Chapter VI: The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma (1)

R. C. MOBERLY.

I. Many years ago, in undergraduate days, I was speaking once to a friend of my hope of beginning some little acquaintance with Theology. I well remember the air of nicely mingled civility and contemptuousness, with which my friend, wishing to sympathize, at once drew a distinction for me between speculative and dogmatic Theology, and assumed that I could not mean that the mere study of dogmatic Theology could have any sort of attractiveness. I do not think that I accepted his kindly overture; but it certainly made me consider more than once afterwards, whether the 'mere study of dogmatic Theology' could after all be so slavish and profitless an employment as had been implied. On the whole, however, I settled with myself that his condemnation, however obviously candid and even impressive, must nevertheless remain, so far as I was concerned, a surprise and an enigma. For what, after all, did the study of dogmatic Theology mean, but the study of those truths which the mind of Christ's Church upon earth has believed to be at once the most certain and the most important truths of man's history, nature and destiny, in this world and for ever?

It is impossible, however, not to feel that my friend, in his objection, represented what was, and is, a very widespread instinct against the study of dogma. Some think, for instance, that to practical men exactnesses of doctrinal statement, even if true, are immaterial. Others think that any exactness of doctrinal statement is convicted, by its mere exactness, of untruth; for that knowledge about things unseen can only be indefinite in character. If, indeed, religious knowledge is a process of evolution simply, if it means only a gradual development towards ever-increasing definiteness of religious supposition, then no doubt its exactness may be the condemnation of dogma. But then, no doubt, to make room for such a view, the whole fact of historical Christianity must be first displaced.

Is it put as an impossibility, that there _cannot_ be any definite or certain Theology? Can there, then, be a Revelation? Can there be an Incarnation? Those only are consistent, who assert that all three are impossible, and who understand that in so doing they are limiting the possibilities, and therefore _pro tanto_ questioning the reality of a Personal God. But if there be a Personal God, what are the adequate grounds on which it is nevertheless laid down that He _cannot_ directly reveal Himself? Or, if He can reveal Himself, on what ground can the _à priori_ assertion rest, that theological truth must be uncertain or indefinite? The Christian Church claims to have both definite and certain knowledge. These claims can never be met by any _à priori_ judgment that such knowledge is impossible. Such a judgment is too slenderly based to bear the weight of argument. To argue from it would be to commit the very fault so often imputed to the dogmatist. It would be a flagrant instance of dogmatic assertion (and that for the most important of argumentative purposes) of what we could not possibly know.

The claim of the Church to knowledge through the Incarnation can only be rationally met, and only really answered, when the claim itself, and its evidence, are seriously examined. Herein lies, and will always lie, the heart of the struggle for or against the dogmatic character of the Church. Anything else is only the fringe of the matter. Any rebutting of _à priori_ presumptions against dogma is a mere clearing of the way for battle. Thus it is said, perhaps, that the objection is to the degree of definiteness, or to the tone of authority. It is fancied that dogma in its very nature, quite apart from its contents, is a curtailment of the rights, and a limitation of the powers, of mind. Is dogma, the most definite and authoritative, fettering to the freedom of intellect? We can see in a moment the entire unreality of the objection, by simply substituting for it another question. Is truth fettering to intellect? Does the utmost certitude of truth limit freedom of mind? Because, if not, dogma, so far as it coincides with truth, cannot fetter either. If perfect knowledge of truth could paralyse the intellect, what (it is worth while to ask) do we mean by intellect? Do we mean something which must for ever be struggling with difficulties which it cannot overcome? Is it necessary for the idea of mind that it should be baffled? Is it a creature only of the tangle and the fog? And if ever the day should come, when after struggling, more or less ineffectually, with the tangle and the fog, man should emerge at last in clear sunshine upon the mountain top, will mind cease to have any faculty or place, because the knowledge of truth has come? At least, if we understand this to be the conception of mind, it need not frighten us quite so much as it did, to be told that dogma interferes with mind. But if, however different from our experience the employment of mind would be in the presence of perfect knowledge, we cannot so conceive of mind as to admit that truth could possibly be its enemy or its destruction, then we may certainly insist that no amount of dogma, so far as it is true, can limit or fetter the freedom of intellect. But then we are at once thrown back upon the question; is the dogmatic teaching of the Church true? No statement which absolutely coincides with truth can hurt the freedom of mind. But mistaken presumption of truth can, and does, limit it; and so does authority, if it prevents the examination of truth. Dogma, then, is, as dogma, a wrong to mind, just so far as it can be convicted of either of these things; so far as it forbids examination, or so far as it asserts what is not strictly true.

