What is the Bible, continues the essayist, but the written voice of the congregation, and not the written voice of God? Why all this reverence for the sacred writers, since they acknowledge themselves men of like passions with us? Justification by faith is merely peace of mind from trust in a righteous God, and not a fiction of merit by transfer. Regeneration is a correspondent giving of insight or an awakening of the forces of the soul; propitiation is the recovery of peace, and the atonement is our sharing the Saviour's Spirit, but not his purchase of us by his own blood. Throughout the Scriptures we should assume in ourselves a verifying faculty,—conscience, reason, or whatever else we choose to term it.
III. On the Study of the Evidences of Christianity. By Baden Powell, M. A. The author of this essay having recently died, he has therefore incurred less censure than he would otherwise have received. The views here expressed, taken in connection with his more elaborate treatise on the Order of Nature, do not place him on the same theoretical ground with Hume and Spinoza; but the moral effect of the present attack upon miracles as an evidence of Christianity is not less antagonistic than the theories of either of those authors. Spinoza held that miracles are impossible, because it would be derogatory to God to depart from the established laws of the universe, and one of Hume's objections to them was their incapability of being proved from testimony.[179]
Professor Powell objects to them because they bear no analogy to the harmony of God's dealings in the material world; and insists that they are not to be credited, since they are a violation of the laws of matter or an interruption of the course of physical causes. The orthodox portion of the Church are laboring under the egregious error of making them an essential doctrine, when they are really a mere external accessory. Reason, and not "our desires" must come to our aid in all examination of them. The key-note to Professor Powell's opposition is contained in the following statement: "From the nature of our antecedent convictions, the probability of some kind of mistake or deception somewhere, though we know not where, is greater than the probability of the event really happening in the way and from the causes assigned."[180] The inductive philosophy, for which great respect must be paid, is enlisted against miracles. If we once know all about those alleged and held as such, we would find them resolved into natural phenomena, just as "the angel at Milan was the aerial reflection of an image on a church; the balls of fire at Plausac were electrical; the sea-serpent was a basking shark on a stem of sea-weed. A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, with Lavoisier at its head, after a grave investigation, pronounced the alleged fall of aërolites to be a superstitious fable."[181]
The two theories against the reality of miracles in their received sense, are: first, that they are attributable to natural causes; and, second, that they may involve more or less of the parabolic or mythic character. These assumptions do away with any real admission of miracles even on religious grounds. The animus of the whole essay may be determined by the following treatment of testimony and reason: "Testimony, after all, is but a second-hand assurance; it is but a blind guide; testimony can avail nothing against reason. The essential question of miracles stands quite apart from any consideration of testimony; the question would remain the same, if we had the evidence of our own senses to an alleged miracle; that is, to an extraordinary or inexplicable fact. It is not the mere fact, but the cause or explanation of it, which is the point at issue."[182] This means far more than Spinoza, Hume, or any other opponent of miracles, except the radical Rationalists of Germany, has claimed,—that we must not believe a miracle though actually witnessed.
IV. Seances Historiques de Geneve—The National Church. By Henry Bristow Wilson, B. D. The Multitudinist principle, or Broad Christianity, is advocated by the essayist with earnestness and an array of learning. The difficulty concerning the non-attendance of a large portion of the British population upon the ordinances of the Church is met by the proposition to abrogate subscription to all creeds and articles of faith, and thus convert the whole nation into a Broad Church. The youth of the land are educated into a false and idolatrous view of the Bible. But on the Census-Sunday of 1861, five millions and a quarter of persons, or forty-two per cent. of the whole population, were not present at service. Many of these people do not believe some of the doctrines preached; they have thought seriously, but cannot sympathize with what they are compelled to hear. If we break down all subscription and include them in the great National Church, we will approach the Scriptural ideal. Unless this be done they will fall into Dissenting hands, and die outside the Church of Christ. There are several proofs of the Scriptural indorsement of Nationalism; Christ's lament over Jerusalem declares that he had offered Multitudinism to the inhabitants nationally, while the three thousand souls converted on the day of Pentecost cannot be supposed to have been individual converts, but merely a mass of persons brought in as a body. Some of the converts of the apostolic age did not believe in the resurrection, which fact implies that the early Churches took collective names from the localities where they were situated, and that doubt of the resurrection should now be no bar to communion in the National Church. Even heathenism in its best form proceeded on the Multitudinist principle, for all were included as believers in the faith of the times. The approval of reason and conscience, and not verbal adherence to human interpretation of Scripture, should be the great test of membership. Advice is administered by the essayist to the Church of which he is a clergyman, in this language: "A national church may also find itself in this position; which, perhaps, is our own. Its ministers may become isolated between two other parties,—between those, on