Chapter II: Part 2

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:—

“The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord.
But he said unto them, Except I shall see in his hands the print of
the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and thrust
my hand into his side, I will not believe.”

His Lordship said:

My subject to-night is “Christianity, and Scepticism,” and I have
chosen for my text these words of a sceptic, for as such St. Thomas
has been regarded. His name has become proverbial in Church history
for unbelief. Among the different characters that surround our Lord
in the Gospel story, he has been regarded as the type of the doubter,
and he is known as the doubting or the unbelieving Thomas. And yet
at first sight we hardly see that he should be so called. It is
quite true that he did doubt, and yet his doubt does not at first
sight seem to be unreasonable, or so very obstinate that he should be
called by way of distinction, the doubter, the unbeliever. It was
not unreasonable. On the contrary, it was reasonable and natural
that he should feel some doubt about the resurrection of Jesus
Christ. Others had doubts as well as he, and they were called fools
and slow of heart to believe, and yet they did not inherit the name
of the doubters. Again, his disbelief was not of a very obstinate
kind. It seemed to have yielded almost instantaneously; and almost
immediately after he was satisfied, he said more than others of the
disciples, for he said “My Lord and my God.” He not only
acknowledged the resurrection of Jesus, but his divinity, and yet he
is called Thomas the doubter, the sceptic, and he is rightly so
called.

The Christian consciousness did not err when it gave the name,
because when he uttered the words which I have just read to you,
“Except I see I will not believe,” he uttered that which is the very
essence of scepticism. He suspended his belief upon an absolutely
impossible condition. He declared that he would not give his assent
except on this condition, that it should be made absolutely
impossible for him to doubt. What he said to his brother disciples
amounts to this:—“You tell me that you have seen the Lord, but I
cannot believe you. It does not matter to me how strong your
testimony may be, or how truthful I believe you to be, I will not be
satisfied till I see it for myself. I will not accept of any
testimony but that of my own senses.” He said his assent was only to
be had by absolute demonstration, and its being made impossible for
him to have any doubt. I say the condition makes all belief
absolutely impossible. Belief, in the proper sense of the word, is
assent on an amount of trust. If we have absolute demonstration of
anything, the result is not belief at all, it is demonstration. What
we see with the eyes of our body or mind, we don’t properly believe
in. We know it. We have the certainty, not of faith, but of
science, and where doubt is impossible, belief or faith is
impossible. You may have certainty, but it will be the certainty of
knowledge, it will not be the certainty of faith. It is quite clear
that if any man makes it a condition of his assent to truth of any
kind, that it must first be demonstrated to him as clear as that two
and two make four; it is clear that is if there be any class of
truths which cannot be so proved as that two and two make four, the
man who makes that proof or demonstration a condition of his assent,
must always be in doubt about those truths, or that class of truths;
he must always in respect of them be a sceptic or doubter.

Again, one step further, it is clear that religion or Christianity is
a truth, or class of truths that cannot be demonstrated
scientifically. We cannot prove that there is a God, in the same way
that we can prove that two and two make four. We cannot do this,
because the idea of God is that he is invisible to us. The first
utterance of religion is this: I believe in what I cannot see, I
believe in an invisible God. Clearly he that says, I don’t believe
anything I do not see, must be a sceptic or doubter about the truth
of religion; and therefore it comes to pass, that though religion is
by no means the only subject, or the only collection of truths that
cannot be demonstrated, it is the principal one, and it has come to
pass that though there are sceptics on other subjects, yet for this
reason a sceptic is understood to be a man who doubts about religious
subjects; a man who will not believe all the truths of Christianity,
because they cannot be demonstrated to him in the way he thinks they
should be demonstrated. You see now what a sceptic is, and what
scepticism, is. By the word sceptic we mean a disbeliever in the
truths of religion. A man may disbelieve some of the truths of
religion and not be a sceptic. A Jew does not believe in
Christianity, but he is not a sceptic. It is because he believes in
Moses that he does not believe in Christ. We don’t call the
Pantheists or the Deists sceptics, because they have a fixed belief.
Some of their beliefs I think monstrous; they make a greater demand
on faith than those do who believe in religion. I think the man who
says there is no God must believe more contradictions than the man
who says there is a God. He has a perfectly monstrous creed, but it
is a creed. He is not so much a disbeliever as a misbeliever, for he
believes in something else than God. Again, we don’t call a doubter
a sceptic; a sceptic is a doubter, but the doubter is not necessarily
a sceptic. A man may doubt of the truths of religion, only because
he has not had evidence of the proper kind. A sceptic asks for
evidence of an unreasonable kind. A man may doubt the truth of any
assertion in history; he may think that all the historians or
witnesses of the facts are untruthful or ill informed, I should not
call that man a sceptic; but if a man said, I don’t believe the facts
you allege in history, because I deny all human testimony; you cannot
deny that these men lived some time since, and that they may have
been liars; you cannot give me proof to the contrary: that man I
should call a sceptic, because in matters historical he was demanding
an unreasonable amount of evidence. It is not doubt nor unbelief
that makes the difference as to the sceptic. The sceptic is not such
because he doubts, but on account of the reason of his doubt. He
seeks for evidence that it is not proper or reasonable that he should
have.

