Part 42

Our Christian advocate, however, is not content with reserving to his side the sole power of _discerning_ the duty of religious veracity; he further claims the sole right to _practise_ it. He teaches that it is _not binding_ on all men at all times; and that its obligation is in any case conditional on the "initial postulate, that Christianity is from heaven." He thinks, apparently, that the duty is not so much _revealed_ as _constituted_ by the Gospel, so as to have no existence beyond the pale. We can collect from his words two considerations, under whose influence he seems to pronounce this strange judgment. He evidently assumes that the duty of veracious profession is contingent partly on the _object-matter_ of belief; partly on the _degree of evidence_. If my faith is directed towards _a Person_, then, he implies, there is treachery, even blasphemy, in denying it; but if not, my disclaimer gives no one any title to complain, and I cannot be expected to die on behalf of a proposition. Polycarp must not renounce Christ, his Lord; but Plutarch might very properly recant, without at all altering, his judgment against the poets, for ascribing passions to the gods. Is it so, indeed? Then there is no harm in a lie, unless some one is betrayed or insulted by it besides the hearers whom we deceive,--and we may report as falsely as we please our persuasion about _things_, provided we are true to our sentiments about _persons_? With full recollection of the questionable verdicts, on problems of veracity, which are given by Xenophon and Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, we doubt whether any Pagan moralist can be quoted in favor of a doctrine so unworthy as this. The author seems to imagine that the obligation to speak the truth is a mere duty of personal affection; and that in the absence of this element, its claims altogether disappear. Identifying falsehood with detraction and ingratitude, he concludes that, since an abstract theory is insensible to what people say about it, and can have no services owing to it, it may be blamelessly repudiated by those who really believe it. This is tantamount to an expunging of veracity from the list of human duties altogether; for it gives importance to what is purely accidental, and slights what is alone essential to it. The conditions of a lie, in all its full-blown wickedness, are quite complete, when there is a person to speak it, a person to hear it, and a social state to be the theatre of the deception; should there be also a person _spoken of_, that is a circumstance in no way requisite to constitute the guilt, but a supplementary condition, flinging in a new element of pravity, and turning falsehood into faithlessness. The introduction of this additional person into the case may doubtless render the offence much more flagrant, especially if he be one who has acknowledged claims on gratitude and reverence. Calumny and perfidy are justly held in deeper abhorrence than equivocation unstained with malignity. But to be unaffected by the criminality till it kindles with this diabolical glare, and not even to believe in it unless it smells sulphurous and burns red, betrays a perception too much accustomed to melodramatic contrasts of representation to appreciate the more delicate tints and finer moral lights of the real and open day. And so far from the glory of martyrdom being heightened by the presence of deep personal affection as its inspiration, this very circumstance renders the act a less arduous sacrifice; just as to fall in the hot blood of battle may need less heroism of will, than to die under the knife upon the surgeon's table. In proportion as the denial of Christ in the hour of trial would be the more intolerable blasphemy, must the temptation to it be less overwhelming, and the merit of a good confession less amazing. And those who, in matters touching no such deep affection, can yet be true,--those who, in simple clearness of conscience, can dispense, if need be, with the help of enthusiasm, and so shut their lips against a lie, that not the searing iron can open them,--those who do not want a grand occasion, but just as certainly use the smallest, to fling back the thing that is not,--have assuredly a soul of higher prowess and more severely proved fidelity to God. And it is a heartless thing to turn round upon these men, and taunt them with having no one at whose feet to lay their offering, and no popular sympathy to redeem their uprightness from the imputation of conceit.