As to the first of these two suggestions against dogma, it is quite enough simply to deny it. The Church, as a teacher of dogmatic truth, does not forbid the freest and completest inquiry into the truths which she enunciates. The question is not whether dogmatic theologians have ever dreaded inquiry into truth; but whether the dogmatic Church, as such, precludes or forbids it. True, she enunciates some truths as true; and holds those, in different measures, unwise and wrong, who contradict her truths. But she does not, therefore, forbid the fullest exercise of intellect upon them; nor tremble lest intellect, rightly wielded, should contradict them. Indeed for eighteen centuries she has been engaged, and will be engaged to the end, in examining with a power and discipline of intellect, which she alone ever has, or could have, evoked, into the meaning and exactness of her own knowledge. But she does warn inquirers that successful inquiry into her truths is no work of merely ingenious disputation, but needs the exactest discipline and balance of all the faculties of our human nature.

We return, then, to the second suggestion; and I repeat that the question has for us become, not whether dogma in the abstract is desirable or undesirable, but whether the dogmas of the Christian Church are true or not true. Dogma that is true can only be undesirable in so far as truth is undesirable.

Whether the dogmas of the Church are true or not true, is itself a question of evidence.

Before, however, making any remark upon the nature of this evidence in the case of religion, we may remember that the possession of dogma is in no way peculiar to religion. There is no region of research or knowledge which does not present to the student its own 'dogmata,' or truths ascertained and agreed upon; nor does any one, in the name of freedom of intellect, persist in treating these always as open questions.

But perhaps if we venture thus to claim the ascertained truths of any science as dogmas, the scientific answer will be ready. They differ, it will be felt, from the nature of religious dogmas, in two important respects. The first difference is, that they are offered for acceptance with their full proofs, from the first moment that they are offered at all. The student could not, it may be, have discovered for himself the law of gravitation, or the circulation of the blood; but he can, when these discoveries are once set before him by another, see forthwith not only the coherency of the principles, but the cogency of their proof. The second difference is, that when they have been accepted by the student, proof and all, they still claim no allegiance beyond what his intelligence cannot but freely give; he is still free to supersede or upset them, if he can. He accepts them indeed provisionally, as identical with the truth so far as the truth on the subject is yet known; yet not necessarily as final truth. He accepts them as truths which all his further study will comment upon; presumably indeed in the way of continual illustration and corroboration,--so that what he accepts for study will be more and more certainly proved by the study--but also, if you please, in the way of correction; for if his study can supersede, or even in any measure correct or alter them,--why, so much the better both for science and for him! Why should not this be equally true of Theology? Why should religious dogmas be received without these conditions, as certainly and finally true?

To begin with, then, some exception may be taken to the statement that the student who accepts a scientific doctrine, has the full evidence before him from the beginning. That it is not altogether so is evident from the simple consideration, just mentioned, that his work is a progressive one; and that the whole course of his experience tends, and will tend, to deepen the certainty of his first principles. But in so far as the proof of any leading principle is being deepened and strengthened by the student's daily work, so far it is clear that the amount of certainty about his principles with which at first he began, must be less than that with which he ends at last; and therefore that the proof presented to him at the beginning, however much it may have been adequate to the purpose, (even though it may have been the completest proof capable of being presented in the way of exposition from the lip to the ear) was nevertheless most incomplete in comparison with the fulness of attainable proof. And further, it may certainly be said also, that in the convincingness of this evidence as at first presented, authority, whether more or less, had an undoubted part. At the very least it had a negative place, as a guarantee to the young mind rejoicing in the ingenuity of the apparent demonstration, that the apparent demonstration was not vitiated by some unseen fallacy, or that there was not a series of other considerations behind, which would rob the lesson just learnt of its practical usefulness. Often, indeed, the degree of authority in the first scientific convictions would be very much higher. Often, however helpful the arguments or illustrations of a principle may seem, the really overruling consideration will at first be this, that the whole scientific world has absolutely accepted the principle as truth. So much is this the case, that if an average student should find himself unable in any point to receive the ascertained truths of his science with intelligent agreement, he would not hesitate to assume that the whole fault lay with himself; he would really be convinced in his soul that the dicta of his scientific teachers were right, and that he himself would see the certainty of them by and by.

Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious dogma is not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with that of scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in its first acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to authority, nor is it stagnant and unprogressive after it is accepted. However different in other ways the leading truths of the Creed may be from scientific principles; in this respect at least they are not different,--that not one of them is ever brought for the acceptance of men without some really intelligent evidence and ground for acceptance. If any man is asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground for the acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would be his duty to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself be a large part of his intelligent ground; a larger part or a smaller according to circumstances. But then there is no proper antithesis between believing in deference to authority, and believing in deference to reason, unless it is understood that the authority believed in was accepted at first as authority _without reason_, or maintained in spite of the subsequent refusal of reason to give confirmatory witness to its assertions. Even in the cases in which there seems to be least use of reason, the case of a young child learning at his mother's knee, or of a man whose spirit has suffered and been broken, and who gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a friend or a teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted on grounds essentially reasonable. The child's reasoning may differ in quality from the prodigal's; but the child trusts father or mother on grounds which are wholly, if unconsciously, a product of the strictest reason; and the prodigal has felt in his inmost soul alike the deadness of his own spiritual being, and the power and the beauty which are in the life of the teacher upon whom he throws himself. And this is not the only point; for the reasonable mind in one is not a thing different in nature from the reasonable mind in another, or from the eternal reason which is in God. The truths, therefore, which we are taught about God, and man, and Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the heaven of holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of not unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend themselves, in some shape or measure, even to the callow mind from its earliest immaturity. There is that in the very consciousness of child, or of criminal, with which they are in essential harmony. That in him with which they are in essential correspondence bears witness of them. Nor is anyone, in his acceptance of them, wholly insensible of this witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven upon his own conscious being.

To 'take religion on trust,' then, as it is sometimes derisively called, is not really to act in defiance of, or apart from, reason. It is an exercise of reason up to a certain point,--just so, and so far as, the experience of the person warrants. He sees what to trust, and why. He sees where understanding and experience which transcend his own would point. And he seeks for the rational test of further experience in the only way in which it can be had. He defers to the voice of experience, in faith that his own experience will by and by prove its truthfulness. On a medical question, men would not dispute, they would loudly proclaim, the reasonableness and wisdom of such a course. Yet there are those who suppose that the truths of religion are to admit of a complete preliminary intellectual verification, a verification apart from special training and experience, such as they might more reasonably expect in any other subject-matter than religion, but such as, in fact, they hardly expect elsewhere.

The doctrines of the Church, then, accepted at first on reasonable evidence, which in a greater or less degree, but perhaps never wholly, consists in authority reasonably accepted as authority, are then in all the experience of spiritual life receiving continual comment, explanation, corroboration. The whole experience of Christian life must be a growth in the apprehension and certainty of Christian truth. A Christian neophyte may believe every word of his Creed, and believe neither ignorantly nor unintelligently. But the veteran Christian of four-score will transcend the child at least as much in the degree of certainty, with which the doctrines of the Church are to his entire faculties mental, moral, and spiritual, proved and known to be true, as he can possibly do in his merely intellectual apprehension of the history or meaning of the words. We may say, indeed, that the life of a professing Christian which is not a life of growth in the apprehension of doctrinal truth, must necessarily be a retrogression; just as the life of so-called scientific study, which is not continually illuminating afresh, and deepening the certainty of its own scientific principles, must gradually come to hold even its own scientific principles less and less certainly, and to mean by them less and less.

But even if it may be shewn that there is not quite so essential a contrast as there seemed to be, between the character of theological and scientific dogmas, by reason of the proofs which are offered, along with his principles, to the student of any science; yet still it will be felt that they differ essentially in the tone and manner with which they respectively speak to intellect. The truths of the one claim at once to possess an intellectual finality, and to command a moral allegiance, which the truths of the other do not.

It may be worth while to say in reply, first of all, that there cannot be a real contrast of finality between them, so far as they are both really true. What is really true is really true. Neither 'absolutely,' 'finally,' nor any other adverb in the language will make the statement a stronger one. What we call scientific truths are not in fact liable to correction, except in so far as they may perhaps, after all, not be quite scientific truths, except (that is) in respect of such admixture of erroneous supposition, as still has clung to them after general acceptance. And on the other hand, so far as any mistaken assumptions are mixed up with our apprehension of religious truths, so far these too _are_ liable to receive, and in the history of Church doctrine are continually receiving, correction. It is, after all, a truism. In either sphere the truths, so far as they really are truths, are true absolutely: but are corrigible in so far as our statement of them still contains anything that is other than truth. We may put it, perhaps, in another way still. If, to assume an impossible hypothesis, any one could really prove, not merely that there were some exaggerations or misconceptions in the traditional mode of statement of some doctrinal truths, but that our really essential Faith was wrong, we may grant hypothetically (seeing that truth is supreme) that he would do us all a mighty service, at however tremendous a cost. Similarly of course it must be owned, that if any one could prove the earth to be flat and stationary, and the law of gravitation to be the precise contradictory of truth, he would do immense service to science. But none the less, the scientific certainty on these points is so complete, that if anyone seriously assailed them, it would be felt that he could only be dealing with the evidence in a way which tended to compromise the credit of his own reason; and he would therefore be reasonably held to be, as it is roughly phrased, a fool or a madman. And we must claim that for us the certainty of some theological propositions is so complete, that when anyone assails them, we are no less reasonable in regarding him with concern, rather for his own truth's sake than for the truth of our religion; and that, if miracles or 'an angel from heaven' should seem to bear witness for him, it would still be no bigotry, but in the strictest sense our reasonable course, to refuse the witness, and to treat it as merely an attempt to ensnare us into falsehood to the real requirements of our reason and conscience.

