MR. CHRETIEN'S TRACT ON CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES.* Mn CHB.ETIEN, though an
Oriel man and one of the first of Oxford logicians, by no means belongs to what we must consider as the most prominent school of thought which has lately emanated from that University. He knows as much of the "laws of thought" as Mr. Mansel himself, but is not misled by his knowledge into either of the opposite delusions to which great metaphysical acumen often leads— the delusion of the schoolmen that by torturing the pure intellect you can extort any knowledge of the divine origin of the intellect— or the more common delusion of the present day, that an examination of our own intellectual eyesight will so utterly discredit it for all religious purposes as to reduce us to the dilemma between blind faith and equally blind scepticism. Mr. Chretien's argument implies that God • can establish His own truth at once in the most and least cultivated man's conscience without either any elaborate structure of historical learning on the one hand, or any implicit deference to external au- thority on the other ; be holds that there is a path—and that the most natural, though not the least arduous, nor necessarily the shortest. path to ordinary minds educated or uneducated—by which the faith in God and Christ may be firmly grasped without any personal plunge into the sea of historical evidences, or the substitute for that plunge which the high submission-to-authority doctrine requires. The process is described, and, we are sure, truly described, by Mr. Chretien—de- scribed, too, in thoughtful and delicately discriminated language, which bears the impress both of a fine and serene mind—by which ordinary men, whether highly cultivated or not, who choose their part nobly, and hold to it faithfully, are led into a firm faith in God and His revelation. It is no short cut to faith which Mr. Chretien describes, but the strict and narrow way which is often toilsome, painful, and full of bitter experience. The first stirrings of religion, Mr. Chretien truly says, are usually in the moral nature--often spring- ing from a keen sense of injustice. "The world is out of joint, and the doubter cannot set it right;" he throws in his hand with the side which he feels to be just, and the strife begins : but if it is to grow to its completion, his mind must be as frank and honest as it is sensitive to injustice: he will not ignore the painful facts, the heavy risks, which the just cause runs in our world; he must feel and admit the full .power of evil, and turn to the struggle with a calm resolution to risk much in it : "But those who do take a side, and that manfully, are in little danger of find- ing themselves without a leader. As they play their part in this stern battle of moral forces, they are convinced that a personal Captain guides the host and i directs the onset. The energy of their imperfect wills suggests a Will higher, stronger, more perfect than their own. The moral order which they endeavour to establish in their own hearts and lives, and in the small circle about them, raises their thoughts to One in whose enduring and unbroken thought reposes the moral order of the whole universe. They thus learn to feel after, if not to recognize, the great Author of all goodness, whose holy name is God. The day of His final triumph, and of theirs, may, indeed, be very far distant; but the same voice of their heart which strengthens them, when evil prevails and oppres- sion seems most strong, to believe in the invincible might of truth and goodness, strengthens them also to believe in Him." This faith, however, is, Mr. Chretien adds, "though true and genuine," unsatisfactory. The faith in God necessitates the belief in his self-revelation. You cannot but hold that the inspirer of every human conscience, the leader in every right cause, the captain of evert noble human army, has sought to manifest himself by every conceivably avenue as being in fact very close to the actual lives of men. If there be a God dimly revealed, whom " seeking after" we have found, it is almost a certainty to the conscience that there will be traces of His energy in the outward history of man, as well as in his inward life. Being the source of all the highest human energy and self- sacrifice, even instinct bids us expect that this moral energy and self- sacrifice would be revealed as the law of His own life. You cannot continue to believe in a God behind the veil ; to believe in him as God, is to believe that he will break through the veil: * Tracts for Priests and People. No. WIT. Evidences for those who Think and Feel more than they can Read. By the Rev. C. P.. Chretien, MA. Macmilisn " When they hear or read of One who, though full by His own nature of the strength of God, stooped to the weakness of humanity; i
umanity; who, though pure and sinless, fought side by side with stained and sinful man in the battle against sin and Satan ; who to ensure us the victory, broke the opposing ranks by painfully stretching out His hands, and gathering into His own bosom the sharpest darts of the enemy ; who brought life to us by His death, and, though departed for a time, is still, in life and death, near us and with us by His Spirit; they recognize, with a clear knowledge, that Captain, of their salvation, for whom they longed in their ignorance; confess with i
thankfulness that the Creator has come very close to the creature, and worship God in Christ."
