Letter V. The Criterion of Truth

Mr. Mansel’s Second Letter.—Religious Philosophy.—Mysticism.—the Criterion of Truth.

My dear Sir,

I did not enter upon the theological topics which were considered in my last letter, because I was in a hurry to introduce them before we had settled whether the maxim of Sir William Hamilton did or did not prove that a knowledge of the Infinite or Eternal or Absolute is impossible for human beings. It was Mr. Mansel who forced me into them. He could not, apparently, lay the ground of his religious philosophy without referring to them. He could not begin to build himself, till he had swept away certain thoughts about the Atonement and Incarnation which had been put forth by divines or philosophers. Being driven to this necessity, I have inquired what those doctrines are which the Bampton Lecturer complains of other men for not believing, or for not fully believing. I have asked what is implied in the most full belief of them, in the reception of them as an actual Gospel to be delivered to mankind. Clearly this was implied, that they were not mere doctrines or opinions contained in a book, or generalized by us from a book. If the doctrine of the Atonement was not false as a doctrine, as an opinion, there must have been an actual Reconciliation between God and His creatures in the person of His Son. If the doctrine of the Incarnation was not false as a doctrine, the Eternal Son must have actually come forth from the Eternal Father, and have taken human flesh, and have dwelt among men; the nature and glory of the Eternal God must have come forth in the man, so that He could say, “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” You and I had to determine whether, in this sense, we could receive the Incarnation and Atonement,—whether, in this sense, we could proclaim them to men. For if we called on any human being to receive them as doctrines, and yet did not set them forth as facts, it seemed that we were committing a huge injustice to our fellows, deceiving our own selves, violating the trust we had received from God. But supposing we could do this,—supposing we believed that the word Gospel was not a treacherous sound, and that there is indeed a message from God to man,—then it seemed that we must rejoice in every indication which we found anywhere that men are seeking after the knowledge of God, and cannot be content without it. From whatever point such inquiries might start, whatever forms they might take, however they might be blended with confusion, contradiction, denial, there could be no doubt that they denoted a craving and a necessity which God Himself had awakened, and which He would satisfy. If they were attempts to solve by forms, phrases, and notions, that which demanded a real, not a verbal solution, the perplexity of those attempts which, of course, we had experienced ourselves and felt to be a human perplexity, would give them a deep interest for us; if they were attempts to break through all phrases, formulas, intellectual subtleties, and to reach that which lies behind them and beneath them,—then, however they might fail, they would be still more affecting proofs that God was inspiring men with a passion for that which they found was too large for them to grasp, and yet was altogether necessary to them. If, in the endeavour to get rid of their own partial conceits and notions, and to find a ground which was beneath all, they were often entangled in those conceits and notions, we should again recognize men struggling as we struggle,—we should again perceive how wide, human, universal, God’s revelation must be.

For these reasons, I contended that the controversy which gave so much occupation to men’s thoughts in the Middle Ages, the realistic and nominalistic controversy in its different stages, was a subject of profound interest and instruction to the modern theologian, inasmuch as it taught him how near words and things lie to each other,—what demands the Conscience and Reason of men make for Realities,—how they witness that the highest of all must be the most real, the ground of other reality, how apt we are to confound notions and dogmas and conclusions of our intellect, with the truths to which they refer, and so to turn truths into mere names or mere opinions. I thought the rebellion against school logic just as full of meaning as the perplexities of that logic, and more consolatory,—because it is a deep, authentic testimony that human beings, the moment they are roused to the feeling that they are human, must look above and beyond themselves, must rise out of themselves, whether they can prove their right to do it logically or not. And for us even more interesting is that direction of men’s minds which has been so manifest during the last hundred years,—that direction which, as I said, made it impossible for us to adopt Butler’s phrase of Natural and Revealed Religion,—though it made Butler’s teaching respecting a revelation of God through the Constitution of Nature and through Man all the more precious.

I follow an excellent precedent, which Mr. Mansel has set us at the close of each of his Lectures, in thus recapitulating the lessons which we have been learning from his statements and from the facts which he has adduced. I am particularly anxious to do so at the commencement of his second Lecture, because that is (1) the one in which he has formally announced what is the object and the character of his “religious philosophy;” (2) the one in which he has applied himself most vigorously to the work of demolishing the dream of Mystics and Rationalists that there is any criterion of truth in man; (3) the one in which he has exhibited most of his scholastical skill in dealing with our notions of Cause, of the Absolute, and the Infinite; and in destroying Pantheism. This last portion of the Lecture I reserve for a separate letter. To the other two divisions I address myself now.

