Lux Mundi

VI The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma

R. C. Moberly

I. Many years ago, in undergraduate days, I was speaking once to a friend of my hope of beginning some little acquaintance with Theology. I well remember the air of nicely mingled civility and contemptuousness, with which my friend, wishing to sympathize, at once drew a distinction for me between speculative and dogmatic Theology, and assumed that I could not mean that the mere study of dogmatic Theology could have any sort of attractiveness. I do not think that I accepted his kindly overture; but it certainly made me consider more than once afterwards, whether the ‘mere study of dogmatic Theology’ could after all be so slavish and profitless an employment as had been implied. On the whole, however, I settled with myself that his condemnation, however obviously candid and even impressive, must nevertheless remain, so far as I was concerned, a surprise and an enigma. For what, after all, did the study of dogmatic Theology mean, but the study of those truths which the mind of Christ’s Church upon earth has believed to be at once the most certain and the most important truths of man’s history, nature and destiny, in this world and for ever?

It is impossible, however, not to feel that my friend, in his objection, represented what was, and is, a very widespread instinct against the study of dogma. Some think, for instance, that to practical men exactnesses of doctrinal statement, even if true, are immaterial. Others think that any exactness of doctrinal statement is convicted, by its mere exactness, of untruth; for that knowledge about things unseen can only be indefinite in character. If, indeed, religious knowledge is a process of evolution simply, if it means only a gradual development towards ever-increasing definiteness of religious supposition, then no doubt its exactness may be the condemnation of dogma. But then, no doubt, to make room for such a view, the whole fact of historical Christianity must be first displaced.

Is it put as an impossibility, that there cannot be any definite or certain Theology? Can there, then, be a Revelation? Can there be an Incarnation? Those only are consistent, who assert that all three are impossible, and who understand that in so doing they are limiting the possibilities, and therefore pro tanto questioning the reality of a Personal God. But if there be a Personal God, what are the adequate grounds on which it is nevertheless laid down that He cannot directly reveal Himself? Or, if He can reveal Himself, on what ground can the à priori assertion rest, that theological truth must be uncertain or indefinite? The Christian Church claims to have both definite and certain knowledge. These claims can never be met by any à priori judgment that such knowledge is impossible. Such a judgment is too slenderly based to bear the weight of argument. To argue from it would be to commit the very fault so often imputed to the dogmatist. It would be a flagrant instance of dogmatic assertion (and that for the most important of argumentative purposes) of what we could not possibly know.

The claim of the Church to knowledge through the Incarnation can only be rationally met, and only really answered, when the claim itself, and its evidence, are seriously examined. Herein lies, and will always lie, the heart of the struggle for or against the dogmatic character of the Church. Anything else is only the fringe of the matter. Any rebutting of à priori presumptions against dogma is a mere clearing of the way for battle. Thus it is said, perhaps, that the objection is to the degree of definiteness, or to the tone of authority. It is fancied that dogma in its very nature, quite apart from its contents, is a curtailment of the rights, and a limitation of the powers, of mind. Is dogma, the most definite and authoritative, fettering to the freedom of intellect? We can see in a moment the entire unreality of the objection, by simply substituting for it another question. Is truth fettering to intellect? Does the utmost certitude of truth limit freedom of mind? Because, if not, dogma, so far as it coincides with truth, cannot fetter either. If perfect knowledge of truth could paralyse the intellect, what (it is worth while to ask) do we mean by intellect? Do we mean something which must for ever be struggling with difficulties which it cannot overcome? Is it necessary for the idea of mind that it should be baffled? Is it a creature only of the tangle and the fog? And if ever the day should come, when after struggling, more or less ineffectually, with the tangle and the fog, man should emerge at last in clear sunshine upon the mountain top, will mind cease to have any faculty or place, because the knowledge of truth has come? At least, if we understand this to be the conception of mind, it need not frighten us quite so much as it did, to be told that dogma interferes with mind. But if, however different from our experience the employment of mind would be in the presence of perfect knowledge, we cannot so conceive of mind as to admit that truth could possibly be its enemy or its destruction, then we may certainly insist that no amount of dogma, so far as it is true, can limit or fetter the freedom of intellect. But then we are at once thrown back upon the question; is the dogmatic teaching of the Church true? No statement which absolutely coincides with truth can hurt the freedom of mind. But mistaken presumption of truth can, and does, limit it; and so does authority, if it prevents the examination of truth. Dogma, then, is, as dogma, a wrong to mind, just so far as it can be convicted of either of these things; so far as it forbids examination, or so far as it asserts what is not strictly true.

As to the first of these two suggestions against dogma, it is quite enough simply to deny it. The Church, as a teacher of dogmatic truth, does not forbid the freest and completest inquiry into the truths which she enunciates. The question is not whether dogmatic theologians have ever dreaded inquiry into truth; but whether the dogmatic Church, as such, precludes or forbids it. True, she enunciates some truths as true; and holds those, in different measures, unwise and wrong, who contradict her truths. But she does not, therefore, forbid the fullest exercise of intellect upon them; nor tremble lest intellect, rightly wielded, should contradict them. Indeed for eighteen centuries she has been engaged, and will be engaged to the end, in examining with a power and discipline of intellect, which she alone ever has, or could have, evoked, into the meaning and exactness of her own knowledge. But she does warn inquirers that successful inquiry into her truths is no work of merely ingenious disputation, but needs the exactest discipline and balance of all the faculties of our human nature.

We return, then, to the second suggestion; and I repeat that the question has for us become, not whether dogma in the abstract is desirable or undesirable, but whether the dogmas of the Christian Church are true or not true. Dogma that is true can only be undesirable in so far as truth is undesirable.

Whether the dogmas of the Church are true or not true, is itself a question of evidence.

Before, however, making any remark upon the nature of this evidence in the case of religion, we may remember that the possession of dogma is in no way peculiar to religion. There is no region of research or knowledge which does not present to the student its own ‘dogmata,’ or truths ascertained and agreed upon; nor does any one, in the name of freedom of intellect, persist in treating these always as open questions.

But perhaps if we venture thus to claim the ascertained truths of any science as dogmas, the scientific answer will be ready. They differ, it will be felt, from the nature of religious dogmas, in two important respects. The first difference is, that they are offered for acceptance with their full proofs, from the first moment that they are offered at all. The student could not, it may be, have discovered for himself the law of gravitation, or the circulation of the blood; but he can, when these discoveries are once set before him by another, see forthwith not only the coherency of the principles, but the cogency of their proof. The second difference is, that when they have been accepted by the student, proof and all, they still claim no allegiance beyond what his intelligence cannot but freely give; he is still free to supersede or upset them, if he can. He accepts them indeed provisionally, as identical with the truth so far as the truth on the subject is yet known; yet not necessarily as final truth. He accepts them as truths which all his further study will comment upon; presumably indeed in the way of continual illustration and corroboration,—so that what he accepts for study will be more and more certainly proved by the study—but also, if you please, in the way of correction; for if his study can supersede, or even in any measure correct or alter them,—why, so much the better both for science and for him! Why should not this be equally true of Theology? Why should religious dogmas be received without these conditions, as certainly and finally true?

To begin with, then, some exception may be taken to the statement that the student who accepts a scientific doctrine, has the full evidence before him from the beginning. That it is not altogether so is evident from the simple consideration, just mentioned, that his work is a progressive one; and that the whole course of his experience tends, and will tend, to deepen the certainty of his first principles. But in so far as the proof of any leading principle is being deepened and strengthened by the student’s daily work, so far it is clear that the amount of certainty about his principles with which at first he began, must be less than that with which he ends at last; and therefore that the proof presented to him at the beginning, however much it may have been adequate to the purpose, (even though it may have been the completest proof capable of being presented in the way of exposition from the lip to the ear) was nevertheless most incomplete in comparison with the fulness of attainable proof. And further, it may certainly be said also, that in the convincingness of this evidence as at first presented, authority, whether more or less, had an undoubted part. At the very least it had a negative place, as a guarantee to the young mind rejoicing in the ingenuity of the apparent demonstration, that the apparent demonstration was not vitiated by some unseen fallacy, or that there was not a series of other considerations behind, which would rob the lesson just learnt of its practical usefulness. Often, indeed, the degree of authority in the first scientific convictions would be very much higher. Often, however helpful the arguments or illustrations of a principle may seem, the really overruling consideration will at first be this, that the whole scientific world has absolutely accepted the principle as truth. So much is this the case, that if an average student should find himself unable in any point to receive the ascertained truths of his science with intelligent agreement, he would not hesitate to assume that the whole fault lay with himself; he would really be convinced in his soul that the dicta of his scientific teachers were right, and that he himself would see the certainty of them by and by.

Now in both these two respects the acceptance of religious dogma is not essentially in contrast, but rather is parallel, with that of scientific principles. For religious truth is neither in its first acceptance a mere matter of blind submission to authority, nor is it stagnant and unprogressive after it is accepted. However different in other ways the leading truths of the Creed may be from scientific principles; in this respect at least they are not different,—that not one of them is ever brought for the acceptance of men without some really intelligent evidence and ground for acceptance. If any man is asked to accept them, without any intelligent ground for the acceptance, we may be bold perhaps to assert that it would be his duty to refuse. Of course, however, authority will itself be a large part of his intelligent ground; a larger part or a smaller according to circumstances. But then there is no proper antithesis between believing in deference to authority, and believing in deference to reason, unless it is understood that the authority believed in was accepted at first as authority without reason, or maintained in spite of the subsequent refusal of reason to give confirmatory witness to its assertions. Even in the cases in which there seems to be least use of reason, the case of a young child learning at his mother’s knee, or of a man whose spirit has suffered and been broken, and who gives himself up at last to the mere guidance of a friend or a teacher, the authority, when accepted at all, is accepted on grounds essentially reasonable. The child’s reasoning may differ in quality from the prodigal’s; but the child trusts father or mother on grounds which are wholly, if unconsciously, a product of the strictest reason; and the prodigal has felt in his inmost soul alike the deadness of his own spiritual being, and the power and the beauty which are in the life of the teacher upon whom he throws himself. And this is not the only point; for the reasonable mind in one is not a thing different in nature from the reasonable mind in another, or from the eternal reason which is in God. The truths, therefore, which we are taught about God, and man, and Christ, about sin, and redemption from sin, and the heaven of holiness, and which seem to be accepted as a mere act of not unreasonable dutifulness, do reasonably withal commend themselves, in some shape or measure, even to the callow mind from its earliest immaturity. There is that in the very consciousness of child, or of criminal, with which they are in essential harmony. That in him with which they are in essential correspondence bears witness of them. Nor is anyone, in his acceptance of them, wholly insensible of this witness to their truth, which is, in fact, engraven upon his own conscious being.

