Letters to a Theological Student Preparing for Orders on Mr. Mansel’s Bampton Lectures

Letter I. The Cost of Confutation

Introductory.—the Cost of a Confutation.

My dear Sir,

I do not wonder that you are spending a portion of the time which remains to you before your examination in the study of Mr. Mansel’s Bampton Lectures. You have heard, on good authority, that they expose triumphantly different forms of unbelief or half-belief which exist in Germany and in England. This exposure is not, you are told, like many that have preceded it, made by a man who has only a second-hand acquaintance with the writers whom he condemns, or who condemns them with the zeal and passion of a Theologian. He is a scholar, and has mastered the books against which he warns us; he is a philosopher, and places his warnings on a philosophical ground. His maxim, you are assured, will be as effectual for future Rationalists and semi-Rationalists as for those who flourish in our day. It will be effectual for crushing the questionings that have arisen or may arise in your own mind. It informs you of the Hercules’ Pillars beyond which you cannot, by the very conditions of your intellect, sail in quest of truth. How desirable to have such a monitor! What a help to a student in divinity, who must find himself often amidst the quicksands of written controversies! What a help to a preacher of the Gospel, who must encounter the doubts, old and new, of his lettered or unlettered hearers! Such are the motives which will induce you and very many in your position to hail the appearance of a book which is said to be the latest expression of Oxford learning and Oxford orthodoxy, which promises to become the Ductor Dubitantium for the nineteenth century.

You have been a little startled, I suspect, by the criticism upon these Lectures which appeared sometime ago in the ‘Times’ newspaper. No greater homage could be paid to Mr. Mansel’s ability and success than the writer of that article was willing to bestow; he had the knowledge of the subject, which makes compliments valuable. But without meaning in the least to qualify his praise, he pointed out, with the skill and conscientiousness of a logician, certain results which followed inevitably from Mr. Mansel’s doctrine. Others, he said, besides Hegel and the Germans, our natural enemies, must be crushed beneath it. Thomas à Kempis he especially instanced as one who must henceforth be cast aside as simply ridiculous. With him, it was suggested, a number of divines will perish who are not accused of his mystical tendencies. Where, you have asked yourself, will this prophecy carry us? ‘Am I quite prepared, were that all, to part with the Imitation of Christ, the most cherished book of devotion throughout Christendom, dear to Romanists, to Protestants, to Quakers,—the companion of the sick in hospitals, of the solitary prisoner?’

I should doubt the fairness or lawfulness of this inquiry into the consequences of a principle before you had thoroughly examined the principle itself, if I did not perceive that you were already bribed to accept it by the hope of other consequences which look particularly tempting to you. You should not refuse to try the Lectures by their own merits, because if you yield to their arguments, you must abandon some portions of theological literature which you have been used to consider precious,—even some convictions which have wrought themselves into your heart, and which come forth almost unconsciously in your language. But since you are prepared to admire Mr. Mansel from the hope that he will enable you henceforth to hold your Theology far more comfortably, with little disturbance from without or from within, you are not wrong in considering what it is that you will rescue from these dangers, what treasures you will have to surrender as the price for keeping the rest in security. I wish you to approach the investigation of his doctrines, and of the deductions from it, without an unfair bias for or against either. It will not be amiss, therefore, to calculate a few of the losses we must reckon upon if we bring Mr. Mansel’s powerful weapon into ordinary use; the gains you know already from higher judges.

(1.) First, then; I cannot doubt that the critic in the ‘Times’ was altogether right, and very felicitous, in his selection of Thomas à Kempis as a victim who must at once be sacrificed. Did you ask yourself, as you read, why he could not use the shibboleth which the Bampton Lecturer demands of all theologians? Is it on account of any qualities which appertain to him as a monk or as a Romanist? Is it for that defect which the Dean of St. Paul’s¹ notices in him, that his devotion does not lead enough to active exertion,—that he does not tell us we are to imitate Christ as Him who went about doing good? Whatever of monastic or mediaeval notions may have mingled with his faith, whatever of justice there may be in Dr. Milman’s criticism,—these are not the offences which bring him within the scope of Mr. Mansel’s law, which subject him to its extreme penalties. His crime consists in his assuming that there is a divine Teacher of man’s spirit; that it is possible for man’s spirit to have converse with that Teacher. All that is expressed in books of divinity by the union of the soul with Christ, by living intercourse with Him, is impossible in the very nature of things, if Mr. Mansel’s mode of confuting infidels is the right one. Non meus hic sermo. I am merely indorsing the statement of a highly intelligent admirer; one which I think Mr. Mansel would not himself disclaim.

