Part 6

I have now to complain of something still worse than that the Bishop should have forgotten his Bible, entirely ignored the Thirty-nine Articles, and occasionally in the hurry of rapid speech contradicted his previous sentences. All these are matters at which in even an extraordinary man burdened with a bishop’s dignity, we need not wonder at all; but when we find him blundering in metaphysics, when we find him making mistakes which a man versed in the merest student’s rudiments of Mill or the Scotch and German metaphysicians, would not make, when we find the Bishop so blundering, either wilfully or ignorantly, it puts me in a position of extreme difficulty. He distinguished between the Sceptic and the Christian, and said the Christian had a faith in something underlying all phenomena. The Christian’s faith is nothing of the kind. I will explain my position, and then that of the Christian. The position of the Naturist is that there is only one existence. I can only know that existence as conditioned, as phenomenal. What we call “things” are modes or conditions of existence, known or distinguished from other conditions by various characteristics or qualities; we only know substance or existence as conditioned. We only know the phenomenal or the conditioned. We affirm one existence, and that all we know is condition of that one existence. But that is not the Christian’s position. The Christian says there are two existences, the one what he calls the material universe, and the other the Deity, distinct and differing in essence, who is the creator of that universe out of nothing, and who can be the destroyer of it. When the Bishop tried to make these two opinions into one, he either did not know what he was talking about, or he supposed that the people to whom he was talking had not the time to study. The Bishop defined faith as trust or assent, and he declared that not only in religion but in all other matters we have faith. He said, for example, and his illustration appeared to me most unfortunately chosen, that we trusted in our wives, and children, and friends, that it was possible that our wives might all the time be unfaithful, our children unloving, and our friends treacherous. These are not the words, but they give the exact sense of the words. Now I will explain the difference between religious faith and the ordinary faith. Our ordinary faith in one another in every-day life is a confidence founded upon our own experience and the experience of others; and it is because we find the unfaithful wives are the fewest in number, and the treacherous friends the fewest in number, that we trust in our wives and our friends. But religious faith is something entirely different, it is not only not founded on experience, but it contradicts experience. Religious belief is the prostration of the intellect; ordinary every-day trust is the result of the exercise of the intellect. The Bishop spoke of morality. He said morality was based upon faith, and he asked, supposing you did not go to faith, where were you to get your standard of morality? What is morality, the Bishop did not tell you. With me that is moral which tends to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, which inflicts the least injury on any. What is moral the Bible does not tell you, the Thirty-nine Articles do not tell you, the Creeds do not tell you, the Nicene Creed does not tell you, the Apostles’ Creed does not tell you. They say that it is moral not to steal, but you must not say this with the Bible in your hand, where you find a thief protected and rewarded. And as to adultery, David got to heaven though he committed adultery, and planned the most treacherous murder of the dishonoured husband. It is moral to speak the truth, but Jacob, who lied, got to heaven, and was loved by God, while his brother was hated, though he appears to have been the better man of the two. What is the morality of the Athanasian Creed? You are to believe in a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, three persons in one God, and if you do not believe in this, without doubt you are to perish everlastingly. Is that your morality? He that believes and is baptised, shall be saved. Is faith in Christ morality? Here it is moral to eat beefsteaks, but on the banks of the Ganges it is immoral. Where will you get your guide to morality? No one man, no one book, no one church, can give it you. Your guide to morality can only be got by gathering from the wisdom, and availing yourself of the experience of the greatest minds of past ages and the present times, and thus you may learn to be moral. I don’t speak to annihilate the Bible. No man can annihilate a book. If Moses or Isaiah wrote, no man can sweep their work away from the page of history, but I say that no book should dominate the world. I am a sceptic, for I deny the absolute authority of one book to dominate all people. I find among the Brahmins, among the Buddhists, among the Chinese and Japanese, phases of human truth which in other lands are almost entirely forgotten, which your Jew books do not contain.

