M. GUIZOT'S MEDITATIONS ON CHRISTIANITY.*
M. Gurzox calls his book "meditations," btit it is not a meditative book. It is a book of some ability, and in parts or not a little wisdom, but the thought is of the abstract and
selecting kind rather than of that deeper and more involun- tary mood which acknowledges the sway of a transcendent in- terest,—and the wisdom, though now and then marked by sentences of profound insight, is usually politic to evade difficulties rather than potent to remove them. You see throughout the stamp of the eclectic school of philosophy in dealing with the truths of God's revelation ; and its history is so manipulated and summarized as to keep out of sight indeed many difficulties, but at the same time to blanch the vivid colouring of the divine story and simplify it intellectually at the cost of its most penetrating influences. \Ye aro always inclined to distrust an "essence "of Christianity. That of which you can dis- til the intellectual essences must be human, not divine. It seems to us the necessary peculiarity of a true revelation that being infinitely greater than our apprehensive power, the more we think and meditate upon it the farther we see it stretching away beyond our reach ;—that from whatever side we approach it we gather new warnings against the shallows of our own in ; that like a great river it constantly deepens the chan- nels of our receptive power, and while always the same is yet ever changing. M. Guizot would not, we think, deny this,—but what is much the same in effect he formulates it in a way all but equivalent to adeitial. Leaving us to guess what he means by the " finite " and the "infinite," he lays it down that science can only deal with the former (the fini to),—in which he includes, how- ever, apparently the moral laws of human nature,—and that all the latter (the infinite) is excluded from the sphere of knowledge and must belong to that of fai ;—a distinction which no amount of study of the many philosophical forms in which it has been stated has ever yet enabled us even to apprehend :-
" The finite world alone is within her [Human Science's] reach—the only world that she can fathom. It is only in tho finite world that man's mind can fully grasp the facts, observe them in all their extent, and under all their aspects, discriminate their relations and their laws (which con- stitute also a species of facts), and so verify the system to which they should be referred. This it is that makes what we term scientific pro- cesses and labour ; and human sciences are the results. What need to mention that in speaking of the finite world I do not moan to speak of the material world alone ? Moral facts there also are which fall 'under observation, and enter into the domain of science. The study of man in his actual condition, whether considered as an individual or as forming a member of a nation, is also a scientific study, subject to the same method as that of the material world ; and it is its legitimate province also to detect in the actual order of this world the laws of those particular facts to which it addresses itself. But if the limits of the finite world are those of human science, they are not those of the human soul. Man contains in himself ideas and ambitious aspirations extending far beyond and rising far above the finite world, ideas of and aspirations towards the Infinite, the Ideal, the Perfect, the Immutable, the Eternal. These ideas and aspirations are themselves realities admitted by the human mind; but oven in admitting them man's mind comes to a halt, they give him a presentiment of, or to speak with more precision, a revelation of, an order of things different from the facts and laws of the finite world which lies under his observation ; but whilst man has of this superior order the instinct and the perspective, he can have of it no positive knowledge. It proceeds from the sublimity of his nature if ho has a glimpse of Infinity—if he aspires to it ; whereas it results from the infirmity of his actual condition if his positive knowledge is limited by the world in which he exists,"
The last words are not strictly translated. M. Guizot said "C'est l'infirmit6 de ea condition actuelle que sa science se renferme dans k monde fini oi il vit,"—apparently it struck the translator
that man, even according to M. Guizot's own account, does not live in a finite or finished world, and he left out the qualifying adjective to reduce the paradox of the seeming contradiction. Probably this seems rather an unimportant and abstract specimen of a book which discusses the " essence of
Christianity," but it is really the key to the book's prin- cipal defect. M. Guizot, like Mr. Mansel, wants to cut the difficult knots in the theory of revelation by claiming for miracle and revelation as a whole a world of their own, into which we are only able to enter by " presentiment " or faith, and forbid- ding human science to invade it as "beyond the sphere of
• Meditations cur r limence de la Religion Chrelienne, By M. Guizot. Part.: Ldry ; London: Trubner. Meditations on the Exeauee ol ChrieliaDlty and on the Religions Questions of the Day. By 11. GnIzot. (Translated from the French tinier tho superin- tendence of the Author). Murray.
