Chapter XXXII: Lord Blachford (6)

But how to give to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such
enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal sympathy?
Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one
condition--that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood
forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the
cause and with the interests of all human beings; he was destined,
as he began before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his
life for them. Few of us sympathise originally and directly with
this devotion; few of us can perceive in human nature itself any
merit sufficient to evoke it. But it is not so hard to love and
venerate him who felt it. So vast a passion of love, a devotion so
comprehensive, elevated, deliberate, and profound, has not
elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some of his
imitators. And as love provokes love, many have found it possible
to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no
words can describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the
man within them, that they have said, "I live no more, but Christ
lives in me."

And what, in fact, has been the result, after the utmost and freest abatement for the objections of those who criticise the philosophical theories or the practical effects of Christianity?

But that Christ's method, when rightly applied, is really of
mighty force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor
of Christians will hardly refuse to admit. Compare the ancient
with the modern world: "Look on this picture and on that." The
broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into
prominence. Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there
were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the
epithet "holy." In other words, there were not more than one or
two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were
possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides
abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror.
Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this
higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed. Few
will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare. Perhaps the truth
is that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country
since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without
exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence
has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at
times like the presence of God Himself. And if this be so, has
Christ failed? or can Christianity die?

The principle of feeling and action which Christ implanted in that Divine Society which He founded, or in other words, His morality, had two peculiarities; it sprang, and it must spring still, from what this writer calls all through an "enthusiasm"; and this enthusiasm was kindled and maintained by the influence of a Person. There can be no goodness without impulses to goodness, any more than these impulses are enough without being directed by truth and reason; but the impulses must come before the guidance, and "Christ's Theocracy" is described "as a great attempt to set all the virtues of the world on this basis, and to give it a visible centre and fountain." He thus describes how personal influence is the great instrument of moral quickening and elevation:--

How do men become for the most part "pure, generous, and humane"?
By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by
parents who had these qualities, they have lived in a society
which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts
done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the
gentleness have passed into their hearts, and slowly moulded their
habits and made their moral discernment clear; they remember
commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the
sake of those who gave them; often they think of those who may be
dead and say, "How would this action appear to him? Would he
approve that word or disapprove it?" To such no baseness appears a
small baseness because its consequences may be small, nor does the
yoke of law seem burdensome although it is ever on their necks,
nor do they dream of covering a sin by an atoning act of virtue.
Often in solitude they blush when some impure fancy sails across
the clear heaven of their minds, because they are never alone,
because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere,
rule not their actions only but their inmost hearts; because their
conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the
nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their
most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and
the dead.

Of these two influences--that of Reason and that of Living
Example--which would a wise reformer reinforce? Christ chose the
last He gathered all men into a common relation to himself, and
demanded that each should set him on the pedestal of his heart,
giving a lower place to all other objects of worship, to father
and mother, to husband or wife. In him should the loyalty of all
hearts centre; he should be their pattern, their Authority and
Judge. Of him and his service should no man be ashamed, but to
those who acknowledged it morality should be an easy yoke, and the
law of right as spontaneous as the law of life; sufferings should
be easy to bear, and the loss of worldly friends repaired by a new
home in the bosom of the Christian kingdom; finally, in death
itself their sleep should be sweet upon whose tombstone it could
be written "Obdormivit in Christo."

