Chapter XIII (3)

This is the result of a very common human weakness. Just as the founders of Protestantism could quietly acquiesce in many things which they had imbibed from the Catholic world in which they were educated, so their successors quietly acquiesce in what comes to them from their fathers; and in both cases there is much which cannot be systematically exhibited without contradiction. But very few men care to set about the systematic exhibition of all that they profess to believe or to act upon. If it were otherwise, the Protestant theories of Scripture would never have been set up; and they are now falling before the exertions of men who insist upon having a clear view of what they are called upon to believe. When the reformers made their appeal to Scripture, it was impossible for men of different tempers, habits, and associations to agree upon matters of interpretation, even if the appeal had been made in good faith. As it was, the appeal was made subject to certain foregone conclusions, none of which, perhaps, could have been deduced from the mere text by any scientific process of exegesis. Servetus could not find the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in the Bible; and though he was little if at all to blame, according to Protestant principles, Calvin thought this failure worthy of death. Luther found in the Epistle of St. James much more than he wanted, and therefore he ejected it from the canon. Thus the appearance of an appeal to a common standard is an appearance only. It has been found to cover the widest variations both of doctrine and ritual. The only result of professing to be bound by the Bible is, that the text is wrested to mean any thing. No single system of exegesis, strictly applied throughout and deprived of all external suggestion or comment, will elicit a consistent whole from the declarations of Scripture. All sects can produce some texts in their favor, and all find some texts which they are obliged to explain away. Inquirers are supposed to bring to the task of examination a previous reservation in favor of the doctrines of their peculiar sect. If they do not, they are denounced as traitors and unbelievers, in spite of the ostentatious demand for a free inquiry. When Mr. Jowett proposed to use for the elucidation of Scripture those aids and methods which scholars have applied with great success to the profane classics, he was met with something more than outcry; he was actually persecuted. Yet his persecutors, who kept his salary as professor of Greek down to forty pounds per annum when the other similar professorships were raised in value to four hundred pounds, had nothing to offer by way of reason against his proposal. They stooped to effect their object by using the blind prejudices of country clergymen.

While the name of Scripture has always commanded respect, and in this way a sort of pretended unity has seemed to bind together the sects of Protestantism, every generation has seen less and less ground for establishing any thing like real visible communion. Scripture is useless to this end, because every party insists that it has Scripture on its side. Since Luther and Melancthon conferred at Marburg with Œcolampadius and Zwingli, the futility of conferences has been growing more and more manifest. But so soon as men despair of establishing union by convincing their opponents, they are driven, if they desire union, to propose compromise as the basis upon which to found it; and in religious matters, compromise means the surrender of faith to expediency. Many attempts have been made to induce the sects to coalesce by declaring only that to be obligatory in dogma which is common to all, leaving every thing else in the region of pious opinion; but a very natural and even laudable party obstinacy has always brought these attempts to nothing. The only persons who can approach such compromises with a safe conscience are latitudinarians, whose fundamental principle is the denial that any dogma is of necessity to salvation; and to the latitudinarian this privilege is useless, because his overtures are superfluous if made to latitudinarians, while they are sure to be rejected by the dogmatists. Yet it is hard for the dogmatic Protestant to justify the religious scruple which makes him unwilling to treat with the latitudinarian; for he is cut off from the appeal to the "faith once delivered to the saints," and forced to take up his position on ground which can equally well be claimed by his opponents. The scruples of either side are called prejudices by the other; and neither can rebut the accusation upon solid grounds of reason. A position like this is unstable; and though habit will enable a given set of men to hold their ground firmly against mere argument, yet argument does tell in the long run, and an unreasonable position cannot with security be handed on to the next generation. For the next generation is not born under the same circumstances as the former; and so it often happens that the habit which swayed the fathers is not formed in the children. Bit by bit the ill-established creed rots away, as the "universal solvent" is brought to bear upon the whole; and thus successive generations of Protestants are apt to be pushed nearer and nearer to latitudinarianism, sometimes without any notice being taken of the change. At length, perhaps, we see matters culminate in some portentous vagary, like that society which now exists, or existed not long since in London, which proposes to unite upon the basis of assenting to nothing at all.

