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ALSO MR. SPENCER'S DESCRIPTIVE SOCIOLOGY, COMPILED AND ABSTRACTED BY PROF. DUNCAN, DR. SCHEPPIG, AND MR. COLLIER. FOLIO, BOARDS. 1. ENGLISH ... ... ... ... ... i8,s 2. ANCIENT AMERICAN RACES ... ... ... 165 3. LOWEST RACES, NEGRITOS, POLYNESIANS ... ... 18.? 4. AFRICAN RACES ... ... ... ... 16.9 5. ASIATIC RACES ... ... ... ... i8s 6. AMERICAN RACES ... ... ... ... 185 7. HEBREWS AND PHOENICIANS ... ... ... 2is 8. FRENCH ... ... ... ..* ... 305 THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST. .... der Endzweck der Wissenschaften ist Wahrheit. Wahrheit ist der Seele nothwendig ; und es wird Tyrannei, ihr in Befriedigung dieses wesentlichen Bedurfnisses den geringsten Zwang anzuthun. Lessing, Laokoon, 2. ..... If Truth, who veiled her face With those bright beams yet hid it not, must steer Henceforth a humbler course perplexed and slow ; One solace yet remains for us who came Into this world in days when story lacTced Severe research, that in our hearts we hnoio How, for exciting youth's heroic flame, Assent is power, belief the soul of fact. Wordsworth, 1837. 'ATTOpfTv ovv avrbv irotrjGavTtQ KO.I vapttav wairtp f] vdoKij, n&v TI OVK ejioi dpa /itoi. Plato : Meno. When any facts or doctrines have once been established by men of eminent character, they are usually taken upon trust by all who follow, till some new inquirer arises, who, not content with opinions imposed upon him by chance or education, resolves to judge for himself, and to use his natural right and liberty of searching into the real grounds of them. C. Middleton, Free Enquiry, etc. Works, I., 178. (Ed. 1755.) La logique mene aux abimes. Qui peut sonder Vindiscernable mystdre de sa propre conscience, et dans le grand chaos de la vie humaine quelle raison sait au juste oifc s'arrdtent ses chances de bien voir etson droit d'qffirmer? Renan, Averroes, p. 170. Et'crt y and of the pursuit of righteousness by works of the Law, was a principle which S. Paul may, nay we may say must, with his logical and dialectic mind > have seen before his conversion. Was it not the very perception of what was really involved in the assertion that the Cru- cified was nevertheless the Messias, that intensified the hostility of the zealot for the Law against the Disciples of Jesus ? Saul, with his mind preoccupied by all the doctrines of a highly educated Pharisee of that day, regarding the Law as final and valid for all people, so that the Gentiles could only be partakers in the salva- tion in store for Israel by becoming proselytes, and subject to Israel's Law, is met by the assertion that the Messias, for whose near approach he, in accordance with the general expectation of the more religious part of the nation, was looking, was already come, and had been rejected and slain by the people and their rulers. At first he may have repelled the notion as monstrous and absurd j but he could not come into closer contact with the members of the new religious community, he could not speak with them, or witness their cheerful sufferings and even death on account of their belief, without at least acknowledging that they were honest and pro- foundly in earnest,' and fully persuaded that they had seen their crucified Master risen from the dead. And thus, as the Pharisee Saul could not deem it a thing im- possible that God should raise the dead, the possibility was given to him at least in thought, that what these men had said was true ; that they had indeed seen their risen Master, and that he was in consequence, as they asserted, the Messias. But the further consequences involved in the last assertion could not remain, to SauPs 6* 84 The Fact, energetic and dialectical mind, long undeveloped; and the perception of their ultimate issue, the abrogation of the Law, still to him a mere negation, could only increase the zeal of the lover of the Law against his antagonists. Yet how to meet their repeated assertion that they had seen the Lord after his Eesurrection ? Could Saul ascribe it to falsehood and deception* when he witnessed the honesty and devotion of the men who made the assertion ? Could he fail to perceive that such ascription was an illogical assumption of the very matter in dispute ? Saul was in the attitude of mind, as far as thought is concerned formally, which we described in the first chapter ; he had a body of doctrine in his mind, and in contact with this was now set a new fact, which refused to harmonize with the existing body of doctrine in his mind, and which he yet could not absolutely disprove. It was not credible, as was asserted, that the crucified Jesus was the Messias, as he would be if God had raised him from the dead ; for in that case the Jewish nation had rejected its Saviour, and there was an end to the Law : and yet these men persisted in saying that they had seen him, that God had raised him from the dead. He could not believe them ; yet he could not disprove what they said. For such a mind as S. Paul's this state was one of intel- lectual torture. And already in his heart of hearts, in the fervent depth of his religious nature, had Saul not an inkling of the freedom and rapture which this new fact, if it were after all a fact, might carry as the positive side of what seemed to him so far perhaps but a mere negation ? Is there any one that has ever had occasion, even on a small scale, with no such mighty nature as S. PauFs, than whom perhaps, its Evidence and Explanation. 85 A rarer spirit never Did steer humanity, but in his own degree, completely to alter his fundamental beliefs ; who does not know how what he now holds for truth seemed to him once impossible, monstrous, perhaps impious and unholy ; and yet seemed to draw him in spite of himself, so that he at once feared to face it, and feared to flee, and would fain have sought relief in some manual occupation, or bodily activity ? However this may be, it cannot surprise us that the very moment of Saul's greatest apparent hostility to the faith of Jesus should be the moment of his conversion. The dialectical process in his mind was (we may suppose) at its height, or even, it may be, carried through, and decided against the asserted fact, which his mind could not assimilate. Yet this decision, if formed, was but a hollow one, for Saul was not really in a position to deny the possibility of the disputed fact. The result of this energy of thought was an accession of the innermost religious excitement. Thus with a naturally highly strung nervous temperament now nighly wrought upon, with the vegetative functions of his organization impaired perhaps by fasting or mental preoccupation, Saul was just in the state of mind and body to have such a vision as we have described above as the result of great mental activity ; to be the subject of sensations arising not from an external object, but from internal ideas, produced in the sensorium not by the nerves that connect the cere- bellum with the periphery of the body, but by the nerves which connect the central organ of sensation with the cerebrum, or organ of thought. Such a vision was not a reproduction of sensorial impressions formerly received for Saul had never seen Jesus but a construction of new 86 The Fact, forms by a process which^ if it had been carried on consciously, we should have called Imagination : but which, for the subject who does not carry it on con- sciously, is indistinguishable from sensations produced by an external object. What the contents of S. PauPs vision must have been, we have already seen as an inference from his own con- ception of the spiritual body. Whether the vision had an external occasion, whether the forms which his thought had been preparing, were precipitated so to speak by some natural event, a thunderstorm or what not, as might perhaps be inferred from the accounts in the Acts, though in part inconsistent with each other, is a secon- dary question, the answer to which does not much matter, whichever way it fall. There may have been a thunder- storm on the way to Damascus, and Saul may have been dazzled and struck to the ground by it ; but it is not indispensable to the explanation of the vision, which may have had purely mental and bodily states as its sufficient cause. That the vision may have been joined with a revelation, that Saul may not merely have had visual sen- sations, but also audible sensations, is a supposition which lies well within the range of psychological probability. We have not indeed his own authority for making any positive statement on this head ; but he must have asked himself many times why he was persecuting the men who had been with Jesus, and must already have felt deeply in his soul the goads which his own insight and the mental throes through which he had passed, prepared for him. He may therefore very well have heard a voice saying to him in the Hebrew tongue " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks ! " its Evidence and Explanation. 87 In his philosophy Saul had only one explanation for his vision ; it was the work of God, a direct divine in- terposition in his favour; it was the revelation of the Messias, of the crucified Messias. Saul had already (we suppose) developed in his own mind the significance and consequences of this fact, at least in the main out- line; hitherto indeed these consequences had been nega- tived in his mind, but now in one moment they were turned into his most positive convictions. He already knew, we may suppose, from his disputes with the fol- lowers of Jesus, how little any of them really grasped the full significance of the facts which had been in dis- pute between himself and them, viz., the death and resurrection of the Son of God. Of the truth of those facts he was now convinced, but the new convert did not return to Jerusalem to learn from those who had known Jesus while yet on earth, the details of his life and teaching, nor did he confer with flesh and blood in Damascus, but retired into solitude there to develop in detail all the consequences of the two facts, which for him were the Alpha and Omega of the Gospel, the Death and the Kesurrection of the Christ. And so it comes to pass that S. Paul, although he has left us but a few letters, which with one exception (Ep. to Komans) make no pretence at giving a resum of his system, but arose out of special occasions, nevertheless stands before us in them as a theologian with a thorough and well articulated system, always the same and self-consistent, without change or development, if we except perhaps his escha- tology.* Herein he seems at first to have shared the cruder expectations of a speedy return of the Messias, * Cf. Eeuss, " Gescliichte dcr h. Scliriften, N. T." 1860, 3te Ausg. 63. 88 The Fact, which played so important a role in Jewish Christianity ; but to have laid more and more stress, as years went by, and still the Messias did not appear in the clouds for the day of the Lord, on the present spiritual union with Christ, and on the prospect of closer union with him immediately after death. Not that S. Paul ever broke so completely with Judaism as that other New Testament author whom we associate with the name of S. John. Even in opposition to Judaism Paul was still a Jew, and could only refute Jewish orthodoxy, to use a technical expression, in its own categories ; Sin and Sacrifice, Predestination and Fulfilment, Miracle, Prophecy, Allegory and Eesurrec- tion. Moving in this circle of ideas, with such physical and psychological knowledge or ignorance as was shared by educated men of his nation and time, there could occur to him one and only one explanation for his vision, which we may think of as the product of his own mind working upon a given fact (the assertion that Jesus had been raised by God from the dead) a mind eminently logical to follow out into all details a given premise, a mind intensely religious, and fervent for truth, in a body not at the best of times free from disorders, which may have been in part the cause and in part the effect of his mental temperament, and may be also taken into the reckoning as a factor in predisposing his mind to visions. There is indeed even at first sight so much about the conversion of S. Paul which admits of being referred to natural causes, that a judicious Apologist may at times seem to 'pass too lightly over its evidential value and significance. Thus Dr. Westcott says*; "For us the * When Dr. Westcott adds a note to the effect that " It is im- portant to observe that on another occasion S. Paul notices the its Evidence and Explanation. 89 appearance to S. Paul would certainly in itself fail to satisfy- in some respects the conditions of historic reality it might have been an internal revelation but for him it was essentially objective and outward;" it took place indeed at a time " when the idea of the risen Christ was fully established," as the same writer says in another passage.* Yet still it remained a psychological problem, which even Baur declared insoluble. In the presence of two facts first, Paul's own repeated assertion of the reality of the appearance, and second, the originality of his Chris- tianity, its independence of all instruction from the Apostles, it was, said Keuss in 1860,f a mistake to see nothing in the affair but a thunderstorm and an over- strained imagination (Phantasie). Perhaps the door was here intentionally left open for some supernatural cause doubt which he felt as to the objective character of the revelation wliich lie received (2 Cor. xii. 1 ff.)," he seems to imply tliat "in the body" is equivalent with S. Paul to our term "objective," and "out of the body" to our term "subjective." This is a strange misconception. S. Paul is obviously speaking of his earthly body, and expresses a doubt whether or no when he was caught up to the third heaven, into Paradise, his body was left on earth or not. It would have been rather odd in a dialectician of S. Paul's calibre to appeal to a vision which he granted might be regarded as " subjective" in support of his apostolic dignity. Op. cit. 112. When the same writer, in the second passage referred to, speaks of the appearance " granted to St. Paul" as " different in kind" from the appearances to the first believers, it is sufficient to remark that S. Paul (who never speaks of the empty grave or of the Ascension as a separate phenomenon) justifies no such assertion, but rather shows by the juxta-position of his own and the other visions, that it never occurred to him to doubt that the appearance to him was generically the same as the appearances to the others before him, and only differed from them in being last. * Op. cit. p. 158, note. t Op. cit. p. 49. 90 The Fact, short of "an absolute miracle of the old theological pattern ; " but the writer proceeded : l ' On the other hand no healthy theology can rest in the notion of a mechanical transformation of a noble and great spirit ob extra (gezwungen), by which notion the true providential guidance of the whole work of salvation would rather be called in question." In the following year (1861) Dr. C. Holsten published his essay, "Die christusvision des Paulus und die'genesis des paulinischen evangelium/'* in which he attempted to solve the problem in the interests of historical criticism, by a most careful analysis of the natural conditions general and special, internal and external, which may be assumed as antecedents of Paul's vision. The most original and fruitful idea in this analysis is perhaps the principle that from the Pauline Gospel as it lies before us in S. Paul's authentic writings, and from the intellectual and moral character of S. Paul therein exhibited at once in its opposition to Judaism and its own essentially Jewish form, is to be extracted the key to the problem of Paul's conversion. The present writer does not pretend to have improved this master-key, if it needed improvement ; but borrowed and used with the discretion, even of an apprentice, it seems to fit the lock, and the secret to fly open ; so that we can hardly escape the conclusion of a philosopher of our own, who has taught us a great respect for facts, when he says that the conversion of S. Paul " of all the miracles of the New Testament is the one which admits of the easiest explana- tion from natural causes. "f But this explanation presupposes the idea of the risen * Now printed in his work, " Zum Evangeliun) des Paulus und des Petrus." llostock, 1868. t J. S. Mill : " Three Essays on Religion," p. 239, note. its Evidence and Explanation. 91 Christ, presupposes the belief of the first Apostles, presupposes their vision, or visions, which S. Paul has enumerated as antecedent to his own ; for was not that idea or that belief obviously not the cause buf the product of those visions ? Thus it might seem that the more successfully criticism extended its claim to the vision of S. Paul, the more completely it cuts itself off from the visions of S. Peter and the other primitive believers : given their belief, the vision of S. Paul may be fairly represented as a product of natural causes, of which this very belief of theirs is one; but whence their belief? Must not the visions of Peter and his companioDs seem wonderful and supernatural just in proportion as the vision of Paul is made out to be natural ? And if so, whereto all this trouble to make out the natural causality of the Pauline vision, when it would be much simpler to ascribe all alike to divine interposition, to an objective transcendental source ? The feeling expressed in the latter sentence is one shared by criticism, whose fundamental canon must ever be to follow the lines of nature in her dissection, and neither to part from each other things generically similar, nor to confound together things generically different. And so in the present instance having sought and found a plausible explanation for one given fact in its natural antecedents, it is not to be expected that criti- cism will so lightly abandon the effort to explain another fact, generically the same as the problem which she has solved approximately, or leave such a lump undigested in her knowledge, such a thorn, which to her too is as a messenger of Satan, rankling in her body. Let us here again start from the given facts, so far as we can in outline restore them with any confidence. If 92 The Fact, there is anything certain it is that the Disciples of Jesus regarded him, that he regarded himself, as the expected Messias : but it is not less certain that their conception of the Messias and his destinies differed very widely from their Master's own consciousness of his mission and the means of its accomplishment, perhaps from the very first, without doubt towards the close of his career. Given the self -consciousness of his divine mission and the facts of his life, it is not surprising that Jesus should have grasped the spiritual idea of a suffering Messias, and once in possession of it have found support for it and authority in the Old Testament, foreign as was such an interpretation to the Jews of that time ; and if so, he must have sought to bring home this spiritual idea to his Disciples : but it is still a question how far he expected his Death ; much more, how far he had assimilated and harmonized this expectation or possibility with the inner conviction of his own Messianic dignity. If the case here were such as it is represented to be by the ordinary supernaturalistic theology, then the struggle in the soul of Jesus, of which a tradition has come to us in the synoptic account of the night in Gethsemane, and the last loud cry on the cross, as preserved by Matthew and Mark, are quite inexplicable, except as what in less solemn connection would be called acting ; and that the fourth Evangelist felt this, more or less consciously, is shown by the turn which he has given to the scene in Gethsemane, which in his account has lost all sign of struggle in the all-knowing Son of God, who neither prays to his Father to suffer the cup to pass from him, nor betrays the slightest bodily agitation ; and further in his omission, like Luke, of the "Eli, Eli, lama sabach- thani ; My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me ! " its Evidence and Explanation. 