If you want to know how I would make a code of morality, I would make it as you would a bouquet of flowers: from one plot in a garden you cull the rose, from another other flowers of sweet perfume, from another the flowers of brilliant hue, until colour blending with colour and fragrance aiding, your bouquet presents beauty to the eye and sweet perfume to the scent; so I would take from Shakspere the fruit of his wide grasping brains, from Swift his brilliant wit, from Montesquieu his great power of generalisation, from Voltaire his grand irony, from Rabelais his biting thought, from Spinoza his grand logic, from John Locke his wise reason, I would take from Dr. Magee his eloquence, and bring them and the thoughts of the world’s poets and philosophers together. I would make my bouquet of thought. I say the Bible is not a book to cast away, but to place on our shelves beside the Koran, the Vedas, and other old-world books, to mark how the thought of the world has grown. We know that religion has a hold upon the mass, but I claim for scepticism a higher morality. The belief in religion is the wearing the old clothes of a former age, the swaddling clothes adopted in the childhood of humanity, but scepticism is the bursting out from these old swaddling clothes. It is the effort of buried brain to burst its grave and stand out alive for human deliverance.

THIRD DISCOURSE OF THE BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH. CHRISTIANITY AND FAITH.

ON Thursday evening, March 30th, 1871, the nave of the Cathedral, Norwich, was much crowded with the citizens of all classes, to hear the third sermon of the Bishop of Peterborough, on “Christianity and Faith.” Before the sermon the Bishop prayed specially for the conversion of the infidels present. He selected his text from the Gospel according to St. John, xx. 29,

“Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

His Lordship said:

Last night, I endeavoured to show you what scepticism is, and what it leads to. We saw that scepticism is not simply doubt, but that it is doubt of a particular kind. It is that state of doubt which arises from insisting on referring every question for solution to one part, and one only, of our nature, to the sceptical understanding. It is that state of doubt which arises from refusing to believe until it has been made scientifically and mathematically impossible to doubt. And we saw what this leads to; we saw that it necessarily leads to the destruction of all belief properly so-called, to the destruction of every kind of assent, except assent to scientific and demonstrated facts; that it puts an end to all belief which rests upon moral certainty, as distinguished from scientific certainty, and therefore it puts an end to all belief that appeals to any part of our nature except the understanding; all belief with which the heart and spirit of man have anything to do; all belief of the higher and nobler kind; all belief that arises out of the higher and nobler part of our nature; all belief that is in character and essence moral, and all the higher and nobler life which arises out of such belief. We saw that scepticism was essentially fatal to morality; that there is no scientific demonstration of morality, and that in order to be moral it is necessary to exercise an act of faith; that morality cannot justify itself to the sceptical understanding; as we saw that as religion is not capable of scientific demonstration, as it does appeal to something else than the logical faculty, as it does appeal to man’s heart and spirit, it cannot justify itself to the sceptical intellect; and that scepticism is necessarily as fatal to religion as it is to morality, and to all belief except scientific belief.

I hope you saw what a waste of time it is to endeavour to satisfy the consistent sceptic; we have absolutely nothing in common. It is impossible that religion can silence scepticism, unless it ceases to be religion. It is just as absurd to object to religion that it is not science, as to object to science that it is not religion. It is the wisest course we can take in dealing with sceptics to begin, and for the most part to end the discussion, by asking this plain question: You tell us that you are sceptical, and you demand all your doubts to be satisfied before you believe; we ask you, Do you believe in anything, and if so, what do you believe in the proper sense of the word? Do you assent to anything on trust? Do you believe in anything you cannot demonstrate? If so, you have no right to say to us that we should not believe a religion. If you say, I believe in nothing but what can be demonstrated, then we have nothing to answer, we must leave you to be refuted by the common sense of mankind, and by every act of your daily life which is based on trust. It would save a vast deal of wasted time were we to take this course. Let me advise all Christians; before you allow a sceptic to put you to the proof, ask, What is it you believe? Do you believe anything in the matter of religion? and if so, remember you should not bring any objection against our faith which applies equally to yours. We cannot allow of faith for all the difficulties of your belief, while you ask demonstration for all the difficulties of our belief. Faith for both, or faith for neither; but not faith for one and demonstration for the other. We seek not to get a logical victory over our opponents; that is the poorest of all ambitions; but we recommend such a course for this reason, that you may see that the very same objections which are brought against our belief, lie against any belief, and all belief, and so be strengthened in your faith; for after all man must believe something. There is a necessity of belief in the soul of man. We ask for the sake of our opponents, if we throw them back upon considering the basis of their own belief, and ask them if they are not unconsciously to themselves in some degree believers while they call themselves sceptics?

