DR. LIDDON ON THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH.
DR. LIDDON, in the magnificent sermon which he preached at St. Mary's, Oxford, on Whit-Sunday, dwelt with even more than his usual force on the posthumous life of our Lord in his Church, and the contrast between that posthumous life and the posthumous life of which the Positivists make so much,—such posthumous life as even the greatest of ordinary great men live in the memories of others. We have read few finer passages even in the greatest of the sermons preached in that pulpit, even. in Newman's Oxford sermons themselves, than the passage in which Dr. Liddon remarks on the emptiness of the so-called posthumous influence of merely human heroes. He was preaching on the confidence with which our Lord, on the evening before his crucifixion, announced to his Apostles that he would send to them one who would supply his place in the Church he was about to found, after his short personal ministry of three years, one who would " glorify " him by taking of his, and showing it to them. " He shall glorify me, for he shall take of mine and shall show it unto you." These are certainly words of singular simplicity and certainty. There is no air of wistful or eager or passionate faith about them, such as human beings display when they contemplate exercising in the future an influence on which they have fixed their hopes. Our Lord speaks of what he foresees precisely as if he were speaking of what was before his eyes at the moment at which he was tittering these words ; and so no doubt it actually was. And Dr. Liddon goes on to contrast with such posthumous influence as this, the sort of posthumous influence on which alone even the greatest men can count :— " I great deal is said about the power and endurance of posthumous influence ; but after all, how little can a man generally r3ckon on it ! It is, in ordinary human experience, out of a man's keeping; it takes its own course, or the course which events prescribe for it. It falls into the hands of some clever adventurer and is manipulated for his own purposes, or it is of a kind to discover unsuspected ingredients, any one of which, in its exaggeration, may give it a fatally false turn ; or it is crowded out of its due place by more vigorous and self-asserting competitors for public favour ; or it shows early symptoms of being in a decline, and presently dies of exhaustion. A posthumous influence ! It is wedded to a philosophy, like that of Socrates, which may presently break up into two or more contending schools of thought ; or is embodied in a political inheritance, like that of Alexander, which may be distributed among three or four successors, where jealous rivalries are fatal to its permanent integrity ; or it is a literary or artistic tradition, which in the mere act of passing into other keeping is transformed or dissolved through contact with new and powerful minds. A posthumous influence ! It must, alas ! be made over to the care of others ; whether they be foes or friends ; whether children or disciples. The biography of a modern philosopher has taught us that friends may not always be its safest guardians ; Marcus Aurelius lived long enough to discover what weight would be attached to his Meditations when the Caesar Commodus would alone represent the Antonines on the throne of the world ; and history has again and again shown how disciples may pay compliments to a departed master, while they set aside his clearest and most emphatic instructions. And thus the preacher might seem in one mood of his thought to express the sombre reality := Then said I in my heart, As it happeneth to the fool so it happeneth even to me ; and why was I then more wise ? Then I said in my heart that this also is vanity. For there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool for ever : seeing that which now is, in the days to come shall all be
forgotten Yea ! I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun, because I should leave it unto the man that shall be after me. And who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool 1 This also is vanity.' That, therefore, which must strike us in the words of our Lord is His conscious superiority to the fate which may be commonly expected to befall the influence of a man's character or teaching after death. He had put His life and work into such sort of keeping that it would be unaffected by the varying moods of human minds and the incalculable con- tingencies of human circumstances."