There is, however, another consideration which weighs with our author in granting to "modern unbelievers" a dispensation from the duty of religious veracity. They have only a "personal persuasion" resting on precarious grounds, and not the certitude attaching to "the conclusions of mathematical and physical science"; and it would be folly to suffer on behalf of "_undemonstrable_ religious feeling"! Are we then to lay it down as a canon in ethics, that intensity of assurance is the measure of our obligation to speak the truth,--so that we are to state our certainties correctly, but may tell lies about our doubts? If so, scrupulous fidelity is incumbent on us only within the limits of deductive science and of immediate personal observation; and in the great sphere of _human_ affairs, in matters of historical, moral, and political judgment, nay, in the incipient stage of all knowledge, we may say and unsay, may play fast and loose with our convictions, according as the favor or the fear of men hangs over us. Newton was bound to stand by his "Principia"; but Locke might have renounced his treatise on Government and taken his oath to the divine rights of kings! Were he indeed to refuse so easy a compliance, it would be a great reflection upon his modesty; for if a man, on being threatened with death, will not belie his own persuasion of probable truth, he is chargeable with "overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty"! It is happy for the world that it does not always except the morals of the Church, but brings an unperverted feeling to correct the twisted logic of belief. "Opinion," a wise man has said, "is but knowledge in the making"; and how little knowledge would get made, if opinion were emptied of its conscience, and looked on itself as an egotism rather than a trust! If there is one fruit of intellectual culture which more than another dignifies and ennobles it, it is the scrupulous reverence it trains for the smallest reality, its watchfulness for the earliest promise of truth, its tender care of every stamen in the blossoming of thought, from whose flower-dust the seed of a richer futurity may grow. To cut against this fine veracious sense with the weapons of unappreciating sarcasm, and crush its objects into the ground as weeds with the heel of orthodox scorn, is a feat which can advance the step of Christian evidence only by betraying the Christian ethics. Our author has entangled himself in the metaphor indicated by the word "_martyrdom_"; he thinks of the confessor as _bearing witness_ to something,--which is indeed quite true; and supposes that the things to which he bears witness must be _the facts or doctrines_ held by him; and _this_ is not true at all. For that which we attest in the hour of persecution is simply _our own state of mind; our belief_, and not the object believed. We are required to utter words, or to perform acts, that shall give report of our persuasion; this persuasion is a fact in our personal psychology about which there is no ambiguity; which, as a presence in our consciousness, is wholly unaffected by the question how it got there, and by what logical tenure it holds its seat. Whether we have demonstrated it into the mind or fetched it thither in a dream, whether we had it yesterday or shall continue to have it to-morrow, are matters in no way altering the fact that it is there; and if we say "No" to it, while conscious of a "Yes," the sin is neither greater when the belief concerns the properties of a geometric solid, nor less when it touches some indeterminate problem of metaphysics. The logical ground of our judgments is various without end,--perception, testimony, reasoning, in every possible combination. But the persuasion, once attained, is a simple phenomenon, whose affirmation, or denial, being always positively true, cannot change its moral complexion with every shade in the evidence now left behind. It is plain that, in our author's favorite case of martyrdom, no testimony could be borne by the Christian to anything but his own conviction. Polycarp and Cyprian could only answer in the face of death, that they were Christians; it was not "on behalf of" any outward fact, but simply because they would not belie their inward belief, that they laid down their lives. And had Plutarch been dragged before some anthropomorphist inquisition, and been called on publicly to declare his belief that the immortal gods were well and truly painted by the poets as having passions like mankind, the lie to which he was tempted would have been precisely of the same kind; and had it passed his lips, would have made him despicable as an apostate. He had no power, nor had the Church confessor, over the truth or evidence of his opinion; neither of them had any _witness_, in the strict sense, to bear; but both might veraciously scorn to deny a fact unambiguously present to their self-knowledge. If the heathen's firmness is an example of "overweening confidence in his own reasoning faculty," by what favoring difference does the Christian's escape the same imputation? That his faith is "absolute," his persuasion "irresistible," so far from furnishing a vindication, only avows the fact that his "confidence" is intense; whether it be "overweening" too, must depend on the proportion between the certitude he feels and the grounds of just assurance he possesses. But at all events it is a confidence--in this case as in the other--undeniably reposed "_in his own reasoning faculty_." How else could any belief--except a groundless belief--reach the convert's mind at all? It is vain to pretend that the receivers of an historic doctrine plant their reliance piously on God, while its rejecters proudly trust themselves. There is no less subjective action of the mind on the positive side than on the negative; and on the soundness of that action does the worth of the result in either instance depend. The evidence on both sides comes into the same court of criticism; and pleading and counter-pleading must ask a hearing from the same judicial intelligence. If our author refers the Gospels to the first century, and his opponents to the second; if he finds a miracle in the gift of tongues, they a delusion; if he thinks that the reasoning out of the Old Testament in the New is exegetically and logically sound, they that it is in both respects unsound;--is he not concerned with the same topics, conducting the same processes, liable to the same mistaken estimates, as they? How then can he flatter himself that the same thing is believed on one tenure, and disbelieved on quite another? How affect, even while playing the advocate, to be raised above the contingencies of the "reasoning faculty," and entitled to rebuke its pride? How renounce it for himself, appeal to it for your _as_sent, abuse it for your _dis_sent, in the wayward course of two or three pages?

