MR. MAURICE ON UNSECTARIAN TEACHING.* It is one sign of

Mr. Maurice's capacity as a religious teacher, that while no Englishman ever speaks less in the tone of the prevalent popular opinion, no Englishman is more certain to speak on the topic which is really uppermost on the national mind and conscience, or to furnish clearer evidence in what he says of having earnestly studied it and read much that is said of it on all sides. In the two little publications noted beneath, Mr. Maurice shows how deeply and fully he has entered into the bearing of the recent controversies on secular and unsectarian Christian teaching, raised by the Education debates of last Session, and what his own judgments on them are. Mr. Maurice's general conclusions are that all education, whether religious or secular, may be given in a thoroughly Christian spirit or in a thoroughly unchristian spirit, and that there is quite as good a chance of the religious education being given in a thoroughly unchristian spirit

L * ehrigiart Edueaffon. Two Sermons preached on behalf of the Old Schools of Cambridge on the morning and evening of Sunday, November 20, 1870. By F. D. Maurice, M.A., Professor of Moral Philosophy. MacMillan.

2. The Llet Ts Prayer, the Creed, and the Conunandosents, to which is added the Order of the Scriptures. By F. D. Maurice, MA., Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Cambridge. Macmillan and Co.

as of the secular. He thinks that while we are all wrangling about what kind of education it is right to give, the chance is being lost of giving it, and that, therefore, every one should enter as heartily as possible into the assistance of any existing or feasible schools, whether secular or religious, in the hope of making them as efficient as possible. At the same time, he does not conceal the very great value he attaches to directly Christian teaching, if it. be really Christian ; and in order to explain what he means by it, he has published the very simple little manual named beneath. It consists of lessons at once adapted for children and deep enough for men on the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Com- mandments, and the Order of the Scriptures.

In a preface to this manual, Mr. Maurice admits the force of the. objections raised by Mr. Sidgwick, of Trinity College, Cam- bridge, in his recent pamphlet, noticed by us at the time of its appearance,t on "The Ethics of Conformity," against that omnivorous conformity in laymen which takes no account of real doubts as to portions of the creed, but repeats that which.

is questionable to the mind of the person repeating it, no

leas than that which is heartily accepted. Mr. Maurice thinks careful discrimination in the recital between those clauses in which the believer can heartily join and those in which he cannot, a positive duty ; but he suggests that there must be many to whom no such discrimination is possible, because the different confessions of the Apostles' Creed hang so much together,.

that belief, for instance, in the divine life, character, and.

death of Jesus Christ is absolutely bound up with belief in 'God the Father Almighty,' if not in some sense the source and origin of their knowledge of the deeper reality. And he objects. to cutting down and thinning away the creed to one of apparently

larger comprehensiveness, i.e., less contents, on the ground that if you once begin attenuating the creed to cover as many types. of belief as possible, you will probably get to a very shadowy

sort of Theistn, without having really satisfied any large number of minds,—a suggestion strikingly verified if it be true that a.

large section of a Theistic society not long ago protested vehemently against the reactionary and conservative character of a. proposed creed, which only propose' to recite belief in the Father- hood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, on the ground that this indicated a type of Theism that seemed to exclude Pantheism..

The truth undoubtedly is that we must be content to take our basis of religious unity in facts, or what we believe to be facts,. sure and solid enough to allow a considerable number of different interpretations, and to accept as inevitable that those who do not acknowledge these as facts under any interpretation cannot recognize themselves as belonging to our religious unit. We do. not, therefore, fully understand what Mr. Maurice means when he appears to deny this, and seems to argue that even men who do not accept, as facts, the acknowledgments of the creed, should not.

object to them on the mere ground of private opinion :—

"If ho holds with Mr. Sidgwick that worship should be the bond of. fellowship between men of different opinions, how can he snake it con- tingent on his opinions or his reasonings? If he thinks with Mr. Sidgwick that opinions are liable to great vicissitudes, and that those of twenty-three may not be those of sixty, how can he expect that any opinions—let them express the most attenuated Theism conceivable— will ever be sufficiently permanent in a number of minds to be a basis of agreement between them ? But if we believe in a father who is educating his children to ever fresh knowledge, and at the same time is delivering them from the contentiousness, the self-confidence, the sus- picions which are setting them at variance—the confession of such a father, and of the steps by which we think and our forefathers thought that he has made himself known to his children, is exactly what might lift us above the uncertainties of opinion, above the laziness and vanity which tempt us to seek resting-places in our own conclusions. There is the justification of making a creed, like ours, an integral part of public worship, as well as one of the elements of the education of children."

Now, surely, though it is quite true that, whether in relation to science or faith, if your facts are once laid down and granted, belief in them may be made the centre of unity for those who hold a very great variety of opinion about the proper explanation of those facts, yet, when the difference as to any of these central

beliefs extends to disagreement as to what is or is not a fact at all, Mr. Maurice's distinction between a belief and an opinion so far disappears. To the Atheist, a belief in God is not an acknow- ledgment of fact, but a human opinion. To the Deist, a belief in the

only begotten Son of God is not an acknowledgment of fact, but a human opinion. To the Unitarian, the clause, "Conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary," is one engrafting two mistaken opinions on otherwise undeniable facts. So that though it may be perfectly true that he who accepts all the acknowledgments of the Apostles' Creed as facts, is fully entitled to assert that the Atheist, Deist, and Unitarian have as much.

