Revealed Religion. =—=——473
men in country, or speech, or customs. They do not live in cities of their own, or speak in any peculiar dialect, or adopt any strange modes of living. They: inhabit their native countries, but as sojourners; they take their part in all burdens, as if citizens, and in all sufferings, as if they were strangers. In foreign countries they recognize a home, and in every home they see a foreign country. They marry like other - men, but do not disown their children. They obey the established laws, but they go beyond them in the tenor of their lives. They love all men, and are persecuted by all; they are not known, and they are condemned; they are poor, and make many rich; they are dishonoured, yet in dishonour they are glorified; they are slandered, and they are cleared; they are called names, and they bless. By the Jews they are assailed as aliens, by the Greeks they are persecuted, nor can they who hate them say why. “ Christians are in the world, as the soul in the body. The soul pervades the limbs of the body, and Christians the cities of the world. The flesh hates the soul, and wars against it, though suffering no wrong from it; and _ the world hates Christians. The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and Christians love their enemies. Their tradition is not an earthly invention, nor is it a mortal thought which they so carefully guard, nor a dispensation of human mysteries which is committed to their charge; but God Himself, the Omnipotent and Invisible Creator, has from heaven established among men His Truth and His Word, the Holy and _ Incomprehensible, and has deeply fixed the same in
their hearts; not, as might be expected, sending any
servant, angel, or prince, or administrator of things _
earthly or heavenly, but the very Artificer and Demiurge of the Universe. Him God hath sent to man, not to inflict terror, but in clemency and gentleness, as a King sending a King who was His Son; He sent Him as God to men, to save them. He hated not,
nor rejected us, nor remembered our guilt, but showed
Himself long-suffering, and, in His own words, bore our sins. He gave His own Son as a ransom for us, the just for the unjust. For what other thing, except His Righteousness, could cover our guilt? In whom was it possible for us, lawless sinners, to find justification, save in the Son of God alone? O sweet interchange! O heavenly workmanship past finding out! O benefits exceeding expectation! Sending, then, a Saviour, who is able to save those who of themselves are incapable of salvation, He has willed that we should regard Him as our Guardian, Father, Teacher, Counsellor, Physician; our Mind, Light, Honour, Glory, Strength, and Life.” *
The writing from which I have been quoting is of the early part of the second century. Twenty or thirty years after it St. Justin Martyr speaks as strongly of the spread of the new Religion: ‘There — is not any one race of men,” he says, “barbarian or Greek, nay, of those who live in waggons, or who are Nomads, or Shepherds in tents, among whom prayers and eucharists are not offered to the Father and — Maker of the Universe, through the name of the cruci- _ fied Jesus. ie
Towards the end of the century, Clement:—‘ The
word of our Master did not remain in Judea, as philo-
_ sophy remained in Greece, but has been poured out
over the whole world, persuading Greeks and Barbarians alike, race by race, village by village, every city, whole houses, and hearers one by one, nay, not a few of the philosophers themselves.”
And Tertullian, at the very close of it, could in his Apologia even proceed to threaten the Roman Govern-
ment:—“ We are a people of yesterday,” he says; “and yet we have filled every place belonging to you, cities, islands, castles, towns, assemblies, your very camp, your tribes, companies, palaces, senate, forum. We leave you your temples only. We can count your armies, and our numbers in a single province will be greater, In what war with you should we not be sufficient and ready, even though unequal in numbers, who so willingly are put to death, if it were not in this Religion of ours more lawful to be slain than to slay?
Once more, let us hear the great Origen, in the early part of the next century:—‘‘ In all Greece and
in all barbarous races within our world, there are tens of thousands who have left their national laws and customary gods for the law of Moses and the word of J esus Christ; though to adhere to that law is to incur the hatred of idolaters, and the risk of death besides to have embraced that word. And considering how, in so few years, in spite of the attacks made on us, to the loss of life or property, and with no great store of teachers, the preaching of that word has found its way into every part of the world, so that Greek and
Ricwed Rebs” OS
47 ‘ se hortaa and Assent in 1 Relivion.
barbarians, wise and unwise, adhere to the religion of Jesus, doubtless it is a work greater than any work of a man,”
We need no proof to assure us that this steady and rapid growth of Christianity was a phenomenon which © startled its contemporaries, as much as it excites the curiosity of philosophic historians now; and they too had their own ways then of accounting for it, different indeed from Gibbon’s, but quite as pertinent, though less elaborate. These were principally two, both leading them to persecute it,—the obstinacy of the Christians and their magical powers, of which the former was the explanation adopted by educated minds, and the latter chiefly by the populace.
As to the former, from first to last, men in power magisterially reprobate the senseless obstinacy of the members of the new sect, as their characteristic offence. Pliny, as we have seen, found it to be their only fault, but one sufficient to merit capital punishment. The Kmperor Marcus seems to consider obstinacy the ultimate motive-cause to which their unnatural conduct was traceable. After speaking of the soul, as “ ready, if it must now be separated from the body, tobe extinguished, or dissolved, or to remain with it;” he adds» “ but the readiness must come of its own judgment, not from simple peverseness, as in the case of Christians, but with considerateness, with gravity, and without theatrical effect, so as to be persuasive.” And Diocletian, in his Edict of persecution, professes it to be his “earnest aim to punish the depraved persistence of those most wicked men.”
Cis! Revedled Religion "a7
As to the latter charge, their founder, it was said, had gained a knowledge of magic in Egypt, and had left behind him in his sacred books the secrets of the art.
