The Kernel and the Husk: Letters on Spiritual Christianity

by Edwin Abbott Abbott

The Action of the Will

Hitherto we have been considering the action of the Will upon external Nature; but now what as to the action of our Will upon our own Nature, upon the machinery of our own body? Is that to be called a Law of Nature or a suspension of a Law of Nature?

It is to be called neither. Our definition of “Law of Nature” was “a metaphorical name given to the ordinary course of things apart from the intervention of human will:” consequently the action of human will (about which we are now speaking) is expressly excluded from the province of Nature, in this sense, and can neither be called “a Law of Nature,” nor a “suspension of a Law of Nature.” The action of the Will falls under the head of “human Nature;” and, discussing it under that head, we may call it by any metaphor we please, a custom, habit, law of human Nature.

This distinction between the name given to the course of non-human Nature and the name given to the action of the human Will on the bodily framework, is based on our distinction between the regular and (if I may use the word) the anticipable sequences of the former, as contrasted with the irregular and unanticipable sequences of the latter. When the Will is undeveloped or enfeebled; when the human being is a baby, or one of an excited and undisciplined crowd, or mad, or drunk, or narcoticized, or mesmerized, or reduced to the bestial level by some overpowering instinct; we can occasionally prophesy his actions or movements with something of the certainty and accuracy with which we predict the motions of a machine; but we cannot thus calculate the actions of a mature, healthy, and reasonable man. Hence it has been usual to contrast with the “Laws of Nature” the “freedom of the human Will.” We cannot demonstrate the freedom of the Will any more than the fixity of the Laws of Nature: the belief in both is suggested by Imagination, tested and approved by Experience and Reason, and finally retained by Faith. Of course, when I speak thus, you will not suppose that I assume that my mind, or being, is divided into distinct parts (as the body consists of distinct limbs) called Will, Reason, &c.: you will understand that I merely use the ordinary brief and convenient phraseology which says “The Will does so-and-so,” meaning “I do so-and-so with a certain consciousness which appears to me to result from a faculty inherent in me of choosing between two or more courses of action, which faculty I call Will.” With this precaution, I assert that the action of the Will is natural as regards human Nature, but outside Nature or “extra-natural” as regards non-human Nature, and that it does not involve the suspension of what are technically called “the Laws of Nature.”

It is thus shown that the human Will acts directly on the human body in accordance with the Laws of human Nature, and that it does not interfere with the external world except indirectly, through the body, in accordance with the Laws of Nature (as technically defined). There is nothing therefore in the action of the human Will that would justify the a priori inference that the divine Will would, by any direct intervention, disturb or suspend that fixed Order in the external world which constitutes a large part of the revelation of God to mankind.

If indeed we are to draw any kind of parallel between divine and human action, we shall have to ask ourselves what is there appertaining to the divine Spirit which can in any sense be said to correspond to its “Body”? And I suppose we shall reply, in Pauline language, that Mankind, which is said to have Christ for its Head, might be mystically and spiritually called the Body of the divine Will or Holy Spirit. If this be so, proceeding with our parallel, might we not repeat, word for word, with the needful proportionate changes, the language of the last paragraph: “The divine Will or Spirit acts directly on the divine body (that is on mankind) in accordance with the Laws of Spiritual Nature, and it does not interfere with the external world, except indirectly, through mankind, in accordance with the Laws of Nature (as technically defined)”? I do not say that this analogy is logic-proof: for what can be called a “body,” or what “external,” in relation to the all-pervading God? Nevertheless, as it falls in with our actual experiences, this mystical parallel seems as well worth recording as most a priori notions on this subject, though we take it as no more than an illustration of possibilities. But, if we are to confine ourselves to certainties, the one thing certain is, that Nature, in the fullest sense, human as well as non-human, emphatically discourages us from expecting “miracles.”

XIV
THE MIRACLES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

My dear ——,

Your last letter now comes to the point which I have been long anticipating, or rather it recurs to the point from which our correspondence started—the credibility of the miracles attributed to Christ. You tell me that during the long vacation you have been rapidly reviewing my letters and attempting to enter into my views. There is much, you say, that is new, and there is something that improves on acquaintance, in this form of “Christian Positivism” as you call it; its intellectual security has attractions for you, and it seems to you to satisfy at once the aspirations of those who are drawn to worship humanity, and of those who are drawn to worship something above humanity. All this looks very well on paper, you say; but when you take up the Gospels, it seems to fade away into a mere student’s dream: and you state the objection thus: “For our knowledge of Christ, we depend almost entirely upon the New Testament; now the New Testament contains accounts of miracles; these miracles we are unable to accept as historical; consequently the New Testament must be regarded as non-historical, and the whole story of Christ becomes a myth.”

In return for this argument about the New Testament let me supply you with a similarly sceptical one about the Old Testament, and ask you whether you are prepared consistently to adopt it. “For our knowledge of the children of Israel, we depend almost entirely upon the Old Testament; now the Old Testament contains accounts of miracles; these miracles we are unable to accept as historical; consequently the Old Testament must be regarded as non-historical, and the story of the descendants of Israel becomes a myth.”

Now are you really satisfied with this argument? The so-called Law of Moses, the wandering in the Wilderness, the conquest of Canaan, the lives of the wonder-working Gideon and of Barak, the wars and songs of David, the denunciations, warnings, consolations, sorrows, visions, of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and the other prophets, are they indeed, in your judgment, converted into mere myths by the admixture of the miraculous element? Are they even made so far mythical as not to reveal the story of the training of one of the most remarkable of nations, a nation theologically quite singular upon earth? I contend on the contrary, that the removal of the miraculous element results in a two-fold advantage, on the one hand placing the story of Israel in the province of history, and on the other hand, not bringing it down to the level of the common-place, but elevating it to a pinnacle among the histories of nations, and making it in a certain sense more wonderful than before. If Moses was a plenipotentiary miracle-worker from God, then there was nothing unexpected or wonderful in the spiritual results that he achieved; and the wonder rather is that he achieved so little. Give me the thunders of Sinai, with power to burn, blast, and plague my opponents; add to these the power of producing without labour and without delay miraculous supplies of manna, quails, and water, and I myself would undertake to terrify or allure any nation into obeying a far less noble and attractive code of laws than was set forth in the name of Moses. But when I see a lawgiver with no such powers, doing what Moses did, and shaping, or preparing the way for shaping, one of the most carnal and unspiritual of races into a nation of Priests and Prophets for the civilised world, then I am ready to fall upon my face and to take my shoes from off my feet, saying from the depth of my heart, “Truly God is in this place.” “But,” say you, “the so-called Law of Moses is no more due to Moses than trial by jury is due to Alfred.” That matters not. It is not any one Israelite; it is Israel as a whole, Israel and its lawgivers and poets and prophets collectively; it is the evolution of the spiritual from the carnal Israel that I revere; and all the more, if that evolution be natural. Regarded as miraculous, the history of Israel is somewhat of a failure and a bathos; but, regarded as non-miraculous, it becomes a most miraculous triumph of divine intention and persistence, even though the walls of Jericho succumbed to the trumpets of Israel only in hyperbole, and although the sun stood still at the bidding of Joshua only in the impassioned language of an Oriental poet.

I am quite sure you must feel this as strongly as I do; you cannot honestly and sincerely put aside all the history of Israel as a myth because it contains a non-historic element of miracles, any more than you put aside the battles of Salamis and Regillus because they too have received their miraculous adornment. But some are probably perplexed and scandalized at the task that is apparently set before them of disentangling the true from the false, the myth from the non-myth: “How strange,” they say, “that the story of the training of the Priests of the world, that story which should have been a light to guide our feet, has been suffered to shed darkness instead of light and falsehood instead of truth! Is it probable, is it even decent and reverent, to suppose that God should have allowed the Book of Revelation to be so falsified that the simple and unlearned cannot depend upon it without the aid of scholars and specialists?”

My reply is that, as long as men reason in this way, assuming that Revelation ought to have been conveyed by some perfect medium, and therefore that it must have been conveyed by some perfect medium, so long it will be as impossible to refute them as it was to refute the Aristotelian astronomers who argued that “The planets ought to move in perfect curves; and the circle is a perfect curve; and therefore the planets must move in circles.” We are like children crying for the moon if we demand that this world, or that anything in this world, shall be arranged as if the world were the best of all possible worlds. It is not the best possible world, and we know it is not. Some things attest the glory of God more perfectly than others; but nothing attests it quite perfectly. You might as well hope to remove refraction from the atmosphere, as to remove from the human mind the prejudices which compel and always have compelled mankind to exaggerate and misrepresent divine truth by forcing us to think that God must have acted as we should have acted had we been in His place.

If you and I were omnipotent and had to re-make the Universe, I suppose there is no question but we should make man perfectly good (according to our notions of goodness) and that we should force him to remain good. And if you or I were omnipotent and had to reveal anything to men, we should write it large and clear in the sky, or in the heart, legible to all without effort, so that men should be forced to understand it. But God has neither done this nor anything like it. Therefore, since in other respects He has departed so very far from our notions of the best method, we cannot be surprised if He has not composed the Old Testament quite in the manner which would commend itself to us as the best. From our point of view the Bible teems with obvious imperfections. In the first place there are none of the modern arrangements for securing accuracy. No special newspaper reporters, not even contemporary writers of memoirs or histories, have handed down to posterity the exact words and deeds of Moses, David, Isaiah, and the great heroes and prophets of Israel. Might we not almost say that there have been as it were arrangements for securing inaccuracy? The authors wrote, in many cases, long after the events they recorded, under conditions which rendered accuracy of detail quite impossible. They have often been lengthy where we could have desired brevity (as for example in the enumerations of pedigrees and in the details of the furniture and ritual of the Temple or the Tabernacle) and very brief where we should have prized amplitude. Writing as Orientals for the most part write history, without statistical exactness, they have sometimes made mistakes (sometimes self-contradictory mistakes) in numbers and names, which it is now impossible to rectify. Nay, we can hardly acquit them sometimes of moral error; they have at all events sometimes appeared to praise, or at least not to blame, sometimes even to impute to God, acts that would seem to us—even when all due allowance is made for difference between ancient and modern standards of morality—deserving of express and severe censure.

But their special error which we are now considering remains yet unmentioned. You know that nations, like individuals, in their infancy have very vague notions of the uniformity of Nature, and very strong notions of the personality of Nature or of some Beings behind Nature. Even in modern times Orientals would say that God or Allah did this or that, where we say that this or that “happened;” and I remember hearing not many years ago that some Jews of Palestine, suffering from the consequences of extensive conflagration, wrote to England for relief in a letter which declared—in perfect good faith, and without any intention to imply a miracle—that God had “sent down fire from heaven upon their town.” An Eastern traveller of modern times tells an amusing story to the same effect how a camel-driver, when questioned as to the cause of his rheumatism, could not be induced for a long time to make any other answer except that “Allah had caused it;” and even when the traveller had elicited the immediate cause, the man would still persist that “Allah had sent the rheumatism, though it had followed upon drinking a great quantity of camels’ milk when he was in a violent heat.” You should therefore accustom yourself, if you want to understand the Bible, to look at Western narrative from an Oriental point of view. Take for example the interesting account given by the African traveller Mungo Park of the manner in which a trifling incident saved his life in the desert. Alone and desperate, faint and famished, he had thrown himself down to die, when he suddenly caught sight of a small but exquisitely shaped plant of great rarity and interest: “And can God have taken so much thought and care for the creation of this little plant,” he cried, “and have no thought or care for me?” In the strength of this suggestion he started up, pressed on his way, and reached safety. Now compare this striking little story with the similar incident of the gourd, recorded in the Book of Jonah, and imagine how a prophet of Israel could have described the message of salvation. He would have told us (as the prophet Jonah tells us) how the Lord God in the same day caused a plant to grow up before the face of the man, and how the Lord God said unto the man “Hath the Lord thy God taken thought for this plant, and shall He take no thought for thee? Arise, go on thy way”—giving, as from God, the actual words of the thought which the Western traveller describes as suggesting itself or occurring to his mind. You must surely see how naturally this conversion of the natural into the seemingly miraculous would have been effected by a penman of Israel, without the least intention to imply a real suspension of the laws of nature.

Keeping yourself still in the position of an Oriental historian, consider what you would be called on to describe, in setting down the story of Israel. You would find, as your materials, various traditions, mostly oral, mostly perhaps poetic, describing a great deliverance wrought in every particular by the hand of Jehovah Himself: you would find the nation around you, and yourself among the rest, believing that Jehovah Himself had drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea, that His terrible voice had given the Law from Sinai, that He had been to wandering Israel a cloud in the noontide to protect them from the sun, and a light in the darkness to give them guidance, that He had supplied them with food from Heaven and spread a table for them in the wilderness, that He had Himself given them water from Himself (the Rock of Israel!) to quench their thirst. If the Jordan’s fords, unusually shallow, had allowed the whole nation to pass across, as upon dry land, you would be taught as a child to hear and sing, in hymns that reiterated the national deliverance, that the Lord Himself had done this: “The waters saw thee, O Lord, the waters saw thee, and were afraid.” If, in the general terror of the Canaanites, a strong city suffered itself to be taken on the mere onset and war cry of the invaders as easily as though it had been an unwalled hamlet, the traditions would tell how the walls fell flat at the sound of the trumpets of Joshua; if some sudden storm, accompanied with hail and immediately followed by an inundation of swollen streams, threw the chariots and horses of the enemy into confusion and ensured their speedy rout; or if, on another occasion, the sudden gloom of a storm had been succeeded by a long evening of peculiar brightness and clearness facilitating the pursuit and destruction of the foe, then you would hear that the “stars in their courses” fought against Sisera, or that in the day of Beth-horon the Lord Himself sent down hailstones upon the enemy and stopped the sun at the prayer of Joshua:—

“The sun and moon stood still in their habitation;

At the light of thine arrows as they went,

At the shining of thy glittering spear.”[^[9]]

All these materials, expressed in terse poetic phrase, you, as a historian, would have to amplify into prose. Is it not easy to see how, in the process, without any fraud or conscious exaggeration on your part, you would transmute the natural into the miraculous?

To go through the whole of the miracles in the Old Testament and to attempt to shew how in almost every case the miraculous part of the story may have crept in without intention to deceive, would be a task far above my powers; and it would require a book not a letter. If you were to study with care the articles in the Encyclopædia Britannica on the books of the Old Testament they would give you a good deal of light on this subject. But the problem is complicated by the fact that the causes that originated the miraculous element are not always the same. For example the seven miracles of Elijah and the fourteen miracles of Elisha (the latter number being exactly the double of the former in order to fulfil the prayer of Elisha for a “twofold” portion of the spirit of his master) cannot be explained in the same way as the miracles of the Wanderings or as those in the life of Samson. The eminent Hebraist to whom we are indebted for the Articles above-mentioned would confer on all students of the Bible a very great benefit, if he would give us a separate treatise on the Old Testament miracles. Meantime I must content myself with shewing how some miracles, of what I may call a “grotesque” kind, may be explained as the mere result of misunderstood names. You must be familiar with this kind of explanation, I think, in ancient history, and even in modern English history, although you have never thought of applying it to the Bible. Perhaps you have read in Mr. Isaac Taylor’s Words and Places how the sexton in Leighton Buzzard used to show the eagle of the lectern as the identical buzzard from which the place derived its name—little guessing that “Buzzard” is a mere corruption of “Beaudésert;” and the porter at Warwick Castle, when he shows you the bones of the “dun cow” slain by Guy of Warwick, hands down a similar erroneous tradition probably derived from a misunderstanding of “dun.”[^[10]] A far more famous instance connects itself with the Phœnician name of “Bosra,” belonging to the citadel of Carthage. This name meant, in the Phœnician language, “citadel;” but the Greeks confused it with the Greek word “Bursa,” a “hide;” and then they proceeded to invent a story to explain the name. Queen Dido, they said, had bought for a small price as much ground as she could encompass with a hide; she had cut the hide into thin thongs and thereby purchased the site of a city for a trifle: hence the city received the name of “Hide.” Thus subtilized the Greeks; but it may interest you to know that our own ancestors consciously or unconsciously followed in their footsteps. There is near Sittingbourne a castle called Tong or Thong Castle, situated on a “tongue” of land (Norse, tunga) which has given it its name. But tradition has invented or imitated the old Greek story, and has declared that the castle was so-called because the site was bought like Dido’s, a trifling price being given for so much land as could be included in the “thong” made from a bull’s hide.

But now to come to the particular instance which is the only one I shall give from the Old Testament. You must recollect, and I think you ought to have been perplexed by, the astounding incident in the life of Samson, connected with the “ass’s jawbone.” The hero is said first to have slain some hundreds of men with the jawbone of an ass, and then to have thrown away the jawbone in the anguish of a parching thirst. Upon this, the Lord is said, (in the Old Version of the Bible) to have opened a fountain of water in the hollow of the jawbone in answer to his cry: and the fountain was henceforth named En-hakkore, i.e. the “fountain of him that calleth,” because Samson “called upon the Lord.” Moreover, when he cast away the jawbone, he is said to have called the place Ramath-lehi; which the margin (not of the New Version but of the Old) interprets, “the lifting up of the jawbone” or “the casting away of the jawbone.” Without pausing to dwell on the extreme improbability of the details of the story, I will merely state the probable explanation. It is probable that the valley containing the “hollow” in which the fountain lay, was called, from the configuration of the place, “the Ass’s Jawbone,” before the occurrence of any exploit of Samson in it. Indeed we find it actually called “Lehi,” or “Jawbone,” in the narrative now under discussion, just before the supposed incident of the jawbone took place: “The Philistines went up, and pitched in Judah, and spread themselves in Lehi (Jawbone),” Judges xv. 9. This latter fact indeed is not conclusive (as the narrator, living long after the event, might possibly use the name of the place handed down to him, even in writing of a time when he believed the name to have been not yet given): but the probability of a natural explanation of the origin of the name receives strong confirmation from a passage in Strabo (303) who actually mentions some other place (I think in Peloponnesus) called the “Ass’s Jawbone.” I need not say that Strabo narrates no such Samsonian incident to explain the name, and that it was probably derived (like Dogs Head, Hog’s Back and many other such names) from some similarity between the shape of an ass’s jawbone and the shape of the valley. Moreover, the word translated “hollow,” though it might represent the cavity in an ass’s jawbone, might also represent the hollow in a valley, as in Zephaniah (i. 11) “Howl, ye inhabitants of the hollow.” Again, the name Ramath-lehi cannot mean “casting away of the jawbone;” it means “lifting up,” or “hill,” of Lehi: and accordingly the Revised Version translates, “that place was called Ramath-lehi;” and the margin interprets the name thus, “The hill of the jawbone”. I should add also that the Revisers—instead of the Old Version, “clave an hollow place that was in the jaw”—give us now, “clave the hollow place that is in Lehi.” You must see now surely how on every side the old miraculous interpretation breaks down and makes way for a natural and non-miraculous explanation of the legend. But we have still to explain the name of the fountain, said to have been given from the “calling” of Samson. This is easily done. It appears that the phrase “him that calleth,” or “the Caller,” is a Hebrew name for the Partridge, so named from its “call,” or cry. The “Fountain of the Caller,” therefore, in the “hollow place” of the “Ass’s Jawbone,” was simply, as we might say, Partridge Well in Jawbone Valley, which lay below Jawbone Hill.

But now, many years after the champion of Israel had passed away, comes the legendary poet or historian, who has to tell of some great exploit of deliverance wrought by the hero Samson in this Valley of the Jawbone of the Ass by the side of the Fountain of the Caller. Straight-way, every local name must be connected with the incident that fills his mind and the minds of all his countrymen who live in the neighbourhood. And so “Jawbone Valley” became so called because it was there that Samson smote the Philistines with “the jawbone of an ass;” and “Jawbone heights” are so-called because on this spot Samson “lifted up” the jawbone against his foes, or “threw it away” after he had destroyed them; and “the Well of the Caller” derives not only its name but even its miraculous existence from “the calling of Samson upon Jehovah.”

I think you will now perceive the kind of reasoning which has compelled me to give up the miracles of the Old Testament. It is not in any way because I have an a priori prejudice against miracles: on the contrary, I started with an a priori prejudice for miracles in the Bible, though against miracles in general. It is not simply because there is not sufficient evidence for them; it is in great measure because there is evidence against them. For, when you can shew how a supposed miracle may naturally have occurred, and how the miraculous account may naturally and easily have sprung up, I think that amounts to evidence against the miracle. And of course when you find yourself compelled to explain in this way a large number of miracles in the Old Testament, it becomes far more probable than before that the rest are susceptible of some natural explanation. I do not pretend to have investigated in detail every miraculous narrative in the Old Testament. I am ready to admit that at the bottom of the miraculous, there may have been in many cases something very wonderful. Being for example personally very much inclined to the mysterious, I would not deny that in the Hebrew race, as in some others, there may have been some strange power, natural but at present inexplicable, of “second sight;” but, on the whole, looking at the evidence for and against the miracles of the Old Testament, I have now no hesitation in rejecting them as miracles, however much I may admire the spirit that suggested the narratives, as exhibiting a profound and spiritual sense of the sympathy of God with men.

But we may perhaps be called upon to believe in the miracles of the Old Testament on the authority, so to speak, of the miracles of the New Testament. Such at least I take to be the meaning of the following extract from an author who has done so much good educational as well as episcopal work, and has manifested such an openness to new truth, that I differ from him with diffidence where I may possibly have misunderstood his meaning, and with regret where I am confident that I have understood him correctly. The passage is from Bishop Temple’s Bampton Lectures,[^[11]] and I will give it at full length, partly because I may have to refer to it again, partly because I am afraid of misinterpreting it if I separate one or two sentences from the context:

“We have to ask what evidence can be given that any such miracles as are recorded in the Bible have ever been worked? It is plain at once that the answer must be given by the New Testament. No such[^[12]] evidence can now be produced on behalf of the miracles of the Old Testament. The times are remote; the date and authorship of the Books not established with certainty; the mixture of poetry with history, no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts; and, if the New Testament did not exist, it would be impossible to show such a distinct preponderance of probability as could justify us in calling many [? any] to accept the miraculous parts of the narrative as historically true.”

If I understand this argument, I fear I must dissent from it. But let us try at least to understand it. Dr. Temple admits (what I should not be disposed to have admitted without a good deal of qualification) that “the mixture of poetry with history” (and the context makes it clear that he is referring to the miraculous accounts of the Old Testament) is “no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts.” This is a very important admission indeed. A plain Englishman may miss, at first sight, the full importance of it. He may be disposed to say, “What does this matter to me? What do I care whether a miracle is told in poetry or in prose, provided only it is true?” But by “poetry” Dr. Temple does not mean “verse;” he means hyperbole, poetic figures of speech and metaphors; in plain English, he means language that is literally and historically untrue. Consequently the admission amounts to this, that it is now no longer possible in the miraculous narratives of the Old Testament to separate what is historically true from what is historically untrue. If this be so, I cannot understand how the question is substantially affected by the New Testament. Let us suppose for a moment that, many centuries after the times of Moses and Samson, real miracles were wrought by Christ and the apostles; suppose even, in addition, that the reality of the miracles wrought by Christ and his followers could constitute any evidence for the Mosaic Miracles or could refute the evidence against such stories as that of the Ass’s jawbone; yet even then, what is the use of knowing that there may be a miracle somewhere concealed in an Old Testament narrative in which it is impossible to “make any sure separation” of the historically true from the historically untrue?

But for my part I am quite unable to adopt either of these suppositions. I cannot see how “a distinct preponderance of probability” for the Samsonian myth or the story of the stopping of the sun could be secured by the fact that miracles were really, long afterwards, performed by Christ. All that could fairly be said, as it seems to me, would be this, that since miracles were actually wrought by the Redeemer of the race, who was Himself a child of Israel, it is not so improbable as before that miracles might have been also wrought by other previous deliverers of Israel. But this could not go far, and certainly cannot constitute “a distinct preponderance of probability,” if we find positive evidence for a miracle almost wanting, and negative evidence against it very strong.[^[13]]

So far as Dr. Temple’s argument has weight, so far it appears to me to be capable of being used in the opposite direction to that which he intended. For if there is any connection between the miracles of the Old and of the New Testament, so that the probability of the latter may be fairly said—I will not say to constitute “a distinct preponderance of probability,” but to contribute slightly to the probability of the former, then surely we must also admit that the demonstrated improbability of the former must contribute slightly to the a priori improbability which we ought to attach to the latter. If the Bible is to be regarded as a whole, and Bible miracles as a whole, then the fact that the Divine Author of the Bible allowed revelation in the earlier part of the Book to be conveyed through an imperfect and non-historical medium will constitute a reasonable probability that He may also have conveyed His later revelations through the same means. In other words, the acknowledged presence of the law of “Truth through Illusion” in the Old Testament should prepare us not to be disappointed if we find the same law traceable in the New Testament: and the collapse of miracles in the former should prepare us for a collapse of miracles in the latter.

Do not however suppose for a moment that a collapse of miracles implies a collapse of the Bible, and do not be disheartened by such expressions as that “the mixture of poetry with history is no longer capable of any sure separation into its parts.” If that expression refers merely to some of the legends of the times of the Patriarchs, or to a few isolated passages elsewhere, it may be accepted without fear; but it cannot apply to the great bulk of the history of the Chosen People. Here you will find very little difficulty in rejecting the obviously non-historical and miraculous element; and you will lose nothing by the rejection. Read through Stanley’s Lectures on the Jewish Church and ask yourself whether you have missed anything from the campaigns of Joshua and the exploits of Gideon and Samson because the miracles have vanished from his pages. Where miraculous narratives are manifestly not deliberate fabrications, but (as here) late prosaic interpretations of early poetic traditions, they very often afford trustworthy evidence of ancient historical events which imprinted themselves upon the hearts of a simple people. Certainly I can say for myself that I never realized Israel as a nation and had not half my present appreciation of the wisdom and wonder of the deliverance and training of Israel by Jehovah till I had learned to interpret the miracles as being nothing more than man’s inadequate attempt to set forth in visible shape the unique redemption of the Chosen People. Spiritually as well as intellectually, my enjoyment of the Old Testament has been doubled ever since I have been able, however imperfectly, to separate the historical element in it from the non-historical, and to interpret the prose as prose and the poetry as poetry.

XV
THE MIRACLES OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

My dear ——,

You demur to the parallel that I draw between the Old Testament and the New Testament; “The Battle of Beth-horon can be disentangled from the miracle of the stopping of the sun, just as the battles of Salamis and Regillus can be disentangled from the visions which are said to have accompanied them: and so of other Old Testament narratives. But is it possible,” you ask, “that the life of Christ can be disentangled from miracles? Do not His own words and doctrine imply a continual assumption that He had power to do ‘mighty works’ superior to those of ordinary men?”

You could not have put your question more happily: for you unconsciously illustrate the almost universal confusion—common to a great number of theologians and agnostics as well as to the ordinary Bible reader—between “miracles” and “mighty works.” You are really asking not one but two questions. Your first question asks about “miracles;” by which you mean some kind of suspension of a law of nature, or, if you prefer it, some act not conceived as explicable in accordance with any natural law by the person who is attempting explanation. Your second question asks about “mighty works,” a phrase of constant occurrence in the New Testament, by which phrase we may understand works superior to the works of ordinary persons, but not necessarily suspensions of the laws of nature. Works may be “mighty” and yet quite explicable in accordance with natural law.

You seem to expect a No to your first question and a Yes to your second. I answer Yes to both. (1) The life of Christ can be disentangled from “miracles.” (2) Christ always assumed that He could do “mighty works,” and from them His life cannot be separated.

It is a law of human nature that the mind influences the body. By acting on the imagination and the emotions men have in all ages consciously or unconsciously effected instantaneous cures in accordance with natural laws. There has been much quackery and deception mixed up with cures of this kind; but no physician, and no man of any general information, would doubt that such cures have been and still are performed. The Jansenists, subjected to the test of hostile observation, had some undeniable successes of this nature. Every one has heard of the so-called “miracles” of Lourdes; and no unprejudiced person would deny that amid possible exaggerations and (I greatly fear) some frauds, they have contained an element of reality. “Faith-healing” is going on in England during this very year; and in the very place where I am now writing I heard a captain of the Salvation Army just now give out a notice that, besides a “free and easy meeting,” and a “holiness meeting,” and sundry other meetings, there is to be a meeting on one evening this week for the purpose of “casting out devils.” If I go there, I shall probably see attempts, with partial success, to excite a paralytic to motion, or to arouse some one from a dull stupor approximating to insanity. These attempts, even though immensely assisted by the intense interest and sympathetic demonstrations of the spectators, will probably produce only a temporary effect; and when it passes away the patient will very likely be worse than before. But the law of nature is the same with all; in modern times with the Jansenists, the miracle-workers of Lourdes, the “faith-healers,” and the Salvation Army, and in ancient days with the priests of Æsculapius. Cures can be effected by a strong emotional shock, sometimes of a gross kind such as mere terror or violent excitement, sometimes of a much purer kind, an ecstatic hope and trust. A marked distinction must of course be made between those cures which can, and those which cannot, be effected by appeal to the emotions. Paralysis (called in the New Testament “palsy”), mental disease (often called in the New Testament “possession”), and various kinds of nervous disorder, are all susceptible of emotional cure: but the loss of a limb cannot be so cured. The cure of a man sick of the palsy by the emotional method would be a miracle for spectators of the first century, but it would not be a miracle for us now; that is to say, it would be explicable by us, but not by them, in accordance with known natural laws: but the restoration of a lost limb by faith would be a miracle for them and for us alike: we know nothing of any natural law in accordance with which such an act could be performed by any degree of faith.

Now it will be admitted by all that the great majority of Christ’s “mighty works” were acts of healing, and that many of these were expressly attributed by Him to faith. “Seeing their faith” is the preface, in each of the three Synoptic Gospels, to the account of the cure of the paralytic man, and it is a very curious preface; for it seems to shew that Jesus recognized a kind of sponsorial and contagious efficacy of faith in that instance (as also in the case of the father of the epileptic boy); and we know by modern experience of “faith-healing” how great is the influence of a sympathetic and trustful audience. Elsewhere, “Thy faith hath made thee whole,” “According to your faith be it unto you,” “Great is thy faith, be it unto thee even as thou wilt,” “Thy faith hath saved thee,” “If thou canst believe, all things are possible,” “Believe ye that I am able to do this?” “Be not afraid, only believe”—these and similar expressions lead us to conclude that many of the “mighty works” of Jesus were conditional on faith. Perhaps it might startle you if I were to say that Jesus was not able to perform a “mighty work” unless faith was present; yet if I said this, I should only be repeating what St. Mark (vi. 5), the earliest of the Evangelists, says on a certain occasion, that on account of the general unbelief at Nazareth Jesus was not able (οὐκ ἐδύνατο) to do there any mighty work, “save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk and healed them.” This confession is so frank and almost scandalizing in its plainness that we cannot be surprised that the later Evangelist, in his parallel narrative, softens it down by omitting the words “was not able,” and by inserting “many.”[^[14]] We need by no means infer from this narrative that Jesus attempted “mighty works” and failed. It may be that He did not attempt them because He discerned the faithlessness of those around Him, and felt His own consequent inability. But, interpret it as we may, this passage remains a most important confirmation of the other passages in which Jesus Himself implies the necessity of faith. Where there was no faith, there Jesus “was not able to do any mighty work;” and this limit to His power Jesus Himself recognized.

Here then we find at once a remarkable difference between most of the “mighty works” of Jesus and the “miracles” of the Old Testament. The former were conditional on faith, and, this condition suggests that many of them may be explicable on natural laws; the latter have no condition attached to them and there is nothing to suggest that they are explicable on any natural law. Indeed the miracles of the Old Testament are very often wrought, not as a natural response to belief, but as a rebuke to unbelief: thus the hand of Moses is made leprous one moment and pure the next, in order to inspire him with faith; Gideon lays out a fleece on the grass, and the laws of nature are suspended for the purpose of making it wet to-day and dry to-morrow, simply in order that his unbelieving heart may be encouraged by a sign from God; the faithless Ahaz is encouraged by God in the Old Testament to ask for that very favour which Christ in the New Testament systematically refused to the Pharisees—a sign from heaven: and for the sake of Hezekiah (who asks “What shall be the sign that the Lord will heal me?”) the dial goes miraculously backward! Could contrast be more complete?

It follows that we shall be acting hastily if we place the “mighty works” of Jesus on the same level as the “miracles” of the Old Testament, inasmuch as the former are (in the strict sense of the term) “mighty works,” while the latter (again in the strict sense of the term) are “miracles.” But in addition to this reason, derivable from the nature of the works themselves, there is another reason, derivable from the evidence, for drawing a distinction. Besides the direct testimony of the Gospels, we have other testimony, indirect but even more cogent, to prove that Jesus wrought wonderful cures. The earliest of the Gospels was probably not composed in its present shape till more than a generation had passed away after the death of Christ; and, during the lapse of thirty years evidence—especially if handed down by oral, and that too Oriental, tradition—may undergo many corruptions. But the letters of St. Paul are earlier, some of them much earlier; and many of them are of such an unaffected, personal, informal nature that it is absolutely impossible to suppose that they were written to express a conviction that the writer did not feel, or to make the readers believe in truths which were no truths. Now in his letters St. Paul quietly assumes that many of his fellow-Christians, and he himself in particular, had the power of working wonderful cures without the ordinary means[^[15]]. He even sets down this power as one among many “gifts” or “graces” vouchsafed to the Church, and he places it by no means high in the list. A man must be absolutely destitute of all power of literary and historical criticism, if he can persuade himself that these expressions in St. Paul’s letters had no basis of fact, and that they were inserted, though unmeaning both to the writer and to the hearers, in order to delude posterity into a false belief. There is nothing in the Epistles to indicate the nature of the diseases which were cured by St. Paul and his followers. We may conjecture with much probability that they were nervous diseases, paralysis, “possession,” and the like, such as might be acted on by the “emotional shock” of faith: and the conjecture is confirmed by the fact that, in the time of Josephus, healers of demoniacs were very common in Palestine; and certain Jews of Ephesus are recorded in the Acts of the Apostles to have tried an experiment, after Paul’s manner, in attempting to cure a case of one “possessed.” But be this as it may, the fact that St. Paul and St Paul’s contemporaries unquestionably cured some kinds of diseases in the name of Jesus, and did this after some sort of system, by the utterance of the name of Jesus, without the ordinary means, is a very strong confirmation of the accuracy of the Gospels in attributing to Jesus the power of working instantaneous cures. It would be strange indeed that the Disciples, and not the Master, should have had such powers.

