THE LIBRARY X OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF MRS. VIRGINIA B. SPORER X V MATTHEW ARNOLD. LITERATURE AND DOGMA An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible By MATTHEW ARNOLD, D.C.L Author of " ESSAYS IN CRITICISM," "POEMS," etc., etc. XXX " The path of the just is as a shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day." A. L. BURT COMPANY, * j ^ * * j* j j j* PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK CONTENTS. FAGE Introduction 31 CHAPTER I. Religion Given 39 II. Aberglaube Invading 84 III. Religion New-Given 100 IV. The Proof From Prophecy 125 V. The Proof From Miracles 133 VI. The New Testament Record 161 VII. The Testimony of Jesus to Himself 190 VIII. The Early Witnesses 250 IX. Aberglaube Reinvading 272 X. Our " Masses " and The Bible 303 XI. The True Greatness of The Old Testament 328 XII. The True Greatness of Christianity 350 Conclusion . . . 366 INTRODUCTION. MATTHEW ARNOLD, called the Sainte-Beuve of Eng- land, and eminent as a poet, as a critic, as an essayist, and master of the most exquisite literary style known among modern writers, was a son of Dr. Arnold of Rugby. He was born at Laleham, Eng- land, 24th December, 1822, and educated at Win- chester, Rugby, and Balliol College, Oxford. He won the Newdigate prize with a poem on Cromwell in 1843, and the following year, graduating with honors, was elected a fellow of Oriel in 1845. Soon after he became private secretary to Lord Lans- downe, which position he held for several years till 1851, when he was appointed one of the lay inspec- tors of Schools. During his term of office, which lasted till 1885, he was more than once sent by Gov- ernment to inquire into the state of education on the Continent, and his masterly reports thereon at- tracted much attention throughout the English- speaking world. In 1883 a pension was conferred on him, and in the same year he paid his first visit to the United States. He died suddenly at Liver- pool, 15th April, 1888. 3 4 INTRODUCTION. Although ranking high as a poet Arnold's repu- tation as a writer rests mainly upon his exquisite prose. Nowhere can we find greater dignity of thought and sentiment united to a higher distinction of manner and utterance. His criticisms on poetry did much to raise criticism in England to the level of a serious and almost sympathetic science. His literary judgments have long been received by tho literary world with a respect much higher than that paid to the utterances of any other writer. His lit- erary style is as nearly perfect as it was possible for it to be ; and it would be difficult to overestimate the benefit to all later writers of such an admirable' model and such a high standard for comparison. ROBEBT WAITE, PREFACE. AN inevitable revolution, of which we all recog- nize the beginnings and signs, but which has already spread, perhaps, farther than most of us think, is befalling the religion in which we have been brought up. In those countries where religion has been most loved, this revolution will be felt the most keen- ly ; felt through all its stages and in all its incidents. In no country will it be more felt than in England. This cannot be otherwise; it cannot be but that the revolution should come, and that it should be here felt passionately, profoundly, painfully; but no one is on that account in the least dispensed from the utmost duty of consideration and caution. There is no surer proof of a narrow and ill-instructed mind, than to think and uphold that what a man takes to be the truth on religious matters is always to be pro- claimed. Our truth on these matters, and likewise the error of others, is something so relative, that the good or harm likely to be done by speaking ought always to be taken into account. "" I keep silence at many things," says Goethe, " for I would not mislead men, and am well content if others can find satis- faction in what gives me offence." The man who be- lieves that his truth on religious matters is so abso- 5 6 PREFACE. lately the truth, that say it when, and where, and to whom he will, he cannot but do good with it, is in our day almost always a man whose truth is half hi under, and wholly useless. To be convinced, therefore, that our current the- ology is false, is not necessarily a reason for publish- ing that conviction. The theology may be false, and yet one may do more harm in attacking it than by keeping silence and waiting. To judge rightly the time and its conditions is the great thing; there is a time, as the Preacher says, to speak, and a time to keep silence. If the present time is a time to speak, there must be a reason why it is so. And there is a reason ; and it is this. Clergymen and ministers of religion are full of lamentations over what they call the spread of scepticism, and be- cause of the little hold which religion now has on the masses of the people, the lapsed masses, as some writers call them. Practical hold on them it never, perhaps, had very much, but they did not question its truth, and they held it in considerable awe; as the best of them raised themselves up out of a merely animal life, religion attracted and engaged them. But now they seem to have hardly any awe of it at all, and they freely question its truth ; and many of the most successful, energetic, and ingen- ious of the artisan class, who are steady and rise, :itv now found either of themselves rejecting the Bible altogether, or following teachers who tell them the Bible is an exploded superstition. Let me quote from the letter of a workingman a man, himself, of PREFACE. 7 no common intelligence and temper a passage that sets this forth very clearly. " Despite the efforts of the churches," he says, " the speculations of the day are working their way down among the people, many of whom are asking for the reason and authority for the things they have been taught to believe. Ques- tions of this kind, too, mostly reach them through doubtful channels; and owing to this, and to their lack of culture, a discovery of imperfection and fal- libility in the Bible leads to its contemptuous rejec- tion as a great priestly imposture. And thus those among the working class who eschew the teachings of the orthodox, slide off towards, not the late Mr. Maurice, nor yet Professor Huxley, but towards Mr. Bradlaugh." Despite the efforts of the churches, the writer tells us, this contemptuous rejection of the Bible hap- pens. And we regret the rejection as much as the clergy and ministers of religion do. There may be many others who do not regret it, but we do; all that the churches can say about the importance of the Bible and its religion, we concur in. And it is the religion of the Bible that is professedly in question with all the churches, when they talk of religion and lament its prospects. With Catholics as well as Prot- estants, and with all the sects of Protestantism, this is so; and from the nature of the case it must be so. What the religion of the Bible is, how it is to be got at, they may not agree ; but that it is the re- ligion of the Bible for which they contend, they all aver. " The Bible," says Dr. Newman, " is the rec- S PREFACE. ord of the whole revealed faith; so far all parties agree." Now, this religion of the Bible we say they cannot value more than we do. If we hesitate to adopt strictly their language about its all-impor- tance, that is only because we take an uncommonly large view of human perfection, and say, speaking strictly, that there go to this certain things, art, for instance, and science, which the Bible hardly med- dles with. The difference between us and them, however, is more a difference of theoretical state- ment than of practical conclusion; speaking prac- tically, and looking at the very large part of human life engaged by the Bible, at the comparatively small part unengaged by it, we are quite willing, like the churches, to call the Bible and its religion aZZ-impor- tant. And yet, with all this agreement both in words and in things, when we behold the clergy and min- isters of religion lament the neglect of religion, and iHpire to restore it, how must one feel that to re- store religion as they understand it, to re-enthrone the Bible as explained by our current, theology, whether learned or popular, is absolutely and for- ever impossible ! as impossible as to restore the pre- dominance of the feudal system, or of the belief in witches. Let us admit that the Bible cannot pos- sibly die ; but then the churches cannot even conceive the Bible without the gloss they at present put upon it, and this gloss as certainly cannot possibly live. And it is not a gloss which one church or sect puts upon the Bible and another does not ; it is the gloss PREFACE, they all put upon it, and call the substratum of belief common to all Christian churches, and largely shared with them, even, by natural religion. It is this so-called axiomatic basis which must go, and it supports all the rest ; and if the Bible were really inseparable from this and depended upon it, then Mr. Bradlaugh would have his way, and the Bible would go too ; for this basis is inevitably doomed. For whatever is to stand must rest upon something which is verifiable, not unverifiable. Now, the as- sumption with which all the churches and sects set out, that there is " a great Personal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe," and that from him the Bible derives its authority, can never be verified. Those who " ask for the reason and authority for the things they have been taught to believe," as the people, we are told, are now doing, will begin at the beginning. Rude and hard reasoners as they are, they will never consent to admit, as a self-evident axiom, the preliminary assumption with which the churches start. But this preliminary assumption governs everything which in our current theology follows it ; and it is certain, therefore, that the peo- ple will not receive our current theology. So, if they are to receive the Bible, we must find for the Bible some other basis than that which the churches assign to it, a verifiable basis, and not an assump- tion ; and this, again, will govern everything which comes after. This new religion of the Bible the 10 PREFACE. people may receive; the version now current of the religion of the Bible they never will receive. Here, then, is the problem: to find for the Bible a basis in something which can be verified, instead of in something which has to be assumed. So true and prophetic are Vinet's words : " We must" he said, " make it our business to bring forward the rational side of Christianity, and to show that for thinkers, too, it has a right to be an authority." Yes, and the problem we have stated must be the first stage in the business; with this unsolved, all other religious discussion is idle trifling. This is why Dissent, as a religious movement of our day, would be almost droll, if it were not, from the tempers and actions it excites, so extremely irre- ligious. But what is to be said for men, aspiring to deal with the cause of religion, who either cannot see that what the people now require is a religion of the Bible quite different from that which any of the churches or sects supply; or who, seeing this, spend their energies in fiercely battling as to whether the church shall be connected with the nation in its col- lective and corporate character or no? The ques- tion, at the present juncture, is in itself so abso- lutely unimportant ! The thing is, to recast relig- ion. If this is done, the new religion will be the na- tional one ; if it is not done, separating the nation in its collective and corporate character from religion will not do it. It is as if men's minds were much unsettled about mineralogy, and the teachers of it were at variance, and no teacher was convincing, and PREFACE. 11 many people, therefore, were disposed to throw the study of mineralogy overboard altogether. What would naturally be the first business for every friend of the study ? Surely to establish on sure grounds the value of the study, and to put its claims in a new light where they could no longer be denied. But if he acted as our Dissenters act in religion, what would he do? Give himself, heart and soul, to a furious crusade against keeping the Government School of Mines. But meanwhile there is now an end to all fear of doing harm by gainsaying the received theology of the churches and sects. For this theology is itself now a hindrance to the Bible rather than a help; nay, to abandon it, to put some other construction on the Bible than this theology puts, to find some other basis for the Bible than this theology finds, is indispensable, if we would have the Bible reach the people. And this is the aim of the following essay: to show that, when we come to put the right con- struction on the Bible, we give to the Bible a real ex- perimental basis, and keep on this basis throughout ; instead of any basis of un verifiable assumption to start with, followed by a string of other unverifiable assumptions of the like kind, such as the received theology necessitates. And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim, too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the his- 12 PREFACE. tory of the human spirit. One cannot go far in the attempt to bring in, for the Bible, a right construc- tion, without seeing how necessary is something of culture to its being admitted and used. The cor- respondent we have above quoted notices how the lack of culture disposes the people to conclude .it once, from any imperfection or fallibility in the Bible, that it is a priestly imposture. To a largo ex- tent, this is the fault, not of the people's want <>f culture, but of the priests and theologians, who for centuries have kept assuring the people that perfect and infallible the Bible is. Still, even without tin- confusion added by his theological instructors, the homo unius libri, the man of no range in his reading, must almost inevitably misunderstand the Bible, can- not treat it largely enough, must be inclined to treat it all alike, and to press every word. For, on the one hand, he has not enough experi- ence of the way in which men have thought aul spoken, to feel what the Bible writers are about; TO read between the lines, to discern where lie ought K> rest with his whole weight, and where he ouiiht to pass lightly. On the other "hand, the void and hun- ger in his mind, from want of aliment, almost in. sistibly impels him to fill it by taking literally siml amplifying certain data which ho finds in the IJihl; . whether they ought to be so dealt with or no. Our mechanical and materializing theology, with its in- sane license of affirmation about God, its insane li- cense of affirmation about a future state, is really the result of the poverty and inanition of our minds. It PREFACE. 13 is because we cannot trace God in history that we stay the craving of our minds with a fancy account of him, made up by putting scattered expressions of the Bible together, and taking them literally; it is because we have such a scanty sense of the life of humanity, that we proceed in the like manner in our scheme of a future state. He that cannot watch the God of the Bible, and the salvation of the Bible, gradually and on an immense scale discovering them- selves and becoming., will insist on seeing them ready made, and in such precise and reduced dimensions as may suit his narrow mind. To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific, is the first step towards a right under- standing of the Bible. But to take this very first step, some experience of how men have thought and expressed themselves, and some flexibility of spirit, are necessary ; and this is culture. Much fruit may be got out of the Bible without it, and with those narrow and materialized schemes of God and a fu- ture state which we have mentioned ; that we do not deny, but it is not the important point at present. The important point is, that the diffusion every- where of some notion of the habits of the experi- mental sciences, habits falling in, too, very well with the hard and positive character of the life of " the people," the point is, that this diffusion does not lead " the people " to ask for the ground and authority for these precise schemes of God and a fu- ture state which are presented to them, and to scr 14: PREFACE. clearly and scornfully the failure to give it. The failure to give it is inevitable, because given it can- not be; but whereas in the training, life, and senti- ment of the educated classes there is much to make them disguise the failure to themselves and not in- sist upon it, in the training, life, and sentiment of the people there is nothing. So that, as far as the people are concerned, the old traditional scheme of the Bible is gone ; while neither they nor the so-called educated classes have yet anything to put in its place. And thus we come back to our old remedy of cul- ture, knowing the best that has been thought and known in the world; which turns out to be, in an- other shape, and in particular relation to the Bible: getting the power, through reading, to estimate //;? jim port ion and relation in what we read. If we read but a very little, we naturally want to press it all; if we read a great deal, we are willing not to press the whole of what we read, and we learn what ought to be pressed and what not. Xow this is really the very foundation of any sane criticism. We have told the Dissenters that their " spirit of watchful jenlonsy " is wholly destructive and exclu- sive of th<> spirit of Christianity. They answer us, that St. Paul talks of " a goodly jealousy," and that Christ uses severe invectives against the Scribes and Pharisees. The Dissenters conclude, therefore, that their jealousy is Christian. And so, too, as to the frank, unvarnished language of Mr. Mi all at home, Mr. Miall speaking out of the abundance of his PREFACE. 15 heart as a Dissenter to Dissenters, before he draped himself philosophically for the House of Commons and the world in his garment of blazing principles, as messenger and minister of the sublime truth, that the best way to get religion known and honored is to abolish all national recognition of it. " A State Church ! " cries the real Mr. Miall ; " have people never pondered upon the practical meaning of that word ? have they never looked into that dark, pol- luted inner chamber of which it is the door? have they never caught a glimpse of the loathsome things that live and crawl and gender there? " This, I say, the Dissenters think Christian, because covered by Christ's use of invective. Xow, there can be no doubt whatever, that in his invectives against the Scribes and Pharisees Christ abandoned the mild, uncontentious winning, inward mode of working (He shall not strive nor cry!) which was his true characteristic, and in which his charm and power lay; and that there was no chance at all of his gaining by such invectives the persons at whom they were launched. The same may be said of the cases where St. Paul lets loose his " godly jealousy," and employs objurgation instead of the mildness which was Christ's means, and which Paul though himself no special adept at it nevertheless appreciated so worthily, and so earnestly extols. St. Paul certainly had no chance of convincing those whom he calls " dogs," the " concision," utterers of " profane and vain babblings," by such a manner of dealing with them. 16 PREFACE. What may, indeed, fairly be said is, that the Phar- isees against whom Jesus denounced his wo ( .-s, or the Judaizers against whom Paul fulminated, were peo- ple whom there could be no hope of gaining; and that not their conversion, but a strong impression on the faithful who read or heard, was the thing aimed at, and very rightly aimed at. And so far, at any rate, as Christ's use of invective against the Phari- sees is concerned, this may be quite true ; but what a criticism is that which can gather hence any general defence of jealousy and objurgation as Christian, or any particular defence of them as we see the Dissen- ters and Mr. Miall using them ! For, in the first place, such weapons can have no defence at all ex- cept as employed against individuals who are past hope, or against institutions which are palpably mon- strosities; they can have none as employed against institutions containing at least half a great na- tion, and therefore a multitude of individuals good as well as bad. And therefore we see that Christ never dreamed of assailing the Jewish Church; all he cared for was to transform it, by transforming as many as were transformable of the individuals composing it. In the second place, when such means of action have a defence, they are defen- sible although violations of Christ's established rule of working, never commendable as exemplifications of it. Mildness and sweet reasonableness is the one established rule for Christian working, and no other rule has it or can it have. But, using the Bible in the mechanical and helpless way in which one PREFACE. 17 uses it when one has hardly any other book, men fail to see this, clear as it is. And they do really come to imagine that the Dissenters' " spirit of watchful jealousy " may be a Christian temper ; or that a movement like Mr. MialPs crusade against the Church of England may be a Christian work. And it is in this way that Christianity gets discredited. ]SVw, simple as it is, it is not half enough under- stood, this reason for culture; namely, that to read to good purpose we must read a great deal, and be content not to use a great deal of what we read. We shall never be content not to use the whole, or nearly the whole, of what we read, unless we read a great deal. Yet things are on such a scale, and progress is so gradual, and what one man can do is so bounded, that the moment we press the whole of what any writer says we fall into error. He touches a great deal ; the thing to know is where he is all him- self and his best self, where he shows his power, where he goes to the heart of the matter, where he gives us what no other man gives us, or gives us so well. In his valuable " Church History," Dr. Stoughton says of Hooker : " The Puritan princi- ple of the authority and unchangeableness of a re- vealed Church polity Honker substantially admits. Although this deep thinker sometimes talks perilous- ly of altering Christ's laws, he says : ' In the matter of external discipline itself, we do not deny but there are some things whereto the Church is bound till the world's end.' ' Dr. Stoughton does not see that to use his Hooker in this way is entirely fallacious; 2 18 PREFACE. Hooker, this " deep thinker," as Dr. Stoughton truly calls him, one of the four great names of the English Church, is great by having, signally and above others, or before others and when others had not, the sense, in religion, of history, of historic development. So Butler is great by having the sense of philosophy, Barrow by having that of morals, Wilson that of practical Christianity. But if Hooker spoke, as lie did, of Church history like a historian, and exploded the Puritan figment, due to a defective historic souse, of a revealed Church polity, a Scriptural Church order, if Hooker did this, this was so new that he could not possibly do it without reservations, limi- tations, apologies ; he could not help saying, " We do not deny there may be some external things where- unto the Church is eternally bound." But he is truly himself, he is the great Hooker, the man from whom we learn when he shatters the Puritan error, not when he uses the language of compliment and ceremony after shattering it. In like manner that eloquent orator, Mr. Liddon, looking about him for authorities which commend the Athanasian Creed, finds Hooker commending it, and quotes him as an authority. This, again, is to make a use of Hooker which has no soundness in it. Hooker's greatness is that he gives the real method of criticism for Church dogma, the historic method. Church dogma is not written in black and white in the Bible, he says; it has t> lie rnlleeted from it; it is, as we now say, a development from it. This and that dogma, says Hooker, *' are in Scripture nowhere PREFACE. 19 to be found by express literal mention, only deduced they are out of Scripture by collection." And he assigns one right criterion for determining whether a dogma is justly deduced, and what Scripture moans, and what is its true character: the criterion of reason. He assigns this with splendid boldness: " It is not the word of God itself," says he, " which doth, or possibly can, assure us that we do well to think it his word ; " no, it is reason, much-reviled reason. Surely this is enough to expect a sixteenth- century divine to give us in theology, the very method of true science! without expecting him to make the full application of it, without expecting him to say that the Church dogmas of his time, the dogma of the Athanasian Creed among the rest, which were not seriously in question yet, on which the Time- Spirit had not then turned his light, were false devel- opments ; without wondering at his saying that they were developments, " the necessity whereof is by none denied ! " This is all that Hooker's warranty of the Athanasian Creed really comes to, or can come to. To fix the method by which the creed must finally be judged was the main issue for him ; to judge the Creed by that method was a side issue, whereon he never really entered nor could enter, but treated the thing as already settled. Therefore Hooker is no real authority in favor of the Athanasian Creed; though we might think he was if we read him with- out discrimination. And to read him with discrim- ination, culture is necessary. Luther, again, Mr. Liddon cites as a witness on 20 PREFACE. the question of the Athanasian Creed ; and he might as well cite him as a witness on the question of the origin of species. Luther's greatness is in his re- vival of the sense of conscience and personal respon- sibility, and in the fresh vigorous power which this sense, joined to his robust mother-wit, gave him in using the Bible. He had enough to do in attack- ing Romish developments from the Bible, which by their practical side were evidently, to a plain moral sense and a plain mother-wit, false develop- ments without attacking speculative dogma, which had no visible connection with practice, which had all antiquity in its favor, on which, as we say, the Time-Spirit had not then turned his light, of which so Luther might say, like Hooker " the necessity is by none denied." All this high speculative dogma he could not but affirm, and the more emphatically the more he questioned lower practical dogma. But his affirmation of it is not one of those things wo can use; and whoever reads in the folios of Luther'- works without passing lightly over very much, and, amongst it, over this, reads there ill. And without culture, without the use of so many books that ho can afford not to over-use and mis-use one, ill a man is likely to read there. We can hardly urge this topic too much, of so great a practical importance is it, and above all at the present time. To be able to control what one reads by means of the tact coming, in a clear ami fair mind, from a wide experience, was never per haps so necessary as in the England of our own day. PREFACE. 21 and in theology, and in what concerns the Bible. To get the facts, the data, in all matters of science, but notably in theology and Biblical learning, one goes to Germany. Germany, and it is her high honor, has searched out the facts and exhibited them. And without knowledge of the facts, no clearness or fairness of mind can in any study do anything; this cannot be laid down too rigidly. iSFow, English re- ligion does not know the facts of its study, and has to go to Germany for them ; this is half apparent to English religion even now, and it will become more and more apparent. And so overwhelming is the advantage given by knowing the facts of a study, that a student who comes to a man who knows them is tempted to put himself into his hands altogether; and this we in general see English students do, when they have recourse to the theologians of Germany. They put themselves altogether into their hands, and take all that they give them, conclusions as well as facts. But they ought not to use them in this manner; for a man may have the facts and yet be unable to draw the right conclusions from them. In general, he may want power; as one may say of Dr. Strauss, for instance, that to what is unsolid in the ISTew Tes- tament he applies the historic method ably enough, but that to deal with the reality which is still left in the TsTew Testament, requires a larger, richer, deeper, more imaginative mind than his. But perhaps the quality specially needed for drawing the right con- clusion from the facts, when one has got them, is 22 PREFACE. best called perception, delicacy of perception. And this no man can have who is a mere specialist, who has not what we call culture in addition to the knowl- edge of his particular study; and many theolo- gians, in Germany as well as elsewhere, are spe- cialists. And even when we have added culture to special knowledge, a good fortune, a natural tact, a perception, must go with our culture, to make our criticism sure. And here is what renders crit- icism so large a thing: namely, that learning alone is not enough, one must have perception too. " I wisdom, dwell with subtlety" says the Wise Afan; and, taking subtlety in a good sense, this is most true. After we have acquainted ourselves with the best that has been known in the world, after we have got all the facts of our special study, fineness and delicacy of perception to deal with the facts is still required, and is, even, the principal thing of all. And in this the German mind, if one may speak in swli a general way, does seem to be somewhat wanting. In the German mind, as in the German language, there does seem to be something spiny. something blunt-edged, unhandy, and infelicitous, some want of quick, fine, sure perception, which tends to balance the great superiority of the Ger- mans in knowledge, and in the disposition to deal impartially with knowledge. For impartial they are, as well as learned ; and this is a signal merit. While M. Hartheleniv St.-IIilaire cannot translate Aristotle without dragging in his pompous and false plati- tudes in glorification of the French gospel of the PREFACE. 23 Rights of Man, while one English historian writes history to extol the Whigs and another to execrate the Church, German workers proceed in a more phil- osophical fashion. Still, in quickness and delicacy of perception they do seem to come short. Of course in a man of genius this delicacy and dexterity of perception is much less lacking; but even in Germans of genius there seems some lack of it. Goethe, for instance, has less of it, one must surely own, than the great men of other nations whom alone one can cite as his literary compeers : Shake- speare, Voltaire, Macchiavel, Cicero, Plato. Or, to go a little lower down, compare Bentley as a critic with Hermann ; Bentley treating Menander with Hermann treating Aeschylus. Both are on ground favorable to them ; both know thoroughly, one may say, the facts of their case ; yet such is the difference between them, somehow, in dexterousness and sure- ness of perception, that the gifted English scholar is wrong hardly ever, whereas the gifted German scholar is wrong very often. And then every learned German is not gifted, is not a man of genius. Whether it be, as we have elsewhere speculated,* from race; or whether this quickness and sureness of perception comes, rather, from a long practical conversance with great affairs, and only those nations which have at any time had a practical lead of the civilized world, the Greeks, the Romans, the Ital- ians, the French, the English, can have it ; and the Germans have till now had no such practical lead, * On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. 97. L>4 PREFACE. though now they have got it, and may now, therefore, acquire the practical dexterity of perception ; how- ever this may be, the thing is so, and a learned Ger- man has by no means, in general, a fine and practic- ally sure perception in proportion to his learning. Give a Frenchman, an Italian, an Englishman, the same knowledge of the facts, and you could, in gen- eral, trust his perception more than you can the Ger- man's. This, I say, shows how large a thing criti- cism is; since even of those from whom we take what we now in theology most want, knowledge of the facts of our study, and to whom therefore we are, and ought to be, under deep obligations, even of them we must not take too much, or take anything like all that they offer; but we must take much and leave much, and must have experience enough to know what to take and what to leave. And without culture we cannot have this experience; although it is true that even culture itself, without good fortune and tact, will not fully give it. Still, our best and only chance of it is through means of culture. But it is for the Bible itself that this discrimina- tive experience, so necessary in all our theological studies is most needed. And to our popular religion it is especially difficult; because we have been trained to regard the Bible, not as a book whose parts have varying degrees of value, but as the .I<-\vs came to regard their scriptures, as a sort of talisman given dn\vn to us out of Heaven, with all its parts equi- pollent. And yet there was a time when Jews knc\7 well the vast difference there is between books like PREFACE. 25 Esther, Chronicles, or Daniel, and books like Gene- sis or Isaiah, there was a time when Christians knew well the vast difference between the First Epistle of Peter and his so-called Second Epistle, or between the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Epistles to the Romans or the Corinthians. This, indeed, is what makes the religious watchword of the British and Foreign School Society: The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible! so ingeniously (one must say it) absurd; it is treating the Bible as Mahometans treat the Koran, as if it were a talisman all of one piece, and with all its sentences equipollent. Yet the very expressions, Canon of Scripture, Canonical Books, recall a time when degrees of value were still felt, and all parts of the Bible did not stand on the same footing, and were not taken equally. There was a time when books were read as part of the Bible which are in no Bible now; there was a time when books, which are in every Bible now, were by many disallowed as genuine parts of the Bible. St. Athanasius rejected the Book of Esther, and the Greek Christianity of the East repelled the Apocalypse, and the Latin Christianity of the West repelled the Epistle to the Hebrews. And a true critical sense of relative value lay at the bottom of all these rejections. No one re- jected Isaiah or the Epistle to the Romans ; the books rejected were such books as those which we now print as the Apocrypha, or as the Book of Esther, or the Epistle to the Hebmvs, or the so-called Epis- 26 PREFACE. tic of Judc, or the so-called Second Epistle of St. Peter, or the two short Epistles following the main .K | little attributed to St. John, or the Apocalypse. Xow, whatever, value one may assign to these works, no sound critic would rate their intrinsic worth as high as that of the great undisputed hooks of the Bible. And so far from their finally getting where they are after a thorough trial of their claims, and with indisputable propriety, they got placed by the force of circumstances, by chance or by routine, rather than on their merits. Indeed, by merit alone the Book of Esther could have now no right to be in our Canon while Ecclesiasticus is not, nor the Epis- tle of Jude and the Second Epistle of Peter rather than the Epistle of Clement. But the whole discus- sion died out, not because the matter was sifted and settled and a perfect Canon of Scripture deliberately formed ; it died out as mediaeval ignorance deep- ened, and because there was no longer knowledge or criticism enough left in the world to keep such a dis- cussion alive. And so things went on till the Renascence, when criticism came to life again. But the Church had now long since adopted the Vulgate, and her author- ity was concerned in maintaining what she had adopted. Luther and Calvin, on the other hand, recurred to the old true notion of a difference in rank and genuineness among the Bible books. For they both of them insisted on the criterion of internal evi- dence for Scripture: "the witness of the Spirit." I low freely Luther used this criterion, we may see PREFACE. 27 by reading in the old editions of his Bible his pref- aces, which in succeeding editions have long ceased to appear; whether he used it aright we do not now inquire, but he used it freely. Taunted, however, by Rome with their divisions, their want of a fixed authority like the Church, Protestants were driven to make the Bible this fixed authority ; and so the Bible came to be regarded as a thing all of a piece, endued with talismanic virtues. It came to be regarded as something different from anything it had originally ever been, or primi- tive times had ever imagined it to be. And Protes- tants did practically in this way use the Bible more irrationally than Rome practically ever used it ; for Rome had her hypothesis of the Church Catholic en- dued with talismanic virtues, and did not want a talismanic Bible too. All this has made a discrim- inating use of the Bible-documents very difficult in our country ; yet without it a sound criticism of the Bible is impossible, and even, as we say, the very word Canon, the Canon of Scripture, points to such a use. But, indeed, there is hardly any great thing per- verted by men, which does not in some sort thus indicate its own perversion. The idea of the infal- lible Church Catholic itself, as we have elsewhere said,* is an idea the most fatal of all possible ideas to the concrete so-called infallible Church of Rome, such as we see it. The infallible Church Catholic, is really, tlie, prophetic soul of the wide world dream- * St, Paul and Protestantism, p. 156. 