To ‘take religion on trust,’ then, as it is sometimes derisively called, is not really to act in defiance of, or apart from, reason. It is an exercise of reason up to a certain point,—just so, and so far as, the experience of the person warrants. He sees what to trust, and why. He sees where understanding and experience which transcend his own would point. And he seeks for the rational test of further experience in the only way in which it can be had. He defers to the voice of experience, in faith that his own experience will by and by prove its truthfulness. On a medical question, men would not dispute, they would loudly proclaim, the reasonableness and wisdom of such a course. Yet there are those who suppose that the truths of religion are to admit of a complete preliminary intellectual verification, a verification apart from special training and experience, such as they might more reasonably expect in any other subject-matter than religion, but such as, in fact, they hardly expect elsewhere.

The doctrines of the Church, then, accepted at first on reasonable evidence, which in a greater or less degree, but perhaps never wholly, consists in authority reasonably accepted as authority, are then in all the experience of spiritual life receiving continual comment, explanation, corroboration. The whole experience of Christian life must be a growth in the apprehension and certainty of Christian truth. A Christian neophyte may believe every word of his Creed, and believe neither ignorantly nor unintelligently. But the veteran Christian of four-score will transcend the child at least as much in the degree of certainty, with which the doctrines of the Church are to his entire faculties mental, moral, and spiritual, proved and known to be true, as he can possibly do in his merely intellectual apprehension of the history or meaning of the words. We may say, indeed, that the life of a professing Christian which is not a life of growth in the apprehension of doctrinal truth, must necessarily be a retrogression; just as the life of so-called scientific study, which is not continually illuminating afresh, and deepening the certainty of its own scientific principles, must gradually come to hold even its own scientific principles less and less certainly, and to mean by them less and less.

But even if it may be shewn that there is not quite so essential a contrast as there seemed to be, between the character of theological and scientific dogmas, by reason of the proofs which are offered, along with his principles, to the student of any science; yet still it will be felt that they differ essentially in the tone and manner with which they respectively speak to intellect. The truths of the one claim at once to possess an intellectual finality, and to command a moral allegiance, which the truths of the other do not.

It may be worth while to say in reply, first of all, that there cannot be a real contrast of finality between them, so far as they are both really true. What is really true is really true. Neither ‘absolutely,’ ‘finally,’ nor any other adverb in the language will make the statement a stronger one. What we call scientific truths are not in fact liable to correction, except in so far as they may perhaps, after all, not be quite scientific truths, except (that is) in respect of such admixture of erroneous supposition, as still has clung to them after general acceptance. And on the other hand, so far as any mistaken assumptions are mixed up with our apprehension of religious truths, so far these too are liable to receive, and in the history of Church doctrine are continually receiving, correction. It is, after all, a truism. In either sphere the truths, so far as they really are truths, are true absolutely: but are corrigible in so far as our statement of them still contains anything that is other than truth. We may put it, perhaps, in another way still. If, to assume an impossible hypothesis, any one could really prove, not merely that there were some exaggerations or misconceptions in the traditional mode of statement of some doctrinal truths, but that our really essential Faith was wrong, we may grant hypothetically (seeing that truth is supreme) that he would do us all a mighty service, at however tremendous a cost. Similarly of course it must be owned, that if any one could prove the earth to be flat and stationary, and the law of gravitation to be the precise contradictory of truth, he would do immense service to science. But none the less, the scientific certainty on these points is so complete, that if anyone seriously assailed them, it would be felt that he could only be dealing with the evidence in a way which tended to compromise the credit of his own reason; and he would therefore be reasonably held to be, as it is roughly phrased, a fool or a madman. And we must claim that for us the certainty of some theological propositions is so complete, that when anyone assails them, we are no less reasonable in regarding him with concern, rather for his own truth’s sake than for the truth of our religion; and that, if miracles or ’an angel from heaven’ should seem to bear witness for him, it would still be no bigotry, but in the strictest sense our reasonable course, to refuse the witness, and to treat it as merely an attempt to ensnare us into falsehood to the real requirements of our reason and conscience.

Is the conclusion, then, that there is after all no difference at all between the truths of Theology and of Science, in respect of their claim to authority? On the contrary, there remains a perfectly real contrast of authority between them; only it is to be looked for elsewhere than among the conditions upon which our belief in them respectively is based.

There are two distinct senses in which the doctrines of the Creed may be said to be authoritative. It may be meant that the authoritativeness is in the manner in which they are presented to us; that is to say, that (whatever their content may be) they are statements which we believe, and are to believe, on the sole ground that we are told to do so, without any appeal to reason of our own; or it may be meant that they are statements whose content is of such nature and inherent importance, that we cannot, in fact, believe them, without thereby necessarily being involved in a train of consequential obligations of thought and life. In this latter case the authoritativeness lies not in the manner of their presentation to us or our acceptance of them, but in that which is involved in the nature of the truths themselves, if and when they are believed.

Is it true to say of the Creeds that they are ‘authoritative’ in the former sense? that is to say that they challenge our allegiance, and we are bound to believe them, because we are told that they are true, without examination on our part, and without reason? It has indeed been stated already that, as between pupils and teachers, there is in religious learning, as there is in all human learning whatever, scientific or otherwise, a certain legitimate and important field for authority reasonably accepted as authority, that is, the authority of men more learned and experienced than ourselves. Even this, of course, means that the pupil believes the things taught to be strictly rational to the teacher, though they be not so, as yet, to himself. But is it true, in speaking of religion, to carry this one step further; and to say that in this sphere our whole belief, and duty of belief, rests upon authority as its ultimate foundation, the authority not of man’s experience, but of God’s command? It must, no doubt, be freely owned on all sides, that if there be a creed commanded of God, we certainly are bound to believe it. But is there? or when, or how, was it commanded? Does anyone answer, through our Lord Jesus Christ? or through His Church? or through the Bible? But who is He? or what is the Bible? or how do we know? To accept doctrines, which we otherwise should not accept, because we are told to do so, without knowing first who told us, or why we should believe him, is simply not a reasonable possibility. But to ask these questions and to have answers to them, and believe because we are satisfied in some way as to the answers to them, is certainly not to rest the act of believing on a foundation of mere authority: essentially rather it is, to go over part of the ground of the Creed first, and be satisfied as to the correctness of its main substance, and therefore to believe it. A Christian will not deny that the doctrines of the Creed are entitled in fact to be held as authoritative, in both of the senses distinguished above. But we cannot believe them on God’s authority till we have first believed in the authority of God. And, therefore, their authoritativeness in what we have called the first sense is not really the ultimate ground of our accepting them: for it is not itself accepted and apprehended by us, except as a consequence of our first believing that which is the main substance of the Creed. It may be the warrant to us of this or that detail considered apart: but it is not, and cannot ever be, the original and sufficient cause of our believing the whole. Credo ut intelligam may be the most true and most reasonable motto of the large part of Christian faith and life: but it is not inconsistent with—it is founded upon—an ultimate underlying intellexi ut crederem. There is, then, a real and abiding difference between theological and scientific dogmas, in respect of the authority with which they speak to us. But the difference is one which does not affect at all the method or grounds of our original belief in them respectively: it is to be found exclusively in the different subject-matter of the two when believed.

And herein, also, it is that we find the real answer to the other form of question, viz., why should Theology claim to be so much more final than science? Much as science has conquered of the realm of truth, it does not profess to have conquered more than a little. Of the vast residuum it says nothing. It has no idea how small a proportion its present knowledge may bear to that which will one day be known. Nay, the further it advances in knowledge of truth, so much the smaller a proportion does its realized truth seem to it to bear to that which remains unexplored. Why should the theologian be less patient of additions to theological knowledge, such as may some day throw all his present creeds into comparative obscurity? Why should the Christian Creed be fixed and inexpansive? The question is formidable only in an abstract form. The reasonable answer to it confronts us the moment we consider what is the subject-matter of the Creed. Scientific principles are in their very nature fragments of a truth which is practically infinite. But the Christian Creed, if true at all, cannot possibly be a fragment of truth. For the Christian Creed does not simply enunciate so many abstract principles of natural or supernatural life or governance. It introduces us straight to a supreme Person, Himself the beginning and end, the author and upholder of all. Such a doctrine may be false; but it cannot be a fragment. The child who believes in God, believes in everything, though he knows hardly anything. He has infinitely more yet to learn, as to what his own belief means. But he has nothing to add to it. The perfect knowledge of the universe would not add to it, but would only explain it. It is, then, by virtue of his personal relation to a Personality which is Itself supreme and all inclusive, that he is guilty of no presumption, even though in the face of the modest disavowals of scientific men, he must maintain that his own creed is, in its proper nature, even when all admissions have been made, rather a complete and conclusive, than a partial or a tentative, statement of truth. But this difference between him and them is the result neither of any arrogance in his temper, nor any lack in his logic, but it follows necessarily from the nature of the subject-matter of his creed, if and when it is believed.

But still this fact that, if true, they are truths which by the obvious necessity of their subject-matter speak to our intellects and consciences with a tone of such Divinely commanding authority, ought not to make me or anyone accept them as true, unless the evidence for them is adequate. The question is not how authoritative they would be, if true; nor how important or inclusive they would be, if true; nor is any amount of contingent importance or authority adequate evidence for their truth, but only a motive for inquiring into its evidence. The question is, are they true? or are they not true? and the question is a question of evidence.