I have laid stress upon the fact that Jesus wrought “mighty” but natural cures, in the first place, because it ought to increase our appreciation of His personal influence and power over the souls of men, to know that He not only possessed this power in an unprecedented degree but also communicated it to His disciples; and secondly, because the fact that He performed these “mighty works” has naturally led people, from the earliest times down to the present day, to infer that He performed “miracles.” Even at the present time you will find that the great mass of Christians make no distinction at all between healing a paralytic or a demoniac or a dumb man, and restoring a severed ear or blasting a fig-tree; all alike seem to them “miracles.” If this is so even in these days, in spite of physiology, you cannot be surprised that the first Christians and their followers made no such distinction; they assumed that the man who could heal a paralytic by a word could heal any other disease in the same way, and do any other work he pleased contrary to the course of nature. This belief would prepare the way for attributing to Jesus other works of a very different kind, real “miracles,” that is, suspensions of the laws of nature. Considering the multitude of such acts recorded in the Old Testament as having been performed by Moses, Elijah, Elisha and others, we may well be surprised to find how very few have been attributed to Jesus: and I believe it can be shown that each of these few has originated from some misunderstanding, and without any intention to deceive. Of almost all of these real “miracles,” said to have been wrought by Christ, I believe we are justified in saying with Bishop Temple that, if we take each by itself, we cannot find for it any “clear, and unmistakeable, and sufficient evidence.”[^[16]] So far from being an exaggeration this is rather an understatement of the case: there is not only no “clear and unmistakeable and sufficient evidence” for them, there is also very strong indirect evidence against some of them. In some future letter I may deal in detail with these miracles; for the present I will select only one.

This one shall be the most striking of all the miracles in the New Testament, a miracle exceeding in wonder even the raising of Lazarus. It is found only in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and describes an incident that followed immediately on the death of Jesus. Here are the exact words:

“And the earth did quake, and the tombs were opened; and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised; and coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the Holy City and appeared unto many.”

Have I at all exaggerated this miracle in declaring it to be more startling than even the raising of Lazarus? It records the resurrection, not of one man, but of many. Nor are we allowed by the author to suppose that he referred to visions of the dead, appearing unto friends; for he tells us that “the tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints arose.” Moreover this would appear to have been a miracle not wrought in private as many of the mighty works of Jesus were, nor a sight vouchsafed to a chosen few (like the manifestations of Jesus after death); for these “bodies” went into Jerusalem, during the Passover, at a time when the city was thronged with visitors, and “appeared unto many.” What subsequently became of these “bodies”—whether they remained on earth till the Ascension when they ascended with Jesus, or whether they lived their lives over again and were buried a second time, or whether they went back to their tombs again after they had appeared in Jerusalem—is a question of some difficulty, which has exercised the minds of commentators and has been answered rather variously than satisfactorily. Be this as it may, the miracle must be confessed by all to be stupendous.

Now for the evidence of it. I have been quoting from St. Matthew’s account of this miracle. What would a dispassionate and intelligent heathen say of it, coming for the first time to the study of our four Gospels? Would it not be something of this sort: “Here you call on me to believe a miracle that appears to me to be motiveless and is certainly singularly startling: but I will suspend my judgment of it till I hear the accounts given by your other three Evangelists. What do they say of the effect produced upon the disciples and bystanders by this earthquake and this most extraordinary resurrection? There were present the women that loved and followed Jesus, there was the Roman centurion, there were ‘many’ who witnessed the appearances of the dead: even to those who were not present, an earthquake rending the rocks in the neighbourhood could not be imperceptible: what therefore is said on these points by other contemporary authors as well as by your four Gospels? Tell me that first; and then I will tell you what I think of the miracle.”

In answer to this request, which I think we must characterize as a very natural one, we should have first to admit that no profane author makes any mention of the resurrection of these numerous “bodies,” nor of the earthquake that accompanied it. Then we should have to set down the four records of the four Evangelists as follows:

[Transcriber’s Note: The following four quotations were originally printed side-by-side. They are transcribed one after another so as to be readable on modern reading devices, which often cannot handle multiple columns.]

Mark xv. 37-39.

37. And Jesus uttered a loud voice and gave up the ghost.

38. And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom.

39. And when the centurion, which stood by over against him, saw that he so gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.

Matt. xxvii. 50-54.

50. And Jesus cried again with a loud voice, and yielded up his spirit.

51. And behold the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom [and the earth did quake, and the rocks were rent:

52. And the tombs were opened: and many bodies of the saints that had fallen asleep were raised;

53. And coming forth out of the tombs after his resurrection they entered into the holy city and appeared unto many.]

54. Now the centurion, and they that were with him, watching Jesus, when they saw [the earthquake and] the things that were done, feared exceedingly, saying, Truly this was the Son of God.

Luke xxii. 46-7.

46. And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit: and having said this, he gave up the ghost.

47. And when the centurion saw what was done, he glorified God, saying, Certainly this was a righteous man.

John xix. 30, 31.

30. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.

31. The Jews, therefore, because it was the preparation, &c.

You see then that this extraordinary incident, startling enough to be the very centre of a galaxy of wonders, is omitted by three out of the four Evangelists. You see also that two of the Evangelists agree with St. Matthew in placing a centurion at the foot of the cross, and in assigning to him expressions of faith: but neither of them mentions the “earthquake” as being even a partial cause of the centurion’s faith, nor is there so much as a hint of any resurrection of the “bodies of saints” from the tombs.

Now if you and I, with full knowledge of the facts, were writing a biography of a great man, we might undoubtedly exhibit many variations and divergences in our story. Every biographer who knows everything about a man must omit something; many things therefore that you would omit, I should insert, and vice versâ. But suppose we were writing in some detail the description of the great man’s execution (as the crucifixion is written in great detail by the Evangelists), and, in particular, the emotion and utterances of the soldier who superintended the execution. Is it possible under these circumstances that you should relate (and with truth) that the soldier’s emotion was caused in part by an earthquake which happened at the moment of the man’s death—adding also that a large number of people rose at the same time bodily from the graves—and that I, with a full knowledge that both these facts are true, should make no mention at all either of the earthquake or of this stupendous resurrection? I say that such an omission of facts is absolutely impossible in any sincere and straightforward biographer, on the supposition that he knows them. The argument that “it is unsafe to argue from silence” is quite inapplicable here: nor is it in point to allege the silence of a courtly historian who writes the life of Constantine but omits the Emperor’s execution of his son. The answer is that we have not here to do with courtly historians, but with simple unsophisticated compilers of tradition whose main object was to set down in truth and honesty all that could shew Jesus of Nazareth to be the Son of God. Now it is impossible that the Evangelists should not have recognized in this miracle, if true, a cogent proof—cogent for the minds of men in these days—of the divine mission of Jesus: we are therefore driven to the conclusion that they omitted it either because they had never heard of it, or because although they had heard of it, they did not believe it to be true.

You must not however suppose that this evidently legendary narrative was added with any intent to falsify. Like many of the miraculous accounts in the Old Testament, this story is probably the result of misunderstanding—an allegory misinterpreted. The death of Christ abolished the gulf between God and man; it tore down the veil between the Holy Place and the Holy of Holies, whereby Christ took mankind, in Himself and with Himself, into the direct presence of the Father: and this spiritual truth found a literal interpretation in two of the Gospels which mention the “rending of the veil.” But Christ’s death did more than this. It struck down the power of death itself: it broke open the tombs, and prepared the way for the Resurrection of the Saints; and this spiritual truth, being misinterpreted as if it were literally true, gave rise to a tradition (which does not however seem to have been widely received) that at the moment of Christ’s death certain tombs were actually broken open, and certain of “the Saints” rose bodily from the dead and walked into Jerusalem.[^[17]]

XVI
THE GROWTH OF THE GOSPELS

My dear ——,

You force me to digress. My object just now was to shew that the life of Christ (no less than the history of the redemption of Israel) can be disentangled from “miracles”, although not from “mighty works”; and I proposed to take the six or seven principal miracles attributed to Christ by the Synoptists and to shew of each account that it may have naturally and easily crept into the Gospels without any intention to deceive.

But you will not let me go on in my own way; for you ask a question that claims immediate answer, and something more than a mere Yes or No: “Did or did not, the Publican and Apostle St. Matthew write the Gospel attributed to him? And if he did, how can he have suffered a ‘legendary’ miracle to ‘creep into’ his narrative? The same question,” you add, “applies to the Gospel of St. John. If these two Gospels, as they stand, were written by Apostles, that is, by personal disciples of Jesus and eye-witnesses of the events they profess to describe, then there is no alternative; either Jesus wrought miracles, or the Apostles lied. No eye-witness can err as you suppose some one (I know not whom) to have erred, by interpreting metaphor as though it were literal statement. Imagine Boswell, for example, misinterpreting some metaphorical expression concerning Dr. Johnson to the effect that ‘the great lexicographer was exalted by his countrymen to the pinnacle of honour and fame’ and consequently inferring that his statue was set up on a column like Lord Nelson or the Duke of York! The notion is too grotesque. If then Jesus did not perform miracles we are forced to conclude either that the Apostles deceived us or that the Gospels bearing their names are forgeries. Which is it?”

In order to meet this objection I must say a few words about the composition of the Gospels. For indeed your question shews a complete misapprehension of the manner in which the Gospels grew up, and of the ancient notions about authorship. In particular, you are far too free in the use of the word “forgeries.” The book called the Wisdom of Solomon contains some of the noblest sentiments that have ever found eloquent expression, and yet the philosophic author who composed it (probably in Alexandria about eight or nine centuries after Solomon’s death) does not hesitate to appeal to the Almighty in words by which he ascribes the authorship to Solomon himself: “Thou hast chosen me to be a king of Thy people and a judge of Thy sons and daughters: Thou hast commanded me to build a temple upon Thy Holy mount,” (ix. 7, 8). Now do you call him a forger? The book of Ecclesiastes, one of our own canonical books, declares that it was written by “the son of David, king in Jerusalem” and that the author was a “King over Israel in Jerusalem,” (i. 1-12). No one now (worth mentioning) believes these statements to be true. Yet would you call the composer of Ecclesiastes a forger? Probably in both cases the authors felt that they were honouring the memory of the great king in thus introducing new truths to the world under the protection of his name. I believe many other instances might be given of the literary laxity of ancient times. But besides, in the case of the Gospels, you must remember that authorship hardly came into question at all events for a long time. The story of the life of Christ would be, in some shape, current among the Church as the common property of all, as soon as the Apostles began to proclaim the Gospel. Probably it was not, for some time, reduced to writing. Among the Jews the Old Testament was spoken of as Writing or Scripture; but their most revered and sacred comments on it were retained in oral tradition: and hence all through the New Testament you will find that “Scripture” refers to the Old Testament, and that no mention is made of the doctrine about Christ except as “tradition” or “teaching.” What therefore would probably at first be current in the Church, perhaps for thirty or forty years after Christ’s death, would be simply a number of “traditions” or oral versions of the Gospel, current perhaps in different shapes at the great ecclesiastical centres, such as Jerusalem, Antioch, Ephesus, Alexandria, Rome, yet presenting a general affinity, and all claiming to represent “the Memoirs of the Apostles” or to be “the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.”

It ought not to seem strange to you that the Church could exist, and the Good Tidings be preached for some years without the aid of written Gospels. Did not St. Paul preach the Gospel in his letters? Surely he preached it very effectually: yet his letters do not contain a single quotation from any written Gospel.[^[18]] The same may be said of the letters attributed to St. Peter, St. James, and St. John: not one quotes a single saying of Christ, or contains a phrase that can be said, with certainty, to be borrowed from our Gospels. The book of the Acts of the Apostles, the earliest summary of Church history, contains many speeches by Apostles, one by St. James, some by St. Peter and several by St. Paul: in all these speeches only one saying of our Lord is quoted; and that is a saying not found in any of our extant Gospels. Conjecture might have led us to conclude that this would be so. We might reasonably have inferred that, as long as the Church had in its midst the Apostles and their companions, and as long also as they daily expected that Christ would “come”, the notion of committing the Gospel to writing for posterity would seem superfluous, distasteful, almost implying a want of faith. But when we find this conjecture confirmed by the undeniable fact that the earliest teachers and preachers of the Gospel, in their teaching as it is handed down to us, made no use whatever of our written Gospels, we may regard it as a safe conclusion that, during the first generation after the crucifixion, written Gospels were neither widely used nor much needed.

But soon the need would arise. One after another the Apostles and their companions would pass away, and Christ’s immediate “coming” would now be less and less sanguinely anticipated. The great mass of the earliest Christians were either Jews or proselytes to the Jewish religion; but now the Gentiles, who had come to Christ without first passing through the Law of Moses, would become the majority in the Church; and for them the Old Testament would not have the same pre-eminent title as “Writing” or “Scripture.” For these Gentiles too the old Rabbinical prejudice against committing the teaching of the Church to writing would have no weight. Now therefore in several churches simultaneous efforts would be made to write down the traditions current amongst the brethren; and hence we find St. Luke prefacing his own Gospel with the remark that he was induced to attempt this task because “many” others had attempted it. St. Luke could hardly have written thus if one authentic and apostolic document already occupied the ground and stood pre-eminent in the Church as the written record of Christ’s life by an eye-witness. That there was no such document, known to St. Luke, we may also infer from his acknowledgment of his obligations to those who were “eye-witnesses and ministers of the word.” It says that he shapes his narrative “as they handed down the tradition” for that is the meaning of his word not “as they wrote the tradition.” You must have noticed that the extant titles of the Gospels declare them to have been written not “by,” but “according to” their several authors. The explanation (which has not been successfully impugned) is that, even in the later times in which their titles were given, the old belief continued, that the men who compiled them did no more than commit to writing their version of a tradition already current. They did not compose, they reported, the tradition; the Gospel was supposed to be the same in all Churches, but here “according to” one version or writer, there “according to” another. The Apostles, being with one or two exceptions mere fishermen and unlearned men, ignorant of letters, could not very well be supposed to be authors of written compositions; but St. Matthew, being a tax-gatherer, would necessarily be an expert writer, and therefore one of the earliest traditions committed to writing would be naturally attributed to his penmanship. But the evidence for St. Matthew’s authorship appears, when tested, to be extremely slight. It was the universal belief of the early Church that the Gospel according to St. Matthew was originally written in Hebrew, and Jerome has quoted, as coming from the Hebrew original, a passage not found in our Greek Gospel of St. Matthew. Even when this Gospel is quoted by the earliest writers, it is frequently quoted inexactly, and never connected by them with the name of St. Matthew as the author. We ought not to infer from these unnamed and inexact quotations that the writers did not recognize St. Matthew as the author for their habit is almost invariably to quote Gospels, simply as Gospel, inexactly, and without mentioning the name of the Evangelist. But this unfortunate habit leaves us without any early and trustworthy evidence for St. Matthew’s authorship. On the whole, then, there is very little evidence for supposing that any part of our present Gospel according to St. Matthew was written by an Apostle or by an eye-witness of Christ’s life, and there is very much evidence tending to show that such a supposition is extremely improbable.

Even if we grant that parts of the Gospel were composed by an Apostle, it by no means follows that the whole was. There was a very natural tendency, in the earliest days of the Church—when the traditional Gospel was as it were everybody’s property and had not yet acquired the authority of Scripture—to make the tradition as full, as edifying, and as correct, as possible. If we may judge from the style of the book of Revelation (which is said on rather more substantial grounds than are generally alleged for the authorship of most of the books of the New Testament, to have been the work of the Apostle John) the earliest Greek traditions must have been composed in an ungrammatical, mongrel kind of Greek, which must have been as distasteful to the well-educated Christian as cockney English or pigeon English would be to us. This could not long be tolerated in traditions that were repeated in the presence of the whole congregation; and alterations of style, for edification, would naturally facilitate alterations of matter, also for edification. The love of completeness would introduce many corrections and sometimes corruptions. Often, in those early times, the teacher, catechist, or scribe, who knew some additional fact tending to Christ’s glory, and not mentioned in the tradition or document, would think that he was not doing his duty if he did not add it to his oral or written version of the tradition. Even in MSS. of the fourth or fifth centuries we have abundant instances to shew how this tendency multiplied interpolations; principally by interpolating passages from one Gospel into another, but sometimes by interpolating traditions not found now in any Gospel with which we are acquainted. Occasionally there are also corruptions of omission, arising from the desire to omit difficult or apparently inconsistent passages; but by far the more common custom is to add. If this corrupting tendency was in force in the fourth century when the Christian religion was on the point of becoming the religion of the empire, and when the sacred books of Christianity had attained to a position of authority in the Church not a whit below the books of the Old Testament, you may easily imagine what a multitude of interpolations and amplifications must have crept into the original tradition at a time when it was still young, unauthoritative, and plastic, during the first two or three generations that followed the death of Christ. The result of all these considerations is that we are not obliged and this, to my mind, is a great relief to suppose that any passage which we may be forced to reject from our Gospels as false, was written by an Apostle.

I say this is to me a great relief, but perhaps it is not so to you. Your notion of what the Gospels ought to be, is perhaps borrowed from a passage in Paley’s Evidences where he likens the evidences for the miracles of Christ to that of twelve eye-witnesses, all ready to be martyrs in attestation of the truth of their testimony; and you are shocked perhaps when you find that the Gospels fall very far indeed below the level of such a standard of evidence. What would have seemed best to you would have been an exact record of Christ’s teaching and acts, drawn up by one of the Apostles in the name of the Twelve, duly dated and signed by all, and circulated and received by the whole Church from the day after the Ascension down to the present time. And I quite agree with you. But then, as we have seen in the history of astronomy and in the history of the Old Testament, it has not pleased God to reveal Himself or His works to men in the way which men have thought best. Now you are not indeed obliged to infer that, because revelation in the Old Testament was accompanied by illusion, therefore revelation in the New Testament must have contained a similar alloy; but you ought at least to be prepared for such a discovery. For me, it would be a terrible shock indeed if I were forced to suppose that a faithful Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ had wilfully misrepresented the truth with a view to glorify His Master: but it is no shock at all to find that the highest revelation of God to man has been, like all other revelations, to some extent misinterpreted, obscured, materialized. I have learned to accept this as an inevitable law of our present nature. If it had been God’s will to suspend this law of nature in favour of the New Testament, I think He would have consistently gone further, and miraculously prevented the scribes from making errors, or posterity from perpetuating them. But how can I think God has done this, when I know that even the words of the Lord’s own Prayer are variously reported in the two Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and that every page of a critical edition of the New Testament teems with various readings between which the ablest commentators are perplexed to decide?

You must therefore make up your mind to believe that the earliest Gospel traditions and even that triply attested tradition[^[19]] which is common to the first three Gospels and which runs through the three with a separate character of its own, like a distinguishable stream passed through several phases before they assumed their present shape. In my next letter I shall probably ask you to consider what phases they passed through; but you may perhaps expect me to say something at once about the Fourth Gospel; for to that book many of the previous remarks do not apply. It was much later than the rest; it has little in subject-matter, and nothing at all in style, in common with the rest; it contains scarcely a word of the Common Tradition which pervades the first three Gospels; it probably passed through no phases and suffered few accretions; and it differs from the other Gospels, even from St. Luke’s, in bearing a far more manifest impress of personal authorship. The three synoptic Gospels really agree with their titles in representing the Gospel “according to” their several authors; but the Fourth Gospel (although, like the rest, preceded by “according to”) is a Gospel written “by” whoever wrote it.

The question is, who did write it? If it was written by an Apostle, an eye-witness of the life of Christ, then we have to face—I am not sure we have to accept—your alternative: “Either Jesus worked miracles, or the Apostles lied.” But there is very little evidence (worth calling evidence) for the hypothesis that an Apostle wrote it, and much evidence against that hypothesis. St. John, the reputed author, is said, on the evidence of Justin Martyr, to have written the Apocalypse; which, while it resembles in style what we might have expected from a Galilean fisherman, differs entirely from the style of the Fourth Gospel. Whoever wrote the Gospel, we may be sure that he did not reproduce the words of Jesus, but gave rather what appeared to him to be their latent and spiritual meaning. This can be proved as follows. Suppose three writers—say Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, and Goldsmith—had composed accounts of the life and sayings of Dr. Johnson, widely differing in the subject-matter and style of the narrative, but closely agreeing in the character of Johnson’s thoughts, as reported by them, and very often agreeing in the actual words imputed to Johnson; and suppose a fourth writer, say Burke, had written his reminiscences of Dr. Johnson, which entirely differed in language, in thought, and in subject-matter from the first three: would you not say at once that this was strong proof, that Burke did not report Dr. Johnson’s actual words, and that he had probably tinged them with his own style and thought? But if furthermore Burke reported Dr. Johnson’s words and long discourses in the same language as he reported Sheridan’s, and in language indistinguishable from his own contextual narrative, then you would, I am sure, find it difficult to be patient with any one who, through force of prejudice and pleasing associations, obstinately maintained that Burke’s biography was equally faithful and exact with the three other concordant or synoptic biographies. Now this comparison exactly represents the facts. You will find several of the most learned and painstaking commentators differing as to where the introductory words of the author of the Fourth Gospel cease, and where John the Baptist’s words begin; and the style of our Lord’s discourses in the Fourth Gospel is quite indistinguishable from the style of the author himself. As to the immense difference, in respect of style and thought and subject-matter, between the Synoptic Gospels, and the Fourth Gospel, you must have felt it, even as a child, reading them in English.

I must refer you to the article on “Gospels” in the Encyclopædia Britannica for what I believe to be the most probable explanation of the origin of this remarkable work. It is there shown that there are extraordinary points of similarity between the emblematic language and emblematic acts attributed to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, and the emblematic conceptions of the Alexandrine philosopher Philo, who flourished some sixty or seventy years before that Gospel was written. Dealing, for instance, with the dialogue between Jesus and the woman of Samaria near the well at Sychem, the writer of that article shews that, in the works of Philo, the well is an emblem of the search after knowledge; Sychem is an emblem of materialism; the “five husbands”, or, as Philo calls them, “five seducers” represent the five senses so that the whole dialogue appears to contain a poetic appeal to the heathen world, to turn from the materialistic knowledge which can never satisfy, to the knowledge of the Word of God which is the “living water”. Still more remarkable is Philo’s emblematic use of Lazarus (or Eleazar, for the words are the same) as a type of dead humanity, helpless and lifeless till it has been raised up by the help of the Lord. But into this I have no space to enter. If you care to pursue the subject, I must refer you to the article above mentioned. Canon Westcott has pointed out that in arrangement and structure the Fourth Gospel has some distinct poetic features. I should go further and say that, in this Gospel, History is subordinated to poetic purpose, and that its narratives of incidents, resting sometimes on a basis of fact, but more often on a basis of metaphor, are intended not so much to describe incidents as to lead the reader to spiritual conclusions.

We have no account of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel till the year 170 A.D., and this we find to be “already legendary.”[^[20]] It is there said that, being requested by his fellow-disciples and bishops to write a Gospel, John desired them to fast for three days and then to relate to one another what revelation each had received. It was then revealed to the Apostle Andrew that “while all endeavoured to recall their experiences, John should write everything in his own name”. No confidence can be placed in the exactness of testimony that comes so long after the event; but it points to some kind of joint contribution or revision such as is implied in John xxi. 24: “This is the disciple which testifieth of these things and we know that his testimony is true.” That the Gospel was written “in the name of John” by some pupil of his—perhaps by some namesake—and revised and issued in the name of John by the Elders of the Ephesian Church, is by no means improbable. In some matters of fact, for example in distinguishing between the Passover and “the last supper,” the Fourth Gospel corrects an (apparent) error of the Synoptic Gospels, a correction that possibly proceeded from the Apostle John; and perhaps the solemn asseveration as to the issue of blood and water from the side of Jesus (“And he that hath seen hath borne witness, and his witness is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye also may believe”) may be a reminiscence of some special testimony from the aged Apostle; but it is impossible to ascertain how far emblematic and historical narratives are blended in such passages as the dialogue with the Samaritan woman, the miracle at Cana, and the raising of Lazarus. The author was convinced (like every other believer, at that time) that Jesus did work many miracles, and could have worked any kind of miracle; but he had noted the unspiritual tendency to magnify the “mighty works” of Jesus as merely “mighty:” he therefore selected from the traditions before him those in which the spiritual and emblematic meaning was predominant. In doing this, he sometimes took a spiritual metaphor and expanded it into a spiritual history. Again, he had also noted an unspiritual tendency to lay undue stress upon the exact words of Jesus; and he therefore determined—besides giving prominence to the promise of Jesus concerning His Spirit, which was to guide the disciples into all truth—to exhibit, in his Gospel, the spiritual purport of Christ’s doctrine rather than to repeat each saying as it was actually delivered.

As I write these words, with the pages of the Gospel open before me, my eye falls upon the story of the raising of Lazarus: “Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth on me, though he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth on me shall never die.” Is it possible, I say to myself, that Jesus did not say these entrancing words? And how often does the same question arise as one turns over the leaves: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you:” “Yet a little while and the world beholdeth me no more; but ye behold me: because I live, ye shall live also.” Could any one at any time have invented such sayings? Still less, is it possible they could have been invented in the times of Trajan or Hadrian by any Asiatic Greek or Alexandrian Jew? But truth compels me to answer that, just as the Asiatic Jew St. Paul, although he never saw or heard Jesus, was inspired by the Spirit of Jesus to utter words of spiritual truth and beauty worthy of Jesus Himself, so an Asiatic Greek or Alexandrian Jew of the time of Trajan may have been prompted by the same Spirit to penetrate to the very depths of the meaning of Jesus and to express some of the conclusions to be derived from His sayings more clearly than we can see them even in the words of Jesus Himself, as they are recorded in the Synoptic Gospels. I do not see on what principle we can so limit the operation of the Holy Spirit as to say it could not extend, in its most perfect force, beyond the age of Domitian or Nerva or even Trajan. Having before me the doctrine of the Synoptic Gospels, I am forbidden by mere considerations of style and literary criticism from believing that Jesus used the exact words, “I am the true vine,” “I am the good shepherd,” “I am the light of the world,” “I am the resurrection and the life;” but I accept these sayings as divinely inspired, and as being far deeper and fuller expressions of the spiritual nature of Jesus than any of the inferences which I could draw for myself from the Synoptic doctrine. Do not then say that I “reject” the Fourth Gospel. I accept all that is essential in it; and this I accept on far safer grounds than many who would accuse me of rejecting it. For their acceptance might be shaken to-morrow if some new piece of evidence appeared decisively shewing that the Gospel was not written by John the Apostle; but my acceptance is independent of authorship, and is based upon the testimony of my conscience.

Surely you must feel that it would be absurd for one who tests religious doctrine to some extent by experience and by history, to reject the Fourth Gospel because it is in a great measure emblematic, and because it was not written by the man who was supposed to have written it. Be the author who he may, I shall never cease to feel grateful to him. The all-embracing sweep of view which enabled him to look on the Incarnation as the central incident of the world’s history and to set forth Christ as the Eternal Word and Eternal Son, not dependent for this claim upon a mere Miraculous Conception; the spiritual contempt for mere “mighty works,” which leads him repeatedly to claim faith for Jesus Himself firstly, and for the “words” of Jesus secondly, and only as a last reserve to demand belief “for the works’ sake;” and the true intuition with which he fastens on the promise of Jesus (only hinted at in the Synoptic Gospels) that He would be present with His disciples at every time and place and that He would give them “a voice,” and a Spirit not to be gainsaid—from which brief suggestion the author worked out in detail the promise of the Holy Spirit, and predicted the nobler and ampler future of the Church these true, and profound, and spiritual intuitions will always excite my deepest gratitude and admiration. The doctrine of the Eternal Word had its origin perhaps in the schools of Alexandria, and certainly formed no part of the teaching of Jesus; but, Christianized as it is by the author of the Fourth Gospel, it commends itself as a key to many mysteries, and (like the Fourth Gospel itself) it appears to be but one among many illustrations of the divine development of Christian doctrine; “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” In a word, without the Fourth Gospel, Christendom might (it would seem) have failed forever to appreciate the true nature of its Redeemer.

I cannot indeed repress some regret that this most marvellously endowed minister and prophet of Christ should have been allowed to select a poetic and even illusive form in order to publish his divine truths. Hitherto I have been able with pleasure and satisfaction to see the illusive integument being gradually separated from the inner truth, as in astronomy and in the history of the Old Testament. Now comes a point where I myself should like to recoil. But how puerile and faithless should I be if I assumed that God would give to the world along with His divine revelation precisely that modicum of illusion (and no more) which I myself personally am just able to receive with pleasure! Let us rather follow where, as Plato says, “the argument leads us.” Or, if you prefer me to quote from the Fourth Gospel itself, let us follow the guidance of Him who is both “the Way and the Truth.”

XVII
CHRISTIAN ILLUSIONS

My dear ——,

Once more I am compelled to digress: and, this time, it is in order to meet what you must let me call a preconception of yours. You say that it appears to you “impossible that Christ, if really divine, should have been permitted by God to be worshipped as a worker of miracles for eighteen centuries, although in reality he had no power to work them.”

Is this much more than a repetition of your former objection that my views amount to “a new religion,” and that illusion, although it may abound in the history of the thoughts of mankind, can never have been permitted to connect itself with a really divine revelation? I have already in part answered these prejudices—for they are nothing more—by shewing that illusion permeates what is called “natural religion,” and by subsequently shewing that the inspired books of the Old Testament exhibit illusions in every page; not only the illusions of the chosen people, but illusions also on the part of the authors of the several books, who misinterpreted tradition so as to convert a non-miraculous into a miraculous history. But now let us deal more particularly with Christian illusions. Here I will try to show you, first, how natural and (humanly speaking) how inevitable it was that illusions should gather round the earliest Christian traditions, and how easily there might have sprung up miraculous accounts in connection with them. Then, and not till then, having done my best to dispel your natural prejudice, I will take in detail the six or seven principal miracles attributed to Christ by all the three Synoptic Evangelists, and will endeavour to show you that these accounts did actually spring up in a natural and inevitable way, after the manner of illusions, without any attempt to deceive on the part of the compilers of the Gospels. It will appear, I think, that the life and doctrine of Christ are independent of these miracles and can easily be separated from them.

For the present then I am to speak of the naturalness or inevitability of illusions gathering about Christ’s acts and words in the minds of His disciples. Does any student of the Fourth Gospel need to be convinced of this? Perhaps the author of that work discerned the illusions of the early Church even too clearly, so that he slightly overshot the mark in the frequency of the false inferences and misunderstandings with which he delights to encompass the words and deeds of Jesus. Perhaps the composer of “the Spiritual Gospel” has been led even too far by his profound and true perception that this Incarnate Word—this Being from another sphere who was and is in the bosom of the Father—could not move on the earth, among earthly creatures, without being perpetually misunderstood by them. But is there not manifest truth in his conception of Jesus as of One having different thoughts from those of common men, different ways of regarding all things small or great, a spiritual dialect of His own, not at once to be comprehended by ordinary beings? Certain it is that, in the Fourth Gospel, Christ’s discourses are one string of metaphors which are literally and falsely interpreted by those to whom they are addressed. “Flesh,” “blood,” “water,” “sleep,” “birth,” “death,” “life,” “temple,” “bread,” “meat,” “night,” “way,”—these and I know not how many more simple words present themselves, as we rapidly turn over the pages of that Gospel, always metaphorically used, and always misunderstood. Nor can it be said that they were misunderstood by enemies and unbelievers alone; His disciples constantly misunderstood them. The life of Christ in the Fourth Gospel is one continuous misunderstanding. I will not say that this represents the exact fact; but I doubt not that the inspired insight of the author, be he who he may, took in the full meaning of all the hints that are given by the Synoptists as to the misunderstanding of the disciples about their Master, and led him to the deliberate conclusion that the life of Christ in the flesh was one perpetual source of illusions to the Twelve—illusions through which, by the guidance of the Spirit, they were to be led to the truth: “What I do ye know not now, but ye shall know hereafter.” I believe he went even further and perceived that Christ’s life was in danger of becoming a total delusion to the earliest Christians through their tendency to the materialistic and the miraculous, and that the best means of preserving the Church from such a danger was to accustom the faithful to attach value to the words and deeds of Christ only so far as they could interpret them spiritually, trusting to the Spirit for continual guidance into new truth.

