MR. GLADSTONE ON REVELATION.
IN the first number of a little monthly publication called " The Coming Day," edited by Mr. John Page Hoppa, the minister, we believe, of a Unitarian or Free Christian Church in Leicester, and in 1886 a rather forlorn candidate for South Paddington in opposition to Lord Randolph Churchill, there is an interesting correspondence between Mr. Hopps,— who, we may say, writes very well, though we do not often agree- with his drift,—and Mr. GladstOne on the true meaning to be attached to the word "Revelation." Mr. Hoppa maintains that " the revolt of the nineteenth century against Revelation is not revolt against Religion, but is the revolt of the rational, historical, and scientific mind against the theory:, that the Almighty once supernaturally interfered with the ordinary oonrse of human life, in order to produce a Book,. every part of which should represent, and in fact be, His one final message to mankind." That seems to us an exceedingly doubtful proposition, inasmuch as, in the first place, the great majority of educated Christians at all events, hold no such theory, but regard it with as little respect as Mr. John Page Hopps himself ; and in the second place, those who have made themselves better known than any-, other persons as rejecting Revelation,—for example, the Positivists as a body, writers like Mr. Bradlaugh, or, again,. in a quite different plane, writers of the stamp of Mr. John Morley, Professor Huxley, or Mr. Justice Stephen,—certainly do go a great deal farther than Mr. John Page Hoppe re- presents, and deny the reality of Revelation in every sense in which it has a meaning for Christians. Mr. Hoppa writes to. Mr. Gladstone, after reading his book on "The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," to point out that a sentence in his chapter on the Psalms suggests a meaning for " Revelation" which would not be open to the objection involved in any supernatural view of the Bible, and to' beg him to develop and press the line of thought which that sentence suggests. The phrase in question is : " the specialty of divine suggestion and guidance which we call Revelation." Mr. Hoppa welcomes this phrase as to, him satisfactory, on the ground that "Divine suggestion and guidance never cease," and that they extend to all parts of human life, to the humble functions of the artist and the artisan, no less than to the functions of the prophet and the statesman. He quotes the passage in Exodus (=xi., 2) : " See, I have called by name Bezaleel the son of Uri, the senor Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, anct in all manner of workmanship, to devise cunning works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass, and in cutting of stones to set them, and in carving of timber, to work in all manner of' workmanship." Mr. Hoppa argues therefrom that " the work- shops and laboratories of the world are as truly the objeots of ' divine suggestion and guidance' as its altars ; that thestates- man may be as truly inspired as the Psalmist ; and that men in the House of Commons as well as in Westminster Abbey, may be God's serving priests. The difference is only in aim or in degree." To this letter Mr. Gladstone answers that he agrees in a good deal of its drift ; but that, before assenting to the assertion that " the specialty of divine suggestion and guidance" implied in Revelation conveys a distinction "not in kind but in degree " from the providential suggestion and guidance to which every man may lay claim, he should wish to consider the matter more thoroughly. And then he goes cai " Among the clearest of all clear things to me is the prevalence of that disturbance in Creation which we call sin; and what appears to follow, as far as argument a priori, is admissible,. is the propriety, the need, the enormous value, of an adequate- remedial provision. Such a provision we seek in Revelations and most of all in the grand revelation of the Person of our Lord." Mr. Hopps rejoins that he and his co- religionists see in sin, "not so mach a disturbance in Creation as a mysterious incident in it. We see in man not a fallen: but a risen and a rising creature, whose sin is incidental to his: fearful but necessary growing out of animal darkness into- God's marvellous light." And he concludes his reply to Mr. Gladstone thus : " If you will permit me, I would urge upon you that the difference between us is one which in Science has already been worked out. You seem inclined to regard as exceptional and miraculous what I would treat as universal and normal. In the sphere of Science that is settled. There we have advanced from the theory of catastrophe and miracle to the perception of the steady flow of natural law ;. and in the sphere of Religion a similar advance seems inevitable. There lies the great reconciling thought. What a splendid serviee you would render to mankind, if you would help us along, that glorious road." And there for the present the corre- spondence ends. But what is "the glorious road" to which. Mr. Hopps refers P It is the road which gets rid of " oatta-
strophe and miracle " to "substitute "ithe steady flow of natural law." But, in the first place, how are we to get (rid of catastrophe while we recognise facts at all ? Are there no genuine catastrophes in human life ?—no volcanic submer- sions of Pompeii and Herculaneum, no Gothic invasions of Rome, no Lisbon earthquakes, no French Revolutions, no Sedans or sudden uprisings of a German Empire P Catastrophe, in matters physical and political, is as certain and impressive a fact as the gradual accumulation of the forces which bring about catastrophe. And as for miracle, the reality of it, or the .unreality of it, depends on what it is taken to denote. If every- thing that happens, be due to the inevitable action of uniform and irresistible law, there is certainly no such thing as miracle ; but then there is also no such thing as will, there is no such thing as sin, there is no such thing as good or ill, and Pope's assumption that " whatever is, is right," is only untrue because it is unmeaning, right being in that case only another -word for existence,—regarded in a sanguine spirit,—and wrong being, then, simply a nonentity, except it be taken as describing merely the temporary recoil which takes place after a forward movement, and which takes place as inevitably as that forward movement itself, though it has less significance as an index to the future, as an omen of that of which Mr. Page Hopps enthusiastically hails the advent as "the Coming Day."
