The Christian Life: Its Course, Its Hindrances, and Its Helps

by Thomas Arnold

Now, to resume the consideration of that which, as I said, is the real point of anxiety with many. They doubt whether the course of a reasonable belief can be held to the end without interruptions: they say that the received notions of the inspiration, and consequently of the complete truth of the Scriptures cannot reasonably be maintained; that he who does maintain them does so by a happy inconsistency;--he is to be congratulated for not following up his own principles; but why should he then find fault with others who do that avowedly and consistently to which he is driven against his professions by the clear necessity of the case?

This argument was pressed by Mr. Newman, some time since, in one of the Tracts for the Times; and it was conducted, as may be supposed, with great ingenuity, but with a recklessness of consequences, or an ignorance of mankind, truly astonishing; for he brought forward all the difficulties and differences which can be found in the Scripture narratives, displayed them in their most glaring form, and merely observed, that as those with whom he was arguing could not solve these difficulties, but yet believed the Scriptures no less in spite of them, so the apparent unreasonableness of his doctrine about the priesthood was no ground why it should be rejected--a method of argument most blameable in any Christian to adopt towards his brethren; for what if their faith, being thus vehemently strained, were to give way under the experiment? and if, being convinced that the Scriptures were not more reasonable than Mr. Newman's system, they were to end with believing, not both, but neither?

Therefore the question is one of no small anxiety and interest; and it is not idly nor wantonly that we must speak the truth upon it, even if that truth may to some seem startling; for by God's blessing, if we do go boldly forward wherever truth shall lead us, our course needs not be interrupted, neither shall a single hair of our faith perish.

The same laws of criticism which teach us to distinguish between various degrees of testimony, authorize us to assign the very highest rank to the evidences of the writings of St. John and St. Paul. If belief is to be given to any human compositions, it is due to these; yet if we believe these merely as human compositions, and without assuming anything as to their divine inspiration, our Christian faith, as it seems to me, is reasonable;--not merely the facts of our Lord's miracles and resurrection; but Christian faith, in all its fulness--the whole dispensation of the Spirit, the revelation of the redemption of man and of the Divine Persons who are its authors--of all that Christian faith, and hope, and love can need. And this is so true, that even without reckoning the Epistle to the Hebrews amongst St. Paul's writings,--nay, even if we choose to reject the three pastoral epistles[18]--yet taking only what neither has been nor can be doubted--the epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, we have in these, together with St. John's Gospel and First Epistle,--giving up, if we choose, the other two,--a ground on which our faith may stand for ever, according to the strictest rules of the understanding, according to the clearest intuitions of reason.

[18] I say this, not as having the slightest doubt myself of the genuineness of any one of the three, but merely to show how much is left that has not been questioned at all, even unreasonably.

I take the works of St. John and St. Paul as our foundation, because, in the first place, we find in them the historical basis of Christianity; that is to say, we find the facts of our Lord's miracles, and especially of his resurrection, and the miraculous powers afterwards continued to the church, established by the highest possible evidence. However pure and truly divine the principles taught in the gospel may be, yet we crave to know not only that we were in need of redemption, but that a Redeemer has actually appeared; not only that a resurrection to eternal life is probable, but that such a resurrection has actually taken place. This basis of historical fact, which is one of the great peculiarities of Christianity, is strictly within the cognizance of the understanding; and in the writings of St. John and St. Paul we have that full and perfect evidence of it which the strictest laws of the understanding require.

But the historical truth being once warranted by the understanding, other faculties of our nature now come in to enjoy it, and develop it; the highest reason and the moral and spiritual affections find respectively their proper field and objects, which, whenever presented to them in vision or in theory, they must instinctively cling to, but to which they now abandon themselves without fear of disappointment, because the understanding has assured them of their reality. We must suppose, on any system, the existence of reason and spiritual affections as indispensable to the understanding of the Scriptures; external authority can do nothing for us without these, any more than the mere faculties of the common understanding. But with these we apprehend the view which St. John and St. Paul afford to us: it opens before us one truth after another, one glory after another. St. John evidently supposes that his readers were familiar with another account of our Lord's life and teaching; and we find accordingly, another account existing in the writings of the three other evangelists. One and the same account is manifestly the substance of their three narratives, to which they thus bear a triple testimony, because none of the three has merely transcribed the others, and none of them apparently was the original author of it. Thus having now the full record of our Lord's teaching, we find that he everywhere refers to the Old Testament as to the word of God, and the record of God's earlier manifestations of himself to man. He has cleared up those especial points in it which might have most perplexed us, as I shall notice more fully hereafter, and he represents himself as the perpetual subject of its prophecies. We thus receive the Old Testament, as it were, from his hand, and learn while sitting at his feet to understand the lessons of the law and the prophets.

Thus we make Christ the centre of both Testaments, and by so doing, we cannot be blind to the divinity pervading both. For the amazing fact that God should come into the world and be in the world cannot by possibility stand alone; it hallows, as it were, the whole period of the world's existence, from the beginning to the end, placing all time and every place in relation to God; it disposes us at once to receive the fact of the special call of the people of Israel;--it gives, I had almost said, an à priori reason why there must have been in earlier times some shadows, at least, or images, to represent dimly to former generations that great thing which they were not actually to witness; it leads us to believe that there must have been some prophetic voices to announce the future coming of the Lord, or else "The very stones must have cried out."

But those writings of St. John and St. Paul which were our first lessons in Christianity, and those other accounts of our Lord's life and teaching to which they introduced us,--can we conceive it possible, that the real meaning of all these shall be hopelessly obscure and uncertain; that if we seek it ever so diligently, we shall not find it? With an humble mind ready to learn, with a heart fully impressed with the sense of God's presence, so as to be morally and spiritually in a condition to receive God's truth, can we believe, then, that the use of those intellectual means, which open to us certainly the sense of human writers, shall be applied in vain to those writers who were commissioned to be the very heralds of a divine message, whose especial business it was to make known what they had themselves heard? Surely if a sufficient certainty of interpretation be attainable in common literature, the revelation of God cannot be the solitary exception.

But we may be mistaken: we may believe that we interpret truly, but we cannot be infallibly sure of it; we want an authority which shall give us this assurance. This is no doubt the natural craving of our weakness; but it is no wiser a craving than if we were to long for the heaven to be opened, and for a daily sight of our Lord standing at the right hand of God. To live by faith is our appointed condition, and faith excludes an infallible assurance. We must earnestly believe that we have the truth, and die for our belief, if necessary, but we cannot know it. No device which the human mind can practise, can exclude the possibility of doubt. If we would find an armour which should cover us at every point from this subtle enemy, it would be an armour that would close up the pores of the skin, and stop our breath; our fancied security would kill us. Is it really possible that, with our knowledge of man's nature, our belief in any human authority can really be more free from doubt than our belief in the conclusions of our own reason? There must ever be the liability to uncertainty; we can put no moral truth so surely as that our minds shall always feel it to be absolutely certain. Where is the infallible authority that can assure us even of the existence of God? And will the scepticism that can believe its own conclusions in nothing else rest satisfied with one conclusion only--that the writers of the first four centuries cannot err? Surely to regard this as the most certain proposition that can be submitted to the human mind, is no better than insanity.