In his treatment of this part of the subject, the work of Christ as the true Creator, through the Christian Church, of living morality, what is peculiar and impressive is the way in which sympathy with Christianity in its antique and original form, in its most austere, unearthly, exacting aspects, is combined with sympathy with the practical realities of modern life, with its boldness, its freedom, its love of improvement, its love of truth. It is no common grasp which can embrace both so easily and so firmly. He is one of those writers whose strong hold on their ideas is shown by the facility with which they can afford to make large admissions, which are at first sight startling. Nowhere are more tremendous passages written than in this book about the corruptions of that Christianity which yet the writer holds to be the one hope and safeguard of mankind. He is not afraid to pursue his investigation independently of any inquiry into the peculiar claims to authority of the documents on which it rests. He at once goes to their substance and their facts, and the Person and Life and Character which they witness to. He is not afraid to put Faith on exactly the same footing as Life, neither higher nor lower, as the title to membership in the Church; a doctrine which, if it makes imperfect and rudimentary faith as little a disqualification as imperfect and inconsistent life, obviously does not exclude the further belief that deliberate heresy is on the same level with deliberate profligacy. But the clear sense of what is substantial, the power of piercing through accidents and conditions to the real kernel of the matter, the scornful disregard of all entanglement of apparent contradictions and inconsistencies, enable him to bring out the lesson which he finds before him with overpowering force. He sees before him immense mercy, immense condescension, immense indulgence; but there are also immense requirements--requirements not to be fulfilled by rule or exhausted by the lapse of time, and which the higher they raise men the more they exact--an immense seriousness and strictness, an immense care for substance and truth, to the disregard, if necessary, of the letter and the form. The "Dispensation of the Spirit" has seldom had an interpreter more in earnest and more determined to see meaning in his words. We have room but for two illustrations. He is combating the notion that the work of Christianity and the Church nowadays is with the good, and that it is waste of hope and strength to try to reclaim the bad and the lost:--

Once more, however, the world may answer, Christ may be consistent
in this, but is he wise? It may be true that he does demand an
enthusiasm, and that such an enthusiasm may be capable of
awakening the moral sense in hearts in which it seemed dead. But
if, notwithstanding this demand, only a very few members of the
Christian Church are capable of the enthusiasm, what use in
imposing on the whole body a task which the vast majority are not
qualified to perform? Would it not be well to recognise the fact
which we cannot alter, and to abstain from demanding from frail
human nature what human nature cannot render? Would it not be well
for the Church to impose upon its ordinary members only ordinary
duties? When the Bernard or the Whitefield appears let her by all
means find occupation for him. Let her in such cases boldly invade
the enemy's country. But in ordinary times would it not be well
for her to confine herself to more modest and practicable
undertakings? There is much for her to do even though she should
honestly confess herself unable to reclaim the lost. She may
reclaim the young, administer reproof to slight lapses, maintain a
high standard of virtue, soften manners, diffuse enlightenment.
Would it not be well for her to adapt her ends to her means?

No, it would not be well; it would be fatal to do so; and Christ
meant what he said, and said what was true, when he pronounced the
Enthusiasm of Humanity to be everything, and the absence of it to
be the absence of everything. The world understands its own
routine well enough; what it does not understand is the mode of
changing that routine. It has no appreciation of the nature or
measure of the power of enthusiasm, and on this matter it learns
nothing from experience, but after every fresh proof of that
power, relapses from its brief astonishment into its old
ignorance, and commits precisely the same miscalculation on the
next occasion. The power of enthusiasm is, indeed, far from being
unlimited; in some cases it is very small....

But one power enthusiasm has almost without limit--the power of
propagating itself; and it was for this that Christ depended on
it. He contemplated a Church in which the Enthusiasm of Humanity
should not be felt by two or three only, but widely. In whatever
heart it might be kindled, he calculated that it would pass
rapidly into other hearts, and that as it can make its heat felt
outside the Church, so it would preserve the Church itself from
lukewarmncss. For a lukewarm Church he would not condescend to
legislate, nor did he regard it as at all inevitable that the
Church should become lukewarm. He laid it as a duty upon the
Church to reclaim the lost, because he did not think it utopian to
suppose that the Church might be not in its best members only, but
through its whole body, inspired by that ardour of humanity that
can charm away the bad passions of the wildest heart, and open to
the savage and the outlaw lurking in moral wildernesses an
entrancing view of the holy and tranquil order that broods over
the streets and palaces of the city of God....

Christianity is an enthusiasm or it is nothing; and if there
sometimes appear in the history of the Church instances of a tone
which is pure and high without being enthusiastic, of a mood of
Christian feeling which is calmly favourable to virtue without
being victorious against vice, it will probably be found that all
that is respectable in such a mood is but the slowly-subsiding
movement of an earlier enthusiasm, and all that is produced by the
lukewarmness of the time itself is hypocrisy and corrupt
conventionalism.

