Part 32

In a separate discussion of the question of miracles they are restored to the subordinate position, as compared with moral evidence, assigned to them by the early Protestant divines. Adopting the position of Locke, that "the miracles are to be judged by the doctrines, and not the doctrines by the miracles," he can admit with the less pain his conviction, that, even in the instance of the resurrection of Jesus, the historical evidence is too conflicting and uncertain to bear the supernatural weight imposed upon it. He admits, indeed, that Jesus _may_ have risen from the dead; the Apostles manifestly believed it; and that the marked change in their character and conduct, from despair to triumph, affords the strongest evidence of the sustaining energy of this belief. But, in our ignorance of the grounds of this belief, (the Gospels and book of Acts containing no correct or first-hand report of the facts,) it is impossible, he conceives, to form any rational estimate of their adequacy. In Mr. Greg's decision on this important point, we see the effect of his entrance on the problem of Christianity from the historical end. If, instead of addressing himself first to the Gospels which lie most remote from the source of the religion, and represent the latest and most constituted form of the primitive tradition, he had begun with the earliest remains of Christian literature, and traced the doctrine of the resurrection from the Epistles of Paul into the story of the Evangelists, we think he would have arrived at a different conclusion. In dismissing the testimony of Paul as "of little weight," he throws away the main evidence of the whole case. We can understand the critic who, having put the miraculous entirely aside, as logically inadmissible, makes light of the Pauline statements on this matter, and appeals to their writer's openness to impressions of the supernatural in proof of a certain vitiating unsoundness of mind. But one who, like our author, regards this _à priori_ incredulity as an unphilosophical prejudice, and upon whose list of real causes, never precluded from possible action, supernatural power finds a place, cannot consistently condemn another for believing in concrete instances what he himself allows in the general; and put the Apostle out of court, on the plea that we have no evidence but _his assertion_ of his intercourse with the risen Christ. Is not _his assertion_ the only evidence possible of a subjective miracle? and is there any ground for restricting supernatural agency to an objective direction? No doubt, facts presented to external perception have the advantage of being open to more witnesses than one; and if it be deliberately laid down as a canon, that in no case can any anomalous event be admitted on one man's declaration, we allow the consistency of refusing a hearing to the Apostle. But such a rule would only be an example of the futility of all attempts to reduce moral evidence to mathematical expression. Facts of the most extraordinary nature have always been, and will always be, received on solitary attestation; and if so, it makes no logical difference whether they be called "objective," or "subjective." A man has faculties for apprehending what passes within him, as well as what passes without; nor do we know any ground for trusting the latter which does not hold equally good for the former. If it be said that the reporter of a miracle not only announces what he sees or feels,--which we may accept on his veracity,--but proclaims its supernatural source,--which we may repudiate from distrust of his judgment,--the remark is perfectly just, only that it applies alike to _all_ testimony, and not exclusively to miraculous reports. Our disposition to receive the evidence of a witness assumed to be veracious, depends on our having the same preconceptions of causation with himself. In the ordinary affairs of life, this common ground is sure to exist, and therefore remains a mere latent condition of belief. But the slowness to admit a miracle arises from the failure of this common ground; and if the hearer reserved in the background of his mind, and in equal readiness for action, the same supernatural power to which the witness's assertion refers, he would feel no more temptation to incredulity than in listening to some matter of course. The reluctance to believe, is proof that his store of causation is limited to the natural sphere; and every phenomenon irreducible to this drops away from all hold upon his mind. As there is no such thing as a fact perceived without a judgment formed, so is there no belief in the attestation of a fact without reliance on the soundness of a judgment; and that reliance depends on the hearer having the same list of causes in his mind as the witness. If, then, Mr. Greg holds, with Paul, that the power exists whence a subjective miracle might issue, and if from the nature of the case such miracle must remain a matter of personal consciousness, why reject the Apostle's report of his experience? In choosing from among the causes which both parties admit, it cannot be denied that Paul alights upon that which, _if there_, gives the easiest and most certain explanation; and to find a satisfactory origin for his impressions and conduct in natural agencies is so difficult, that critics would never attempt it, but to escape the acknowledgment of miracle. On his own principles we do not see how our author could excuse himself to the Apostle for rejecting his testimony; which does but communicate, in the only conceivable way, that which is allowed to be possible enough, and which best clears up the mystery of an astonishing revolution in personal character, and in the convictions of an earnest and powerful mind.