II. And now, in recurring once more to the subject of the evidence by which the dogmas of religion are proved, from which we diverged just now, we find, in respect of it, a second reality of contrast between theological truths and the truths of material science. For whilst in both cases equally we depend upon evidence, and evidence that is adequate; it does not follow that the evidence for both is in all points similar in kind. In great part indeed it is so; but it is certainly not so altogether. For when we speak of the evidence of religious truths, it is to be remembered that the full evidence by which our consciences are wholly convinced of them, is not of one kind only, but of all kinds. The facts of religion address themselves to the whole nature of man; and it is only by the whole nature of man that they can ever be fully apprehended. Man is not a being of intellectual conceptions or faculties only. And because he is not so, therefore no set of principles which could be apprehended by the intellect alone (as the theorems of Euclid may appear to be), and which make for their acceptance no demand at all upon the qualities of his moral or spiritual being, could really present, as religion professes to present, a system of truth and life which would be adequate to the scope of his whole nature. It is undoubtedly the case that just as the truths of religion account for, and appeal to, his whole being, so the evidence for them appeals to his whole being also. For its complete appreciation there are requirements other than intellectual. There must be not only certain endowments of mind, but the life of a moral being. There must be moral affections, moral perceptions, spiritual affinities and satisfactions. Even if the primary conviction of his reason may be apart from these, yet of the fully developed evidence, which is the real possession of the Christian believer, these are a most important and necessary part. Without these, his certainty, adequate though it might be, would be far less profound than it is. These are to him essential ingredients in the richness and the fulness of the evidence which to him is everywhere. Now for this necessary width of the full confirmatory evidence of religion, it is impossible for the religious man, with the utmost desire to make every allowance and apology that is possible, to offer any apology at all. So far from being a mark of inconsistency or feebleness, it is a necessary note of the completeness of religion. Religion professes to have for its subject-matter, and in a measure incomplete, but relatively adequate, to include, to account for, and to direct, the whole range of all man’s history, all man’s capacities, explored or unexplored, all man’s destiny now and for ever. If its truths and their evidence were found to address themselves exclusively to the intellect, in isolation from the other qualities and experiences of man’s nature, it would be self-convicted of inadequacy. If men full of worldliness of heart and self-indulgence could be capable of understanding the revelation of religious truth as accurately, of embracing it as completely, of apprehending the depth and the width of the evidence for it (with which all human nature really is saturated) as thoroughly as the prayerful and the penitent, this would not mean that religion or religious evidence had been lifted up, on to a higher and more properly scientific level, but rather that it had shrunk down into correspondence merely with a part, and not the noblest part, of man’s present nature.

It would be far beyond the scope of this paper to discuss kinds of evidence, or argue in defence of the position that there is real evidence for religious truth, which is none the less properly evidence, because it is different in kind from the evidence for the propositions of material science: but it may be permissible, at least, in passing to record the claim, and to insist that religious men, in confining themselves to strictly historical or logical arguments, are necessarily omitting much which is nevertheless, to them, real ground. There are evidences which can speak to the heart, the imagination, the conscience, as well as the intelligence. Or, perhaps, we shall come nearer to an exact expression of the truth, by saying that the intelligence, which can apprehend and pronounce upon the evidence of truths of spiritual consciousness, is an intelligence identical in name, but not identical in nature, with that which can well weigh and judge purely logical—or even that which can pronounce upon moral—problems. The intelligence of a moral character, or of a spiritual personality, differs not in range only, but in quality, from that of a merely ‘rational animal.’ If the moral and the spiritual intelligence did not contain quite other elements, drawn from quite other experiences and possibilities, they could not work upon their higher subject-matter at all. To the religious man, therefore, it must seem strictly unreasonable, in the examination of truths which professedly correspond to man’s whole nature, and need his whole nature and experience for the interpretation of them, to begin by shutting out, as irrelevant, what we will modestly call the half of man’s nature; and to demand that the truths shall be so stated and so proved, as that the statements and proofs shall correspond exclusively with the other half, and find in that other half their whole interpretation, and their whole evidence.

It may, indeed, be desirable to guard against a misconception, by the express admission that there is some necessary ambiguity in the terms employed. We may seem to have unduly extended both the verbal meaning, and the sphere of importance, of ‘evidence’ and ‘proof.’ Undoubtedly there is a sense in which it would be, not merely true to admit, but important to insist, that in the acceptance of religious truth, Faith neither is, nor ever can be, displaced, in order that Demonstration may be enthroned in her place. But then Demonstration is a word which belongs to strictly logical nomenclature. And the very point here insisted on is that the strictly logical presentment of religion is, in reference to the real presentment of religion, most inadequate. Undoubtedly, if everything else is shorn away, and religion remains solely and only in the form of strict logic, without sentiment, without imagination, without experience of duty, or sin, or right, or aspiration, or anything else which belongs to the spiritual consciousness of human personalities, the logic of it is, and must be, imperfectly conclusive.

Now words such as ‘evidence,’ ‘proof,’ ‘intelligence,’ are no doubt often used in connection with processes of the intellect taken apart—the intellect of a being merely rational. In insisting, therefore, that the word evidence, when used in reference to religious subject-matter, must include data which, to the observer of physical phenomena, would seem vague and impalpable; and that intelligence, as adequately trained to apprehend and give judgment upon religious evidence, is in some respects other, and more, than that intelligence which can deal with evidence into which no element of spiritual consciousness enters; we differ, perhaps, at the most, more in form than reality, from those who simply deprecate the appeal to ‘evidence’ or ‘proof’ in matters of faith.

To the religious man, then, the fulness of Christian evidence is as many-sided as human life. There is historical evidence,—itself of at least a dozen different kinds,—literary evidence, metaphysical evidence, moral evidence, evidence of sorrow and joy, of goodness and of evil, of sin and of pardon, of despair and of hope, of life and of death; evidence which defies enumerating; into this the whole gradual life of the Christian grows; and there is no part nor element of life which does not to him perpetually elucidate and confirm the knowledge which has been given him. Everything that is or has been, every consciousness, every possibility, even every doubt or wavering, becomes to the Christian a part of the certainty—an element in the absorbing reality—of his Creed.

But this is rather the end than the beginning. Certainly it is not thus that the Creed of the Church can present itself to those whose life is still independent of the Creed.

Let us consider, then, how the truths of the Creed did first, in fact, introduce themselves to human consciousness. There are three several stages of its presentment in history, of which the central one is so overmastering in importance, that it alone gives their character to the other two. They are, first, the leading up, in the world’s history and consciousness, to the life of Jesus Christ; secondly, the life and death of Jesus Christ; thirdly, the results, in history and consciousness, of the life and death of Jesus Christ. We may say, perhaps, that of the first of these the main outcome was belief in God; and such a God, that belief in Him carried with it the two corollaries of aspiration after righteousness, and conviction of sin. We may say that the third of these means the establishment of the Church upon earth, and the articulating of her consciousness according to the Creeds. But in any case all the three are plainly historical, matters of historical inquiry, of historical evidence; and all plainly depend entirely upon the intermediate one, the history of a certain human life which purports to be—which either is, or is not—the hinge-point of all history whatever.

All turns, then, upon a certain passage of history. Is the history, as believed by Christians, true or false? The Christian record of that history is the New Testament. Indeed, of that history, the New Testament is the only record. Is, then, the history of the teaching and the work, the life and the death, of Jesus Christ, presented to us in the New Testament as a chapter of historical fact,—is it historical fact, or is it not? The Incarnation is either a fact, or a fiction. The Incarnation means also for Christians the Atonement. For our present purpose, the Incarnation may be taken as necessarily including the Atonement. But still of this complex fact the dilemma stands. If it is not true, it is false. There is no middle term. If it is not true, then, whether dogma in itself is, or is not, desirable, at least all the dogma of the Christian Church is false.

The Incarnation and the Atonement together are not presented in the New Testament as, by their own mere statement, guaranteeing themselves. On the contrary, there is one single, definite, historical fact, which is represented there as the central heart and core of the evidence upon which the conviction of their truth depends. This fact is the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Though this is not the whole of the Christian Creed, yet this, according to S. Paul, is, to the whole of the Christian Creed, crucial. ‘If there be no resurrection from the dead, then is Christ not risen; and if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain. Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God, that he raised up Christ; whom He raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not. For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised; and if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain, ye are yet in your sins.’ To be direct personal evidence of a certain fact, and that fact the resurrection;—this was, in the view of S. Peter and the Apostles, the first qualification, and the central meaning, of Apostleship: ‘must one be ordained to be a witness with us of His resurrection;’ ‘this Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses.’ Upon the historical truth or falsehood, then, of the resurrection, hangs the whole question of the nature and work of Jesus Christ, the whole doctrine of Incarnation and Atonement.

But in saying this, it is necessary to guard our proper meaning. If we admit the fact of the Resurrection to be cardinal, what is the fact of the Resurrection which is in question? It is as far as possible from being simply a question whether ‘a man’ could or could not, did or did not, reappear, after death, in life. When we speak of the historical fact, we must mean at least the whole fact with all that it was and meant, complex as it was and many-sided; not with its meaning or its proof isolated upon a single page of the book of history, but having far-reaching affinities, parts essentially of its interpretation and of its evidence, entwined in the depths of the whole constitution of our nature, and the whole drama of history from the first moment to the last. However much Christians may have at times to argue about the simple evidence for the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ of the Resurrection of Jesus, as if it were the alleged resurrection of any other man that was in question, neither the question itself, nor the evidence about it, can possibly be, in fact, of the same nature or upon the same level, as the evidence about another. No amount of conviction of the reappearance in life of any other man, would have any similar meaning, or carry any similar consequences. The inherent character of Him who rose, and the necessary connection between what He was, and had said and claimed for Himself, on the one hand, and on the other His rising out of death; this is an essential part of that fact of the resurrection, which comes up for proof or disproof. The fact that Jesus Christ, being what He was, the climax and fulfilment of a thousand converging lines—nay, of all the antecedent history of mankind—rose from the dead, and by that fact of resurrection (solemnly fore-announced, yet none the less totally unlooked for) illuminated and explained for the first time all that before had seemed enigmatical or contradictory in what He was,—and indeed in all humanity; this is the real fact of the resurrection which confronts us. It is this vast fact which is either true or false. The resurrection of the crucified Jesus cannot possibly be a bare or simple fact. When viewed as a material manifestation of the moment only, it is at least misunderstood; it may be unintelligible. It is, no doubt, an event in history; and yet it confronts us, even there in its place and witness in history, not simply as a finite historical event, but as an eternal counsel and infinite act of God.

Yet there are times when we must consent to leave much of all this, for the moment, on one side. Whatever else the event in history may carry with it, of course it must stand its ground as a mere historical event. The mere fact may be but a part of it; yet all will be overthrown if the fact be not fact. And so, though the truths of the Christian religion, and the evidence for them, be at least as wide as was represented above, yet they present themselves to our minds still, as they presented themselves at first to the minds of men, within the sphere and the rules of ordinary human history and historical evidence. Here are events written on the page of history. Examine them. Are they historically false or true? If they be not false, what do they mean and involve? This is the modest way in which they present themselves.

No one will now dispute that Jesus died upon the Cross. If He did not, on the third day, rise again from that death to life;—cadit quaestio—all Christian dogma, all Christian faith, is at an end. Something might still be true which might be of interest; something, even, which for sheer want of a better, might be still the most interesting fact in the world’s long history; but something which, from the first line to the last, would be essentially different from the Catholic faith. But, on the other hand, if He did so rise again, then the fact of His resurrection necessarily raises further questions as to His nature and being,—necessarily requires the understanding of further truths for its own intelligent explanation. Now the present paper is not an evidential treatise. It is no part of our task to attempt to prove the historical reality of the resurrection. What it does concern us to notice is the way in which the determination of all Christian truth hinges upon it. If it falls, all the rest will drift away, anchorless and unsubstantial, into the region of a merely beautiful dreamland. As dreamland, indeed, it may still captivate and inspire; but anchor of sure fact there will be none. It will only be a beautiful imagination,—a false mirage reflected from, based upon, falsehood. No doubt imagination is sovereign in the lives of men. But then imagination means the vivifying of truth, not the spectral embodiment of a lie.

On the other hand, if the fact of the resurrection stands, then it cannot stand alone. If Jesus Christ so lived and taught as even the most indefinite believers concede that He lived and taught, if He then died on the Cross, and rose again the third day from, the dead, you have indeed already the foundation dogma of the Creed; and having that, you cannot possibly rest in it: that foundation fact will absolutely compel you to ask and to answer certain further necessary questions; and whatever intelligible answer you may choose to give to them will be essentially a dogmatic definition. Who or what was this man who thus lived, thus spoke, thus died, and thus rose from the dead? As a matter of fact, the whole Church of Christ in history (including the men who had been His own companions, trained and inspired by Himself,) taught and believed, without shadow of hesitation, that He was very God. Very gradually, indeed, had they advanced to this; step by step, through their growing intimacy with a character whose very excellences were only enigmatical and confounding, so long as the master-truth, which lay behind them, was ignored. And very tentative, on His side, was the method of His self-revelation; through qualities, through inherent powers, through explicit teachings, slowly felt, slowly recognised, as transcendent, as impossible, except in relation to a truth which, after long misconceptions and perplexities, is seen by them at last not only to be true, but to be the essential truth which He Himself requires of them. For, be the method as gradual and as tentative as you please, these witnesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever has had, or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify unhesitatingly not only that all true acceptance of Him was, in their judgment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His life and death were penetrated by the consciousness of His own Godhead; and by the deliberate purpose (through whatever unexpected patience of method) of convincing the whole world in the end of His Godhead, and receiving universal belief, and universal worship, as God.

Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it true that He was very God? It is either true or false. As to the fact there are only the two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is impassable. If it is not false, it is true. If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false. According to the faith of the Catholic Church it is absolutely true. According to the highest form of Arianism, not less than according to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try to gloss it over) absolutely false.

Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or press argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. But it is necessary to see with perfect clearness, how the question must have been raised, and being raised must have been answered. The very life of the Church was belief in Him; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was the one thing which had never been allowed to those who drew near Christ. All through His ministry those who came near Him, and felt the spell of His presence, His holiness, His power, were undergoing a training and a sifting. Moment by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence of His transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more and more upon them all the question which He would never let them escape, the question by which they were to be tested and judged; ‘What think ye of Christ?’ ‘If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.’

If there is a true historical sense in which the clear definition of the doctrine of the Divinity of Jesus Christ must be assigned to the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries, yet it would be a great historical blunder to state or imagine, as inference, that till then the doctrine was only held partially or with imperfect consciousness in the Catholic Church. The Church did not, as a result of those controversies, develop the consciousness of any new doctrine: the development of her consciousness was rather in respect of the shallow but tempting logic which would deform, or the delusions which might counterfeit, her doctrine, and of the perils to which these must lead. It may be a question, indeed, how far the words implicit and explicit do, or do not, represent the distinction between the dogmatic consciousness of the Apostolic and the Conciliar ages. The difficulty in determining depends solely on this, that the words themselves are used with different meanings. Thus, sometimes men are said to hold implicitly what they never perhaps suspected themselves of holding, if it can be shewn to be a more or less legitimate outcome, or logical development, of their belief. If such men advance inferentially from point to point, their explicit belief at a later time may be, in many particulars, materially different from what it had been at an earlier; even though it might be logically shewn that the earlier thought was, more or less directly, the parent of the later. Now in any such sense as this we shall stoutly maintain that, from the beginning, the Church held dogmatic truths not implicitly, but explicitly and positively. They who baptized into the threefold Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; whose blessing was ‘The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost;’ who, living in the Spirit, lived in Christ; whose highest worship was the Communion of the Body and the Blood of Christ, and whose perfectness of life was Christ; they, so living and worshipping, did not hold the Godhead of Jesus Christ implicitly; they did not hold something out of which the doctrine of the Trinity might come to be unfolded. On the other hand, you may use the same contrast of words, meaning merely that you have, through cross-questioning or otherwise, obtained a power which you did not possess, of defining, in thought and in words, the limits of your belief, and distinguishing it precisely from whatever does not belong to it. You hold still what you always meant to hold. You say still what you always meant to say. But it is your intellectual mastery over your own meaning which is altered. Like a person fresh from the encounter of a keen cross-examination, you are furnished now, as you were not before, with distinctions and comparisons, with definitions and measurements,—in a word, with all that intellectual equipment, that furniture of alert perception and exact language, by which you are able to realize for yourself, as well as to define to others, what that meaning exactly is, and what it is not, which itself was before, as truly as it is now, the very thing that you meant.

In this sense, no doubt, the definitions of councils did make Christian consciousness more explicit in relation to positive truth. They acquired, indeed, no new truth. Primarily they were rather, on this side or on that, a blocking off of such false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference, as forced themselves forward, one by one, amidst the intellectual efforts of the time, to challenge the acceptance of Christian people. Primarily they are not the Church saying ‘yes’ to fresh truths, or developments, or forms of consciousness; but rather saying ‘no’ to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth. Only indirectly, in that effort, the Church acquires through them a new definiteness of mastery for the intellect in reference to the exactness of her own meaning.

It is comparatively easy for those who are convinced of a truth to struggle against its open contradiction. But false modes of stating their truth, and unbalanced inferences from their truth, are often staggering to minds which would be unperplexed by any less insidious form of error. It may be that, in all ages of the Church, even those who are born and bred in undoubting faith in the Person of Jesus, have to pass, more or less explicitly, through their own experience of hesitation and exaggeration, of reaction and counter-reaction, before they are quite in a position to define, or maintain by argument in the face of insidious alternatives, the exact proportion of their own Catholic belief.

Not unsuggestively, indeed, nor indirectly, do the oscillations of the public consciousness in the era of the councils, as to the due expression of Catholic belief, reproduce on a larger scale, and therefore with more magnified clumsiness, the alternating exaggerations of such a single struggling mind. The natural thought begins, as a matter of course, as Apostles had begun of old, with the perfect and obvious certainty that Jesus was a man. Then comes the mighty crisis to natural thought. With infinite heavings and strugglings, and every conceivable expedient of evasion, it strains to avoid the immense conclusion which challenges it, catching eagerly at every refinement, if so be it may be possible to stop short of full acceptance of a truth so staggering (when it comes to be measured intellectually) as that the Man Jesus was Himself the Eternal God. Now however grossly unjust it might be to think of Arianism as if it ever meant, or held, Jesus Christ to be merely a man; yet it is true that in respect of the one great question which is at the root of Christian faith,—is He God, or is He not?—it stands as offering alternatives and expedients, by which the plain answer ‘yes’ may be avoided; by which therefore the answer ‘no’ is in effect maintained; for between ‘God’ and ‘not God’ the distinction cannot be bridged. This, then, is the real hinge-point of the Catholic faith. But when this, the greatest of all battles of belief, is won at last, in spite of every variety of Arian and semi-Arian refining; forthwith the undisciplined mind, always ready to exaggerate, always difficult of balance, begins so to run into ardour of expression of its truth, as in effect to make unreal the other half of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The first great wonder once grasped, it is so natural, in fervour of insistance on the very Godhead, to forget or deny the simple completeness of the very Manhood! It seems so hard,—almost wanting in reverence,—still to conceive of Him then as perfectly human,—human body and human soul! What more obvious reaction in the mind of any pupil not yet perfectly steadied and balanced? Yet these few short sentences represent not untruly the real process of education, painfully accomplished by those intellectual struggles which culminated in the councils of Nicaea and Constantinople, in 325 and 381 respectively. And when the pupil is steadied from this second excess, and the Godhead and the Manhood are both grasped, each severally, each completely, there follows again a perfectly natural result in a new uncertainty about the union of the two in Jesus. Again it seems an instinct of reverence which shrinks from the truth. For the Manhood, it is urged, though complete, body, soul, and spirit, must yet remain, in Him, a thing separable and separate from His own original Divine personality. But if the human nature was not verily His own nature, if it was animated by any consciousness which was not absolutely His own consciousness, the consciousness of His one undivided personality,—what or whence in Him was this other than His own individual consciousness? Is it so, then, the mind begins necessarily to ask itself, that the mystery of the Incarnate Life was the mystery of a double consciousness, a double personality? two distinguishable existences, two selves, two identities, side by side, harmonious, allied, yet nowhere really meeting in any one underlying principle of unity? It was necessary that the doubt should be raised, that its meaning and results might be measured. But it is this which becomes the Nestorianism against which the council of Ephesus in 431 set the seal of Catholic belief. Once more, the natural reaction from Nestorianism, when the believer is keenly alert against its danger, is so to insist upon the indivisible Personal unity, as to shrink from the admission of any distinguishableness in Him, actual or possible, between the two natures or characters which He united, between the human and the Divine elements in His one consciousness. But this is either once more to curtail the true completeness of the human nature, or to fuse it with the Divine into some new thing not truly identical with either. And this is the Monophysitism of 451, the subject-matter of the fourth great general council at Chalcedon.

