It is remarkable, then, on account of the sensation which it has made in religious circles. In the course of a few months it has reached a third edition, though it is a fair-sized octavo and not an over-cheap one. And it has received the praise of critics and reviewers of very distinct shades of opinion. Such a reception must be owing either to the book itself or to the circumstances of the day in which it has appeared, or to both of these causes together. Or, as seems to be the case, the needs of the day have become a call for some such work; and the work, on its appearance, has been thankfully welcomed, on account of its professed object, by those whose needs called for it. The author includes himself in the number of these; and, while providing for his own wants, he has ministered to theirs. This is what we especially mean by calling his book "remarkable."
Disputants may maintain, if they please, that religious doubt is our natural, our normal state; that to cherish doubts is our duty that to complain of them is impatience; that to dread them is cowardice; that to overcome them is inveracity; that it is even a happy state, a state of calm philosophic enjoyment, to be conscious of them--but after all, necessary or not, such a state is not natural, and not happy, if the voice of mankind is to decide the question. English minds, in particular, have too much of a religious temper in them, as a natural gift, to acquiesce for any long time in positive, active doubt. For doubt and devotion are incompatible with each other; every doubt, be it greater or less, stronger or weaker, involuntary as well as voluntary, acts upon [{619}] devotion, so far forth, as water sprinkled, or dashed, or poured out upon a flame, Real and proper doubt kills faith, and devotion with it; and even involuntary or half-deliberate doubt, though it does not actually kill faith, goes far to kill devotion; and religion without devotion is little better than a burden, and soon becomes a superstition. Since, then, this is a day of objection and of doubt about the intellectual basis of revealed truth, it follows that there is a great deal of secret discomfort and distress in the religions portion of the community, the result of that general curiosity in speculation and inquiry which has been the growth among us of the last twenty or thirty years.
The people of this country, being Protestants, appeal to Scripture, when a religious question arises, as their ultimate informant and decisive authority in all such matters; but who is to decide for them the previous question, that Scripture is really such an authority? When, then, as at this time, its divine authority is the very point to be determined, that is, the character and extent of its inspiration and its component parts, then they find themselves at sea, without possessing any power over the direction of their course. Doubting about the authority of Scripture, they doubt about its substantial truth; doubting about its truth, they have doubts concerning the objects which it sets before their faith, about the historical accuracy and objective reality of the picture which it presents to us of our Lord. We are not speaking of wilful doubting but of those painful misgivings, greater or less, to which we have already alluded. Religious Protestants, when they think calmly on the subject, can hardly conceal from themselves that they have a house without logical foundations, which contrives indeed for the present to stand, but which may go any day--and where are they then?
Of course Catholics will tell them to receive the canon of Scripture on the authority of the church, in the spirit of St. Augustine's well-known words: "I should not believe the gospel, were I not moved by the authority of the Catholic Church." But who, they ask, is to be voucher in turn for the church and St. Augustine? is it not as difficult to prove the authority of the church and her doctors as the authority of the Scriptures? We Catholics answer, and with reason, in the negative; but, since they cannot be brought to agree with us here, what argumentative ground is open to them? Thus they seem drifting, slowly perhaps, but surely, in the direction of scepticism.
It is under these circumstances that they are invited, in the volume before us, to betake themselves to the contemplation of our Lord's character, as it is recorded by the evangelists, as carrying with it its own evidence, dispensing with extrinsic proof, and claiming authoritatively by itself the faith and devotion of all to whom it is presented. Such an argument, of course, is as old as Christianity itself; the young man in the Gospel calls our Lord "Good Master," and St. Peter introduces him to the first Gentile converts as one who "went about doing good;" and in these last times we can refer to the testimony even of unbelievers in behalf of an argument as simple as it is constraining. "Si la vie et la mort de Socrate sont d'un sage," says Rousseau, "la vie et la mort de Jésus sont d'un Dieu." And he clenches the argument by observing, that, were the picture a mere conception of the sacred writers, "l'inventeur en serait plus étonnant que le héros." Its especial force lies in its directness; it comes to the point at once, and concentrates in itself evidence, doctrine, and devotion. In theological language, it is the motivum credibilitatis, the objectum materiale and the formale, all in one; it unites human reason and supernatural faith in one complex act; and it comes home to all men, educated and ignorant, young and old. And it is the point to which, after all [{620}] and in fact, all religious minds tend, and in which they ultimately rest, even if they do not start from it. Without an intimate apprehension of the personal character of our Saviour, what professes to be faith is little more than an act of ratiocination. If faith is to live, it must love; it must lovingly live in the author of faith as a true and living being, in Deo vivo et vero; according to the saying of the Samaritans to their towns-woman: "We now believe, not for thy saying, for we ourselves have heard him." Many doctrines may be held implicitly; but to see him as if intuitively is the very promise and gift of him who is the object of the intuition. We are constrained to believe when it is he that speaks to us about himself.
Such undeniably is the characteristic of divine faith viewed in itself; but here we are concerned, not simply with faith, but with its logical antecedents; and the question returns on which we have already touched, as a difficulty with Protestants--how can our Lord's life, as recorded in the Gospels, be a logical ground of faith, unless we set out with assuming the truth of those Gospels; that is, without assuming as proved the original matter of doubt? And Protestant apologists, it may be urged--Paley for instance--show their sense of this difficulty when they place the argument drawn from our Lord's character only among the auxiliary evidences of Christianity. Now the following answer may fairly be made to this objection; nor need we grudge Protestants the use of it, for, as will appear in the sequel, it proves too much for their purpose, as being an argument for the divinity not only of Christ's mission, but of that of his church also. However, we say this by the way.