The whole question of miracles, however, loses its anxious importance with those who, like our author, would still, amid their constant occurrence, look to other sources for the credentials of moral and religious truth. If anything is positively and incontrovertibly known respecting the Apostles,--and in proportion as we trust the synoptical Gospels must we allow Mr. Greg to extend the remark to their Master,--it is this: that whatever powers they exercised, and whatever communications they received, were inadequate to preserve them from serious error; and from delivering to the world, as a substantive part of their message, a most solemn expectation which was not to be fulfilled. This fact, no longer denied by any reputable theologian, alone shows that, even in the presence of the highest Christian authority, the natural criteria of reason and conscience cannot be dispensed with. In the application of these to the teachings and life of Christ, our author finds, if not any truths of supernatural dictation, at least the highest object of veneration and affection yet given to this world.

"Now on this subject," he says, "we hope our confession of faith will be acceptable to all save the narrowly orthodox. It is difficult, without exhausting superlatives, even to unexpressive and wearisome satiety, to do justice to our intense love, reverence, and admiration for the character and teachings of Jesus. We regard him, not as the perfection of the intellectual or philosophic mind, but as the perfection of the spiritual character,--as surpassing all men of all times in the closeness and depth of his communion with the Father. In reading his sayings, we feel that we are holding converse with the wisest, purest, noblest Being that ever clothed thought in the poor language of humanity. In studying his life, we feel that we are following the footsteps of the highest ideal yet presented to us upon earth. 'Blessed be God that so much manliness has been lived out, and stands there yet, a lasting monument to mark how high the tides of divine life have risen in the world of man!'"--p. 227.

We differ altogether from our author in his notion of inspiration, and his reduction of Christianity within the limits of human resource. But we must say, that while there is such an estimate as this of what Jesus Christ _was_, it is a matter of subordinate moment what is thought about the mode in which he _became so_.

By a process of "Christian Eclecticism," Mr. Greg draws forth from the Gospels the elements which he regards as characteristic of the religion of Jesus; distinguishing those which make it the purest of faiths from others which appear to him irreconcilable with a just philosophy. The doctrine of a future life is reserved for a separate discussion; the general result of which we know not how to describe, otherwise than by saying that the author discards all the evidence and yet retains the conclusion. All the arguments, metaphysical and moral, for human immortality, he condemns as absolutely worthless; he confesses that he has no new ones to propose; he affirms that all appearances, without exception, proclaim the permanence of death, the absence of any spiritual essence in man, and the absolute sway of the laws of organization; yet, on the report of that very "soul" within him, whose existence nature disowns, he holds the doctrine of a future existence by the irresistible tenure of a first truth. We do not wonder that the rigor with which Mr. Greg has pushed his principles through other subjects of thought should relent at this point, and refuse to cast the sublimest of human hopes over the brink of darkness. We respect, as a holy abstinence, his refusal to silence the pleadings of the inner voice. But we admire his faith more than his philosophy; and are astonished that he does not suspect the soundness of a scientific method which lands him in results he cannot hold. No scepticism is so fatal,--for none has so wide a sweep,--as that which despairs of the self-reconciliation of human nature; which flings among our faculties the reproach of irretrievable contradiction; which sets up first truths against deductions, conscience against science, faith against logic. Ever since Kant balanced his Antinomies, and employed the gravitation of _Practical_ reason to turn the irresolute scales of the _Speculative_, this unwholesome practice has been spreading, of assuming an ultimate discordance between co-existing powers of the mind. In the language of rhetoric or poetry, in the discussion of popular notions on morals and religion, it would be hypercritical to complain of the antitheses of understanding and feeling,--sense and soul. But to an exact thinker it must be apparent that an ambidextrous intellect is no intellect at all; and that, were this all our endowment, the life of the wisest would be but a chase after mocking shadows of thought. The following words of our author, with all their tranquil appearance, describe a state of things which, were it real, might well strike us with dismay:--

"There are three points especially of religious belief, regarding which intuition (or instinct) and logic are at variance,--the efficacy of prayer, man's free-will, and a future existence. If believed, they must be believed, the last without the countenance, the two former in spite of the hostility of logic."--p. 303.