Is the conclusion, then, that there is after all no difference at all between the truths of Theology and of Science, in respect of their claim to authority? On the contrary, there remains a perfectly real contrast of authority between them; only it is to be looked for elsewhere than among the conditions upon which our belief in them respectively is based.

There are two distinct senses in which the doctrines of the Creed may be said to be authoritative. It may be meant that the authoritativeness is in the manner in which they are presented to us; that is to say, that (whatever their content may be) they are statements which we believe, and are to believe, on the sole ground that we are told to do so, without any appeal to reason of our own; or it may be meant that they are statements whose content is of such nature and inherent importance, that we cannot, in fact, believe them, without thereby necessarily being involved in a train of consequential obligations of thought and life. In this latter case the authoritativeness lies not in the manner of their presentation to us or our acceptance of them, but in that which is involved in the nature of the truths themselves, _if and when_ they are believed.

Is it true to say of the Creeds that they are 'authoritative' in the former sense? that is to say that they challenge our allegiance, and we are bound to believe them, because we are told that they are true, without examination on our part, and without reason? It has indeed been stated already that, as between pupils and teachers, there is in religious learning, as there is in all human learning whatever, scientific or otherwise, a certain legitimate and important field for authority reasonably accepted as authority, that is, the authority of men more learned and experienced than ourselves. Even this, of course, means that the pupil believes the things taught to be strictly rational to the teacher, though they be not so, as yet, to himself. But is it true, in speaking of religion, to carry this one step further; and to say that in this sphere our _whole_ belief, and duty of belief, rests upon authority as its ultimate foundation, the authority not of man's experience, but of God's command? It must, no doubt, be freely owned on all sides, that if there be a creed commanded of God, we certainly are bound to believe it. But is there? or when, or how, was it commanded? Does anyone answer, through our Lord Jesus Christ? or through His Church? or through the Bible? But who is He? or what is the Bible? or how do we know? To accept doctrines, which we otherwise should not accept, because we are told to do so, without knowing first who told us, or why we should believe him, is simply not a reasonable possibility. But to ask these questions and to have answers to them, and believe because we are satisfied in some way as to the answers to them, is certainly not to rest the act of believing on a foundation of mere authority: essentially rather it is, to go over part of the ground of the Creed first, and be satisfied as to the correctness of its main substance, and _therefore_ to believe it. A Christian will not deny that the doctrines of the Creed are entitled in fact to be held as authoritative, in both of the senses distinguished above. But we cannot believe them on God's authority till we have first believed in the authority of God. And, therefore, their authoritativeness in what we have called the first sense is not really the ultimate ground of our accepting them: for it is not itself accepted and apprehended by us, except as a consequence of our first believing that which is the main substance of the Creed. It may be the warrant to us of this or that detail considered apart: but it is not, and cannot ever be, the original and sufficient cause of our believing the whole. _Credo ut intelligam_ may be the most true and most reasonable motto of the large part of Christian faith and life: but it is not inconsistent with--it is founded upon--an ultimate underlying _intellexi ut crederem_. There is, then, a real and abiding difference between theological and scientific dogmas, in respect of the authority with which they speak to us. But the difference is one which does not affect at all the method or grounds of our original belief in them respectively: it is to be found exclusively in the different subject-matter of the two when believed.

