"My object," he says, speaking of the words which he has taken as the subject of his essays, "has been to examine the language with which we are most familiar, and which has been open to most objections, especially from Unitarians. Respecting the Conception I have been purposely silent; not because I have any doubt about that article, or am indifferent to it, but because I believe the word 'miraculous,' which we ordinarily connect with it, suggests an untrue meaning; because I think the truth is conveyed to us most safely in the simple language of the Evangelists; and because that language taken in connection with the rest of their story, offers itself, I suspect, to a majority of those who have taken in the idea of an Incarnation, as the only natural and rational account of the method by which the eternal Son of God could have taken human flesh."
Now, would not Mr. Maurice have done better if he had enounced the definite meaning, or shade of meaning, which he considers short of, or different from, our ordinary meaning of miraculous, as applied to this subject, and yet the same as that suggested by the Gospel account? We have no doubt what Mr. Maurice does believe on this sacred subject. But we are puzzled by what he means to disavow, as an "untrue meaning" of the word miraculous, as applied to what he believes. And the Unitarians whom he addresses must, we think, be puzzled too.
We have quoted this passage because it is a short one, and therefore a convenient one for a short notice like this. But the same tormenting indistinctness pervades the attempts generally to get a meaning or a position, which shall be substantially and in its living force the same as the popular and orthodox article, yet convict it of confusion or formalism; and which shall give to the Unitarian what he aims at by his negation of the popular article, without leaving him any longer a reason for denying it. The essay on Inspiration is an instance of this. Mr. Maurice says very truly, that it is necessary to face the fact that important questions are asked on the subject, very widely, and by serious people; that popular notions are loose and vague about it; that it is a dangerous thing to take refuge in a hard theory, if it is an inconsistent and inadequate one; that if doubts do grow up, they are hardly to be driven away by assertions. He accepts the challenge to state his own view of Inspiration, and devotes many pages to doing so. In these page's are many true and striking things. So far as we understand, there is not a statement that we should contradict. But we have searched in vain for a passage which might give, in Mr. Maurice's words, a distinct answer to the question of friend or opponent, What do you mean by the "Inspiration of the Bible?" Mr. Maurice tells us a most important truth—that that same Great Person by whose "holy inspiration" all true Christians still hope to be taught, inspired the prophets. He protests against making it necessary to say that there is a generic difference between one kind of Inspiration and the other, or "setting up the Bible as a book which encloses all that may be lawfully called Inspiration." He looks on the Bible as a link—a great one, yet a link, joining on to what is before and what comes after—in God's method of teaching man His truth. He cares little about phrases like "verbal inspiration" and "plenary inspiration"—"forms of speech which are pretty toys for those that have leisure to play with them; and if they are not made so hard as to do mischief, the use of them should not be checked. But they do not belong to business." He bids us, instead, give men "the Book of Life," and "have courage to tell them that there is a Spirit with them who will guide them into all truth." Great and salutary lessons. But we must say that they have been long in the world, and, it must be said, are as liable to be misunderstood as any other "popular" notions on the subject. If there is nothing more to say on the subject—if it is one where, though we see and are sure of a truth, yet we must confess it to be behind a veil, as yet indistinct and not to be grasped, let us manfully say so, and wait till God reveal even this unto us. But it is not a wise or a right course to raise expectations of being able to say something, not perhaps new, but satisfactory, when the questions which are really being asked, which are the professed occasion of the answer, remain, in their Intellectual difficulty, entirely unresolved. Mr. Maurice is no trifler; when he throws hard words about,—when at the close of this essay he paints to himself the disappointment of some "Unitarian listener, who had hoped that Mr. Maurice was going to join him in cursing his enemies, and found that he had blessed them these three times,"—he ought to consider whether the result has not been, and very naturally, to leave both parties more convinced than before of the hollowness of all professions to enter into, and give weight to, the difficulties and the claims of opposite sides.