_ Suetonius himself speaks of them as “ men of a magical superstition;”’ and Celsus accuses them of “incantations in the name of demons.” The officer who had custody of St. Perpetua, feared her escape from prison “ by magical incantations.” When St. Tiburtius had walked barefoot on hot coals, his judge cried out that Christ had taught him magic. St. Anastasia was thrown into prison as dealing in poisons; the populace called out against St. Agnes, “ Away with the witch! away with the sorceress!” When St. Bonosus and St. Maximilian bore the burning pitch without shrinking, Jews and heathen cried out, ‘‘'Those wizards and sorcerers! ” “ What new delusion,” says the magistrate concerning St. Romanus, in the Hymn of Prudentius, “has brought in these sophists who deny the worship of the Gods? how doth this chief sorcerer mock us, skilled by his Thessalian charm to laugh at punishment?”’ ®
It is indeed difficult to enter into the feelings of irritation and fear, of contempt and amazement, which were excited, whether in the town populace or in the magistrates, in the presence of conduct so novel, so unvarying, so absolutely beyond their comprehension, The very young and the very old, the child, the youth in the heyday of his passions, the sober man of middle age, maidens and mothers of families, boors and slaves as well as philosophers and nobles, solitary confessors
473 Inference and Assent in Religion.
and companies of men and women,—all these were seen equally to defy the powers of darkness to do their worst. In this strange encounter it became a point of honour with the Roman to break the determination of his victim, and it was the triumph of faith when his most savage expedients for that purpose were found to be in vain. The martyrs’shrank from suffering like other men, but such natural shrinking was incommensurable with apostasy. No intensity of torture had any means of affecting what was a mental conviction; and the sovereign Thought in which they had lived was their adequate support and consolation in their death. To them the prospect of wounds and loss of limbs was not more terrible than it is to the combatant of this world. They faced the implements of torture as the soldier takes his post before the enemy’s battery. They cheered and ran forward to meet his attack, and as it were dared him, if he would, to destroy the numbers wha kept closing up the foremost rank, as their comrades who had filled it fell. And when Rome at last found she had to deal with a host of Scwvolas, then the proudest of earthly sovereignties, arrayed in the completeness of her material resources, humbled herself before a power which was founded on a mere sense of the unseen.
In the colloquy of the aged Ignatius, the disciple of the Apostles, with the Emperor Trajan, we have a sort of type of what went on for three, or rather four centuries. He was sent all the way from Antioch to Rome to be devoured by the beasts in the amphitheatre. As he traveiled, he wrote letters to various Christi: n
Churches, and among others to his Roman brethren, among whom he was to suffer. Let us see whether, as I have said, the Image of that Divine King, who had been promised from the beginning, was not the living principle of his obstinate resolve. The old man is almost fierce in his determination to be martyred.
“May those beasts,” he says to his brethren, “be my _ gain, which are in readiness for me! I will provoke and coax them to devour me quickly, and not to be afraid of me, as they are of some whom they will not touch. Should they be unwilling, I will compel them. Bear with me; I know what ismy gain. NowI begin to be a disciple. Of nothing of things visible or invisible am I ambitious, save to gain Christ. Whether it is fire or the cross, the assault of wild beasts, the wrenching of my bones, the crunching of my limbs, the crushing of my whole body, let the tortures of the devil all assail me, if I do but gain Christ Jesus.”” Elsewhere in the same Epistle he says, “ I write to you, still alive, but longing to die. My Love is crucified! I have no taste for _ perishable food. I long for God’s Bread, heavenly Bread, Bread of life, which is Flesh of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. I long for God’s draught, His Blood, which is Love without corruption, and Life for evermore.” It is said that, when he came into the presénce
of Trajan, the latter cried out, “ Who are you, poor devil, who are so eager to transgress our rules?” “That is no name,” he answered, “for Theophorus.” “Who is Theophorus?” asked the Emperor. “He who bears Christ in his breast.” In the Apostle’s words, already cited, he had “ Christ in him, the hope
Pe et Sm eas — 480 Yajorince ane Assent in Religion. "
of glory.” All this may be called euthusiasm; but — enthusiasm affords a much more adequate explanation of the confessorship of an old man, than do Gibbon’s five reasons.
Instances of the same ardent spirit, and of the living faith on which it was founded, are to be found wherever we open the Act@ Martyrum. In the outbreak at Smyrna, in the middle of the second century, amid tortures which even moved the heathen bystanders to compassion, the sufferers were conspicuous for their serene calmness. ‘They made it evident to us all,” says the Hpistle of the Church, “that in the midst of those sufferings they were absent from the body, or rather, that the Lord stood by them, and walked in the midst of them.” |
At that time Polycarp, the familiar friend of St. John, and a contemporary of Ignatius, suffered in his extreme old age. When, before his sentence, the Proconsul bade him “ swear by the fortunes of Ceasar, and have done with Christ,” his answer betrayed that intimate devotion to the self-same Idea, which had been the inward life of Ignatius. “ Highty and six years,” he answered, “have I been His servant, and He has never wronged me, but ever has preserved me; and how can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?” When they would have fastened him to the stake, he said, “ Let alone; He who gives me to bear the fire, will give me also to stand firm upon the pyre without your nails.” Christians felt it as an acceptable service to Him who loved them, to confess with courage and to suffer — ton. with dignity. In this chivalrous spirit, as it may be called, they met the words and deeds of their persecutors, as the children of men return bitterness for bitterness, and blow for blow. ‘ What soldier,” says Minucius, with a reference to the invisible Presence of our Lord, “does not challenge danger more daringly under the eye of his commander?” In that same outbreak at Smyrna, when the Proconsul urged the young Germanicus to have mercy on himself and on his youth, to the astonishment of the populace he provoked a wild beast to fall upon him. In like manner, St. Justin tells us of Lucius, who, when he saw a Christian sent off to suffer, at once remonstrated sharply with the judge, and was sent off to execution with him; and then another presented himself, and was sent off also. When the Christians were thrown into prison, in the fierce persecution at Lyons, Vettius Epagathus, a youth of distinction who had given himself to an ascetic life, could not bear the sight of the sufferings of his brethren, and asked leave to plead their cause. The only answer he got was to be sent off the first to die. What the contemporary account sees in his conduct is, not that he was zealous for his brethren, though zealous he was, nor that he believed in miracles, though he doubtless did believe; but that he “was a gracious disciple of Christ, following the Lamb whithersoever He went.” In that memorable persecution, when Blandina, a slave, was seized for confessorship, her mistress and her fellow-Christians dreaded lest, from her delicate make, she should give way under the torments; but
