Part 42

In Hume, on the other hand, we have the mightiest of all sceptics in the literal sense of the term, inasmuch as he was purely a doubter and seems hardly to have felt the desire of arriving at any positive result. He who has given rise to so much controversy was himself uncontroversial. His writings, considered as the vehicle of his opinions, are the perfection of literary art. Over common minds the teacher who merely suspends judgment, seeming not to be in quest of positive truth, can never have much influence; but Hume had great influence over cultivated men of the world. His argument against the credibility of miracles, though it became as standard on one side as Paley’s apologue of the watch upon the other, will hardly bear examination. Assuming the existence of God and His care for man as His work, which Hume does not openly deny, there is no presumption against His revelation of Himself in the only conceivable way, which is by an interruption of the general course of things; there is rather a presumption that He would so reveal Himself. Nor can it be maintained that no degree of evidence, say that of a multitude of scientific men, after providing all possible safeguards against deception, would satisfy us of the fact.

Gibbon’s great work is instinct with the tendency of men of the world in the generation of Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and Hume. Its spirit is identical with that of Hume’s philosophy and history. It is of first-rate importance in the religious controversy as having opened the trenches historically against revealed religion in undertaking to account for the success of Christianity by natural causes. But its cynical treatment of that which, on any hypothesis, was the prevailing and formative force is unphilosophical and detracts largely from the value of the work. He who could imagine that man had been happiest in the Roman Empire under the Antonines was an apt partisan of Lord North. Gibbon no doubt imagined himself a rich patrician of his golden era. Would he have liked to be a Roman slave? Conyers Middleton in his _Free Inquiry_ into the ecclesiastical miracles glanced at the credibility of the Gospel miracles and had thus partly paved the way for Gibbon.

Among the disintegrating forces may be counted Unitarianism, which was growing among thinkers, and probably before very long became the mask for profounder scepticism in Protestant Europe as it did afterwards in New England. We find it in England on the eve of the French Revolution, combined with science in Priestley and with mathematics and philosophy in Price.

Among the apologetic and defensive forces may be numbered the practical vindication of Christianity by a certain revival of piety in the Anglican Church which produced Wilberforce, Cowper, and the Evangelicals, and still more by the religious crusade of John Wesley. Wesley’s achievements, however, were among the poor and illiterate, and were consequently demonstrations of the power of Christianity rather than of its truth. His Church had the advantage of being born, not like other Protestant Churches in doctrinal controversy, but in evangelical reaction against the impiety and vice of the age. It was, however, not undogmatic; besides what might be called the dogma of sudden conversion, it implicitly accepted not only the literal inspiration of Scripture, but the bulk of the Anglican Articles, to which was afterwards added, as an ordination test, general agreement with the more important of Wesley’s sermons.

The French Revolution brought on a strong reaction against the free-thought which had been hideously travestied in the blasphemous follies, and sullied by the crimes, of the Jacobins. In England the Tory mob, with true instinct, sacked the library and laboratory of Priestley. Coleridge, who, like other young men of intellect, had hailed the revolutionary dawn, shared the reaction, and combining in a curious way German metaphysic with English orthodoxy and Establishmentarianism, produced a religious system which perhaps entitles him to high place among English theologians in the proper sense of that term, as denoting a philosophic inquirer into the nature of the Deity and the relations between the Deity and man; though, as his guiding light was philosophy, not authority or tradition, he may in that respect be numbered among the promoters of free-thought and of the results to which it was ultimately to lead. Such free-thinking as there was naturally took a turn answering in violence to the repression. Tom Paine assailed orthodoxy, not with freedom only, but with enmity the most virulent. Though far from an attractive, he is by no means an unimportant figure. His criticisms of the credibility and morality of Scripture, unlearned and coarse as they were, went, not over the heads of the people like the high-flying and metaphysical speculations, but straight to their understandings and their hearts. It was difficult for apologetic fencers to parry such home thrusts. The same sort of effect has been produced by the irreverent frankness of Ingersoll in our own day. Shelley rushed from the religion of Eldon into what he took for Satanism; though his Satan is really the power of good, while the God of Eldon, as viewed by him, is the Devil.