This is absolute Pyrrhonism, and though said in the interest of religion, is subversive alike of knowledge and of faith. The pretended "logic" can be good for very little, which comes out with so suicidal an achievement as the _disproof of first truths_. The condition under which alone logic can exist as a science is the unity in the human mind of the laws of belief,--a condition which would be violated if any first truth contradicted another in itself, or in its deductions. The moment, therefore, such a contradiction turns up, a consistent thinker will either regard it as a mere semblance, and proceed to re-examine his premises, and test his reasoning; or he will treat it as real; and then it throws contempt on logic altogether, and relegates it into impossibility. In neither case can his reliance incline to the logical side. Mr. Greg, however, sticks to his logic whenever, as in the two cases mentioned in the foregoing extract, it loudly _negatives_ a point of religious belief; and abandons it only where it restricts itself to cold and dumb discouragement. A bolder distrust of _his_ logic, and a firmer faith in the logic of nature, would perhaps have harmonized the differing voices of the intellect and the soul, blending them in a faith neither afraid to think nor ashamed to pray.

Had our author been as familiar with the Catholic and Arminian divines, as with the literature of inductive science and Calvinistic theology, he would have known that there is a philosophy from which the religious intuitions encounter no repugnance; and would, at least, have noticed its offer of mediation between Faith and Reason. He is, however, entirely shut up within the formulas of a different school, which press with their resistance on his religious feeling in every direction, and produce a conflict which he can neither appease nor terminate. With an intellect entirely overridden by the ideas of Law and Necessity, no man can escape the force of the common objections to any doctrine of prayer, or of forgiveness of sin; and if those ideas possess universal validity, the very discussion of such doctrines is, in the last degree, idle and absurd. But what if some mediæval schoolman, or some impugner of the Baconian orthodoxy, were to suggest that, though Law is coextensive with outward nature, Nature is not coextensive with God, and that beyond the range where his agency is bound by the pledge of predetermined rules lies an infinite margin, where his spirit is free? And what if, in aggravation of his heresy, he were to contend that Man also, as counterpart of God, belongs not wholly to the realm of nature, but transcends it by a certain endowment of free power in his spirit? Having made these assumptions, on the ground that they were more agreeable to "intuitive" feeling, and not less so to external evidence, than the one-sidedness of their opposites, might he not suggest that room is now found for a doctrine of prayer? Not that any event bespoken and planted in the sphere of nature can be turned aside by the urgency of desire and devotion; not that the slightest swerving is to be expected from the usages of creation, or of the mind; wherever law is established--without us or within us--there let it be absolute as the everlasting faithfulness. But God has not spent himself wholly in the courses of custom, and mortgaged his infinite resources to nature; nor has he closed up with rules every avenue through which his fresh energy might find entrance into life; but has left in the human soul a theatre whose scenery is not all pre-arranged, and whose drama is ever open to new developments. Between the free centre of the soul in man, and the free margin of the activity of God, what hinders the existence of a real and living communion, the interchange of look and answer, of thought and counterthought? If, in response to human aspiration, a higher mood is infused into the mind; if, in consolation of penitence or sorrow, a gleam of gentle hope steals in; and if these should be themselves the vivifying touch of divine sympathy and pity, what law is prejudiced? what faith is broken? what province of nature has any title to complain? And so, too, (might our mediæval friend continue,) with respect to the doctrine of forgiveness. If men are under moral obligation, and God is a being of moral perfection, he must regard their unfaithfulness with disapproval. Of his sentiments, the clear trace will be found in the various sufferings which constitute the natural punishment of wrong. These are incorporated in the very structure of the world and the constitution of life; and to persistence in their infliction, the Supreme Ruler is committed by the assurance of his constancy. They fasten on the guilty a chain which no pardon will strike off, but which he will drag till it is worn away. _Not all_ the divine sentiment, however, is embodied in the physical consequences. Besides this determinate expression of his thought, written out on the finite world, there is an unexpressed element remaining behind, in his infinite nature: on the visible side of the veil is the suggestive manifestation; on the invisible, is the very affection manifested. There is a personal alienation, a forfeiture of approach and sympathy, which would survive though creation were to perish and carry its punishments away; and would still cast its black shadow into empty space. This reserved sentiment, and this alone, is affected by repentance. But it is no small thing for the heart of shame to know this. The estrangement lasts no longer than the guilty temper and the unsoftened conscience; and when, through its sorrow, the mind is clear and pure, the sunshine of divine affection will burst it again. In this the free Spirit of God is different from his bound action in nature. Long after he himself has forgiven and embraced again, necessity--the creature of his legislation--will continue to wield the lash, and measure out with no relenting the remainder of the penalty incurred; and he that yet drags his burden and visibly limps upon his sin, may all the while have a heart at rest with God. And thus is retribution--the reaping as we have sown--in no contradiction with forgiveness,--the personal restoration.