The connection between faith and reason, and the influence which intellectual processes may lawfully exercise upon religious belief, are questions of profound difficulty. But without attempting to draw the line exactly between what is right and what is wrong, it may be possible to assert with confidence of particular cases that they lie on this or that side of the line. We would not rashly encourage persons who have been brought up in any dogmatic system, however ill-grounded or erroneous we may think their belief, to set about mocking their hereditary faith upon the strength of a shallow scepticism; still less would we employ ridicule against errors which cannot be ridiculed without shocking deep convictions; because we think that the cause of truth, in the long run, loses more than it gains by such means. But the logical weakness of the Protestant position is made apparent by the fact that it always does give way before reason. England has passed through many phases, and one of these was a phase of rationalism, that is, of appealing to reason only as the ultimate ground of religious belief. During that period the popular religion sank into a vague deism, together with a practical code of moral decency. Yet, during that time--the eighteenth century--the Church of England was peculiarly rich in men whom she esteemed great divines; but theology is excluded from the pages of these theologians. We find little beyond exhortations to the practice of virtue, grounded upon appeals to good feeling and the hope of reward; and what ought to be the dogmatic side of their teaching is occupied with proofs of the reasonableness of Christianity, or with statements of the evidences of Christianity--a Christianity which, in the popular mind, had lost all hold upon the divinity of Christ. Here, then, the old Protestant dogmatic position had gone down before reason; and its fall is the more notable because reason was not polemically directed against it. The men who had renounced the dogmatic position were the champions of the church, nor had they the least suspicion that they had surrendered every thing to the other side except an empty title. Circumstances had forced them to take their stand upon reason; and dogma was quietly and instinctively dropped out of sight, simply because it could not be defended by them in their position upon that ground. We shall see presently how close, at this time, was the resemblance between the orthodox and the deist.

But in the change of circumstances, which is the result of the course of time, there is something to compensate for this sinking and loosening of the dogmatic foundations of the Protestants. Something is gained in the greater ease with which later generations can shut their eyes to the presence of certain troublesome facts; and this is what Catholics mean when they speak of the children of schismatics as being less responsible than their fathers for the schism in which they find themselves. While the old Protestants were quite ready to take the Bible upon trust, they felt the force of certain texts which do not at all trouble their successors. No modern evangelical or Presbyterian feels any qualm of suspicion when he reads the words, "This is my body," nor does he trouble himself to seek out a plausible explanation. Macaulay said that "the absurdity of a literal interpretation was as great and as obvious in the sixteenth century as it is now." But, at all events, there is this great difference between the two centuries: that in the sixteenth, men felt bound to give some meaning to the text, while now, in the nineteenth, they feel able to pass it over without giving to it any meaning at all. Œcolampadius and Zwingli were at the head of the two principal sections of the sacramentarian party, who denied all real presence, and reduced the eucharist to a mere commemorative rite. There stood the text, and they felt bound to explain it somehow, so that it might agree with their opinions. They assigned the same general meaning to the whole, but they could not agree on the question whether "is" or "body" must be interpreted by a kind of metonymy, that is, saying one thing and meaning another. The subject is not a fit one for laughter; but it is hard to read without laughing that Andrew Carlstadt thought our Lord pointed to his natural body, when he uttered the words of the text. Men must be sore pressed before they will execute such wrigglings as these; and there are many signs of the existence of similar pressures at that day, from which modern Protestants are more or less relieved. Thus, Calvin was obliged for the sake of consistency to declare that Scripture shines by its own light; while the moderns can act as if it did without being obliged to say so. Again, when Archbishop Heath and his fellow-sufferers protested against their deprivation by Queen Elizabeth, she felt bound to make some attempt to argue from the fathers against the supremacy of the pope, though she could have found no pleasure in the task, because she had so little to say for herself. Now, when a modern Protestant uses arguments of this sort, it is only to satisfy his own private whims or scruples; but Elizabeth was peremptorily called upon to defend herself against adverse public opinion.

Nothing seems simpler to a modern Protestant than that a man should take his stand on "the Bible, and the Bible only;" nothing seems more strange to any one who has considered the various ultimate grounds and hypotheses upon which religious belief may be supposed to rest. It is not necessary to be always obtruding the question of ultimate grounds upon men's notice, because it is not required that all who believe shall be able to produce an accurate statement of the true ultimate grounds of their belief. But such grounds must be supposed to exist, and to be capable of accurate statement; and the statement of them is, at any rate, fatal to the Protestant position. We have seen how dogmatic theology disappeared from the popular mind under the rationalism of the eighteenth century. And at the time of the French revolution, it was found that when men deserted the church, they did not take their stand upon the Bible, but on atheism; and that when they ceased to be atheists, they became Catholics again, not Protestants; nor has Protestantism ever made any large number of converts, except in the sixteenth century. This was a sore puzzle to Macaulay, as he himself declares; but it is easily explained on the principles we have laid down. In the sixteenth century, men had no thought of inquiring about ultimate grounds of belief; they were determined to believe something, and they looked about for any proximate ground which was near at hand and plausible in appearance. At the end of the eighteenth century, the question of ultimate grounds had occurred to many, and they had answered that there were ultimately no grounds for believing any religion at all. When they changed this opinion, and determined to have a religious belief, they did not take up the Protestant position, because it was exploded; and the proof that it was exploded lies in the fact that they did not take it up. They could no longer play the part of arbitrary eclectics, selecting what they chose and rejecting what they chose from the Catholic system. They could not follow the example of Calvin, who first stopped short where he did, and then helped to burn[166] Servetus for going a few steps further. The French revolutionists were without any of those convenient traditional drags which hamper movement, and enable men to stop short at arbitrary points. They ruthlessly carried out their principles into the wildest and most ferocious excesses, things for which no logical consistency will compensate; but they _did_ carry them out. Therefore they were in some sense incapacitated for becoming Protestants, because they had once known what it was to carry out principles, and there is no set of principles whatever, which, if vigorously carried out, will land a man in Protestantism.