Now I have shown you that there may be doubt without scepticism; and
on the other hand, there may be belief, or at least assent, upon
sceptical principles. It is quite possible that a man may be firmly
persuaded of some of the truths of religion, and yet be in heart a
sceptic. If a man were to say I cannot believe in the existence of a
God till I have it demonstrated to me as clear as that the three
angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, then he is in
principle a sceptic, because it is clear that if he could not have
that sort of proof, he would begin to doubt of the existence of God.
All the time his assent to the existence of God would not have rested
upon any faith or trust, but upon demonstration. But when the idea
of God ceased to be a scientific certainty, it is clear that he would
be in heart a sceptic. And there is no doubt that the first belief
of the apostle Thomas was rendered upon sceptical principles. He
said, I will not believe till I put my finger in the print of the
nails, &c., as if he had said, I will believe nothing but the
evidence of my own senses. He believed only because he got this
evidence of his senses; and mark this, when our Lord gave him what he
asked, he pronounced no praise on his belief; he did not say to him
as he said to another, “Blessed art thou, Simon Barjonas, for flesh
and blood has not revealed this to thee;” but flesh and blood had
revealed the fact to Thomas, and our Lord said, “Blessed are they
that have not seen, and yet have believed.” Thus it is possible to
doubt without being sceptical, and it is possible to assent, and to
be still sceptical. I want you to dwell on this point of belief,
doubt, and sceptical belief, because there are certain things that I
am going to point out in this way. I ask you to test for yourselves
what I am now going to say, and try the effect upon your own
feelings. We cannot demonstrate Christianity. It is utterly
impossible that I can give you a demonstration of Christianity, such
as will leave no possible room for doubt or question. When those who
have to follow me have said all they have to say; when they have put
before you all the evidences of Christianity in all their fulness and
variety; when they have shown how much more reasonable it is to
believe than to disbelieve, how many more difficulties there are in
the way of disbelief than of belief; when all this is done, there may
still be a doubt on your minds; there will be questions that cannot
be answered, there will be difficulties that cannot be explained, and
which no living man can explain. We can give the highest degree of
evidence, short of demonstration, for belief in Christ, but we cannot
demonstrate Christianity. Now what effect has that announcement on
your hearts? Possibly you have heard it with some disappointment.
You may have come to hear these sermons, expecting to have all your
doubts removed. You may say, “I thought you were going to answer all
the questions with mathematical certainty.” Our answer is, If we
could prove with as much certainty that there is a God as that two
and two make four, or as that this is a book [holding it up], then
our religion would do you as much good as the knowledge that two and
two make four. We would not in that case cultivate the quality of
faith in your souls, in spite of difficulties and doubts. We cannot
demonstrate Christianity, but we can give sufficient reason for our
belief in it, in spite of doubt.

What we have to say is this, that the evidences of Christianity are
weapons to put in the hands of every one of you, with which every man
and woman may fight out in his or her innermost soul the desolating
and besieging doubt that from time to time will assault it. This is
the real object of evidences of faith, but they are not meant to be
the outlying works of the citadel of the soul outside of which the
enemy is compelled to keep. The shield of faith in God you have to
carry on your own arm, and with it quench all the fiery darts of the
wicked one. Though your own arm tremble, you must carry it to repel
the darts that are aimed at your own heart.

There is another word of comfort we have to give you the really
distressed doubter. Christianity does not repel the doubter who
says, I believe, Lord help my unbelief. What Christianity is
intolerant of is not doubt, but the spirit of doubt, not unbelief,
but the demand for unreasonable, impossible conditions of belief. We
don’t tell you to stamp out every doubt before you can become a
Christian. We say if you believe but one point, you may come to
believe all the rest, and our message to you is, weary as you may be
of the load of doubt, the same as that of the Saviour who said “Come
unto me all you that are weary and heavy laden,” and you will find
rest to your souls.

