind and deaf to most of the colours and tones of the thought he is criticizing. No doubt the explanation of the criticism is that the critic really admiral Mr. Maurice for the theological falsehoods he has slain and the social revolutions he has promoted, and wishes to make as light as possible of the very grave differences of faith really dividing him from the writer, and so rationalizes him to the utmost. But in so doing he seems to us to have emptied out nearly all that is cha- racteristic of Mr. Maurice, and to have dismissed as the mere form of his teaching what is the very principle of its life.
No doubt, however, the critic is right when he insists on it as one of the very greatest services which Mr. Maurice has rendered to theology, that he has rejected and even scorned the attempt to attribute to God moral principles and procedures which we should regard as of the very essence of flagrant injustice in man. But he is wrong in representing this as an attempt to humanize God. "It is this purely human conception of the Divine being that has become, as regards the current theology, the distinctive force of Mr. Mau- rice's creed," says the Pall Mall critic. Now, Mr. Maurice himself certainly would assert that the views he has attacked have been far more human conceptions of God, than the faith which he has tried to substitute,—that they have arisen exclusively from human passions and from anthropomorphic dreams, and that in assailing them he has had to strive against the misleading tendencies of his own heart, and to keep his eye fixed steadily on that Divine Word which is revealed at once by con- science and by the Bible. His critic might reply, 'Of course I know all that, but would what Mr. Maurice says be true ? Is Mr. Maurice's vehement protest against accepting the suffer- ing of an infinite holiness as the equivalent for an infinitely multiplied number of punishments inflicted on finite guilt, really derived from human or from divine authority ? Mr. Maurice only preaches as of divine sanction what we derive from plain human reason, and the influence he has gained is due to the ratification of plain human reason, and not to any mystical authority whatever ? ' To this we can only answer that the exposure of the unreal morality of vicarious punishment by 'plain human reason' has been common enough for centuries, but that the fascination exercised by Mr. Maurice over even the most sceptical thinkers has not been common enough, but the rarest possible phenomenon in connection with such scepticism. According to the showing of the Pall Mall itself, Mr. Maurice has always drawn the rationalists towards him with a power which rationalists themselves have never exerted. Can, then, the secret of his influence be its rationalism ? Must it not be, on the contrary, the deep spiritual faith in which whatever measure of rationalism he teaches is rooted and nourished? That Mr. Maurice denies the possibility of a contradiction between the highest human morality and the divine, is common to him and Mr. J. S. Mill, for instance. But Mr. J. S. Mill has certainly exercised an influence in many respects diametrically opposed to Mr. Maurice's, and hardly, therefore, one would suppose, by virtue of the same faith. Surely the specific difference between them is this,—that Mr. Maurice has always regarded morality as the law imposed upon us by our participation in an infinite life descending from above, which it keeps human nature constantly on the stretch to apprehend,—and which never for a moment permits us to con- stitute ourselves its measure, but is always measuring us and showing us that we are wanting,—while Mr. Mill regards morality as a mere net result of human experiences, the sober calculations of which it can never transcend. If Mr. Maurice's peculiar spell has not consisted in the intensity with which he has realized himself, and helped his hearers to realize, that human duty, human love, human society, are all but faint transcripts of things divine, that every ray of truth we catch is a descend- ing ray which we are bound to follow upwards at our peril, we confess ourselves utterly at a loss to apprehend what it is at all. And we believe that this method of thought, as we may call it, is really learned from the Bible,—we do not mean, of course, the Bible as distinguished from the divine Spirit in man, but the Bible as interpreted by that divine Spirit,—that it is not a gloss put upon the Bible by Mr. Maurice, as his critic in the Pall Mall seems to hint, but is derived from it by artless and honest interpretation. On one point, however, we agree with the implied criticism of the Pall Mall. We do think that Mr. Maurice, in his habitual 'thankfulness for difficulties,' often ignores patent flaws both in the historical and the moral teaching of Scripture, and some- times appears to learn what, as far as we can see, his authority does not teach. He did the same with the formulas of our Church, when he defended what he has now, we believe, ceased to approve, the Athanasian Creed. His habit of mind is so reverential that not unfrequently he seems to us to import into an authority something to our minds utterly foreign to its meaning, and expresses the deepest gratitude for what we cannot find there at all. But this is from the mere excess and abundance of that in him which has helped him to restore the true interpretation to so much which had been misconceived owing to dogmatic prepossessions and the arrogance of earthly conceptions. No man has done so much towards interpreting the Bible in the true spirit of the Bible, as Mr. Maurice.
It will be seen that we cannot easily conceive of any more complete misunderstanding of Mr. Maurice than the conception of him as a ' humanist ' in a theological disguise. If he is not a genuine theologian, if the ground of his whole teaching is not God's revelation of Himself to the frequently mis-seeing, but also fre- quently aided and purified vision of man, he has been nothing at. all, and his whole work in life has been lost. But it is quite- true, as his critic maintains, that he is no controversialist, and even " abhors " controversy. Nor is the secret of this the mere instinct of positive affirmation to which his critic attributes it.. To Mr. Maurice, human opinion, even his own opinion, seema. unimportant, almost insignificant, because he understands by " opinion " a body of propositions connecting together human. conceptions (necessarily imperfect), while what he is always seek- ing to promote is the recognition by man of facts outside himself, and not a mere dictionary definition of the meaning of his own ideas. Inone sense the least scientific of men,—the book of his which seems to us far the least instructive is that on the relation of the Bible to Science,—Mr. Maurice has at least succeeded in impress- ing on his pupils that unless theological facts are as real and external to the soul as the facts on which the natural sciences are based, and unless they are as inexhaustible in their aspects and as full of freshness to every fresh mind which really touches them, they are nothing. Hence Mr. Maurice uses the word. " opinion " almost as a term of reproach, as representing a mere result of an intellectual analysis of our own thoughts ; and con- stantly contrasts " opinion " with the intellectual acknowledg- ment of external divine realities too great for any such analysis,. and which exert upon the soul the sort of vital and various. influence which objective life in all its complexity exerts on. the bodily senses. What a man's ' opinions ' are Mr. Maurice does not care. He thinks the root of all error lies in opinion? What facts and beings a man acknowledges,—whether, for instance,. he acknowledges the Incarnation and Crucifixion, or is blind to. those events,—he cares very much indeed. Many men would say that all they mean by acknowledging the Incarnation, is accepting the 'opinion ' that "the Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us." But Mr. Maurice would see the widest distinction between the two. He would say that millions hold the latter as a mere opinion, who never think of the divine act itself as an eternal spring of mercy and love which is as full of various wonder and unexhausted, nay,. inexhaustible, life for us as when Christ first took up the burden of the flesh or hung upon the cross. The opinion may be held) with no further result than the connection of a subject and a. predicate. The constant acknowledgment of the fact, involves opening the heart to a great stream of divine influences from a. source outside it altogether. Of course, with such views Mr. Maurice does not care for controversy in which he sees so much wrangling of mere opinions. He cares a great deal for any evi- dence that a man sees, or fails to see, any single act in the greatt unfolding of God's life as it appears to him.
Certainly, if we are right in our interpretation of Mr. Maurice,. no greater blunder was ever made than to consider his theology the mere form, and the earnestness of his human morality, the substance, of his teaching. In him the one root of earnestness is the recognition that a divine righteousness has been revealed to. man.
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