(2.) When the objection to Thomas à Kempis is stated in this way, I scarcely know what divines of any age are not within the peril of it. The Jansenists must give up all their great authors; the Puritans the best of theirs. You are well read, I doubt not, in Leighton’s Commentary, as well as in those ‘Prelections’ which Professor Scholefield edited so carefully; those, I mean, that were addressed to an assembly at Edinburgh, not altogether unlike the one which Mr. Mansel addressed at Oxford. These must fall upon the same ground with à Kempis, and upon other grounds, to which I may allude hereafter. In these cases it is not the theoretical part of the divinity which must be rejected; it is what the writers believed to be the essentially practical part, that which concerned the moral reformation of themselves and their hearers. And note this. Just the part of their teaching which brings them within Mr. Mansel’s condemnation, is that which had fallen into oblivion in the last century, and which the conscience of England, the conscience of the most earnest and religious men in England, has demanded again with a voice so loud and imperative, that all the modern discourses even of those who are naturally disinclined to the use of its favourite language, are coloured by it.

(3.) For, next, all that history of mental and spiritual experiences which exists either in the old Hagiographies or in the Puritan biographies, or which has been brought forth among us since the days of Wesley and Whitfield, must be expelled from the libraries of Christians, or at least must be treated as merely fictitious. All these assume an actual living knowledge of God to be possible for men. They assume the conversion of the soul to consist in its awakening to that knowledge. Do you remind me that there is much in the narratives of such conversions which even those who attach most value to them trace to an enthusiastic or morbid temperament? I grant you that there is. But I think those who have most earnestly considered such stories, and have most brought them to the test of that self-knowledge which Mr. Mansel regards as the exclusive test of truth, have treated that as the fantastic element in them which concerns the senses and apparitions to the senses. This they could refer to the conditions of the writer’s body or to his external circumstances; whereas just the part which, according to Mr. Mansel, we must discard as delusion, is what they would confess as sound and true—that which concerns the internal and spiritual apprehension, the recognition of the Eternal Being.

(4.) Again, there is one eminent theologian whose fate we have not to gather from the inferences of any of Mr. Mansel’s supporters or disciples. The following passage from himself decides the question:—

“‘God,’ says Augustine, ‘is not a Spirit as regards substance, and good as regards quality; but both as regards substance. The Justice of God is one with His Goodness and with His Blessedness; and all are one with His Spirituality.’ But this assertion, if it be literally true (and of this we have no means of judging), annihilates personality itself, in the only form in which we can conceive it. We cannot transcend our own personality, as we cannot transcend our own relation to time; and to speak of an Absolute and Infinite Person, is simply to use language to which, however true it may be in a superhuman sense, no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself.” (Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 85.)

Now I would put it to Dr. Pusey, to the Dean of Westminster, to any person differing as widely from them as they differ from each other, provided he has devoted as much attention as they have to the writings of St. Augustine, whether the conclusion which is thus peremptorily announced, that “we cannot transcend our own personality, as we cannot transcend our own relation to time,” annihilates a single passage of this Father; whether it does not annihilate the very man himself? If you cannot wait for their decision, read ‘The Confessions,’ read any passages which you may stumble upon by chance from the first book to the last, and then ask yourself whether every part of his experience, everything which raised him from a Manichean into a Christian, even from an animal into a man, is not associated with the conviction that he could and did transcend his own personality and his relation to time, that he could and did apprehend the Personality of God.

(5.) Augustine then must perish, and with him all that have thought and written in his spirit: a blow, I need not tell you, to nearly all the most powerful of the medieval thinkers, even to those who did not follow Augustine in his Platonism, but belonged to the Aristotelian period. How Anselm is treated by Mr. Mansel we shall know by-and-by. Bernard has, of course, no chance of mercy at his hands. If Aquinas is not absolutely scorned, Bonaventura must be. The disciples of Luther might perhaps endure this violence to Schoolmen. They will be foolish if they do. Of all persons their Master has the least hope of escaping the new proscription. He hated the logicians precisely because they denied that faith was a way to a direct personal knowledge of God. His Reformation consisted in the assertion that there is a Gospel from God to men, revealing His Righteousness to them, announcing that Righteousness as the foundation of their own.

(6.) But may we not at least retain the Creeds of the Church? We may retain them to this extent: all objections to them can be proved utterly futile, because it is impossible for men to know anything certain about the Nature of God. But these Creeds profess to tell us something certain about the Nature of God. Nay, they assume that certainty to be the deepest certainty, the ground of all other. Must not they and their antagonists die by the same rule? Has not Mr. Mansel demonstrated the futility of both?