28 PREFACE. ing on things to come; the whole race, in its onward progress, developing truth more complete than the parcel of truth any momentary individual can seize. Nay, even that amiable old pessimist in St. Peter's Chair, whose allocutions we read and call them im- potent and vain, the Pope himself is, in his idea, the very Time-Spirit taking flesh, the incarnate " Zeit-Geist ! " O man, how true are thine instincts, how over-hasty thine interpretations of them ! But to return. Difficult, certainly, is the right reading of the Bible, and true culture, too, is difficult. For true culture implies not only knowledge, but right tact and delicacy of judgment, forming them- selves by knowledge ; without this tact it is not true culture. Difficult, however, as culture is, it is nec- essary. For, after all, the Bible is not a talisman, to be taken and used literally; neither is any exist- ing Church a talisman, whatever pretensions of the sort it may make, for giving the right interpretation of the Bible. Only true culture can give us this ; so that if conduct is, as it is, inextricably bound up with the Bible and the right interpretation of it, then the importance of culture becomes unshakable. For if conduct is necessary (and there is nothing so necessary), culture is necessary. And the poor require it as much as the rich; an-1 at present their education, even when they get edu- cation, gives them hardly anything of it. Yet hardly less of it, perhaps, than the education of the rich gives to the rich. For when we say that culture is, to know the best that has been thovqlit n- diift is. Or, once more, when Monsieur Lit ire ( and RELIGION GIVEN. 45 "we hope to make our peace with the Comtists by quot- ing an author of theirs in preference to those au- thors whom all the British public is now reading and quoting), when Monsieur Littre, in a most ingenious essay on the origin of morals, traces up, better, per- haps, than any one else, all our impulses into two elementary instincts, the instinct of self-preservation and the reproductive instinct, then we take his theory and we say, that all the impulses which can be con- ceived as derivable from the instinct of self-preser- vation in us and the reproductive instinct, these terms being applied in their ordinary sense, are the matter of conduct. It is evident this includes, to say no more, every impulse relating to temper, every impulse relating to sensuality ; and we all know how much that is. How we deal with these impulses is the matter of conduct, how we obey, regulate, or restrain them, that and nothing else. ISTot whether M. Littre's theory is true or false ; for whether it be true or false, there the impulses confessedly now are, and the busi- ness of conduct is to deal with them. But it is evi- dent, if conduct deals with these, both how important a thing conduct is, and how simple a thing. Im- portant, because it covers so large a portion of human life, and the portion common to all sorts of people; simple, because, though there needs perpetual admo- nition to form conduct, the admonition is needed, not to determine what we ought to do, but to make us do it. And as to this simplicity, all moralists arc 46 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. agreed. " Let any plain, honest man," says Bishop Butler, " before he engages in any course of action " (he means action of the very kind we call conduct}, " ask himself, l Is this I am going about right, or is it wrong? is it good, or is it evil C I do not in the least doubt but that this question would be answered agreeably to truth and virtue by almost any fair man in almost any circumstance." And Bishop Wil- son says: "Look up to God" (by which he means just this, consult your conscience) " at all times, and he will, as in a glass, discover what is fit to be done." And the Preacher's well-known sentence is exactly to the same effect, " God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions," or, as it more correctly is, " many abstruse reasonings." Let us hold fast to this, and we shall find we have a stay by the help of which even poor weak men, with no pre- tensions to be athletes, may stand firmly. And so, when we are asked, What is the object of religion ? let us reply, Conduct. And when we are asked further, What is conduct ? let us answer, Three fourths of life. And certainly we need not go far about to prove that conduct, or " righteousness," which is the object of religion, is in a special manner the object of religion. The word " righteousness " is llir word of the Old Testament. " Keep judgment and do righteousness! Cease to do evil, learn to do RELIGION GIVEN. 47 well ! " these words being taken in their plainest sense of conduct; Offer the sacrifice, not of victims and ceremonies, as the way of the world in religion then was, but, Offer the sacrifice of righteousness! The great concern of the New Testament is likewise righteousness, but righteousness reached through par- ticular means, Righteousness by the power of Christ. A sentence which sums up the New Testament, and assigns the ground whereon the Christian Church stands, is, as we have elsewhere said,* this : " Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity ! " If we are to take a sentence which in like manner sums up the Old Testament, such a sentence is this : " O ye that love the Eternal, see that ye hate the thing which is evil ! to him that or- dereth his conversion right shall be shown the salva- tion of God." But instantly there will be raised the objection that this is morality, not religion; morality, ethics, conduct, being by many people, and above all by the- ologians, carefully contra-distinguished from religion, which is supposed in some special way to be con- nected with propositions about the Godhead of the Eternal Son, like those for which the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester want to do something, or propositions about the personality of God, or about election or justification. Religion, however, means simply either a binding to righteousness, or else a serious attending to righteousness and dwelling upon it; which of these two it most nearly means, depends * St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 159. 48 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. upon the view we take of the word's derivation ; but it means one of them, arid they are really much the same. And the antithesis between ethical and re- ligious is thus quite a false one. Ethical means prac- tical, it relates to practice or conduct passing into habit or disposition. Religious also means prac- tical, but practical in a still higher Degree; and the right antithesis to both ethical and religious is the same as the right antithesis to practical', namely, theoretical. Now, the propositions of the Bishops of Winches- ter and Gloucester are theoretical, and they there- fore are very properly opposed to propositions which are moral or ethical; but they are with equal pro- priety opposed to propositions which are religious. They differ in kind from what is religious while what is ethical agrees in kind with it. 'I Jut is there, therefore, no difference between what is ethical, or morality, and religion ? There is a difference, a dif- ference of degrees. Religion, if we follow the in- tention of human thought and human language in the use of the word, is ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling; the passage from morality to religion is made, when to morality is applied emotion. And the true meaning of religion is thus not simply mor- ality, but morality touched by emotion. And this new elevation and inspiration of morality is well marked by the word " righteousness." Conduct is the word of common life, morality is the word of philosophical disquisition, righteousness is the word of religion. RELIGION GIVEN. 49 Some people, indeed, are for calling all high thought and feeling by the name of religion ; accord- ing to that saying of Goethe, " lie who has art and science has also religion." But let us use words as mankind generally use them. We may call art and science touched by emotion religion, if we will ; as we may make the instinct of self-preservation, into which M. Littre traces up all our private affections, include the perfecting ourselves by the study of what is beautiful in art ; and the reproductive instinct, into which he traces up all our social affections, include the perfecting mankind by political science. But men have not yet got to that stage, when we think much of either their private or their social affections at all, except as exercising themselves in conduct; neither do we yet think of religion as otherwise exer- cising itself. When mankind speak of religion, they have before their mind an activity engaged, not with the whole of life, but with that three fourths of life which is conduct. This ^s w y ide enough range for one word, surely ; but at any rate, let us at present limit ourselves as mankind do. And if some one now asks, But what is this appli- cation of emotion to morality, and by what marks may we know it? wr ran quite easily satisfy him; not, indeed, by any disquisition of our own, but in a much better way, by examples. " By the dispen- sation of Providence to mankind," says Quintilian, "goodness gives men most pleasure."" That is * Dedit hoc Providentia hominibus munus, ut honesta ma- gis juvarent. 4 50 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. morality. " The path of the just is as the shining light which shineth more and more unto the perfect day." That is morality touched with emotion or re- ligion. " Hold off from sensuality," says Cicero ; "for, if you have given yourself up to it, you will find yourself unable to think of anything else." That is morality. " Blessed are the pure in heart," says Jesus; "for they shall sec God." That is re- ligion. " We all want to live honestly, but cannot," says the Greek maxim-maker.f That is morality. " O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death ! " says St. Paul. That is religion. " Would thou wert of as good conversa- tion in deed as in word ! " is morality.:}: " Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in Heaven ! " is religion. " Live as you were meant to live! " is morality. " Lay hold on eternal life ! " is religion. Or we may take the contrast within the bounds of the Bible itself. " Love not sleep, lest thou come to poverty," is morality. " My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work," is re- ligion. Or we may even observe a third stage h" tween these two stages, which shows to us the transi- tion from one to the other. " If thou givest fhy son! the desires that please her, she will make thee a laugh- * Sis a venereis amoribus ayersns : qniims si te dfdidci j>, non aliucl quidquam possis ro<;it.-HV <|ii;un illud quod diligis. { Oftofiev a?x>f Zfiv Travrrr, n'/'/' : >i>oiv. RELIGION GIVEN. 51 ing-stock to thine enemies ; "-^-that is morality. "He that resisteth pleasure crowneth his life;" that is morality with the tone heightened, passing, or trying to pass, into religion. " Flesh and blood can- not inherit the kingdom of God ; " there the passage is made, and we have religion. Our religious exam- ples are here all taken from the Bible, and from the Bible such examples can best be taken, but we might also find them elsewhere. " O that my lot might lead me in the path of holy innocence of thought and di'cd, the path which august laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven had their birth, neither did the race of mortal man beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep; the power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old ! " That is from Soph- ocles, but it is as much religion as any of the things which we have quoted as religious. Like them, it is not the mere enjoining of conduct, but it is this en- joining touched, strengthened, and almost trans- formed by the addition of feeling. So what is meant by the application of emotion to morality has now, it is to be hoped, been made clear. The next question will, I suppose, be, But how does one get the application made ? Why, how does one get to feel much about any matter whatever ? By dwelling upon it, by staying our thoughts upon it, by having it perpetually in our mind. The very words mind, memory, remain, come, probably, all from the same root, from the notion of staying, at- tending. Possibly even the word man comes from the same ; so entirely does the idea of humanity, of 52 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. intelligence, of looking before and after, of raising one's self out of the flux of things, rest upon the idea of steadying one's self, concentrating one's self, mak- ing order in the chaos of one's impressions, by attend- ing to one impression rather than the other. The rules of conduct, of morality, were themselves, philos- ophers suppose, reached in this way ; the notion of a whole self as opposed to a partial self, a best self to an inferior, to a momentary self a permanent self requiring the restraint of impulses a man would naturally have indulged; because, by attending to his life, man found it had a scope beyond the wants of the present moment. Suppose it was so; then the first man who, as " a being," comparatively, " of a large discourse, looking before and after," controlled the native, instantaneous, mechanical impulses of the instinct of self-preservation, controlled the native, in- stantaneous, mechanical impulses of the reproductive instinct, had morality revealed to him. But there is a long way from this to that habitual dwelling on the rules thus reached, that constant turn- ing them over in the mind, that near and lively ex- perimental sense of their beneficence, which commu- nicates emotion to our thought of them, and thus in- calculably heightens their power. And the more mankind attended to the claims of that part of our nature which does not belong to conduct, properly so called, or to morality (and we have seen that, after all, about one fourth of our nature is in this ease). the more they would have distractions to take oil' their thoughts from those moral conclusions which all RELIGION GIVEN. 53 races of men, one may say, seem to have reached, and to prevent these moral conclusions from being quick- ened by emotion, and thus becoming religious. 3. Only with one people, the people from whom we get the Bible, these distractions did not happen. The Old Testament, I suppose nobody will deny, is filled with the word and thought of righteousness. " In the way of righteousness is life, and in the path- way thereof is no death ; " " Righteousness tendeth to life ; " " The wicked man troubleth his own flesh ; " "The way of the transgressors is hard;" nobody will deny that those texts may stand for the funda- mental and ever-recurring idea of the Old Testament. No people ever felt so strongly as the people of the Old Testament, the Hebrew people, that conduct is three fourths of our life and its largest concern ; no people ever felt so strongly that succeeding, going right, hitting the mark in this great concern, was the way of peace, the highest possible satisfaction. " He that keepeth the law, happy is he ; its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all its 'paths are peace ; if thou hadst walked in its ways, thou shouldst have dwelt in peace forever ! " Jeshurun, one of the ideal names of their race, is the upright; Israel, the other and greater, is the wrestler with God, he who has known the contention and strain it costs to stand upright. Tli at mysterious personage, by whom their history first touches the hill of Sion, is Melchisedek, the 54 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. tnjhteous king; their holy city, Jerusalem, is the foundation, or vision, or inheritance, of that which righteousness achieves, peace. The law of right- eousness was such an object of attention to them, that its words were to " be in their heart, and thou shalt teach the"m diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up." To keep them ever in mind, they wore them, went about with them, made talismans of them ; " Bind them upon thy fin- gers, bind them about thy neck ; write them upon the table of thine heart ! " " Take fast hold of her," they said of the doctrine of conduct, or righteous- ness, " let her not go ! keep her, for she is thy life ! " People who thus spoke of righteousness could not but have had their minds long and deeply engaged with it ; much more than the generality of mankind, who have nevertheless, as we saw, got as far as the notion of morals or conduct. And, if they were so deeply attentive to it, one thing could not fail to strike them. It is this: the very great part in righteous- ness which belongs, we may say, to not ourselves. In the first place, we did not make ourselves, or our na- ture, or conduct as the object of three fourths of that nature; we did not provide that happiness should follow conduct, as it undeniably does; that the sense of succeeding, going right, hitting the mark, in con- duct, should give satisfaction, and a very high satis- faction, just as really as the sense of doing well in his work gives pleasure to a poet or painter, or ac- RELIGION GIVEN. 55 oomplishing what he tries gives pleasure to a man who is learning to ride or shoot ; or as satisfying his hunger, also, gives pleasure to a man who is hungry. All this we did not make ; and, in the next place, our dealing with it at all, when it is made, is not wholly, or even nearly wholly, in our power. Our conduct is capable, irrespective of what we can our- selves certainly answer for, of almost infinitely dif- ferent degrees of force and energy in the performance of it, of lucidity and vividness in the perception of it, of fulness in the satisfaction from it ; and these degrees may vary from day to day, and quite incal- culably. Facilities and felicities, whence do they come? suggestions and stimulations, where do they tend ? hardly a day passes but we have some experi- ence of them. And so Henry More was led to say " that there was something about us that knew bet- ter, often, what we would be at than we ourselves." For instance, every one can understand how health and freedom from pain may give energy for conduct, and how a neuralgia, suppose, may diminish it; it does not depend on ourselves, indeed, whether wo have the neuralgia or not, but we can understand its impairing our spirit. But the strange thing is, that with the same neuralgia we may find ourselves one day without spirit and energy for conduct, and an- other day with them. So that we may most truly say, " Left to ourselves, we sink and perish ; visited, we lift up our heads and live." And we may well * "Relicti mergimur et perimus, visitati vero erigimur et viviinus. 5G LITERATURE AND DOGMA. give ourselves, in grateful and devout self-surrender, to that by which we are thus visited. So much is there incalculable, so much that belongs to not our- selves, in conduct; and the more we attend to con- duct, and the more we value it, the more we shall feel this. The not ourselves, which is in us and in the world round us, has almost everywhere, as far as we can see, struck the minds of men, as they awoke to conscious- ness, and has inspired them with awe. Every one knows how the mighty natural objects which most took their regards became the objects to which this awe addressed itself. Our very word God is a rem- iniscence of these times, when men invoked " The Brilliant on high," sublime hoc candens quod invo- cent omnes Jovem, as the power representing to thorn that which transcended the limits of their narrow selves, and that by which they lived and moved and had their being. Every one knows of what differ- ences of operation men's dealing with this power has in different places and times shown itself capable; how here they have been moved by the not ourselves to a cruel terror, there to a timid religiosity, there again to a play of imagination ; almost always, how- ever, connecting with it, by some string or other, conduct. But we are not writing a history of religion ; wo are only tracing its effect on the hmiiujiii'o of the men from whom we get the Bible. At the time tlu-y pro- duced those documents which gave to the Old Testa- ment its power and true character, the not ourselves RELIGION GIVEN. 57 which weighed upon the mind of Israel, and engaged its awe, was the not ourselves by which we get the sense for righteousness and whence we find the help lo do right. This conception was indubitably what lay at the bottom of that remarkable change which, under Moses, at a certain stage of their religious his- tory, befell their mode of naming God; this was what they intended in that name, which we wrongly convey either without translation, by Jehovah, which gives us the notion of a mere mythological deity, or by a wrong translation, Lord, which gives us the no- tion of a magnified and non-natural man. The name they used was : The Eternal. Philosophers dispute whether moral ideas, as they call them, the simplest ideas of conduct and right- eousness which now seem instinctive, did not all grow, were not once inchoate, embryo, dubious, un- formed ; that may have been so ; the question is an interesting one for science. But the interesting ques- tion for conduct is whether those ideas are unformed or formed now ; they are formed now, and they were formed when the Hebrews named the power, out of themselves, which pressed upon their spirit: The Eternal. Probably the life of Abraham, the friend of God, however imperfectly the Bible traditions by themselves convey it to us, was a decisive step for- wards in the development of these ideas of righteous- ness. Probably this was the moment when such ideas became fixed and solid for the Hebrew people, and marked it permanently off from all others who had not made the same step. But long before the 58 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. first beginnings of recorded history, long before the oldest word of Bible literature, these ideas must have Urn at work; we know it by the result, although they may have for a long while been but rudimentary. In Israel's earliest history and earliest literature, un- der the name of Eloah, Elohim, The Mighty, there may have lain and matured, there did lie and mature, ideas of God more as a moral power, more as a power connected above everything with conduct and right- eousness, than were entertained by other races; not only can we judge by the result that this must have been so, but we can see that it was so. Still their name, The Mighty, does not in itself involve any true and deep religious ideas, any more than our name, The Brilliant. With The Eternal it is other- wise. For what did they mean by the Eternal ; the Eternal what? The Eternal cause? Alas, these poor people were not Archbishops of York. They meant the Eternal righteous, who lovetli rit/hf eons- ness. They had dwelt upon the thought of conduct and right and wrong, till the not ourselves which is in us and around us became to them adorable emi- nently and altogether as a power which makes for righteousness; which makes for it unchangeably and eternally, and is therefore called The Eternal. There is not a particle of metaphysics in their use of this name, any more than in their conception of the not ourselves to which they attached it. Both came to them, not from abstruse reasoning, but from experience, and from experience in the plain region of conduct. Theologians with metaphysical heads RELIGION GIVEN. 59 render Israel's Eternal by the self -existent, and Israel's not ourselves by the absolute, and attribute to Israel their own subtleties. According to them, Israel had his head full of the necessity of a first cause, and therefore said, The Eternal; as, again, they imagine him looking out into the world, noting everywhere the marks of design and adaptation to his wants, and reasoning out and inferring thence the fatherhood of God. All these fancies come from an excessive turn for reasoning, and a neglect of observ- ing men's actual course of thinking and way of using words. Israel, at this stage when The Eternal was revealed to him, inferred nothing, reasoned out noth- ing. He felt and experienced. When he begins to speculate in the schools of Rabbinism, he quickly shows how much less native talent than the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester he has for this perilous business. Happily, when The Eternal was revealed to him, he had not yet begun to speculate. He personified, indeed, his Eternal, for he was strongly moved, and an orator and poet. " Man never knows how an- thropomorphic he is," says Goethe, and so man tends always to represent everything under his own figure. In poetry and eloquence, man may and must follow this tendency, but in science it often leads him astray. Israel, however, did not scientifically predicate per- sonality of God ; he would not even have had a notion what was meant by it. He called him the maker of all things, who gives drink to all out of his pleas- ures as out of a river ; but he was led to this by no 60 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. theory of a first cause. The grandeur of the spec- tacle given by the world, the grandeur of the sense of its all being not ourselves, being above and be- yond ourselves and immeasurably dwarfing us, a man of imagination instinctively personifies as a single mighty living and productive power; as Goethe tells us that the words which rose naturally to his lips, when he stood on the top of the Brocken, were: " Lord, what is man, that thou mindest him, or the son of man, that thou makest account of him ? " But Israel's confessing and extolling of this power came not even from his imaginative feeling, but came first from his gratitude for righteousness. To one who knows what conduct is, it is a joy to be alive; the not ourselves, which by revealing to us righteousness makes our happiness, adds to the boon this glorious world to be righteous in. That is the notion at the bottom of the Hebrew's praise of a Creator; and if we attend, we can see this quite clearly. Wisdom and understanding mean, for Israel, " the fear of the Eternal ; " and the fear of the Eternal means for him " to depart from evil," righteousness. Righteousness, order, conduct, is for him the essence of The Eternal, and the source of nil man's happiness; and it is only as a further ;nid natural working of this essence that he conceives creation. " The fear of the Eternal, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil, that is understanding] Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the 111:111 that getteth understanding! She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, and h;ippy is every one RELIGION GIVEN. 61 that retaineth her. The Eternal by wisdom hath founded the earth, by understanding hath he estab- lished the heavens ! " and so the Bible writer passes into the account of creation. It all comes to him from the idea of righteousness. And it is the same with all the language our He- brew speaker uses. God is a father, because the power in and around us which makes for righteous- ness is indeed best described by the name of this au- thoritative but yet tender and protecting relation. So, too, with the intense fear and abhorrence of idol- atry. Conduct, righteousness, is, above all, an inward motion and rule; no sensible forms can represent it, or help us to it ; such attempts at representation can only distract us from it. So, too, with the sense of the oneness of God. " Hear, O Israel ! The Lord our God is one Lord." People think that in this unity of God this monotheistic idea, as they call it they have certainly got metaphysics at last. It is noth- ing of the kind. The monotheistic idea of Israel is simply seriousness. There are, indeed, many aspects of the not ourselves; but Israel regarded one aspect of it only, that by which it makes for righteousness. He had the advantage, to be sure, that with this as- pect three fourths of human life is concerned. But there are other aspects which may be taken. " Frail and striving mortality," says the elder Pliny, in a noble passage, " mindful of its own weakness, has distinguished these aspects severally, so as for each man to be able to attach himself to the divine by this or that part, according as he has most need." That 62 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. is an apology for polytheism, as answering to man's many-sidedness. But Israel felt that being thus many-sided degenerated into an imaginative play, and bewildered what Israel recognized as our sole religious consciousness, the consciousness of right. " Let thine eyelids look right on, and let thine eye- lids look straight before thee; turn not to the right hand nor to the left ; remove thy foot from evil ! " Does 'not Ovid say,* in excuse for the immorality of his verses, that the sight and mention of the gods themselves the rulers of human life often raised immoral thoughts ? and so the sight and mention of all aspects of the not ourselves must. Yet how tempt- ing are many of these aspects ! Even at this time of day, the grave authorities of the University of Cam- bridge are so struck by one of them, that of pleasure, life, and fecundity, of the hominum divomque voluptas, alma Venus, that they set it publicly up as an object of their scholars to fix their minds upon, and to compose verses in honor of. That is all very well at present; but with this natural bent in the au- thorities of the University of Cambridge, and in the Indo-European race to which they belong, where would they be now if it had not been for Israel, and the stern check which Israel put upon the glorifica- tion and divinization of this natural bent of man- kind, this attractive aspect of the not ourselr* > / Perhaps going in procession, Vice-Chancellor, bedels, * Tristia, II. 287. " Quis locus est templis augustinr ? haec quoque vitet In riilpum si qua est ingeniosa suam." See the whole passage. RELIGION GIVEN. 63 masters, scholars, and all, in spite of their Professor of Moral Philosophy, to the temple of Aphrodite! Nay, and very likely Mr. Birks himself, his brows crowned with myrtle and scarcely a shade of melan- choly on his countenance, would have been going along with them ! It is Israel and his seriousness that have saved the authorities of the University of Cambridge from carrying their divinization of pleas- ure to these lengths, or from making more of it, in- deed, than a mere passing intellectual play ; and even this play Israel would have beheld with displeasure, saying, " O turn away mine eyes lest they behold vanity, but quicken Thou me in thy law ! " So earnestly and exclusively were Israel's regards bent on one aspect of the not ourselves; its aspect as a power making for conduct, righteousness. Israel's Eternal was the Eternal which says, " To depart from evil, that is understanding! " " Be ye holy, for I am holy ! " Now, as righteousness is but a height- ened conduct, so holiness is but a heightened right- eousness ; a more finished, entire, and awe-filled right- eousness. It was such a righteousness which was Israel's ideal ; and therefore it was that Israel said, not indeed what our Bibles make him say, but this: "Hear, O Israel! The Eternal is our God, The Eternal alone." And in spite of his turn for personification, his want of a clear boundary line between poetry and science, his inaptitude to express even abstract no- tions by other than highly concrete terms, in spite of these scientific disadvantages, or rather, perhaps, 64 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. because of them, because he had no talent for abstruse reasoning to lead him astray, the spirit and tongue of Israel kept a propriety, a reserve, a sense of the in- adequacy of language in conveying man's ideas of God, which contrast strongly with the license of af- firmation in our Western theology. " The high and holy One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is holy," is far more proper and felicitous language, than, " the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe," just because it far less attempts to be precise, but keeps to the language of poetry and does not essay the language of science. As he had devel- oped his idea of God from personal experience, Israel knew what we, who have developed our idea from his words about it, so often are ignorant of: that his words were but thrown out at a vast object of con- sciousness, which he could not fully grasp, and which he apprehended clearly by one point alone, that it made for the great concern of life, conduct. How lit- tle we know of it besides, how impenetrable is the course of its ways with us, how we are baffled in our attempts to name and describe it, how, when we per- sonify it and call it " the moral and intelligent Gov- ernor of the universe," we presently find it not to be a person as man conceives of person, nor moral as man conceives of moral, nor intelligent as man con- ceives of intelligent, nor a governor as man conceives of governors, all this, which scientific theology loses sight of, Israel, who had but poetry and eloquence, and no system, and who did not mind contradicting himself, knew. " Is it any pleasure to the Almighty. RELIGION GIVEN. 65 that thou art righteous ? " What a blow to our ideal of that magnified and non-natural man, " the moral and intelligent Governor ! " Say what we can about God, say our best, we have yet, Israel knew, to add instantly : " Lo, these are parts of his ways ; but how little a portion is heard of him!" Yes, indeed, Israel remembered that, far better than our bishops do. " Canst thou by searching find out God ; canst thou find out the perfection of the Almighty ? It is more high than heaven, what canst thou do? deeper than hell, what canst thou know? " Will it be said, experience might also have shown to Israel a not ourselves which did not make for his happiness, but rather made against it, baffled his claims to it ? But no man, as we have elsewhere re- marked, who simply follows his own consciousness, is aware of any claims, any rights, whatever;* what he gets of good makes him thankful, what he gets of ill seems to him natural. It is true, the not ourselves of which he is thankfully conscious he inevitably speaks of and speaks to as a man ; for " man never knows how anthropomorphic he is." As time pro- ceeds, imagination and reasoning keep working upon this substructure, and build from it a magnified and non-natural man. Attention is then drawn, after- wards, to causes outside ourselves which seem to make for sin and suffering; and then either these causes have to be reconciled by some highly ingenious scheme with the magnified and non-natural man's power, or a second magnified and non-natural man * Culture and Anarchy, p. 214. 5 60 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. has to be supposed, who pulls the contrary way to the first. So arise Satan and his angels. But all this is secondary, and comes much later; Israel, the founder of our religion, did not begin with this. He began with experience. He knew from thankful ex- perience the not ourselves which makes for righteous- ness, and knew how little we know about God be- The language of the Bible, then, is literary, not scientific language; language thrown out at an object of consciousness not fully grasped, which inspired emotion. Evidently, if the object be one not fully to be grasped, and one to inspire emotion, the lan- guage of figure and feeling will satisfy us better about it, will cover more of what we seek to express than the language of literal fact and science; the lan- guage of science about it will be below what we feel to be the truth. The question however has arisen and confronts us ; what was the scientific basis of fact for this coiwions- ness. When we have once satisfied ourselves both as to the tentative, poetic way in which the Bible per- sonages used language, and also as to their having no pretensions to metaphysics at all, let us, therefore, when there is this question raised as to the scientific account of what they had before their minds, be con- tent with a very unpretending answer. And in this way such a phrase as that which we have formerly HELIGION GIVEN. 67 used concerning God, and have been much blamed for using, the phrase, namely, that, " for science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things fulfil the law of their being," may be allowed, and even prove useful. Certainly it is inadequate; cer- tainly it is a less proper phrase than, for instance: " Clouds and darkness are round about him, right- eousness and judgment are the habitation of his seat." * But then it is, in however humble a de- gree and with however narrow a reach, a scientific definition, which the other is not. The phrase, " A Personal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Gov- ernor of the universe," has also, when applied to God, the character, no doubt, of a scientific definition ; but then it goes far beyond what is admittedly certain and verifiable, which is what we mean by scientific. It attempts far too much ; if we want here, as we do want, to have what is admittedly certain and verifi- able, we must content ourselves with very little. No one will say, that it is admittedly certain and veri- fiable, that there is a personal first cause, the moral and intelligent governor of the universe, whom we may call God if we will. But that all things seem to us to have what we call a law of their being, and to tend to fulfil it, is certain and admitted; though * It has been urged that if this personifying mode of expres- sion is more proper and adequate, it must also be more scien- tifically exact. But surely it must on reflection appear that this is by no means so. Wordsworth calls the earth " the mighty mother of mankind," and the geographers call her "an oblate spheroid 1 '; Wordsworth's expression is more proper and adequate to convey what men feel about the earth, but it is not therefore the more scientifically exact. 68 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. whether we will call this God or not is a matter of choice. Suppose, however, we call it God, we then give the name of God to a certain and admitted real- ity; this, at least, is an advantage. And the motion does, in fact, enter into the term God, in men's common use of it. To please God, to serve God, to obey God's will, does mean to follow a law of things which is found in conscience, and which is an indication, irrespective of our arbitrary wish and fancy, of what we ought to do. There is, then, a real power which makes for righteousness; and it is the greatest of realities for us. When Paul says, our business is " to serve the spirit of God," " to serve the living and true God ; " and when Epictetus says, " What do I want ? to acquaint myself with the true order of things, and comply with it," they both mean, so far, the same, in that they both mean we should obey a tendency, which is not ourselves, but which appears in our consciousness, by which ihing.- fulfil the real law of their being. It is true, the not ourselves, by which things fulfil the real law of their being, extends a great deal be- yond that sphere where alone we usually think of it. That is, a man may disserve God, disobey indications not of our own making but wliidi appear, if we at- tend, in our consciousness, he may dist they, I say, such indications of the real law of our being in other spheres besides the sphere of conduct. Ho does dis- obey them, when he sings a hymn like, " \\ \ Jesus to know, and feel his blood flow," or, indeed, like nine tenths of our hymns, or when he frames and main- RELIGION GIVEN. 69 tains a blundering and miserable constitution of so- ciety, as well as when he commits some plain breach of the moral law. That is, he may disobey them in art and science as well as in conduct. But he at- tends, and the generality of men attend, only to the indications of a true law of our being as to conduct; and hardly at all to indications, though they as really exist, of a true law of our being on its aesthetic and intelligential side. The reason is, that the moral side, though not more real, is so much larger ; taking in, as we have said, at least three fourths of life. Now, the indications on this moral side of that ten- dency, not of our making, by which things fulfil the law of their being, we do very much mean to denote and to sum up when we speak of the will of God, pleasing God, serving God. Let us keep firm foot- ing on this basis of plain fact, narrow though it may be. To feel that one is fulfilling in any way the law of one's being, that one is succeeding and hitting the mark, brings us, we know, happiness ; to feel this in regard to so great a thing as conduct brings, of course, happiness proportionate to the thing's great- ness. We have already had Quintilian's witness, how right conduct gives joy. Who could value knowl- edge more than Goethe ? but he marks it as being without question a lesser source of joy than conduct ; conduct he ranks with health as beyond all compare primary. " Nothing, after health and virtue," he says, " can give so much satisfaction as learning and knowing." Nay, and Bishop Butler, at the view of 70 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. die happiness from conduct, breaks free from all that hesitancy and depression which so commonly hangs on his masterly thinking. " Self-love, methinks. should he alarmed! May she not pass over greater pleasures than those >he is so wholly taken up with '? " And Bishop Wilson, always hitting the right nail on the head in matters of this sort, remarks that, " if it were not for the practical difficulties attending it, virtue would hardly he distinguishable from a kind of sensuality." The practical difficulties are indeed exceeding great ; plain as is the course, and high the prize, we all find ourselves daily led to say, with the Imitation, " Would that for one single day we had lived in this world as we ought ! " Yet the course is so evidently plain, and the prize so high, that the same Imitation cries out presently, " If a man would but take notice, what peace he brings himself, and what joy to others, merely by managing himself right! " And for such happiness, since certainly we ourselves did not make it, we instinctively feel grate- ful; according to that remark of one of the whole- somest and truest of moralists, Barrow : " lie is not a man who doth not delight to make some returns thither whence he hath found great kindness." And this sense of gratitude, again, is itself an addition to our happiness ! So strong, altogether, is the witness and sanction happiness gives to going right in con- duct, to fulfilling, so far as conduct is concerned, the law indicated to us of our being; and there can be no sanction to compare, for force, with the strong sanction of happiness, if it is true what Bishop But- RELIGION GIVEN. ft ler, who is here but the mouthpiece of humanity it- self, says so irresistibly : " It is manifest that noth- ing can be of consequence to mankind, or any crea- ture, but happiness." And now let us see how exactly Israel's percep- tions about God follow and confirm this simple line, which we have here reached quite independently. First : " It is joy to the just to do judgment." Then : " It becometh well the just to be thankful." Finally : " A pleasant thing it is to be thankful." What can be simpler than this, and at the same time more solid ? But again : " There is nothing sweeter than to take heed unto the commandments of the Eternal." And then : " Thou art my portion, Eternal! at midnight will I rise to give thanks unto thee because of thy righteous judgments." And lastly: "O praise the Eternal, for it is a good thing to sing praises unto our God!" Why, these are the very same proposi- tions as the others, only with a power and depth of emotion added! Emotion has been applied to morality. God is here really, at bottom, a deeply moved way of saying conduct or righteousness. " Trust in God " is trust in the law of conduct ; " delight in the Eternal " is, in a deeply moved way of expression, the happiness we all feel to spring from conduct. At- tending to conduct, to judgment, makes the attender feel that it is joy to do it ; attending to it more still makes him feel that it is the commandment of the Eternal, and that the joy got from it is joy got from fulfilling the commandment of the Eternal. The 72 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. thankfulness for this joy is thankfulness to the Eter- nal ; and to the Eternal, again, is due that further joy which comes from this thankfulness. " The fear of the Eternal, that is wisdom ; and to depart from evil, that is understanding." " The fear of the Eternal " and " To depart from evil " here mean, and are put to mean, and, by the very laws of Hebrew composi- tion which make the second phrase in a parallelism repeat the first in other words, they must mean, just the same thing. Yet what man of soul, after he had once risen to feel that to depart from evil was to walk in awful observance of an enduring clew, within us and without us, which leads to happiness, but would prefer to say, instead of " to depart from evil," " the fear of the Eternal ? " Henceforth, then, Israel transferred to this Eter- nal all his obligations. Instead of saying, " Whoso keepcth the commandment keepeth his own soul," he rather said, " My soul, wait thou still upon God, for of him cometh my salvation ! " Instead of saying, " Bind them (the laws of righteousness) continually upon thine heart, and tie them about thy neck ! " he rather said, " Have I not remembered Thee on my bed, and thought of Thee when I was waking ( " The obligation of a grateful and devout self-surrender to the Eternal replaced all sense of obligation to one's own better self, one's own permanent welfare. The moralist's rule : " Take thought for your permanent, not your monetary, well-being," became now: " Honor the Eternal, not doing thine own ways, nor finding thine own pleasure, nor speaking thine own RELIGION GIVEN. 73 words ! " That is, with Israel religion replaced morality. It is true, out of the humble yet divine ground of attention to conduct, of care for what in conduct is right and wrong, grew morality and religion both; but, from the time the soul felt the motive of religion, it dropped and could not but drop the other. And the motive of doing right, to a sincere soul, is now really no longer his own welfare, but to please God; and it bewilders his consciousness if you tell him that he does right out of self-love. So that as we have said that the first man who, as " a being of a large discourse, looking before and after," controlled the blind momentary impulses of the instinct of self- preservation, controlled the blind momentary im- pulses of the sexual instinct, had morality revealed to him ; so in like manner we may say, that the first man who was thrilled with gratitude, devotion, and awe at the sense of joy and peace, not of his own making, which followed the exercise of this self-control, had religion revealed to him. And, for us at least, this man was Israel. And here, as we have already pointed out the falseness of the common antithesis between ethical and religious, let us anticipate the objection that the religion now spoken of is but natural religion, by pointing out the falseness of the common antithesis, also, between natural and revealed. For that in us which is really natural is, in truth, revealed. We awake to the consciousness of it, we are aware of it coming forth in our mind; but we feel that we did 74: LITERATURE AND DOGMA. not make it, that it is discovered to us, that it is what it is whether we will or no. If we are little con- cerned about it, we say it is natural; if much, we say it is revealed. But the difference between the two is not one of kind, only of degree. The real antithesis, to natural and revealed alike, is invented, artificial. Religion springing out of an experience of the power, the grandeur, the necessity of righteousness, is re- vealed religion, whether we find it in Sophocles or Isaiah ; " the will of mortal men did not beget it, neither shall oblivion ever put it to sleep." A sys- tem of theological notions about personality, essence, existence, consubstantiality, is artificial religion, and is the proper opposite to revealed; since it is a re- ligion which comes forth in no one's consciousness, but is invented by the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester, and personages of their stamp, able men with uncommon talents for abstruse reasoning. The religion is in no sense revealed, just because it is in no sense natural ; and revealed religion is properly so named, just in proportion as it is in a pre-eminent degree natural. The religion of the Bible, therefore, is well said to be revealed, because the great natural truth, that " Righteousness tendeth to life," is seized and exhib- ited there with such incomparable force and efficacy. All, or very nearly all, the nations of mankind have recognized the importance of conduct, and have at- tributed to it a natural obligation. They, however, looked at conduct,, not as something full of happiness and joy, but as something one could not manage to do RELIGION GIVEN. 75 without. But : " Zion heard of it and rejoiced., and the daughters of Judah were glad, because of thy judgments, O Eternal ! " Happiness is our being's end and aim, and no one has ever come near Israel in feeling, and in making others feel, that " to right- eousness belongs happiness ! " The prodigies and tho marvellous of Bible-religion are common to it with all religions ; the love of righteousness, in this eminency, is its own. 5. The real germ of religious consciousness, therefore, out of which sprang Israel's name for God, to which the records of his history adapted themselves, and which came to be clothed upon, in time, with a mighty growth of poetry and tradition, was a consciousness of the not ourselves which makes for righteousness. And the way to convince one's self of this is by study- ing their literature with a fair mind, and with the tact which letters, surely, alone can give. For the thing turns upon understanding the manner in which men have thought, their way of using words, and what they mean by them. And if to know letters is to know the best that has been thought and uttered in tho world, then, by knowing letters, we become ac- quainted not only with the history, but also with the scope and powers, of the instruments men employ in thinking and speaking. And this is just what is sought for. And with the sort of experience thus gained, ob- 76 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. jections, as we have said, will be found not so much to be refuted by logical reasoning as to fall of them- selves. Is it objected : " Why, if the Hebrews of the Bible had thus eminently the sense for righteousness does it not equally distinguish the Jews now > " But does not experience show us how entirely a change of circumstances may change a people's character; ami have the modern Jews lost more of what distinguished their ancestors, or even so much, as the modern Greeks of what distinguished theirs ? Where is now, among the Greeks, the dignity of life of Pericles, the dignity of thought and of art of Phidias and Plato '. Is it objected, that the Jews' God was not the endur- ing power that makes for righteousness, but only their tribal God, who gave them the victory in the battle, and plagued them that hated them ? But how, then, comes their literature to be full of such things ;is : " Show me thy ways, O Eternal, and teach me thy paths ; let integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I put my trust in thee ! if I incline unto wickedness with my heart, the Eternal will not hear me, -for they who do no wickedness walk in his ways." From the sense that with men thus guided and going right in goodness it could not but be well, that their leaf could not wither, and that whatsoever they did must pros- per, would naturally come the sense that in their wars with an enemy the enemy should be put to confusion and they should triumph. But how, out of the mere sense that their enemy should be put to confusion ami they should triumph, could the desire for goodi come? Is it objected, that " the law of the Lord " RELIGION GIVEN. 77 was a positive traditionary code to them, standing as a mechanical rule which held them in awe ? that their " fear of the Lord " was superstitious dread of an assumed, magnified, and non-natural man? But why, then, are they always saying: " Teach me thy law, open mine eyes, make me to understand wisdom secretly ! " if all the law they were thinking of stood stark and fixed before their eyes already ? And what could they mean by: "I will love thee, O Eternal, my strength ! " if the fear they meant was not the awe-filled observance from deep attachment, but a servile terror ? Is it objected, that their conception of righteousness was a narrow and rigid one, centring mainly in what they called judgment: "Hate the evil and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate ! " so that " evil," for them, did not take in all faults whatever of heart and conduct, but meant chiefly oppression, graspingness, a violent, menda- cious tongue, insolent and riotous excess ? True, their conception of righteousness ivas much of this kind, and it was narrow. But whoever sincerely at- tends to conduct, along however limited a line, is on his way to bring under the eye of conscience all con- duct whatever; and already, in the Old Testament, the somewhat monotonous inculcation of the social virtues of judgment and justice is continually broken through by deeper movements of personal religion. Every time that the words contrition or humility drop from the lips of prophet or psalmist, Christianity ap- pears. Is it objected, finally, that' even their own narrow conception of righteousness this people could 78 LITERATURE AXD DOGMA. not follow, but were perpetually oppressive, grasp- ing, slanderous, sensual ? Why, the very interest and importance of their witness to righteousness lies in their having felt so deeply the necessity of what they were so little able to accomplish ! They had the strongest impulses in the world to violence and excess, the keenest pleasure in gratifying these iinpul>'-.-. And yet they had such a sense of the natural, nen sary connection between conduct and happiness, that they kept always saying, in spite of themselves : " To him that ordereth his conversation right shall be shown the salvation of God ! " X'-w manifestly this sense of theirs has a double force for the rest of mankind, an evidential force and a practical force. Its evidential force is in keep- ing in men's view, by the example of the signal ap- parition in one branch of our race of the sense for conduct and righteousness, the reality and natural- ness of that sense. Clearly, unless a sense or endow- ment of human nature, however in itself real and beneficent, has some signal representative among mankind, it tends to be pressed upon by other senses and endowments, to suffer from its own want of en- ergy, and to be more and more pushed out of sight. Any one, for instance, who will go to the Potter and will look at the tawdry, glaring, ill-proportioned ware which is being made there for certain American and colonial markets, will easily convince himself how, in our people and kindred, the sense for the arts of design, though it i- certainly planted in human na- ture, might dwindle and sink to almost nothing, if it RELIGION GIVEN. 79 were not for the witness borne to this sense, and the protest offered against its extinction, by the brilliant aesthetic endowment and artistic work of ancient Greece. And one cannot look out over the world without seeing that the same sort of thing might very well befall conduct, too, if it were not for the signal witness borne by Israel. Thou there is the practical force of their example ; and this is even more important. Every one knows, how those who want to cultivate any sense or endow- ment in themselves must be habitually conversant with the works of people who have been eminent for that sense, must study them, catch inspiration from them ; only in this way, indeed, can progress be made. And as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for in- spiration, as to the people who have had the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest; and in hearing and reading the words Israel has uttered for us, careers for conduct will find a glow and a force they could find nowhere else. As well imagine a man with a sense for sculpture not cultivating it by the help of the remains of Greek art, or a man with a sense for poetry not cultivating it by the help of Homer and Shakespeare, as a man with a sense for conduct not cultivating it by the help of the Bible! And this sense, in the satisfying of which we come naturally to the Bible, is a sense which the generality of men have far more decidedly than they have the sense for art or for science ; at any rate, whether we 80 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. have it decidedly or no, it is the sense which has to do with three fourths of human life. This does truly constitute for Israel a most extra- ordinary distinction. In spite of all which in them and their character is unattractive, nay, repellent; in spite of their short-comings even in righteousness itself and their insignificance in everything else, this petty, unsuccessful, unamiable people, without politics, without science, without art, without charm, deserve their great place in the world's regard, and are likely to have it greater, as the world goes on, rather than less. It is secured to them by the facts of human nature, and by the unalterable constitution of things. " God has given commandment to bless, and he hath blessed, and we cannot reverse it! lie hath not seen iniquity in Jacob, and he hath not seen perverseness in Israel; the Eternal, his God, is with him!" Any one does a good deed who removes stum- bling-blocks out of the way of feeling and profiting by the witness left by this people. And so, instead of making our Hebrew speakers mean, in their use of the word God, a scientific affirmation which never entered into their heads, and about which many will dispute, let us content ourselves with making them mean, as matter of scientific fact and experience, what they really did mean as such, and what is un- challengeable. Let us put into their "Eternal " and " God " no more science than they did, " the en- during power, not ourselves, which makes for right- eousness." They meant more by these names, but RELIGION GIVEN. 81 they meant this ; and what they meant more they could not grasp fully, but this they grasped fully. The sense which this will give us for their words is at least solid ; so that we may find it of use as a guide to steady us, and to give us a constant clew in fol- lowing what they say. And is it so unworthy ? It is true, unless we can fill it with as much feeling as they did, the mere possessing it will not carry us far. But matters are not much mended by taking their language of approx- imative figure and using it for the language of scien- tific definition; or by crediting them with our own dubious science, deduced from metaphysical ideas which they never had. A better way than this, surely, is to take their fact of experience, to keep it steadily for our basis in using their language, and to see whether from using their language with the ground of this real and firm sense to it, as they them- selves did, somewhat of their feeling, too, may not grow upon us. At least we shall know what we are saying ; and that what we are saying is true, however inadequate. But is this confessed inadequateness of our speech, concerning that which we will not call by the negative name of the unknown and unknowable, but rather by the name of the unexplored and the inexpressible, and of which the Hebrews themselves said, " It is more high than heaven, what canst thou do ? deeper than hell, what canst thou know ? " is this reservedness of affirmation about God loss worthy of him, than the astounding particularity and license of affirmation of 6 82 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. our dogmatists, as if he were a man in the next street ? Nay, and nearly all the difficulties which torment theology as the reconciling God's justice with hi> mercy, and so on come from this license and partic- ularity; theologians having precisely, as it would often seem, built up a wall first, in order afterwards to run their own heads against it. This, we say, is what comes of too much talent for abstract reasoning. One cannot help seeing tin- theory of causation and such things, where one should only see a far simpler matter: the power, the gran- deur, the necessity of righteousness. To be sure, a perception of these is at the bottom of popular re- ligion, underneath all the extravagances theologians have taught people to utter, and makes the whole value of it. For the sake of this true practical per- ception one might be quite content to leave at rest a matter where practice, after all, is everything, and theory nothing. Only, when religion is called in question because of the extravagances of theology be- ing passed off as religion, one disengages and helps religion by showing their utter delusiveness. The\ arose out of the talents of able men for reasoning, and their want (not through lack of talent, for the thing needs none; it needs only time, trouble, good fortune, and a fair mind; but through their being taken up with their reasoning power), their want of literary experience. Unluckily, the sphere where they show their talents is one for literary experience rather than for reasoning. And this at the very outset, in the dealings of theologians with that starting-point of our RELIGION GIVEN. 83 religion, the experience of Israel as set forth in the Old Testament, has produced, we have seen, great confusion. Naturally, as we shall hereafter see, the confusion becomes worse confounded as they pro- ceed. CHAPTER II. ABEBGLATJBE INVADING. WHEN people ask for our attention because of what has passed, they say, " in the Council of the Trinity," and been promulgated, for our direction, by " a Per- sonal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe," it is certainly open to any man to refuse to hear them, on the plea that the very thing they start with they have no means of proving. And we see that many do so refuse their attention; and that the breach there is, for instance, between popular religion and what is called science, comes from this cause. But it is altogether different when people ask for our attention on the strength of this other first principle: "To righteousness belongs happiness;" or this: " There is an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." The more we medi- tate on this starting-ground of theirs, the more we shall find that there is solidity in it, and the more we shall be inclined to go along with them, and to see what they can make of it. And herein is the advantage of giving this phiin. though restricted, sense to the Bible phrases: " lie that keepeth the law, happy is he! " and, " Wlms. trusteth in the Eternal, happy is he ! " P>v tradition, emotion, imagination, the Hebrews, no doubt, came t<> 84 ABERGLAU'BE INVADING. 85 attach more than this plain sense to these phrases; but this plain, solid, and experimental sense they at- tached to them at bottom, they attached originally; and in attaching it they were on sure ground of fact, where we can all go with them. Their words, we shall find, taken in this sense have quite a new force for us, and an indisputable one. It is worth while accustoming ourselves to use them thus, in order to bring out this force and to see how real it is, limited though it be, and unpretending as it may appear. The very substitution of the word Eternal for the word Lord is something gained in this direction. The word Eternal has less of particularity and pal- pability for the imagination, but what it does affirm is real and verifiable. Let vis fix firmly in our minds, with this limited but real sense to the words we employ, the connec- tion of ideas which was ever present to the spirit of the Hebrew people. " In the way of righteousness is life, and in the pathway thereof is no death; as righteousness tendeth to life, so he that pursueth evil, pursueth it to his own death ; as the whirlwind pass- eth, so is the wicked no more, but the righteous is an everlasting foundation ; "here is the ground idea. Yet there are continual momentary suggestions which make for gratifying our apparent self, for unright- eousness ; nevertheless, what makes for our real self, for righteousness, is lasting, and holds good in the end. Therefore : " Trust in the Eternal with all thine heart, and lean not unto thine own understand- in ir ; there is no wisdom, nor understanding, nor coun- 80 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. sel against the Eternal; there is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death ; there are many devices in a man's heart, never- theless the counsel of the Eternal, that shall stand." To follow this counsel of the Eternal is the only true wisdom and understanding: " The fear of the Eternal, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding." It is also happiness: " Blessed is every one that feareth the Eternal, that walketh in his ways ; happy shall he be, and it shall be well with him ! O taste and see how gracious the Eternal is ! blessed is the man that trusteth in him. Blessed is the man whose delight is in the law of the Eternal ; his leaf shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth, it shall prosper." And the more a man walks in this way of righteousness, the more he feels himself borne by a power not his own : " Not by might and not by power, but by my spirit, saith the Eternal. O Eternal, I know that the way of man is not in himself! all things come of thee; in thy light do we see light ; the preparation of the heart in man is from the Eternal. The Eternal ordereth a good man's going, and making his way acceptable to him- self." But man feels, too, how far he comes from fulfilling or even from fully perceiving this true law of his being, these indications of the Eternal, the way of righteousness. lie says, and must say: "I am a stranger upon earth, O, hide not thy commandments from me! Enter not into judgment with thy ser- vant, O Eternal, for in thy sight shall no man living be justified ! " Nevertheless, as a man holds on to ABERGLAUBE INVADING. 87 practise as well as he can, and avoids, at any rate. "' presumptuous sins," courses he can clearly see to l)i' wrong, films fall away from his eyes, the indica- tions of the Eternal come out more and more fully, we are cleansed from faults which were hitherto se- cret to us : " Examine me, O God, and prove me, try out my reins and my heart ; look well if there be any way of wickedness in me, and lead me in the way everlasting! O cleanse thou me from my secret faults ! thou hast proved my heart, thou hast visited me in the night, thou hast tried me and shalt find nothing." And the more we thus get to keep inno- cency, the more we wonderfully find joy and peace: " O how plentiful is thy goodness which thou hast laid up for them that fear thee ! Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the provoking of men. Thou wilt show me the path of life, in thy presence is the fulness of joy, at thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore." More and more this dwelling on the joy and peace from righteousness, and on the power which makes for righteousness, be- comes a man's consolation and refuge : " Thou art my hiding- place, thou shalt preserve me from trouble; if my delight had not been in thy law, I should have perished in my trouble. When I am in heaviness, I will think upon God ; a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat ! O set me up upon the rock that is higher than I ! The name of the Eternal is as a strong tower, the righteousness runneth into it and is safe." And the more we experience this shelter, the ii:<>re we come to feel that it is protecting even to 88 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. tenderness : " Like as a father pitieth his own chil- dren, even so is the Eternal merciful unto them that fear him." Nay, every other support, we at last find, every other attachment, may fail us, this alone fails not : " Can a woman forgot her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forgot thee!" All this, we say, rests originally upon the simple but solid experience : " Conduct brings happiness," or, " Righteousness tendeth to life! " And, by mak- ing it again rest there, we bring out in a new but most real and sure way its truth and its power. For it has not always continued to rest there, and in popular religion now, as we manifestly see, it rests there no longer. It is worth while to follow the way in which this change gradually happened, and the thing ceased to rest there. Israel's original percep- tion was true : " Righteousness tendeth to life! " The workers of righteousness have a covenant irilh the Eternal, that their work shall be blessed and blessing, and shall endure forever. But what apparent con- tradictions was this true original perception destined to meet with ; what vast delays, at any rate, were to be interposed before its truth could become manifest ! And how instructively the successive documents of the Bible- which popular religion treats as if it were all of one piece, one time, and one mind bring out the effect on Israel of these delays and contradictions ! What a distance between the eighteenth Psalm jind the eighty-ninth, between the Book of Proverbs and ABERGLAUBE INVADING. 89 the Book of Ecclesiastes ! A time some thousand years before Christ, the golden age of Israel, is the date to which the eighteenth Psalm and the chief part of the Book of Proverbs belong ; this is the .time in which the sense of the necessary connection between righteousness and happiness appears with its full simplicity and force. " The righteous shall be rec- ompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner ! " is the constant burden of the Book of Prov- erbs. And David, in the eighteenth Psalm, expresses his conviction of the intimate dependence of happi- ness upon conduct, in terms which, though they are not without a certain crudity, are yet far more edifying in their truth and naturalness than those morbid sentimentalities of Protestantism about man's natural vileness and Christ's imputed righteousness, to which they are diametrically op- posed. " I have kept the ways of the Eternal," he says ; " I was also upright before him, and I kept my- self from mine iniquity; therefore hath the Eternal rewarded me according to my righteousness, accord- ing to the cleanness of my hands hath he recompensed me; great prosperity showeth he unto his king, acd showeth loving-kindness unto David, his anointed, and unto his seed forevermore." That may be called the classic passage for that covenant Israel always thinks and speaks of, as made by God with his servant David, Israel's second founder. And this covenant was but a renewal of the covenant made with Israel's first founder, God's servant Abraham, that " righteousness shall inherit a blessing," and that 90 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. " in his seed all nations of the earth shall be blessed." Bnt what a change in the eighty-ninth Psalm, a few hundred years later ! " Eternal, where are thy former loving-kindnesses which thou swarest unto David?' thou hast abhorred and forsaken thine anointed, thou hast made void the covenant; O re- member how short my time is ! " " The righteous shall be recompensed in the earth ! " the speaker means ; " my death is near, and death ends all ; where, Eternal, is thy promise ? " Most remarkable, indeed, is the inward travail to which, in the six hundred years that followed the age of David and Solomon, the many and rude shocks be- falling Israel's fundamental idea, " Righteousness tendeth to life and he that pursueth evil pursueth it to his own death," gave occasion. " Wherefore do the wicked live," asks Job, " become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them ? " Job him- self is righteous, and yet : " On mine eyelids is the shadow of death, not for any injustice in mine hands." All through the Book of Job, the question how this can be is over and over again asked and never answered; inadequate solutions are offered and repelled, but an adequate solution is never reached. The only solution readied is that of silence before the insoluble: " T will lay mine hand upon my mouth." The two perceptions are left confronting one another like Kantian antimonies. " The earth is given unto the hand of the wicked ! " and yet: " The council of the wicked is far from me, God rewardeth him, and ABERGLAUBE INVADING. Ql he shall know it ! " And this last, the original per- ception, remains indestructible. The Book of Ec- clesiastes, again, has been called sceptical, epicurean ; it is certainly without the glow and hope which ani- mate the Bible in general. It belongs, probably, to the latter half of the fifth century before Christ, to the time of Xehemiah and Malachi, with difficulties pressing the newly restored Jewish community on all sides, with a Persian governor lording it in Jerusa- lem, with resources light and taxes heavy, with the cancer of poverty eating into the mass of the people, with the rich estranged from the poor and from the national traditions, with the priesthood slack, insin- cere, and worthless. Composed under such circum- stances, the book has been said, and with justice, to breathe " resignation at the grave of Israel ; " its author sees " the tears of the oppressed, and they had no comforter, and on the side of their oppressors there was power ; wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive." He sees " all things come alike to all, there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked." At- tempts at a philosophic indifference appear, at a sceptical suspension of judgment, at an easy ne quid nimis: " Be not righteous overmuch, neither make thyself over-wise ! why shouldst thou destroy thy- self ? " Vain attempts, even at a moment which fa- vored them ! shows of scepticism, vanishing as soon as uttered before the intractable conscientiousness of Israel ! For the Preacher makes answer against himself: " Though a sinner do evil a hundred times 92 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. and his days be prolonged, yet surely I know that it shall be well with them that fear God; but it shall not be well with the wicked, because he feareth not before God." The Preacher's contemporary, too, Malachi, felt the pressure of the same circumstances, had the same occasions of despondency. All around him people were saying : " Every one that doeth evil is good in the sight of the Eternal, and he delighteth in them ; where is the God of judgment ? it is vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance ? " What a change from the clear certitude of the golden age: " As the whirlwind pass- eth, so is the wicked no more; but the righteous is an everlasting foundation ! " But yet, with all the cer- titude of this happier past, Malachi answers on be- half of the Eternal : " Unto you that fear my name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in his wings ! " Many there were, no doubt, who had lost all living sense that the promises were made to righteousness; who took them mechanically, as made to them and sure to them because they were the seed of Abraham, because they were, in St. Paul's words: "Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption and the glory and the covenants and the giving of the law and the service of God, and whose are the fathers." Tin sc people were perplexed and indignant when the privileged seed became unprosperous ; and they looked for some great change to be wrought in the fallen fortunes of Israel, wrought miraculously and mechanically. And they were, no doubt, the great majority, and of ABERGLAUBE INVADING. 