Chapter 16

"I transfer the war, My good Sir: a practice which I would recommend to most Christians in these days. When I meet with an opponent of the stamp you refer to, who thinks insoluble objections alone are sufficient reasons for rejecting any thing. I say to him, 'My friend, this Christianity, if so clearly false, is not worth talking about: let us quit it. But as you admit, with me, that religious truth is of great moment, and as you think you have it, pray oblige me by your system.' To tell you the truth, I never found any difficulty in propounding plenty of insoluble objections; but if you think differently, you or any gentleman present can make experiment of the matter now."

"Nay, my dear uncle," said Harrington, "you are invading my province. It is I only who can consistently challenge all comers; like the ancient Scythians, I have every thing to gain and nothing to lose."

Whether it was out of respect for the host, or that each felt, after the recent disclosures, that he would not only have Harrington and myself, but every body else, down upon him, nobody accepted this challenge.

At last one of them said he could not even yet comprehend how it was that I could remain an old-fashioned believer in these days of "progress." "It was infidelity itself," I replied, "that early robbed me of the advantages of being an infidel."

Several expressed their surprise, and I told them that, after we had taken tea in the drawing-room (to which we were then summoned), I would, if they felt any curiosity upon the matter, and would allow a little scope to the garrulity of an old man, tell them

HOW IT WAS THAT INFIDELITY PREVENTED MY BECOMING AN INFIDEL.

AFTER tea I gave my story, as nearly as I can recollect, in the following way. Of course I cannot recall the precise words; but the order of the thoughts--how often have they been pondered!--I cannot be mistaken about. ____

It is now thirty years ago or more since I was passing through many of the mental conflicts in which I see so many of the young in the present day involved. I have no doubt that the majority of them will come out, probably after an eclipse more or less partial, very orthodox Christians,--so great are the revolutions of opinion which an experience of human life and the necessities of the human heart work upon us! As I look around me, I see few of my youthful contemporaries who have not survived their infidelity.

Far be it from me--(I spoke in a tone which, I imagine, they hardly knew whether to take as compliment or irony)--to affirm that the infidels of this day are like those I knew in my youth. I have no hesitation in saying of us, that a perfectly natural recoil--partly intellectual and partly moral--from the supernatural history, the peculiar doctrines, but, above all, the severe morality of the New Testament, was at the bottom of our unbelief. I have long felt that the reception of that book on the part of any human being is not the least of its proofs that it is divine, for I am persuaded there never was a book naturally more repulsive either to the human head or heart. All the prejudices of man are necessarily arrayed against it. I felt these prejudice, I am now distinctly conscious; nor was I insensible to the palpable advantages of infidelity;--its accommodating morality; its Large margin for the passions and appetites; its doubts of any future world, or its certainty that, if there were one, it would prove a universal paradise (for doubts and certainties are equally within the compass of human wishes); the absolute abolition of hell and every thing like in. I say I saw clearly enough the advantages which infidelity promised, and I acknowledge I was not insensible to them. I think no young men are likely to be.

I do not insinuate that similar advantages have any thing to do with those many peculiar revelations of religion which different oracles have in our day substituted for the New Testament. The arguments against Christianity, indeed, I do not find much altered; the substitutions for it, though distractingly various, are, I confess, in some respects different. Nay, we see that many of our "spiritualists" complain chiefly of the moral and spiritual deficiencies of Christianity; they are afraid, with Mr. Newman, of the conscience of man being DEPRESSED to the Bible standard! So that we must suppose that the aim of some, at least, of our infidel reformers, are prompted by a loftier ideal of "spiritual" purity than Christianity presents!

It certainly was not so then. I felicitate some of you, gentlemen, on being so much holier and wiser, nor only than we were, but even than Christ and his Apostles.

I have said I was not insensible to the advantages of infidelity; but nature had endowed me with prudence as well as passions; and I wanted evidence for what appeared to me its most gratuitous philosophy of the future,--for its too uncertain doubts of all futurity, and its too doubtful certainty of none but a happy one! I also wanted evidence of the falsehood of Christianity itself. As to the former, I shall not trouble you with my difficulties; there were indeed then, as now, an admirable variety of theories; but if I could have been convinced of the futility of the claims of Christianity, I believe I should have been easily satisfied as to a substitute; or rather, unable to decide between Chubb and Bolingbroke, Voltaire and Rousseau, I should most likely have tossed up for my religion.

It was the distractions with regard to the evidences of Christianity that ruined me; and at last condemned me to be a Christian.