This then is my first proposition, that Christ was sure to be misunderstood by those around Him, owing to His manner of using the language of metaphor. You must know very well that this conjecture is confirmed by fact. Sometimes the Synoptists note the fact, as when He spoke of “leaven” and the Twelve misunderstood Him literally; and several other instances are on record. But it is of course possible that on many other occasions the misunderstanding may have existed, but may not have been noted by the Evangelists. Take one instance. In the discourse of Jesus to the Seventy Disciples (Luke x. 19) Jesus makes the following statement: “I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall in any wise hurt (ἀδικήσει) you.” How are we to understand this “treading upon serpents and scorpions”? Literally or metaphorically? Surely the text itself makes it evident that Jesus used the words metaphorically to refer to “the power of the Enemy,” i.e. “the Serpent,” or Satan, probably with a special reference to the casting out of devils. Moreover the passage is introduced by a statement that “the Seventy returned with joy, saying, Lord, even the devils are subject unto us in thy name. And he said, I beheld Satan fall as lightning from Heaven. Behold I have given you authority to tread upon serpents.... Howbeit in this rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you; but rejoice that your names are written in Heaven.” As for the other part of the promise, “nothing shall hurt you,” it surely does not seem to you that these words must imply literal “hurt”? If it does, let me direct your attention to a much more striking instance of Christ’s extraordinary use of metaphor in a passage where the Disciples are told, almost in a breath, that not a hair of their heads shall perish and yet that some of them shall be “put to death” (Luke xxi. 16-18). I think then that you will agree with me that the “authority to tread upon serpents” mentioned in St. Luke contained not a literal, but a spiritual promise, to tread upon the power of “the Serpent.” Nevertheless, that this promise about “serpents” was very early misinterpreted literally can be shewn, not indeed from a genuine passage of the Gospels, but from a very early interpolation in St. Mark’s Gospel, xvi. 17, 18: “These signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall in no wise hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”

Here then we have a clear instance of misunderstanding (not noted by the Evangelists) arising in very early if not in the very earliest times from the metaphorical language of Jesus. One more instance of probable misunderstanding must suffice for the present. You know how often in the Epistles of St. Paul the word “dead” is used to indicate spiritually “dead” i.e. “dead in sin.” A similar use is attributed to Christ in the Fourth Gospel: “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John xi. 25); but here the impending resurrection of Lazarus gives the reader the impression that it is literally used. However it is almost certainly metaphorical in John v. 24, 25, 28, “He that heareth my word and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not unto judgment, but is passed from death into life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, the hour cometh and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.... Marvel not at this, for the hour cometh in which all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth” &c. Here apparently the meaning is that the hour has already come (“now is”) when the spiritually dead shall hear the voice, and the hour is on the point of coming when the literally dead (“all that are in the tombs”) shall hear it. In any case, the metaphorical meaning is indisputable in the striking saying of Jesus (Luke ix. 60) “Let the dead bury their dead.”

Now if Jesus was in the habit of describing those who were lost in sin as being “dead,” and of bidding His disciples “raise the dead”—meaning that they were to restore sinners to spiritual life—we can easily see how such language might be misunderstood. It is probable that Jesus Himself had actually restored life to at least one person given over for dead, the daughter of Jairus, though by natural means. Of such revivification you may find an instance described in Onesimus (pp. 77-81) which is taken almost verbatim from the account of his own revivification given by the late Archbishop of Bordeaux to the late Dean Stanley, and sent me by the Dean as being taken down from the Archbishop’s lips. If that was so, how natural for some of the Disciples to attach a literal meaning to the precept, “raise the dead”! They would argue thus, “Our Master healed diseases at a word, so can we; He once raised a child from the dead and bade us also raise the dead; some of the Disciples therefore ought to be able to do this.” How natural, under the circumstances, such a confusion of the material and the spiritual! Yet I have little doubt that the diseases which were cured by the Twelve were almost always “possession,” or paralysis, or nervous diseases. Compare the different accounts given by the Synoptists of the instructions of Jesus to the Twelve when He sent them forth on their first mission:

[Transcriber’s Note: The following three quotations were originally printed side-by-side.]

Mark vi. 7.

And he called unto him the twelve, and began to send them forth by two and two; and he gave them authority over the unclean spirits.

Matthew x. 1.

And he called unto him his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits to cast them out, and to heal all manner of disease and all manner of sickness.

Luke ix. 1.

And he called the twelve together and gave them power and authority over all devils and to cure diseases.

Here you find that the first Gospel (St. Mark’s) makes mention only of the “authority over unclean spirits,” and this probably represents the fact. The third account is an amplification; and the second altogether exaggerates. Hence, when we read, in the context of the second version of these instructions, “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out devils; freely ye received freely give” (Matthew x. 8), we cannot fail to see several arguments against the probability of the italicized words being literally intended by Jesus. First, the language of Christ habitually dealt in metaphor, and in metaphor habitually misunderstood by His disciples; secondly, there is no instance in which a single one of the Twelve carried out this precept during the life of their Master, and only one in which one of the Twelve (Peter) is said to have raised a woman from the dead (for St. Paul’s incident with Eutychus can hardly be called a case in point); thirdly the precept is recorded by only one Evangelist;[^[21]] fourthly that same Evangelist records only one case in which our Lord Himself raised any one from the dead, i.e. the revivified daughter of Jairus—and it seems absurd to represent Christ as commanding all the Apostles to do that which most of them probably never did, and He Himself (according to the First Gospel) only did once.

We pass now to another cause that may have originated miraculous narratives in the Gospels. Try to extricate yourself from our Western, cold-blooded, analytical, and critical way of looking at things. Sit down in the reign of Vespasian or Domitian in the midst of a congregation of Jewish and Græco-Oriental brethren, assembled for a sacred service, “singing a hymn” (as Pliny says, describing them a few years afterwards) “to Christ as to a God.” What effect on the traditions of Christ’s life and works would be produced by these “hymns and spiritual songs” which St. Paul’s testimony (as well as Pliny’s) shows to have been a common part of the earliest Christian ritual? Would they not inevitably tend, by poetic hyperbole and metaphor, to build up fresh traditions which, when literally interpreted, would—like the songs and psalms of the Chosen People—give rise to miraculous narratives? Part of the service indeed would not consist of hymns but of the reading of the “Scriptures” i.e. the Old Testament; but this also would tend in the same direction. For there you would hear, read out to the congregation, marvellous prophecies how, in the day of the Lord the Redeemer, the eyes of the blind should be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped, and the lame should leap as a hart; and the sole thought possessing you and every man in the congregation would be, “How far did all these things find fulfilment in the Lord Jesus Christ?” You would hear from the “Scriptures” narratives of marvellous miracles, how Moses gave water from the rock to Israel in the wilderness and fed them with food from Heaven, how Elijah raised the widow’s child from death, and how Jonah spent three days in the belly of the fish; and the sole thought possessing you would be, “How far were like wonders wrought by Christ?” Then would arise the hymn describing, in imagery borrowed from the Old Testament, how Christ had done all these things, and more besides, for the spiritual Israel; how He had spread a table for His people in the wilderness, and given to thousands to partake of His body and His blood; how Moses had merely given water to the people, but Jesus had changed the water of the Jews (i.e. the Law) into the wine which flowed from His side; how Jesus had fulfilled the predictions of the prophets by curing the halt, the maimed, the blind, the leper, the deaf; how He had even raised the dead and bidden His disciples to raise the dead; how He, like Jonah, had spent three days in the darkness of the grave. If you look at the earliest Christian paintings you will find that they represent Christ as the Fish (the emblem of food); others depict the Mosaic miracles of the manna and the water from the rock. These shew what a hold the notion of the miraculous food had taken on the mind of the earliest believers. How easy it would be to amplify a metaphor derived from the Eucharistic feeding on the Bread of Life and perhaps on the “honey-sweet fish” (as Christ is actually called in a poem written about the middle of the second century) into a miraculous account of the feeding of many thousands upon material bread and material fish! It is greatly to be regretted that we have not one left out of the many hymns and psalms of which St. Paul and Pliny make mention. The only vestige of one that I know is found in a verse of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. It is at all events printed by Westcott and Hort as poetry, and it is thought by many commentators to be an extract from some well-known hymn (Eph. v. 14):

“Wherefore (he) saith,

Awake thou that sleepest

And arise from the dead

And Christ shall shine upon thee.”

This perhaps is our only specimen of the earliest Christian hymnals. Surely then it is noticeable that in three lines of this unique specimen there are three metaphors, and in the second line a metaphorical use of the word “dead” which—as I have pointed out above—has probably elsewhere resulted in serious misunderstanding.

After the hymn would come the sermon. The preacher would stand up like Apollos to “prove from the Scriptures,” that is, from the Old Testament, that Jesus is the Christ. If you wish to know how some of the Christian Preachers would probably discharge their task you should look at the Dialogue with Trypho written (about a hundred years after Apollos) by Justin Martyr—who, I take it, was very much superior in judgment, learning, and ability, to the great mass of Christian Preachers in the first and second centuries. There—among many other instances of the adaptation of history to preconception—you will find Justin declaring that Jesus was born in a cave, and that the ass on which He rode into Jerusalem was tied to a vine, simply because certain prophecies of Isaiah mention a cave and a vine, and because he is determined to find fulfilments of them in the life of Christ. But in the early times of Apollos, and during the next twenty or thirty years, before the Gospels had been committed to writing, there must have been a far stronger gravitation towards the Old Testament and a far more powerful tendency to find something in the life of Christ to fulfil every prediction about the Messiah and to correspond to every miracle wrought by Moses and the prophets. Judged in the light of these considerations, our present record of Christ’s life ought to surprise us not by the number, but by the paucity, of the fulfilments of prophecy and the miracles contained in them.

Against these arguments for the antecedent probability that miracles would be baselessly imputed to Jesus (to be followed presently by a few instances to shew that they have been so imputed) I know nothing that has been recently urged except a consideration drawn from the life of John the Baptist: “To the Baptist no miracle has been imputed by the Gospels; to Christ miracles have been imputed; why not to both? What is the reason for this distinction except that the former did not perform miracles, while the latter did?” Two reasons can be given. In the first place Christ worked “mighty works,” while John did not; and since many of these “mighty works” could not in the first century be distinguished from “miracles,” they served as a nucleus round which a miraculous narrative might gather; in the history of the Baptist there would be no such nucleus. The second and perhaps more important reason is, that, as a counterpoise to the natural exaggerative tendency which might have led men to attribute miracles to the Baptist, there would be also a tendency to heighten the contrast between the Servant and the Master. This tendency appears to me to increase in the later Gospels till at last in the Fourth we come to the express statement, “John worked no miracle” (John x. 41). But whether I am right or not in this conjecture, it is quite certain that the attitude of the Christians towards the mere forerunner of the Messiah—about whom the Prophets had simply predicted that he would “turn the hearts of the children to the fathers”—would not be such as to render likely any imputations of miracles to him. At Ephesus, in the days of St. Paul, there were some quasi-Christians who had received none but “John’s Baptism,” and had “not so much as heard whether there is a Holy Ghost.” That gives us a much stronger impression of the Prophet’s influence, and a much weaker impression of the prevalence of the doctrine about the Holy Spirit in the earliest Christian teaching, than we should have inferred from what we read in the Fourth Gospel: was it likely, when the Baptist’s influence seemed to the contemporaries of St. Paul still so powerful (perhaps too powerful) that they would be tempted unconsciously to magnify it by casting round him that halo of miraculous action which naturally gathered around the life of Christ?

Does it seem to you very hard, and almost cruelly unnatural, that the life of the Baptist—in whom the world takes comparatively little interest—should be handed down with historical accuracy (at least so far as miracles are concerned) while the life of Christ, the centre of the hopes and fears of the civilized world, has been permitted by Providence to become a nucleus for illusion and superstition as well as for the righteous faith and love of mankind? It is hard; it is not unnatural.

“When beggars die there are no comets seen;

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.”

What does Shakespeare mean by this except to exemplify the universal, and natural, but illusive belief, that whatever affects the greatest man must also affect material nature? Therefore in proportion to the greatness of any man we must expect that the illusions about him will be great in the minds of posterity. How indeed could it be otherwise? Reflect for a moment. Jesus came into the world to be a spiritual Saviour, a spiritual Judge; but how few there were in those days who could fully appreciate even the meaning of these titles! Do you yourself, even at this date, after the lapse of eighteen centuries, grasp firmly this notion of spiritual judgment? Reverence can hardly restrain you from smiling at the Apostles for their unspiritual dreams of a “carnal” empire with twelve tangible thrones to be set up for their twelve selves in Palestine; but you yourself, have you never, at all events in younger days, dreamed sometimes of a visible white throne on material clouds, of a visible and perhaps tangible trumpet, of an audible verdict of “Guilty” or “Not guilty” externally pronounced on each soul? perhaps also of palpable palm branches, and of I know not what more sensuous apparatus, without which you can scarcely realize the notion of the Day of Judgment? And yet all these are adventitious and accidental accompaniments of the real and essential “judgment” which is in Greek the “sifting” or “division” i.e. the division between good and evil in the heart of each one of us. But I doubt even now whether you understand the meaning of this spiritual “division” or judgment. Let me try to explain it. Have you not at any time suddenly, in a flash, been brought face to face with some revelation of goodness, some good person, or action, or book, or word, or thoughts—which in a moment, before you were aware, has lighted up all the black caverns of your nature and made your mind’s eye realize them, and your conscience abhor them, setting your higher nature against your lower nature, so that, without your knowing it, this angelic visitant has taken hold of you, carried away the better part of you along with itself into higher regions of purer thought than yours, from whence your better nature is forced to look down upon, and condemn, your lower and grosser self? This “division” is the operation of the two-edged sword of the Spirit; and when a man’s cheeks flush with shame, or his heart feels crushed with remorse, under this “dividing” power, and he feels the verdict “I am guilty,” then he is being judged far more effectually than any earthly law court could judge him. Now it is this kind of judgment that Jesus had in mind when He spoke of the judgment of the world by the Son of Man. In this sense He has been judging, is judging, and will judge, till the Great Judgment consummates the story of such things as are to be judged. But how little has the world realized this!

Probably some would have realized less of the spiritual if they had imagined less of the material. You know how the English judges of our times still insist on much of the old pomp and ceremony which in the days of our forefathers was thought necessary in order to make justice venerable. The trumpets, and the javelin-men, and the sheriffs in the procession, the wig and gown and bands in court—they all seem a little ridiculous to most of us now; yet possibly the judges are right in retaining them. Possibly our brutal English nature will need for some decades longer these antique and now meaningless trappings before they will be able to respect the just judge for the sake of justice itself. And in the same way, from the days of Clovis to those of Napoleon, many a man who would have found it impossible to realize the righteous Judge as the invisible wielder of the two-edged sword of the Spirit, has felt a fear, which perhaps did more good than harm, at the thought of the opening graves, the unclothed trembling dead, the thunder-pealing verdict and the flames of a material hell. Who also can deny that the illusion which has represented Jesus as having possessed and exerted the power to cure every imaginable disease of the body, has led many to realize Him as the Healer of something more than material disease, in a manner otherwise impossible for masses of men living under an oppression which often scarcely left them the consciousness that they possessed anything but bodies wherewith to serve their masters?

Do not suppose, because I am forced by evidence to reject the miracles, that I am blind to the part that they once played in facilitating faith in Christ. A whole essay, a volume of essays might be written on that subject, without fear of exaggeration. The Miraculous Conception, the Miraculous Resurrection and Ascension, the miracles of the feeding of the four thousand and of the five thousand,—it would be quite possible to shew from Christian literature and history, how in times gone by, when laws of nature were unrecognized, these supposed incidents of Christ’s life not only found their way into men’s minds without hesitation and without a strain upon intellect or conscience, but also conveyed to the human heart, each in its own way, some deep spiritual truth satisfying some deep spiritual need. It is the old lesson once more repeated: the eyes take in, as a picture, what the ears fail to convey to the brain or heart, when expressed in mere words.

But now, there are abundant symptoms that the tempers and minds of men are greatly changed. Men’s minds are more open than before to the need of some spiritual bond to keep society together; and the character and spiritual claims of Christ, and the marvellous results that have followed from His life and death, are beginning (I think) to be recognized with more spontaneousness and with less of superstitious formalism. On the other hand, the vast regularity of Nature has so come home to our hearts that some believe in it as if it had a divine sanctity; the thought of praying that the sun or moon may stand still shocks us as a profanity; and boys and girls, as they stand opposite to some picture setting forth a Bible miracle, look puzzled and perplexed, or, if they are a little older, say with a sententious smile that “the age of miracles is past.” In a word, that very element of inexplicable wonder which once strengthened the faith, now weakens it, by furnishing weapons to its assailants, and by inducing rash believers to take up and defend against sceptics a position that is indefensible.

In any case, it is the duty of each generation of Christians to put aside, as far as it can, the illusions of the previous generation and to rise higher to the fuller knowledge of Christ; for the outworn and undiscarded illusions of one generation become the hypocrisies of the next. The illusions of the permanence of the Mosaic Law, of the speedy Consummation, of Transubstantiation, of the Infallible Church, of the Infallible Book, have all been in due course put away. A candid and modest Christian ought surely to argue that, where so many illusions have already been discarded—and all without injury to the worship of Christ—some may remain to be discarded still, and equally without injury to the Eternal Truth.

What if miraculous Christianity is to natural Christianity as the Ptolemaic astronomy is to the Newtonian? Both of these astronomical systems were of practical utility; both could predict eclipses; both revealed God as a God of order. But the former imputed to the unmoving sun the terrestrial motion which the latter correctly imputed to the earth; the former explained by a number of arbitrary, non-natural, and quasi-miraculous suppositions—spheres, and spirals, and epicycles, and the like—phenomena which the latter more simply explained by one celestial curve traced out in accordance with one fixed law. I believe that in religion also we have made a similar mistake and are being prepared for a similar correction. We have imputed to Christ some actions which have sprung from the promptings of our own imaginations—imaging forth what our ideal Deliverer would have done—and which have represented, not His motions, but the motions of our own hearts. By what we have euphemistically denominated “latent laws,” that is to say by hypotheses as arbitrary and baseless as the old epicycles, unsupported by sufficient evidence and inconsistent with all that we see and hear and feel around us in God’s world, we have endeavoured to explain a Redemption which no more needs such explanations than forgiveness needs them—a Redemption which is as natural (that is to say, as much in accordance with the laws of physical nature and the ordinary processes of human nature) as that Law of Love, or Spiritual gravitation, which may be illustrated in the microcosm of every human household. Now we are to learn the new truth: and as the God of Newton is greater (is He not?) than the God of Ptolemy, so let us not doubt that the God revealed in spiritual Christianity will be greater than the God revealed in material and miraculous Christianity. The new heavens will not cease to declare the glory of God; the new firmament will not fail to tell of His handiwork.

XVIII
ARE THE MIRACLES INSEPARABLE FROM THE LIFE OF CHRIST?

My dear ——,

From the digressions concerning the growth of the Gospels and the possibility or probability that their truths would be conveyed through illusion I now return to our main subject, the question whether the life of Christ can be disentangled from miracles. And here you tell me that some of your agnostic and sceptical friends quote with great satisfaction the following sentence from Bishop Temple’s recent Bampton Lectures[^[22]]: “Many of our Lord’s most characteristic sayings are so associated with narratives of miracles that the two cannot be torn apart.” I can well believe what you tell me as to the advantage which they naturally take of this admission: “Here,” they say, “is a statement made on high authority that, unless you can believe that Jesus worked bonâ fide miracles, such as the blasting of the fig tree and the destruction of the swine, you must give up ‘many of Christ’s most characteristic sayings’ in other words, you must give up the hope of knowing what Jesus taught.” I wish your friends, who quote this assertion with so much pleasure, would also have quoted the “characteristic sayings” alleged by Dr. Temple in proof of this assertion; for you would then have seen for yourself that many of these “characteristic sayings” are associated not with “miracles” but with “mighty works;” and I am sure you have not forgotten the difference between the two.[^[23]]

For example the first of the “characteristic sayings” is, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee.” Now these words were spoken to the paralytic man; and, as we have seen above, the cure of paralysis by appeal to the emotions—although a remarkable act, and although, if permanent, so remarkable as to deserve to be called “a mighty work”—cannot be called a miracle. But I need say no more of this, as I have treated of cures by “emotional shock” in a previous letter. Now all the other sayings quoted by Dr. Temple refer to “faith” or “believing;” and all, I think, are connected with acts of healing. There may be doubtless in some of our present accounts of the “mighty works” some inaccuracies or exaggerations as to the nature of the disease and the circumstances of the cure. For example, when the cure is said to have been performed at a distance from the patient, either (1) faith must have wrought in the patient by his knowledge that his friends were interceding with Christ, or (2) we must assume some very doubtful theory of “brain-wave” sympathy, or admit that (3) the story is exaggerated, or else that (4) there is a bonâ fide miracle. For my own part I waver, in such cases as that of the centurion’s servant and the Syro-Phœnician’s daughter, between the hypotheses which I have numbered (1) and (3), with a sentimental reserve in favour of (2); but any one of these seems to me so far more probable than the hypothesis of a suspension of the laws of nature that I do not feel in the least constrained by reason of such “characteristic sayings” concerning faith, to give in my adhesion to a narrative of miracle. On the contrary I say the mention of “faith,” and Christ’s “marvel” at faith, and His eulogy of the “greatness” of the “faith” in certain cases, all go to prove that these acts were not miracles, but simply acts of faith-healing on a colossal scale. I hope you will not feel inclined to sneer at the reservation in those last four words. You will surely admit that, if Christ did anything naturally, the result might be proportionate to His nature; and if His power of appealing to the emotions was colossal, the material result of that appeal might be proportionately colossal. I begin, therefore, the process of disentanglement between the historical and the miraculous in Christ’s life by a protest against a hasty and blind confusion which refuses to discriminate between “miracles” and “mighty works,” and calls on us to reject from the history not only the miraculous but the marvellous as well; and I assert that the acts of faith healing with which, as Bishop Temple truly says, there are associated many of our Lord’s most characteristic sayings, may be accepted as generally historical and natural.

This, however, would not apply to such a miracle as the restoration of the ear of the high priest’s servant; and the reasons are obvious. The faith necessary for an act of emotional healing is not said to have existed, and is not likely to have existed, in a man who probably looked on Christ as an impostor. Even if it had existed, the case was not one where we have reason to think faith could have healed. Besides, the miracle is omitted by three out of the four Evangelists. It is possibly a mistaken inference from some tradition about an utterance of Jesus, “Suffer ye thus far;” which may have really had an entirely different meaning, but which led the third Evangelist to conclude that Jesus desired His captors to give Him so much liberty as would allow him to perform this act of mercy—a humane and picturesque thought, but not history. It is scarcely conceivable that the other three Evangelists should have mentioned the wound inflicted on the servant; that Matthew and John should have added a rebuke addressed by Jesus to Peter for inflicting it; and that John should have taken the pains to tell us the name of the high priest’s servant and yet that they should have omitted, if they actually knew, the fact that the wound was immediately and miraculously healed by Jesus. The irresistible conclusion is that St. Mark, St. Matthew, and St. John, knew nothing of this miracle.

When the acts of healing are set apart, and considered as “mighty works” but not “miracles,” the bonâ fide miracles in the Synoptic Gospels will become few indeed: and I think it will be found that these few are susceptible of explanation on natural grounds. We will pass over the finding of the coin in the fish’s mouth which is found in St. Matthew’s Gospel alone and can hardly be associated with any “characteristic saying” of Jesus—and come to a miracle common to the three Synoptists, the destruction of two thousand swine following on the exorcism of the Gadarene.

This is a very curious case of misunderstanding arising from literalism. It was a common belief in Palestine (as it was also in Europe during the middle ages), that the bodies of the “possessed,” or insane, were tenanted by familiar demons in various shapes—toads, scorpions, swine, serpents, and the like. These demons were supposed to have as their normal home an “abyss” or “deep” (Luke viii. 31, ἄβυσσον); but this they abhorred, and were never so happy as when they found a home in some human body. The “possessed” believed that these demons were visible and material; and the juggling exorcist would sometimes (so Josephus tells us) place a bucket of water to be overturned by the demons in passing, as a proof that they were driven out. In a word, the “possessed” could hardly be convinced that he was cured, unless he saw, or thought he saw, the frogs, serpents, scorpions, or swine actually rushing from his mouth in some definite direction.

The explanation of the miracle will now readily suggest itself to you. Some man, perhaps a patriotic Galilean, to whom nothing would be more hateful than a Roman army, conceived himself to be possessed by a whole “legion,” two thousand “unclean swine.” Identifying himself—as was the habit of those who were “possessed”—with the demons whom he supposed to have possession of him, the insane man declared that his name was “Legion, for we are many” and they (or he) besought Jesus that He would not drive them into the “deep,” i.e. into the “abyss” above-mentioned. But by the voice of Jesus the man is instantaneously healed: he sees the legion of demons that had possessed him rushing forth in the shapes of two thousand swine and hurrying down into “the deep;” and what he sees, he loudly proclaims to the bystanders. It is easy to perceive how on some such a basis of fact there might be built the tradition that Jesus healed a demoniac whose name was Legion, and sent two thousand swine into the deep sea; and from thence by easy stages the tradition might arrive at its present shape.

So far, I think, you do not find it very difficult to separate the miraculous from the historical in the life of Christ, nor feel yourself forced to sacrifice any of the “most characteristic sayings of Jesus.” Let us now come to a miracle of greater difficulty, the blasting of the barren fig-tree.

Even of those commentators who accept the miracle of the fig-tree as historical, most, I believe, see in it a kind of parable. The barren fig-tree, they say, which made a great show of leaves but bore no fruit, obviously represents, in the first place, the Pharisees, and in the second place, the nation, which, as a whole, identified itself with the Pharisees. Both the Prophets and the Psalms delight in similar metaphors. Israel is the vine; Jehovah, in Isaiah, is the Lord of the vine, who demands good fruit and finds it not, and consequently resolves to destroy the vine. So here, the Lord comes to the fig-tree of Phariseeism, the tree of degenerate Israel, seeking fruit; and finding none, He curses it, and withers it with the breath of His mouth. Is it not easy to see how a parable, thus expressed in the hymns and earliest traditions of the Church, might speedily be literalized and give rise to a miraculous narrative?

Let me point out to you a curious fact confirmatory of this view. I dare say you may have noticed that St. Luke, although he agrees with St. Mark and St. Matthew in the context of this miracle, omits the miracle itself. Why so? Is it because he never heard of the miracle? Not quite so. It is because he had heard of it in a slightly different form, not as a miracle but as a parable, which he alone has preserved. St. Luke’s version of the tradition is that the Lord comes to the barren tree and, finding no fruit on it, gives orders that it is to be cut down: but the steward of the farm pleads for a respite; let the ground be digged and manured, then, if there be no fruit, let it be cut down. A similar thought, you see, is here expressed in two different shapes, a miraculous and a non-miraculous; and it is not difficult to understand how the former may have been developed from the latter.

But I see that your last letter has a remark on this very miracle, and on the difficulty of rejecting it. “It is associated,” you say, “with one of the most characteristic sayings of Jesus: for it is in connection with the withering of the fig-tree that Jesus says (Matt. xxi. 21), ‘If ye have faith, ye shall not only do what is done to the fig-tree, but even if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.’” “Here,” you say, “we have a characteristic saying of Jesus expressly referring to something done, and done miraculously.”

Would it not have been wise, before making so emphatic a statement, to consider how St. Mark, the earlier of the two narrators of this miracle, sets forth the comment of Jesus? The comments run thus in the first two Gospels, and I will add a parallel saying from the third Gospel, not attached to any miracle:

[Transcriber’s Note: The following three quotations were originally printed side-by-side.]

Mark xi. 21-23.

And Peter, calling to remembrance, saith unto him, “Rabbi, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.” And Jesus answering saith unto them, “Have faith in God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass; he shall have it.”

Matthew xxi. 20-21.

And when the disciples saw it, they marvelled, saying, “How did the fig tree immediately wither away?” And Jesus said unto them, “Verify I say unto you, If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall [not only do what is done to the fig tree, but even if ye shall] say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, it shall be done.”

Luke xvii. 5-6.

And the apostles said unto the Lord “Increase our faith.” And the Lord said, “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye would say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou rooted up, and be thou planted in the sea; and it would have obeyed you.”

You see then that the more authoritative (because earlier) of our two witnesses omits those very words on which you lay so much stress, the “express reference to something done, and done miraculously.” And ought not this fact to make you pause and ask yourself “Am I really to suppose that the Lord Jesus encouraged His disciples to command material mountains to be cast into the sea, and material trees to be destroyed? Did He Himself so habitually act thus that He could naturally urge His disciples to do the like? Does it not seem, literally taken, advice contrary not only to common sense but also to a reverent appreciation of the law and order of nature?” I would suggest to you that you might weigh the inherent improbability of the words in St. Matthew (literally taken), as well as the external probability—which I will now endeavour to shew—that the whole passage was metaphorical.

We know from St. Paul’s works, as well as from Rabbinical literature, that “to move mountains” was a common metaphor to express intellectual or spiritual ability. St. Paul speaks of faith that would “move mountains;” and you will find in Lightfoot’s Horae Hebraicae (ii. p. 285), “There was not such another rooter up of mountains as Ben Azzai.” Now we know from St. Luke’s Gospel (xvii. 6), that Jesus used a similar metaphor of trees, as well as of mountains, to exemplify the power of faith; and this without any reference to “something done and done miraculously:” “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye would say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou rooted up and planted in the sea; and it would have obeyed.” Planted in the sea! Can you dream that so preposterous a portent could have been prayed for by any sane and sober follower of Christ in compliance with his Master’s suggestion? Bear in mind that these words in St. Luke’s Gospel were uttered a long time before the blasting of the fig tree is supposed to have happened, and at a different place. Does not then a comparison of this passage with the other two make it probable that Jesus was in the habit of encouraging His disciples to be “pluckers up of mountains” and “rooters up of trees,” not literally but metaphorically, meaning thereby that they were to attempt and accomplish the greatest feats of faith?

You will, perhaps, be surprised when you find what it was that Jesus regarded as the greatest feat of faith in the passage of St. Luke just mentioned. It was a feat of which we are accustomed to think rather lightly; partly, perhaps, because we are often contented with the appearance of it without the reality: it was simply forgiveness. He had told the disciples they must forgive “till seventy times seven:” The Apostles, in despair, replied “Increase our faith:” and then Jesus tells them that if they had but a germ of living trust, they could become “uprooters of sycamine trees,” in other words they could perform forgiveness, the greatest feat of faith. But perhaps you will say, “At all events in St. Mark, the earliest authority for the miracle of the blasting of the fig-tree, there is no mention of forgiveness, and nothing that would indicate that his version of the words of Jesus referred to what you call ‘the greatest feat of faith,’ i.e. forgiveness.” On the contrary, you will find that St. Mark, with some apparent confusion of different thoughts, retains the trace of the original spiritual signification of the words (Mark xi. 22-25): “Have faith in God. Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up and cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart but shall believe that what he saith cometh to pass, he shall have it. Therefore I say unto you, All things whatsoever ye pray and ask for, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them; And whensoever ye stand praying, forgive, if ye have aught against any one; that your Father which is in heaven may forgive your trespasses.”

I contend that, upon the whole, an impartial critic must come to the conclusion that neither the miracle, nor the reference to the miracle, is historical; and that, in all probability, both the miracle and the reference to it arose from a misunderstanding, without any intention to deceive. We must remember that the “short sayings” of the Lord Jesus—as they are called by some early writer, Justin, I think—must have caused considerable difficulty to the compilers of the earliest Gospels in the attempt to arrange them in order. Pointed, pithy, and brief, pregnant with meaning, sometimes obscured by metaphor, many of these sayings, if taken out of their context, were very liable to be misunderstood. Some compilers might think it best, as the author of St. Matthew’s Gospel has done in the Sermon on the Mount, to group a number of these sayings together without connection; others, as the author of St. Luke’s Gospel, might object to this arrangement, and might make it a main object to set forth these sayings “in order,” attaching to each its appropriate and explanatory context. Now to apply this to the particular case of the legend of the fig-tree. It seems probable that the compilers had before them two traditions, one, a parable about a barren fig-tree destroyed by the Lord of the vine-yard because it bore no fruit; another, a precept about the power of faith in uprooting a mountain or a tree, i.e. in achieving the greatest of spiritual tasks, the task of forgiving. St. Luke interpreted both the parable and the precept spiritually, and kept the two distinct. St. Mark interpreted the parable literally and adopted the tradition which made it refer to an actual destruction of a tree; he also appended to it the saying on the power of faithful prayer to work any wonders soever, as being an appropriate comment on so startling a miracle; but he did not think fit to adapt the saying to the miracle by any insertion of the word “tree” (“Verily I say unto you, whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou taken up” &c.); and he retained the old connection of the saying with forgiveness. St. Matthew—of course, when I say St. Matthew, I mean the unknown authors or compilers of the Gospel called by his name—is more consistent. He, like St. Mark interprets the parable literally, and he appends to it the saying on the power of faithful prayer; but he inserts in the latter an express reference to the miracle which, according to his hypothesis, had recently been worked before the eyes of the Disciples and could hardly therefore fail to be mentioned: “If ye have faith and doubt not, ye shall [not only do what is done to the fig-tree, but even if ye shall] say unto this mountain,” &c. In order to complete the adaptation, he also omits the words that connect the saying with forgiveness, and relegates them to the Sermon on the Mount (vi. 14, 15) which he makes the receptacle for all those sayings of Jesus for which he can find no special time and place.

“All this is shadowy, barely possible, mere conjecture.” I maintain that conjecture, fairly supported, is enough to give the finishing blow to all faith in a miracle so different from Christ’s other “mighty works” as this of the fig-tree. Before finally and utterly rejecting a story found in a generally truthful narrative we wish not only to know that the story is improbable, but also to answer the question, “How may it have crept into the narrative?” The above conjecture supplies a fairly probable answer to that question; and the combined result of the evidence for the probability of some rational explanation, and against the probability of the miraculous occurrence, is so great that I can feel no hesitation in rejecting the miracle of the fig-tree and in declaring that the “characteristic sayings” of Jesus about the uprooting of mountains and trees were never intended to be literally understood.