It is said, indeed, that the ages of councils were uncritical ages; and that their decisions are therefore not to be accepted as authoritative on questions of minute theological criticism, for which their uncritical spirit made them specially unfit. The assertion is perhaps a little beside the mark. You have not to plead that they were likely to be uncritical, but to shew that they were in fact wrong. It is clear that they were not specially unfit either to arrive at a definiteness of meaning, or to express what they meant. They were sure what they meant; and have expressed it with perfect clearness. The question is not how critical they were likely to be, but whether their meaning—which is clear—is right or wrong. Whatever antecedent probability there may be either in the minds of nineteenth century critics against their correctness, or in the minds of Churchmen accustomed to defer to them in favour of it; it is certain that no one who is really doubtful about the truth of Christianity, will be called upon to accept it in deference to the mere authority of the Councils. However much more they may be to ourselves, to such an one as this they must stand at least as witnesses of what the consciousness of the Christian community set its seal to, in the way of interpretation of its own original deposit of belief. We do not much care to argue whether they belonged to an age of criticism or not. Yet we must needs be ready to listen to anyone who can prove that their determinations were wrong. Councils, we admit, and Creeds, cannot go behind, but must wholly rest upon the history of our Lord Jesus Christ. If anyone could seriously convict the Creeds of being unscriptural, we must listen to him and bow,—as scientific men would have to bow to anyone who really could prove the fundamental propositions of their science to be wrong. But meanwhile, so complete is the historical acceptance of the Creeds, and their consecration in the consciousness of the Church; that there is at least as clear a presumption that we are uncatholic in differing from them, as there would be that we were unscientific if we dissented from the most universally accepted faiths of science.

Now even this, the most commonplace statement of the growth of Christian definitions, will serve to mark what the nature of dogma is. So far from faith without it being a thing more spiritual or pure, faith without it is a thing irrational. Faith in what? I cannot have faith without an object. Faith in Jesus Christ? But who is Jesus Christ? Is He a dead man? Is He, as a dead man, no longer in any existence? Or am I, at least, necessarily ignorant as to whether He and other dead men have any existence, actual or probable? Or is He a man indeed,—no more; and dead indeed; but, as other good men, alive after death somehow in the blessedness of God? And what then did His life mean? or His strange deliberate dying? or what connection have they of meaning or power with me? And this God that you speak of; do I know anything of Him? or what? or how? Or again, is Jesus Himself the living God? And are the things true which are handed down to me in the Church as taught by Himself about the relations of God? Is He my living Master; my very Redeemer by the Cross; my eternal Judge? and where and how have I contact in life or soul with the benefits of His Cross, or the power of His help? If indeed I have nothing to do with Him, and no interest in His history, it is possible for me to go on without caring to answer such questions. But faith in Him can have no meaning while these are ignored. The question whether He is or is not God, is one which cannot but be asked and answered.

And either answer to the question is alike dogmatic. The Arian is no less dogmatic than the Catholic. A dogmatic faith is only a definite faith; and that upon questions upon which it has become irrational to remain indefinite, after I have once been brought to a certain point of acquaintance with them. The question between the Catholic and the Arian is, not whose doctrine evades definiteness of determination, but whose dogma is in accord with the truth and its evidence. The negative answer to the question proposed would only be unjudicial, not undogmatic. Meanwhile, the affirmative answer would be so complete a concession of the whole position, that if it has once been made, as much has really been admitted, so far as any battle, about dogma goes, as if the whole formal statement of the Athanasian Creed had been expressly, as it will have been implicitly, included. There is nothing, then, really to fight against in these words, ‘The right faith is, that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and Man; God, of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds: and Man, of the substance of His mother, born in the world; perfect God, and perfect Man: of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting; equal to the Father, as touching His Godhead; and inferior to the Father, as touching His Manhood. Who although He be God and Man: yet He is not two, but one Christ; One; not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by taking of the Manhood into God; One altogether; not by confusion of substance, but by unity of Person.’

Another thing which perhaps the same commonplace statement may illustrate as to the character of Christian dogma, is its largeness and equity. It is harmony; it is proportion; it is the protest of balanced completeness against all that partiality, which, by exaggerating something that is true, distorts the proportion and simplicity of truth. Every several form of error,—we admit it willingly,—grew out of, and represented, a truth. Catholic doctrine alone preserves the proportion of truth. To work and to think within the lines of dogmatic faith, is to work and to think upon the true and harmonious conception of the Person of Jesus Christ—‘Quem nosse vivere, Cui servire regnare.’ In this knowledge certainly there is no limitedness, and in this subordination no slavery.

The meaning of Christian dogma, then, so far as we have at present had anything to do with it, is simply this. It is the self-realizing of the consciousness of the Christian community in respect of the answer to be given to that one great question, fundamental and inevitable, with which all in all times who would approach Christ must be met,—‘Whom say ye that I am?’

But, it will be felt, it is all very well to insist so much upon this one point, which it is comparatively easy to represent as the necessary answer of a truthful conscience to a question which is forced upon it by the plainest evidence;—but are there not a great many Christian doctrines besides? What of the rest of them,—‘all the articles of the Christian faith,’ as the Catechism says? I have ventured to speak at length upon this one, not because it is easier to handle conveniently than the others, but because it directly carries, if it does not contain, everything. It is not only that this is in itself so tremendous a dogma, that no one who affirms this can possibly quarrel any longer with the principle of dogmatic definition, but that this so inevitably involves all the other propositions of the Creed, that no one, whose conscience has accepted this, will find it easy to separate between it and the whole Christian faith.

The Christian Creed consists of three parts only; and all three are, ‘Belief in God.’ ‘I believe in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost’ is, in brief, the whole Christian Creed. Its shortest expression is in three words (which three words are but one), ‘Holy, Holy, Holy.’ The definitions of the Apostles’, of the Nicene, and of the Athanasian Creeds, none of them really travel outside of this. Take, for example, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Intellectually it is, of course, antecedent to the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Atonement. But it will be observed that it is made known to us not antecedently, but as a consequence of our previous conviction of the Incarnation. Moreover, when it is made known, it is made known rather incidentally than directly. Even though it is, when revealed and apprehended, the inclusive sum of our faith, yet there is, in the revelation, no formal unfolding of it, as of a mysterious truth set to challenge our express contemplation and worship. There is nothing here to be found in the least corresponding with the explicit challenge, ‘Whom say ye that I am?’ or ‘On this rock will I build My Church;’ but rather indirectly, so far as our contemplation of the Incarnation, and its abiding consequences, requires for its own necessary interpretation to our understanding, that we should have some insight into the mystery of the distinction of Persons in the Godhead, so far, and in reference to that purpose, the mystery of the Holy Trinity grows gradually into clearness of revelation to our consciousness. It is clear that any distinctness of conception whatever as to the meaning of Incarnation would be impossible, without some revelation of mutual relations between the Sender and the Sent, the Immutable and the Incarnate, the Father and the Son. If it is less clear from the first, it is surely not less certain, that any conception we may have of the relation so revealed between the Father and the Son, would be fainter by far, and less intelligible than it is, if it were not for that which our Lord Jesus Christ has told us as to the office and nature of the Holy Spirit; if with our growing conception of distinctness and relation as between the Sender and the Sent, we had not also some added conception of that Blessed Spirit of Holiness, Who, emanating from both, is the Spirit of both alike, and is thereby also the very bond of perfectness of Love whereby both are united in One; and whereby, further, all spirits in whom God’s presence dwells, are united, so far, in a real oneness of spirit with one another and with God. And it is quite certain, that whether we seem to anyone to be right or no in treating this revelation of the Holy Ghost as a necessary, if incidental, part of what we had need to be taught of the revelation of the Father and the Son, in order to make Incarnation properly intelligible; it is altogether essential for that other purpose, in connection with which the revelation is more immediately made, that is, for any understanding on our part of the abiding work of God in His Church, after the Resurrection and Ascension. ‘The holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting;’ these are not miscellaneous items thrown in at the end of the Creed after the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is finished, but they are essential parts of the understanding of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost: and on the other hand, without the revelation of the Person and work of the Holy Ghost, these doctrines, practical though they be, and vital for practice,—no less indeed than the very essence and meaning of the work of the Incarnation from the day of Ascension forwards, that is to say the whole historical effect and fruit of the Incarnation,—would be evacuated of all living meaning, and would become for us only the empty phrases of a far-away baseless yearning, which even now (apart from the life of the Holy Spirit informing us) they are ever too ready to become.

It is hoped that even such brief statements may at least serve to indicate how it is true that the whole of our Christian creed, even those parts which seem most separable from it, or antecedent to it, are for us really contained in the one crucial doctrine of the Incarnation, that is, of the eternal Godhead of the Man Christ Jesus. And this will compel us once more to recognise the simplicity of Christian dogma. It does not mean a complicated system of arbitrary definitions upon a great variety of subjects of religious speculation, formulated one after another by human ingenuity, and imposed by human despotism upon the consciences of the unthinking or the submissive; it means rather the simple expression (guarded according to experience of misconception) of the fundamental fact of the Incarnation, together with such revelation as to the relations of the Divine Being, and the wonder of His work amongst men, as is clearly lit up by the event of the Incarnation itself, and is required for such apprehension of the meaning and effects of the Incarnation, as Jesus Christ held to be meet and necessary for us.

And so it is with all parts of Christian doctrine. If they would be found to be necessarily contained in a full unfolding of the great truth which the Creed so briefly and simply declares, then they really are parts of our faith, because they are really involved in the understanding of the threefold revelation to man of the Name of God, which is the sum total of our faith. But if the Name of our God does not contain them, they are not in our creed or our faith. Is there, for example, a visible Church? Is there an Apostolic Ministry? The answer depends on the inquiry as to what is revealed, first in Scripture, and then in history, as to the method of the working of the Spirit of Christ in the world. Did the Old Testament prefigure, in action and in utterance, did the Incarnation require, did the Gospels interpret or comment upon, did the Apostles organize or govern, any definitely articulated society, with ceremonies or officers, rules or discipline, of its own? Was this, the method of association and membership, or was some other, the mode of the working of the Spirit of the Christ among men? Is the work of Christ, in redeeming and reconciling to God, is His present relation to the world, properly intelligible, or not,—apart from the Church? Is the ministry of the Church, or are the sacraments of the Church, to those who thoughtfully read Scripture and history, a demonstrable part, or normal condition, of the working of the Holy Ghost in the Church? If so, belief in them is contained in my words, not only when I say, ‘I believe in the holy Catholic Church,’ but also, though less plainly, when I say, ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost.’ But if not, it is not contained. If they are really separable from the Catholic Church, truly understood, or from the understanding of the Holy Spirit and His work, then they are no part of what any Christian need believe. But so far as the holy Catholic Church,—so far as the orderly, covenanted work of the Holy Spirit in the world,—involves and contains the idea of the ministry or the sacraments, so far every Christian will know, just in proportion as he knows the true meaning of his creed, that he is bound to them. It is no part of my business to pursue the question of the sacraments or the ministry further here.

It may be observed, perhaps, that the Creed contains no proposition expressly about ourselves,—about the fall, for instance, or about sin. Yet in and from the first word of the Creed, I of course am present there: and as to formal propositions about myself, it may be that they are not so much articles of belief, as, rather, conditions of mind antecedent to belief, conditions of self-consciousness to which belief fits and responds, and without which the Creed itself would be unintelligible. But what is thus necessarily implied and involved in the terms of the Creed, is after all substantially contained in that Creed to which it is a condition of intelligibleness. Of course my creed necessarily presupposes myself. I cannot believe at all, except I am, and have a certain history and faculties. I cannot believe in God as Father, as Almighty, as Creator, without implying and including within that belief the fundamental facts of my nature and relation to Him. I cannot believe in the Incarnation and the Redemption, their meaning or their consequences, I cannot believe in the Holy Spirit, or have any intelligent apprehension of His working, except there be implied, as conditions of my consciousness necessary to that intelligence, some apprehension of that which is meant by the fall, some inalienable sense of evil, of sin, of the banishment from God which is the fruit of sin, of the inherent contradiction to my nature, the unnatural penalty and horror, which the banishment of sin involves. So probation, judgment, heaven, hell, are beliefs which grow by inevitable consequence out of the apprehension, once grasped, of the nature and distinction of good and evil; they are necessary corollaries from the full perception of the eternal rightness of right, the eternal wrongness of wrong, the eternal separation and contrast between right and wrong; in a word, from belief in God on the part of man.

Perhaps this illustration may serve to shew how much, that is not obvious in the letter, may nevertheless be really contained in man’s utterance of the Name of God.

III. But while the doctrines of the Church which her Creeds express are thus as simple as they are profound, it is no doubt true that there has grown up round about them a considerable body of theological teaching, more or less complicated, which is really of the nature of comment upon them, or explication of their nature and meaning. When we speak of the dogmas of Christianity, it is right to distinguish, with the clearest possible line of demarcation, between all this mass of explanatory teaching (more or less authoritative as it may from time to time appear to be) and the central truths themselves, which are our real certainties. The doctrine itself is one thing: the theories explicative of the doctrine are another. They may be of the highest value in their own time and place; but they are not the immutable principles of Church truth. To say this is not really to depreciate the work of theological writers and teachers of different ages; but it is to assign to their work its true position. The current mode of explaining a doctrine in one age, and bringing it home by illustrations to the imagination of men, may be discredited and superseded in another. When the current mode of statement or illustration begins to be more or less discredited, the minds of quiet people are apt to be distressed. This is because very few of us can distinguish between the truths themselves which we hold, and the (often mistaken) modes of expression by which we seem to explain our truths to ourselves. Even when our explanation is substantially true, the doctrine is still a different thing from our explanation of it; and if any imperfection is detected in our explanation of it, it is not truth which suffers; it is only that truth is being distinguished from our imperfect and unconscious glosses; and thereby in the end the truth can only be served. Perhaps no illustration of this can be more convincing than that which the history of the doctrine of Atonement supplies. That Christ died upon the cross for us, that He offered Himself as a sacrifice, and that we are redeemed through His blood, this is a belief fundamental to Christianity; nor has the Church ever wavered for an instant in her strong faith in this. But when we go further, and come to the different illustrations that have been given to make the precise nature of Atonement clear to human logic, when in fact we enter upon the domain of explicative theories, we have not only left the sure ground of the Creeds, and embarked upon views which may or may not be correct, but we find, as a fact, that the modes of thought which seemed adequately to explain the doctrine to the conscience of some ages, have not only failed to satisfy, but have actually shocked and offended, others. The teaching that God was angry, but that Jesus, as a result of gentler mercy, and through His innocent blood, appeased, by satisfying, the wrath of the Father, and so reconciled God to us; the teaching that Satan had obtained a right over man, but that Jesus, by giving up Himself, paid a splendid ransom into the hands of Satan; the teaching that a debt was due from humanity to God, and that Jesus, clothed as man, alone could deliver man by discharging God’s debt: these—be they popular blunderings, or genuine efforts of Theology—may, in their times, have both helped and wounded consciences; but whether they be to us as helps or hindrances, it is of the utmost importance that we should discriminate them, or others which may have succeeded to them as theories explanatory of the Atonement, from our cardinal belief in the Atonement itself. We may have rightly seen what is vicious in these statements, and we may have greatly improved upon them, but however much more helpful our modes of exposition may prove themselves to our own minds or those of our hearers, we may only be repeating the old error, and leading the way to fresh distresses in the future, if we confound our mode of explanatory comment with the truth of the doctrine itself, and claim that the mysterious fact of the Atonement means exactly that which is our own best approach to a statement, in illustrative words, of what it expresses to us.

But it may be asked, Are you not saying too much? Does not this seem to mean that the doctrines themselves are little better than unintelligible symbols, which need not indeed be changed for the simple reason that they can be made to mean whatever is necessary to suit the times? No, the truth of them does not change; and even the changeful modes of presenting them are less changeful, after all, than they seem. They cannot indefinitely vary; there is one thing which unites them all, and that is the truth itself which lies behind them all. The Atonement is a fact, whether I can adequately expound it or no. The Atonement is a fact, which my attempted expositions do indeed represent, more or less correctly, more or less clumsily, even when I seem most to have failed. Much as they may seem to differ, and inconsistent as they may appear with each other, yet not one of them really represents untruth but truth. Imperfect images they may be, and in respect of their imperfections, diverse and distorting; yet there is not one of the theories of Atonement referred to above—not even such as are now seen to contain most error—which did not, as seriously held, represent and convey some real image of the truth. It may be that the truth which they represented was conveyed in an inexact way; and that afterwards, when attention was concentrated on the points of inexactness, the statement became, and would have become, more and more misleading; it was no longer then a possible vehicle of truth; but what it had really conveyed to those to whom it was living, was a real soul-enlightening image of the truth of the Atonement. It was an imperfect image; it was even in part a distorted image,—as everything that I see through my window is in part distorted. But it was a real image of the real truth none the less.

Local and popular modes of exposition then are often as the medium through which dogmatic truth is seen and apprehended,—not always, certainly, without distortion. But the more catholic the truth, the more it retains its identity of form, however remote from each other, in place or time, the diverse types of mind which view and teach it, so much the purer must it be from accidental or temporary conditionings; so much the nearer, in rank, to a fundamental doctrine of the Catholic Church.

We do not, of course, distinguish Catholic dogma from theological literature, as though the one were bare facts, and the other all explanations of the facts. But we may rightly confine the use of the word ‘dogma’ to the fundamental facts, together with such explanation of them as the Church has agreed, by universal instinct, or by dogmatic decree endorsed through ecumenical acceptance, to be essential to a reasonable apprehension of the facts.

It is the more important to guard with unfaltering clearness this distinction between dogma on the one hand, and theological literature on the other, because it is, no doubt, in the sphere of explanatory theories and expressions, that most of those controversies find their place, which distress quiet minds, and rouse hot battles of orthodoxy between sincere Christian combatants. If it could be recognised at the time how far the apparent innovators of successive generations were really questioning not the doctrines themselves, but certain traditional modes of thought and teaching which have wrongly adhered to the doctrines, there would be fewer accusations of heterodoxy, and less distress and perplexity amongst the orthodox. But it is natural enough that this should not be perceived by the defenders, when the innovators themselves are so often both blind and indifferent to it. And it is just herein that the different innovators are apt to make themselves indefensible. Too often they think that they are making real advance upon the doctrines of the Church and her Creeds, and they are elated, instead of being ashamed, at the thought. They make light of loyalty, they despise the birthright of their Churchmanship, and find their own self-exaltation in the very consciousness of offending their brethren. This, whether done under provocation or no, is to depart from the spirit of the Church of Christ, in temper and meaning at least,—even though their work in the long run should prove (as it must so far as there is truth in it) only to serve the interest and work of the Church.

