Chapter XV: Part 15

Yet, however we believe, blindly or reasonably, (for some men, by God's mercy, are accidentally, as it were, in possession of the truth, the falsehood of their own minds in holding it not being, it is to be hoped, imputed to them as a sin;) however we believe, I never mean to say that our faith is not God's gift, to be sought for and retained by constant prayer and watchfulness, and to be forfeited by carelessness or sin. That is no true faith in which reason does not accord; yet neither can reason alone and without God ever become perfected into faith. For although intellectually, the grounds of belief may be made out satisfactorily, yet we are not able to follow our pure reason by ourselves; and no work on the evidences of Christianity can by itself give us faith; and much less can amid the manifold conflicts of life maintain it. That faith is thus the gift of God, and not our own work, I would desire to feel as keenly and continually, as with the fullest conviction I acknowledge it.

Now, to resume the consideration of that which, as I said, is the real point of anxiety with many. They doubt whether the course of a reasonable belief can be held to the end without interruptions: they say that the received notions of the inspiration, and consequently of the complete truth of the Scriptures cannot reasonably be maintained; that he who does maintain them does so by a happy inconsistency;--he is to be congratulated for not following up his own principles; but why should he then find fault with others who do that avowedly and consistently to which he is driven against his professions by the clear necessity of the case?

This argument was pressed by Mr. Newman, some time since, in one of the Tracts for the Times; and it was conducted, as may be supposed, with great ingenuity, but with a recklessness of consequences, or an ignorance of mankind, truly astonishing; for he brought forward all the difficulties and differences which can be found in the Scripture narratives, displayed them in their most glaring form, and merely observed, that as those with whom he was arguing could not solve these difficulties, but yet believed the Scriptures no less in spite of them, so the apparent unreasonableness of his doctrine about the priesthood was no ground why it should be rejected--a method of argument most blameable in any Christian to adopt towards his brethren; for what if their faith, being thus vehemently strained, were to give way under the experiment? and if, being convinced that the Scriptures were not more reasonable than Mr. Newman's system, they were to end with believing, not both, but neither?

Therefore the question is one of no small anxiety and interest; and it is not idly nor wantonly that we must speak the truth upon it, even if that truth may to some seem startling; for by God's blessing, if we do go boldly forward wherever truth shall lead us, our course needs not be interrupted, neither shall a single hair of our faith perish.

The same laws of criticism which teach us to distinguish between various degrees of testimony, authorize us to assign the very highest rank to the evidences of the writings of St. John and St. Paul. If belief is to be given to any human compositions, it is due to these; yet if we believe these merely as human compositions, and without assuming anything as to their divine inspiration, our Christian faith, as it seems to me, is reasonable;--not merely the facts of our Lord's miracles and resurrection; but Christian faith, in all its fulness--the whole dispensation of the Spirit, the revelation of the redemption of man and of the Divine Persons who are its authors--of all that Christian faith, and hope, and love can need. And this is so true, that even without reckoning the Epistle to the Hebrews amongst St. Paul's writings,--nay, even if we choose to reject the three pastoral epistles[18]--yet taking only what neither has been nor can be doubted--the epistles to the Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians, we have in these, together with St. John's Gospel and First Epistle,--giving up, if we choose, the other two,--a ground on which our faith may stand for ever, according to the strictest rules of the understanding, according to the clearest intuitions of reason.

[Footnote 18: I say this, not as having the slightest doubt myself of the genuineness of any one of the three, but merely to show how much is left that has not been questioned at all, even unreasonably.]

I take the works of St. John and St. Paul as our foundation, because, in the first place, we find in them the historical basis of Christianity; that is to say, we find the facts of our Lord's miracles, and especially of his resurrection, and the miraculous powers afterwards continued to the church, established by the highest possible evidence. However pure and truly divine the principles taught in the gospel may be, yet we crave to know not only that we were in need of redemption, but that a Redeemer has actually appeared; not only that a resurrection to eternal life is probable, but that such a resurrection has actually taken place. This basis of historical fact, which is one of the great peculiarities of Christianity, is strictly within the cognizance of the understanding; and in the writings of St. John and St. Paul we have that full and perfect evidence of it which the strictest laws of the understanding require.