I was first troubled, like so many in our day, about the miracles. I could hardly bring my mind to believe them. One day, talking with a jovial fellow whom I casually met (not of very strong mind indeed, but who made up for it by very strong passions) over the improbability of such occurrences, he exclaimed, as he mixed his third glass of brandy and water, "I only wonder how any one can be such a fool as to believe in any stuff of that sort? Do you think that, if the miracles had been really wrought, there could have been any doubters of Christianity?" He tossed off the brandy and water with a triumphant air; and I quite forgot his argument in compassion for his bestiality. I expostulated with him. "You may spare your breath, Mr. Solomon," said he. "May this be my poison (as it will be my poison)," mixing a fourth glass, "if I need any sermons on the subject. Hark ye,--I am perfectly convinced that the habit I am chained to will be the destruction of health, of reputation, of my slender means,--will reduce to beggary and starvation my wife and children,--and yet," drinking again, "I know I shall never leave it off."

"Good heavens!" said I. "Why, you seem as plainly convinced of the infatuation of your conduct as if miracle had been wrought to convince you of it.

"I am." he said, unthinkingly; "ten thousand miracles could not make it plainer; so you may 'spare your breath to cool your porridge,' and preach to one who is not already in the condemned cell."

I was exceedingly shocked; but I thought within myself,--It appears, then, that man may act against convictions, as strong as any that a miracle could produce. It is clear there are no LIMITS to the perversity with which a depraved will and passions can overrule evidence, even where it is admitted by the reason to be invincible. It does not follow, then, that a miracle (which cannot present conclusions more clear) must triumph over them. If the passions can defy the understanding, where it coolly acknowledges they cannot pervert the evidence, how much more easily may they cajole it to suggest doubts of the evidence itself! And what more easy than in relation to miracles? Such a phenomenon might from novelty produce a transient impression; but that would pass away, just as the vivid feelings sometimes excited by a sudden escape from death pass away; the half-roused debauchee resumes his old career, just as if he had never looked over the brink of eternity and shuddered with horror as he gazed. He who had seen a miracle might very soon, and probably would, if he did not like the doctrine it was to confirm, persuade himself that it was an illusion of his senses, for they have deceived him; unless, indeed, he saw a new miracle every day, and then he would be certain to get used to it. How much more easily could the Jews do this, who both hated the doctrine of Him who taught, and, not thinking miracles impossible, could conveniently refer them to Beelzebub!

I felt, therefore, that the brandy and water logic had perfectly convinced me that this was far too precarious ground on which to conclude that the miracles of the New Testament had been wrought.

I was further confirmed in my convictions of the illogical nature of all a priori views on the subject, by the whimsical differences of opinion among my infidel friends.

One told me that it was plain that miracles were "incredible," and "impossible," per se; but he was immediately contradicted by a second, who said that he really could not see any thing incredible or impossible about them; that all that was wanting to make them credible was sufficient evidence, which perhaps had in no case been given.

A third said, that it was of little consequence; that no miracle could prove a moral truth; and; taking a view just the opposite to that of my first acquaintance, swore that, if he saw a score of miracles, he should not be a bit the more inclined to believe in the authority of a religion authenticated by them.

Here was a fine beginning for an ingenuous neophyte, who was eager to be fully initiated in infidel theology!

It set me to examine the miracles themselves, and the evidence for them.

"They were the simple result of fraud practising upon simplicity," said one of the genuine descendants of Bolingbroke and Tindal.

I pondered over it a good deal. At last I said one day to another infidel acquaintance, "You ask me to believe that the miraculous events of the New Testament were contrivances of fraud; which, though ventured upon in the very eyes of those who were interested in detecting them, who must have been prejudiced against them, nay, the majority of whom (as the events show) were determined, whether they detected them or not, not to believe those who wrought them, were yet successfully practised, not only on the deluded disciples of the impostors, but on their unbelieving persecutors, who admitted them to be miracles, only of Beelzebub's performing. I really know not how to believe it. As I look at the general history of religion, I see that this open-day appeal to miracles--especially such as raising the dead--among prejudiced spectators interested in unmasking them is, if unsupported by truth, just the thing under which a religious enterprise inevitably fails."