Christianity, then, would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned
its missionary character and became a mere educational
institution. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true
_articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae_. When the power of
reclaiming the lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the
Church. It may remain a useful institution, though it is most
likely to become an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power
remains, there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that
"the tabernacle of God is with men."

One more passage about those who in all Churches and sects think that all that Christ meant by His call was to give them a means to do what the French call _faire son salut_:--

It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a
class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion--the
persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He
describes them by a word which originally meant an "actor."
Probably it may in Christ's time have already become current in
the sense which we give to the word "hypocrite." But no doubt
whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly
remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any
vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common
with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and
deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including
affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one
incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a
piece. For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some
inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner
of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion,
is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh
by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade
before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down
sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor
who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler
forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably
because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler
creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit
with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his
means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of
their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another
happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither
understand nor regard his words, others would understand and
receive them. But a third class would receive them without
understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice
and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of
desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively
believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a
triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh
at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented
himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.
They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said
heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek,
indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion
those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them
spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would
certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might
easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new class of
actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an
earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but
hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible
treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their
Father in heaven.

We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work; between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come, which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where, for the present, he leaves the subject:--

For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from
corruption than was the Old.... First the rottenness of dying
superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism
preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling
Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan's
philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science--all
these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life
infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of
individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes
human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable
of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are
exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the
sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect
for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest
temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without
a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more
ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human
nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and
if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they
are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a
question whether mankind has gained on the whole....

But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is
_there_--that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead
of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and
when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few
select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth's
surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an
age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured
for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years,
instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of
the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of
adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the
transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and
inspired by its Founder's universal and unquenchable spirit.

It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine
power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in
any completeness or all-sufficiency....

But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and
power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other
achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of
action are coarse and common in comparison with it, and the
masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we
speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.
Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill
displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.
Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were,
implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which,
it is said, the gates of hell shall not prevail, cannot be
analysed. No architects' designs were furnished for the New
Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal
Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the
indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of
precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ's work it may be that the
same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers
were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in
the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was
done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly
accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that
which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech
which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively
the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can
explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be
enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No
man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded
together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard
the chink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from
God_.

And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such, as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love, about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains, not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed, _who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy, it asserts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable, to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ, as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from us the reality of the wonders in which it began.

The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is, in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of hearts in the object for which He created it.

X

THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]

[12]
_Guardian_, 6th March 1889.

Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so, using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect, in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fashion of discussing the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of mankind. According to the time and its circumstances, it is a _Summa Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a Calvin's _Institutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an _Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs. Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials and passionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad. Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience, and range of illustration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination; and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let them speak.

It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal, undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what, with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins. Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that he had assurances and pledges which could not fail him, that God was in the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book, which was its guaranteed witness, and by which God still spoke to his soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible, far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanctity was not so to all--was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more knowing than himself--was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he thought himself in full possession of the truth which God had given him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going on in the creeds and institutions and intellectual statements of Christianity. He is assured, and sees some reason to believe it, that the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further, that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another; the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere, comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been, which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve God in a Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than any of the old ones could be--of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper "A New Reformation."

In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book. _Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism, chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between _bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless, narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts true life and character and human feeling and motives into the personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A New Reformation."

Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know, in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode. It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which, when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of life, or make use of a poor and mean standard--_mesquin_ would be the French word--in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has impressed on us the lesson--not to be forgotten when we read Mrs. Ward's lists of learned names--that weight and not number is the test of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is bad--conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport--may we not say, without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares' nests? When the question is asked, why all this mass of criticism has made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important, and, in many ways, interesting class of intellectual phenomena, among the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific, political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a factor in the practical thought and life of the mass of mankind. Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live, and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring assumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible, self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this mysterious book is?

