"IN QUEST OF A CREED." D R. LEEBODY, the Professor of
Mathematics and Physics in Magee College, Londonderry, has just published two interesting lectures on " Religious Teaching and Modern Thought."* the first of which is termed " In Quest of a Creed," and the second, " The Methods of Instruction." In these lectures, he lays down what he conceives to be the right attitude of Christian laymen towards the various theological schools of the present day. Dr. Leebody writes with acuteness and knowledge, but we cannot agree with his estimate of the attitude which a layman of fair general culture in the field of theological literature is likely to take up, when he speaks of " Scripture " as if it all stood on the same basis, and lays it down as a canon that " the authority of Scripture is, of course, paramount with all Christian people, and doctrinal proposi- tions resting on explicit statements of Scripture will be accepted without gainsaying." We should have said that even those who, like ourselves, reject the so-called Rationalism of the day with the utmost confidence, as not only dangerous to our moral and spiritual progress, but founded on utterly untrue and unsound views of the facts of history and of the inner life of man, would be the first to concede that if modern criticism has succeeded in anything, it has succeeded in showing that a very considerable literature of very different degrees of value is contained in the general word "Scripture," and that it is as impossible to admit that everything contained in the Book of Genesis, or the Book of Judges, or the Book of Ecclesiastes, is "to be accepted without gainsaying," as it is to admit that such attacks upon Scripture as were contained in the book called " Supernatural Religion" can be justified. The one point which a layman with a fair amount of general and a little special knowledge of the theological difficulties of the present day would find it most difficult to decide, would be the best way of discriminating between the many various elements in Scripture, and the proper amount of authority to be conceded to different parts of it. It is not merely the question of the true interpretation of Scripture which is the difficulty,—though, of course, that is often a matter of difficulty,—but the question of the authority of a good many portions of Scripture itself, put upon them what interpreta- tion you will. Will any interpretation of the story of creation make it agree with the highest and most accurate science? Will any interpretation of the Book of Chronicles make the whole of it square with the statements in the Book of Kings ? Will any interpretation of the statements in the Synoptic Gospels that our Lord ate the ordinary Passover with his Disciples on the evening before his crucifixion make them agree with the explicit statement in the fourth Gospel that the Last Supper was held on the day previous to the Jewish feast, and that, as a matter of fact, the other Apostles understood that Jridas had been sent out to buy the things that were needed " against the feast " ? Nothing is more essential to a Christian layman " in quest of a creed" in the present day than some principle by which
Publiehed by Henry Fronde.
he could discriminate the divine element in Scripture from the human, and gain some conception at least, of the dif- ference between the inspiring spirit and the literary medium in which its inspiration is embodied, and by which, often enough, it is more or less modified and disturbed. No one who knows what the ordinary life of men seven or eight centuries before Christ actually was, will deny the inspiration of the Psalms usually attributed to David. But no one who believes Christ to have been the perfect incarnation of God in man, will suppose for a moment that when a psalmist speaks of the man who dashes against the stones the children of the daughter of Babylon, as peculiarly happy, he speaks by the inspiration of God, any more than he will regard Deborah's panegyric on the wife of Heber the Kenite for a peculiarly treacherous murder, and one especially shocking to all the Eastern notions of the duty of hospitality, as inspired by the divine spirit,
What, then, shall we regard as the unfailing test of true inspiration ? First, we should say that we see it wherever we find conceptions of God and duty far in advance of the age to which they belong, and cutting right across the grain of the particular tribal or national character affected by it, and especially where we see these conceptions gaining steadily in their influence over the life of a people such as the Israelites, and wrenching them away from the characteristic worship and moral tendencies of the tribes and nations round them. Nobody can doubt that the steady inculcation of a pure moral law, and a fastidiorisly elevated spiritual worship, on a people lusting, as the Israelites lusted, " after the flesh-pots of Egypt," and its inculcation with such effect that it won the whole heart of the people, and fixed it upon an almost Pharisaic observance of the rites and ceremonies which unsensualised them,—was a triumph of the divine spirit over most unpromising material. And, next, the growth of a deeper and deeper belief in the approach of a time when a perfect embodiment of this pure and noble and self- sacrificing rule of life should appear in Israel, and the specially rapid growth of this belief during a period when everything in the history of the people seemed to tell against it, unquestionably witnessed to the triumph of a divine control over the human media of Jewish thought and aspiration. When a pure law prevails against all the natural tendencies of a people, and inspires their greatest writers with an ardent and even passionate love of that law, we see clear evidence of the inspiration of God. And when a hope that is against hope triumphs over all the depressing conditions of exile and national ruin, and not only blossoms in the midst of desolation, but results in its own fulfilment,—there, too, we see the unmis- takable signs of the possession of the Jewish writers by a spirit much higher in its character, and much more penetrating in its vision than their own. If a people who habitually cling to earth, are in their meditations exalted far above earth,—if