British Quarterly Review, American Edition, Vol. LIII / January and April, 1871

by Various

THEOLOGY AND PHILOLOGY.

Essays, Theological and Literary. By Richard Holt Hutton, M.A. (Lond.) Two vols. Strahan and Co.

These volumes are likely to take a high place in English literature, and to measure and expound the influence which their author has for many years exerted on the higher thought of our generation, through the periodical press. He has submitted a selection of his more elaborate essays to final revision, and has brought them together with much skill and felicity of arrangement. The two volumes are, in fact, two separate works of exceeding interest, the one bearing on the highest forms of modern literature, and the other on the theological and philosophical speculations of the last twenty years. The polish and finish of the revision have excised the genial humour and delicate satire which have characterized some of Mr. Hutton's critical efforts, but they have not altered the substance or modified the tone of these remarkable papers. In almost all of them it is easy to trace the hand of the accomplished publicist, who has acquired the faculty of seizing one main characteristic of the poetry or philosophy, political career, or moral tendency he is wishful to examine, and having made himself master of this, is resolved to establish or illustrate it at his leisure. He decides on a good working hypothesis to account for the composition of a great poet, or the spirit of a remarkable book, and leisurely sits down to transform his hypothesis into a true induction. When Mr. Hutton brings Wordsworth, or George Eliot, or Ernest Rénan, or Henry Rogers into his field of view, he seems to say to himself, 'some explanation is possible of this congeries of spiritual phenomena,' and he forthwith attacks the problem with the enthusiasm of a naturalist, and often with the penetration of a true philosopher. He exhibits great insight, and his speculation is always worthy of attention, but it too much resembles the bar of sunshine gleaming through an aperture in a shutter, which throws an intense light on some portions of a painted chamber but leaves other portions in hazy and dubious shadow. We heartily thank him for the vivid image he has drawn, and for the key he has often given us to the intellectual treasures of some of our greatest modern thinkers; but we do not feel that he has adequately solved all the problem, or has definitely formulated the mental life or calibre of either the poets or theologians whom he passes in review. Thus almost all that he says of Wordsworth is nobly and truly said. There is consummate ability in his reply to Hazlitt's 'thorny praise,' in his comparison of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in his method of proving the thesis with which he starts, viz., that the charge against Wordsworth, of 'profundity and transcendentalism,' sprang from the same root as that which declaims against his 'unintelligible fuss about common feelings and common things.' Still, in his anxiety to establish this position, Mr. Hutton appears to us to overstate the frugality of Wordsworth's genius, and to exaggerate the poet's habit of making a very minute modicum of incident furnish all the material he needed for the exercise of his imagination and the development of his vast subjective energies. The entire series of ecclesiastical sonnets, as well as those which were dedicated to national independence, cover a prodigious field, and make no inconsiderable demand upon the reader's knowledge, as well as upon his sympathy. In the description of the retreat from Moscow, Wordsworth surely chose a theme big enough for the historic imagination of Scott, and he dealt with it in an as objective a fashion, with Dryden's fire and Shelley's pomp of style to boot. Again, in Mr. Hutton's profoundly interesting paper on the 'Poetry of the Old Testament,' there is a principle which is full of force, and our author's working hypothesis will and does explain a great deal. He urges with eloquence and beauty of illustration, that 'faith in the glorious destiny of the nation, and the overseeing providence of God as the power which had wrought out that destiny,' are the two roots of the Hebrew traditionary poems, and he sees these roots in all the efflorescence of the glorious tree; but while there is truth in the remark that this double idea underlies and absorbs the significance of all the Hebrew poet's references to the beauty of nature, and much also of the tragic human interest of the life that was being lived by the prophets, there is some niggardliness in failing to acknowledge how the very fringes of the tabernacle that enshrined both the nation's destiny and the Divine presence are glittering with touches of refined gold, and how much nearer an approach the few Hebrews made to the modern conceptions of the transcendent and pathetic beauty of nature, than all the Greeks and Romans put together.

