MR. GORE'S BAMPTON LECTURES.* !CONCLUDING NOTICE. I
Mn. GORE in these Lectures reoccupies tbe position which Cardinal Newman abandoned when he gave up the idea that the primitive Church really held a different position, both doctrinal and spiritual, from that which the Roman Church in its development has since assumed. It is, indeed, evident that Mr. Gore's mind is not so completely preoccupied with the idea of "the Church" as the practical guide to Christ's true teaching, as was Dr. Newman's. Both of them refer to the saying of St. Paul that the Church is "the pillar and ground of the truth ;" but while Newman harped upon this idea more and more, and gave it a meaning which seems to be quite beyond its real significance in the context in which it stands, Mr. Gore keeps the eye always fixed upon Jesus Christ, and uses the Church only as the witness to Jesus Christ. To him it is like other human institutions, capable of misleading, if we do not continually verify its teaching by the direct words and acts of our Lord himself. It is clear to us that Mr. Gore does not lean nearly so heavily and absolutely on the authority of the Church as did Dr. Newman. He takes for granted that we can com- pare its teaching with that of the divine Master to whom it bears witness, and that it is not, therefore, so absolutely and finally the pillar and ground of the truth, but what we may, on sufficient evidence, correct its lessons by those of the divine Word to which it should lead us, which is the Truth itself, and of far deeper foundation than the pedestal on which the Truth is in appearance so lifted up as to make it more visible to ordinary human eyes. The great assumption of the Roman Catholics is, that it is easier to find the Church for yourself, and let the Church guide you to the Truth, than it is to find the Truth for yourself, and let the Truth guide you to the Church. Mr. Gore, we take it, would not deny this. But he would lay on the Christian the sacred duty of comparing the teach- ing of the Church with the teaching of him to whom the Church witnesses, and of not allowing the former to override the- * The Incarnation of the Son of God. Being the Bampton Lectures for the Year 1891. By Charles Gore, M.A., Principal of Posey House, Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. London: John Murray. latter where there is clear divergence. We have said, perhaps, enough in our former notice of the error which one great Church has made in ignoring practically (though not theoreti- cally) the true humanity of our Lord, a subject with which Mr. Gore deals still further, and with admirable force and clearness, in his sixth lecture. But we will not dwell on that -point further. We wish to go on to the very impressive seventh lecture, in which Mr. Gore dilates on the different kinds of authority to which different religions give their sanction. He lays it down with perfect justice that the very idea of Revelation implies authority, because it implies the existence of a being far above men, of whom man could never discover the true nature if it were not his will to condescend to us and teach us what that nature really is. But when we
have said that the Christian Revelation necessarily implies authority, we have not yet said what kind of authority it implies ; and in different religions the types of the authority assumed are very different :—
"Broadly we may distinguish two, the despotic and the fatherly. The aim of despotic authority is to produce unquestioning -obedience, at least in that department of life to which it applies —and it is worth noticing that it can be content with part of a life more easily than parental authority. The aim, I say, of despotic authority is to produce in the intellect simple acceptance, and in the conduct unquestioning obedience. It works therefore through explicit commands and dogmas, which cannot in fact be too ex- plicit, or leave too little to the imagination and thought of the subject. If the end is simply to produce obedient servants, the directions cannot be too clear or too exact. But parental authority -works by other means. Its end is to produce conformity of character, sympathy of mind, intelligent co-operation in action. It is never satisfied with blind obedience. For this very reason, it delights in the stimulus of hall-disclosures, in directions which arrest attention and suggest inquiry, but leave much to be done in the mind of their recipients. For education in sonship, it is easily possible for information to be too full, and directions too explicit, because such fullness and explicitness may tend to suppress rather than to stimulate, and secure blind obedience rather than co-operation." (pp. 177-78.) In our opinion it is impossible to speak too strongly of the admirable contrast drawn between the despotic authority and the paternal authority which different religions enforce, and
which different varieties of the same religion enforce in very different proportions. The following illustration of the paternal authority to which Christ always appealed, and which, as Mr. Gore thinks, our Church herself succeeds in exercising mach more conspicuously than the Roman Catholic Church, seems to us as happy in literary form as it is true in sub- stance :—