And now I have clearly explained the difference between Christianity
and Scepticism. Let us briefly sum up again and show the points of
collision between Scepticism and Christianity. We saw last night
that the question between Christianity and Freethought was a dispute
as to the nature of liberty, so the question between Christianity and
Scepticism is a dispute as to the nature of certainty. Christianity
offers and gives certainty in the end; Scepticism demands certainty.
But the certainty of Christianity is partly the certainty of reason
and partly of faith and of experience. The certainty demanded by
Scepticism is the certainty of science only. The most extreme of
unbelievers will admit that there is something to be said for
Christianity; and that it is not unworthy of a hearing as regards its
evidences. The men who have believed in Christianity for the last
1800 years, have not been the greatest fools in the world. Liebnitz
and Butler were not drivellers, and not those only, but hundreds and
thousands of the greatest intellects that humanity has produced.
They were not such utter fools that any man is entitled to dismiss
Christianity with a wave of his hand. On the other hand, every
reasonable Christian will admit that there is something fair and
reasonable in some of the objections to Christianity. But the
Christian says to the sceptic, It is unreasonable in you to ask that
every difficulty should be got rid of and every question answered
before you believe in Christianity. The sceptic replies, It is
unreasonable in you to ask me to believe in Christianity till you
have removed every doubt. I will ask you which is the reasonable
demand—the demand of the Christian for faith upon probable evidence,
or the demand of the sceptic for assent only upon scientific
demonstration?

Now in order to argue it fairly and without passion or prejudice, let
us pass from the subject of religious doubt and let us consider the
case of doubt in other matters than religion; we all know that men
have doubted in other subjects. Try then to recall to your minds the
first doubt; it was only a little later than the first belief. The
first instinct of the child is to believe everything, that everything
he sees and hears is true. All appearances to the child are
realities. The sun is to him a ball of fire that climbs up the sky,
the stars are little specks of light that shine at night. The earth
is a flat plain. Very soon the child learns the first great lesson
of doubt, learns that things are not what they appear to be, learns
to distrust appearances, learns that under the appearances there is a
reality. He gets his first teaching from doubt, and all-important is
the instinct of doubt. Very soon is the awakening of the sceptical
part of the mental nature of man, of his understanding. The nature
of the understanding is ever to ask, What and why? The spirit of
doubt leads the man from question to question, from step to step,
till he gets answers to his questions; he goes on from doubt to
belief, and from belief to doubt, and so on to greater knowledge.
Thus doubt is the means of knowledge, the instrument of discovery.
Without the instinct of doubt humanity would be stagnant; with it
alone humanity progresses. I do not disparage doubt, I highly value
it; but doubt is useful on one condition, and one only, that it
starts from a first belief. What is the cause of all this doubt and
pursuit of knowledge? The supreme instinctive belief, that under all
appearances there is a reality, that something underlies and causes
all being; and it is the search for this essence of existence that
leads the doubter on, the search of this _I am_. If he had no faith
in some underlying reality beneath these phenomena, there would be no
progress, and so doubt is ever seeking for that which is below what
appears, and yet never reaches it.

Never yet has science reached to the great reason of all reasons, to
the great cause of all causes, that underlies all knowledge; and yet
ever as we seek for it we are advancing in knowledge. We do not
reach it, but are ever reaching and passing on, through that which
lies between us and it. Doubt is like the mainspring of a watch, it
is ever seeking to uncoil itself and yet never entirely doing so.
The result is that the hands of the watch move uniformly because
there is an attachment of the mainspring. Cut the attachment, and
the hands will give one wild whirl and all will be still, and the
watch useless. It is just the same with doubt and faith. Doubt is
attached to the primary belief that there is a cause of all things,
but it is ever seeking to detach itself from that belief and never
succeeds. The consequence is, that there is a constant and measured
progress of the human mind. But we have to consider how much further
the intellect which has thus been the rule and test of our belief
might go. A child not only believes in appearances or facts, but he
has an instinctive belief in the truthfulness of humanity. The child
has not learned that it is not wise to believe everything that is
said to him. Was that a happy discovery? Should we tell a child not
to believe the word of any human being until he had demonstration
about it? Is it wisdom always to distrust human nature? We are
always trusting. Give a logical proof that we are right in any of
our trusts. A wife may be false, a child may hate its parents, and a
man may be robbed by a friend or a confidential servant; yet are we
to distrust everybody? If a man were not to trust any one till it
was proved by demonstration that he ought to do so, he would be put
in a lunatic asylum; and rightly so, as a man one part of whose
nature had got diseased and had mastered all the other parts of his
nature. I defy any one to say logically that the man may not be
right, or to give a logical demonstration that it is absolutely
impossible that his wife, children, and friend were not in a
conspiracy to wrong him. There is thus an absolute necessity for
trust in the ordinary affairs of life, I hope you will see that life
must be conducted on the principle of faith or trust.

