The Progress of the Century

by Unknown

Hampden, Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, formed another object of High Church attack. He had been condemned by the university on account of doctrines alleged to be anti-Trinitarian, and his appointment by a Whig ministry to a bishopric caused a renewal of the onslaught, which, however, only served by its failure to emphasize the fact that the Church of England was in complete subjection to the state. In this, as in the general commotion, prominently figured Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, son of the great evangelical and philanthropist, a man gifted, dexterous, and versatile, who would have made a first-rate advocate or politician, balancing himself with one foot on his hereditary Evangelicism, the other on High Churchmanship, to which, in his heart, as a hierarch, he inclined. A character so ambiguous could make little impression, however great his abilities might be.

James Anthony Froude had been a follower and fellow-worker of Newman. But on Newman’s secession he not only hung back, but violently recoiled and produced a highly sceptical work, The Nemesis of Faith, which entailed his resignation of a clerical fellowship in an Oxford college. Then he exemplified the strange variations of the age by coming out as an historian in the colors of Carlyle.

Carlyle himself is not to be left out of sight in an account of the progress of religious thought; for his Scotch Calvinism, transmuted into hero worship, has taken a strong hold, if not on the distinct convictions, on the sentiment and temper of the nation. If he has administered wholesome rebuke to the self-complacency of democracy with its ballot-box, he has also set up a worship of force and kindled a spirit of violence totally subversive of the Sermon on the Mount.

Matthew Arnold, with his silver shafts, was rather a connoisseur in all lines than a serious philosopher or theologian; but he also, with his conversion of God into the “not ourselves which makes for righteousness,” did something in his light but insinuating and charming way to forward disintegration.

But in 1874–77 appeared Supernatural Religion, a searching and uncompromising inquiry into the historical evidences of supernatural Christianity. The book, though attacked on secondary points with perhaps superior learning by Bishop Lightfoot, Bishop Westcott, and others, cannot be said to have met with any general answer. Supplemented in some respects by Dr. Martineau’s Seat of Authority in Religion and other works on the same side, it sets forth the sceptic’s case against the supernatural.

Miracles, says criticism, belong to an age of ignorance. With the dawn of knowledge they diminish. In its meridian light they disappear. The Jews were eminently addicted to belief in miracles. There was Satanic miracle as well as divine; nor can any distinction be drawn as a matter of evidence between the two. As little can any distinction be drawn in point of evidence between the Gospel miracles and the ecclesiastical miracles, which nevertheless Protestants reject. The miracles of one sort, the demoniac, are bound up with the Jewish belief in possession by personal devils, from which all efforts to disentangle them so as to resolve them into cures of lunacy by moral influence are vain. The four Gospels and the Acts, which comprise the historic evidences, are all anonymous, all of uncertain authorship. The first three Gospels are evident incrustations upon an older document which is lost and about which nothing is known. In not one of the five cases can the existence of the book be traced to the time of the events or a time so near the events as to preclude the growth of fable in a highly superstitious and totally uncritical age. The presentation of Christ’s character and teaching in the fourth Gospel, which is Alexandrian, is far from identical with the presentation in the first three Gospels, which are Jewish. There are irreconcilable discrepancies between the Gospels as to matters of fact, notably in regard to the genealogy of Christ, the length of his mission, the Last Supper, the day of the Crucifixion, the details of the Resurrection and the Ascension. Such miracles as the miraculous darkness, the earthquake, the rending of the veil of the Temple, the opening of the tombs and the apparition of the dead in the streets of Jerusalem, being totally unconfirmed by history or by any recorded effect, stagger belief. Such testimony as St. Paul bears to the Resurrection is second hand, is that of a convert in the ecstasy of conversion, and is manifestly uncritical. His own enthusiasm is intelligible on merely human grounds. We may be sure that had God become incarnate to save man, absolutely conclusive proof of that fact would have been vouchsafed. But the proof is not sufficient to establish anything not otherwise perfectly credible, far less to establish the miraculous Birth, the Resurrection, and the Incarnation. Such in broad outline is the case of Rationalism against Supernatural Religion presented by the work just mentioned and its allies. The effects are visible even in High Church writings. In the writings of liberals, of course, they are still more visible. Jowett had come to the conclusion that our sources of knowledge about Christ had been reduced to a single document, no longer in existence, which formed the basis of the first three Gospels.

The desire to minimize the supernatural and throw it into the background, bringing the personal character of Christ and his ethical teaching into the foreground, is now manifest in English, as it has long been in German, divines. It is conspicuous in the very popular and colorably orthodox works of Dr. Farrar. In his Life of Lives the supernatural has little place. There is an evident tendency throughout to disentangle from it the character and moral teaching. Responsibility for belief in the Godhead of Christ seems to rest on the Nicene Council. In the Life of Christ we see reduced to a natural occurrence the miracle of Gadara, where the devils cast out of the men enter into the herd of swine. It is needless to say that with the miraculous element of these occurrences their value as evidence for the supernatural disappears.

Scotland generally remained fast bound by her Westminster Confession. There had been a period of liberalism marked by the appearance of “Jupiter” Carlyle; Robertson, the historian; Dugald Stewart, and other philosophers and men of mind. But the Church of Scotland being democratic, its faith was in the keeping of the people, who were impervious to criticism and naturally opposed to innovation. At last, however, the thaw came, hastened perhaps by the collision between the state Church of Scotland and the Free Church. The Westminster Confession, it seems, has now been tacitly laid aside, and Scotch theology has had its Robertson Smith, whose critical views on the Old Testament earned him removal from his professorial chair.

Another book which in its day startled the world and awakened all the echoes of orthodox alarm was Buckle’s History of Civilization, in which the characters of nations and the progress of humanity were traced to physical influences, excluding the moral and by implication the theistic element. Its thesis was supported by an overwhelming display of learning. Though not expressly, it was in its tenor hostile to religious belief. Of Buckle’s work less is now heard, but it had an influence in its day, perhaps more in America than in its native land. Americans, it seems, were captured both by the boldness of the theory and by the imposing display of erudition.

In the line of learned and dispassionate research France has produced Renan, whose Life of Jesus especially made a vast impression on Europe, and still probably exercises an influence by virtue not only of the boldness of the speculation and the intense interest of the subject, but of the extreme beauty of the style. The work, however, is one in which imagination acts strongly on history. It lacks critical basis; not that the author fails fully to set out his authorities, but that in his narrative he fails to discriminate among them. One incident is treated as real, another as mythical, to suit the requirements of poetical conception, without reason assigned for the distinction. There seems no reason, for example, why the miracle of the raising of Lazarus should be treated as historical, though in the sense of imposture or illusion, while other miracles are treated as totally unhistoric. Nor is the portrait free from a French and slightly sensuous cast. From the whole body of Renan’s histories of Israel, of Christ, and of the early Church the supernatural is entirely excluded.