If the Hebrews rose to the stupendous idea of the universe being but the shadow of Jehovah's might, and believed that the light was the skirt of His raiment, that the heavens, the sun, moon, and stars, were the work of His fingers, that the 'seven stars and Orion,' the 'sweet influence of Pleiades,' and 'the morning spread upon the mountains,' were alike declaring His glory, there is sufficient evidence in the abundance of their imagery and the sweetness of their song, that they exulted in as well as beheld the primal beauty. Interesting and demonstrative as Mr. Hutton's essay is, he leaves a range of facts unaccounted for. The gorgeous imagery of Ezekiel, when in parabolic fashion he sees the analogies between nature and national life, the idyllic, perhaps dramatic grace of the Song of Songs, and the genuine lyrical cry of large portions of the minor prophets and Psalms, seem to us to transgress the canon of our author.

One of the volumes before us consists of eighteen theological essays, admirably classified. They start from the moral and religious significance of Atheism; they proceed to show the insufficiency of the scientific and positivistic explanation of our moral relations. The Pantheistic hypothesis is displayed in its strength and its weakness. The question, 'What is revelation?' is then handled, and Mr. Maurice is vindicated and Dean Mansel demolished. In another essay the historic problems of the fourth Gospel are discussed with great candour and success. 'The principles of evidence' are illustrated in their application to the 'Doctrine of Incarnation,' which our author, like Mr. Baring-Gould, would hold, even if the New Testament should pass out of existence. Two papers on M. Rénan's recent works, and a vehement attack upon the evangelical doctrine, under the irritating title of 'The Hard Church,' are followed by an estimate of the relative position of the 'Romanists, Protestants, and Anglicans.' Several of these papers were published in the National Review, and one of them forms part of a series of essays entitled 'Tracts for Priests and People.' We acknowledge great obligation to Mr. Hutton for many of these dissertations. We sympathise most profoundly in the general estimate he forms of the position of the Atheist, the Positivist, and the Pantheist; and we are confident, after again perusing his examination of 'the historical problems of the fourth Gospel,' that though we differ from him in many details, and regret that he should find it necessary to relinquish the Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse, it is the noblest and most triumphant vindication in the English language of this stronghold of Christianity. In the graceful preface to the first volume, in which Mr. Hutton acknowledges his debt of obligation to Mr. Maurice, he sums up in a sentence the living principle of Mr. Maurice's writings. There, as elsewhere, too much credit is given to a key; too much of a jet of light is thrown upon a portion of Mr. Maurice's theology. We do not believe that this great and suggestive writer can be crushed into a proposition. Still it does cover much of the speculation associated with Mr. Maurice's name. It is as follows:—'All beliefs about God are but inadequate intellectual attempts to justify a belief in Him, which is never a merely intellectual affirmation, but rather a living act of the spirit, by no means confined to those who consciously confess His presence.' The paper entitled 'What is Revelation?' and part of the argument entitled 'The Hard Church,' are expansions of this principle, in vehement opposition to the philosophy of Hamilton, as it was applied by Dean Mansel to theological problems. We think that we may give Mr. Hutton credit for having made the difference between Dean Mansel and Professor Maurice more obvious than those distinguished men ever succeeded in making it appear for themselves; but we imagine that he has forced them into more irreconcilable antagonism than they are themselves conscious of, and has effected this by a slight exaggeration of the position of each disputant. We sympathize with Mr. Hutton far more than with Dean Mansel, in his general philosophical opinions; but this vehement scolding and irate horror caught from Mr. Maurice seems to us perfectly misplaced. Surely, surely the 'living act of the spirit,' by which man knows the only true God, the intuition of God by the eye of the soul, the transcendental conclusion or conviction of the whole intelligence, the bound heavenwards of the sanctified imagination, the 'real