93 the last words of the dying Master recorded by the two earlier Evangelists, which throw light, so terrible yet human, into ' ' the divine depth " of his sorrow. Infinitely more probable must it appear, on any theory which admits a discussion of probability into the matter at all, that even up to the last Jesus may have expected a divine interposition in his favour, and, when after all no such interposition took place, may have felt himself forsaken of God : though there is no one who would not wish to believe that the innocent sufferer regained his consciousness of perfect peace with God, as implied in the commendation of his spirit into his Father's hands, recorded by Luke, or even the self-assurance of the com- pletion of his intended work as implied in the ' ' It is finished" of S. John. But whether or not Jesus foresaw his own death, and the necessity of it to the completion of his mission, it is perfectly certain that these profound ideas remained entirely dark and inexplicable to the Disciples : otherwise they could not have come to him on his way to Jerusalem with such crude and ill-timed requests, as they are repre- sented to have done (Mark x. 35 ff.), nor could they have been so utterly unprepared for the event when it took place, or have so entirely lost heart and faith in their Master, as they apparently did. On the contrary his sufferings and death, which he had accurately foretold to them, would have been a fresh confirmation of his prophetic power and divine mission, and they would have waited in quiet assurance for his Resurrection on the third day which he had explicitly foretold them several times (Matt. xvi. 21 ; xvii. 9-23 ; xx. 19 ff. ; xxvi. 32 ff. ; cp. Mark x. 34; Luke xviii. 33; xxiv. 7). Could they have forgotten all this at his death, and have only thought 94 The Fact, of a robbery when they found the tomb empty (if they found it empty) ; have doubted the report of his Resur- rection (Luke xxiv. 11), and been incredulous still even when they saw him (Matt, xxviii. 17) ? If the Apostles little expected the death of their Master, still less did they expect his Resurrection; and he cannot have fore- told it as he is represented to have done. But it may be said, granted that the Disciples had no expectation of the return of their Master to life, then all the more improbable that the appearances to them were merely visions ; one natural source of visions is cut off expectancy. Let us look a little closer at the circumstances and mental state of the Disciples, when the fatal event fell upon them, shattering apparently at once their faith in their Messias, and their hopes of a speedy restoration of the kingdom to Israel, and of a foremost rank in that kingdom for themselves. On the arrest of Jesus these men, who for at least a good year, perhaps for longer^ had been his chosen com- panions and confidants, who a few days before had been spectators and co-operators in his enthusiastic reception in Jerusalem as the royal prophet, were so unmanned by consternation and overcome by faithless fear that they all forsook him and fled. Whether they were at once all scattered to their homes in Galilee, as might seem not improbable, or remained, at least one or more of them, in Jerusalem, we can hardly decide with assurance. But wherever they might be, whether in the scenes so inti- mately associated with their Master's presence in Galilee, or in the city, now the centre of their interest as the place of his violent death, it could not but be that a nobler mind should reassert itself in them, the panic of its Evidence and Explanation. 95 the moment once over. These men, unlearned and ignorant as they might be, must yet have had a strong chord of sympathy with their spiritual Master to have made them his friends at all. How this chord must now have vibrated, not merely under the stroke of his death, but under shame and contrition for their own cowardly conduct ! And if any tidings came to them through the women, who followed Jesus to Calvary itself, of his last moments, of his sublime patience and trust in God to the last that he would deliver him, of his love to the last for those whom he left behind, how vastly must their shame and confusion have been increased ! God had not deli- vered him, as it seemed ; and they with their Jewish way of looking at material events, and seeing everywhere a direct divine judgment, had been tempted perhaps to regard the arrest and death of their Master as God's sentence upon him. But the instinct of their women had been other, and had shamed them at least in their deser- tion and flight : nay, they might recall teaching of the lost Master himself, in which he had sought to correct and enlarge similar partial views of the divine course and guidance of events (Luke xiii. 1 if.) ; and as they remem- bered and mutually excited their remembrance of his person and his teaching, spite of their baffled hopes, spite of his dishonoured death, spite of their own shame- ful desertion and moral cowardice, they must have felt themselves in fault, they must have cleared him in their minds, and as their better consciousness reasserted itself, it was they, if anybody, who said, " Truly this man was the Son of God." If there is any historical credibility in the Gospel narra- tives of the Resurrection at all, if they give us any materials for the reconstruction of events and characters, we may infer 96 The Fact, that no Apostle in the hours and days immediately fol- lowing the catastrophe which revealed the thoughts of all hearts concerned in it, was so convulsed and over- whelmed by the experiences of the moment as Peter. Naturally enough ; for none had stood so high or fallen so low. Peter had belonged to the inner circle of the friends of Jesus ; Peter had been the recipient of special favour and reliance, and had ever been most forward in professions of belief and devotion. Of a hasty and enthu- siastic yet vacillating temper (cp. Gal. ii. 11 IF.), Peter had perhaps been ready in the first moment that danger overtook his Master to stand by him and draw weapon in his defence ; yet within a few hours perhaps none had so explicitly renounced all connection with Jesus. In none could the reaction be more sure and complete. Peter, in whom we may fairly see a mixture of strength and weak- ness, which gave him a certain originality, combined an ambitious self-assertion with an intelligence by no means so logical or powerful as Paul's. His nature was elevated by a genuine religious fervour, which had been developed and concentrated by the Master whom he had denied and lost. In such a nature, after such a collapse, must have arisen a psychological necessity for a restoration of self- respect, and of the sense of reconciliation with the departed Jesus, the assurance that Jesus had forgiven him. That this is no hypothesis taken out of the air is proved by a glance at the Christian tradition itself, which shows the instinctive feeling that some special intimation must have been received by Peter before he could have regained self-assurance or respect from his companions. (Mark xvi. 7; Luke xxiv. 34, cf. Luke xxiv. 12; John xx. 3 ff. ; xxi. 15 ff.) And what in Paul was produced chiefly through the action of the dialectic of thought, and its Evidence and Explanation. 97 its influence on the centre of sensation, may have been produced in Peter by the dialectic of feeling, by the tempest of conflicting feelings, shame, self-reproach, love, which threatened to overwhelm him as once the waves on Galilee's lake, and above all the image of the Master in all his power and purity reasserting itself in his mind, till he felt that every man might be a liar, but not this man, not the Son of the Highest. And then under circumstances of time and place, which have not been reported to us, Peter sees his Master again, and receives from him, doubtless, some sign, perhaps some words, of forgiveness and restoration. In what form he saw Jesus, whether as in the body or in a glorified shape, we cannot say ; could we cross-question the Apostle as to the details of his vision, he might waive such items, as did Joan of Arc when cross-questioned as to the appearance of S. Michael, whom she frequently saw. The outlines of a vision are not always hard and fast ; and if the visionary tries to fix them, they melt often like cloud before his eyes : that is proof to him, not of the unreality but of the supernatural character of what he sees ; and all the more so, if the vision is accompanied by words, even by dialogue, as was the fact in the case of Joan of Arc. In the latter case, an uneducated peasant girl, who could not write her name, who had no mental equivalent for such an abstract idea as the Church, when asked did she acknowledge its authority ; who, with the Council of Basel sitting at the time, did not know what a Church Council meant, had yet seen and conversed with Angel and Archangel, and distinguished them by their voices many times : and she was in all other respects of the strongest and soberest practical understanding, and carried out the direction-s which she received from above 98 The Fact, in a way which, humanly speaking, was a series of strokes of genius. And are we to be told that what, in the hour of need, in the case of a French peasant girl in the fifteenth century, was produced, so far as we can see, by a deeply religious temperament coupled to patriotic and loyal ideas, could not have been produced in a Galilean peasant of the first century by similar causes of greater intensity ? Peter also had loyal and patriotic ideas, and magnificent expectations for his Master, for his nation, for himself, and above and beyond this, had the pressing personal necessity of inner peace and restored consciousness, wounded by his disloyalty to one whom he had fervently regarded as the destined restorer of the holy nation and the holy place, whom he had reverenced as the Son of God, and who, as he could not but feel more and more acutely every hour he recalled all their common life, had deserved that reverence, had never fallen below the ideal standard, had always had something incomprehensible and beyond the grasp of his disciples in his teaching and person ! There is always a gap between the first vision and all subsequent ones : they may be psychologically explained as products of it ; the first remains something primitive and original. S. Paul, and all visionaries since (and there have been many), who have seen Jesus, have seen him when the idea of the risen Christ was already esta- blished ; but the vision, or visions, which established this idea, cannot have been its products. But is it so certain that this was the first vision of Peter ? Was that strange night-scene on the mount of Transfiguration then a sober reality, or has that narrative too a vision of Peter's as its kernel ? Was that strange night-apparition on the waters also an unconscious crea- its Evidence and Explanation. 99 tion of Peter's ? (Matt. xiv. 22 ff. ; Mark vi. 4 ff. ; John vi. 16 ff.) We cannot say more positively than that it might have been so. Peter has the credit of several visions after the Eesurrection (Acts x, 10 ff. : xii. 7 ff.), and what have come down to us as events in the life of Christ, which seem to set the physical laws of the uni- verse at defiance, may have had an historical centre of fact quite in accordance with those laws, in the visions of his followers. It has been said that had we the reports of eye- witnesses of the life of Jesus, they would not differ materially from the reports which we possess ; it may be so ; but if so, so much the worse for the eye-witnesses' credit. But at least could we cross-question the eye- witnesses, and specially upon this point, of their visions of the risen Master, we should find probably that their accounts were much more ethereal and less loaded with corporeal traits and incidents than the descriptions which we actually possess. We can trace in the case of the last recorded appearance a gradual process of materialization, at least approximately. In Matthew the appearance is apparently a heavenly one, takes place in the open air, and nothing is said descriptive of its coming or going. In Mark the disciples are in a room, the final commission contains some very magical details, and it is expressly said that the Lord was taken up into heaven, though there is no description of the event or process. In the third Gospel the details are enriched, but it is only in the Acts that the Ascension can be said to be properly described, with its accompaniments of cloud and angels. However this may be, it is remarkable that the only notice of a vision of Christ by an eye-witness, S. Paul, gives 110 details ; and as little does S. Paul give details of 7 * 100 The Fact, the other appearances which he records. Could we have cross- questioned Peter or Paul, they would have asserted the reality of their visions, just as stoutly as Joan of Arc when cross-questioned asserted the reality of hers ; but they would perhaps have been just as impatient of ques- tions of detail as Joan was, when asked about the size and hair and eyes and so on, of the Archangel Michael. It is one thing to have to do with a vision at first hand ; and another, when it has passed awhile from mouth to mouth. But there always remains a gap, not only between the first vision and any following one, but between the first vision and the antecedents out of which we attempt to account for it. In the particular instance we never come quite to fill up the line of continuity between cause and effect with details ; we never grasp the individual in all its individuality, we never reproduce in definition or analysis the full substance and reality of life and exist- ence. But then this is true of every individual reality, near and far ; do we therefore in all cases abandon the belief that the unknown is homogeneous with the known, do we open the door to the supernatural ? To explain the vision of Peter as the product of natural causes, we have the negative conditions for a vision arising from the ignorance of the times, from the prevalent ideas current on the subject of supernatural warnings and visitants, and the relations of the spiritual and material worlds to each other, the spiritual world being still conceived as substantially material, and located in a definite place, above the earth ; these ideas formed, as it were, the common background of any ordinary Jewish mind of the time. We have, besides, the special circumstances and character of Peter, so far as we can its Evidence and Explanation. 101 reconstruct them : and it must be admitted that there is a great deal in them to make a vision comprehensible; they go a certain way towards explaining it. And if his vision still remains to us more or less an irrational quan- tity, shall we ascribe the unamalgamated residuum to our ignorance of all the co-efficients at work in the case, and range this vision with all other visions ; or shall we leave it as a problem still, or even grasp at what must now appear an arbitrary and external explanation, and as such indeed, strictly speaking, no explanation at all ? To Peter we may ascribe on S. Paul's authority the first vision of the risen Master. Whether any of the Galilean women had previously visions of Jesus or of angels must remain, on account of the silence of S. Paul, very doubtful. It has been said that the vision of Peter was really the vision of Mary Magdalene, who was the first to behold the risen Christ, but " in consequence of the eternal injustice by which the man appropriates to himself alone the work in which the woman has had just as much part as he, Cephas eclipses Mary, and causes her to be forgotten."* That Mary may have had a vision, not merely as a woman deeply attached to the departed Jesus, but as a woman specially susceptible from a more or less abnormal organism, a woman out of whom, in the scriptural phrase, Jesus had cast seven devils, cannot appear improbable ; but there is no sufficient reason for denying the vision to Peter, because Mary may have had one too, any more than for identifying his vision with hers. We cannot adequately represent to ourselves the state of mind of the disciples in those first days of the over- * Kenan, "Les Apotres," p. 55, cf. p. 11 ff. 102 The Fact, throw of their hopes : they could not, we may well believe, settle down to any ordinary occupation ; at least till they had in some way or other come to an under- standing with the event which had overtaken them. They may well have searched the Scriptures in the hope of finding light on the matter, and they could not search in vain : they may well have fasted and prayed for comfort and guidance in their collapse and bewilderment ; and what a light must have come, once the word went forth, " The Lord hath appeared unto Simon ! " " The idea of the risen Christ " was therewith not indeed established, but given ; and this was enough. It was not long before others also had visions, how frequently we cannot say ; the list given by S. Paul must surprise us rather by its brevity than its length, for it is obviously complete according to the best of his knowledge. That several persons should have a vision at once is far from being without parallel. " We know," write the anonymous authors of " The Unseen Universe," " the almost infinite power of the mind not only to delude itself, but to pro- pagate its delusion to the mind of others."* And mere numbers add nothing in such a case to the credibility of a supernatural explanation of the appearance : " if not only a single individual, but several persons, should be 'possessed' by one and the same idea or feeling, the same misinterpretation may be made by all of them ; and in such a case the concurrence of their testimony does not add the least strength to it."f There may have been five hundred brethren together on some occasion, but if so they can hardly have been drawn together by any other cause than the report that Jesus had risen ; they * Op. cit. p. 42. 1st Edit. t Carpenter, op. cit. 187, its Evidence and Explanation. 103 were in fact possessed by one and the same idea or feeling, and that they may have seen, some of them or all of them, (for it is not very likely that they were individually cross-questioned) something which they took for an appearance of the risen Lord, is quite possible. A natural object may be mistaken for a supernatural appearance by persons possessed with an idea, and their account of this vision however coherent, is not therefore trustworthy ; and the mind unconvinced by the visions of Paul or of Peter cannot be seriously discomposed by the bare assertion that five hundred brethren saw the risen Jesus at once, of whom the greater part were alive when S. Paul wrote as though he had cross-examined upwards of two hundred and fifty of them ! A great deal is sometimes made of the doubts and unwillingness to believe the fact of the Resurrection which are ascribed to the Apostles in the Gospel record. If they really had any doubts, if this trait in the narrative be not a result of the more or less apologetic conscious- ness of a later time working on the bare facts for the benefit of those who had not seen and might yet believe ; we must not confuse such doubts or misgivings with the critical scepticism of modern science. Joan of Arc also doubted her visions at first, but the mere repetition of the vision was sufficient to persuade her of its truth; and the Apostles were not any more critical than Joan of Arc. Some stress too has been laid on the sober understanding of the Apostles, and on the calm unvarnished character of the narratives ; as to the latter, because the narratives are " simple, earnest, cold, almost lifeless," it does not follow that the Apostles were so ; as to the former point, there is nothing more interesting than to observe how strong the mind and understanding of visionaries may 104 The Fact, be, as well in their inferences and deductions from their visions, as also in matters of daily life ; it was so, again, with Joan, it was so with Savonarola; and indeed a certain strength of mind is necessary perhaps before a man can have a vision at all, most of all where the vision is more or less the effect of an idea. There is a further point upon which Apologists insist, viz. that three days were too short a time for all the psy- chological process necessary to produce a vision, for the thought and reflection on the events, on the previous life with Jesus, on his Messianic claims, on the Old Testament prophecies. In his first ' ' Leben Jesu" Strauss represented the origin of the belief in the Kesurrection as a process of reflection on what must have happened, Jesus being the Messias, and on the right interpretation of Scripture, a specimen of which is preserved to us in the second chapter of the Acts. But such a conscious process of reflection had probably in the case of the first believers little or nothing to do with the production of their visions ; though, once the visions had taken place, such a process must have had full play, and being conducted to prove the truth of the Resurrection of the Messias, a foregone conclusion, the proof was naturally conclusive ; nor was there any principle of interpretation among the Jews of the day which could invalidate the Apostolic exegesis. It must however be noticed that it cannot really be admitted as at all an established fact that the first appearance of the risen Christ took place on the third day, though it may be agreed that it did not take place before. The doctrine is that Christ rose again the third day ; but even on this point there is not a fixed manner of expression in our documental sources.* Three * ry rnlry jy/itpp, 1 Cor. xv. 4 ; as also Matt, and Luke, furd TPHQ its Evidence and Explanation. 105 days was a proverbial Jewish expression for a short period ; but there were also special allusions in the Old Testament which might have suggested this number (Hosea vi. 2), and the typical case of the prophet Jonah (Matt. xii. 39 ff.) by a misinterpretation perhaps of words of Jesus' own, may have been made to suit it. It was also a belief of the Jews that the departed soul remained in the neighbourhood of the dead body for three days, and then sought the underworld.* There seems an uncertainty in the tradition as to the exact time at which Jesus rose ; the earlier form represents the Resurrection as taking place, as we should say, on Saturday evening, the later on Sunday morning; the preference for the latter being due perhaps to its making the great event coincide with the dawn of the natural day and of the Christian Sunday.f Thus the belief was that Jesus rose on the third day, and the natural supposition was that he appeared on the same day on which he rose ; but S. Paul does not say so expressly, nor does he give any distinct temporal any more than local details of the appearances which he enumerates. Keim notices that the journey to Galilee takes just three days, and that only in Galilee could so many as five hundred disciples have come together; but just as we cannot be quite sure whether the appearances took place in Jerusalem or in Galilee, or some perhaps in the one, some in the other, so we cannot be quite sure whether or not the first vision took place on the third day. It may have done so ; and if it did, this was a reason more for the belief that Jesus had , Mark viii. 31, ix. 31, x. 34. Cf. Rev. xi. 11, ^ra TO.Q Kill TJfiKTV. * Keim, iii. p. 549. t So Keim. 106 The Fact, risen on the third day. This is as much as we can say definitely. We return here naturally upon the narrative that the grave was found empty on the third day. But we have already found so many difficulties about the empty grave of Jesus that even the fact has become suspect. The doubt can only be increased by the reflection that the visions of the Apostles took place perhaps in Galilee. It is sometimes said that if the grave had not been found empty the Jews would have refuted the Apostles' an- nouncement of the Resurrection of their Master, by producing the dead body. But before this announce- ment can have come to the ears of the Jewish authorities the body was already unrecognizable ; and it is also very doubtful whether the production of the body would have been a refutation of the assertion of the Apostles. It would have been no 'difficulty, as we have seen, to the doctrine of Paul ; and if the primitive Apostles had less clear theories of the nature of Christ's Person, yet the visions would have had absolute validity for them, and would have helped them to form the conception of the spi- ritual body in distinction from the earthy. But this idea of the production of the dead body to refute the Apostles shows a want of historical appreciation of the state of thought at the time. So current was the notion of Resurrection, in some form or other, that Herod is represented as mistaking Jesus for the risen John Bap- tist (Matt. xiv. 2). Did Antipas or his servants settle the question of John's resurrection by examining his grave ? And what would it have profited, when the Jews believed that after three days a corpse was unrecog- nizable?* The Christian imagination must take the * Keim, iii. p. 549. its Evidence and Explanation. 107 credit of many details, consciously or unconsciously in- corporated with the primitive tradition, as well from the inevitable tendency to idealize (according to its own canons of idealization) the original Figure of its Head, as in order to refute popular objections, sure to be of the crudest and most materialistic type. Is it inconceivable that this imaginative activity should have produced the whole story of the empty grave ? In the accounts of the burial we may observe a growing tendency to exaggerate details which might be supposed to contribute to the honour of Jesus ; yet in presence of Paul's express asser- tion that Jesus was buried, (though he only makes it on the authority of hearsay,) and in view of the actual importance of burial in the eyes of Jews, it may be admitted as most probable that Jesus was laid in a grave by the hands of some friends. And so it must remain an open question whether or not the grave was afterwards found empty ; if it was, and the body removed by the hands of foes or friends, unknown to the other disciples of Jesus, then the discovery of the empty grave was one more cause for the speedy growth of the belief that the Lord had risen, though not an indispensable cause for the growth of that belief. It must always remain an open question whether the discovery of the empty sepul- chre helped to produce the idea of the risen Christ, or the idea of the risen Christ produced the story of the empty sepulchre. What emerges from the discussion as a common admission is that there were visions among the friends of Jesus shortly after his death, which they explained from the idea of Kesurrection. That they should do so was almost inevitable, for they were imbued with the current notions of their age and nation ; and given their 108 The Fad, previous belief in Jesus as the Messias, and the fact of his death, his reappearance could only be his Resurrection. Jesus, himself, who, while perpetually insisting on the moral and spiritual truths which held the first place in his consciousness, was still not in all respects so far above his time and circumstances but that he must have used the common language, and shared some common ignorance or illusions with the people about him, may have used lan- guage during his life, which when recalled and interpreted in the light of his Resurrection looked like a prophecy of the event, and thus in the minds of the Apostles confirmed at once the fact of the Resurrection, and the Messiasship of their Master. But however this may be, no one will be found to assert that the Resurrection of Jesus was the introduction of this idea into human consciousness ; on the contrary the idea of a Resurrection, not indeed of the Messias himself, but of the Jews to take part in his king- dom, and even of a Second Resurrection, of the just and unjust to judgment, was a commonplace in Jewish thought at the time.* The belief of the Apostles in the Resur- rection was the result of the process which we have already twice described as the process in every case where we become convinced of a new fact or doctrine, of the truth of a new proposition ; it was the expression of the adjustment effected in their consciousness, between a mass of ideas already therein more or less systematized, and a new fact or group of facts, the appearances, the visions of their Master. That he whom they had firmly believed to be the expected Deliverer should die, and die on the cross, that was startling, and seemed to cut at the roots of all * Bertholdt: " Christologia Judaeorum Jesu Apostolorumque tempers," 35-41. its Evidence and Explanation. 109 their most cherished preconvictions ; and a struggle must have ensued between this fact and those preconvictions, and the Disciples must either have modified the latter, or resigned their belief and love for their Master, which yet they could not do, all the less, the more the full influence of his teaching and personality reasserted itself. But the further fact of his Eesurrection restored harmony to their distracted minds and feelings ; he was crucified, and yet the Messias. And that they should interpret the appear- ances which presented themselves, not as products of their own mental and moral excitement, working within the doctrinal lines furnished by the theology and psychology of their day, but as objective supernatural Christophanies ; this was predetermined by these very doctrinal lines. The first believers may be said to have been converted by the Resurrection of Jesus, but it was a slight conversion compared even with the change wrought in S. Paul ; and so was not immediately fruitful for the world ; and their highest service to humanity perhaps has been that they formed an indispensable condition for the conversion of the Apostle of the Gentiles. They created, or carried on from Jesus himself, the idea of a suffering and crucified Messias, which became to Paul the new moral revelation of God's plan of salvation : but they never grasped the significance of this fact themselves; they never reformed, so completely as Paul did, the Jewish expectations and preconceptions of the work and office of the Messias, which they shared with him, and with the majority of their nation. They had believed Jesus to be the Messias, and had therefore attached to his Person those floating popular expecta- tions ; his death shook for the moment their confidence that he it was that should restore the kingdom to Israel in their day, but did not alter their Messianic ideas 110 The Fact, themselves : with the appearances, which they inter- preted by the idea of Resurrection familiar to them, their relation to their Messias was restored, their hopes revived, and they could now wait in hope and joy for his return in power and glory to establish the Messianic kingdom, for which it was now their function to prepare the way by preaching repentance to the people, among whom they expected shortly to sit, each on a throne, in judgment. These crude and partial conceptions of the future may well have been intensified and further defined by opposi- tion to the new convert, who, without ever having known Jesus personally, claimed to be an Apostle, not merely a subordinate fellow-worker with the Twelve; and it needed not merely the actual success of the preaching of Paul (which was to a Jew the sign of the divine approval,) but the actual destruction of Jerusalem (A.D. 70), to make the Jewish preconceptions of the early Christians give way to accomplished facts. Nay, we cannot say that they ever properly speaking gave way, in the sense that the primi- tive Jewish Christians altered their doctrine to suit events ; the centre of Christianity was shifted from Jerusalem to Antioch, to Rome, to Alexandria, and Christianity itself underwent corresponding modifications j and Jerusalem never regained importance, as a centre of orthodox Chris- tianity, until ,the pious attention of the western Church made it the bourn for pilgrims.* But neither the change accomplished in S. Paul nor the change accomplished in the primitive Apostles car- ried them out of their most fundamental methods of conceiving God, and the Soul, and the World. In both * "Ce lieu a toujours ete anticretien." Eenanj "Vie de Jesu," 224. its Evidence and Explanation. Ill cases no doubt a profound moral change in consciousness took place; but the change was conditioned by the physical and psychological, yes and the metaphysical notions of the subjects of the change. They interpreted the facts of their experience by the doctrines already in their mind ; are we to do the same ? But what are the doctrines in our mind ? Did we not start in doubt as it were between two sets of conflicting doctrine, or opinion, the one or the other of which we were to choose according as the Kesurrection turned out to be a fact or not a fact ? And now what do we find but that in order to be assured that the Kesurrection is a fact we must have, it seems, a body of doctrines already held for true in our minds ? The state of the case seems to be this : there are two sets of doctrine, two views ' ( of the whole universe, of all being and of all life, of man and of the world and of God;" either of these views fits in with the facts, but not both of them ; they are neither of them, at least on the first glance, inconsistent with the facts, but they are inconsistent with each other, and cannot therefore both be true. The admitted fact is that the Apostles believed Jesus to have risen from the dead. The explanation of this fact according to the one view comes out as the state- ment that he did miraculously rise; on the other view, that the Apostles, from their standpoint must inevitably have believed him to be risen. Is our standpoint the same as theirs ? This very claim to explain the appearances of the risen Christ out of their natural antecedents is a fact which meets us, which we have to digest as best we may. Just as the assertion that the faith of the early believers in the Kesurrection was due to the fact of the Kesurrection, 112 The Fact, or to the reality, the transcendental reality, of the appear- ances of the risen Jesus, is an assertion coherent with one view of the universe, so the assertion that this belief was due to natural antecedents, without the immediate intervention of any supernatural causality, is coherent with another view of the universe : and thus it appears that the ultimate fact in question, viz., the Kesurrection, remains still in question, until we have settled which view of the universe we are to adopt. That is to say, in order to decide the nature of the cardinal fact or event of Christianity, we must already have a view of the universe : do the doctrines of Christianity not constitute such a view? And if they do, what becomes of the assertion that the doctrines of Christianity flow from alleged facts ? What then does the allegation of the facts flow from ? In truth the two sets of doctrines lie before us ; if the one set is true, Jesus rose from the dead; if it is not true, or if the other set is true, he did not rise from the dead ; but how are we to decide between the two con- flicting and fundamental views ? What has the one or the other to say in its own favour ? The one may claim to be more or less nearly the view held by the Apostles themselves, and by the majority of Christians since, at least when pressed to state their theoretical views of God, the Soul, and the World. The other may claim to be a view that is habitually acted upon in daily life, that is presupposed in all science, and in all popular knowledge, which differs from science not so much in kind as in degree. It may also claim to have constantly won ground from its rival. Above all, it may claim to be consistent with itself in practice; whereas the advocates of the other view are its Evidence and Explanation. 113 guilty of perpetual inconsistencies, for they introduce a principle of disunion and confusion into the universe; fatal to the first principle of continuity, a first principle to which they nevertheless pay daily practical homage, in every step of life when they trust the order of nature and their own intelligence either in theory or practice : so that they are constantly acting and reasoning upon principles at fundamental discord with their own view of the universe, a view which is indeed destructive of thought and action, for if carried out, it amounts to absolute scepticism or absolute quietism. The view, which we may call that of critical philosophy, further rests itself on the appeal to verification; whereas the other is not open to verification at all, and must there- fore appeal to authority, as it does not even make a show of a living revelation in the present.* This appeal to authority involves it in fresh contradictions, since this authority can after all itself only be justified by an appeal to reason, by subjecting itself to criticism ; so that nothing but ' ' permanent mental confusion" could be the result of this view of the universe, if it were clearly comprehended and acted upon by its advocates. Whence comes it then that the rival theory is not accepted ? What are the intellectual causes which keep in existence a theory apparently so obsolete in itself, and so destructive of all logical consistency in thought ? * This is true at least of Anglican and Protestant Apologetics. The superior Logic of the Roman Church will be indicated in the sequel. 114 Fact and Illusion : CHAPTEK III. FACT AND ILLUSION : FIRST PRINCIPLES AND FAITH. CRITICISM may go a long way in "explaining" the belief of the Apostles in the Kesurrection, in explaining their visions as not different in origin or psychological form from any visions of which a healthy human organism can be the subject ; and yet it seems still as far as ever from gaining assent to its analysis, as far as ever from satisfying the intelligence of the average Christian that its conclusions are really true or even probable ; though his instinct or imagination is quick to grasp the sup- posed bearings of criticism on life and morality, which, it may be admitted, are of the gravest and most alarming character. And yet, for good or for ill, Criticism must have the best of the argument, from the nature of the case ; it must win a game, where, with the consent of its adver- sary, or whether he consent or not, it has the making of the rules ; and where the game consists in the adversary assuming the defensive, and only surrendering piece after piece as slowly as possible, till Criticism is left com- plete master of the intellectual field. The same story repeats itself in every fresh case of surrender ; Criticism gives check ; the Apologist invokes a Deus ex machina ; Criticism says, Such intervention puts an end to the game, for it is against the rules which constitute the First Principles and Faith. 