The most shockingly searching, influential, and permanent blunder that ever has affected the mind of man has been the fancy that a religion includes a creed as to its απορῥητα, and a morality; in short, that it was doctrinal by necessity, enactory, and (which has been the practical part of the blunder) therefore exclusive, because:
1. With our notion of a religion as essentially doctrinal, the very first axiom about it is, that being true itself it makes all others false. Whereas, the capital distinction of the Pagan was—that given, supposing to be assumed, 10,000 religions—all must be true simultaneously, all equally. When a religion includes any distinct propositions offered to the understanding (that is, I think, resting upon a principle or tendency to a consequence by way of differencing from facts which also are for the understanding, but then barely to contemplate not with a power of reacting on the understanding, for every principle introduces into the mind that which may become a modification, a restraint; whereas, a fact restrains nothing in the way of thought unless it includes a principle), it would rise continually in its exclusive power according to the number of those propositions. At first it might exclude all but ten, eight, seven, and so on; finally, as integrated it would exclude all.
2. If you ask on what principle a Pagan believed his religion, the question to him was almost amusing and laughable. I will illustrate the case. A man meets you who inquires in a hurried, suppose even in an agitated way, whether you met a tall man, blind of one eye, dressed in such a coloured dress, etc. Now, does it ever occur to you that the inquirer is lying? Lying! Wherefore should he lie? Or again, if you say that your house stands under a hill, that three out of four chimneys smoke, and that you must indeed try some of the inventions for remedying this annoyance, would any man in his senses think of speculating on the possibility that all this should be a romance? Or, to come nearer in the kind of fact, if a man represented his family fortune as having been bequeathed by a maiden aunt in the last generation, would any man say otherwise than that doubtless the man knew his own benefactors and relatives best? On this same principle, when Christ was mentioned as the divinity adored by a certain part of the Jews who were by way of distinction called Christians, why should a Roman object? What motive could he have for denying the existence or the divine existence of Christ? Even the idea of dissent or schism, some Jews worshipping, some protesting, would not much puzzle him. Something like it had occurred in Pagan lands. Neptune and Athene had contended for Attica. And under the slight inquiry which he would ever make, or listen to when made by others, he might wonder at the rancour displayed by the protesting party, but he would take it for granted that a divinity of some local section had been unduly pushed into pre-eminence over a more strictly epichorial divinity. He would go off with this notion, that whereas, the elder Jews insisted on paying vows, etc., to a God called Jehovah, a section sought to transfer that allegiance to a divinity called Christ. If he were further pressed on the subject, he would fancy that very possibly, as had been thought, found or imagined in the case of Syrian deities or Egyptian, etc., that perhaps Christ might correspond to Apollo, as Astarte to Diana, Neptune of Latium to the Poseidôn of Greece. But if not, that would cause no scruple at all. Thus far it was by possibility a mere affair of verbal difference. But suppose it ascertained that in no point of the symbols surrounding the worship of Christ, or the conception of His person, He could be identified with any previously-known Pagan God—that would only introduce Him into the matricula of Gods as a positive novelty. Nor would it have startled a Roman to hear that in India or any country large enough there should be a separate Pantheon of many thousand deities, plus some other Pantheon of divinities corresponding to their own. For Syria—but still more in one section of Syrian Palestine—this would surprise him quoad the degree, not quoad the principle. The Jew had a separate or peculiar God, why not? No nation could exist without Gods: the very separate existence of a people, trivial as it might be in power and wealth, argued a tutelary God, but, of course, proportioned to the destinies at least (and in part to the present size) of the country. Thus far no difficulties at all. But the morality! Aye, but that would never be accounted a part of religion. As well confound a science with religion. Aye, but the απορῥητα. These would be viewed as the rites of Adonis, or of Ceres; you could not warn him from his preconception that these concerned only Jews. Where, therefore, lodged the offence? Why here, as personalities—for such merely were all religions—the God must be measured by his nation. So some Romans proposed to introduce Christ into the Roman Pantheon. But what first exploded as a civil offence was the demand of supremacy and the inconceivable principle set up of incompatibility. This was mere folly.
A much more solemn, significant and prophetic meaning than the common one may be secured to the famous passage in St. Matthew—'And thou shalt call His name Jesus.' This injunction wears the most impressive character belonging to heavenly adjuration, when it is thus confided to the care and custody of a special angel, and in the very hour of inauguration, and amongst the very birth-throes of Christianity. For in two separate modes the attention is secretly pointed and solicited to the grand serpentine artifice, which met and confronted the almost insurmountable difficulty besetting Christianity on its very threshold: First, by the record of the early therapeutic miracles, since in that way only, viz., by a science of healing, which the philosopher equally with the populace recognised as resting upon inspiration from God, could the magistrate and civil authority have been steadily propitiated; secondly, by the very verbal suggestion couched in the name Jesus, or Healer. At the most critical of moments an angel reveals himself, for the purpose of saying 'Thou shalt call His name Jesus'—and why Jesus? Because, says the angel, 'He shall heal or cleanse His people from sin as from a bodily disease.' Thus, in one and the same moment is suggested prospectively to the early Christian, who is looking forward in search of some adequate protection against the civil magistrate, and theoretically and retrospectively is suggested to the Christian of our own philosophizing days, that admirable resource of what by a shorthand expression I will call Hakimism. The Hakim, the Jesus, the Healer, comes from God. Mobs must not be tolerated. But neither must the deep therapeutic inspirations of God be made of none effect, or narrowed in their applications. And thus in one moment was the panic from disease armed against the panic from insurgent mobs; the privileged Hakim was marshalled against the privileged magistrate; and the deep superstition, which saw, and not unreasonably, a demon raging in a lawless mob, saw also a demon not less blind or cruel in the pestilence that walked in darkness. And, as one magnet creates other magnets, so also the Hakim, once privileged, could secretly privilege others. And the physical Hakim could by no test or shibboleth be prevented from silently introducing the spiritual Hakim. And thus, whilst thrones and councils were tumultuating in panic, behold! suddenly the Christian soldier was revealed amongst them as an armed man.