Men who found their belief upon the Bible alone, have first to determine the canon, then to settle the text, and lastly to interpret it. They have three questions to answer: 1. How is it known that the Bible is, as a whole, the word of God? 2. How is it known that the text is free from material corruption? 3. When men differ about its meaning, as they notoriously do, who is to decide between them? Until a reply is found to these questions, their position is open to attacks which cannot justly be stigmatized as the result of a shallow scepticism; and the best proof of this is the fact that it always goes down before reason. One or two men of learning and ability may be found to abide by the ancient ways; but they are deserted by the great majority of their fellows, and therefore they are the exception and not the rule. Who can pretend to doubt in what direction the whole of the learning and ability among the undergraduates of Oxford has been moving of late years? With hardly an exception, all the most promising among the young men have been moving away from those stand-points which Dr. Pusey finds necessary to his position as a Protestant; and if there be any exception to this general movement, he only marks the motion of the stream by standing still himself. This is because our three questions remain unanswered, while those who attempt to find such an answer as shall be acceptable to a rational mind, are denounced and persecuted. Yet these so-called liberals have a right to demand to be heard, and to be allowed to make out what they can by fair argument; nor has Dr. Pusey any right to be shocked when they find things in Scripture which he does not, except upon grounds which, if he would rigorously carry them out, would make him a Catholic. In his present position, we cannot guess how he would attempt to answer Charlotte Elizabeth, that great departed light of the extreme evangelicals. An acquaintance once suggested a doubt about the inspiration of the book of Revelation in these words: "You are a person of too much sense to believe that the binding up of certain leaves between the covers of the Bible makes them a part of it." This, in fact, raised the question how the canon is to be determined; and Charlotte Elizabeth was staggered for a moment, as she herself tells us. But the battle was turned by the following reply, which she piously believed to be dictated by God: "If you can persuade me that the book of Revelation is not inspired, another person may do the same with regard to the book of Genesis; and so of all that lie between them, till the whole Bible is taken from me. That will never do," etc. Having thus determined the canon, she promptly provides the interpreter. "Man can tell me no more than that God has clearly revealed" the Calvinistic doctrine of election and reprobation; "therefore, man cannot strengthen a belief founded on the sure word of God; _or if he tells me it is not revealed, I know that it is; because I have found it so, and relinquish it I never can_." (_Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth_, third edition, p. 134. The other passage quoted is at p. 130.) Charlotte Elizabeth, upon the strength of this, deals out the most uncompromising damnation to those who _have found that it is not_. And Dr. Pusey's estimable friend, Mr. Burgon, is equally ferocious toward those who doubt whether every syllable, point, jot, tittle, and full stop in the Bible is the express act of God. It would be impossible, we suppose, to convert the wood-and-leather man of Martinus Scriblerus, even though he "should reason as well as most of your country parsons."

Political circumstances have given such peculiar interest to the career of the Church of England that it deserves to be placed in a class by itself, apart from the other schismatical bodies which sprang up at the Reformation. Amid the storms of theological controversy she has always found a dubious sheet-anchor in the state, which secured to her a certain stability of political position, while it allowed her to drift through many widely different doctrinal phases. The tameness with which she veered about at the bidding of successive sovereigns, and the ease with which great changes were effected in her constitution, show that, in puritan phrase, her heart was not in the work. Historians are equally astonished at the power of the crown and the pusillanimity of the people. And there is ground for astonishment, though the facts are often described in terms of exaggeration. We are not to suppose that the passing of an act of parliament, or the "devising" of an ordinal by Cranmer, made a change in religion which was instantly felt through all corners of the kingdom. Multitudes had very vague notions of what was going on, and the only people who were thoroughly well informed, the courtiers, had their eyes fixed on church lands, not on theology. In some parts of the country, as in Lancashire, the change was little felt, and the Catholic religion remains there to this day a common heirloom. But in the mass of the people we quite miss that delicate spiritual sense, so keenly alive to the slightest variation from the faith, which gives such interest to the struggles of the church with the early heretics. When all has been said in their favor, it cannot be denied that the English have always shown themselves somewhat supine and spiritually sluggish. It is only the "right to tax themselves" which appeals to their energies with force enough to stir up a rebellion. The Scots took their religion into their own hands; but the English were contented to be led like sheep by Cecil and Parker.