Let us ask if morality can exist without faith or trust, whether we
can get a demonstrative or scientific basis for morality itself? I
ask this, because those who ask for the destruction of our religion
talk of the gain to morality. They say, Sweep away the influences of
religion and morality will be stronger. Let us see how morality will
bear the assaults of scepticism. Morality is that code or rule of
action which we follow in questions of right or wrong, or it is that
code of right and wrong which every man adopts for himself. To take
the first definition. Have we got the universal sense of humanity
upon any moral question of right or wrong? If the majority of
mankind agree with us, can we prove logically that they must always
be right and the minority wrong? Again, which morality will we
have—that of to-day or that of a past generation? If we cannot
settle the question by majority or minority, how are we to settle it?
By asking the opinion of the wise and good. Before we know the wise
and good we must know what wisdom and goodness are; and if we know
what they are, what need have we to look to the wise and good to tell
us? Who are the wise and good? Those who gave good opinions. Is
that logical? Will it stand sceptical inquiry? If it is not to be
settled by the appeal to the universal voice of humanity—which is
simply illogical and preposterous, for this reason, that we are part
of universal humanity, and if we differ from that verdict it is not
the verdict of universal humanity, and if we agree with it, we might
as well have taken our own in the first instance—then man must decide
for himself what is right and wrong. What is it decides in a man
what is right or wrong? Conscience. Why must a man submit to the
decision of his own conscience? We are told that it is part of our
moral nature. What demonstration is there that one part of our
nature is to yield to another? Have we any logical demonstration as
to what we are? I have a scientific demonstration that I am made of
carbon, lime, phosphate, and certain other chemicals, but no man of
science has ever demonstrated spirit or conscience. Why is it that a
man is to obey the bidding of one convolution of his brain more than
another? It cannot be made as clear as that two and two make four,
that a man is to do to another man as he would be done unto. Duty
and right are words of the spirit, of the soul, but science and logic
never yet revealed the soul.

Therefore the man who will believe nothing but what can be
demonstrated to him, will deny at last the obligation of duty in
obedience to his sceptical intellect, just as he began with denying
the existence of God. How does he get out of this great difficulty?
By calling up the instinct of faith. He wills to believe that he is
something more than a bundle of material elements, that the
conscience in his soul is something supreme and divine, that the man
in him is something above the animal; and by an exercise of faith in
his own higher and better self, he silences the eternal _why_ of the
sceptical intellect, the serpent more subtile than any other beast of
the field, which if it had its way would make man a beast.

There is only one more question to which I have to call your
attention. Having shown you that the sceptical intellect is not the
only judge, having shown you that there are domains of human
knowledge and human life into which, if it comes at all, it must come
as the servant and not as the master; having shown you that
scepticism is really nothing else than the intrusion of the mere
understanding into the province of the soul and the spirit, it
remains to ask, Is religion, is Christianity, one of those subjects
on which the understanding is not to be the only judge, but on which
the spirit and soul and heart of man have something to say about his
belief? Surely then if Christianity be what it professes to be, a
life, like all human and temporal life, it must be conducted upon a
principle of faith or trust. If we cannot live our ordinary human
life without trust, where we cannot have certainty, neither can we
live the spiritual life without trust, where we can neither prove nor
demonstrate; then if we think of this life in close relationship with
the divine and the infinite life, can it possibly be otherwise than
that out of the meeting place of those two mysteries there shall grow
mystery and difficulty? All that Christianity requires is, not that
man shall not ask for reasonable proof, but that we should not deal
with it in a different way from that in which we deal with human life
and morality. We don’t ask you in religion to believe without
evidence, but to require large evidence. Now my friends, still
remember when we ask you to believe before you see all, it is that
you may experience all. Christianity has a certainty, but it comes
not as the proof, but as the reward of faith. There is a
demonstration of the spirit, an evidence of divine life, in the soul
of the Christian, that he cannot demonstrate to others, because it is
as invisible as his own soul and spirit, and yet it fills the inner
core of the spirit—it is the strengthener of the spirit.
Christianity is a great experiment, a probable experiment, a
reasonable experiment, but still it is an experiment, and you may try
it. If you have a simple and earnest desire to ascertain its truth,
try it, casting aside the trivial interests that the profligate man
has in the disproof of it. Try it and see if there does not come
into your soul that conviction not created by science, but springing
from the inner life of the soul, that shall be like a well of water
springing up to everlasting life. As in life so in religion,
“blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

SECOND REPLY OF MR. C. BRADLAUGH. CHRISTIANITY AND SCEPTICISM.

ON Tuesday evening, April 4th, Mr. Bradlaugh delivered his second lecture on “Christianity and Scepticism,” before a very crowded audience, in the Free Library. He commenced by observing: