Bishop Magee further urges that “those who say that Christianity was received in an ignorant age, are contradicted by the story of Christianity itself, for many of those who saw his miracles rejected them.” I fail to see the contradiction; clearly the Jews were an ignorant people, they had no scientific literature, no philosophy, no recorded oratory, not even a language—for the Hebrew is but that which the captives borrowed from their captors—not a trace of their ancient tongue having been preserved.
The learned Bishop argues that “the desires, prejudices, and passions of men largely share in the making of their beliefs.” But surely he might have carried this farther still, and have shown—and this even apart from the case made out by Darwin, Spencer, and Wallace—that race, climate, soil, food, and mode of life, modify and change beliefs, and that such beliefs are transmissible and transmitted from parent to child in similar—though perhaps not in the same—fashion as are features and frames. And as in the case of the physique the inherited nature is modified, improving or deteriorating with the mode of life of the individual, so also, but in a more varied degree, with his thought-abilities and his thoughts. But if it be true, as was so powerfully urged by the Right Reverend Christian Advocate, that men’s desires, passions, and prejudices contribute largely to the making up of their beliefs, what becomes of his Lordship’s subsequent startling declaration that a man is free to choose what he will believe, “to will his own belief?” If there are hereditary predispositions to particular lines of thought, hereditary predispositions to regard particular topics from limited stand-points, hereditary predispositions to ignore or accept unquestioningly particular propositions, I ask, Does not the acquiescence in such a doctrine fatally impeach the Bishop’s arguments?
On the reference made to the “bigotry of the priest,” I desire in this lecture to say but little, for I would willingly follow the example of my Right Reverend antagonist, and entirely avoid those arguments which savour of mere personal denunciation; but it is hard to forget that during the 1800 years which, it was boasted, Christianity has endured it was the policy and practice of priestly bigotry, first in the Church of Rome, and afterwards, and not less, in the Church of England, to oppose, and without mercy to seek to crush out all efforts at Freethought. If to-day the Lord Bishop of Peterborough lifts his powerful and eloquent voice in the Cathedral nave, if to-day we are charmed with his suasive pleading and well-turned periods, we can scarcely forget that it is only since the Church has been unable to strike with the arm of the law that she has condescended to plead with the tongue.
I must assume to-night that those of you who are present were also present at the Bishop’s discourse; but I speak with more freedom as it is my intention to print this reply together with a verbatim report of the Lord Bishop’s sermon, so that they may stand side by side. I regret that the learned and eloquent advocate of Church Christianity did not think it right when talking of freedom, necessity, laws of nature, absolute freedom, and so forth, to favour us with some explanation or definition to guide us to the sense he intended to convey by their use; as I could not help fancying that he more than once used the same words with quite different meanings. Jonathan Edwards, whom I shall quote to you with slight modification, thus in effect states the doctrine of necessity:—“The whole universe exhibits a fixed, certain, and constant succession of events, which bear to each other the relation of causes and effects. This series of causes and effects, as they belong to unconscious and involuntary subjects, is the physical order of the material universe: of which order the phenomena are found by observation to take place according to certain principles, which are usually called the laws of nature. This series, as it applies to intelligent and voluntary agents, consists of the fixed and invariable conjunction of volitions and voluntary actions with antecedent motives. In every instance that we know by experience, or that we can conceive, there is an invariable and necessary conjunction of motives and volitions. We cannot conceive a change in the volition without an antecedent change in the motive; and the motives remaining the same, the volitions and the voluntary acts will be correspondent. We are conscious that we never do, and never can, perform any voluntary action without a motive.” While not adopting entirely the words of Jonathan Edwards, I have given his view of the doctrine of necessity, a view not contained in the sermon by Bishop Magee; but each used the phrase laws of nature. Now, clearly, in the mouth of the Bishop, law meant the expression of personal will. The Duke of Argyll in his “Reign of Law,” says:—“In its primary signification a ‘law’ is the authoritative expression of human will enforced by power;” but he gives five different senses in which the word “law” is used. First, “We have law as applied simply to an observed order of facts; secondly, to that order as involving the action of some force or forces of which nothing more may be known; thirdly, as applied to individual forces, the measure of whose operation has been more or less defined or ascertained; fourthly, as applied to those combinations of force which have reference to the fulfilment of purpose, or the discharge of function; fifthly, as applied to abstract conceptions of the mind, not corresponding with any actual phenomena, but deduced therefrom as axioms of thought necessary to our understanding of them. Law, in this sense, is a reduction of the phenomena, not merely to an order of facts, but to an order of thought.” I use law only as denoting observed concurrence or sequence of events. When it is said to be a law that water poured from the glass shall fall to the ground, it is not, or should not, be meant that the water falls by command emanating from personal will, but only that this is the recorded experience of all competent observers without exception. Jonathan Edwards, relying on Isaiah xlvi. 9 and 10, xiv. 27, Acts xv. 18, Psalms xxxiii. 10 and 11, and other texts, declared that the absolute and perfect foreknowledge of God, asserted in the Bible, was inconsistent with freedom of volition, as it implied the certainty of the happening of the events foreknown. The Duke of Argyll says, “There is nothing to object to or deny in the doctrine that if we knew everything that determines the conduct of a man, we should be able to know what the conduct will be. That is to say, if we knew all the motives which are brought by external agencies to bear upon his mind, and if we knew all the other motives which that mind evolves out of its own powers, and out of previously acquired materials, to bear upon itself; and if we knew the character and disposition of that mind so perfectly as to estimate exactly the weight it will allow to all the different motives operating upon it, then we should be able to predict with certainty the resulting course of conduct.” Sir William Hamilton, for I prefer to quote from antagonists, says, “How the will can possibly be free, must remain to us, under the present limitation of our faculties, wholly incomprehensible. We are unable to conceive an absolute commencement, we cannot, therefore, conceive a free volition. A determination by motives cannot, to our understanding, escape from necessitation. Nay, were we even to admit as true what we cannot think as possible, still the doctrine of a motiveless volition would be only casualism; and the free acts of an indifferent, are, morally and rationally, as worthless as the pre-ordered passions of a determined will. How, therefore, I repeat, moral liberty is possible in man or God, we are utterly unable, speculatively, to understand.”
