Broken Lights proved to be (with the exception of my Duties of Women) the most successful of my books. It went through three English editions, and I believe quite as many in America; but of these last all I knew was the occasional present of a single specimen copy. It was very favourably reviewed, but some of my fellow Theists rather disapproved of the tribute I had paid to Christ (as quoted above); and my good friend, Prof. F. W. Newman, actually wrote a severe pamphlet against me, entitled “Hero-Making Religion.” It did not alter my view. I do not believe that our Religion (the relation of our souls to God) can ever properly rest upon History. Nay I cannot understand how any one who knows the intricacies and obscurities attendant on the verification of any ancient History, should for a moment be content to suppose that God has required of all men to rest their faith in Him on such grounds, or on what others report to them of such grounds. In the case of Christianity, where scholars like Renan and Martineau—profoundly learned in ancient and obsolete tongues, and equipped with the whole arsenal of criticism of modern Germany, France and England,—can differ about the age and authority of the principal piéce de conviction (the Gospel of St. John), it is truly preposterous to suggest that ordinary men and women should form any judgment at all on the matter. The Ideal Christ needs only a good heart to find and love him. The Historical Christ needs the best critic in Europe, a Lightfoot, a Koenen, a Martineau, to trace his footsteps on the sands of time. And they differ as regards nearly every one of them!
But though History cannot rightly be Religion or the basis of Religion, there is, and must be, a History of Religion; as there is a history of geometry and astronomy; and of that History of the whole world’s Religion the supreme interest centres in the record of
“The sinless years
That breathed beneath the Syrian blue.”
Yet, as regards my own personal feeling, I must avow that the halo which has gathered round Jesus Christ obscures him to my eyes. I see that he is much more real to many of my friends, both Orthodox and Unitarian, than he can ever be to me. There is nothing, no, not one single sentence or action attributed to him of which (if we open our minds to criticism) we can feel sufficiently certain to base on it any definite conclusion, and this to me envelopes him in a cloud. Each Christian age has indeed, (as I remark in my Dawning Lights), seen a Christ of its own; so that we could imagine students in the future arguing that there must have been “several Christs,” as old scholars held there were several Zoroasters and several Buddhas. Just as Michael Angelo’s Christ was the production of that dark and stormy age when first his awful form loomed out of the shadows of the Sistine, in no less a degree do the portraits of Ecce Homo and the Vie de Jésus belong to our era of sentiment and philanthropy. We have no sun-made photograph of his features; only such wavering image of them as may have rested on the waters of Galilee, rippling in the breeze. I must not however further prolong these reflections on a subject discussed to the best of my poor ability in my more serious books.
After Broken Lights, I wrote the sequel: Dawning Lights just quoted above. In the first I had endeavoured to sketch the Conditions and Prospects of religious belief. In the second I speculated on the Results of the changes which were taking place in various articles of that belief. The chapters deal consecutively with Changes in the Method of Theology,—in the Idea of God; in the Idea of Christ; in the Doctrine of Sin, theoretical and practical; in the idea of the Relation of this life to the next; in the idea of the Perfect Life; in the Idea of Happiness; in the Doctrine of Prayer; in the Idea of Death; and in the Doctrine of the eternity of Punishment.
This book also was fairly successful, and went into a second edition.
Somewhere about this time (I have no exact record) I edited a little book called Alone to the Alone, consisting of private prayers for Theists. It contains contributions from fifteen men and women, of Prayers, mostly written for personal use, before the idea of the book had been suggested, under the influence of those occasional deeper insights and more fervent feelings which all religious persons desire to perpetuate. They are all anonymous. In the Preface I say that the result of such a compilation,
“‘Is necessarily altogether imperfect and fragmentary, but in the great solitude where most of us pass our lives as regards our deeper emotions, it may be more helpful to know that other human hearts are feeling as we feel, and thinking as we think, rather than to read far nobler words which come to us only as echoes of the Past.’ The book is ‘designed for the use of those who desire to cultivate the feelings which culminate in Prayer, but who find the rich and beautiful collections of the Churches of Christendom no longer available, either because of the doctrines whose acceptance they imply or of the nature of the requests to which they give utterance. Adequately to replace in a generation, or in several generations, such books, through which the piety of ages has been poured, is wholly beyond hope; and the ambition to do so would betray ignorance of the way in which these precious drops are distilled slowly year after year, from the great Incense-tree of humanity.’”
The remainder of the Preface, which is somewhat lengthy, discusses the validity of Prayer for the attainment of spiritual (not physical) benefits. It concludes thus—p. xxxvi.