And herein, also, it is that we find the real answer to the other form of question, viz., why should Theology claim to be so much more final than science? Much as science has conquered of the realm of truth, it does not profess to have conquered more than a little. Of the vast residuum it says nothing. It has no idea how small a proportion its present knowledge may bear to that which will one day be known. Nay, the further it advances in knowledge of truth, so much the smaller a proportion does its realized truth seem to it to bear to that which remains unexplored. Why should the theologian be less patient of additions to theological knowledge, such as may some day throw all his present creeds into comparative obscurity? Why should the Christian Creed be fixed and inexpansive? The question is formidable only in an abstract form. The reasonable answer to it confronts us the moment we consider what is the subject-matter of the Creed. Scientific principles are in their very nature fragments of a truth which is practically infinite. But the Christian Creed, if true at all, cannot possibly be a fragment of truth. For the Christian Creed does not simply enunciate so many abstract principles of natural or supernatural life or governance. It introduces us straight to a supreme Person, Himself the beginning and end, the author and upholder of all. Such a doctrine may be false; but it cannot be a fragment. The child who believes in God, believes in everything, though he knows hardly anything. He has infinitely more yet to learn, as to what his own belief means. But he has nothing to add to it. The perfect knowledge of the universe would not add to it, but would only explain it. It is, then, by virtue of his personal relation to a Personality which is Itself supreme and all inclusive, that he is guilty of no presumption, even though in the face of the modest disavowals of scientific men, he must maintain that his own creed is, in its proper nature, even when all admissions have been made, rather a complete and conclusive, than a partial or a tentative, statement of truth. But this difference between him and them is the result neither of any arrogance in his temper, nor any lack in his logic, but it follows necessarily from the nature of the subject-matter of his creed, if and when it is believed.

But still this fact that, if true, they are truths which by the obvious necessity of their subject-matter speak to our intellects and consciences with a tone of such Divinely commanding authority, ought not to make me or anyone accept them as true, unless the evidence for them is adequate. The question is not how authoritative they would be, if true; nor how important or inclusive they would be, if true; nor is any amount of contingent importance or authority adequate evidence for their truth, but only a motive for inquiring into its evidence. The question is, are they true? or are they not true? and the question is a question of evidence.

II. And now, in recurring once more to the subject of the evidence by which the dogmas of religion are proved, from which we diverged just now, we find, in respect of it, a second reality of contrast between theological truths and the truths of material science. For whilst in both cases equally we depend upon evidence, and evidence that is adequate; it does not follow that the evidence for both is in all points similar in kind. In great part indeed it is so; but it is certainly not so altogether. For when we speak of the evidence of religious truths, it is to be remembered that the full evidence by which our consciences are wholly convinced of them, is not of one kind only, but of all kinds. The facts of religion address themselves to the whole nature of man; and it is only by the whole nature of man that they can ever be fully apprehended. Man is not a being of intellectual conceptions or faculties only. And because he is not so, therefore no set of principles which could be apprehended by the intellect alone (as the theorems of Euclid may appear to be), and which make for their acceptance no demand at all upon the qualities of his moral or spiritual being, could really present, as religion professes to present, a system of truth and life which would be adequate to the scope of his whole nature. It is undoubtedly the case that just as the truths of religion account for, and appeal to, his whole being, so the evidence for them appeals to his whole being also. For its complete appreciation there are requirements other than intellectual. There must be not only certain endowments of mind, but the life of a moral being. There must be moral affections, moral perceptions, spiritual affinities and satisfactions. Even if the primary conviction of his reason may be apart from these, yet of the fully developed evidence, which is the real possession of the Christian believer, these are a most important and necessary part. Without these, his certainty, adequate though it might be, would be far less profound than it is. These are to him essential ingredients in the richness and the fulness of the evidence which to him is everywhere. Now for this necessary width of the full confirmatory evidence of religion, it is impossible for the religious man, with the utmost desire to make every allowance and apology that is possible, to offer any apology at all. So far from being a mark of inconsistency or feebleness, it is a necessary note of the completeness of religion. Religion professes to have for its subject-matter, and in a measure incomplete, but relatively adequate, to include, to account for, and to direct, the whole range of all man's history, all man's capacities, explored or unexplored, all man's destiny now and for ever. If its truths and their evidence were found to address themselves exclusively to the intellect, in isolation from the other qualities and experiences of man's nature, it would be self-convicted of inadequacy. If men full of worldliness of heart and self-indulgence could be capable of understanding the revelation of religious truth as accurately, of embracing it as completely, of apprehending the depth and the width of the evidence for it (with which all human nature really is saturated) as thoroughly as the prayerful and the penitent, this would not mean that religion or religious evidence had been lifted up, on to a higher and more properly scientific level, but rather that it had shrunk down into correspondence merely with a part, and not the noblest part, of man's present nature.