The fundamental profession of faith of the Church of England, the Thirty-nine Articles, labors under this disadvantage, that it has never secured to the Established Church any closer union or more uniform dogmatic tradition than has been secured to Protestants in general by their common possession of the Bible. Very significant are those words in the _King's Declaration_ prefixed to the articles, in which his majesty finds so much comfort from the fact that nobody refuses to sign the articles, in spite of "some differences which have been ill raised;" and that, when they differ, "_men of all sorts take the articles of the Church of England to be for them_." What is the value of a formula which has been found compatible with the primacy both of Whitgift and of Sancroft? Only once did the spirit of the nation question the right of "men of all sorts" to "take the articles to be for them;" and that was when Dr. Newman took them to contain the Catholic faith. But this was due to the national hatred of popery, not to the stringency of the articles. Their weak blast has never blown either hot or cold. They look like the offspring of a union between inconsiderate haste and the latitudinarian hankering after conversions made by compromise. They limit their confidence like the sagacious Bottom. "Masters, I am to discourse wonders; but ask me not what; for if I tell you, I am no true Athenian."

The Elizabethan pacificators were of that sort who turn a country into a wilderness, and then boast that peace has been happily restored. Their Established Church was not a religion, but a machinery for enabling men to dispense with religion in their daily lives; and every attempt to graft religious feeling upon its sapless stock has ended in discord. Having no efficient discipline, no central authority, no energetic corporate action, no audible dogmatic voice, and no intelligible symbols of faith, and receiving its hierarchy from the state with abject submissiveness, it has never got so far as to attempt to fulfil any of the functions of the church. Its usual condition has been that of a bundle of differences held together by some fleeting economy or the presence of the state. Scarcely had it settled down into any thing like an organized polity, when the Puritan schism became formidably apparent; and by the accidental bias of political association, the Churchman and the Puritan became the champions respectively of prerogative and of liberty. The church rallied round the monarchy, because the favor of the crown was the breath of its nostrils; and persecution made the Puritans ripe for rebellion, and therefore ready to fight for the cause of liberty in any shape. The men who began the Great Rebellion were politicians, not religious enthusiasts; but they gained the day by enlisting on their side that religious enthusiasm which afterward declared that "the Lord had no need" of the Rump Parliament. When the intolerable government of the saints had made inevitable the restoration of Charles, the Established Church came back with the crown almost as naturally as the court of chancery and the privy council. Nothing could be more in keeping than that the ecclesiastical loyalty which had blossomed into the divine right of kings under the earlier Stuarts, should bear its fruit in passive obedience after the restoration. This much had been claimed by Henry VIII. in that edifying manual, _The Pious and Godly Institution of a Christian Man_; and it now became the touchstone of Anglican orthodoxy, almost to the exclusion of dogmatic considerations. It is true that Archbishop Laud had long before begun what he meant to be a theological reaction; but in his scheme the position of an altar or the use of a vestment counted for more than the gravest doctrinal questions, and he did not scruple to act cordially with men whose theological views differed very widely from his own. Whatever claim the Established Church may seem to have made to doctrinal infallibility or to magisterial decision, we think that it will be found on closer inspection to resolve itself into this, that every preacher was allowed to propound his own crotchets as infallibly true, provided only that his fidelity to the great dogma of passive obedience was beyond suspicion. Yet the prominence of this one proposition, and the vehemence of the clergy in preaching it, gave a certain aspect of unity to the church, and somewhat resembled the energy with which divine truth should be taught. The establishment has grown up into a great and conspicuous edifice, imposing from its majestic appearance and the apparent solidity of its foundation, and endeared to many by the recollection of sufferings endured in a cause with which it seemed to be inseparably bound up. Her ministers "agreed in essentials;" that is to say, in the fundamental rules of morality and passive obedience. It was the very strength of the church's position which made the violence of James II. so disastrous to her influence. The clergy found themselves before the horns of a fatal dilemma, when they were compelled to choose between their church and their king. The people, long used to hear that passive obedience was the first duty of a Christian, saw with a sceptical shock the defection of the clergy from their most sacred tenet. The non-jurors set up a fresh schism, and the shattered establishment could offer no effectual resistance to the phlegmatic William and his latitudinarian primate.

By the revolution the Anglican was finally and for ever cut off from all appeal to the living authority of the church; and it is well worthy of note that when the high Anglicans of this century, after the tractarian movement had set in, began to appeal to authority, they could find no living authority whither to carry their appeal, and were forced to set up the dead authority of books and records. At the close of the seventeenth century, there would seem to have been a good opportunity for anticipating by a hundred and fifty years the tractarian revival; and perhaps we may regard the career of the non-jurors as a proof that Sancroft and his brethren were utterly removed from every breath of the Catholic spirit. Cut off at that time from all appeal to authority, yet forced to lay down some ground of belief, it remained for the establishment to choose between reason and the witness of the Spirit, or the purer light manifesting itself to the separate conscience of the individual. This latter had been the basis of independency, and of those still darker sects which sprang from independency during the commonwealth. It had appeared that this guidance might be made to lead anywhere, except in any direction that a sane man would choose, and therefore it remained to put reason on its trial. Thenceforth the appeal of the Anglican was addressed to the reason of his hearers, and the reasonable was the basis of argument between parties. Different men believed different things; but each admitted that his creed must stand or fall according as it should or should not approve itself to reason. That knowledge of God and of his will which could be discovered by unaided reason was styled natural religion; and this was the whole of religion, according to the deists. According to the orthodox, natural religion was an outline, true as far as it went, the details of which were to be filled in by revelation. It was an obvious consequence of this view, that such parts of Christianity as could not easily be foisted in upon natural religion, came to be rejected as popish corruptions; and thus the distinction between the orthodox and the deist became at last very shallow. Bishop Butler, a man of fervid piety and with a natural bias toward asceticism, whose disposition made him an exception in many ways to the common tendency of the age in which he lived, complains that religion had in his day become too reasonable to have any connection with the heart and the affections. The least deviation in any direction from the surrounding dead-level was looked upon with suspicion; and Butler's _Durham Charge_ caused him to be accused of "squinting" toward the superstition of popery. After his death, it was said by many that he had died a Catholic; and Secker came forward with indignant zeal to defend his memory from the "calumny."

