to the value of our divine Saviour’s evidence in favor of revelation, he uses the following extraordinary language:
“I desire not to deny the existence of a divine element in Jesus. I gladly recognize him as the loftiest spiritual seer and teacher the world has seen; the best historic embodiment of spiritual perfection that we have. But we must own, if we are clear-sighted and frank, that in Christ himself we do not obtain an oracle exempt from the limitations of humanity and the conditions of earthly knowledge.”
This is a clear negation of the divinity of Christ, and an implied avowal that Mr. Bixby ranges himself with Renan and Strauss. As before stated, Mr. Bixby’s chief aim in the first chapters of his book is to simplify the conditions of the problem which he has set before him, and we see that he has striven to do this by stripping religion of all its positive attributes, and putting in its stead a bloodless and emasculated spectre. “It is a force,” he says, “anterior to all churches and hierarchies, the grand spiritual stream flowing from above through the souls of men, of which ecclesiastical organizations are but the earthly banks, the clayey reservoirs and wooden dams, by which men have thought they could better utilize the heavenly forces.” This is fine and figurative, we confess, but more marked by sound than sense. Mr. Bixby here brands all churches as purely human institutions, and yet allows that they possess religion, that they are its conduits and distributors to men, and that dogmas and codes and ethical enactments are mere accretions, the work of human minds. These must consequently be false, and, being such, should retard rather and operate against the influences of religion
pure and undefiled, the embodiment of truth. How, then, can they be said to be utilizers of heavenly force and reservoirs of religion, they being false, and it true?
“Pergis pugnantia secum
Frontibus adversis componere?”
The definition of religion which has passed current for centuries, making it to consist of a determinate and specified allegiance of man to his Maker, is contradicted by the views advanced in Mr. Bixby’s book, and therefore the few only, whose opinions are equally unsettled, can accept his conclusions. There is something so unreal and shadowy in his estimate of religion that one is at a loss to see thoroughly into what he means by it, and consequently incapable of appreciating all that his conclusions are intended to embody. “Religious truth,” he says, “(theologians and preachers defending the old beliefs have maintained) belongs to another realm from ordinary kinds of truth. It is not to be tried by the understanding. It is not to be brought to the bar of common sense, but it is to be discerned by the inner soul, and its evidence found in the soul’s satisfaction in it.” If this be Mr. Bixby’s estimate of the value of the evidence on which religious truth reposes, he must have had in view, as the ideal of all dogmatic religion, the utterances of some strong-lunged preacher at a camp-meeting. No theologian of the Catholic nor of the approximating sects ever thought for a moment that religion is not to be tried by the understanding nor brought to the bar of common sense. The evidences of revealed religion are based upon reason, which, closely scrutinizing these, is compelled to admit the claims of the Scriptures
and the church, just as it is obliged to admit the truths of geometry. It is true that individual dogmas are not the subject-matter of purely rational investigation, but they appeal to our reason just as strongly through the evident infallibility of the authority which submits them to our belief. Mr. Bixby, we fear, either misapprehends plain things or is given to misrepresenting. Objectively, all truths resemble each other in that they are true—i.e., eternal, immutable, and necessary; subjectively, for us, those truths which we can discern with the eye of reason pertain to the natural order, and to the supernatural order those whose guarantee depends on the revealed word of God. It is evident that in the logical order, the natural precedes and underlies the supernatural, and that, with respect to the evidence on which both repose, it must be tried by the understanding, and that searchingly, and cannot escape the bar of common sense. “Truth,” says the author of An Essay on a Philosophy of Literature, “is independent of man. The power is his to discover, develop, and apply it; but he cannot create it. That belongs to the Infinite Intelligence alone. He it is who creates it and who creates the light of our reason by which to perceive it.” Truth, therefore, must be consistent with itself; and it is the province of every individual truth to borrow lustre from, and shed radiance on, each sister truth, and not to detract from and obstruct it. This is the logic of the schools—nay, it is the logic of Hamilton, Mansel, Baden Powell, and Faraday, whom Bixby charges with dividing the field of truth into two separate portions: one the province of knowledge, where science holds sway; the other the province of
belief, where religion has her throne. Then truth may be divided against itself, and to this effect must we interpret the writings of the distinguished philosophers mentioned. We doubt not that, for logic’s sake, these scholars would all indignantly repudiate this charge which places them in an absurd and uncourted position. Pity ’tis Mr. Bixby did not attempt by a citation to substantiate his charge. He does not fail, however, to draw his accustomed inference. “Now,” he says, “by taking this mode of defending itself against the incursions of modern science, the church has aided much in spreading suspicion of the certainty of its cherished doctrines.” Then modern science does make incursions against the church, which is perfectly right, but the church is debarred the right of repelling them. A burglar may break into our house, and we are not at liberty to resist his ingress by means of the nearest weapon at hand, but we should preach him a homily on the impropriety of his conduct.
But he is brave enough in this: that not an inkling or a wrinkle of his too transparent sophistry disturbs him. Immediately after he says (p. 72): “Bishops like he [sic] of London may exhort the modern inquirer as eloquently as they please to throw away doubt as they would a bombshell; but it serves only to make the investigator more suspicious of the validity of religion.” Then is it not proper, Mr. Bixby, to throw away doubt? If not so, it must by all means be better to entertain doubt, so that a state of doubt ought to be our normal intellectual condition. Just in proportion as we entertain doubt may we be less suspicious of the validity of religion; but the moment we think of discarding