It would be far beyond the scope of this paper to discuss kinds of evidence, or argue in defence of the position that there is real evidence for religious truth, which is none the less properly evidence, because it is different in kind from the evidence for the propositions of material science: but it may be permissible, at least, in passing to record the claim, and to insist that religious men, in confining themselves to strictly historical or logical arguments, are necessarily omitting much which is nevertheless, to them, real ground. There are evidences which can speak to the heart, the imagination, the conscience, as well as the intelligence. Or, perhaps, we shall come nearer to an exact expression of the truth, by saying that the intelligence, which can apprehend and pronounce upon the evidence of truths of spiritual consciousness, is an intelligence identical in name, but not identical in nature, with that which can well weigh and judge purely logical--or even that which can pronounce upon moral--problems. The intelligence of a moral character, or of a spiritual personality, differs not in range only, but in quality, from that of a merely 'rational animal.' If the moral and the spiritual intelligence did not contain quite other elements, drawn from quite other experiences and possibilities, they could not work upon their higher subject-matter at all. To the religious man, therefore, it must seem strictly unreasonable, in the examination of truths which professedly correspond to man's whole nature, and need his whole nature and experience for the interpretation of them, to begin by shutting out, as irrelevant, what we will modestly call the half of man's nature; and to demand that the truths shall be so stated and so proved, as that the statements and proofs shall correspond exclusively with the other half, and find in that other half their whole interpretation, and their whole evidence.

It may, indeed, be desirable to guard against a misconception, by the express admission that there is some necessary ambiguity in the terms employed. We may seem to have unduly extended both the verbal meaning, and the sphere of importance, of 'evidence' and 'proof.' Undoubtedly there is a sense in which it would be, not merely true to admit, but important to insist, that in the acceptance of religious truth, Faith neither is, nor ever can be, displaced, in order that Demonstration may be enthroned in her place. But then Demonstration is a word which belongs to strictly logical nomenclature. And the very point here insisted on is that the strictly logical presentment of religion is, in reference to the real presentment of religion, most inadequate. Undoubtedly, if everything else is shorn away, and religion remains solely and only in the form of strict logic, without sentiment, without imagination, without experience of duty, or sin, or right, or aspiration, or anything else which belongs to the spiritual consciousness of human personalities, the logic of it is, and must be, imperfectly conclusive.

Now words such as 'evidence,' 'proof,' 'intelligence,' are no doubt often used in connection with processes of the intellect taken apart--the intellect of a being merely rational. In insisting, therefore, that the word evidence, when used in reference to religious subject-matter, must include data which, to the observer of physical phenomena, would seem vague and impalpable; and that intelligence, as adequately trained to apprehend and give judgment upon religious evidence, is in some respects other, and more, than that intelligence which can deal with evidence into which no element of spiritual consciousness enters; we differ, perhaps, at the most, more in form than reality, from those who simply deprecate the appeal to 'evidence' or 'proof' in matters of faith.

To the religious man, then, the fulness of Christian evidence is as many-sided as human life. There is historical evidence,--itself of at least a dozen different kinds,--literary evidence, metaphysical evidence, moral evidence, evidence of sorrow and joy, of goodness and of evil, of sin and of pardon, of despair and of hope, of life and of death; evidence which defies enumerating; into this the whole gradual life of the Christian grows; and there is no part nor element of life which does not to him perpetually elucidate and confirm the knowledge which has been given him. Everything that is or has been, every consciousness, every possibility, even every doubt or wavering, becomes to the Christian a part of the certainty--an element in the absorbing reality--of his Creed.

But this is rather the end than the beginning. Certainly it is not thus that the Creed of the Church can present itself to those whose life is still independent of the Creed.

Let us consider, then, how the truths of the Creed did first, in fact, introduce themselves to human consciousness. There are three several stages of its presentment in history, of which the central one is so overmastering in importance, that it alone gives their character to the other two. They are, first, the leading up, in the world's history and consciousness, to the life of Jesus Christ; secondly, the life and death of Jesus Christ; thirdly, the results, in history and consciousness, of the life and death of Jesus Christ. We may say, perhaps, that of the first of these the main outcome was belief in God; and such a God, that belief in Him carried with it the two corollaries of aspiration after righteousness, and conviction of sin. We may say that the third of these means the establishment of the Church upon earth, and the articulating of her consciousness according to the Creeds. But in any case all the three are plainly historical, matters of historical inquiry, of historical evidence; and all plainly depend entirely upon the intermediate one, the history of a certain human life which purports to be--which either is, or is not--the hinge-point of all history whatever.

All turns, then, upon a certain passage of history. Is the history, as believed by Christians, true or false? The Christian record of that history is the New Testament. Indeed, of that history, the New Testament is the only record. Is, then, the history of the teaching and the work, the life and the death, of Jesus Christ, presented to us in the New Testament as a chapter of historical fact,--is it historical fact, or is it not? The Incarnation is either a fact, or a fiction. The Incarnation means also for Christians the Atonement. For our present purpose, the Incarnation may be taken as necessarily including the Atonement. But still of this complex fact the dilemma stands. If it is not true, it is false. There is no middle term. If it is not true, then, whether dogma in itself is, or is not, desirable, at least all the dogma of the Christian Church is false.

