I think you only evade the whole issue raised by the book when you say that Elsmere was never a Christian. Of course in the case of every one who goes through such a change, it is easy to say this; it is extremely difficult to prove it; and all probability is against its being true in every case. What do you really fall back upon when you say that if Elsmere had been a Christian he could not have been influenced as he was? Surely on the “inward witness.” But the “inward witness,” or as you call it “the supernatural life,” belongs to every religion that exists. The Andaman islander even believes himself filled by his God, the devout Buddhist and Mahommedan certainly believe themselves under divine and supernatural direction, and have been inspired by the belief to heroic efforts and sufferings. What is, in essence and fundamentally, to distinguish your “inner witness” from theirs? And if the critical observer maintains that this “supernatural life” is in all cases really an intense life of the imagination, differently peopled and conditioned, what answer have you?
None, unless you appeal to the facts and fruits of Christianity. The Church has always done so. Only the Quaker or the Quietist can stand mainly on the “inward witness.”
The fruits we are not concerned with. But it is as to the facts that Elsmere and, as I conceive, our whole modern time is really troubled. An acute Scotch economist was talking to Humphry the other day about the religious change in the Scotch lowlands. “It is so pathetic,” he said: “when I was young religion was the main interest, the passionate occupation of the whole people. Now when I go back there, as I constantly do, I find everything changed. The old keenness is gone, the people’s minds are turning to other things; there is a restless consciousness, coming they know not whence, but invading every stratum of life, that the evidence is not enough.” There, on another scale, is Elsmere’s experience writ large. Why is he to be called “very ill-trained,” and his impressions “accidental” because he undergoes it?... What convinced me finally and irrevocably was two years of close and constant occupation with the materials of history in those centuries which lie near to the birth of Christianity, and were the critical centuries of its development. I then saw that to adopt the witness of those centuries to matters of fact, without translating it at every step into the historical language of our own day—a language which the long education of time has brought closer to the realities of things—would be to end by knowing nothing, actually and truly, about their life. And if one is so to translate Augustine and Jerome, nay even Suetonius and Tacitus, when they talk to you of raisings from the dead, and making blind men to see, why not St. Paul and the Synoptics?
I don’t think you have ever felt this pressure, though within the limits of your own work I notice that you are always so translating the language of the past. But those who have, cannot escape it by any appeal to the “inward witness.” They too, or many of them, still cling to a religious life of the imagination, nay perhaps they live for it, but it must be one where the expansive energies of life and reason cannot be always disturbing and tormenting, which is less vulnerable and offers less prey to the plunderer than that which depends on the orthodox Christian story.
Another old friend, Mrs. Edward Conybeare, wrote to contend that the “mere life and death of the carpenter’s son of Nazareth could never have proved the vast historical influence for good which you allow it to be,” had that life ended in
“nothing but a Syrian grave.”
Mrs. Ward replied to her as follows:—
May 16, 1888.
My dear Frances,
It was very interesting to me to get your letter about Robert Elsmere. I wish we could have a good talk about it. Writing is very difficult to me, for the letters about it are overwhelming, and I am always as you know more or less hampered by writer’s cramp.