DR. ABBOTT ON NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL.
WE publish in another column an interesting criticism by Dr. Abbott on the remarks made in this journal last week concerning his conception of Liberal Christianity. To a good deal that he says in that letter we have no reply to make. We do not know that we differ from him substantially in relation to his definition of worship, and are glad to find that he wishes to express by the term something much deeper and larger than that purely spontaneous and instinctive sentiment to which some of the language of his book appeared to confine it.
But as regards the latter portion of his letter, we fear that the better we understand him, the more widely we differ from him ; and as there can be no doubt but that Dr. Abbott's view is widely spread, and. perhaps becoming more widely spread every day, we do not think it amiss to offer a few more remarks on the subject which he there touches. We had ques- tioned how far a thinker who denies altogether what is culled miraculous power to Christ, could consistently attribute to him the "divine power" which is a condition, of course, of human faith and worship. If we understand aright Dr. Abbott's reply, it is this,—that there is no real connection between control over the outward physical processes of nature, and divine power,—that he attributes to Christ all the divine power which is usually attributed to God, except the power to alter these uniform relations of physical phenomena,—and that eveu this exception is not in any sense a limit on Christ's power, since, in the same sense, he would attribute the same positive change- lessness, the same fixed will against change, to God him- self, so that there is no denial of the so-called power of miracle to Christ, which he would not, in one sense, be willing
to extend to God himself. His words are these We believe (in a sense) that Christ could have turned the stones to bread, just as we believe (in a sense) that Christ could have listened to the voice of the Tempter; but, as a matter of fact and history, we believe that he did not thus 'mould nature,' and hence we infer that it was not hie will to do so. Perhaps we may go still further, and say that as he could not commit sin, HO neither could he mould nature contrary to nature's recognised laws." Take this in connection with Dr. Abbott's assertion that Christ had "power enough to redeem a seemingly fallen world ; to introduce and keep current among men the hitherto non-existent or latent faculty of forgiveness ; to discern the deepest needs of human society and the fittest . and most natural means for satisfying them, to foresee and plan the triumph of life over death by self .sacrifice, of righteousness over sin by repentance ; and to purify by His spirit not only the comparatively insigni- ficant fraction of mankind called the Christian Church, but ultimately the whole human race ;" and we suppose it moans that Mr. Abbott attributes to Christ all the moral omnipotence need. lid to hear and. answer human prayer in the only sense in which, in hie belief, it ought to be answered,—and of course, therefore, without any deviation from the strict uniformity of physical natures—including the omnipresence necessarily implied in such omnipotence. If tins interpretation of ours be correct, Dr. Abbott holds that Christ has excess to every human heart and every human will in every ago, knows all our wants and wishes, inspires us in proportion to our needs, and is gradually renovating the whole universe of spiritual being in his own like. nem If such be his meaning, he has sufficiently answered our doubt as to the foundation he would lay for the worship of Christ. If he really holds that whatever God can do for men, Christ can do, and that whatever limits there are on what Christ will do, there are also on what God will do,—namely the moral limits of what is fitting, and no others,—then, however much he may differ from us in ascribing to the physical uni- formities of nature a sort of spiritual sacredness which makes it morally impossible oven to God to change them, he un- doubtedly has in his own faith an ample justification for using of his attitude towards Christ, the word "worship."
But then, by this explanation, Dr. Abbott has only shifted. the ground of our difficulty concerning his view of Christ- ianity. He earnestly asserts that what he ascribes to Christ is an infinite moral power, involving that omniscience without which even such power would. be all but impotence ; and yet
the evidence on which he believes this ie precisely the same, and
no other, than the evidence which he finds wholly worthless when it is brought to prove certain physical facts far less marvellous. If Christ forgave the paralytic's sins, he coupled his forgiveness with the saying,—" But that yo may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins —A •• and take up thy bed, and go thy way into thine house." Dr. Abbott, if we rightly understand him, accepts the unverifiable half of the story, the insight into the paralytic's repentant heart and the forgiveness of his sins, and. casts the other half, the half that was within the observation and verification of a human witness, away. Again, in the case of the multiplica- tion of the five loaves to feed five thousand, and the seven loaves to feed four thousand people, Dr. Abbot rejects both stories as pure myth or legend ; but accepts with enthusiasm the statement that Christ is still feeding, by his direct, personal, spiritual influence, the hearts of millions who never heard his name uttered by any human being. If we have under- stood. him rightly, he thinks our Lord's prediction of the destruc- tion of Jerusalem unhistorical, and regards it as an interpolation after the event; but he thinks his prediction of the complete triumph of his teaching over the world. perfectly historical, and accepts it, though as yet ages from its fulfilment, as one of the evidences of Christ's divinity.