The Incarnation and the Atonement together are not presented in the New Testament as, by their own mere statement, guaranteeing themselves. On the contrary, there is one single, definite, historical fact, which is represented there as the central heart and core of the evidence upon which the conviction of their truth depends. This fact is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Though this is not the whole of the Christian Creed, yet this, according to S. Paul, is, to the whole of the Christian Creed, crucial. 'If there be no resurrection from the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God, that he raised up Christ; whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised; and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins.' To be direct personal evidence of a certain fact, and that fact the resurrection;--this was, in the view of S. Peter and the Apostles, the first qualification, and the central meaning, of Apostleship: 'must one be ordained _to be a witness with us of His resurrection_;' 'this Jesus hath God raised up, _whereof we all are witnesses_.' Upon the historical truth or falsehood, then, of the resurrection, hangs the whole question of the nature and work of Jesus Christ, the whole doctrine of Incarnation and Atonement.

But in saying this, it is necessary to guard our proper meaning. If we admit the fact of the Resurrection to be cardinal, what is the fact of the Resurrection which is in question? It is as far as possible from being simply a question whether 'a man' could or could not, did or did not, reappear, after death, in life. When we speak of the historical fact, we must mean at least the whole fact with all that it was and meant, complex as it was and many-sided; not with its meaning or its proof isolated upon a single page of the book of history, but having far-reaching affinities, parts essentially of its interpretation and of its evidence, entwined in the depths of the whole constitution of our nature, and the whole drama of history from the first moment to the last. However much Christians may have at times to argue about the simple evidence for the 'yes' or 'no' of the Resurrection of Jesus, as if it were the alleged resurrection of any other man that was in question, neither the question itself, nor the evidence about it, can possibly be, in fact, of the same nature or upon the same level, as the evidence about another. No amount of conviction of the reappearance in life of any other man, would have any similar meaning, or carry any similar consequences. The inherent character of Him who rose, and the necessary connection between what He was, and had said and claimed for Himself, on the one hand, and on the other His rising out of death; this is an essential part of that fact of the resurrection, which comes up for proof or disproof. The fact that Jesus Christ, _being what He was_, the climax and fulfilment of a thousand converging lines--nay, of all the antecedent history of mankind--rose from the dead, and by that fact of resurrection (solemnly fore-announced, yet none the less totally unlooked for) illuminated and explained for the first time all that before had seemed enigmatical or contradictory in what He was,--and indeed in all humanity; this is the real fact of the resurrection which confronts us. It is this vast fact which is either true or false. The resurrection of the crucified Jesus cannot possibly be a bare or simple fact. When viewed as a material manifestation of the moment only, it is at least misunderstood; it may be unintelligible. It is, no doubt, an event in history; and yet it confronts us, even there in its place and witness in history, not simply as a finite historical event, but as an eternal counsel and infinite act of God.

Yet there are times when we must consent to leave much of all this, for the moment, on one side. Whatever else the event in history may carry with it, of course it must stand its ground as a mere historical event. The mere fact may be but a part of it; yet all will be overthrown if the fact be not fact. And so, though the truths of the Christian religion, and the evidence for them, be at least as wide as was represented above, yet they present themselves to our minds still, as they presented themselves at first to the minds of men, within the sphere and the rules of ordinary human history and historical evidence. Here are events written on the page of history. Examine them. Are they historically false or true? If they be not false, what do they mean and involve? This is the modest way in which they present themselves.

No one will now dispute that Jesus died upon the Cross. If He did not, on the third day, rise again from that death to life;--cadit quaestio--all Christian dogma, all Christian faith, is at an end. Something might still be true which might be of interest; something, even, which for sheer want of a better, might be still the most interesting fact in the world's long history; but something which, from the first line to the last, would be essentially different from the Catholic faith. But, on the other hand, if He did so rise again, then the fact of His resurrection necessarily raises further questions as to His nature and being,--necessarily requires the understanding of further truths for its own intelligent explanation. Now the present paper is not an evidential treatise. It is no part of our task to attempt to prove the historical reality of the resurrection. What it does concern us to notice is the way in which the determination of all Christian truth hinges upon it. If it falls, all the rest will drift away, anchorless and unsubstantial, into the region of a merely beautiful dreamland. As dreamland, indeed, it may still captivate and inspire; but anchor of sure fact there will be none. It will only be a beautiful imagination,--a false mirage reflected from, based upon, falsehood. No doubt imagination is sovereign in the lives of men. But then imagination means the vivifying of truth, not the spectral embodiment of a lie.