And now, before going further, ask yourself once more, “What have I lost, so far, by giving up the miracles of Jesus? Does He sink in my estimation because He did not blast a fig-tree or destroy two thousand swine, or draw a fish with a stater in its mouth to the hook of Peter? Or have I lost a precious and ‘characteristic saying’ of Jesus because I no longer believe that He really encouraged His disciples to pray for the uprooting of material mountains and material trees?” I am quite sure your conscience must reply that you have hitherto lost nothing. If so, take courage, and follow on step by step where the argument leads you.

XIX
THE MIRACLES OF FEEDING

My dear ——,

You remind me that I have omitted the most important of all those sayings of Christ which are associated with miracles—the passage in which he comments on the feeding of the Four Thousand and on that of the Five Thousand, as two separate acts, apparently implying their miraculous nature. I have not forgotten it; but I reserved it to the last because it is, as you justly say, the most important and the most difficult of all; but I believe it to be susceptible of explanation.

Let us first have the facts before us. In the Gospels of St. Matthew (viii. 15) and St. Mark (xvi. 6) Jesus is introduced as bidding the Disciples “beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and the leaven of Herod” (or, as Matthew, “the Sadducees.”) Upon this the disciples, as usual, interpret the words of Jesus literally; they suppose that, since they have forgotten to bring bread with them (for they had but one loaf) their Master wishes to warn them to beware of leaven during the approaching feast of Passover or unleavened bread. Hereupon Jesus, in order to shew them that He was not speaking literally, rebukes their dull and literalizing minds as follows:—

Mark viii. 17-21.

“Why reason ye because ye have no bread? Do ye not yet perceive?... When I brake the five loaves among the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces took ye up?” They say unto him, “Twelve.” “And when the seven among the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces took ye up?” And they say unto him, “Seven.” And he said unto them, “Do ye not yet understand?”

Matthew xvi. 8-12.

“Why reason ye among yourselves because ye have no bread? Do ye not yet perceive neither remember the five loaves of the five thousand and how many baskets took ye up? Neither the seven loaves of the four thousand and how many baskets ye took up? How is it that ye do not perceive that I spake not to you concerning bread? But beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” Then understood they how that he bade them not beware of the leaven of bread, but of the teaching of the Pharisees and Sadducees.

Now before I proceed further I must point out to you that these words are not found in St. Luke’s Gospel. For my own part I am disposed to believe them to be genuine, though not quite in the exact form in which we now find them. I think St. Luke may have omitted them because he found some difficulty or obscurity in them; or because he did not know of them; or perhaps because he did not know of, or did not accept, the feeding of the Four Thousand, to which they refer. But suppose we are forced to give them up as altogether spurious, that is to say, as not being genuine words of Jesus, though genuine parts of the first and second Gospels; what is the consequence? Simply that we shall be reduced to St. Luke’s version of the words, which is as follows (Luke xii. 1): “Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy.” Can we say that St. Luke has herein omitted words that are essential to the life of Christ, or that we have lost anything of the highest importance, or even that we have lost a very “characteristic saying” of Jesus in omitting the statistical comparison which St. Luke omits? I think not.

But now let us assume that Jesus uttered these words or something like them. I think you would perceive that they could be interpreted metaphorically, if you could only comprehend how the accounts of the miraculous feeding of the Four Thousand and of the Five Thousand (obviously literal as they now stand in our Gospels) could be referred to as spiritual incidents. In order to answer this question we must now pass to the narratives of the two miracles themselves. I suppose even those who accept them literally would admit that they are emblematic, and that they represent Jesus, the Bread of Life, giving Himself for the world. The Fourth Gospel manifests this in the subsequent discourse where the feeding on the bread and fishes introduces the subject of the feeding on the flesh and blood of Christ. The notion that we feed on the Word of God, first found in Deuteronomy (viii. 3), pervades all Jewish literature. It is found in Philo (i. 119): “The soul is nourished not on earthly and corruptible food, but on the words which Gods rains down out of His sublime and pure nature which He calls heaven.” It reappears in the account of our Lord’s temptation, when He replies to Satan, quoting Deut. viii. 3, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God;” and again (John iv. 32), “I have meat to eat that ye know not.”

On that last occasion the Fourth Gospel tells us that the disciples actually misunderstood the metaphor and interpreted it literally; and to this day I dare say many would give a literal interpretation to the “daily bread” of the Lord’s prayer; but there can be little doubt that Jesus meant by “bread” every gift and blessing that constitutes life, and primarily the spiritual sustenance of the soul. As to the emblematic use of the “fish,” it cannot be traced to the Old Testament; but in a very early period of the existence of the Church, as early as the reign of Vespasian, we find the Fish in rude paintings representing the Eucharistic food of the faithful; and it is said that this appellation was given to Jesus from the initial letters of the Greek title I(esous) Ch(ristos) Th(eou) U(ios) S(oter) [Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour] because they made up the Greek word Ichthus, fish. About the middle of the second century we find one of the earliest extant Christian poems describing how the Church everywhere presented to the faithful, as their food, “the Fish, great and pure, which the Holy Virgin had caught.” The poet evidently did not invent this metaphor; it was established, intelligible, and inherited, at the time when he used it, and must have been in use much earlier. To speak of “crumbs” metaphorically may perhaps seem to us a bold metaphor, but it may be illustrated by the dialogue between Jesus and the Syro-Phœnician woman: “It is not meet to take the children’s food and cast it unto dogs:” “Truth, Lord; yet even the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from the master’s table.” Now it was a common-place in the doctrine of Jesus that every disciple who ministered the Word or Bread of Life invariably received it back in ample measure: “Freely ye have received, freely give.” Give what? Certainly not material bread, but the truth or bread of life. And again, “Give, and it shall be given unto you: good measure pressed down and running over shall THEY[^[24]] give into your bosom.” Again, I ask, give what? What but the spiritual Bread, which, by the laws of spiritual nature, cannot be freely given without a yet more rich return into the giver’s heart? It was this Bread that Christ ministered to His disciples and bade them set before the people; it was this Bread which the disciples found multiplied in their hands so that it sufficed for all, and they themselves were fed from the crumbs that fell from the food.

In course of time the story of this spiritual banquet finding its way into Christian hymns and traditions would be literalized and amplified with variations. As Moses “spread a table” for Israel “in the wilderness,” so also, it would be said, did Jesus of Nazareth when he fed thousands of His followers on divine Bread. The Fish, which is not mentioned in our Lord’s dialogue with the Disciples, might naturally he added to the Bread, in the narrative, as a Eucharistic emblem. If the Fish had been mentioned by our Lord in the dialogue under question, my explanation would at once fall to the ground; but it is not mentioned; and the only difficulty is in explaining how Jesus could have spoken metaphorically of the “seven” as well as the “twelve” baskets. We can understand the “twelve”—each one of the twelve Apostles who ministered, receiving a return of spiritual “crumbs”—but whence the “seven?” Here I can but conjecture. You know that seven is what is called “a sacred number.” I find in the Fourth Gospel, xxi. 2-14, a story (evidently emblematic) of a miraculous meal of bread and fishes in which “seven” apostles took part. This may have been based upon some tradition in which seven apostles were recorded as having taken part in a spiritual Eucharistic feeding of the multitude. If that was so, it would follow that in the latter case there would be “seven baskets” of fragments, as in the former case there were “twelve,” corresponding to the number of the ministering apostles: and Jesus, in the dialogue under consideration, would remind His disciples how on two occasions where the bread of life was multiplied for the hungry, the twelve Apostles received the twelve baskets of crumbs, and the seven received the seven.

What is the argument in the words under consideration, according to your interpretation? I presume you would take them thus: “Why do you suppose I am talking about literal bread? Can I not make bread as I please? Do you not remember my two miracles, and how from five loaves for five thousand people there came twelve baskets of fragments, while from seven loaves for four thousand people there came seven baskets?[^[25]] How then can I (or you while you are with me) be in need of literal bread?” But this interpretation is open to one serious objection. It is opposed to the whole tenour of Christ’s life. Nowhere else in the Gospels do we find that Jesus used any miraculous power to exempt Himself and His disciples from hunger. We are even taught that on one occasion He resisted a prompting to turn stones into bread, as being a temptation from the Evil One. For His disciples he might undoubtedly have been willing to do what He would not do for Himself; but that Jesus (like Elisha) so habitually used miraculous powers to shelter His disciples from the inconveniences and hardships of a wandering life, that he could encourage them to believe that he would do so on the present occasion, is a hypothesis quite inconsistent with the Gospel history. Moreover, plausible although this interpretation may appear to us—because we are familiar with the literalizing interpretation of the miracles of the Four Thousand and Five Thousand—it does not, if I may so say, bring out the proportion of the sentence. Surely it does not sound logical to say, “Did I not once supply you with bread for four and five thousand people (literally)? Why then do you not understand that I now speak of ‘leaven’ metaphorically?” Instead of this, should we not rather expect: “Do you not remember how on two previous occasions ‘bread’ was used spiritually? Why then do you not understand that ‘leaven’ is here used spiritually?” Now this is what I believe to have been the original meaning of the words, if genuine. I believe that Jesus intended to remind the Disciples how on two previous occasions the multitude had been fed with the spiritual Bread, the Bread of Life: “You know that that was what I meant before, when I spoke of Bread; how is it then that you do not understand my meaning now when I speak similarly of leaven?”

I do not pretend to say that this explanation is completely satisfactory even to me, much less to claim that it should completely satisfy others. Some may prefer to rationalize the miracle as an exaggeration with a substratum of fact; others may reject the dialogue as a late interpolation. Yet even then I think the considerations above alleged—which I have put forward, on the supposition that the dialogue is genuine—may go a long way toward shewing how these miraculous stories may have sprung up without any real basis of miracle, and how, in the elaboration of these narratives, words that cannot be accepted as historical may have been attributed to Jesus without any fraudulent purpose. Although I am unwilling to admit (and do not feel called upon by evidence to admit) that the words and doctrine of Jesus have been seriously modified to suit the miraculous interpolations of early Christian times, yet of course (on my hypothesis) some slight occasional modifications cannot be denied. For example, in the miracle of the Four Thousand, Jesus is introduced as saying, “How many loaves have ye?” These words must necessarily be rejected by any one taking my view of the narrative, as the addition of some later tradition which, interpreting a metaphor literally, endeavoured to set forth the literal fact dramatically as it was supposed to have occurred. In the same way it is possible that the dialogue now under consideration may be an amplification of a simple rebuke from Jesus to the disciples for misunderstanding His precept as to leaven, the early tradition having run somewhat after this fashion: “The Lord spread a table for the hungry in the wilderness: He gave them bread from heaven to eat. The Lord gave food unto the multitude through the hands of the Twelve; and in their hands the Bread of Life was multiplied so that a few loaves satisfied many thousands. Then did the Lord warn His disciples that they should beware of leaven and feed on nought save the one true Bread. But they understood not His words, and remembered not the mighty works of His hands.” It seems to me quite possible, I say, that the dialogue under discussion may have arisen from an amplification of some such words as those above italicized; and I am somewhat the more inclined to take this view because St. Mark’s narrative (the earliest) contains a curious little detail which looks like a trace of some old hymn about “the one true Bread” i.e. Jesus: “They had not in the boat with them more than one loaf (Gr. bread).”

If these suggested solutions seem improbable, let me once more remind you that you have to choose between them and greater improbabilities. Either the miraculous narrative must be historically true; or it must have been deliberately fabricated; or it must have sprung into existence without intention to deceive. As to the improbability of the first of these solutions, I say nothing, because you have rejected it. Certainly it would be difficult for a painter to depict in detail the processes necessitated by this miracle without producing a grotesque impression: but on this point I am silent, as it is beside my purpose. It remains therefore for you to decide whether the theory of deliberate falsehood, or of the unconscious accretions of tradition and misunderstanding of metaphor, supplies the least improbable explanation. For my part, having regard to the character of Christ’s disciples, the abundant evidence that they misunderstood the teaching of their Master, and the frequent instances of miraculous narrative arising from misunderstanding in other cases, I have no hesitation in saying that, in this case also, the hypothesis of deceit is far more improbable than that of misunderstanding.

I had not intended to touch on any other miracle; but one more can be so briefly discussed that I will not omit it. I dare say you have anticipated (though you have not read Onesimus[^[26]]) that I should explain the “walking on the waves” and the “stilling of the sea” as narratives derived from early Christian hymns representing the Son of God as stilling the storms that threaten the bark of the Church. Nevertheless you may not have perceived how easily a historical and authentic tradition of the deeds and words of Christ would lend itself to amplification so as to be elaborated into the full miraculous narrative as we now find it in the Gospels. Well then, open your Greek Testament at St. Mark’s narrative (i. 25-27, or Luke iv. 35, 36) of the exorcism of an unclean spirit. You will there find it stated that Jesus “rebuked an unclean spirit;” and a somewhat rare word is used to express the rebuke, “Be thou muzzled (φιμώθητι).” It is further added that the disciples, in their astonishment, said to one another “What is this? With authority he commandeth even the unclean spirits and they obey him.” Now you know very well that the same Greek word (πνεῦμα) expresses two totally distinct English words “spirit” and “wind;” but you may not so well know that the same ambiguity is found in Hebrew. Look at Psalm civ. 4 in the Old Version, and you will find “Who maketh his angels (i.e. messengers) spirits;” but the New Version gives, more correctly, “Who maketh winds his messengers,” or, “Who maketh his angels winds.” Now suppose that in some cases where the above tradition was circulated in the Church, either in Greek or Aramaic, the word “unclean” was omitted, as it easily might be for brevity. It would follow that, without the change of a single word, the hearers might interpret the story as follows: “Jesus rebuked the wind, saying to it, Be thou muzzled. His disciples marvelled, saying, What is this? With authority he commandeth even the winds and they obey him.”

But you may say perhaps, “Jesus could not use such an extraordinary phrase as ‘Be thou muzzled,’ in addressing the wind. To a human being it would be applicable, or even to a spirit, but not to the wind.” Well, it certainly would be rather unusual: but turn to St. Mark iv. 39, and you will there find a passage telling you how, in a storm at sea, Jesus awoke and “rebuked the wind” with the words “Be thou muzzled (Φιμώθητι),” and how the wondering disciples said to one another, “Who is this that even the wind (Matthew and Luke, ‘the winds’) and sea obey him?” It appears to me by no means unlikely that we have here two versions of the same tradition; the one in the earlier chapter of St. Mark representing the facts; the other in the later chapter resulting from a misunderstanding of the facts, whence there sprang up the amplified and beautiful tradition of the Stilling of the Storm—a story which must have in all ages commended itself to the Church, and may still commend itself, by reason of its deep spiritual truth, but which ought, in this age, to be recognized as in all probability, not historically true.

Neither of the above-mentioned explanations of this miraculous narrative appears to me by any means certain; but either seems to me decidedly more likely than that Jesus so far raised Himself above the conditions of humanity as to rebuke and check the winds and the seas. If I interpret the life of Christ aright, He neither did, nor wished to do, any such thing, and would have regarded the suggestion to do it as a temptation from Satan. I say this with reverence, almost with fear and trembling, knowing that I must give account of these words hereafter before Him. But what can a man do more to shew his homage for the Truth than follow where the Truth appears to lead?

In any case I am sure we cannot rightly understand the life and mind of Jesus until, by a great effort, we have divested ourselves of our inveterate and vulgar belief that He wrought His mighty works as mere demonstrations of His divine mission, and that He had power to perform any works whatever, quite regardless of the laws of nature. Had that been the case, I do not see how He could have blamed the Pharisees for asking Him to work a sign in heaven. Why should they not have asked it, and why should not He have worked it? Jugglers and impostors were very common in the East; Galilee and Samaria were thronged with professional exorcists: in miracles performed on men there was always the possibility of collusion; any act on earth was open to suspicion of imposture, but in heaven this was the general belief—there could be certainty; no mere magician could work a sign in heaven. “Let but the sun stand still for half a day, and we will believe,” surely this, from the demonstration-point-of-view of miracles, was a very natural request; and if Jesus really had the power of stopping the sun for half a day, and if He felt that His wonder-working faculty was given to Him for the mere purpose of demonstrating His divine power, I cannot understand how He could have refused, much less rebuked, the request of the Pharisees.

But in truth His mighty works or signs were not wrought in this deliberate way for the mere purpose of demonstration. They were the results of an irrepressible pity, appealing to an instinct of power. He could not see a demoniac or a paralytic look trustfully upon Him without longing to help, and in many cases feeling that it was God’s will that He should help. To suppose that He cured all who were brought to Him is absurd, and is contrary (as we have seen above) to the evidence of the earliest Evangelist. He had the power of distinguishing between faith and not faith; had He an equal power of discerning physiological possibilities from impossibilities? Did a kind of instinct tell Him that the restoration of a lost limb was not like the cure of a paralytic, not one of the works “prepared for Him by His Father?” I do not suppose that such physiological distinctions were intellectually known by Christ in His human nature, any more than the modern discoveries of geology, astronomy, or history. But experience and some kind of intuition may have enabled Him to distinguish those cases which He could heal from those (a far more numerous class) which He could not. In performing these “mighty works” of healing, Jesus appears on many occasions to have studiously avoided that very publicity which—on the theory of their being intended as demonstrations—ought to have been a condition of their performance. He takes the patient apart, or expressly warns him to be silent about his cure—acts quite inconsistent with the demonstration-hypothesis. Probably He felt that these works, although they came to Him fresh from His Father’s hands, were not without a danger. Men crowded round Him, not to hear the truth but to see “the miracles.” Instead of recognizing that He did only such works as “the Father had prepared for Him to do,” they thought that He could do “anything He pleased.” I think we ought to feel that the very notion of such a power as this was absolutely revolting to Jesus: “To stop the sun, to call down fire or bread from heaven, to stay the course of rivers, and cast down the walls of cities—doubtless Joshua and Elijah had done these works; but they were not the works that the Father had prepared for the Son to do.” Joshua and Elijah were but servants. He was the Son: and, being the Son, He felt bound to conform Himself each moment to that heavenly Will which He ever felt within Him and saw before Him, which dictated “mighty works” indeed, but always works of love and healing. In one sense He was entirely free; He could do all things because all things were possible with the Father, and the Father and He were one; in another sense He felt Himself less free than any being that had ever assumed the shape of man, because all other human creatures had deviated, but He alone could never deviate, no, not by a hair’s breadth, from the indwelling Will of the Father.

It is for these reasons then that I reject miracles, not because they are impossible, not even because they are a priori improbable, not because they were once useless and are now harmful; but because the facts are against them. If the evidence shewed that miracles had actually occurred, I should be prepared to learn from these materialized parables as reverently as from word-parables, and to believe that God—in order to break down men’s excessive faith in the machine-like order of the visible world, and in order to divert their attention from Sequence to Will—fore-ordained these divergences from the monotonous routine of things. But the evidence does not shew this. The criticism of the Old Testament, and the criticism of the New Testament, and the researches of science, and the closer study of the life of Christ Himself, all converge to this conclusion—that Christ conquered the world, not by working miracles, but by living such a life and dying such a death as might be lived and died by the Son of God, incarnate as a Son of man, and self-subjected to all the physical limitations of humanity; and by bequeathing to mankind, after His death, such a Spirit as was correspondent to His own nature.

XX
THE MANIFESTATION OF CHRIST

My dear ——,

You wish to draw my attention to the Resurrection of Christ. “That,” you say, “is either miraculous or nothing. The arguments by which you appear to be driving miracles into non-existence—expelling them first from profane history, then from the Old Testament, then step by step from every part of the New—cannot make a stand at your convenience, so as to except the Resurrection. Yet even St. Paul makes the Resurrection of Jesus the basis of his own belief and Gospel. If, therefore, that final miracle falls to the ground, the Pauline Gospel falls with it: and to that downfall I fear your arguments all tend, although you yourself do not see it or wish it.”

I entirely deny the quiet assumption of your first sentence; which, as it stands (but I am sure you cannot mean it), affirms that the Resurrection of Christ “is either miraculous or nothing.” I assert, without fear of contradiction, that if the phenomena which convinced the earliest disciples and St. Paul of the reality of the Resurrection of Christ, were not miraculous but natural, they constitute the most wonderful event in the history of the world. But what you wish to say, I suspect, is this: “By the Resurrection of Christ I mean the Resurrection of the body; now if Christ’s body was raised again, the act must have been miraculous.” But how if the Resurrection was spiritual? St. Paul himself speaks of a “spiritual body,” not a material body, as rising in the Resurrection. Do you suppose that a “spiritual body” can be touched? Or that St. Paul could have touched the presence that appeared to him when he heard the words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” Now if the Resurrection of Christ was spiritual and not material, there may have been no suspension at all of the laws of material nature, but simply a real, spiritual fact, manifested to the world according to certain laws by which spiritual facts are manifested to the senses.

But this theory, you will reply, although possibly consistent with the Pauline narrative, is inconsistent with the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It certainly is. But it is quite certain—however unprepared you may possibly be for the statement—that the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection, taken altogether, cannot be compared, for weight, with the Pauline evidence. You know that the oldest Gospel (St. Mark xvi. 8) terminates (probably because it was left incomplete) with a vision of angels who speak of the tomb as empty and of Christ as risen; but not a word about Christ’s resurrection itself. The next Gospel in chronological order (St. Matthew’s) mentions one appearance of Christ to some women, and another to some disciples in Galilee; but as to the last it is said that “some doubted.” Not till we come to St. Luke’s Gospel do we find detailed appearances of Jesus to disciples in or near Jerusalem, in the course of which Jesus is present at a meal and offers to eat, as evidence that He is no mere spirit. In the last Gospel of all (St. John’s) there is added an appeal to the sense of touch; and in an Appendix to that Gospel, Jesus is represented as inviting the disciples to a repast of fish and bread, apparently miraculously supplied and prepared (“they see a fire of coals there and fish laid thereon, and bread,” John xxi. 9), which He distributes to the disciples. Afterwards he holds a long discourse with them. Similarly long discourses between the risen Saviour and the disciples are recorded in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, which we know to have been written after the Gospel of St. Luke. You see how unsatisfactory all this is. The further back we go, and the nearer to the event, the more meagre and shadowy does the evidence become. It does not appear in a form ample and cogent until a period so late as to throw irresistible doubt upon its truth. How can we possibly answer the doubter’s natural question, “If there was this unanswerable evidence of the material resurrection of Jesus, why was it suppressed for two generations?” Moreover, some of these later accounts, which relate the handling of the body of Jesus, or the presence of Jesus at the breaking of bread, might be literal misinterpretations of some traditions concerning visions of Christ accompanying the “handling of the body of the Lord Jesus” in the Lord’s Supper. It is very significant that St. Peter—whose allusions in the Acts of the Apostles to his personal evidence concerning the Resurrection of Christ are of the briefest kind—is introduced by St. Luke as mentioning only one definite kind of manifestation of Jesus; and that is one in which the Apostles “did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts x. 41). Lastly, there are traces of interpolations, or additions, at a very early date in the post-resurrection chapters of St. Luke, and probably of St. Matthew and St. John; and in dealing with the post-resurrection narrative of the life of Christ some of the earliest Fathers quote passages not found in our Gospels but agreeing somewhat with the suspected additions in the third and fourth Gospel. The sum of all is, so far as my own experience goes, that after a patient and prolonged study of the evidence, with every desire, and indeed I may say with an intense anxiety (at one period of my life), to justify myself in continuing to believe all that I once believed, I now rise from the perusal of the last chapters of the Gospels and the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, with the conviction that something certainly happened to persuade the Apostles that their Master had verily risen from the dead, but what that something was, the evidence, so far as it can he obtained from the Gospels, does not enable us to determine.

But we have not yet touched on the evidence of St. Paul and to this we now pass. Here at last we stand on firm ground. Here for the first time we find (in St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians xv. 8), the unquestionable evidence of an eye-witness, probably recorded several years before the appearance of any Gospel now extant. No one who is competent to form an opinion on the question can for a moment doubt St. Paul’s assertion that Christ “appeared” to him, and that some such appearance as that recorded thrice in the Acts, converted him from a persecutor into an apostle of Christianity. We have just been asking, “What was that unknown something—possibly some manifestation of Jesus after death—which inspired the Twelve with the conviction and the faculties necessary to overcome the world?” Now we seem to have found the answer. An appearance that overcame and converted a recalcitrant enemy might well satisfy and imbue with confidence loving disciples, longing to believe. Especially might this be the case if Jesus had predicted, as I believe He did predict, that His work would not be cut short by death, but that in Him would be fulfilled the saying of Hosea: “In the third day he shall raise us up and we shall live in his sight.” Although these words may have been neglected or not understood at the time when they were uttered, they may have well recurred to the minds of the Disciples, after their Master’s death, with a powerful effect. To urge that the despair of the Twelve could be a greater obstacle than the vehement and bigoted antagonism of Saul, in the way of their receiving a vision of their beloved Master, is a paradox so pedantical that it is scarcely worth mentioning. You cannot have forgotten, too, how St. Paul himself assumes that the appearances of the Saviour to himself, and to the original Apostles, were of the same kind and on the same footing: “He appeared unto Cephas, he appeared unto James, he appeared unto five hundred brethren ... and last of all he appeared unto me also.” In the two latest Gospels these “appearances” have been magnified into accounts that represented Jesus as possessed of flesh and bones, as capable of eating, as reclining at a meal, and as entering into long and familiar discourses: naturally we ask as to St. Paul’s, the indisputably earliest account of a manifestation of Christ, what traces it exhibits of similar distortions and exaggerations? You know the answer. There are no such traces. The manifestation to St. Paul is plainly admitted by the accounts in the Acts to be what is commonly called subjective. The “subjectivity” of some of the earlier manifestations of Jesus to the disciples is dimly suggested by some passages in the Gospels which describe how “some doubted” and others failed to recognize Him; but it is not merely suggested, it is plainly expressed, in the accounts of the manifestation to St. Paul. The Apostle is clearly stated to have seen a sight and heard words, which other people, his companions, with the same opportunities for seeing and hearing, did not see and did not hear. Putting aside some slight discrepancies in the three accounts given in the Acts[^[27]]—discrepancies easily and naturally explicable, and valuable as shewing that the accounts have not been arbitrarily harmonized we may say that this is the substantial result: the Lord Jesus appeared to St. Paul in what is called a vision. I myself firmly believe that there was a spiritual act of Jesus simultaneous with the conveyance of the manifestation to the brain of the Apostle. But none the less, however coincident it may have been with a spiritual reality, if there was no presence of a material body, the manifestation of Jesus to St. Paul must be placed in the class of visions: and if it was not seen by others who had the same physical means of seeing, it must be called, in some sense, “subjective.”

Yet this vision sufficed for him and for the world. In the strength of this vision, (followed, no doubt, by subsequent visions and communings with the Lord Jesus), the Thirteenth Apostle, the intruder, as he might be called—not “chosen of men,” like Matthias, not called by Christ in the flesh did the great work of which you and I, with millions of others, are now joint inheritors. Think of it; Is it not a remarkable instance of “men working one thing while God worketh another” to see the Apostles with due form and ceremony electing their substitute for the Traitor to be the solemnly ordained Twelfth Apostle, henceforth unnamed in Holy Writ and all the while the Holy Spirit preparing a Thirteenth! And for this Thirteenth Apostle, who never looked on the face of Christ, never heard a single word of His doctrine, it has been reserved to tell us perhaps more about the meaning of Christ’s teaching and certainly to give us more cogent proof of His Resurrection than all the other Apostles and Evangelists put together! Truly the last has been first! And in the strength of his proof of Christ’s Resurrection—mere vision though we may call it—this Thirteenth Apostle, in the face of persecutions outside the Church, and discouragements and jealousies inside the Church, first converted the Roman empire to the Christian faith; then, fifteen centuries afterwards, reconverted and purified a large section of the Church from mediæval corruptions; and now, as I believe, some nineteen centuries afterwards, is on the point of still further purifying the Church from antique superstition and from modern materialism!

What shall we say of the mighty vision that originated these stupendous results? Shall we take the view of the modern scientific young man, and lecture the great Apostle on the folly of that indiscreet journey to Damascus at noon-tide, when his nerves were a little over-wrought after that unpleasant incident of poor Stephen? Shall we say it was all ophthalmia and indigestion—that flash of blinding light, those unforgettable words, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?”—all a mere vision? Is a fact that changed the destinies of Europe to be put aside with the epithet “mere”? Would not even a materialist stonemason recognize that a vision which built St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s is of some tangible importance? You and I and your scientific young lecturer—do we not in some sort owe our existence to this “mere vision,” but for which the earth might be a chaos of barbarism, England a forest scantly populated with tattooed bipeds, and our civilized selves non-existent? Patricidal creatures, let us not speak lightly of the “mere” author of our own important being!

To my mind the manifestation of the Resurrection of Christ appears, not as an isolated fact, but as a part, and the central part, of the great revelation of the immortality of the soul which has been conveyed by God to man, in accordance with the laws of human nature, from the beginning of the creation of the world by the medium of imaginative Faith. In the same way the laws of astronomy have been conveyed by God to man, in accordance with the laws of human nature, from the beginning of the creation of the world, by the medium of imaginative Reason. I have shewn in previous letters that Imagination has been the basis of all that is worth calling knowledge. To shew the bearing of this on the manifestations of the Resurrection of Christ shall be the object of my next letter.

XXI
THE RESURRECTION REVEALED

My dear ——,

You are startled, and well you may be, “at the notion that the resurrection of Christ has been the mere offspring of the imagination.” I am quoting your words, but you have not quoted mine. I never said, nor should I dream of saying, that the resurrection of Christ was “the offspring of the imagination,” any more than I should say that the law of gravitation is “the offspring of the imagination,” or that light is “the offspring of the eye.” But this is just an ordinary specimen of the way in which people whose minds are blocked and choked with prejudice, misunderstand what is contrary to their preconceptions. You have made up your mind that the Imagination is a kind of excrescence on humanity, a faculty independent of the Creator, and incapable of being made by Him the medium of revelation; and so you pervert my words to suit your fancies. But what I said was that Imagination is the basis of all that is worth calling knowledge, and that, as God reveals the laws of astronomy through imaginative Reason, so He has revealed the Resurrection of Christ through imaginative Faith.

Before speaking of the special bearing of the Imagination upon the manifestation of Christ’s Resurrection, let me say a word or two on the manner in which our human environment appears to have been adapted to foster the growth of this faculty. You will be better prepared to expect great things from the Imagination when you reflect on the great things that have been wrought by God for its development. You say that you do not understand the statement in the last paragraph of my last letter, that the Imagination has been made “the medium of conveying the revelation of the immortality of the soul,” and still less do you comprehend how this revelation has been going on “from the creation of the world,” especially since, during a large portion of this time, there must have been no men to receive any revelation at all.

I said deliberately “from the creation of the world,” and not “from the creation of mankind,” because inanimate creation itself appears to me to bear witness to a purpose, from the first, that this visible world should help its future tenants to imagine things invisible. Consider but one instance, the immense influence of Night upon the Imagination, and you will perhaps come to the conclusion that, but for the provision of darkness (“these orbs of light and shade”), men would never have been led to a faith in the light of immortality. In the first place by revealing to us the wonder-striking order of the infinite stars—which, but for darkness, would have remained for ever a closed book to men—Night leads us to dream, or to infer, that there may be other pages still unturned in the book of Nature’s mysteries, and stimulates us, however far we may progress in thought, still to press on to something more beyond; and at the same time, throwing a temporary veil over all the sights of day, it persuades us to trust that on the morrow the veil will be removed, and that in the meantime all things will continue in their order.

Night is aided by sleep and dreams. Slumbering in the darkness, and bereft of the control of the understanding, Imagination has reproduced before the mind’s eye the sights of daylight, blended together without thought of fitness, order, time, or place, so as to form quite new combinations which scarcely any deliberate daytime effort could have so vividly depicted: and in the long train of confused visionary images there have sometimes passed before the mental eye of the mourner or the murderer the very shapes, and even the voices of the dead, forcing the slumberer to start up and cry, “They live, they still live; there is a life beyond the grave.” This trans-sepulchral existence having been once discerned, the Imagination has set to work to formulate the laws of it, and to map out and people its regions, thus causing heaven and hell to become realities and (in course of time) ancestral traditions, and almost inherited instincts. Sometimes, Imagination has come with a special and rarely manifested force to the aid of a belief in a future life. Not in dreams, but in wakeful moments, though for the most part by night, there have appeared before the mind’s eye such vivid images of the departed, as have convinced not only the seers of the visions but also their friends—and so, by a pervasive influence, all but a small minority of the human race—that something real has been seen, the spirit of the dead made visible: and to this day, in England, there are not wanting men of the highest ability, culture, and love of truth, who busy themselves with serious investigations into the reality of apparitions.

Does this seem to you fanciful? Surely it is the fact that Night and its phenomena have largely influenced the spiritual, or superstitious, side of human nature: and if you admit this to be the fact, the only difference between us is this, that to you this subtle but universal influence of Darker Nature on Man appears to have been the result of chance, whereas I think it came from God. To you, one half of Time appears to have been allowed by God to be spiritually barren, set apart for the mere repairing of the human material machine: I do not believe that the spiritual making of Man was foreordained on this “half-time” principle.