115 game, and to these you have given at least implicit assent, by entering the lists at all ; the Apologist gives up his " mechanical theory" with the best grace he can, or makes room for a brother Apologist, a degree or two more initiated in the skill of the game, who discards the " mechanical theory" with as much impatience or pity as the hottest critic, and makes his move, sublimely uncon- scious that the same fate awaits himself which has befallen his predecessor : he too will receive his check ; he too will appeal, if not to the Church's infallibility, if not to the mechanical theory of inspiration, still to his own Deus ex machina, perhaps " Faith/' Criticism will repeat, ' ' Against the rules of the game ; why did you come here to play?" and his place will be taken by another, who finds one piece less on the board. Revelation and its correlative Faith are indeed, in one form or other, always the powers outside the game to which the appeal is made when a piece becomes forfeit ; and one might be tempted, in forgetfulness of the ingenuity of the human mind, to think that this appeal has now been made for the last time. It has come to this ; the historical event, imprimis, the Resurrection of Jesus on the third day from the dead, is the Revelation all else is to be deduced from this, by the ordinary processes of criticism : leave us one supernatural event, and that is our basis from which we can reconstruct the whole revelation ; that one fact contains in itself impli- citly the whole. But how are we to convince ourselves of the truth of this one fact ? The answer offcen is, and wisely is, by Faith. Unfortunately, however, we find ourselves here in a glaring contradiction : Criticism says, The historical event can only be vouched for by my canons ; an event cannot be at once historical and super- 8* 116 Fact and Illusion : natural, for history is only possible on the presupposition of the absolute continuity and homogeneity of experience ; and that presupposition is uprooted and annihilated by the presupposition of Revelation. Thus what you here call Faith is a presupposition which renders my whole existence null ; and you should not have sat down to play with me at all. On the other hand, if you admit that the historical supernatural event is to be attested by my own canons, the contradiction is only the more apparent : nothing enters the realm of history, as constituted by me, save through the gates of nature : you are moving a piece otherwise than the laws of the game admit, you cannot save the piece ; surrender it, or make way for another player.* To make use of our metaphor a little further : it is the history of the game itself which is peculiarly instructive. * For a remarkable confirmation of the view taken in this Essay of the relations between facts and doctrine, as well as for additional support of the explanation offered of the Apostolic visions, I should like to refer my readers to an article by Dr. Carpenter in the " Contemporary Eeview," January, 1876, entitled, " The fallacies of testimony in relation to the Supernatural." Dr. Carpenter's polemic against the Supernatural is indeed of a character all but purely empirical. He admits the possibility of miracles ; he only questions the credibility of the historical evidence. This is a very- reasonable ground to take in a popular polemic : most persons per- haps are Theists of one sort or another, all with a growing respect for science : and this is the position of " the Scientific Theist," as Dr. Carpenter calls him (op. cit. p. 281). Many will resign Miracles and Eevelation, but still cling to dogmatic Theism, for a long time. But any one who considers more deeply the question of the possibility of history in every sense of the word will probably come to the conclusion that it is only possible upon the basis of that principle of continuity, which is irreconcilable with miracles ; that if miracles are possible, history is impossible ; and that historical evidence for miracles is nothing short of a contradic- tion in terms. First Principles and Faith. 117 We see the Apologist when compelled by the presuppo- sition of criticism to resign one position after another, still go on to defend the positions left him, first with the aid of criticism, so far as it appears to lend him a shield or even a spear; and then by an appeal to the presuppo- sition of faith, when the ground is cut from under his feet, in virtue of the very principles which he professes to recognize. The real controversy does not lie, there- fore, anywhere else than between the presuppositions; the utterly false position of the modern Apologist consists in this, that he is not in earnest with either presupposi- tion, but tries to combine them, though they are no more to be combined than oil and vinegar. The practical result is that he goes a mile with his man, but will not go twain ; he is always harking back to a road, which if it start from the same centre, goes out into space in a diametrically opposite direction. He is not thorough- going with his criticism, and he is not thoroughgoing with his faith. To be the latter is indeed a sheer impos- sibility, for as the presuppositions of criticism, or ration- alized experience, are exactly the same as the presuppo- sitions of ordinary everyday experience and human life, the Apologist can scarcely be anything in his theories but a half and half philosopher, where the two halves are heterogeneous : and must help himself out of the dilemma, as best he can, by the assumption of two truths, the one philosophic, the other theological ; or of a Yes from the practical reason where the theoretical reason has said No ; or of light in Faith where man's science threatens to extinguish God's revelation ; or by the assumption of some other dualistic theory which virtually maintains that Truth is to be found by com- bining the conclusions of Dogmatism and Scepticism. 118 Fact and Illusion : In any case his theory and his practice must stand in contradiction to each other ; for we only live in security so long and in so far as we behave as rational beings ; and our freest thoughts, our most unconscious acts pay homage to the reason in things, and in ourselves ; the laws given, which shall not be broken. It is for these reasons : because the presupposition of Supernafruralism cuts at the root of all experience, whether in esse or in posse, whether codified in science or unconsciously gathered and applied in life ; and because the history of the struggle between criticism and its adversary shows the self-condemnation of the latter; that we must throw in our lot with the younger child of Time, and believe that he is destined to supplant the elder. Supernaturalism is perpetually stultifying itself by selling its birthright, and making all sorts of suicidal con- cessions to its younger brother. We can reconstruct, after a fashion, its title deeds, from the history of these concessions. It still claims the Father's blessing; we can show what this claim logically presupposes, and how this ^presupposition has long ago been voluntarily abandoned. What we are now asked to spare is a supernatural his- torical phenomenon, as source of Christian doctrine. But such an event is at variance with ordinary historical criti- cism ; as this criticism, therefore, cannot be applied to the record or evidence for the event without producing in our minds the negation of the event, to preserve the pheno- menon we must exempt the record from strict criticism, we must not treat the Bible as we treat other books;* we must * Cp. the words addressed to the University of Oxford by a preacher, now Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture : " Woe to you, if they (philology, history, geography) persuade you to read the Book of Life as a Pagan might read it, as you First Principles^ and Faith. 119 hold fast the doctrine of Inspiration in some form or other, which shall make a qualitative difference between the Bible and all other books, or collection of books. But it is quite obvious that even the inspired book, or literature rather, is capable of widely different interpreta- tions, and the Faith which demands an inspired record of supernatural events, will require further an infallible authority for the correct interpretation of the record ; all the more so, as the record is not merely a record, but also a treasury of doctrine. So we come back from the necessity of a past supernatural event to the necessity of a present supernatural Church, at least for all who do not claim for themselves an immediate divine revelation ; for all, that is, who acknowledge that the Truth comes to them mediately. But this logical process of construc- tion, which might very well lead an earnest dialectical mind, once convinced of the necessity of a special revela- tion, to pass over to the Church of Kome, is just the reverse of the process which has accomplished itself in the progressive mind of Europe since the Reformation. Protestantism in discarding the supernatural claims and authority of the Church, was far from applying its own principle universally ; partly no doubt because the Re- formation was in its beginning more a moral than an intellectual protest and uprising, partly because the full bearings even of intellectual principles are never seen at first ; and as has been well said, though in quite a different connection, to judge of the doctrine we must look not to the Master but to the scholars. The first effect of the Reformation was indeed to force out a more definite position and authority for the Scriptures, and the selves might read Herodotus or Plato." Liddon : " University Sermons X." (5th Ed. p. 278.) 120 Fact and Illusion : so-called " mechanical doctrine of Inspiration/' of which our liberal Apologists now-a-days make such short work, was a product as natural and necessary in its day, and with as definite a purpose to serve as their own vaguer appeals to Faith or Instinct.* It may have served its * In his " Gospel of the Kesurrection," Dr. Westcott's Court of Appeal seems to be Instinct ; e.g. p. 12. " The authority of testi- mony is supplemented by that of the instinct within us which recognizes the harmony of a Revelation claiming to be Divine with the essential wants of man." The claim to be divine is made by all Religions, and so far therefore as this is concerned, Instinct says as much for one as for any other ; and the inference is : The more a religion corresponds to the essential wants of man, the more likely it is to be a natural product, even if an unconscious, and in so far instinctive, product of human wishes and 'thoughts concur- ring with external conditions. It is also, however, rapidly becom- ing, if not already become, an essential want of man, to examine his instincts, all of them, whether original or acquired, whether spontaneous, or mixed with reflection, with a view of controlling, and if need be, altering them by the light of his maturest reason and experience, P. 40. " It is, indeed, a mystery wholly beyond our comprehen- sion how an infinite Being can reveal or in any way manifest Him- self to finite creatures. But in obedience to an instinct which we cannot question we have taken it for granted that he does so." Why cannot we question it ? Of course we can, we ought to ques- tion it ; and both Reason and History have a word to say on the subject of this so-called instinct, which is no instinct at all, but only the logical necessity to assume a premise for a foregone con- clusion. P. 146, " There is indeed an imperious instinct which affirms that we shall survive death," etc. How a theological doctrine may come in course of time to look like spontaneous faith ! Most thoughtful people understand by instinct something 'spontaneous, active, and above all unconscious, something which produces results often in a high degree artful (so to speak) without design. But we need not press a correct terminology. To refer a doctrine, a theory, a hope to instinct (or was it Christianity which brought Immortality to light ?) as the final ground of belief, shows strange oversight in a work which First Principles and Faith. 121 purpose, at least of stopping a gap against Rome, but as it is essentially arbitrary, it must submit in turn to the same law of disintegration which proves too much for the authority of the Church. The supernatural authority of the Bible is given up in turn, and we are invited to apply to it the ordinary processes of Criticism, Faith (so-called) having taken refuge in the assumption that though the record may be natural the event will remain supernatural. Vain assumption ! The process of disintegration must proceed, and the event must be recognized as natural, as well as the record. But what is the event to be recognized as natural ? Not surely the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead ? It is indeed conceivable that persons very imperfectly acquainted with the comparative history of religions, with the state of belief and opinions in the first century of our era, and with the psychological conditions of belief in general, should suppose that Jesus really rose from the sets " relation to reason and history" on its title page. What does History show, if not that the education of man consists to no small extent in bringing his "imperious" instinct under the yoke of Reason P However it would seem that Dr. Westcott on occasion knows tliat our instincts, real or misnamed, are not in themselves final authorities, for he says of another " instinct " that the " Scripture first teaches us to believe that the instinct is true " (p. 172). One does not at first know what teaches us to accept Scripture as bail for our instinct ; perhaps another instinct, .... and so on ad infinitum. After all this it is strange to hear of belief in Christ that it has not only " interpreted " but also " conquered this and that instinc- tive feeling" (p. 245). What then renders any instinct imperious or unquestionable ? Not its being instinct at any rate. It is unfortunate that Dr. Westcott should adopt as a specula- tive authority a power which is supposed specially to be rooted in the natural, but unconscious, action of mind and nerves j and is not safely to be appealed to on theoretical questions. 122 Fact and Illusion: grave on the third day ; and in the acknowledged obscu- rity of the relations between spirit and matter, both of which enter into all natural processes, it might be hypo- thetically maintained that this Resurrection, as a strictly natural event, and in no sense miraculous, did take place. This sort of appeal ad ignorantiam could not in any case justify more than a suspension of judgment, or a negative hypothesis; as the event seems probable on historical grounds, it may be that there are powers in nature, or rather moments where spirit has such all but omnipotence over matter, that functions of life which had been inter- rupted and replaced by the process of dissolution, might be resumed, and dissolution reversed. But such an hypo- thesis is too obviously in the air, and, as it is utterly devoid of all support in analogy, could not maintain itself against the strong negative improbability. In the light of experience it must remain more probable that the Apostles were in error than that such an event took place ; add the considerations drawn from what we know of them, their state of mind, hopes, opinions; and the strong negative improbability of the one event, hitherto deemed supernatural, but in the present case ex Tiypotliesi natural, becomes a positive argument in favour of the rival fact, or supposed fact, viz. that the belief of the Apostles in the Resurrection was a purely natural product, but not due to the objective reality of the alleged fact. Such is the conclusion of philosophical criticism, but it is not generally acceptable : much of what is best and most humane in us, our so-called moral instincts, seem to rise against such a conclusion. They furnish us with an argument of a teleological character against the theory that a belief in the Resurrection was due to natural antecedents, one of which was not the fact in First Principles and Faith. 123 question : in other words, that it was an erroneous infer- ence, however unconscious, on the part of the first believers, which has propagated itself in the world, ever since. The influence of the belief upon the Apostles in the first instance, and through them upon the world, or that part of it which has come under the influence of Christianity, is pointed out ; and we are asked whether such results, and such results for good, can be due to an illusion ? Now it must be remarked here, in the first place, that given a belief of the same intensity, its results remain exactly the same, whether it is an illusion or an accurate reproduction of facts. Leaving out of account beliefs which lead to acts hostile or destructive to human society; of those which have been productive of the greatest benefits to nations or individuals, how many have been true, in a scientific sense ? How many have not been better than the truth ? What we wish for, that we believe to be good ; and what is good, must be true ; this is the epitome of Faith/s genesis.* Our ideals are always untrue, measured by experience ; they are antici- pations of experience, and they remain, many of them, anticipations which experience teaches us were not merely ideals but illusions. But an illusion, if it is strong, can produce good fruit for the whole world, if only the illu- sion be the expression of the best wish in the world at the time. And the best wish which the Apostles could have was that their Master should be with them to the end of the world. What if the wish, the necessity, * Constat itaque .... niliil nos conari, velle, appetere neque cupere, quia id bonum esse judicamus ; sed contra nos propterea aliquid bonum csse judicarc, quia id conamur, volumus, appetimus atquc cupimus. Spinoza, " Eth. III., ix. Scliol." 1 24 Fact and Illusion : working in conjunction with the other motives analyzed previously., should have produced the belief ? or how could the belief realize itself save in the forms supplied to it by the knowledge and opinions of the time and of the men ? The truth is that the Master was with them, if not in the body, yet in power and spiritual presence, far more after death than before ; the illusion was only the form in which this real presence expressed itself in the first instance. We cannot easily bear to acknowledge to ourselves that the Apostles were subject to an illusion in respect to the Reappearance of their departed Master and the inference based thereupon ; and yet we make little diffi- culty perhaps out of another illusion to which they were as certainly subject, and which stood in near relation to the former, although it lies now so far from us, the belief in his Second Advent. There is perhaps no point at which the difference between the primitive Church and the mass of modern Christians makes itself more conspi- cuously manifest than this. Those who wish to identify their form of Christianity with that of the first believers, by raising the fact of the Resurrection into supreme prominence, should remember that the certainty of the Parusia, or Second Coming of Christ, and that in their own day, was an element in the primitive Creed of Chris- tians no less essential. If the Resurrection had value for them, it was primarily an evidential value which it had ; it restored fcheir confidence that Jesus was the Messias, and this confidence was the whole faith of primitive Christianity, and the novelty of it was not contained in the predicate but in the subject of the sentence.* The * Keuss, op. cit. 29, First Principles and Faith. 