Now, this state of mind is to us hardly intelligible. We do not Hay it is wholly unintelligible, for we do not believe, as the old writers on the Evidences used to assert, that the evidence of the physically superhuman is so much easier to get and to test than the evidence of the spiritually superhuman, that in the absence of the former we have no measure of the latter. On the contrary, we hold with Dr. Abbott that the evidence of the spiritually superhuman is the first step, and the clearest; but then it does seem to us most unreasonable that when you have satisfactorily established the spiritually superhuman character of Christ's life and work, you should be greatly offended and surprised at miracle, and in- duced to regard with great distrust the element of the physically superhuman closely combined with it. On the contrary, it would be rather reasonable, in the absence of any direct evidence on the matter, to expect the manifestation of physically super- human power in the person of him who has already manifested spiritually superhuman power. Dr. Abbott, so far as we under- stand. him, declares that he is not in any way prejudiced against the evidence of physically superhuman power in Christ, if it is forthcoming (though he is quite clearly not prepared to expect it), but that it is not forthcoming. And. his reason for this very curious statement is,—that the more you examine the struc- ture and. growth of the Gospels, the more you see that the mirac- ulous element in it is Of later growth. The present writer can only say that he has given a considerable portion of his life to this study, and that he cannot conceive a proposition which seems to him more utterly without foundation. Why, two most stupendous miracles,—the two multiplications of the loaves, with the conversation with the disciples in which our Lord refers to each separately, and reminds his disciples of the number of bas- kets of fragments taken up in each case,—are both recorded in what Dr. Abbott regards as the earliest of all the Gospels, St. Mark's, and both recorded without the smallest suggestion of any mode of explaining them as an event that might have occurred in the ordinary course of nature. The rebuke to the storm on the Lake of Galilee, and the impression produced by the sudden sinking of the wind and. waves on the .minds of the disciples, is also recorded. by the same Evangelist, with the same brief and earnest simplicity. So is the walking on the sea. And. if there be several miraculous events not recorded in St. Mark which are recorded in the other Evangelists, the explanation lies in the extreme compression of the Gospel, not in the slightest evidence that St. Mark told in germ what the other Evangelists expanded into leaf and blossom. It seems to us that the natural effect of rejecting as untrustworthy the story of the visible side of Christ's life, is to inspire a great doubt of the higher interpretation of the invisible side of that life. And that this will be the practical effect on those who accept Dr. Abbott's view of the Gospels, we feel entirely as- sured. It is impossible to conceive the discrediting of some- thing like one quarter of the story of our Lord's life, as it is now given to us, without the discrediting in an almost equal degree of the other three.quarters.
But then Dr. Abbott will tell us that the teaching of science runs directly counter to the story of miracle, and that unless we accept God's teaching humbly on the physical side, we shall not succeed in getting his teaching humbly accepted. by physicists on the moral and spirituel side. We quite agree ; but what we utterly dispute is that the teaching of science concerning the uniformity of nature, properly studied, goes to discredit miracle, any more than it goes to discredit the spiritual divinity of Christ. There is a direction in which the touch- ing of science goes to discredit both,—the direction in which it confines the attention to a class of purely physical phenomena in intimate conversance with which a habit of mind is apt to be formed far from favourable to the admission of any sort of superhuman power, either physical or spiritual. There is a direction in which the teach- ing of science goes to discredit neither,—the direction in which it discovers the secrets of new powers which it can neither ex- plain nor deny, and which are totally inconsistent with the theory of an ultimate control exerted by physical agencies over the moral and spiritual agencies of the universe. Keep to the
science of the intermediate links between the well-established physical phenomena of the universe, and you.will contract the former habit of mind ; immerse yourself in the science of con- trolling causes, of such phenomena as mesmerism, somnam- bulism, and all the strange phenomena of specially stimulated and so-called clairvoyant states—what Dr, Carpenter and others have rather audaciously included under the term "mental physiology "—and you will have no reason to complain that your belief in the uniformity of natural laws, seems in any degree inconsistent with that belief in the complete subservience of matter to spirit which is all that is involved in miracle.
For what is implied in miracle, as it is brought before us in the Bible, is not, of course, any caprice in nature, but a sub- servience of physical to spiritual agencies in exact proportion to the closeness of communion between man and God. Even Dr. Abbott appears to believe in this so far as it concerns the healing agency of faith, and Dr. Carpenter and other great physiologists go HO far o.s to say that the power of emotion over the body is even sufficient to produce from natural, but as yet entirely hidden, causes the " stigmata " as seen, for instance, on the body of St. Francis of Assisi and many of the modern Extaticas. Well, if that be possible,—as men of great authority tell us it is,—what more would be needed than such divinity as Dr. Abbott attributes to Christ, to involve mental control over physical nature of an immeasurably higher kind,—a power rising to what we have hitherto called miracle,—a power of conveying signs of specific meaning, that is, of divine purpose intelligible to finite minds, through phenomena which usually embody only a mere frag- ment of an infinite purpose P Establish as you will the moral divinity of Christ, but however you establish it, your conclusion will imply the strongest possible probability that Christ must have also had a spiritual control over physical nature. Under- mine as you will the belief in the spiritual control of Christ over physical nature, and your result will imply the strongest possible probability that the moral divinity of Christ, so far at least as it implies omnipotence or omnipresence, must have been a dream. Dr. Abbott apparently thinks physical miracle, though a question of fact, one of com- plete moral indifference to spiritual faith. We cannot agree with him. We believe that there is but one step from thinking the system of physical law so abeolutely fixed by divine will that it never has been, or ought to be, " violated " as the phrase goes, to doubting whether it was a divine will at all, or anything like it, to which that rigidity of system is due. The people who believe to-day that God has made so fast the laws of his physical universe, that it is in many directions utterly im- penetrable to moral'and spiritual influences, will believe to- morrow that the physical universe subsists by its own inherent laws, and that God, oven if he dwells within it, cannot do with it what he would ; and will find out the next day, that God does not even dwell within it, but must, as M. Ronan says, be " organised " by man, if we are to have a God at all.
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