[THE CREED OF CHRISTENDOM.]
1. The Creed of Christendom; its Foundations and Superstructure. By William Rathbone Greg. London: Chapman. 1851.
2. St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians; an Attempt to convey their Spirit and Significance. By John Hamilton Thom. London: Chapman. 1851.
These two books are placed together without the least intention to intimate a resemblance between them, or to represent either author as sharing in the conclusions of the other. They are, indeed, concerned with opposite sides of the same subject; viewed, moreover, from the separate stations of the layman and the divine; and are the expression of strongly contrasted modes of thought. Mr. Greg deals principally with the external vehicle of the primitive Christianity; Mr. Thom with its internal essence. The one seeks in vain for any outward title in the records to suppress the operations of natural reason; the other clears away from the interior every interference with the free action of conscience and affection. The one, in the name of science, demolishes the outworks of ecclesiastical logic with which the shrine of faith has been dangerously guarded: the other, in the name of Christ, expels both priest and dogma from the sanctuary itself. The one, selecting deep truths from the words of Jesus, would construct religion into a philosophy; the other, with eye upon His person as an image of perfect goodness, would develop it from a sentiment. As all opposites, however, are embraced in the circumference of the same circle, so are these works complements of each other. Mr. Greg, in common with the Catholics and the Unitarians, evidently looks for the strength of Christianity in the Gospels; Mr. Thom, with the majority of Protestants, in the Epistles. For want of some mediating harmony between the two, each perhaps requires some correction: the historical picture of Christ saved by the former is but a pale and meagre outline; while the Pauline ideal presented by the latter is a glow of rich but undefined coloring. Mr. Greg, who, in spite of particular errors, manifests a large knowledge and a masterly judgment in his criticism of the Evangelists, appears to have, in his own sympathies, no way of access to a mind like that of Paul, and to be much at fault in estimating the place of the Apostle both as a witness and a power in the organization of Christian tradition and doctrine. Had the acuteness and severity of his understanding been a little more qualified by such reflective depth and moral tenderness as Mr. Thom brings to the work of interpretation, his religion, we fancy, would have retained a less slender remnant of the primitive Christianity.
Measured by the standard of common Protestantism, there can be no doubt that the second of these books would be condemned for heresy, and the first for unbelief. These ugly words, however, have been too often applied to what is fullest of truth and faith, to express more than a departure, which weak men feel to be irritating, from a favorite type of thought. They have lost their effect on all who are competent to meditate on the great problems of religion, and are fast taking their place in the scandalous vocabulary of professional polemics. It is a thing offensive to just men when divines, who have succeeded in smothering, or been too dull to entertain, doubts which rend the soul of genius and faithfulness, and insist on a veracious answer, meet them, not with sympathy, still less with mastery, but with the commonplaces of incompetent pity and holy malediction. And the offence is doubled in the eyes of instructed men, who know the state to which Biblical criticism has brought the theology of the Reformation. It is notorious that, in the revolt from Rome, the Scriptures—like a dictator suddenly created for the perils of a crisis—were forced into a position where it was impossible for them permanently to repose; that they cannot be treated as infallible oracles of either fact or doctrine, and were never meant to bear the weight of such unnatural claims; that the authority once concentrated in them, and held even against the reason and conscience, must now be distributed, and ask their concurrence. These are not questionable positions, but so irresistibly established, that learning of the highest order would no more listen to an argument against them, than Herschel or Airy to a disquisition against the rotation of the earth. When a clergyman, therefore, treats them with horror, and denounces them as infidelity, he produces no conviction, except that he himself is either ill-informed or insincere. Professional reproaches against a book so manly and modest, so evidently truth-loving, so high-minded and devout, as this of Mr. Greg's, are but a melancholy imbecility. We may hold to many things which he resigns; we may think him wrong in the date of a Gospel or the construction of a miracle; we may even dissent from his estimate of the grounds of immortal hope and the ways of eternal Providence: but we do not envy, and cannot understand, the religion which can feel no thankful communion with thought so elevated, and trust so sound and real. No candid reader of the "Creed of Christendom" can close the book without the secret acknowledgment that it is a model of honest investigation and clear exposition; that it is conceived in the true spirit of serious and faithful research; and that whatever the author wants of being an ecclesiastical Christian is plainly not essential to the noble guidance of life, and the devout earnestness of the affections.