125 doctrine that Jesus was the Messias was the only dogma, so to speak, by which primitive Christianity separated itself from Judaism, or at least from the beliefs and hopes of the bulk of the Jewish people. The Apostles carried over into Christianity all the opinions, beliefs, and expectations connected with the Messias which they had been familiar with as Jews ; and it was, as we have seen above, in the first instance the genius of Paul, working upon the given fact of the death of the Messias, and secondly the Christian consciousness of a later time, which has found its sublime representative in the author of the fourth Gospel, working upon the given fact that the apostolic age had passed away, and still the Millennium was not come, which profoundly modified the Christian conception of the Messias, his work, and his kingdom. The Bible is so habitually read in the light of precon- ceptions of a dogmatic character, and such preconceptions have so disturbing an effect upon the historical sense, that there are still persons to be found who deny that the Apostles and early Christians definitely anticipated the end of the world and the second coming of Christ in their own day, or allowed such an expectation to affect their conduct in any way or degree other than the thought of his Advent, and the uncertainty of the day and hour of his appearance, should affect devout believers in the present day. This one-sided and subjective and at the same time dogmatical assertion, which we may expect from persons of strong ecclesiastical bias who have Church history at their backs, may be corrected in a way by the more naive interpretation, no less subjective and one-sided, of those of a more " evangelical" bias, who look more or less confidently for the reappearance of Jesus Christ in the clouds at no distant day. The latter un- 126 Fact and Illusion: doubtedly represent the early Christians more accurately in this respect ; for the primitive Church looked for the Return of its Master, not merely at some wholly indefi- nite time in the future, but before long, in a short time, quickly, soon. Now-a-days those who hold to this belief, and its kindred notion of a Millennium, or Eeign of Christ on earth for a thousand years, ground their faith chiefly on the book of Revelation. It is undoubtedly most clearly expressed in this book, the earliest work in the New Testament which can be connected with the primitive Christianity of Jerusalem ; but the same ideas and expectations underlie all the writings of the New Testament, the Johannine works perhaps alone excepted, and form unmistakably a presupposition for the right understanding of Pauline Christianity, however much Paul's Gospel may be in secret already developed and raised above the level and limits of such conceptions. Paul was a Pharisee, and transferred to Jesus the pharisaic ideas connected with the Messias, the two Eesurrections, the thousand years' reign, the last trumpet, the judgment, the renewal of all things. But certainly with Paul these ideas held a different rank to that assigned to them by the primitive believers ; for Paul, as already shown, was the first to grasp the significance of the Crucifixion of the Messias ; and the practical consequences of the doctrine which he deduced from the given fact were very different to the practice of the Church in Jerusalem. But reflec- tion on the consequences of the death of the Messias was not of itself sufficient to transform the eschatology of the primitive Church ; it required the might of external facts, on the one hand the negative fact of the delay and non- fulfilment of the expectation of a speedy Restitution of all things, of the Restitution of the Kingdom to Israel ; First Principles and Faith. 127 on the other hand the positive fact of the destruction of Jerusalem, to discredit the primitive conception on this head. Paul did not live to witness the confirmation of his thought and work contained in the fact of the destruction of Jerusalem, though it can hardly be doubtful that he would have grasped the significance of this event, and its bearing upon traditional doctrine, as he had grasped the significance of the Death of Christ. But it could hardly have been given to him to modify the primitive conception of the kingdom of the Messias more profoundly than the author of the Epistle and Gospel which bear the name of John has modified that conception. However that may be, his eschatology is the one point where' we can still see in Paul a develop- ment, more or less pronounced, after his appearance as a Christian Apostle. In his earlier Epistles he writes in the unquestioning assurance that he himself will live to see the Return of his Master in glory : in his Roman prison, with the memory of his activity and sufferings for the Gospel behind him, with the shadow of death already perhaps upon him, he is divided between the wish to depart and the wish to remain, for to depart is to be with Christ immediately. But what was thus to Paul at last become for his own person an external and acci- dental conception, which did not further or impede his union with Christ in life and death, had remained for the primitive Jewish Christians, as may still be seen in the New Testament itself, one of the main elements of their faith and source of their hope and strength. Either Jesus himself had given some countenance to these hopes, or his immediate disciples had, perhaps quite unconsciously, given words of his a twist into accord- ance with their own more materialistic expectations, and 128 Fact and Illusion : missed the deeper spiritual truth which he may have meant to convey to those who had ears to hear. However this may be, we have before us the spectacle of men finding divine sustenance and support, amid danger and persecu- tion from their own countrymen, and with the prospect of their country's complete overthrow already before their eyes, in an idea and order of ideas which we must now pronounce illusions : the Lord did not come, the generation passed away, and all things were not fulfilled as they had expected. But it may be said; There is a great difference in illusions. It is one thing to believe that a man has risen from the grave and ascended into heaven ; it is another thing to believe that he will come again and that shortly. The one is an assertion of accomplished facts, based on the testimony of the senses ; the other is an assertion of facts still to be accomplished, based on inference from popular beliefs and from words of the Master himself. The one is history, the other is prophecy ; and while an error or illusion in the latter may be put down to human fallibility or misconception, such an error in the former, if it were possible, would look like a deception practised on man by God himself; we cannot credit it. There is a difference in illusions ; but what is the difference worth ? The senses can deceive us no less than the judgment ; or rather perhaps more accurately said, it is in every case the judgment, be it a conscious or an un- conscious judgment, which deceives itself, as to the causes and relations of external things. Granted that the Apostles saw their Master in a glorified form after he had been crucified, dead and already some days, that of him which was mortal, buried : the appearance was real enough, the affection of their organs of sense was real y First Principles and Faith. 129 it was the judgment which they, were it instinctively or after discussion among themselves, and with comparison of other experiences, based upon the appearance which was erroneous. If any one now-a-days has a vision of a departed friend, probably he puts it down to physiological and psychological causes, and might very well welcome it as a spontaneous testimony of his own nature to the worth of his friend, and to his own love and loyalty to the departed one. The Apostles interpreted their visions from the standpoint of their own unreflecting'realism, or of a scepticism as natural and unreflective. There may very well have been doubts at first, but they were not the doubts of a modern man of science ; they were only such as a repetition of the vision, as a confirmation from others, as a sympathetic enthusiasm, would convert into assurance. It has been said (as above noticed) that had we really the testimony of eye-witnesses to the life of Jesus, the testi- mony would not be very different to that which we actually possess : the statement is fairly open to question, and it is nowhere more questionable than in so far as it might be applied to the supposed post mortem life of Jesus on earth. The visionary character of the appearances of the Lord is indicated abundantly even in the records as we have them ; had we the testimony of eye-witnesses in all cases, as we have in the case of Paul, we can hardly doubt that the records would be as indefinite and tell- tale as Paul's authentic accounts of his own visions; and could we cross-examine the witnesses, as Joan of Arc was cross-examined or rather not so, not from theolo- gical motives of suspicion and anxiety to show a case of witchcraft or black arts, but from the pure curiosity, to put it on its lowest ground, of human science should we not find them as unwilling and unable to describe the material 9 130 Fact and Illusion : details of the visions as she was ? Perhaps not quite so unable : for Joan of Arc's imagination was but stored with the memory of pictures of the Angels and Madonna, such as she had seen in churches, and this was the stuff from which her visions were composed : the Apostles and Mary of Magdala had the memory of a living person, his familiar gestures and voice, to form a nucleus for the unconscious construction of a vision, indistinguishable to them from an objective appearance ; and for all that, the appearances were visionary and ghostly in their comings and goings, and best recognized in the breaking of bread, or the well-known voice. We have already cleared our minds of the fallacy that the fact is something hard and fast outside and inde- pendent of the judgment ; and the relation between our sense and our judgment is very like that between the fact and the doctrine which is supposed to flow from it : the doctrine has been at the making of the fact, and every perception is already a judgment. Joan of Arc when asked how she recognized the Archangel Michael as such, before he made himself known to her, answers : ' ' because I saw him with my bodily eyes." The fisher- men of Galilee were hardly more heroic or less naive than the peasant girl of Domremy ; and her visions were of more service to her " Fair France," than the visions of the Apostles to the Chosen land and city. The liberation of Palestine was not indeed then the event predestined and necessary for the progress of the world, or the coming of the Kingdom ; but it may be ascribed to the illusions of the early Christians upon this point that they took no active part in the patriotic struggle of their kinsfolk against the Romans. They looked for a supernatural deliverance, they watched the heavens for the sign of the First Principles and Faith. Son of Man coming in his glory, and all the holy Angels with him : and their illusion respecting the future was part and parcel of their illusion about the past, and had ultimately one root with it in their identification of their Master with the Messias, and their consequent trans- ference to him of all the attributes and functions which their countrymen ascribed to the expected Saviour ; with a difference, that for the Christians the glorious coming of the Christ was a second coming, and so naturally looked for more definitely and confidently in the imme- diate future, than could be the single coming of the Messias Ben-David awaited by the Jews. As there are two broad paths of science, the inductive and deductive, so there are two fundamental tendencies in art, of which the end of the one is the idealization of the real world, the end of the other, the realization, in an artistic sense, of the ideal world : and just as the methods of science are but the conscious and rationalized counter- parts of the forms of inference which men employ daily and hourly on objects of all sorts ; so are the results of art but due to the processes of imagination to be observed in less concentrated and specific forms in the general mind of man, of a people, of an age, of a commu- nity. Just as the common sense, which is the common science, can set in circulation its proverbs and wise sayings, and is always the conservator of a certain amount of knowledge and judgment and rationalized experience, so the common imagination provides ideals for the life and enthusiasm of societies, whether the ideals be in the past or in the future. In either case the forms of the ideal are borrowed from the actual world ; but it results from the nature of these relations that an idealized history or person seems to have a nearer relation to concrete 9 * 132 Fact and Illusion : reality than a future state of better things, brought near to us by an imagination which can only work in the material supplied by the present and the past. And so it is easy to persuade ourselves that prophecy is illusive even while history is true, and we fail perhaps to note it when both are really presented to us by the same spirit working with the same tools and the same stuff. We take the Apostolical picture and representation of the Christ, conveyed though it be in the terms of Jewish thought and belief, and we reject the Apostolical picture of the glory of the Christ, which is conveyed to us in the same terms, and belongs to the same general standpoint ; and we modify the picture of the Last Things down to the forms and colours permitted by our later common sense, enriched, or at least augmented, by the experienoe of centuries, and the collapse of many ideals. So be it : Wisdom is justified of all her works : the idealized past is nearer to that external reality which is given to us, that concrete experience to which we are accustomed to ascribe exclusively truth ; prophecy can but move in the terms supplied to a great extent by this very idealized history, as, for example, the Jewish expec- tations of the Messias King were an imaginative repro- duction of the tradition of the Davidic kingdom. Yet it should be remembered that it is only when history has passed into prophecy that it affects the will, or tends to produce an active effort for better things j it is only when the Golden Age is thought of as a period which is to return, to be regained it may be in more than pristine glory that it becomes a source of joyful action or patience. In the hopes of Christ's second coming the primitive disciples did and suffered much ; but how many Christians now-a-days abstain from marriage, or establish First 'Principles and Faith. 133 a community of goods, in the light of the speedy approach of their Master from heaven, and his millennial reign over the saints on earth ? The majority either think, or act as though they thought, early Christian prophecy an illusion, even while they still think early Christian history a plain record of absolute fact. But the real distinction is sought for in the wrong place, and is not of the essen- tial and permanent nature it is represented to be, when the Gospels are treated as the simplest and surest ground in the New Testament, and the Apocalypse as the most insecure and obscure. The very reverse is the true state of the case. The problem of the right general under- standing of the Apocalypse is of far easier solution than the problem of the right understanding of the Gospels : it is easier to see into the ideal truth in the former than to disentangle the historical truth in the latter ; for while the primary substance and starting point in the Gospels is, we will not say a series of external events, but at least an historical personality ; the ultimate residuum in the Apocalypse is an idea, or set of ideas, more or less uni- versal and omnipresent in the human mind; and the chief difficulty is, to put ourslves, by historical knowledge and criticism, in the right position to understand the particular form which these ideas assumed in Jewish Christendom. In the Gospels we have the idealization of the real and historical ; in the Revelation we have the realization of the ideal represented in the forms present to the imagination of the writer ; but to disentangle and abstract the historical person, the external reality, from the envelope or web in which it has been set, as in a shining garment, is a far more difficult task than to set free the ideal presented to us in the visions of the Apoca- lypse; for the ideal is present with us in one form or 134 Fact and Illusion : another through all generations, in our mind and heart ; and we recognize easily the wants and wishes of the common spirit, even when it meets us in strange Eastern raiment. What is here said is not, however, to be so understood as though the two processes of the imagination were severed from each other in act, or could not play upon the same objects at the same time. On the contrary; the most abstract and idealistic visions presuppose an historical reality, to which they have at once a negative and a positive relation; negatively they condemn it as insufficient for the ideal wants and happiness of man; positively they affirm it again, in the very fact of trans- forming and idealizing it into a state of happiness to come. And similarly the process of idealizing the actual is only possible in reference to given ideals and ideas ; the historical fact or person can only be transfigured in accord- ance with the ideas of happiness or of perfection more or less consciously present in the mind of the artist, even though the artist be the common and sympathetic mind of a whole society. Thus in the works of imagination the relations between the real and the ideal shift through innumerable gradations ; and now the one element, now the other obtains a preponderance, and the unity of their perfect balance is destroyed. In the gradual develop- ment of the Christian conception of the Person of Christ, we can see the ideal moment steadily gaining ground upon the strictly historical, and moulding the historical into conformity with itself. We see the process already carried a long way in the New Testament. With S. Paul, who had not known Christ after the flesh, i.e., historically in life and outward experience, the Christ within is the highest and deepest truth, and the Christian life is the First Principles and Faith. 135 realization of this spiritual ideal in thought, word and deed. In the contrast between the Synoptic and the fourth Gospels we have a striking example of the results of the two methods ; and it is hardly doubtful which of the two pictures of Christ is nearer the historical reality. Nevertheless the fourth Gospel has always been the favourite gospel of the deeper Christian consciousness, un- troubled by the misgivings of over-scrupulous rationalism; and that, just because it is further from the historical truth, and nearer to the inner demand and satisfaction of ideal truth. The Synoptic Gospels, to be sure, are read by the devout Christian in the light of the fourth, or we may suspect that their difference from it would be more sensibly felt in general; and there is no doubt that a simple and unrationalizing faith in Christ, where such is still to be found, can only think of its Lord and Master as the perfect man, in every sense of that expression, with all the strength and all the beauty of character con- ceivable in man and woman. Such faith effects anew, in every generation, upon the traditional picture of Jesus the act of transfiguration in its own terminology according to its own contents. This act, which takes place in the hearts of believers, should reflect itself and find an abiding record, not merely in literature, but at least in painting too : and we might be tempted to take it as a sign of the feebleness and confusion of the inmost heart of Christen- dom in the present day, when we see the crude realism with which modern Art attempts the portraiture of the Son of Man. The ideal, or if we like to call it so, the supernatural, loses itself in a maze of external and arbitrary symbolism, none the less arbitrary because it is borrowed from real natural objects, or household utensils : and the historical and natural truth is reproduced, it may 136 Fact and Illusion: be, in an accurate portrait of a weak looking Syrian in strict Oriental surroundings ; and instead of an f< Ecce Homo/'' where the ideal may seem to have gained an expression within purely natural limits, and of a ' ' Trans- figuration" where the impossible is attempted in a form compatible with the serious belief of the time, and with the poetry of all time ; we have a " Light of the World/' or a " Shadow of the Cross/ ' where the natural and the supernatural appear in mere juxta-position, held in one frame by a clever symbolism and a name, but in no wise fused into one by an inner and spiritual unity. If such pictures are the products and representatives of modern Christianity, its enemies might rejoice to think that it was degenerating into externals, incompatible with each other : but are they not rather witnesses to the state of orthodox and apologetic Theology, which in these days of cheap literature makes itself everywhere popular, with its half-and-half advances to criticism and concessions to rationalism, and its attempts to convert modern realism into an ally of dogmas which put an impassable gulf between nature and spirit ? For an elementary and unsophisticated consciousness as for the maturest reason, that dualism, which belongs to the intermediate stage of rationalistic inquiry whether it be conducted in the interests of orthodoxy or of un- orthodoxy does not exist : the one may be said to be in a certain sense below it, the other above it ; or, to avoid the appearance of a claim to moral superiority which might be attached to that mode of description, the one may be said to have this rationalistic dualism still before it, while the other can look back upon it as upon a necessary stage in the process of its own development. Thus reason restores the unity and fulness of the primitive intuition First Principles and Faith. 