MISS COBBE'S " HOPES FOR THE HUMAN RACE."' THIS is
in many respects an able and valuable book. Sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to understand why, since Miss Cobbe goes as far as she does in the direction of Christian faith, she stops where she does; and the difficulty is not diminished by these essays. In it we may say that she endeavours, with more or less success, to establish the rationality (in the higher sense) of some of the most important of those views of God's nature and purposes which Revelation confirms,—though we admit that what she strives
* Hopes for the Human Race,—Hereafter and Here. Si Frances Power Cobb. London: William, and Nergate. to establish, goes, in one respect, beyond the teaching of revelation. But having shown that we ought to have learnt to accept all these truths from the study of our own nature and experience, she treats with the most magnificent contempt the evidence that God has actually revealed through supernatural means those very truths, of the shadow of which she has endeavoured, not without very candid confessions of dismay and misgiving at the conflict between the merely " natural " and the " moral " evidence, to trace the outline in our spiritual and moral constitution. We have no wish to dwell on this part of Miss Cobbe's book, but before we pass from it, we must say a single word on what seems to us her inadequate and almost unfair treatment of the connection of Revelation with the truths which she is so genuinely anxious to establish without its aid:— " The old popular creed having presented the doctrine to us as a matter of historical revelation, we were first trained to think of it as a fact guaranteed by a Book, and, accordingly, of course to be ascertained by the criticism of that Book. Our eternal life was secure if we could demonstrate the authenticity and canonicity of certain Greek manu- scripts ; but, were the Bible to prove untrustworthy, our only valid ground of hope would be lost, and the Immortality (which, in the face of Egypt and India, we were complacently assured had been only ' brought to light through the Gospel ') would be re-consigned to the blackness of darkness. From this primary mistake those who think freely in our day are pretty nearly emancipated. The ' apocalyptic side of Chris- tianity ' has ceased to satisfy even those religious liberals who still take its moral and spiritual part as absolutely divine ; and the halting logic which argued from the supposed corporeal resurrection of the Second Person of the Trinity to the spiritual survival of the mass of mankind has been so often exposed, that it can scarcely again be produced in serious controversy."
Now, why Miss Cobbe should saddle the belief in Revelation with all the faults of what she holds, with us, to be a false philo- s ophy, without also observing that the same belief assumes a very much more weighty place in the minds of those who con- sider it the authoritative historical verification of the moral and spiritual anticipations on which she lays so much stress, we cannot quite understand. It seems to us a much more rational state of mind to find in the mind provisions for a belief for the confirma- tion of which there are also corresponding provisions in external history, than to find the one without the other. If God be what Miss Cobbe is so anxious to show, then to find in human history a series of events which are but the clearer and more complete historical transcription and completion of those indistinct antici- pations of the heart, is but to find human instincts justified. It is just like the verification of Bant's doctrine of the space- intuitions in man's actual experience of space as corresponding to those intuitions. If we had had the experience without the in- tuitions, we should have had no rapid-striding geometry ; if we had had the intuitions without the experience, we should have had no belief that the same Creator who made our minds was also the architect of the external universe. But discover that both agree, and so far everything is clear. Again, it seems a little grotesque that Miss Cobbe should herself invent very improbable myths to explain away what, though it answers to and verifies that human belief in immortality on which she justly lays so much stress, is apparently too good for her to believe in its simple historic form :—
"That the Death of Christ—not his supposed Resurrection—furnishes a strong argument in favour of Immortality, will be shewn by and by. It is not probable that the great myth of his bodily revival owes its origin simply to the overwhelming impression which the scene of the Passion must have made on the disciples, transforming their hitherto passive Pharisaic or Essene belief in a future life, into the vivid personal faith that such a soul could not have become extinct? In a lesser way the grave of a beloved friend has been to many a man the birth-place of his faith, and it is obvious that in the case of Christ every condition was fulfilled which would raise such sudden conviction to the height of passionate fervour. The first words of the disciples to one another on that Easter morn may well have been He is not dead. His spirit is this day in Paradise among the sons of God.' It was the simplest con- sequence of their veneration for him that they should feel such assur- ance and give it utterance with prophetic fire. In that age of belief in miracles, this new-born faith in the immortality of a righteous soul was inevitably clothed almost immediately in materialistic shape, and by the time the Gospels wore written it had become stereotyped in traditions which we can class only as Jewish ghost-stories. If this conjecture be admitted, we are absolved equally from the acceptance as historical of the monster-miracle of the New Testament, and from the insufferable alternative of recourse to some hypothesis of fraud, collusion, or mistake. It cannot have been on any such base or haphazard incident that the reliance of Christendom has rested for eighteen centuries. Even with its blended note of human error, it is after all the reverberation of that earthquake which rent the hearts of those who watched on Calvary and tore the veil of mortality from their eyes, which has ever since echoed down the ages and still sounds in our ears."
