MR. PAGE ROBERTS ON LIBERALISM IN RELIGION.
Air R. PAGE ROBERTS, the incumbent of the church in Vere Street in which Frederick Maurice preached during the last years of his life, has just published a volume of singularly patient and careful sermons, which sometimes rise into noble eloquence, and always give the impression of a mind singularly free from ecclesiastical formalism and professional habits of thought. To two of these sermons, which give their title to the volume,—he gives the name of " Liberalism in Religion," and as he attempts in them to define what he does not and what he does mean by " Liberalism " in religion, and as the remainder of the volume gives us plenty of illustrations of his method and drift, it is a matter of some interest to follow the course of his thought, and to test his conception of religious Liberalism by any other standards by which it may occur to us to try it. Mr. Page Roberts points out that two of the most widely-read writers of our day, Cardinal Newman and Frederick Maurice, have both disliked the word "Liberalism" in its application to religion, Cardinal Newman having described his Oxford movement as a war against Liberalism, and even Frederick Maurice having described the Liberals as maintaining that "people could know nothing about theology." Mr. Page Roberts believes that this dread of Liberalism in religion is due, in great measure at least, to misunderstanding. Dr. Newman held that the Liberals reject all religious dogma, all absolute truth in the region of revelation. Mr. Maurice held that the Liberals derided theology, and wished to look for truth alto- gether from the human side, a side on which he did not think that they would find it. Mr. Page Roberts thinks them both wrong. He has no hesitation in declaring that a religion with- out dogma is not, properly speaking, a religion at all ; it is mere feeling without a conviction. He is very clear and firm in holding by dogma. He holds that anti-dogmatic teachers and anti- theological teachers are not " Liberals in religion," but Liberals without religion,"—irreligious Liberals. There is no such thing at all, he says, as religion without dogma, religion without theology. It is those who wish to subvert religion altogether, not religions Liberals, who denounce dogma and decry theology. Why, then, have the religions Liberals got this bad name ? Because, says Mr. Page Roberts, they do not accept dogmas so freely as the religious Conservatives on the authority of the Churches. Religions Liberals regard all Churches as
fallible, and question some of the dogmas which each Church in its turn has approved. They not only think that the Roman Church has erred, but that the Lutheran, Calvinistic, and Anglican Churches have erred also. Mr. Page Roberts regards it as the aim of Liberalism in religion "to get more certain hold of positive troth " by the method of examination, as distinguished from the method of authority :—"It may be that some of the doctrinal formula; of the past may be shown to be erroneous conclusions from revelation, and others but imperfect representations of revelation. But the end will be, that if fewer things may positively be affirmed, and some things which have been looked upon as dogmas take the place of pious opinions, or of ' specula- tive expansions,' the firm foundation will be seen to be secure, and on that foundation union will be possible. The method of authority has been tried and failed. We must try the method of science, the method of unfettered examination. It tends to unity in physical researches, and if that which religions men seek to understand is positive, is real—real as the entities from which we obtain the laws of science—then faith in God will be seen to have no less sure a foundation than faith in the Cosmos; the mode of God's manifestation in history, I mean the revela- tion of the Trinity, will be more certain than the laws of physical development ; and the salvation of Christ as sure in its action as the movements of the heavenly bodies. Authority has resulted in dead submission or in open rebellion. Free and capable investigation will result in a unity which cannot be broken."
