THE HIGH CHURCH RECIPE FOR SCEPTICAL TENDENCIES.*
Tim attempt to meet the sceptic on his own ground by one who utterly distrusts the powers of the human mind to discern truth—who distrusts the "verifying" faculty, as one of the Essayists and Reviewers called it—is seldom likely to be satisfactory or successful. Dr. Sewell, feeling as all men who know that faith is essential to their own moral health and happiness must feel, that it is a time "to seize -upon any weapon that they possess and join in the defence," has taken up and completed thoughts written nine years since, and given them to the world as his reply to the more sceptical statements in Essays and Reviews. His volume is thoughtful and able, quick in its apprehen- sion of the various signs of unity in the intellectual constitution of the universe, and comprehensive in its grasp of the various tendencies of human doubt. But we very much question its general tendency. From the beginning to the end, we feel that we are listening to an author who has little or no confidence in the special train of thought lie is pressing upon us. Indeed, he presents it with the avowal that it is not his own ground for faith, that it would be very dangerous to lean much on it : " It may fall into the hands of some younger readers, for whom I am more than ordinarily re sponsible. They will perceive at once that the line of reasoning is formed upon Butler's ` Analogy.' But they will let me give them a solemn warning against the possible danger of such reasoning. In it the Christian con- sents for a time to abandon as it were his baptismal faith, and the true ground of testimony upon which that faith rests as on a rock ; and he descends down to • Christian Vestiges of Creation. By William Sewell, D.D. J. H. and James Parker. meet the unbeliever upon his own low and false ground of human reasoning; he assumes to put aside from his mind all that he has learnt, and believes already, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, of the Sacraments, of the Church: and as if it were all false, or had no existence, he proceeds by the light of his own mind to examine the material world, and the constitution of human nature, and to systematize his discoveries in them. He consents to act for a time precisely as the rationalist. And although, carrying with him secretly, as he does, his Christian truths, his creeds, and his Bible, he can and does discover, and draw them out, at every step in the cyphers of the book of nature, still lie adopts and so far authorizes, the process of the rationalist, who, alike assuming to reject both creed and Bible, pursues his own researches by the light of his own eyes, and arrives at very different results. For this reason a Christian never should adopt this line of argument, except under solemn protest, and with a most distinct warning, that reasoning of this kind, however correct it may be, however sound its conclusions, cannot be made the foundation of our Christian faith. That faith, like all other truth, must ultimately rest upon testimony, the testimony of men. Straggle, as the spirit of the age will struggle, against this, the only tbundation of all true logic, for this fact we must do battle. And with this, the Christian faith must be victorious. But abandon it, and we must admit the fundamental principle of rationalism—that every one must walk by the light of his own eyes and his own reasoning, that each individual is the measure of truth, in other words, that there is no external standard of truth, or what is equivalent, that no truth at all exists. Limit therefore carefully and distinctly the employment of this argument from analogy. It is safe as defeating the unbeliever on his ground, if we take care not to abandon our own. It is interesting as illustrating and strengthening the soundness of our own position, that is, our faith, as founded upon testimony, if we are careful not to rest upon it too much. It brings philosophy to the aid of our simple, childlike trust in God's Word, and in the testimony by which He has revealed that Word. And philsosophy is a useful weapon with which to combat philosophy, and a light and ornament with which to adorn a childlike faith. But if we transfer our confidence from the Word of God to the reasoning of philosophy, if we make philosophy primary and not secondary, essential and not supplemental, the feet on which our footing is to rest, not the staff with which we occasionally steady our steps and can beat off the ag- gressor, the use of it may be fatal, as fatal to our souls as it is fatal to sound logic and to true reason. God grant nothing in the following pages may tend to such a result. God grant that nothing may have been written inconsistent with the teaching of that true Catholic Apostolical Church of England, to whose judgments I most humbly and heartily submit whatever is here suggested." Now we confess that, after a warning of this kind, we read the book with comparatively languid interest, If a man will tell us the grounds on which his own mind leans, the mode in which he has really and truly got his own grasp of realities above this world, we listen with more than interest, with the deepest conviction that we have something to learn, that some fresh insight into those great truths, or at least some new strength and satisfaction in our hold of them, is before us. But when a man is only told, by some one stand- ing on quite different ground, of evidence that ought to be adequate to him, though it is admitted that it is not the ground of the reasoner's own conviction, and would be very unsafe ground too, we do not think that