482 Inference and Assent in Religion.
she even tired out her tormentors. It was a refresh. ment and relief to her to cry out amid her pains, “ am a Christian.” They remanded her to prison, and then brought her out for fresh suffering a second day and a third. On the last day she saw a boy of fifteen brought into the amphitheatre for death; she feared for him, as others had feared for her; but he too went through his trial generously, and went to God before her. Her last sufferings were to be placed in the notorious red-hot chair, and then to be exposed in a net to a wild bull; they finished by cutting her throat. Sanctus, too, when the burning plates of brass were placed on his limbs, all through his torments did but say, “1 am a Christian,” and stood erect and firm, “‘bathed and strengthened,” say his brethren who write the account, “in the heavenly well of living water which flows from the breast of Christ,” or, as they say elsewhere of all the martyrs, “refreshed with the joy of martyrdom, the hope of blessedness, love towards Christ, and the spirit of God the Father.” How clearly do we see all through this narrative what it was which nerved them for the combat! Ifthey love their brethren, it is in the fellowship of their Lord; if they look for heaven, it is because He is the Light of it.
Epipodius, a youth of gentle nurture, when struck ty the Prefect on the mouth, while blood flowed from it, cried out, “I confess that Jesus Christ is God, together with the Father and the Holy Ghost.” Symphorian, of Autun, also a youth, and of noble birth, when told to adore an idol, answered, “Give me leave, and I will hammer it to pieces.” When Leoni- das, the father of the young Origen, was in prison for his faith, the boy, then seventeen, burned to share his martyrdom, and his mother had to hide his clothes to prevent him from executing his purpose. Afterwards he attended the confessors in prison, stood by them at the tribunal, and gave them the kiss of peace when they were led out to suffer, and this, in spite of being several times apprehended and put upon the rack. Also in Alexandria, the beautiful slave, Potamizna, when about to be stripped in order to be thrown into the cauldron of hot pitch, said to the Prefect, “I pray you rather let me be dipped down slowly into it with my clothes on, and you shall see with what patience I am gifted by Him of whom you are ignorant, Jesus Christ.”” When the populace in the same city had beaten out the aged Apollonia’s teeth, and lit a fire to burn her, unless she would blaspheme, she leaped into the fire herself, and so gained her crown. When Sixtas, Bishop of Rome, was led to martyrdom, his deacon, Laurence, followed him weeping and complaining, “ O my father, whither goest thou without thy son?” And when his own turn came, three days afterwards, and he was put upon the gridiron, after a while he said to the Prefect, “ 'Turn me; this side is done.” Whence came this tremendous spirit, scaring, nay, offending, the fastidious criticism of our delicate days? Does Gibbon think to sound the depths of the eternal ocean with the tape and measuring-rod of his merely literary philosophy?
When Barulas, a child of seven years old, was ~scourged to blood for repeating his catechism before
484 eer ee and id seed in Relivion.
the heathen judge—viz. “There is but one God, and Jesus Christ is true God”—his mother encouraged him to persevere, chiding him for asking for some drink. At Merida, a girl of noble family, of the age of twelve, presented herself before the tribunal, and overturned the idols. She was scourged and burned with torches; she heither shed a tear, nor showed other signs of suffering. When the fire reached her face, she opened her mouth to receive it, and was suffocated. At Caesarea, a girl, under eighteen, went boldly to ask the prayers of some Christians who were in chairs before the Preetorium. She was seized at once, and her sides torn open with the iron rakes, preserving the while a bright and joyous countenance. Peter, Dorotheus, Gorgonius, were boys of the imperial bedchamber; they were highly in favour with their masters, and were Christians. They too suffered dreadful torments, dying under them, without a shadow of wavering. Call such conduct madness, if you will, or magic: but do not mock us by ascribing it in such mere children to simple desire of immortality, or to any ecclesiastical organization.
When the persecution raged in Asia, a vast multitude of Christians presented themselves before the Proconsul, challenging him to proceed against them. “Poor wretches! ” affright, he answered, “if you must die, cannot you find ropes or precipices for the purpose?’”’ At Utica, a hundred and fifty Christians of both sexes and all ages were martyrs In one company. ‘They are said to luve been told to burn incense to an idol, or they half in contempt and half in should be thrown into a pit of burning lime; they _ without hesitation leapt into it. In Egypt a hundred and twenty confessors, after having sustained the loss of eyes or of feet, endured to linger out their lives in the mines of Palestine and Cilicia. In the last perse- -_ eution, according to the testimony of the grave Eusebius, a contemporary, the slaughter of men, women, and children, went on by twenties, sixties, hundreds, till the instruments of execution were worn out, and the executioners could kill no more. Yet he tells us, as an eye-witness, that, as soon as any Christians were condemned, others ran from all parts, and surrounded the tribunals, confessing the faith, and joyfully receiving their condemnation, and singing songs of thanksgiving and triumph to the last.
Thus was the Roman power overcome. Thus did the Seed of Abraham, and the Expectation of the Gentiles, the meek Son of man, “ take to Himself His great power and reign ” in the hearts of His people, in the public theatre of the world. The mode in which the primeval prophecy was fulfilled is as marvellous, as the prophecy itself is clear and bold.
“So may all Thy enemies perish, O Lord; but let them that love Thee shine, as = sun shineth in his rising!”:
I will add the memorable words of the two great Apologists of the period:—
| “Your cruelty,” says Tertullian, “though each act be more refined than the last, doth profit you nothing.
486 ILnference and Assent in Religion.
To our sect it is rather an inducement. We grow up in greater numbers, as often as you cut us down. The blood of the martyrs is their seed for the harvest.”
Origen even uses the language of prophecy. To the objection of Celsus that Christianity from its principles would, if let alone, open the whole empire to the irruption of the barbarians, and the utter ruin of civilization, he replies, “ If all Romans are such as we, then too the barbarians will draw near to the Word of God, and will become the most observant of the Law. And every worship shall come to nought, and that of the Christians alone obtain the mastery, for the Word is continually gaining possession of more and more souls.”
One additional remark:—It was fitting that those mixed unlettered multitudes, who for three centuries had suffered and triumphed by virtue of the inward Vision of their Divine Lord, should be selected, as we know they were, in the fourth, to be the special champions of His Divinity and the victorious foes of its impugners, at a time when the civil power, which had found them too strong for its arms, attempted, by means of a portentous heresy in the high places of the Church, to rob them of that Truth which had all along been the principle of their strength.
I have been forestalling all along the thought with which I shall close these considerations on the subject of Christianity; and necessarily forestalling it, because it properly comes first, though the course which my argument has tuken has not allowed me to introduce it in its natural place. Revelation begins where Natural Religion fails. The Religion of Nature is a mere inchoation, and needs a complement,—it can have but one complement, and that very complement is Christianity.
Natural Religion is based upon the sense of sin; it recognizes the disease, but it cannot find, it does but look out for the remedy. That remedy, both for guilt and for moral impotence, is found in the central doctrine of Revelation, the Mediation of Christ. I need not go into a subject so familiar to all men in a Christian country.
Thus it is that Christianity is the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham, and of the Mosaic revelations; this is how it has been able from the first to occupy the world and gain a hold on every class of human society to which its preachers reached; this is why the Roman power and the multitude of religions which it embraced could not stand against it; this is
_ the secret of its sustained energy, and its never-flag- — ging martyrdoms; this is how at present it is so mysteriously potent, in spite of the new and fearful adversaries which beset its path, It has with it that _ gift of staunching and healing the one deep wound of human nature, which avails more for its success than a full encyclopedia of scientific knowledge and a whole library of controversy, and therefore it must last while human nature lasts, It is a living truth which never van grow old.
Some persons speak of it as if it were a thing of his- _ tory, with only indirect bearings upon modern times;
{ cannot allow that it is a mere historical religion. © Certainly it has its foundations in past and glorious memories, but its power is in the present. It is no dreary matter of antiquarianism; we do not contemplate it in conclusions drawn from dumb documents and dead events, but by faith exercised in ever-living objects, and by thé appropriation and use of everrecurring gifts.
Our communion with it is in the unseen, not in the obsolete. At this very day its rites and ordinances are continually eliciting the active interposition of that Omnipotence in which the Religion long ago began. First and above all is the Holy Mass, in which He who once died for us upon the Cross, brings back and perpetuates, by His literal presence in it, that one and the same sacrifice which cannot be repeated. Next, there is the actual entrance of Himself, soul and body, and divinity, into the soul and body of every worshipper who comes to Him for the gift, a privilege more intimate than if we lived with Him during His long-past sojourn upon earth. And then, moreover) there is His personal abidance in our churches, raising earthly service into a foretaste of heaven. Such is the profession of Christianity, and, I repeat, its very divination of our needs is in itself a proof that it is really the supply of them.
Upon the doctrines which I have mentioned as central truths, others, as we all know, follow, which rule our personal conduct and course of life, and our social and civil relations. ‘The promised Deliverer, the Kixpectation of the nations, has not done His work by _ 4 halves. He has given us Saints and Angels for our protection. He has taught us how by our prayers and services to benefit our departed friends, and to keep up a memorial of ourselves when we are gone. He has created a visible hierarchy and a succession of sacraments, to be the channels of His mercies, and the Crucifix secures the thought of Him in every house and chamber. In all these ways He brings Himself before us. Iam not here speaking of His gifts as gifts, but as memorials; not as what Christians know they convey, but in their visible character; and I say, that, as human nature itself is still in life and action as much as ever it was,so He too lives, to our imaginations, by His visible symbols, as if He were on earth, with a practical efficacy which even unbelievers cannot deny, so as to be the corrective of that nature, and its strength day by day,—and that this power of perpetuating His Image, being altogether singular and special, and the prerogative of Him and Him alone, isa grand evidence how well He fulfils to this day that Sovereign Mission which, from the first beginning of the world’s history, has been in prophecy assigned to Him.
I cannot better illustrate this argument than by recurring to a deep thought on the subject of Christianity, which has before now attracted the notice of philosophers and preachers,’ as.-coming from the wonderful man who swayed the destinies of Europe in the first years of this century. It was an argument not unnatural in one who had that special passion for human glory, which has been the incentive of so many
490)= Inference and Assent in Religion.
heroic careers and of so many mighty revolutions in the history of the world. In the solitude of his imprisonment, and in the view of death, he seems to have expressed himself to the following effect:—
“JT have been accustomed to put before me the examples of Alexander and Cesar, with the hope of rivalling their exploits, and living in the minds of men for ever. Yet, after all, in what sense does Ceasar, in what sense does Alexander live? Who knows or cares anything about them? At best, nothing but their names is known; for who among the multitude of men, who hear or who utter their names, really knows anything about their lives or their deeds, or attaches to those names any definite idea? Nay, even their names do but flit up and down the world like ghosts, mentioned only on particular occasions, or from accidental associations. Their chief home is the schoolroom; they have a foremost place in boys’ grammars and exercise books; they are splendid examples for themes; they form writing-copies. So low is heroic Alexander fallen, so low is imperial Ceesar, ‘ut pueris placeat et declamatio fiat.’
“But, on the contrary” (he is reported to have continued), ‘there is juss One Name in the whole world that lives; it is the Name of One who passed His years in obscurity, and who died a malefactor’s death. Eighteen hundred years have gone since that time, but still it has its hold upon the human mind. It has possessed the world, and it maintains possession. Amid the most varied nations, under the most diversified circumstances, in the most cultivated, in the rudest races and intellects, in all classes of society, the Owner of that great Name reigns. High and low, rich and poor, acknowledge Him. Millions of souls are conversing with Him, are venturing on His word, are looking for His Presence. Palaces, sumptuous, innumerable, are raised to His honour; His image, as in the hour of His deepest humiliation, is triumphantly displayed in the proud city, in the open country, in the corners of streets, on the tops of mountains. It sanctifies the ancestral hall, the closet, and the bedchamber; it is the subject for the exercise of the highest genius in the imitative arts. It is worn next the heart in life; it is held before the failing eyes in death. Here, then, is One who is not a mere name, who is not a mere fiction, who is a reality. He is dead and gone, but still He lives,—lives as a living, energetic thought of successive generations, as the awful motive-power of a thousand great events. He has done without effort what others with life-long struggles have not done. Can He be less than Divine? Who is He but the Creator Himself; who is sovereign over His own works, towards whom our eyes and hearts turn instinctively, because He is our Father and our God?”’®
Here I end my specimens, among the many which might be given, of the arguments. adducible for Christianity. I have dwelt upon them, in order to show how I would apply the principles of this Essay to the proof of its divine origin. Christianity is addressed, both as regards its evidences and its contents, to
- minds ia are in the normal condition of human, nature, as believing in God and in a future judgment. | Such minds it addresses both through the intellneem and through the imagination; creating a certitude of — its truth by arguments too various for direct enumeration, too personal and deep for words, too powerful; and concurrent for fefutation. Nor need reason come first and faith second (though this is the logical order), but one and the same teaching is in different aspects both object and proof, and elicits one complex act both of inference and of assent. It speaks to us one by one, and it is received by us one by one, as the counterpart, so to say, of ourselves, and is real as we are real.,
In the sacred words of its Divine Author and Object concerning Himself, “ I am the Good Shepherd, and I know Mine, and Mine know Me. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give them everlasting life, and they shall never
perish; and no man shall pluck them out of My band.”
1. On the first publication of this volume, a Correspondent did me the favour of marking for me a list of passages in Chillingworth’s celebrated work, besides that which I had myself quoted, in which the argument was more or less brought forward, on which I have animadverted in ch. vii. § 2, p. 226. He did this with the purpose of showing, that Chillingworth’s meaning, when carefully inquired into, would be found to be in substantial agreement with the distinction I had myself made between infallibility and certitude; those inaccuracies of language into which he fell, being necessarily involved in the argumentum ad hominem, which he was urging upon his opponent, or being the accidental result of the peculiar character of his intellect, which, while full of ideas, was wanting in the calmness and caution which are conspicuous in Bishop Butler. Others more familiar with Chillingworth than I am must decide on this point; but I can have no indisposition to accept an explanation, which deprives controversialists of this day of the authority of a vigorous and acute mind in their use of an argument, which is certainly founded on a great confusion of thought.
I subjoin the references with which my Correspondent has
(1.) Passages tending to show an agreement of Chillingworth’s. opinion on the distinction between certitude and infallibility with that laid down in the foregoing essay:—
2. Ibid. § 152 (p. 265). The last-sentence, however, alter “when they thought they dreamt,” is a fall into the error which he had been exposing.
2. Also, I have to express my obligation to another Correspondent, who called my -attention to a passage of Hooker (‘* Eccles. Pol.” ii. 7) beginning “An earnest desire,” &c., which seemed to anticipate the doctrine of Locke about certitude. It is so difficult to be sure of the meaning of a writer whose style is so foreign to that of our own times, that I am shy of attempting to turn this passage into categorical statements. Else, I should ask, does not Hooker here assume the absolute certainty of the inspiration and divine authority of Scripture, and believe its teaching as the very truth unconditionally and without any admixture of doubt? Yet what had he but probable evidence as a warrant for such a view of it? Again, did he receive the Athanasian Creed on any logical demonstration that its articles were in Scripture P Yet he felt himself able without any misgiving to say aloud in the congregation, ‘“‘ Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’’ In truth itis the happy inconsistency of his school to be more orthodox in their conclusions than in their premisses; to be sceptics in their paper theories, and believers in their own persons.
3. Also, a friend sends me word, as regards the controversy on the various readings of Shakespeare to which I have referred (supra, ch. viii. § 1, p. 271) in illustration of the shortcomings of Formal Inference, that, since the date of the article in the magazine, of which I have there availed myself, the verdict of critics has been unfavourable to the authority and value of the Annotated Copy, discovered twenty years ago. I may add, that, since my first edition,
I have had the pleasure of reading Dr. Ingleby’s interesting dissertation on the “ Traces of the Authorship of the Works attributed to Shakespeare.”
On the alternative intellectually between Atheism and Catholicity, vid. supr. p. 141, &e.
As Iam sending the last pages of the New Edition of this Essay to the press, [ avail myself of an opportunity which its subject makes apposite, to explain a misunderstanding, as appearing in a London daily print, of a statement of mine used in controversy, which has elicited within the last few days a prompt and effective defence from the kind zeal of Mr. Lilly. I should not think it necessary to make any addition to what he has said so well, except that it may be expected that what is a great mistake concerning me should be set right under my own hand and in my own words.
It has been said of me that ‘ Cardinal Newman has confined his defence of his own creed to the proposition that it is the only possible alternative to Atheism.” I understand this to mean, that I have given up, both in my religious convictions and my controversial efforts, any thought of bringing arguments from reason to bear upon the question of the truth of the Catholic faith, and that I do but rely upon the threat and the consequent scare, that, unless a man be a Catholic he ought to be an Atheist. And I consider it te be said, not only that I use no argument in controversy in behalf of my creed besides the threat of atheism as its alternative; but also that I have not even attempted to prove by argument the reasonableness of that threat.
Now, what do I hold, and what do I not hold? The present volume supplies an answer to this question. From beginning to end it is full of arguments, of which the scope is the truth of the Catholic religion, yet no one of them introduces or depends upon the alternative of Catholicity or Atheism; how, then, can it be said that that alternative is the only defence that I have proposed for my creed? The Essay begins with refuting the fallacies of those who say that we cannot believe what we cannot understand. No appeal to _ the argument from Atheism here. Incidentally and obiter reasons are given for saying that causation and law, as we find them in the universe, bespeak an infinite Creator; still no argumentum ab atheismo. This portion of the work finished, I proceed to justify certitude as exercised upon a cumulation of proofs, short of demonstration separately; nothing aboutatheism. Then I go to a direct proof of theism (which, indeed, has been in a great measure anticipated in a former chapter) as a conclusion drawn from three departments of phenomena; still the threat of atheism is away. I pass on to the proof of Christianity; and where does the threat of atheism come in here? I begin it with prophecy; then I proceed to the coincident testimony of the two covenants, and thence to the overpowering argument from the testimony borne to the divinity of Catholicism by the bravery and endurance of the primitive martyrs. And there I end.
Nor is this my only argumentative work in defence of my “creed” which I have given to the public. I have published an “Essay on Development of Doctrine,’ “‘ Theological Tracts,” “A Letter to Dr. Pusey,” “ A Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” works all more or less controversial, all defences of the Catholic creed; does the very word “ atheism ” occur in any one of them?
So much, then, on what I do not hold and have not said:—now as to what I have avowed and do adhere to. This brings me at once to the saying to which I have committed myself in “ Apologia,” page 198, viz., “that there is no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below must embrace either the one or the other;”—a saying which doubtless my critic bas in mind, and which, I am aware, has been before now a difficulty with readers whom I should be sorry to perplex.
Now, if we found it asserted in Butler’s Analogy that there is no consistent standing or logical medium between the acceptance of the Gospel and the denial of'a Moral Governor, for the same difficulties can be brought against both beliefs, and if they are fatal as against Christianity, they are fatal against natural religion, should we not have understood what was meant? It might be taken, indeed, as a threat against denying Christianity, but would it not have an argumentative basis and meaning, and would such an interpretation be fair? It would be quite fair indeed to say, as some have said, “ It drives me the wrong way,” and its advocates could only reply, “ What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison,” but would it be fair to accuse Butler of putting aside all scientific reasoning for a threat? No one would say, “ Butler confines the defence of his own creed to the proposition that it is the only possible alternative of the denial of the Moral Law,” putting aside as nothing to the purpose his Sermons at the Rolls’ Chapel. Yet. what have I said more dangerous or more obscure than Butler’s argument? Could he be said to destroy all logical proof of a God, because he paralleled the difficulties of grace to the difficulties of nature P Nay, even should he goon to say with me, “ if on account of difficulties we give up the gospel, then on account of parallel difficulties we must give up nature; for there is no standing-ground between putting up with the one trial of faith, and putting up with the other?”
Nor is this all. It seems, insistence on this analogy between the _ mysteries of nature and those of grace is my sole argument for the truth of my creed. How can this be, from the very nature of the caseP The argument from Analogy is mainly negative, but argument which tends to prove must be positive. Butler does not prove Christianity to be true by his famous argument, but he removes a great obstacle of a primd facie character to listening to the proofs of Christianity. It is like the trenches soldiers dig to shield them when they propose to storm a fort. No one would say that such trenches dispense with soldiers. So far, then, from “ con- - fining” myself to the argument from Analogy in behalf of my creed, I absolutely imply the presence and the use of independent arguments, positive arguments, by the fact of using what is mainly a negative one. And that I was quite aware of this, and acted upon it, the following passage from my Sermon on Mysteries shows beyond mistake:—
“TfI must submit my reason to mysteries, it is not much matter whether it isa mystery more or a mystery less; the main difficulty is to believe at all; the main difficulty for an inquirer is firmly to hold that there is a living God, in spite of the darkness which surrounds Him, the Creator, Witness, and Judge of men. When once the mind is broken in, as it must be, to the belief of a Power above it, when once it understands that it is not itself the measure of all things in heaven and earth, it will have little difficulty in going forward. J do not say it will, or can, go on to other truths without conviction; I do not say it ought to believe the Catholic Faith without grounds and motives; but.I say that, when once it believes in God, the great obstacle to faith has been taken away, a proud, self-sufficient spirit, &c.”—(Discourses.)