93 the mass of Jewish expectation about the future they stamped the character. With them, however, our in- terest does not for the present lie; it lies with the prophets and those whom the prophets represent. It lies with the continued depositaries of the original revelation to Israel, Righteousness tendeth to life! who saw clearly enough that the promises were to righteousness, and that what fendeth to life was not the seed of Abraham taken in itself, but righteous- ness. With this minority, and with its noble repre- sentatives the prophets, our present interest lies ; and the development of their conviction about righteous- ness is what it here imports us to trace. An inde- structible faith that " the righteous is an everlasting foundation " they had ; yet they, too, as we have seen, could not but notice, as time went on, many things which seemed apparently to contradict this their be- lief. In private life, there was the frequent pros- perity of the sinner. In the life of nations, there was the rise and power of the great unrighteous king- doms of the heathen, the unsuccessfulness of Israel ; though Israel was undoubtedly, as compared with the heathen, the depositary and upholder of the idea of righteousness. Therefore prophets and righteous men also, like the unspiritual crowd, could not but look ardently to the future, to some great change and redress in store. At the same time, although their experience, that the righteous were often afflicted and the wicked often prosperous, could not but perplex pious Hebrews ; al- though their conscience felt, and could not but frel. 9i LITERATURE AND DOGMA. that, compared with the other nations with whom they came in contact, they themselves and their fathers had a concern for righteousness, and an unre- mitting sense of its necessity, which put them in cove- nant with the Eternal who makes for righteousness, and which rendered the triumph of other nations over them a triumph of people who cared little for right- eousness over people who cared for it much, and a cause of perplexity, therefore, to men's trust in the Eternal, though their conscience told them this, yet of their own short-comings and perversities it told them louder still, and that their sins had in truth been enough to break their covenant with the Eternal a thousand times over, and to bring justly upon them all the miseries they suffered. To enable them to meet the terrible day, when the Eternal would avenge him of his enemies and make up his jewels, they themselves needed, they knew, the voice of a second Elijah, a change of the inner man, repentance. 2. And then, with Malachi's testimony on its lips to the truth of Israel's ruling idea, Righteousness ictnl- ctli to life! died prophecy. For four hundred ycMr- the mind of Israel revolved those wonderful utter- ances, which, on the ear of even those who only half understand them, and who do not at all believe them, strike with such strange, incomparable power, the promises of prophecy. For four hundred years, through defeat and humiliation, the Hebrew race ABERGLAUBE INVADING. 95 pondered those magnificent assurances that '" the Eternal's arm is not shortened," that " righteousness shall be forever," and that the future would prove this, even if the present did not. " The Eternal fainteth not, neither is weary; he giveth power to the faint. They that wait on the Eternal shall renew their strength ; the redeemed of the Eternal shall re- turn and come with singing to Zion, and everlasting joy shall he upon their head; they shall repair the old wastes, the desolations of many generations ; and I, the Eternal, will make an everlasting covenant with them. The Eternal shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended; the Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising, and my righteousness shall be forever, and my salvation shall not be abolished ! " The prophets themselves, speaking when the ruin of their country was impending, or soon after it had happened, had had in prospect the actual restoration of Jerusalem, the submission of the nations around, and the empire of David and Solomon renewed. But as time went on, and Israel's return from captivity and resettlement of Jerusalem by no means answered his glowing anticipations from them, these anticipa- tions had more and more a construction put upon them which set at defiance the uriworthiness and in- felicities of the actual present, which filled up what prophecy left in outline, and which embraced the world. The Hebrew Amos, of the eighth century before Christ, promises to his hearers a recovery from their ruin in which they " shall possess the remnant 96 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. of Edom ; " the Greek or Aramaic Amos of the Chris- tian era, whose words St. James produces in the Con- ference at Jerusalem, promises a recovery for Israel in which " the residue of men shall seek the Eternal." This is but a specimen of what went forward on a large scale. The redeemer, whom the unknown prophet of the captivity foretold to Zion, has, a few hundred years later, for the writer whom we call Daniel and for his contemporaries, become the mirac- ulous agent of Israel's new restoration, the heaven- sent executor of the Eternal's judgment, and the bringer-in of the kingdom of righteousness ; the Mes- siah, in short, of our popular religion. " One like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of Days, and there was given him dominion and glory, and a kingdom, that all peo- ple, nations, and languages should serve him ; and the kingdom and dominion shall be given to the peo- ple of the saints of the Most High." An impartial criticism will hardly find in the Old Testament writers before the times of the Maccabees (and cer- tainly not in the passages usually quoted to prove it) the doctrine of the immortality of the soul or of the resurrection of the dead. But by the time of the Maccabees, when this passage of the Book of Daniel was written, in the second century before Christ, the Jews have undoubtedly become familiar, not indeed with the idea of the immortality of the soul as philos- ophers like Plato conceived it, but with the notion of a resurrection of the dead to take their trial for no- ABERGLAUBE INVADING. 97 ceptance or rejection in the Messiah's judgment and kingdom. To this has swelled Israel's original and fruitful thesis : " Righteousness tendeth to life ! as the whirl- wind passeth, so is the wicked no more, but the right- eous is an everlasting foundation ! " The phantas- magories of move prodigal and wild imaginations have mingled with the work of Israel's austere spirit ; Babylon, Persia, Egypt, even Greece, have left their trace there; but the unchangeable substructure re- mains, and on that substructure is everything built which comes after. In one sense the lofty Messianic ideas of " the day of the Eternal's coming," " the consolation of Is- rael," " the restitution of all things," are even more important than the solid but humbler idea, Right- eousness tendeth to life ! out of which they arose ; in another sense they are much less important. They are more important, because they are the develop- ment of this idea and prove its strength. It might have been crushed and baffled by the falsification events seemed to delight in giving it ; that instead of being crushed and baffled, it took this magnificent flight, shows its innate power. And they also in a wonderful manner attract emotion to the ideas of conduct and morality, attract it to them and combine it with them. On the other hand, the idea that righteousness tendeth to life has a firm, experimental ground, which the Messianic ideas have not. And the day comes when the possession of such a ground is invaluable. 7 98 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. That the spirit of man should entertain hopes and anticipations beyond what it actually knows and can verify, is quite natural. Human life could not have the scope, and depth, and progress it has, were this otherwise. It is natural, too, to make these hopes and anticipations give in their turn support to the simple and humble experience which was their orig- inal ground. Israel, therefore, who originally fol- lowed righteousness because he felt that it tended to life, might naturally come at last to follow it because it would enable him to stand before the Son of Man at his coming, and to share in the triumph of the saints. But this later belief has not the same character as the belief which it is thus set to confirm. It is a kind of fairy-tale, which a man tells himself, which no one, we grant, can prove impossible to turn out true, but which no one, also, can prove certain to turn out true. It is exactly what is expressed by the German word " Aberglaube," extra-belief . belief be- yond what is certain and verifiable. Our word " superstition " had by its derivation this same menu- ing, but it has come to be used in a merely bad sense, and to mean a childish and craven religiosity. With the German word it is not so; therefore Goethe can say with propriety and truth: ''Aberglaube is tin- poetry of life, der Aberglaube /.s7 die Poesie dcs Lebens." It is so; extra-belief, that which we hope, augur, imagine, is the poetry of life, and has tin- rights of poetry. lint it is not science; and yet it tends always to imagine itself science, to substitute ABERGLAUBE INVADING. 99 itself for science, to make itself the ground of the very science out of which it has grown. The Mes- sianic ideas, which were the poetry of life to Israel in the age when Christ came, did this; and it is the more important to mark that they did it, because similar ideas have so signally done the same thing in popular Christianity. CHAPTER HI. RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. JESUS CHRIST was undoubtedly the very last sort of Messiah whom the Jews expected. Christian theologians say confidently that the characters of hu- mility, obscureness, and depression were commonly attributed to the Jewish Messiah; and even Bishop Butler, in general the most severely exact of writers, gives countenance to this error. What is true is, that we find these characters attributed to some one by the prophets; that we attribute them to Christ; that Christ is for us the Messiah, and that Christ they suit. But for the prophets themselves, and for the Jews who heard and read them, these characters of lowliness and depression belonged to God's chastened servant, the idealized Israel. When Israel had been purged and renewed by these, the Messiah was to appear ; but with glory and power for his attributes, not humility and weakness. It is impossible to re- sist acknowledging this, if we read the Bible to find from it what those who wrote it really intended to think and say, and not to put in it what we wish them to have thought and said. To find in Jesus the genuine Jewish Messiah, tlir Mi-siah nf Daniel, one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven 100 RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. 101 and having universal dominion given him, must cer- tainly, to a Jew, have been extremely difficult. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly in the Old Tes- tament the germ of Christianity. In developing this germ lay the future of righteousness itself, of Israel's primary and immortal concern ; and the incompara' ble greatness of the religion founded by Christ cornea from his having developed it. He is not the Mes- siah to whom the hopes of his nation pointed ; and yet Christendom with perfect justice has made him the Messiah, because he alone took, when his nation was on another and a false tack, a way obscurely indi* cated in the Old Testament, and the one possible and successful way, for the accomplishment of the Mes- siah's function : " to bring in everlasting righteous- ness." Let us see how this was. Religion in the Old Testament is a matter of na- tional and social conduct mainly. First, it consists in devotion to Israel's God, the Eternal who loveth righteousness, and of separation from other nations whose concern for righteousness was less fervent, of abhorrence of their idolatries, which were sure to bewilder and diminish this fervent concern. Sec- ondly, it consists in doing justice, hating all wrong, robbery, and oppression, abstaining from insolence, lying, and slandering. The Jews' polity, their the- ocracy, was of such immense importance, because re- ligion, when conceived as having its existence in these national and social duties mainly, requires a polity to put itself forth in ; and the Jews' polity was adapted to such a religion. But this religion, as it 102 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. f Isniel could be RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. H3 restored and culminate. For the true greatness of Israel was righteousness; and only by an inward personal religion could the sense revive of what right- eousness really was, revive in Israel and bear fruit for the world. Instead, then, of " the Root of David who should set up an ensign for the nations and assemble the out- casts of Israel," Christ took from prophecy and made pre-eminent " the Servant whom man despiseth and the people abhorreth," but " who bringeth good tid- ings, who publisheth peace, publisheth salvation." And instead of saying like the prophets, " This peo- ple must mend, this nation must do so and so, Israel must follow such and such ways," Christ took the in- dividual Israelite by himself apart, made him listen for the voice of his conscience, and said to him in ef- fect, " If every one would mend one, we should have a new world." So vital for the Jews was this change of character in their religion, that the Old Testament abounds, as we have said, in points and approxima- tions to it ; and most truly might Christ say to his fol- lowers, that many prophets and kings had desired, though unavailingly, to see the things which his dis- ciples saw and heard. The desire felt by pious Israelites for some new as- pect of religion such as Christ presented, is, undoubt- edly, the best proof of its timeliness and salutari- ness. Perhaps New Testament witnesses to the workings of this desire may be received with sus- picion, as having arisen after the event and when the new ideal of Christ had become established. Other- 8 114 LITERATURE AND DOQMA. wise, John the Baptist's characterization of the Mes- siah as " the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin? of the world," and the bold Messianic turn given in the twelfth chapter of St. Matthew to the prophecy there quoted from the forty-second chapter of Isaiah., would be evidence of the highest importance. " A bruised reed breaketh ho not," says Tsaiah of the meek servant and messenger of God, " and a glimmer- ing wick quencheth he not; ho declareth judgment with truth; far lands wait for his doctrine." " A bruised reed shall he not break," runs the passage in St. Matthew, " and smoking flax shall he not quench. until he send forth judgment unto victory; hi his name shall the Gentiles trust." The words, "until he send forth judgment unto victory," words giving a clear Messianic stamp to the personage described, are neither in the original Hebrew nor in the Greek of the Septuagint; where did the Gospel-writer find them? If, as is possible, they were in some version of Isaiah then extant, they prove in a striking Avay the existence and strength of the aspiration which Christ satisfied by transforming the old popular ideal of the Messiah. But there is in any case proof of the existence of such an aspiration, since a Jewish commentator, contemporary, probably, with the Christian era but not himself a Christian, assigns to the prophecy a Messianic intention. And, indeed, the rendering of the final words, " in his name shall the Gentiles trust," which in in the Greek of the Sep tuagint as well as in that of St. Matthew, shows, per- RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. 115 haps, a similar leaning in the Jews of Alexandria some two centuries before Christ. Signs there are, then, without doubt, of others try- ing to identify the Messiah of popular hope the triumphant Root of David, the mystic Son of Man with an ideal of meekness, inwardness, patience, and self-denial ; and well might reformers try to effect this identification, for the true line of Israel's prog- ress lay through it ! But not he who tries makes an epoch, but he who effects; and the identification which was needed Jesus effected. Henceforth the true Israelite was, undoubtedly, he who allied him- self with this identification ; who perceived its incom- parable fruitfulness, its continuance of the real tradi- tion of Israel, its correspondence with the ruling idea of the Hebrew spirit: "Through righteousness to happiness ! " or, in Bible words, " To him that or- dereth his conversation right shall be shown the sal- vation of God." That the Jewish nation at large, and its rulers, refused to accept the identification, shows simply that want of power to penetrate through wraps and appearances to the essence of things, which the majority of mankind always display. The na- tional and social character of their theocracy was everything to the Jews, and they could see no bless- ings in a revolution which annulled it. It has often been remarked, that the Puritans are like the Jews of the Old Testament ; and Mr. Froude thinks he defends the Puritans by saying that they, like the Jews of the Old Testament, had their hearts set on a theocracy, on a fashioning of politics and LITERATURE AND DOGMA. society to suit the government of God. How strange that he does not perceive that he thus passes, and with justice, the gravest condemnation on the Puritans as followers of Christ! At the Christian era the time had passed, in religion, for outward constructions of this kind, and for all care about establishing or abol- ishing them. The time had come for inwardness and self-reconstruction, a time to last till the self-re- construction is fully achieved. It was the error of the Jews that they did not perceive this ; and the error of the Jews the Puritans, without the Jews' excuse, faithfully repeated. And the blunder of both had the same cause, a want of tact to perceive what is really most wanted for the attainment of their own professed ideal, the reign of righteousness. When Jesus appeared, his disciples were those who did not make this blunder. They were, in general, simple souls, without pretensions which Christ's nc\v religious ideal cut short, or self-consequence which it mortified; and any Israelite who was, on the one hand, not warped by personal pretensions and self- consequence, and on the other, not dull of feeling and gross of life like the common multitude, might well be open to the spell which, after all, was the great confirmation of Christ's religion, as it was tho groat confirmation of the original religion of Israel, the spell of its happiness. " Be glad, O yo righteous. and rejoice in the Eternal," the old and lost preroiM tive of Israel, Christianity offered to make again a living and true word to him. RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. H7 4. For we have already remarked, how it is the great achievement of the Israel of the Old Testament, hap- piness being mankind's confessed end and aim, to have more than any one else felt, and more than any one else succeeded in making others feel, that " to righteousness belongs happiness." Now, it will be denied by no one that Christ, in his turn, was emi- nently characterized by professing to bring, and by being felt to bring, happiness. All the words that be- long to his mission gospel, kingdom of God, saviour, grace, peace, living water, bread of life are brimful of promise and of joy. " I am come," he said, " that ye might have life, and that ye might have it more abundantly ; " " Come to me, and ye shall find rest unto your souls; " " I speak, that my disciples may have my joy fulfilled in themselves." That the operation, professed and actual, of this " son of peace " was to replace his followers in " the way of peace," no one can question ; the only matter of dis- pute can be how he replaced them there. Now, that we may see this more clearly, let us re- turn for a moment to what we said of conduct, of conduct, which we found to be three fourths, at least, of human life, and the object with which religion is concerned. We said of conduct, that it is the sim- plest thing in the world as far as knowledge is con- cerned, but the hardest thing in the world as far as doing is concerned. We added that going right, suc- ceeding, in the management of this vast concern, gave 118 LiiKRATUKE AND DOGMA. naturally the liveliest possible sense of satisfaction and happiness ; that attending to it was naturally the secret of success, that attachment makes us attend, and that whatever, therefore, made us love to attend to it must inspire us with gratitude. We found the central point of the religion of the Old Testament in Israel's keen perception of a power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness and disposes us to at- tain to it, and in his energy of grateful self-surrender to this power. Let us take, to guide ourselves in the New Testament, the help of the clew furnished by all this. First, as to the extreme simplicity of the matter concerned ; a matter sophisticated, overlaid, and hid- den in a thousand ways. The artless, unschooled per- ception of a child is, Christ says, the right organ for apprehending it : " Whosoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, cannot enter there- in." And yet it is so difficult of attainment that it seems we cannot attain it of ourselves : " No man can come to me unless it be given him of the Father." The things to be done are so simple and necessary that the doctrine about them proves itself as soon as we do them : " Whoever will do God's will, shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God." Only it is indispen- sable to do them ; speculating and professing arc abso- lutely useless, here, without doing: " Why call ye me. Lord, Lord, and do not the things that I say?" The great and learned people, the masters in Israel, have their authoritative version of what righteous- ness and the will of God is, of what the ideal for the RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. H9 Jewish nation is, of the correct way to interpret the prophets. But: "Judge not according to the ap- pearance, but judge righteous judgment; " " beware of insincerity; " " God sees the heart; what comes from within, that defiles us." The new covenant, the New Testament, consists in the rule of this very inwardness, in a state of things when God " puts his law in the inward parts and writes it in the heart," in conscience being made the test. You can see, Jesus says, you can see the leading religionists of the Jewish nation, with the current notions about righteousness, God's will, and the meaning of prophecy, you can see them saying and not doing, full of fierce temper, pride, and sensuality; this shows they can be but blind guides for you. The saviour of Israel is he who makes Israel use his conscience simply and sincerely, who makes him change and sweeten his temper, conquer and annul his sensuality. The prophets all point to such a saviour, and he is the Messiah, and the promised happiness to Israel is in him and in his reign. He is, in the exalted lan- guage of prophecy, the holy one of God, the son of God, the beloved of God, the anointed of God, the son of man in an eminent and unique sense, the Messiah and Christ ; in plainer language, he is " a man who tells you the truth which he has heard of God ; " who came not of himself and speaks not of himself, but who " came forth from God," from the original God of Israel's worship, the God of righteousness, and of hapniness joined to righteousness, "and is come to you." Israel is perpetually talking of God and call- 120 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. ing him his Father, and " every one," says Christ, " who hears the Father comes to me, for I know Him, and know His will, and utter His word." God's will and word, in the Old Testament, was righteousness; in the New Testament, it is righteousness explained to have its essence in inwardness, mildness, and self- renouncement. This is, in substance, the word of Christ, which he who hears " shall never see death; " of which he who follows it " shall know by experience whether it be of God." But as the Israel of the Old Testament did not say or feel that he followed righteousness by his own power, or out of self-interest and self-love, but said and felt that he followed it in thankful self-surrender to " the Eternal who loveth righteousness," and that " the Eternal ordereth a good man's going, and ?'//,- etli his way acceptable to Himself," so, in the resto- ration effected by Jesus, the motive which is of force is not the moral motive that inwardness, mildness, and self-renouncement make for man's happiness, but a far stronger motive, full of ardent affection and gratitude, and which, though it really has its ground and confirmation in the fact that inwardness, mild- ness, and self-renouncement do make for man's hajv- pincss, yet keeps no consciousness of this as its ground. For it finds a far surer ground in personal devotion to Christ, who brought the doctrine to his disciples and made a passage for it into their hearts; in believing that Christ is come from God, followinir Christ, loving Christ. And, in the happiness which RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. 121 thus believing in him, following him, and loving him gives, it finds the mightiest of sanctions. 5. And thus was the great doctrine of the Old Testa- ment, " To righteousness belongs happiness ! " made a true and potent word again. Christ was the Mes- siah to restore the all things of Israel, righteous- ness, and happiness with righteousness ; to bring light and recovery after long days of darkness and ruin, and to make good the belief written on Israel's heart, " The righteous is an everlasting foundation ! " But we have seen how in the hopes of the nation and in the promises of prophecy this true and vital belief of Israel was mixed with a quantity of what we have called Aberglaube or extra-belief, adding all manner of shape and circumstance to the original thought. The kingdom of David and Solomon was to be re- stored on a grander scale, the enemies of Israel were to lick the dust, kings were to bring gifts ; there was to be the Son of Man coming in the clouds, judgment given to the saints of the Most High, and an eternal reign of the saints afterwards. Now, most of this has a poetical value, some of it has a moral value. All of it is, in truth, a testi- mony to the strength of Israel's idea of righteousness. For the order of its growth is, as we have seen, this, ce To righteousness belongs happiness! this sure rule is often broken in the state of things which now is; there must, therefore, be in store for us, in the future, 1-22 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. a state of things where it will hold good." But none of it has a scientific value, a certitude arising from proof and experience. And, indeed, it cannot have this, for it professes to be an anticipation of a state of things not yet actually experienced. But human nature is such, that the mind easily dwells on an anticipation of this kind until wo oomo to forget the order in which it arose, place it first when it is by rights second, and make it support that by which it is in truth supported. And so there came to be many Israelites most likely they were the great majority of their nation who supposed that righteousness was to be followed, not out of thankful self -surrender to " the Eternal who loveth righteousness," but because the Ancient of Days was coming before long, and judgment was to be given to the saints and they were to possess the kingdom, and from the kingdom those who did not follow right- eousness would be excluded. From this way of con- ceiving religion came naturally the religious condi- tion of the Jews as Christ at his coming found it; and from which, by his new and living way of pre- senting the Messiah, he sought to extricate the whole nation, and did extricate his disciples. Ho did ex- tricate these, in that he fixed their thoughts upon him- self and upon an ideal of inwardness, mildness, and self -renouncement, instead of a phantasmagory of outward grandeur and self-assertion. But at the same time the whole train of extra-belief, or Abcr- glaube, which had attached itself to Israel's old creed, " The righteous is an everlasting foundation! " trans- RELIGION NEW-GIVEN. 123 ferred itself to the new creed brought by Christ, " I am the door ! by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved ! " And there arose, accordingly, a new Aberglaube like the old. The mild, inward, self- renouncing, and sacrificed Servant of the Eternal, the new and better Messiah, was yet, before the pres- ent generation passed, to come on the clouds of heaven in power and glory, like the Messiah of Daniel, to gather by trumpet-call his elect from the four-winds, and to set his apostles on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel. The motive of Christianity, which was, in truth, that pure souls " knew the voice " of Jesus as sheep know the voice of their shep- herd, and felt after seeing and hearing him that his doctrine and ideal was what they wanted, that he was " indeed the saviour of the world," this simple mo- tive became a mixed motive, adding to its first con- tents a vast extra-belief of a phantasmagorical Advent of Christ, a resurrection and judgment, Christ's ad- herents glorified, his rejectors punished everlastingly. And when the generation for which this Advent was first fixed had passed away without it, Christians discovered by a process of criticism common enough in popular theology, but by which, as Bishop Butler says of a like kind of process, " anything may be made out of anything," they discovered that the Advent had never really been fixed for that first gen- eration, but that it was foretold, and certainly in store, for a later time. So the Aberglaube was per- petuated, placed out of reach of all practical test, and made stronger than ever, With the multitude 124 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. this Aberglaube or extra-belief inevitably came soon to surpass the original conviction in attractiveness and seeming certitude. The future and the miracu- lous engaged the chief attention of Christians; and, in accordance with this strain of thought, they more and more rested the proof of Christianity, not on its internal evidence, but on prediction and miracle. CHAPTER IV. THE PROOF FROM PROPHECY. " ABERGLAUBE is the poetry of life." That men should, by help of their imagination, take short cuts to what they ardently desire, whether the triumph of Israel or the triumph of Christianity, should tell themselves fairy-tales about it, should make these fairy-tales the basis for what is far more sure and solid than the fairy-tales, the desire itself, all this has in it, we repeat, nothing which is not natural, nothing blamable. ^ay, the region of our hopes and presentiments extends, as we have also said, far be- yond the region of what we can know with certainty. What we reach by hop% and presentiment may yet be true, and he would be a narrow reasoner who denied, for instance, all validity to the idea of immortality, because this idea rests on presentiment mainly, and does not admit of certain demonstration. In re- ligion, above all, extra-belief is in itself no matter, assuredly, for blame. The object of religion is con- duct; and if a man helps himself in his conduct by taking an object of hope and presentiment as if it were an object of certainty, he may even be said to gain thereby an advantage. And yet there is always a drawback to a man's ad- vantage in thus treating, in religion and conduct, 125 1^6 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. what is extra-belief, and not certain, as if it were matter of certainty, and in making it his ground of action ; he pays for it. The time comes when he discovers that it is not certain ; and then the whole certainty of religion seems discredited, and the basis of conduct gone. This danger attends the reliance on prediction and miracle as evidences of Christianity. They have been attacked as a part of the " cheat " or ''imposture" of religion and of Christianity. For us, religion is the solidest of realities, and Christian- ity the greatest and happiest stroke ever yet made for human perfection. Prediction and miracle were attributed to it as its supports, because of its gran- deur, and because of the awe and admiration which it inspired. Generations of men have helped them- selves to hold firmer to it, helped themselves in con- duct, by the aid of these supports. " Miracles prove," 'men have said and thought, " that the order of physical nature is not fate, nor a mere material constitution of things, but the subject of a free, om- ni]x)tent master. Prophecy fulfilled proves that neither fate nor man are masters of the world." And to take prophecy first. " The conditions," it is said, " which form the true conclusive standard of a prophetic inspiration are these: That the predic- tion be known to have been promulgated before the event ; that the event be such as could not have been foreseen, when it was predicted, by any effort of hu- man reason ; and that the event and the prediction correspond together in a clear accomplishment. * Davison's Discourses on Prophecy ; Discourse II. Part 2. THE PROOF FROM PROPHECY. 127 There are prophecies in Scripture answering to the standard of an absolute proof. Their publication, their fulfillment, their supernatural prescience, are all fully ascertained." On this sort of ground men came to rest the proof of Christianity. 2. Now, it may be said, indeed, that a prediction ful- filled, an exhibition of supernatural prescience, proves nothing for or against the truth and necessity of conduct and righteousness. But it must be al- lowed, notwithstanding, that while human nature is what it is, the mass of men are likely to listen more to a teacher of righteousness, if he accompanies his teaching by an exhibition of supernatural prescience. And what were called the " signal predictions " con- cerning the Christ of popular theology, as they stand in our Bibles, had and have undoubtedly a look of su- pernatural prescience. The employment of capital letters, and other aids, such as the constant use of the future tense, naturally and innocently adopted by in- terpreters who were profoundly convinced that Chris- tianity needed these express predictions and that they must be in the Bible, enhanced, certainly, this look; but the look, even without these aids, was sufficiently striking. That Jacob on his death-bed should, two thousand years before Christ, have " been enabled," as the phrase is, to foretell to his son Judah that " the scep- tre shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh (or the * Davison's Discourses on Prophecy ; Discourses IX, and XII 128 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Messiah) come, and to him shall the gathering of the people be," does seem, when the explanation is put with it that the Jewish kingdom lasted till the Chris- tian era and then perished, a miracle of prediction in favor of our current Christian theology. That Jeremiah should have " been enabled " to foretell, in the name of Jehovah : " The days come when I will raise to David a righteous Branch ; in his days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is the name whereby he shall be called, The Lord Our Righteousness ! " does seem a wonder of prediction in favor of that tenet of the Godhead of the Eternal Son, for which the Bishops of Winchester and Glou- cester are so anxious to do something. For unques- tionably Jehovah is often spoken of as the saviour of Judah and Israel: "All flesh shall know that I the Eternal am thy saviour arid thy redeemer, the mighty one of Jacob ; " and in the prophecy given above as Jeremiah's, the Branch of David is dearly identified with Jehovah. Again, that David should say, " The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou on my right hand until I make thy foes thy footstool," does seem a prodigy of prediction to the same effect. That he should say, " Kiss the Son, lest he be angry and so ye perish," does seem a supernatural ly prescient as- sertion of the Eternal Sonship. And so long as these prophecies stand as they are here given, they no doubt bring to Christianity all the support (and with the mass of mankind this is by no means inconsiderable') which it can derive from the display of supernatural pro.science. THE PROOF FROM PROPHECY. 129 But who will dispute that it more and more be- comes known that these prophecies cannot stand as we have here given them ? Manifestly, it more and more becomes known, that the passage from Genesis, with its mysterious Shiloh and the gathering of the people to him, is rightly to be rendered as follows: f the enduring continuance of the greatness of Judah. " The Lord said unto my Lord," in like manner will not people be startled when they find that it ought to run instead : "' The Eternal said unto 11 iv lord the king," a simple promise of victory to a prince of God's chosen people? and that, " Kiss the Son," is in reality, " Be warned," or, " be in- structed ; " " lay hold," according to the Septuagint, " on instruction ? " 3. Leslie, in his once famous " Short and i Method with the Deists," speaks of the impugners of the current evidences of Christianity as men who consider the Scripture histories and the Christian religion " cheats and impositions of cunning and de- signing men upon the credulity of simple people/' Collins, and the whole array of writers at whom Les- lie aims this, greatly need to be re-surveyed from the point of view of our own age. Xevertheless, we may grant that some of them, at any rate, conduct their attacks on the current evidences for Christianity in such a manner as to give the notion that in their opin- THE PROOF FROM PROPHECY. 131 ion Christianity itself, and religion, is a cheat and an imposture. But how far more prone will the mass of mankind be to hearken to this opinion, if they have been kept intent on predictions such as those of which we have given specimens ; if they have been kept full of the great importance of this nar- row line of mechanical evidence, and then suddenly find that this line of evidence gives way at all points ? It can hardly be gainsaid, that, to a delicate and pen- etrating criticism, it has long been manifest that the chief literal fulfilment by Christ of things said by the prophets was the fulfilment such as w r ould naturally be given by one who nourished his spirit on the prophets and on living and acting their words. The great prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah are, critics can now see, not strictly predictions at all; and pre- dictions which are strictly meant as such, like those in the Book of Daniel, are an embarrassment to the Bible rather than a main element of it. The " Zeit- Geist," and the mere spread of what is called en- lightenment, superficial and barren as this often is, will inevitably, before long, make this conviction of criticism a popular opinion held far and wide. And then, what will be their case, who have been so long and sedulously taught to rely on supernatural predic- tions as a mainstay ( The same must be said of miracles. The substitu- tion of some other proof of Christianity for this ac- customed proof is now to be desired most by those who most think Christianity of importance. That old friend of ours on whom we have formerly com- 132 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. mented,* who insists upon it that Christianity is and shall be nothing else but this, " that Christ promised Paradise to the saint and threatened the worldly man with hell-fire, and proved his power to promise and threaten by rising from the dead and ascending into heaven," is certainly not the guide whom lovers of Christianity, if they could discern what it is that he really expects and aims at, and what it is which tin y themselves really desire, would think it wise to fol- low. But the subject of miracles is a very great one ; it includes within itself, indeed, the whole question about " supernatural prescience," which meets us when we deal with prophecy. And this great sub- ject requires, in order that we may deal with it prop erly, some little recapitulation of our original design in this essay, and of the circumstances in which flu- cause of religion and of the Bible seems to be at this moment placed. * St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 157. CHAPTER V. THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. WE have seen that some new treatment or otner the religion of the Bible certainly seems to require, for it is attacked on all sides, and the theologians are not so successful as one might wish in defending it. One critic says, that if these islands had no religion at all, it would not enter into his mind to introduce the religious and ethical idea by the agency of the Bible ; another, that though certain commonplaces are common to all systems of mortality, yet the Bible way of enunciating these commonplaces no longer suits us. And we may rest assured, he adds, that by saying what we think in some other, more congenial, language, we shall really be taking the shortest road to discovering the new doctrines which will satisfy at once our reason and our imagination. Another critic goes farther still, and calls Bible religion not only destitute of a modern and congenial way of stat- ing its commonplacea of morality, but a defacer and disfigurer of moral treasures which were once in bet- ter keeping. The more one studies, the more, says he, one is convinced, that the religion which calls it- self revealed contains, in the way of what is good, nothing which is not the incoherent and ill-digested 133 104 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. residue of the wisdom of the ancients. To the same effect the Duke of Somerset, who has been afford- ing lately proof to the world that our aristocratic class are not, as has been said, inaccessible to ideas and merely polite, but that they are familiar, on the con- trary, with modern criticism of the most advanced kind, the Duke of Somerset finds very much to be dissatisfied with in tho Bible and its teaching; al- though the soul, he says, has (outside the Bible, ap- parently) one unassailable fortress to which she may retire, faith in God. All this seems to threaten to push Bible religion from the place it has long held in our affections. And even what the most modern criticism of all some- times does, to save it and set it up again, can hardly be called very flattering to it. For whereas the He- brew race imagined that to them were committed the oracles of God, and that their God, " the Eternal who loveth righteousness," was the God to whom every knee should bow and every tongue swear, there now comes Monsieur Emile Burnouf, the accomplished son of a gifted father, and will prove to us in a thick volume* that the oracles of God were not committed to a Semitic race at all, but to the Aryan ; that the true God is not Israel's God at all, but is " the idea of the absolute " which Israel could never properly master. This " sacred theory of the Aryas," it seems, passed into Palestine from Persia and India, and got possession of the founder of Christianity and of his greatest :ip<>stles, St. Paul and St. John; be- * La Science des Religions. Paris, 1872. THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 135 coming more perfect, and returning more and more to its true character of a " transcendent metaphysic," as the doctors of the Christian Church developed it. So that we Christians, who are Aryas, may have the satisfaction of thinking that " the religion of Christ has not come to us from the Semites," and that " it is in the hymns of the Veda and not in the Bible that we are to look for the primordial source of our re- ligion." The theory of Christ is accordingly the theory of the Vedic Agni, or fire; the Incarnation represents the Vedic solemnity of the production of fire, symbol of force of every kind, of all movement, life, and thought; the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit is the Vedic Trinity of Sun, Fire, and Wind ; and God, finally, is " a cosmic unity." Such speculations almost take away the breath of a mere man of letters. What one is inclined to say of them is this: Undoubtedly these exploits of the Aryan genius are gratifying to us members of the Aryan race. The God of the Hebrews, M. Burnouf says expressly, " was not a cosmic unity ; " the re- ligion of the Hebrews " had not that transcendent metaphysic which the genius of the Aryas requires ; " and, " in passing from the Aryan race to the inferior races, religion underwent a deterioration due to the physical and moral constitution of these races." For religion, it must be remembered, is, in M. Burnouf's view, fundamentally a science ; " a metaphysical con- ception, a theory, a synthetic explanation of the uni- verse." Xow " the perfect Arya is capable of a great deal of science; the Semite is inferior to him." 136 LITERATURE AND DOGMA As Arjas or Aryans, then, we ought to be pleased at having vindicated the greatness of our race, and hav- ing not borrowed a Semitic religion, but transformed it by importing our own metaphysics into it. And this seems to harmonize very well with what the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester say about " doing something for the honor of Our Lord's God- head," and about " the infinite separation for time and for eternity which is involved in rejecting the Godhead of the Eternal Son, Very God of Very God, Light of Light ; " and also with the Athanasian Creed generally, and with what the clergy write to tho "Guardian" about "eternal life being unquestion- ably annexed to a right knowledge of the Godhead." For all these have in view high science and meta- physics, worthy of the Aryas. But to Bible religion, in the plain sense of the word, it is not flattering; for it throws overboard almost entirely the Old Testa- ment, and makes the essence of the Xew to consist in an esoteric doctrine not very visible there, but more fully developed outside of it. The metaphysical ele- ment is made the fundamental element in religion : but " the Bible books, especially the more ancient of them, are destitute of metaphysics, and consequently of method and classification in their ideas." I-rael, therefore, instead of being a light of the Gentiles and a salvation to the ends of the earth, falls to a place in the world's religious history behind the Arya. I If is dismissed as ranking anthropologically between the Aryas and the yellow men; as having frizzled hair, thick lips, small calves, flat feet, and belonging, above THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 137 all, to those " occipital races " whose brain cannot grow after the age of sixteen ; whereas the brain of a theological Arya, such as one of our bishops, may go on growing all his life. But we who think that the Old Testament leads surely up to the Xe\v, who believe that, indeed, " sal- vation is of the Jews," and that, for what concerns conduct or righteousness (that is, for what concerns three fourths of human life), they and their docu- ments can no more be neglected by whoever would make proficiency in it, than Greece can be neglected by any one who would make proficiency in art, or NVwton's discoveries by whoever would comprehend the world's physical laws, we are naturally not sat- isfied with this treatment of Israel and the Bible. And admitting that Israel shows no talent for meta- physics, we say that his religious greatness is just this, that he does not found religion on metaphysics, but on moral experience, which is a much simpler matter ; and that, ever since the apparition of Israel and the Bible, religion is no longer what, according to M. Burnouf, to our Aryan forefathers in the valley of the Oxus it was, and what perhaps it really was to tli cm, a metaphysical theory, but is what Israel has made it. And what Israel made, and how he made it, we seek to show from the Bible itself. Thus we hope to win for the Bible and its religion, which seem to us so indispensable to the world, an access to many of those who now neglect them. For there is this to be said against M. Burnouf 's metaphysics : no one 138 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. can allege that the Bible has failed to win access for want of metaphysics being applied to it. Meta- physics are just what all our theology runs up into, and our bishops, as we have seen, are here particu- larly strong. But we have seen that the making re- ligion into metaphysics is the weakening of religion ; now M. Burnouf makes religion into metaphysics more than ever. Yet evidently the metaphysical method lacks power for laying hold on people, and compelling them to receive the Bible from it; it is felt to be inconclusive as thus employed, and its in- conclusiveness tells against the Bible. This is the case with the metaphysics of our bishops, and it will be the same with M. Burnouf's new metaphysics also. They will be found, we fear, to have an inconclusive- ness in their recommendation of Christianity. To very many persons, indeed to the great majority, such a method, in such a matter, must be inconclusive. 2. Therefore we would not allow ourselves to start with any metaphysical conception at all, not with the monotheistic idea, as it is styled, any more than with the pantheistic idea ; and, indeed, we are quite sure that Israel himself began with nothing of the, kind. The idea of God, as it is given us in the Bible, rests, we say, not on a metaphysical concep- tion of the necessity of certain deductions from our ideas of cause, existence, identity, and the like; but on a inoml perception of a rule of conduct not of our THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 139 own making, into which we are born, and which ex- ists whether we will or no; of awe at its grandeur and necessity, and of gratitude at its beneficence. This is the great original revelation made to Israel, this is his " Eternal." Man, however, as Goethe says, " never knows how anthropomorphic he is." Israel described his Eter- nal in the language of poetry and emotion, and could not thus describe him but with the character of a man. Scientifically he never attempted to describe him at all. But still the Eternal was ever at last reducible, for Israel, to the reality of experience out of which the revelation sprang ; he was " the righteous Eternal who loveth righteousness." They who " seek the Eternal," and they who " follow after righteousness," were identical ; just as, conversely, they who " fear the Eternal," and they who " depart from evil," were identical. Above all : " He that feareth the Eternal happy is he ; " " it is joy to the just to do judg- ment; " " righteousness tendeth to life; " " the right- eous is an everlasting foundation." But, as time went on, facts seemed, we saw, to con- tradict this fundamental belief, to refute this faith in the Eternal ; material forces prevailed, and God appeared, as they say, to be on the side of the big battalions. The great unrighteous kingdoms of the world, kingdoms which cared far less than Israel for righteousness, and for the Eternal who makes for righteousness, overpowered Israel. Prophecy as- sured him that the triumph of the Eternal's cause and people was certain: "Behold, the Eternal's hand is 140 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. not shortened that it cannot save." The triumph was but adjourned through Israel's own sins: " Your iniquities have separated between you and your God." Prophecy directed his thoughts to the future, and promised to him a new everlasting kingdom under a heaven-sent leader. The characters of this kingdom and leader were more spiritualized by one prophet, more materialized by another. As time went on, in the last centuries before our era, they became iucrea-- ingly turbid and phantasmagorical. In addition t<> his original experimental belief in the almighty Eter- nal who makes for righteousness, Israel had now a vast Aberglaube , an after or extra-belief, not exj>eri- mental, in an approaching kingdom of the saints, to be established by an Anointed, a Messiah, " <>ne like the Son of Man," commissioned from the Ancient of Days and coming in the clouds of heaven. Jesus came, calling himself the Messiah, tin > of Man, the Son of God; and the question is. What is the true meaning of these assertions of his, and of all his teaching? It is the same question \\e had about the Old Testament. Is the language scientific, or, as we say, literary; that is, the language of poetry and emotion, approximative language, thrown mil. as it were, at certain great objects which the human mind augurs and feels after, but not language ac- curately defining them? Popular religion say-, we know, that the language is scientific: that the God of the Old Testament is a great Personal First Cause, who thinks and loves (for this too. it seem-. \ve ought to have added), the moral and intelligent THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. of the universe. Learned religion, the metaphysical theology of our bishops, proves or confirms this by abstruse reasoning of our ideas from cause, design, existence, identity, and so on. Popular religion rests it altogether on miracles. The God of Israel, for popular religion, is a mag- nified and non-natural man who has really worked stupendous miracles, where.as the Gods of the heathen were vainly imagined to be able to work them, but could not, and had therefore no real existence. Of this God, Jesus for popular religion is the Son. He came to appease God's wrath against sinful men by the sacrifice of himself; and he proved his Sonship by a course of stupendous miracles, and by. the won- derful accomplishment in him of the supernatural Messianic predictions of prophecy. Here, again, learned religion elucidates and develops the relation of the Son to the Father by a copious exhibition of metaphysics; but for popular religion the relation- ship, and the authority of Jesus which derives from it, is altogether established by miracle. Now, we have seen that our bishops and their met- aphysics are so little convincing, that many people throw the Bible quite aside, and will not attend to it, because they are given to understand that the meta- physics go necessarily along with it, and that one can- not be taken without the other. So far, then, the tal- ents of the Bishops of Winchester and Gloucester, and their zeal to do something for the honor of the Eternal Son's Godhead, may be said to be actual obstacles to the receiving and studying of the Bible. But the LITERATURE AND DOGMA. same may now be also said of the popular theology which rests the Bible's authority and the Christian re- ligion on miracle. To a great many persons this is tantamount to stopping their use of the Bible and of the Christian religion ; for they have made up their minds that what is popularly called miracle never really happens nor can happen, and that the belief in it arises out of ignorance, fraud, or mistake. To these persons we restore the use of the Bible, if, while showing them that the Bible language is not scientific, but the language of common speech or of poetry and eloquence, approximative language thrown out at cer- tain great objects of consciousness which it does not pretend to define fully, we convince them at the same time that this language deals with facts of ex- perience most momentous and real. We have sought to do this for the language of the Old Testament first, and we now seek to do it for that of the New. Our attempt, therefore, has in view those who now throw the Bible aside, not those who receive it on the^round supplied either by popu- lar theology or by metaphysical theology. For per- sons of this kind, what we say neither will have, nor seeks to have, any constraining force at all; only it is rendered necessary by the want of constraining force, for other- than themselves, in their own tin - ology. 1I< >w little constraining force metaphysical dogma has, we all see. And we have shown, too, how the proof from the fulfilment in Christ of a num- ber of definite, detailed predictions, supposed to have been made with supernatural prescience about him THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 143 long beforehand, is losing, and seems likely more and more to lose, its constraining force. It is found that the predictions and their fulfilment are not what they are said to be. Xow we come to miracles, more specially so called ; and we have to see whether the constraining force of this proof, too, must not be admitted to be far less than it used to be, and whether some other source of authority for the Bible is not much to be desired. 3. That miracles, when fully believed, are felt by men in general to be a source of authority, it is absurd to deny. One may say, indeed : Suppose I could change the pen with which I write this into a pen- wiper, I should not thus make what I write any the truer or more convincing. That may be so in reality, but the mass of mankind feel differently. In the judgment of the mass of mankind, could I visibly and undeniably change the pen with which I write this into a pen-wiper, not only would this which I write acquire a claim to be held perfectly true and convincing, but I should even be entitled to affirm, and to be believed in affirming, propositions the most palpably at war with common fact and experience. It is almost impossible to exaggerate the proneness of the human mind to take miracles as evidence, and to seek for miracles as evidence ; or the extent to which religion, and religion of a true and admirable kind, has been, and is still, held in connection with a re- 144 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. liance upon miracles. This reliance will long out- last the reliance on the supernatural prescience of prophecy, for it is not exposed to the same tests. To pick Scripture miracles one by one to pieces is an odious and repulsive task; it is also an unprofitable one, for whatever we may think of the affirmative demonstrations of them, a negative demonstration of them is, from the circumstances of the case, impossi- ble. And yet the human mind is assuredly passing away, however slowly, from this hold of reliance also ; and those who make it their stay will more and more find it fail them, will be more and more disturbed, shaken, distressed, and bewildered. For it is what we call the Time-Spirit that is sapping the proof from miracles, it is the " Zeit- Geist " itself. Whether we attack them, or whether wo defend them, does not much matter; the human mind, as its experience widens, is turning ;i\v;iy from them. And for this reason: it sees, as its experience widens, how r they arise. It sees that, under certain circumstances, they always do arise; and that they have not more solidity in one case than smother. Un- der certain circumstances, wherever men are found, there is, as Shakespeare says, " No natural exhalation in the sky. No scape of nature, no distemper'd clay, No common wind, no custotned event. But they will pluck away his natural cause, And call them meteors, prodigies, and signs, Abortives, presages, and tongues of heaven." Imposture is so far from being the general rule in these cases, that it is the rare exception. Signs and THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 145 wonders men's minds will have, and they create them honestly and naturally; yet not so but that we can see how they created them. Roman Catholics fancy that Bible miracles and the miracles of their Church form a class by themselves ; Protestants fancy that Bible miracles, alone, form a class by themselves. This was eminently the posture of mind of the late Archbishop Whately: to hold that all other miracles would turn out to be impos- tures, or capable of a natural explanation, but that Bible miracles would stand sifting by a London spe- cial jury or by a committee of scientific men. No acuteness can save such notions, as our knowledge widens, from being seen to be mere extravagances, and the Protestant notion is doomed to an earlier ruin than the Catholic. For the Catholic notion ad- mits miracles in the mass; the Protestant notion in- vites to a criticism by which it must finally itself perish. When Stephen was martyred, he looked up into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God. That, says the Protestant, is solid fact. At the martyrdom of St. Fructuosus, Babylas and Mygdone, the Christian ser- vants of the Roman governor, saw the heavens open, and the saint and his deacon Eulogius carried up on high with crowns on their heads. That is, says the Protestant, imposture or else illusion. St. Paul hears on his way to Damascus the voice of Jesus say to him : " Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me ? " That, again, is solid fact. The companion of St. Thomas Aquinas hears a voice from the crucifix say 10 146 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. to the praying saint : "Thou hast written well of me. Thomas; what recompense dost thou desire? " That, again, is imposture or else illusion. Why? It is impossible to find any criterion by which one of these incidents may establish its claim to a solidity which we refuse to the others. One of two things must be made out in order to place either the Bible miracles alone, or the "Bible miracles and the miracles of the Catholic Church with them, in a class by themselves. Either they must be shown to have arisen in a time eminently un- favorable to such a process as Shakespeare describes, to amplification and the production of legend; or they must be shown to be recorded in documents of an eminently historical mode of birth and publication. But surely it is manifest that the Bible miracles fulfil neither of these conditions. It was said that the waters of the Pamphylian Sea miraculously opened a passage for the army of Alexander the Great. Ad- miral Beaufort, however, tells us that, " though there are no tides in this part of the Mediterranean, a con- siderable depression of the sea is caused by loirr- continued north winds; and Alexander, taking ad- vantage of such a moment, may have dashed on with- out impediment;" * and we accept the explanation as a matter of course. But the waters of the Urd Sea are said to have miraculously opened a passair' for the children of Israel ; and we insist on the literal truth of this story, and reject natural explanations as monstrous. Yet the time and circumstances of the * Beaufort's Karamania, p. 116. THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 147 flight from Egypt were a thousand times more fa- vorable to the rise of some natural incident into a miracle, than the age of Alexander. They were a time and circumstances of less broad daylight. It \v;is said, again, that during the battle of Leuctra the gates of the Heraculeum at Thebes suddenly opened and the armor of Hercules vanished from the temple, to enable the god to take part with the The- bans in the battle. Probably there was some real circumstance, however slight, which gave a founda- tion for the story. But this is the most we think of saving in its favor; the literal story it never even occurs to one of us to believe. But that the walls of Jericho literally fell down at the sound of the trum- pets of Joshua, we are asked to believe, told that it is impious to disbelieve it. Yet which place and time were most likely to generate a miraculous story with ease, Hellas and the days of Epaminondas, or Pales- tine and the days of Joshua ? And of documentary records, which are the most historical in their way of being generated and propagated, which are the most favorable for the a'dmission of legend and miracle of all kinds, the Old Testament narratives with their incubation of centuries, and the New Testament nar- ratives with their incubation of a century (and tra- dition active all the while), or the narratives, say, of Herodotus or Plutarch ? None of them are what we call critical. Experi- ence of the history of the human mind, and of men's habits of seeing, sifting, and relating, convinces us that the miraculous stories of Herodotus or Plutarch 148 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. do grow out of the process described by Shakespeare. But we shall find ourselves inevitably led, sooner or later, to extend the same rule to all miraculous stories; nay, the considerations which apply in other cases apply, we shall most surely discover, with even greater force in the case of Bible miracles. This being so, there is nothing one would more de- sire for a person or document one greatly values, than to make them independent of miracles. And with regard to the Old Testament we have done tin's; for we have shown that the essential matter in the Old Testament is the revelation to Israel of the im- measurable grandeur, the eternal necessity, the price- less blessing of that with which not less than throe fourths of human life is indeed concerned, right- eousness. And it makes no difference to the precious- ness of this revelation, whether we believe that the Red Sea miraculously o])cned a passage to the Israel- ites, and the walls of Jericho miraculously fell down at the blast of Joshua's trumpet, or that these stories arose in the same way as other stories of the kind. In the Xew Testament the essential thing is the rev- elation of Christ. For this too, then, if one values it, one's great wish must in like manner be to make it independent of miracle; if miracle is a slay which one perceives, as more and more we are all coin ing to perceive it, to be not solid. Now, it may look at first sight a strange thing to THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 14-9 say, but it is a truth which we will make abundantly clear as we go on, that one of the very best helps to prepare a way for the revelation of Christ is to con- vince one's self of the liability to mistake in his re- porters. Our popular theology imagines that the Old Testament writers were miraculously inspired, and could make no mistakes ; that the New Testament writers were miraculously inspired, and could make no mistakes ; and that there this miraculous inspira- tion stopped, and all writers on religion have been liable to make mistakes ever since. It is as if a hand had been put out of the sky presenting us with the Bible, and the rules of criticism which apply to other books did not apply to the Bible. Now, the fatal thing for this fancy is, that its owners stab it to the heart the moment they use any palliation or explain- ing away, however small, of the literal words of the Bible ; and some they always use. For instance, it is said in the eighteenth Psalm, that a consuming fire went out of the mouth of God, so that coals were kindled at it. The veriest literalist will cry out : Every one knows that this is not to be taken literally ! The truth is, even he knows that this is not to be taken literally; but others know that a great deal more is not to be taken literally. He knows very little ; but, as far as his little knowledge goes, he gives up his theory, which is, of course, palpably hollow. For indeed it is only by applying to the Bible his criticism, such as it is, that any man makes out that criticism does not apply to the Bible. But suppose that the Bible itself put forth (which 150 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. it does not) this theory, and made its own value all depend on the truth of it, then the result would be, at the best, not firmer conviction, but utter puzzle and bewilderment. Contradictions would meet us, and we should have no means of escape from them. There would grow up an irresistible sense that the belief in miracles was due to man's want of experi- ence, to his ignorance, agitation, and helplessness; and yet we should have a book, which we felt to be precious, purporting to be put out of the sky, to be full of miracles, and to depend for all its value upon their being true. Then it is that the cry, imposture ! would more and more, in spite of all we could do, gather strength, and the book bo thrown aside more and more. But when we convince ourselves that, in the Xew Testament as in the Old, what is given us is words thrown out at an immense reality, not fully or half fully grasped by the writer, but, even thus, able to affect us with indescribable force; when we convince ourselves that, as in the Old Testament we have Israel's inadequate yet inexhaustibly fruitful testimony to " the Eternal thai makes for righteous- ness," so we have in the Xew Testament a report in- adequate, indeed, but the only report we have and therefore priceless, by men, some more able and clear, others less able and clear, but all full of the influ- ences of their time and condition, partakers of some of its simple or its learned ignorance, inevitably, in fine, expecting miracles and demanding them, a re- port, I say, by these men of that immense reality not fully or half fully grasped by them, the mind of THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 151 Christ; then we shall he drawn to the Gospels with a new zest and as by a fresh spell. We shall throw ourselves upon their narratives with an ardor answer- ing to the value of the pearl of great price they hold, and to the difficulty of reaching it. So, to profit fully by the New Testament, the first thing to be done is to make it perfectly clear to one's self that its reporters both could err and did err. For a plain person, an incident in the report of St. Paul's conversion which comes into our minds the more naturally as this incident has been turned against something w r e have ourselves said * would, one would think, be enough. We had spoken of the notion that St. Paul's miraculous vision at his con- version proved the truth of his doctrine. We related a vision which converted Sampson Staniforth, one of the early Methodists ; and we said that just so much proving force, and no more, as Sampson Staniforth's vision had to confirm the truth of anything he might afterwards teach, St. Paul's vision had to establish his subsequent doctrine. It was eagerly rejoined that Staniforth's vision was but a fancy of his own, whereas the reality of Paul's was proved by his com- panions hearing the voice that spoke to him. And so in one place of the Acts we are told they did ; but in another place of the Acts we are told by Paul him- self just the contrary: that his companions did not hoar the voice that spoke to him. Need we say that the two statements have been " reconciled ? " They have, over and over again ; but by one of those pro- * St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 54. 152 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. cesses which are the opprobrium of our Bible criti- cism, and by which, as Bishop Butler says, anything can be made to mean anything. There is between the two statements a contradiction as clear as can be. The contradiction proves nothing against the good faith of the reporter, and St. Paul undoubtedly had his vision; he had it as Sampson Staniforth had his. What the contradiction proves is, the incurable loose- ness with which the circumstances of what is called and thought a miracle are related ; and that this loose- ness the Bible relators of a miracle exhibit, just like other people. And the moral is, what an unsure stay, then, must miracles be ! But, after all, that there is here any contradiction or mistake, some do deny ; so let vis choose a case where the mistake is quite undeniably clear. Such a case we find in the confident expectation and asser- tion, on the part of the New Testament writers, of the approaching end of the world. Even this mis- take people try to explain away ; but it is so palpable that no words can cloud our perception of it. " The time is short." " The Lord is at hand." " The end of all things is at hand." " Little children, it is the final time." " The Lord's coming is at hand ; be- hold the judge standeth before the door." Nothing can really obscure the evidence furnished by such sayings as these. When Paul told the Thessaloniana that they and he, at the approaching coming f Christ, should have their turn after, not before, the * 1 Cor. vii. 20 ; Philipp. iv. 5 ; 1 Pet. iv. 7 ; 1 John ii. 18 ; James v. 8. 