assent' to super-sensuous, extra-logical, metaphysical facts, all of which processes are aided by the facts and words of Scripture, by the recorded life of Christ, by the sublime utterances and confessions of the creeds, will not be rejected by Dean Mansel. They are differently described but thankfully acknowledged. What Mansel seems to us to imply is that these processes do not solve the contradictions which are involved in the logical effort to formulate the infinite; the knowledge they supply is approximate rather than exhaustive, regulative rather than absolute; a spiritual apprehension rather than scientific comprehension. The intuitions of Mr. Hutton and Mr. Maurice are far more numerous and intense than Dean Mansel's. Our author has more confidence in his direct experiences of truth than Dean Mansel has. The living God is more visible, more accessible to some minds than others, and these want less help and fewer manifestations to penetrate the mystery; but we do not see why Mr. Hutton should be so wrath with Dean Mansel for the position that 'the faculties in man furnish the conditions of constructing a philosophical theory of the object presented.' 'The object presented' is not the living and infinite God, but the finite manifestation and unveiling of his perfections through a certain series of human experiences. The criticism of Mr. Hutton shows that he is attributing to the words 'philosophical theory' more than it is meant by Mansel to carry. It is just because Dean Mansel cannot form a theory of the underlying 'infinite' and the 'abysmal deep' of human personality, that he is content to theorize about that which is presented in the person and voice and known history and character of a human being. It is because the infinite baffles and confounds us, and refuses to come under the formal laws of thought, that Mansel and Hamilton made a virtue and a science out of the recognition of our nescience, and would confine their theorizing to that which was manageable and apprehensible; but the entire philosophy of the unconditioned turns on the presence in our consciousness of these stupendous factors, unlabelled and untheorized. It appears to us that the conflict narrows itself to the name to be given to our personal relations with the transcendental and eternal realities in which both disputants profoundly believe; and therefore we do not for one moment think that this summation of Dean Mansel's position would be accepted by him. Can Mr. Hutton really mean that Dean Mansel would deny that we can be 'conscious of God's presence with us, conscious of the life we receive from Him, conscious of what He really is, and in the same, indeed, even in far higher sense than that in which we are conscious of what human beings are?' We heartily agree with Mr. Hutton in his denunciation of the idea that the moral nature of man is fundamentally different from the moral nature of God, that the goodness and mercy of God's being must be essentially different from the goodness and mercy in a human will, and that the 'revelation to us of the very character and life of the Eternal God' has been made by the 'purification of human vision,' and is 'the history of the awakening, purifying, and answering of the yearnings of the human spirit for a direct knowledge of Him. It proceeds from God, and not from man.' He details with clearness and force the spread of this 'revelation,' the human condition of it, and the widely diffused material of it, in the instincts and regrets, and secret hopes and fears of universal man. 'The revelation through Christ fulfilled ... the desire of all nations, by revealing the living power in man, by which human nature is wrought into His likeness.' But in his defence of this position he appears to us partially, if not utterly, to ignore the new life given to our humanity in Christ. 'Grace' seems on this theory rather to be a development of dormant powers than the conference of a new tendency, and 'Christ' to become rather the name of a sleeping but universal divineness in all humanity, which is at length realized to the conscience, rather than to be the personal source of all the life. The 'Father,' in the theology of Mr. Hutton, is a living God, as against the Pantheistic tendencies of modern science; but we are not sure—and few things would be farther from our wish than to misrepresent him—that the Christ and the Spirit of God are distinguishable from the voice of universal conscience and the hidden and better nature of the (not fallen but) ever aspiring child of the living God.