It is easier to see this in retrospect than in struggle. But perhaps those who look back upon the struggles of the last generation within the Church, will recognise that the orthodox thought of the present day has been not a little cleared and served, not merely by the work of orthodox defence, but in no small part by the work of the ‘liberalizers’ also. To say this, is by no means necessarily to acquit the liberalizers, or to cast a slur upon those who fought against them. Such condemnations or acquittals depend upon other considerations, which do not concern us here. But putting wholly aside as irrelevant all condemnation or acquittal of individuals, we may yet acknowledge that the work done has in the end served the cause of the truth and the Church. This is said, of course, of its real intellectual outcome; certainly not of the unsettling of souls by the way. And it is also to be noted that even when the fruit of their work has been in a real sense, after all, accepted and incorporated, it is hardly ever in the sense, and never quite with the results, which they, so far as they had allowed themselves to be malcontents, had supposed. But if whatever is good and true in their work becomes, after all, an element in the consciousness of the Church, might not the work itself have been done, all along, in perfect Church loyalty? In so far as different earnest writers of a generation ago, or of to-day, are really, whether consciously or not, making a contribution to one of the great theological tasks of our time, in so far (that is) as they are helping towards the correction of erroneous fancies of popular theology,—helping, for instance, to modify that superstitious over-statement about ‘justification’ which would really leave no meaning in ‘righteousness;’ or to limit the grossness of the theory often represented by the word ‘imputation;’ or to rebuke the nervous selfishness of religionists whose one idea of the meaning of religion was ‘to be saved;’ or to qualify the materialism or superstition of ignorant sacramentalists; or to banish dogmatic realisms about hell, or explications of atonement which malign God’s Fatherhood; or the freezing chill and paralysis of all life supposed before now to be necessarily involved in the Apostolic words ‘predestination’ and ‘election;’ so far they are really, though it may be from the outside and very indirectly, doing the work of the Church. But the pity of it is that the men who do this kind of service are so apt to spoil it, by overvaluing themselves and forgetting the loveliness and the power of perfect subordination to the Church. We may own that Church people and Church rulers have too often been the stumbling-block. It is they who again and again have seemed to fight against everything, and by intellectual apathy, and stern moral proscription of every form of mental difficulty (wherein oftentimes are the birth-throes of enlightenment) to drive living and growing intelligence out of the Church. It is true that the greatest of Churchmen would, if the badge of their work were submissiveness, have sometimes to wait awhile, and bear delay, and wrong from inferior minds, with the patience of humility. Yes; but that work of theirs, if it once were stamped with this seal of patient submissiveness, would be a glory to the Church for ever, like the work of her quiet confessors, the work of a Scupoli, a Ken, or a Fénelon; instead of being, as it more often seems to be, a great offending and perplexing of thousands of the very consciences which deserve to be treated most tenderly, and therefore also a wrong and a loss to the conscience and character of the writer.

Are statements like these a concession to the antidogmatist? If so, they are one to which, in the name of truth, he is heartily welcome. And perhaps, under the same high sanction we may add what will look, to some minds, like another. We claimed some time since that the Creed must be, to Christians, rather a complete and conclusive than a partial or a tentative statement of truth. Yet there is one sense in which we may own that even the definitions of the Creeds may themselves be called relative and temporary. For we must not claim for phrases of earthly coinage a more than earthly and relative completeness. The Creeds are temporary, in that they are a complete and sufficient statement of truth only for time. And therefore they are only quite perfectly adequate to express those truths which have their place in time. But we, in respect of truths which transcend time, if we cannot as yet be freed from the trammels and limits of earthly thought and expression, yet can recognise at least the fact, that we are, even in our Creeds, still labouring within those trammels. We may have ground for believing the Creeds of the Church to be the most perfectly balanced and harmonious expression of the truth whereof our earthly knowledge is, or will be, capable. Yet when we struggle, as in the language of the Athanasian Creed, to express the relations which have been exhibited to us in the eternal Godhead through the use of the words ‘Person’ and ‘Substance,’ or ὑπόσταστς and οὐσία; or when we thus profess our belief in the Person of the Holy Ghost, ‘The Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son: neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding,’ need we fear to own that the instruments which, perforce, we make use of upon earth, even in the Creeds of the Church, are necessarily imperfect instruments; the power of conception imperfect; the power of phrase and imagery imperfect also; and that their sufficiency of truth (though not their correctness meanwhile) is so far temporary that it is limited to earth and to time; and that, in the perfect light and knowledge of the presence of God, the perfectest knowledge represented by them will be superseded and absorbed, while the glosses and materialisms with which, in various ways, we may have been unconsciously clothing them to our own imaginations, will be—not superseded only but corrected, and, it may be, reproved? Moreover, if the truths represented in the Creeds are wider and deeper than our conceptions of them, we can admit that there may possibly be particulars in which, even now, the experience of spiritual life may deepen and enlarge the meaning, to us, of our Creeds; as, for instance, the words heaven and hell may present to us ideas differing, in the direction of more correctness, from those which they presented to some of our forefathers. It is not that the Creeds will be some day corrected. It is not that we shall see hereafter how false they were, but how far the best conceptions which they opened to us,—the best, that is, that our earthly faculties were capable of, lagged in their clumsiness behind the perfect apprehension of the truths which they had, nevertheless, not untruly represented; but which we then shall have power to see and know as they are. The truth which is dimly imaged for us in the Creeds, will never belie, but will infinitely transcend, what their words represented on earth.

But it will very naturally be asked by what right we speak thus of the Creeds. In the very moment of admitting, in one sense, their incompleteness and want of finality, by what right do we lay down still that they are final and complete to the end of time; that is, perhaps, through ages of human advance, of which we may have now no conception at all? Such a question does not apply to the strictly historical statements which constitute the foundation of our creed, but to those interpretations of historical fact, and to those assertions about the Divine Being and its relations, which necessarily transcend time and experience. And after all, perhaps, the answer is not difficult. We have to consider, first, that for the very reason that these beliefs do absolutely transcend time and experience, therefore no human development which belongs merely to time and experience, can, in itself, displace or improve upon them; and secondly, that our knowledge of these truths is really derived from a Divine revelation, which took place, as we believe, within time and experience. We may say, indeed, that the statements of this Divine revelation are corroborated to us, by such elements of thought as our reason (which we believe to be also in its reality Divine) is able to supply. It remains, however, that they can only really be proved or disproved, by arguments which go to prove or disprove the truth of the historical Incarnation, and of the revelations which it contains.

It follows from hence that we have a valid right to hold them not only true, but final in their statement of truth for this present world, exactly so far as we have a right to believe that our historical revelation is, for time, a final one. Should there, indeed, be a wholly fresh revelation, the amount of truth hitherto revealed might be superseded; but nothing short of a revelation can supersede it. The idea that any advance of human reason could be inconsistent with it, involves for the Christian who believes human reason to be divinely reflected and divinely implanted, nothing less than an unthinkable contradiction. We may therefore believe it in any case to be final, till the coming of a further revelation: and so far as there is anything in the truth already revealed to us, which may warrant us in feeling confident that there is no fresh revelation in store, within the limits of time, by which the revelation of Jesus Christ will be superseded, just so far and no further are we justified in claiming for those clauses in the Creed, whose subject-matter transcends time and experience, that they are the completest expressions of their truths which can be reached in time.

IV. It may, perhaps, be a matter of prudence to refer for a moment to what are called the ‘damnatory clauses’ of the Athanasian Creed; though it would not be necessary to do so for the purpose of any positive statement or explanation of Christian doctrine. These clauses, however, to the positive statement add a negative. It is easy to misunderstand them, and even, by misrepresenting, to make them appear grotesque. But if the question be as to what they really mean, they are, after all, to the Christian, an obvious and necessary corollary of the Creed which is his life. There is but One God, and One Heaven, and One Salvation; not a choice of alternative salvations, or heavens, or gods. There is One Incarnation, One Cross, One Divine restoring and exalting of humanity. There is One Spirit of God, One Church—the fabric and the method of the working of the Spirit,—One Spiritual Covenant with man. Man must have part in this One, or he has part in none; for there is no other. Man must have knowledge of this One, belief in this One; or there is none for him to believe in or to know. God’s covenant is with His Church on earth; and the statements of the Creed are the representation in words of that knowledge of the truth which the Church possesses, the possession of which is her life. The Athanasian Creed is not addressed to outsiders, but to those who are within the Church. For encouragement, or (if necessary) for warning, it insists to them on the uniqueness of their faith. To have hold on God is to have hold on Life. To revolt from God is to revolt from Life. This is so, to those who have or ought to have learnt that it is so, both in fact and in thought. Thus, in fact, to drop out of communion with the Incarnation of Christ, is to drop out of communion with the inner realities and possibilities of humanity. But the mind, and its convictions and meanings, cannot wholly be separated from the facts of the life. There comes, at least in most lives, a time when the man’s own allegiance to the facts is a necessary condition of his identification with them. ‘If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.’ There comes a point at which the mind’s refusal of the doctrines of religion is the man’s revolt from the facts; and such a revolt is repudiation of the One revelation of God, the One Incarnation, the One Salvation, the One Church or Covenant. This must be broadly true, true in the abstract, as principle, unless truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are fundamentally false distinctions, and every man is to be equally good, and equally compelled to heaven. At what point any individual person, or class of persons, does, or does not, in the sight of the Judge who knows the whole inward history, and tries the most secret motive, fall within the scope of this principle, and incur the final condemnation of rebellion against the one light and hope of all humanity, is another question altogether. Any such application of the principle to the case of individuals belongs only to God the Judge, and would be an arrogant impiety in any man. Even when such a question may have to be determined ecclesiastically, the ecclesiastical condemnation and sentence, though expressly representing in shadow the eternal sentence, is none the less quite distinct, and indeed in its ultimate motive even contrasted with it. But however unchristian it may be to say that A or B will perish everlastingly, the principle nevertheless is true, that the truth which the Creed embodies, the truth of which Christ’s Incarnation is the pivot and centre, is the only deliverance from everlasting perishing; and that whole-hearted union and communion with this truth, is that true state of Church life which alone has the certain seal of the covenant of God. This broad truth it is, the necessary complement of any holding of the Christian creed as true, which these clauses affirm. If it be said, ‘your Athanasian Creed is simple and trenchant; it has no qualifications such as you admit’; our reply would be threefold. First, the Creed is part of our heritage from the past, and its phraseology is not our handiwork; but we know that the necessary qualifications with which we understand its phraseology have been generally recognised by the Church from which we inherit it. Secondly, the Quicunque vult is, strictly, not so much a creed as a canticle; it has never been used as a test of Church communion; and it speaks, on a point like this, as the Te Deum would speak, in the language not of judicial award but of devotional loyalty. Thirdly, the qualifications with which we say that any generalisation about man’s responsibility for belief, whether in this ‘canticle’ or in scripture, must necessarily be understood, are only such as all men apply to any similar generalisation about responsibility for conduct. ‘If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins,’ is paralleled by ‘They which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.’ We claim only to interpret the one as rationally as all men understand the other.