How far such modes of thought as these would help to reconcile the conflicting claims,--and how they would stand related to Mr. Greg's terrible friend, "Logic," we do not pretend to decide. We refer to them only as possible means of escaping--at least of postponing--his desolating doctrine, that intuitions may tell lies; and in support of our statement, that his theoretic view lies entirely within the circle of a particular school,--a school, moreover, so little able to satisfy his aspirations, that he is obliged to patch up a compromise between his nature and his culture. The curious amalgamation which has taken place in England, of the metaphysics of Calvin with the physics of Bacon, has produced, in a large class, a philosophical tendency, with which the distinctive sentiments of Christianity very uneasily combine. The effacing of all lines separating the natural and moral, the limitation of God to the realm of nature, and the subjugation of all things to predestination, are among the chief features of this tendency, and the chief obstacles to any concurrence between the intellectual and the spiritual religion of the age.

If some of the elements in the early Christianity are too hastily cancelled by our author, there is one sentiment whose inapplicability to the present day he exposes with an irresistible force;--that depreciating estimate of life which, however natural to Apostles "impressed with the conviction that the world was falling to pieces," is wholly misplaced among those for whose office and work this earthly scene is the appointed place. The exhortations of the Apostles, "granting the premises, were natural and wise."

"But for divines in this day--when the profession of Christianity is attended with no peril, when its practice, even, demands no sacrifice, save that preference of duty to enjoyment which is the first law of cultivated humanity--to repeat the language, profess the feelings, inculcate the notions, of men who lived in daily dread of such awful martyrdom, and under the excitement of such a mighty misconception; to cry down the world, with its profound beauty, its thrilling interests, its glorious works, its noble and holy affections; to exhort their hearers, Sunday after Sunday, to detach their heart from the earthly life, as inane, fleeting, and unworthy, and fix it upon heaven, as the only sphere deserving the love of the loving or the meditation of the wise,--appears to us, we confess, frightful insincerity, the enactment of a wicked and gigantic lie. The exhortation is delivered and listened to as a thing of course; and an hour afterwards the preacher, who has thus usurped and profaned the language of an Apostle who wrote with the fagot and the cross full in view, is sitting comfortably with his hearer over his claret; they are fondling their children, discussing public affairs or private plans in life, with passionate interest, and yet can look at each other without a smile or a blush for the sad and meaningless farce they have been acting!... Everything tends to prove that this life is, not perhaps, not probably, our only sphere, but still an _integral_ one, and _the_ one with which we are here meant to be concerned. The present is our scene of action,--the future is for speculation and for trust. We firmly believe that man was sent upon the earth to live in it, to enjoy it, to study it, to love it, to embellish it,--to make the most of it, in short. It is his country, on which he should lavish his affections and his efforts. _Spartam nactus es--hanc exorna_. It should be to him a house, not a tent,--a home, not only a school. If, when this house and this home are taken from him, Providence, in its wisdom and its bounty, provides him with another, let him be deeply grateful for the gift,--let him transfer to that future, _when it has become his present_, his exertions, his researches, and his love. But let him rest assured that he is sent into this world, not to be constantly hankering after, dreaming of, preparing for, another, which may or may not be in store for him, but to do his duty and fulfil his destiny on earth,--to do all that lies in his power to improve it, to render it a scene of elevated happiness to himself, to those around him, to those who are to come after him. So will he avoid those tormenting contests with nature,--those struggles to suppress affections which God has implanted, sanctioned, and endowed with irresistible supremacy,--those agonies of remorse when he finds that God is too strong for him,--which now embitter the lives of so many earnest and sincere souls; so will he best prepare for that future which we hope for, if it come; so will he best have occupied the present, if the present be his all. To demand that we love heaven more than earth, that the unseen should hold a higher place in our affections than the seen and familiar, is to ask that which cannot be obtained without subduing nature, and inducing a morbid condition of the soul. The very law of our being is love of life, and all its interests and adornments."--pp. 271, 272.