And now, while I have endeavoured thus clearly to show you that religion, like morality, has no answer, properly speaking, to scepticism—but that it rests upon an act of faith in answer to what is ever saying, How, what, and why?—let us come back then to that point at which we left it last night. That is the point at which we saw, that in order to be moral, and to believe in morality, we must exercise an act of faith, we must trust in ourselves, in our own higher and better nature. It must be an act of faith which never can justify itself to the understanding. Submit the understanding to the soul, elevate the conscience above the merely logical and questioning faculty; say by the exercise of a higher faculty, say by the power of that instinct of faith, which is given us for the very purpose that we may rise above the instinct of doubt—say, I know that this is right and this is true, while I have a soul. There is in the heart of every human being an eternal opposition between the merely sceptical understanding and the spiritual faculty, between that which demonstrates and that which believes, between the mind which we share with the animal, and the soul which we Christians believe we specially derive from God; and these two are opposite the one to the other. That in us which says, This must be so, this shall be so so, is a higher faculty than that which in us inquires, Why is it so, how can this be so? And that act of faith in us on which our morality, our religion, and our higher forms of being rest, is that by which we assert the supremacy of the one above the other. We are not always conscious, nor often conscious, of this contradiction in our innermost nature, of the opposition between the spiritual part of our nature and the mere fleshly man. There are times, however, when we feel conscious of it. There are times when to each one of us comes some dire and deadly temptation, when we find ourselves in the presence of some coveted object, when the animal craves for its gratification, and the spirit trembles at the thought of the unlawful thing; and then we find the serpent intellect pleading in an ingenious way that there is no law against it. I say, there is not in this church a single man or woman who has not felt the eternal opposition between the spirit and the flesh; who has not felt that his deliverance from temptation, the mastery over the evil thing that was leading him on to evil, lies not in any logic or demonstration, but in the submission of the logical faculty to the spiritual, in saying to the animal part of our nature, Be silent, submit, I will be righteous, I will not sin. I say, in that moment we do become conscious of the opposition that exists between the intellectual and spiritual part of our nature. It is then that the great billows of our souls are ebbing and flowing in the agony of our temptation. It is at that time we feel the innermost parts of our being, the fountains of the great deep broken up; and then the spirit says, I will be righteous. And though we are not conscious of it, though the animal has been accustomed to obey the man, there is this secret opposition between the two. It is in the nature of what oculists tell us. They tell us, that the image of an object is inverted on the retina of the eye, and that it is only by constant habit of correction of the impression that we see things truly. So there is the natural inversion of the nature of the man; the animal gets the upper hand in the man, and it is only by the unconscious training of the man in Christian society that the supremacy of the moral part of the man is strongly established; and we are not conscious of the act of faith, but still that act of faith underlies all morality, and it is true in morality as in religion, “The just shall live by faith.” There is no righteous deed that any one of us has done that we did not do by virtue of this act of faith; “The just shall live by faith.”

Now let us pass on to another question, for if the whole moral and religious life is based upon the act of faith, there doubtless must be a good reason for it. We Christians believe that God made us so for a good reason. Can we see any reason why we should live our moral life by faith? That faith is not a mere assent to propositions, it is trust in a person, in a nature, a belief that we are better, nobler, than our understanding would persuade us we are. Every time this opposition which I have described arises within a man, he is given a choice; he has to pass through a probation, or a test as to whether he will or will not believe in his better self, whether he will rise up to the idea of his spiritual nature, or sink down to the depths of his animal nature. There is a trial for him, and a discipline in the trial, and a culture and a growth of his moral nature if he stands firm in the trial. We cannot believe, in such a moment of trial, in our nobler and better selves, without becoming in the very act of believing, nobler and better out of such strife; and the man comes out stronger every time he wrestles with his baser self; his purer and nobler self comes out of the trial nobler and purer.