9. We have here the express declarations of St. Paul, St. Peter, St. John, and St. James. THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 153 faithful dead : " For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the arch- angel and with the trump of God, and the dead in Christ shall rise first, then we which are alive and re- main shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air," when he said this, St. Paul was simply mistaken in his notion of what was going to happen. This is as clear as any- thing can be. And not only were the ISTew Testament writers thus demonstrably liable to commit, like other men, mis- takes in fact; they were also demonstrably liable to commit mistakes in argument. As before, let us take a case which w r ill be manifest and palpable to every one. St. Paul, arguing to the Galatians that salvation was not by the Jewish law but by Jesus Christ, proves his point from the promise to Abra- ham having been made to him and his seed, not seeds. The words are not, he says, " to seeds, as of many, but as of one ; to thy seed, which is Christ." Xow, as to the point to be proved, we all agree with St. Paul ; but his argument is that of a Jewish Rabbi, and is clearly both fanciful and false. The writer in Genesis never intended to draw any distinction be- tween one of Abraham's seed, and Abraham's seed in (/cncral. And even if he had expressly meant, w r hat Paul says he did not mean, Abraham's seed in gen- eral, he would still have said seed, and not seeds. This is a good instance to take, because the Apostle's substantial doctrine is here not at all concerned. As to the root of the matter in question, we are all at one LITERATURE AND DOGMA. wirh St. Paul. But it is evident how he could, like the rest of us, bring a quite false argument in sup- port of a quite true thesis. And the use of prophecy by the writers of the Xew Testament furnishes really, almost at every turn in- stances of false argument of the same kind. Habit makes us so lend ourselves to their way of speaking, that nothing checks us ; but, the moment we begin to attend, we perceive how much there is that ought to check us. Take the famous allegation of the parted clothes but lot-assigned coat of Christ as fulfilment of the supposed prophecy in the Psalms : " They parted my garments among them, and for my vesture did they cast lots." The words of the Psalm are taken to mean contrast, when they do in truth moan identity. According to the rules of Hebrew poetry, "'for my vesture they did cast lots " is merely a repe- tition, in different words, of " they parted my gar- ments among them," not an antithesis to it. The al- leged " prophecy " is, therefore, due to a dealing with the Psalmist's words which is arbitrary and erro- neous. So, again, to call the words, " a bone of him shall not be broken," a prophecy of Christ, fulfilled by his legs not being broken on the cross, is evidently, the moment one considers it, a playing with words which nowadays we should account childish. For what do the words, taken as alone words can ration- ally be taken, along with their context, really proph- esy ? The entire safety of the righteous, not his death. " Many are the troubles of the righteous, but the Eternal delivereth him out of all ; he keepeth THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 155 all his bones, so that not one of them is broken." Worse words, therefore, conld hardly have been chosen from the Old Testament to apply in that con- nection where they come ; for they are really contra- dicted by the death of Christ, not fulfilled by it. It is true, this verbal and unintelligent use of Scripture is just what was to be expected from the circumstances of the Xew Testament writers. It was inevitable for them; it was the sort of trifling which then, in common with Jewish theology, passed for grave argument and made a serious impression, as it has in common Christian theology ever since. But this does not make it the less really trifling; or hinder one nowadays seeing it to be trifling, directly we examine it. The mistake made will strike some people more forcibly in one of the cases cited, some in another, but in one or another of the cases the mis- take will be visible to everybody. Xow, this recognition of the liability of the Xe\v Testament writers to make mistakes, both of fact and of argument, will certainly, as we have said, more and more gain strength, and spread wider and wider. The futility of their mode of demonstration from prophecy, of which we have just given examples, will be more and more felt. The fallibility of that dem- onstration from miracles to which they and all about them attached such preponderating weight, which made the disciples of Jesus believe in him, which made the people believe in him, will be more and more recognized. Reverence for all, who, in those first dubious davs 156 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. of Christianity, chose the better part, and resolutely cast in their lot with " the despised and rejected of men ! " Gratitude to all, who, while the tradition was yet fresh, helped by their writings to preserve and set clear the precious record of the words and life of Jesus ! And honor, eternal honor, to the great and profound qualities of soul and mind which some of these writers display! But the writers are ad- mirable for what they are, not for what, by the na- ture of things, they could not be. It was superiority enough in them to attach themselves firmly to Jesus ; to feel to the bottom of their hearts that power of his words which alone held permanently, held when the miracles, in which the multitude believed as well as they, failed to hold. The good faith of the Bible writers is above all question ; it speaks for itself ; and the very same criticism, which shows us the defects of their exegesis and of their demonstrations from miracles, establishes their good faith. But this could not, and did not, prevent them from arguing in the methods by which every one around them argued, and from expecting miracles where everybody else exj>ected them. In one respect alone have the miracles recorded by them a more real ground than the mas- of mira<-le- of which we have the relation. Medical science ha- never gauged never, perhaps, enough set it -elf t< gauge the intimate connection between moral fault and disease. To what extent, or in how many c; what is called illness is due to moral springs having Veen used amiss, whether by being over -u-ed ( .r by THE PROOF FROM Mil: A; U-:s. 157 not being used sufficiently, we hardly at all know, and we too little inquire. Certainly it is due to this very much more than we commonly think ; and the more it is due to this, the more do moral therapeutics rise in possibility and importance.* The bringer of light and happiness, the calmer and pacifier or in- vigorator and stimulator, is one of the chiefest of doctors. Such a doctor was Jesus ; such an operator, by an efficacious and real though little observed and little employed agency, upon what we, in the language of popular superstition, call the unclean spirits, but which arc to be designated more literally and more correctly as the uncleared, unpurified spirits, which came raging and madding before him. This his own language shows, if we know how to read it. " What does it matter whether I say, Thy sins are forgiven thee ! or whether I say, Arise and walk ? " And again: " Thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thcr." 1 1 is reporters, we must re- member, are men who saw thaumaturgy in all that Jesus did, and who saw in all sickness and disaster visitations from God, and they bend his language ac- cordingly. But indications enough remain to show Ot/ O the line of the Master, his perception of the large part of moral cause in many kinds of disease, and his method of addressing to this part his cure. It would never have done, indeed, to have men pro- nouncing right and left that this and that was a judg- ment, and how, and for what, and on whom ; and so, * Consult the Charmides of Plato (Chap. V.) for a remark- able account of the theory of such a treatment, attributed by Socrates to Zamolxis, the god-king of the Thrauians. 158 LITERATURE AND Due MA. when the disciples, seeing an afflicted person, asked whether this man had done sin or his parents, Jesus checked them and said: ''Neither the one nor the other, but that the works of God might be made mani- fest in him." Not the less clear is his own belief in the moral root of much physical disease, and in moral therapeutics; and it is important to note well the branch of miracles where this belief comes in. For the action of Jesus in these cases, however it may be amplified in the reports, was real; but it is not, therefore, as popular religion fancies, thaumaturgy, it is not what people are fond of calling the super- natural, but what is better called the non-natural. It is, on the contrary, like the grace of Raphael, or the grand style of Phidias, eminently natural; but it is above common low-pitched nature ; it is a line of na- ture not yet mastered or followed out. Its significance as a guaranty of the authenticity of Christ's mission is trivial, however, compared with the guaranty furnished by his sayings. Its im- portance is in its necessary effect upon the beholders and reporters. This element of what was really won- derful, unprecedented, and unaccountable, they had actually before them ; and we may estimate how it must have helped and seemed to sanction that ten- dency which in any case would have carried them, circumstanced as they were, to find all the perform- ances and career of Jesus miraculous. But, except for this, the miracles related in the pels will appear to us more and more, the more i -nr experience and knowledge increases, to have but THE PROOF FROM MIRACLES. 159 the same ground which is common to all miracles, the ground indicated by Shakespeare; to have been gen- erated under the same kind of conditions as other miracles, and to follow the same laws. When once the " Zeit-Geist " has made us entertain the notion of this, a thousand things in the manner of relating will strike us which never struck us before, and will make us wonder how we could ever have thought dif- ferently. Discrepancies which we now labor with such honest pains and by such astonishing methods to explain away, the voice at Paul's conversion, heard by the bystanders according to one account, not heard by them according to another; the Holy Dove at Christ's baptism, visible to John the Baptist in one narrative, in two others to Jesus himself, in another, finally, to all the people as well ; the single blind man in one relation, growing into two blind men in an- other; the speaking with tongues, according to St. Paul a sound without meaning, according to the Acts an intelligent and intelligible utterance, all this will be felt to require really no explanation at all, to ex- plain itself, to be natural to the whole class of inci- dents to which these miracles belong, and the inev- itable result of the looseness with which the stories of them arise and are propagated. And the more the miraculousness of the story deepens, as after the death of Jesus, the more does the texture of the incidents become loose and floating, the more does the very air and aspect of things seem to tell us we are in wonderland. Jesus after his res- urrection not known by Mary Magdalene, taken by 160 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. her for the gardener ; not known by the two disciples going with him to Emmaus and at supper with him there ; not known by his most intimate apostles on the borders of the Sea of Galilee; and presently, out of these vague beginnings, the recognitions getting asserted, then the ocular demonstrations, the supreme commissions, the ascension ; one hardly knows which of the two to call the most evident here, the perfect simplicity and good faith of the narrators, or the plainness with which they themselves really say to us, " Behold a legend growing under your eyes ! " And suggestions of this sort, with respect to the whole miraculous side of the New Testament, will meet us at every turn; we do but give a sample of them. It is neither our wish nor our design to ac- cumulate them, to marshal them, to insist upon them, to make their force felt. Let those who desire to keep them at arms' length continue to do so, if they can, and go on placing the sanction of the Christian religion in its miracles. Our point is, that the ob- jections to miracles do, and more and more will, without insistence, without attack, without contro- versy, make their own force felt; and that the sanc- tion of Christianity, if Christianity is not to be lost along with its miracles, must be found elsewhere. CHAPTEK VI. THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. Now, then, will be perceived the bearing and grav- ity of what we some little way back said, that the more we convince ourselves of the liability of the New Testament writers to mistake, the more we really bring out the greatness and worth of the New Testament. For the New Testament exists to reveal Jesus, not to establish the immunity of its writers from error. Jesus himself is not a New Testament writer; he is the object of description and comment to the New Testament writers. As the Old Testa- ment speaks about the Eternal and bears an inval- uable witness to him, without yet ever adequately in words defining and expressing him ; so, and even yet ii K ire, do the New Testament writers speak about Jesus and give a priceless record of him, without adequately and accurately comprehending him. They are altogether on another plane from Jesus, and their mistakes are not his. It is not Jesus him- self who relates his own miracles to us; who tells us of his own apparition after his death ; who alleges his crucifixion and sufferings as a fulfilment of the prophecy : " The Eternal keepeth all the bones of the ri ali teems so that not one of them is broken ; " who 11 161 1 02 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. proves salvation to be by Christ alone, from the prom- ise to Abraham being made to seed in the singular number, not the plural. If, therefore, the human mind is now drawing away from reliance on miracles, coming to perceive the community of character which pervades them nil, to understand their natural laws, so to speak, their loose mode of origination and their untrustworthiness, and is inclined rather t<> distrust the dealer in thorn than to pin its faith upon him; then it is good for the authority of Jesus, that his reporters are evidently liable to ignorance and error. Tic is reported to deal in miracles, to he above all a thaumaturgist. But the more his reporters were intellectually men of their nation and time, and of its current beliefs, the more, that is, they were open to mistakes, the more certain they were to impute miracles to a wonderful and half-understood person- age like Jesus, whether he would or no. lie himself may, at the same time, have had quite other notions as to what he was doing and intending. Again, the mistake of imagining that the world was to end, as St. Paul announces, within the life- time of the first Christian generation, is now palpa- ble. The reporters of Jesus make him announcing just the same thing: " This generation shall not pass away till they shall see the Son of Man coining in the clouds with great power and glory, and then shall he send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds." Popular theology can put a plain satis- factory sense upon this, but, as usual, through that, process described by Hutler by which anything can THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. 1C3 be made to mean anything; and from this sort of process the human mind is beginning to shrink. A more plausible theology will say that the words are an accommodation ; that the speaker lends himself to the fancies and expectations of his hearers. A good deal of such accommodation there is in this and other sayings of Jesus; but accommodation to the full ex- tent here supposed would surely have been impossible. To suppose it, is most violent and unsatisfactory. Either, then, the words were, like St. Paul's an- nouncement, a mistake, or they are not really the very words Jesus said, just as he said them. That is, the reporters have given them a turn, however slight, a tone and a color, to make them comply with a fixed idea in their own minds, which they un- feignedly believed was a fixed idea with Jesus also. Xow, the more we regard the reporters of Jesus as men liable to err, full of the turbid Jewish fancies about " the grand consummation " which were then current, the easier we can understand these men in- evitably putting their own eschatology into the mouth of Jesus, when they had to report his discourse about the kingdom of God and the troubles in store for the Jewish nation, and the less need have we to make Jesus a copartner in their eschatology. Again, the futility of such demonstrations from prophecy as those of which we have given examples, and generally of all that Jewish exegesis, based on a mere unintelligent catching at the letter of the Old Testament, isolated from its context and real mean- ing, of which the Xew Testament writers give us so 164 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. much, begins to disconcert attentive readers of the Bible more and more, and to be felt by them as an embarrassment to the cause of Jesus, not a support. Well, then, it is good for the authority of Jesus, that those who establish it by arguments of this sort should be clearly men of their race and time, not above its futile methods of reasoning and demonstration. The more they were this, and the more they were sure to mix up much futile logic and exegesis with their presentation of Jesus, the less is Jesus himself re- sponsible for such logic and exegesis, or at all depen- dent upon it. He may himself have rated such argu- mentation at precisely its true value, and have based his mission and authority upon no grounds but solid ones. Whether he did so or not, his hearers and re- porters were sure to base it on their own fantastic grounds also, and to credit Jesus with doing the same. In short, the more we conceive Jesus as almost as much over the heads of his disciples and reporters as he is over the heads of the mass of so-called Christian-^ now, the more we see his disciples to have been, as they were, men raised by a truer moral susceptivo- ness above their countrymen, but in intellectual con- ceptions and habits much on a par with them, all (lie more do we make room, so to speak, for Jesus to l>c inconceivably great and wonderful; a> wonderful as anything his reporters imagined him to be, though in a different manner. 2. We make room for him to be this, and through tin.- THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. 165 inadequate reporting of his followers there breaks and shines, and will more and more break and shine the more the matter is examined, abundant evidence that he was this. It is most remarkable, and the best proof of the simplicity, seriousness, and good faith which intercourse with Christ inspired, that wit- nesses with a fixed prepossession, and having no doubt at all as to the interpretation to be put on Christ's acts and career, should yet admit so much of what makes against themselves and their own power of in- terpreting. For them, it was a thing beyond all doubt that by miracles Christ manifested forth his glory and induced the faithful to believe in him; yet what checks to this paramount and all-governing belief of theirs do they report from Christ himself! Everybody will be able to recall such checks, al- though he may never yet have been accustomed to consider their full significance. " Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe ! " as much as to say : " Believe on right grounds you cannot, and you must needs believe on wrong ! " And again : " Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me; or else believe for the very works' sake!" as much as to say : " Acknowledge me on the ground of my healing and restoring acts being miraculous, if you must ; but it is not the right ground." No, not the right ground ; and when Xicodemus came, and would put conversion on this ground (" We know that thou art a teacher come from God, for no one can do the miracles that thou doest except God lye with him"} Jesus rejoined: "Verily, verily, I say 100 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. unto thee, except a man be born from above, he can- not see the kingdom of God ! " thus tacitly changing his disciple's ground, and correcting him. Even dis- tress and impatience at this false ground being taken is visible sometimes: "Jesus yi-oancd in Ids spirit and said, Why doth this generation ask for a sign \ Verily I say unto you, there shall no sign be given to this generation ! " Who does not see what double and treble importance these checks of Jesus to the reliance on miracles gain, from their being reported by those who relied on miracles devoutly? Who does not see what a clew they offer as to the real mind of Jesus ? To convey at all to such hearers of him that there was any objection to miracles, his own sense of the objection must have been profound ; and to get them, who neither shared nor understood it, to repeat it a few times, he must have repeated it many times. Take, again, the eschatology of the disciples, their notion of final things and of the approaching great judgment and end of the world. This consisted mainly in a literal appropriation of the apocalyptic pictures of the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch, and a transference of them to Christ and his kingdom. It is not surprising, certainly, that men with the mental range of their time, and with so lit- tle flexibility of thought, that, when Jesus told them to beware of " the leaven of the Pharisees," or when he called himself " the bread of life," and said, " He that eateth me shall live by me! " they stuck hope- lessly fast in the literal meaning of the words, and THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. 167 were accordingly puzzled or else offended by them, it is not surprising that those men should have been incapable of dealing in a large spirit with the proph- ecies of Daniel, that they should have applied them to Christ narrowly and literally, and should therefore have conceived his kingdom unintelligently. This is not remarkable; what is remarkable is, that they should themselves supply us with their Master's blame of their too literal criticism, his famous sen- tence : u The kingdom of God is within you ! " Such an account of the kingdom of God has more right, even if recorded only once, to pass with us for Christ's own account, than the common materializ- ing accounts, if repeated twenty times; for it was manifestly quite foreign to the disciples' own notions, and they could never have invented it. Evidence of the same kind, again, evidence borne by the reporters themselves against their own power of rightly under- standing what Christ, on this topic of the kingdom of God and its coming, meant to say, is Christ's warn- ing to his apostles, that the subject of final things was one where they were all out of their depth : " It is not for you to know the times and the seasons which the Father hath put in his own power." So, too, with the use of prophecy and of the Old Testament generally. A very small experience of Jewish exegesis will convince us that, in the disciples, their catching at the letter of the Scriptures, and mis- taking this play with words for serious argument, was nothing extraordinary. The extraordinary thing is that. Jesus, even in the report of these critics, uses 168 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Scripture in a totally different manner; he wields it as an instrument of which he truly possesses the use. Either he puts prophecy into act, and by the startling point thus made he engages the popular imagination on his side, makes the popular familiar- ity with prophecy serve him; as when he rides into Jerusalem on an ass, or clears the Temple of buyers and sellers. Or else he applies Scripture in what is called " a superior spirit," to make it yield to nar- row-minded hearers a lesson of wisdom; as, for in- stance, to rebuke a superstitious observance of the Sabbath, he employs the incident of David's taking the shewbread. His reporters, in short, are the ser- vants of the Scripture-letter, Jesus is its master : and it is from the very men, who were servants to it them- selves, that we learn that he was master of it. IIo\v signal, therefore, must this mastery have been ! how eminently and strikingly different from the treat- ment known and practised by the disciples them- selves! Finally, for the reporters of Jesus the rule was, undoubtedly, that men " believed on Jesus irltrn they saw the miracles which he did." 'Miracles were in these reporters' eyes, beyond question, the evidence of tin- Christian religion. And yet these same reporters indicate another and a totally different evidence of- fered for the Christian religion by Jesus himself. "Everyone that heareth and learneth from the Father cometh unto inc. As the Father hath taught me, so I speak; he that is of God heareth the words of G<><1 ; if God was your Father, ye would have loved me! " THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. This is inward evidence, direct evidence. From that previous knowledge of God, as " the Eternal that lov- eth righteousness," which Israel possessed, the hearers of Jesus could and should have concluded irresistibly, when they heard his words, that he came from God. Now, miracles are outward evidence, in- direct evidence, not conclusive in this fashion. To walk on the sea cannot really prove a man to proceed from the Eternal that loveth righteousness ; although undoubtedly, as we have said, a man who walks on the sea will be able to make the mass of mankind be- lieve about him anything he chooses to say. But there is, after all, no necessary connection between walking on the sea and proceeding from the Eternal that loveth righteousness. Jesus propounds, on the other hand, an evidence of which the whole force lies in the necessary connection between the proving mat- tor and the power that makes for righteousness. This is It is evidence for the Christian religion. His disciples experienced the evidence, indeed. Peter's answer to the question " Will ye also go away?" "To whom should we go? thou hast the irords of eternal life!" proves it. But experiencing a thing is very different from understanding and pos- sessing it. The evidence, which the disciples were conscious of understanding and possessing, was the evidence from miracles. And yet, in their report, Jesus is plainly shown to us insisting on a different evidence, an internal one. The character of the re- porters gives to this indication a paramount im- portance. That they should indicate this internal 170 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. evidence once, as the evidence on which Jesus in- sisted, is more significant, we repeat, than their in- dicating, twenty times, the evidence from miracles as the evidence naturally convincing to mankind and recommended, as they thought, by Jesus. The no- tion of the one evidence they would have of them- selves; the notion of the other they could only get from a superior mind. This mind must have been full of it to make them feel it at all ; and their exhi- bition of it, even then, must of necessity be inade- quate and broken. But is it possible to overrate the value of the ground thus gained for showing the riches of the Xew Testament to those who, sick of the popular arguments from prophecy, sick of the popular argu- ments from miracles, are for casting the New Testa- ment aside altogether? The book contains all that we know of a wonderful spirit, far above the heads of his reporters, still farther above the head of our popular theology, which has added its own misun- derstanding of the reporters to the reporters' misun- derstanding of Jesus. And it was quite inevitable that anything so snj>erior and so profound should be imperfectly understood l, v those amongst whom it first appeared, and for a very long time afterwards; and that it should come at la.-t L-radnally to stand out clearer only by time, " Time," as the Greek maxim says, " the wisest of all things for he i< the unfailing discoverer." Yet. however much is discovered, the object of our scrutiny must still be beyond us, must still transcend THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. ]7t our adequate knowledge, if for no other reason, be- cause of the character of the first and only records of him. But in the view now taken we have even at the point to which we have already come at least a wonderful figure transcending his time, transcend- ing his disciples, attaching them but transcending them ; in very much that he uttered going far above their heads, treating Scripture and prophecy like a master while they treated it like children, resting his doctrine on internal evidence while they rested it on miracles ; and yet, by his incomparable lucidity and penetrativeness, planting his profound veins of thought in their memory along with their own no- tions and prepossessions, to come out all mixed up together, but still distinguishable one day and separa- ble ; and leaving his word thus to bear fruit for the future. 3. Surely to follow and extract these veins of true ore is a wise man's business ; not to let them lie neglected and unused, because the beds where they are found are not all of the same quality with them. The beds are invaluable because they contain the ore ; and, though the search for it in them is undoubtedly a grave and difficult quest, yet it is not a quest of the elaborate and endless kind that it will at first, per- haps, be fancied to be. It is a quest with this for its governing idea : " Jesus was over the heads of hi? reporters; what, therefore, in the report of him, is Jesus', and what is the reporters' 1 " 172 LITERATURE AND DC GM A. Now, this excludes as unessential much of the crit- icism which is bestowed on the New Testament, and gives a sure point of view for the remainder. And what it excludes is those questions as to the exact date. the real authorship, the first publication, the rank of priority, of the Gospels; questions which have a great attraction for critics, which are in themselve- good to be entertained, which lead to much close and fruitful observation of the texts, and in which very high ingenuity may be shown and very great plan.-i bility reached, but not more ; they cannot be really settled, the data are insufficient. And for our pur- pose they are not essential. Neither is it essential for our purpose to get at the very primitive text of the New Testament writers, deeply interesting and deeply important as this is. The changes that have befallen the text show, no doubt, the constant ten- dency of popular Christianity to add to the element of theurgy and thaumaturgy, to increase and develop it. To clear the text of these will show the New Tes- tament writers to have been less preoccupied with this tendency, and is, so far, very instructive. But it will not, by re-establishing the real words of the writers, necessarily give the real truth as to Christ's religion; because to the writers themselves this re- ligion was, in a considerable Degree certainly, a theurgy and a thaumaturgy, although not in the me- chanical and extravagant way that it is in our present popular theology. For instance : the famous text of the three heavenly witnesses is an imposture, and an extravagant one. THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. 173 It shows us, no doubt, theologians like the Bishop of Gloucester already at work, men with more meta- physics than literary tact, full of the Aryan genius, of the notion that religion is a metaphysical concep- tion ; anxious to do something for the thesis of " the Godhead of the Eternal Son," or of " the blessed truth that the God of the universe is a person," or, as the Bishop of Gloucester writes it, " Person," and so on. But something of the same intention is unquestionably visible, never, indeed, in Jesus, but in the author of the Fourth Gospel. Much of the conversation with Xicodemus is a proof of it ; the 46th verse of the 6th chapter is a signal proof of it. One can there almost see the author, after recording Christ's words, " Every one that heareth and learneth of the Father cometh unto me," take alarm at the no- tion that this looks too downright and natural, and, sincerely persuaded that he " did something " for the honor of Jesus by making him more abstract, bring in and put into the mouth of Jesus the 46th verse: " Xot that any one hath seen the Father, except he that is from God, he hath seen the Father." This verse has neither rhyme nor reason where it stands in Christ's discourse; it jars with the words which precede and follow, and is in quite another vein from them. Yet it is the author's own ; it is no interpola- tion. Again : Socinians lay much stress on the probabil- ity that in the first words of St. Mark's Gospel, " The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God," //(c Son of God is an interpolation. And, no 174 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. doubt, if the words are an interpolation, this shows that the desire to prove the dogma of Christ's God- head was not so painfully ever-present to the writer of the Second Gospel as it became to later theologians. But it shows no more; it does not show that he had the least doubt about Jesus being the Son of God. Ten verses later, in an undisputed passage, he calls him so. Again, in the last chapter of the same Gospel, all that follows the eighth verse all the account of Christ's resurrection and ascension is probably an addition by a later hand. But the resurrection i- plainly indicated in the first eight verses; and that the writer of the Second Gospel stops after the eighth verse proves rather that he was writing briefly than that he did not believe in the resurrection and ascen- sion as much as, for instance, the writer of the Third Gospel; unless, indeed, there are other signs (for ex- ample, in his way of relating such an incident as the Transfiguration) to show that he was suspicious of the preternatural. But there are none; and he plainly was not, and could not have been. Again: it seems impossible that the very primitive original of the First Gospel should have made J< say that " the sign of Jonas " consisted in his being three days and three nights in the whale's belly, as the Son of Man was to be a like time in the heart of the earth. It spoils the argument, and in another place the argument is given simply and rightly. Jonas was a sign to the Jews, because the Xinevites repented at his preaching and p greater than Jonas THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. 175 stood now preaching to the Jews. But whether the words are genuine (and there seems no evidence to the contrary) in that particular place or not, to get rid of them brings us really but a very little way, when it is plain that their argument is exactly one which the evangelists would be disposed to use, and to think that Jesus meant to use. For so they make him to have said, for instance : " Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up ! " in prediction of his own death and resurrection. In short, to know accurately the history of our documents is impossible, and even if it were possible, we should yet not know accurately what Jesus said and did ; for his reporters were incapable of render- ing it, he was so much above them. This is the im- portant thing to get clearly fixed in our minds. And the more it becomes established to us, the more we shall see the futility of what is called rationalism, and the rationalistic treatment of the New Testa- ment ; of the endeavor, that is, to reduce all the su- pernatural in it to real events, much resembling what is related, which have got a little magnified and col- ored by being seen through the eyes of men having certain prepossessions, but may easily be brought back to their true proportirms and made historical and reasonable. A famous specimen of this kind of treat- ment is Schleiermacher's fancy of the death on the cross having been a swoon, and the resurrection of Jesus a recovery from this swoon. Victorious in- deed, whatever may be in other ways his own short- comings, is Dr. Strauss's demolition of this error of 170 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Schleiermacher's ! Like the rationalistic treatment of Scripture throughout, it makes far more difficulties than it solves, and rests on too narrow a conception of the history of the human mind, and of its diversities of operation and production. It puts ourselves in the original disciples' place, imagines the original disciples to have been men rational in our sense and way, and then explains their record as it might be made explicable if it were ours. And it may safely be said that in this fashion it is not explicable. Im- aginations so little creative and with so substantial a framework of fact for each of their wonderful stories as this theory assumes, would never have created so much as they did ; at least, they could not have done so and retained their manifest simplicity and good faith. They must have fallen, we in like case should fall, into arrangement and artifice. But the original disciples were not men rational in our sense and way. The real wonderfulaess of Jesus, and their belief in him, being given, they needed no such full and parallel body of fact for each miracle as we suppose. Some hints and help of fact, undoubtedly, there always was, and we naturally seek to explore it. Sometimes our guesses may be right, sometimes wrong, but we can never be sure, the range of possibility is so wide; and we may easily make them too elaborate. Shakespeare's explanation is far the soundest : " No natural exhalation in the sky. No scape of nature, no distemper'd day, No common wind, no custonn-d THE NEW TESTAMENT RECORD. 177 But they will pluck away his natural cause, And call them meteors, prodigies, and signs, Abortives, presages, and tongues of heaven." And it must be remembered, moreover, that of none of these recorders have we, probably, the very original record. The record, when we first get it, has passed through at least half a century, or more, of oral tradition, and through more than one written account. Miraculous incidents swell and grow apace ; they are just the elements of a tradition that swell and grow most. These incidents, therefore, in the history of Jesus, the preternatural things he did, the preternatural things that befell him, are just the parts of the record which are least solid. Beyond the historic outline of the life of Jesus, his Galilean origin, his preaching in Galilee, his preaching in Jerusalem, his crucifixion, much the firmest ele- ment is the record of his words. Happily it is of these that he himself said : " The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." But in reading them, we have still to bear in mind our gov- erning idea, that they are words of one " inadequately comprehended by his hearers," men though these be of pureness of heart, discernment to know and love the good, perfect uprightness of intention, faithful simplicity. What they will have reported best, probably, is dis- course where there was the framework of a story and its application to guide them, discourse such as the parables. Instructive and beautiful as the parables are, however, they have not the importance of the T2 178 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. direct teaching of Jesus. But in his direct teach- ing we are on the surest ground in single sentence-, which have their ineffaceable and unforgettable stamp: " My yoke is kindly and my burden light; " " Many are called, few chosen ; " "' They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick; " " Xo man having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God." The longer trains of discourse, and many sayings in im- mediate connection with miracles, present much more difficulty. Probably there are very few sayings at- tributed to Jesus which do not contain what he on some occasion actually said, or much of what be actually said. But the connection, the juncture, is plainly often missed ; things are put out of their true place and order. Failure of memory would occasion- ally cause this with any reporters ; failure of com- prehension would with the reporters of Jesus fre- quently cause it. The surrounding tradition insen- sibly biases them, their love of miracles biases them. their eschatology biases them. All these three e.v ercise an attraction on words of Jesus, and draw them into occasions, placings, and turns which not exactly theirs. The one safe guide to the extri cation and right reception of what comes from Jt is the internal evidence. And wherever we find what enforces this evidence or builds upon it. there we may be especially sure that we are on the trie Jesus; because turn or bias in this direction the r his bad literary and scientific criticism of the Bible; but if he were, how dreadful would the state of our orthodox theologians be! They themselves freely fling about this word infidel at all those who reject their literary and scientific criticism, which we see to be quite false. It would be but just ii mete to them with their own measure, and to condemn them by their own rule; and, when they air their un- sound criticism in public, to say indignantly : " The Bishop of So-and-so, the Dean of So-and-so, ami ntlier infidel lecturers of the present day ! " or: " Thai ram pant infidel, the Archdeacon of So-and-so, in his n cent letter on the Athanasian Creed!" or: " The Kock,' l The Church Times,' and the rest of the in- fidel press!" or: "The torrent of infidelity which pours every Sunday from our pulpits!" Just it would be, and by no means inurbane; but hardly, JXT- THE NEW TESTAMENT UKCORD. 