Wrecked, body and soul, by the Thirty Years’ war, and afterwards stifled under a group of petty despotisms, Germany was for a time lost to intellectual progress. Her churches and their clergy, the Lutheran clergy at least, were in a very low condition. When her intellect began to work again, it was in a recluse and highly speculative way, the natural consequence of its exclusion from politics and other fields of action, together with the complete severance of the academical element from the people. Hence, from Leibnitz and Lessing onward, there was a train of metaphysical philosophies, each of them professing to find in our consciousness a key to the mystery of Being and an account of God, of His counsels, and of the relation between Him and man. In derision of such speculations it was said that to the French belonged the land, to the English the sea, to the Germans the air. Essentially incapable of verification, these theories went on shifting in nebulous succession and, with the exception of that of Kant, may now be said to have vanished, leaving scarce a rack behind. Even of the great Hegel little remains. Leibnitz, with his “best of all possible worlds,” hardly survived _Candide_. Still, we must speak with respect and gratitude of these efforts of minds, powerful in their way and devoted to truth, to solve for us the great mystery. Speculation so free could not fail to promote general freedom of thought, and the treatment by these thinkers of the popular and established religion was as philosophic as possible, though, with the exception of Feuerbach, they were theists. By Lessing much was done for the recognition of all religions and the promotion of universal toleration.

Presently, however, came direct criticism of the Bible, the way to which, long before, had been lighted by Spinoza. It assumed a strange form in the work of Paulus, who applied to the Gospel miracles a solvent something like that which Euhemerus had applied to the Pagan Pantheon, reducing them to natural occurrences turned into miracles by a devout imagination. The miraculous fish with the coin in its mouth was a fish which would sell for the coin. The miraculous feeding of the five thousand was brought within the compass of belief by supposing that they were not fasting, but had only gone without a regular meal. Christ’s walking on the water was his holding out a hand from the shore to Peter who had leaped into the water to ascertain whether it was really Christ that was walking on the shore.

Far more serious, and a startling blow to orthodoxy, was the _Life of Jesus_, by Strauss, who undertook to explain the Gospels on the mythical theory, showing that the reputed incidents of the life of Jesus and his miracles were mythical fulfilments of Old Testament prophecies and aspirations. From this, his first theory, Strauss afterwards partly receded, and in his second _Life of Jesus_, after a critical examination of the authorities, he comes to the conclusion that “few great men have existed of whose history we have so unsatisfactory a knowledge as that we have of Jesus.” The figure of Socrates, he thinks, though four hundred years older, is beyond all comparison more distinct. The momentous step, however, had been taken. Jesus had become the subject of a biography founded on critical examination of the materials, and Strauss is right in saying, as he does in his second _Life_, that when the biography was seriously taken up the doom of the theological conception was sealed. Lives of Christ, including even the most popular of them, however they may pretend and struggle to be orthodox, are really, as Strauss says, destructive of the theological conception, while they do not help to confirm our loyalty to historical truth. Ferdinand Christian Baur and his Tübingen school applied historical criticism to the early Christian Church, showing the conflict in it of the Pauline with the Petrine tendency, and bringing it altogether, as well as its source, within the pale of human history. Historical criticism of the Gospels was furthered by the progress of historical criticism in general, shown by such a work as Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. Wolf’s treatment of the Homeric poems had already marked the birth of a critical spirit, which was aided by historical and archæological discoveries of all kinds, as well as by the growing influence of science on the methods of religious and anthropological speculation.

There was an evangelical reaction against rationalism in Germany with a train of controversialists and commentators reputed as orthodox. Yet even in these, more or less of a rationalist undertone is perceived. There is a tendency more or less apparent to minimize the supernatural, to throw the miracles into the background, and dwell rather on the spiritual significance of Christ’s character and words. This is very conspicuous in Neander, the head of the line. An orthodox English divine such as Mr. Rose might well, after a survey of German theology, make a rather mournful report.

In Holland, ever the land of free speculation, criticism advanced without fear, and at last by the pen of Kuenen arraigns the authenticity, antiquity, and authority of the historical books of the Old Testament to an extent totally subversive of their character as records of a primeval history, much more as organs of a divine revelation.

German philosophy had mingled with English theology through Coleridge. German criticism of the Bible did not lag much behind. Milman’s _History of the Jews_, dealing with the subject in the spirit of an ordinary history, treating patriarchs as Arab sheiks and minimizing miracles, gave a serious shock to orthodox sentiment in England. Even what was deemed orthodox in Germany appeared rationalistic to the Anglican divines. To the evangelicals especially, whose leader was Simeon, and who occupied many of the fashionable pulpits, anything like critical treatment of the sacred history seemed impiety. Yet they, with their inward persuasion of conversion and spiritual union with the Saviour, as well as the Quaker with his inner light, or the Roman Catholic with his implicit faith in the Church, were really beyond the critic’s reach.

A long line of British leaders of thought and controversialists succeeds. Rationalist and heterodox in different degrees were Thomas Arnold, Frederick Maurice, Stanley, Jowett, the writers of _Essays and Reviews_, and Robertson, of Brighton. Decidedly sceptical were Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, and James Anthony Froude. Reaction on the High Church side found leaders in Pusey, Newman, and Hurrell Froude. The evangelical pulpit combated at once rationalism and High Church. The state Church was awakened from its long torpor, and under the inspiration of its High Church party strove to reanimate its Convocation.