(1.) I have used the phrase “Religious Philosophy.” It is Mr. Mansel’s. The following extract will tell you what he does and does not mean by it.

“A philosophy of religion may be attempted from two opposite points of view, and by two opposite modes of development. It may be conceived either as a Philosophy of the Object of Religion; that is to say, as a scientific exposition of the nature of God; or as a Philosophy of the Subject of Religion; that is to say, as a scientific inquiry into the constitution of the human mind, so far as it receives and deals with religious ideas. The former is that branch of Metaphysics which is commonly known by the name of Rational Theology. Its general aim, in common with all metaphysical inquiries, is to disengage the real from the apparent, the true from the false: its special aim, as a Theology, is to exhibit a true representation of the Nature and Attributes of God, purified from foreign accretions, and displaying the exact features of their Divine Original. The latter is a branch of Psychology, which, at its outset at least, contents itself with investigating the phenomena presented to it, leaving their relation to further realities to be determined at a later stage of the inquiry. Its primary concern is with the operations and laws of the human mind; and its special purpose is to ascertain the nature, the origin, and the limits of the religious element in man; postponing, till after that question has been decided, the further inquiry into the absolute nature of God.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 34, 35.)

Though we are entering, you see, upon an inquiry that is to be very accurate and scholastic, the two principal words which are to engage our attention are left undefined. We are not told what Religion is; we are not told what Philosophy is. I have explained already why I do not pretend to supply Mr. Mansel’s deficiencies with respect to the first word. I think it is a peculiarly ambiguous one, and one that is likely to continue ambiguous, because we connect it habitually with the study and treatment of the Bible, though the Bible itself gives us no help in ascertaining the force of the word, apparently sets no great store by it or any similar one. So as far as I am able to make out, it is best used to denote certain processes or habits or conditions of our own minds, so that, “the subject of religion,” as opposed to the “object” of it, will be the subject of a subject, our thoughts about our thoughts—about what?

Philosophy is a word which is much more easy to define. Sir William Hamilton has given it its natural, legitimate force, when he has called it a Search after Wisdom; he has shown what is its relation to man, when he has adopted Plato’s phrase, and described man as a Hunter after Truth. Supposing, as I have said already, there was a Truth to meet this search, a living Object to present itself to a creature who was made to pursue that object, we might have something to speak of which is not philosophy, whatever other name you give it. But with such an Object Mr. Mansel will have nothing to do. To begin from that, is to involve yourself in Mystical Theology; to suppose we have any faculties for seeking that or testing it when it is presented to us, is to involve yourself in Rational Theology. The only escape from both is a philosophy of religion, i.e. if we add the definition we have now got to the previous one, a search after the way in which we should think about our thoughts—about what? See whether the following passages do not bear out my statement.

On the other hand, the second method of philosophical inquiry does not profess to furnish a direct criticism of Revelation, but only of the instruments by which Revelation is to be criticized. It looks to the human, not to the divine, and aspires to teach us no more than the limits of our own powers of thought, and the consequent distinction between what we may and what we may not seek to comprehend….

Religious criticism is itself an act of thought; and its immediate instruments must, under any circumstances, be thoughts also. We are thus compelled in the first instance to inquire into the origin and value of those thoughts themselves.—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 36, 38.)

