"FAITH AND UNFAITH."
WE called attention, in a few lines in our paper on "The Magazines," in the Spectator for October 7th, to Mr. Kegan Paul's essay on this subject in the current number of the Nineteenth. Century, and noted especially the point on which • he appears to us to have shown weakness, namely, the .as- sumption that because pure Naturalism finds almost as much of superstitious assumption in the least orthodox of the genuinely Christian creeds, as it finds in one of the most ancient and picturesque of them all, therefore there is nothing to choose between these various forms of the Christian Church and creed in respect of their fidelity to the original Christian revelation, or even that it is reasonable to assume that the most imposing is the best. Mr. Kogan Paul presses this very naturally from his point of view, because his objection to all supernatural religion appears to consist simply in its supernaturalism ; and this being so, he is, of course, quite justified in treating all the supernatural creeds as more or less one in principle, and making light of their differences as, to him, comparatively unimportant matters. So, indeed, they are, to any one who takes definitively the naturalistic view of life; to him it may be no less easy,---perhaps a great deal easier,—to become a Roman Catholic at once, than to become a supernaturalist who stops short of the Roman Church. Nay, we may go farther and say that all supernaturalists-, all who believe in the spiritual origin of the Universe, in the frequent Command of mind over matter, in moral freedom, in the absoluteness of right and wrong, in the infinite evil of sin, in the omnipresence of God, and in the individual dispositions of Providence, approach necessarily far nearer to the Roman Catholic view of life than they can ever approach to the Agnostic, since they accept the very principle of miracle, ind.eed the greatest of all nairacles in the fact of Creation ; and, do not stumble at the most daunting of all prac- tical paradoxes, since they affirm their belief that the mighty order of the Universe is, nevertheless;subordinated to the special education of each individual soul. But strongly as we hold this, —that all convinced supernaturalists are almost at one in theoretic principle, as compared with their relation to any materialist or agnostic,—we cannot understand how Mr. Kegan Paul can suppose that to one who has once gravely adopted the supernaturalist's point of view, the differences between the various Churches which accept the Christian revelation can ap- pear trivial. It is only to the point of view of Unfaith, that all the Faiths appear hardly distinguishable, since they all contain the principle of spiritual creation and of spiritual miracle, and. all defy the paradoxes involved in the apparent neglect, mishap, and even mishandling, of individual sufferers by the Providence of God. But what Unfaith thus confuses as forms of Faith hardly to be distinguished from each other in point of pure prin- ciple, Faith finds widely distinguishable, for the very simple reason that the more confident we are that divine revelation is- the origin of our creed, the more important we think it not to deviate from that revelation, and not to take creeds as equivalent, only because they can be shown to involve milder or sterner applications of "the same logic." The difference between a milder and a sterner application of the same logic may be, "to such creatures as we are, in such a world as the present," the difference between life arid death itself. The doctrine that God. gives one man easier access to himself and subjects him to fewer dangers and temptations than he provides for another, is a mild application of the principle that the divine grace is not to be measured by purely human standards of justice ; the doctrine that God, like the potter who makes one vessel for honour and another for dishonour, has the absolute right to place one in circumstances in which he will inevitably sink hopelessly into evil, and. another in circumstances an which
he will inevitably be purified, is a sterner application of the same principle. Yet the difference between these two applications of the same principle is, to most of us, the difference between religion and irreligion.—the difference between a doctrine which we could accept in humility and trust, and a doctrine which we must reject with indignant scorn. Differences in the application of the same logical principle may mean differences between what humbles and what revolts us. Mr. Kegan Paul draws a very skilful comparison between a rule adopted at Eton in his day, for giving a kind of indulgence from trivial penalties to successful map-drawers, and the indulgences of the Roman Catholic Church, and points out that both were applications of the same logical principle :—
"Some years ago there was an usage at Eton, which seemed to the present writer, when only a boy of thirteen, exactly, though perhaps unintentionally, framed on the lines of ecclesiastical indulgences. The 'Remove' was a part of the school in which geography and history wore especially studied, and the making of maps was a weekly exercise, to which an importance was attached beyond their real value as a means of teaching. The masters of this form, and, as far as I remember, of this form alone, were in the habit of giving what were termed exemptions' for well-executed maps. A small piece of the corner of the map which deserved praise was torn off, signed with the master's initials, and handed to the artist. Perhaps a day or two afterwards the same boy was accidentally late fdr school, and ordered to write out fifty lines of Virgil as a punishment. When the time came for producing the lines, he presented instead his exemp- tion,' which was accepted without a word ; his previous merits had gained him an indulgence. I have some impression, though my memory in this serves me bat imperfectly, that the transfer of exemptions was at least tacitly allowed, even if not directly sanctioned, but I speak under correction: If it so chanced that a graver fault had been committed than the