Letter XI. Evidences of the Bible

Eighth Lecture.—Contents and Evidences of the Bible.—Paley.—Unfairness of Our Mode of Dealing with Evidence.—How the Bible Has Suffered from It.—What Evidences Have Wrought Convictions in Our Time.—Political, Theological, Philosophical Difficulties, How Met by the Bible.—Mr. Mansel’s Treatment of It.—Why He Must Be out of Sympathy with It.—Conclusion.

My dear Sir,

Thus far Mr. Mansel has taught us these lessons: That it is not right to be Dogmatists or Rationalists, or Mystics. That it is not possible to know anything about the Absolute and the Infinite. That it is not possible to rise above our own Consciousnesses and Conceptions. That it is not right to pray as the eclectical philosopher Schleiermacher prayed. That it is not right to think about the union of the Divine and human natures as Hegel or Marheinecke thought about it. That it is not in any department good to seek for principles satisfying to the Reason. That it is not possible for us to know that which is. That Philosophy does not teach us, any more than Religion, about the Many or the One. That we are not to esteem one Representation of the union of the Finite with the Infinite above another, except because it is revealed, since one is as impossible for us to conceive of as another. That we are not to know anything of an Absolute Morality. That there is not a general human Consciousness. That Forgiveness in man is not the image of God’s forgiveness. That we are not to hope for the final extinction of Evil. Thus far we have advanced at present. The Regulative Morality and the Regulative Revelation have brought us to this point. What remains must be contained in the Lecture we are now entering upon. If there is anything positive in the course, it will be there.

Mr. Mansel is fully aware that as yet he has established nothing. He admits that his demonstrations, however conclusive, are only preliminary. Preliminary to what? To a study of the ‘contents’ of the Scripture? By no means. To a study of the evidences in favour of their authenticity and inspiration. When we have finished Mr. Mansel, we are in a condition to enter upon the study of Paley. The object of this final Lecture is therefore to complain of the indifference which is shown in our days to external evidences—to show within what very narrow limits any argument grounded upon internal evidence must be confined; to give a summary of those points of evidence with which we are most familiar; to guard us against the danger of attaching any weight to plausible reasoning on the other side after we have once admitted that the probabilities on our own predominate; to warn us that the Scriptures must be taken altogether or rejected altogether; to propound a theory respecting Moral Miracles, which disposes of all objections to particular acts as not being in accordance with the moral character of God; to repeat what has been said before respecting the impossibility of our arriving at any conclusion about what is or is not in accordance with His character; to moderate the reasonings of some theologians of Mr. Mansel’s own school, who, he thinks, have too hastily affirmed that there is no relation between human qualities and divine; to deepen by these very cautions the sense of our incapacity to pronounce anything certain concerning the relation; finally, to urge the duty of our cultivating self-knowledge, as we can have no other knowledge.

I. I do not feel the temptation which Mr. Mansel deems is characteristic of our age, to undervalue Paley for being too historical. The more I meet those whose passion is for logical formulas and intellectual abstractions, the more I reverence that quality of his mind. It was connected with the transparency of his style, and with that simplicity of character which co-existed with a northern shrewdness, with a utilitarian creed, and with notions about moral honesty which would have disturbed it if it had not been part of himself. His love of evidence was cultivated in him, as it is in all Englishmen, by our institutions, especially by our jury system. It was not in the spirit of an advocate chiefly that he desired to make use of his skill in weighing the worth of testimony. He shared the feeling which now and then induces a young nobleman to throw aside his conventional dignity that he may wrestle or box with a mechanic, perhaps with a professional prize-fighter. It seemed to him that it was scarcely fair play to meet the objector to Christianity, or even to Theism, with a weight of traditional opinion, with the prescription of centuries on our side. He would do his best to cast off these advantages. He had confidence that his case could dispense with them. There was an apparent justice and manliness in this course which his countrymen, in whose habits of mind he so largely partook, were able to appreciate. The feeling that it was a homage to truth not to profit by assumptions, worked powerfully, if somewhat confusedly, in those who read the ‘Natural Theology,’ the ‘Evidences of Christianity,’ or the ‘Horæ Paulinæ.’ With respect to the first, even those who, like me, yield to the opinion of Kant and Mr. Mansel, that he has not proved anything, may yet be most thankful to him for having given them reasons for adoration which their coldness wants, the proof being sought and found elsewhere; may rejoice that any corrections which later discoveries have made in his science will not diminish but increase these reasons, however fatal they might be if we supposed we could not confess the Author of Nature till we understood His works. Again, the books which turn upon the authority of documents, will always suggest a number of thoughts even to those who read the books themselves, and find in them lessons which they prize more, and which carry more conviction to their minds than the most subtle observation of coincidences ever did or could impart.

II. Why then are Englishmen of this day, as Mr. Mansel complains, more indifferent to these evidences, even as they are presented by this able writer, than their fathers were? One very strong reason appears to me to be this, that the quality which recommended them to Paley and to men of his character, has been found signally wanting in them. The objector has not a clear stage for fighting his battle on. It has proved altogether an illusion that in managing these evidences no favour is shown to one side. I must speak what I have seen and know,—in some degree, what I have felt. Young men at College are taught these evidences; they learn them by heart, and must be able to produce them. They are reminded while they learn that a certain conclusion is to be reached; they are told that it is exceedingly perilous if they arrive at any other than that. The statement of Butler, which has been dwelt upon till it has almost extinguished in some minds every other passage in his writings, till it has made three parts of them out of four unmeaning,—that in a question of safety a very low amount of probability ought to satisfy us, is thrown in to make up for any deficiencies in Paley’s reasoning; it is accompanied in many cases with serious warnings against rash meddling with adverse arguments. Now whatever may be the justification for such suggestions, they are utterly incompatible with that profession of putting ourselves on the level of opponents with which we started. A young man soon becomes keenly, bitterly, sensible of this contradiction. He says when he goes out into the world, ‘The Christian evidences with which I was supplied at college do not answer in the very least degree to the idea of evidence which prevails in the law courts, or which I find recognized by men of science. The maxim Audi alteram partem is not one upon which I was encouraged to act; I was warned against it. Why, then, was I deceived by a promise to the ear which was belied in fact? Why was I not told the thing that I was to receive, as people are told it in other countries? Why did they give me sham arguments which I was to swallow under that name, instead of merely thrusting the conclusions down my throat simply and frankly? Was this what Paley meant?’ The amount of infidelity among young laymen of the upper and middle class which proceeds from this discovery is, I believe, incalculable.

And how is it with the Clergy? We hear that the conflict which Paley provoked,—which he had courage to believe would turn out for the honour of the Bible,—has been carried on fiercely in another country. We hear that documents, the genuineness and authenticity of which we thought were proved by our evidence, have been assailed. We have not, most of us, leisure to inquire how they have been attacked, or how they have been defended; perhaps we know that the gifts,—very peculiar gifts,—which fit men for this special work, have not been bestowed upon us, that there is other work we can do better. And yet there is an uneasy feeling, which our education—I mean our recent education—has fostered, that our whole faith depends on the settlement of these points; that if any one of them should be determined the wrong way, we should have nothing left us to stand upon. Therefore we practically come to the conclusion, that they must not and shall not be determined the wrong way. In other words, we take Paley’s evidences for granted as if they were divine. Nothing must be permitted to shake their authority in our minds. Yet we know all the while that they are not divine, that they are mere ordinary, clever, human arguments, any one of which is liable to be sifted, has a right to be sifted, and may turn out to be worthless. Of course we have all heard a thousand times what Mr. Mansel tells us for the thousand and first, that if there is the least balance of probabilities in favour of a conclusion, that conclusion must be received, however many there may be on the other side. But are we prepared to rest all on which we lean for life and death, all which we tell others is necessary for them, on the cast of a die? Whatever logicians may say, every practical man feels that he does not, and that he cannot. If this is the ground of our faith, it must fall. And therefore, to give it a ground, we throw in the consideration that it is safer to hold some opinion than not to hold it. We all know how that argument works; we all know whither it leads. ‘The safety of an infallible Church, oh, will you not seek that, poor youth, tossed by a thousand arguments about this document and that! Consider the repose of receiving whatever you are told to receive! You can find out nothing that is. Oh, take these probable seemings to save your soul!’ How many clergymen and laymen have listened to the voice of this Siren! If all have not listened to it, we have not our books of evidence to thank for stopping our ears to it.

III. But the book to which those evidences refer—that book, so far as we have opened it, so far as we have cared for the contents of it more than for proofs about it, so far as we have thought of it as our fathers thought of it, that has been a protection, for that has testified to us of One who is, of One from whom men fled in the old times to gods on hill altars and in dark groves for the safety of their souls, of One who delivered them from the miserable darkness and captivity into which they came when they forgot Him who was not far from any of them—the Infinite and Eternal, the Father of their spirits—and tried to make Him anew out of their conceptions of the finite and the temporal. It testifies of a God of Righteousness and Truth, ruling in the armies of Heaven, and among the inhabitants of earth. It testifies of the way in which that Being has discovered Himself through the actual doings and sufferings of nations, through the doubts and struggles of individual hearts, through the discomfiture and overthrow of those who were appointed to be the witnesses for Him, but who refused to own Him when He came near to them and showed Himself forth in a living and suffering man. Therefore did our fathers find in the Bible a refuge from dark superstitions and moral evils; therefore did they regard it as the pillar of their national and daily life; therefore did they call it the word of God. The Bible pointed them to a ground of Certainty, not of Probability, beneath them, beneath itself. Its power rested on no arguments about the origin of documents. It proved itself in another way,—by the facts of life, by sore and blessed experiences. They could trust these proofs. They could trust God to show forth His mind and purpose, which they believed to be unchangeable, in their day as in other days, through common events, through the righteous or the foul doings of men, through mighty deliverances and mighty judgments. They felt that they understood the Bible very imperfectly, but it helped them to understand all that was passing around them.

IV. In the last century, during the lull that preceded the tempest which closed it, the Bible was not thought of much as an interpreter of political events. At one time it had almost ceased to be regarded as an interpreter of the problems of personal life. As it was smiled at by men of wit and fashion in London, rejected in the salons of Paris, the divines supposed that their function was to extol its beauties or to allege signs of its inspiration. But there were men at that time also who said, ‘The Bible has shown itself to us to be the Word of God by other than this evidence. It has come to us with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power. It has changed the purpose of our lives. It has enabled us to become witnesses to others of that which we have found to be true ourselves. We cannot convince people as we have been convinced, but God can. His Word will not return to Him void. It will accomplish that for which He has sent it.’ This brave and manly language, or rather the deep conviction which it expressed, kindled a feeling respecting the Bible which all the arguments about authenticity and inspiration in the world could not kindle. It prepared our people for the shock that was to try the nations of what sort they were, whether they had anything better than their own opinions and decrees and the traditions of the past to rest upon; whether they believed in anything, or only believed that there was something in which it was exceedingly desirable, for various interests here or hereafter, that they should believe.

V. It is owing to such men as these that what is called internal evidence has, to Mr. Mansel’s great sorrow, so much displaced what he calls external or historical evidence. There was no intention on the part of these believers in the Bible to set up one against the other. They were merely testifying of what they had seen and known; they were exalting the contents of the Book above talk and arguments about the Book. In his able summary of Christian evidences (p. 248), Mr. Mansel speaks of the “inability of human means to bring about the results which Christianity actually accomplished; its antagonism to the current ideas of the age and country of its origin; its effects as a system on the moral and social condition of subsequent generations of mankind; its fitness to satisfy the wants and console the sufferings of human nature.” Well, the men of the last century, to whom I have alluded, believed all this about the primitive time, but they believed it also about their own. They found human means quite unable to bring about the results which the Gospel actually accomplished in them. They found, that when they tried to act upon its principles they were in antagonism to ideas that were current in their age and country, and that were even strong in themselves. They felt that if it had produced moral and social effects upon other generations,—for instance, in breaking the chains of slaves,—it was capable of producing the same in their own. And they deemed it very unnecessary to prove its fitness for satisfying the wants and consoling the sufferings of human nature, because they could actually offer it to satisfy those wants and console those sufferings which were as real, and were to all intents and purposes the same, in their time as in the time of the Apostles. Arguments about these things become very important when the things themselves are dead; as long as they are alive, the things take the place of the arguments.

VI. In reference to the strife about documents, the battle of books, in Germany and elsewhere, Mr. Mansel knows much better than I do how these feelings about the internal worth of the truths contained in the Scriptures have operated. He must be conscious, I think, of some unfairness in his way of representing to his English readers the sentiments of those whom he calls Naturalists, or Neologians, or Rationalists. He has not concealed the fact of their being very different from one another; but he has endeavoured to make capital out of their differences, by showing that they could not agree because they had departed from our quiet and uniform standard. Would it not have been fairer to confess, that the mere Naturalists, who looked at the doctrines and events of Scripture as altogether external to themselves, had been driven from a number of their strongest holds by men who had felt that all true criticism demanded an examination of the meaning and purport of the books and of their relation to human beings, as well as of their origin and outward structure? Might it not have been right to remind us that we stimulated that eager inquiry into the origin of the books, that we in some sort were the authors of their Naturalism, and that a spiritual conviction, of which our writers upon Evidences had taken little account, restored much of that affection for the Bible to the German mind which characterized it at the time of the Reformation? The statement of these facts might have been inconvenient for the purposes of Mr. Mansel’s argument; it might have been humbling to our vanity. But would it not have been a consolation to some perplexed thinkers to have tokens that God can take better care of His Revelation than we can, and that the criticism which we might have desired to stifle, may, after all, have done more to bring the actual power of the Bible to light than our apologies for it?

VII. I am, however, convinced that there was a weakness in the English asserters of internal evidence, as well as in the Germans who applied that same evidence to documentary criticism. I would adopt Mr. Mansel’s phrase, though in a somewhat different sense, and say they were too indifferent to the historical evidence for the Bible,—to the external proofs, that we must resort to other than human means for explaining its wonderful power of “satisfying the wants of human nature, and consoling its sufferings.” There has been a very loud cry, ever since the commencement of the French Revolution, for Principles of Political Justice and Order. There must be a Right, it has been said, beneath our laws and conventions. It cannot be measured by the habits and prejudices of particular races or nations. It ought to explain how those habits and prejudices have arisen. This demand was at first eminently unhistorical. It trampled upon history. It tried to find maxims of pure reason on which all society should be constructed and rebuilt. But it has given birth to a painstaking and earnest study of history; a sense of its importance, and of its superiority to all abstract conclusions, such as I believe existed in no former day, prevails among us. The danger is that this historical spirit having become so lively in its apprehension of the tendencies of ages and races, should almost lose sight of the influence which first awakened it; that it should too much overlook that deep craving in men for that which is not limited by special circumstances, but belongs to all. If, however, this danger becomes imminent for the student, it is met and counteracted by a demand—inarticulate generally—yet often expressing itself distinctly and loudly in that class of society which forms the bulk of every nation; that class to which Paine addressed his ‘Rights of Men’ and his ‘Age of Reason.’ This class asks whether we do confess any foundations deeper than those we have laid,—any laws not created for the interest of particular classes,—any to which priests and kings are as much subject as other men?

VIII. These needs of human nature cannot be satisfied,—the sufferings which are associated with them cannot be consoled,—by reference to what Christianity or the Bible did in former days. Are we willing to ask manfully what it can do in these days for meeting the questions which are disturbing all hearts? If we are, I believe numerous portions of the Bible which lay almost in shadow from some of the most earnest of our immediate forefathers, may become an illuminated scroll for us. We shall prize the Old Testament as much as the Puritans, or those who argued against Puritans, prized it. But we shall not dare to use it as they did, for the purpose of proving that God is on our side, and against our opponents;—that we are the Israelites, and they the Moabites or Hagarenes. We shall read in it that a living God is sitting as our judge no less than theirs;—that He has been condemning in all ages the unrighteous and cruel deeds of His servants, has been showing forth in all ages His righteousness in contrast to their evil. We shall not scruple to declare that He has dealt with priests and kings, with Churches and kingdoms, in the modern as He did in the old world, justifying what was right in every pagan or Mohammedan land, condemning what was evil and accursed in every Christian land; no respecter of persons, of sinners or saints. If we have not courage to do this,—if we go on as we have done, pleading and arguing for our schools and our opinions,—I believe God will confound us in the sight of the people; that every day they will become more atheistical for our defences and apologies; that we shall become in our hearts as atheistical as they. If we enter humbly and in fear on that course, I do not say that we may look for any immediate results. I believe that the immediate result will be an experience of our own feebleness to crush opposition, of our own impatience with it; a discovery, to which others have been led before us, that the word is God’s word, and not ours. But see whether, if we work on, He will not confirm that word with signs following, whether He will not justify Himself in the eyes of men if He does not justify us.

IX. And if this is so with the poor and ignorant to whom the Gospel was first preached, I am satisfied that a result no less real and satisfactory may be looked for among the patient and conscientious students of history. It has been a miserable part of our apologetic system to set up Sacred History as a kind of rival to Profane; to treat one as if it concerned God, and the other as if it was merely of the earth. At the same time, there has been a discreditable and faithless eagerness to catch at every witness in favour of a Scripture narrative from a profane author, as if we could not trust it without that confirmation; an eagerness which has led us often to accept doubtful legends in Pagan histories, which, when they were shown to be less probable than other statements of the same transaction, left those who had depended on that evidence in great perplexity. Oh! shall we never do justice to our own convictions? Shall we never try whether Scripture, by interpreting God’s dealings with one nation, may not expound His dealings with the other nations? Shall we never consider whether the witness which the Bible bears against the idolatry to which Jews were so prone, does not explain the temptation of every land; the forms under which the temptation has presented itself to one and another; the necessity of idolatry, if we deduce the Eternal from the Temporal, the Infinite from the Finite; the protest against idolatry which there was in the heart of every people under Heaven in the assurance that the Eternal must be the ground of the Temporal, the Infinite of the Finite? Shall we never ask whether the Day of Pentecost is not the explanation of the Constitution of human society, the interpretation of the difference between that Universality which is grounded upon a Spirit of Truth, who binds together and quickens the spirits of men,—and the Universality of Despotism, Imperial, Ecclesiastical, Democratical?—whether therefore the record of that day is not a key to the sins with which Church History abounds, as well as to the possibility that there could be a Church in the midst of them? Here, again, we can expect and desire no sudden conversions of modern historians to an acknowledgment of the Scriptures, which have seemed to so many of them a chain upon all free and manly investigation. Our clumsy efforts to connect the Bible with their studies may only display our imperfect acquaintance with both. If we think we have some wonderful new trick of fence, it will be laughed to scorn, as all such tricks ought to be, by those against whom they are used. But if we suffer the Bible to trample upon our tricks, and to speak its own speech, I am sure it will at last be found to ‘satisfy the wants and console the sufferings’ of those who have found in history most of those wants and those sufferings.

X. Those who have deduced the divine origin of the Bible from their own personal experience, though far more efficient than the mere reasoners about genuineness and authenticity, have failed, then, as I think, in appreciating the social and historical demands of their time, as well as the social and historical character of the Bible. It would have been much less serious failure if they had not understood the demands of philosophers; for just so far as these demands are special, just so far as they are not connected with what is universal, they may be fairly overlooked by those whose message is not to classes but to men. Oftentimes, however, what appear to be the reasonings of Philosophers point to the most serious ‘wants of human nature,’ to its most intense ‘sufferings.’ Such, I believe, is that demand for the knowledge of the Infinite or Eternal which has occupied us in these Letters. Mr. Mansel has said in his third Lecture (p. 68), that “a belief in the existence of an Absolute and Infinite Being appears forced upon us as the complement of our consciousness of the relative and the finite.” This is a very good statement of a logical necessity. The terms on which he dwells so much indicate it; the term Finite is unintelligible without the term Infinite. But translated from the formulas of logic into the forms of life, this search for something to complement the finite and relative is nothing less than the most awful demand in the nature of man; that which has been expressing itself in every age; that which, as I have just said, has been the witness against thinking that the “Godhead is like to gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art or man’s device;” that which has become strongest and clearest in the great crises of human history; that which in our days, though not for the first time, has given birth to the fearful question, Is this Infinite anything, or everything, or nothing?

XI. If we set this question distinctly before ourselves, if we treat it as the question which God is awakening in all men’s hearts, I believe the New Testament will be read with an interest with which it has never been read; that it will be taken more literally than it has ever been taken; that the acts and words of Christ, His miracles, His parables, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, the descent of the Spirit, the preaching and letters of the Apostles, the final unveiling to the Beloved Disciple, will all come forth as parts of the answer to the question—as declarations that the Eternal and the Infinite is not the Nothing which it must be if it is a mere generalization from our conceptions of the Finite and the Temporal, but is that Love which was before the worlds were, which was manifested in due time in the Only-begotten Son, which is the ground of all that is loving and true in the hearts or in the acts of men. I do not say that this discovery can commend itself at once to any human being. It must have deadly battles to fight with that which is opposed to it in us and in every man. The battle, I think, will be such as it has never been in any other generation. No one can dare to say how he may comport himself in it; no one who knows the depth of selfishness in his own heart can boast that he may not succumb to it; no one who takes any measure of the struggle between good and evil, between light and darkness, or who reflects how often the opinion of the world—the religion of the world—has been ranged against that which he is sure must ultimately triumph, can help trembling lest he should yield to that opinion or resist it through selfwill, not in obedience to the Spirit of Truth. But looking at the question apart from these personal considerations, I cannot doubt that a more reverent and childlike faith in the lessons of the New Testament will result from its being brought side by side with this great inquiry. Nor can I doubt that that peculiarity of the Bible which we have all noticed,—that it is written in the language of the senses, and with such an absence of logical formulas as is to be found in no other book,—will explain itself by this comparison. Beginning from the Eternal, and descending to the Temporal, proceeding from the Infinite to the Finite, the forms of logic, which are abstractions from the Finite and the Temporal, have no place in it. The realities which are behind the veil express themselves through the forms of sense, because that is the order and principle of God’s universe. The logical difficulty vanishes in its own nothingness. The real difficulty is felt more and more as we feel what we are in the sight of the Holy One who inhabiteth eternity. It disappears only in the awfulness of trust and adoration, only in the belief of an eternal Daysman between the creature and the Creator, who has borne our weakness and carried our sorrows, who dwells at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

XII. But if this question is ignored, if it is treated as insoluble, if there is a perpetual balance and equivocation between the real problem and the nominal one, then I am satisfied that the Old Testament and the New, as far as their contents are concerned, as far as any evidence is concerned which is involved in those contents, must be equally cast aside or explained away. It is one object of Mr. Mansel in this last Lecture, to show that we must either accept the whole Bible or reject the whole. I do not know that I have shown much desire to reject any part of it in these Sermons or Letters; nevertheless I cannot pretend that I attach much worth to this kind of language. It sounds very well in the ears of the religious world; it has been quoted largely in the religious journals. But does it indicate faith that the Bible is God’s word? Does it not look rather as if we thought that it was our word? If the Bible speaks truly, if the experience of godly men in all ages speaks truly, He has guided them very gently and gradually, giving line on line, precept on precept, often through dark roads, to the goal which He meant them to reach. It looks rather as if we were taking the matter into our hands, as if we were assuming to be the guides of the spirits of men, guides most ignorant of what these spirits are and what voices they obey, when we cry, ‘Now, you rebels! we have given you arguments such as ought to convince you. Take all, or reject all.’ As long as I believe the Bible, I shall hate that mode of speaking, however orthodox and popular it may sound; I shall regard it as the proper dialect of inquisitors, which is quite out of date when there are no swords to maintain it with. The utterer of it is complimented on his faith. It turns the hearer into an infidel.

XIII. But when I am told that I must take all or nothing, I am obliged to inquire whether the all is not a very near approximation to nothing? I have read carefully through these Lectures; I have marked every instance in which Mr. Mansel has quoted a text; I have considered especially those which he has prefixed to his discourses; I must say I never saw Scripture treated with so little reverence, its words so recklessly employed, merely to point a sentence or confound an opponent, without the least reference to the occasion on which they were spoken, or to the meaning which they must bear in the Sacred Volume. I know that the habit of using mottoes to sermons has prevailed greatly;—I hoped it was beginning to be discarded; I hoped that in Oxford, whence we clergy are to derive our models of preaching, it would have been banished altogether. But Mr. Mansel has improved upon the old practice: he has given his mottoes all their sting, by emptying them of all their original signification.

The first is taken from that magnificent chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy, in which Moses begins to set forth the privileges of his people, in that the Living God had come so near to them, in that He had spoken to them out of the midst of the fire, in that He had given them ordinances which would make them a wise and understanding people in the sight of the nations, if they remembered Him; the unseen God, and did not bow down to the likeness of any created thing, “Ye shall not add,” he says, “to the word which I command you; neither shall ye diminish aught from it.” The word that proceeded out of the mouth of God is a religious system. Dogmatists add to it; Rationalists take from it. Conceive such an application of the language of any legislator, whose sentences were not written in the Bible: who would not call it monstrous?

The third Lecture is introduced by another passage from the Pentateuch. It is that in which Moses is told that “He cannot see the face of God, for no man shall see Him and live.” If Mr. Mansel had acknowledged any connection between the Old and New Testament, would not this passage have led him to that in the third chapter of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, in which St. Paul contrasts the Old Dispensation with the New in this very respect, winding up with the memorable words, “And we all with open face beholding the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory”?

The fourth and the seventh Lectures also open with sentences from the Old Testament. The first is that from the sixty-fifth Psalm: “O Thou that hearest prayer, to Thee shall all flesh come.” It is quoted in the course of the Sermon (p. 128), apparently to support the proposition “that it is not as the Infinite that God reveals Himself in His Moral Government, nor as the Infinite that He promises to answer prayer.” The second is the memorable passage from the tenth of Ezekiel: “Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. Hear ye now, O house of Israel, Is not my way equal? Are not your ways unequal?” I need not tell you to read the chapter. I need not tell you that this verse is connected with the whole argument of it. That argument, you know, is one which God holds with His people, through the prophet, to convince them that His course of government is just; He explains it to them. The prophet assumes them to have a standard by which they could judge of God’s dealings with them. The object of the preacher is to show that as finite human beings they could have none.

Mr. Mansel’s treatment of the New Testament is of the same kind; only in some cases there is a curious felicity in the quotation which one might almost call judicial. For instance, the second Lecture, in which there are more logical subtleties than were ever gathered into a sermon before,—for the purpose of proving that there can be no knowledge of the Infinite Being by a finite being,—opens with that address to young Timothy, the force of which some of the congregation may perhaps have felt. “Keep that which is committed to thee, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so called; which some professing have erred concerning the faith.” The persons aimed at are Rationalists and Mystics.

The fifth is taken from 1 Cor. i. 21-24. That text declares that the Apostle preaches “Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness, but unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ, the Wisdom of God and the Power of God.” The Lecturer undertakes to show that “in Religion God has given us truths… which do not tell us what God is in His absolute Nature, but how He wills that we should think of Him in our present finite state.” Surely a most valuable correction and mitigation of the Apostle’s broad statement of the truth which he declared to men!

The sixth is taken from that passage, in the same Epistle, to which I have referred more than once: “For what man knoweth the things of a man save the spirit of a man which is in him? Even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God.” The verse which immediately follows that text is this: “Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is of God, that we might know the things that are freely given us of God.” And the 16th verse is this: “For who hath known the mind of the Lord that he might instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.” The object of the sermon is, of course, to show that we cannot know the mind of God.

The Lecture before us is headed by a verse from the fifth chapter of St. John. It is this: “The works which the Father hath given me to finish, the same works that I do, bear witness of me, that the Father hath sent me.” One of the sermons I have sent you is on a text closely resembling this, from the tenth chapter of the same Evangelist. It is on the subject of Miracles. I have endeavoured to show you how our Lord’s works did each of them bear witness by its character of the Father who had sent Him.¹ I will not repeat what I have said, but I will apply it to a very remarkable passage, in this Lecture, on Moral Miracles. I could scarcely find a more complete illustration of the way in which an apologist may overthrow the principles of the book for which he is pleading, whilst he is demolishing the objections to it.

XIV. Many acts recorded in Scripture, especially in the Old Testament, have, you well know, been objected to as inconsistent with the moral character of God. The wars with the Canaanites are the most obvious example. These wars are clearly represented in Scripture as part of the conflict of a Righteous God with an unrighteous, filthy, and cruel people. They are set forth as acts of the God of Order in punishing disorder. Some may feel, as I do, that they were so, and may find in them a key to later events in the history and government of the world. Some may be quite unable to take this view of the case; then their true course is, at all events, not to pretend that they think what they do not think. If they follow the example of the prophets, they will ask God to interpret His own ways to them; I, for my part, believe that they will not ask in vain. But what is Mr. Mansel’s method of solving the difficulty? He assumes that these wars were not what Joshua manifestly assumes them to be, part of God’s Order, but exceptions, or departures from that Order; not illustrations of His righteous dealings with men, but Moral Miracles. Thus, to save the credit of the Book, he destroys the testimony of the Book on that point; and, if I am not greatly mistaken, its testimony respecting the whole meaning and purpose of God’s works, as they were manifested by Him who “did the works which His Father gave Him to finish.”

XV. This, it seems, is the modern method of coming to inquire of the oracles of God; by this process they become a light to our feet, a lamp to our path! Accept the book as a whole, and then treat all the portions of it just as you like. Confess all its words to be words of the Lord, and then you may yourself be lords over them, and may perform moral miracles by turning the bread of life into stones for casting at your enemies! Far indeed am I from charging Mr. Mansel either with intending this irreverence, or with setting the first example of it. No disease is so prevalent in our times; there is no one of us who is not liable to the infection; none, who has not often caught it, and done something to spread it. That is my reason for entering upon this examination. If Mr. Mansel’s were a new scheme for confuting infidels, or establishing a religious philosophy, one might trust our English Conservatism, or, I am afraid, our indifference, to extinguish it. But he appeals to our Conservatism; he enters into an alliance with our indifference. He promises us peace from foes that we are afraid of. He assures us that we shall be able to repose comfortably in our ancient opinions. The habits and tendencies which he finds prevalent amongst us, he condenses; our floating maxims he reduces into order, flatters our vanity for having entertained them, teaches us to laugh at all as unphilosophical, or to condemn all as irreligious, who do not accept them. He is sure therefore to be popular with us, for he gives us back our own judgments, looking far less incoherent than they commonly look. We have secretly thought that it would be a great relief if we could persuade ourselves that the Eternal lay entirely beyond us; that the doctrines of our creeds may be taken for granted because they treat of matters about which people have disputed to no purpose for centuries; that Morality cannot be brought to any absolute standard, but is a subject for rules and conventions, such as we can get; that certain services and duties are owing to God, and that certain things are to be believed about Him for the regulation of our lives, but that the truth of these things cannot be ascertained; that truth and falsehood are properties of our conceptions; that we are to admit the evidences of the Bible because it is safer to do so, and not to be anxious about its contents. We have all, I say, held these thoughts; but we have held them uneasily. We have said to ourselves, ‘Is this then the faith once delivered to the Saints,—the faith which has overcome the world, and is to overcome it?—the faith which lifts men above themselves, which unites them to God, which makes them partakers of Christ’s risen life?’ To have all such suspicions quelled; to be assured that we cannot have a faith which raises us above ourselves; to be told that to ascend above our own thoughts is the dream of Rationalists and Mystics; and that to stay on the level of our own thoughts is the duty of all sober Christians,—to have all this set forth to us in logical statements which we do not the least understand, but which we are sure must prove the case,—the old ignotum pro magnifico of superstition happily combining with the delight of thinking that we are in possession of the last result of school wisdom;—to have the testimony of a man who knows all about Germans and Philosophy, that we are not only much better, but very much wiser, than those who we were afraid were about to rob us of our treasures—where can we look for comfort if not here?

XVI. My answer is, Certainly not to the Bible, not to the book which Englishmen have cherished and reverenced,—if this is the comfort we want! If we turn to its words, and not to the words which wise people have written about it, or in excuse for it, we shall be robbed of this comfort. We shall be robbed of our notion that we can have rest by suppressing the doubts and oppositions of other men, or the doubts and opposition in ourselves. We shall be taught that truth has never thriven except in conflict;² that men have never sought the true peace till they have rejected the false peace; that those who make the soul a solitude, and call it peace, must part with the peace which passeth understanding and dwells in the knowledge of God. We shall be robbed of the notion that logic can set our minds at rest. It is of great value. It tells us what we are when we are shut up in ourselves, in our own conceptions; how we abstract and form notions from names; how they are to be distinguished from the things which they set forth; how impossible it is for them to exhibit a single living process. For every process of bodily life—seeing, smelling, tasting, handling, walking, breathing—is an act of rising out of ourselves. Not to do that is to die. The Bible consistently and harmoniously shows us that every process of life in the man himself, every movement of thought, feeling, affection—is, in like manner, a rising above ourselves, an ascent into another region. The Bible tells us of the new man who is created after God in righteousness and true holiness, created for the knowledge of a righteousness and true holiness which are not in himself but in Him. The Bible, in every song and prayer, is inviting us to leave the dungeon-keep of our own low, grovelling thoughts; it affirms that the invitation comes from the Creator of the Universe, the Father of our spirits. That our dull ears will not hear this music, that we are always seeking to gravitate into ourselves, is what the Bible warns us of. It is this accursed sloth we have to shake off, this spiritual death from which we need to be delivered. Believing this, I thought it necessary to ask how far one who urged that confinement within the limits of our own thoughts could face the facts and lessons of the Bible. This Lecture, it seems to me, is altogether decisive on that point. The author defends the Bible; the moment he approaches it, you feel that he is at war with it. He must emasculate it—he must reduce it from a word of God into a collection of opinions—before it has any meaning for him. And so the only moral he can leave us with is that which Pope, educated in Romanism, matured by Bolingbroke, expressed, as perfectly as it can be expressed, in the well-worn couplet,

“Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.”

On which text I take this to be the true comment. We can know nothing of ourselves till we look above ourselves. We can see light only in God’s light. The knowledge of man is possible, because the knowledge of God is possible.

Very truly yours,

Postscript

It may appear to you and to other readers, that I have not done justice to some passages in Mr. Mansel’s volume, wherein he holds out the hope that the knowledge which is impossible for us here, may be attained in a future state. A hint of this kind occurs in the peroration to the fourth Lecture. I give all weight to such remarks; I gladly accept them as proofs that the writer longs for that fruition which the Psalmist longed for. But taken in connection with the rest of his treatise, these passages, I must say, are utterly puzzling to me. If it is involved in the very condition of a finite being, that he should not know the Infinite, such promises must imply that hereafter we shall cease to be finite. If it is treason against the limitations which God has appointed for us, to suppose that we can transcend our own conceptions here, will it cease to be a treason in another world? Is then all that Butler has taught us about the relation between the two worlds, about the analogy between our pursuits and expectations here and that which is to be bestowed upon us when we have passed out of this world, a delusion? Is that which is evil here to be the good there? We have been used to think that all the restless ambitions and longings which we indulge in this imperfect state, will be quelled for ever in a perfect one. Far from it. These ambitions, which it is our duty to check on this side the grave, are to be indulged freely on the other. Mr. Mansel speaks as if it were a difference of degree. It is a difference of degree when St. Paul tells us that we see through a glass darkly here, and shall see face to face hereafter. The same object is presented to us in both cases,—is presented with equal truth in both cases; only the eye from the very contemplation is growing stronger,—is becoming more able to take in the vision. But it is a question of kind, not of degree, whether by faith we rise above ourselves, or whether to make that attempt is to be guilty of infidelity. Whatever is true upon that question now must be true for ever.