Mr. Maurice has not done justice, as it seems to us, in this case, to the difficulty of the Unitarian. In other cases he makes free with the common belief of Christendom, and claims sacrifices which are as needless as they are unwarrantable. If there is a belief rooted in the minds of Christians, it is that of a future judgment. If there is an expectation which Scripture and the Creed sanction in the plainest words, it is that this present world is to have an end, and that then, a time now future, Christ will judge quick and dead. Say as much as can be said of the difficulty of conceiving such a thing, it really amounts to no more than the difficulty of conceiving what will happen, and how we shall be dealt with, when this familiar world passes away. And this belief in a "final judgment, unlike any other that has ever been in the world," Mr. Maurice would have us regard as a misinterpretation of Bible and Creed—a "dream" which St. Paul would never "allow us" to entertain, but would "compel" us instead "to look upon everyone of what we rightly call 'God's judgments' as essentially resembling it in kind and principle." "Our eagerness to deny this," he continues, "to make out an altogether peculiar and unprecedented judgment at the end of the world, has obliged us first to practise the most violent outrages upon the language of Scripture, insisting that words cannot really mean what, according to all ordinary rules of construction, they must mean." It really must be said that the "outrage," if so it is to be called, is not on the side of the popular belief. And why does this belief seem untenable to Mr. Maurice? Because it seems inconsistent to him with a truth which he states and enforces with no less earnestness than reason, that Christ is every moment judging us—that His tribunal is one before which we in our inmost "being are standing now—and that the time will come when we shall know that it is so, and when all that has concealed the Judge from us shall be taken away." Doubtless Christ is always with us—always seeing us—always judging us. Doubtless "everywhere" in Scripture the idea is kept before us of judgment in its fullest, largest, most natural sense, as "importing" not merely passing sentence, and awarding reward or penalty, but "discrimination and discovery. Everywhere that discrimination or discovery is supposed to be exercised over the man himself, over his internal character, over his meaning and will." Granted, also, that men have, in their attempts to figure to themselves the "great assize," sometimes made strange work, and shown how carnal their thoughts are, both in what they expected, and in the influence they allowed it to have over them. But what of all this? Correct these gross ideas, but leave the words of Scripture in their literal meaning, and do not say that all those who receive them as the announcement of what is to be, under conditions now inconceivable to man, must understand "the substitution of a mere external trial or examination" for the inward and daily trial of our hearts, as a mere display of "earthly pomp and ceremonial"—a resumption by Christ "of earthly conditions"; or that, because they believe that at "some distant unknown period they shall be brought into the presence of One who is now" not "far from them," but out of sight—how, or in what manner they know not—therefore they must suppose that He "is not now fulfilling the office of a Judge, whatever else may be committed to Him."
Mr. Maurice is aiming at a high object. He would reconcile the old and the new. He would disencumber what is popular of what is vulgar, confused, sectarian, and preserve and illustrate it by disencumbering it. He calls on us not to be afraid of the depths and heights, the freedom and largeness, the "spirit and the truth," of our own theology. It is a warning and a call which every age wants. We sympathise with his aim, with much of his positive teaching, with some of his aversions and some of his fears. We do not respect him the less for not being afraid of being called hard names. But certainly such a writer has need, in no common degree, of conforming himself to that wise maxim, which holds in writing as well as in art—"Know what you want to do, then do it."
XIX
FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE[22]
[22] Saturday Review, 6th April 1872.
This Easter week we have lost a man about whom opinions and feelings were much divided, who was by many of the best and most thoughtful among us looked on as the noblest and greatest of recent English teachers, and who certainly had that rare gift of inspiring enthusiasm and trust among honest and powerful minds in search of guidance, which belongs to none but to men of a very high order. Professor Maurice has ended a life of the severest and most unceasing toil, still working to the utmost that failing bodily strength allowed—still to the last in harness. The general public, though his name is familiar to them, probably little measure the deep and passionate affection with which he was regarded by the circle of his friends and by those whose thoughts and purposes he had moulded; or the feeling which his loss causes in them of a blank, great and not to be filled up, not only personally for themselves, but in the agencies which are working most hopefully in English society. But even those who knew him least, and only from the outside, and whose points of view least coincided with his, must feel that there has been, now that we look back on his course, something singularly touching and even pathetic in the combination shown in all that he did, of high courage and spirit, and of unwearied faith and vigour, with the deepest humility and with the sincerest disinterestedness and abnegation, which never allowed him to seek anything great for himself, and, in fact, distinguished and honoured as he was, never found it. For the sake of his generation we may regret that he did not receive the public recognition and honour which were assuredly his due; but in truth his was one of those careers which, for their own completeness and consistency, gain rather than lose by escaping the distractions and false lights of what is called preferment.
The two features which strike us at the moment as characteristic of Mr. Maurice as a writer and teacher, besides the vast range both of his reading and thought, and the singularly personal tone and language of all that he wrote, are, first, the combination in him of the most profound and intense religiousness with the most boundless claim and exercise of intellectual liberty; and next, the value which he set, exemplifying his estimate in his own long and laborious course, on processes and efforts, as compared with conclusions and definite results, in that pursuit of truth which was to him the most sacred of duties. There is no want of earnest and fervent religion among us, intelligent, well-informed, deliberate, as well as of religion, to which these terms can hardly be applied. And there is also no want of the boldest and most daring freedom of investigation and judgment. But what Mr. Maurice seemed to see himself, and what he endeavoured to impress on others, was that religion and liberty are no natural enemies, but that the deepest and most absorbing forms of historical and traditional religion draw strength and seriousness of meaning, and binding obligation, from an alliance, frank and unconditional, with what seem to many the risks, the perilous risks and chances, of freedom.