137 which, has been disturbed and destroyed by the rationalism of the discursive understanding. This rationalism is repre- sented in the present case by Church history, or that por- tion of it which is concerned with the systematization of dogma, and the dissolution of the same, effected chiefly by modern rationalism and science, since the Reformation. But in thus asserting its identity with the primitive con- sciousness, as well over against the theology of the modern Apologist, as over against the theology of the negative or sceptical Rationalist, critical philosophy asserts the identity with a difference : the whole process of thought during the centuries is not to go for nothing : and critical speculation claims a certain advantage over the primitive uncritical intuition in holding the truth without the illusion, or, what is the same thing, in recog- nizing the illusion as such ; in semi-athanasian language there is an identity of substance (ovori'a) and a difference of form (TrpocreoTTov), or from a more modern standpoint, the objective reality is the same, though the temporary apprehension of it is different ; the problem of thought is the same, though the terms of its solution be otherwise expressed. The illusive character of the primitive intui- tion consists in this, that it identifies the spiritual reality or ideal, of which it is immediately conscious, with what is after all a representation or symbol borrowed from the sensual world ; or on the other hand, identifies the reality given in the sensible world as the vehicle of spiritual truth with this truth itself, and so in either case confuses together two spheres, the recognition of whose real difference is one of the last and most difficult steps in theoretic consciousness, though happily in practice Faith and Love find out a short way of their own. The very terms in which we have here recognized the 138 Fact and Illusion : illusive nature of primitive consciousness betray the difficulty of doing justice to the form in which that con- sciousness expressed itself. What is above written might easily be interpreted to mean that the identification of the spiritual and the sensual, of the eternal and the temporal, which is the secret of all claims to supernatural revelation, to absolute truth in dogmas, was the result in the first instance of a deliberate synthesis ; that is not at all what is here intended. It is not until reflection has set in upon the given material, it is not until Theology, to speak roughly, has come to the aid or the injury of Religion, that the inconsistency of the various elements of the primitive faith or revelation, as doctrine, comes to light. And thus it conveys quite a false impression to speak of the Apostles as the " victims of illusion :" it is our doubts not our illusions which victimize us : and it is the intermediate stage between the original and na'ive .Realism of simple faith and the spiritual realism of a Reason at unity with itself, it is the stage of our theology and oppositions of science falsely so called, which is the period of our unhappiness. Joy, as has often been re- marked, is one of the great characteristics of primitive Christendom ; and so long and so far as that Joy is really one of the gifts of the Spirit, it indicates the unity of the Spirit with itself, it indicates the real presence of a spiritual truth. We do not therefore say that the Apostles were free from what is to us illusion, on the contrary, a bitter experience was necessary before the illusion could be torn in twain ; and it may be said perhaps of most Christians up to the present day, that the veil is on their hearts when they read Christian history or Christian prophecy : but we say that the illusion is not the chief thing, not the First Principles and Faith. 139 thing of permanent worth or practical importance, any more than of theoretical truth : it points to something below and above itself. Illusions too have their signifi- cance, and it is not accidental either that a man has just this illusion, or that it is just this man who has this illusion. To be a sharer in the bulk of the Messianic illusions, the notion of the thousand years reign, of the two resurrections, and so on, it was only necessary to be a Jew and a Pharisee ; but to live in the specific illusion which differentiated the first Christians from their countrymen, it was necessary to have been with Jesus, and that too in more than the merely external sense. Whether it be the Master who chooses his disciples, or the disciples who choose their Master, the relation points to an internal compatibility and correspondence, to some " elective affinity " and the men whom Jesus called his friends cannot have been quite unworthy of his friend- ship. And as the Messianic expectations of the Jewish people, however illusive and the theologian most dead in dogmatic presuppositions will allow that the Jews were filled with illusive hopes and expectations point nevertheless to a grand and ideal truth of which the whole people was possessed ; so the concentration of all these hopes and beliefs on Jesus, the identification of Jesus with the Messias by his immediate followers, points to the fact that he in his person answered their ideal, and justified in their minds the claim which he perhaps made. In a far higher degree is the impression which Jesus had made upon them during his life established in its ideal proportions, when we suppose that the visions which the Apostles had of their Master after his death were the results, not of external supernatural interposition, but of the internal working of 'their own hearts and minds. 140 Fact and Illusion : By no slight impact could such " convulsions of the soul" have been produced. The visions which testify to the earnestness and genuineness of the Disciples, testify, in an even greater degree to the spiritual impression which the lost Master must have made upon them, while he was still with them. The visions themselves were no illusions ; the illusion lay in the explanation of the visions ; and the explanation could only be couched in the current forms of the time and place. But ifc may now fairly be said that just in proportion as we recognize the visions as natural products, so must the natural cause assume larger proportions, so must the historical Person of Christ grow in importance, even if it be at the expense of the sacrifice of one more illusion. And so from the ground of history and criticism the Person of Christ gains not loses by the transfiguration which it underwent, and in which it manifested itself to his disciples. In reconstructing the life and person of Jesus of Nazareth we stand upon a solid ground of history, and know that the materials offered have some value, direct or indirect ; and the belief in his Resur- rection is not the least but perhaps the greatest of the indirect proofs of his veritable exaltation above the common level of humanity during his life on earth. To effect this reconstruction is the task and pure interest of historical science when directed to the origin of Christianity; and from the importance which seems to accrue to the Person of Christ from the fearless applica- tion of critical methods to the material for reconstructing his life, it might seem for an instant as though the results of criticism could only be acceptable to the inherited dogma of the divinity of that Person. It is indeed not improbable that the naive tactics of the Apologist will First Principles and Faith. 141 repeat themselves in this instance also. The history of religion and of theology shows that it is a law of pro- gress here that the primary identification of the Finite with the Infinite, of the temporal with the eternal, should yield to critical analysis in one point, only to reassert itself more clearly and expressly in another : so it was at the Keforrnation, where the divine authority of the given Book took the place of the divine authority of the Church ; so it is now with the more progressive Theolo- gians, who are ready to give up the Book to the ordinary processes of Criticism, if they may keep the super- natural and authoritative event intact. There is a step further to be taken ; the event too may be given up ; some wondrous theory may be excogitated to bring the pre- existent Deity into special relation with the created man ; and the whole argument of Critic and Apologist may concentrate itself round the Person of Christ. That Christian Theology would thus gain very much by concentration on its proper problem viz. 5 the elucidation of fi the mind which was in Christ Jesus," the determina- tion of the fundamental elements of that consciousness which has been the source of such life and strength to humanity, spite of all the errors, superstitions, or illusions through which it has made its way in the world is not doubtful. And this was indeed always the chief interest of Christendom, at least until the Roman Church and the development of Papal claims usurped the place belonging of right to the Person of Christ. The Athanasian Creed itself is the result of the controversy as to the nature of Christ ; and the doctrine of the Trinity has developed in accordance with the needs of the Christology. Protes- tantism, (which in its best heart is the protest against every human or finite power which sets itself in the place 142 Fact and Illusion : of God, or identifies itself with, the sole divine authority, and consequently on its positive side the appeal from man to God,) restored the supreme interest in the Person of Christ. Certainly our Protestantism did not at once see the full application of its own implicit prin- ciple, and in its protest against the finite authority of the Church, itself identified the Bible with the absolute and final authority : but it only requires time for this identification also to be given up. Already the Christian Theologian is falling back upon a supernatural pheno- menon as the key to the divine Revelation j a few years more, and we may see this too abandoned, and all stress laid upon a divine Person. But the inner contradiction is still there, and will remorselessly demand the sacrifice of this illusion as of its predecessors, and the complete freedom of the divine and final authority from all condi- tions of time and space. It will then seem a sort of heathenism to identify Jesus with God : it will then seem a necessity to distinguish the Divine Principle even from the Person in whom it may first have become manifest ; it will then seem possible to realize the divine Sonship and heritage, without transferring the metaphor into the abstract regions of a transcendental Godhead, and reproducing it again as a verity above and beyond human reason, to be accepted in spite of self-contradiction as a divine revelation. The identification of the finite with the infinite, even in its highest form, viz., the identification of Jesus with God, must necessarily contain this inner contradiction ; not merely because every finite existence is in its time and place a manifestation of the Absolute Being, which cannot therefore be exhausted in any one manifestation ; but because the eternal is ex hypothesi different in kind First Principles and Faith. 143 from the temporal, which is nevertheless here identified with it. This is the error of Heathendom as a Keligion, whether polytheistic or pantheistic, to identify the temporal and phenomenal appearance with the eternal principle of which it might be the manifestation. On the other hand, the opposite theory, which in order to avoid this pantheistic identification abstracts the infinite from the finite, and establishes a dualistic antinomy between them, involves a self-contradiction no less fatal ; for the abstract infinite is conceived still in a form borrowed from the finite, as a Person, an infinite or absolute Person, which, it is confessed, is a contradictio in adjecto. This contradiction in the idea of God is really rendered necessary by the contradiction in the dogma of Christ's Deity; logically indeed the former is a presupposition for the latter ; but historically the development of the latter has led the way, and determined the shape to be taken by the former. Once given the antithesis of the finite and the infinite, and given their unity in the Person of Christ, as an object for the speculative theologian, there were two rocks upon which the given dogma might suffer shipwreck : those who laid most stress upon the transcendental nature of the Infinite, tended to fall into an abstract Deism on the one side, and on the other, to reduce Christ to the level of ordinary humanity, or at least to represent him as an inferior, even if angelic, being. Those who laid most stress upon the reality of the Divinity in Christ, were inclined to eliminate the human or finite element altogether, and fall into speculations of a pantheistic character. In the development and expli- cation of her dogma the Church pursued the via media of asserting both extremes at once beside each other as alike true, however contradictory ; and the Athanasian Creed 144 Fact and Illusion : remains as the faithful witness and result of this pro- cedure, and the logical development of the dogma which was the starting point of the whole process : 6 Xoyoe (TapZ lytvtro (the "Word was made flesh. John i. 14). But this re-assertion is no solution ; both members of the contradiction remain beside and outside each other, each plainly false in its especial one-sidedness, and each justified in its one-sidedness as against the other. If Christ is God, he is not man : if man, not God. If God is absolute, he is not a Person : if a Person, not absolute. The difficulty is not any the less striking when it is transferred to the supposed inner relations of the Godhead itself ; if there are three Persons, and each is God, there are three Gods ; if there is but one God, there are not three Persons, in our sense of the word. It was not written in heaven that these hopeless pro- blems should be solved upon the path of theological controversy; there was need of a fresh polemic, not between theologian and theologian, but between theolo- gian and secular science, before the right standpoint for their abolition or absorption could develop itself. What- ever may be the errors of men of science in their special realms, the pursuit and acquisition of natural knowledge implies a set of presuppositions and conditions utterly incompatible with the presupposition of dogmatic theo- logy : the key to the scientific position, the condition 011 which alone science is possible, may be variously ex- pressed, but it remains under various expressions funda- mentally the same, be it named, the uniformity of nature, or the continuity of experience, or the trust that God will work in such a way as not to put us to permanent intel- lectual confusion. This is certainly a metaphysical prin- ciple ; and it may very well be the case, that men devoted First Principles and Faith. 145 to special inquiries do not perceive the full bearing and significance of the principle upon which they work, explicitly or implicitly : it is not necessary for the special sciences that they should, any more than for ordinary everyday life and experience, which also implies, as is seen upon analysis, exactly the same principle. But this principle of unity, this metaphysical monism, once recognized as the only possible theoretic and practical " view of the whole universe, of all being and of all life," must work an end to the absolute dualism, which is the theoretic presupposition of supernaturalism, for the latter implies a contradiction in the ultimate being of things, before which nothing awaits us but permanent intellectual confusion. To the antithesis which made itself good in the idea of God (and which led to Deism or Pantheism, according as one or other member of the contradiction was raised to sole validity), corresponds in the idea of Nature the antithesis of matter and mind ; and the same process of one-sided assertion repeats itself here, with the same final solution, which is no solution. It is indeed an involuntary witness to the rational necessity of a metaphysical monism that the whole explanation of the world is now given from the side of materialism alone, now from the side of idealism alone. Even in their extremest forms each must be allowed a certain right over against the other; and neither consequently can be recognized as final or satis- factory. On the one hand we must admit that every existence is ideal, inasmuch as it comes to us only as and in an act of consciousness ; and the whole world appears to be a creation of our own minds. On the other hand, we cannot deny that we are ourselves members of the world, creatures of nature, results of material processes, of 10 146 Fact and Illusion : processes independent of ourselves, and all our ideas and volitions; and so it might seem as though the ideal moment in existence were only a product and function of the material. We are thus involved in a circle, in a contradiction : matter is but an idea ; and yet the idea, the state of consciousness, presupposes matter. Some of those who perceive the dilemma think to come straight out of it by asserting both members of it to be equally justified in their claims ; others, by representing the whole discussion as a mere quarrel about words. But even a quarrel about words is instructive ; and as in one sense all discussion whatever is a quarrel about words, we are not helped much further by such a merely negative criticism. To reassert both idealism and materialism in the same breath as equally right is no solution of the difficulty ; it is but its recognition ; though as such, it is not without its value. Just as the dualistic contradiction in our Theology started from the Christology and its given dogma, 6 \6yog aapZ lytvtro (the Word was made flesh) : so the dualism in our modern philosophy dates from Descartes, and his celebrated anthropological word; Qogito, ergo sum (think- ing proves existence). Given this word as the starting- point, the progress of metaphysics exhibited, just as the progress of theology had done, the continued separation and driving out of one another of the two elements originally set in juxta-position, now the exclusive assertion of the one, now the exclusive assertion of the other, and now their attempted re-union by means of a third, which in its turn must fall into the same elementary antithesis, or finally, their bare re-assertion one beside the other. It is the abiding merit of Kant to have opened the door to the true solution of the metaphysical problem; negatively, First Principles and Faith. 