1' See Spectator, 1870.

interest in the significance of these facts as himself, it cannot possibly be that any of these latter can feel united to one who

regards the whole creed as a mere statement of fact, where they hold all such statements to be illusory. A blind man who did not

believe in the sun would be included by those who saw and felt

its light and heat amongst those for whose benefit it shines ; but y him, so long as he regarded the sun as a hypothetical illusion

of his fellow-men, this belief, however much a belief in fact, being ignored, would be a ground of opinionative difference. Mr. Maurice seems to us too much to ignore that those who differ from him are not simply persons who make a different series of inferences from the same facts, but persons who do not at all acknowledge what he acknowledges. Thus he says in his little lesson on the Creed :—

" THIRD Dar.—I Believe.

"What is this I BELIEVE? I look into your faces. I see them. But I do not see what is passing in you. 1 do not see what you mean. lf do not see what you are. When I say that boy is honest and true,' I speak what I believe, not what I see. When you speak words to

sue, I say believe those words, or I believe you who speak those words ; ' I believe you are telling me what is in you, that you are not speaking one thing with your lips when another is in your hearts. It is much more to you that I should believe you than that I should see you. My belief brings me much nearer to you than my sight. We do not know each other because we see each other. When we believe in each other we begin to know. Well, suppose there was one altogether good, altogether true. I should not sea his goodness or his truth more than I see yours. But I might believe in it thoroughly. I might believe in him with my whole heart."

"My belief," says Mr. Maurice, "brings me much nearer to you than my sight ;" no doubt, if the belief is true. But if the belief is false ? If the person in whom I believe is not what I believe

to be, but quite otherwise, does not my belief in him lead me much further from him than my sight ? What the doubter who attempts to use this manual of Mr. Maurice's will feel profoundly is, that while Mr. Maurice leaves an immense verge for opinion as to the true construction of the facts, he is hardly able to admit, even hypothetically, and for the sake of understanding an oppon- ent who objects to religious education on the ground that it must assume so many assumptions of which he is doubtful, that there is any real possibility of doubting the basis of facts on which he

builds his teaching.

In a word, we should say of this little manual that it is a very deep and noble one, and full of true spiritual hints for all teachers who do, on the whole, take their stand on the same facts of Revelation as Mr. Maurice, and that it is for them in the highest degree unsectariau. But it does not, and we do not see how it could, attempt to bridge the gulf between those who think the main statements of the Creed solid facts, and those who think them fanciful hopes. Probably Mr. Maurice would say that no

.argument of his, however earnest, would ever turn these statements into facts for those who question them, while the defects of such an argument might throw injurious doubts upon the facts for those who now believe in them, and that therefore, he prefers to .assume the facts which constitute his points of departure, instead

of to try and substantiate them. His little manual is rather one to suggest the deeper lessons of the creed to those who have never doubted, than to indicate the reasons for believing it to those who have. And no doubt in this he is quite right, only that in arguing with Mr. Sidgwick, he appears to think that the facts of the Creed should in some sense not only be common ground (which they might be), but be accepted as common ground (which they cannot be) by those who do and those who do not agree in the truth of the facts.

To take another illustration, Mr. Maurice's suggestion as to the moral drift of the teaching as to the Garden of Eden given by Moses for the Israelites in the desert is very fine :—

" Famns DIY.—The Garden.

"It was a great thing for the Israelites to be told that the human race to which they belonged had been called into life by God and was made in his image. But each of them knew that he was akin to the animals ; each of them knew that his flesh would one day turn to dust. He wanted to know how that could be if man was so glorious. And besides, he was in a desert, hungry and thirsty, often wishing himself a slave again in Egypt, that he might have plenty of food. Would it not be a very good thing to live in a garden where everything grew of itself, and which needed no tillage? His second lesson was about these points. He was told that the Lord God had puts man and his wife into a garden, and had given them all good things to eat and drink and to enjoy. And God made them know that he was their Lord, and that there was a tree of which they should not eat. But they listened to the voice of an animal rather than to his voice. They disobeyed him ; that disobedience was a tall into death: for a man's death is to be divided from his Lord. And so it was found good for men not to live in a comfortable garden, but to till the ground, and take the thorns and thistles out of it. And the Israelites were taught besides that men do not get knowledge or life by snatching at it and thinking it is theirs ; that we get knowledge by looking up to him who has created us to know, and has made us in his likenesa ; and that our life comes by trusting him and hoping in him. Without him we know only what is evil ; without him we only taste death. These were lessons for the Israelites, and they are lessons for

us. And it was taught them, and taught us also, by the story of Adam and Eve, how ready we are to hide ourselves from God ; how he will not let us hide ourselves from him ; how he will find us out when we have done wrong, and will bring us to confess it ; how then he will restore us to trust and hope in him."

But could a schoolmaster teach this as fact who only thought it a moral vision, and who did not believe in the real existence of the Garden of Eden and of Adam's life in it? Would a schoolmaster who said, "The Bible teaches this, and the lesson implied in it is true, but whether the fact were as the Bible teaches, I am very

doubtful indeed," be likely to implant the lesson in his pupil's mind ?

On the whole, while we thank Mr. Maurice heartily for this striking and simple little manual, we fear it will hardly help a teacher in the very difficult task of discriminating the great facts of Revelation from the more or less doubtful histories connected with those facts, and yet stated as facts without any hesitation in

the same records in which the divine Character itself is revealed. Very few Christian teachers whose faith is as large and catholic in its tone as Mr. Maurice's, have had so few doubts as to the main facts recorded, especially in the Old Testament. And as scarcely any now belonging to this school of thinking are disposed to deny that erroneous history and fable is more or less mixed up with the Biblical literature, they want more and more some guidance as to the Biblical narrative which they should give to children as the foundation of their faith, and here alone Mr.

Maurice's manual seems to us defective.