If however you ask me what amount of truth or reality there has been in these dreams and visions, I should reply, as about poetry and prophecy, that some of these imaginations have represented realities, some unrealities; but that the total result to which they have led men, the belief in the immortality of the soul, is a reality. But when I speak of a “real vision” of a spirit or ghost, I hope you will not misunderstand me so far as to suppose that I could mean a material, gas-like (though intangible) form, occupying so many cubical inches of space. A spirit, so far as I conceive it, does not occupy space; nor is it the object of sight, any more than of smell or touch; it is, to me, of the nature of a thought, only a thought personified, i.e. a thought capable of loving and being loved, of hating and being hated. But though it may not be the object of the senses in the same way in which external things are, it may be manifested to the Imagination, i.e. the mind’s eye, in such a way as to produce the same effect as though it were an external object seen by the body’s eye.

Every one who loves truth will tread with cautious steps in this mysterious province of phantasmal existence, and carefully measure his language, knowing that we are in a region of illusion, exaggeration, and (sometimes) of imposture. But there does seem evidence to show that people (mostly perhaps twins), at a distance from one another, have in some at present inexplicable manner influenced one another so that the disease or death or calamity of one has been simultaneously made known to the other; and you have probably read of cases, fairly supported, which would show that a passionate longing on the part of a dying man to see some distant friend may create a responsive emotion, if not an actual vision, in the mind of that friend. We are so completely in the dark as to the originating causes (for physiology tells us nothing but the instrumental causes) which produce our thoughts, that I see nothing at all absurd in the notion that every truthful and vivid conception of one human being in the mind of another upon earth, arises from some communion in the spirit-world between the spirits of the two.

So much for conjectures as to the possible reality or possible causes of some classes of apparitions. I do not often myself set much store on them, except so far as they are of use in reminding us how wide is the province of possibility, or how narrow the province of certainty, in the region of ultimate causation. I lay stress, not upon any conjectural explanation of ghost phenomena, but upon the following general considerations, most of which are of the nature, not of conjectures, but of facts: 1st, man is what he is, largely in virtue of the Imagination; 2nd, one half of man’s time and one half of the phenomena of Nature seem to have no other purpose (so far as man is concerned) than to stimulate the Imagination; 3rd, if we suppose that this wonderful world is under the government of a good God, although opposed by an inferior Evil, we are led to infer that He has implanted in us this faculty of Imagination and that the noble aspirations and beliefs which have been developed by it have not been unmixed delusions; 4th, among the noblest of the beliefs thus developed, has been the belief in the immortality of the soul, which, after being tested by the faith of many centuries, is at this day cherished by the majority of civilized mankind; 5th, this belief has proved its truth, so far as imaginations can prove themselves true, by working well, i.e. it has raised and ennobled those who have entertained it, and has made them (on the whole) morally the better for it; 6th, a part of the training of the Imagination, intimately connected with the production of the belief in the immortality of the soul, has been the development of a power to see mental visions, with all the vividness of material visions; 7th, among these visions, some of the most common have been apparitions of the forms of the dead, and some of the best authenticated of these have occurred where a strong unfulfilled desire has possessed the departed in the moment of dying and where the seer of the apparition has been bound by close ties to the dead.

These are the considerations, mostly facts—you may dispute some of them, but not all I think—in the light of which I should endeavour to illustrate the manifestation of Christ to His disciples after death. To these facts I merely added the conjecture that possibly there may be something besides the mere movement of our brains that produces these images of the departed, something—I will not say external, for a spirit, if independent of place, can be neither external to us nor internal—but some act in the invisible world of spirits corresponding to every apparition upon the visible world. But I did not pledge myself to such a theory. I only insisted that the whole revelation of poetry and religion through the Imagination has been of such inestimable importance to man that we cannot put it all aside as false because imaginative; we must regard it with reverence and be prepared to find that in the central event of the purest religion of all, the Imagination has been made the medium of the culminating revelation of spirit and truth. Indeed, if the spiritual world is real and near, it is difficult to conceive how God—without breaking the Laws of Nature and without unfitting us for life in a world of sense—could better give us glimpses of an invisible environment, than by causing it to press in, as it were, upon the Imagination, so that the mind’s eye, thus stimulated by real invisibilities, may, for the time, supplant the bodily faculty of sight, and afterwards leave behind in us a permanent suggestion that, as there is a material world corresponding to the bodily eye, so there is a mind’s world corresponding to the mind’s eye. With this pre-conception I will ask you to approach the narrative of Christ’s Resurrection as I shall endeavour to set it forth in my next letter from the natural point of view.

XXII
THE RESURRECTION

My dear ——,

My last letter broke off rather abruptly with a promise to do my best to set forth hereafter the Resurrection of Christ as it may be regarded from a natural point of view.

Looking at the facts in this light, we have in the first place to set before ourselves the short life of One of whom we must merely say that He was unique in the goodness and grandeur of His character, and that He died with the unfulfilled purpose of redeeming mankind from sin, deserted for the moment by the few disciples who had adhered to Him almost to the last. He died, for the time, the most pitiable, the most despair-inspiring death that the world has ever witnessed, asking in His last moments why He had been “forsaken” by God. But His death—pardon me if I deviate for one moment from material to celestial facts, provided that I never deviate into miracles—was really the triumph over death, and His Spirit had in reality (we speak in a metaphor) broken open the bars of the grave and ascended to the throne of the Father carrying with Himself the promise of the ultimate redemption of mankind. This was now to be revealed to the world as the culminating vision in that continuous Revelation through the Imagination by which the minds of men had been led to look beyond this life to a life that knows no end. Speaking terrestrially, we must say that the influence of Jesus, love, faith, remorse, were moulding the hearts of the disciples on earth to receive the truth; speaking celestially we may say that Jesus bent down from His throne by the right hand of God to prepare them for the manifestation of His victory. What in this crisis exactly befell on earth we shall never know. The tradition that Jesus appeared on the third day, or after three days, to His disciples, is so naturally derived from the prophecy of Hosea “on the third day he shall raise us up”—a prophecy probably applied by Jesus to Himself—that we can place no reliance on its numerical accuracy. Nor do we know exactly where Jesus first appeared to His disciples. The oldest tradition[^[28]] declared that they were to “go to Galilee” after their Master’s death, and that He had promised to guide them thither; but a subsequent account interpreted the words about “Galilee” quite differently.[^[29]] In any case, before many days had elapsed, to some one disciple, perhaps to Mary Magdalene—out of whom there had been cast “seven devils”—it was given to see the Lord Jesus.

Here, by the way, we must note the remarkable prominence given in all the Gospels to the part played by women in receiving the first manifestations of Christ’s Resurrection. Writers who were careful to avoid giving occasion for unbelief might naturally have desired to give less prominence to the testimony of highly imaginative and impressionable witnesses; and indeed St. Paul, in his brief list of the appearances of Jesus (possibly because writing as an Apostle who had seen Christ, he desired to confine himself almost entirely to manifestations witnessed by Apostles), makes no mention of the appearances to women: their prominence, therefore, in all the Gospels, testifies strongly to the early and universal acceptance of the tradition that women were the first witnesses to the risen Saviour. But to resume. The news quickened the faith even of those disciples who had not seen and who could not yet believe; and presently apparitions were seen—a thing almost, though (I believe) not quite, unique in visions—by several disciples together. Probably the most frequent occasions for these manifestations were when they had met together to partake of the body and blood of their Master; and it was in the moment of the breaking of the bread that the image of the Living Bread was flashed before them, appearing in the form of Jesus giving Himself for them, and uttering words of blessing, comfort, or exhortation, audible to the ears of the faithful, who at the same moment were handling His body and touching the blood which flowed from His side. At other times he appeared before them with other messages; to the women he seemed to wave them off as if deprecating a too close approach, or as if bidding them go hence and carry the glad tidings to the Apostles; others He seemed to rebuke for their want of faith; in the sight of others, His hands, outstretched in the attitude of parting benediction, seemed to send forth His disciples to preach His word with promise of His presence; but how these messages were conveyed, whether by gesture simply, or by spiritual voice (as in the case of St. Paul), audible perhaps to one, and by him interpreted to the rest, or audible to all that were in the same faithful sympathy—these and other details cannot now be determined.

“Why did not the adversaries of Christ confront His followers by producing the body from the tomb, thus disproving the story that His body had risen from the dead?” The tomb was probably empty. That is probable for two reasons, first because the earliest traditions agree that the women going to the tomb found the stone rolled away; and secondly, because the adversaries of Jesus appear to have themselves subsequently circulated a story that the disciples had stolen away the body. This they would hardly have done if they had known that their own explanation could be at any moment refuted by opening the tomb, which would have shown the body still lying there. Possibly some of the enemies of Jesus had themselves removed the body, influenced by some of those predictions of Jesus about Himself, which, though they had not the power to inspire the disciples with faith in the moment of His death, had power to inspire His enemies with a vague fear. Being almost surprised in the act, they may not have had time to replace the great stone at the entrance of the tomb, when the women arrived; if so, the action of Christ’s own enemies prepared the way for the belief in His resurrection by exhibiting to the sorrowing disciples the stone rolled away and the empty sepulchre. First came the cry, “He is not here,” and that prepared the way for “He is risen.”

How long the visionary period lasted we cannot tell. It is almost certain that there were many more visions than the five recorded by St. Paul (1 Cor. xv. 6, 7). At least one of St. Paul’s five visions, that to St. James, is not mentioned in any of our extant Gospels; on the other hand St. Paul omits some of those peculiar to the third or fourth Gospels, as well as the manifestations to the women. Perhaps the visions were so many, and all so like each other, that the Church found it difficult to select which to record; and each Evangelist chose those which appeared to him fittest, either because they were the earliest, or because the witnesses were numerous, or because they were apostolic, or because they contained the most striking proof of a veritable resurrection. We may therefore easily accept the statement that the period of visions lasted for forty days or even for a much longer time, probably till the disciples felt emboldened to take an active course in preaching the Gospel.

Concerning Christ’s manifestation to St. Paul I have said enough in my last letter—if anything needed to be said—to shew that it must have been of the nature of a vision, and (in a sense) “subjective.” But it differs from the rest in that it was made to an enemy while the other manifestations were made to devoted disciples. Love, remorse, faith, affection, stimulated the Apostles to cry, “He cannot have died,” and prepared their souls to see the image of Jesus risen; but where, it may be asked, was the spiritual preparation in the heart of St. Paul to receive such a vision? You may trace it in the words which St. Paul heard from Jesus: “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” They shew that the future Apostle had been struggling, and struggling hard, against the compunctions of conscience. Being a lover of truth from his childhood, he was prepared to give up all for its sake; but recent events had made him ask whether he was not fighting against the truth instead of for the truth. He had been persecuting the Christians; but their faith and patience had made him doubt whether they might not be right and he wrong. When the first martyr Stephen looked up to heaven and there saw Jesus seated at the right hand of God, then or soon afterwards, the question must have arisen in the mind of the persecutor, “What if the follower of the Nazarene was speaking truth? What if the crucified Jesus whom I am now persecuting was really exalted to God’s throne?” Such was the struggle through which Saul’s mind was passing when the Spirit of Jesus, acting indirectly through the constancy and faith of His persecuted disciples, having first insensibly permeated and undermined the barriers of Pharisaic training and education, now swept all obstacles before it in an instantaneous deluge of conviction that this persecuted Jesus was the Messiah. At that same moment the Messiah Himself (who during these last months and weeks of spiritual conflict had been bending down closer and closer to the predestined Apostle from His throne in heaven) now burst upon the convert’s sight on earth.

But I think I hear you saying, “All this sounds well; but he has repeatedly described these visions of the risen Saviour as subjective: how then can he call them real? What is real?” Let me refer you to the paper of Definitions which I enclosed in a previous letter.[^[30]]

1. Absolute reality cannot be comprehended by men, and can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by Faith.

2. Among objects of sensation, those are (relatively) real which present similar sensations in similar circumstances.

Now if you try to regard the manifestation of the risen Christ under the second head, as an “object of sensation,” you must pronounce it “unreal,” inasmuch as it would not “present similar sensations in similar circumstances;” by which I mean that, with similar opportunities of observation, different persons (believers, for example, and unbelievers) would not have derived similar sensations from it. But your conclusion would be false because you started from a false premise: these manifestations cannot be classed “among objects of sensation.”

The movements of the risen Saviour appear to me to have been the movements of God; His manifestations to the faith of the Apostles were divine acts, passing direct from God to the souls of men. Since therefore these manifestations belonged to the class of things which “can only be apprehended as God, or in God, by faith,” I call them “absolute realities”—as much more real than flesh and blood, as God Himself is more real than the paper on which I am now writing.

XXIII
THE SPIRITUAL RESURRECTION

My dear ——,

I am not surprised to hear that you consider the theory above described of Christ’s resurrection, “vague, shadowy, and unsatisfying.” But as in the very same letter you say that you are quite convinced of the unhistorical nature of the account of the resurrection of Christ’s material body, I think you ought not to dismiss the subject without giving more attention than you have given as yet to it. As a student of history and as a young man bent on attaining such knowledge as can be attained concerning the certainties or probabilities that have the most important bearing on the life and conduct of myriads of your fellow-creatures, you ought at least to ask yourself what better explanation you have to offer of the marvellous phenomena of the Christian Church and in particular of St. Paul’s part in spreading Christianity.

I sympathize with the “sense of bathos,” as you call it, which comes over you when you hear that the phenomena of the Resurrection of Christ are to be explained by a study of the growth and development of the revelation given to mankind through the Imagination. I sympathize with you; but I sympathize with you as I should with a child who might be standing by Elijah’s side at the time when the prophet saw his never-to-be-forgotten vision. That child would feel, no doubt, “a sense of bathos” because the Lord was not in the fire, nor in the whirlwind, nor in the earthquake, but in the still small voice. You are in the childish stage of susceptibility to anything that is noisy and big; you have not been taught by experience and thought to appreciate the divineness of things obvious, ordinary, and quiet; above all you have not yet learned to revere your own nature nor to acknowledge (except with your lips) that you are made in the image of God. Retaining still a keen recollection of the pain with which I passed through that stage myself, I have neither the inclination, nor the right, to despise your present condition of mind; but I believe, if you will still keep the question open in your mind, and if you will meditate a little now and then on the frequency, or I may say the universality, of illusion in the conveyance of all the highest truth, you will gradually come, as I came, to perceive that the essence of the resurrection of Christ is that His Spirit should have really triumphed over death, and not that His body should have risen from the grave.

No doubt you would be much more impressed if the tangible body of some dead friend of yours, after being buried in the earth, had appeared to certain witnesses and touched them, and eaten in their company, than if a vivid apparition of the friend had appeared to the same witnesses; but I think you would much more easily believe the latter than the former; and you might be more impressed by a strong conviction of the latter than by a doubtful, timid, clinging to the former. I can hardly think that if you had received several accounts from independent witnesses, of apparitions of this kind resulting in a marvellous change of character in all who had seen them, you would at once put them aside simply because they might be called in some sense natural. The very fact of their being natural would lead you to consider how strange must have been the causes that had produced such strange results; how powerful must have been the personality that had thus forced itself on the mental retina of the seers of the apparition; and if something important had followed from such a vision, say, for example, the writing of a great poem, or the foundation of a noble empire, I cannot think that you would set down the vision as a negligible trifle.

But you feel, I dare say, that, though you might be impressed by the stories of such an apparition, you could not feel certain that the apparition represented any reality; there would be no definite proof that the witnesses of the apparition were not under the influence of a delusion. Well, I will admit that there would be no proof of the ordinary kind, that is to say, no proof such as is conveyed through the senses about ordinary terrestrial phenomena; but I think you might feel certain; only it would be that kind of certainty which is largely bred from Faith and Hope. And this sort of certainty, and no other, appears to me that which was intended to be produced by the Resurrection of Christ. His manifestations were unseen and unheard save by the eye and ear of Faith. If the proof of His resurrection had not depended upon Faith, then the Roman soldiers would have seen His material body miraculously issuing from the shattered sepulchre, and the companions of Saul would have both seen Christ and understood the voice that cried, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” If we could ascertain exactly the historical basis for the account in the Fourth Gospel of Christ’s manifestation to the doubting Thomas we should probably find—supposing that we were really justified in treating the account as historical—that there was in Thomas a strong desire to believe, combined with a strong sense of the impossibility of attaining adequate proof. As in the life of Christ, so in the resurrection of Christ, conviction appears never to have been forced on any entirely unwilling unbeliever.

In order to believe in the resurrection of Christ, it is not enough to be convinced that the evidence is honest and genuine, and that the witnesses could not be deceived; that kind of belief savours of the law-court, and there is nothing spiritual in it; but the man who truly and spiritually accepts Christ’s resurrection is he who says to himself as he reviews the life of Christ and the history of the Church: “Being what He was, and having done the work that He has done, this Jesus of Nazareth ought not to have succumbed to death. If there is any evidence to shew that the veil of the invisible has been so far thrown back, be it for a moment, as to shew me Jesus in the spiritual world still living and triumphant over death, my conscience opens its arms at once to embrace that belief.” And there is this advantage in basing your faith on the spiritual resurrection of Jesus, that you keep the region of faith distinct from the region of disputable testimony. If you rest your hopes on the material resurrection, that is a question of doubtful evidence. Your heart says, “Oh that it might be true!” Your brain says, “I cannot honestly say that I think it is true.” Hence a constant conflict between heart and brain, while you are forced again and again to ask yourself, “Must I be dishonest in order that I may persuade myself that I am happy? And even if I can honestly believe in the material resurrection to-day, how do I know that some new evidence—the discovery of some new Gospel for example—may not overturn my belief to-morrow?”

But the life and doctrine of Christ, the conversion and letters of St. Paul, the growth and victories of the Church, and the present power of Christ’s Spirit are facts that can never be overthrown; and if you say, “On the basis of these indisputable facts, considered as a part of the evolution and training of mankind I rest my hope and my faith that Jesus has conquered death and still lives and works among us and for us”—why then you rest on a basis that cannot be shaken. And surely such a faith is more strong, more spiritual, more comforting, yes, and more certain too, than a “knowledge” which you know in your own heart to be no knowledge! How long will mankind be content to be ignorant that the HALF which constitutes truth is worth more than the WHOLE which is made up of truth and truth’s integumentary illusion! How many there are to whom the saying of old Hesiod is still unmeaning:

Alas thou know’st not, silly soul,

How much the half exceeds the whole!

You cannot obtain, and must not expect to obtain, any demonstrative proof of the Resurrection of Christ, any more than you can obtain a demonstrative proof of the existence of a God: yet you can feel as strong and as sincere a conviction of the former fact as of the latter.

It is curious that St. Paul’s parallel between the Resurrection of Christ and that of men should be so habitually overlooked. He assumes, as a matter of course, a similarity, almost an identity, between the Resurrection of men and the Resurrection of Christ: “If there is no resurrection of the dead neither hath Christ been raised,” and again: “Now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first fruits of them that are asleep.” This reasoning holds excellently, if the Resurrection is to be the same for us as it was for our Saviour, a spiritual Resurrection, and if the Resurrection of Christ visibly revealed the universal law which shall apply to all who are animated by the Spirit of God. But if Christ’s Resurrection was of a quite different kind, if it was a bodily stepping out of the tomb three days after burial, how can this be called the “first fruits” of the Resurrection of men whose bodies will all decay and for whom therefore no such stepping out from the tomb can ever be anticipated? The best, the truest, the most comforting belief in the end will be found to be that Jesus was “put to death in the flesh but quickened (not in the flesh but) in the spirit.” And as it was with Him, so we believe it will be with us.

But perhaps you will remind me that one of the Creeds mentions “the Resurrection of the body,” and that St. Paul anticipates the Resurrection, not of a “spirit,” but of “a spiritual body;” and you may ask me what I infer from this. I for my part infer that St. Paul desired to guard against the notion that the dead lose their identity and are merged in God or in some other essence; he wished to convey to his hearers that they would still retain their individuality, the power of loving and of being loved; possibly also he wished to suggest a life of continued activity in the service of God; and in order to express this he used such language (metaphorical of course) as would unmistakeably imply that identity would be preserved, and activity would be possible. But he took care to guard his language against materialistic misinterpretation by insisting that the body would be “spiritual” and therefore invisible to the earthly eye and cognizable only by the spirit. The new body, he says, is “a building from God,” “a house not made with hands, eternal;” and he prefaces this by saying “the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.” Hereby he clearly implies that the new body will be “not seen.” Elsewhere he tells us that “the things prepared by God” for them that love Him (and of course he includes in these the “building from God, the house not made with hands”) are such as eye “hath not seen nor ear heard, nor have they entered into the heart of man; but God hath revealed them unto us by the Spirit;” and again, “the things of God none knoweth save the Spirit of God,” which has been imparted to the faithful.

To speak honestly, I must add that, even if I found St. Paul had committed himself repeatedly to any theory of a material or semi-material Resurrection, consonant with the feelings of his times, I should not have felt bound to place a belief in a materialistic detail of this kind upon the same high and authoritative level as the belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, or any other general and spiritual article of faith. But I find no such materialism in St. Paul. He appears to me to say consistently, 1st, that Christ’s Resurrection was a type of (“the first fruits of”) the Resurrection of mankind; 2nd, that in contrast to the first man Adam, the earthy, who became a living soul, the last Adam, the heavenly, became a “life-giving spirit;” 3rd, that, as we have borne the image of the earthy, so we shall also bear the image of the heavenly; 4th, that the “body” of the faithful after death will be “spiritual,” just as the Church of God is “a spiritual house,” and the sacrifices of the saints are “spiritual sacrifices.” There is no more ground for thinking that St. Paul supposed that we should hereafter have spiritual hands, or be spiritual bipeds, than for thinking that he supposed the sacrifices of the Church to be spiritual sheep, or the temple of the Church to be composed of celestial stones. After our Resurrection, we are still to be conscious of God’s past love, still to rejoice in His present and never-ending love, still to be capable of glorifying and serving God, of loving as well as of being loved—this St. Paul’s theory of the “spiritual body” certainly implies; and it need not imply more. And what our Resurrection will be, that Christ’s Resurrection was.

The ordinary fancies about the Resurrection teem with absurdities, and are redeemed from being ridiculous, only because they all spring from the natural and reasonable desire that we may hereafter preserve our identity. But they ought to be suppressed if they create, as I fear they create, additional difficulties in the way of conceiving, and believing in, a future life. I do not wish to scoff at the popular views; but it is important that those who adopt the materialistic theory of the Resurrection should realize the unnecessary and grotesque inconsistencies with which they obscure the Christian faith. Popular Christianity appears generally to accept a sensuous paradise, only excluding what some may deem the coarser senses, the smell, touch, and taste. But what is the special merit of the other two senses, hearing and seeing, that they alone should be allowed places in Paradise? And this visible, semi-spiritual body upon which the vulgar fancy so insists—what purpose will it serve? “The purposes of recognition between friends.” Then it will be like the old material body of the departed—at what period of his existence? Shall he be represented as a youth of twenty or a man of forty, or of fifty, or as a child of ten? And how as to the body of one who was deformed, maimed, or hideously misshapen and ugly? “It would be a purified likeness, summarizing, as it were, every period of life, so that it would be recognizable, not indeed by our eyes but by those of spiritual beings.” That is conceivable: but why all this trouble to obtain a visible body that shall make recognition difficult, when recognition can be conceived so much more easily as the result of mere spiritual communion? Keep by all means the language of the Apocalypse and of the Pilgrim’s Progress in order to describe in poetry the condition of the blessed dead; but remember that it is the language of poetry; and let every such use of words be concluded (as with a doxology) by the thought, “Thus will it be, only far better, infinitely better; for God is love; and our future communion with the love of God will be a height of happiness such as no power of sense can reveal, and only the spirit-guided soul can faintly apprehend.”

But perhaps you will say “You are ready enough to attack other people’s notions about the semi-material resurrection; but you are not equally ready to explain your own notions about a spiritual resurrection. You cannot even tell us what a spiritual body is, except that it has the power of loving and being loved.” Precisely so; I am quite ignorant. Yet in my knowledge of this matter I am superior to a very great number of other theologians. For they think they know, whereas I know that neither I nor they know. Let me go a little further in my confession of ignorance and admit that I do not really possess knowledge about a number of other matters about which many profess with great glibness to know everything. I am certain that I exist; but I doubt whether I can analyse and explain the reasons for my certainty, and I am quite sure I cannot prove my existence by logic. If I am pressed for a proof, I should say (as I have stated in a previous letter) that my belief in my existence was largely due to the Imagination. Cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,”—if intended as a serious proof, and if there is any real meaning in the “ergo”—appears to me to be the most babyish of arguments. I respect the gigantic intellect of the arguer, but not even a giant can make ropes of sand; and it needs but a little grammar to dissolve this reasoning to nothing. “I think” means “I am one thinking.” In some languages, in Hebrew for example, you might have no other way of expressing the proposition than in this form: “I am one thinking.” What sort of reasoning then is this! “I am one thinking, therefore I am.” “This is white paper, therefore it is!” Surely a ridiculous offspring to issue from great logical travail! And besides, what infinite assumptions are presupposed in that monosyllable “I”! How do I know that “I think,” and that it is not the great world-spirit who thinks in me, as well as rains outside me? Why ought I not to say “it thinks,” just as I say “it rains”? What do you mean by “I”? Tell us what “I” is. And how can the desperate logician set about telling us what “I” is, without assuming that his own “I” is, which is equivalent to assuming “I am”? Surely this is altogether a hopeless muddle, and we ought to give up reasoning about “I” and “am;” yes, and I would add not only about “I” and “am,” but also about a number of other fundamental conceptions, which are far more profitably assumed as axioms. For my part, whenever I use the words “mind,” “matter,” “substance,” “spirit,” “soul,” “intellect,” and the like, and make any serious statement about them, I hardly ever do so without a mental reservation, saying to myself—“but of course there may be no such things precisely as these, but some other things quite different, producing the results which we ascribe to these; so that all these statements may be only proportionately true.”

I do not object to the use of the materialistic language where it is recognized as metaphor by those who use and those who hear it; but the mischief is that it is often not so recognized. Once make yourself the slave of the popular language about “spirit,” and “substance,” and what not—and you are in danger of being manacled intellectually as well as theologically. The popular belief is that a man’s spirit is inside him, like his qualities; the latter like peas in a box, the former like gas in a bladder. Drive a hole through a man’s left side or the middle of his head, and—out goes the spirit; that is the common materialistic creed. Now I have a strong desire to declare that this creed is ridiculously false. But I will be consistent and simply say that I know nothing whatever about it. My spirit may possibly be inside me; but it may possibly be outside me; say at a point six feet, or six miles, above me; or away in Jupiter, or Saturn, or down at the earth’s centre; or it may be incapable of occupying space. What does it matter to you or to me, theologically or intellectually, whether that part of us which we call our “spirit” has its local habitation inside us, or outside, or in no locality at all? Is it not enough to recognize that we have powers of acting, loving, trusting, and believing, and to feel certain that God intends these powers to be developed and never to perish? Yet I remember that a friend of mine was shocked, and almost appalled, when I avowed ignorance as to the locality of my spirit. He seemed to think I might as well have no spirit at all, if it could not prove its respectability by giving its name and address!

For my part I am now quite certain of Christ’s spiritual Resurrection, and in that conviction I am far happier and far more trustful than when I at first mechanically accepted upon authority and evidence the belief in the Resurrection of Christ’s body, and subsequently strove to retain that belief, against the testimony of my intelligence and my conscience. I think you also will find, as years go on, when it becomes your lot to stand by the grave into which friend after friend is lowered, that a heartfelt conviction of the spiritual Resurrection of Christ affords more comfort to you at such moments than your old belief—based largely upon historical evidence, and brain-felt rather than heart-felt—in His physical Resurrection. For the former unites us with Christ, the latter separates us from Christ. We none of us expect that the material and tangible bodies of our friends will rise from the dead in the flesh without “seeing corruption;” but we do trust that they shall rise as “spiritual bodies” over whom death shall have no power. This trust is confirmed by the belief that Christ rose as we trust they shall hereafter rise. If, therefore, Christ rose a material body from the grave—that stirs no hope in us. But if, while His body remained in the grave, His spirit rose triumphant to the throne of God, then we see a hope indeed that may suit our case and give us some gleam of consolation. The bodies of the dead may lie there and decay; but what of that? Even so was it with the Saviour: but the spiritual body is independent of the flesh and shall rise superior to death.

Do not imagine that the spiritual body is one whit less real than the material body; only, as the material body belongs to the time-world, so the spiritual body belongs to the eternal world. Each is suited to its own environment, but each of them is a real body. As to the relation between the material and the spiritual body we know nothing, and we need know nothing.

When will men learn to be less greedy of shams and bubbles of pretended material knowledge, and more earnest and patient in their sober aspirations after spiritual truth? When will they realize that an unhesitating faith in a few elementary principles is better than a tremulous quasi-knowledge of a whole globe of dogmas?

XXIV
WHAT IS A SPIRIT?

My dear ——,

You take me to task for the abrupt termination of my last letter. I broke off, you say, just when you thought I was on the point of explaining what I meant by a spirit: “Surely you have some theory of your own and are not content with disbelieving other people’s theories.” Well, I thought I had said before that I am content to know merely this about a spirit, that it possesses capabilities for loving and serving God, or other nobler capabilities corresponding to these. But if you press me to set up some theory of my own that you may have the pleasure of pulling it to pieces, I will confess to you that my nearest conception of a spirit is a personified virtue. This cannot very well be quite right; any more than a carpenter can be like a door, or like anything else that he has constructed. But it is the nearest I can come to any conception that is not too repulsively material. And sometimes, when I try to conceive of the causes of terrestrial thoughts, and emotions, and spiritual movements, I find myself recurring to the antique notion, hinted at in one or two passages of the Bible, and I believe encouraged by some of the old Rabbis, that there are two worlds; one visible, terrestrial, and material, the other invisible, celestial, and spiritual; and that whatsoever takes place down here takes place first (or simultaneously but causatively) up there; here, the mere outsides of things; there, the causes and springs of action; the bodies down on earth, the spirits up in heaven.

This is but a harmless fancy. Let me give you another. You know—or might know if you would read a little book recently published called Flatland, and still better, if you would study a very able and original work by Mr. C. H. Hinton[^[31]]—that a being of Four Dimensions, if such there were, could come into our closed rooms without opening door or window, nay, could even penetrate into, and inhabit, our bodies; that he could simultaneously see the insides of all things and the interior of the whole earth thrown open to his vision: he would also have the power of making himself visible and invisible at pleasure; and could address words to us from an invisible position outside us, or inside our own person. Why then might not spirits be beings of the Fourth Dimension? Well, I will tell you why. Although we cannot hope ever to comprehend what a spirit is—just as we can never comprehend what God is—yet St. Paul teaches us that the deep things of the spirit are in some degree made known to us by our own spirits. Now when does the spirit seem most active in us? or when do we seem nearest to the apprehension of “the deep things of God”? Is it not when we are exercising those virtues which, as St. Paul says, “abide”—I mean faith, hope and love? Now there is obviously no connection between these virtues and the Fourth Dimension. Even if we could conceive of space of Four Dimensions—which we cannot do, although we can perhaps describe what some of its phenomena would be if it existed—we should not be a whit the better morally or spiritually. It seems to me rather a moral than an intellectual process, to approximate to the conception of a spirit: and toward this no knowledge of Quadridimensional space can guide us.

What, for example, do we mean when we speak of the Holy Spirit, and describe Him as the Third Person in the Trinity? I hope you will not suppose—because I happen to be a rationalist as regards the historical interpretation of certain parts of the Bible, or because I have not disguised my dislike of the formal and quasi-arithmetical propositions in which the Athanasian creed sets forth the doctrine of the Trinity—that I reject the teaching of the New Testament on the nature and functions of the Holy Spirit. Literary criticism may oblige us to regard the long discourses on the functions of the Paraclete or Advocate in the Fourth Gospel as being in the style of the author and not the language of Christ; but it is difficult to suppose that the sublime thoughts in those passages are the mere inventions of a disciple of Jesus; and the characteristic sayings of Christ in the Synoptic Gospels bear cogent though terse witness to His acknowledgment of a Holy Spirit who should “speak” in His disciples, and “teach” His disciples what to say, when they were summoned before the bar of princes: “it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Spirit,” Mark xiii. 11; “it is not ye that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you,” Matth. x. 20; “the Holy Spirit shall teach you in that very hour what ye ought to say,” Luke xii. 12. I need not remind you how large a space “the Spirit” claims in St. Paul’s Epistles, and especially of the use which the Apostle makes of the triple combination of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Even, therefore, if I could give no explanation of the whole of it, nor so much as put into words the faint glimpse I may have gained into the meaning of a part of this doctrine, I should be inclined to accept the existence of the Holy Spirit on the authority of Christ or St. Paul, as being a doctrine that does not enter into the domain of evidence, a conception of the divine nature from which I might hope to learn much, if I would reverently keep it before me and try to apprehend it. But I seem to have a glimpse of it. That influence or “idea” of the dead which, as Shakespeare says, “creeps into our study of imagination,” and which reproduces all the best and essential characteristics of the departed—when this has once taken possession of us, do we not naturally say that we now realize “the spirit” of the dead, feeling that it guides us for the first time to the appreciation of his words and deeds? Now as God, the initial Thought, needed to be revealed to us by means of the Word of God, so the Word needed to be revealed to us by means of the Influence of the Word. Or, to put it more personally, as the Father needed to be revealed by the Son, so the Son needed to be revealed by the Spirit. Those who knew Christ merely in the flesh knew but little of Him, and had little understanding of His words. It was the Spirit of Christ that guided, and still guides, His disciples into the fuller knowledge of the meaning of His past life on earth and His present purposes in heaven.