It is highly honorable to an English layman, amid the pressure of affairs, to take up a class of critical inquiries, which the clergy seem to have abandoned for a narrower and more passionate polemic. It is a remarkable characteristic of the present age, that, when the most startling attacks are made upon the very foundations of existing churches, nobody repels them. Nothing is offered to break their effect, except the inertia of the mass that rests upon the base assailed. For every great sceptical work of the last century there was some score of reputable answers; but half a dozen books of the same tendency have appeared within a few years, all of which have been copiously reviewed, have spread excitement over a wide surface, and set an immense amount of theological hair on end, but not one of which has received any adequate reply. Yet the slightest of these productions would favorably compare, in all the requisites for successful persuasion,—in learning, in temper, in acuteness,—with the best of the last age, excepting only the philosophical disquisitions of Hume and the ecclesiastical chapters of Gibbon. The first in time,—Hennell's "Inquiry into the Origin of Christianity,"—though the most open to refutation, was permitted to pass through an unmolested existence; and its influence, considerable in itself, and increased by the sweet and truthful character of the author, is still traceable in the pages of Mr. Greg. To the effect of Strauss's extraordinary work, the good Neander's Leben Jesu offers but a mild resistance, and is itself, through the extent of its concessions, an open proclamation that the problems of theology can never be restored to the state in which all churches assume them to be. Parker was excommunicated by his sect; but his "Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion" has walked the course unchallenged, and displayed the splendor of its gifts, within the entire lines of the English language. Newman, Foxton, and Greg have since entered their names on the index expurgatorius of Orthodoxy; but they also will be simply excluded from the sacred circle of readers bound over not to think; and, beyond this, will make their converts undisturbed, and accumulate fresh charges of threatening power in the intellectual atmosphere which surrounds the Church. Whence this pusillanimous apathy? Is it forgotten that creeds always assailed and never defended are sure to perish? Or is it felt that the defence, to be sound and strong, must be so partial—so limited to points of detail—as to promise a mere diversion, instead of a repulse, and be more dangerous than the attitude of passiveness? Or does the Church resignedly give up her hold on the class of earnest, intellectual men who cannot degrade religion into a second-hand tradition, but must "know what they worship"? Certain it is that her whole activity has long abandoned this class, and addressed itself exclusively to the narrower and lower order of mind, whose vision is bounded by the periphery of a given creed, and whose life is satisfied with the squabbles and the gossip of articles forced into neighborhood, but no longer on speaking terms. If the efficacy of "holy orders" is called in question, streams of sacerdotal refutation flow from the press; but if the inspiration of the twelve Apostles is denied, it is a thing that neither bishop nor priest will care to vindicate. If a word of mistake is uttered about the drops of water on the face of a baptized baby, it conjures up a storm that rolls from diocese to diocese; but if you say that pure religion has no rite or sacrament at all, the ecclesiastic atmosphere remains still as a Quaker's silent meeting. The deepest interest is felt about the origin of liturgies, and the history of articles, but nobody heeds the most staggering evidence that three of the Gospels are second-hand aggregations of hearsay reports, and the fourth of questionable authenticity. You deny the self-consistency of the Church of England and call it a compromise; and the sudden rustle of gowns and sleeves proclaims a great sensation. You analyze the accounts of Christ's resurrection; you ask whether they are not discrepant; you point out that, apparently, the oldest record (Mark's) contained, in its original form, no account of the event at all, and that the others bear seeming traces of distinct and incompatible traditions. You cry aloud for help in this perplexity, and hold yourselves ready to follow any vestiges of truth; and, except that the creeds are still muttered every Sunday, all the oracles are dumb. If you want to find the true magic pass into heaven, scores of rival professors press round you with obtrusive supply: if you ask in your sorrow, Who can tell me whether there be a heaven at all? every soul will keep aloof and leave you alone. All men that bring from God a fresh, deep nature, all in whom religious wants live with eager power, and who yet are too clear of soul to unthink a thought and falsify a truth, receive in these days no help and no response. The Church feels its interest, as an educated corporation, to consist in overlaying and covering up the foundations of faith with huge piles of curious learning, history, and art, which, by affording endless occupation, may detain men from search after the living rock, or notice of the undermining flood. And, as an established corporation, she relies on the lazy conservatism of mental possession; on the dislike felt by the comfortable classes towards the trouble of thought and the disturbance of feeling, and their usual willingness to hand over these operations to the prayer-book and the priest. We are grateful to Mr. Greg for shaking this ignoble and precarious reliance, which he notices in these admirable sentences.
"A more genuine and important objection to the consequences of our views is felt by indolent minds on their own account. They shrink from the toil of working out truth for themselves out of the materials which Providence has placed before them. They long for the precious metal, but loathe the rude ore out of which it has to be extricated by the laborious alchemy of thought. A ready-made creed is the paradise of their lazy dreams. A string of authoritative, dogmatic propositions comprises the whole mental wealth which they desire. The volume of nature—the volume of history—the volume of life—appall and terrify them. Such men are the materials out of whom good catholics of all sects are made. They form the uninquiring and submissive flocks which rejoice the hearts of all priesthoods. Let such cling to the faith of their forefathers, if they can. But men whose minds are cast in a nobler mould, and are instinct with a diviner life,—who love truth more than rest, and the peace of Heaven rather than the peace of Eden,—to whom 'a loftier being brings severer cares,'—
'Who know man does not live by joy alone,
But by the presence of the power of God,'—
such must cast behind them the hope of any repose or tranquillity, save that which is the last reward of long agonies of thought; they must relinquish all prospect of any heaven, save that of which tribulation is the avenue and portal; they must gird up their loins and trim their lamp for a work which cannot be put by, and which must not be negligently done. 'He,' says Zschokke, 'who does not like living in the furnished lodgings of tradition, must build his own house, his own system of thought and faith for himself.'"—p. 242.