Mr. Gladstone did well to put his finger on the one point which distinguishes in the most absolute way the drift of Revelation from the drift of mere natural tendency. Mr. Page Hoppa evidently confounds them. He holds that there is " no supernatural,"—that " all is natural." Sin is not a " dis- turbance in Creation;" it is only a " mysterious incident" in .Creation, in other words, we suppose, God wills sin just as he wills righteousness, or at least as he wills imperfection, or every- thing which is merely inchoate and inadequate. Now, that we take to be the very opposite of what is revealed of the character of God in the Bible. He does not will sin. He does not regard sin as mere inchoate righteousness. He regards all true sin as the -one absolute evil for which he has nothing but displeasure and retribution ; and if that is not true, there is nothing in the general drift of inspiration or revelation which is true. Revelation is, from beginning to end, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, the story of God's war against sin, and of the -gradual manifestation of the character of God as a sinless being, of Christ as the perfect human representation of a sinless being, of grace as the one power which can prevent sin and produce penitence, of redemption as the one power which neutralises the steady drift in human nature towards sin, and which alone reverses the strong current flowing to produce the degeneration of man's nature. All this Mr. Hoppa ignores. To him, man is not a fallen or falling, but a risen and rising being, and that apparently just as much, if he illustrates what he calls this " mysterious incident" in Creation, as if he loses himself in the passion of that long and tragic war with -sin which is the main theme of Revelation. Mr. Hopps is so taken up with the lessons of science, that he does not see that science has nothing to do with the will of man, but only with 'his intelligence, that science can teach us nothing but the -order of observed events, and has no more power to explain the influence of a higher nature on a lower, than conscience has to interpret the laws of motion or the phenomena of chemical affinity. Mr. Hopps's apparent objection to the word " supernatural " seems to us due to a total misunderstanding. Wherever you have the interference of a higher kind of nature with a lower kind of nature, you have a trace of -the supernatural. There is something supernatural in the domestication of animals. There is something that is super- -natural in the phenomena of what is now called hypnotism. 'There is much more that is supernatural in the magnetism of great minds. But we rightly reserve the word "supernatural" specially for the direct influence of what is divine over what is human, and if this is all to be included in the region of Nature, —because it expresses God's nature,—then there is no word left to characterise most important and unique phenomena, the phenomena of which the Bible may be said to be -the chief record, and which include the story of the reversal of very natural and very vivid and very importunate human desires under the thrill which the Spirit of God sends through our nature when he touches it. Mr. Hopps says that science has disposed of the idea of miracle. It certainly has not dis- posed of the fact that higher natures can alter the whole bent of lower natures ; that the power of spirit totally transfigures
the body ; that there is a transubstantiating power in mind which pours grace and spiritual influence into mere material things; and that what is called miracle is nothing but the use of this transubstantiating power to heal the weaknesses and sufferings of human life. If God wields no such transubstan- tiating power over human life, the whole teaching of the Bible is a falsehood. If he does wield such a power, then there is nothing unnatural in supernaturalism, which only affirms that the highest creative energy can transfigure all the lower fields of creative energy till they glow with a new and marvellous radiance of which we never before suspected them to be sus- ceptible. Mr. Hoppe appears to us to teach a kind of pantheism, finding nothing in all experience with which God is really at war. We hold that revelation which takes the veil from God's nature shows us God as being at war with sin, and shows us his inspiration as exerted even in the field of physical nature for the purification of man from sin ; or, where man's own resistance renders that impossible, for exacting the retri- bution which sin deserves. The Bible is, of coarse, a human literature, though the one human literature which is chiefly con- cerned with the contact of divine with human life. As human literature, it shows plenty of imperfections, refractions, flaws, disproportions, and inconsistencies. But the one great drift of it is to reveal the character of God as gradually dawning upon the minds of a single people, and as at length fully manifested in one sinless and perfect being. And if sin be a mere " mysterious incident " in Creation, the Bible contains, instead of a revelation, a new obscuring of the purpose of the Creator.
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