‘And as to difficulties, the great difficulties of all lay in the way of Theism. ‘I am surprised at men who don’t feel this—I am surprised at you!‘ he said, smiling. Newman had put these difficulties so powerfully in the Apologia. The Christian system satisfied all the demands of the conscience; and as to the intellectual difficulties—well there we came to the question of miracles.
‘Here he restated the old argument against an a priori impossibility of miracles. Granted a God, it is absurd to limit the scope and range of the will of such a being. I agreed; then I asked him to let me tell him how I had approached the question—through a long immersion in documents of the early Church, in critical and historical questions connected with miracles. I had come to see how miracles arise, and to feel it impossible to draw the line with any rigidity between one miraculous story and another.
‘‘The difficulty is’—he said slowly, ‘if you sweep away miracles, you sweep away the Resurrection! With regard to the other miracles, I no longer feel as I once did that they are the most essential evidence for Christianity. The evidence which now comes nearest to me is the evidence of Christian history, of the type of character Christianity has produced——‘
“Here the Talbots’ supper bell rang, and the clock struck eight. He said in the most cordial way it was impossible it could be so late, that he must not put the Warden’s household out, but that our conversation could not end there, and would I come again? We settled 9.30 in the morning. He thanked me, came with me to the hall and bade me a most courteous and friendly good-bye.”[12]
The next morning she duly presented herself after breakfast, and this time they got to grips far more thoroughly than before with the question of miracles and of New Testament criticism generally. In a letter to her husband (published in the Recollections) she calls it “a battle royal over the book and Christian evidences,” and describes how “at times he looked stern and angry and white to a degree, so that I wondered sometimes how I had the courage to go on—the drawn brows were so formidable!” But she stuck to her points and found, as she thought, that for all his versatility he was not really familiar with the literature of the subject, but took refuge instead in attacking her own Theistic position, divested as it was of supernatural Christianity. “I do not say or think you ‘attack’ Christianity,” he wrote to her two days later, “but in proposing a substitute for it, reached by reduction and negation, I think (forgive me) you are dreaming the most visionary of all human dreams.”
He enclosed a volume of his Gleanings, marking the article on “The Courses of Religious Thought.” Mrs. Ward replied to him as follows:—
April 15, 1888.
Dear Mr. Gladstone,—
Thank you very much for the volume of Gleanings with its gracious inscription. I have read the article you point out to me with the greatest interest, and shall do the same with the others. Does not the difference between us on the question of sin come very much to this—that to you the great fact in the world and in the history of man, is sin—to me, progress? I remember Amiel somewhere speaks of the distinction as marking off two classes of thought, two orders of temperament. In myself I see a perpetual struggle, in the world also, but through it all I feel the “Power that makes for righteousness.” In the life of conscience, in the play of physical and moral law, I see the ordained means by which sin is gradually scourged and weakened both in the individual and in the human society. And as to that sense of irreparableness, that awful burden of evil both on the self and outside it, for which all religions have sought an anodyne in the ceremonies of propitiation and sacrifice, I think the modern who believes in God and cherishes the dear memory of a human Christ will learn humbly, as Amiel says, even “to accept himself,” and life, as they are, at God’s hands. Constant and recurrent experience teaches him that the baser self can only be killed by constant and recurrent effort towards good; the action of the higher self is governed by an even stronger and more prevailing law of self-preservation than that of the lower; evil finds its appointed punishment and deterrent in pain and restlessness; and as the old certainty of the Christian heaven fades it will become clear to him that his only hope of an immortality worth having lies in the developing and maturing of that diviner part in him which can conceive and share the divine life—of the soul. And for the rest, he will trust in the indulgence and pity of the power which brought forth this strangely mingled world.
So much for the minds capable of such ideas. For the masses, in the future, it seems to me that charitable and social organization will be all-important. If the simpler Christian ideas can clothe themselves in such organization—and I believe they can and are even now beginning to do it—their effect on the democracy may be incalculable. If not, then God will fulfil Himself in other ways. But “dream” as it may be, it seems to many of us, a dream worth trying to realize in a world which contains your seven millions of persons in France, who will have nothing to say to religious beliefs, or the 200,000 persons in South London alone, amongst whom, according to the Record, Christianity has practically no existence.