But the historical truth being once warranted by the understanding, other faculties of our nature now come in to enjoy it, and develop it; the highest reason and the moral and spiritual affections find respectively their proper field and objects, which, whenever presented to them in vision or in theory, they must instinctively cling to, but to which they now abandon themselves without fear of disappointment, because the understanding has assured them of their reality. We must suppose, on any system, the existence of reason and spiritual affections as indispensable to the understanding of the Scriptures; external authority can do nothing for us without these, any more than the mere faculties of the common understanding. But with these we apprehend the view which St. John and St. Paul afford to us: it opens before us one truth after another, one glory after another. St. John evidently supposes that his readers were familiar with another account of our Lord's life and teaching; and we find accordingly, another account existing in the writings of the three other evangelists. One and the same account is manifestly the substance of their three narratives, to which they thus bear a triple testimony, because none of the three has merely transcribed the others, and none of them apparently was the original author of it. Thus having now the full record of our Lord's teaching, we find that he everywhere refers to the Old Testament as to the word of God, and the record of God's earlier manifestations of himself to man. He has cleared up those especial points in it which might have most perplexed us, as I shall notice more fully hereafter, and he represents himself as the perpetual subject of its prophecies. We thus receive the Old Testament, as it were, from his hand, and learn while sitting at his feet to understand the lessons of the law and the prophets.

Thus we make Christ the centre of both Testaments, and by so doing, we cannot be blind to the divinity pervading both. For the amazing fact that God should come into the world and be in the world cannot by possibility stand alone; it hallows, as it were, the whole period of the world's existence, from the beginning to the end, placing all time and every place in relation to God; it disposes us at once to receive the fact of the special call of the people of Israel;--it gives, I had almost said, an _à priori_ reason why there must have been in earlier times some shadows, at least, or images, to represent dimly to former generations that great thing which they were not actually to witness; it leads us to believe that there must have been some prophetic voices to announce the future coming of the Lord, or else "The very stones must have cried out."

But those writings of St. John and St. Paul which were our first lessons in Christianity, and those other accounts of our Lord's life and teaching to which they introduced us,--can we conceive it possible, that the real meaning of all these shall be hopelessly obscure and uncertain; that if we seek it ever so diligently, we shall not find it? With an humble mind ready to learn, with a heart fully impressed with the sense of God's presence, so as to be morally and spiritually in a condition to receive God's truth, can we believe, then, that the use of those intellectual means, which open to us certainly the sense of human writers, shall be applied in vain to those writers who were commissioned to be the very heralds of a divine message, whose especial business it was to make known what they had themselves heard? Surely if a sufficient certainty of interpretation be attainable in common literature, the revelation of God cannot be the solitary exception.

But we may be mistaken: we may _believe_ that we interpret truly, but we cannot be _infallibly sure_ of it; we want an authority which shall give us this assurance. This is no doubt the natural craving of our weakness; but it is no wiser a craving than if we were to long for the heaven to be opened, and for a daily sight of our Lord standing at the right hand of God. To live by faith is our appointed condition, and faith excludes an infallible assurance. We must earnestly believe that we have the truth, and die for our belief, if necessary, but we cannot _know_ it. No device which the human mind can practise, can exclude the possibility of doubt. If we would find an armour which should cover us at every point from this subtle enemy, it would be an armour that would close up the pores of the skin, and stop our breath; our fancied security would kill us. Is it really possible that, with our knowledge of man's nature, our belief in any human authority can really be more free from doubt than our belief in the conclusions of our own reason? There must ever be the liability to uncertainty; we can put no moral truth so surely as that our minds shall always feel it to be absolutely certain. Where is the infallible authority that can assure us even of the existence of God? And will the scepticism that can believe its own conclusions in nothing else rest satisfied with one conclusion only--that the writers of the first four centuries cannot err? Surely to regard this as the most certain proposition that can be submitted to the human mind, is no better than insanity.

But we will consent to trust, it may be said, with God's help, to our own deliberate convictions that we have interpreted Scripture truly; but you tell us that the Scripture itself is not inspired in every part; you tell us that there are in it chronological and historical difficulties, if not errors; that there are possibly some interpolations; that even the apostles may have been in some things mistaken, as in their belief that the end of the world was at hand. Where shall we find a rest for our feet, if you first take away from us our infallible interpreter, and now tell us, that even if we can ourselves interpret it aright, yet that we cannot be sure that the very Scripture itself is infallibly true?