189 haps, Christian. Therefore we will not permit our- selves to say it ; but it is only kind to point out, in passing, to these loud and rash people to what they expose themselves, at the hands of adversaries less scrupulous than we are. CHAPTER VII. THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. WE have said and it cannot be repeated too often that what is called orthodox theology is, in fact, an immense misunderstanding of the Bible, due to the junction of a talent for abstruse reasoning with much literary inexperience. It cannot be repeated too often ; because our dogmatic friends seem to imagine that the truth of their dogma is conceded on all hands, and that the only objection is to the harsh or over- rigid way in which it is put. Dr. Pusey and the " Church Review " assume that what the Athanasian Creed, for instance, does, is " to take up the ad- mitted facts of Christian faith, and arrange them sentence after sentence ; " and then they ask us why we should be so squeamish about " letting the Prayer Book contain once, at least, the statement that Chris- tian faith is necessary to salvation." Others talk of the contest going on between "definite religion." " religion with the sinew and bone of doctrine," ami " indefinite religion," " nerveless religion," " vague, negative, and cloudy religion ; " and Lord Salisbury, as we have seen, declares that " religion is no more to be severed from dogma than light from the sun." To be sure, to make this maxim of Lord Salis- 190 THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 191 bury's go on all fours, it ought to be: "Religion is no more be severed from the truth of religion than light from the sun." And dogma and the truth of religion are not exactly synonymes ; dogma means, not necessarily a true doctrine, but merely a doctrine or system of doctrine determined, decreed, and re- ceived. Lord Salisbury, however, takes it as in this case another word for truth, and so do the other speak- ers. And they accordingly represent their opponents as either secret enemies of the truth of religion, men who are, as the " Rock " says in a Biblical figure ad- dressed to the Dean of Westminster, " the degenerate plant of a strange vine bringing forth the grapes of Sodom and the clusters of Gomorrah ; " or, at best, as amiable, soft-headed people, afraid of clear thought and plain speech, and requiring with their light a very unnecessary dose of sweetness. We, however, try to keep our love of sweetness within reasonable bounds ; and the " Rock " will hardly call us a Gomorrah vine, when we agree to say heartily after it, as we do, that **' Christian faith is necessary to salvation." But what is Christian faith ? Is it the " admitted facts taken up and ar- ranged, sentence after sentence, in the Athanasian Creed ? " Are these facts admitted ? the whole question is here. So far from these facts being ad- mitted, or from the enumeration of them being the enumeration of the facts of the Christian faith, we say that they are deductions from the Bible of mat- ters which are not the real matters of Christian faith at all ; and that, moreover, they are false deductions 192 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. from the Bible, blunders arising from a want of skill and experience in dealing with a very complex liter- ary problem. Therefore we can honestly tell our dogmatic friends that we agree with them in disliking an in- definite religion, in preferring a definite one. Our quarrel with them is, not that they define religion, but that they define it so abominably. And to the eloquent and impetuous Chancellor of Oxford, who cannot away with a hazy amiability in religious mat- ters, and brandishes before us his dogma, not vague, he says, but precise: " Precise enough," we answer, " precisely wrong! " And having thus, we hope, put ourselves right with our adversaries as to the real question between us and them, we will proceed with our endeavor to free the Bible, by showing that it is not metaphysics but literature, by following it con- tinuously and by interpreting it naturally, to free the Bible from the serious dangers with which their advocacy threatens it. For when the IJishops of Winchester and Gloucester talk of " doing soinethinu for the Godhead of the Eternal Son," they are doing nothing, we say, for the Bible, they are endanger- ing it. For their notions about the Godhead of the Eternal Son, and what it is, cannot possibly stand; and yet these notions they have drawn, they tell us, from the Bible, they impute them to the I'.ible. But they have drawn them wrongly, and the Bible is to be made answerable for no such doctrine. And we have now come to that point where we may see, clearer than we were in a position to see before, what i~. THE Ti.SiLMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 193 rightly to be drawn from the Bible on this matter, and what the doctrine of Jesus himself about his own Godhead really is. 2. Following the Bible continuously and interpreting it naturally, we saw the people of " the Eternal that loveth righteousness/' and that " blesseth the man that putteth his trust in Him," we saw Israel, con- founded and perplexed by the misfortunes of God's people and the success of the unrighteous world, con- struct a vast Abcrglaube, an after or extra-belief, ac- cording to which there should come about, in no dis- tant future, a grand and wonderful change. God should send his Messiah, judge the world, punish the wicked, and restore the kingdom to Israel. For Israel's original revelation and intuition had been : u The Eternal loveth righteousness; to him that or- dereth his conversation right shall be shown the sal- vation of God." And the natural corollary from this was, " As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more; but the righteous is an everlasting founda- tion." Both the revelation and the corollary from it were true ; but the virtue of both, for Israel, turned upon knowing what righteousness and righteous meant. And this indispensable intuition Israel is always rep- resented as having once had, and with time in great measure lost. " vStand ye in the ways and see," says Jeremiah, " and ask for the old paths, where is the 13 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls." The prophets may be seen trying to re- awaken in Israel this intuition, by inculcating in- wardness, humbleness, sincerity. But the mass of people naturally inclined to place righteousness rather in something mechanically to be given or done, in being endowed with the character of God's chosen people, or in punctually observing a law full of minute observances. And the promises to right- eousness they in like manner construed as promises of things material: a mighty Jewish kingdom, God's people reigning, the heathen licking the dust. This material conception of the promises to right- eousness fell in with the mechanical conception of righteousness itself, and each heightened the hurtful- ness of the other. Between them both, a type of soul more and more hard, impervious, and impracticable, was formed in the Jewish people; and the intuition. in which their greatness began, died out more and more. There still remained of it so much as this: that of all the nations of the world they were the only one that felt the all-importance of righteousness, and the eternity of the promises made to it. But wh:it righteousness really was they knew not ; and their situation, when Christ came, is admirably summed up in these two verses of prophecy, which every one who wishes for a clear sense of the Jews' relations with Christ would do well to write as a reminder on the blank page between the Old Testament and the Xew: " Forasmuch as this people draw near me with THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 195 their month, and with their lips do honor me, but have removed their heart far from me, and their fear towards me is taught by the precept of men ; " Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvel- lous work among this people, even a marvellous work and a wonder ; for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid." Meanwhile, the Jews were full of their Aber- glaube, their added or extra-belief in a Messianic ad- vent, a great judgment, a world-wide reign of the saints ; and it is well to have distinctly before us the main texts which they had gathered from the Old Testament in support of this belief, and which were in everybody's mind and mouth. They are all given us by the New Testament. Moses had said : " The Eternal thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me ; unto him shall ye hearken." In the Psalms it was written : *' The Eternal hath sworn a faithful oath unto David : Of the fruit of thy body will I set upon thy seat: thy seed will I stablish forever, and set up thy throne from one generation to another." Isaiah had said : " There shall come forth a Rod out of the stem of Jesse and a Branch shall grow out of his roots; and the Spirit of the Eternal shall rest upon him, and he shall smite the earth with the breath of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked." Finally, Malachi, the last prophet, had announced from God : " Behold, I will 196 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Eternal." These may stand, perhaps, as four fundamental texts, forming the ground for popular Jewish Aber- glaube as it developed itself; and it will be seen of what large and loose construction they admit. But the ground-plan thus given was filled out from later and inferior scriptures, full of the spirit of the time, grandiose, but turbid and phantasmagoric, such as the Book of Enoch and the Book of Daniel. The Book of Daniel is in our Bibles; we can all verify there the elements which constituted, when Christ came. the popular religious hope and belief of the Jews. It may be hoped that we ourselves, most of us, read other parts of the Bible far more than the Book of Daniel ; but we know how, in general, those who use the Bible most unintelligently have a peculiar fond- ness for the apocalyptic and phantasrtttgbrid parts of it. The Book of Daniel gave form and Imdy t> the Prophet of Moses, the seed of David of the Psalms. the great and terrible day of Malarhi; it enabled tin- popular imagination to see and figure them. " A time of trouble such as never was since there was a nation to that time! The Ancient of days did sit, whose garment was white as snow and the hair of his head like the pure wool; his throne was like the fiery flame; the judgment was set and the books wen- opened. And behold, one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days, and there was given him dominion and glory, that all people, nations, and languages should -erve THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 107 him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion which shall not pass away. And judgment was given to the saints of the Most High, and the time came that the saints possessed the kingdom. At that time the people of God shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book; and many of them that sleep in dust shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." Other figures which laid hold of men's memories the Book of Enoch supplied. It told how, in the great visitation : " They shall rise up to destroy one another, neither shall a man acknowledge his friend and his brother, nor the son his father and his mother ; " how : " Ye shall enter into the holes of the earth and into the clefts of the rocks ; " and how, finally, the proud rulers of the world " shall see the Son of Man sitting on the throne of his glory." The Book of Enoch described this Son of Man, also, as " The Son of Man, living with the Lord of Spirits." " The Elect One, whom the Lord of Spirits hath gifted and glorified." Both books gave him the name of " Son of God " and of " Messiah." It was of all this that the heart of the Jews was full when Christ came ; it was on this that their thoughts fed and their hopes brooded. The old words, God, the Eternal, the Father, the Redeemer, were perpet- ually in their mouths; but in this connection. The goal of their lives was still, as of old, " the salvation of God ; " but this was what they understood the sal- vation of God to be. They had lost the intuition, 198 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. and they had thrown themselves, heart and soul, upon an extra-belief, or Aberglaube. 3. Now, if we describe the work of Christ by a short expression which may give the clearest view of it, we shall describe it thus: that he came to restore the tiititilion. He came, it is true, to sace, and to gire eternal life; but the way in which he did this was by restoring the intuition. This we have already touched upon in our third chapter, for we there passed in brief review the teach- ing of Jesus. But there the objection met us, that what attested Christ was miracles, and the preter- natural fulfilment in him of certain minute predic- tions made about him long before; and that such is the teaching of Christ himself and of the Bible. "\Yr had to pause and deal with this objection; and now, as it disperses, we come in full view of our old point again, that what did attest Christ was his restora- tion of the intuition. He found Israel all astray, with an endless talk about God, the law, righteous- ness, the kingdom, everlasting life, and no real hojd upon any one of them. Israel's old, sure proof of being in the right way the sanction of joy and peace was plainly wanting; and this was a test which anybody could at once apply. " O Eternal, blessed is the man that putteth his trust in thfc." was a cor- Tior-stono of Israel's religion. Xow, the Jewish peo- ple, however thoy might talk about putting their trust THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 199 in the Eternal, were evidently, as they stood there before Jesus, not blessed at all; and they knew it themselves as well as he did. " Great peace have they who love thy law," was another corner-stone. But the Jewish people had at that time in its soul as little peace as it had joy and blessedness; it was seething with inward unrest, irritation, and trouble. Yet the way of the Eternal was most indubitably a way of peace and joy ; so, if Israel felt no peace and no joy, it could not be walking in the way of the Eternal. Here we have the firm unchanging ground on which the operations of Jesus both began, and al- ways proceeded. And it is to be observed that Jesus by no means gave a new, more precise, scientific definition of God, but took up this term just as Israel used it, to stand for the Eternal that loveth righteousness. If there- fore this term was, in Israel's use of it, not a term of science, but, as we say, a term of common speech, of poetry and eloquence, thrown out at a vast object of consciousness not fully covered by it, so it was in Christ's use of it also. And if the substratum of scientific affirmation in the term was, with Israel, not the affirmation of " a great Personal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe," but the affirmation of " an enduring Power, not our- selves, that makes for righteousness," so it remained with Christ likewise. He set going a great process of searching and sifting, but this process had for its direct object the idea of righteousness, and only touched the idea of God through this, and not inde- 200 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. pendently of this and immediately. If the idea of righteousness was changed, this implied, undoubt- edly, a corresponding change in the idea of the Power that makes for righteousness ; but in this man- ner only, and to this extent, does the teaching of Jesus re-define the idea of God. But search and sift and renew the idea of right- eousness Jesus did. And though the work of Jesus, like the name of God, calls up in the believer a mul- titude of emotions and associations far more than any brief definition can cover, yet, remembering Jeremy Taylor's advice to avoid exhortations to get Christ, to be in Christ, and to seek some more distinct and practical way of speaking of him, we shall not do ill, perhaps, if we summarize to our own minds his work by saying, that he restored the intuition of God through transforming the idea of righteousness ; and that, to do this, he brought a method, and he brought a secret. And of those two great words which fill -ueh a place in his gospel, repentance and peace, as we see that his Apostles, when they preached his gos- pel, preached "Repentance unto life" and "Peace through Jesus Christ," of these two great words, one, repentance, attaches itself, we shall find, to his method, and the other, peace, to his scrn I. There was no question between Jesus and the Jews as to the object to aim at. " If thou wouldst enter into life, keep the Commandments," said Jesus. And Israel, too, on his part, said : " He that keepeth the commandments keepeth his own soul." But irliof i-oinmandments ? The commandments of God ; about THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 201 this, too, there was no question. But : " Leaving the commandment of God, ye hold the tradition of men; ye make the commandment of God of none effect by your tradition," said Jesus. Therefore the com- mandments which Israel followed were not the com- mandments of God, by which a man keeps his own soul, enters into life. And the practical proof of this was, that Israel stood before the eyes of the world manifestly neither joyful, nor blessed, nor at peace ; yet these characters of joy, bliss, and peace, the following of the real commandments was con- fessed to give. So a rule, or method, was wanted, by which to determine what the real commandments were. And Jesus gave one : " The things that come from within a man's heart, they it is that defile him ! " We have seen what an immense matter conduct is ; that it is three fourths of life. We have seen how plain and simple a matter it is, so far as knowledge is concerned. We have seen how, moreover, philos- ophers are for referring all conduct to one or other of man's two elementary instincts, the instinct of self-preservation and the reproductive instinct; it is the suggestions of one or other of these instincts, they say, which call forth all cases in which there is scope for exercising morality, or conduct. And this does, we saw, cover the facts well enough. For we can run up nearly all faults of conduct into two classes, faults of temper and faults of sensuality; to be referred, all of them, to one or other of these two instincts. 202 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Now Jesus not only says that things coming from within a man's heart defile him, he adds expressly what these things that, coining from within a man, defile him, are. And what he enumerates are the following : " Evil thoughts, fornications, stealings, murders, adulteries, greed, vices, fraud, dissolute- ness, envy, evil-speaking, pride, folly." These fall into two groups : one, of faults of self-assertion, grasp- ingness, and violence, all of which we may call faults of temper; and the other, of faults of sensuality. And the two groups, between them, do for practical purposes cover all the range of faults proceeding from these two sources, and therefore all the range of con- duct. So the motions or impulses to faults of con- duct were what Jesus said the real commandments are concerned with. And it was plain what such faults are ; but, to make assurance more sure, he, as we have seen, said what they are. No outward observances were conduct, were that keeping of the commandments which was the keep- ing of a man's own soul and made him enter into life. To have the thoughts in order as to certain matters was conduct. This was the " method " of Jesus: setting up a great unceasing inward move- ment of attention and verification in matters which are three fourths of human life, where to see true and to verify is not difficult, the difficult thing is to care and to attend. And the inducement to attend was, because joy and peace, missed on every other line, were to be reached on this. " Keep judgment and do righteousness! " had not THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 203 been guidance enough. The Jews found themselves taking " meats and drinks and divers washings " for judgment ; taking for righteousness " gifts and sacri- fices which cannot perfect the worshipper as to his conscience" (here is the word of Jesus!); tithing mint, anise, and cummin; saying to their parents, It is Corban! evil-disposed, and not at all blessed. But : " As to all wherein what men commonly call conduct is exercised, eating, drinking, ease, pleas- ure, money, the intercourse of the sexes, the giving full swing to one's tempers and instincts, as to all this, watch attentively what passes within you, that you may obey the voice of conscience ! so you will keep God's commandment and be blessed ; " this is the new and much more exact guidance. " The things that come from within a man's heart, they defile him ! cleanse the inside of the cup ! beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is insincerity! judge not after the appearance, but judge righteous judgment ! " this, we say, is the " method " of Jesus. To it belongs his use of that important word which in the Greek is " metanoia." We translate it repentance, a mourning and lamenting over one's sins ; and we translate it wrong. Of " metanoia," as Jesus used the word, the lamenting one's sins was a small part ; the main part was something far more active and fruitful, the setting up an immense new inward movement for obtaining the rule of life. And "' metanoia," accordingly, is: "a change of the inner man." Mention and recommendation of this inwardness j>i;4 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. there often was, we know, in prophet or psalmist; but to make mention of it was one thing, to erect it into a positive method was another. Christianity has made it so familiar, that to give any freshness to one's words about it is now not easy; but to its first recipients it was abundantly fresh and novel. It was the introduction, in morals and religion, of the famous know thyself of the Greeks; and this among a people deeply serious, but also wedded to moral and religious routine, and singularly devoid of flexibility and play of mind. For them it was a revolution. Of course the hard thing is not to say, " Cleanse the inside of the cup," but to make people do it ; in moral- and religion, the man who is " founded upon rock " is always, as Jesus said, the man who does, never tin- man who only hears. To say, Look wi/li in . was there- fore not everything; yet we none of us, probably, enough feel the power which at first resided in the mere saying of it, as Christ said it. And this is lie cause his words have become so trite to us that we fail to see how powerfully they were all adapted to call forth the new habit of inwardness; and if we \v:mt to see this, we must for a time either re translate his words for ourselves or paraphrase them. And not only the words he employed, but also the words he excited; the words which the effect produeed by him made men use about him. Just as it i- well t<> sub- stitute Eternal for Lord, and /lie f/o /uouv, but the sense and effect is as given above. THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 209 already a cherished ideal with Israel (" Thou wilt show me the path of life!") ; and a man might be placed in it, Jesus said, by dying to the second. For it is to be noted that our common expression, " deny himself," is an inadequate and misleading version of the words used by Jesus. To deny one's self is com- monly understood to mean that one refuses one's self something ; but what Jesus says is : " Let a man dis- own himself, renounce himself, die as regards his old self, and so live. Himself, the old man, the life in this world, meant following those " wishes of the flesh and of the current thoughts " which Jesus had, by his method, already put his disciples in the way of sifting and scrutinizing, and of trying by the standard of conformity to conscience. Thus, after putting him by his method in the way to find what doing righteousness was, by his secret Jesus put the disciples in the way of doing it. For the breaking the sway of what is commonly called one's self, ceasing our concern with it and leaving it to perish, is not, he said, being thwarted or crossed, but living. And the proof of this is that it has the characters of life in the highest degree, the sense of going right, hitting the mark, succeeding. That is, it has the characters of happiness; and happiness is, for Israel, the same thing as having the Eternal with us, seeing the salvation of God. " The tree," as Jesus was always saying, " is known by its fruits; " Jesus was to be received by Israel as sent from God, be- cause the secret of Jesus lead- T<> the snlvation of God, which is what Israel most desired. " The word of H 210 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. the cross," in short, turned out to be at the same time " the word of the kingdom." And to this experi- mental sanction of his secret, this sense it gives of having the Eternal on our side and approving 11-. Jesus appealed when he said of himself : " Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I may take it again." This, again, in our popular theurgy, is materialized into the First Person of the Trinity approving the Second, because he stands to the contract already in the Council of the Trinity passed. But what it really means is, that the joy of Jesus, of this " Son of peace," the " joy " he was so desirous that his disciples should find " fulfilled in themselves," was due to his having him- self followed his own secret. And the great counter- part to : "A life-giving change of the inner man,"- the promise : " Peace through Jesus Christ ! " is peace through this secret of his. Now, the value of this rule that one should die to one's apparent self, live to one's real self, depends upon whether it is true. And true it certainly is ; a profound truth of what our scientific friends, wh<> have a systematic philosophy and a nomenclature to match, and who talk of Egoism and Altruism, would call, perhaps, psycho-physiology. And we m;iy trace men's experience affirming and confirming if. from a very plain and level account of it to tin ac- count almost as high and solemn as that of Jesus. That an opposition there is, in all mattor of what wo call conduct, between a man's first impulses and what * A^tof nfc Baoiteiaf. Matt. xiii. 19, THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 211 he ultimately ilnds to be the real law of his being; that a man accomplishes his right function as a man, fulfils his end, hits the mark, in giving effect to the real law of his being; and that happiness attends his thus hitting the mark, all good observers report. Xo statement of this general experience can be sim- pler or more faithful than one given us by that great naturalist, Aristotle.* " In all wholes made up of parts," says he, " there is a ruler and a ruled ; throughout nature this is so ; we see it even in things without life, they have their harmony or law. The living being is composed of soul and body, whereof the one is naturally ruler and the other ruled. Now what is natural we are to learn from what fulfills the law of its nature most, and not from what is de- praved. So we ought to take the man who has the best disposition of body and soul; and in him we shall find that this is so ; for in people that are griev- ous both to others and to themselves the body may often appear ruling the soul, because such people are poor creatures and false to nature." And Aristotle goes on to distinguish between the body., over which, he says, the rule of the soul is absolute, and the " movement of thought and desire," over which rea- son has, says he, " a constitutional rule," in words which exactly recall St. Paul's phrase for our double enemy : " the flesh and the current thoughts." So entirely are we here on ground of general experience. And if we go on and take this maxim from Stobaeus : " All find acquirement implies a foregoing exercise of * Politics, 1. 5. 212 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. self-control ; " * or this from the Latin poet : " Rule your current self or it will rule you! bridle it in and chain it down ! " f or this from Goethe's autobiog- raphy : " Everything cries out to us that we must renounce; " \ or still more this from his Faust; " Thou must go without, go without ! that is the ever- lasting song which every hour, all our life through, hoarsely sings to us ! " then we have testimony not only to the necessity of this natural law of rule and su jipression, but also to the strain and labor and suf- fering which attend it. But when we come a little farther and take a sentence like this of Plato : " Of sufferings and pains cometh help, for it is not possi- ble by any other way to be ridded of our iniquity ; " then we get a higher strain, a strain like St. Peter's ; " He that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin ; " and we are brought to see, not only the neces- sity of the law of rule and suppression, not only the pain and suffering in it, but also its beneficence. And this positive sense of beneficence, salutariness, and hope, comes out yet more strongly when Wordsworth says to Duty: " Nor know we anything so fair as i> the smile upon thy face;" or when Bishop Wilson says : " They that deny themselves will be sure to * TlavTof naXov KTrjfiaro^ ir6vo$ irpoTjyeiTai b /car' eynpaTeiav. f . . . Animum rege, /, of going right, hitting the mark, succeeding, which you will get." And the same with the commandment, " Love one another," which is the positive side of the comma nd- ini 'iit, ''Renounce thyself," and, like this, can be drawn out as a truth of psycho-physiology. Jesus exhibited it as an intuition and a practical rule; and as what, by being practised, would, through giving THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 217 happiness, prove its own truth as a rule of life. This, wo say, is of the very essence of his secret of self- renouncement, as of his method of inwardness ; that its truth will be found to commend itself by happi- ness, to prove itself by happiness. And of the se- cret more especially is this true ; and as we have said, that though there gathers round the word " God " very much besides, yet we shall in general, in reading the Bible, get the surest hold on the word " God " by giving it the sense of the Eternal Power not our- selves, which makes for righteousness, so we shall get the best hold on many expressions of Jesus by re- ferring them, though they include more, yet primar- ily and pointedly to his " secret," and to the happi- ness which this contained. Bread of life, living water, these are, in general, Jesus, Jesus in his whole being and in his total effect ; but in especial they are Jesus as offering his secret. And when Jesus says : " He that eateth me shall live by me ! " we shall un- derstand the words best if we think of his secret. And so again with the famous words to the woman by the well in Samaria : " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst, but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a fount of water springing up unto everlasting life." These words, how are we to take them, so as to reach their meaning best ? What distinctly is this " water that I shall give him ? " Jesus himself and his word, no doubt ; yet so we come but to that very notion, which 218 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Jeremy Taylor warns us against as vague, of getting Christ. The Bishop of Gloucester will tell us, per- haps, that it is " the blessed truth that the Creator of the universe is a Person," or the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Eternal Son. But surely it would be a strong figure of speech to say of thcso doctrines, that a man, after receiving them, could never again feel thirsty ! See, on the contrary, how the words suit the secret: "He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal." This " secret of Jesus," as we call it, will be found applicable to all the thousand problems which the exercise of conduct daily offers ; it alone can solve them all happily, and may indeed be called " a fount of water springing up unto everlasting life." And, in general, wherever the words life and death are used by Jesus, we shall do well to have his " secret " at hand ; for in his thoughts, on these occasions, it is never far off. And now, too, we can see why it is a mistake, and may lead to much error, to exhibit any series of maxims, like those of the Sermon on the Mount, as the ultimate sum and formula into which Christian- ity may be run up. Maxims of this kind are but applications of the method and the secret of Josus; and the method and secret are capable of yet an in- finite number more of such applications. Chris- tianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity. THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 219 5. A method of inwardness, a secret of self-renounce- ment; but can any statement of what Jesus brought be complete, which does not take in his mildness? To the representative texts already given there is cer- tainly to be added this other : " Learn of me that I am mild and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls ! " Shall we attach mildness to the method, because, without it, a clear and limpid view inwards is impossible ? Or shall we attach it to the secret? the dying to faults of temper is a part, certainly, of dying to one's ordinary self, one's life in this world. Mildness, however, is rather an ele- ment in which, in Jesus, both method and secret worked ; the medium through which both the method and the secret were exhibited. We may think of it as perfectly illustrated and exemplified in his answer to the foolish question, " Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven ? " when, taking a little child and setting him in the midst, he said : " Whosoever receives the kingdom of God as a little child, the same is the greatest in it." Here are both inward ap- praisal and self-renouncement ; but what is most ad- mirable is the " sweet reasonableness," the exquisite, mild, winning felicity, with which the renouncement and the inward appraisal are applied and conveyed. And the conjunction of the three in Jesus, the method of inwardness, and the secret of self-renounce- ment, working in and through this element of mild- ness, produced the total impression of his " epiei- 220 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. keia," or sweet reasonableness ; a total impression in- effable and indescribable for the disciples, as also it was irresistible for them, but at which their descrip- tive words, words like this " sweet reasonableness" and like " full of grace and truth/' are thrown out and aimed. And this total stamp of " grace and truth," this exquisite conjunction and balance, in an element of mildness, of a method of inwardness perfectly han- dled and a self-renouncement perfectly kept, was found in Jesus alone. Yet what is the method of inwardness, and the secret of self-renouncement, without the sure balance of Jesus, without liis epieikeia? Much, 'but very far indeed from what he showed or what he meant; they come to be uscn his column, Lacordaire flogging himself on his death- bed, are what the secret by itself produces. The method by itself gives us our political Dissenter, pluming himself on some irrational " conscientious objections," and not knowing that with conscience he has done nothing until he has got to the bottom of conscience, and made it tell him right. Therefore the disciples of Christ were not told to believe in his method, or to believe in his secret, but to believe in him; they were not told to follow the method or to follow the secret, but they were told : " Follow me ! " It was only by fixing their heart and mind on him that thev could learn to use the method and secret THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 221 right; by "feeding on him," by, as he often said, " remaining in him." But this is just what Israel had been told to do as regards the Eternal himself. " I have set the Eternal always before me; " " Mine eyes are ever toward the Eternal ; " " The Eternal is the strength of my life ; " " Wait, I say, on the Eternal ! " ISTow, then, let us go back again for a little to Israel, and to Israel's belief. 