AGN OF PRINGESX- Ke ig ey 24 as Little Books on Religion Edited by W. Ropertson Nicoti, LL.D. AIDS. TO BELIEF LITTLE BOOKS ON RELIGION Cloth Elegant, 1s. 6@. each. Christ and the Future Life. By R. W. Datz, D.D., LL.D. The Seven Words from the Cross. By W. Rospertson Nico.t, M.A., LL.D. The Visions of a Prophet. By Prof. Marcus Dons, D.D. The Four Temperaments. By ALEx. WuyTeE, D.D. The Upper Room. By Joun Watson, M.A., D.D. The Unity and Symmetry of the Bible. By Prof. J. M. Gisson, M.A., D.D. Gospel Questions and Answers. By Prof. James DENNEY, D.D. Why be a Christian ? By Prof. Marcus Dops, D.D. Four Psalms. By Prof. G. A. Smitu, D.D. The Holy Father and the Living Christ. By P. T. Forsyru, D.D. From Strength to Strength. By J. H. Jowett, M.A. The Restored Innocence. By R. J. CAMPBELL, B.A. Heredity and the Gospel. By GreorcE Jackson, B.A. Christian. Perfection. By P. T. Forsyru, D.D. LONDON: HODDER & STOUGHTON 27 Paternoster Row FALDS TO. BELIEF BEING SERMONS PREACHED IN THE CATHEDRAL CHURCH OF LONDONDERRY DURING THE SUNDAY EVENINGS OF LENT 1899 BY THE Ricut Rev. G. A. CHADWICK, D.D. LORD BISHOP OF DERRY AND RAP. RES, me ee iP PR Lae SN PORE R LE ooh AE oe. Cet iy fe Ss ayes oe | f" ve ~ $4 » wy ga 1931 He, 7 “A yeicar sew NEW YORK DODD, MEAD AND CoO. 149-151 FIFTH AVENUE Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library _https://archive.org/details/aidstobeliefbeind0chad J Uu ‘ i Gl ay iy, 28 Ww A ; as | Sa A < & = v4 j t eek ¢ 7 I PAGE WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? ; ‘ I II THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH, . : 21 III THE HIGHER CRITICISM AND THE FAITH, - : : 5 41 IV THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST, : phus63 Vv THE AGES SINCE CHRIST,. , Od vi AIDS TO BELIEF VI TIIE PORTRAYING OF CHRIST, . 9) LO5 NOTE A TO SERMON IIL, - ° .* 129 NOTE B TO SERMON IIL, . : rae hs 2 32 I WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? ‘Pilate saith unto Him, What is truth?’— JOHN xviii. 38. Wuy should one preach a course of evidential sermons? Without doubt there are happy and simple believers for whom this whole subject is unwelcome. But there are also many, especially young people, who may be saved much pain and temptation by learning how to look at such subjects; and I am told, by those who have best means of knowing, that — such a course might, with the 2 AIDS TO BELIEF blessing of God, be very use- ful’ in: this. city, I> am: not going, however, to preach a book of evidences. The proofs of the Christian faith are such that whoever expects to hear a complete statement in half a dozen sermons will always be much mistaken; nor should he desire this. His duty is to take as much trouble in the matter ot his immortal soul as he would readily give to the interests of his health or his profession. My object is to remind you of some all-important facts which lie outside the beaten tracks of evidential controversy, and this evening, in the first place, to show you what it is unreason- | able to expect in the way of WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 3 proofs, and what you are entitled to look for. And I hope to convince you, as I am myself with all -my heart persuaded, that the faith of Jesus, which is the loveliest, is also the most reasonable and best attested of a rea tf Tt % all the influences which inspire ~ and uplift mankind. } a First among the perplexities which disturb inquiring minds I put this: Why should perplexi- }. ties exist at all? Why should not religious truth be as plain as the sun in the skies? Why should faith and not only logic be required for it? Why should not the creed be as certain, as self-evident, as the multiplica- tion table? But have you never observed that those truths 4 AIDS TO BELIEF which are quite free from per- plexity, which seem—I_ say ‘seem’—to demand no _ faith, may instruct the brain, but fail to influence the soul? As you are no better, not more generous or trustworthy, for knowing that twice two are four, so you may go on to the differential calculus without becoming a whit braver, truer, or more pure. Now, the task of religion is to purify and soften and uplift you, much more than to develop your brain power. And not religion alone, but all the influences which elevate character, are such as you may, if you choose, reject. You can deny that your mothe loves you—not to treat you kindly would be indecent—or Pee ee ee WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 5 that your children care for any- thing but their maintenance, or that your generous friend, when ‘ he shared your reproaches and made your cause his own, had any finer motive than to win praise, to ingratiate himself, and to play the patron. Only the truths which the heart must co-operate with the brain in grasping can possibly educate the heart equally with the brain. I do not say the heart without the head. You are not asked to believe without evidence in mother or child or friend, yet the evidence does not coerce your belief: you must make your choice, and either exercise faith, responding willingly to the appeal of goodness outside your- AD 6 AIDS TO BELIEF self, and thus become loving and true, or else refuse to ‘trust, and then your soul must shrivel and dry up. And is it any wonder that religion, which pro- fesses to purify and cleanse your heart and save your soul, should make the same demand, and refuse, as it does refuse flatly, to trample down your power of choice and moral judgment? You do not think a modern sea - -captain. heroic because he Steers: for America, for now it is as certain that America lies beyond the Atlantic as that Liverpool is across the Channel. But \ what about Columbus, gazing ae waters ‘which no keel had ever ploughed upon horizons which no eye had ever searched, PL ry WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 7 unshaken by hope deferred, un- appalled by murmurs or even by mutiny, until at last the flickering light in the dim dis- tance told that his long trial was over and he had won his immortal fame? Yes, his ‘trial.’ And it is so with us: the trial of our faith, much more precious than of gold that perishes, is found unto praise and honour ance clory. 2 ¢There:.is.«neéftther praise nor honour in believing the properties of a triangle or a square, because there is no room for doubt about them. I can fancy that some one is objecting, ‘This might be very well if you did not teach that doubt is sinful, but you must not call it, at the same time, 8 AIDS TO BELIEF a sin and a means of discipline for the soul.’ But I have not called it sin. There is indeed a sinful unbelief in God, just as there is a vile and degrading unbelief in human nature. But the unbelief which Scripture denounces is not ever the desire to reach truth, nor caution in the quest: it is the immoral rejection of it when perceived; not the search, but the turning of the back upon it. Were not the Bereans noble, who searched the Scripture whether these things were so? And did not Jesus say: If I had not come and spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but now have they both seen and hated? Yes, hated. Their soul, ee SS a WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 9 not their brain, perpetrated the unbelief which condemns the soul. It is true that all our sorrows, and mental trouble among the rest, though not sin, are the result of sin, of our fallen state ; and if we were nearer to God we should not doubt Him. But no wise man says, when you are tortured by © toothache, ‘This happens be- cause you are a fallen creature ; go pray. And I should just as willingly speak so to the sufferer of bodily as of mental anguish. ‘Well, then,’ another says, ‘let us grant that the heart as well as the intellect is needed, and for a moral religion we must only expect moral certainties; 10 AIDS TO BELIEF nea yet surely what I am thus to receive should at least explain all my perplexities and answer all my questions—my trustful inquiries. Mystery, the problems which you refuse even to attempt to solve, these are the reasons why I hesitate’ It is clear, however, that the object of religion is not philosophy, but worship —the restoration of the lost soul to God—and it formally refuses to explain all the mighty problems by which our life is enclosed on every side. We see as in a mirror dimly. The Word is a lamp to guide our feet; not to illuminate the distant mountain ranges, and the forests in which the winds are sobbing far away. You will inquire in vain, for WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? II instance, ‘How can a good God and a world of pain and sin exist together?’ For this is a question clearly of philosophy, though men do reject the faith because it does not explain, nor even attempt to explain, the origin of physical and mental evil. That is to say, they reject the medicine because they want to know how disease began. Further, I ask you to observe care-. fully that it is not against Chris- tianity as such that this objection lies. It would be just as power- ful if Christ had never lived. It is an argument against all belief in a good God, all theistic systems, equally. So far as it has any force it goes to prove either that there is no God, or b 12 AIDS TO BELIEF else that He does not care about the difference between good and evil. Well, then, if I reject God altogether, have I got rid of this problem of the origin of evil? I have enlarged it into the heavier and more urgent problem of explaining the origin of either good or evil; I cannot now prove that they exist. To explain or defend morality without God, law without a Lawgiver, is the despair of all sceptical systems. In vain do they assure me that what is profitable, that is good. In vain, because I know the difference. I know that self- sacrifice was not evolved by ages of struggle to exist, in which the weakest always perished for the advancement of the race. The WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 13 inventor of the steam-engine was a great benefactor of his race, but his usefulness does not set him in the same rank with the martyrs for righteousness. The difference between the two is profound and spiritual. A bad investment and a sin, a hurt and a moral soil, are not in the same category. Nay, to question | whether an act is profitable spoils | the moral beauty of it; and there | are plenty of acts, clearly and | demonstrably profitable to the | individual and the race, which — morality forbids. Suppose that ; : I am walking after dark beside. . a precipice with a miscreant who | ./ is using enormous wealth for the | vilest purposes, to ruin and de-. grade and trample on his fellows, Es, 14 AIDS TO BELIEF eee! Se ee | and as we walk he confesses that his life is a burden and a curse to himself. Suppose that his \ next heir will spend his bound- \ less wealth for the blessing of ‘mankind. Now tell me, why ‘should I not push him over? Why should an atheist shrink from such a murder? Only be- cause he feels, most irrationally upon his principles, but by a deep instinct, the difference between what is expedient and what ,, is right. The recognised and | classical case, by which to test | whether sin is mere temporal | inexpediency, is suicide. In cases where life is a grievous | burden, why not end it? The '** problem is exactly where Shake- ‘speare left it, and the two ——— WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? I5 arguments which he found against suicide are both re- ligious. One is the dread of something after death, The other is that the Almighty hath fixed His canon ’gainst self- slaughter. Commonly, indeed, the two things, expediency and right, coincide, and the Christian knows why: it is because there is a God who judgeth the earth. But even when they coincide they differ, as the vibration of chords differs from the soul in the music which thrills the violin- ist, even though they are insep- arable. Now, it is clear that | either Christianity or theism or atheism is true. Yet they are all confronted by this problem of the origin of evil, which there- t 16 AIDS TO BELIEF fore can be no reason for reject- ing the faith. Nor is this all. Our religion at least explains why the mys- tery should oppress us, when it tells us that moral evil did not originate here. If it began upon our level we might expect to understand its beginning; but it is otherwise if it is an im- ported article, infecting us from beings so much greater than we, and moving amid such different conditions, that probably no explanation could force its way into the little minds of men. In the nature of things, I have this evening been at work only in the removing of hindrances, and I feel deeply that in itself a WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 17 this is not enough to satisfy a human soul, Let me then re- mind you, in conclusion, of some things which your human nature is entitled to demand, but can never receive anywhere but from the faith of Jesus. Professor . Tyndall said, a quarter of a cen- | ay tury ago, that the religious in- stinct in man had an immovable basis, and that the first duty of science now was to meet its demands. Did he ever make an attempt? Does any one believe that science can or will seriously attempt to satisfy the religious instinct? And yet how great a thing is this! How vast a pro- portion of most elevating thought and aspiration lies beyond the | senses, beyond science! (a) There : YY 18 AIDS TO BELIEF is contemplation. I am haunted by ‘The subtle thoughts which fly And shun the sense, like flower-smells, the : closer we draw nigh.’ _. (6) And there is love. For do not all pure and lofty human loves seem ever to stretch be- ‘yond themselves, to become sacrar | mental, to reach out and up, like |. “Nature, which ever rises from a eG EL “a. solid stem to fine leaf and subtler “,. perfume, from the base of the _ mountain to the pinnacle wrapped ©. in mist, from swelling billow to iridescent foam, all that is visible ‘reaching out its hands to the ae Unseen? (c) Again, there is the 2 craving for immortality. ‘If the wages of Virtue were dust, Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm or the fly?’ Set nies Se WHAT MAY BE EXPECTED? 19 (dq) Last and greatest, there is the mighty yearning for purity, for the recovery of moral health. Who shall satisfy these? Science should take note of them, one thinks, as keenly as of other longings—of the restlessness, at e e 4) certain seasons, of the salmon in/”’ the river and the wild swan on the 0: lake. And if these find their goal, surely there must be some- where a Satisfaction, a response from fact, to the finest instincts of what is, at least, the loftiest of. the mammalia. Is he alone the fool of Nature? Yet there is no answer, no Satisfaction, save in Him Who said to the lost of old, ‘Go and sin no more,’ and made them saints—Who says, I am the Resurrection and the Life, and 20 AIDS TO BELIEF proves Himself the Resurrection by being visibly the Life, the life of all goodness and nobility, of our virtues, our philanthropies, our hope for the degraded, the life of barbarous nations clothed and in their right mind, and the satis- faction of the highest desires of men, who knowing Him know the Father also. II THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH ‘Search the Scriptures; for in them ye think that ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of Me. And ye will not come unto Me, that ye may have life.".—JOHN v. 39, 40. IT is often overlooked that our Lord in this saying condemns a false and mischievous notion of the Scriptures, and shows what their true function is. There is nothing in the Greek to tell us whether He asserts that the Jews do actually search the Scriptures because they give them honour (although a mistaken honour), or bids them search and not be con- ‘ 21 22 AIDS TO BELIEF tent in their delusion. ‘Search the Scriptures,’ or ‘ye search the Scriptures ’—the Greek will bear either rendering. But what is clear is this: the Jews were not anxious for any higher life, be- cause they fancied they had it already safe and complete in their orthodoxy, in the roll of their manuscripts. ‘In them ye’ —the word is emphatic—‘ ye think ye have eternal life. And ye will not come unto Me, that ye may have life.’ Their super- stitious contentment drugged down and stupefied the higher cravings of the soul of man, To quote a phrase, the true meaning of which is excellent, but the expression most unfortunate, the Bible, and the Bible alone, was aba nacre THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 23 the religion of these Jews. It should have been their mariner’s compass, their explorer’s chart, their map. It should not have been the resting-place, but the sure guide to that: their school- master to bring them to Christ. As long as they relied for salva- tion upon their adhesion to what was written, how could they look to Christ for that life which they supposed they had already? Yet these very Scriptures, which hindered them while treated as a sort of charm, were indeed most precious, being not only wit- nesses, but such official and divinely appointed witnesses that we read within six verses, ‘I receive not the testimony of man ... these are they which testify 24 AIDS TO BELIEF of Me’ (34-39). Thus we under- stand the passage, and see what the first clause really means— ‘Search the Scriptures—it is idle superstition to be content with holding them: they make no profession themselves to save your soul: they testify of Me; if you would attend to them you would learn to find in Me that eternal life which you foolishly conceive to be inherent in them.’ Therefore this great utterance offers a most convenient standing- place from which to survey the relation between Holy Scripture and our faith. It warns us that _the Scriptures, misused, may be- come a formidable hindrance to the soul. And it tells us that they have a true function, highly ng ty, pat PL eee la all THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 25 evidential, and yet much more than evidential; they are they which testify of Jesus. Next Sunday night I hope to touch on the difficulties (so much talked of in our time) which have been raised by what is called the Higher Criticism. Do not ima- gine that I ignore this question when I put it on one side for the present, and simply appeal to them in the meantime to bear their testimony to Jesus, a testi- mony triumphant and conclusive. We must pause, however, to re- mind the sceptic that for him their witness, though it is over- whelming, has nothing to do with any theory of inspiration. That is a matter which does not concern him at all, and he is no 26 AIDS TO BELIEF more fit to discuss it than a drowning man, struggling not to sink, is fit to judge of the air- tight compartments of the life- boat which throws a rope to him. What concerns him is whether she can float. And what con- cerns the sceptic, as yet, is not whether inspiration is verbal or plenary, nor whether inspiration exists at all; it is simply whether the writers were truthful enough to convince him that Jesus rose from the grave. For, certainly, if this much be true—if Christ was indeed declared to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from among the dead —then I am bound to be a Chris- tian, apart from any theory of how the evangelists wrote. They oi thane THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 27 might conceivably have written just as Tacitus and Josephus wrote of the burning of Rome and Jerusalem, events which none doubt, although no person conceives these writers to have been inspired, or even accurate in all details. I am not making little of the discussion of these subjects in the Church — they deeply concern theology,—but I assert that no possible opinion about inspiration justifies un- belief; neither is the unbeliever in a position to judge of them calmly and without prejudice. As a fact, it is understood that at least one great student and man of letters in our day, a lay- man with the very loosest views of inspiration, does nevertheless é Cc 28 AIDS TO BELIEF avow that the resurrection of Christ is the best-attested fact in all history. And it is so. I wish that people who are scep- tical about the Four Gospels would take the trouble to find out how much older and more numerous are the copies of these than of the ancient classics; how soon and how often they were translated into other tongues; how early are the quotations and allusions to them in other books ; with what veneration they were treated from the beginning. I suppose that nearly a cen- tury has passed since a half-crazy man of letters printed a really in- genious book to show that none of the classical writers ever lived; that whole literature was a hoax, THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 29 or rather it was an ingenious mental exercise of the monks in the monasteries of the Middle Ages. They wrote the classics for us. The poor man was laughed at; yet the evidence for the genuineness of these books is a drop in the bucket compared with the evidence for ours, which I boldly assert that no one would ever have doubted if they were not so _ exact- ing, if they did not require the submission alike of the intellect to their doctrine and of the life to their precepts. There is more to say, and, per- haps, to some here it may be more surprising. In my college days, every sceptical writer in- sisted on putting St. John’s 30 AIDS TO BELIEF Gospel at least well into the second century; and they avowed that if Jesus were simply a great teacher, then the belief in His Divinity, according to St. John, could not have sprung up sooner. Such were the controversies in which I was trained. But all this is over now. The greatest New Testament scholar of liberal views in Germany, the illustrious Harnach, after a life of diligent study, has published his avowal that what he calls ‘the reaction,’ that is, the reaction against loose views, has triumphed, and that all the greater books of the New Testament (all, I think, except the Pastoral Epistles and Second Peter) are proved be- yond doubt to belong to the THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 3! first age, the period to which the Church assigns them. Now, see what this means. It means that neither the belief in miracles, nor the adoration of a carpenter as God (knowing Him to be a carpenter), nor the notion that His body and blood were things to be given to others, things to eat and drink in some spiritual way, none of these were after- thoughts: they did not grow up slowly as legends have gathered about all great men, from Alex- ander to Napoleon, but all of them utterly unlike ours. No; they were part and parcel from the first of the convictions of the generation who had seen Christ. But this is enough; it is decisive; the battle of scep- 32 AIDS TO BELIEF ticism is lost before a word has been said about inspiration. And yet I am so unhappy as to feel quite sure that the same silly people who were frightened into hysterics by the theology of ‘Robert Elsmere, long after every competent judge of all schools knew that Dr. Light- foot and others had blown such theories into space—the same foolish women of both sexes will be just as much alarmed the next time that a fashion- able novelist serves up second- . hand infidelity to spice a romance. There are always people to be- lieve in ghosts. As in the time of Our Lord, so now, much harm is done, and many doubts are excited, I me eet £5 FRR a Oe Ne PC NE EN Ae Ne ye hae s we? Ss BOA ae A Nee? a Nae THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 33 by notions of inspiration which have no authority whatever in Scripture itself. I can remem- ber the immense sale of a book which insisted that the Bible was not only the word, but the very words, of God. But if you observe closely, you will find that the Scripture itself is quite free from any such assertion, It says that the word of the Lord came to Isaiah, but it speaks also of the word which Isaiah saw— his message flaming before his in- ward eye. To Jeremiah it was a fire in his bones, forcing him to speak ; but always the speaker is human, the message divine, and the tone of the human voice, which in writing we call the ‘style, is not the same in 34 AIDS TO BELIEF any two. And so we are dis- tinctly told that ‘holy men of old spake’—they spake—‘as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. And in the most ex- press definition given us any- where of the work of inspiration, what we read is this —‘ Every Scripture inspired of God is also profitable for teaching, for re- proof, for correction, for instruc- tion which is in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, furnished completely, unto every good work. And I will say here that whoever accepts Scripture in this sense, as given by God, to be his moral and religious guide and teacher, his theory of inspiration may be undefined and vague, THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 35 but it suffices, not, perhaps, for theological science, but for sal- vation. Let none be disquieted or self-reproachful who listens with the ear of a disciple to the Bible witnessing of Jesus. And what a marvellous testi- mony it bears! The most spiri- tual creed anywhere outside the Church of Christ is Buddhism, but the first page of the Bible supplies what all Buddhism can- not give: it meets the deepest craving of our nature with the twofold proclamation of human sin and of a human suffering Re- deemer. Buddhism says: ‘Sup- press your appetites, for all that exists is a delusion.’ The Bible says: ‘ All flesh is corrupt before the Lord.’ The Buddha says: 36 AIDS TO BELIEF ‘I have saved myself; ye must save yourselves.’ Scripture says that the seed of the woman, with his own heel bruised, shall crush the head of our tempter. To Abraham there is promised a descendant who shall bless the whole world. No sooner is the law given than it becomes plain that He is to set the law aside; for this chief of a religion is not to belong to the priestly but the Royal tribe, and yet He is to bea Priest sitting upon a throne, and even, while then sitting, not stand- ing, at God’s right hand, a priest after the order of a Canaanite. Is there anywhere else, I wonder, a religion which looks forward eagerly to the greatest of its sons trampling thus on all that y= THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 37 it holds sacred? Everywhere else in the Old Testament the righteous is rewarded—he is to be like a tree planted beside a river: goodness and mercy shall follow him all his days: the Lord will make fat his bones: his enemies shall come against him one way and flee from him seven ways: light is sown for the righteous and joyful glad- ness for the true-hearted. But there is one Righteous Man (and always one), whose doom is shown in the Twenty-second Psalm and the Fifty-third of Isaiah, whom it pleases the Lord to bruise; who is Himself offered, a human sacrifice, to God. ‘Sin,’ says Dr. Driver, ‘is regarded as an invasion of 38 AIDS TO BELIEF God’s honour, and the satisfac- tion paid for it is the innocent life of His Righteous Servant.’ ‘A curious satisfaction, is it not? And who can fathom the per- plexity of a devout Jew, pon- dering the strange notion that God is to make of a righteous soul an offering for sin? Such is the picture. Whence came it? How has it come to be ful- filled? And His character is as unique as His career. All the great men of the race are types of Him, but none re- sembles Him. Isaiah, indeed, has drawn a sharp contrast, in a passage unhappily cut asunder by our division of chapters, be- tween Cyrus (the only Gentile whom any prophet calls ‘my a ee eee THE BIBLE AND THE FAITH 39 —_— servant’) and that other, ‘My Servant whom I have chosen’ ; the one coming upon rulers as upon mortar and as a potter tramples clay; the other break- ing no bruised reed, nor quench- ing the flax in which only a little smoke is lingering. What does it matter to evidence like this whether the words were written a century earlier or later? There they shine, a divine paradox divinely fulfilled. For none denies that they were written while no feet had even striven to climb this solitary and painful way to a solitary and sublime greatness. Jesus has done this. And, in the light of these complicated and profound coincidences, these para- 40 AIDS TO BELIEF doxes reconciled; these intui- tions so adverse to Judaism, so lovingly cherished in her bosom, so magnificently fulfilled, so fruit- ful of moral greatness whenever in all the centuries and wherever in all the ruined world men have truly known the Scriptures and the power of God,—Oh, it is in the light of these that I bid you hear again the Saviour’s words and judge whether they are not watranted: ‘Search the Scrip- tures ... they are they which testify of Me.’ Il! THE HIGHER CRITICISM AND THE FAITH ‘Prove all things: hold fast that which is good.’—1 THESS, v. 21. I HOPE that the hearers of my last argument observed that at least it was a broad one. How- ever instructive and edifying to Christians the predictions of minute details may be, the sceptic has always a chance to throw doubt upon their actual fulfilment. In the nature of things it is difficult to put beyond all dispute that not a bone was broken of a sufferer ‘ 41 42 AIDS TO BELIEF nearly two thousand years ago. But there are other facts beyond evasion. No one can deny that the Old Testament came to Jesus with a challenge in its hand, most complicated and intricate—a challenge to main- tain and enlarge all its religious teaching, and yet to abolish all its religious institutions — the Temple, the sacrifices, the priestly order,—and by so doing, by stripping it of so much that it reckoned dearest, to make its deepest convictions, hitherto those of a petty tribe, strong enough to renew the world. No one can deny that it cautioned every aspirant to this great task that it would please the Lord to bruise him THE HIGHER CRITICISM 43 and put him to grief. No one can deny that prophecy described a sort of greatness quite unlike © any which the world had ever seen—that, as I showed you, it expressly contrasted Cyrus, com- ing upon rulers as upon mortar, with that mightier Servant of God who should not break a bruised reed. It is certain that even when this type of great- ness was described no person strove to attain to it, and the Maccabees, with this prediction in their hands, were quite as ready to trample rulers like clay as any of the former leaders of Israel. In all the history of the world one human being only has taken rank among the supreme leaders of the race D A4 AIDS TO BELIEF upon such lines as these. This was foretold, and this has come to pass. Now, I was very careful to urge upon you that this convincing evidence depends upon no theory of inspira- tion whatever, and that, like all the Christian evidences, it assumes nothing more than the substantial truth of the story of our Lord, and the previous existence of the prophetic writ- ings. I laid stress upon this, because people cannot judge of - such matters, of Old Testament difficulties, of the higher criticism concerning which I am now to speak to you—they cannot judge of them reasonably unless they can judge calmly. If I think THE HIGHER CRITICISM 45 that all is lost, that my hopes for eternity are gravely com- promised, unless Moses wrote the account of his own death in Deuteronomy, I shall be tempted to make my reason blind, and endeavour at least to believe that I believe that it is believable that he might possibly have written this. But if I feel confident that provided I believe on the Lord Jesus Christ I shall be saved, then I shall retain my senses; then I shall remember that the Bible itself never really asserts that Moses wrote the Pentateuch at all, but only that he sang a cer- tain song in it, and that, however interesting and even important such discussions may be, the 46 AIDS TO BELIEF ordinary Christian need not agitate himself at all about a question of scholarship, which only concerns scholars! I say it is a question for scholars; yet I have undertaken, with much reluctance I confess, to say something about the higher criticism ; because men’s minds are so unsettled, such bold asser- tions are made in the penny papers and sixpenny magazines, that the Christian public requires to have some frank words spoken to it upon a subject which cannot really be popularised. I cannot speak fully in a sermon, even if I were qualified to do so, but at least I shall speak quite frankly. What then does the © 3 See Note A, p. 129. THE HIGHER CRITICISM 47 higher criticism mean? You may be surprised to hear that it is a thing absolutely harmless in itself, which has done great ser- vices to the Church, and will yet do more, and perhaps greater. Suppose then that one who had never seen the Epistle to the Hebrews were to come upon that noble book. He would examine the meaning of many expressions and allusions, the difference between some quota- _tions and the exact words of the Old Testament—a hundred such questions would occur to any intelligent student, and _ this would be criticism, textual and other criticism. But when he came thus at the meaning and force of the words, higher 48 AIDS TO BELIEF questions, the higher criticism, might well begin—he would wonder who the writer was, and when he wrote. He _ would notice some of St. Paul’s habitual words and arguments, but also some very unlike his—a_ vast number of words that he has never used, and some that he used in a slightly different sense. He would notice that, while Paul earnestly protests that he received not his doctrine from men, this writer says, ‘They delivered them unto us who from the beginning were eye- witnesses. He would notice that his Greek is such as writers used in the great school of Alexandria, and that his elo- quence, less fiery than the THE HIGHER CRITICISM 49 eee ee Apostle’s, is much more balanced and artistic, so that —I take an extreme example —while St. Paul says, ‘ Christ sitteth at the right hand of God, he says, ‘He for ever sat down on the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in the heavens. He would now, like many of the greatest Fathers, and all the reformers and the best modern scholars, feel sure that the writer was not Paul himself, but some one who had drunk deep into his spirit. Then he would ask, When was it written? and would have no trouble in answering that it was among the earliest of the New Testament books, because it tells us that the old 50 AIDS TO BELIEF system was ‘ready to vanish away, which implies that it was not yet gone, and also that there were still ‘priests who offer sacrifices according to the law.’ And thus we have another and powerful witness to the creed of the Church, writing within forty years of the Resurrection, and quoting witnesses yet earlier than himself. This is the higher criticism. I told you already that Harnach, the greatest liberal critic of our day in Germany, avows that the re- action (which means the reaction against unbelieving notions about the date of the New Testament) has completely triumphed. Now this is constantly spoken of as a victory over the higher criti- THE HIGHER CRITICISM 51 ———————— al cism. But it is not so. It is a victory in the field of the higher criticism, gained by ortho- dox critics, Lightfoot, Westcott, and our own Dr. Salmon, over the unbelieving critics. And it has not only beaten off the attack: in doing so it has taught us to think far better and more wisely about the writers and their work; to observe and value the differences between the four Evangelists, the methodical — man of business, and the friend of the fiery Peter, and the comrade of the Apostle of the Gentiles, and him who leaned his honoured head upon the breast of our Lord Jesus. I say that we are not exactly where the attack found us, but we are 52. ~~ AIDS TO BELIEF far better off—the inundation of the Nile has gone down, and the fields are fertilised. Why then should we, who have seen this great victory won, be so hysterical in our alarm because a battle is still raging over the Old Testament, where the issues are far less vital, where nothing can disturb the mighty evidence which I have shown you, the progressive education through centuries of a nation and a religion for a future which they utterly failed to apprehend? In the Old Testament, as in the New, the struggle has already taught us much. I suspect that we used to think of the authors, if we thought of them at all, as caught into a sort of frenzy, and writing THE HIGHER CRITICISM 53 their fine utterances at a white heat, as the old poets pretended that they sang. But surely the dis- covery that traditions, documents, pedigrees, and even legal forms are copied into the very earliest books, adds weight, and gives a lively interest to them. Listen, for instance, to Abraham pur- chasing a place of burial; hear — the words of the grave and dignified mourner, and then of the greedy sellers, offering the field as a_ gift, but making mention of three times the true value of the property, and then observe how the narrative pro- ceeds—‘ So the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and 54 AIDS TO BELIEF all the trees which were in the field, which were in all the border thereof round about, were made sure unto Abraham.’ And every teachable soul should be inter- ested, not offended, by learning that before footnotes were in- vented, the- editor put’ -his remarks into the text, so that we have mention of the later names of places, and even of kings in Israel; while the death of Moses comes in just as the autobiography of a certain medizval Italian general goes on to tell about his death and burial, in no way divided from his own writing; and there has come down to us in the original law-book many a later law. It was impossible that a code THE HIGHER CRITICISM 55 written in the desert should not have required additions and changes, and the two, existing side by side, are evidence that no such wholesale revision was ever made as_ would have smoothed the first away. I for one see nothing to alarm us in the thought that we have more than one writer in our Book of Isaiah. This only adds another to the profoundest voices and clearest visions of the ancient time. Nor can any evidence of style prove anything, unless it was some later poet seeking to exhibit the vanity of human glory, who used the great name of Solomon to dramatise the bitter disappointment, the ex- hausted animalism and intellec- 56 | AIDS TO BELIEF tualism from which he _ turns, almost broken-hearted, to the simple ways of duty. It is criticism which has set this magnificent creation in a blaze of artistic and ethical glory, and has for ever silenced the bitter scoff, that we have canonised, and adopted as our own, the sour complaints of some jaded voluptuary. But, of course, this critical method has been seized by un- belief. A daring attempt is being made to prove that the old histories were not only written many centuries after the events which they relate, and touched up, again and again, afterward, but are unhistorical in their accounts of the religion, THE HIGHER CRITICISM 57 and the general circumstances of their forefathers; and in many cases this is done with the avowed intention of getting rid of all that is miraculous in them. It is impossible to go into the details of such a controversy here ; but for myself, I am con- vinced that already the seams are opening in the timbers of these wilder theories, and the water is rushing in. It used to be argued that writing was unknown to the Jews of the time of Moses: now that contention is quite given up. It is impossible to make what we know about the Psalms square with the demands of such criticism, and the earliest Prophets who wrote down their predictions imply 58 AIDS TO BELIEF a state of things very far from harmonising with its theories. But let us have one specimen of their work. The twin giants of the destructive criticism are Wellhausen and Kuenen. Now, Wellhausen labours with great earnestness to prove that the early sacrifices were all festive— simply a sharing of their banquet with the kindly God of the tribe —and the darker notion of pro- pitiation only came with what is called the priestly code. He writes: ‘An underlying reference to sacrifice for sin, speaking generally, was entirely absent. The ancient sacrifices were wholly of a joyous nature—a merry-making before Jehovah’ (History of Israel, p. 81). THE HIGHER CRITICISM 59 © 1 confess that‘ I find this theory the odder because he tells us that the human sacri- fices of Abraham and Jephthah ‘belonged to the older practice’ (p. 69); but it is a matter which he lays great stress upon, and which he proves quite clearly, if you only allow him to blot out, as an interpolation, every verse or half-line which looks the other way. With this liberty, I suppose we could all prove anything. And Kuenen proves just the reverse: ‘By various paths we arrive at one and the same conclusion: originally ... Javeh was conceived by those who worshipped Him to be a Severe Being inaccessible to mankind, whom it was _ neces- E 60 . AIDS TO BELIEF sary to propitiate with sacri- fices, and even with human sacrifices’ (Relig. of Israel, 1. 249). These diverse conclusions throw a curious light upon the processes which lead equally to both. And I advise you, when you wish to test the qualifications of some flippant talker about the modern school and its assured results, to ask whether he agrees with Wellhausen or Kuenen about the origin of sacrifices. Give him no further clue, and watch the result. Something I would fain have added about the ease—as great or greater—with which a similar process would break up the English literature of our own THE HIGHER CRITICISM OI time: But I must be content with what has been said, and with this for a moral—that in Yin Wek erent nema neem calmness and quietness is our | security, not railing at science | or its methods; not imagining that all is lost when some old opinion changes form, like the teil tree or the oak, whose strength is in them when they cast their leaves ; not supposing that all which asserts itself loudly must be true; not doubt- ing but that all genuine truth is | our inheritance, and, above all, remembering that no truth can smite another in the face, and > that the veriest truth of God is_ that mighty revelation of One coming, who now has, indeed, a * Aj : — oe \ tr , A 4S mat EE ¥¥1i AR Aas F ~ . % 2 { i} i? R - a en ‘ee, - Spr Vas ldesis;, f Be es PELE AR Db OF Ses ® 62:\./SAIDS. TOV BELIEF come—a revelation which took shape and colour through con- federate ages, and was consum- mated in the person of Our - Lord. IV THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST ‘From everlasting to everlasting Thou art God.’—PSALM xc, 2. WE are now to consider the evi- dence borne to our faith by the ages before Christ. Stress has been already laid upon one branch of this subject, because no argument can be more evident to any one who takes the trouble to think, or larger in scale, or more convincing, than the correspondence between what even scepticism will not refuse to call the mystic anticipations of former ages and what Our 68 64 .. AIDS TO BELIEF Lord achieved. If any one objects that these may have fulfilled themselves by suggest- ing and shaping His career, the answer is plain: they suggested it to no one else; the deepest students of the Old Testament rejected Him with scorn, and demanded a _ quite different Messiah; and, moreover, the course He took, in the nature of things, could not have attracted the ambition or in- flamed the imagination of any one, for He was despised and rejected of men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. But there is more to say about the relation between our creed and the older time. I can THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 65 imagine that as this argument was pressed some acute minds in this congregation were silently rejoining, ‘What about the oldest history of all, whose records only science can inter- pret? What about creation in six days? And what about the development of species?’ Here I admit at once that some explanation is required, and much candour (quite as much from me who speak as from you who listen), and that grave and real offence has been caused by hasty advocates of the faith, resolved to see nothing in the case except what suits their own brief. I admit that no reader of the Bible, before geo- logy, had seen in the first 66 AIDS TO BELIEF chapter of Genesis what we see now, just as no gazer upon the rocks had seen it there. Theo- logy is a human science, exactly as geology is, except that the material it works upon is revela- tion, while geology works upon the physical universe; and I put it to your common-sense, which of the two ought to have been the first to cease making mistakes in a question of physics? But yet I hasten to add that there was conclusive evidence in Scrip- ture itself, just as there was in the rocks, though unobserved in both, that the week of creation was not a literal week, and con- sequently the narrative was not to be read as one reads a cove- nant or an indenture. People THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 67 speak of the six days, but what about the Seventh Day? The Book of Psalms declared plainly that the Sabbath of God had not yet ended ; that if the Jews had been faithful they should have entered not merely into rest, but into ‘My rest.’ The Epistle to the Hebrews laid stress upon this curious point: ‘He sware in His wrath, if they shall enter into My rest, although the works were finished from the founda- tion of the world.” ‘He hath said of the seventh day on this wise, God rested on the seventh day from all His works,’ and in this place again, ‘They shall not enter into My rest.’ And it draws the really irresistible con- clusion that this Sabbath still 68 AIDS TO BELIEF endures, and we may share itt ©. there remaineth, therefore, Sabbath-keeping for the people of God.” More emphatic and remarkable still is our Lord’s own argument, when reproached with Sabbath-breaking : — ‘My Father worketh until now, and I work. That is to say, though God rests from creation, His work of providence and kind- ness goes forward, and it entitles Me to heal this impotent man on My seventh day. It cannot mean anything else. For what sort of answer would it have been to say:—‘My Father worketh when it is not His Sabbath, and therefore I work although it is Mine’? But it follows that the whole week is THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 69 ee non-literal, for who ever heard of a week of which six days were twenty-four hours each, and the seventh a few thousand years? I have shown you already\ that the purpose for which | Scripture was _ inspired was religious, and it would have been ridiculous as well as im+ possible to teach modern ge0-| logy to ancient Israel. What, was possible was to claim the whole universe, sun, moon, and stars, as well as earth, and all the races of mankind, for God, and thereby to shut out for ever the notion of a tribal god, fighting for his own adorers against the rival deities of other races, and the notion of various gods for various functions—one for the | 70 ~~ +AIDS TO BELIEF sky, another for the waters, and es another for the land. If, _ | now, you ask what permanent * teaching for mankind the division pot creation into six days was pa really intended to convey, I think : myself that there is a ready \ answer, and the clue to it is { _the order of the days, in their | double column of three days leach. For does not all our ; existence move in a _ threefold | habitation and wrap itself in a a threefold envelope? The outer- ! \ most of all that we know is i \ light, that vast and luminous \ \ \ocean in which we and whatever lwe may conceive are launched ; and within it is a second en- velope of water, washing the } i | | Hi } ° ‘shore of every continent, and | THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 7! ncn falling upon us from the rushing clouds; and within this again the green world which we in- | habit. Light, and the twofold waters, and the grassy world, | —these, in this order, make the first three days. And the second column enu- merates in the same order the moving denizens of each of these: in the light, the sun, moon, and stars: in the waters, the fish and birds: on the earth, the beasts and men. Behold the six days, the creation of all that exists in | orderly and logical succession ; \ not at a stroke, but at intervals, | and rising up to man, who is not the first-born (as you might ex- pect), but the last to appear on\ / N the earth which is given him to 72 AIDS TO BELIEF ‘subdue. ‘Ah yes,’ one retorts, ‘if “© you had found this out before ‘science prompted you: but why \had you to wait for other folk ‘to discover it all before you be- came so wise?’ Because it was not our business: because God, Who gave religion to tell us of Himseif, gave science to explain His world. It would have been strange indeed if He had para- lysed our intellects by prompting religion to push science off her chair. But I will tell you some- thing stranger still: that when- ever science has changed her own opinion upon matters purely scientific—the movement of the earth around the sun, the substi- tution of gravitation for vortices, the origin of species—an outcry THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 73 has been raised against religion. No one attacks science, which has actually misled us hither- to; but her professors (who, if any one, should really do penance in a white sheet) invariably raise the cry that it is religion which has been deceiving folk, that religion is untrustworthy, and this fine science of theirs, which, you observe, has just turned this prodigious somersault, is the one thing stable in a world of change. For science, and even for the teachers of science, I have a supreme respect, but this is in spite of their ugly habit of ston- ing the Pentateuch as often as they find that their own physio- logy was a romance or their astronomy a fond thing vainly p SSNS SS % 2 veld LU iW ae all 74 AIDS TO BELIEF imagined. I repeat that physi- ology, astronomy, geology belong to science. 4»~And now, what is to be said of Darwinism? For at least a century and a half every great naturalist has believed in some form of natural development, and every competent theologian has observed that whereas the heavens and the earth are said to have been created, the animals are all said to have been made, and man explicitly of pre-exist- ing material—whether vitalised or not is not so much as hinted. People speak of the decline of Darwinism as if it were in some way a relief to theology. But, in the first place, it does not concern us in the least, as THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 75 we have already seen; and in the next place, the so-called decline of Darwinism really means no more than this, that people have ceased to think of it as explaining everything, and now reckon it one force among many, yet a real force, in the upward movement of life to sensation, self-consciousness, and reason. But there is more to say. This upward movement is drilled and disciplined: it is not a scramble but a plan worked out. There are hints in the lower creature (useless, and even cumbersome, as I cannot but think, sometimes, to himself) of the greater yet to come, and even the writers who deny the designer fail utterly to express F 70 AIDS TO BELIEF the process without using the language of design. This is notorious. And when we come up to man there is one question which no materialistic theory can answer. The difference between ._ him and the nearest of the mam- * malia is measured by steam- “ engines and printing presses, by telescopes, cathedrals, epic poems, oratorios, and litanies, by the means of grace and the hope of glory. Is all this difference ex- plained by differences in his body? Then you have certainly many missing links to find be- fore you can claim to have bridged the wide and unfathom- able gulf which severs him from the ape, cracking nuts in his tree. If it is not in his body, what THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 77 better name have you found for it than ours, who shall still call it his soul, this immaterial part of him which reaches up its hands to God and cries into immensity, Our Father? More yet. This process of a slow evolution, weeding out the unfit, preparing in lower forms the germs of higher glories— this is the very history of the Christian faith, rising from the Jewish and the patriarchal. The ancient philosopher adored a re- mote and solitary being, ignorant of emotion and of suffering. The Christian kneels to One who desires, plans, and is patient; thwarted in details but never in the issue of His wondrous pro- cess, not leaping at once to His 78 AIDS TO BELIEF mark as if the interval between starting-place and goal insulted Him; but loving the process equally with the result, the blade and the ear and the full corn in the ear.. The Arian ‘and Socinian heresies have their root in impatience at this strange spectacle of a God who is Him- self immersed in the struggle and burden of His universe. And our fathers may well have been perplexed by the strange contrast between the prompt and direct action of God in creation and the slow, long-suffering pro- cess by which, in the fulness of time, He bringeth the First-Be- gotten into the world. But now the contrast is an analogy. For us who think of natural life, at THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 79 first rudimentary, always vexed and buffeted by competition of the higher and lower type, but elevated by the very struggle to exist, and led slowly upward by the unseen hand of God—for us nature is a record in the same handwriting which has traced the history of the Church. Abraham had faith to emigrate, to believe that he should have a son, and to lay Isaac on the altar. But when St. Paul dissects out this rudimentary faith, he finds in it the germ of everything, exactly as the questioner of nature finds in certain ascidian larve the hint and promise of that spinal column which holds man erect, with eyes looking out into the infinite. 80 + AIDS TO BELIEF Will any one deny that the struggle to exist has been as sharp an instrument of God to shape the Church as to mould the world around? From the furnace of Egypt, Moses and his law; from the defeat and ruin of Saul, David; from the invasions of Assyria, Isaiah ; in the hour of soverthrow and exile, Jeremiah; in the captivity, Ezekiel; and in all of these, as we already saw, some sure premonition of a . greatness unlike their own, and higher, of which, however, their own was a type, a premoni- tion, even sometimes a rudiment. Lastly, the one development which is absolutely certain is the development of men into Chris- tian men. Come back, then, from ky i rd a #2 ; a » j SS ee ee eee ‘ ‘ é i t . = 9 Peta Ie 2 THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 81 DO Ee the far-off ages, from peering into mists wherein one imagines the half of what he sees, come back to the Cross of Jesus, and confess that you may explain much animal mechanism without explaining Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. ‘The effects of our most uniform and frequent experiences, Mr. Herbert Spencer tells us, ‘have been bequeathed, principle and interest, to the race’ So be it. But the most constant ex- perience of all was that suc- cess came of strength, cunning, adaptability ; that the weak must perish; that the fittest must survive; that the task not only of individuals but of races is to succeed, to struggle, to trample, 82 AIDS TO BELIEF to absorb, to grasp, to live. Yet, on a sudden, in the worst age in the world, when even revealed religion is dying of ossification of the heart, behold, a simultaneous movement spreading from the Pharisees of Judea to the fre- quenters of gladiatorial shows: together they adore an executed _ carpenter—they adore Him be- cause He accepts agony and a bloody sweat, and the cross and passion, because He laughs to scorn your beautiful doctrines of the survival of the fittest, and success by strength, cunning, and adaptability. The weeding out of weak specimens, the natural selection of the strongest and best nourished, these you vaunt as the secret of the upward pro- gress of all life, the one lesson a ? , 3 v P a = =A. gn ee ee AE a 1 8 es THE AGES BEFORE CHRIST 83 which countless ages have graven upon the universal conscious- ness. And yet the mightiest and healthiest races, the most certain to survive, are those which have best learned the quixotic and ruinous precepts that bid the weak, the helpless, and the diseased be cherished with especial tenderness, preach- ing self-sacrifice and the taking up of a cross. Why, then, if Darwinism has really discerned the law of natural progress, here is the supernatural, visible to all men’s eyes. Or else what is it? And the greatest of all its preachers answers: It is the weakness of God stronger than men; and the foolishness of God wiser than men. Vv THE AGES SINCE CHRIST ‘Lo, Iam with you all the days, even unt the end of the world.’—-MATT. xxviii. 20, WE have argued that the ages before Christ foreboded Him ; and as modern science reads in the lower animals hints and prefigurations of loftier forms to come, so we found in the Old Testament the germs whence Christianity unfolded itself. This is now an evidence, but clearly it was an embarrassment at first ; the multitude and variety of these premonitions were en- tanglements for the feet of the 84 ——- THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 85 Messiah. Let us look at a few of them before we pass. A narrow and intolerant religion and race shall raise up a Seed in whom all the families of the earth shall be blessed. A Man is to be Jehovah’s fellow, and yet a sword shall awake against Him. Jehovah Himself shall smite the Shepherd and scatter His own flock, An all-conquer- ing Hero goes to mockery and - shame of which even the details are given. He is made an offer- ing for sin by One who delighteth not in burnt offerings. He fails so utterly that men hide their faces from Him, and He succeeds so perfectly that they call Him Mighty God and _ Everlasting Father. He is the Prince of ceiennideaiindiainieean iaseeomnmmmemetl asmepenemens 86 AIDS TO BELIEF Peace, and His arrows are sharp in the heart of His enemies. All greatness is a type of His; He is a Prophet like unto Moses; He is called ‘My Servant David’; He is* a: Priest after the order of him to whom Abra- ham paid tithes; and not only must all these functions be re- conciled, but at the same time His originality must be preserved, for this august personage must not be the pale imitator of any one. He must be a voice, not an echo, Thus the history of the past is at once a snare for the impostor, and a convincing witness to Him who solves its problem. And now we come to the history of the ages since Christ THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 87 appeared ; and at the very out- set I ask, Where are the other | religions of the first century ?) Those of Egypt and of Persia are dead: it is seldom that ae lonely student spells out pain- | fully the inscription on their \ crumbling sepulchres, | Where are the bright and | romantic superstitions of Greece and Rome? They too are dead: poetry and art have only em- balmed them; and though we gaze upon their features, there is no voice, none answers when _ we speak. ‘’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more.’ And if the religions of the } Fast live on, they are bed-ridden / and paralysed: they only em- 88 AIDS TO BELIEF phasise by contrast the difference between senility and eternal youth. For the religion of Judea, transformed and glorified, lives “on. Its temples overtop the palaces of our kings, and its saints are revered in lands where Cesar and Napoleon are un- known. We often appeal to the evidence for Christ’s resurrection, and urge that nothing short of absolute certainty could have nerved men who hoped for no earthly gain to defy sword and flame for the joy of proclaiming that the Lord is risen. We have a right to this appeal. But here is a resurrection which none can gainsay: the hopes and convic- tions of God’s ancient people, THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 89 whatever made Israel dwell alone among the nations, all are buried in the grave dug for Israel by the Roman steel; but the stone is rolled away from the door of the sepulchre, and the creed has emerged, infinitely more beautiful and bright, ‘raised a_ spiritual body’ in the winged faith of Jesus which traverses the world to-day. Now every day since then has + put it to some new test. The | ~2 deadliest foes, the most astonish- ing revolutions, the most terrible revolt of her own sons, and something still more dangerous, that slow and steady change of Opinions, that drifting away and swamping of old views, tastes, methods of judging, arguing, and 90 AIDS TO BELIEF feeling, which make the contrast between the ancient and the modern world, the new civilisa- tion and the old,—all these have met her, all have raged against her, and all have raged in vain. They have come and gone like the winds ; they have swung this way and that like the tides, but she has stood up amid the tem- pest and above the foam, a rock crowned with a beacon for the mariners, and sheltering a haven from the blast. Now this per- manent force, this many-sidedness of conquest, is not given to false- hood; it belongs only to what is rooted in nature, what is true. Look round the world, as it was when Jesus came. Here is the Jew, formal, un- THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 91 loving, with high but severe views of God. Christ melts his formalism, kindles his bigotry into a most loving ardour, lights up his shadowy truths like the painting on a lamp-shade when the flame within is kindled, and sends him to bear the cross to the world’s end. And forthwith whatever holds aloof, whatever insists on being merely Jewish, dies. It exists, if you like, still ; but it is a fossil. Nias And here is the Greek. He = has just given the last touch to 1i7il B® "3 \ See Vs Plea tor his marvellous language, his keen logic, his perfect perception of the beautiful. The Christian faith makes a shrine for her imperishable truths of the per- fect language which is understood G ee ene = ae ap SS = —se SS ae PEE 92 AIDS TO BELIEF everywhere; takes the edge of his logic with which to mould her dogmas and to smite her oppo- nents down; takes his unparal- leled sense of beauty, to confess, as fairer than the sons of men, the visage which was more marred than that of any man. Which being done, the Greek intellect straightway falls into its dotage. ot And here is, lastly, the Roman. He has just built up that mighty organisation of empire, the most terrible and solid specimen ever exhibited of disciplined, calm, all-conquering brute force. His power is everywhere. It has stamped out for the moment the aggressiveness of small na- tional and local prejudice; and the Faith employs this catho- THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 93 licity of empire to smooth its way from Syria to Greece and Rome, to Spain and England. His laws are everywhere; and she invokes them to shelter her great Apostle from the fury of his foes, and to protect the truth from being crushed in its infancy. ‘Take heed what thou doest,’ she said, ‘for this man is a Roman,’ His trade is everywhere, and she uses it, as she uses our British sails to-day, to waft her Gospel from shore to shore. Then she publicly desires him to do her a further service. Looking this giant in the face, she dares him before the world to match his tremendous resources against her gentleness, his mailed fist against her open palm. The empire of © 94 —«AIDS TO BELIEF sak Sate pee Renna eR Rd S the world accepts the challenge, and smites her, who never strikes back, again and again and again. ~ The blows of her buffeting re- if sound through the world, but she ' never totters. From the fires of her martyrdom a face of im- mortal youth and_ unsullied splendour looks out on the astonished world ; and after three centuries of blood and smoke, she quietly grasps the crown of her persecutor and sets it upon a Christian head. And now the work of Rome is over ; and as the Temple of Jerusalem crumbled, and the organ voice of Greece erew thin, so the sword which smote the earth with a perpetual stroke was first blunted, and then snapped across, THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 95 All the powers of earth served her, mocked her, and expired. And what then? In rushed upon the ruining empire the con- fused crowds, naked and strong and bloody, which had slain each other outside in the dark for ages. They upset her laws, quenched her civilisation, tore her empire into fragments. They had no soul for painting or poetry, sculpture or architecture, yet something in this strange religion brought them also, awe- struck, silent, on their knees be- fore the Cross of Jesus. In that wild Europe our Christian faith is the one guiding star that shone over the weltering waters, Jus- tice, order, learning, would all have perished but for her. To- — 96 AIDS TO BELIEF day there would exist no Homer, no Atschylus, no Virgil, no Juvenal, I say quite seriously, and without exaggeration, that we should only know by some vague and shapeless legend the difference between Jupiter and Julius Cesar, but for Christ, and because His religion put a bridle in the mouth of passions which only under her coercion spared age or sex or helplessness. Ex- plain to us, you who deny Jesus, how the same delusion which fascinated the fastidious Greek and the majestic Roman could also mesmerise the Vandal and the Goth—how it floated across the deluge in which all else of beauty or splendour was en- culfed. THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 97 ic alle RRS aa a Te There came an evil day. The / | cs Church had bridled the bar- tH nf barians, but success turned her ere brain, and pride and idleness and fulness of bread ‘made her a curse and a burden to those who lately blessed her. She became an incubus, a dead weight, and every free force in existence strove to shake her off, How did they fare in that endeavour? Art cried out on her and was bribed; violence smote her and was crushed ; philosophy accused her and was gagged; and Europe reeled under a load which she could not endure, but from which she was powerless to disengage her- self. Then was seen the majesty of the Faith itself, for 98 AIDS TO BELIEF a few obscure and feeble men, returning to the doctrines of the Gospel, wrought the deliverance which mighty emperors, deep thinkers, and the greatest poet of _ the middle ages strove to effect | in vain, Only Christ could _ reform the Church of_ Christ, \and He is seen to loose this | worst burden from the shoulders of every nation that accepts } Him; and while the remainder sink back into degradation and the night, these bask in the sun of fortune and of freedom. Think how Spain and England have changed places. Z 5 é gf att ,-eee Yet another storm assails her J gag : ; Ws Atheism lifts up her blatant voice and curses her—a_ shriek- owl hooting at the sun. For THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 99 the first time since Julian the Apostate, a nation solemnly and and officially renounces Christ, and engraves on the doorway of her burial-ground the somewhat hazardous assertion, ‘Death is an eternal sleep. And what follows? Such a delirium as in the name of liberty sets up a reign of terror, in the name of equality installs a despot, and in the name of fraternity per- petrates the invasion and plunder of Europe—a delirium and the inevitable reaction; the old dynasty, because its tyranny is better than a godless freedom; the old superstition, because even a degenerate Christianity is better than a goddess of reason half-naked in the streets; and TOO; AIDS TO BELIEF with these the sword of outraged Europe at her throat. And ever since the nation which rejected Christ, even beautiful and gifted France, has been alternately frenzied and despairing, trampled by usurpers and by mobs, bleed- ing from her own sword and her foemen’s, until to-day upon any theory her officers are forgers, and her magistracy is insulted in the streets. Is it possible, one asks in a sort of terror, that fraud or madness reared this imperishable fabric? Pagan hate, barbaric rage, the old selfish civilisation, medizval ignorance, revulsion against the usurpation of her sons, the denial of scholars and raillery of wits, all have striven in turn to slay, THE AGES SINCE CHRIST IOI to dishonour, to ignore her. You might as well strive to bridle the morning, to arrest the tides. | Nor has she merely existed through the centuries; she has been a power utterly unique and unparalleled: in the monas- tery with Kempis, Savonarola, Luther ; in Parliament with Wil- berforce, Buxton, and Shaftes- bury; in heathendom with a hundred missionaries through whom the people that sat in darkness have seen a_ great light; ay, and on the sick- bed with tortured men and frail women and children, teaching them to look steadily into the face of the king of terrors, and to know him for a beaten foe. Le nee a nt te Fg / fot F | 1} 102 AIDS TO BELIEF The Apostles found humanity like the impotent man of their first miracle. Around were the glories of hill and valley, within — was the awe and sanctity of the Temple, but he lay prostrate in the porch, and could enjoy neither, craving some ignoble gift, with- out a hope of vigour and of health. The teachers from Gali- lee said to mankind, In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, arise! and immediately its feet and ankle- bones received strength. They were, as they professed to be, not sages but heralds of salva- — tion endued with power. They — | poured into a new channel the — torrent of the ages, whose drops |;are the lives of men. Here, then, is the witness of history. The THE AGES SINCE CHRIST 103 ages before Christ saw Him, j . if i Pym = unknowing of whom they sang./= Bill The subsequent ages assailed Him and were overthrown, or\ neglected Him and were blighted, | or kneeled to Him and were | _ crowned, O Lamb of God, Redeemer of the World, truly Thy name is above every name! Still, as of old, unbelievers do their worst upon Thee, Our Master. They “expose Thee among thieves; the sky blackens, the earth shudders; it seems as if the Father has forsaken Thee ; they boast that Thou art crucified, dead, and buried. Only, as of old, voices pierce the darkness : some penitent mocker cries, ; | * H zy } * Y 104 AIDS TO BELIEF ‘Lord, remember me’; some torturer is heard to murmur, ‘Truly this was the Son of God.’ And again, the stone is rolled away from the tomb, where they sealed Thee down and guarded Thee, and by the tomb stand forms of supernatural power, like lightning in their terror for the spearmen, like young men in their nearness to the faithful. And still, through grey mists and shadows (of the morning, not of the night!) Thou comest, changed, mysterious, and august, but speaking with lips immortal now the unforgotten names of us — who love Thee, and at the word we know in Whom we have believed, and our faith in Thee is the victory which overcometh the world. Mai THE PORTRAYING OF CHRIST ‘Even if I bear witness of Myself, My wit- ness is true, for I know whence I came and whither I go, but ye know not whence I came or whither I go,’—Jou viii. 14. WE have now reached the close of these evidential lectures. As I said at the outset, they have not been a survey of the wide field of the Christian evidences, but an attempt to place you at the proper standing-point whence all the evidences should be viewed. For if you regard the “faith as a wild and all but in- credible belief, into which you “are being dragooned by hostile 105 i 106° AIDS TO BELIEF evidence, we know the proverbial folly of attempting to convince a man against his will. But if you begin by realising the exist- ence of a vast and holy pheno- menon, unparalleled alike in the ages through which it was evolved, in its moral altitude, in the grasp it lays upon various temperaments and _ characters, from the Eskimo to the Anglo- Saxon, and from the Magdalen up to St. John, and in the end- less variety of its practical fruits —the existence of something, high as the heavens above us, with equal sublimities of burning noon and crimson evening and the silvery infinitudes of night, and yet dropping the soft rains which feed the grasses and bid PORTRAYING OF CHRIST 107 the torrents thunder down the gorge—why, then, the sceptical attempt to derive all this wonder and goodness from Hebrew superstitions and the hysterical excitement of a few fishermen, tax-collectors, and such folk, will become as inadequate as the notion that the stars were lighted by a match. Our text is much to the point: the claims of the Gospel are evidenced by this, that only our Christ ex- plains the origin and the ten- dencies of Himself and of all the world around. Grant Him, and life and death and history, and this strange religion which dominates them all—all are clear. Deny Him, and the story of Him, and of humanity, and all H 108 AIDS TO BELIEF our struggles and aspirations, are an insoluble enigma, a meaning- less confusion, and ‘ All the windy ways of men Are but dust that rises up And is lightly laid again.’ If you even doubt Him, you can no longer explain the origin or the issue of Him or yourselves, or anything. You must have observed all through the varied argument how continually the discussion led us to the mention of our Lord Himself, pressing us for- ward from the religion to the Man. And now I am to speak to you of the manner in which the Gospels write about Him, Himself. None can sufficiently do that. Moreover, I have to PORTRAYING OF CHRIST I09 speak of little things, because these are what would most surely elude fiction, just as the Egyp- tian magicians could manipulate serpents, but failed with flies. Much that is nearest to all Chris- tian hearts is not appropriate to an evidential lecture, and I con- fess that I recoil from the some- what critical method which best suits my object. Yet let us take up, as if for the first time, the four little pamphlets which have transformed the world. Here is the essence of the faith. Re- move them, and the Old Tes- tament interests humanity no more. Disprove one event which they record—the Resurrection— and our faith is vain and we are yet in our sins. And the re- 110. AIDS TO BELIEF mainder of the New Testament is altogether built on these. Reading them, we find that three are occupied with the Galilean ministry, its public teaching, and its wonders, and because they treat thus of the same matters they are called the Synoptic Gospels. And the fourth, later and deeper, assuming this story known, goes on to tell of different matters, of the controversies in Jerusalem, and the familiar con- verse with the chosen twelve, which naturally leads to a certain difference in style, to deeper thoughts, but less methodical and regular expression. And a rare opportunity is offered by this four-fold narrative, and chiefly by this difference between the first PORTRAYING OF CHRIST III three and the last, to compare, to cross-examine, and to observe whether they describe the same character, and the same habit of thought and action. It is a severe test. The difference is unmistakable between Cyrus de- scribed by Xenophon and by Herodotus, and Socrates by Xenophon and by Plato, because in each case one writer has touched up the simple story, for purposes of edification, and to slorify the hero. After so many centuries we can rip off, like gold lace from an officer’s uniform, what has been thus added to make a fine impression at the cost of truth. Surely four Gali- leans, of no literary experience whatever, will not succeed in 112 AIDS TO BELIEF deceiving us where the Greek intellect has failed. If, as every sceptic admits, most of the dis- courses are genuine, and enough of the story to reveal the real character of Jesus, how should the custom-house officer and the fisherman, when they patch up the story with all that is miracu- lous, and with the claim to be God Almighty, succeed in mak- ing the same delicate threads and filaments of character and of manner to run through the original fabric and these purple patches sewn upon it? He Him- self said that if you sew a new patch on a garment that has shrunken they will pull asunder and make a rent. With this in mind, we begin to consider what PORTRAYING OF CHRIST 113 effect the four stories have pro- duced upon us. And at the outset, one ques- tion occurs—What was Jesus Christ like? We know this more or less of all other famous men. We know it of Epictetus, Paul, Mahomet, Cicero, Of Alexander we know the double curve of the forehead and the line in the middle, the thick curls, the head carried somewhat on one side. Not only the face of Cesar is familiar, but his concealment of his baldness, and how folk bantered his affected manner of scratching his head. The bust of Socrates does not require his name upon it. But the Fathers of the Church have disputed whether Christ was physically Ii4 AIDS TO BELIEF the fairest of mankind or more marred in visage than any. And the first ages were so anxious to know this that forged documents have come to us from very early days describing His appearance and how He wore His hair and beard. Strange that all four Apostles keep silence. Was it that grander truth made them indifferent to this, or did some guiding Spirit seal their lips? Doubtless the same Spirit which taught Paul to say, ‘Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet henceforth after the flesh know we Him no more.’ We go on to notice elsewhere, in all four, the same persistent refusal to answer any question of our mere curiosity. What did PORTRAYING OF CHRIST I1I5§ Jesus write upon the ground, the only time we ever hear that He wrote atall? When the dead man sat up and began to speak, what did he say? Or what were the experiences of Lazarus in the spirit world ? ‘ Behold a man raised up by Christ ! The rest remaineth unrevealed : He told it not ; or something sealed The lips of that evangelist.’ . All this we would very gladly know. | Stranger still, how comes it that we have no account what- ever of the actual Resurrection? We know what happened im- mediately before and after, but over the supreme event itself hangs a curtain of impenetrable awe. Again, St. Paul tells us that 116 AIDS TO BELIEF Jesus appeared first to Cephas— that is to say, to him first of the witnesses whom Paul can cite. And so the two disciples return- ing from Emmaus were met with the glad words, ‘The Lord hath risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon’ Have you ever thought how the peni- tent sobbed at his Master’s feet, and with what a voice and what eyes his Lord restored him? We may ponder, but we do not know. Over that most sacred interview there is woven ‘a silver veil of tears.’ Now, all these are incidents of the most telling kind. I think ® that Tennyson never makes us really sympathise with King Arthur except in that most lofty PORTRAYING OF CHRIST I17 and pathetic scene where he pardons his guilty wife. Yet all the four Evangelists have deliberately passed by the op- portunity of thus revealing the heart of Christ to us as He forgives Peter. Or again, have you noticed: how Shakespeare makes us know his people? It is almost entirely by their soliloquies, for in speak- ing to themselves they betray to us their deepest thoughts and feelings: ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light.’ ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ ‘Oh, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven.’ ‘Out, damned spot ! out.’ ‘ All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ Nh, AeA him, put into the lips of Jesus a att Ea Eg ne ER sy ARES md (Pe £554 ae ead 118 AIDS TO BELIEF soliloquy of ninety-eight lines, with one heresy and_ several absurdities in it. Yet where Milton failed the Galileans have succeeded without resorting to any of the literary methods; they neither make Him solilo- quise, nor do they describe Him, much less dare to gush over Him, gi like Macaulay over the asthmatic skeleton covering the slow retreat of England, and upon whom - danger acts like wine; or Carlyle over ‘My Oliver, whom you will rightly judge only if your own soul is ‘beautiful and terrible to you, steeped in the eternal depths, in the eternal sunbeams.’ And yet they have drawn the best known and most intensely vital character in the world, and so PORTRAYING OF CHRIST I19 vividly that people of all sorts, ages, and ranks, barbarians and Anglo-Saxons, mill-girls, soldiers, philosophers, are guided through life and on their death-beds by the example of the Carpenter of Nazareth. Nay, not the Carpenter. For, of all that silence which we have observed, the most remarkable and sustained is concerning our Lord’s home life, and all that passed before His thirtieth year. This, you would think, is what we could hope to imitate; yet this is what none of the Gospels have recorded. They tell how He preached, not like us, but with authority; how He did among us the works that none other man did, but they suppress 120 AIDS TO BELIEF exactly that part which appears the best suited for our imitation. So grandly has the same inspira- tion taught them all, that it is not the acts of Jesus but the Spirit of the Divine Man which is to leadus. And now I ask you to notice, as a specimen of many which are crowded out by lack of time, one of those minuter features which the clumsy fingers of legend would certainly have let slip. It will be useful to take your Bible and search out many more: the power of the eyes with which He looked round about upon them: the richness and the quietude of His allusions to nature, far beyond those of any other teacher. But we must now be content with one. And I PORTRAYING OF CHRIST 121 do not take His kindness, for every one grants that. A great infidel explains the character of His miracles (so unlike Moses plaguing Egypt, or Elijah call- ing drought upon the nation) by saying that His true character was so well remembered all the while the legend was growing up, as to prevent a single harsh ‘miracle being ascribed to Him. Strange that this same character, so well remembered, did not pre- vent people from believing that He, being a man, made Himself God. At all events, Tact is a smaller matter: Tact would not and could not be guarded by mere tradition in this jealous fashion. Yet it is here. When they try to ensnare Him about 122. AIDS TO BELIEF the tribute, He makes them answer their own question by confessing that their currency is Czsar’s. He awakes the conscience of the woman of Samaria by the subtle word, ‘Go, call thy husband.’ It is only once, only with a rich but _ despised publican who dares not presume to invite Him, that He invites Himself to dine. How full are the parables, and among them some which the infidel rejects because they imply too much, of just the same tender feeling for human sensibilities: the host whose table is neglected ; the woman who cannot find her money without telling her neigh- bours of her joy; the prodigal who .composes a longer and PORTRAVING OF CHRIST 123 humbler speech than the love of his father lets him finish; and the father who is not con- tent without calling, from the distance to which he has run to meet him, to ‘bring hither’ the robe and the ring. Now, if this same attribute is equally seen in the miracles; if, as I said, this thread stretches equally through these, they can- not be a patch sewn on, but a part of the very fabric of which other portions are admitted to be genuine. Men are watching whether He will heal upon the Sabbath Day; their malicious hopes are excited when the man is set in the midst ; He exposes their pretended care for the Sabbath by consulting them, I 124 AIDS TO BELIEF without receiving an answer ; and then He confounds them by the wonderful device of doing no- thing: there is no touch, no word of apparent healing; He only says, Stretch forth thine hand; but the miracle is wrought. So, when a few women and children are mingled with a vast crowd of famishing men, He will not hazard a rush: the men must sit down in companies of fifties, and thus at the end they are easily reckoned, while the women and children go uncounted. When the daughter of Jairus is restored, He alone reflects that her system, now healthy, is long unfed, and amid their looks and words of amazement He is practical and calm; He bade that something PORTRAYING OF CHRIST 125 on should be given her toeat. When the widow of Nain dares not let her yearning heart loose upon the weird visitant from another world, He delivered him to his mother. We have fortunately one oppor- tunity of matching the work of these despised Galileans, in a half-assimilated language, against the ripest art of Greece. The tenderest of all Greek poets, ‘our Euripides the human,’ drew no fairer picture than the restora- tion by Heracles of the wife of Admetos from the grave. Yet the demi-god spices for himself with a little cruelty the tamer bliss of his benevolence, telling the bereaved husband that the longing for a new bridal will soon ease his woe, and hand- 126 AIDS TO BELIEF Snes tarot ESAT hs ABR S ee acta ling so roughly the wound he means to heal, as to wrench the cry from the sufferer, ‘Silence! what have you said? I would not have believed it of you.’ This is the Greek counterpart to the tears which Jesus wept. And when the lost one is re- stored, when the mighty art of Greece can find no better word than the stupid yet highly natural boast, ‘Thou wilt say some day that the son of Jove is a capital guest to entertain,’ then the guest of the house of Simon retains all his calmness, and heedful of the discomfort of the trammelled man recalls the bystanders from _ wonder to homely duty. ‘Loose him and let him go’ This victory of the fisherman over Euripides PORTRAYING OF CHRIST 127 is hard to explain, unless you be- lieve that he had really watched Jesus raising Lazarus. I say the figure of Jesus of Nazareth is visibly real, and the faith is once more, and by another process, proved. And happily, when we come to argue about this three-fold problem—the portion which is granted by every one, and the Jesus of the miracles, and Him who claims to be Divine, to judge mankind, to know as the Father knows—we have one decisive test, to which no other figure in all history or literature submits. It is the test of the intense and practical study and endeavour to follow Him of the holiest and most intelligent of the race. Asx 128 AIDS TO BELIEF them whether they recognise one Jesus, Him whom they know and love, in all the narrative? Ask then whether they experience check or perplexity in passing from the synoptics to John— from the discourse on the hill- side to the healing of the leper or the raising of the dead. None has ever studied any character as they have studied Him. They know Him well. How should you conceal it from them if that were another Head which once drooped low under a crown of thorns, from this which bears erect all the diadems of time and of eternity ? NOTE A—SERMON IIL, p. 46. I AM asked to add something concern- ing our Lord’s use of the Old Testament. And I do so, after much hesitation, because of my clear conviction that it is possible to overstrain the argument from either side, and that a word of moderating counsel may be useful to the average reader. Any one who reverences Christ's © teaching must feel that His use of the Old Testament authenticates its claim — to a divine authority. It is not here | that Christian people differ, but only when the question of the authorship of certain books comes into debate. It is urged, upon one side, that the most incidental phrase, spoken by Him in whatever connection, binds us to the uttermost extent of meaning which can 130 AIDS TO BELIEF be imposed upon it, so that the author- ship of Daniel and the Pentateuch is ruled, because our Lord quoted ‘the prophet Daniel,’ and asked, ‘Did not Moses give you the law?’ Now, it is far more reverential to inquire what our Lord’s usage actually was, and to accept this, than to argue a prioré what it must have been. And we find that He actually said, Moses therefore gave you circumcision, al- though it was not of Moses but of the fathers (John vii. 22). Whether the qualifying addition was His, or a comment of the Evangelist’s, matters not at all: the point is that He used, where it did not affect His argument, the ordinary method of quotation, much as we quote Lady Macbeth or Hamlet without ruling the question whether Shakespeare is the real author of the phrase. All that in any way concerned His argument was that circumcision had the sanction of the law. The rest was immaterial, and He no more paused to consider it as affecting His language NOTE A—SERMON III. 131 than to consider whether it is the sun which rises or the earth which revolves. This much, I think, is clear. On the other hand, it seems indis- putable that our Lord deliberately hung an argument upon the Davidical author- ship of the 110th Psalm. For David could only be proved inferior to the Messiah, provided that it was David and no other (‘that very David,’ Mark xii. 37) who wrote ‘The Lord said unto my Lord.’ It is not enough to reply that our Lord in the days of His senoszs knew not all things. This is indeed certain, because He asserts it, once explicitly and often by implication and gesture. But the question is whether He knew all that He built His teaching upon, whether the Spirit of knowledge and wisdom, which was upon Him without measure, is consistent with assuming for a basis of argument what He did not know, what in fact was otherwise. To me this is incredible, not because error in argument is mendacious, but 132 AIDS TO BELIEF because it is darkened by some shade of presumption, the assuming of know- ledge which one does not possess, an ethical shortcoming inseparable perhaps from our fallen conditions, but not there- fore to be ascribed to our Deliverer. As to the notion of His refuting His enemies by an assertion which He only affected to believe—‘David himself saith’—in order to make sharp His argumentum ad hominem, it is enough to say that, thanks altogether to His teaching and example, there are hun- dreds of Christian controversialists to- day who would scorn to win a dialectic victory on such terms. So much at least appears certain, that we who revere Christ must accept His assurance with regard to the au- thority of Old Testament, but that His authority does not appear to be pledged to the authorship of whole books, merely because He used the accustomed method of citation. NOTE B—SERMON III. 133 NOTE B—SERMON IIL., p. 61. ‘A similar process would break up the English , literature of our own time.’ } to Lord Macaulay, and place yourselves in imagination a thousand years hence. Lay proper stress upon the fact that there are still known to have existed two persons named Macaulay: one the friend of Wilberforce, a philanthropist, keenly interested in the welfare of the people; the other a statesman of im- perial instincts, whose rhetoric blazes with the glory of England, which he extols above that of Greece. And now open the history. Chapter differs utterly from chapter in the subject matter, the authorities relied upon, the heroes magnified, and, what should a VE ff LA A oF tiling. TAKE, for example, the history ascribe 4 134 AIDS TO BELIEF SES 9 eae tn a ge 2 interest higher criticism most of all, in the vocabulary. Scores of words might easily be catalogued, which occur often in one set of chapters, and never in the other set. Here are statistics, the con- dition of agriculture, trade, and the currency ; just and unjust judges, harsh and beneficent legislation, Jeffreys, ; Somers, Montague, Newton. You turn the page, and here is nothing but battle and siege, mine, ravelin, counterscarp and citadel, charge and rout and orderly retreat, intrigue, treason, and pleno- potentiaries, Marlborough and Luxem- burg, James, Louis, William and the Pope. These subjects and vocabularies (much more various than those of J., E., and P.) alternate in such blocks as if two carts had simultaneously shot into one heap a load of brick and one of stone. Here is a chapter of the philanthropist, and here of the some- what jingo statesman. But there are curiously entangled (like those half lines of Q. and R., and the others which astonish us) passages from other NOTE B—SERMON III. 135 writers, for I have myself discovered phrases identical with the earlier frag- mentary work of Mackintosh. These I propose to indicate by the initial H, for it may be suspected that they came to both from Halifax. Nothing in the way of authorship in the Old Testament is more wildly incredible than that it should have been the son of Zachary Macaulay, himself the admiring friend of the leading abolitionist, who wrote the ac- count in this history of the abolition of slavery. Thus he writes—if any one can believe it to be his writing,—and there is no account elsewhere of another later struggle: ‘Slavery and the evils by which slavery is everywhere accom- panied were fast disappearing . . . the change was brought about neither by legislative enactment nor by physical force. . . . Moral causes noiselessly effaced first the distinction between Norman and Saxon, and then the dis- tinction between master and _ slave.’ This is all, and this, we are asked to 136 AIDS TO BELIEF believe, is the writing of the son of an abolitionist, of the friend of Wilber- force. ee He Or take Wordsworth. Consider the “contrast between the soaring Ode on the Intimations of Immortality, and the abject Ecclesiastical—you observe, Ecclesiastical—Sonnets, and then say whether there is no significance in the tradition that another Wordsworth, a bishop, wrote second-rate hymns. More- over, there is proof positive that Words- | worth’s best work has been tampered | with by some downrightly stupid if not | malignant hand. His finest sonnet is perhaps that which tells us that the lark, even when in the sky, is always near its nest :— ‘Type of the wise, who soar but never roam, True to the kindred points of heaven and home.’ But, as we have it, this laudation opens with the most unsuitable epithet in the language, ‘Ethereal Minstrel, Pil- grim !’—A pilgrim which never roams ! In another fine sonnet he defends him- NOTE B—SERMON III. 137 self for having entertained fears of England, by the plea that his alarm at her peril was the result of his affec- tion :— ‘What wonder if a poet now and then Feels toward thee like a lover or a child? Like a child! that is to say, his were filial fears. But then it was impossible by that he should have written, ‘Of those unjilial fears I am ashamed’; A and it becomes clear that for some an Qn. unknown reason his writing has been / / iP tampered with. Th My , Ponder again the difference between /’,, if Lord ig the styles, said to be contemporary, of we a. os Carlyle and Ruskin; and observe thatLPr Bi * y the phenomenon is not of one writer but Out ye of schools, that the disjected Teutonisms Ne pia bel BES f of Carlyle join hands with Browning’s verse, and the finished purity of Ruskin with Tennyson’s. How incredible is the assertion that all these are contemporaries, wielding the same language at the same period, and under exactly the same influences ! 138 AIDS TO BELIEF If some one would only tabulate their grammatical differences, and the differ- ences of their vocabulary, the absurdity of this pretension would become trans- parent. And a similar contrast may be observed between the speeches and the writings commonly attributed to Disraeli—the former virile, direct, and rapier-like, the latter so steeped in French affectations as to be ungram- matical from end to end. For these reasons I have not shrunk ~ from the assertion that the methods to the Higher Criticism may some day make havoc in the literature of the Victorian epoch. pie Soe ie Re Edinburgh University Press T. and A. ConsTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty Nereis) 9) (arya ey ye Date Due oy {i 1 ESE