Meanwhile, in the face of theories and conjectures and negative arguments, there is something in the world which is fact, and hard fact. The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most important ages of the world's progress. It is an institution like the world itself, which has grown up by its own strength and according to its own principle of life, full of good and evil, having as the law of its fate to be knocked about in the stern development of events, exposed, like human society, to all kinds of vicissitudes and alternations, giving occasion to many a scandal, and shaking the faith and loyalty of many a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear of its existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, sometimes improved, in one way or another, since those dim and long distant days when its course began; but showing in all these ways what a real thing it is, never in the extremity of storms and ruin, never in the deepest degradation of its unfaithfulness, losing hold of its own central unchanging faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of recovery. _Solvitur ambulando_ is an argument to which Mrs. Ward appeals, in reply to doubts about the solidity of the "New Reformation." It could be urged more modestly if the march of the "New Reformation" had lasted for even half of one of the Christian centuries. The Church is in the world, as the family is in the world, as the State is in the world, as morality is in the world, a fact of the same order and greatness. Like these it has to make its account with the "all-dissolving" assaults of human thought. Like these it has to prove itself by living, and it does do so. In all its infinite influences and ministries, in infinite degrees and variations, it is the public source of light and good and hope. If there are select and aristocratic souls who can do without it, or owe it nothing, the multitude of us cannot. And the Christian Church is founded on a definite historic fact, that Jesus Christ who was crucified rose from the dead; and, coming from such an author, it comes to us, bringing with it the Bible. The fault of a book like _Robert Elsmere_ is that it is written with a deliberate ignoring that these two points are not merely important, but absolutely fundamental, in the problems with which it deals. With these not faced and settled it is like looking out at a prospect through a window of which all the glass is ribbed and twisted, distorting everything. It may be that even yet we imperfectly understand our wondrous Bible. It may be that we have yet much to learn about it. It may be that there is much that is very difficult about it. Let us reverently and fearlessly learn all we can about it. Let us take care not to misuse it, as it has been terribly misused. But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class of clever and cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and noble thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity. _Robert Elsmere_ may be true to life, as representing one of those tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is illogical to reason.

XI

RENAN'S "VIE DE JÉSUS"[13]

[13]
_Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre I.--_Vie de Jésus_.
Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 9th September 1863.

Unbelief is called upon nowadays, as well as belief, to give its account of the origin of that undeniable and most important fact which we call the Christian religion. And if it is true that in some respects the circumstances under which the controversy is carried on are, as it has been alleged, more than heretofore favourable to unbelief, it is also true that in some other respects the case of unbelief has difficulties which it had not once. It has to accept and admit, if it wishes to gain a favourable hearing from the present generation, the unique and surpassing moral grandeur, depth, and attractiveness of Christianity. The polemic method which set Christianity in broad contrast with what was supposed to be best and highest in human nature, and therefore found no difficulty in tracing to a bad source what was itself represented to be bad, is not a method suited to the ideas and feelings of our time; and the sneers and sarcasms of the last century, provoked by abuses and inconsistencies which have since received their ample and memorable punishment, cease to produce any effect on readers of the present day, except to call forth a passing feeling of repugnance at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes, with an equally passing admiration for what is witty and brilliant. Even in M. Renan's view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and distinguishing elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are, they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which, in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in it and are ministered by it to society.

That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other religion, is the point from which its assailants have now to start. They have also to take account of the circumstance, to the recognition of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us, that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and accidental favouring circumstances, but of its intrinsic power and of principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not corrupt; how that which alone has revealed God to man's conscience had no other origin than what in other instances has led men through enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superstition.