Each of Mr. Hutton's papers deserves careful study; we regret that we cannot even refer to more than one other, and this, moreover, one to which we cannot fail to take certain exceptions. It is entitled 'The Hard Church,' a 'degraded phase of the Church of common sense.' It is the Church whose logic has been supplied by Whately, whose metaphysic has been elaborated by Dr. Mansel; one of its most 'merciless and slashing captains' is seen in Professor Henry Rogers, and Mr. Binney caught its exact spirit in his lecture addressed to young persons on the possibility of 'Making the best of both Worlds.' 'Its heroes,' we are told, are 'latitudinarian but not catholic in the tone of their theology.' It has no sympathy, no heart, offers 'no divine reconciliation of contradictory yearnings;' it glories in 'hard sense,' and 'dismisses from view all those fluctuating elements of human life which do not seem deeply imbedded in the average notions of average men.' Its representatives scold away all individuality, denounce the eccentricities of positive faith, and are, in short, 'the most mischievous section of Christendom.' All this is introductory to a tremendous attack on Mr. Rogers for the pitiless severity with which he introduces a thoroughly sceptical mind, seeing no intellectual standing-place in a 'shallow Deism,' and more consistency in thoroughfaced Positivism or Pantheism, and more hope too, because he is sure that at the very bottom of the abyss, the heart will spring upward and the conscience will rise in rebellion. Mr. Hutton should remember that 'the real and deep Theism, holding by prayer, near to Christianity,' was not the intellectual position condemned by the author of 'The Eclipse of Faith;' it was a Theism that is or was in a fluent and changeable condition, a Theism that had, in deference to certain loudly-vaunted principles of reasoning, relinquished Christianity, and spoken of the moral character of Jesus—to put it mildly—with disloyalty if not with disrespect; it was a Theism trembling on the verge of Atheism, yet boasting itself to be a spiritual religion. Methods of thought may surely be harmless in some regions, and deadly in other spheres. It is not hardness but goodness which exposes the worthlessness of the method. This seems to us to have been the work of Mr. Rogers. We are not called upon to defend Mr. Rogers's strong way of putting certain things, but we think that Mr. Hutton has not shown him a more excellent way when he speaks of his 'throttling art,' and would give you to believe that he is a spiritual garotter, rather perhaps of the Antæus proportions, who has at last found a Hercules. Mr. Hutton appears to us to be too angry to see the genuine humour as well as rather grim pleasantry with which Mr. Rogers has represented the enemies of the Christianity infinitely dear to him as destroying each other. The doctrine that 'Christianity is against the grain of human nature,' is spoken of as demonstrating the truth that 'the Hard Church has a hard Master.' Nothing surely is more true than this language of Mr. Rogers, and we are astonished that Mr. Hutton thinks he replies to this estimate of Christianity by saying that Paul told the Athenians that they were 'seeking the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find Him.' Our author is generally quite ready to admit the complexity of human nature, the multiplicity of the forces that are moving it. The same apostle who thus spake to Athenians, said to Galatians, 'Brethren, if I yet preach circumcision, why do I yet suffer persecution? then is the offence of the Cross ceased.' We can conceive of no more satisfactory response to the position here assailed than that so often attributed to Lord Palmerston, 'that all children are born good.' We suppose Mr. Hutton must endorse it. The paper on 'Romanism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism' cannot be discussed by us here for want of space. Its delicate insight into 'root-principles,' and formulated tendencies, is another illustration of the author's disposition to generalise, and to cast pencils of coloured light upon the parts of a theme, or of a system of thought. With the general estimate of Luther we have not much to contend against, except that no reference is made to the objects or reasons of his faith. The unlimited, ecstatic, violent confidence in an unproved, transcendental fact, with nothing but personal intuitions to guide the triumphant trust—itself a Saviour—may be apparently proved from certain table-talk of Luther, but is a very imperfect exhibition of Luther's position. Why, by implication, should all whom Mr. Hutton calls 'pseudo-Protestants' be supposed to deny the indispensable necessity of an entire moral surrender of the whole nature to the will of God? With some of those whom Mr. Hutton thus denounces, as for example, Bishop Bull and all who agree with him, faith is identifiable with moral surrender to the will of God; in the view of others, as proved by almost all the Protestant confessions, it is inseparably associated with saving trust. Where, we ask, is 'the bibliolatry which relegates the Holy Spirit to the province of explaining the Bible,' except in a small section of Scotch divines, whose hard and artificial lines have long since shown a tendency to vanish away? Mr. Hutton seems to try to take from those whose joy and crown it is to speak of trust in a present Christ their most distinctive feature; because here and there a logical theologian may use scholastic or forensic phrases in his theorizing, it is ungenerous to say that 'the passionate faith of Luther is degraded into the acceptance of an artificial contract,' or that 'the orthodox theory of substitution excludes the purifying influence of spiritual union with Christ.' The best reply that we can make to Mr. Hutton's contemptuous allusion to Dr. Candlish is to call his attention to Dr. Candlish's sermon on 'His servants shall serve Him,' and to the greater part of his Commentary on the first Epistle of St. John. Would that our great thinkers succeeded in learning more of each other's mind! There are a hundred other questions raised by Mr. Hutton on which it is tempting but difficult to dilate. We cannot part from him, however, without assuring him that we believe these volumes will gain what they richly deserve—a high place in English literature. Our remarks have been somewhat critical and dissatisfied, but we are anxious to express, notwithstanding, the exceeding admiration which we feel for these eloquent and noble essays. It is often most instructive to see how the position we occupy shapes itself to the intelligence of one who is only in partial sympathy with us.