In dealing with “Freedom as opposed to Necessity,” Dr. Magee declared “that a man is free to think in one way or another, that it is not absolutely necessary for him always to think in one way or another.” This declaration is so obscure, that I should have had to abandon all attempt to solve the Bishop’s meaning but for the added explanation—viz., “that is to say, his thought is not the necessary product of physical constitution, that his thoughts do not grow out of him, as the blade grows out of the seed or the flower out of the plant, that it is not mechanical or necessary, but that a man has the power to choose how he will think.” I do not imagine that Dr. Magee used the word “thought” as limited by Sir William Hamilton; or that he intended in the loose words he uttered on this head to examine the doctrine as to evolution of thought put forward by German thinkers. I assume that the Lord Bishop regarded brilliancy of speech as preferable to profundity of argument, and fancied that he would best clear the way for the other Christian advocates who are to follow him, by piling well-sounding but often perfectly unmeaning phrases in their pathway. When the Bishop of Peterborough urges that thought is not the necessary product of physical constitution, we answer by opening before him an ethnical map; and pointing to the Australian as probably the lowest human type, the Bushman of the Cape, the Esquimaux, the Negro, the Teuton, we ask whether physical constitution has not something to do with thought-ability? Nay, taking a mal-formed cranium or a diseased brain from a lunatic asylum, we demand further whether the unhealthy and inaccurate thought is not there alleged in precise terms to be the “necessary product of physical constitution?” The assertion “that a man has the power to choose how he will think,” may be met by the query—When? Has the old man, partly deaf, partly blind, with failing memory, the power to choose how he will think? Has the drunken man, while intoxicated, the power to choose how he will think? Has the untaught Norfolk farm labourer with Sir W. Hamilton’s “Philosophy of the Unconditioned” before him, the power to choose how he will think in opposition to or in support of Cousin or Kant? Has the man to whom Church of England Christianity was taught as a child, whose intellect was bent and bound while yet pliable and scarce resisting, whose scope of inquiry has always been restrained by that line where reason applied becomes blasphemy, has he the power to choose what he will think? Let the wretched subterfuges with which even thinkers above the average—as your Essayists and Reviewers, your Dunbar Heaths, your Drs. Giles and Irons, your Colensos and your Voyseys—try to reconcile orthodoxy and Freethought, be examined, and you will have fuller answer than any I can give. Has man the power to choose how he will think? It may be fairly presumed, that under the words “to think,” Dr. Magee included all phases of mental activity, perception, recollection of perception, comparison of perception, judgment, reason, volition. Any word by which any condition of mental activity could be fairly described is, I take leave to submit, included by Dr. Magee under the head of “thought.” But is it true that a man can choose his perceptions? Are they not first limited by his perceptive ability, and, next, by the range within which that ability can be exercised, and its development in exercise? And if perception be compulsory, if a man cannot refuse to perceive that which is within the range of his ability, if he cannot elect to perceive that which is not within its range, then how can the thought-processes—all related to, and more or less based upon, the primary perceptions, modified or enlarged as these may afterwards be—how can these be free? And will Dr. Magee contend that a man has the power to choose what he will remember, or what he will forget?
