alternative. The translator of Seiler's "Biblical Hermeneutics" (p. 474) may well ask, "If the Bible be accepted as true in essentials only, who is to decide on the essentials, or to fix the limits of mis-statement; if the Evangelists were in error in their accounts of the angel who appeared to Zacharias, or to the woman at the sepulchre, what ground have we for believing they were not mistaken throughout, e.g. as to the miraculous circumstances attending the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of the Redeemer?" Yet the only available answer to Strauss on one side and orthodoxy on the other is the same strain of halting concession and prevarication which among philosophical divines pervades the whole treatment of religious subjects. At one time paradoxical terms1 or balanced contradictory propositions jar upon the ear with abrupt and startling effect; at another the conventional jargon of an uncouth mysticism comes recommended to the ear by all the witchery of mellifluous but unmeaning language— In notes with many a winding bout The melting voice through mazes running— such as may be met with abundantly in any of our modern popular divines, but which it would be tedious and nauseous to quote.3 Theology thus becomes the art of ingenious quibbling, a very Proteus of language, whom it is impossible effectually to grasp, and who after a thousand baffling transformations finally vanishes like the Homeric favourites of the gods in misty obscurity. 1 For example, "theoanthropology," "infinite personality," etc. etc. 2 Thus Dean Trench says: "The laws of nature are the very working of the continuous will of God excluding all wilfulness;" and yet "miracles are instances of a lower law neutralised and for a time put out of working by a higher" (Notes on Miracles, pp. 10 and 16). But then what becomes of the pretended "higher law" in the intervals of its action; what is it in fact but wilful and capricious interference? 3 Dr. Schwartz, in his Neueste Theologie, pp. 252, 554, gives several specimens of what he terms the "balancing or shifting theology," which means the art of saying a thing without seeming to say it; of admitting the premises and wrangling with the conclusion; in short, of adroitly pandering to the infatuation of those whose sole desire is mystification. PART III. INFERENCES OF THE TÜBINGEN CRITICISM. The Latest Phase of Supernaturalism. To convince men against their will is proverbially difficult. Obstinacy changes weakness into strength, absurdities into "principles." In the face of a predetermination to insist on the infallibility and divinity of a certain book, it were vain to point to errors or even moral deformities in it. These very deformities, the very cruelties and other startling anomalies of the Old Testament, amuse, nay delight the infatuated admirer. Opportunities of self-deception are never wanting. We are told about the writer's candour, the benefits of warning example, the necessities of divine chastisement, the general economy of divine education; in short, all kinds of arbitrary assumptions as to "the divine," which it is as difficult to refute as it is rationally to establish. Objections to particular statements or precepts meet the reply that special applications must be regulated by analogy; in answer to palpable inconsistencies and incongruities it is urged that the great merit of the Bible is its boundless variety, its dealing with the same spiritual truths from different points of view, and that, after all, the same differences and anomalies are discoverable in nature. In vain you think to silence the objector by appealing to common sense and victoriously grappling with details; by 1 1 Arnold's Life, Letter 37, vol. i. chap. 6. . 2 Duke of Argyle's address to the National Bible Society of Scotland.Times, Jan. 22, 1863. 2 shewing the astronomy, the geography, the chronology, the geology, the arithmetical details, to be fanciful and faulty all these faults, it is said, were known before; and an unexpected barrier presents itself in an alleged impalpable essence, a nucleus or ideal basis of inspiration, after all the solid constituents of the theory have avowedly crumbled into ruin. All the hairs in the horse's tail have disappeared, but he must not be admitted to be tail-less; the missing essence is not in the kitchen, the drawing-room, or the attic, yet somewhere in the house it must be; and thus all theology becomes an illogical suspense between the conclusion and the premises; the literalist relents, but the mystical spiritualist is firm, and the true "Word" in Scripture remains unimpeached by literary and historical refutation. The husk is gone, but an invisible kernel maintains the position; although in the many pious platitudes passing current on the subject no real meaning be discernible except the broad inferences of natural morality and providential superintendence, the general teleological purpose which we believe to be ever tending to good in its majestic passage through the ages, although ourselves far too limited in faculty to identify its action in special cases, or to make it directly responsible for particular occurrences or books. In the foregoing pages an attempt has been made to shew how-in spite of the general tendencies of free sentimentthe postulate of absolute infallibility was