The depressing results of this prevailing tone are well shown by its effect on the religious views of such men as Sydney Smith. A touch of fanaticism has great claims upon our respect, when it is seen in contrast to the heathenism which regards a good education and gentlemanlike manners as the most necessary qualifications for the spiritual guide. Those evangelicals, the "patent Christians" of Sydney Smith, were the representatives inside the Church of England of the feelings and aspirations which animated the Methodists outside; and if the church had been the same in the days of Wesley that it was in the days of Wilberforce, there would have been no separation. We remarked that the close of the seventeenth century seems to have presented a good opportunity for anticipating the tractarian movement; but the times were not ripe for it, and the attempt was not made. Wesley did attempt to anticipate the evangelical movement; but the times were again not ripe, and the attempt ended in extensive schism. The evangelicals were the true forerunners of the tractarians; and perhaps the Methodists had opened the way to both. And as the Church of England first drove out the Methodists, but acquired by the process a certain capacity to endure Methodism, so, perhaps, she drove out the Tractarians, and acquired thereby a certain leaven which enables her now to endure with comparative equanimity the presence in her bosom of men who profess Catholic doctrine. The church had no fixed spirit; she was put in motion by the clamors of unstable popular opinion; and popular opinion is liable to be modified by the views with which it is brought into contact, even when it attacks them most fiercely. Yet we think we see signs that a time is coming when the comprehensive shelter of the establishment will no longer be open to all who choose to stand under it.

During this century three great movements have at different times made inroads upon the dead-level bequeathed by a former age. The evangelical movement has had its day, and its force is now spent; it no longer does active work, but only serves as a protest and drag. The tractarian movement has passed into a second phase; but it is still so far vigorous that it makes progress; that is, it increases continually the number of exoteric members who hang upon its skirts, while the esoteric members become more and more thorough-going in their assertion of Catholic doctrine and practice. The third and last movement is the critical, which is an attempt imported from Germany, and in England supported with great ingenuity and learning, to set up a criterion of religious truth and error apart from the reception of the Catholic scheme. For a long time there was room enough for all these parties to exist together; and if they quarrelled, it was rather because they had a taste for quarrelling than because they were brought into collision. But now there is no longer room for them, and collision is imminent. We may expect soon to see the battle fought out between them; nor would it have been delayed so long had there been any ground solid enough for pitting one against another. The English ecclesiastical law is so vague that men hardly dare to invoke it, even when they hope to find it on their side; for it is impossible to predict its course with certainty, when once it is set moving. But recent decisions have tended more and more to bring out this much, that an exact compliance with the present law, so far as it can be fixed, would be equally distasteful both to the evangelicals and to the tractarians. It is, in fact, a compromise constructed with unusual clumsiness, which is now for the first time being exposed to a searching examination; and it is likely to meet with the just fate of compromises, by being found equally hateful to both of the parties whom it was meant to reconcile. The critical school, who greatly outweigh the two others in learning and ability, are more evidently outside the letter of the present law, though its machinery is too clumsy to be used against them with any great effect. But the matter will not long be left in the hands of the present law; and it is hard to foretell the legislation of the future. Nobody, we think, can now doubt that a few years will see some great change, either of secularization, or at least of redistribution, in the ecclesiastical revenues. A large section of the tractarian party now cries out for disestablishment, as the only way open to them by which they may keep the Catholic faith.