“Christianity,” says Dr. Magee, “teaches that man is free, and terribly free, to will his own belief;” but the tenth article of Dr. Magee’s own Church, an article which binds him in this argument, declares that “The condition of man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith and calling upon God;” nay, the very Litany in which the Lord Bishop took part proceeds on the assumption that all are miserable sinners, who may desire to escape, but cannot escape, from sin without God’s help. And the ninth article of the Church of England positively declares that every man “is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh always lusteth contrary to the spirit.” “Where there is absolute freedom,” says my Lord Bishop of Peterborough, “there cannot be authority.” But man is absolutely, “terribly free” to choose his belief, therefore this is a subject upon which God can have no authority. This is a point upon which the power of the Omnipotent is limited. This being monstrously absurd, it was natural that the acute advocate for a falling Church should make some effort to retreat with the honours of war, and he, admitting the difficulty in religion, says that you find precisely the same difficulty in politics in fact, and in law, medicine, and morality, as to opinion. Arguments from analogy are dangerous at best, but here there is no analogy. Dr. Magee should at least read the “Contrat Social” of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and the exhaustive essay on Liberty by John Stuart Mill. No one but a madman would contend in politics either for the absolute liberty of the individual, or for the absolute supremacy of authority. Even Guizot’s views of government might have saved Bishop Magee from an illustration so faulty. And as to the opinions on law and medicine which we receive submissively from lawyer and doctor, their authority is usually the measure of our ignorance. We swallow the drugs of Dr. Pangloss, and bow to the dictum of Justice Shallow, it is true; but the more we know of physiology, the more we learn of jurisprudence, the less is our acquiescence a mere submission to authority.
As to so much of the Bishop’s sermon as deals with the authority of revelation and miracles, and which in effect declares that, on the authority of a revelation not made to me, I may be required to believe in Jesus Christ as the “only son” of God, while that very revelation tells me that God had more than one son—(Job i. 6, ii. 1)—and which on the authority of miracles disbelieved by the mass of the people who are supposed to have seen them, requires me to believe that Jesus, “very God of very God,” having descended into hell, afterwards ascended into heaven with “his body, flesh, and bones, and all things appertaining to man’s nature,” and there sits at the right hand of God—(Article four and Nicene Creed)—my answer is a very simple one. The Bishop’s declaration that here no tyranny is attempted over Freethought is not a fair and honest declaration. The revelation does not submit its proof to Freethought, but, on the contrary, my Lord Bishop of Peterborough, as the spokesman of his Church, is bound to tell us in the words of his own horrible creed, that the man who will not submit to acknowledge the dogmas of his Church, without doubt shall perish everlastingly.
When the Bishop says that men are continually submitting to authority, and that if they did not they would never learn anything, he is woefully inaccurate in his analogy. It is perfectly true that Humboldt, Lyell, Huxley, Darwin, Lewes, Spencer, Mill, and such men’s names are names of authority, and that our experience is supplemented and aided by the recorded experiences of such men. But our confidence is not an unlimited one, their authority is not supreme. It is limited by the measure of our own experience in the first place, and by our acquaintance with the experience of other men than these in the next; both of these, too, modified and affected by our general intellectual ability. But all that our scientific teachers say is, We have learned such and such things, we learned them in such a fashion, you may if you have leisure and means verify our experiments, we show you the road we have travelled, we have mapped and scaled it for you. But in religion there is no such teaching, the authority of the Church dominates, denies, and annihilates experience with a graveyard resurrection for lack of living verification. Nothing could more fittingly be denounced as a trick of pulpit advocacy had it come from the mouth of any other man, than the supposition of an impossible event in a graveyard as evidence on some equally impossible doctrine. It would be far more natural in thought to suppose deception in the alleged graveyard conjuring, than to suppose anything else. For decomposing bodies, fleshless skeletons, forms in which the vital organisation had been destroyed, and disappearing for days, weeks, months, or years, to suddenly break through coffins, which living they would have been unable to burst, to get through a superincumbent mass of earth, and to stand out in flesh, alive, the blood circulating through newly manufactured veins—a man who saw this instead of crying “A miracle,” had far better believe himself subject to delirium, and make his straightway to the nearest physician for medicine to cool his disordered brain. But the Bishop’s case is weaker still; his graveyard opened 1800 years ago, the men who saw it have ever rejected it, and we who have not even seen it are required to believe it, and are told, that in this there is no tyranny over our thought. When the Bishop talks of the “soulless and merciless machinery of law,” and declares that “there are no laws so merciless as those of nature,” we must not forget that by the very terms of his sermon, and by the creed of his Church, he asserts all law as the expression of the “personal will” of Deity; and the soulless and merciless law is, according to the Lord Bishop of Peterborough, the manifested will of the merciful God who is infinite soul and love. Reading to us a portion of the Apostles’ Creed, Dr. Magee said, All these are assertions of facts, and “you are bound to think right about them under penalties,” but not more so than about other alleged matters of fact. This is untrue. What other alleged matters of fact are men required to believe under Act of Parliament? What other alleged facts are there which if a man deny he may be sent to gaol, lose civil rights, be denied the guardianship of his children, and be made an outlaw in the State? Where of an alleged fact in astronomy or geology is your investigation prefaced with the declaration that if you deny it you shall be sent to a bottomless pit filled with brimstone and fire, and prepared for the Devil and his angels?
SECOND DISCOURSE
OF THE
BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH.
CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.
On Wednesday evening, March 29th, the Bishop of Peterborough preached his second sermon, on “Christianity and Scepticism,” before a large congregation in the nave of the Cathedral, Norwich. His text was from the Gospel according to St. John, xx. 25:—