(7.) I cannot tell what your feelings are about alterations in the Prayer-book. You may dread them less than I do. But are you prepared—is any Dissenter in England prepared—for the changes which Mr. Mansel must demand in it—which the University of Oxford must demand, if the Bampton Lecturer is the faithful representative of her sentiments? Mr. Mansel has handled with great severity one of Schleiermacher’s doctrines, “as involving something like hypocrisy in every act of prayer” (Note 16 to Lecture IV. p. 360). He has therefore a righteous horror of anything approaching to such hypocrisy. He could not mean to impute it to so devout and honest a man as Schleiermacher was in the judgment of those who differ from him most; he only dreaded that which might ‘involve’ it; might cause it in other minds if not in his. How much then must the Lecturer tremble at the thought of our using such phrases as these, “We who know thee now by faith,” “In knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life.” What ‘hypocrisy’ must be ‘involved’ in such language, what hypocrisy we must be propagating in our Congregations—if we have thoroughly persuaded ourselves that to know the Infinite and Eternal is impossible! And yet one of these prayers is read every morning; and the habit of thought which it indicates may be traced through the whole Liturgy. Can we be parties to such an imposture? Must we not purge our consciences of it, if we do not wish to bring down a curse upon ourselves and upon our land?

I shall not now speak of the revision—not of our translation of the Bible, but—of the Bible itself, which will be necessary if the doctrine of the Lectures is true. That is the subject of the Sermons I have sent you. That subject will recur again and again in the course of these Letters. I confine myself now to some topics which should press very heavily on the consciences of us who are offering up prayers in the Church, and who are inviting men to enter into actual communion with God. They need not press so heavily upon yours if you, before you take the irrevocable step of binding yourself by vows of Ordination, consider solemnly whether you can really, in a simple sense, use the words which the Church puts into your lips,—whether they are to you honest words or deceitful words. I conjure you, as you value your own peace, as you care for the souls that will be committed to you, not to evade that inquiry, but resolutely to grapple with it, arming yourself for any consequence to which it may lead you. I rejoice in the publication of Mr. Mansel’s book nearly as much as its most vehement admirers can rejoice. I look upon it more, not less, than they do as a critical event in the history of the English Church. For the question must now be asked of each one of us,—Do you take those words about knowing God which occur in books of devotion, in old divines, in the Prayer-book, in the Bible, literally or figuratively,—in a less exact sense than you would use the word know as applied to some other subject, or in the most exact sense, the one which determines its use in reference to any other subject? Because we have not given a distinct answer to this question in our own minds, because we have used one kind of language on our knees before God and another in our arguments with men, our discourses to the people have been confused and unsatisfactory; they have not understood whether we came to them with good tidings, or with ill tidings, or with no tidings at all. Thank God for any one who understands his meaning, and so can compel us to understand our meaning! Thank God for any one who compels two principles that have long fought blindly in the twilight to come forth and meet each other in the open day!

I am glad, also, that those two contradictory principles concerning the knowledge of God cannot be brought into conflict without discovering two contradictory methods in which the Bible may be presented to the acceptance of mankind. For those who say that no knowledge of the Eternal is to be had, and that the Bible offers us something in place of it, must regard every search which men have made after such knowledge with suspicion,—must delight to register their mistakes, their inconsistencies, their disappointments. If, in the height of their pride or in the agony of their failure, these seekers have uttered words like the east wind,—words in which reproaches, often just, against men were mixed with unbelief of God,—all these must be preserved and triumphantly proclaimed, there being, it would appear, some comfort or some virtue in recollecting that creatures of our flesh and blood have given us an excuse for condemning them. Scorn of their folly in attempting to reach some height which they could not attain is, however, in these days, a more favourite indulgence than indignation at the worst moral perversity. A man may grovel in the stye without attracting any special notice from the modern defender of Christianity; if he aspires by an irregular method after righteousness, no laughter is too loud for his punishment.

He who holds that the Bible testifies from its first page to its last that God has created men for the knowledge of Himself, and is kindling in them a thirst for that knowledge, a discontent with anything which comes short of it,—cannot by possibility listen without the profoundest interest to every cry of men after it in one age or another. He must not ask first what they have failed to attain, but what they have been permitted to attain. He must be glad to learn from their blunders as well as their successes: perceiving in the first the likeness of his own; in the second, the guidance of God. He may not expect their opinions or conclusions to do much for him; their struggles and questionings and glimpses of light he will cherish, and be thankful for. All will appear to him to be pointing to a full-orbed Truth which is not in them but in God, and which He has manifested in the Eternal Word, the only begotten Son. The remembrance of hard and proud words spoken against those who were crying out for Truth will be always the bitterest in his life, that which recurs to him with the keenest sense of having grieved the Holy Spirit of God, of having brought upon him the curse of a brother’s blood. And if he may look upon that sin as blotted out in the blood of the great Elder Brother of the whole family, he must ask that hereafter he may regard the Sermon on the Mount as if it were not an interpolation in the Divine Book,—that he may accept it as the law of his discourses and acts, not only in his daily life, but even when he is contending for the faith once delivered to the saints.

Yours very truly,