When the catastrophe to which we are looking forward does come, no doubt there will be some splitting up of parties. Some, we hope many, of the tractarians will be received into the Catholic Church; and then it will be seen whether the remainder will be able to set up a free church, according to their darling scheme. Many of the evangelicals will doubtless join the various dissenting bodies; and some, perhaps, will coalesce with the liberals, (whom we called the critical school,) and it is possible that these latter may be left for a little while in possession of the whole of the temporalities of the church. This, however, we do not think likely; it is probable that disestablishment will be itself the occasion of a general dissolution. But the liberals have this great advantage on their side, that they are under no temptation whatever to split up. The agreement which holds them together is an agreement to differ; and their bond of union is a protest against all persons who consider dogmatic opinions of any kind to be a sufficient ground for breaking communion. Upon this understanding they are ready to shake hands with the whole world. And the opinions which are held by the esoteric members of the party (for some of them have opinions) are always embraced subject to the admission that they may possibly be false. They find truth everywhere, and close resemblances between things which are totally different. A bigot, according to the old joke, is a person who says that he is in the right, and that every body who differs from him is in the wrong; but a liberal is afraid to say that he is in the right, lest he should be obliged to say that somebody else is not. They avoid mistakes by saying as little as possible, and by using the vaguest terms they can find; and, above all, by cheerfully admitting that there is always a great deal to be said on both sides. As certain of their own poets have said,

"Methinks I see them
Through everlasting limbos of void time
Twirling and twiddling ineffectively,
And indeterminately swaying for ever."

But it is only fair to say that here they are seen in their weakness, not in their strength. This vague and undecided habit of mind is the result of the circumstances in which they had their beginning. The spectacle of a great number of sects, each in practice arrogating to itself infallibility while they teach incompatible doctrines, produces different effects upon different minds. Its natural effect upon the shallow, who are just deep enough to find out that other sects exist beside the one in which they were brought up, is to breed scepticism. They know that two contradictory propositions cannot both be true, and they think that the one is as well supported by evidence as the other; and out of these premises, by the help of bad logic, they draw the conclusion that both must be false. But sounder intellects set about investigating more closely the criterion of truth and falsehood; and to such we owe the critical theory, which is not only ingenious, but even true so far as it goes. Something of the indecision of men who have seen so much of error that they now hardly believe in the existence of truth, clings to these critics; and this makes their proceeding seem to be sceptical when it is not really so. Their theory may be briefly summed up as follows: "Interpret the Scripture," says one,[167] "like any other book." This in his mouth was a brief way of bidding us measure religious truth by the same tests, while we seek it by the same methods, as other truth. It is well known that the labor of successive generations of scholars, following the same main rules of criticism, has made a great approach to uniformity in the interpretation of profane authors; and nobody doubts that the common consent of the critics, if it could be obtained, would be the best possible evidence to the unlearned of the true meaning of an obscure passage. It is inferred that the same critical methods may be applied to the Bible, and that the same approach to uniformity of interpretation may thus be secured.

This is a plausible theory; and it is sound so far as it goes. But it completely ignores the Catholic theory of the interpretation of Scripture. Its authors evidently suppose, for example, that if a text quoted by the Council of Trent in support of a doctrine could be critically proved irrelevant to the purpose, then the doctrine would be seriously shaken in the minds of Catholics. But this opinion rests on a profound misapprehension of the Catholic view. We accept the doctrine on the authority of the council, as the voice of the church, without criticising the source from which the words are drawn; and although the church in her decisions is guided by her unalterable tradition, yet it is a possible case that she might be quite assured of the fact of the tradition, and yet (to speak reverently) erroneously quote a document in evidence. A Catholic would be very cautious about attributing critical errors of this kind to a general council; but no theologian will deny that such a thing might happen. The function of the church in interpreting Scripture is by no means limited to ascertaining what the words written represented to the mind of the writer; the question is much wider than this, including all that was intended by God to be conveyed or suggested by the written words to the church at large. It does not follow that, because a given meaning is the only sense which the words could appropriately bear at the time when they were written, therefore no other additional sense was intended to be conveyed at some future time. In proportion as we exalt the degree in which a passage or a book is supposed to be inspired, so much the more probable does it become that its words will bear more than one meaning. In the higher sense of the word inspiration, the human agent becomes a mere instrument to convey a message, which he himself may possibly not understand at all. The meaning then lies wholly in the mind of God; and it is to be sought out by the divinely appointed interpreter. Hence is apparent the reasonableness, when they are taken together, of the two elements which make up the Catholic theory of Scripture--the inspiration of the written word, and the commission of the church to interpret. Both these things are ignored or denied by that school of criticism about which we have been speaking. Their view is quite incompatible with the Catholic view of inspiration, and they at the same time naturally deny the right of interpretation to the church, in order to give it to the scholar. And they therefore limit the function of interpretation to that which the scholar can reasonably attempt--the discovery of the meaning appropriate to the circumstances under which the words were uttered.

The theory, as it stands by itself, is a plausible hypothesis, much better able to bear examination than any other theory which Protestants have ever put forward. We do not think that it will fulfil the hopes of its friends, by securing the wished for uniformity of interpretation. And we cannot help thinking that its adherents ought to be on their guard against their peculiar faculty of finding out likenesses in dissimilar things, lest they should deceive themselves by fancying that they have secured uniformity when they have not. At present, they are rather apt to mistake the progeny of their neighbors for their own--

... "simillima proles
Indiscreta suis gratusque parentibus error."

A few years ago, one of them placed on record his pious delight at the closeness with which Dr. Pusey's theological system resembled that of Mr. Jowett. He seemed to think that we are all of us getting year by year into closer agreement, and that the golden mean toward which all are gravitating is that hazy creed which looms vaguely upon the inner vision of Dean Stanley.