I reminded him that the French prophets in England got on pretty well till their unlucky attempt to raise the dead, when the bubble burst instantly; that for this reason the more astute impostors have refrained from any pretensions of the kind, from Mahomet downwards; (How discreetly cautious, again, have the Mormonites been on this point!) that the miracles they professed to have wrought were conveniently wrought in secret, on the safe theatre of their mental consciousness; or that they were reserved for times when their disciples were predetermined to believe them, because they were cordial believers already in the religion which appealed to them! I said nothing of the unlikelihood of the instruments--Galilean Jews--whom the theory invests with such superhuman powers of deception; or of the prodigious intellect and lofty ambition with which it also so liberally endows these obscure vagabonds, who not only conceived, in spite of their narrow-hearted Jewish bigotry, such a system as Christianity, but proclaimed their audacious resolve of establishing it on the ruins of every other religion,--Jewish or Heathen. I said nothing of the still stranger moral attributes with which it invests them, (in spite of their being such odious tricksters, in spite of all their grovelling notions and exclusive prejudices,) as the teachers of a singularly elevated and catholic morality; what is still stranger as suffering for it,--strangest of all, as apparently practising it. I said nothing of what is still more wonderful, their acting this inconsistent part from motives we cannot assign or even imagine; their encountering obloquy, persecution, death, in the prosecution of their object, whatever it was. I said nothing of the innumerable and one would think inimitable, traits of nature and sincerity in the narrative of those who record these miracles, and which, if simulated by such liars, would be almost a miracle itself; a narrative, in which majestic indifference to human criticism is everywhere exhibited; in which are no apologies for the extraordinary stories told, no attempt to conciliate prejudice, no embellishment, no invectives (as Pascal says) against the persecutors of Christ himself;--they are simple witnesses, and nothing more, and are seemingly indifferent whether men despise them or not. I repeat, I said nothing of all these paradoxes; I insisted that the mere fact of the successful machination of false miracles, of such a nature, at so many points, in open day, in defiance of every motive and prejudice which must have prompted the world to unmask the cheat,--of a conspiracy successfully prosecuted, not by one, but by many conspirators, whose fortitude, obstinacy, and circumspection, both when acting together and acting alone, never allowed them to betray themselves,--was, per se, incredible; "and yet," said I to my friend, "you ask me to believe it?"

"I ask you to believe it?" cried he, in surprise which equalled my own. "I am not fool enough ask you to believe any thing of the kind: and they are fools who do. The miracles fraudulent machinations! no, no, it was, as you say, evidently impossible. And where shall we look for marks of simplicity and truthfulness, if not in the records which contain them. The fact is." said he (I should mention that it was just about the time that the system of "naturalism" was culminating under the auspices of Paulus of Heidelberg, from whom, at second hand, my infidel friend borrowed as much as he wanted),--"the fact is, that the compilers of the New Testament were pious, simple-minded, excellent enthusiasts, who sincerely, but not the less falsely, mistook natural phenomena for supernatural miracles. What more easy than to suppose people dead when they were not, and who were merely recovered from a swoon or trance? than to imagine the blind, deaf, or dumb to be miraculously healed, when in fact they were cured by medical skill? than to fancy the blaze of a flambeau to be a star, and to shape thunder into articulate speech, and so on? Christ was no miracle-worker, but he was a capital doctor."

I pondered over this "natural" explanation for a long time. At last I ventured to express to a third infidel friend my dissatisfaction with it. "Not only," said I, "is such a perpetual and felicitous genius for gross blundering, such absolute craziness of credulity, in strange contrast with the intellectual and moral elevation which the New Testament writers everywhere evince, and especially in the conception of that Ideal of Excellence which even those who reject all that is supernatural in Christianity acknowledge to be so sublime a masterpiece,--in whose discourses the most admirable ethics are illustrated, and in whose life they are still more divinely dramatized,--not only is such ludicrous madness of fanaticism at variance with the tone of sobriety and simplicity everywhere traceable; but,--what is more,--when I reflect on the number and grossness of these supposed illusions, I find it hard to imagine how to image how even individual could have been honestly stupid enough to be beguiled by them, and utterly impossible to suppose that a number of men should on many occasions have been simultaneously thus befooled! But, what is much more, how can those who must often have managed the phenomena which were thus misinterpreted into miracles,--how, especially, can the great Physician himself, who knew that he was only playing the doctor, be supposed honestly to have allowed the simple-minded followers to persist in so strange an error? Either he, or they, or both, must, one would think, have been guilty of the grossest frauds. But the mere number and simultaneity of such strange illusions, under such a variety of circumstances, render it impossible to receive this hypothesis. I cannot see, I said, that it is so very easy for a number of men to have been continually mistaking 'flambeaux' for 'stars,' 'thunder' for 'human speech,' and 'Roman soldiers' for 'angels.'"

My friend laughed outright. "I should think it is not easy, indeed!" he exclaimed, "especially that last. For my part, I see clearly, on this theory, that either the Apostles or their commentators were the most crazy, addle-headed wretches in the world. Either Paulus of Tarsus or Paulus of Heidelberg was certainly cracked: I believe the last. No, my friend; depend upon it that the Gospels consist of a number of fictions,--many of them very beautiful,--invented, I am inclined to believe, for a very pious purpose, by highly imaginative minds."

This sat me thinking again. And, in time, my doubts, as usual, assumed a determinate shape, and I hastened to another oracle of infidelity in hopes of a solution.

