It is amazing and amusing to see with what case Mr. Foxton decides points which have filled folios of controversy. 'In the teaching of Christ himself, there is not the slightest allusion to the modern evangelical notion of an atonement.' 'The diversities of "gifts" to which Paul alludes, Cor. i. 12. are nothing more than those different "gifts" which, in common parlance, we attribute to the various tempers and talents of men.' (P. 67.) 'It is, however, after all, absurd to suppose that the miracles of the Scriptures are subjects of actual belief; either to the vulgar or the learned.' (P. 104.) What an easy time of it must such an all-sufficient controvertist have!
He thinks it possible; too, that Christ, though nothing more than an ordinary man, may really have 'thought himself Divine,' without being liable to the charge of a visionary self-idolatry or of blasphemy,—as supposed by every body, Trinitarian or Unitarian, except Mr. Foxton. He accounts for it by the 'wild sublimity of human emotion, when the rapt spirit first feels the throbbings of the divine afflatus,' &c. &c. A singular afflatus which teaches a man to usurp the name and prerogatives of Deity, and a strange 'inspiration' which inspires him with so profound an ignorance of his own nature! This interpretation, we believe, is peculiarly Mr. Foxton's owe.
The way in which he disposes of the miracles, is essentially that of a vulgar, undiscriminating, unphilosophic mind. There have been, he tells us in effect, so many false miracles, superstitious stories of witches, conjurors, ghosts, hobgoblins, of cures by royal touch, and the like,—and therefore the Scripture miracles are false! Why, who denies that there have been plenty of false miracles? And there have been as many false religions. Is there, therefore, none true? The proper business in every such case is to examine fairly the evidence, and not to generalise after this absurd fashion. Otherwise we shall never believe any thing; for there is hardly one truth that has not its half score of audacious counterfeits.
Still he is amusingly perplexed, like all the rest of the infidel world, how to get rid of the miracles—whether on the principle of fraud, or fiction, or illusion. He thinks there would be 'a great accession to the ranks of reason and common sense by disproving the reality of the miracles, without damaging the veracity or honestly of the simple, earnest, and enthusiastic writers by whom they are recorded;' and complains of the coarse and undiscriminating criticism of most of the French and English Deists, who explain the miracles 'on the supposition of the grossest fraud acting on the grossest credulity.' But he soon finds that the materials for such a compromise are utterly intractable. He thinks that the German Rationalists have depended too much on some 'single hypothesis, which often proves to be insufficient to meet the great variety of conditions and circumstances with which the miracles have been handed down to us.' Very true; but what remedy? 'We find one German writer endeavouring to explain away the miracles on the mystical (mythical) theory; and another riding into the arena of controversy on the miserable hobby-horse of "clairvoyance" or "mesmerism"; each of these, and a host of others of the same class, rejecting whatever light is thrown on the question by all the theories together.' He therefore proposes, with great and gratuitous liberality, to heap all these theories together, and to take them as they are wanted; not withholding any of the wonders of modern science—even, as would seem, the possible knowledge of 'chloroform' (PP. 104.. 86, 87.)—from the propagators of Christianity!
But, alas! the phenomena are still intractable. The stubborn 'Book' will still baffle all such efforts to explain it away; it is willing to be rejected, if it so pleases men, but it guards itself from being thus made a fool of. For who can fail to see that neither all or any considerable part of the multifarious miracles of the New Testament can be explained by any such gratuitous extension of ingenious fancies; and that if they could be so explained, it would be still impossible to exculpate the men who need such explanations from the charge of perpetuating the grossest frauds! Yet this logical ostrich, who am digest all these stones, presumptuously declares a miracle an impossibility and the very notion of it a contradiction.* But enough of Mr. Foxton.