Our author stands, therefore, in spite of every effort to escape it, on the same logical ground as his opponents; and they, notwithstanding his objection to their companionship, are on the same footing of religious obligation with himself. He is offended to find such a one as Mr. Newman on the same sacred pavement, and to overhear from unbelieving lips the genuine tones of prayer; and, thanking God, apprises men that he "is not as this publican." He prosecutes for trespass all who, after rejecting his Christianity, can dare to profess allegiance to the "truth of God," and "speak _as if they were conscience-bound towards God_." Are they then _not_ so bound? Has no one a conscience except the approved historical believer? Is it not in others also a Divine voice,--a Holy Spirit,--which to resist and stifle were the true and only "Infidelity"? Surely the faith in God, and the earnest acceptance of the laws of duty as the expression of his authority, are not forbidden to men who cannot assume the disciple's style. These sentiments, so far from waiting on revelation for their possibility, are the pre-requisite conditions of all revelation, the state of mind to which it speaks, the secret power by which it finds us out; and if men cannot be "conscience-bound towards God" _before and without_ Christianity, never can they become so _after it and with it_. It does not take us up as atheists and brutes, and supply us with the faculties as well as the substance of faith; else were there no medium of suasion across the boundary of unbelief;--but it appeals to us as knowing much and aspiring to more,--as already before the face, only shrinking from the clear look of God,--as feeling the divine restraint upon us of justice, purity, and truth, but unable, without some emancipating power, to turn it into freedom and joy. This spirit of profound sympathy, not of arrogant insult, towards the highest faiths and affections of our nature, we recognize in the portraiture and teachings of Jesus Christ; and when we find one who, like our author, instead of rejoicing that the sacred embers of nature are yet warm, instead of kneeling over them to fan them with a breath of reverence into a flame, flings them with scattering scorn on the damp ground of his own moral scepticism to show how little they will burn,--we see reversed in the "Restorer of Belief" the divine temper of the "Author of Faith." Such a teacher will vainly endeavor to recover by severity of warning the influence he forfeits by want of sympathy. He cannot frighten men like Parker, Newman, Greg, by appealing to fancied "misgivings of their own hearts" respecting the precariousness of their convictions, and uttering dismal prophecies about yawning gulfs; which, however alarming as a shudder of rhetoric, can disturb no quiet trust in reality. Let us hear the words, however:--

"Educated men should not wait to be reminded that those who, after abandoning a peremptory historic belief, endeavor to retain Faith and Piety for their comfort, stand upon a slope that has no ledges: Atheism in its simplest form yawns to receive those who there stand; and they know themselves to be gravitating towards it.

"It would be far more reasonable for a man to die as a martyr for Atheism,--a stage beyond which no further progress is possible,--than to do so at any point short of that terminus, knowing as he does that every day is bringing him nearer to the gulf. The stronger the mind is, and the more it has of intellectual massiveness, the more rapid will be its descent upon this declivity. Minds of little density, and of much airy sentiment, may stay long where they are, just as gnats and flies walk to and fro upon the honeyed sides of a china vase; they do not go down, but never again will they fly."--p. 94.

This is one of the conventional minatory arguments which betray the absence of security and repose from the heart of the received theology; whose teachers could never propound it, except from a position of conscious danger. They must imagine in their own case that, if they were to find the Gospels no longer oracular, they would plunge at once into endless depths of negation; and that, unless they can refute an interpretation of De Wette's, or correct a date of Baur's, there will be eternal night in heaven. They feel the universe, and life, and love, and sorrow, and the history of times and races unbaptized, to be all atheistic through and through,--profane to the core,--untraced by a vestige, untransfigured by a color, of divine significance. What they can think of a Being who creates all reality and lives in it on these blindfold terms, we will not attempt to decide; but it is no wonder that, having once brought themselves to believe in Him, they feel how a single move would overset them into disbelief. This thing, however, is true of their own state of mind alone; whose spaces, dark throughout with scepticism but for one distant lamp, might easily be left without a ray. It is consistent neither with reason nor with experience to threaten with this rule men who have opened their souls to something else than documentary authority. It is notoriously false that the career of historic doubt usually terminates in the loss of all faith in God; nor do we suppose that our author would have awarded to the atheist, for actually reaching this point, the praise of "intellectual massiveness," had he not wanted a heavy weight to slide down his metaphorical inclined plane,[57] and outstrip the slippery believers who try to stop half-way. The accusation against Theism, of being possible to the light-minded and superficial,--a mere sweet-bait to entrap the silly insects of the intellectual world,--is confuted by the whole history of philosophy and human culture; all whose grandest names have connected themselves with the recognition of a religion indigenous or accessible to the faculties of the soul. Let our author collect on one side of his library all the giants and heroes of utter disbelief, and on the other the literature of natural faith; nay, let him ransack for fresh names and forgotten suffrages Lalande's "Dictionnaire des Athées"; and if, having weighed the various merits of Leucippus and Lucretius, of Baron d'Holbach and La Mettrie, of Robert Owen and Atkinson, he thinks them of more sterling mass than the pure gold of thought and life accumulated by Socrates, Plato, Antoninus,--by Anselm and Abelard, Descartes and Arnaud,--by the authors of the "Theodicée," the "Essay on the Human Understanding," and the "Principles of Human Knowledge,"--by Kant and Cousin,--by Butler and Paley and Arnold,--we can only profess a dissent from his intellectual taste, not less than from his moral judgment.

