THE HEAD MASTER OF CLIFTON COLLEGE ON THE THEORY OF
INSPIRATION.
THE Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge has seldom done either a better or a bolder thing than its publication of two remarkable lectures by the Head Master of Clifton College,—the Rev. J. M. Wilson,—on "The Theory of Inspiration?' It has never done a bolder thing, because these lectures face the difficulties of the Bible in a much freer and franker spirit than the Councils of our various Religious Societies can usually persuade themselves to sanction and approve. It has never done a better thing, because these lectures do not rationalise and explain away Revelation into a mere human evolution, bat are well calculated to vindicate the faith in a divine power in almost the only way in which in our day it can, as we believe, be triumphantly vindicated, as a faith justified and even required by the study of history—which contains constant proofs of a power perpetually conversing with man, and sustaining, indeed, as one of the minor prophets terms it, "the Lord's controversy" with him,—a power especially re- flected in the history of the Jewish people, and receiving at last its perfect human embodiment in the life of Christ. Mr. Wilson begins by contrasting the extreme reticence not of one Christian Church only, but of nearly all the greater branches of the Christian Church, as to the true definition of Inspiration, with the desire of Secularists and Agnostics so to define it that they may confute the Christian revelation, as it were, out of its own mouth. He contrasts impressively the language of two different authorities on this question. One of these says, "The purely organic (i.e., mechanical) theory of Inspiration rests on no Scrip- tural authority, and, if we except a few ambiguous metaphors, is supported by no historical testimony. It is at variance with the.whole form and fashion of the Bible, and it is destructive of all that is holiest in man and highest in religion." The other authority says, " It will not do to say that it [the Bible] is not verbally inspired. If the words are not in- spired, what is ?" And then Mr. Wilson explains that the former authority, who protests so strongly against verbal inspiration as inconsistent with historical testimony and fatal to what is highest in religion, is Canon Westcott, of Cambridge, one of the most learned of our living Biblical oritks ; and that the latter authority, who is eager to tie the Bible down to verbal inspiration, is the well-known Ameri- can Secularist, Colonel Robert Ingersoll, who really contends for verbal inspiration as the only intelligible kind of inspiration, in order that he may explode all inspiration altogether. "Do you, then, ask me," says Mr. Wilson," can I become a Christian with- out having first believed in the divinely-guaranteed accuracy of the Bible ? A thousand times I answer, Yes.' " And then he pro- ceeds, in a passage of great beauty and wisdom, to explain him- self :—" The truth is, that the belief in inspiration is not the portal by which you enter the temple: it is the atmosphere that you breathe when you have entered. You may become a Christian,—most men do become Christians,—from finding in the life and sayings and death of Jesus Christ something that touches them, something that finds them, something that is a revelation of divine love to the human heart. Men find that there is something in them dear and precious to God. And then love springs up in them, and a new life begins. They look out on the world with larger and more loving eyes. They see God in their brethren, God in Nature, and God in their Bibles. In their Bibles they read of the Christ whom they love. Those pages are filled with power that moves the soul ; never man spake as this man ; never book spike as this hook. And this, and this only, is the theory of inspiration that Christians must needs possess. It is primarily an internal question among believers; not an external question with the world. It has little or no relation to the convictions which make and keep a man a Christian. It is not a question which I or any one would care to talk about to one who is not already drawn to Christ. It is premature to talk with others of the exact limits of inspiration. Let them first read the Gospels, read them as they would read any other book, with any theory of inspiration or with none, with the one aim of learning the truth about Jesus Christ, of finding in the book what is pure, and noble, and elevating; let them first learn to admire, to love, to copy, to serve Jesus Christ, and I care not what theory they may form of inspiration ; they will have got the thing, and then they will not be over-anxious to define it." In a word, to be a Christian, all you have to believe is that a real power in- finitely higher than man manifested itself to man through the series of historical causes which prepared the way for Jesus Christ, and most perfectly of all in Jesus Christ himself. Believe this, and the antecedent improbability of miracle vanishes at once, while the mind is prepared to accept as historical events, physical marvels which are plainly asserted to have happened in close association with what is super- human on the spiritual side; but as regards all individual miracles, you are free to weigh the evidence for them indi- vidually and on their own basis; they do not all "stand or fall together," but,—so, at least, we should interpret Mr. Wilson's meaning, though we are now speaking for ourselves, and not for him,—those miracles which are most clasely implicated, most
absolutely in harmony, with the spiritual marvels of revelation, will stand most firmly ; while those completely separable from those spiritual marvels, and standing in what may seem acci- dental relations with them, will remain on a distinct plane of evidence of their own, and .we shall feel perfectly free to say in our own minds, Whether that really happened exactly as it is there declared to have happened, is a question on which we do not feel called upon to pro- fess any decided opinion, nor are we even capable of forming such an opinion. We can only say that the suffi- cient evidence on which we should be ready to believe it is hardly in existence ; and that whether it was a miracle or a natural event glorified by the halo of popular tradition, makes absolutely no difference to the substantial truth of the history of the divine education of Israel, or to the culmination of that education in the life and death and resurrection and ascension of Christ and in the descent of the Holy Spirit on his disciples:
Thus far goes the drift—as we understand it—of Mr. Wilson's first lecture. The second lecture, on the moral difficulties of the Bible, insists on the view that the divine inspiration of man is necessarily relative to the actual historical condition of the race by whom that inspiration is received. All that is needful to compel the belief that a divine agency external to man is engaged in his education and purification, is the evidence that whatever his actual condition, he finds within him, and especially within the hearts of his best religious teachers, a power which constrains him, against the grain of his nature, to become holier and purer than he is ;—no matter whether that which to one century is far holier and better than the spiritual life of that century, seems to us looking back, after the better experience of thirty or forty centuries more, less excellent than the best spiritual life of our own day. "We must judge of a divine command in the Old Testament by the following considerations. The voice spoke in the heart, not outside it, and was but the voice of the conscience enlightened up to its then standard, and receiving from the ever- present, ever-acting Spirit of God, such fresh enlightenment or inspiration as it could bear. Did the voice seem wrong to them ? Was it not in general a call to something higher, to some fresh duty ? Could it have been intelligible, if given in the modes of thought of this century, so widely separate as they are ? and why of this century rather than of any other, past or to come ? To my mind, the only intelli- gible revelation is the gradual, historical, accommodated revela- tion. Such commands or permissions are only so far given to us as they are applicable to our conditions of society and morals ; and here is the function of intellect, an ample sphere for our keenest moral judgment and most trained insight." And Mr. Wilson illustrates his meaning by saying of the com- mand to Abraham to take his son Isaac and to offer him as burnt offering :—" I, for one, can only interpret this as in any sense a command from God by the help that I get from the historical view of revelation that I have been setting forth. The inner voice of God in our hearts and later revelation, tell us this command is wrong to us ; if the outer voice tells us that it is right to us, the contradiction is intolerable, and even maddening. But the question is not what the inner voice in our hearts now says, but what it said in Abraham's, nearly four thousand years ago. And to understand this we have only to reflect that, strange as it may seem, the offering of the first-born was then common ; that it was no moral shock, only a sorrow and trial to Abra- ham; and that the command was used,—its importance is that it was used,—not to sanction, but to abolish human sacrifices, and to look forward by a long series of types to the perfect sacrifice of will and life that Christ made on the Cross." That is finely put, and we wholly agree with the view expressed, but we should like to add to what Mr. Wilson says, that the only reason, so far as we can judge, why the command addressed to Abraham is "wrong to us," and would be simply incredible to us as a divine command, is not in the least because we may not be required rightly, and in numbers of cases, to give up to death at least as certain as ever Abraham destined for Isaac, those who are as dear to us as ever Isaac was to Abraham, but solely be- cause in his revelation of himself as a father, God has taught us to cherish the deeper human affections, and what they sug- gest to us, as truer and more decisive revelations of himself than any sort of external voice which would merely and blankly command the severing of those relations. We may be, and often are, commanded by the interior voice of duty to do what hazards the continuance of these relations on earth, and what ends, perhaps, in as complete a severance of them as that for which Abraham showed himself to be willing at God's com- mand. But the difference is that since Abraham's time anything like a direct outrage on the sacredness of these affections has been forbidden, and that we have been taught, what Abraham till then had never been taught, that God re- veals to us more of himself through the life of these affections,— and by that reverence which the Fifth Commandment especially enjoined,—than through any outward teaching of any other kind. Instead of representing,—as the religion of the Phoonicians represented,—the jealousy of God as if it were a jealousy felt by him of the existence of human affections, as if it were a jealousy felt by one who regarded himself as competing with human love for the exclusive devotion of his worshippers,— his revelation has explained the true divine jealousy as re- quiring the highest fidelity and purity in human relations, for the very purpose of educating us towards fidelity and purity in our relations to God. The relations of father and son, and of wife and husband, instead of being depreciated as in rivalry with religious worship, have been surrounded by his revelation with infinite mystery, and treated as training us to the truest conceptions of what our love for God himself ought to be. It is not that Abraham's lesson as to God's claim upon us for the willing surrender even of our dearest earthly treasure has ever been cancelled or reversed, but that it has been taught in a different manner,—first, by the careful forbidding of everything which outrages those deeper affections and tends to lower and degrade them; and next, by teaching us to consecrate these affections with all the mystery and glory of religious associations. The sacrifice of Isaac, seemingly ac- cepte3, but really forbidden, and thenceforward made the start- ing point of a new teaching as to the fatherhood of God and the revealing character of the higher affections of man,—a teaching developed till, as Mr. Wilson says, it culminated in the sacrifice of the Cross,—seems to us to furnish one of the noblest illustrations in history of the evolution of the highest religion out of a creed which, once significant but rude, was rapidly falling into a corrupt and cruel superstition when it was suddenly rescued from that degradation and expanded into the highest of all religions, by the supernatural providence of -God.
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