That is perfectly true and singularly powerful, but there is another side to the agency of that spirit of truth to which our Lord committed the care of his life and work after his very brief stay on earth, a side of it to which, as we think, Dr. Liddon did not do equal justice in his Whit-Sunday sermon. In moulding a Church, and preparing a canon of sacred writings by which that Church was to be guided, and which it was to take as the foundation for its teaching, the spirit of truth had to deal with various other elements very different indeed from our Lord's life and work. It had to deal with very imperfect human materials, with highly resisting media to the divine influence, with the agency of creatures who, even when they were, on the whole, good, were very apt to think that they could improve upon God's law, persons of fallible judgment and of limited in- telligence who, but for the providence which overruled their actions, could have reflected but very dimly the divine purpose, and who yet were often the truest representatives of that purpose to be found on this human scene. One of the greatest of the paradoxes of revelation, as it seems to us, is the earthliness of many of the agencies which it employs,— the violent passions of many of its heroes, the weakness and wavering of some of its saints, the obscurity and difficulty of a great number of its visions and prophecies, the moral paradoxes involved in not a few of what we should certainly term its most vivid, and in some respects
its most spiritual lyrics. Dees the "spirit of truth"
teach us to ignore these perplexities, to ignore, for instance, the paradox of Deborah's panegyric on Jael for a most treacherous, as well as,—what in the East implies a kind of treachery of peculiarly repulsive aspect—a most inhospitable murder ? Does the " spirit of truth " teach us to make light, of the difficulty involved in Micaiah's vision of God asking for a spirit that should persuade Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth Gilead by falsely predicting to him his triumph ? It seems to us that the deliberate inclusion of elements of this kind in the story of revelation cannot be ignored by any one who is under the guidance of the " spirit of truth ;" and that, whatever we ought to say about them, we ought at• least not to say anything that is inconsistent with what is not mere belief but absolute knowledge,—namely, that God never gave his divine sanction to treachery or deception, whether it were preached by a prophet or undertaken by a spiritual agency with the avowed intention of forwarding the divine purposes ; and that, so fax as divine " inspiration " condescends to record and perpetuate the memory of such panegyrics on evil. and such readiness to tempt bad men to their destruction, it: is. not as giving any sanction to them, but rather by way of impressing upon us that there are flaws in all the best of God's human agents, faults in the very structure of human inspiration itself, and that these flaws are to be candidly recognised, these faults to be frankly admitted, by the light of that more fully developed divine purpose to which revelation, ultimately leads us.
We make this remark because in a later part of Dr.' Liddon's sermon, he seems to us to limit and narrow the character of the inspiration of Scripture in a way which may be very dangerous to the candour of Christian teachers. Towards the close of his sermon on the Holy Spirit, Dr. Liddon says :-
" As we follow the Holy Spirit in this department of His work, we may venture without presumption to observe that His action is limited by His own attributes. He is the Spirit of Truth not only because it is the truth which He teaches, but also because He Himself is true. Therefore He cannot contradict Himself. If, for instance, through the Sixth Council He really pronounced Honoring to be a heretic, He cannot in our day by implication have pronounced hIonorius to be infallible. Nor can He take into His service literary fictions which trifle with the law and the sense of truth. If it could really bo shown that the addresses ascribed to Moses in Deuteronomy were the composi- tion of a writer of the age of Josiah, who desired to secure for later legal decisions or institutions the countenance of the great lawgiver ; or that speeches attributed to David in the Book of Chronicles were never uttered by the real David at all, but only represent the opinion of a sacerdotal scribe after the Exile as to what David, if properly instructed, would or should have said; or that passages in Daniel which claim to be predictions of still future events are really a history of events which the writer had himself witnessed, and are thrown into a predictive form, in order to invigorate national enthusiasm at a critical moment by the spectacle of the imaginary fulfilment of a fictitious prophecy ; or that the discourses of our Lord reported by St. John are not the ipsissima verba of the same Son of Man Who speaks in the Synoptic Gospels, but only the voice of some Christian of the second century, or earlier, when thought had been steeped in the Platonised Judaism of Alexandria; or, perhaps, of the Apostle of Love, who, however, could not distinguish clearly between his own and his Divine Master's words ; or that the sermons of St. Peter and St. Paul in the Acts resemble each other too closely to have been actually uttered by those Apostles, and really represent a literary effort to produce ecclesiastical harmony in the sub- Apostolic age ; or that the pastoral Epistles of St. Paul, although expressly claiming to be his work, were really composed when the struggle with Gnosticism had obliged the Church to create a more elaborate organisation, and are largely due to an endeavour to procure for this organisation the sanction of the great Apostle's name,—if, I say, these and other suchlike theories which might be mentioned could be shown to be based on fact, it surely would be shown at the same time that the Holy Spirit could not have had anything to do with the writings in question. He is not responsible for speeches which cultivated pagans like Thucydides or Tacitus could naturally and without scruple put into the mouths of their heroes. Those great writers had no more the divine law of truth upon their hearts and consciences than they had the divine laws of love or purity; and nothing depends upon the historical worth of those fictitious speeches of theirs beyond the degree and quality of literary entertainment which we at this day may or may not derive from them. It is quite otherwise when we pass within the sacred precincts of the canon of Scrip- ture. If the Holy Spirit is in any way concerned in the produc- tion of its contents, we may at least be sure that language is not used in it to create a false impression, and that that which claims, on the face of it, to be history is not really fiction in an historical guise. The Book of Truth cannot belie either the laws of truth or the Spirit and Source of truth."