FOOTNOTES:

[165] Now Bishop of Exeter. He was the author of an ingenious but whimsical essay, styled, "The Education of the World," in _Essays and Reviews_, where he parcelled out the elements of our present civilization among different nations of antiquity. He almost seems to have thought that Turner owed his knowledge of painting, in some vague way, to Zeuxis and Parrhasius.

[166] To give Calvin his due, he was only for chopping off the head of Servetus. He called eagerly for his blood; but he was willing to temper justice with so much mercy as lies in substituting the axe for the fagot.

[167] Professor Jowett, _Essays and Reviews_, ninth ed. p. 377. This essay contains several jokes, which to us seem rather out of place. "Even the Greek Plato," says the professor, (p. 390,) "would have 'coldly furnished forth' the words of 'eternal life.'" The reader will remember the words of Shakespeare,

"The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,"

meaning (as is shown by the preceding words, _Thrift, thrift, Horatio!_) that the marriage had followed so close upon the funeral that the pasties which had been hot at the one came up cold at the other. The new turn given by Mr. Jowett to his original has, we admit, a very humorous effect; but we cannot help thinking that he has been unseasonably witty.

THE SAGACIOUS WIG.

I.

A wig may be said to have two lives--the one with its own head, the other with its adopted head, or rather the head which adopts it; it has, therefore, a double chance for wisdom, and might be expected to profit accordingly. Generally speaking, this is the case, and wig and wisdom are almost synonymous.

Such wonderful tales had been told in a certain shop, by wigs that came back to be _fixed a little_, of the glory of their new abodes--wigs shorn from the very dregs of the people--from heads that had never been combed or petted or cared for--from heads houseless and hatless, that had been rained on and hailed on, and now in their second life dwelt in splendor unmitigated--that their discourses fairly curled up tighter every wig in the place. The shop had proved but a stepping-stone to blissful companionship with wits and statesmen; they reposed on the brows of sages and philosophers, shared the applauses of the multitude with popular orators, listened to the eloquence born of champagne and gaslight, and won the smiles and flirted with sweet ladies on Turkish divans and velvet _fauteuils_; all this and more, the wigs who came back had to relate. No wonder hopes were raised in each that went forth--hopes often delusive.

II.

If the few hairs which made a kind of rim round the head of Martin Tryterlittle had chosen to speak when he first clapped a wig on his bald crown, (bald though not yet old,) they could have told a long story, or rather a succession of many stories, of hope, expectation, and disappointment in the three great walks of life--money-making, love-making, and fame-making. Striving, ever striving, he hardly paused to look back at the profitless path he had trodden. The meeting accidentally with an old school-chum in fine broadcloth, or the ultra urgency of his landlady or some other disagreeable creditor, gave him occasionally more vivid views of things, and at such times he indulged in indignant and certainly very disrespectful language toward mankind in general and some individuals in particular; but generally his mood was patient endurance.

Success in life was an enigma. There was Job Lovemee, who began his career by ridiculously marrying a girl as poor as himself, and blessed since with six children, was getting as rich as a nabob; "while I," said Martin, "with no such drawbacks, am as poor as a church mouse."

It was a pleasant bright spring morning when Martin Tryterlittle suddenly resolved to turn over a new leaf in his book of life and mend its story.

"No wonder I cannot succeed," said he; "look at me!" So, as no one was by, he looked at himself, bit at a time, in the little cracked mirror which adorned his attic lodging-room. As the fortunes of Martin had been gradually sinking in the scale of social existence, he had physically been rising; that is, from occupying the first floor handsomely furnished, as the advertisement set forth, he had ascended to the attic, so nearly unfurnished that a bed, a table, a chair, and a broken mirror comprised its whole inventory.

"Look at me!" said Martin to himself, "threadbare and bald! No wonder I find nothing to do and no one to woo, and stay lagging behind in this march of mankind! I'll buy a wig to-day if I have to sell something to pay for it; for every body can see my head, but nobody--well, I'll button up my coat!"

It was no one's business how it was accomplished, as Martin truly said, but it _was_ done; the wig was bought and paid for, and rested now on his table in happy anticipation of the triumphs of the ensuing day. "No one will know me," said he. "I hardly know myself! O my wig! how happy we shall be; to thee shall I owe friends and fortune!"

It may startle some old-fashioned people to hear me assert that there was a responsive chord in the wig which answered to all this; but those familiar with modern metaphysical speculations will easily credit it. The wig, be it remembered, was once part and parcel of a sentient being; nor have we any reason to suppose that baking and boiling, in the process of wig-making, could in any way touch the spark immortal and invisible which once pervaded it. It is true that counter arguments might be advanced, and so there is no end to controversy; but there is a shorter way--and having demonstrated how the thing _might_ have been, we are satisfied to believe that so it _was_. Martin felt that his wig understood him. He was no longer alone in the world; companionship is something even with a wig, and he realized it as he laid his purchase carefully on the table and betook himself to his bed.