It is very true that our position with respect to the Scriptures is not in all points the same as our fathers'. For sixteen hundred years nearly, while physical science, and history, and chronology, and criticism, were all in a state of torpor, the questions which now present themselves to our minds could not from the nature of the case arise. When they did arise, they came forward into notice gradually: first the discoveries in astronomy excited uneasiness: then as men began to read more critically, differences in the several Scripture narratives of the same thing awakened attention; more lately, the greater knowledge which has been gained of history, and of language, and in all respects the more careful inquiry to which all ancient records have been submitted, have brought other difficulties to light, and some sort of answer must be given to them. Mr. Newman, as we have seen, has made use of those difficulties much as the Romanists have used the doctrine of the Trinity when arguing with Trinitarians[19] in defence of transubstantiation. The Romanists said,--"Here are all these inexplicable difficulties in the doctrine of the Trinity, and yet you believe it." So Mr. Newman argues with those who hold the plenary inspiration of Scripture, that if they believe that, in spite of all the difficulties which beset it, they may as well believe his doctrine of the priesthood; and many, if I mistake not, alarmed by this representation, have actually embraced his opinions.

[Footnote 19: On this proceeding of the Romanists, Stillingfleet observes, "Methinks for the sake of our common Christianity you should no more venture upon such bold and unreasonable comparisons. Do you in earnest think it is all one whether men do believe a God, or providence, or heaven, or hell, or the Trinity, and incarnation of Christ, if they do not believe transubstantiation? We have heard much of late about old and new popery: but if this be the way of representing new popery, by exposing the common articles of faith, it will set the minds of all good Christians farther from it than ever. For upon the very same grounds we may expect another parallel between the belief of a God and transubstantiation, the effect of which will be the exposing of all religion. This is a very destructive and mischievous method of proceeding; but our comfort is that it is very unreasonable, as I hope hath fully appeared by this discourse."--_Doctrine of the Trinity and Transubstantiation compared_, at the end.]

It has unfortunately happened that the difficulties of the Scripture have been generally treated as objections to the truth of Christianity; as such they have been pressed by adversaries, and as such Christian writers have replied to them. But then they become of such tremendous interest, that it is scarcely possible to examine them fairly. If my faith in God and my hope of eternal life is to depend on the accuracy of a date or of some minute historical particular, who can wonder that I should listen to any sophistry that may be used in defence of them, or that I should force my mind to do any sort of violence to itself, when life and death seem to hang on the issue of its decision?

Yet what conceivable connexion is there between the date of Cyrenius's government, or the question whether our Lord healed a blind man as he was going into Jericho or as he was leaving it; or whether Judas bought himself the field of blood, or it was bought by the high priests: what connexion can there be between such questions, and the truth of God's love to man in the redemption, and of the resurrection of our Lord? Do we give to any narrative in the world, to any statement, verbal or written, no other alternative than that it must be either infallible or unworthy of belief? Is not such an alternative so extravagant as to be a complete reductio ad absurdum? And yet such is the alternative which men seem generally to have admitted in considering the Scripture narratives: if a single error can be discovered, it is supposed to be fatal to the credibility of the whole.

This has arisen from an unwarranted interpretation of the word "inspiration," and by a still more unwarranted inference. An inspired work is supposed to mean a work to which God has communicated his own perfections; so that the slightest error or defect of any kind in it is inconceivable, and that which is other than perfect in all points cannot be inspired. This is the unwarranted interpretation of the word "inspiration." But then follows the still more unwarranted inference,--"If all the Scripture is not inspired, Christianity cannot be true," an inference which is absolutely entitled to no other consideration than what it may seem to derive from the number of those who have either openly or tacitly maintained it.

Most truly do I believe the Scriptures to be inspired; the proofs of their inspiration rise continually with the study of them. The scriptural narratives are not only about divine things, but are themselves divinely framed and superintended. I cannot conceive my conviction of this truth being otherwise than sure. Yet I must acknowledge that the scriptural narratives do not claim this inspiration for themselves; so that if I should be obliged to resign my belief in it, which seems to me impossible, I yet should have no right to tax the Scriptures with having advanced a pretension proved to be unfounded; their whole credibility as a most authentic history of the most important facts would remain untouched; the gospel of St. John would still be a narrative as unimpeachable as that of Thucydides, which no sane man has ever disbelieved.

So much for the unwarranted inference, that if the Scripture histories are not inspired, the great facts of the Christian revelation cannot be maintained. But it is no less an unwarranted interpretation of the term "inspiration," to suppose that it is equivalent to a communication of the Divine perfections. Surely, many of our words and many of our actions are spoken and done by the inspiration of God's Spirit, without whom we can do nothing acceptable to God. Yet does the Holy Spirit so inspire us as to communicate to us His own perfections? Are our best words or works utterly free from error or from sin? All inspiration does not then destroy the human and fallible part in the nature which it inspires; it does not change man into God.