First Principles of Ecclesiastical Truth. Essays on the Church and Society. By J. Baldwin Brown, B.A. Hodder and Stoughton.

This volume consists of ten essays: the first four are entitled 'The Doctrine of the Infallible,' and contain Mr. Brown's exposition of the inquiry—What is truth? a brave and full exhibition of the answer to that question given by the infallible church; a criticism of the Protestant dictum that an infallible book is adequate to the solution of every great moral and spiritual problem; and in the last place a passionate vindication for the free spirit of the possession of the true infallibility. Two essays then follow, of considerable speculative interest, under the titles of 'The Natural History of Antichrist,' and 'The Christian Commonwealth.' The volume is completed by four lecture essays on the 'Revolution of the last Quarter of a Century,' the intellectual, social, ecclesiastical and theological revolution which has unrolled itself during the twenty-five years of Mr. Brown's fruitful and stimulating ministry. We have said enough to indicate the comprehensiveness and multifariousness of the theme which our author has here investigated. It is as though he had taken his stand on some high promontory which overlooks a boundless sea of thought, and with well practised, almost prophetic eye, taken in the vast expanse, the rolling tides, the brooding storms of the great highway of the nations; here a very maelström of confusion and wreathing agony, where equatorial and arctic currents blend in driving mist and fierce agitation, and there a dreamy outlook of serene though glittering colour; now, the breaker and the wreck and then the ark of refuge, the busy craft, the haven of rest. Few writers of the present day appear to us to take a larger view of men and things, and though his senses seem painfully acute to the moan of distress and the shriek of the torment, yet few appear to hear more distinctly the sound of the Master's voice, or to see more clearly the triumphant form of Him who holds that ocean in the hollow of His hand.

We think this volume is unquestionably the noblest production of Mr. Baldwin Brown's pen. In refinement and elevation of style, in high sympathy with the good and the noble side of that which he condemns, in readiness to learn from his opponents, and to see himself and his own position with their eyes, amounting to what some may deem almost a dangerous concession to the misconception of the free spirit entertained by both the Romish doctor and the apostle of science, coupled with outspoken and brave utterance of unpopular truth, this volume will hardly find its parallel in modern times.

We cannot attempt more than to touch on a few points. We are inclined to think that the paper on 'The Natural History of Antichrist' is not only the most original and suggestive portion of the volume, but that it is, in fact, the pivot, or the centre of the entire argument. Our author has drawn a comparison between 'Babel,' 'Babylon,' and 'Babylon the Great,' and has shown how the hoary legend of man's first endeavour to establish a worldly and human independence of the Supreme will, found its counterpart in the subsequent efforts to produce the four world-wide monarchies of pre-Christian times, and again, in the towering system of Pontifical rule, the rise, triumph, and fall of which are seen in the visions of Patmos. He has discussed with consummate eloquence and brilliancy of touch, the analogies which link these three manifestations of the spirit of antichrist, and how God's providence has undermined them one after the other by a like energy of the individual conscience and the free spirit. The paper on the 'Christian Commonwealth' provides a delicately-sketched theory of the true relation between the governing and the Christian spirit. Mr. Brown admits, nay, contends, for the fact that the Church and the State in their last significance and highest development are one, and argues with great ingenuity that a supposed alliance between the Church and the State, as between two contracting parties, is essentially unchristian; it is, moreover, 'an exceedingly low and false conception of the true character of the National Establishment, and is quite unsupported by its early history.' He acknowledges the difficulty of realizing the Christian idea in any Christian State, and asserts 'that the Gospel has still a missionary function in every State in Christendom; men have not only to be helped to live by it, they have to be persuaded to believe in it;' but 'that the idea of a National Church whose rulers are clergy, which shall have the whole spiritual interests of the community in charge, having its own ordinances, officers, and laws, of which it is the only lawful custodian and administrator, lending a Christian character to the State by its alliance, and deriving material countenance and support from the State in return, is simply anti-Christian. The only National Church is the whole community which has been redeemed by Christ, and on which, and in which, He is working as the head of the Church in a thousand ways, of which theologians of all parties little dream.'