I must somewhat enlarge what I have last been saying, but itis — an order to increase the force and fulness of this explanation. There is acertain sense in which Analogy may be said to supply a positive argument, though it is not its primary and direct purpose. The coincidence of two witnesSes independently giving the same account of a transaction is an argument for its truth; the likeness of two effects argues one cause for both. The fact of Mediation so promiment in Scripture and in the world, as Butler illustrates it, is a positive argument that the God of Scripture is the God of the world. his is the immediate sense in which I speak in the “ Apologia” of the objective matter of Religion, Natural and Revealed, of the. character of the evidence, and of the legitimate position and exercise of the intellect relatively towards it. Religion has, as such, certain definite belongings and surroundings, and it calls for what Aristotle would call a weradevu¢vos investigator, and a process of investigation swt similis. This peculiarity I first found in the history of doctrinal development; in the first instance it had presented itself to me as a mode of accounting for a difficulty, viz. for what are called “the Variations of Popery,” but next I found it a law, which was instanced in the successive developments through which revealed truth has passed. And then I reflected that a law implied a lawgiver, and that so orderly and majestic a growth of doctrine in the Catholic Church, contrasted with the deadness and helplessness, or the vague changes and contradictions in the teaching of other religious bodies, argued a spiritual Presence in Rome, which was nowhere else, and which constituted a presumption that Rome was right; if the doctrine of the Eucharist was not from heaven, why should the doctrine of Original Sin be? If the Athanasian Creed was from heaven, why not the Creed of Pope Pius? This was a use of Analogy beside and beyond Butler’s use of it; and then, when I had recognized its force in the development of doctrine, I was led to apply it to the Evidences of Religion, and in this sense I came to say what I have said in the “Apologia.” “There is no medium in true philosophy,” “to a perfectly consistent mind,” “between Atheism and Catholicity.”
The multitude of men indeed are not consistent, logical, or thorough; they obey no law in the course of their religious views; and while they cannot reason without premisses, and premisses demand first principles, and first principles must ultimately be (in one shape or other) assumptions, they do not recognize what this involves, and are set down at this or that point in the ascending or descending scale of thought, according as their knowledge of facts, prejudices, education, domestic ties, social position, and opportunities for inquiry determine; but nevertheless there is a certain ethical character, one and the same, a system of first principles, sentiments and tastes, a mode of viewing the question and of arguing, which is formally and normally, naturally and divinely, the organwm investigandi given us for gaining religious truth, and which would lead the mind by an infallible succession from the rejection of atheism to theism, and from theism to Christianity, and from Christianity to Evangelical Religion, and from these to Catholicity. And again when a Catholic is seriously wanting in this system of thought, we vannot be surprised if he leaves the Catholic Church, and then in due time gives up religion altogether. I will add, that a main reason for my writing this Essay on Assent, to which I am adding these last words, was, as far as I could, to describe the organum investigandi which I thought the true one, and thereby to illustrate and explain the saying in the “ Apologia” which has been the subject of this Note.
I have only one remark more before concluding. I have said of course there was a descending as well as an ascending course of inquiry and of faith. However, speaking in my “ Apologia” of Evidences, and, following the lead of what I have said there about doctrinal development, I have mainly in view the ascending scale, not the descending. I have meant to say, “‘ Iam a Catholic, for the reason that I am not an Atheist.” This makes the misinterpretation of my words which I am exposing the more striking, for it paraphrases me into a threat and nothing else, viz. “If you are not a Catholic, you must be an Atheist, and will go to hell.” Mr. Lilly, in his letter in my defence, sees this, and most happily adopts the positive interpretation which is the true one.
This explanation, also, is an answer to some good, but easily frightened men, who have fancied that I was denying that the
Being of a God was a natural truth, because I said that to deny zk 2 a re, eA Se ee Ree tae ete 500 © Note fl.
revelation was the way to deny natural religion. I have but argued that the same sophistry which denies the one may deny the other. =
That the ascending scale of my abstract alternative has been the prominent idea in my mind, may be argued from the following; passage of a Lecture delivered many years before the “ Apologia:”—
“A Protestant is already reaching forward to the whole truth, — from the very circumstance of his really grasping any part of it.. So strongly do I feel this, that I account it no paradox to say that, | let a man but master th@ one doctrine of the Being of a God, let. him really and truly, and not in words only, or by inherited profession, or in the conclusions of reason, but by a direct apprehension be a Monotheist,” (that is, with what in the foregoing Hssay I have called a “real assent” as following upon “ Inference,” and acting as a fresh start) “and he is already three-fourths of the way towards Catholicism.”
I end by placing before the reader Mr. Lilly’s apposite Letter, dated Nov. 18.
“ Str,—I observe in your issue of this evening a statement against which I must beg your permission to protest in the strongest manner as a most serious, although, I am quite sure, an unintentional, misrepresentation of my deeply venerated friend Cardinal Newman. The statement is that ‘he has confined his defence of his own ‘creed to the proposition that it is the only possible alternative to atheism.” It certainly is true that Cardinal Newman has said, ‘There is no medium, in true philosophy, between Atheism and Catholicism’ (‘ Apologia, p. 198, Third Edition); and it as certainly is not true that he confines his defence of his creed to this proposition. He expressly recognizes ‘the formal proofs on which the being of a God rests’ (they may be seen in any text-book of Catholic theology) as affording ‘ irrefragable demonstration’ (‘ Discourses to Mixed Congregations,’ p. 262, Fourth Edition); but the great argument which comes home to him personally with supreme force is that derived from the witness of Conscience—‘ the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas.’ The existence of God, ‘borne in upon him irresistibly’ by the voice within, is ‘the great truth of which his whole being is full’ (‘ Apologia,’ p. 241).’