I wish to make one remark before I proceed. Mr. Mansel has been celebrated by one of his reviewers as a writer who appeals to the common sense of Englishmen against the wild and fantastic notions of the Medieval period, or of modern Germany and France. Here, if anywhere, we are to look for the justification of that claim. The religious philosophy which is announced in this programme, is expressly designed to deliver us from the absurdities and ravings of Mystics and Rationalists. This is the sword which is to lay low the Eckarts and Taulers of the fourteenth century, the Hegels and Schellings of the nineteenth. Now, I ask you to make this experiment with any English gentleman you know. Set before him Mr. Mansel’s statement of his purpose, not in my words but in his. You and I ought to make our message intelligible to the uneducated as well as the educated: it is meant for both. But you would not be dealing fairly with Mr. Mansel if you made that demand upon him. He is a learned man, addressing a University audience. Choose then the most educated man you can find, in the English sense of the word ‘educated.’ I mean, let him have had the full advantage of our public school and university training, and have profited by it. Let him then have had the discipline of public life, all that discipline which goes to cultivate what we call our practical faculty, our common sense. Let him be a man who has sounded the meaning of words, but who loves things better than words, and tests words by their relation to things. Let him have, if you please (I should like that additional qualification), an excessive prejudice against German philosophy. Try him with Mr. Mansel’s account of his religious philosophy, and tell me if he does not make some such observations as these upon it. ‘Why, my good Sir, you know that this is just what I abominate in those Teutonic doctors and divines. They seem to me to be always thinking about their own thoughts. I cannot open one of their books without finding something about the Begriff of this, or the Begriff of that; most of all they torment me with their Begriff of Religion. What do we want of any Begriff? We who are tossed about in the world want a God. Tell us of Him if you can. If you cannot, hold your peace. The other thing or nothing we do not need at all.’

(2.) Mr. Mansel’s purpose in submitting our thoughts about our thoughts about religion to a searching criticism, is that he may save Revelation from it. That is a delicate plant which the winds of heaven must not be permitted to visit too roughly. But the word Revelation surely is not exempted from criticism; we are not obliged to leave it in the vagueness which enwraps the word Religion. It must be the revelation of something to something. Is it the revelation of a religion? If it were, we should be able to know something of what that is; it would not be covered with the thick veil which Mr. Mansel allows to rest over it. Is it a revelation of God? So the Bible seems to say. That is its simple, obvious language. But if a revelation of Him, a revelation also to something. To what? Not to Angels, unless the Bible speaks falsely, but to Men. Not to the bodily eye of men, unless the Bible speaks falsely, for it says that the eye of the body has not seen God and cannot see Him. Then to some eye which is not in the body? So our Lord seems to say, for He speaks of a light that is in us which may become darkness. Here comes in Mr. Mansel’s critical religious philosophy. He undertakes to show that there is no such eye in man which can receive a revelation of God. Thus he proceeds with his demonstration:—

“Such a conviction may be possible in two different ways. It may be the result of a direct intuition of the Divine Nature; or it may be gained by inference from certain attributes of human nature, which, though on a smaller scale, are known to be sufficiently representative of the corresponding properties of the Deity. We may suppose the existence in man of a special faculty of knowledge, of which God is the immediate object—a kind of religious sense or reason, by which the Divine attributes are apprehended in their own nature: or we may maintain that the attributes of God differ from those of man in degree only, not in kind; and hence that certain mental and moral qualities, of which we are immediately conscious in ourselves, furnish at the same time a true and adequate image of the infinite perfections of God. The first of these suppositions professes to convey a knowledge of God by direct apprehension, in a manner similar to the evidence of the senses: the second professes to convey the same knowledge by a logical process, similar to the demonstrations of science. The former is the method of Mysticism, and of that Rationalism which agrees with Mysticism, in referring the knowledge of divine things to an extraordinary and abnormal process of intuition or thought. The latter is the method of the vulgar Rationalism, which regards the reason of man, in its ordinary and normal operation, as the supreme criterion of religious truth.

On the former supposition, a system of religious philosophy or criticism may be constructed by starting from the divine and reasoning down to the human: on the latter, by starting from the human and reasoning up to the divine. The first commences with a supposed immediate knowledge of God as He is in His absolute nature, and proceeds to exhibit the process by which that nature, acting according to its own laws, will manifest itself in operation, and become known to man. The second commences with an immediate knowledge of the mental and moral attributes of man, and proceeds to exhibit the manner in which those attributes will manifest themselves, when exalted to the degree in which they form part of the nature of God. If, for example, the two systems severally undertake to give a representation of the infinite power and wisdom of God, the former will profess to explain how the nature of the infinite manifests itself in the forms of power and wisdom; while the latter will attempt to show how power and wisdom must manifest themselves when existing in an infinite degree. In their criticisms of Revelation, in like manner, the former will rather take as its standard that absolute and essential nature of God, which must remain unchanged in every manifestation; the latter will judge by reference to those intellectual and moral qualities, which must exist in all their essential features in the divine nature as well as in the human.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 38-41.)

These, you perceive, are the two possible ways of arriving at any knowledge of God. Mr. Mansel has told us already that neither the Mystic nor the Rationalist necessarily rejects a Revelation. The principle of one or the other is just as absurd, according to him, with a Revelation as without it. All the attempts therefore which are made in this Lecture to enlist the sympathies of believers in the Bible on the side of his religious philosophy, by dwelling on the different objections to the Bible and the denials of the Bible which have proceeded from those who speak of a reason in man that can judge of a revelation, are rhetorical artifices, deserving of all commendation for their cleverness, but utterly worthless so far as the argument is concerned. What is said here against Mystics and Rationalists applies as directly, as sharply, to every person who believes as you and I believe, that we are bound in our sermons to set forth Christ as the Wisdom of God and the Power of God, and to take the words addressed to the Apostle Philip literally: “Have I been so long a time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen Me, hath seen the Father. How sayest thou then, Show us the Father?”

Do I then confess myself a Mystic or a Rationalist because I do not put in any plea for exemption from the charges of folly or of heresy which Mr. Mansel would fix upon them? I have answered that question already as far as Rationalism is concerned.

I have confessed that I have in myself an evil Rationalism, and that there is also a Rationalism which I desire to cultivate, which I believe it is killing the spirit in us not to have. I make the same confession precisely about Mysticism. I find a number of men, in all ages of the Christian Church, who have been called Mystics; I find them amongst Germans, Frenchmen, Englishmen, Italians,—amongst princes, priests, scholars, shoemakers, women,—amongst Franciscans, Dominicans, Jansenists, Lutherans, Calvinists, English High Churchmen, Quakers; I find among them those who have led the life of recluses, those who have stood by dying beds in hospitals, those who have preached to crowds and drawn crowds after them, those who have produced a moral reformation in the most hardened and ignorant. I find among them those who have been charged, perhaps rightly charged, with affecting obscurity, and those who have written the broadest, homeliest, most thoroughly idiomatic German or English. These men have differed in all their opinions, feelings, habits of mind. Even those who have stood to one another in the relation of pupil and teacher, like Eckart and Tauler, have been markedly unlike each other. Under the same name stand Sterry the chaplain of Cromwell, and Law the Nonjuror. There must be something which associates men so dissimilar together. In Mr. Mansel’s eyes it is something altogether evil, something worthy of his profoundest contempt. I cannot say so, seeing that I find every one of them to be an immeasurably better and wiser man than I am,—seeing there is not one of them, whose writings I have read or into whose life I have had any glimpse, that has not instructed me and done me good; scarcely one from whom I have not learnt increased reverence for the Scriptures and more distrust of my own judgment. Nevertheless I do think I have seen a tendency in them which offers an excuse for the bad name they have earned; I should not have understood it if I had not discovered it in myself. Mr. Mansel has represented it harshly, but perhaps not wrongly, when he speaks of the Mystics referring “the knowledge of divine things to an extraordinary and abnormal process of intuition or thought.” The description does not apply to any one of those I have named, in his highest and best moods. Some of them fought vehemently and almost to the death against it. Those who were followed in the fourteenth century by multitudes of listening peasants, could scarcely have deemed that they had some special “abnormal” insight. Still that is unquestionably the mystical temptation. Out of it have come a multitude of conceits respecting the meaning of Scripture, a number of fantastical speculations respecting Nature, a number of harsh judgments respecting men of a different character from their own, a number of sensual apparitions which often contradict the principles they are most eager to assert.

There is that in this habit which may ripen into a settled spiritual pride. Of that pride these men, so far as I can make out, gave few indications. But whence could the motive to it have arisen in minds like theirs? They had been dwelling, most of them, in a scholastical atmosphere, talking and thinking much about religion and religious motives, contemplating the world around them with some pity, speculating much on opinions right and wrong. At one crisis of their lives they were aroused to feel that they wanted something else than a religion, or a philosophy of religion. One whom they could not see, or who they thought was afar off, seemed to come very nigh to them, to question them about themselves, to bring not their acts and words merely, but them, the doers of the acts, the speakers of the words, into His clear and piercing light. The process was terrible. Out of it they emerged different men. The visible things with which they had conversed, looked shadowy and indistinct; that which was unseen had a fixedness, a certainty, which they could not express in words, which none who were about them appeared to recognize. ‘We are out of the region of notions and appearances. We are in contact with Him who is.’ For a time they were sure this was the sane, healthful condition of a man. ‘In himself nothing, living by trust on One always near him, growing more and more into acquaintance with Him,—is not this what every one of us is meant to be? Is not being out of this condition the anomaly?’ So they felt, so in their practical discourses they spoke. But yet, when they looked round upon the people with whom they associated, the religious, the respectable, was not there an excuse for saying, ‘These convictions of ours are special, abnormal? They do not belong to our race; they belong to us, a certain favoured and select portion of the race. Are we not new men, spiritual men, who can judge of all things, but can ourselves be judged of no man? Does not that text of St. Paul warrant us in vindicating to ourselves an intuition altogether unlike that which belongs to the herd of mere natural or soulish creatures.’¹