by such reasoning any very deep impression is likely to be. pro- duced. If Dr. Sewell is sure that the ground of external testimony is his own real and adequate stay of faith, let him press it. What has convinced hint is a thousand times more likely to be put forward by him with power, than a line of thought which has not convinced him, though he may think it plausible and full of weight. If he is not sure—and we strongly suspect lie is not—that his own or any other man's faith, when it is real and profound, is based on mere external testimony, then he should try to distinguish its true basis, and not to thrust upon the sceptic a staff on which her would be afraid to lean himself. As it is, Dr. Sewell's little book has an undertone of scep- ticism which is anything but likely to subvert it in other minds. "This," he seems to say, " is a line of argument showing that there is a certain degree of inherent probability in Christianity—at least enough to make it very imprudent to reject its assumptions hastily ; but a not very high probability is the most it can establish." For instance, at p. 136, he says : "To accept them (the promises of the gospel) can do us no harm; to reject them, leaves Ur in imperfection. Our duty, like our interest, is clear." As if faith were either a matter of duty or interest alone, as if it could be given by any frantic effort of our own will, however much supported by enlightened self-interest! Dr. Sewell will never get at the heart of scepticism while lie coldly accumulates probabilities and appeals to prudence. Let him, instead, show that it is life and light to man, whatever his calling, the root of power and love and a sound mind, and he will not write in vain. The truth is, that he believes, as is evident from many a passage in this little book, in a God still hidden instead of revealed, shrouded in His own Church, in a God who " blinds our eyes to His immediate presence," who "allows us to suppose He is a God afar off," and "calls upon us, and tempts to feel our way to Him, as if we were alone." Thus thinking, no wonder he appeals to prudence and duty rather than to the constraining power of manifested life and truth. Mr. Sewell's line of argument is subtle and, to a certain extent, deep; but it wants a frank and solid basis on universal human cravings, a want which it betrays again and again by its " economical " theories of God's dealings with us. The argument itself is an adaptation from "Butler's Analogy," but an adaptation kept within the limits of a single thought. That thought is, that the whole scientific develop- ment of the world teaches us to look at it as springing from an Original Unity of some kind that contains within itself the germs of Plurality, fostering those germs into actual life and strength, and then gradually reconciling them again, so as to bring them back with- in the constraining law of overruling Unity. This law of scientific evolution Dr. Sewell illustrates with great felicity. He applies it; of course, as a foreshadowing of the revealed nature of God as • a Unity not simple, but complex, enfolding in Himself a distinction of persons, creating a manifold variety of moral beings in apparent con- tradiction to His purposes, who are, nevertheless, either to be assimi- lated by "the organism of the Church of Christ," so far as they are destined for true sons, or to be subordinated, in their rejection, to the trial and purification of the former. We cannot follow Dr. Sewell through his argument, which is re- fined as well as comprehensive. Bat we must enter our protest against the attempt, so inherent in analogical argument, to relieve us of moral and intellectual stumbling-blocks, by boldly ascribing to the Diving mind itself the most painful contradictions which beset our human lot. Thus Dr. Sewell, assuming the fact, wishes to show why we are left so much to ourselves by God. He takes the analogy of human education. He says we want to bring up our children so as not to lean on our immediate help and counsel. To do this we must let them at least think they are free; we must form their habits for them under the impression that they are forming their own ; we must subject them to such influ- ences that they are pretty certain to decide right while they are under the delusion that they are deciding for themselves. "It is the con- sciousoess not the fuel of external influence," Dr. Sewell says, with all the emphasis of italics, " which destroys free agency and renders a soul no longer an object of our moral ejections." And accordingly he implies that God gives us the consciousness of freedom without the reality, and that all the education of the human race is, in fact, a necessary evolution of Providential plans in which man's freedom probably plays a merely phenomenal and unreal part. It is needful to our mental growth that we should think ourselves free ; it is not needful we should be so. So at least we understand him. Of course, if God can educate us on a false hypothesis, there is no difficulty in any of those legal figments by which theology is so often disfigured. The great act of incarnation, instead of being the emancipation of man from doubt and despair, becomes a mere escape from a formal difficulty as between God's justice and his love, and all the unreali- ties of theological dogmatism rush in at once. If Convocation is to discuss dangerous heresies, might they not as well discuss this mise- rable suggestion of Dr. Sewell's, that God is willing to give us the impression that we are free without giving us the reality of freedom ?
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