allowed after the Reformation to settle down upon the Bible; and how by degrees, as errors were detected, and science obtruded its discoveries, the stringency of the theory gave way, the notion of inspiration became elastic, and reason, in its two forms of empiricism and idealism, was summoned to assist a vacillating faith, first by authenticating the revelation generally by external evidence, then by defending at least so much of it as could be shewn to agree with the internal voice of conscience. But reason, once allowed an entrance, 1 That is, as applied in the Baconian and Cartesian philosophies. could no longer be limited to the part of servant. The method of "rational supernaturalism," which implicitly accepted the message after testing the credentials of the messenger, eventually led to a juster appreciation of the nature of the subject and of the limits and value of testimony; and "supernatural rationalism," which sifted the message itself, and accepted it as revelation only so far as it appeared rational and right, tended to subvert the very notion of the supernatural,-to transfer the whole matter to the dominion of reason, and to exhibit to every impartial mind the real basis of revelation in nature.1 The example of distinguishing the rational from the non-essential was set by Spinoza, who, appealing to the "inner light,” proposed to separate from the mass of Scripture what he called the "pure Word," corresponding to the divine law written in the heart; and so the Socinians and Arminians, Quakers and Swedenborgians, all in different ways contrived to elevate the spirit above the letter, to subordinate the external rule to the internal intuitions. The barrier to free criticism was thus virtually removed; and it was but a seeming renewal of it, in a form calculated by its author to promote rather than to intercept the reconciliation of new ideas and old, when Schleiermacher undertook to plead the cause of inspiration in a modified form by asserting the superior dignity and authority of the 1 Both of these forms of qualified rationalism, of which the one was but little more than the necessary issue and corollary of the other, were put forth by Leibnitz and by Lessing; by the latter in his "Essay on the Education of the Human Race," and in the observations appended to the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, p. 417 (see too the Fragment, “Ueber die Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion," Works, Lachmann's ed. vol. ii. part 2, p. 247); by the former in his Theodicée. Thus where in section 29 of the "Discours sur la conformité," etc., Leibnitz says, "Les motifs de credibilité justifient une fois pour toutes l'autorité de la sainte ecriture devant le tribunal de la raison, afin que la raison lui cède dans la suite comme à une nouvelle lumière, et lui sacrifie toutes ses vraisemblances," this is "rational supernaturalism;" but when in the Preface to the Theodicée he says, "Je fais seulement voir comment Jésus Christ acheva de faire passer la religion naturelle en loi, et de lui donner l'autorité d'un dogme public," he takes the ground of supernatural rationalism, which is indeed nothing more than pure rationalism ennobled by the general idea of providential guidance and illumination. books of the New Testament on the ground of their comparative antiquity, and the consequent purity and accuracy of the witness borne by them to original Christian truth. The plea was little more than that of authenticity, serving in fact only to put that postulate more distinctly on its trial in any other view it was irrelevant, since first attempts are naturally imperfect, and these books not being Christianity itself, but only the records of its foundation— more or less imperfect attempts to express its meaning,— to make them the type and pattern for all succeeding times was like setting up the designs of Cimabue as the universal standard of art, or seeking the ideal of human beauty in the undeveloped forms of childhood. But supernatural-rationalism was after all only half rational; in most of its current forms, whether based on reason, sentiment, or conscience, it continued to claim for the spiritual essence of Scripture the same exceptional preeminence as a revelation which had before been ascribed to the whole. And it was impossible to deny the postulate of Leibnitz and Lessing as to a certain reality and truth in all phases of opinion and institution; or on the other hand that all truth must be held to be divine, and that consequently all formularies and establishments are to be viewed as successive portions of a Providential education. "The necessity of a positive religion, by which natural religion is modified according to special times and places, I call its inner truth," said Lessing; and Kant, too, admitted in a certain sense a divine prerogative in established doctrines and churches, which, although really meaning no more than the analogous concession of Spinoza, enabled him to speak the language of supernaturalism. And so old pretensions revived in new forms. Although it was no longer said that the religious ideas are externally originated independently of reason, it was still urged that reason itself operates only under divine guidance and 1 Entstehung der geoffenbarten Religion, Works, vol. ii. part 2, p. 247. |