CRITICISM AND THE GOSPEL HISTORY.[E]
The spirit of criticism is not the spirit of religion. The spirit of criticism is a questioning spirit; the spirit of religion is a spirit of faith, of humility and submission. Other qualities may go to the formation of a religious character in the highest and grandest sense of the word; but the virtues which religious teachers most generally approve, which make up the ideal of a Catholic saint, which the Catholic and all other churches endeavour most to cultivate in their children, are those of passive and loyal obedience, a devotion without reserve or qualification; or to use the technical word, 'a spirit of teachableness.' A religious education is most successful when it has formed a mind to which difficulties are welcome as an opportunity for the triumph of faith—which regards doubts as temptations to be resisted like the suggestions of sensuality, and which alike in action or opinion follows the path prescribed to it with affectionate and unhesitating confidence.
To men or women of the tender and sensitive piety which is produced by such a training, an enquiry into the grounds of its faith appears shocking and profane. To demand an explanation of ambiguities or mysteries of which they have been accustomed to think only upon their knees, is as it were to challenge the Almighty to explain his ways to his creatures, and to refuse obedience unless human presumption has been first gratified.
Undoubtedly, not in religion only, but in any branch of human knowledge, teachableness is the condition of growth. We augur ill for the future of the youth who sets his own judgment against that of his instructors, and refuses to believe what cannot be at once made plain to him. Yet again, the wise instructor will not lightly discourage questions which are prompted by an intelligent desire of knowledge. That an unenquiring submission produces characters of great and varied beauty; that it has inspired the most splendid acts of endurance which have given a lustre to humanity, no one will venture to deny. A genial faith is one of that group of qualities which commend themselves most to the young, the generous, and the enthusiastic—to those whose native and original nobleness has suffered least from contact with the world—which belong rather to the imagination than the reason, and stand related to truth through the emotions rather than through the sober calculations of probability. It is akin to loyalty, to enthusiasm, to hero-worship, to that deep affection to a person or a cause which can see no fault in what it loves.
'Belief,' says Mr. Sewell, 'is a virtue; doubt is a sin.' Iago is nothing if not critical; and the sceptical spirit—der Geist der stets verneint—which is satisfied with nothing, which sees in everything good the seed of evil, and the weak spot in every great cause or nature, has been made the special characteristic—we all feel with justice—of the devil.
And yet this devotedness or devotion, this reverence for authority, is but one element of excellence. To reverence is good; but on the one condition that the object of it be a thing which deserves reverence; and the necessary complement, the security that we are not bestowing our best affections where they should not be given, must be looked for in some quality which, if less attractive, is no less essential for our true welfare. To prove all things—to try the spirits whether they be of God—is a duty laid upon us by the highest authority; and what is called progress in human things—religious as well as material—has been due uniformly to a dissatisfaction with them as they are. Every advance in science, every improvement in the command of the mechanical forces of nature, every step in political or social freedom, has risen in the first instance from an act of scepticism, from an uncertainty whether the formulas, or the opinions, or the government, or the received practical theories were absolutely perfect; or whether beyond the circle of received truths there might not lie something broader, deeper, truer, and thus better deserving the acceptance of mankind.
Submissiveness, humility, obedience, produce if uncorrected, in politics a nation of slaves, whose baseness becomes an incentive to tyranny; in religion, they produce the consecration of falsehood, poperies, immaculate conceptions, winking images, and the confessional. The spirit of enquiry if left to itself becomes in like manner a disease of uncertainty, and terminates in universal scepticism. It seems as if in a healthy order of things, to the willingness to believe there should be chained as its inseparable companion a jealousy of deception; and there is no lesson more important for serious persons to impress upon themselves than that each of these temperaments must learn to tolerate the other; faith accepting from reason the sanction of its service, and reason receiving in return the warm pulsations of life. The two principles exist together in the highest natures; and the man who in the best sense of the word is devout, is also the most cautious to whom or to what he pays his devotion. Among the multitude, the units of which are each inadequate and incomplete, the elements are disproportionately mixed; some men are humble and diffident, some are sceptical and enquiring; yet both are filling a place in the great intellectual economy; both contribute to make up the sum and proportion of qualities which are required to hold the balance even; and neither party is entitled to say to the other, 'Stand by; I am holier than thou.'
And as it is with individuals, so is it also with whole periods and cycles. For centuries together the believing spirit held undisputed sovereignty; and these were what are called 'ages of faith;' ages, that is, in which the highest business of the intellect was to pray rather than to investigate; when for every unusual phenomenon a supernatural cause was instinctively assumed; when wonders were credible in proportion to their magnitude; and theologians, with easy command of belief, added miracle to miracle and piled dogma upon dogma. Then the tide changed; a fresh era opened, which in the eyes of those who considered the old system the only right one, was the letting loose of the impersonated spirit of evil; when profane eyes were looking their idols in the face; when men were saying to the miraculous images, 'You are but stone and wood,' and to the piece of bread, 'You are but dust as I am dust;' and then the huge mediæval fabric crumbled down in ruin.
All forms of thought, all objects of devotion, are made thus liable to perpetual revision, if only that belief shall not petrify into habit, but remain the reasonable conviction of a reasonable soul. The change of times and the change of conditions change also the appearance of things which in themselves are the same which they always were. Facts supposed once to be as fixed as the stars melt into fiction. A closer acquaintance with the phenomena of experience has revealed to us the action of forces before undreamt of working throughout nature with unerring uniformity; and to the mediæval stories of magic, witchcraft, or the miracles of saints, we are thus placed in a new relation. The direct evidence on which such stories were received may remain unimpaired, but it no longer produces the same conviction. Even in ordinary human things where the evidence is lost—as in some of our own State trials, and where we know only that it was such as brought conviction to judges, juries, and parliaments—historians do not hesitate to call their verdicts into question, thinking it more likely that whole masses of men should have been led away by passion or fraud or cowardice than that this or that particular crime should have been committed. That we often go beyond our office and exaggerate the value of our new criteria of truth may be possible enough; but it is no less certain that this is the tendency of modern thought. Our own age, like every age which has gone before it, judges the value of testimony, not by itself merely, but by the degree to which it corresponds with our own sense of the laws of probability; and we consider events probable or improbable by the habit of mind which is the result of our general knowledge and culture. To the Catholic of the middle ages a miracle was more likely than not; and when he was told that a miracle had been worked, he believed it as he would have believed had he been told that a shower of rain had fallen, or that the night frost had killed the buds upon his fruit trees. If his cattle died, he found the cause in the malice of Satan or the evil eye of a witch; and if two or more witnesses could have been found to swear that they had heard an old woman curse him, she would have been burnt for a sorceress. The man of science, on the other hand, knows nothing of witches and sorcerers; when he can find a natural cause he refuses to entertain the possibility of the intervention of a cause beyond nature; and thus that very element of marvel which to the more superstitious temperament was an evidence of truth, becomes to the better informed a cause of suspicion.