If the New Testament be supposed a series of fictions, I argued,--the work of highly imaginative minds for a pious purposes--there is perhaps a slight moral anomaly in the case (but I do not insist upon it): I mean that of supposing pious men writing fictions which they evidently wish to impose on the world as simple history, and which they must have known would, if received at all, be actually regarded as such; as, in fact, they have been. I do not quite understand how pious men should thus endeavor to cheat men into virtue, nor inculcate sanctity and truth through the medium of deliberate fraud and falsehood. But let that pass; perhaps one could forgive it. Other anomalies, far more inexplicable, strike me. That Galilean Jews (such as the history of the time represents them), with all their national and inveterate prejudices,--wedded not more to the law of Moses than to their own corruptions of it, bigoted and exclusive beyond all the nations that ever existed, eaten up with the most beggarly superstitions,--should rise to the moral grandeur, the nobility of sentiment, the catholicity of spirit, which characterize the Gospel, and, above all, to such an ideal as Jesus Christ,--this is a moral anomaly, which is to me incomprehensible: the improbability of Christianity having its natural origin in such a source is properly measured by the hatred of the Jews against it, both then and through all time. I said I could as little understand the intellectual anomalies of such a theory. Could men, among the most ignorant of a nation sunk in that gross and puerile superstition of which the New Testament itself presents a true picture, and which is reflected in the Jewish literature of that age, and ever since,--a nation whose master minds then and ever since (think of that!) have given us only such stuff as fills the Talmud, --could such men, I said, have created such fictions as those of the New Testament,--reached such elevated sentiments, or conveyed them in perfectly original forms, embodied truth so sublime in a style so simple? Throughout those writings is a peculiar tone which belongs to no other compositions of man. While the individuality of the writers not lost, there are still peculiarities which pervade the whole, and have, as I think, justly been called a Scripture style. One of their most striking characteristics, by the way, is a severely simple taste; a uniform freedom from the vulgarities of conception, the exaggerated sentiment, the mawkish nonsense and twaddle, which disfigure such an infinitude of volumes of religious biography and fiction which have been written since. Could such men attain this uniform elevation? Could such men have invented those extraordinary fictions,--the miracles and the parables? Could they, in spite of their gross ignorance, have so interwoven the fictitious and the historical as to make the fiction let into the history seem a natural part of it? Could they, above all, have conceived the daring, but glorious, project of embodying and dramatizing the ideal of the system they inculcated in the person of Christ? And yet they have succeeded, though choosing to attempt the wonderful task in a life full of unearthly incidents, which they have somehow wrought into an exquisite harmony! But even if one such man in such an age and nation could have been found equal to all this, could we, I argued, believe that several (with undeniable individual varieties of manner) were capable of working into the picture similarly unique, but different materials, with similar success, and of reproducing the same portrait, in varying posture and attitude, of the great Moral Idea? Could we believe that, in achieving this task, not one, but several, were intellectual magicians enough to solve that great problem of producing compositions in a form independent of language,--of laying on colors which do not fade by time; so that while Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, suffer grievous wrong the moment their thoughts are transferred into another tongue, these men should have written so that their wonderful narrative naturally adapts itself to every dialect under heaven?

These intellectual anomalies, I confessed,--if these had been all,-- staggered me. As Lord Bacon said that he would sooner believe "all the fables of the Talmud, than that this universal frame was without a mind," so I could sooner believe all those fables, than that minds that can only produce Talmuds should have conceived such fictions as the Gospel. I could as soon believe that some dull chronicler of the Middle Ages composed Shakspeare's plays, or a ploughman had written Paradise Lost; only that, to parallel the present case, we ought to believe that four ploughmen wrote four Paradise Losts! Nay, I said, I would as soon believe that most laughable theory of learned folly, that the monks of the Middle Ages compiled all the classics! Nor could it help me to say that it was Christians, not Jews, who compiled the New Testament; for they must have been Jews before they were Christians: and the twofold moral and intellectual problem comes back upon our hands,--to imagine how the Jewish mind could have given birth to the ideas of Christianity, or have embodied them in such a surpassing form. And as to the intellectual part of the difficulty,--unhappily abundant proof exists in Christian literature that the early Christians could as little have manufactured such fictions as the Jews themselves! The New Testament is not more different from the writings of Jews, or superior to them, than it is different from the writings of the Fathers, and superior to them. It stands alone, like the Peak of Teneriffe. The Alps amidst the flats of Holland would not present a greater contrast than the New Testament and the Fathers. And the further we come down, the less capable morally, and nearly as incapable intellectually, do the rapidly degenerating Christians appear, of producing such a fiction as the New Testament; so that, if it be asked whether it was not possible that some Christians of after times might have forged these books, one must say with Paley, that they could not.