Excuses for self-exaltation surely! I have mentioned some of the antidotes to it; the sympathy of crowds, tendance on the sick. Insufficient, I should think, without actual bodily sufferings, and the discovery of internal evils, which all the knowledge of Good had not destroyed, perhaps had only brought into stronger illumination. But in the course of history has there not also been a counteraction to these dangers? Mr. Mansel has pointed out one, which in our day, I suspect, is working more effectually than we know, and which those who trace God’s hand in His Church and Universe will not fancy has existed without His providence and appointment. There are those vulgar Rationalists, so Mr. Mansel calls them, “who regard the Reason of man in its ordinary and normal operation as the criterion of religious Truth.”

It is not necessary that I should go over again the ground I travelled in my last letter. I tried then to show you that there is a disorderly operation of the Reason in us to which we are all prone, that which is busy in creating the object which it beholds, or else argues about it instead of contemplating it; —that there is a true and normal operation of the Reason, which we all recognize in reference to common things, an operation by means of which we discern that which is from that which merely seems or appears. Not to use this Reason in the daily pursuits of life, is to sink into the condition of an animal. One sees it in the liveliest exercise among those who are utterly incapable of drawing conclusions, who are not logicians, who can neither form dogmas nor understand them when they are formed. Among pure, true-hearted women, among honest mechanics, among those upon whose powers of sense and even of reflection death has laid his hand, this power of discerning the truth from the lie, the thing that is from that that is not, dwells often with enviable clearness. We turn to them as to oracles; does not the Statesman, with his hard experience, the Divine, with his well-learnt maxims and systems, find that they are seers while he is well-nigh blind?

Is this Reason critical only of low things? May it not also exercise a discernment in the highest? That is the question which has been especially raised in our time; that is the one to which Mr. Mansel gives his emphatic “No.” To me it seems that in making that denial, he is either forgetting what is the ‘normal’ use of the Reason in lower things, and speaking merely of its irregular use; or that if he is saying there is nothing in man which can distinguish between “the thief who cometh to steal and destroy, and the Shepherd who cometh that we might have life, and have it more abundantly”—he is simply setting at nought the words of Christ, and overthrowing the whole Bible. But I wish to show you how the assertion of this power by the Rationalist—whether he exercises it legitimately or illegitimately—affects the Mystic who is not only under Mr. Mansel’s ban for his abnormal intuitions, but is humbled in himself by the recollection of having claimed them. Now he begins to perceive that what he has to thank God for with his whole heart, was not for giving him something which He has refused to the race generally, but for opening in him that eye which belongs to us as men, and which, through our desire to magnify our own individual souls and to separate them from other men’s, we put out. So the words of St. Paul on which he had been used to rest his case, assume an entirely different aspect, and come forth to chastise his vanity, as well as to nourish his hope. Is not the spiritual man, as we are told in that very Epistle, the man who will not divide himself from others, division being the sign of carnality,—who will not make his own notions or opinions the standards for men, or the measures of God’s acts,—who will receive the things that are freely given him of God—who therefore has a faculty of discrimination, which does not suffer him to be deluded by impostors, or to confound the Devil with the true God?

In what I have said about the faculty of Reason, which one finds most alive in the simplest, truest, humblest people, often most dead in the clever and the learned,—in the writers of leading articles, and in doctors of divinity,—I may have seemed to take for granted a distinction of which Mr. Mansel has spoken in one of his notes thus:—

“If there is but one faculty of thought, that which Kant calls the Understanding, occupied with the finite only, there is an obvious end to be answered in making us aware of its limits, and warning us that the boundaries of thought are not those of existence. But if, with Kant, we distinguish the Understanding from the Reason, and attribute to the latter the delusions necessarily arising from the idea of the unconditioned, we must believe in the existence of a special faculty of lies created for the express purpose of deceiving those who trust to it.”—(Note 24 to p. 127; p. 364.)