There is a deep meaning in the temptation of our Saviour, when he is said to have been with the wild beasts, in that hour when the man is wrestling with the wild beasts, or the brute part of his nature, and his spiritual nature comes strong out of the struggle; just as the waving of the branches of the trees in the wind, makes the sap circulate to the tiniest leaflet, and brings the life-blood of the plant to every part. This is the use and object of the act of faith; to train, discipline, and elevate the man. Further, I have said, in every case in which a man believes in his better self, he becomes better; but we have to deal not only with our better selves, we have to come constantly in contact with other natures and other personalities than our own. Now, what happens when we encounter a higher or more moral nature than our own? Just the very same trial and discipline; because if a man comes to deal with a higher and better nature than his own, there is always a trial to the lower nature. If a higher nature could be easily understood by a lower nature, then the two natures would be equal. It is the very essence of a higher and purer nature to be something of a mystery to a lower nature. Some of the sayings or the doings of that higher nature, will always appear strange and puzzling to the lower nature, just because it is a lower nature. There is always the possibility of the lower nature saying of the higher nature, This nature is no better than mine, I do not believe in its higher or greater goodness. But are these cynical, worldly-wise men who disparage others, generally speaking, the most improving and valuable of our acquaintances? Do we not generally find these cynical, bitter, disparaging men to be men of low tone? They have lowered their moral nature in the hour of probation and trial; they have sunk lower than themselves, because they have refused to believe in something higher and better than themselves. If these men could have risen to the higher natures they had to deal with, then in that very hour, their own nature would have grown purer, nobler, and higher. So we see again, the act of faith would be an act of probation, an act of discipline, an act of moral culture and growth. Therefore we say it is true, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

But now let us go one step further. We have seen that in all morality there is an act of faith, and we believe in our own higher nature and the higher nature of others, and in so doing we ourselves grow better; but is there not something better still? We that believe in higher natures than our own, is there not in our hearts an instinctive belief that there must be somewhere perfect righteousness, perfect truth, perfect holiness? We seek for it, believe in it; do we ever find it? The more we know of men, though we may know more of their excellencies, we are compelled to know something more too of their imperfections. The result of this discovery is that one of two things happens, according as we listen to our understanding or our will. The sceptical understanding says, There is no such thing as perfection anywhere. That answer is unanswerable if we look only to experience. Is that the answer of the soul and heart of man? No, the soul and the heart rebel against this cheerless teaching. The soul has ever been uttering its protest against this despairing creed, ever speaking its belief in the reality of a perfect righteousness, a perfect truth, a perfect holiness; but can never attain to it. It may be a dream, but it is a dream that has haunted humanity from the first hour of its existence. We thus have faith in humanity, and the value of this faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it; a faith which cannot justify itself to the understanding, a faith as deep as the human heart, and as old as the hills.

There is in very deed, in a very true sense, although it may be a low sense comparatively, a religion of humanity; a creed and an act of faith; and that religion has for its creed these articles: man is pure; he is not a bundle of passions merely; man is responsible, he has to answer for his beliefs; man may yet be perfect. There is no article in this creed that can be justified to the sceptical intellect, and yet there is not a single article in it that the loving heart of man, and that his soul in his highest and best moments, does not cling to as the very life of its life. The heart of man believes in the perfectibility of humanity, in spite of sin and misery and oppression. The long litany of man’s [imperfections?] comes down with a wail of despairing denial of the possibility of perfection. Remedy after remedy has been tried, scheme after scheme has been invented, and have been borne away like the bubbles on the wave; but still the heart of man clings to the belief that there is a perfect goodness somewhere, even when civilisation fails to produce it, even in spite of what we have seen in the last three months when the most civilised nations of Europe have banded themselves together for mutual destruction; in spite of all this disproof of perfection, the heart of man clings to it still. We do have faith in humanity, and the value of the faith is that it elevates the soul which believes in it. This belief in the possibility of perfection, in the possibility of delivering men from sin and sorrow, this is not merely the dream of the poet, it is not merely the Utopia of the philosopher, but it is the instinctive might in the heart of the earnest worker, that gives strength to him who does his duty amid the haunts of sin and sorrow; it is this that sends the Christian worker into the back streets and lanes of our great cities; it is this that sends the Christian minister to the bedside of the dying; it is this that makes men toil and suffer for their fellow men, like him whom we worship, who saw in his dying hour of the travail of his soul and was satisfied.