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* Mr. Foxton denies that men, in Paley's 'single case in which he tries the general theorem,' would believe the miracle; but he finds it convenient to leave out the most significant circumstances on which Paley makes the validity of the testimony to depend, instead of stating them fairly in Paley's own words. Yet that the sceptics (if such there could be) must be the merest fraction of the species, Mr. Foxton himself immediately proceeds to prove by showing what is undeniably the case) that almost all mankind readily receive miraculous occurrences on far lower evidence than Paley's common sense would require them to demand. Surely he must be related to the Irishman who placed his ladder against the bough he was cutting off. I
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There are no doubt some minds amongst us, whose power we admit, and whose perversion of power we lament, who have bewildered themselves by really deep meditation on inexplicable mysteries; who demand certainty where certainty is not given to man, or demand for truths which are established by sufficient evidence, other evidence than those truths will admit. We can even painfully sympathise in that ordeal of doubt which such powerful minds are peculiarly exposed—with their Titanic struggles against the still mightier power of Him who has said to the turbulent intellect of man, as well as to the stormy ocean 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther,—and here shall thy proud waves be staid.' We cannot wish better to any such agitated mind than that it may listen to those potent and majestic words: 'Peace—be still!' uttered by the voice of Him who so suddenly hushed the billows of the Galilean lake.
But we are at the same time fully convinced that in our day there are thousands of youths who are falling into the same errors and perils from sheer vanity and affectation; who admire most what they least understand, and adopt all the obscurities and paradoxes they stumble upon, as a cheap path to a reputation for profundity; who awkwardly imitate the manner and retail the phrases of the writers they study; and, as usual, exaggerate to caricature their least agreeable eccentricities. We should think that some of these more powerful minds must be by this time ashamed of that ragged regiment of shallow thinkers, and obscure writers and talkers who at present infest our literature, and whose parrot-like repetition of their own stereotyped phraseology, mingled with some barbarous infusion of half Anglicised German, threatens to form as odious a cant as ever polluted the stream of thought or disfigured the purity of language. Happily it is not likely to be more than a passing fashion; but still it is a very unpleasant fashion while it lasts. As in Johnson's day, every young writer imitated as well as he could the ponderous diction and everlasting antitheses of the great dictator as in Byron's day, there were thousands to whom the world 'was a blank' at twenty or thereabouts, and of whose dark imaginings,' as Macaulay says, the waste was prodigious; so now there are hundreds of dilettanti pantheists', mystics and sceptics to whom everything is a 'sham,' an 'unreality'; Who tell us that the world stands in need of a great 'prophet,' a seer,' a 'true prophet', a large soul,' a god-like soul,'*—who shall dive into 'the depths of the human consciousness,' and whose 'utterances' shall rouse the human mind from the 'cheats and frauds' which have hitherto everywhere practised on its simplicity. The tell us, in relation to philosophy, religion, and especially in relation to Christianity, that all that has been believed by mankind has been believed only on 'empirical' grounds; and that the old answers to difficulties will do no longer. They shake their sage heads at such men as Clarke, Paley, Butler, and declare that such arguments as theirs will not satisfy them.,—We are glad to admit that all this vague pretension is now but rarely displayed with the scurrilous spirit of that elder unbelief against which the long series of British apologists for Christianity arose between 1700 and 1750; But there is often in it an arrogance as real, though not in so offensive a form. Sometimes the spirit of unbelief even assumes an air of sentimental regret at its own inconvenient profundity. Many a worthy youth tells us he almost wishes he could believe. He admires, of all things, the 'moral grandeur'—the 'ethical beauty' of many parts of Christianity; he condescends to patronize Jesus Christ, though he believes that the great mass of words and actions by which alone we know anything about him, are sheer fictions or legends; he believes—gratuitously enough in this instance, for he has no ground for it—that Jesus Christ was a very 'great man' worthy of comparison at least with Mahomet, Luther, Napoleon, and 'other heroes'; he even admits that happiness of a simple, child-like faith, in the puerilities of Christianity—it produces such content of mind! But alas! he cannot believe—his intellect is not satisfied—he has revolved the matter too profoundly to be thus taken in; he must, he supposes, (and our beardless philosopher sighs as he says it) bear the penalty of a too restless intellect, and a too speculative genius; he knows all the usual arguments which satisfied Pascal, Butler, Bacon, Leibnitz; but they will do no longer: more radical, more tremendous difficulties have suggested themselves, 'from the 'depths of philosophy,' and far different answers are required now!+