Miss Cobbe forgets that the materialistic shape, as she calls it,— why, by the way, is it materialistic to suppose that an immortal soul which has had a visible and tangible form once, can manifest itself in a visible and tangible form after death as before ?)—of the doctrine of the resurrection did not wait for the writing of the Gospels. St. Paul tells us in 2 Cor. xv. what he had been told by the witnesses of Christ's resurrection at Jeru- salem, and St. Peter, in the undoubted first epistle, speaks of himself both as a witness of the death on the cross and as " be- gotten into a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead." Why it should be so foolish for believers in immortality to believe also that all the hopeful, but doubtful an- ticipations of it in our hearts have been clinched, as it were, by an actual resurrection, not, indeed, as proving necessarily the same destiny for man, but as proving the final authority of the words which affirmed that destiny for man, is one of those per- plexities attaching to Miss Cobbe's position which seem to us of an irreducible kind. We suspect she thinks it more spiritual to trust to the vague prophecies of the heart alone, than to trust to those prophecies after they have been answered and verified by God in history. But we do not wish to expend the little space at our disposal in carping. We will add but one small cavil more Miss Cobbe seems to us too fond of striking language, of lan- guage which goes beyond the bounds of what the context requires, and makes a phrase remarkable on its own account. Thus she speaks of the conception of God which makes Him " the great Policeman of the Universe," as one in contrast with that of the per- fectly loving Father. But the view she is really combating is not in the least that of a great Policeman, but of one whose view of sin is as much sterner than ours, as bis love of the sinner is greater. And we suspect that it ia weakness, and not strength, which merges altogether the retributive view of sin in the compassionate view. Again, in the essay called " Doomed to be Saved," why should Miss Cobbe go out of her way at the close to address God as "Father and Mother of the world " ? Is it a sort of rights-of- women argument in disguise ? If so, we think it an unfortunate one. No one doubts that the phrase " Father " is intended to convey all that the originating side of the parental relation in any way can convey. But while the especially religious use of "Father" has snore or less set that word free from the mere anthropomorphic associations of the expression, the word " Mother " has not lost those associations in the same way, and the mind shrinks even more from its use than it would if you were to call ' Nature' or 'the Church' the Father of physical or spiritual life respectively. There is no gain in these little shocks to literary taste and habit. Nor can we quite see why Miss Cobbe should invent the rather oppressive word " heteropathy,"—which, of course, is always re minding us of allopathy,—as the correlative word to "sympathy" in her last essay. It seems to us that "antipathy,"—which by no means expresses ' hatred,' as she would have us think, would convey her meaning much better.
However, there is so much in this book which is true and able, that we are sensible of having already said too much on the score of dissatisfaction. The best things in it are the preface and the last essay ; the preface being a somewhat elaborate, and in many respects very able criticism on Mr. Mill's posthumous Essays on Religion, while the last essay traces the development of the social sentiment or passion which is now called the " Enthusiasm of Humanity " from its germs in the savage and barbarous stages of society. We rather doubt, by the way, Miss Cobbe's assertion that most animals, except the dog and horse, are irritated by the display of joy in others of the same tribe. Did she ever see larks vexed with the carols of other larks? or squirrels with the gambols of squirrels? or lambs at the playfulness of their fellows? or porpoises at the joyful bounds of the rest of the herd? We should have liked a fuller justification of the natural history of that part of her thesis. Also, we think, she puts the development of compassion much too late when she finds its first trace in Greek literature in Euripides. Not to notice how JEschylus makes both Heaven and Ocean sympathise most deeply with the sufferings of Prometheus, Homer in the Iliad represents even Achilles as stirred by Heaven with a deep sympathy for the woes of Priam, whose son he had slain. Still this essay on the steady evolution of the principle of social sympathy is an exceedingly valuable one, and serves as the basis for a very strong argument in the criticism on Mr. Mill contained in the preface. For the development of human senti- ment and the human obligation it carries with it is not to be accounted for on what is called the solid ground of human self- interest, and cannot be ascribed to anything short of an interior guidance towards the good. The following passage seems to us of great force, especially if read after instead of before, Miss Cobbe's final essay :— "Finally, if the sketch I have attempted to draw of the Evolution of the Social Sentiment appear to possess historical truth, it remains only to remark—that the long progress upward of mankind which I have traced from the primeval reign of violence and antagonism to that of sympathy and mutual help, has not supplied us with the slightest clue to the mystery of how, at each successive stage and as the higher senti- ment dawns, there is a corresponding overruling inward command to follow the higher and disregard the lower impulse. Nothing in the progress of the emotion explains either the existence or progress of the moral sense of obligation ; any more than the anatomy of a horse explains how he is found with bit and bridle. Other things grow, .nay, every- thing in our nature grows, as well as these emotions ; every taste alters, every sentiment develops. But nothing within us corresponding to the Moral Sense develops simultaneously along-side of them, setting the seal of approval on the tastes and feelings of adult life, and of dis- approbation on those of childhood. If then, this Regulative Principle or intuition of a Duty to follow the higher Emotion and renounce the lower stand out no less inexplicable when we have traced the long his- tory of one of the chief emotions to be regulated, we have surely obtained at least a negative reply to the desolating doctrine recently introduced, that the Moral Sense in man is only the social instinct of the brute modified under the conditions of human existence ? These cultivated instincts, rising into humane emotions, are not the Moral sense itself, but only that which the Moral Sense works upon,—not that which, in any way, explains the ethical choice of good and rejection of evil, but merely the good and evil things regarding which the choice is exercised. Whence we derive the solemn sense of Duty to give place to the higher emotion rather than to the lower (a sense which undoubtedly grows simultaneously with the growth of the emotions which it controls), is another problem whose solution cannot here be attempted. One remark only need be made to forestall a common-place of the new phase of Utilitarianism. We are told that our personal intuitions of Duty are the inherited prejudices of our ancestors in favour of the kind of actions which have proved on experience to be most conducive to the general welfare of the community, or, as Mr. Martineau well calls them, 'the capitalised experiences of utility and social coercion ; the record of ancestral fears and satisfactions stored in the brain and re-appearing with divine pretensions only because their animal origin is forgotten.' If this be the case, how does it happen that we have all acquired in these days a very clear Intuition that it is our duty to preserve the lives of the aged, of sufferers by disease, and of deformed children ? The howl of indignation which followed the publication of a humanely- intended scheme of Euthanasia for shortening the existence of such persons for their own benefit, may afford us a measure of what the feelings of modern Christendom would be were some new Lycurgus to propose to extinguish them for the good of the commonwealth. Yet what, in truth, is this ever-growing sense of the infinite sacredness of human life but a sentiment tending directly to counteract the interest of the community at large ?"
