LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
IGNORING THE BIBLE IN RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY.
[To Till EDITOR OF Tun “EPEOTATOR.1 SIR,—You take as the title of an article in last Saturday's Spectator St. Paul's words, in which he calls the love of money the "root of all evil." But one object of the article appears to be, if not to deny that it is so, yet certainly to question the assertion. It reminds me of the first sentence of Sterne's sermon on the words, "It is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting,"—which is, "That I deny."
Now, I would by no means accuse you of any intention to disparage St. Paul's authority. No doubt it may be said that it does not follow that because his words were true in his own time and country, therefore they must be so everywhere ; or other explanations might be given. But it is, I think, remarkable that the writer of the article does not feel himself moved to make any explanation of his apparent disagreement with St. Paul. He takes his words as the text of his remarks, and then simply sets them aside, and gives his own view of the subject instead. And this is an instance of what seems to me a singular sign of the times on religious belief. What- ever may be the reason of it, whether it be owing to the discredit thrown upon arguments founded upon " texts " of Scripture by the lax and uncritical way in which they are often applied— specially, I think, in England—or to any other cause, the fact is that in controversy, carried on at least by lay Christians, the arguments that will least trouble them, and will be least noticed, are such as are founded upon Scrip- ture, Not the Spectator alone certainly, but Churchmen of all schools, are apt to pass by Scriptural arguments, High Churchmen appeal rather to Church authority and Church Watery; Broad Churchmen, to philosophy or reason ; many Low Church- men do not speculate on high matters of religious or moral philo- sophy at all, but while holding even vehemently to the doctrine of the absolute and equal infallibility of every word of the Bible, from the first of Genesis to the last of Revelation, yet in their teaching and religious thought almost confine themselves to what might be comprised in three pages, and very much ignore the rest. Hence, in general none of these think it needful to indicate their view of the meaning of words of Scripture adduced against them, —all which is much to our loss, in the critical study and popular understanding of the Bible.
This has been strikingly illustrated in the discussion lately carried on in your pages and in the Nineteenth Century on the belief in a future life. Some of those who have taken part in this discussion have been Christians, who would cer- tainly attribute to Apostles, and much more to Christ him- self, the highest authority on all such matters ; yet not one of them ever even notices those notable assertions, " as of one having authority, and not as the Scribes," in which Christ affirms the doctrine of man's immortality. It is curious that one of your correspondents, whose words we all, I think, read with deep interest and pleasure, Mr. Greg, happening to say that one argument for immortality is, in his judgment, for those who can receive it, very strong—that, namely, drawn from the conscious personal relation of the soul to God—seems quite unconscious that it is that upon which our Lord rests his assertion that the Old Testament re- ligion teaches or implies man's immortality. In answer to the Sadducees, our Lord said that the fact that God in Exodus called himself "the God of Abraham, and Isaac, Jacob," implied that those three persons must be living, not dead ; and by that surely meant that if the God who spoke to them, and who entered into close personal relations with them, was the Eternal God—the fountain and giver of life—he would never have suffered those whom he so loved to perish. If we ourselves loved any creature and had the power of life and death, we should never suffer it to perish. And so any religion which, like that of the Old Testament, reveals God as loving, not only " humanity " in general, but individual men, does teach or imply their immortality, to all who accept it. As the ancient Greeks taught that, so long as the sun shone upon a dead body, it could not decay, so our Lord seems to say that so long as the personal love of God rests upon any creature, as the Old Testament says it did upon individual men, that creature must live,—" for God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all live unto him." But this saying of Christ is altogether passed over in the discussion ; and so are the many -others in which our Lord and his Apostles affirm that man has a future and eternal life beyond the grave. For myself let me say that however strong many of the philosophical arguments in favour of our immortality may be—and I think many of them are strong—still far the firmest holding-ground for the anchor of our hopes seems to be, besides the fact of his resurrection, these assertions of Christ, The notion that he was a fanatic or dishonest would be repudiated as incredible by almost all, even unbelievers in Christianity. How, then, are we to account for his calm and repeated assertions of man's immortality, and of the future universal judgment of individual men, upon which 'his whole moral teaching is so very much based, but upon the ground that they were true, and that he knew that they were so ?
Of course, it may be said that the object of the Christian interlocutors in the recent controversy was to take a ground which would not be objected to by the non-Christians. Still, even non-Christians would, I suppose, allow some force and weight to the opinions (1)—shall I venture to call them, for the purpose of my argument ?—of Christ and of St. Paul. These ' opinions ' .surely are facts of sonic importance, that stand in their way. It is surely a singular "sign of the times" that Christians of unquestionable sincerity and earnestness of belief should argue the question of man's immortality without even alluding to the- ft will not be denied—considerable fact of the Biblical assertions with regard to it. —I am, Sir, &c., Bagley Rectory. W. II. LYTTELTON.
„[The true answer to Mr. Lyttelton is that the question of the ;immortality of the soul has not been argued, we believe, either in the Nineteenth Century or in our own columns. The issue argued in our own columns was whether the rather peculiar tenet of a -small modern Congregationalist school, that some men absolutely 'die while others win eternal life, has any reasonableness. The issue argued in the Nineteenth century was, as we understand it, whether the Positivist belief in posthumous life is or is not a religious equivalent for the Christian belief in immortality. True, Mr. Harrison, in his reply, taunted his opponents with not widening the issue, but it was quite wide enough as it was. To neither issue would Mr. Lyttelton's argument, as it seems to us, have been really germane at all, though we entirely agree with him that immense force should be attached to it—ED. Spectator.]
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