It was a long night; but day dawned at last, and, in the mean time, the whole future had been mapped out in the mind of Martin Tryterlittle. He rose early, made a careful toilette of such materials as were to be had, and sallied forth in thoughtful mood.

"Fame, wealth, love"--he conned them over in the order of valuation. "Fame (said he) I must first secure, and then I can command my own price in every thing else. Wealth will follow; and as for love, I need not go after that. Lord! there is no end to the love that comes tumbling in upon fame and money!"

_C'est le premier pas qui coute_--the problem was, how to be famous. There was a military and a civil career. There was invention in all the arts subservient to human needs. Could any wheels anywhere be made to go faster or smoother or with less smashing up? Well, as far as he saw, every thing was as good as it could be. Literature? Ah! that is a long track; besides, publishers are "lions in the way"--they cannot or will not always appreciate merit; fame seldom comes to the scribe till after he is beyond the reach of earthly pain or blame. "No," said Martin, "I must be famous living; what matters it after one is dead?"

"What is all this jabber about?" thought the wig; "surely my master has so many ways before him he cannot tell which to choose; but so jauntily I sit on his brow, he cannot fail of success whichever he takes."

This cogitating mood brought them step by step to a corner--one of those comers peculiar to great cities; where, while down one wide avenue the mighty human tide goes rushing and roaring, the narrow side street, like a little sluggish stream with scarce a perceptible ripple, joins it and empties its trifle into it. At this moment the usual tide in the great thoroughfare was swollen to a torrent; in plain words, at the corner Martin encountered a mighty mob. Hark! what a rabble shout! pell-mell--something had happened. Somebody had sinned, and very vindictive seemed the sufferers. Martin was caught in the current and twirled into their midst. Then was heard, "Oh! the man had a wig on!"--"wig!" "man!" "man!" "wig!" It went from mouth to mouth. Well, here was a man with a wig on in their midst; this must be he. The logic was conclusive; so Martin was seized and hurried along.

"What have I done?" cried he.

"Oh! yes, you know what you've done; and we know what you've done," shouted a dozen tongues. So, pinioned close, he was borne onward to the halls of justice, or injustice, as the case might be.

"Well, well!" thought the wig; "I little expected to get in such a fix with my gentleman, or I should have clinched his bald pate till he would have been glad to leave me for some other customer. It is disgraceful!"

"It's villainous! it's outrageous!" roared Martin.

"Shut up!" said a looker-on.

Now came a medley of questions and cross-questions, and ejaculations, and assertions, and confirmations, and contradictions, and, in short, the usual path of law and order was trodden over, till they settled down to unanimity on one point: the evil deed, whatever it was, (and very few seemed to know exactly what it was,) had been done by a man in a wig; but then it was a yellow-white, frowsy, sunburnt sort of a wig. Who could ever suspect that mass of dark, glossy curls of concealing a rogue? No one. So Martin was dismissed with the galling consciousness that for the great wrong done him there was no redress. A great wrong, too, he felt it; for what was he henceforth? Why, the very boys in the street would point to him as "the one wot was took up." He shrank from being seen; he had been too famous already.

He turned his steps homeward to collect his thoughts and rearrange his dress.

"This comes of a wig," said he; "a wig is deception, deception is rascality. A man guilty of one deception must not take it in dudgeon that he is suspected of another. I scorn fame! I go for money; and money shall make me famous. I began at the wrong end."

"Yes," (chimed in the wig,) "we'll be rich and loved; and the rest is all bosh."

It took Martin Tryterlittle a long time to put himself again in presentable order; one more such adventure, and he would be obliged to cease intercourse with that portion of creation who walk in sunlight, and join the human owls who, from choice or necessity, fly only by night. Their ways are not so widely different as a casual observer might suppose. Money is dear to both, and both are fond of taking short roads to it. Only in one thing they differ vastly--the day-worker sighs and seeks for notoriety, and often fails to obtain it; the night-prowlers have it thrust upon them, though they shun it. Martin had shared their hapless luck, and his ideas were changed; henceforth he scorned fame in all its phases, and exalted that other idol--money.

III.

A second time day-dawn called up Martin and his wig for new projects. It was a glorious morning. There was something exhilarating in that yellow flood of light which promised success. It was so cosmopolitan--that sunlight! It gave to all things such a gloss of delicate beauty. First, it just touched with gold the spires, and tallest trees and chimney-tops; then it slid down the house-side to peep in my lady's chamber; then it poured a glow all over the pavement, and made merry and warm all the little things, animate and inanimate, which but for that would have been dark and cold. Into this atmosphere of joyousness walked forth now Martin Tryterlittle to find something to do, some fellow-creature with a want unfilled.

It is surprising that any one ever begins to do any thing in this world, where every avenue to success is crowded, every necessity supplied, and every evil surrounded by a belt of antidotes; it takes immense penetration to discover where there is left any thing to be done.