Such an attempt is the work before us--a work destined, probably, both from its ability and power and from its faults, to be for modern France what the work of Strauss was for Germany, the standard expression of an unbelief which shrinks with genuine distaste from the coarse and negative irreligion of older infidelity, and which is too refined, too profound and sympathetic in its views of human nature, to be insensible to those numberless points in which as a fact Christianity has given expression to the best and highest thoughts that man can have. Strauss, to account for what we see, imagined an idea, or a set of ideas, gradually worked out into the shape of a history, of which scarcely anything can be taken as real matter of fact, except the bare existence of the person who was clothed in the process of time with the attributes created by the idealising legend. Such a view is too vague and indistinct to satisfy French minds. A theory of this sort, to find general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish as soon as touched. M. Renan's process is in the main the reverse of Strauss's. He undertakes to extract the real history recorded in the Gospels; and not only so, but to make it even more palpable and interesting, if not more wonderful, than it seems at first sight in the original records, by removing the crust of mistake and exaggeration which has concealed the true character of what the narrative records; by rewriting it according to those canons of what is probable and intelligible in human life and capacity which are recognised in the public whom he addresses.

Two of these canons govern the construction of the book. One of them is the assumption that in no part of the history of man is the supernatural to be admitted. This, of course, is not peculiar to M. Renan, though he lays it down with such emphasis in all his works, and is so anxious to bring it into distinct notice on every occasion, that it is manifestly one which he is desirous to impress on all who read him, as one of the ultimate and unquestionable foundations of all historical inquiry. The other canon is one of moral likelihood, and it is, that it is credible and agreeable to what we gather from experience, that the highest moral elevation ever attained by man should have admitted along with it, and for its ends, conscious imposture. On the first of these assumptions, all that is miraculous in the Gospel narratives is, not argued about, or, except perhaps in one instance--the raising of Lazarus--attempted to be accounted for or explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact from which there is no escape--that He whom M. Renan venerates with a sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral reformers, did claim power from God to work miracles--is harmonised with the assumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true one.

M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects, the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity, and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history, overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.

His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom, first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for century after century of millions of men; but who will dare assert that any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas and needs, of the civilised West?

When M. Renan comes to detail he is as strangely insensible to what seem at first sight the simplest demands of probability. As it were by a sort of reaction to the minute realising of particulars which has been in vogue among some Roman Catholic writers, M. Renan realises too--realises with no less force and vividness, and, according to his point of view, with no less affectionate and tender interest. He popularises the Gospels; but not for a religious set of readers--nor, we must add, for readers of thought and sense, whether interested for or against Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to those representations of human nature which aspire to pass beyond the conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on the story. When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions have on the mind. We are told that there is a broad distinction between the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord's ministry, and the later days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find in Galilee the "_fin et joyeux moraliste_," full of a "_conversation pleine de gaieté et de charme_," of "_douce gaieté et aimables plaisanteries_," with a "_prédication suave et douce, toute pleine de la nature et du parfum des champs_," creating out of his originality of mind his "_innocents aphorismes_," and the "_genre d'élicieux_" of parabolic teaching; "_le charmant docteur qui pardonnait à tous pourvu qu'on l'aimât_." He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in "_la joyeuse Galilée_" in the midst of the "_nature ravissante_" which gave to everything about the Sea of Galilee "_un tour idyllique et charmant_." So the history of Christianity at its birth is a "_délicieuse pastorale_" an "_idylle_," a "_milieu enivrant_" of joy and hope. The master was surrounded by a "_bande de joyeux enfants_," a "_troupe gaie et vagabonde_," whose existence in the open air was a "perpetual enchantment." The disciples were "_ces petits comités de bonnes gens_," very simple, very credulous, and like their country full of a "_sentiment gai et tendre de la vie_," and of an "_imagination riante_." Everything is spoken of as "delicious"--"_délicieuse pastorale," "délicieuse beauté," "délicieuses sentences," "délicieuse théologie d'amour_." Among the "tender and delicate souls of the North"--it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans--was set up an "_aimable communisme_." Is it possible to imagine a more extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself inaccurately conceived of?--

Il parcourait ainsi la Galilée au milieu _d'une fête perpétuelle_.
Il se servait d'une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sûre,
et dont le grand oeil noir, ombragé de longs cils, a beaucoup de
douceur. Ses disciples déployarent quelquefois autour de lui une
pompe rustique, dont leurs vêtements, tenant lieu de tapis,
faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait,
ou les étendaient à terre sur son passage.

History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions, that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these "_petits comités de bonnes gens_" though influenced by a great example and wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect, and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome alternative.