a people who live habitually in the present, are in their medita- tions transported into a clear future of no terrestrial form of happiness, if a people who kick against the pricks of the law, are in their meditations possessed by the most profound love of the law, we may recognise very clearly that they them- selves were not mistaken when they regarded the divine spirit as controlling for them the course of their meditations, and controlling it not merely from hour to hour, but from generation to generation, and from century to cen- tury. This is the true test of inspiration, when a selfish and even sensual people are purified by it into a spiritual mind, when a passionate and even bloodthirsty people are chastened by it into a gentle mind, when a proud and even stiff-necked people are broken by it into a humble mind; when David sings, " Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow ;" when Elijah pro- claims that God is neither in the tempest, nor the earthquake, nor the fire, but is in the still small voice ; when John the Baptist drops the stern cry "Repent," to proclaim him the latchet of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose ; when St. Paul, who could wrathfully predict that God should smite the unjust judge for ordering him to be smitten contrary to the law, when sitting to judge him according to the law, is com- pelled to chaunt the praises of that charity without which zeal even to the death is worthless, which " suffereth long and is kind, envieth not, vaunteth not itself, is not puffed-up, does not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil." This transformation of the
character of a race and of the personal characteristics of individuals under the immediate breath of a higher spirit, is the very test of inspiration ; and in Scripture, no doubt, we see in almost every page the marvels and miracles which it effects. But that does not show that all the history of the Chronicler is accurate ; that Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy are free from serious numerical exaggera- tions ; that St. Matthew is right in supposing that the flight into Egypt was needful in order to give a messianic meaning to the perfectly simple historical statement concerning Israel, " Out of Egypt have I called my son," or in interpreting the statement that as Jonah was a sign to the Ninevites, so should our Lord be a sign to the generation in which he lived, as suggesting the very forced analogy between the time spent by the former in the whale's belly and the time during which the body of Christ was buried in the earth. These are all matters which do not suggest the action of inspiration at all, indeed, which force upon us the evidence of fantastic huinan impres- sions. If we were to insist that St. Paul was inspired when he said "Alexander the coppersmith has done me much evil, the Lord reward him according to his works," why should we not argue that St. Peter was inspired when he took our Lord to task for predicting his own humiliation and death P The limits of the inspiration of Scripture are no doubt far from easy to define strictly. We must be content to leave them vague. But we cannot doubt for a moment that from the beginning of the literature of the Jews to the close, there is a growing and deepening impression of the brooding of a divine character of clear and definite features over the story, and this divine character is at last visibly and vividly embodied in the life of him who, though he wept over the fate of Jerusalem, bade its daughters not weep for him, but weep for themselves and for their children, as he toiled up the hill on which he was to suffer, and by suffering, to redeem the world. Inspiration is demonstrated by the gradual control gained by that divine character over the character and genius of the Jewish people, and by the results produced on the minds and characters of those who gave themselves up wholly to its influence. And yet that inspiration no more implies that there were no unrebuked bursts of passion in the Old Testament, no blunders in the New, no misinterpretations of prophecy, no blanks where we look for help, and no con- fusions where we need elucidation, than the writing of the moral law on the heart implies that there are no perverted consciences in human life, no fiery acts of distorted and cruel zeal.
Nor can we quite agree with Dr. Leebody in making so light as he does of the authority of the Church and of tradition in his "Quest for a Creed." It is surely true that there is a great deal we want to know about the Church of Christ which Scripture does not contain, and of which our only evidence is the actual life of the primitive Church. And "common-sense," of which Dr. Leebody makes so much, suggests that we should eke out our very inadequate knowledge of what kind of organi- sation our Lord's instructions reared, by inquiring how they were actually understood and acted upon in the earliest times of which we have any record. This is at least as much one of the legitimate "common-sense" sources for our estimate of Christianity, as Scripture itself wherever Scripture is dealing rather with facts than with spiritual principles. If we are to arrive at the creed which is the fullest and fairest account of the supernatural influence that culminated in the life of our Lord, we must surely ask what were the teachings of which we find the clearest trace in the legacy transmitted to the next age, as well as what were the teachings of which we find the record in the Apostolic writings. It seems to us that laymen honestly in quest of the most adequate Christian creed, will not only be unable to regard all the Scriptures as equally inspired, but will be compelled to attach a good deal of im- portance to the actual results of the Apostolic teaching on the communities which the Apostles and their immediate successors founded; and that we can neither attribute the final authority ascribed by Dr. Leebody to all the words of Scripture, nor deny a certain authority to the evidence furnished by the early life of the Church as to what it was which, in the opinion of primitive Christians, Christ had really directed their immediate predecessors to expect and to inculcate.
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