In one man, indeed, it was otherwise; but He was both God and man. To Him the Spirit was given without measure; and as his life was without sin, so his words were without error. But to all others the Spirit has been given by measure; in almost infinitely different measure it is true: the difference between the inspiration of the common and perhaps unworthy Christian who merely said that "Jesus was the Lord," and that of Moses, or St. Paul, and St. John, is almost to our eyes beyond measuring. Still the position remains, that the highest degree of inspiration given to man has still suffered to exist along with it a portion of human fallibility and corruption.

Now, then, consider the epistles of the blessed Apostle St. Paul, who had the Spirit of God so abundantly, that never we may suppose did any merely human being enjoy a larger share of it. Endowed with the Spirit as a Christian, and daily receiving grace more largely, as he became more and more ripe for glory; endowed with the Spirit's extraordinary gifts most eminently; favoured also with an abundance of revelations, disclosing to him things ineffable and inconceivable,--are not his writings to be most truly called inspired? Can we doubt that, in what he has told us of things not seen, or not seen as yet,--of Him who pre-existed in the form of God before he was manifested in the form of man,--of that great day, when we shall arise incorruptible, and meet our Lord in the air, and be joined to him for ever,--can any reasonable mind doubt, that in speaking of these things he spoke what he had heard from God; that to refuse to believe his testimony is really to disbelieve God?

Yet this great Apostle expected that the world would come to an end in the generation then existing. When he wrote to the Thessalonians some years before his first imprisonment at Rome, he warned them, no doubt, against expecting the end immediately: but he appears still to have supposed that it would come in the lifetime of men then living. At a later period, when writing to the Corinthians, his dissuasion of marriage seems to rest mainly upon this impression; it is good not to marry, "on account of the distress which is close at hand;" ([Greek: dia taen enestosan anankaen]; compare 2 Thess. ii. 2, [Greek: hos hoti enestaeken hae haemera tou Kyriou].) "The time is short," he adds; "the fashion of this world is passing away." And again, when speaking of the resurrection, he says emphatically, "the dead shall rise incorruptible, and _we_ shall be changed;" where the pronoun being expressed in the original, [Greek: chai haemeis allagaesometha], shows that by the term "_we_," he does not mean the dead, but those who were to be alive at Christ's coming. So again, still later, when writing from Rome to the Philippians, he tells them "the Lord is at hand;" and later still, even in his first epistle to Timothy, he charges Timothy "to keep his commandment without spot, unrebukable, until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ." These and other passages cannot without violence be interpreted even singly in any other sense; but taking them together, their meaning seems absolutely certain. Shall we say, then, that St. Paul entertained and expressed a belief which the event did not verify? We may say so, safely and reverently, in this instance; for here he was most certainly speaking as a man, and not by revelation; as it has been providentially ordered that our Lord's express words on this point have been recorded--"Of that day and hour knoweth no man; no, not the angels in heaven." Or again, shall we say, that St. Paul advised the Corinthians not to marry, chiefly on this ground; and that this throws a suspicion over his directions in other points? But again it has been ordered, that in this very place, and no where else in all his writing, St. Paul has expressly said that he was only giving his judgment as a Christian, and not speaking with divine authority;--the concluding words of the chapter, [Greek: doko de kago pneuma theou echein] do not signify, as our Version renders them, "And I think also that I have the Spirit of God," as if he were confirming his own judgment by an assertion of his inspiration in a sense beyond that of common Christians; but the words say, "And I think that I too have the Spirit of God," "I too as well as others whom you might consult, so that my judgment is no less worthy of attention than theirs." But it is his Christian judgment only that he is giving, as he expressly declares, and not his apostolical command or revelation; a distinction which he never makes elsewhere, and which is in itself so striking, that we seem to recognise in it God's especial mercy to us, that our faith in St. Paul's general declarations of divine truth might not be shaken, because in one particular point he was permitted to speak as a man, giving express notice at the same time that he was doing so.