" Our Lord, then, trained His disciples to do a great deal for themselves in the way of spiritual effort in apprehending truth. Thus, when He finally elicited from St_Peter the confession of His own name= Thou art the Christ, the son of the living God,'—He -elicited, as the utterance of the disciple's own slowly formed con- viction, what He might have dictated from outside. We have -further evidence of our Lord's refusal to do too much for His dis- ciples in His use of paradoxes. The Mosaic law says exactly what it means, you have only to take it and obey it : but the Sermon on the Mount sets a man thinking ; it perplexes, it almost baffles ; it is only by patient effort to appreciate its spirit, that it can be reduced to practice. The same is true of the parables which our Lord used to teach the people. They stimulate thought, they suggest principles, they arrest the attention, but they do not give men spiritual information in the easiest and most direct form. Our Lord then taught, and especially taught His disciples, so as to train their characters and stimulate their intelligences ; He worked to make them intelligent sons and friends, not obedient slaves. He would have them set ends above means, and principles above ordinances ; as when He said that 'the sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.' And His own ordinances, such as baptism and the eucharist, are Christian sacraments and not Jewish laws—the sacraments of sons and not the ordinances -of servants—because they carry with them their own justification, because they convey a declared and intelligible grace. They are -obligatory, but as food is obligatory ; for to know their secret is to desire their use, as a son desires food and fellowship in his father's household." (pp. 180-81.) In conformity with his view of the paternal and, so to say, -eliciting character of our Lord's use of spiritual authority, Mr. Gore insists that he was not always giving direct lessons, but, on the other hand, teaching his hearers to draw conclu- sions for themselves from what the Scriptures had declared ; and therefore Mr. Gore puts aside as entirely inconsistent with our Lord's methods, the bard-and-fast practice of drawing very large inferences from his casual references to the Pentateuch as the books of Moses, or to the Psalms as David's composition, as if such references implied a
deliberate endorsement of the view that all the Penta- teuch was written by Moses, and that every Psalm which Christ cited as what it was then commonly supposed to be,— namely, David's,—had really come from David's pen. Christ was not only a deliberate teacher, he says ; he was also of the same mind as Socrates, that you cannot teach better than by compelling your pupils to question and understand them- selves :—
"At times He does something besides teaching, He asks men questions such as will lead them to examine themselves closely in the light of their own principles. It is not difficult to select examples : 'If I by Beelzebub cast out devils,' he challenges the Jews, `by whom do your sons cast them out ? ' Here it is not necessary to say that any positive truth is being taught as to Jewish exorcisms, but an appeal is made to our Lord's adversaries to be fair and just in view of their ordinary assumptions. Again, 'Why callest thou me good ? there is none good but one, that is God.' Our Lord is not here really disclaiming, as He appears to disclaim, identity in moral goodness with God, but He is leading a young man to cross-question himself as to the meaning of his words, to ask himself what reason he had to address our Lord with a title of deference. It is probable that our Lord was using a similar method in His appeal to the Jews about Psalm cx. On the face of it, the argument suggests that the Messiah could not be David's son,—` if David calleth him Lord, how is he his son ? —but in fact its purpose is not to prove or disprove anything, to affirm or to deny anything, but simply to press upon the Pharisees an argument which their habitual assumptions ought to have suggested to them : to confront them with just that question, which they, with their principles, ought to have been asking them-
selves. (p. 198.) Now it seems to me that we have got here to a very important principle : that, if Jam interpreting rightly our Lord's argument with the Pharisees, it shows us the Son of man fulfilling an important function towards human life, which we have been inclined to overlook. The critical and argumentative methods of men change considerably from age to age, from nation to nation. Consequently they cannot form part of the substance of a catholic religion. Christian apologetics have never the per- manence or the universality of the creeds. But criticism and argument have their value in relation to divine truth, and their responsibilities. Our Lord then does not bring to bear on men's intellectual equipment in any generation the divine omniscience so as to crush it, any more than He did upon the Pharisees. But He does bring to bear upon it the moral claim that it should be used rightly, honestly, and impartially. He does teach us, by His question to the Pharisees, that he expects of us all that Socrates expected of his contemporaries, while He supplies us with a great deal more than Socrates could ever supply." (pp. 199-200.)
It seems to us that Mr. Gore has done a very great service in bringing out, as he has done, the great danger of not veri- fying the teaching of any Christian Church to which we may belong, by the facts of our Lord's life and teaching as the early Church has declared them. He reminds us most justly that "those who give the highest meaning to the inspiration of Holy Scripture as a doctrine, may be least at pains to pay attention to what it really says." Scripture honestly inter- preted disposes entirely of its own claim to infallibility. It claims inspiration in the sense in which every work under- taken at the instance of a divine prompting claims inspira- tion. But every work to which God prompts us, he does not guarantee against all error. St. Paul carefully distinguishes between what he believes that he says under divine guidance, and what he says only on his own judgment. Where is the evidence that any writer in Scripture claimed to write more completely from inspiration than St. Paul? And the only result of taking a higher view of the inspiration of Scripture than Scripture itself warrants, is that those who do so, are tempted to ignore all the statements which make Scripture most attrac- tive and fascinating, and to substitute for the plain meaning a number of forced interpretations which no one, unless possessed by the desire to justify an unreal theory, could ever have thought of entertaining.
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