On the other hand, if the fact of the resurrection stands, then it cannot stand alone. If Jesus Christ so lived and taught as even the most indefinite believers concede that He lived and taught, if He then died on the Cross, _and rose again the third day from, the dead_, you have indeed already the foundation dogma of the Creed; and having that, you cannot possibly rest in it: that foundation fact will absolutely compel you to ask and to answer certain further necessary questions; and whatever intelligible answer you may choose to give to them will be essentially a dogmatic definition. Who or what was this man who thus lived, thus spoke, thus died, and thus rose from the dead? As a matter of fact, the whole Church of Christ in history (including the men who had been His own companions, trained and inspired by Himself,) taught and believed, without shadow of hesitation, that He was very God. Very gradually, indeed, had they advanced to this; step by step, through their growing intimacy with a character whose very excellences were only enigmatical and confounding, so long as the master-truth, which lay behind them, was ignored. And very tentative, on His side, was the method of His self-revelation; through qualities, through inherent powers, through explicit teachings, slowly felt, slowly recognised, as transcendent, as impossible, except in relation to a truth which, after long misconceptions and perplexities, is seen by them at last not only to be true, but to be the essential truth which He Himself requires of them. For, be the method as gradual and as tentative as you please, these witnesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever has had, or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify unhesitatingly not only that all true acceptance of Him was, in their judgment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His life and death were penetrated by the consciousness of His own Godhead; and by the deliberate purpose (through whatever unexpected patience of method) of convincing the whole world in the end of His Godhead, and receiving universal belief, and universal worship, as God.

Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it true that He was very God? It is either true or false. As to the fact there are only the two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is impassable. If it is not false, it is true. If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false. According to the faith of the Catholic Church it is absolutely true. According to the highest form of Arianism, not less than according to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try to gloss it over) absolutely false.

Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or press argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. But it is necessary to see with perfect clearness, how the question must have been raised, and being raised must have been answered. The very life of the Church was belief in Him; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was the one thing which had never been allowed to those who drew near Christ. All through His ministry those who came near Him, and felt the spell of His presence, His holiness, His power, were undergoing a training and a sifting. Moment by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence of His transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more and more upon them all the question which He would never let them escape, the question by which they were to be tested and judged; 'What think ye of Christ?' 'If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.'

If there is a true historical sense in which the clear definition of the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be assigned to the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet it would be a great historical blunder to state or imagine, as inference, that till then the doctrine was only held partially or with imperfect consciousness in the Catholic Church. The Church did not, as a result of those controversies, develop the consciousness of any new doctrine: the development of her consciousness was rather in respect of the shallow but tempting logic which would deform, or the delusions which might counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the perils to which these must lead. It may be a question, indeed, how far the words implicit and explicit do, or do not, represent the distinction between the dogmatic consciousness of the Apostolic and the Conciliar ages. The difficulty in determining depends solely on this, that the words themselves are used with different meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold implicitly what they never perhaps suspected themselves of holding, if it can be shewn to be a more or less legitimate outcome, or logical development, of their belief. If such men advance inferentially from point to point, their explicit belief at a later time may be, in many particulars, materially different from what it had been at an earlier; even though it might be logically shewn that the earlier thought was, more or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any such sense as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the beginning, the Church held dogmatic truths not implicitly, but explicitly and positively. They who baptized into the threefold Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; whose blessing was 'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost;' who, living in the Spirit, lived in Christ; whose highest worship was the Communion of the Body and the Blood of Christ, and whose perfectness of life was Christ; they, so living and worshipping, did not hold the Godhead of Jesus Christ implicitly; they did not hold something out of which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be unfolded. On the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words, meaning merely that you have, through cross-questioning or otherwise, obtained a power which you did not possess, of defining, in thought and in words, the limits of your belief, and distinguishing it precisely from whatever does not belong to it. You hold still what you always meant to hold. You say still what you always meant to say. But it is your intellectual mastery over your own meaning which is altered. Like a person fresh from the encounter of a keen cross-examination, you are furnished now, as you were not before, with distinctions and comparisons, with definitions and measurements,--in a word, with all that intellectual equipment, that furniture of alert perception and exact language, by which you are able to realize for yourself, as well as to define to others, what that meaning exactly is, and what it is not, which itself was before, as truly as it is now, the very thing that you meant.

In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive truth. They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they were rather, on this side or on that, a blocking off of such false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference, as forced themselves forward, one by one, amidst the intellectual efforts of the time, to challenge the acceptance of Christian people. Primarily they are not the Church saying 'yes' to fresh truths, or developments, or forms of consciousness; but rather saying 'no' to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that effort, the Church acquires through them a new definiteness of mastery for the intellect in reference to the exactness of her own meaning.