I own, however, that I have sometimes felt at a loss when I have asked myself, “How is this Spirit a Person? And do I love Him or It? And if Jesus and the Spirit of Jesus are two Persons, then must I also infer two personalities for myself, one for my mortal terrestrial humanity, another for my immortal celestial spirit?” These questions are extremely difficult for me to answer with confidence: yet I feel instinctively that they have a profound and satisfying answer to which I have not yet attained; but I suggest some answer of this kind, “When we endeavour to form a conception of God we ought to put aside the limitations of human individuality. Now we cannot do this while we conceive of God simply as the Father, and still less while we conceive of Him simply as the Son; but we can do it when we conceive of Him as being an all-pervasive Power, the source of order and harmony and light, sometimes as a Breath breathing life into all things good and beautiful, sometimes as a Bond, or Law, linking or attracting together all things material and spiritual so as to make up the Kosmos or Order of the Universe. The traditions of the Church have taught us that there has been such a Power, subsisting from the first with the Father and the Eternal Son, in whom the Father and the Son were, and are, united; and by whom the whole human race is bound together in brotherhood to one another and in sonship to the Eternal Father. What is this Being but the Personification of that Power which, in the material world, we call Attraction and in the immaterial, Love? Is it not conceivable that this Being which breathes good thoughts into every human breast should love those whom It inspires? And we—can we love our country, and love Goodness, Purity, Honour, Faith, Hope, and yet must we find it impossible to love this personified Love, this Holy Spirit? But if we love the Spirit of God, and the Spirit loves us, then we can understand how it may be called a Person.”

I foresee the answer that might be given to these—I will not call them reasonings, say meditations. “All this is the mere play of fancy: you personify England, Virtue, Goodness, Hope, Faith, and the like; and such personifications are tolerable in poetry; but you do not surely maintain that such personifications have any real existence: in the same way, you may find a certain conception of the Supreme Being useful for the encouragement of devotion, but you have no right hence to infer that this conception represents an objective reality, much less God Himself.” My reply is that in the region of theological contemplation where demonstration, and proof of the ordinary kind, are both impossible, I conceive I “have a right” to do this on the authority of Christ and St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel, and the general tradition of the Church. I would sooner believe that myself and my spirit have a dual personality; I would sooner recognize the presence of the Angels of England and France and the other great nations of the world about the heavenly throne, like the Angels of the seven churches of Asia or the Angel of the Chosen People; I would sooner acknowledge the actual personality of Hope, Faith, and I know not what other celestial ministers between God and man; I would sooner, in a word, believe that personality depends upon some subtle combination such as only poets have dimly guessed at, than I would give up the belief that there is beside the Eternal Father, and the Eternal Son, an Eternal Spirit, to the description of whom we can best approximate by calling Him personified Love.

Looking at the Spirit of God in this way I sometimes seem to discern a closer connection than is generally recognized between the Resurrection and the power of loving. You will remember that St. Paul constantly connects the Resurrection of Christ with the “Spirit;” Christ was “raised from the dead in, or by, the Spirit;” and St. Peter says that Christ was “put to death in the flesh, but quickened in the Spirit.” Now this Spirit is the Power of Love. Do we ask for an explanation of this connection? It is surely obvious that the Resurrection of Christ would not have directly availed men (so far as we can see) unless it had been manifested to them. But how was it manifested? We think it was by love: on the one hand by the unsatisfied and longing love of the sorrowing disciples, creating a blank in the heart which could only be filled by the image of the risen Saviour; on the other hand by the unsatisfied and longing love of the Lord Jesus Christ, dying with a purpose as yet unfulfilled. Thus—so far as concerns the influence of the Resurrection of Jesus upon humanity—it was the Spirit of Love that raised Jesus from the abyss of inert oblivion and exalted Him to the right hand of God in the souls of men. I dare not say that, if Jesus had failed to root Himself in the hearts of men He could never have been raised from the dead; just as I dare not say that, if St. Peter had not been inspired to say “Thou art the Christ,” the Church could never have been founded on the rock of heaven-imparted faith. Let us avoid this way of looking at things, as being repulsive and preposterous, putting things terrestrial before things celestial. Let us rather say that, because the rock of faith was being set up by the hand of God in heaven, therefore at that same instant the Apostle received the strength to utter his confession of faith; and because Christ’s Spirit had soared up after death to the heaven of heavens and thence was bending down lovingly to look upon His despairing followers, therefore they received power to see Him again, living for them on earth.

Yet as regards ordinary men, I cannot help occasionally reviving that same preposterous method which I would discard in the case of Christ. And starting from terrestrial phenomena first, I sometimes ask myself, Is it possible that the resurrection of each human soul may depend upon the degree to which it has rooted itself in the affection of others? The Roman Catholic Church teaches that the condition of the dead may be affected by the prayers of survivors; and many abuses have resulted from a perverted and mechanical misinterpretation of that doctrine; but how if the spirit of a dead man actually owes its spiritual resurrection, not indeed to formally uttered petitions, but to the silent prayers, the loving wishes, the irrepressible desires of fellow-spirits on earth and in heaven? How if a man lives in heaven and in the second life so far as his spirit has imprinted itself on the loving memories of others above and below? “Has the dead man kindled in the heart of one single human being a spark of genuine unselfish affection? To that extent, then, he receives a proportional germ of expansive and eternal life—might it not be so? And if it were so, then we could better understand how both the Lord Jesus Christ, and we mortal men, die in the flesh but are raised to a life eternal after death ‘in the Spirit’ and ‘by the Spirit’—that great pervasive spiritual Power of Love which links all things in heaven and earth together.”

I trust I have theorized enough to please you. I have done so because on the whole I think it best that you should see all the weakness, as well as all the strength, of my position—the credulous and fanciful side of it, as well as its breadth, its naturalness, its reasonableness, its spiritual comfort, its dependence on moral effort, its recognition of Law, its consistency with facts, and its absolute freedom from intellectual difficulties. Regarded in the ordinary way, as being the revivification of the material body, the Resurrection of Christ becomes an isolated portent in history; regarded naturally, it becomes the triumph of the Spirit over the fear of death, the central event of our earthly history. Central I say, but not isolated; because there are seen converging towards it, as it were predictively, all the phenomena of the evolution and training of the Imagination; all instances of true poetic and prophetic vision; the stars of heaven and all the creative provisions of night and darkness and sleep and dreams, nay even death itself. And what higher tribute (short of actual worship) can be paid to the personality of Christ than to say that “the phenomena of His resurrection are natural.” I think if I were depressed and shaken in faith—as one is liable to be at times, not by intellectual but by moral considerations, when one feels that evil is stronger than it should be, both in oneself and outside oneself—it would be a great help to go and hear some agnostic saying with vehement conviction, “The resurrection of Christ was natural, purely natural.” I should bid him say it again, and again; and I would go home and say it over and over again to myself by way of comfort, to strengthen my faith: “The manifestations of the Resurrection of Christ were purely natural. So they were. Things could not be otherwise. Being what He was, Christ could not but thus be manifested to His followers after death. It was the natural effect of Christ’s personality upon the disciples; and through the disciples upon St. Paul. Then what a Person have we here! A Person consciously superior to death, and, after His death, fulfilling a promise which He made to His disciples that He would still be present with them! What wonder if He is even now present with us, influencing us with something of the power with which He moved the last of the Apostles! What wonder if He is destined yet for future ages to be a present Power among men until the establishment of that Kingdom which He proclaimed upon earth, the Fatherhood of God and brotherhood of man!”

XXV
THE INCARNATION

My dear ——,

I had not forgotten that, in order to complete the brief discussion of the miraculous element in the New Testament, it is necessary to give some explanation of the origin of the accounts of the birth of Christ. Your last letter reminds me of this necessity, and you put before me two alternatives. “If,” you say, “Christ was born of a Virgin, then a miracle is conceded so stupendous that it is absurd to object to the other miracles: but if Christ was not born of a Virgin, then, unless the honesty of the Gospel narratives is to be impeached, some account is needed of the way in which the miraculous legend found its way into the Gospels;” and you add that you would like to know what meaning, if any, I attach to the statement in the Creed, that Jesus was “born of a Virgin.”

As you probably anticipate, I accept the latter of your alternatives, and I will therefore endeavour briefly to shew how the story of the Miraculous Conception “found its way into the Gospels.” But first I must protest against your expression as inexact. The story of the Miraculous Conception, so far from having “found its way into the Gospels,” found its way into only two out of the four, namely, St. Matthew’s and St. Luke’s. And this fact, strong as it is, does not represent the strength of the negative argument from omission. Of the nine authors, or thereabouts, of the different books in the New Testament, only two contain any account, reference, or allusion to the Miraculous Conception. No mention is made of it in any of the numerous Epistles of St. Paul; nor in any of his speeches, nor in those of St. Peter, recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, nor in any part of that book; nor in the Epistles of St. John, St. James, St. Peter, St. Jude; nor in the Apocalypse; nor in the Gospels of St. Mark and St. John! Even the two Gospels that mention it contain no evidence that it was known to any of the disciples during the life-time of Jesus, and one of these (Luke iii. 23) traces the genealogy of Jesus from Joseph and expressly declares that He “was supposed” to be “the Son of Joseph.”[^[32]] This negative evidence becomes all the more weighty if you consider how very natural it was, and I may almost say inevitable, that the story of a Miraculous Conception should speedily find its way into the traditions of the early Church. The causes that worked toward this result were, first, Old Testament prophecy; secondly, traditions and expressions current among a certain section of the Jews; thirdly, the preconceptions of pagan converts.

Recall to mind what was said in a previous letter concerning the importance attached by the earliest Christians to the argument from prophecy. Now there is a prophecy in Isaiah which, if separated from its context, might seem to point to nothing but the Miraculous Conception of the Messiah: “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: behold a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Immanuel.” But a careful study of the context puts the matter in a quite different light. Isaiah (vii. 10-viii. 4) is promising to King Ahaz deliverance from the kings of Syria and Samaria. As the king will not ask for a sign, the prophet promises that the Lord will give him one; a virgin shall conceive and bring forth a child and shall call his name Immanuel (“God with us”): he shall “eat butter and honey” when he arrives at the age of distinction between good and evil; for before he arrives at that age, the land abhorred by Ahaz shall be “forsaken by both her kings.” The meaning appears to be that, within the time necessary for the conception and birth of a child, that is to say, in less than a year, the prospects of deliverance for Judah from her present enemies (Syria and Samaria) shall so brighten that a child shall be born and called by a name implying the favour of God; afterwards, before that child shall grow up to childhood, the two aggressive countries of Syria and Samaria shall be themselves desolated, as well as Judah, by the “razor” of Assyria which shall shave the country clean from all cultivated crops. Amid the general desolation, the fruit trees will be cut down, the corn will not be sown; bread there will be none; there will be nothing to eat but “butter and honey;” it is not the new-born child alone who shall eat “butter and honey;” “butter and honey shall every one eat that is left in the land” (vii. 22).

In all this, even though we may suppose that there may have been some Messianic reference, there is no prediction at all of a conception from a virgin or of a miracle of any kind. Indeed, the prophecy appears to find some sort of fulfilment in what happens immediately afterwards (Isaiah viii. 1-4), when the prophet contracts a marriage, and calls the son who springs from it by a name implying the vengeance imminent on Samaria and Assyria: “Call his name Maher-shalal-hash-baz (i.e. booty, quick, spoil, speedy): for before the boy shall have knowledge to cry my father! my mother! the riches of Damascus and the spoil of Samaria shall be taken away before the king of Assyria.” No doubt it may be said that this son was not called “Immanuel,” so that the prophecy was not fulfilled in him. But the same argument might be urged against the application to our Lord; for He also was not called “Immanuel,” but received the old national name of “Joshua,” “Jeshua,” or “Jesus.” Reviewing all the circumstances of the prophecy, I think we may say, without exaggeration, first, that there are no grounds for seeing in it any reference to a Miraculous Conception; secondly, that, when isolated, it might easily be misinterpreted so as to convey such a reference.[^[33]]

Even if no such prophecy had existed, the language and preconceptions of the earliest Christians and their converts would almost necessarily have introduced a belief in the Miraculous Conception. The language of Philo—who represents not a mere individual eccentricity but the current phraseology of the Alexandrine school of thought, and whose influence may be traced in almost every page of the Fourth Gospel—consistently affirms that, whenever a child is mentioned in the Old Testament as having been born to be a deliverer in fulfilment of a divine promise, that child is “begotten of God.” The words of Sarah, he says, indicate that, in reality, “The Lord begot Isaac.” God is also spoken of as “the husband of Leah.” Zipporah is described as being “pregnant by no mortal.” Samuel, in words that contain an implied belief that only his maternal parentage was mortal, is declared to be “perhaps a man,” and “born of a human mother.” I have already quoted one passage about Isaac but another asserts that he is to be considered “not the result of generation but the work of the unbegotten.” Sometimes the language of Philo is so worded as to convey even to a careful reader the impression that he believed in a literally Miraculous Conception, as for example when he says that “Moses introduces Sarah as being pregnant when alone, and as being visited by God.” Elsewhere, he removes the possibility of misunderstanding by saying that “the Scripture is cautious, and describes God as the husband, not of a virgin, but of virginity.” None the less, you can easily see how expressions of this kind, current among Jewish philosophers a generation before the time of St. Paul, might be very easily interpreted literally by ordinary people unskilled in these metaphorical subtleties, and especially by Gentile converts asking for a plain answer to a plain question, “What was the parentage of this man whom you call the Son of God?”

In truth the preconceptions of the Gentile converts must have played no small part in preparing the way for the doctrine of the literal Miraculous Conception. The Greeks and Romans who worshipped or honoured Æsculapius son of Apollo, Romulus son of Mars, Hercules son of Jupiter, and a score of other demi-gods, would be quite familiar with the notion of a god or hero born of a human mother and of a divine father; they would not only be prepared for it in the case of Jesus, whom they were called on to adore as the Son of God, they would even demand and assume it. They would argue much as Tertullian argued: “If he was the son of a man, he was not the son of God; and if he was the son of God, he was not the son of a man.” This argument ought to have been met by a flat denial, thus: “The mere physical and carnal union by which, according to your legends, the gods, assuming the forms of men, generated Æsculapius, Romulus, and Hercules, is not to be thought of here. When we speak of Jesus being the Son of God, we do not mean that His body was formed by God descending from heaven and assuming human shape or functions, but that His Spirit was spiritually begotten of God. It is therefore quite possible that Jesus may have been the Son of God according to the Spirit and yet the son of man according to the flesh.” But instead of that, the whole truth, there came back this half-true answer. “The parentage was divine, but not of the materialistic nature you suppose: God did not assume human shape: the generation was spiritual.” By these words there may have been meant at first, simply what Philo meant, that while the spiritual parentage was divine, the material parentage was human: but such an answer would leave many under the impression that the body as well as the spirit of Jesus resulted from a spiritual generation in which no human father participated. The Gentiles would naturally interpret the Philonian doctrine literally and say of Mary, as Philo had said of Sarah, that she was “pregnant when alone, and visited by God.”

From a very different point of view, the ritual and hymnals of some of the Jews might facilitate the growth of the belief that Jesus was born of a virgin. For they might naturally speak of their Messiah as being a child of the virgin daughter of Sion, whose only husband was Jehovah. And hence in the Apocalypse, a book imbued with Jewish feeling, we find Jesus described (xii. 1-6) as the child of a woman who evidently represents Israel: “A woman arrayed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars; and she was with child.... And she was delivered of a son, a man child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron.” This personification of the daughter of Israel or of Jerusalem as representing the nation, the bride of Jehovah, is very common in the prophets. You may find similar personifications in the New Testament. The Apocalypse describes the Church as the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, descending from Heaven “as a bride adorned for her husband.” St. Paul speaks of the New Jerusalem, which is above (i.e. the spiritual Jerusalem, free from the law), as being “the mother of us all.” Sometimes the personification of the Church is liable to be misinterpreted literally, as in St. Peter’s and St. John’s Epistles, where “the elect lady” “thine elect sister” and “the (lady) in Babylon” have been supposed by some to refer to individuals, but are believed by Bishop Lightfoot to represent the Churches of the places from which, and to which, the epistles were written. The whole of St. Paul’s Epistles presuppose the metaphor of a Virgin Church, and toward the end of the second century (177 A.D.) we find a very curious passage (in an epistle from the Church of Lyons) in which the repentance and martyrdom of some previous apostates are described as a restoration to “the Virgin Mother” of her children, “raised from the dead.” You see then how this personification runs through all Jewish and all early Christian literature, so that the Church, old or new, might be described as a woman; and I ought perhaps not to have omitted the strange dream in the second book of Esdras (x. 44-46) where Israel is a woman and the Temple is the son: “This woman whom thou sawest is Sion ... she hath been thirty years barren, but after thirty years Solomon builded the city and offered offerings, and then bare the barren a son.” Does not this continuous stream of thought shew how natural it would be for the earliest Jewish Christians to adore Christ in their hymns as the son of the daughter of Zion, the son of the Virgin Mother? Add to this the prejudice among the Gentile converts against a human paternity for the Son of God, the influence of the Alexandrine Jewish philosophy and the still more powerful influence of Isaiah’s prophecy about “the virgin,” and I think you will see that the causes at work to produce the belief in the Miraculous Conception were so strong that I may almost say a miracle would have been needed to prevent it.

But it has been urged that St. Luke was a historian and a physician; that he had great power of careful description—as may be seen from his exact account of St. Paul’s shipwreck;—that he describes the circumstances of the miraculous birth in a plain and simple manner: and that he assures us that he had taken every pains to make himself acquainted with the truth of the things which he records.[^[34]] All this may be: but because a man can describe exactly a comparatively recent shipwreck, which he may have himself witnessed, or which at all events may have been witnessed by some who told him the story, it does not follow that he has exact information about a miraculous birth which occurred (if at all) upwards of sixty years—more probably upwards of seventy—before he wrote. The mother of Jesus had, in all probability, passed away when St. Luke was writing. Such obscurities and variations by this time attended the stories concerning the infancy of Jesus, that we find even the compiler of St. Matthew’s Gospel apparently ignorant that the home of the parents of Jesus was (if St. Luke is correct on this point) not Bethlehem, but Nazareth. It is hardly possible to deny his ignorance when we find in the First Gospel these words: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judæa ... And he arose and took the young child and his mother and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning over Judæa, he was afraid to go thither; and being warned [of God] in a dream, he withdrew into the parts of Galilee and came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth.” Obviously the writer is ignorant that “a city called Nazareth” was the original home of the parents of Jesus, and that they had no reason for returning to “Judæa;” his whole narrative assumes that Bethlehem in Judæa was the home, and that the parents of Jesus were only prevented from returning thither by the fear of Archelaus, which forced them to leave their native city and to take up their abode in “a city called Nazareth.” Now it is probable that St. Luke’s account is here the correct one, and that the erroneous tradition found in the First Gospel was a mere inference from the prophecy that “from Bethlehem” there should “come forth a governor.” But what a light does this discrepancy throw upon the uncertainty of the very earliest traditions about the infancy of Jesus when we find the only two Evangelists who say anything about it, differing as to the place where the parents of Jesus lived at the time when they were married! I have no doubt that St. Luke did his best, in the paucity, or more probably in the variety, of conflicting traditions, to select those which seemed to him most authoritative and most spiritual. Even the most careless reader of the English text must feel, without knowing a word of Greek, that St. Luke’s first two chapters—which contain the stories of the infancy—are entirely different from the style of the preface (i. 1-4), and from that of the rest of the Gospel. The two chapters sound, even in English, like a bit out of the Old Testament; and any Greek scholar, accustomed to the LXX, would recognize that they were either a close translation from the Aramaic, or written by some one who wrote in Greek, modelling his style on the LXX. It is probable that they represent some traditions of Aramaic origin, the best that St. Luke could find when he began to write of the wonders that had happened more than sixty or seventy years ago. To those who can form the least conception of the extent to which Oriental tradition in the villages of Galilee might be transmuted after an interval of sixty or seventy years, it must seem quite beside the mark to assert the historical accuracy of the tradition concerning the Miraculous Conception which St. Luke has incorporated in his Gospel, on the ground that he was a physician; that he took pains to get at the truth; and that he has written a masterly and exact account of a shipwreck which he, or some friends of his, may have witnessed in person.

The very sobriety of his own preface ought to put us on our guard against attaching to St. Luke’s history such weight, for example, as we attach to the history of Thucydides. He says, it is true, that he had “traced the course of all things accurately from the first, i.e. from the commencement of Christ’s life:” but this amounts to much less than the statement of Thucydides, who tells us that he had personally inquired from those who knew the facts, besides having seen some of the facts himself (Thuc. i. 22). He does not say that “the eye-witnesses and ministers of the word” had given him any special information: on the contrary he mentions himself only as one of many who had received “traditions” from eye-witnesses, and he implies that a good many of the existing narratives, based upon these very traditions, were at least so far unsatisfactory that they did not dispense with an additional narrative from him. The emphasis which St. Luke lays on the fact that he has traced things “from the first,” and that he writes “in order,”—combined with the mention of “many” predecessors who have “taken in hand” the work which he intends to do over again—makes it almost certain that some of these Evangelists had omitted all account of our Lord’s birth; others had not regarded chronological order; others had not written “accurately.” All these deficiencies indicate a great and general difficulty in obtaining exact information; and the mere honesty of a new attempt, under circumstance so disadvantageous, cannot justify us in attaching a very high authority to a tradition in this new Gospel, of a miraculous character, and in a style that appears to be not St. Luke’s own, referring to an incident supposed to have occurred upwards of sixty years before. This digression about St. Luke’s Gospel will not be without its use if it leads you to perceive that history, and experience, and criticism, while they tend to make us believe more, tend also to make us know less, about Christ’s life and doctrine; I mean, that we find we know a little less about the historical facts of Christ’s life than we supposed we knew, while we are led to believe a great deal more in the divine depth and wisdom of His ideas.

I pass to the second question which you put to me, “What sense, if any, do you yourself attach to the statement in the Creed that Christ was born of a Virgin?” Before I tell you what sense I attach to it, or rather what sense seems to me the only one compatible with the facts, I must honestly express my doubt whether any sense that is compatible with the facts, is also compatible with the words. To speak plainly, the statement appears to be so obviously literal that I shrink from interpreting it metaphorically; and yet, if taken literally, it appears to me to be false. The word “Virgin” is perhaps the only word in the service and ritual of the Church of England (if the Athanasian Creed be left out of consideration, owing to the non-natural and humane interpretations of it which have been sanctioned by high authority) which has made me doubt at times whether I ought to do official work as a minister in that Church. As regards the “resurrection of the body,” asserted in one of the Creeds, I feel little or no difficulty: for St. Paul’s use of the term “spiritual body” allows great latitude to those who would give a spiritual interpretation to the phrase in the Creed; and I trust that I have made it clear to you that I accept Christ’s Resurrection as a reality, though a spiritual reality.[^[35]] But the words implying the birth from the Virgin stand on a different footing. In the Resurrection of Jesus I believe that there was a unique vision of the buried Saviour, apparent to several disciples at a time; but in the conception and birth of Jesus I have no reason for thinking that there was anything unusual apparent to the senses. What can I mean then by saying that Jesus is “born of a Virgin”?

All that I can mean is this. Human generation does not by any means account for the birth of a new human spirit. So far as we are righteous, we all owe our righteousness to a spiritual seed within us; “we are not,” as Philo would say, “the result of generation but the work of the Unbegotten.” So far as we are righteous, we are “born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (John i. 13). But of the Lord Jesus Christ we are in the habit of saying and believing that He was uniquely and entirely righteous; and therefore we say that He was uniquely and entirely born of God. In all human generation there must be some congenital divine act, if a righteous soul is to be produced; and in the generation of Christ there was a unique congenital act of the Holy Spirit. That Word of God which in various degrees inspires every righteous human soul (none can say how soon in its existence) did not inspire Jesus, but was (to speak in metaphor) totally present in Jesus from the first so as to exclude all imperfection of humanity. Human unrighteousness—such as we are in the habit of attributing to human generation—there was, in this case, none. Therefore we say that the generation of Jesus was not human but divine.

So much I can honestly say because I heartily believe it. How far one is justified in putting so strained an interpretation on the words “born of the Virgin Mary”—even in the Church of England, where simultaneous conservatism and progress have been bought at the cost of many strained interpretations—is a question on which I may perhaps hereafter say a word or two, but not now. Meantime let me merely add my conviction that there may have been a time when this illusion of the Miraculous Conception did more good than harm. In former days, that spiritual truth which we can now disentangle from the story of the Miraculous Conception may have been conveyed by means of it to hearts which would have otherwise never recognized that Jesus was the Son of God. It was surely better then, and it is better now, that men should believe the great truth that Jesus is the Son of God, at the cost of believing (provided they can honestly believe) the untruth that Jesus was not the son of Joseph, than that they should altogether fail to recognize His divine Sonship, because they were alive to the fact that He was born of human parents in accordance with the laws of humanity. But in these days the doctrine of the Miraculous Conception seems to me fraught with evil; partly because the weakness of the evidence makes the narrative a stumbling-block for many who are taught to consider this doctrine essential and who cannot bring themselves to believe it; partly because it tends to sanction a false and monastic ideal of life; to separate Jesus from common humanity and from human love and sympathy; and to encourage false notions about a material Resurrection of the body of Jesus, which naturally result in a false, bewildering, and disorderly expectation of a material Resurrection for ourselves.

XXVI
PRAYER, HEAVEN, HELL

You ask me whether one who has seceded from miraculous to non-miraculous Christianity still finds himself able to pray as before. But towards the end of your letter you amend your question. You are “quite sure,” you are pleased to say, from what you know of me, that I shall “answer this question affirmatively, though in defiance of all logic:” and therefore, anticipating my answer, you state your objection to it beforehand, and ask me how I can meet your objection, which is to this effect: “If the laws of nature are never suspended, then it is absurd, or perhaps impious, to pray for that which implies their suspension. For example, a friend of mine may be in a stage of disease so fatally advanced that, without a suspension of the laws of nature, it is no more possible that he should recover from the disease than that his body should rise from the grave. According to the tenets of your non-miraculous Christianity, must I not abstain from praying that he may recover?”

I do not see any great difficulty here. Change the hypothesis for a moment. Suppose your friend to be no longer living, but dead. Are you willing—would you be willing, even were you the most orthodox believer in miraculous Christianity—to pray that the body of your dead friend might arise revivified from the grave a week after he had been laid in it? You know you would not be willing. Why not? You cannot say “Because it is impossible,” for you would admit (on the supposition of your being a believer in the miraculous) not only that it is possible, but that it has actually been done in times past. But you would feel, I am sure, that you dare not, and ought not, to pray for this object, because such a prayer would be a revolt against that established order of things which you recognize to be a manifestation of God’s present will. I say “God’s present will,” because you do not (if you agree with me) regard death as being in accordance with God’s future will: it is an evil, sprung, not from God, but from evil, out of which God is working good. But He bids us acquiesce in it during our present imperfect state of existence; and hence, though you believe He will ultimately destroy death, you do not feel justified in praying that its present operation may be neutralized by a suspension of the laws of nature.

Now to return to your own supposition that your friend is not dead, but merely in danger of death. Health and life are dependent upon many complex causes, among which (it will be admitted by all) are those mysterious fluctuations of the thoughts and emotions, which I believe in many cases to proceed—I speak in a metaphor—straight from God Himself. To one who believes that the spirits of men are in constant communion with the all-sustaining Spirit of the Creator, the thoughts of men may well seem to be as dependent upon their divine Origin as the air in my little room is at this moment dependent upon the changes of the circumambient atmosphere. Of course, if you are a thorough-going, scientific hope-nothing and trust-nothing, such a belief as this appears to you an idle dream. From your point of view, you are a machine; your friend is a machine; all men are machines; the world is a machine; the action and inter-action of all these animate and inanimate machines is predetermined, even to the minutest movement of a limb, or most fleeting shade of thought, in each one of the myriads of human mechanisms called men.

The thorough-going materialist, when he rebukes his son and tells him that he “ought not to have” told a lie, knows perfectly well that his son could not possibly help telling that lie, and that he was bound by all the laws of nature to tell it. The materialist father is, in fact, telling a lie himself; only more deliberately than the little son. He is using words which have no true meaning for him, as a kind of oil to grease the wheels of the little machine before him, having learned by accumulated experience that this lying phrase, “You ought to have,” has for many thousands of years proved a very effective kind of oil, and that the true and scientific phrase, “It would have been better if you could have, but you could not,” would be wholly inefficacious. But since it is obvious that this view of existence converts all moral language, and almost all the higher relations of life, into one gigantic lie, I make no apology at all for putting it by with contempt as being beneath the consideration of a child of ten at which age, as far as I remember I grappled with this question of predestination, and settled it (so far as I was concerned, for ever) by coming to the conclusion that “it does not work.” Now when you have once given up, as unworkable, the theory that all our thoughts and emotions spring necessarily from antecedent material causes, you have bidden good-bye to Knowledge, so far as concerns the origin of human thought, and you are thrown back upon Faith. I believe therefore, and I make no apology for my belief, that the mysterious fluctuations of human thought and will may sometimes proceed from God without the intervention of material causes, perhaps in virtue of the existence of some invisible law of union by which the souls of men are united to God and to one another. This being my belief—which at all events does not contain so many and such perpetually-recurring inconsistencies as the belief of your thorough-going materialist—you will understand, without much further explanation, when and why I should pray even for those of whom the physician is inclined to despair. Faith and hope, have, before now, worked such wonders in healing, that “while there is life there is hope” has passed into a proverb. I cannot be sure that my prayers might not have some kind of direct power—by a kind of brain-wave such as we have heard of lately—in affecting the emotions and spirits of the sufferer. It is seldom that even a physician can speak with certainty about the immediate issue of a disease: and whatsoever is uncertain is (if it be also right) a reasonable subject for prayer. But if I were myself absolutely convinced that there was no chance of my friend’s recovery without a suspension of the laws of nature, I should feel that prayer rightly and naturally gave way to resignation.

No one however who is in the habit of praying will think it necessary to spend much time or thought in discriminating exactly between that which may be, and that which cannot possibly be. He must know that, very often, where his prayer trenches on the province of the material, the line cannot be drawn except by an expert in science, which he may not happen to be; and besides, in the mood of prayer, he will feel that the scientific and discriminating spirit is out of place. He is not thinking of things scientifically, but spiritually, putting his wishes before the Father in heaven, and content to couple each wish with an “If it be possible.” Sometimes he learns, after constant repetition, that the prayer is an unfit one, and he discontinues it; in that case he has gained by his prayer a closer insight into, and conformity with, the will of God. In other cases he continues his prayer and receives an answer to it—either the answer that he himself desires, or some other perhaps, quite different from that which he expected, but one which he ultimately recognizes to be the best. But there will be cases where he will continue his prayer, feeling it to be right and natural, although he receives no answer to it at all, so far as he can discern. For he will feel quite certain that no genuine prayer is wasted. Our spirits, or our angels—to use the language of metaphor—are not on earth: they sit together in heaven, that is to say, in the heart of God; and whenever one of us can conceive a genuinely unselfish and righteous wish for a brother spirit and wing it with faith so that it flies up to heaven—a flight by no means so easy or so common as we suppose, and probably not often flown, unless the arrow is feathered by deeds and pains as well as words—then it not only brings back a blessing upon the wisher but also thrills through the spiritual assembly above and comes back as a special blessing to the person prayed for. But need I add that this is not a process to be performed mechanically? There is no recipe for effectual prayer.

But, to come down from metaphors, let me attempt to answer your question, “What difference of attitude in prayer will there be between the believer in natural, and the believer in miraculous, Christianity?” As far as my experience goes, there will be very little; except that the former will be rather more disposed to ask, before uttering a prayer, how far the granting of it might indirectly affect others. Logically and theoretically there ought to be a great deal of difference; for if the believer in the miraculous were consistent, he might naturally pray that a miracle might be performed for him, as it has been for others, for a good purpose. As a matter of fact, the prayers of children trained in orthodoxy are thus sometimes consistent. I dare say one might find a child who has prayed that the sun might stand still that he might have a longer holiday. And why not now from the child’s point of view as well as formerly? But I suppose few men in England, now, even of the strictly orthodox, are in this puerile stage. Almost all full-grown English Protestants recognize that, although miracles were freely performed from the year 4004 B.C. to, say A.D. 61 or thereabouts—when St. Paul shook off the serpent and took no harm—yet “the age of miracles is now past.” Yet I have heard of men of business who make a point of praying earnestly on the subject of commercial speculations, the rise and fall of consols, the price of sugar and the like. Will any one maintain that people are not the worse for such prayers as these, or that the believer in natural Christianity is not a gainer by losing the desire and the power to utter them? On the whole, I see but one subject of prayer mentioned in our English Prayer-book, as to which natural Christianity would probably dictate silence: I mean the weather. It might be argued that, “since the weather is affected by human action (by the clearing of forests, draining of marshes, and so on), and since prayers affect human action, therefore they do affect the weather indirectly, and may affect it directly.” But from “indirect” to “direct” is a great leap; and I am moved toward resignation rather than prayer, by the thought that, in revealing to us more and more of the extent of the causes and effects of meteorological phenomena, God seems to be shewing us that, in asking for weather that suits ourselves, we may be asking for weather that may not suit others. I should be sorry to see harvest prayers excluded from our Church service; but I think they should express our hope and trust in God’s orderly government of the seasons, beseeching Him to bestow on the husbandman patience and skill so as to meet and improve adversity, and on the nation thrift and frugality so as to avoid waste.