The few pages on which we have been commenting were the first--though they are near the end of the treatise--that fully opened our eyes to the author's theological _animus_. For a while, his large professions, and, no doubt, sincere purpose of fairness,--his apparent breadth of view, and his free hand in putting down his subject on the canvas,--secured our admiring confidence, and made us feel that here at length justice, earnestness, and accomplishment will go together. One feature, indeed, we noticed as giving a suspicious appearance to his equity of temper; it displays itself more in censoriousness towards his friends, than in large-heartedness towards his antagonists. He readily allows faults in the advocates of his own side, but is never carried away into even a momentary appreciation of the other. This particular form of impartiality, which consists in detracting from the merits of allies, instead of delighting in those of opponents, is the ecclesiastic counterfeit of candor,--the half-shekel, which is alone payable in the temple-service, but which nowhere, save at the sacred money-table, is deemed equivalent to the good Roman coin of common life. Much as we dislike the chink of this consecrated metal, we hoped that it would only ring for a passing instant on the ear. But alas! it is an indication seldom deceptive; and we feel constrained to report that there are, in this tract, quotations from both Mr. Newman and Mr. Greg, which, if we were in the court of veracity, and not of theology, we would say are unconscientiously made. The quotations are made anonymously as well as unfaithfully, so that the reader, unless haunted by the checking impressions of memory, cannot correct the injustice of the writer. The "Phases of Faith" describes, it will be remembered, the gradual course of Mr. Newman's defections from his original orthodoxy. His first movements of doubt were naturally timid and inconsiderable, bringing him only to the conclusion, that the genealogy in the first chapter of Matthew was copied wrong, and counted wrong, from the Old Testament. On this step followed a second, and a third, each more important than the preceding, and necessitating a next more momentous than itself. The latter stages of his progress included an inquiry into the evidence of the Resurrection, the miraculous gifts ascribed to the early Church, the claims to credit of the Apostle Paul, and other topics, undeniably affecting the very essence of Christian evidence. Having traced the successive advances of his doubts, Mr. Newman, in a recapitulary "Conclusion," makes a solemn appeal to his readers, to say at what point he could have stopped, and to lay a finger distinctly on the place at which the guilt of his scepticism began. One by one he counts out the steps by which he had proceeded, and asks, "Was this the sinful one?" The whole effect of the appeal is certainly an impression that the series, if not an inevitable sequence, is very difficult to break; and that, small as the beginnings were, they linked themselves, by close connection, with very momentous results. From this chapter our author cites a sentence or two, but in such a way as immediately to conjoin the small initial steps of doubt with the great ultimate conclusion, and to make it appear that Mr. Newman renounced Christianity because he could not make out the pedigree of Jesus to his satisfaction. The genealogical difficulty is the only one which he quotes, and as to which Mr. Newman is permitted to speak for himself. Presenting this as a specimen, and suppressing all the rest, he says that he could have shown "this writer" a course far better "than, on account of difficulties _such as these_, to renounce Christianity"! His citation from Mr. Greg is introduced as follows:--

"Let another witness be heard; and in hearing him one might think that his words are an echo that has come softly travelling down, through sixteen centuries, from some field of blood, or some forum, or some amphitheatre, where Christian men were witnessing a good confession in the midst of their mortal agonies! _This_ witness is one who assures us that 'he can believe no longer, he can worship no longer; he has discovered that the creed of his early days is baseless, or fallacious.' Yet he too takes up the MARTYR TRUTH, that we must not lie to God."--p. 91.

Here, then, Mr. Greg (with concealment of his name) is represented as one who, by his own confession, _can neither believe nor worship any more_. Turning to the preface of "The Creed of Christendom," we find the following original to this quotation:--