'Écrasez l'infâme,' I also say: and who is he? It would be mere insanity to suppose that it could be any teacher of moral truths. Even I, who so much despise Socrates, could not reasonably call him l'infâme.
But who, then, is l'infâme? It is he who, finding in those great ideas which I have noticed as revelations from God, and which throw open to the startled heart the heaven of heavens, in the purity, the holiness, the peace which passeth all understanding, finding no argument of divinity, then afterwards does find it in the little tricks of legerdemain, in conjuring, in præstigia. But here, though perhaps roused a little to see the baseness of relying on these miracles, and also in the rear a far worse argument against them, he still feels uncomfortable at such words applied to things which Christ did. Christ could not make, nor wished to make, that great which was inherently mean; that relevant, which was originally irrelevant. If He did things in themselves mean, it was because He suited Himself to mean minds, incapable of higher views; wretches such as exist amongst us of modern days by millions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away, wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;' who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read in the events of things[31]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches, that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere legerdemain or jugglery.
The Truth.—But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague phantom of possibility, there was now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or Atlas'—say rather, by symbolizing the greatest of human interests by the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them; and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but dread crashes of sound—again to fade or vanish, the colossal form, never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32] Where there had been nothing, a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for man, called The Truth. Why was it called The Truth? How could such an idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as ὁποητης was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement of dissimulation a man was called by the title of The Orator, his own favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of the imply a momentary annihilation of the competitors, as though in comparison of the ideal exemplification these minor and approximating forms had no existence—or at least, not quoad hunc locum—as 'the mountain in Sicily' would rightly indicate Etna), on the same artificial principle they may imagine rhetoricians to have denominated (or if not, to have had it in their power to denominate) some one department of truth which they wished to favour as the truth. But this conventional denomination would not avail, and for two reasons: First, that rival modes of truth (physics against mathematics, rhetoric against music) would contest the title, and no such denomination would have a basis of any but a sort of courtesy or vicarious harmonious reality from the very first. Secondly, that, standing in no relation whatever to God, every mode, form, division or subdivision of truth merely intellectual would gain nothing at all by such ostentatious arts. Algebra has been distinguished by glorious names; so has the fancied knowledge of transmutation applied to the metals; so, doubtless, has many a visionary speculation of magic; so, again, has the ridiculous schwermerey of the Rabbis in particular ages. But those are as transient and even for the moment as partial titles as the titles of Invincible or Seraphic applied to scholastic divines. Out of this idea the truth grew, next (suppose x) another Martyrdom.
The difference between all human doctrines and this is as between a marble statue and a quick thing. The statue may be better, and it may be of better material; it may be of ivory, of marble, and amongst marbles known to the ancient sculptors of several different kinds the most prized; of silver gilt, of hollow gold, of massy gold, and in all degrees of skill; but still one condition applies to all—whatever the material, whoever the artist, the statue is inanimate, the breath of life is not within its nostrils. Motion, spontaneity, action and antagonist action, the subtle watch-work of the brain, the mighty laboratory of the heart, vision, sensibility, self-propagated warmth, pleasure, hope, memory, thought, liberty—not one of these divine gifts does it possess. It is cold, icy, senseless, dull, inert matter. Let Phidias have formed the statue, it is no better. Let the purest gold be its material, it is no worthier than the meanest model in clay to the valuation of the philosopher. And here, as in so many cases, the great philosopher meets with the labouring man; both meet with the little innocent child. All have the same undervaluation of the statue. And if any man values it preposterously, it will be neither a great philosopher, nor a labouring man with horny fists, nor a little innocent and natural child. It will be some crazy simpleton, who dignifies himself as a man of taste, as elegans formarum spectator, as one having a judicious eye for the distinctions of form. But now, suddenly, let one of the meanest of these statues begin to stir and shiver with the mystery of life, let it be announced that something 'quick' is in the form, let the creeping of life, the suffusion of sensibility, the awful sense of responsibility and accountability ripen themselves, what a shock—what a panic! What an interest—how profound—would diffuse itself in every channel. Such is the ethics of God as contrasted with the ethics of Greek philosophers. The only great thing ever done by Greece or by Greek philosophers was the ethics. Yet, after all, these were but integrations of the natural ethics implanted in each man's heart. Integrations they were, but rearrangements—redevelopments from some common source.
It is remarkable that the Scriptures, valuing clearness and fencing against misunderstandings above all things, never suspend—there is no εποχη in the scriptural style of the early books. And, therefore, when I first came to a text, 'If when,' I was thunderstruck, and I found that this belongs to the more cultivated age of Hebrew literature.
'And the swine because it divideth the hoof, yet cheweth not the cud, it is unclean unto you' (Deut. xiv. 8). Now the obvious meaning is, primâ facie, that the ground of its uncleanness was its dividing the hoof. Whereas, so far from this, to divide the hoof is a ground of cleanness. It is a fact, a sine quâ non—that is, a negative condition of cleanness; but not, therefore, taken singly the affirmative or efficient cause of cleanness. It must in addition to this chew the cud—it must ruminate. Which, again, was but a sine quâ non—that is, a negative condition, indispensable, indeed; whose absence could not be tolerated in any case, but whose presence did not therefore, and as a matter of course, avail anything. For the reverse case occurred in the camel, hare, and rabbit. They do chew the cud, the absence of which habit caused the swine to be rejected, but then they 'divide not the hoof.' Accordingly they were equally rejected as food with the swine.