6. We have seen how the Jews, at the coming of Christ, had their thoughts full of a grand and turbid phantasmagory ; a vision of God judging the world. sending his Messiah on the clouds of heaven, taking vengeance on his enemies, restoring the kingdom to Israel. And we marked the line of texts which this expectation followed : from the " Prophet " of Moses to the victorious " Rod out of the stem of Jesse " of Isaiah, and thence to the " Messiah," the " Son of Man," the " Son of God," of the Book of Daniel. But there was another line of texts pointing to a servant and emissary of God, besides the line point- ing to the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the princely and conquering Root of David. It stood written : " Behold my servant whom I uphold, mine elect in whom my soul delighteth ! I have put my spirit upon him ; he shall declare judgment to the Gentiles. He shall not strive nor cry, nor cause his voice to be heard in the streets; he shall declare judgment with truth. He shall not fail nor be discouraged, until lie 222 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. set judgment in the earth; far lands wait for his law." Who is this? And again : " He was despised, and we esteemed him not ; but he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. All we like sheep were gone astray, we were turned every one to his own way ; and the Eternal hath laid on him the iniquity of us all. And he made his grave with the wicked, although he had done no violence; yet it pleased the Eternal to bruise him. When Thou hast made his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Eternal shall prosper in his hand ; he shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied!" Who, again, is this ? Is it the " Prophet " like great Moses ? Is it the brilliant " Branch " out of the root of Jesse, smiting the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips slaying the wicked? with his do- minion from the one sea to the other, all things falling down before him, all nations serving him ; with his seed to endure forever, and his throne as the days of heaven ? This Branch it was, whom Israel iden- tified with the Messiah coming in the clouds of heaven to give the kingdom to the saints of the Most High, with the Son of Man sitting on the throne of his glory. Was the afflicted and lowly servant at the same time the Branch, and therefore the Mes- siah, the Son of God, and the bringer of the king- dom ? Israel never identified them. Here and there ho made guesses and snatches at the truth ; momen- THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO &IMSELF. 223 tary elevations of it there were, faint approaches to- wards connecting the two ideals, isolated tentatives; but the Jewish people at large had never grasped the idea of the identification, and it had never been so presented to them that they could grasp it. And, as we have already said, it was an extraor- dinary novelty, although the profound and the only true solution of Israel's wonderful history, when this identification was by Jesus boldly made. " A little while," the Jews were saying, " and the God of heaven shall set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed." * " Nay," answered Jesus, " the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand ! change the inner man, and believe the good news ! " " But," said the Jews, " Elias must first come." Jesus replied : " Elias is come already ! John the Baptist, my precursor, who preached a change of the inner man as I do." " But there shall be a time of trouble," the Jews urged, " such as never was since there was a nation to that time; abomination and desolation ; a fiery stream issuing from before the throne of the Ancient of days ; one like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven ! " f Jesus beheld the fierce and impracticable people before him, with their inevitable future : " Fear not," he an- swered mournfully, " where the carcass is, there will the eagles be gathered together ! soon enough you will have the affliction such as was not from the beginning of the world to this time, the Son of Man coming, * Dan. ii. 44. t Dan. xii. 1, 11 ; vii. 10, 13. 22 i LITERATURE AND DOGMA. Jerusalem encompassed with armies, abomination and desolation, not one stone of the Temple left on another." "But the judgment shall sit!" said the Jews, " and at that time the people shall be deliv- ered, every one that shall be found written in the book!" To the outward crisis, or world-judgment of Jerusalem's ruin, shall correspond, Jesus answered, an inward judgment, the new crisis of conscience. " The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they who hear shall live. Every one that is of the truth hear- eth my voice ; the word that I speak, the same shall judge him." " But the righteous," the Jews said, " shall awake to everlasting life! " " If a man keep my word," answered Jesus, " he shall never see death; but it shall be in him a fount of water, spring- ing up unto everlasting life." " But God's Mes- siah," finally rejoined the Jews, " shall smite the earth with the breath of his mouth! his throne $//30 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. plainly!" And even then Jesus does not answer point-blank, but prefers to say : " I have told you, and ye believe not." Yet this does not imply that he had the least doubt or hesitation in naming him- self the "Messiah, the Son of God; but only that his concern was, as we have said, with (Jod's ritihtcous- ' 7 J ness and Christ's Miration, and that he avoided all use of the names (tod, and Christ, which might give an opening into mere theosophical speculation. And this is shown, moreover, by the largeness and free- dom almost, one may say, indifference of his treat- ment of both names; as names, in using which, his hearers were always in danger of going off into a theosophy that did them no good and had better oc- cupy them as little as possible. " I and my Father are one!" he would say at one time; and " My Father is greater than T ! " at another. When the Jews were offended at his calling himself the Son of God, he quotes Scripture to show that even mere men were in Scripture called Gods; and for you, he says, who go by the letter of Scripture, surely this is sanction enough for calling any one. whom God sends, the Son of God! He did not at all mean that the Me-siah was a son of God merely in the sense in which any great man might be so called ; but he meant that these questions of theosophy were useless for his hearers, and that they puzzled themselves with them in vain. All they were concerned with was, that he was the Messiah they expected, sent to them with >alvation from God. Tt is the same when Jesus says: "Before A bra- THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 231 ham was, I am ! " He was baffling his countrymen's theosophy, showing them how little his doctrine was meant to offer a field for it. " Life," he means, " the life of him who lays down his life that he may take it again, is not what you suppose; your notions of everlasting life are all false, and with your present notions you cannot discuss theology with me ; follow me ! " So, again, to the Jews in the rut of their traditional theology, and haggling about the Son of David ; Jesus, they insisted, could not be the Christ, because tlic Christ was the Son of David. Jesus answers them by the objection that in the Psalms (and the Scripture cannot be broken!) David calls the Christ his Lord ; and " if he call him Lord, how is lu> then his son ? " The argument as a serious argument is perfectly futile ; the King of Israel is going out to war, and what the Psalmists really sing is : " The Eternal saith unto the king's majesty, Thou shall conquer!" St. Peter in the Acts gravely uses the same verse to prove Jesus to be Christ: " God," says he, " tells my Lord, Sit tliou upon my right hand ! Yet David never went up into heaven." And this is exactly of a piece with St. Paul's proving salvation to be by Christ alone, from seed, in the promise to Abraham, being in the singular, not the plural. It is merely false criticism of the Old Testa- ment, such as the Jews were full of, and of which the Apostles retained far too much. But the Jews were full of it, and therefore the objection of Jesus was just such an objection as the Jews would think weighty. He used it as he might have used a crux 232 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. about personality or consubstantiality with the Bish- ops of Winchester or Gloucester; to baffle and put to rout their false dogmatic theology, to disenchant them with it and make them cast it aside and come simply to him. " See," he says to the Jewish doc- tors, " what a mess you make of it with your learn- ing, and evidences, and orthodox theology; with the. wisdom, of your wise men and the understanding of i/our prudent men! You can do nothing with them, your arms break in your hands; fling the rubbish away, and throw yourselves upon my method and se- cret, upon me! Believe that the Father hath sent me; he that receiveth me receiveth Him that sent me. If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God, or whether I have invented it ! " And no grand performance or discovery of a man's o\vii to bring him thus to .joy and peace, but an at- tachment! the influence of One full of grace and truth! An influence, which we feel we know not how, and which subdues us we know not when ; which, like the wind, blows where it lists, passes here, and does not pass there ! Once more, then, we come to that root and ground of religion, that element of awe and gratitude which fills religion with emotion, and makes it other and greater than morality, the not ourselves. Wo did not make the order of con- duct, or provide that happiness should belong to it, or dispose our hearts to it. " The preparation of the heart in man is," a* Israel said, " from the Eternnl ! " We did not make the " grace and truth " of Jesus THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 33 provide that happiness should belong to feeling them, and dispose our hearts to feel them. " No man can come to me," as Jesus said, " except the Father which sent me draw him ! " So the revelation of Christ in the New Testament, like the revelation of the God of Israel in the Old, is the revelation of " the Eternal, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness." It is like it, and has the same power of religion in it. 7. Now, then, we see what the doctrine, " I came forth from God," really means. We see how far it has any likeness with that doctrine of the Godhead of the Eternal Son, for which our two bishops are so anx- ious to do " something." We see how far the pseudo- scientific language of our creeds, about persons, and substance, and godhead, and coequal, and coeternal, and created, and begotten, and proceeding, has any- thing at all to do with what Jesus said or meant. We see how impossible it is that one should concede to our clerical friends what they assume to be beyond dis- pute : that the so-called Athanasian Creed " takes the facts of Christian doctrine, and just arranges them sentence after sentence." We see how wide of the mark is that philosophical clergyman, who writes to the " Guardian " that " Our Lord unquestionably annexes eternal life to a right knowledge of the God- head," in imagining that when Jesus said, " This is life eternal, to know Thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent," Jesus had in view 234: LITERATURE AND DOGMA. anything at all like the " facts " which the Athana- sian Creed " arranges, sentence after sentence." But we see more than this. We see how much a very com- mon use of the word faith, which gives rise to false notions like that of this clergyman, needs amending. For it is constantly assumed that there is an oppo- sition between faith and reason ; and that those, whom Christ calls to believe in him, he calls to receive a doc- trine puzzling to the reason, but which, if adopted, will gradually become clear. It is obvious how well this notion of faith suits the recommenders of such doctrine as that which the Athanasian Creed " ar- ranges, sentence after sentence," which is certainly very puzzling to the reason. But this is of the es- sence of faith, it is said : to take on trust what per- plexes the reason. Only adopt the doctrine which perplexes the reason, be a Christian, and afterwards " you shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God." And with this is connected what is so often said in the Bible about " receiving the kingdom of God as a little child," about " babes seeing what is hidden from the wine and prudent." The unlettered believer is, in fact, according to this version of what the Bible means to say, represented in the Bible as a better judge about a thing which perplexes the reason than the philosopher. And this explains the disdain with which the possessors of gospel truth, as it is called, are apt to treat art and literature and science. These happy men are supposed to have, by faith, a certainty in matters perplexing in the highest degree to the reason, which the vaunted exercise of the THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 235 reason can never attain to. And as with faith in Christ, so with faith in God: it is taking on trust something perplexing to the reason. Texts like, " They that seek the Eternal understand all things," and, " I am wiser than the aged because I keep Thy commandments," mean, that we are better off and see clearer than men of study and experience, if, in spite of its puzzling the reason, we accept in faith, and they do not, some truth like the Bishop of Glou- cester's " blessed truth that the God of the universe is a Person." oSTo one has more insisted on this opposition be- tween faith and reason than a writer whom we can never name but with respect, Dr. Newman. " The moral trial involved in faith," he says, " lies in the submission of the reason to external realities partially disclosed." And again : " Faith is, in its very na- ture, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach, simply and absolutely upon testimony." But surely faith is, in its very nature, (with all respect be it spoken!) nothing of the kind; else how could Christ say to the Jews : " If I tell you the truth, why do ye not believe mei y Surely this implies that faith, instead of bring a submission of the reason to what puzzles it, is rather a recognition of what is perfectly clear, if we will attend to it. We cannot always at- tend, all of us ; and here is the not ourselves in the matter, " the grace of God." But attention, cleav- ing, attaching one's self fast to what is undeniably true, that is what the faith of Scripture, " in its very nature," is; and not the submission of the rea- 236 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. son to what puzzles it, or the acceptance, simply and absolutely upon testimony, of what our reason cannot reach. And all that the Bible says of bringing to naught the wisdom of the wise, and of receiving the kingdom of God as a little child, has nothing what- ever to do with the believers acceptance of some dogma that perplexes the reason ; it is aimed at those who sophisticate a very simple thing, religion, by im- porting into it a so-called science with which it has nothing to do. Jewish theological learning, the >\ - tern of divinity of the Jewish hierarchy, who did not know how simple a thing righteousness really was. and who, when simple souls saw it in Christ and were drawn to it, cried out, " This people that knowetli not the laws are cursed ! " it was at these, and at what- ever resembles these, that Christ aimed the words about receiving the kingdom of God as a little child. And the " marvellous work and wonder " about the saving truth which the simple receive is, not that, being difficult to the reason, it is yet got hold of by the unlettered and not by the wise; but that, being so simple, it should yet be so immense, important, in- dispensable; and that, being so immense, important indispensable, it should yet so often be followed by quite unlettered people and neglected by such very clever ones. They are attending to other things, things which do task the reason and intelligence, and in which the unlettered have no skill and no voice; these things, however, are, at most, only one fourth of life. And this absurdity for such it really is- we see every day; people attending to the dillicnlt THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 237 science of matters where the plain practice they quite let slip. How many people will be now busy with Mr. Darwin's new book, so admirably ingenious, on the natural history of the emotions, who yet are al- ways using their own emotions in the worst possible manner! They are eager to know how their emo- tions arose, how these came to express themselves as they do ; yet there the emotions now are, and have for a long time been, and the first thing for any sane man is, to make a proper use of them, and to know how to make a proper use is not difficult ; but all this we never think of, but investigate- zealously how they arose ! Such persons are just like those learned inquirers the Cynic laughed at, who were so busy about the strayings of Ulysses, so inattentive to their own. And Israel's greatness was that he was so impa- tient of trifling of this kind, of being busy with one fourth of life, while the three fourths, conduct, was forgotten. And Israel boldly said : " They that seek the Eternal understand all things; " that is, they are occupied with conduct, righteousness, which truly is, as we have seen, at least three fourths of life, and which Israel thought the whole of it. They have a hold on three fourths of life, while it may be that their great, clever, and accomplished neighbors have a hold on only one fourth, or part of one fourth of life. Which is the solid and sensible man, which understands most, which lives most? Compare a Methodist day-laborer with some dissolute, gifted, brilliant grandee, who thinks nothing of him ! but 238 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. the first deals successfully with nearly the whole of life, while the second is all abroad in it. Compare some simple and pious monk, at Rome, with one of those frivolous men of taste whom we have all seen there ! each knows nothing of what interests the other ; but which is the more vital concern for a man : conduct, or arts and antiquities? Nay, and however false his science and Biblical criticism, the believer who applies the method and secret of Jesus has a width of range and surencss of foothold in life, which even the best scientific and literary critic of the Bible, who applies them not, i< without ; because the first is right in what affects three fourths of life, and the second in what affects but one fourth, or even but one eighth. Each has a secret of which the other, who has no experience of it, does not know the value ; but the value of the learned man's secret is ridiculously least. This, I say, is the very glory and marvel of the religion of the true Israel, and what makes this religion, as Jesus called it, " the good news to the poor! " that it covers nearly the whole of life, and yet is so simple. The only right contrast, therefore, to set up In- tween faith and reason is, not that faith grasps what i> too hard for reason, but that reason does nut, like faitli, attend to what is at mice so great and *n simple. The difficulty about faith is, to attend to what is very simple and very important, but liable to be pushed by more showy or tempting matters out of sight; the marvel about faith is, that wha* i^ ?o simple should be so all-sufficing, so necessary, and so often ncg- THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. yai) lecied. And faith is neither the submission of the reason, nor is it the acceptance, simply and absolutely upon testimony, of what reason cannot reach. Faith is : " the being able to cleave to a power of goodness appealing to our higher and real self, not to our lower and apparent self." 8. So we see how unlike is Christ's own doctrine of his being the Son of God to the difficult doctrine of the Godhead of the Eternal Son, as the Athanasian Creed " arranges it, sentence after sentence," and in the form in which our bishops want to " do some- thing " for it ; as unlike as the original revelation to Israel of the Eternal that loveth righteousness is to " the blessed doctrine that the God of the universe is a Person." And we see how the clergymen who write to the " Guardian " deceive themselves, when they imagine that it is to these doctrines of our bish- ops that Christ " unquestionably attaches eternal life," and how they are led into this error by having more of turn for abstruse reasoning than of literary experience. They are not conversant enough with the many different ways in which men think and speak, so as to be able to distinguish rightly between them, and to perceive that the Bible is literature; and that its words are used, like the words of common life and of poetry and eloquence, approximately, and not like the terms of science, adequately. And if they fall into mistakes about words applied 240 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. to the Father and the Son, by thus making them scientific, how much more do they fall into mistakes when they extend this treatment to words applied to the Holy Spirit. We have seen how the word Pneuma, just by reason of its inward and infinite character, was much employed by Jesus for his method of inwardness and of deliverance from bind- ing traditions and formulas; and how, since Holy Ghost has become to us a formula, just as God and righteousness were to the Jews, to get the force of Christ's use of the word " Pneuma," we ought to re- translate the word for ourselves, and to call it, for a time at any rate, rather influence, intuition, or some such name. For it was thus that Jesus himself used it. When Jesus was going away, above all, and his dis- ciples were to be thrown on themselves and left to use his method of inwardness more deeply and thor- oughly, not having him to go to, then they would find, he said, a new power come to their help ; a power of insight such as they had never had before, and which was none of their making, but came from God as Jesus did, and said nothing of itself, but only what God said or Jesus said ; a " Paraclete," or reinforce- ment working in aid of God and Jesus: even the Spirit of Truth. While Jesus was with them, the disciples had lived in contact with aletlicia, or real- ity ; and they were promised now an intuition of re- ality within themselves. Now, will it be believed that the Athan;if the Atonement, as it is called, holds the central place, drops away and disappears as the Bible comes to be better known. The true centre of gravity of tli" Christian religion is in the method and the sccrd \' Jesus, approximating, in their application, ever closer to the epieikcia, the sweet reasonableness and un- erring sureness, of Jesus himself. And as l!i" method of Jesus led up to his secret, and his secret was dying to " the life in this world " and livinu t<> "the eternal life," both his method and his secret. therefore, culminated in his "perfecting'' on the cross, which he foresaw and foretold. The miracle of the corporeal resurrection ruled the minds of those who have reported Christ's sayings THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 243 for us; and their report, how he foretold his death, cannot always be entirely accepted. One of them alleges him to have foretold it by pointing to his Ixxly and saying: " Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up! " Now, this is certainly an instance of the retrospective pressure exercised on words of Jesus by the established belief in the resur- rection, lie had said of the Temple at Jerusalem: " There shall not be left of it one stone upon an- other." He had said of himself and this much-rev- erenced Temple : " There standeth here One greater than the Temple." He had said he should be put to death, and the death of the worst malefactors, cru- cifixion. He had said that this should happen after he had worked but a little while longer : " I do cures to-day and to-morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected." Nothing more was needed. The mirac- ulous prediction concerning " the temple of his body " was ready to the miracle-writer's hand ! Jesus had said : " Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up ! " In sayings of this kind, the internal evidence is all-important. Now, the sure clew of internal evi- dence to follow, in tracing any words of Jesus about his death and rising again, is the clew given by the ideal of the stricken Servant of God in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah. This ideal, as we have seen, Jesus had adopted and elevated as the true ideal of Israel's Saviour; he had corrected by it the favorite popular ideals he found regnant. And, in this ideal of the stricken Servant of God, the notion of sacri- 244 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. fee is, that this lover of righteousness falls because of a state of iniquity and wickedness which he had no share in making, and as the only remedy for it. The notion of redemption is, that by endurance to the end and by his death crowning his life, he establishes all seekers after good in their allegiance to good, en- ables them to follow it and to reach true life through it. Finally, the notion of resurrection is, that his death makes an epoch of victory for him and his ean-e. which thenceforward live and reign indestruct- ibly. ' He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in his mouth ; he was bruised for our iniquities, the Eternal hath laid on him the iniquity of us all ; " there is the sacrifice. " With his stripes wo are healed;" there is the redemption. But: "When Thou hast made his soul an offering for sin, ho shall see his seed, he shall prolong his days, and the pleas- ure of the Eternal shall prosper in his hand ; " there, at the end of it all, is the resurrection. And just these stages we shall find again in Jesus. " Which of you convinceth me of sin ? " he asked the Jews; nevertheless: u The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected of this generation ; thr Son of Man must be lifted up: " there is the sacri- fice. " Kxeejit a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; the Son of Man came \ give his life a ransom for many; " then- is tin domption. But: " If the grain of corn dio, it briiii? eth forth much fruit; I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me; if F go not away the Spirit of truth will not come unto y..u. but if 1 THE TESTIMONY OK JESUS TO HIMSELF. 245 depart I will send him unto you, and when he is come he will convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment; " there, there is the resurrection and triumph ! The use by Jesus of the words life and death must on no account, however, be limited to this his cruci- fixion and after-triumph, though in these, no doubt, his dying and living culminated. Yet both here, and always in his use of them, they are to be referred to his secret : " He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal ; renounce thyself, and take up thy cross daily, and follow Me ! " Long before his signal Cru- cifixion Jesus had died, by taking up daily that cross which his disciples, after his daily example, were to take up also. " Therefore doth rny Father love me," he says, " because I lay down my life that I may take it again/' He had risen to life long before his crowning Resurrection, risen to life in what he calls " my joy" which he desired to see fulfilled in his disciples also ; " my joy, to have kept my Father's commandment and abide in his love." I^ay, and there is no more powerful testimony to Christ's real use of the words life and death, than a famous text, borrowed from Jewish Aberglaubc, which popular Christianity has wrested in support of its tenet of a physical resurrection at the Metaiikh'fl second advent. Whatever we may think of the nar- rative of the raising of Lazarus, we need have no dif- ficulty in believing that Jesus really did say to the bnther or sister of a dead disciple: "Thy brother 246 LITERATURE AND DOGMA. rise again ! " and that the mourner replied : " I know that he shall rise again at the resurrection of the last day." For the answer which follows has the certain stamp of Jesus : " I am the resurrection and the life ; he that believeth on me, though he die, shall live, and whosoever liveth and believeth on mo shall never die." Now, Martha believed already in the resurrection of Jewish and Christian Aberglaube the resurrection according to the Book of Daniel and the Book of Enoch, the resurrection of the last day, when " they that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." But Jesus cor- rects her Aberglaube, by telling her that her brother is not dead at all; and his words, out of which tho story of the miracle very likely grew, do really make the miracle quite unnecessary. " He that has be- lieved on me and had my secret," says Jesus, " though his body die to the life of this world, still lives; for such an one had died to the life of this world already, and found true life, life out of him- self, life in the Eternal that loveth righteousness, In- doing so." Just in the same way, again, is his promise to see his disciples again after his crucifixion and to take up his abode with them, Jesus corrects, for those who have eyes to read, he corrects in the clearest and most decisive way, those very errors with which our com- mon material conceptions of life and death have made us invest his death and resurrection. " Yet a little while," he says, " and the world seeth me no more; THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 24-7 but ye see me, because I live, and ye shall live too. Tie that hath my commandments and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me ; and him that loveth me I will love, and will manifest myself to him." Jude nat- urally objects: "How is it that thou wilt manifest thyself to us and not to the world ? " And Jesus answers : " If a man love me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we ivill come unto him and make our abode with him; he that loveth me not, keepeth not my word." Therefore the mani- festation of himself he speaks of is nothing external and material. It is, like the manifestation of God to him that ordereth his conversation right, the eter- nal life and joy in keeping the commandments, it is the life for the disciples of Christ, in and with Christ, in " keeping the commandments of God ; " those commandments, which had at last in their true scope been made known to them, through Christ's method and through his secret. 10. Thus, then, did Jesus seek to transform the im- mense materializing Aberglaube into which the re- ligion of Israel had fallen, and to spiritualize it at all points ; while in his method and secret he supplied a sure basis for practice. But to follow him entirely there was needed an cpicikeia, an unfailing sweet- ness and an unerring perception, like his own. It was much if his disciples got firm hold on his method and his secret; and if they transmitted fragments LITERATURE AND DOGMA. enough of his lofty spiritualism, to make it in the fulness of time discernible, and to make it at once and from the first in a large degree serviceable. Who can read in the Gospels the comments preserved to us, both of disciples and of others, on what ho said, and not feel that Jesus must have known, win hi he nevertheless persevered in saying them, how things like: " The bread which I will give is my flesh for the life of the world," or: "I will not leave you comfortless, I will come unto you," would be misap- prehended by those who heard them ? " But, indeed, Jesus himself tells us that he knew and foresaw this. With the promise of the Spirit of truth which should, after his departure, work in his disciples first, then in the world, and which should convince the world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment, and finally transform it, we are all familiar. But how little we remark the impressive words, uttered to the crowd around him only a little while before, and of far wider application than the reporter imagined : " Yet a little while is the light with you; walk while ye have the light, lest the darkness overtake you unawares! " The real appli- cation cannot have been to the unconverted only ; a call to the unconverted to make haste because their chance of conversion would soon, with ( 1 hrist's de- parture, be gone; no, converts came in far thicker after Christ's departure than in his life. The words are for the converted also; it is as if Jesus foresaw the want of his sweet reasonableness which he could not leave, to help his method and his secret which THE TESTIMONY OF JESUS TO HIMSELF. 249 he could leave ; as if he foresaw his words miscon- strued, his rising to eternal life turned into a physical miracle, the advent of the Spirit of truth turned into a scene of thaumaturgy, Peter proving his Master's Messiahship from a Psalm that does not prove it, the great Apostle of the Gentiles word-splitting like a pedantic Rabbi, the most beautiful soul among his own reporters saddling him with metaphysics ; fore- saw the growth of creeds, the growth of dogma, and so, through all the confusion worse confounded of councils, schoolmen, and confessions of faith, down to our own twin Bishops of Winchester and Glouces- ter bent on " doing something " for the honor of the Godhead of the Eternal Son! CHAPTER VIII. THE EAKLY WITNESSES. OUE object in this essay has never been to argue against miracles. Even with Lourdes and La Salette before our eyes, we may yet say that miracles are doomed ; they will drop out, like fairies or witch- craft, from among the matters which serious people, believe. Our one object is to save the revelation in i he Bible from being made solidary, as our Comtist friends say, with miracles; from being attended to or held cheap just in proportion as miracles are attended to or are held cheap. In like manner, nay far more, our object is not, and never can be, to pick holes in the apostles and re- porters of Jesus. Hut much which they say cannot stand ; our one object is to hinder people from mak- ing Jesus solidary with this, and with his reporters' and apostles' character for infallibility. To this ex- tent, and to this only, we are brought at moments into collision with miracles, into collision with the disciples of Jesus and with the writers of the New Testament. We have to show that, the men being what and when and whence they were, the miracles would certainly grow up for them around and in the wake of Jesus. 250 THE EARLY WITNESSES. 251 How did Christ's words : " I will see you again, I go to prepare a place for you ! " grow into the legend so beautiful, and round which have for cen- turies gathered such sacred feelings and aspirations, yet a legend of his coporeal resurrection and ascen- sion ? How ? Why, Herod's first words, when after the execution of John the Baptist he heard of Jesus, were: " It is John the Baptist; lie in risen from the dead!" In such an atmosphere of belief were the disciples living, when their loss of Jesus, the great- est loss that ever befell men, happened. All his dis- course, when he was with them, had run on life and death, apparent death, enduring life; and how many are the stories of the survivors, in an atmos- phere of belief like that of those Palestine times, re- fusing to believe in the death of a head even far ]<>- precious to them, full of reports of his reappearance in this place and that place, feeding themselves on the promise of his triumphant return ! How many thou- sand at this moment, in Persia, refuse to credit the death of the Bab, their Gate of life, executed some years ago! assert that he will return, that he has been seen, that they have seen him ! But the reporters of Jesus were not as others ; they were infallible. So infallible that they report them- selves, when Jesus reappeared, after all his labors to transform and spiritualize for them the old Jew- ish ideal, they report themselves to have met him with the inquiry : " Lord, wilt thou at this time re- store the kingdom to Israel ? " But the Holy Ghost had not then been given J And after the Holy Ghost 252 LITERATURE AND DO(iMA. was given, we find them with one voice assorting that in the lifetime of that generation should come Christ's second advent and the end of the world; Peter falling back into Judaism, so that Paul had to withstand him to the face because he vn\ to be blamed, and Paul himself proving salvation to be by Jesus, from seed, in the promise to Abraham, being used in the singular ! That it is impossible the dis- ciples of Jesus should have been, alone of all the dis- ciples in the world, infallible, that it is begging the question to say they were infallible, need not be made out ; it is conspicuous, on the face of their own show- ing of themselves, that they were not infallible. Ami well it is that it should be so; for this favorite P estant doctrine of the infallibility of the Biblr writers, inherited, indeed, from the Fathers alnnir with that of the infallibility of the Church, but kepi and extolled by Protestants as the true single uiK-lmr to ride at, whereas the other was rotten, this doc- trine involves Christianity in dangers quite as serious as its discarded rival does. But it was not for nothing that the Apostles had lived with Jesus; or even, in the case of a great re- ligious spirit like Paul, lived in his time, lived in his country, had his presrnrr ;uul words near and fresh to them. And, untrue and dtmirrmus as is the popu- lar Protestant doctrine of the plenary inspiration of the Apostles, making them infallible, and vouch- safed no more to any one after the Apostles were gone, yet it rests on a true perception of the vast listanoe which separates them t'l'-.m :iftcr-writers on THE EARLY WITNESSES. Christianity, from the Fathers as from Luther ari