DR. RE1CHEL ON M. RENAN.*
TIM Irish branch of the United Church is at least as well entitled as the University in which the greater number of its ministers are edgeated to the name of the " silent sister." It stands aloof from the great controversies of the modern time, indifferent to them because ignorant of them. Absorbed in the conflict with Rome,—not the Rome of Father Newman or Dollinger, but the Rome of the parish priest,—it fights still after its own fashion the obsolete battles of the Reformation. This stationary character is due mainly to its social and political position. The Protestantism of a small minority in a Catholic country has a tendency to degenerate into mere anti-Romanism. The Irish Church Establishment, as it now is, can be justified only on the • Modern Infidelity, soak Special Regard to M. Renan's " Life of /cons." A Sermon preached in Trinity Church. Edinburgh, and in the Chapel Royal, Dublin, on the Fourth and Fifth Sundays after Tr.nity. By Charles Parsons itehilici, D.D., late Professor of Latin, Queen's College, Belfast, now Vicar of bfullIngar, Treasurer of the Cathedral of Down, and Chaplain to His Excellency the Lord-Lieutenant of Ire. laud. Edinburgh: Grant and Sons; Loudon: RivIngtons. 1884.
"no Popery" theories of Mr.Whalley and Exeter Hall. This fact binds over almost the whole of its clergy to maintain and defend the Whalley and Exeter Hall view of Romanism, and makes that their sole idea and occupation.
The social and political evils of this posture of affairs are of
the gravest character, but this is not the place in which to dwell upon them. We are concerned here to notice the fact that the political establishment of the Anglican Church has destroyed theology in Ireland. The ecclesiastical parties whose contentions are sometimes the scandal but whose co-existence is the life of
the English Church are there quite unknown. The varieties of individual thought which the names of half-a-dozen of our greatest divines would recall are wholly unrepresented on the other side of St. George's Channel. A dead level of low Calvinism prevails all but universally. The prospect for the future is not cheering. In France, under conditions somewhat different, Calvinism and Romanism long divided the religious world,— with a result of which M. Renan's book is only the latest manifestation. Is it conjuring up an imaginary danger to suppose that the next great religious change of which Ireland may be the scene will be to the profit of neither of the rival Churches ? Will she be able to clear herself of the counter- errors of Rome and Calvin which now solicit her, and to find her way to a purer and deeper Christian faith without first passing, as France is now doing, through the desert of scept icism or of utter unbelief? We should be glad if we could hope well for the future.
It may have been with some foresight of this danger, though we have no warrant for attributing to him concurrence in our estimate of the causes predisposing thereto, that Dr. Reichel has written, preached, and published the sermon which is named below. Since its appearance the author has, we believe, been appointed to the vicarage of Mullingar, and has in consequence resigned his academic position fur the direct service of the Church, in which alike his merits and her interests would claim for him a higher and more influential place. It is on men such as Dr. Reichel,—men who have shown themselves capable of dealing with the great speculative and theological difficulties of the age,—that the future of the Irish Church, and possibly of Protestantism and Christianity in Ireland, must depend. Left in the hands of anti-Romanist fanatics, Church Education Society divines, and popular preachers, its fate is sealed. The religious controversy which agitates Europe has, as we have indicated, special dangers for Ireland, where neither clergymen nor laymen are prepared for it. A weighty responsibility rests upon those whose influence in Church and State places the religious future of the country in their hands so far as it is under human control.
