The relation of the Christian revelation to nature, the Bishop thus intelligibly points out:
“The Christian revelation teaches nothing merely to gratify our curiosity. In this respect it is the very opposite of nature. The handwriting of the Creator in the works of nature seems to be imprinted on them for the very purpose of stimulating our curiosity and training and rewarding our powers of investigation and discovery. In the Christian revelation, on the contrary, nothing is revealed for the sake merely of its being known, but that the degree of knowledge given us may in some way or other affect our moral and spiritual training.”
An Undergraduate of Oxford, in bearing testimony to the influence of these Sermons upon him at the time they were preached, describes the Free Inquiry of the present day as working in three classes of men. With some it was hailed as a relief from the annoyance of a conscience which told them that if the “old paths” were the true ones, there was certainly an ill look-out for them; and it was a pleasure, therefore, to hear those who ought to know say that the hard things (such as eternal punishment, &c.) which had been told them from their cradles were matters, to say the least, of considerable doubt. With others it was adopted with the gratifying feeling that thus they showed themselves “wiser than their sires,” and as intellectual champions “in the foremost files of time,” superior to all old wives’ fables. With others it was entertained, in a spirit eager for truth, with a painful sense of perplexity—the distress of men who feel that, while they have conscientiously left the old way as a way averse to all true progress, they neither know nor like to contemplate the issue of the new.
Of these three classes of “free inquirers,” the first two were of course contemptible, but the third could not be passed by unheeded; and after a vehement effort to stand up for truths hitherto on his part unquestioned, the writer felt that he was more or less with them. He then acknowledges to reading the Essays and Reviews through three times, which gave him a new freedom, with which he felt self-satisfied: still, he was miserable with uncertainty, for he had nothing beneath his feet but his own private judgment; and he asks, what was that as regards the truth, when he saw that no two men arrived at the same conclusion? In the midst of all this he went, with others, to hear these sermons: instead of hearing the Bishop steer between conflicting opinions in this matter, our Undergraduate was influenced by these sermons to feel that reverence must go hand-in-hand with knowledge, in order that the true harmony may exist between mind and soul; that a man’s reason and judgment alone are a poor support and comfort, and the kingdom of God must be received in the spirit of a little child.[23]
The Bishop concludes an earnest deprecation of the habit of doubting, with the following awful picture of the death-bed of a victim to this pernicious practice:
“It is not from imagination that I have drawn this warning. I can tell you of an overshadowed grave which closed in on such a struggle and such an end as that at which I have glanced. In it was laid a form which had hardly reached the fulness of earliest manhood. That young man had gone, young, ardent, and simply faithful, to the tutelage of one, himself I doubt not a believer, but one who sought to reconcile the teaching of our Church, in which he ministered, with the dreams of Rationalism. His favourite pupil learnt his lore, and it sufficed for his needs while health beat high in his youthful veins: but on him sickness and decay closed early in, and as the glow of health faded, the intellectual lights for which he had exchanged the simplicity of faith began to pale; whilst the viper brood of doubts which almost unawares he had let slip into his soul, crept forth from their hiding-places and raised against him their fearfully envenomed heads. And they were too strong for him. The teacher who had suggested could not remove them: and in darkness and despair his victim died before his eyes the doubter’s death.”
Our Age of Doubt.
The intellect of the present generation is usually acknowledged to have gone off on quite a different tack from that of its predecessor. Not belief, but doubt, is the present fashion. Now, belief and doubt, both of them, have their uses. Each of them has its good and its bad side. Doubt is the more daring and impressive; but belief, even if sometimes rather illogical, is decidedly the more amiable. Let a negative system be true, and a positive system be false; still the positive system will call out some of the best qualities of our nature in a way that the negative system cannot. It is certain that the present generation is growing up in a spirit of greater independence and self-reliance, of less deference to age, to tradition, to authority of all kinds, than was in vogue twenty years since. The change may be for the better or for the worse, but the fact of the change is undeniable. Probably, if minutely examined, it has both its good and its bad side. The young men of the present day have gained something in wideness of view, and at least apparent worldly knowledge; but they have certainly lost much that was very attractive in their predecessors. On the other hand, acts of petty persecution are doing all that can be done to enlist their best feelings on the side on which it is wished that they should not be enlisted. If any man, especially one of the most conscientious and hard-working officers of the University, is proscribed and insulted on account of his opinions, those opinions are at once put in an attractive light to every generous mind. Men in authority are slow to believe it, but there is no policy so foolish as that of making martyrs.—From the Saturday Review.