OUR LORD'S AUTHORITY.
[10 THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—The gravity of the question raised by Canon Liddon (and, I may add, by Archdeacon Denison also) may be pleaded as an excuse for venturing to contribute a few thoughts towards the solution of the problem of which he treats.
I share his estimate, as I have lately shown elsewhere, of the conclusions towards which the followers of Wellhausen and Kuenen are drifting. I do not share his convictions as to the right way of meeting those conclusions. To me it seems best to challenge free inquiry, to examine the theories which lead to them, to test both premisses and the inferences from them by thorough and honest in- vestigation. He speaks from another standpoint. If you question,' he practically says, the authorship of Deuteronomy or Daniel, you are questioning also the authority of Christ. You cannot examine the composition of the Pentateuch as an open question, without abandoning your faith in the Nicene Creed. The indwelling of the Logos in the human nature of our Lord involved an absolute exemption from any error on any question whatever, on any point, however incidental, on which he has spoken, however indirectly. Inquiry is there- -fore estopped to him who believes in the Incarnation. if he enters on it (as, e.g., Dr. Pusey did in the case of Daniel), he must enter on it with a foregone conclusion.'
I own that to me the position which Canon Liddon has thus taken up seems to approximate over-closely to that of Apollin- s.rianism. The "reasonable soul" of our Lord's humanity is so pervaded by the Divine Word, that it does not develop and acquire its knowledge after the manner of the souls of other men. It loses its limitations, and therefore its reality. There is no real growth in wisdom. The questions of the boy to his teachers are "Socratic questions" intended to expose their ignorance. The one solitary exception to the omniscience of our Lord's human nature, the anima rationalis, is that in which he himself disclaims it. He could not share the current beliefs of his time, in matters of history, criticism, or science, in any case in which that belief was erroneous.
I feel to the full the difficulty of formulating a definition on a question at once so grave and so mysterious, but I venture -to think that we may at least approximate, in this case, to such a definition by the argument from analogy. There were pre- ludings of the Incarnation in the presence, in the human soul, of the "Light that lighteth every man" who does not refuse the light. There have been, and are, "extensions of the Incarnation" in the presence of the "Christ in us," through which we also are made "partakers of the Divine Nature." In these cases it will be admitted by the most devout believers that the presence works through revealing to our souls the will, the nature, the attributes of God. No one dreams of connecting it with a revelation of historical, or orscientific truths. In these cases the revelation was and is imperfect. Our intuitions of divine things are marred and clouded by the moral imperfections of our nature. In the person of Christ there is the indwelling of the Divine Logos, subject itself to the kenosis of which St. Paul speaks by the fact of its so indwelling, in a human nature in which there is no moral imperfection. In him, therefore, as in no other, before or after, the human soul received the fullness of all knowledge that was necessary to his work as the Redeemer of the World, the Revealer of the Father, the Prophet of Mankind. But, if we follow on the lines which analogy suggests to us, the com- munication of that knowledge to his human nature did not necessarily involve its illumination on points that lay outside that work. There might be, to use Jeremy Taylor's phrase, a "suspension of the emanations" of the divine wisdom. Is it wise, therefore, to argue as if the absence of knowledge on such points were fatal to our belief in him, as speaking the things which the Father had given him to speak ? Our faith in the continuity of the divine work of education may lead us to enter on questions affecting the Old Testament in the confident expectation that inquiry will show that, written as it is "by divers portions and in divers manners," it bears its witness to him, and is, with whatever mixture of human elements, a true record of a divine work. But would it follow, even if the authorship of Deuteronomy or Daniel were disproved, or left an unsolved question (as many, for example, leave the author- ship of Ecclesiastes or the Song of Solomon), that he was less, in word, act, and life, the Revealer of the Father? Even the authoritative teaching of the Latin Church limits the infallibility of its head to things de fate and judgments pronounced ex cathedrci. May we not be content with an infallibility in Christ which includes all things that pertain to the will and character of God, to his own nature, and to his own work ? I doubt the wisdom of this introduction of the argument in terrorem, which puts the alternative of "all or nothing." It never has stopped inquiry, and it never will. Gainsayers welcome it as a con- fession of weakness. It rouses a reaction in the minds of honest doubters. It has even something like a perilous fascination for those who think that the surrender of inherited beliefs is the noblest sacrifice they can make for what they look upon as the truth, and tempts them to accept, on imperfect evidence, conclusions which, in its absence, they would have examined with more caution and with greater thoroughness.— I am, Sir, &c.,
Deanery, Wells, Somerset, June 291h. E. H. PLIIMPTRE.
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