Since writing the last paragraph I was interrupted; and now, returning to my letter, I feel strongly inclined to cancel the last two or three pages of apologetic argumentation; arguing about prayer seems so absurdly useless. Yet perhaps my remarks may weigh for something with you in your present oscillation. They may possibly prevent you from giving up, in a moment of virtuous logic, a habit which, once discontinued, is not easily resumed. Let them pass then; but let them not pass without a protest that they by no means express my sense of the vital necessity of prayer for a Christian. To me it seems the very breath of our spiritual life, as needful for peace and union with God as communion between children and parents is needful for domestic concord. Without it, faith must speedily vanish. Even a comparatively dull and lifeless petition at stated intervals has some value as a sign-post, indicating the road on which we ought to be travelling though our feet may be straying elsewhere. But in truth real Christian prayer (mostly silent) should be, as St. Paul says “without ceasing;” for prayer is but aspiration and desire, emerging into shape. When a man has reached such a height that he has ceased to wish to be something better than he is, then and then only may he cease to pray.

One kind of prayer at all events I have felt able to retain which seems to me of far more value than the prayer for fair weather—I mean prayer for the dead. I do not deny that, when coupled with superstitious views about heaven and hell, the custom of praying for the dead may result in superstition, and even in the encouragement of immorality; and the hired and conventional prayers for the dead prevalent in the sixteenth century appear to me to have constituted an abuse against which our English Reformers did well to protest. But these abuses and corruptions seem to me accidental, and quite insufficient to deter us from use of the most helpful of spiritual habits. I do not propose to argue about it, but you may like to know the sort of accident by which I was led to form this habit, and the practical reasons for which I clung to it, and still cling to it, with the deepest conviction that it is not only spiritually useful, but also based on spiritual truth.

Many years ago a brother of mine was drowned at sea through the sudden capsizing of a vessel by night. When the news came, I was at first distracted between an intense desire to pray as before, and a kind of instinctive and general repugnance to all prayers for the dead as being “a Romanist practice.” All the books I had read, and all the notions I had formed, about the fixed future of the dead, suggested that such prayers were useless, if not blasphemous. On the other side there was no argument at all, nothing but a vague strong desire to pray. The painful conflict of that night—a conflict, as it seems to me now, between true natural religion and the false appearance of revealed religion—is still present to my recollection. At last it occurred to me that more than a month had elapsed between the death and our knowledge of the death, and throughout all those thirty days my prayers had gone up to God for one whose soul was no longer upon earth. Were those prayers wasted? I could not believe it. Besides, we had not yet received full details of the loss of the vessel. It was just possible that my brother might have been saved in one of the ship’s boats: he might be still living, and in sore need of help: how monstrous, if it were so, that I should in such a crisis cease to pray for him! So with doubt and trembling I still continued my custom, fashioning some kind of prayer to suit the emergency. While I was in this oscillating state of mind, news came that a second boatful, and almost immediately afterwards that a third, had been picked up at sea. My brother was not in either: but why might there not be a fourth? For some time, with less doubt than before, I continued to pray. Days, weeks, months rolled on, and now all hope had slipped away; but the habit was now fixed. I could not, or would not, break it. Praying day and night for one who was possibly living; just possibly living; probably not living; certainly dead—I had learned to realize the presence of my brother’s spirit, as very near and close to me, as one with whom I was still in some kind of communion; and now to drop his name out of my prayers, simply because I should never touch his hand again in this world, seemed a faithless, a wicked, a cruel act. The prayer could not indeed remain the same in circumstances so completely changed; I could of course no longer pray that the dead might be restored to me on earth; but it was still open to me to make mention of his name, and to beseech God that he and I might meet again in heaven: and thus, with a curious kind of compromise, worthy of a less youthful theologian, I circumvented my own orthodoxy by still praying in reality for my brother while I appeared to be praying for myself. More than seven-and-twenty years have now passed away, but not a night or morning has passed without the mention of that familiar name; and I entreat you to believe me that, next to the power of Christ Himself upon the soul, I have not found, nor can I imagine, any influence so potent as this habit of praying for the dead, to detach the mind from petty and visible things, to unlock the spiritual world, to carry the soul up to the very source and centre of spiritual life, and to bring us into faithful communion with the Father of the spirits of all flesh.

You see I have kept my promise of not arguing on this matter. I have simply told you how I have longed and doubted; how my doubts were dissipated by practice; and what strength I have personally derived from the practice. Probably this will seem to you, if interesting, at all events inadequate. “Logically,” you will perhaps say to yourself, “he ought to have attempted first to convince me that the eternal state of the dead is not finally determined at the moment of death; so that prayer may reasonably be expected to have some power to change their condition. He ought to have told me whether he believes in a Purgatory, or in a limited Hell; whether he is a Universalist; or whether he believes in the annihilation of all who are not to be saved. In a word, he ought to have given me a full account of his theory about the condition of the dead, before he commends to me the habit of praying for them.”

Here I fear I shall terribly disappoint you; but, at the risk of whatever disappointment, I will confess to you the whole truth. This part of my Manual of Theology has large print, large margin, and several blank pages. I believe some things with such force and clearness that I prefer to say I do not believe them. I see them: but about many other things which most people believe, I know little or nothing. Do I believe in a Hell? Yes, as firmly as I believe in a Heaven; but not in your Hell perhaps, and certainly not in the ordinary guide-books to Hell and Heaven. Perhaps some would call my Hell “merely retribution,” or “an illogical and ill-defined Purgatory;” and from their point of view they could be right in complaining of its indefiniteness; for they profess to know all about it and to be able to define it. But from my point of view I am equally right in speaking indefinitely; for I profess to have only a glimpse of it. Of the principles of Hell and Heaven I am certain, but of the details I am entirely ignorant. I know nothing whatever, and I know that no one else knows anything whatever, about the state of the dead; except that they are just as much in God’s hand when dead as when living, and that He will ultimately do the best thing for each; but what that “best thing” may be I cannot tell in detail, although I am very sure that it will be one thing for St. Francis and quite another for Nero. For the rest, all the elaborate structures and fancy-fabrics of Heaven and Hell, Purgatory, Paradise, Limbo, and other regions, whether theologians or poets be the architects, appear to me built upon the flimsiest foundations, tags of texts, fragments of words, quagmires of metaphor, quicksands of hyperbole. No; such real knowledge—or shall we say such conviction?—as we have about the eternal future of the dead, is to be based, not upon argument or inference from minute and disputable interpretations of small portions of Scripture, but mainly upon our faith in the divine righteousness and power. You will not, I hope, misunderstand my words that “God will do the best thing for each,” or draw from them the inference, “Then he is a Universalist after all.” I took for granted—I hope I was not wrong—that you would remember the definition of justice which you have read in Plato. In fact therefore I merely expressed in those words my conviction that God would be “just” to us after death.[^[36]] Might we not also define the highest mercy, in the same terms in which we define the highest justice, as being the feeling that prompts us to “do what is best for each”? And, if so, does it not seem to follow that in Hell God will not cease to be merciful, and in Heaven God will not cease to be just? And hence are we not brought close to the conclusion that Heaven and Hell are not really places, but the diverse results of the operation of the Eternal—the just Mercy, the merciful Justice—upon the diverse dead? But here the question widens and deepens into expanses and depths altogether too vast and profound for me, and I give up the problem. All that I know is, that there will be hereafter a just retribution.

Yet if I am to tell you my own conjectural imaginations—for who can help at times imagining what the infinite unknown may be, however loth he may be to insist or dogmatize about it, or even to bestow much attention on it, when the urgent present presses its superior claims?—I will say for myself that I cannot believe I shall have served all my apprenticeship to righteousness in my brief life upon this earth, or that I shall be fit immediately after death, for that closest communion with God which appears to me the Heaven of Heavens. Some cleansing retribution, some further purification, seems to me necessary and likely for myself—and, I must add, for the greater number of those human beings with whom I have had to do—before we attain to that blessed consummation.

“So you believe in a Purgatory then?” How do I know? Say rather, I conjecture there may be many heavens. In any case, I find it very easy to imagine a retribution and a purification that shall be purely spiritual, without having recourse to any material flames or physical horrors. Some people find a difficulty in this notion: they consider it, but deliberately put it aside; as if mere remorse, sorrow, and self-condemnation, could never be bitter enough to constitute a just Hell. I do not think they have ever realized—perhaps they have never tried to realize—the pain that may be felt by a spirit sitting alone, away from this familiar world and every well-known face, and quietly judging and condemning itself. A mere accident, a ludicrous accident, once gave me a moment’s experience of this feeling, and I have never been able to forget it, never been able to put aside the conviction that that feeling, intensified, might constitute Hell.

It happened in this way. Some years ago, before nitrous oxide had come into very general use among dentists, I went to have a tooth extracted, and determined to try the gas. Perhaps I had some misgivings that it was a little cowardly; perhaps I was a little nervous; in any case I remember at the last moment thinking that I should like to be conscious of the precise moment when unconsciousness came; I remember struggling to retain consciousness—even when a tell-tale throbbing in the temples shewed that something new was going on—protesting to myself that the gas had “no power,” “no power at all yet,” “I don’t believe it’s going to have any power”—till the portcullis came down. I suppose the consequence was that I inhaled rather more than was usual; and when I came to myself I heard the voices of the dentist and the physician—a long way off, as it seemed to me, but with perfect distinctness saying that “he was a long time coming to” and they did not “quite like the look of things,” and so on. Meantime I lay motionless and without power either to move or speak, but perfectly conscious. I took in the whole situation at once. I was dead. I had passed into another state of existence. I could think more clearly than before. I was a spirit. And then the thought came pressing in upon me, as I reviewed my whole life and the manner of my death, that to avoid a little pain I had done a wrong thing and had deserted those who needed me and would miss me. No fear possessed me, not the slightest fear, of any external punishment for the fault which I thought I had committed: but in a detached solitude I seemed to be quietly and coldly sitting in judgment upon myself, impartially hearing what I had to say in self-defence, rejecting it as inadequate, and passing against myself the verdict of Guilty. Painful, increasingly painful, the burden of this self-condemnation seemed to press and crush me down more and more past power of bearing, so that at last, when in one moment I recovered both power of motion and knowledge that I was alive again, I leapt up from the dentist’s arm-chair, and, without taking the least notice of the two operators, I gave vent to my feelings by shouting aloud the well-known words from Clarence’s dream

“—and for a space

Could not believe but that I was in hell.”

I shall not easily forget the look of mingled humour and horror with which the dentist replied, “Well, sir, considering you are a clergyman, I should have hoped it might have been the other place.” I tried to explain. I assured him that it was a quotation from Shakespeare; that I had not really believed that I was in the place commonly called Hell; and so on. But I am quite sure my explanations were utterly ineffectual; and to this day I probably labour under the suspicion, in the minds of at least two worthy persons, of having committed some horrible crime by which my conscience is racked with agony. In reality, however, it was a small offence, if any, for which I suffered that bad quarter of a minute; and I have often since thought that, if the mind is capable of inflicting such pain upon itself for a venial error, those pangs must be terrible indeed with which our sinful souls may be forced to scourge themselves when we judicially review the actions of a selfish life with a compulsory knowledge of all the evil, direct and indirect, which we have wrought, and when we realize at last—ah, how differently from the dull, decorous, conventional contrition with which we droned out the words on earth, kneeling on the hassocks in the family pew—that “we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and done those things which we ought not to have done.”

But why do I thus discourse in detail upon a subject about which I have admitted that I know no details? It is in order to shew you that though I do not know much, the little I do know greatly influences me. The thought of a material Hell has probably contributed largely to insanity, and has exercised a baneful influence upon many women and children; but the majority of healthy men who profess to believe in a pit of flame are little influenced by it. It is so horrible, so unnatural, so unjust, that in their heart of hearts they feel sure the good God cannot mean it; He will let them off; or they will get off somehow—by absolution, by forensic justification, by baptism, by uncovenanted mercies, or what not. This is but natural. How can it not be natural to believe that an unnatural and arbitrary Hell may be dispensed with by an unnatural and arbitrary indulgence? I have no such consolations. With me, Hell is a different thing altogether: it is natural, it is inevitable, it is just, it is merciful. Not a day passes but I think of it and anticipate it in some sort for myself and my friends. Tout sepayera: this act, I say, or this neglect, was wrong, and must have been injurious: the doers cannot escape from the consequences of it; I do not wish to escape from the consequences of it. God will work good out of evil; but He will be just, not indulgent. I do not want Him to be indulgent. Thus Heaven and Hell, impending over the routine of my every-day life, become to me practical and potent realities; but they are real to because the conceptions I have formed of them are in accordance with the profound laws of spiritual nature, and quite independent of the conflicting fancies of theologians.

Ask me what I trust to be in Heaven, and I can give you no answer save that one which I have often given you before—a being capable of loving and of serving God. Ask me the nature of Hell and Heaven, and my only reply is that they will be God’s retribution. Ask me whether all will be hereafter “saved,” and I am silent, or merely answer that God is good, and that I believe a time will come when we, in Him, shall look back, and around, and forward, and shall see that His work has been “very good.” Enough for me to work and fight on the side of God and against Evil, that His righteous Kingdom may come and bring with it the time when His work will be seen to have been “very good.” As for other details, I know nothing and delight in knowing nothing. I do not know whether I shall live again on earth or elsewhere; whether I shall be a being of three dimensions, or four, or of no dimensions at all; whether I shall be in space or out of space. It is far better to give up speculations about accidental trifles such as these: for accidents they are, as compared with the essence of the second life, which consists in Love. Do not give up the belief in that, at any cost; least of all, at the cost of a little banter. “But surely it is possible that our very highest and purest conceptions of Heaven may fall short of the reality.” Granted: but we must hold fast to the belief that there is at all events a proportion between our best terrestrial aspirations and their celestial equivalents. We must reject, as from Satan, the suggestion (was it Spinoza’s?) that there is no more likeness between God and our conception of God than between the constellation Canis and a dog. “God may not be Love:” I do not believe you: but if He is not Love, He will be some celestial form of Love, corresponding to our Love, only infinitely better. “You will not retain your individuality:” possibly not, but certainly we shall have something corresponding to individuality, only better. And so of the rest. We shall talk humbly, as beseems our microcosmic faculties; we are but the transitory tenants of a little world, which is to the Universe but as a dew-drop to the ocean: yet even a dew-drop exhibits the same infrangible laws of light and the same divine glories that are manifested in the rainbow and the sunset. So it is with a human soul: there are laws in it of righteousness and justice and retribution—laws which cannot be broken by the fictions and illusions of theology, but must be manifested in all places and in all time, now and for all eternity, on earth, in Heaven, in Hell.

XXVII
PAULINE THEOLOGY

My dear ——,

I will begin this letter by quoting the end of your last. For when you have thought over the matter I am sure your mind will be so completely changed that unless I send you an exact copy of your own words you will hardly believe you could ever have written them. You are speaking about the theology of St. Paul, and this is what you say: “I presume that Natural Christianity, however glad it may be to shelter itself under Pauline authority in the low estimate it sets on miracles, will find it difficult to digest or swallow Pauline theology. The abstruse and artificial doctrines of the imputation of righteousness, justification by faith, and the atonement, must surely stand at the very antipodes of any religion, Christian, or other, that can claim the name of natural.”

I do not believe you can ever have given five minutes of attention to these subjects: or if you have, you must have attended, not to St. Paul, but to some voluminous commentator who has buried St. Paul’s text under his own and other people’s annotations. Cast your commentaries away. Read St. Paul for yourself in the light of his own works and the Old Testament (especially the Septuagint version), and I will guarantee that his general drift shall come out clear and definite enough; and, what is more, you shall acknowledge that his religion is perfectly natural, so natural that you meet exemplifications of it every day of your life, in every family, in your own home, in your own heart. It would be tedious if I were to give you a scheme of Pauline theology and then shew you the naturalness of each part of the scheme. For me it would be long and wearisome; and you too would be inclined to stop me at the end of every other sentence and say “I know that St. Paul says this or that, but how is it natural?” I will therefore begin at the other end, that is to say, with Nature, and endeavour to shew you that the natural history of a child, under favourable circumstances, exhibits the general features of St. Paul’s theology, the scheme of Redemption by which the Apostle believed mankind to have been led to God.

We begin then with a baby—a creature wholly selfish (in no bad sense), say, “self-regarding.” He is of course “in the flesh,” or “walks according to the flesh;” that is to say, he obeys every impulse of the moment, and these impulses are what we call animal impulses. He is conscious of no Law, and therefore of no error: being “without the Law” he “knows not sin.” As he grows up, he finds himself making mistakes, trespassing against Nature’s rules, playing with fire, for example: and Nature’s punishment makes him conscious of mistake, and desirous of avoiding mistake for fear of being punished; that is to say, he learns to avoid playing with fire because he has been burned for it. This is his first introduction to “the Law;” and if he obeys Nature’s Law, through fear of Nature’s punishment, or hope of Nature’s reward, so much the better for him. Hitherto, however, there is no question of sin, only of mistake. But now comes in the parental Law, saying “Do this,” “Do not do that.” Sometimes he obeys; sometimes, when “the flesh” is too strong, he disobeys. In the latter case he is punished. This new kind of Law is not a machine-like reward or punishment like that of Nature: it is connected with a Will, which is dimly felt by the child to be higher and better than his own, yet constantly opposed to his own. Here then arises a conflict between his strong animal impulses, i.e. “the flesh,” and a weak nascent impulse of conscience, i.e. “the spirit;” the former bidding him disobey the higher Will, the latter bidding him obey. Even when he disobeys, the spirit has at least the power to make him uneasy in his disobedience, and this uneasiness for the first time reveals in him the nature of sin. Until the Law of the higher Will was thus placed side by side with his own will, and until the deflections of his own will from the higher Will were thus made manifest and rebuked by conscience, the child had no notion of sin. Now he knows it: “by Law has come the knowledge of sin.”

As long as he is thus “under the Law” he cannot possibly be righteous; he can neither be “justified” nor feel “justified.” When he is disobedient under the Law, he is conscious of sin; but when he is obedient under the Law, he is not conscious of peace or inward harmony: the Law stands up, for ever antagonistic to his natural impulses, and he cannot but dislike it, although he acknowledges its claims upon him: consequently, even when he obeys it, he obeys it with a sense of servitude, obeying in the fear of punishment or in the hope of reward. Such actions as are performed in this spirit have no spontaneousness or grace; they are the tasks of a hireling, mere piece-work—“works,” as St. Paul more shortly calls them. or “the works of the Law;” and “by the works of the Law shall no flesh be justified.” During this period he finds no guidance from the spirit of loving obedience, but has to trust in formularies and prescriptions, “do this,” “avoid that;” he fears lest he may do too little, and grudges lest he may do too much: he is in the condition, not of a son, but of a servant working for wages. Just as the Stoic said of the man who was not “wise,” that whatever he did, even to the moving of his little finger, was sure to be wrong, so St. Paul taught—and it is the truth—that our every action, as long as we are “under the Law,” is void of harmony, beauty, freedom, and spiritual life: it is but obedience to a dead rule; such actions are of the nature of sin and tend to spiritual destruction: “the wages of sin are death.”

During this state the raw, half-developed, ungraceful, unharmonized, and ever-erring boy of fifteen appears to have retrograded from the perfectly graceful and unconscious selfishness of the innocent child of four. But it is not so. The knowledge of sin is the stepping-stone to a higher righteousness than could have been obtained by perpetuating the innocence of childhood. Even during the period of the “bondage to the Law” there were occasional intervals of freedom, prophetic of a higher state. Duty, sometimes, shining out before the child as something purer and nobler than a mere inevitable debt, appeared “sweet and honourable;”[^[37]] and wherever Duty thus revealed herself, the child, in freely and ungrudgingly obeying her, was obeying no unworthy emblem of the Father in heaven; and by such obedience his character was strengthened and matured. But now the time has come for another step upwards. The boy disobeys and is forgiven. At first, forgiveness makes no impression on him. He does not understand it, does not believe in it, because he does not quite believe in the author of it; he regards his father as one too far above him to be able to sympathize entirely with his boyish desires and impatience of restraint, too much like a Law to be capable of feeling real pain at his faults. As long as he is in this condition, forgiveness comes to him as the mere remission of penalty; he is glad to “get off,” but his heart is not yet touched, and there is therefore no real remission of sin, partly because he has no sufficient sense of sin, partly because he has no faith in the forgiver.

But at last comes the revelation of the meaning of forgiveness. Some outward sign, a mother’s tear, the mere expression of the father’s face—it may be this, or it may be something of much longer duration and far more complex—but something at last brings home to him the fact that his sin weighs like a crushing burden upon the heart of some one else, who, in spite of his sin, still loves him and still trusts in him. His parents, he finds—or it may be some brother, sister, or friend—are bearing his sin and carrying his iniquity as if it were their own: the shame and the pain of it, which he feels as a mere unpleasant uneasiness, are causing to others an acute sorrow of which he had not dreamed before. Instead of being savagely angry with him, furious at the mischief he has done, and at the disgrace which he has brought upon them, instead of visiting upon him all the consequences of his fault, his parents are themselves suffering some part of it, themselves crushed down by it: if they punish him, they are not punishing him vindictively but for his good—it is hard indeed to believe this, but he believes it at last—the chastisement of his peace falls upon them as well as upon him; their heart is broken and contrite for his sake; their souls are a sacrifice for his; they feel his sin as if it were their own; they have appropriated his sin; have been identified with his sin; they are “made sin” for him.

Now if the youth has not in him the germ of faith or trust whereby he can believe in the sincerity of these (to him) mysterious and at first inexplicable feelings, why then the parental forgiveness is worse than nothing to him. If he resists its influence and calls it cant or humbug, it hardens instead of softening the boy’s heart; and then the little spiritual sensitiveness that he once had, dies rapidly away. In this case “from him that hath not there hath been ta’en away even that which he seemed to have,” and the good-tidings or Gospel of forgiveness has proved, in this case, “a savour of death unto death.” But if he has the germ of faith to begin with, then the Gospel works its natural result: “to him that hath there is added, and he hath more abundantly.” “Proceeding from faith” the message of forgiveness tends “to the increase of faith.”[^[38]] Insensibly he finds himself raised up from his former position to the level of those who have forgiven him; he is identified with his forgivers in spirit, so that he now sees things as they see them, and for the first time discerns the hatefulness of sin, and hates it as they hate it, and longs to shake it off as a burden alien to his nature. At the same time, finding himself trusted by those in whose truth as well as goodness he himself places trust, he learns a new self-respect even in the moment when he awakens to his past degradation; he has (he feels it to be true) something within him that may be trusted, some possibility of better things which at once springs up into the reality of fulfilment under the warm breath of affectionate and trustful forgiveness. In other words, righteousness is “imputed to him,” and he becomes righteous. The gulf between the parental will and himself is now bridged over by a kind of atonement. The relations which he imagined and created for himself before between his parents and himself, were angry justice on the one side, sullen obedience or open disobedience on the other side: all this is now exchanged for an entirely different relationship, love on both sides, kind control from the one, willing, zealous obedience from the other, resulting in perfect peace and in an atmosphere of mutual goodwill, happiness, joy, favour. For this kind of “favour” we have no exact word in English, but in the Greek Testament it is called by a word which we must translate “grace:” the youth then is “no more under the law but under grace.” No longer now is he a servant, performing “works;” a community of feeling unites him with those above him, whom he had once regarded as hostile and despotic. No longer the slave of rules and orders, no longer fearing punishment nor drudging for reward, he is quickened by a spirit within him which guides him naturally to do, and to anticipate, not only the bidding, but even the unexpressed wishes, of that higher Will. His whole life is now a service devoted to this new Master; yet he is not a servant, but free, because he serves willingly in a service which is the noblest freedom. The simplest actions are performed in a fresh spirit; all things have become new: the life of the flesh is ended, the life of the spirit has begun. Looking back upon his former self he finds that it is dead; he has died unto sin and risen from the dead that he may live again to righteousness.

Is it necessary for me to trace the parallelism between these phenomena in the life of the individual and the Pauline scheme of the redemption of man? You must have recognized in each step of the development sketched above some feature of the Pauline doctrine. My fear is, not so much that you may fail to acknowledge this, as that you may doubt whether the individual always passes through these phases. But I am confident that it must be so for all who are to be saved: there is no royal road of privilege or miracle by which a man can pass from the innocent selfishness of childhood to the practised righteousness of manhood, without passing through the narrow defiles of the flesh and fighting his battle with sin; nor do I believe that any man, has ever been “saved,” that is to say, has passed through that struggle so far safely as to attain some thoughtfulness for others, some love of righteousness for its own sake, unless he has received through the Word of God some such revelation as I have described.

The typical revelation of this kind, which sums up all others, is the revelation made by the atonement of Jesus Christ: but that revelation has been a silence for the myriads who have died in ignorance of the very name of Jesus: is there no other way then in which the Word of God has taught them, redeemed them, forgiven them, made atonement for them? Yes, assuredly the Word of God has been mediating between God and men since men first existed—long before the time when the children of Israel “drank of that Rock which followed them, and that Rock was Christ”—and the chief vehicle of His mediation has been the influence of the righteous on the unrighteous, especially of parents on children. In this influence, the bright and central point has been the power which each man has, in some poor degree, of forgiving, and making atonement for, the sins of others—a power so weak and small, compared with the same power in Christ, that it may be easily ignored by superficial observers; and some may think to do God honour by ignoring it. But in reality whoso ignores it is ignoring the best gift of God to man. This undeveloped power of forgiving has been that uneffaced likeness of God in which He created us; and every act of forgiveness, from Adam down to John the Baptist, has been inspired by the Word of God to be a type and prophecy of that great and unique act which sums up and explains all forgiveness, the Atonement made by the Word’s own sacrifice. I said above that the mother’s tear might for the first time reveal to a child the meaning and power of forgiveness. What the tear of a mother may be to her child, that the Cross of Christ has been to mankind; the expression as it were, of the Father’s pitifulness for His sinful children, revealing to them the meaning, and the pain, of forgiveness.

St. Paul (you will find) in all his epistles recognizes the analogy between the human race and the individual; and all that he teaches about mankind corresponds to the development I have tried to sketch above. You will be told indeed that the attempt to trace such a parallelism as I have traced above, is an attempt to “read modern thoughts into an ancient author.” But do not be in haste to call St. Paul an “ancient author,” not at least in any disparaging sense, as if we had outgrown the antiquated limits of his thoughts. Being a man of realities St. Paul dived deep down below the surface of language, cant, and formularies; he reached the very source and centre of the human heart where righteousness is made. He realized the making of righteousness as a visible process. Others, who have not realized it, think his writings misguided, antique, occasionally untrue. But do not you fail to distinguish between St. Paul’s style and St. Paul’s thought. He wrote in a hurry; he did not think in a hurry. The general scheme of his theology needs no excuse, nor allowance, nor patronage. His illustrations of it, arguments in defence of it, even his expressions of it, are, from our point of view, often inadequate; but his spiritual truths are the deepest truths of human nature, as it may be seen ascending through illusion and frailty to divine knowledge and divine righteousness. St. Paul has been wonderfully obscured by formularizing commentators. The best commentary on him that I know is an ordinary home; but for a young man, away from home, and in danger of forgetting his childhood, the next best commentary is Shakespeare, and the next to that is Wordsworth, or, from a different point of view, the In Memoriam.

Tell me now; was I wrong in saying that the Pauline scheme of salvation is eminently natural? I do not of course mean materialistic, but natural in the sense of orderly. Where, in the whole of this doctrine, is there any necessity for believing that the Son of God—“born of a woman” and manifested “in the flesh that he might destroy the works of the devil”—did or said anything that involves a suspension of the laws of nature? I have already shewn that the “miracles” wrought by St. Paul himself were in all probability works of healing, and natural; and the manifestations in which Christ “appeared” to him and to the other disciples have been shewn to be, in all probability, visions in accordance with the laws of nature, though representing an objective reality. There is no reference in St. Paul’s works to the Miraculous Conception, nor to any of those miracles of Jesus which, if historical, must be admitted to be real miracles. On the other hand there runs through all his epistles an acknowledgment of a continuous spiritual Law, predetermined and inviolable. What else does St. Paul mean by the continual assertion that the calling of the Gentiles, and the “election” of all men, are “predestined?” Perhaps you have never yet appreciated the circumstances which led the Apostle to lay so much stress on the “predestination” apparent in history. I do not think you can ever understand St. Paul’s teaching on this subject, as long as you fasten your attention on two or three isolated texts which appear to set it forth. You must look at it as a whole, and have regard to the motive of the author; and then you will find that it is to be understood negatively rather than positively. When St. Paul says “God predestined this, or that,” he means, “God did not make a mistake, or change his mind, about this or that: the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.”

In setting forth Predestination, St. Paul is always mentally protesting against two tendencies already perceptible to him in the Church, the tendency of the Jews to regard the admission of the Gentiles into the Church as an after-thought, perhaps as a mistake; and the tendency of the Gentiles to regard the Law of Moses as a complete and useless failure. It was one of St. Paul’s main objects to shew that the history of Israel and of the Gentile world revealed a thread of immutable purpose of salvation running through the whole—a purpose to subordinate evil to good, the flesh to the spirit, the Law to the Gospel; so that there has been no mistake, no dislocation of the divine scheme, nor change of the divine will. Although the Apostle always refers things to a Will and not a Law as their ultimate origin, yet the whole tenour of his argument exhibits that Will as being not liable to caprice or accidental shifting, but a Will of predestination, a Law, so to speak, tinged with emotion. No doubt St. Paul, sometimes, in the attempt to shew the immutability of the divine purposes, puts forward somewhat baldly and repellently the insoluble problem of the origin of evil, as if God Himself predestined not only rejection but also the sin that was the cause of rejection. But it was not his intention to exhibit God as originating evil; and the cause that leads him so to do, or so to appear to do, is his intense desire to exhibit God’s mysterious plan of not at once annihilating evil but of utilizing it and subordinating it to good. The fore-ordained purpose of God before the foundation of the world is the redemption of mankind; and in order to help men to attain to this height, the flesh, the law, death, yes, even sin itself, are forced to serve as stepping-stones. Hence even in rejection, as well as in election, the Apostle cannot fail to discern the hand of God. There is a Law in all God’s doing, and especially in His election. God hath chosen the weak things of this world to confound the strong and the foolish things of this world to confound the wise; the first-born is rejected, the younger son is chosen. This is not accident; it is a type of the general law exemplified in the vision of Elijah. Not by the whirlwind or the fire or the earthquake but by the quiet and neglected processes of nature does God perform His mightiest works. This deep truth pervades the doctrine of St. Paul. Pierce through the antique and Oriental integument of his expression, and you will find no other Christian writer who so clearly brings out that the Christian religion is not according to caprice but according to Law.

XXVIII
OBJECTIONS

My dear ——,

You tell me that you have been shewing my letters to some of your young friends, and that they have expressed various objections to non-miraculous Christianity. Some say that I am an “optimist;” others that it is a compromise between faith and reason, and that compromises are always to be rejected; one says that I am for introducing “a new religion;” others that a Gospel of illusion must, by its own shewing, be itself illusive; others, that “these new notions are so vague that they can never be put into a definite shape, and they are so mixed up with theories and fancies and suppositions of error in every period of the Church, that they can never commend themselves to the masses.”

Do you know what “cant” means, and why it was so called? “Cant” is the sort of language used (not always deceitfully) when a man “chants,” or utters in a kind of sing-song, words that he has not felt himself, or, if he has ever felt, has ceased to feel, through the too frequent use of them. Hence he cannot speak them, but “sing-songs” them, “chants” or “cants” them. Now I take leave to think that two or three of the objections above-mentioned come under this head of “cant.” I mean that your young objectors, not knowing exactly at the moment what to say about opinions that are new and require some thought to understand or criticise, and being desirous of saying something at the moment, and something, if possible, that shall be brief and smart, say what they have heard other people say about other sets of opinions which have some affinity of sound with mine. This is a very common habit with inferior professional reviewers, who are bound to say something readable and epigrammatic for limited remuneration and consequently in limited time: but your friends have not come to that yet, and are therefore not to be so easily excused.

“Optimist!” How can a man who believes in a real Satan be an optimist? I thought an optimist was one who believed the world to be the best of all possible worlds. This I do not, and cannot, believe. I trust indeed that a time may come when we may be optimists after a fashion; when we shall look back, in God, upon the universal sum of things and find that it has been the best possible under the circumstances, and that evil has been marvellously subordinated to good: but I never can believe that a Universe in which God defeats Satan is better than a Universe in which God reigns unresisted; and therefore, as to this “best of all possible worlds,” I rest always humbly silent. Some people may believe, if they can, that evil is another form of good; that the world is like one of those spectroscopes—I think they call them—where several different pictures on a round card, each meaningless by itself, are converted into one significant picture by whirling the card round too quickly for the eye to follow. In the same way they seem to suppose they can take little pictures of oppression, adultery, murder, and the other myriad shapes of sin, spin them round fast enough along with other little pictures of temperance, purity, peace, and all the virtues; and the whole becomes a panorama of moral perfection! Argue thus who will; I cannot.

If I am not an optimist in my view of this world, you will surely not accuse me of optimism in my views of the next. Do my notions of heaven and hell encourage any one to be selfish and luxurious or idle now, in the hope that he will be let off easily hereafter? Have I not said that there will be no “letting off”? That God will do the best thing for Nero—is that do you think likely to make Nero altogether an optimist in the life to come? I think He will do the best thing for me; but I sometimes shiver when I say it; awe possesses me, awe mingled with trust, but certainly not without a touch of fear. Assuredly the certainty of retribution in heaven makes me no optimist for myself or others, as to the life after death. In one sense only am I an optimist, that I believe that the best will ultimately prevail, and that faith, hope, and love, will prove the dominant powers in the Universe. This I believe, and to this belief I cling as a most precious hope, to be cherished by action as well as by meditation; but this is not, I think, what is ordinarily meant by optimism; and certainly it does not encourage the spirit of laissez faire which optimism is supposed to breed.