mere venial offence of being late for school, talking in class, or the like and that the offender then presented an exemption, not only was it not received in lieu of punishment, but the very pleading the excuse was held to deepen the fault ; and here, on a lower ground, was all the distinction between mortal and venial sin. We read in the papers that the same school has lately been granted an extra week of holidays on account of the marriage, that is to say, the merits,' of the Duke of Albany. If there be nothing immoral in giving boys a holiday because some one else is married, or in forgiving a trivial misdeed for the sake of previous good con- duct, we fail to see the moral iniquity of remitting temporal punish- ment of in on account of the merits of the saints, or of a devotion sedulously performed. And this is all that was ever.claim ed for in- dulgences, rightly understood. The acts are, it is true, on altogether different planes, but the principle is the same, and a principle is independent of magnitude, it 'shuns the lore of nicely calculated less or more.' "
Granted. But is it not the essential difficulty of the Roman Catholic doctrine of Indulgences, that it elevates to the moral plane, to the plane proper to its method of dealing with sin, disciplinary rules which are only appropriate to methods of dealing with carelessness and inadvertence, and so confuses the distinction which it is the very object of all spiritual revela- tion to deepen P Why it should be assumed that what you can justify as a prudent disciplinary measure in stimulating the emulation of a class, is equally admirable for the purpose of impressing on man the moral revelation of the divine character, we are wholly unable to conjecture. The very fact that the principle illustrated is the same in both cases, increases the difficulty. We are bewildered at finding the principles of worldly calculation elaborated with the utmost nicety in the field of the highest spiritual life.
The plan of insisting that intellectually it is no less difficult, perhaps even more difficult, to accept any supernatural Christ- ianity at all, than to accept the most imperious form of historical Christianity, Roman Catholicism, is very much favoured just now by those who lean to Naturalism. Nor do we wonder at it. In the first place, it is, as we have already admitted, true that, intellectually speaking, the paradoxes which other Christian creeds evade by rejecting the Roman Catholic Church, are trifling, compared with those which they must over- come in asserting their own creed,—indeed, we should extend this to Agnosticiem itself, which seems to us to revel in paradoxes so far as it admits anything like ultimate principles of knowledge and a close correspondence betweou material laws and the laws of thought. And, in the second place, it is, of course, very convenient for the Sceptics to represent the fight as one between Unfaith and the one Faith which, from time to time, has endeavoured to shelter and excuse by far the greatest number of secular abuses ever taken under Christian patronage. Butthe truth undoubtedly is, that Christian supernaturalism once granted, the whole ques- tion revives as to which Church most truly represents the spiritual revelation received by man,—as to which Church
mingles it with the least alloy of human frailty. It is nothing to tell us that almost all forms of supernatural Christianity involve at bottom the same logio. Of course, they do. But the true question is, which of them so applies that logic as to concede the least to human weakness—applies it so as to hold up man most firmly to the true standard of the Christian revelation. What may be justly said of Roman Catholicism is, that it, more than any other Christian faith, becomes, while insisting inexorably on its own conditions, all things to all men, spiritual to the spiritual, devout to the devout, superstitious to the superstitious, strenuous to the strenuous, worldly to the worldly, easy to the easy-going,— austere and rigid only to open rebellion. But the super- natural principle once granted, this description is just what would seem to be least applicable to a Church truly representing the divine revelation. St. Paul was not, in this sense, "all things to all men," that he might gain some. He did not pro- claim temporal indulgences to be earned by the saints for those who could just manage to save their own souls and nothing more. He would almost have offered his own salva- tion for the sake of his own people, if such an offer had not been a contradiction in terms ; but it never seems to have occurred to him that by his own devotion, he might a little attenuate the natural duration of the purifying suffer- ings of others. These doctrines, and other developments. of doctrine like them, bear on them the very impress of concession made by a spiritual organisation to that scheme of things which is least spiritual in conception and policy. And it is partly on account, doubtless, of suli concessions, as well as on account of the high ideal held out by the Catholic Church to the most devout, that that Church has become so great a power in the market-place, as well as in the soul of man. Yet for that very reason, it seems to us that " Unfaith " is mistaken in trying to identify the supernaturalism of Christianity with the supernaturalism of the Roman Church. In intellectual principle, the two arc doubtless identical. But the Church which applies the most steady pressure to the elevation of average human nature, is sure to be the one that best represents the divine ideal ; and can that be the Church which enters into terms of accom- modation with -the worldly, while it presses hard on the self- sacrificing and the devout P " Unfaith " may ignore these dis- tinctions. But the moment the step is taken to faith, that moment the gulfs between the different types of Christian teaching open afresh, and it becomes a groat question which of them is the truest representative of that revelation of which all Churches preserve a more or less blurred image.
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