It may be maintained then, that, making as large an allowance as the most sceptical mind, when pressed to state its demands in full, would desire, we are at least safe in asserting that the books of the New Testament, taken as a whole, existed about the middle of the second century, and were then received by Christians, or were in the way of being received, and nothing else but them was received, as the authoritative record of the origin and rise of their religion. In that first age they were the only account of the mode in which Christianity was introduced to the world. Internal as well as external evidence sanctions us in so speaking. Four Gospels, the book of the acts of the Apostles, various Apostolic writings, made up then, as now, our sacred books. Whether there was a book more or less, say even an important book, does not affect the general character of the religion as those books set it forth. Omit one or other of the Gospels, and three or four Epistles, and the outline and nature of its objects and its teaching remain what they were before the omission. The moral peculiarities, if particular, of its Founder are, on the whole, identical, whether we learn them from St. Matthew, St. John, St. Peter, or St. Paul. He is not in one book a Socrates, in another a Zeno, and in a third an Epicurus. Much less is the religion changed or obscured by the loss of particular chapters or verses, or even by inaccuracy in fact, or by error in opinion, (supposing per impossible such a charge could be made good,) in particular portions of a book. For argument's sake, suppose that the three first Gospels are an accidental collection of traditions or legends, for which no one is responsible, and in which Christians put faith because there was nothing else to put faith in. This is the limit to which extreme scepticism can proceed, and we are willing to commence our argument by granting it. Still, starting at this disadvantage, we should be prepared to argue, that if, in spite of this, and after all, there be shadowed out in these anonymous and fortuitous documents a teacher sui generis, distinct, consistent, and original, then does that picture, thus accidentally resulting, for the very reason [{621}] of its accidental composition, only become more marvellous; then he is an historical fact and again a supernatural or divine fact--historical from the consistency of the representation, and because the time cannot be assigned when it was not received as a reality; and supernatural, in proportion as the qualities, with which he is invested in those writings, are incompatible with what it is reasonable or possible to ascribe to human nature viewed simply in itself. Let these writings be as open to criticism, whether as to their origin or their text, as sceptics can maintain; nevertheless the representation in question is there, and forces upon the mind a conviction that it records a fact, and a superhuman fact, just as the reflection of an object in a stream remains in its definite form, however rapid the current, and however many the ripples, and is a sure warrant to us of the presence of the object on the bank, though that object be out of sight.
Such, we conceive, though stated in our own words, is the argument drawn out in the pages before us, or rather such is the ground on which the argument is raised; and the interest which it has excited lies, not in its novelty, but in the particular mode in which it is brought before the reader, in the originality and preciseness of certain strokes by which is traced out for us the outline of the divine teacher. These strokes are not always correct; they are sometimes gratuitous, sometimes derogatory to their object; but they are always determinate; and, being such, they present an old argument before us with a certain freshness, which, because it is old, is necessary for its being effective.
We do not wonder at all, then, at the sensation which the volume is said to have caused at Oxford, and among the Anglicans of the Oxford school, after the wearisome doubt and disquiet of the last ten years; for it has opened the prospect of a successful issue of inquiries in an all-important province of thought, where there seemed to be no thoroughfare. Distinct as are the liberal and catholicising parties in the Anglican Church, both in their principles and their policy, it must not be supposed that they are as distinct in the members that compose them. No line of demarcation can be drawn between the one collection of men and the other, in fact; for no two minds are altogether alike, and, individually, Anglicans have each his own shade of opinion, and belong partly to this school, partly to that. Or, rather, there is a large body of men who are neither the one nor the other; they cannot be called an intermediate party, for they have no discriminating watch-words; they range from those who are almost Catholic to those who are almost liberals. They are not liberals, because they do not glory in a state of doubt; they cannot profess to be "Anglo-Catholics," because they are not prepared to give an eternal assent to all that is put forth by the church as truth of revelation. These are the men who, if they could, would unite old ideas with new; who cannot give up tradition, yet are loth to shut the door to progress; who look for a more exact adjustment of faith with reason than has hitherto been attained; who love the conclusions of Catholic theology better than the proofs, and the methods of modern thought better than its results; and who, in the present wide unsettlement of religious opinion, believe indeed, or wish to believe, scripture and orthodox doctrine, taken as a whole, and cannot get themselves to avow any deliberate dissent from any part of either, but still, not knowing how to defend their belief with logical exactness, or at least feeling that there are large unsatisfied objections lying against parts of it, or having misgivings lest there should be such, acquiesce in what is called a practical belief, that is, believe in revealed truths, only because belief in them is the safest course, because they are probable, and because belief in [{622}] consequence is a duty, not as if they felt absolutely certain, though they will not allow themselves to be actually in doubt. Such is about the description to be given of them as a class, though, as we have said, they so materially differ from each other, that no general account of them can be applied strictly to any individual in their body.
Now, it is to this large class which we have been describing that such a work as that before us, in spite of the serious errors which they will not be slow to recognize in it, comes as a friend in need. They do not stumble at the author's inconsistencies or shortcomings; they are arrested by his professed purpose, and are profoundly moved by his successful hits (as they may be called) toward fulfilling it. Remarks on the gospel history, such as Paley's they feel to be casual and superficial; such as Rousseau's, to be vague and declamatory: they wish to justify with their intellect all that they believe with their heart; they cannot separate their ideas of religion from its revealed object; but they have an aching dissatisfaction within them, that they apprehend him so dimly, when they would fain (as it were) see and touch him as well as hear. When, then, they have logical grounds presented to them for holding that the recorded picture of our Lord is its own evidence, that it carries with it its own reality and authority, that his "revelatio" is "revelata" in the very act of being a "revelatio," it is as if he himself said to them, as he once said to his disciples, "It is I, be not afraid;" and the clouds at once clear off, and the waters subside, and the land is gained for which they are looking out.