147 by having shown the refutation as well of Materialism and of Idealism, as of the dogmatic combination of both ; positively, by having given a new starting-point and fir- mament for metaphysical thought, in the denial of tran- scendental knowledge of any kind, and the assertion of the legitimacy of experience, or if we may so say, the reality of natural knowledge. This is exactly the same thing as saying that the only legitimate metaphysics must bo monistic : that this should again be misunderstood, and that the post-Kantian philosophy should again fall into the old antithesis of abstract Idealism and abstract Materialism, was not without an excuse in Kant himself. For Kant only went half-way in his negation ; and from such a negation only a half -position could be won. He denied transcendental knowledge, but left transcendental existence as a problem on the limits of Reason : and so he did not clear himself of the wreck and fragments of Dualism. The world of knowledge is one thing, and there is, after all to this the Kantian doctrine of the " Ding an sich" virtually comes a transcendental world, behind or above. Such an admission or postulate is a permanent challenge to the human mind to overreach itself; for it must always appear purely arbitrary that the Keason should be entitled and indeed compelled to make a purely existential proposition, that " God is/' for example ; and have absolutely no ground to go on to qualify this assertion by saying What God is. The arbitrariness of the Kantian postulate is aggravated when it is seen that this transcendental Thing is historically a survival of the old Dogmatism, or a concession to it, which has no theoretic value; and indeed it is not till Kant comes to practice that he assigns anything but a negative value to the transcendental postulates. But it is not till 10* Fact and Illusion: wo see that theoretically speaking the " Ding an sich" is a piece of abstract realism, is, that is to say, an abstrac- tion taken from the world of space and time and given a reality which is purely imaginary, that we have courage not merely to deny its cognoscibility, but also its existence. But this denial of another world (as a metaphysical reality) would remain a mere negation, if we could not explain how it ever comes to be asserted. And this ex- planation can only be given when we have gained a clear insight into the nature and methods of thought, and how. it is that we come by the contents of our consciousness at all. The logical starting-point for all knowledge is the Socratic axiom, yvuQi atavrov (know thyself) : upon the right distinction of the elements of our own nature from one another depends our insight into the nature of the ultimate metaphysical categories or first principles, which render knowledge and existence possible. The science of the soul is the propaedeutic to all other science, whether physical or metaphysical. Consciousness is a web woven of stuff supplied to us by an external world ; and this externality, however we may name it, is as necessary a datum of consciousness as the self of which we are said to have most immediate cognition. But the external world as presented to us is not a chaos; it is already an order of nature; there is method and reason in it, in virtue of which alone are we, as rational beings, enabled to appropriate the experience which comes to us. That this external order, or ideal unity of things, is omnipresent, is indeed a late discovery for scientific consciousness ; but omnipresent unity is implied in knowledge and potentially contained in it from the very first. Practically speaking, however, experience comes to us in the first instance as perception through First Principles and Faith. 149 the senses, and it is only as thought that it becomes for us science, a system, and loses its accidental character by the discovery or recognition of the inherent order, to a belief in which order we have committed ourselves in our first act of knowledge. Thus the goal of all scientific endeavour is the gradual conversion of sensual experience (whether dependent or independent of human volition) into a necessary order of ideas for consciousness ; or, in other words, the gradual identification of our explicit con- sciousness with the reason inherent in things, the realiza- tion in our minds of the world, which came to us first as a vague multiplicity of objects (or of sensations), as a rational whole or unity, as a universe. The psychological process, by which the carte blanche of man's mind is being filled in with knowledge, is the formation, by abstraction and generalization, of ideas applicable to many objects, but not indissolubly associated with any special object; from these ideas are formed more abstract and general notions, still further removed from the fulness of the individual perceptions of definite ex- ternal objects. These general notions, being on the one hand products and contents of the mind, have a spiritual or intellectual character, they are ideas; being on the other hand only more or less blurred and attenuated copies of sensible things, they never quite lose the pro- perties which are indissoluble from time and space, they always remain ideas of sense, sensations in the abstract, symbols of possible sensations ; they have not a purely and completely ideal character. But in the hunt for Truth, what has been sought and implied as a presupposition from the first in the process of consciousness, is the pure rationality of the world. The mind has contained this presupposition, even at the very 150 Fact and Illusion: outset, but as an empty form, a naked idea, a potentiality, to be filled up and clothed upon, and raised by experience to actual knowledge. Now on the way to its goal, the filling in of this formal unity with material contents by means of experience (or as it may be otherwise expressed, the estab- lishment of a balance or equation between its own ideal unity and the multiplicity of external objects and events, all relative to that unity), the mind encounters those abstract sensations above described, takes them for the ideal world it is looking for, and expects to find in one of them, in the most abstract of them, the full unity and complete truth of thought ; identifies, that is, the first principles of things, the fundamental unity or unities of concrete reality, with the most abstract ideas of sensation which it can form at the time being. The mind represents to itself the pure ideas of the Reason, God, the Soul, the World, when it seeks to realize their truth, under the form of this or that abstract of sensations ; not unnatu- rally so, for these notions, abstracted from sensation, form as it were a world of quasi ideas between the inner unity of the subject or self, and the outer unity of the object or not-self; and as it is the sensibility and not the rationality, the material and not the ideal moment of external existence which forces itself first upon the mind, the reality of a being, even ex hypothesi spiritual, admits of being repre- sented to the mind at first only under the forms of sensible existence. Abstract ideas are each of them the ideal unity of a mass of sensations, and are in so far powers for systema- tizing experience; but when used by the mind as equiva- lent to absolute ideal unities, which cannot be subject to time and space, and the contradictions which belong to temporal and spatial existence, they collapse; for their First Principles and Faith. 151 intrinsic materiality, their inheritance of sensation, makes itself apparent as a contradiction of the ideal unity pos- tulated, and refuses to be reduced to rest or self-identity. From the very first they have consisted of two heteroge- neous elements, the element of indefinite multiplicity or sensation, and the element of unity or form, which is purely rational ; and when such a complex compound is taken as absolute unity, as the real form of pure spirit, it falls to pieces in the contradiction between the absolute unity which is sought and the relative unity which has been identified with it ; and the development and expli- cation of this contradiction produces a dialectical process in the history of human thought between the antitheses of Dogmatism and Scepticism, Materialism and Ideal- ism, Supernaturalism and Rationalism, which can never find a satisfactory termination so long as the dispute is carried on without a critical discrimination of the fundamental metaphysical difference between Spirit in time and in eternity. The Soul has been sent out to seek and find itself and the spiritual unity outside itself which is implied in its own derivative or created unity, and which it desires to assimilate ; and now believes itself to have arrived at the goal, when it catches at a self -representation under the form of abstract sensation, the form for example abstracted from the human body as seen in the phenomenal world. But what the soul is seeking is some purely spiritual being, and this form is not purely spiritual, but on the one hand has a material element, for it is borrowed from sense; and on the other hand has not even material reality, for it is but an abstract notion. Therefore, the very contradiction arises here in the idea of the Soul, which belongs to any notion of an absolute thing (Ding 1 52 Fact and Illusion : an sich), and which we have already recognized in the notion of God as an absolute Person : for all things or persons are essentially relative existences. Never can the soul come to itself so long as it represents its own spiritual essence under the forms of sensible existence ; for every such existence, every thing, always exhibits the two moments, the ideal and the material, and so the search is everlasting, or ends in the sceptical recognition of ultimate antinomies, so long as the unity which is postulated as eternal is still represented under simili- tudes borrowed from space and time. Thus in considering the three metaphysical realities, God, the Soul, and the World, we are necessarily involved in endless contradiction so long as we conceive their mode of being as analogous to the existence of sensible things and individuals; for the implicit postulate from which we start in the consideration of these absolute spiritual unities is that they are other and different to the visible creation. That we should involve ourselves in the dialectical process provoked by such self-contradictory conceptions may be a result of the nature and limitation of our mental faculties, and the consequent necessity for a gradual development of science from a naive and un- critical state to fuller consciousness of self and other. At least, it may fairly be said of the metaphysicians that they have not been so wrong-headed as might seem at first sight. They have been less blind or dull to the conditions of any knowledge at all than those who, because a hundred systems have had their day and ceased to be, conclude that the metaphysical element in knowledge is delusive or transitory. All knowledge and experience contain such an element, and it is just this ingredient which gives stability and certainty to the whole, and lifts it clear of the First Principles and Faith. 153 changes and chances of mere mortality. A science of Fore- and After- Physics is implied in the existence of physical science itself, which gives no account of its own first principles and assumptions ; that this knowledge other than the bare and empirical knowledge of sensible things should be taken for knowledge of another world pre- existent and post-existent, is an indiscriminate confusion of things temporal and things eternal, a conversion of metaphor into metaphysics, which is inevitable to a certain stage in the development of thought, owing to the method by which the human Reason proceeds in the for- mation of its ideas, and the recognition of truth. All knowledge as such is ideal, the crassest materialism only exists by a virtue not its own, inasmuch as the sensible experience or the external world, which it proclaims as the Alpha and Omega of science, is assumed to be an organized and systematic, that is, a rational and ideal whole. In general, people, even of a philosophic turn, find it easier to admit the spiritual reality of God and of the Soul than that of the World, and find themselves tempted to think of the spiritual world as removed in time and place from the material. In other words, it is harder to think of the " System of Nature" as spiritual, not material ; it is harder to realize the ideal of Nature as a spiritual reality, and not merely an abstraction, not merely a notion derived from experience, than to envisage the idea of Grod or of the Soul ; yet at the very same time the spiritual world is more hopelessly identified with a world of time and space, of matter and sense, over again, than are the two other rational ideas. But this false abstraction, whereby the spiritual unity or substance of the world is represented as after all matter, but matter removed in time and space from the matter of the visible universe, 154 Fact and Illusion : involves a similar false abstraction in the mode of con- ceiving Grod and the Soul: the absolute Spirit, whose habitation is the spiritual world, is conceived of after the likeness and similitude of a man, i.e. as one individual among other individuals, a person with other persons beside him : and the Soul or finite Spirit is conceived of, if not as an aetherial body, at least as a material force, or a second substance within, even if independent of the individual body to which it is allied, to which it is tied and bound, in which it is incarcerated, or however else the accidental conjunction of two separate substances may be expressed in the terms of the dualistic theory which underlies the orthodox and popular terminology on these matters. If the individual soul were of the nature thus ascribed to it, could it be a matter of indifference or obscurity what becomes of any particular soul at its separation from the body? The spiritualism of our day, which reposes on the same crude psychological and metaphysical dualism as the current theology, gives the answer of the natural man to this question. Turning to Revelation from the standpoint of such a theory it cannot but appear a matter of considerable importance, specially with reference to the doctrine of the Resurrection, to determine what is the fate of the soul immediately on its separation from the body, or whether the soul can exist at all without a body material, and if so, in what condition. For the solution of such questions by a Christian in the light of the great principle of Christianity set by Dr. Westcott at the head of his chapter, treating of the bearings of the Resurrection of Christ on the individual Christian, it might be thought that the Church doctrine as to the fate of Christ's Soul during the three days which intervened First Principles and Faith. 155 between its separation from the body on the Cross and its reunion with the same in the Sepulchre, would be of considerable significance. But this is just one of the points where the doctrines of the Church and the Bible stand in clearest divergence from and antithesis to the present teaching of science ; also, fortunately, where the practical Christian life has glided beyond the storm of controversy, and is to a great extent independent of the dogma as theory ; and so, albeit no one would deny that on the principle above alluded to, a flood of light would be thrown not merely on the destiny but on the nature of the soul, could we know what became of the soul of Jesus during the interval between his death and resurrection ;* * The Descent into Hell was not indeed in any of the early Creeds, even as preserved by Augustin ; but for all that he says : " Quis nisi infidelis negaverit fuisse apud inferos Christum ?" It may originally, as Bishop Pearson says, have been equivalent in the Creeds, where it was introduced without further explicit reference to the Burial, merely to an assertion that Christ's Body was buried ; in which case it is another instance of the gradual development of legendary details, and just as the Resurrection was quickly differentiated by a materializing phantasy into Resurrec- tion and Ascension, so Burial was multiplied into Burial and Descent into Hell. This multiplication was effected in popular Christian Belief long before it found its expression in the Creeds ; and in spite of Bishop Pearson the more probable interpretation of 1 Peter iii. 18, 19, is the more materialistic. The article (r^ irvtvuari) which is important for his interpretation, though not conclusive, is a doubtful reading. The Gospel of Nicodemus gives a detailed account of the circumstances attendant on the Descent and sojourn in the Shades, as narrated by Charinus and Lenthius, the sons of Simeon, who were permitted to rise, remain on earth for three days, make written depositions before the high priests, after which "they were changed into exceeding white forms, and were seen no more." This represents the early popular imaginations on the subject ; which reappear also in mediaeval art, in pictures of the deliverance, etc., of the souls in prison on the advent of Christ in Hades. 156 Fact and Illusion : it is easier and more discreet for the modern Apologist to pass over the question as lightly as possible ; not because there is no primitive teaching on this head, but because such teaching is in more flagrant opposition to modern science than admits of serious defence. The dictum of modern science is that a soul cannot Bishop Pearson is sceptical as to the details of the Descent and Return ; hut he acknowledges that there was a local downward motion of the soul of Jesus in separation from liis body. The belief that Christ raised with him from Hades a number of the Old Testament saints, is supported by Matt, xxvii. 52, 53. (Patriarchse et prophetse appendices dominicse resurrection] s. Tertullian, cit. in C. L. Miiller, op. cit. 10.) There was also a less material idea ; e.g., Gregory of Nyssa thinks not of a place but a state TIVO. rrjg \oyiKrjg vGett)Q did, Sravdrou TOJV trapKiicuiv Ttp tv i^v^alQ Sfwpiirctt, quoted in Miiller, 8. But this spiritualism is as foreign to orthodox mediaeval as to native Jewish belief. Before Christ, Abraham was in hell ; after Christ, the crucified thief was in Paradise. Alger, op. cit. p. 227, quoting Jerome. Cp. 1 Peter iii. 19 f., iv. 6 ; Luke xxiii. 43, xvi. 22 ff. Paul's belief on this point also may very well have been more refined than that of the Brethren in Jerusalem. Cp. 1 Thess. iv. 14-17 ; Phil. i. 23. Professor Westcott seems to doubt the con- scious existence of the soul apart from the body, p. 146 : " There is no reason to suppose that the soul separated from the body is personal." He sees rightly enough that on rational principles there is as much to be said for the Pre- as for the Post-existence of the individual soul. All the more obscure for him, " the inter- mediate state of the soul after death and before the Resurrection ;" and lie prudently says nothing about it except that " probably there is something wholly deceptive in our use of words of time (' before' and ' after') in such a connexion." A remark to which we may heartily assent, and only press for its fearless application. The Descent into Hell, however, in its material signification is an integral and consistent development and part of the belief in material Resurrection ; and should not be so lightly passed over, if, at least, it is one of the great principles of Christianity that all which happened to Jesus Christ is to take place in the soul and in the body of each Christian. First Principles and Faith. 