This sentence, you perceive, settles the whole question. That happy, courteous phrase, ‘a faculty of lies,’ proceeding from an eminent philosopher, a great enemy of Dogmatism, one who sets out from the maxim, ‘Know thyself,’ ought to silence every objection and every argument. You will appreciate the full force of it, even though you may not be a reader of Kant, if you will turn back to that account of him and his special objects which I have extracted from Sir William Hamilton’s discussion on the Unconditioned. You will see there that the tendency of Kant’s mind was destructive,—that he applied the severest logic to the overthrow of the metaphysical or ontological notions of his predecessors,—that he did effectually sweep away, so Sir W. Hamilton thinks, all mere notions and conceptions about the Infinite. It was this man who, because he was a logician, could not bring himself to deny that there is something in us which takes hold of fact, something which will not be circumscribed by notions and conceptions, which confesses that which is. He felt that if there is no such faculty in man as this, there is not and cannot be any morality for man, there is not and cannot be any truth for man. It is because a stern necessity drove this philosopher to overleap the bounds of his own philosophy for the sake of reality, that Mr. Mansel says he believed in a faculty of lies created for the especial purpose of deceiving those who possess it. It is because he affirmed a principle so very like the principle of a conscience, for which Butler contends, that every blow to the one is practically and effectually a blow to the other, that a disciple of Butler, one who desires to cultivate the study and spirit of Butler in Oxford, uses language respecting Kant which is scarcely paralleled in philosophical, even in theological controversy.

You and I, however, are not concerned with the vindication of Kant. We are concerned in claiming that great concession which Kant made to common human beings, a concession of which the religious philosophy of Mr. Mansel seeks to deprive us.

If there is nothing in the people to whom we deliver our message but a faculty which forms notions, judges of opinions, criticizes documents, we know that we have not a Gospel to the poor—it is monstrous to pretend that we have. That faculty of forming notions, judging opinions, criticizing documents, is a peculiar one; it requires a special cultivation; the degrees in which those possess it in whom it has been cultivated, are more various than it is possible to express. The difference between Bentley and the most ignorant undergraduate who answers a question at an Oxford or Cambridge examination, is an inadequate measure of the variety in one direction. Those in whom the faculty exists in the highest degree, are not always the persons to whom one would appeal with confidence on a moral question. And when one compares their different exercises upon their own ground, e.g. the Discussion on the Epistles of Phalaris with the Commentary on Paradise Lost, one feels how a homely perception of facts is needful even to a critic, how worthless the merely critical power becomes without it. Even therefore if one wanted to bring out this power in its strength, one would have need to educate another first, one which is not special, but human. In a university, if that human faculty is denied or not appealed to, all special studies will be worthless,—yes, mischievous and accursed. But for the Minister of the Gospel, that is what he has to speak to: I had nearly said that only. It is because the Bible addresses that human faculty and not some special faculty, that it can bear to be translated into every tongue of the earth, that it can speak to all tribes and nations. For us to deny the existence of such a faculty, is simply to deny our own work. Any one who tells us that it does not exist, is bound also to tell us that if we are honest men we must relinquish that work.

‘What,’ you say, ‘does it depend upon our acceptance of a certain philosophy whether we shall do our work as Evangelists?’ Not the least. You need know nothing about philosophy. If you do not, you will take for granted the existence of this faculty to which you can speak. It is the ordinary postulate of an Englishman’s life that there is such a one. That is what he means when he says, ‘I do not care for your fine notions; I have something in me which tells me when a man is speaking truth or falsehood.’ Of course, he may be very much deceived about his own preference for truth over falsehood in any particular case; he may be bribed to like a lie better than the truth. But are you justified in telling him that he has not that faculty? Are you not destroying his soul if you do? Are you not saving his soul alive if you can persuade him to use that faculty, if you can teach him how he may use it,—who is helping him to use it,—who would deliver him from the falsehoods which are corrupting and enchaining him? This, I say, is the ordinary judgment of a practical man. And the part of Kant’s philosophy which Mr. Mansel rejects is the part which owns that the philosopher cannot interfere with this practical human faith,—that it is worth more than all the notions of the understanding, because it takes hold of that which is substantial,—worth more than all the conclusions of the understanding, because it converses with premisses.