Now, we at once agree and disagree with Mr. Page Roberts in this statement of his case. We agree heartily so far as he holds that the declarations of ecclesiastical assemblies have added nothing to the true " authority " of religious truths, except only so far as, in the generations which followed imme- diately the foundation of the Church, they offered indirect evidence of the belief which revelation had inspired in those who received the teaching of Christ himself. But we disagree with him so far as we understand him to say that the method of " unfettered examination" can prove theological truth at all in the same way in which "unfettered examination " can prove scientific truth. Let us consider how scientific examination testa and verifies scientific truths, and how, on the other hand, spiritual investigation tests and verifies spiritual truths, and we shall see at once that in the latter case there enters,—neces- sarily and largely,—an element of authority which does not enter at all in the former case. Any man with common ability to follow mathematical demonstrations and physical inductions, can for himself verify the evidence (say) for the law of gravita- tion, and for the determination of the various eclipses and occul- tations put down in the nautical almanack for any given year. These things involve no special powers, but only a certain pre- scribed course of education. Speaking generally, all those who follow that prescribed course come to the same conclusions ; and those who only follow it a little way see enough to know that, if they followed it farther, they would in all probability be able to verify the demonstrations not yet arrived at, as adequately as they have verified those which they have fully mastered. Now, is that the case, or at all like the case of revelation ? Surely not. How did Nathan, or David, or Isaiah, or John the Baptist, or our Lord gain the power they wielded over the minds of their contemporaries and disciples ? Clearly not by merely putting them on a line of thought which any one with the proper amount of culture could follow and verify for himself ; but rather by startling their consciences, elevating their spiritual nature, convincing them with sudden intuition that the power behind the veil of visible things had held a mach more living communication with these teachers than ordinary men had hitherto been able to hold with it ; and that by obeying the authority which was revealed to them through these teachers, they could attain an ease of conscience and a peace of spirit which they had never felt before. But was not this conviction bound up with the acceptance of a spiritual authority in the true sense ? Was it competent to the man who accepted Isaiah as an inspired teacher, to doubt him when he prophesied that the truly righteous servant,— he who should see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied,— would be a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, who should have to bear the sin of many, and to make intercession for the transgressors ? If any one had disputed this prophecy of Isaiah's, how could Isaiah have proved it to him, as a mathe- matician could prove to a doubter the verification of Newton's law ? The moral authority of the prophet is implied in the very attitude which recognises a man as a prophet, and it is impossible to say that the method of authority has failed, when in the last resort religions truth is proved by a method of authority still. We admit that the prophet must make good his hold over the inferior mind, by flashing upon it moral truths which that inferior mind at once recognises. Still, the inferior mind must accept much on the authority of the superior mind which it cannot verify for itself. When John the Baptist told the multitudes who went out to him, that one was coming far mightier than he, the latchet of whose shoes he was not worthy to unloose, he expected his authority for that statement to be accepted by those who had felt his moral power in the exposure of their sins. When our Lord declared that it was God himself who had revealed to St. Peter that he was the Christ the Son of the living God, he expected that statement to be accepted on his authority by those over whose minds he had asserted his moral power by reading their secrets and rebuking their cowardice. It is impossible to separate revelation from the sphere of authority in any way at all akin to that in which we may separate scientific truth from the sphere of authority. The deeper and higher and nobler the mind to which the spiritual secrets of the universe are communicated, the less verifiable by others will be the spiritual penumbra of truth, as it were, by which the moral power of that mind will be surrounded. Who will pretend that ordinary men can verify for themselves the statements of our Lord concerning his own knowledge of God? Yet the teaching of the early Church is founded entirely on those statements, and is inseparable from them. If they are to be discredited because they cannot be verified, the authority of the Christian revelation vanishes with them. No one could maintain more strenuously than we should that there is no true religious authority except in combination with the power to pierce the con- science, to dominate the judgment, to satisfy and glorify the common-sense of practical men. It is because the Prophets and Apostles irradiate the common duties of life by the sobriety of their piety and the fine exaltation of their common-sense,that men so gladly accept them as their guides in the perplexities of their earthly ways. But then, they do accept them as their guides even where they cannot verify that guidance. They do believe what they tell them of a world to which it is impossible to go for the purposes of verification. They do accept their authority. Therefore, we very much hesitate to say with Mr. Page Roberts that Liberal religion consists in putting authority aside, though it no doubt does often put the authority of ecclesiastical assem-
blies aside. And why Because ecclesiastical assemblies have never shown that moral power to pierce and enlighten the conscience which is the only true stamp of spiritual authority. Nevertheless, religions Liberals must not dis- own authority, or they disown religion itself. Admit, if you please, that the question of what the great Prophets and Apostles did reveal, nay, what Christ himself did reveal, is a question on which we should listen to some extent to scholars and historical critics, as well as to the existing documents in which these revelations were first recorded. Admit that it is not altogether an easy question what the authentic part of these revelations is. But it cannot be admitted that, so far as we can feel confident that we have them,—a question on which not only documentary evidence, but every indication of the belief of the primitive Church which they founded, has a right to be con- sulted,—we are to accept them only so far as we can ourselves attest the truths they declare. For it is of the very essence of revelation that it reveals an infinitely higher and deeper nature and character than our own, the measure of which we are wholly unable to take. Revelation must tell us that which our conscience confesses to be true, or we should not be struck by it and laid hold of by it. But it must and does do more. It must lay us under the obligation to believe
much which, while it supports the authority of the conscience and extends it into a world to which the conscience alone could never admit us, cannot be verified by us. Spiritual authority
is inseparable from revelation, and he who cannot bow his intellect to what that intellect cannot verify, will soon come to throw off the moral authority through which the intellectual authority first obtains its hold upon us. The spectacle of M.
Renan, first undermining all the spiritual authority of revela- tion, and then going on to insult in the grossest way the purest,
simplest, and moat peremptory of men's moral instincts, is one that should warn us all of the frightful consequences to which indulgence in the delight of trampling on authority may ultimately lead Ay.
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