157 exist without a body : so, those who wish to reconcile the dogma that the soul exists after death with this dictum, are driven to some hypothesis which may smooth away the uncompromising dualism of the old dogma. Hence the spectacle of the latest apologetic attempt to find new bottles for old wine, which represents the soul as the architect of its own {( spiritual body" during this life, by action upon who knows how many intervening orders of aether rings, till at death the soul (hitherto quite uncon- scious apparently of this unseen building) finds a fresh vessel equipped for a further voyage after this body of death has gone under. A perusal of "The Unseen Universe" can leave no doubt on the mind that this apology is not an intentional reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine which it professes to defend, nor is it merely an essay in the poetry of science, though much therein con- tained lends itself readily to a poetical supernaturalism, which must have a charm for all but pedantic dogmatists : the attempt made is made in sober honesty. None the less must we marvel at the reception which the work has found from some orthodox reviews ; that they should allow the apologetic intention of the book to blind them to its real bearings on orthodox doctrine must be written down to the " destiny which shapes our ends rough hew them how we will." That the doctrine put forward in this book of the gradual formation of a body by the action of the soul itself upon invisible matter for the unseen universe is still material to be a vehicle for the soul at its departure from the visible body death being as it were the junction where the spiritual passenger changes carriages could be confounded either with the ordinary Christian doctrine of the Resurrection of the body on the one hand, or with the Pauline doctrine of a ' f spiritual body" on the other ; 158 Fact and Illusion seems to show the ignorance or the desperation of every- day Apologetics. The new argument for the survival of the soul, based upon the hypothetical possibility of its con- struction for itself of an invisible body independent of the visible body, is fatal to the orthodox doctrine of the Kesur- rection of the Body, or of the Flesh as it is sometimes even put, just in proportion as it is strong for the immortality of the Soul ; and instead of a general resuscitation and resurrection at the last day, we have at best the change in each individual consciousness at death produced by the discovery that it is in possession of an eetherial (but still material) organism, of which hitherto it knew nothing. Further, between the 98ther body of the authors of " The Unseen Universe" and the spiritual body of S. Paul there is at first sight, taking each in isolation from the separate systems in which they severally find suitable place, a possible identification : but when we consider the respective sources and relations of the two notions, their coherence disappears. The spiritual body of the Epistle to the Corinthians is indeed composed of a celes- tial matter, but it is composed in a moment, in the twink- ling of an eye, at the last trump, it is a miraculous work : it is of matter not invisible to eyes miraculously opened, but of matter supernatural and different in kind from matter terrestrial : and the notion in this case hangs together with a theory respecting the material earth and heavens, their laws and difference of substance, which has been abolished and replaced by the Copernican system, the Law of Gravitation, and the results of the Spectrum analysis. The spiritual body in " The Unseen Universe " is the fair result of an incoherent synthesis of modern physics and ancient theology.* It is not super - * The theological orthodoxy of men of science may be expected First Principles and Faith. 159 natural, of miraculous fiat, but developed gradually during this life by the action of the human soul itself in con- formity with natural laws and the principle of continuity. Whatever may be the worth of this hypothetical body tested by the canons or conclusions of metaphysics, it is in itself, and in the set of presuppositions which it implies, as far from identity with the Pauline notion of a spiritual body, as the indifference of the theory of Christ's Person to the question of his Resurrection and our immortality, professed by these authorities, is from the apostolic gospel of faith in a crucified and glorified Messias. " If Christ rose from the dead, immortality becomes more than possible ; it becomes probable ; and we do not see that this conclusion is greatly modified by differences in our mode of regarding the exact nature of Christ."* ' The chief interest which animates the last attempt to rescue the bare dogma of the Resurrection of Jesus, apparently is the belief in personal immortality, which is supposed to be rendered probable if he rose from the dead. That this is not the case has been already pointed out ; least of all could it be the case irrespective of our view of the nature of Christ ; nor shall we be assisted to really probable conclusions in one of two allied lines by inexactness in the other. On scientific principles we could only conclude that given the Resurrection of Jesus as an historical event, wherever the same spiritual and material forces were again united under similar circum- stances, the same event would be effected. To spring to vary (cateris paribus), concomitantly with the anthropological bearings of their studies. Chemists will be more unorthodox than pure physicists or mathematicians, biologists than chemists, and so on. * " The Unseen Universe," p, 199, 1st Ed. (p. 256, 6th Ed.) 160 Fact and Illusion : from the particular fact of the Resurrection of Jesus to the general doctrine of the Immortality of the Human Soul, and that too irrespective of our mode of regarding the nature of Jesus, seems a saltus rather startling to any one imbued, be it ever so little, with a spirit of logical continuity. It would seem a more scientific pro- cedure to attempt to show the immortality of the soul by an examination of its own nature and conditions of existence than by appeal to a past event of a most excep- tional character on any theory. The Resurrection of Christ in any case would not be of much service without the complementary fact of his Ascension ; for he might have risen from the dead once and returned to them again a second time and permanently : but of the second event we read nothing in " The Unseen Universe," though it surely has if anything a more direct intimation of Immor- tality than the first. The great interest which concentrates itself in modern theology upon the doctrine of a future personal immor- tality; insomuch that the old Creed in its entirety seems often to be maintained for the sake of this one dogma which is thought to be interwoven with it, or supported and substantiated by it ; offers a great contrast to the religion of the Bible, whether in the Old or New Testament. In the New Testament many expressions are to be found which look, especially when read from a modern standpoint, as if the chief moment in the Christian Revelation were an endless life after death for the indi- vidual in bliss : but set in their proper perspective such expressions will be seen to be anything but dogmatic statements about a life to come in another world. The Messianic expectations of primitive Christendom can scarcely be identified with the hope of personal immor- First Principles and Faith. 161 tality ; and wo may indeed say that the Eschatology of the first Christians if we may use a theological term for what was still rather imaginative belief than a technical formula making as it did so much of the community, so little comparatively of the individual (where the Church not the Soul was the Bride of Christ), though expressed in forms which may now appear illusive, reveals in this respect perhaps a grander spirit than does the preoccupation with his own personal prospects which is not seldom the source of faith in a modern Christian. If the original individuality of Paul, and his dissent from the Church in Jerusalem might have tended to make him anxious for the doctrine of the personal future life of the individual ; his strong practical faith, his missionary zeal, and not least his sense of the mystical union of the believer with Christ, secured with him the supreme interest for the new life in the present ; he too speaks at times of the Resurrection as though it had already taken place, and he too proclaims that principle of the solidarity of the Church, of all men that is potentially, which is one of the surest springs of a large humanity. Still more predominant is the thought not of future but of present immortal life in the Johan- nine writings, wherein the doctrine of death and resurrec- tion and new life in Christ is still further and more explicitly developed. The best minds of the New Testa- ment, we may fairly say, do not ignore the doctrine of a future life for the individual; but are very far from making it in its abstraction the pearl of revelation, or the cause and motive of righteousness and newness of life. And what is said of the New Testament may be said quite as emphatically of the Old. Few theologians will now venture to say that the Old Testament does not preserve for us the highest utterances of religious inspiration before 11 162 Fact and Illusion : Christ ; yet so weak and indistinct are the traces of any definite doctrine of personal immortality in the Old Testament that its absence has been made the ground of an assertion that the Old Testament contains no revela- tion at all by those who thought this doctrine essential to all Keligion.* And certainly if the Old Testament revela- tion had been designed to make known a personal immor- tality as now conceived, it failed very conspicuously of its purpose j and we see even in the New Testament to what straits the Jews of the days of Jesus were driven in their attempts to read into the sacred books from the first the doctrine of Eesurrection or even that of immortality.t But in truth, as has well been said, we might take it as a proof of the sublimity of the revelation preserved in the Old Testament, that it contains, not a doctrine of future immortality, but a series of protests more or less explicit against the doctrine of immortality in all the forms then current in the world, from the simple naturalism of Shamanism to the elaborate morality of Persian dualism. J This is its negative service to humanity, just as its posi- * E.g., in the fourth Wolfenhiittler Fragment ("Dass die Biicher A. T. nicht geschrieben worden, eine Religion zu offenbaren"). So too Kant, in the " Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der reinen Vermmft." t E.g., in the argument put into Jesus' mouth against the Sadducees to prove the Eesurrection an argument which could not even prove a Life to come, on any acceptable principles of evidence. Matt. xxii. 23 ff. ; Mark xii. 18 ff. ; Luke xx. 27 ff. The Synoptists however may be supposed to have thought it a crushing reply so it was, perhaps, on Rabbinical principles of interpretation. J This is admirably brought out in a small work entitled : " Das negative Verdienst des Alten Testaments um die Unsterblichkeits- Lehre, dargestellt von Dr. Hermann Engelbert," Berlin, 1857, though perhaps some of the details are a little too methodically carried out. First Principles and Faith. 163 live desert is to have maintained at all costs the assertion of the righteousness, mercy, and truth of God. The Old Testament is no less fatal to every form of pessimism and nihilism ; but our minds are so much preoccupied by the introspective habits of the latter centuries, and we are so deeply prejudiced in favour of the opinion that our own existence is the chief if not the only certainty, that not a little of modern religion is, theoretically viewed, not much removed from the teaching of that Indian school of interpreters, who hold the world an illusion, and deny the eternity of God, but recognize after a fashion the future life of the individual souls of men.* Such has never been the prevalent colour of Western thought ; and our common sense and the current philo- sophy of language recognize fully the reality of the ideas which we have been considering, whatever disputes be waged in the schools as to their natures severally. But in nearly all discourse, whether popular or esoteric, the same presumption reigns, that the spiritual object which is sought exists in the form of a sensible object, that the reality which is the ground of phenomena is itself a phenomenon. This mode of conceiving spiritual truth, as it involves the antinomies which we have noticed, so it causes that what are but different moments, sides, aspects, elements, or however they be called, of one * The notion of a spiritual Body is found in the Vedas ; and in the Sankhya system of interpretation is combined with Atheism, and the notion of a multiplicity of individual souls, pre- and post- existent, i.e., practically immortal. Each soul has a primitive Body, consisting of nineteen out of the twenty-four elements, inseparable from it through all its wanderings : at birth it receives as well a material body of the five coarser elements (^Ether, Air, Light, Water, Earth) from the parents. Wurm : " Gcschichte der indisclicn Ildigionen," pp. 119 ff'. 164 Fact and Illusion: spiritual object in permanence, are thought and spoken of as different periods, stages or states removed from each other in space and time. Such is, for example, in the case of God, the assertion of an act of creation before which there was nothing, standing as it does in opposition to the unchangeableness of the divine nature : such too are all modes of speaking of God which predicate psycho- logical alteration of him. The same mode of thought is exemplified with reference to the World, when the spiritual side of creation is spoken of as another world removed in time and place from the present ; or when the good in the world is regarded as an ideal age in its history past or future. Of this character too are all modes of thinking of the Soul which transform internal psychological rela- tions into external temporal events or changes ; making, for example, its original sin an inheritance from an external and so far accidental event in the life of the first Adam, and its eternal and intrinsic bliss or woe as external a result of its relation to the second. Such are the modes of popular thought ; and upon the same level, in dogmatic theology (which has formularized the popular thought into a logical system and then iden- tified this system with the truth contained in the popular religious intuition on the one side and with scientific truth on the other), the battle of Faith comes to be identified with the triumph of a way of thinking, to wit, its own way. That this way is full of contradictions is no objec- tion in the eyes of the theologian, who closes every path of ratiocination with the dead wall of a " Credo quia absur- dum :" and in a certain fashion he is right. A spiritual truth expressed in sensible forms involves, as we have said, a contradiction ; and the more adequate and full the expression is, on the given level, the more manifest and First Principles and Faith. 165 explicit will be the contradiction; but for this very reason, on the given level, it is not any rationalistic or semi-rationalistic attempts to mitigate the apparent harsh- ness of orthodox dogma which keep us nearest the truth ; and in the dialectic process of the development of doctrine we throw in our lot with the Church rather than with the heretics. But we must not for all that fall into the error of the theologians, and confuse Faith as a saving grace with a particular way of thinking of the Trinity or of the Unity. It is the doom of nearly all theologians, whether Christian or other, seeing rightly enough that there can be no religion without dogmas in one sense, to identify Faith with the theoretical tradition which has come down to them, however far it may be from anything which the believer can now comprehend or apprehend in his own experience, or even by analogy from the experience of others. But this is hardly the biblical meaning of the term, and upon the Bible we may fall back as on the most authoritative code and chronicle of religious insight and experience. If there ever was a writer who from the vigour and depth of his dialectical gifts and interest might have been betrayed into identifying Faith with a particular mode of thought, or a particular set of views, it was surely S. Paul ; yet had he given Faith such a meaning he could hardly have spoken of the Faith of Abraham as though it were not essentially different from his own ; nor can the Faith which is set beside Hope and Charity, even though less than Charity, be a thing so little as any particular mode of thought. But it is a danger which attends much thinking about God that we may come to confound our Creed with our Faith, or even "the Fnith ;" and a writer so liberal and tender as 166 Fact and Illusion : Dr. Westcott can fall into the error (apparently) of speak- ing as though "the victory of Faith " to be wrought nowadays were the victory of one way of thinking over another, of one view of the universe, &c., or, as if there were one theoretic view of these objects handed down to us, which could be taken as the truth in the religious sense of the word.* Indeed, wherever there is a theology, or certain number not of definite precepts but of more or less definite propositions on speculative and historical topics, this confusion takes place in the minds of those who accept these doctrines as of unchangeable nature and unquestionable authority. To the theologians who con- demned Galileo, the battle of faith concentrated itself upon the question whether the earth moved or not; e pur si muove ! To many of the present day it seems a question of faith whether we accept or reject the Dar- winian hypothesis as to the origin of man, and the genesis of things ; and this false identification of faith and religion with a particular view of things, made in the first instance by the theologians, has been accepted by many men of natural science ; who, seeing that the clerical view of things is condemned already within the whole possible circumference of science, have supposed Faith and Religion to be thereby exploded as irreconcilably at variance with science, or to have disappeared as prior and imperfect forerunners of positive knowledge.f A battle is being waged undoubtedly between various modes * See in especial the " Notice to the Third Edition " of his "Gospel of the Resurrection." f How misleading and unfortunate is Dr. Draper's Title : " The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science." London, 1875. The italics arc mine. First Principles and Faith. 167 of thought, various views of the Universe, of God, Man, and Nature : and these various modes of thought, though they all speak with equal definiteness, may be broadly classed as either theological or scientific or perhaps better said, as either dogmatic or critical. The history of thought shows nowhere clearer than since the development of physical science in modern times, that dogma is doomed to fall and criticism to triumph : were Faith interchangeable with dogmatic Theology, there are few if any more victories in store for Faith. But the battle of Faith is quite other than the process of deciding which of the two views of anything or all things is more probable ; the battle of Faith is always and everywhere the same, its new victories are only the old victories which repeat themselves in every case where the spiritual life is begun and carried through by the grace of God. Selfishness and insanity are the only foes of Faith ; and the salvation wrought in the ignorant or the outcast is the same, due to the same powers, as when the victory of Faith is achieved in the life of a Theologian, versed in dis- putes about various views of the Universe. It is some- thing accidental, not essential in reference to Faith, whether a man concern himself with arguments and experi- ments, or with making screws ; even granted that scien- tific ideas play a larger part in the general progress of mankind than screws do. It is not our business in this place to follow out the practical bearings of this essential distinction between Faith as Religion and Faith as Theology ; for the object of this Essay is not homiletical, but merely theoretic. Suffice it to observe that it is an untold gain for peace and disinterestedness of mind in a man, when once he 168 Fact and Faith. sees that the disputes between various theoretic methods and conclusions are something quite different from the victory of Faith, in which latter the question at issue is as little the acceptance of any number of theoretical principles as the observance of a certain number of defi- nite precepts. THE END. HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON } 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH. CATALOGUE OF SOME WORKS PUBLISHED BY WILLIAMS AND NORGATE. Beard (Rev. Chas., LL.D.) The Universal Christ, and other Sermons. Crown 8vo. cloth 75 6d Beard (Rev. Chas.) Port Royal, a Contribution to the History of Religion and Literature in France. Cheaper Edition. 2 vols. Crown 8vo. iis Booth (C.) Labour and Life of the People. Volume I: East London. 600 pp. 8 o. Cloth, i os 6d. Edited by Charles Booth. With a large Coloured Map. 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