‘Yes,’ Mr. Mansel will say, ‘but I acknowledge a faith which goes beyond these notions; I admit that the realm of existence is not bounded by the realm of thought. What I object to is your speaking of the Reason, as if that had anything to do with this faith, as if that were distinct from the Understanding.’ Now observe; about nomenclature I care nothing, or next to nothing. Throw over Kant’s nomenclature if you dislike it. There is no sacredness in the names of Understanding or of Reason; one cannot be quite certain whether they are respectively the best equivalents for the words which Kant has used—supposing that were a point of any importance. But we must not be cheated by compliments to our faith, nor yet by the distinction—all-important as it is when rightly apprehended—between thought and existence. Does the faith you speak of take hold of existence, or, as I should say,—for I do not like school-terms when I can get plain words,—of that which is? If not, it is not what we mean by faith; it is not the faith which is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It is an act of the mind; therefore I have to ask, Of what mind? It is the belief in something; then I have to ask, What is that something? The mind, according to Mr. Mansel, only gives out thoughts, and thoughts are in no connection with existence or that which is. Whence then comes this faith? Whither does it go? How should it be described? I know how it would be described by some persons; they would call it a faculty or the exercise of a faculty of lies. I do not like such language. Mr. Mansel who does, must vindicate the Faith which he speaks of from the imputation which he has bestowed upon Kant’s Reason.

What concerns you and me is that faith should be the act of the man himself, of that which is most truly, radically human in him, call it by what name you please, and that it should be in direct contact with that which is most living and most substantial. Less than this we will not accept from any philosopher, religious or irreligious. Any one who tells us of another faith than this, must begin with erasing the 11th chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews out of the Bible, must go on to destroy the whole Gospel which the Bible contains. Remember that that is the issue. We are not now talking about the Finite or the Infinite, the Relative or the Absolute. To those words, and to Mr. Mansel’s treatment of them, I hope to come in due time; I have not the least wish to avoid the fullest examination of what he says about them. But that is not our business now. I will repeat it even to weariness: the question is concerning that which is and that which is not; whether there is any faculty in man that can be brought to perceive that which is, and to reject that which is not, in any matter whatsoever; whether that faculty is extinguished when we are called to pay the highest reverence and worship to a certain object or objects; or whether it is this to which God himself appeals. For I must again beseech you not to be deceived by Mr. Mansel’s rhetoric into the supposition that what he is saying only concerns those who reject the Bible, or fancy that they are wiser than the writers of it. It concerns quite as much every one who accepts the Bible as God’s speech to man; it concerns the humblest believer in every cottage, on every hospital pallet.

He himself has told us that he is equally at war with those who start from the Divine and reason down to the Human, as with those who start from the Human and reason up to the Divine. He must be equally at war with both. On the other hand, those who accept a revelation of God to man, i.e. of the Divine meeting the Human, must be very careful indeed how they trifle with any of those efforts, even if they have been failures, of the Human to meet the Divine, lest haply they should be fighting not merely with the spirit of man, but with the Spirit of God. Mr. Mansel has said himself:—

“The Philosophy which reasons downwards from the Infinite is but an exaggeration of the true conviction that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways: the philosophy which reasons upwards from the human, bears witness, even in its perversion, to the unextinguishable consciousness that man, however fallen, was created in the image of God.” (p. 43.)

Just so. It is the very point for which I am contending, and therefore it must be your business and mine to recognize the truth of both these opposing principles, quite indifferent who calls us Mystics and who calls us Rationalists, because it is our business to show that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor His ways our ways,—because it is our business to tell men that they are created in the image of God, and that Christ, the express Image of God, has come to raise them out of their fall, and to renew them after that image. Our preaching is continually encountered by the argument, ‘We are fallen creatures; what can we know of God? how can we ever rise to the perception of the Eternal Truth and Goodness?’ Must we not answer that argument by appealing to every witness of the heart, the Conscience, the Reason,—if you will, to every contradiction of Philosophy,—that the spirit of man within us demands the knowledge of God, demands the perception of Eternal Truth and Goodness? If we can say also, ‘What the spirit of man seeks, the Spirit of God will give,’ may we not feel that we have indeed preached good news to our fellows?

Faithfully yours,