Again, nothing can be better than Miss Cobbe's criticism on Mr. Mill's leaning towards the worship of a probable God, and on his singular view that a future life is desired mainly from selfish motives :—
" Now to those amongst us who do not believe that great benefits are ever derived from crediting delusions, and who do not feel in themselves the inclination to cultivate and water a Hope which they know to be a flower stuck rootless by a child in the ground, this kind of exhortation is as strange as that which follows it on the ' infinitely precious famili- arity of the imagination with the conception of a morally perfect Being ;' the same idealisation of our standard of excellence in a Person ' being quite possible, even when that Person is conceived as merely imaginary.' Meditating upon imaginary gods, and cherishing hopes which are known to depend on an even balance of probabilities, seems to most of us very like the mournful preservation of a casket when the jewel is stolen, of a cage when the bird is flown ; for ever reminding us of an irreparable loss. Far better, to our apprehensions, would it be to gather courage from our despair, and face as best we may the facts (if facts they be) that we have either no Father above, or that he is weak and unwise, and that our hopes beyond the grave hang on a straw, than mock those solemn trusts of the human soul in God and Tmmortality by 'making believe,' like children, that we possess them when they are ours no more. ' Si Dieu n'existait pas, it faudrait l'inventer; is an epigram which has now been paralleled : 'If we are not immortal, we had better think ourselves so.' Yet there seems some contradiction in Mr. Mill's view of the advantages of the Hope altogether. In the pre- ceding essay on the Utility of Religion, he makes very light of it. He
says When mankind cease to need a future life as a consolation for the sufferings of the present, it will have lost its chief value to them for themselves. I am now speaking of the unselfish. Those who are so wrapped up in self that they are unable to identify their feelings with anything which will survive them, require the notion of another selfish life beyond the grave to keep up any interest in existence.' Here, again, surely we meet the singular train of misapprehensions which seem to crowd upon the writer from his incapacity to understand the religious sentiments of other men. It is precisely the selfish man who has had a comfortable life here below, who may inscribe on his tombstone that he, ' From Nature's temperate feast rose satisfied, Thanked Heaven that he had lived and that he died ;'
and made no farther demand for further existence for himself or any- body else. Bat the unselfish man who has looked abroad with aching heart upon a sinful and suffering world, cannot thus be content to rise with a sanctimonious grace from the feast of life (so richly spread for him), and to leave Lazarus starving at his doors. That his own life on earth should have been so happy, so replete with the joys of the senses, the intellect and the affections,—that he should have been kept from sinking into the slough of vice, and permitted to taste some of the un- utterable joys of a loving and religious life,—all this makes it only the more inexplicable and the more agonising to him to behold his brothers and sisters—no worse, he is well assured, and often far better, than him- self—dragging out lives of misery and privation of all higher joy, and dying perhaps at last, so far as their own consciousness goes, in final alienation and revolt from God and goodness. It is for these that he demands another and a better life at the hands of the Divine Justice and Love; and in as far as he loves both God and man, so far is he incapable of renouncing that demand, and resting satisfied because he has had a pleasant mortal existence, and because younger men will enjoy the like after him, and, when he is gone, help to carry on the progressive movement of human affairs.' The prayer of his soul, Thy kingdom come,' includes indefinitely more than this."
Those who read Miss Cobbe's book carefully will find not a little else in it as good and as powerfully stated as this. All we regret is, that with her profound sympathy with the philosophy and the sentiment of Christianity, she should appear to feel a sort of amused surprise at those who believe that in it is revealed, far more clearly than in ordinary human nature itself, the divine character and purposes of God.
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