Frederick Maurice impressed more by his character than by his writings, which were fatally obscure. He was rationalist enough to be deprived of his professorship in an Anglican college. At the same time he could persuade himself that subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was no bondage but a security for free thought. To his yoke-fellow, Kingsley, is to be traced “muscular Christianity,” a rather suspicious adaptation of the Sermon on the Mount to our times. But the pair exercised more influence as social missionaries, striving, in conjunction with Thomas Hughes, to give the labor movement a religious turn, than as religious philosophers or critics.

Thomas Arnold, the head-master of Rugby, was a man of noble character, powerful mind, and intense earnestness of purpose. He was a firm believer in Christianity as a revealed religion. But he held a most liberal view of the Church. He would have admitted to it all the sects of dissenters and have identified it as far as possible with the nation. His theory of the identity of the Church with the nation probably came to him from his passionate study of the ancient commonwealths. He forgot that the philosophers of Greece, though they might sacrifice a cock to Æsculapius, were really outside the state religion, and that the state religion made the chief of them drink hemlock. Prince of educators as he was, he sometimes laid too heavy a strain on his pupils, and prematurely developed their speculative tendencies. In the case of Clough especially, mental health and vigor seem to have been impaired by premature development.

With Thomas Arnold may be coupled his friend Whately, who, though, as Primate of the state Church of Ireland, he held the most equivocal of prelacies, was, by reason of his strong understanding, his fearless character, and his shrewd wit, essentially an iconoclast and a rebuker of ecclesiastical pretensions, as well as a vigorous promoter of education. His keen sayings flew abroad, but his personal influence was greater than his influence as a divine. His _Historic Doubts_ was an apologetic _jeu d’esprit_ which told greatly in its day.

Bishop Connop Thirlwall was a man of first-rate power. At Cambridge he had set out as a rationalist, translating German theology of a heterodox cast and Niebuhr’s _History of Rome_. But his intellect was curbed by a bishopric, and though he delivered liberal charges and personally exerted a liberal influence, he was lost to the direct service of reason.

Arthur Stanley was Arnold’s best boy, his most devoted adherent, and his model biographer. He embraced Arnold’s theory of the Church as coextensive with the nation and carried his theory of the supremacy of the state so far as to feel a certain sympathy with “Bluidie Mackenzie” as the defender of a state Church against the independence of the Covenanters of Scotland. His name was for a time a terror to all the orthodox, High Church or Low. Yet there was little that was terrible about him. The sweetness of his character was remarkable. His liberality of religious sentiment was boundless. But he had little of the logical or critical faculty, and showed scarcely the desire, still less the ability, to make his way to definite truth. His passion was history, and the historical picturesque was his forte. In a haze of this to the last he floated, coming to no determinate conclusion. His best works, apart from biography, are not his commentaries or sermons, but his lectures on the history of the Russian Church and his _Sinai and Palestine_; although we cannot help smiling when, in his _Sinai and Palestine_, we see him hunting with passionate interest and implicit faith for the imaginary scenes of mythical events.

Stanley’s yoke-fellow, Jowett, was a man of a different cast of mind and of higher calibre, as all the world now knows. But in him also, though from different causes, there was the same want of inclination to grasp or capacity for grasping definite truth. These two men were eminently typical of an age of religious dissolution, when people felt the ground of faith giving way under their feet and were striving, by some sort of compromise, to save themselves from falling into the abyss. That Jowett had drifted very far away, not only from orthodoxy, but from his belief in Christianity as a miraculous revelation, and even from belief in our knowledge of the historical character of Christ, the posthumous publication of his letters has plainly shown. How he could have reconciled it to his conscience to remain a clergyman, to hold the clerical headship of an Anglican college, to perform the service and administer the sacrament, it is not easy to see. We can only say that the position was found tenable by one of the most upright and disinterested of mankind. Jowett’s defence probably was and is the defence of others, and the indication of spreading doubt. Clergymen are educated men and can hardly be proof against that which is carrying conviction to other minds.

Robertson, of Brighton, as an eloquent preacher and spiritual leader, rather on the rationalist side, is not to be forgotten. In his sermons there is an evident tendency to liberalize Christianity and to present it ethically as a religion of purity and love rather than as a miraculous revelation which did not escape the keen scent of alarmed orthodoxy and exposed the preacher to some social persecution.

