“No,” said Maddock, “I cannot grant him even that! A faint glimmering of a thing cannot be called a perception. Consider this very contradiction of his! Consider, again, his unspeakably gross and ignorant treatment of the Old Testament which he brands with blood-thirstiness and impurity. He works by a rule of thumb. The higher spiritual mathematics are mere names to him. He is—I must declare—too much of a blockhead to ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of Three.”
“I agree to a large extent, dear Doctor; but you will admit, I think, that even the Rule of Three is not without its use, without its real and vital truth?”
“Not when the schoolboy cannot use it properly! I have pointed out, for example, that, in attacking the doctrine of the Divine Sonship, he only attacks a dummy doctrine of his own. Your schoolboy does not know which of the three is his third quantity! He wants, then, to be whipped and put onto the dunce’s stool—to encourage the others!” The Doctor spoke for the first time with a little testiness.
“Be it so,” Gildea said, “our good Judge is not to be allowed more than a faint glimmering of that fine theory of ours of the world’s unseen τελος. The ‘divine far-off event’ is not more than a fog-lamp to him, which he will not, then, mistake for the moon, or its light for moonshine. But that he is too much of a blockhead to even rise beyond the spiritual rule of thumb, the spiritual Rule of Three, seems to me, I confess, dear Doctor ... well, a rather strong statement. The average intelligent secular view of things is, is it not, less pedantic, less given to accepting the conventional value of things as their true value, than the average intelligent orthodox view? Are not, indeed, these tears a most convincing proof of it? Is it not just because our good Judge refuses, for instance, to accept the orthodox view of Jesus and of God that he wrote his little book, and you replied to it? Now the orthodox view of God is, if you will let me say so, excessively pedantic: it adheres to the expressions of a belief in which in its heart it does not believe at all. Parker’s criticism on this is excellent. ‘It is impossible,’ he says, ‘to lay down any definition of God which will even satisfy man’s conception of God.’ What, then, is the good, he asks, of holding up this ‘magnified non-natural man’ of yours, and asking me to fall down and worship it? Common-sense revolts against such an idea and common-sense, dear Doctor, is, will you not agree, for once right?”
“You surprise me, Sir Horace,” said Maddock. “Are you too going to spend your time and trouble in demolishing the survivals of verbal inspiration?”
“Certainly not! I am only trying to see wherein common-sense is a safe guide as a biblical critic. We are agreed, then,—you, that is, the Judge and I—that we must unite in opposing many of ‘the statements which,’ as the Judge says, ‘the orthodox are pleased to call evidence.’ Because, for instance (to continue with the Judge’s own words), ‘the fallible man Paul says in a letter to Timothy that the Scriptures were inspired, it does not make them so.’ We are agreed here?”
“We are agreed here,” said Maddock, with deliberation.
“Or again, to take another instance, when Matthew and Luke, for whatever purpose, strive in their genealogical tables ‘to give Jesus’ (I always use the Judge’s words) ‘a divine origin, conceived of a virgin by the Holy Ghost, and yet to connect him with David by making Joseph the natural father of Jesus.’—are we not here faced by two ideas which ‘no one short of an ecclesiastical metaphysician,’ or, as you say, a ‘very bad critic,’ would or could ‘reconcile?’—We are still agreed, of course.”
“We are still agreed—to a certain extent.”
“Nay, let us go further, then, and chime in with the Judge to the effect that ‘on far stronger evidence (if evidence it can be called) than that which supports’—let us say, almost all—‘of the events or miracles’ of the Scriptures, ‘the Roman Catholic Church propound to the world their miracles,’ which ‘the Protestant section of Christianity reject as incredulous.’”