positive knowledge," And consequently he throughout warns us off any deep sounding of the contents of revelation. He tries to make us accept it as essential to our needs without exercising our intellects upon it. He prepares us a neat little distilled essence of each of his "principal " Christian dogmas—Creation, Providence, Original Sin, the Incarnation, Redemption—which he hopes will be free from some great difficulties, but into the nature of which he forbids As to enter deeply for the reasons above alleged. For example, in speaking of the Incarnation he adheres steadily to general and abstract terms concerning Christ's deity :—" It is a great source of error," he apologizes, "in the study of facts not to know how to stop at their general and essential features, and losing sight of these to give prominence to partial and secondary features. On the subject of the divinity of Christ, that fundamental principle of the Christian religion, the precise meaning and purport of such and such a word may be disputed, such or such an expression may be eli- minated from any particular gospel or epistle, neverthe- less there will always remain infinitely more than suffi- cient evidence that those who believe to-day in the divinity of Jesus Christ believe simply what the Apostles believed and said, and that the Apostles only believed and said, now nearly nineteen centuries ago, what Jesus Christ Himself told them." And to this bare fact he wishes to limit our intel- lectual investigation of the subject, adding further on, "how was the divine Incarnation accomplished in man? Here, as in the union of soul and body,—as in the Creation,—mystery enters; but if the how escapes us the fact does not the less exist. When the fact has taken the form of a dogma, theology has wished to explain it. In my mind it was mistaken ; it has obscured the fact in developing and commenting on it. It is the fact itself of the Incarnation which constitutes the Christian faith, and which rises above all definitions and all theological controversies." These words we might accept, but not what in M. Guizot's hands and treatment they really mean. He means, as is obvious by his studious objection to anything more than the vaguest admis- sion of some peculiar tie between God and man in Christ, not only that we cannot comprehend and explain "the how," but that we cannot even gain any light on the meaning of the fact itself. The infinite can only be believed, not made the object of "positive knowledge.'' Human science keeps to the finite, and is therefore in a wholly different world from that of the Incarna- tion. M. Guizot is anxious to keep the Incarnation as the root of Christianity, but not to dig at the root, not to meditate on it,– simply to accept it. He blames theology for meditating on it so much, under cover of charging it with exploring "the how" of questions too high for us. And so the whole book becomes some- what frigid and abstract. Instead of bringing his full mind to revelation as an infinite reality to be explored, M. Guizot seems to us too intent on epitomizing God's proceedings in a popular form. He does not see that the whole drift of the Bible is one long protest against his division of life into "the finite "—the object of science," and " the infinite "—the object of faith. If revelation teaches us anything it is that we can only understand the finite by the help of the infinite ;—that those "moral laws" which M. Guizot places amongst "the finite" are nothing at all if they are not the manifestation of God, and therefore we suppose infinite—(for the word itself seems to us to have little or no meaning in relation to the phenomena of human nature proper, none of which are in any sense finite, or indeed strictly speak- ing intelligible without direct reference to the divine source whence human nature is derived),—that the science of man could not exist without the revelation of God. This is the truth, as we believe underlying all Christian teaching, of which M. Guizot through his attempted divorce between the infinite and the finite certainly loses eight. Indeed he seems to us to clip down revelation in his résumés of doctrine in order to separate as much as possible between its roots which he admits to be mysterious and infinite, and its results from which he wishes as much as possible to clear away the difficulties, and for which be wishes to gain credence with ordinary human sense.
And the same defect which seems to us to pervade the spiritual teaching of the book extends itself to thehistory. The summary which M. Guizot gives us of the revelation of God to the Jews is meagre and abstract, with the exception of one or two short passages of some power. It fails to notice the most living characteristic of that history, the closer and closer approach of God to man in the minds of the prophets as it goes on. The history starts from the Absolute Will, the "I Am that I Am," in the time of Moses, i. e., begins with that vision of God which would generally be called the most free from human conceptious,—the most like "the Absolute" of the philosophers,—and gradually becomes saturated with visions of a human perfection, of a
Messiah manifesting God on earth, of a "man who should be
a hiding-place from the tempest, and the shadow of a great rock in a weary land," as it proceeds. M. Guizot misses this characteristic of the Hebiew history, and misses it chiefly, we believe, because he is so intent on keeping his imaginary "limits of human science" distinctly drawn. Perhaps the only passage in his book where he quite forgets them and becomes in consequence deeper and richer in the tone of his thought, is in. his beautiful comment on the distinction between Christian charity and that mere kindness of nature which does not draw from any infinite spring :-
"Jesus- Christ ern. cifid, c'est la charitd de Dien envers lea hommes. Comment lea hommes no se devraient-ils pas entre etuc ce qua Dien a fait pour enz, et quel homme In charite no serait-elle pas due ? Otez In divinite et le sacrifice de Jesus-Christ; le prim de l'ame humaine s'abaisse, s'il eat portals de parler alma ; ce n'est plus do son saint, ni de l'exemple do son sanvenr qu'il s'agit ; in charite n'est plus qua la bontd humaine, bean et utile sentiment, mats limitd dons so force dim- pnIsion comma dans son efficacitd car il vient de l'homme seal, et it no pent qne sonlager incompletement des miseres indgalement distribudes. Ce n'est pm assez pour inspirer lea longs efforts at les grands sacrifices ; ce n'est pas assez pour clue le desk de in gndrison morale, comme du soulagement materiel des hommes, devienne cette sympathie inepuisable at cotta passion infatigable qui sont vraiment in charite, et quo, dans le cours de l'histoire du monde, in foi chrdtdenne smile a an inspirer."
We quote in the French because the English translation is here peculiarly bald and even inaccurate, and leaves the impres- sion of a second-rate Evangelical sermon instead of the deep personal conviction of the author.
The translation generally is good, but there are a few slips, some blunders, and many passages in which the English is raw and hasty. For example, in the above passage, "Comment lea hommes ne se devraient-ils pas entre eux ce que Dieu a fait pour aux, et is quel homrne la charite ne serait-elle pas due ?" is translated, "Impossible that men should not feel themselves bound to act towards each other as God has done to them : and towards what man is not charity a duty ?" where the transla- tion of " serait " by "is" destroys the nexus of the sentence and obliterates the meaning of its latter clause,—which continues the inferential question grounded on the love which God has shown to us, instead of breaking suddenly into an abrupt and perfectly meaningless query. If the interrogative form is trans- lated in the first half by "impossible that,"—which is not, how- ever, at all a good rendering,—the same form should be extended to its latter part. Another curious error, because it consists in inserting wantonly words which have no place in the French and no meaning in the English, is on p. 261. of the English edition :— " In the second series of these Meditations, when I treat the authenticity of the localities specified in the Holy Scriptures, I shall occupy myself with this examination,"—i. e., weighing the positive evidence for particular miracles. The French only says, " l'authenticite des hares saints," nor do the intrusive words appear to have any meaning. The translation, however, is generally faithful, though we have noted several other errors.
We shall expect more instruction from M. Guizot's next part, on the historical authenticity of the different books of the Bible, than from this. It is probably a subject for which his habits of thought and study have better qualified him.
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