the one hand, who draw fanatical inferences from formularies and principles which they themselves are not able or are unwilling to repudiate; and on the other, those who have been tempted, in impatience of old fetters, to follow free thought heedlessly wherever it may lead them. If our own churchmen expect to discourage and repress a fanatical Christianity without a frank appeal to reason, and a frank criticism of Scripture, they will find themselves without any effectual arms for that combat; or if they attempt to check inquiry by the repetition of old forms and denunciations, they will be equally powerless, and run the especial risk of turning into bitterness the sincerity of those who should be their best allies, as friends of truth. They should avail themselves of the aid of all reasonable persons for enlightening the fanatical religionist, making no reserve of any seemingly harmless or apparently serviceable superstitions of their own. They should also endeavor to supply to the negative theologian some positive elements in Christianity, on grounds more sure to him than the assumption of an objective "faith once delivered to the saints," which he cannot identify with the creed of any church as yet known to him."[183]
V. On the Mosaic Cosmogony. By C. W. Goodwin, M. A. The assumption is made that the Mosaic account of creation is irreconcilable with the real creation of the earth. We do wrong in elevating that narrative above its proper position, and orthodox geologists have grossly erred in attaching much importance to the language of the first chapter of Genesis. There is nothing poetical or figurative in the whole account; it contains no mystical or symbolical meaning, and is a plain statement of just so much as suited the Jewish mind. All attempts, however, to find any consistency between it and the present state of science are simply absurd. The theory of Chalmers and Buckland, and afterward that of Hugh Miller, are not tenable, for Moses was ignorant of what we now know, and his alleged description is contradicted by scientific inquiry. If then it is plain that God has not thought it needful to communicate to the writer of the Scriptural Cosmogony the knowledge revealed by modern researches, why do we not confess it? We would do so if it did not conflict with a human theory which presumes to point out how God ought to have instructed man.[184] The writer had no authority for what he asserts so solemnly and unhesitatingly, for he was an early speculator who stated as facts what he only conjectured as probabilities. Yet he seized one great truth, in which he anticipated the highest revelation of modern inquiry; namely, the unity of the design of the world, and its subordination to one sole Maker and Law-giver.[185] But no one contends that the Mosaic view can be used as a basis of astronomical or geological teaching; and we must therefore consider the Scriptural cosmogony not as "an authentic utterance of divine knowledge, but a human utterance, which it has pleased Providence to use in a special way for the education of mankind."[186]
VI. Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750. By Mark Pattison, B. D. We are surrounded with a Babel of religious creeds and theories, and it is all-important that we should know how we have inherited them. If we would understand our times, we must know the productive influences of the past; if we would thread the present mazes of religious pretension, we should not neglect those immediate agencies in their production that had their origin near the beginning of the eighteenth century. These agencies are three in number: 1. The formation and growth of that compromise between church and state which is called Toleration; 2. Methodism without the Church and the evangelical movement within it; 3. The growth and gradual diffusion, through all religious thinking, of the supremacy of reason. The theology of the Deistic age is identical with Rationalism. That Rationalistic period of England is divided into two parts: from 1688 to 1750, and from 1750 to 1830. The second age may be called that of evidences, when the clergy continued to manufacture evidence as an ingenious exercise,—a literature which was avowedly professional, a study which might seem theology without being it, and which could awaken none of the dormant skepticism beneath the surface of society.[187] The defense of the Deists was perhaps as good as the orthodox attack, but they were inquirers after truth, and being guided by reason, they deserve all commendation. Yet they only foreshadowed the glory of the present supremacy of reason. Deism strove eagerly for light; it saw the dawn; the present is the noonday. The human understanding wished to be satisfied, and did not care to believe that of which it could not see the substantial ground. The mind was coming slowly to see that it had duties which it could not devolve upon others, and that a man must think for himself, protect his own rights, and administer his own affairs.
Reason was never less extravagant than in this first essay of its strength; for its demands were modest, and it was easily satisfied,—far too easily, we must think, when we look at some of the reasonings which passed as valid.[188]
English Deism, a system which paralyzed the religious life and thought of the nation, has never had a more enthusiastic eulogist than the author of this historical plea for Rationalism. If the demands of the Deists were "modest," who shall be able to find a term sufficiently descriptive of the claims of their present successors?
VII. On the Interpretation of Scripture. By Benjamin Jowett, M. A. Professor Jowett, as commentator on St. Paul's epistles, had already so defined his position on the science of Scriptural exegesis, that we needed no new information to be convinced of his antagonism to evangelical interpretation. The present essay, which is the most formidable and destructive in the volume, commences with a lamentation over the prevailing differences in the exposition of the Bible. The Germans have been far more successful in this respect than the English people, the former having arrived at a tolerable degree of concurrence.