Such, briefly, is Mr. Chretien's description of the natural avenue to faith in ordinary men, which he contrasts forcibly and truly with the argumentative method of Paley and Evidence-writers in general, who, if they ever can engender faith at all by their method taken alone, can barely, as Mr. Chretien truly says, hope to do so before the end of a long career spent in the most laborious and candid historical inquiry. The defect in this tract is, that Mr. Chretien does not directly meet the objections which must be taken to his argument by every cultivated thinker. Such a one will say in answer to him that this chain of moral and intellectual experience which he traces out is fully adequate to establish the moral side of the Christian theology, but not the historical. Faith in a personal God most will admit, while a few will deny, to be a legitimate part of this moral yield of the experience of life. But faith in the Christian revelation, so far as it involves any supernatural event, any true historical impersonation of the Divine will, is an historical event depending for its evidence on the witnesses of that age, and must be judged by historical laws. How then, they will ask, can a man who does not even know what the historical and scientific difficulties are—and in every hundred Christians probably ninety-nine are in this position—be said to have a faith that can be reckoned as of any value in the Christian revelation ? That they may take hold of any truth which carries its own evidence with it, is obvious ; but that they can take hold of anything which is dependent on testimony, without sifting that testimony, or obtaining adequate proof that it has been sifted and established, is not so easy to admit. And this aspect of the question, which falls naturallyinto Mr. Chretien's way, is entirely ignored in his pamphlet. Readers of it will infer that not only the personality of God, but the revelation through Christ, in some more or less explicitly supernatural form, may be held, and held on ade- quate grounds, without any examination of the historic testimony on which that revelation is accepted. No doubt Mr. Chretien believes this to be true. But if so, he should at least have considered and removed the obvious difficulties which lie in the way of accepting it as true. The only passage in which Mr. Chretien gives us any ade- quate clue to his own explanation is the following :
"To which kind of evidence, then, the practical or the historical, is the quiet, unquestioning, undoubting life of faith more nearly allied in principle? The answer is clear. Such a life has no traceable affinity with the method of judicial suspense and systematic argument. The soul which lives this life, sits at the feet of Christ, and will not leave Him, even with the intent of serving Him, and in the hope of returning to wait upon Him. She does not try the spirits, whether they be of God, by the rule of external evidence, but knows them by a Divine in- stinct, as a child knows a friendly face, and as love answers to love. She recog- nizes a mighty work spreading through the centuries. She sees the vine of God trained upon the Cross, bearing its fruit even then and now, while its roots run under the very foundation of the world ; but in this recognition there is little historical scrutiny. She does not pry among the dry stones, anxious about the course of each trailing fibre, as it seeks the moisture beneath, but sits down under its shadow with great delight ; and its fruit is sweet to her taste."
From this we gather that Mr. Chisetien would distinguish between historical facts which once required special analysis as well as the inward confirmation which the liberated will and illuminated conscience afford, and those which have now in some sense demonstrated themselves by the healing power they have exerted over the nations. The "mighty work spreadmg through the centuries" carries, Mr. Chretien thinks, its own evidence of divine origin, and demands but the confirmation of individual needs and yearnings in order to take up the highest po- sition of moral authority in the soul. This is true, perhaps, but it is a very vague truth, and admits of almost any variety of explanation of the real significance of the Christian revelation, from the faintest Christian Theism up to the faith of the Romanist himself. It is doubtless true that an historical body of fact so considerable as that which constitutes the history of the Christian Church, acquires, as century after century passes by, a kind of vital and convincing power of its own, more remarkable in its way than any testimony. But then, first, the true influence of such a body of history over the mind is one which is far greater with cultivated than uncultivated men, who do not realise distinctly the nature of the change engrafted on human history by the Christian revelation. And, secondly, the influence of this kind of massive fact is, as we have said, exceedingly vague, and while with one man it would be held to establish the peculiar dogmas of Rome, it would by another be considered scarcely inconsistent with pure rationalism. The former would confess as divine all that has won men to enter the Catholic Church; the latter would detect tiny germs of pure truth embedded in vast husks of error, but would belittle concerned as to the proportion. We think, then, that while Mr. Chretien has pointed out the true path by which ordinary men attain a living faith in Christ, he has omitted to remove the great difficulties which beset it even in their own eyes. Many who reach such a faith are more than half dissatisfied with their own intellectual facility, as they think it, in reaching it by that path ; many more who might so reach it are deterred by their dread of slurring over impe- diments which they know they have neither learning nor opportunity to resolve, and which they hold to be of th% very essence of the problem. We wish, therefore, that Mr. Chretien had entered, at in outline, into the question, how far faith, in an historical
declaration of the divine nature and purposes, demands evidence the same or different in kind from that which is legitimately demanded to substantiate the troth of a political or biographical event. It would be trespassing beyond both our limits and our province to discuss this question in these columns. We may however, con- fessour belief that the laws of historical evidence will always be likely rather to puzzle and browbeat, than to aid and support, i the moral instincts of human nature, so long as the impression is
suffered to remain that they are a sort of mathematical calculus which should be manipulated and construed by exactly the same rules, whether the object of investigation is a court scandal, a life of noble human interest, or a divine revelation. The laws of evidence which belong to science are not only wholly inapplicable, but misleading, if applied to human affairs. In the latter case a certain moral standard of fitness or probability is immediately set up. And as the level rises, the scope of the laws of evidence, which ought to be satisfied, rises with it. Thus we believe it will be found that where any series of events claim on the face of them to be the expression or declaration of divine purposes, they only come under the lower laws of historical evidence so far as the mere existence of such a class of events is called in question ; for the rest, they are rightly judged by their conformity with their own purpose and profession—by the standard to which they themselves appeal. If the truth of the general outline of events be a matter of as much certainty as the in- dividual existence of the inquirer's mind, and it is only the true inter- pretation of them which is disputed,—and this, we need not say, is the actual state of the case with regard to almost all the strife and con- troversies which the different historical faiths of the world have elicited,—then we maintain that the natural canon of evidence is simply this : " Whatever explanation of these facts, natural or super- natural, gives the clearest and fullest apprehension of the central Justice, Righteousness, and Love, is the truest explanation we are capable of grasping." The false assumption which is ordinarily made, and which we wish Mr. Chretien had endeavoured clearly to expose, consists in this—that the empirical rules of evidence derived from the lowest departments of human probability are made to override the highest: in other words, miracle and inspiration are gravely judged by laws of chance ;—without its ever seeming to occur to these critics that a glimpse into the divine nature may be permitted us, and if permitted us, must teach us more of human things than the largest survey of human things can ever be tortured into telling us of the nature of God.
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