By this time a strong current in an opposite direction had begun to flow. The religious movement was closely connected with the political movement, especially where there was a state Church. Alarmed by the progress of liberalism, which had carried the Parliamentary Reform bill and threatened to withdraw from the Church of England the support of the state, some of the clergy began to look about for a new foundation of their authority, and thought that they found it in apostolical succession and the sacerdotal theory of the sacraments. The leaders of the movement were Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford; Henry Newman, a Fellow of Oriel College; and, in its opening, Hurrell Froude, in whose _Life of Becket_ its spirit and aims are plainly revealed. It took practically the shape of an attempt to return to the priestly Middle Ages. Oxford, with its mediæval colleges, the Fellows of which were then clerical and celibate, formed the natural scene of such an attempt. Pusey, who, by his academical rank, gave his name to the movement, was a man of monastic character and mind, with a piety intense but austere and gloomy enough almost to cling to such a doctrine as the irremissibility of post-baptismal sin. Henry Newman was a man of genius, a writer with a most charming and persuasive style, great personal fascination, and extraordinary subtlety of mind. What he lacked was the love of truth; system, not truth, was his aspiration; and as a reasoner he was extremely sophistical, however honest he might be as a man. In this respect he presented a singular contrast to his brother, Francis Newman, in whom the love of truth was the ruling passion, intense and uncompromising, while he was totally devoid of the gifts of imagination with which Henry was endowed. Henry Newman’s attempt to revive mediæval doctrines presently landed him, with his immediate following, in the mediæval Church. Pusey was illogical enough to refuse the leap. He was also believed to be rather strongly attached to the leadership and spiritual directorship which, as a magnate of the Church of England, he enjoyed. He went so near to the brink as, in his _Irenicon_, to avow that nothing separated him from Rome but the unmeasured autocracy of the Pope and the excessive worship of the Virgin, both of them mere questions of degree. Manning in time followed: an aspiring hierarch who would probably have stayed in the Church of England if they had made him a bishop. Passing into the Church of Rome, he became a Cardinal, an active intriguer of the Vatican, and an extreme Ultramontane, outvying Newman, who, when the convert’s first ecstasy was over, might be said to be converted rather than changed.

The mediævalizing movement owed much to the fascinations of mediæval art. The Gothic churches and cathedrals and the Gothic ruins of abbeys have been very powerful conservators and propagators of the faith of their builders. It is curious that this talisman should have been renounced by the Church of Rome in favor of the heathen style, of which St. Peter’s is the paragon, magnificent but, in a religious sense, unimpressive.

By the progress of Tractarianism British Protestantism was alarmed and incensed. The Oxford Convocation was the scene of a pitched battle brought on by a bold deliverance of Ward, a disciple of Newman, more logical and daring than his master, who exultingly proclaimed that English clergymen were embracing “the whole cycle of Roman doctrine.” Ward, after a struggle which was a sort of Armageddon of High and Low Church, was condemned and deprived of his degree. Newman’s conversion speedily followed. The rationalists, such as Stanley and Jowett, voted on liberal grounds against the condemnation of Ward.

A storm from the other quarter was raised by _Essays and Reviews_, a collection of seven essays written by clergymen of the rationalistic school, having for its object the liberalizing of inquiry in the Church. The manifesto at the time created an immense sensation, though in the present advanced state of doctrinal disintegration it would almost pass unnoticed. One of the essays, the most innocent, it is true, which nevertheless committed the author to the general object of the combination, was written by the present Archbishop of Canterbury, and caused the High Church clergy to protest against his appointment as a bishop. The glove thus thrown down was taken up by the High Churchmen. The writers were arraigned for heresy before the Privy Council, and, as Carlyle said, you had a bench of old British judges, “like Roman augurs, debating with iron gravity questions of prevenient grace, supervenient moonshine, and the color of the bishop’s nightmare if that happened to turn up.” Before the same tribunal was arraigned Colenso, a missionary bishop of South Africa and an eminent mathematician, whose arithmetical instincts had led him to examine the numerical statements of the Pentateuch, with highly heretical results. Both the essayists and Bishop Colenso escaped conviction. The Committee of Privy Council, if it was judicial, was also political, and it was resolved, if possible, to avert a rupture in the state Church. Veteran lawyers had little difficulty in finding grounds for acquittal when they did not choose to convict. The language of the impugned writings was seldom so precise as to defy the power of interpretation. “Either the passage means what I say, or it has no meaning,” thundered the counsel for the prosecution. “Is it not possible, Mr. Blank, that the passage may have no meaning?” was the reply of the judge. The Rev. Mr. Voysey, however, succeeded in obtaining the honor of a conviction. Tendered a week to retract, he thanked the court for the opportunity they had given him of rejecting the offer of repurchasing his once cherished position in the Established Church by proclaiming himself a hypocrite.