After quoting the words of M. SH Mr. Lilly proceeds, “‘ This
4s the point from which he (Cardinal Newman) starts. Conscience, the ‘ great internal teacher,’ ‘ nearer to us than any other means of knowledge,’ informs us (as he judges) that God is; ‘ the special _ Attribute under which it brings Him before us, to which it sub- __ ordinates all other Attributes, being that of justice—retributive justice’ (‘Grammar of Assent,’ p. 385, Third Edition). ‘The sense of right and wrong’ he considers to be ‘ the first element’ in natural religion (‘ Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,’ p. 67, Fourth gy Edition). And Catholicism, which he regards as the sole form of Christianity historically or philosophically tenable, is for him the only possible complement of natural religion. I cannot venture to ask you to allow me space to do more than thus indicate the nature of the argument by which he ascends from his first to his final religious idea. I would refer those who would follow it step by step to his ‘Grammar of Assent,’ ‘ Apologia,’ and ‘ Discourses to Mixed Congregations;’ or, if a mere summary will suffice, to an article of my own in the Fortnightly Review of July, 1879. Cardinal Newman’s main defence—not his sole defence— of his creed amounts, then, to this: that religion is an integral part of our nature, and that Catholicism alone adequately fulfils the expectation of a revelation which natural religion raises. This may be a good | ora bad defence; but, whether good or bad, it is very different from the nude proposition ‘ that Catholicism is the only possible alternative to atheism.’” He ends with a few kind words about myself & personally,
Vid. my answer to Principal Fairbairn in the Contemporary
On the punishment of the wicked having no termination, vid. supr. 422.
A serious misrepresentation of a passage in this volume, which appeared last year in a Review of great name, calls for some notice here.
Petavius says, that, according to Fathers of high authority, a refrigerium or refrigeria may be conceived as granted to the lost, amid their endless penal suffering; that is, that their punishment, though without end, is not without cessation. I have quoted his words in the footnote on p.422; and in the text I have ventured on a suggestion of my own, but short of his, to the effect that a refrigerium was conceivable, which was not strictly a cessation of punishment, though it acted as such; I mean, the temporary absence in the lost soul of the consciousness of its continuity or duration.
The story is well known of the monk who, going out into the wood to meditate, was detained there by the song ofa bird for three hundred years, which to his consciousness passed as only one hour. Now pain as well as joy, may be an ecstasy, and destroy for the time the sense of succession; even in this life, and when not great, it sometimes has this effect; and, supposing such an insensibility to time to Jast for three hundred years, for three hundred years pain might be gathered up into a point; and there would be for that intervala refrigerium. And, if for three hundred years, so it might be for three million, or million million, according to the degrees of guilt with which individual souls were severally laden.
It may be objected, that such a view of future punishment explains away its severity, and blunts its moral force as a threat and restraint upon crime. Not so; on this view the fact of suffering and of its eternity remains intact; and of suffering, it may be, “as by fire.” Also, the eternity of punishment remains in its negative aspect, viz., that there never will be change of state, annihilation or restoration. Mere eternity, though without suffering, if realized in the soul’s consciousness, is formidable enough; it would be insupportable even to the good, except for, and as involved in, the Beatific Vision; it would be a perpetual solitary confinement. It is this which makes the prospect of a future life so dismal to our present agnostics, who have no God to give them “ mansions” in the unseen world.
On the other hand, it may be objected, that the longest possible series of refrigeria, to whatever extent, added together, they may run, is as nothing after all compared with an eternity of punishment. But this is to misconceive what I have been advancing. As belonging to an eternity, the refrigeria which I contemplate match, in their recurrence, and reach as far as, that eternity, and ure themselves in number infinite, as being exceptions in a course which is infinite. |
Further, it may be objected that this view of future punishment is at first sight inconsistent with the teaching of St. Thomas, 2. 2, qu. xviii. 3, where he says that, if the lost are condemned to eternal punishment, they must know that it is eternal, because such knowledge is necessarily a part of their punishment.
I understand him to argue thus:—
1. It is de ratione peene that it should voluntati repugnare.
2. But there cannot be this repugnantia, unless there is present to the party punished a consciousness of the fact of that pcena.
3. Therefore poena implies a consciousness of the fact of the pena.
4, And, if the pena is perpetual, so is its consciousness.
Certainly: but I do not predicate anything of the pena, nor of the consciousness of the pena, nor of its perpetuity, nor of the consciousness of its perpetuity; I do but speak of the consciousness (perpetuity apart,) of the lapse of time or successiveness of moments, through which that poena and consciousness of pcena passes. The lost may be conscious of their lost state and of its irreversibility, yet it may be a further question, whether, however conscious that it is irreversible, they are always or ever conscious of the fact of its long course, in memory and in prospect, through periods and eons.
The song of the bird, which the monk heard without taking note of the passage of time, might bave been, “And they shall reign for ever and ever;” though of the many thousand times of the bird’s repeating the words, there sounded in the monk’s ear but one song once sung. And if this may be in the case of holy souls, why not, if it should so please God, in the instance of the unholy?
In what I have been saying, I have considered eternity as infinite time, because this is the received assumption.
And I have been speaking all along under correction, as submitting absolutely all I have said to the judgment of the Church and its head.
Vid. my article in the Contemporary above referred to.