If the existing form of scepticism or unbelief be wisely met the result will, we believe, be entirely good. Dr. Reichel in the opening sentences of his sermon penetrates to the real essence of the matter. Taking his text from the words of our Lord in
St. Matthew's Gaspel (Nlatthew xi., 28), ". Come unto me all ye
that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest," he points out that these words
"immediately follow one of those strangely deep sayings which difference our Lord's discourses from those of any other human being. 'At that time Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, 0 Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou haat hid these things from the wise and prudent, and haat revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father ; for so it seemed good in,thy sight. All things are delivered unto me by my Father : and no man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father save the So; and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.' One of the moat independent and vigorous thinkers of the last generation, Dr. Arnold, has called special attention to the extraordinary nature of the declaration made in the last verse I have quoted. How strange it is, he observes, that no one is said to know the Son except the Father; while of the Father, the eternal God, the Fountain of all being, it is declared that not only the Son knows Him, but he to whomsoever the Son chooses to reveal Him. The infer- ence from this verse is, to my own mind, perfectly irresistible. If Jesus was neither a fanatic nor an impostor, the verse is absohAely in- explicable, unless He were far more than a man, nay, unless He were far more than any created existence. The superior inscrutability ascribed to the Son over the Father probably belongs to that double nature in which the New Testament invariably presents to our view Him who is at once the Son of God and the Son of man; for pure deity is less inconceivable than deity united with humanity. The Father is capable •of being known by those to whom the Son deigns to reveal Him ; but the Son, in whom Godhead and manhood coalesce into one person is, in His double nature, beyond the grasp of all created intel- lect: the Father alone can understand Him. Taken in this obvious and necessary light, the verse may ho considered as a prophetic antici- pation of all the difficulties which have been started in the Church against the deity of Christ. It is not my present purpose to enlarge on this fruitful topic ; I merely call your attention to it in passing, because this verse is the ground and basis of that which immediately follows it, and which forms my text. This Son, whom no one knoweth save the Father—this Being, the mystery of whose existence, though revealed, is nevertheless incomprehensible to every finite intelligence—is He who in my text invites all that are weary and heavy laden to come to Him, and promises that He will give them rest. And indeed there is a breadth in this invitation, an assurance in this promise, which require the mystery of the foregoing saying to authorize and lend them force. He who could without arrogance say to all the weary and heavy laden of this world, 'Come unto me, and I will give you rest,' He, and He only, could likewise say that none but the eternal God could know Him. The promise is too great to be given by any created being. No mere human teacher, no mere angelic messenger, no matter how high his order, could Call the weary and heavy laden to himself, as to the source and fountain of refreshment and repose. The heart of man knoweth its own bitterness '• ' and no stranger, were that stranger even the loftiest archangel who bows before the eternal throne, can intermeddle with it. No one can give rest to the troubled spirit save He who made the spirit. All inferior mediation, all inferior comfort, is rejected by the anguished heart. Limited as we are, we have yet in us a something of divinity which, in our hours of weariness and heaviness, in momenta of spiritual agony, transcends creation, and will not be comforted save by the Creator. If Jesus had not felt Himself to be God, He was a blas- phemer when He said, 'Come unto me, all ye that are weary and heavy lade; and I will give you rest."
We believe the alternative which Dr. Reichel here lays down to be logically exhaustive. Theories of Christ's life and character such as those of M. Renan and Mr. F. W. Newman are the reductio ad absurdum not only of the humanitarian hypothesis, but of any and every other which assigns to Jesus the position of a mere creature. The language in which Christ speaks of Him- self and the language in which the two Apostles,—St. Paul and St. John,—through whom chiefly as secondary sources and channels the world has received its Christianity, speak of Him, are inconsistent with any theology which makes Him a created being. Mr. Newman indeed, with the candour which always marks him, expressly acknowledges that the features which on the " model-man " hypothesis of the Unitarian seem to him imperfections in Christ, are not so on the assumption of His Deity. In other words he admits from the Deistic side the alternative which Dr. lteichel states from the Christian side. What is to Christian feeling and conviction most painful in the opinions and expressions of these writers is the logical and in- evitable result of their theory. In spite of the pain we respect them, and are grateful to them for having followed it out to all its issues. In the hands of M. Ream Jesus becomes, as Dr. Reichel justly observes, "a naisture the most portentos a of super- human wisdom and crazed fanaticism, of the loftiest and purest. aims and the meanest and most revolting deceit in carrying out those aims,—now a sage at whose feet all mankind may well be content to sit (though, by the bye, all that He teaches is impracti- cable),—now, I almost shrink from saying it, a thaumatttrge, or in plain English a charlatan or quack, trading on the credulity of his contemporaries,—a monster of a character such as the world, I will venture to say, has never seen." Yet these con- sequences should not be charged upon the writers who draw them. They spring from the theory which assigns to Christ a lower rank than that which the Catholic creeds, expressing the all but universal consciousness of Christendom, attribute to Him. They are the outcome of principles common to M. Renan, with many truly pious and devout Christians to whom it is impossible to impute moral obliquity. M. Renan is not open to censure for being logically more consistent than Priestley, and Channing, and Martineau, and for courageously facing and openly stating the consequences of the principles held alike by him and them. Fairly treated, a powerful apologetic, not only for Christianity as against unbelief but for orthodox Christianity as against the humanitarian and Arian heresies, might, we believe, be con- structed out of the "Vie de Jane," and the ‘' Phases of Faith." The principle laid down in Dr. Reichel's sermon enables us not only to think charitably of unbelievers, and to honour their truth- fulness and consistency, but to believe that they are really, though indirectly, serving the cause which they attack.
Besides a criticism of M. Renan's book the discourse contains an admirable sketch of the successive forms of modern doubt, and some critical and philosophical notes of great value. It is perhaps the ablest of the special publications which the Renan controversy has called forth. A style remarkable for nervous force and precision and for purity of English diction does justice to the vigorous thought which it embodies. At the same time the sermon is not free from blemishes. Harsh judg- ment of persons upon what seems to us mistaken grounds of fact, or on principles inconsistent with the writer's own assumptions, and a certain tone of scorn and sarcasm traceable throughout, mar its persuasive farce. But in spite of these de- fects, the great substantial merits of the sermon remain.
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