Now, the force of these remarks depends entirely on the pus- pose which Scripture was intended by the divine mind to answer in the religious education of man. If, as we believe, it was in- tended to record adequately the effect of the divine teaching upon the chosen race,—the mixed effect, for undoubtedly where such materials as human life presents are subjected to the divine teaching, the effect is not always good even in the main, and still seldomer pure good,—then we see no reason at all why we should not find books wherein we see not only the high-water mark of divine teaching, but the low-water mark, and the average water mark also ; wherein we see the am- biguous impressions made even on those minds on which the divine teaching has taken a strong hold, without absolutely purifying them, such impressions as Dr. Liddon himself would probably admit to be discernible in the passage from the Book of Ecclesiastes, for instance, which he himself quotes. If it is part of the purpose of God to give us the confessions of a cynical nature which on the whole submitted itself (somewhat hesitatingly) to the divine teaching, why should it not be part of its purpose,—as we think it is,—to give us the various views of the character of certain Kings of Israel and Kings of Judaea, taken by chroniclers who write from very different points of view, such as the earlier authors of the Books of Samuel and Kings, and the later authors of the Books of Chronicles? On what possible principle can it be maintained that, while it was certainly believed at one period of the Jewish history by one of the sacred writers that God had commissioned a lying spirit to lure Ahab to his destruction, it would be impossible for another of the sacred writers to infiltrate (probably quite un- consciously) the earlier history of Israel with the prepossessions of a later sacerdotalism, or to attribute (again probably quite honestly though mistakenly) to Moses an elaborated law of which Moses really only sowed the seeds ? It seems to us that the literature of inspiration has never been, nay, has never been intended to be, otherwise than expressive of the very mixed and miscellaneous effects which divine teaching produces on a half-subdued,—often less than half-subdued,- humanity. We find included in Scripture not only the history of men who resisted that teaching, and the history of men who only half-submitted to it, and the history of men who fully sub- mitted to it, but also the writings of men of both of these latter classes, though not the writings of any of the enemies of God. If a good part of the Book of " Proverbs" and all the Book of "Ecclesiastes" are undoubtedly the writings of more or less decidedly worldly men,—though worldly men inclined to be religions,—surely the Books of Deuteronomy and Chronicles were the writings of ardent disciples of the Levitical system who read into antiquity more than a sober criticism would have found there. The books of the prophets give us the highest summits of the religious experience of the old dis- pensation, but other books give us various levels measurably lower and more mingled with human elements. And it seems to us that it was the very purpose of what we call divine " inspiration " to preserve specimens of various types and stages of the Jewish mind as they were brought under the spell of revealed truth.
We hold that this is what the " spirit of truth " itself is teaching us about the Bible, and that the idealism which struggles against the conviction that it is so, is ignoring one of the most conspicuous purposes of God in the preservation of the Bible as we have it. We have in it the revealed truth in its fullness and perfection in the life of our Lord ; we have in it the highest of its earlier stages in the books of the greater prophets, and we have in it various other phases in other books of the Bible, including the Apocrypha, which contains one at least of the noblest of these books. But the "spirit of truth" certainly does not witness, and never did witness, that all the Bible is pure truth. On the contrary, it compels us to confess that the Bible contains a great litera- ture in which the light indeed vastly predominates, but in which it is often seen shining into darkness, and the darkness comprehending it not.
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