Now it is at least remarkable, that in the only two instances in which the existence of any absence of divine authority is to be discerned in St. Paul's epistles, provision is actually made by God's fondness to prevent them from prejudicing our faith in St. Paul's divine authority generally. And so in whatever points any error may be discoverable in Scripture, we shall find either that the errors are of a kind wholly unconnected with the revelation of what God has done to us, and of what we are to do towards Him; and therefore are perfectly consistent with the inspiration of the writer, unless we take that unwarranted notion of inspiration which considers it as equivalent to a communication of God's attributes perfectly; (and of this kind are any errors that may exist either in points of physical science, or of chronology, or of history;) or if there be any thing else which appears inconsistent with inspiration, in the sense in which we really may and do apply it to the Scriptures, namely, that they are a perfect guide and rule in all matters concerning our relations with God, then we shall find that God has made some special provision for the case, to remove what it otherwise might have had of real difficulty.

This merciful care is above all to be recognised with regard to one point, which otherwise would, I think, have been a difficulty actually insuperable: I mean the manifestly imperfect moral standard, which in some cases is displayed in the characters of good men in the Old Testament. Put the gospel by the side of the law and history of the Israelites; observe what the law permitted, and public opinion under the law did not condemn; observe the actions recorded of persons who are declared to have been eminently good, and to have received God's especial blessing; and it is manifest that had not our Lord himself vouchsafed his help, one of two things must have happened--either that we must have followed the old heresy of rejecting the Old Testament altogether, or else that our respect for the Old Testament must have impeded the growth of the more perfect law of Christ. The true solution I do not think that we could have discovered, or ventured to admit on less authority than our Lord's. But his express declaration, that some things in the law itself were permitted, because nothing higher could then have been borne, and his stating in detail that in several points what was accounted good or allowable in the former dispensation was not so really, while at the same time he constantly refers to the Old Testament as divine, and confirms its language of blessing with respect to its most eminent characters, has completely cleared to us the whole question, and enables us to recognize the divinity of the Old Testament and the holiness of its characters, without lying against our consciences and our more perfect revelation, by justifying the actions of those characters as right, essentially and abstractedly, although they were excusable, or in some cases actually virtuous, according to the standard of right and wrong which prevailed under the law.

After observing God's gracious care for us in this instance, as well as in those which I have noticed before, I cannot but feel that we may safely trust Him for every other similar case, if any such there be, and that he will not permit our faith either in him or in his holy word to be shaken, because we do not attempt to close our eyes against truth, nor seek to support our faith by sophistry and falsehood. Feeling what the Scriptures are, I would not give unnecessary pain to any one by an enumeration of those points in which the literal historical statement of an inspired writer has been vainly defended. Some instances will probably occur to most readers; others are perhaps not known, and never will be known to many, nor is it at all needful or desirable that they should know them. But if ever they are brought before them, let them not try to put them aside unfairly, from a fear that they will injure our faith. Let us not do evil that evil may be escaped from; and it is an evil, and the fruitful parent of evils innumerable, to do violence to our understanding or to our reason in their own appointed fields; to maintain falsehood in their despite, and reject the truth which they sanction. If writers of Mr. Newman's school will persist in displaying the difficulties of the Scripture before the eyes of those who had not been before aware of them, let those who are so cruelly tempted be conjured not to be dismayed; to refuse utterly to surrender up their sense of truth,--to persist in rejecting the unchristian falsehoods which they are called upon to worship; sure that after all that can be said, that system will remain false to the end; and their Christian faith, if they do not faithlessly attempt to strengthen it by unlawful means, will stand no less unshaken.

In conclusion, Christian faith rests upon Scripture; and as it is in itself agreeable to the highest reason, so the authenticity of the Scriptures on which it rests is assured to us by the deliberate conclusions of the understanding; nor is any "mortal leap" necessary at any part of the process: nor any rejection of one truth, in order to retain our hold on another. And if it should happen, as in all probability it will, that we shall be called upon to correct in some respects our notions as to the Scriptures, and so far to hold views different from those of our fathers, we should consider that our fathers did not, and could not stand in our circumstances; that the knowledge which may call upon us to relinquish some of their opinions, was a knowledge which they had not. Till this knowledge comes to us, let us hold our fathers' opinions as they held them; but when it does come, it will come by God's will, and to do his work: and that work will, assuredly, not be our separation from our father's faith; but if we follow God's guidance humbly and cheerfully, clinging to God the while in personal devotion and obedience, we may be made aware of what to them would have been an inexplicable difficulty, and which was, therefore, hidden from their knowledge; and yet, "through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, we believe that we shall be saved even as they."

THE END.