Next as to “compromise.” The ordinary cant about “compromise” is sometimes the lazy expedient of those who wish to avoid the trouble of coming to a decision, and to shelter their indolence under a noble censoriousness. What they mean by “compromise” is any theory that attributes results to more than one cause. It is generally very easy to elaborate some extreme theory which shall explain almost everything by some single cause, by Faith, for example, on the one side, or by Reason on the other; and it is equally easy for the advocates on either side to demolish the theory of their adversaries; but it is far from easy afterwards to shew how, and to what extent, both causes are accountable for the result which has been fictitiously attributed to a single cause. Now the two extreme parties, in their contests, afford us fine cut-and-thrust exhibitions; the via media exhibits an organized campaign. The theatrical multitude, which does not care in the least about truth, but delights in intellectual slashers, soon finds it dull work, after clapping an exciting mêlée, to have to sit still and listen to a dispassionate and impartial discussion; so they cry “compromise” and hiss. But the term is a misnomer. “Compromise,” or “mutual promise,” cannot describe a legitimate conclusion that hits the mark missed by two previously divergent shots. It is as if A were to hit the top of the target, and B the bottom, and then both A and B were to fall foul of C, and accuse him of “compromising”, because he pierces the bull’s eye half way between the two. “Compromise” often implies a failure of exact justice; as when Smith thinks Jones owes him 50l., and Jones thinks he owes Smith only 40l.; and they “split the difference” and make it 45l.; both of them thinking that the arrangement is unjust, but both preferring the injustice to the expensive formalities of legal justice. This is “compromise,” and illogical; but there is none of this illogicality in a fair impartial discussion avoiding previous bias.

So in the present instance. Some have been biassed in favour of Faith, others in favour of Reason; some have accepted as historical all the miracles and mighty works in the Old and New Testament indiscriminately, others have rejected all indiscriminately; some have declared that every word in the Old and New Testament (I don’t quite know how they have got rid of the difficulty of various readings) is exactly inspired and every detail historically true; others, that there are so many errors and illusions that the books may be put aside as no better than myths: some have said that, since we cannot worship an unknown Being, we must worship the human race; others that, since we cannot worship our very degraded selves, we must worship some being altogether different from ourselves: some have said that Christ is God, and have ignored His humanity; others have said that He was a “mere man,” and therefore not divine. Now in all these cases the truth lies between the two extremes. Man derives religious truth from Faith, but Faith assisted by Reason; Christ did not perform miracles, but He did perform mighty works; the Old and New Testament, like all other vehicles of revelation, contain illusion, but illusion preserving and protecting truth; we must not worship ourselves, and yet we cannot worship one who is altogether different from ourselves; Christ is a man, and yet Christ is God. But to all these conclusions we are not led by “mutual promise,” give and take of any kind, but by full and unbiassed consideration of all sides of the subject, knowing that (for the present at all events) we shall displease all, both the orthodox and heterodox alike.

So far from suggesting any compromise between Faith and Reason, I have merely pointed out that the provinces of the two are, to a very large extent, distinct, so that many of their operations can be performed altogether independently. I have never said, “Do not follow out the conclusions of your Reason in this or that instance because you would be led to inconvenient results,” but, “Follow out the conclusions of your Reason in every instance and presently acknowledge that you are led, in some cases, to results so absurd and unpractical that you must infer Reason to be out of its province in these cases. Reason your utmost for example about a First Cause and Predestination and the Origin of Evil and the like; but then, when you have come to the conclusion that, logically speaking, it is equally absurd to suppose that the world had no cause, and that the First Cause had no cause, give the subject up as being beyond the syllogistic powers.” Surely there is no unworthy compromise here, nothing but common sense! Wherever historical facts are affirmed in religion, I have said that the accounts of those facts are to be judged upon evidence and by Reason alone; here Faith and Hope have no place; history in the New Testament is to be judged like history in Thucydides.

In reality it is not I with my via media that am guilty of compromise; it is the Hyper-orthodox (if I may use a term that is nominally meaningless but really quite intelligible) and the Agnostic. For the Hyper-orthodox say “Accept the Scriptures in a lump.” Why? “Because it would be so very inconvenient not to have an infallible guide.” Of course they do not say so in these precise words: but this is what their replies ultimately amount to. Again the Agnostics say, “Reject the Scriptures in toto.” Why? “Because it would be so very inconvenient to weigh evidence and discriminate the true from the false.” It is these, not I, who are calling in emotion to do the work of Reason, and who (partly, I think, to avoid facing unpalatable facts) force Reason to make a compromise with prejudice. “Convenience,” as I have pointed out in a previous letter, may be a legitimate basis for accepting as a Law of Nature the tried and tested suggestions of the Imagination; but it is not a legitimate basis on which to construct a belief in the genuineness of the Book of Daniel or the Second Epistle of St. Peter.

Let me mention one point where, in appearance, but not in reality, my theory is liable to the charge of compromise: I mean the discussion of the Miraculous Conception and the Supernatural Incarnation. In discussing the Miraculous Conception I have advised you to trust to your Reason alone, because here you have to deal with a statement of physical facts, true or untrue, and to be proved or disproved by evidence; but as regards the Supernatural Incarnation and the statement that the Word of God became a human spirit, I have pointed out that here we have a statement that cannot be proved or disproved by simple historical evidence, nor even by miracle, because even if an archangel descended from heaven to trumpet forth a “Yes” or “No” to the world, the message might be from the Devil. If then we are to believe in the Incarnation we must have a twofold testimony. First must come the historical evidence indicating the words, and deeds, and character, and results, of the life of Christ, the truth of which must be judged by the Reason; and then there must come the witness of the conscience exclaiming “This life is divine; this man is one with God.” Consequently it is quite possible to accept the Supernatural Incarnation while denying the Miraculous Conception; and this I have felt obliged to do. But where is the compromise or inconsistency? I am compelled by evidence and Reason to deny the truth of the Miraculous Conception, on account of the very small amount of evidence for it and the very large amount of evidence against it; I am equally compelled by evidence and Faith to accept the Supernatural Incarnation, because the evidence convinces me that a certain life has been lived on earth, and my conscience convinces me that this life could not have been lived by any being who was not one with God.

Are my accusers equally free from confusion? I think not. Ask the Hyper-orthodox why they believe in the Miraculous Conception in spite of the silence of all the earliest documents; they will reply, (if you penetrate below their first superficial answers, such as, “Because it is in the Bible,” “Because I have believed it from my youth upward,” and the like), “Jesus must have been born miraculously, because He was the Son of God”—a confusion of things historical and spiritual, and a manifest expulsion of Reason from her rightful province. Again, ask the Agnostic why he does not believe that Jesus was the Son of God; he will reply that he sees no proof of the fact, nor even of the existence of a God; and if you press him to define what he means by “proof” of the existence of a God, you will find that he wholly ignores the influence of Imagination as a means of arriving at truth, and that he requires some kind of evidence that shall entirely dispense with Faith. Thus the Hyper-orthodox and the Agnostic are equally guilty, the one of dispossessing Reason, the other of dispossessing Faith, from their rightful provinces; and they accuse me of “compromising,” not because I really compromise, but because I pursue truth at the cost of some trouble, while they—partly perhaps to avoid the pain of thinking, and the prospect of colliding with hard unpleasing truths—pursue severally that form of untruth to which they are inclined by prejudice.

And now for the next objection, that “this is a new religion.” How can men give the name of a new religion to that which proclaims as the one means of salvation the Eternal Word of God believed in of old by Jews as well as by Christians? Or is it a mark of novelty to accept Jesus of Nazareth as that Word incarnate? The one thing new about the opinions put forward in my letters is this—that it is not a necessary condition for believing in Christ, that men should accept a number of historical statements which are, and have been, doubted by many honest seekers after truth. I believe I might add, without any exaggeration, that the statements which I impugn are rejected by so large a number of those who are most competent to judge, that, in spite of many inducements—some richly substantial, some nobly spiritual—many of the ablest and best educated young men of England cannot in these days be persuaded to become ministers of the religion which appears to insist on them. Beyond this protest, there is nothing, or very little, that is new about the theory which I have endeavoured to set forth. I do not protest against any moral abuse in the Church of England or the orthodox churches—such abuses as made a great gulf in the days of Luther between the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestants, when indulgences for sins were sold by the cart-load. Possibly indeed the protracted belief in the miraculous, when it has long outlived the conditions which made it natural or pardonable, may tend to produce some moral evil; some over-estimation of ostentatious and, so to speak, theatrical force; some depreciation of the quiet processes by which God has mostly taught and shaped mankind; some latent trust in a capricious God, who will not “reward men according to their works” but will exercise a dispensing power at the Day of Judgment. I say this may possibly soon happen, if it has not already begun to happen; but at all events it is at present latent, and it is not on any ground of this kind that I am advocating a new view of the Old and New Testament. My object has been not to destroy the old belief, but to remove certain obstacles which tend to prevent people from embracing the essence of the old belief. The existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, the conflict between God and Satan, the redemption of mankind through the sacrifice of the eternal Son of God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth, the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus, the operation of the Holy Spirit, the certainty of a heaven and hell, the efficacy of prayer, the ultimate triumph of goodness and God— all these things I steadfastly believe. But I see not the slightest reason why, in order to hold fast these precious truths, I should be compelled to believe that Joshua stopped the sun (or the earth?) or that an ass talked with a human voice, or that the incarnate Son of God drowned two thousand swine or destroyed a fig-tree with a word.

I am probably doing no more than give utterance to thoughts which have been already expressed by others, or which, though unexpressed, are latent in thousands of doubtful and expectant souls. But even were it otherwise, even were it granted that the form of Christianity set forth in my letters has some points of novelty, is mere novelty to suffice for its condemnation?—and this in our century, when God has been teaching and is teaching His children so much that is new in every department of knowledge! Is it absolutely incredible that the same Supreme Teacher who allowed some nineteen centuries to elapse between the Promise and the promised Seed, should allow another nineteen centuries to elapse between the Seed and the Harvest? Is it inconsistent that He who has led men to the truths of science through mistakes and illusions should lead men by the same paths to spiritual truth? How often must the Law of Illusion be inculcated before we take it to heart? Illusions have encompassed spiritual truth for Israel, for the Jews, for the Twelve in their Master’s lifetime, for the first generation of Christians, and for every subsequent generation down to the time of Luther. So much we Protestants are bound to admit. Are we not then intolerably presumptuous in assuming that illusions must have suddenly disappeared in the fifteenth century and have left the theological atmosphere for the first time since the creation of the world free from all spiritual refraction? How much humbler and truer to suppose that every century and every generation has its special cloud of illusions through which in due course we must all toil upward, penetrating layer after layer of the illusive mist till we reach at last the summit of the hill of Truth!

I find I have left myself too little time to answer your last two objections as to the “vagueness” of my views and their inability to “commend themselves to the masses.” I will try to answer them in my next letter.

XXIX
THE RELIGION OF THE MASSES

My dear ——,

I have been thinking over your objection that my notions are “vague;” feeling that there is some truth in it, but that your words do not quite express your probable meaning. I think you mean, not that the “notions” are vague, but that the proofs are vague. The “notions” are in the Creeds, if you interpret the Creeds spiritually: and I do not think that the Creeds are more “vague” when interpreted spiritually than when interpreted literally. The spiritual Resurrection of Christ, for example—is it more vague than the material Resurrection? If you admit that there is a spirit in man, and that this spirit is made apparently powerless by death, is it “vague” to say that the spirit of Jesus, after passing through this state of death, manifested itself to the disciples in greater power than ever? Even those who maintain the material Resurrection admit that it would be a mere mockery without the spiritual Resurrection, and that the latter is the essence of the act: so that to declare the statement of the spiritual Resurrection of Jesus to be “vague,” appears to be equivalent to declaring that any statement of the essential Resurrection of Jesus is “vague.” Again, redemption from sin is a spiritual notion, redemption from the flames of a material hell is a material notion; but is the former more “vague” than the latter? If so, then we are led to this conclusion, that all spiritual notions are more vague than material notions; and the vagueness which you censure is a necessary characteristic of every religion that approaches God as He ought to be approached, I mean, as a Spirit and through the medium of spiritual conceptions. But to my mind you are not justified in thus using the word “vague,” which ought rather to be applied to notions wanderingly and shiftingly defined; as for example, if I defined the Resurrection of Jesus as being at one time the rising of His body, at another the rising of His Spirit; or if I spoke of redemption, now as deliverance from sin, and now as deliverance from punishment. Convict me of such inconsistencies, and I will submit to be called “vague;” but at present I plead, “Not guilty.”

However I think you meant that the proofs, and not the notions were vague; and here, although you should not have used the word “vague,” I will admit that you would have been right if you had said that they were “complex” and “more easy to feel than to define.” No doubt the proof of Christ’s divinity from the material Resurrection is simple and straightforward enough: “It is impossible that a man’s body could have arisen from the grave, and that the man could have afterwards lived with his friends on earth for several days, and then have ascended into heaven, if he had not been under the express protection of God; and such a man we are prepared to believe, if he tells us that he is the Son of God.” That certainly would seem to a large number of minds a very plain and straightforward argument—as plain as Paley’s Evidences. No trust, no faith, no affection, is here requisite: nothing is needed except that rough and ready assumption—in which we are all disposed to acquiesce—that any altogether exceptional and startling power must come from God. It must be admitted that this sort of proof would be cogent as well as direct. Let a man rise from the dead to-morrow, and transport his body through closed doors, and say that he is Christ, and then mount up to the clouds and disappear; and I doubt not many of those who saw him would cry “This must be the Christ,” without so much as enquiring what manner of man he was. But cogent and popular and delightfully simple though it may be, this is not the kind of proof on which Jesus appears to have relied, or by which Jesus has produced a spiritual change in the hearts of mankind. The very fact that no trust or faith or affection is needed in such a demonstration, unfits it for spiritual purposes. In order to believe in the Resurrection of Jesus, a man needs the testimony of all his powers, emotional as well as intellectual, trust and love as well as reason; and I have endeavoured to shew above that the whole of the training of the human Imagination, and all the mysterious natural provisions which have stimulated the eye of the mind to see what the eye of the body cannot see, have contributed to bring about the faith in the risen Saviour. As we are to love God with our strength and with our mind as well as with our heart and our soul, so are we to believe in Christ with the same collective energy. The proof therefore of Christ’s Resurrection and of Christ’s divinity is intended to be, in a certain sense, complex, because it is intended to appeal to our every faculty and to be based upon our every experience.

But “this form of Christianity can never commend itself to the masses.” Objection in the shape of prophecy is always difficult to meet, and not often worth meeting. However, this prophecy has so specious a sound that it deserves some reply. But first let me ask, Does the present form of Christianity commend itself to the masses? Surely not to the very poor, that is to say, not to the class to whom Christ appears to have specially addressed Himself. And even among the classes which retain the tradition of worshipping Christ, has Christianity been such as would commend itself to Christ? Has not our religion been too often divorced from morality? Has there been dominant among us that habit of mutual helpfulness—“comforting one another,” as St. Paul calls it—which is the criterion of a truly Christian nation? Have not the laws in almost all cases, until the French Revolution, been made in the interests of the rich, rather than in the interests of the poor; and where the poor have been considered, has not the consideration arisen largely from the fear of violence and revolution? There has been a certain amount of alms-giving, or legacy-leaving, on the part of the minority who have laid themselves out to lead religious lives; and there has always been a still more select minority who have been imbued with a truly Christian enthusiasm for their fellow-creatures, a passionate desire to do something for Christ, and to leave the world a little better for their having lived: but the great unheeding mass of men in Christian countries has rolled on in its selfish path, less selfish certainly, less brutishly intent on present pleasure than the masses of heathendom, and indirectly humanized and leavened by a thousand Christian influences, but still not more than superficially Christian. The reason for this comparative failure has been, in part, that Christ has not been rightly presented to the hearts of the people. Too often it has not been Christ at all—it has been but a lifeless semblance of Christianity—to which they have given their adhesion. The fear of hell, the hope of heaven—these have been often the chief motives of religion; and alms-giving, church-going, Bible-reading, and the use of the sacraments, have been the means by which men have thought they could escape the one and secure the other. Asking still further the cause for this perversion, by which Christ has been converted into a second Law, we find that in some cases and more especially in recent times, it appears to have arisen in part from the miraculous element in our religion. This has made Christ unreal to some of us by taking Him out of the reach of our sympathies and affection; this also has artificialized our religious conceptions and divorced our religion from morality by making us think that God will suspend the laws of spiritual nature for us, as He has suspended the laws of material nature for Christ and Christ’s Apostles. Hence has arisen too often a pitiable and preposterous reversal of the Pauline theology. We have “died” unto Christ, and “risen again” unto the Law. “Grace” has fled away, and, with it, all natural and harmonious morality; and the whole duty of a Christian man has been degraded to a routine of “works.”

It is for this cause that the morality of Agnostics frequently surpasses the morality of professing Christians. The philanthropy of the former, so far as it goes, is at all events perfectly natural. They do not love their brother man in order to obey the Gospel or save their own souls; they love because they must love. Christ’s heaven is often in their hearts without any of the corruptions of a conventional Christianity. They do not believe in a capricious Heaven and Hell, but they are drawn towards goodness, kindness, justice and mutual helpfulness, whenever and wherever they see them; and such worship as they have, they give to these qualities. Hence also in foreign politics the working people and the Agnostics often manifest a much purer and more Christian feeling than church-goers. For the Hyper-orthodox, foreign politics lie outside the Bible; and whatsoever lies outside the Bible lies, for them, outside morality: but the Agnostic makes no such distinction; he does not believe that the laws of right and wrong can be miraculously suspended in favour of his own country. The disbelief in a future Heaven makes the poor indisposed to tolerate present remediable miseries in the hope of coming compensation. Hence they shew a much stronger determination not to put up with a state of things in which the happiness and prosperity of a whole nation are purchased by the misery of one class. They are willing enough individually to make sacrifices for one another, and, in bad times the working people have sometimes collectively borne considerable burdens with an admirable patience; but that the unwilling wretchedness of some should form the basis of the prosperity of the rest, and that the rest should be content to have it so—this they cannot endure; and sooner than this, they would prefer to see every class in the nation pulled down two or three degrees in wealth and refinement, if thereby the lowest class could be raised a single degree.

Rich church-goers are far more ready to acquiesce in present inequalities, sometimes consoling themselves with the thought that in heaven all these evils will be redressed, sometimes fortifying their acquiescence in the inevitable with a text of Scripture. But the poor declaim passionately against the Bible, when thus quoted—as being a mere instrument in the hands of the rich, and the priests their accomplices, to keep the miserable in a state of contentment with their misery. It is a pity that the poor should be embittered by misrepresentations against that which is pre-eminently the poor man’s Book; for no tribune or democrat more persistently than the Bible takes the side of the oppressed, or more emphatically declares that it is part of God’s method to raise up the poor from the dung-hill and to fill the hungry with good things, while He casts down the princes and sends the rich empty away. But the fact remains that, even when he raves against his own Book, the poor man is raving in the spirit of the Book. It is not in accordance with the Bible—and still less in accordance with the spirit of the New Testament and of Christ—that any nation should tolerate and perpetuate the misery of a class in order that the whole nation may prosper. Indeed in such a nation permanent prosperity—in any sense, and much more in the Christian sense—is quite impossible. Even though they may suppress rebellion and escape revolution for the time, the governing classes cannot escape the spiritual evils that must ultimately spring from that comfortable acquiescence in the wretchedness of others to which they may give the name of resignation but to which Christ would have given the name of hypocrisy. Material misery may imply the immorality of those who are forced to endure it; but it must imply the immorality and spiritual degradation of those who acquiesce in it because it does not come nigh them, and because “the Bible says it must be so.” Let but such Pharisaism continue for a generation, and it will have gone far to extinguish the purest of religions and to prepare the way for revolutionary strife.

It appears then that what is called “socialism” is really nothing but a narrow and unwise form of Christianity; narrow because it excludes the rich from its sympathies, and unwise because, instead of going to the root of evils, it simply aims at the branches; capable also, of course, (like every other theory) of being made to appear immoral, when adopted for self-interested or vindictive purposes—yet nevertheless containing much more of the Spirit of Christ than that selfish form of Christianity which has for its sole object the salvation of the individual. Socialism owes all that is good in it to Christ.

The gigantic evil of slavery (which is antagonistic to all true socialism) after a contest of eighteen centuries, has succumbed at last in Christian countries to Christ’s Spirit and to no other champion. Do you suppose that it perished owing to the “march of intellect,” or the discoveries of science, or the general refinement and rise in the standard of comfort and happiness among mankind? There is no reason at all for thinking so. The Law of Moses, as you know, recognized, though it controlled and mitigated, the institution of slavery. The race that gave birth to Socrates, Aristotle, Sophocles, Phidias, Euclid, Archimedes, and Ptolemy, was unable so much as to conceive of a state of society where slavery should not exist: civilization appeared to them to require the servitude of the masses as its necessary foundation. It was not cruelty or callousness that prompted Aristotle to divide “tools” into two classes, “lifeless” and “living”—under which latter head came slaves: it was want of faith in human nature. “Who would do the scullion-work in the great household of humanity if there were no slaves?” Such was the question which perplexed the great philosophers of antiquity and which Christ came to answer by making Himself the slave of mankind and classing Himself among the scullions. How strangely dull and unappreciative do those words of Renan sound, that, if you deduct from what Christ taught, what other people have taught before Him, little will be left that is original! “Taught!” It was not the teaching, it was the doing. Nay, it was not the doing, it was the in-breathing into mankind of a new Spirit, by means of doing, that ultimately destroyed slavery. “Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister and to give his life a ransom for many”—the Spirit that dictated these words, dictated also the death upon the Cross; and this Spirit has destroyed slavery and will establish true socialism upon earth.

“But this Spirit of Christ has never been fully obeyed or even understood by His followers: even St. Paul does not seem to have understood that Christianity was incompatible with slavery.” You are quite right. The Spirit of Christ has never yet been fully obeyed, and, when we thus obey it, life will be heaven. Do you not see that your objection ignores the fact that we are not yet in heaven, and that Christianity is to be a gradual growth? Are you not a little like the child who sows his mustard-seed at night and comes down next morning expecting to see the great tree in which the birds of the air ought to have built their nests? The important question is whether the Christian Spirit so far as it has been obeyed, has worked well; so that we may trust it to lead us still further forward into practical ameliorations of our existence, whether individual or national. But to expect it to do everything in eighteen hundred years, is to forget all the teaching of history, astronomy, and geology, three voices that unite in proclaiming that the Hand of God works slowly.

And further, as to your objection that even St. Paul did not realize the incompatibility between Christianity and slavery, what follows from that? Nothing I suppose except a confirmation of the words in the Fourth Gospel, that the followers of Christ must not depend entirely upon St. Paul, but upon that Spirit which shall “guide us into all truth.” To my mind it is refreshing and delightful to confess—as I am sure St. Paul himself would have been the first to confess—that he had not fully realized all the consequences to which the Spirit of Christ would lead posterity. I believe that St. Paul wished slaves to take every lawful opportunity of becoming free, but that he would by no means have encouraged slaves to run away or to rise violently against their masters. If he had encouraged them, and if he had universally succeeded, he would have caused the whole Empire, all civilized society, to collapse at once. Was he wrong in not causing this? I am not prepared to say so. I think he shewed more statesmanlike and Christian intuition in doing nothing of the kind. But he did much. He had no slaves of his own, you may be sure; he worked like a slave all night, that he might preach all day; he bore fetters like a slave, and was proud to call himself a slave for the sake of Christ; he inveighed against the spirit of slavery, declaring that in Christ “there is neither bond nor free;” and on the only occasion that we know of, when he had to mediate in a practical way between an angry master and a runaway slave, he sent the man back to his master without conditions or stipulations, but with a letter that was equivalent to an emancipation: “For perhaps he was therefore parted from thee for a season that thou shouldest have him for ever; no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a brother beloved, specially to me, but how much rather to thee, both in the flesh and in the Lord. If then thou countest me a partner, receive him as myself.” Was not this, practically and morally, more efficacious than if the Apostle had fulminated against the master Philemon fiery utterances about the rights of man and the incompatibility between Christianity and slavery? Was not Onesimus more sure of being emancipated by the quiet apostolic method? Was not Philemon likely to feel a quickened sense of new and higher duty when the Spirit of Christ was breathed into his heart by these touching and affectionate words, than if a Pauline edict had confronted him with a “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not”? St. Paul’s method has been the method of the Spirit of Christ: for eighteen centuries Christ has been saying to men, not “All slavery is unlawful,” but to each master about each individual slave, “If then thou countest Me a partner, receive him as Myself.” Hence by degrees has been shaped a conviction that slavery in itself is against the will of God.

But the destruction of slavery has not destroyed other problems of life which still await their solution from Christian socialism. When men cease to work from the compulsion of a master, they either give up working, or they work for some other motive—their own subsistence, or their own comfort, luxury, avarice, ambition, the mere pleasure and interest of work, or for the sake of others. Are people to give up working? And, if they work, which of these motives is to take the place of the old bestial coercion which prevailed in the days of slavery? These are the great questions of the present, affecting the happiness, morality, and religion of the whole human race. True Christians and true socialists are here at one. “If a man will not work, neither let him eat” is their answer to the first question; and the more we can combine to make the drone feel that he is out of place in the hive, and that he must either conform to the hive’s ways or betake himself elsewhither, the better will it be morally, and therefore ultimately better in all respects, for the inhabitants of the hive. As to the second question, socialists and moralists agree that each must work for the sake of others, and, as far as possible, for all. To my mind, therefore, one of the most hopeful signs of the times is to be discerned in the spread of the higher socialist spirit which protests against making competition the basis of national prosperity. Disguise it as you may, competition contains an ugly element which was clearly brought out by its first eulogist, the practical agricultural Hesiod, who tells us that there are two kinds of strife, namely, war and competition. The latter, he says, is good; for it rouses even the sluggard to action, when he sees his neighbour hastening to wealth:

“—this strife is good for mortals,

And potter envieth potter and carpenter carpenter.”

This is the plain truth. Competition is always in danger of producing “envy,” and, when it is carried consistently to its extreme—as where a large manufacturer undersells and ruins small manufacturers that he may secure a monopoly—it verges on that other kind of strife which Hesiod has himself described as “blameful;” it becomes a kind of war, and is manifestly unchristian. Christianity might have been therefore expected to protest against it; but it has not done so: that task has been reserved for the informal kind of Christianity called socialism. But very much more than protest is needed. The problem of competition and how to dispense with it—or how to restrain it while remedying its evils—is far more complex than that of slavery. Some people regard it as an inherent law of human society, a natural and continuous development of the law of the struggle for existence which we have inherited from our remotest ancestry. Others, while admitting this primæval origin, hope that, as progressive man has worked out from his nature much else of the baser element, so he may in time eliminate this also. But, if any success is to be attained, all sorts of experiments will have to be tried; all sorts of failures will have to be encountered; and it may be that in the end the Pauline method of dealing with slavery may be found the best means of dealing with competition—not so much protesting and fulminating, but the earnest, informal action of individual enthusiasm. Action like St. Paul’s may prepare the way for legislation; but, without change of temper, mere legislation cannot permanently help a people to deal with a great social difficulty.

In the solution of the complicated problems presented by competition, socialism, when severed from Christianity, labours (1885) under most serious disadvantages. Ignoring Christ, it reads amiss the whole of the history of the past and is in danger of making terrible mistakes in the future. Even where it avoids revolutionary extravagances, it is tempted to trust far too much to force, moral if not physical coercion, legislative enactments, and other shapes of what St. Paul would call “Law.” Looking up to no Leader in heaven, it does not feel sufficiently sure of ultimate success. “He that believeth,” says the prophet, “shall not make haste:” now socialism has no firm basis of belief and therefore is disposed to “make haste,” not always the haste of energy, sometimes the spasmodic haste of self-distrust and error, followed perhaps by dejection or inaction. Its neglect of the true religion leads it into political as well as religious mistakes. Taking too little account of sentiments, imaginations, and associations, it aims at a merely material prosperity which, if attained, would leave the minds of men still vacant and craving more; and besides, it proceeds by methods which excite alarm and distrust in many well-wishers. The most serious evil of all is that the leaders of the socialist movement, if they themselves see no Leader above them, are actuated by no sense of loyalty and affection such as Christians should feel for Christ, and consequently are far more exposed to the dangers arising from their own individual weaknesses and shortcomings. Their mainspring of action is a passionate enthusiasm for poor toiling humanity: but how if humanity shews itself to them at times in its basest aspects, ungrateful, suspicious, mean and shabby, timorous and traitorous, quite unworthy of their devotion? Are they to serve such a god as this? And it is a perishable god too; for must not all things perish, and the earth itself become ultimately as vacant as the moon? For so vile a master as this, then, are they to endure to be humiliated and attacked by the rich and powerful, envied and slandered by rival leaders, occasionally suspected even by the very poor to whom they are giving their lives? In moments of depression, when thoughts like these occur—as occur they must—it is hard indeed for a leaderless leader of men to refrain from flinging up his task, or from continuing to pursue it out of mere shame of inconsistency, or mere love of occupation, excitement, and power. When that change comes over the tribune of the poor, all is over with him. His work is done, though he may have done nothing. Outwardly such a man’s conduct may be little changed, but inwardly his spirit is dead within him. His religion—for it was a religion to him—is now dead; and sooner or later his changed influence must make itself felt in an infection of deadness spreading through the whole of the multitudes whom he once inspired.

It is for these reasons that I look to a simpler form of Christianity as the future religion of the masses; first because I see that the most active religious forces of the present day are already unconsciously following on the lines traced by Christ’s spirit; and secondly, because these movements already exhibit a deficiency which the worship of Christ alone can fill up.

The worship of Christ as the type and King of men helps to solve the problems of the individual as well as those of the nation. As long as human nature is what it is, as long as friends and families are parted by death, as long as the mind is liable to be weighed down by depression, and the body to be racked by physical pain, so long will there be hours when we shall all look upward and demand some other consolation than the commonplace; “These misfortunes are common to all.” Stripped of all myth and miracle, the life and death and triumph of Christ convey to the simplest heart the simplest answer that can be given to the irrepressible question, “Whence comes this misery?” From the cross of Christ there is sent back to each of us this answer, “We know not fully; but our Leader bore it, and good came of it in the end.” And when we stand at the brink of the grave and ask, “What is death?” again the answer comes back from the same source, “We know not fully; but He passed through it and He still lives and reigns.”

But besides the powerful influence of religion in the critical and exceptional moments of our lives, the influence of Christ would come full of strength and blessing to the working men of England even if they acknowledged Him, at first, in the most inarticulate of creeds, as the man whom they admired most: “We used to think that Christ was a fiction of the priests; at all events not a man like us in any way; a different sort of being altogether; one who could do what he liked—so people said—and turn the world upside down if he pleased: and then we could not make him out at all. Why, thought we, did he not turn the world upside down and make it better, if he could? It was all a mystery to us. But now we find he was a man after all, like us; a poor working man, who had a heart for the poor, and wanted to turn the world upside down, but could not do it at once; and he went a strange way, and a long way round, to do it; but he has come nearer doing it, spite of his enemies, than any man we know; and now that we understand this, we say—though we don’t understand it all or anything like it—‘He is the man for us.’” I say that even if this rudimentary feeling of gratitude and admiration for their great Leader could possess the hearts of English working men—and this is surely not too much to expect—much would come from even this inadequate worship. And, for myself, I unhesitatingly declare that I would sooner be in the position of a working man who doubts about Heaven and Hell and even about God, but can say of Christ, “He is the man for me,” than I would be in the position of the well-to-do manufacturer who is persuaded of the reality of Heaven and Hell and of the truth of all the theology of the Church of England, but can reconcile his religion with the deliberate establishment of a colossal fortune on the ruin of his fellow creatures.

But I do not believe that the feeling of the working man for Jesus of Nazareth could long confine itself to admiration. It is not so easy to make a happy nation or a happy world as the working man thinks: and this he will soon find out. When sanitation, education, culture, science, political rearrangements, enlargements for the poor, and restrictions for the rich, have all done their best and failed—as they necessarily must fail, unless helped by something more—then the working man will find what that “something more” is, without which nothing effectual can be done. Then he will perceive that, after all, unless there is a spirit of mutual concession in classes and individuals, no Acts of Parliament can ever be devised to secure lasting prosperity and concord. Then he will awaken to the fact that Jesus of Nazareth revealed and exemplified that spirit of concession or self-sacrifice, and that it was by this means that He went as far as He did toward “turning the world upside down;” and so he will be gradually led still further to see that the way which He went was after all not such a very “long way round,” but a divine way, a way truly worthy of the Son of God. I believe that the recognition of this single fact would go further than even the recognition of the marvellous phenomena which manifested the Resurrection of Christ, to convince working men that the man who possessed this sublime intuition into spiritual truth, and the perfect unselfishness and self-control needful to give effect to his plans for the raising up of mankind, must be no other than the Son of God. The rest would follow. They would find they had been all their lives on a wrong track in their search after the divine reality; worshipping brute force while protesting against it; bowing in their hearts to pomp, and wealth, and high birth, even while they professed to deride them; despising things familiar and near; gaping in stupid servile admiration at things far and unknown; yet all the time God was near them, among them, in them; the Spirit of God was none other than the spirit of true socialism; the Son of God was none other than the poor and lowly Workman of Nazareth.