It has seemed to be desirable, while insisting upon the claims of dogma, not indeed in the name of allegiance to imposed authority, but in the name of truth, and on the ground of its simple identity with truth, to try to state, with the utmost possible plainness, whatever could be truly admitted in the way of apparent qualification of those claims. Truth is supreme, and eternal; and dogma, so far as it coincides with truth, is, of course, all that truth is. For the dogmatic position of the Church and her Creeds, we claim that it is the true and simple expression upon earth of the highest truth that is, or can be, known. But dogmatic theologians are not infallible, and so far as the name of dogma has been claimed for mistaken presumption or misleading statement of truth, so far may dogma have seemed to fight against truth. The words, indeed, ‘dogmatic’ and ‘dogmatism’ have acquired a bad reputation. But this is not the fault of dogma. A dogmatist, in the invidious sense of the word, does not mean one who studies dogma, but rather one who foolishly utters what are not dogmas as if they were. The dogmatic temper is the temper of one who is imperiously confident that he is right when he is not. That is to say, the words dogma, dogmatic, dogmatize, etc., are commonly used of something which is the mere abuse and travesty of their proper meaning. It is hard that dogma itself should be prejudiced by this caricaturing misuse of its name.

Meanwhile, if real charges be brought against any part of our dogmatic creed, we are willing most honestly to examine into them. In so far as they are made against current suppositions, which are separable from our essential belief,—separable as, for example, we now see various details of traditional belief about the first chapter of Genesis to be separable—we join our critics in the examination with a mind as open as they could desire. And it must, in simple candour, be admitted further, that upon the appearance of any new form of thought, Churchmen have not generally been quick of mind to discriminate the essential from the non-essential, so as to receive at first, with any openness of mind, what they had afterwards to admit that they might have received from the first. But not even this admission must prevent us from claiming, that when that to which exception is taken does really belong to the essential truths of our creed, which to us are more absolutely established certainties than anything in heaven and earth besides, they must pardon us if, while we are still willing to give the most candid hearing possible to everything that they have to urge, we yet cannot, if we would, divest ourselves of the deepest certainties of our existence;—cannot therefore pretend to argue with more openness of mind than would scientific professors—say with a champion who undertook to prove that the globe was flat, or that the sun went round the earth. We are ready to listen to everything. We are fully prepared to find that the champion may produce in evidence some phenomena which we shall be unable to account for. We have found it before; we are not unaccustomed to finding it (though, in good time, the perplexity always unravels itself); and we shall be in no way disconcerted if we find it again. But we cannot pretend meanwhile to hold all the truth which our consciences have known in suspense.

V. What was said just now about the Creeds will not, it is hoped, appear to any minds to fail in the entire respect which is due to them. Yet it makes it, perhaps, the more incumbent upon us to take notice of another form of attack upon dogma, which connects itself with an attitude about the Creeds, such as may seem at first sight to be not wholly dissimilar; though presently all the foundations of dogma are dissolved by it. But in point of fact, if we admit that what the Creeds mean on earth, is less than what the same truths will mean in heaven, or that there may be, even here, a clumsier, and a completer, understanding of them; this is a position essentially different from maintaining that what the Creeds both say and mean, is not only less than, but (if strictly taken) inconsistent with, the real truth; and that not in any transcendent sense, as celestial beings, with wholly other faculties, may conceivably have power of apprehending it in heaven, but as the more intelligent among us may, and do, see it now. This is not only to admit that the Creeds are built up, perforce, of materials which belong to this earth; but to treat them as mere serviceable fictions for the teaching of the uncivilized or the young. The deliberate unbeliever, indeed, assumes that the Creeds mean what they say, and that the Church understands the Creeds. Assuming this, he parts company with the Church, because he holds that the statements of her Creeds are, in fact, fictitious. But it may surprise us to find that there is another form of this view of the fictitiousness of Creeds, and that here the critic speaks, not at all in the character of an unbeliever, but rather in that of an enlightened Churchman. All Christian truth, he says, is true. Even the Creeds in a real sense represent the truth. But the Church’s understanding and expression of Christian truth in the Creeds, is, none the less, strictly, a misrepresentation of the truth. Though the truth of Christ lies behind the Church’s Creeds, yet they have so overlaid, and thereby, in strict speech, misstated it, that it is only the patience of criticism, which cutting bravely adrift from the authority of traditional interpretation, has succeeded in discriminating between the Creeds and the meaning of the Creeds, and behind what are practically the fictions of dogmatic Christianity, has re-discovered the germs of Christian truth. Neither the facts of the life of Jesus Christ, nor His teaching, nor His consciousness in regard of Himself, were as we have been taught, but were something different. He never thought nor taught of Himself as personally God, nor did He perform any miracles, nor did He rise on the third day from the dead. Whatever scriptures state these things explicitly, are proved by that very fact to be glosses or errors. And yet, all the while, everything is true spiritually. The record of the Incarnate Life is true literally, it may be, at comparatively few points; certainly not the story of the Birth; certainly not the story of the Resurrection; certainly not any incident which involves, or any expression which implies, miracle. But the Birth, the Resurrection, the miracles, every one of them, represent, in the most splendid of imaginative language and portraiture, essential spiritual truths. They are fictions, but vivid representations, in fiction, of fact; splendid truths, therefore, so long as they are understood to be literally fictitious, but perversions of truth, if taken for truth of fact.

It is this conception which was set forth not long ago with a singular power and persuasiveness by the author of The Kernel and the Husk. The lofty level of thought, the restraint and felicity of language, above all the deeply religious spirit of the author, invest his arguments with a charm of unusual attractiveness. The arguments are not such as it is wholly pleasant to see thus recommended. He deals in detail, in the course of the volume, with much of the narrative of Scripture, with the purpose of shewing how one by one the various records, including of course the Birth and Resurrection, have grown to their present form out of realities which contained no miracle, and which therefore differed essentially from the historical scriptures and faith of the Church.

It is no part of our task to enter upon such details. Nor is it necessary. The struggle against such a theory of Christianity will not be fought out on details. It may be conceded that many of the miracles, taken singly, can easily be made to fall in with conjectural theories as to a mythical origin, if only the antecedent conviction against their reality as miracles be cogent enough really to require that the necessary force should be put upon the evidence. Some indeed may lend themselves to the process with a facility which fairly surprises us. Others seem still to be very obstinate, and force the rationalizer into strange hypotheses. But after all, the real question, through one and all, is not how easily this or that miracle can be made, by squeezing of evidence, to square with a rationalizing hypothesis; but what is the strength of the argument for the rationalizing hypothesis itself, which is the warrant for squeezing the evidence at all.

The Evangelists say that Jesus taught in the synagogue at Capernaum. Our author takes for granted that He did so. The Evangelists say that Jesus miraculously multiplied loaves and fishes in the wilderness. Our author takes for granted that He did not so. Now why this contrast? Incidentally, indeed, it may be remarked that on the author’s own general method, this multiplication of loaves ought to be one of the most certain facts in the life of Christ, as it is emphasized in every Gospel. But this is by the way. The real ground of the contrast in the treatment of the same evidence is a certain prior conviction with which the evidence is approached. Now we are not contending that any such sifting of evidence in the light of prior tests is inadmissible. On the contrary, there is hardly anyone who does not, on a similar principle, explain the differences (for example) in the accounts of the title upon the Cross, or the difficulty as to whether Jesus healed one blind man or two, on the way into, or out from, Jericho; but we do say that the admissibleness of such a method of interpreting absolutely depends upon the certainty of the correctness of the prior conviction itself.

The various details of ingenuity, then, with which he explains away particular incidents, are to us of quite subordinate interest. Everything depends upon the cogency of the grounds for explaining away at all. A large part of the book is occupied in explaining away the facts of Christianity, as the Christian Church has hitherto understood them; an explaining away which may be more or less necessary, more or less satisfactory, if the premisses which require it are once admitted; but which certainly is wholly unnecessary, and wholly unsatisfactory, if those premisses are denied.

The prior conviction in the book in question is that miracles neither do, nor did, happen in fact, and therefore that any narrative which involves them is incredible. All the ingenuities of conjecture on individual points become relevant subsequently to, and in reliance upon, this underlying principle. Admit this, and they are forthwith interesting and valuable. Deny this, and they lose their importance at once. It is the pressure of this prior conviction which seems to give life and force to a number of suggestions, about other stories, and particularly about that of the Resurrection, which, apart from this animating conviction, would be felt to be very lifeless; and to a total experiment of subjective reconstruction, which, but for the strength of the antecedent conviction, would have been impossible to men of reverent thought and modest utterance. The teaching of the book will therefore really be accepted or the reverse, precisely according as the minds of its readers do, or do not, incline to admit the hypothesis upon which it depends.

It is probable, indeed, that the author would demur to this statement, at least when put so simply; on the ground that, though he avows the conviction, yet he has reached the conviction itself by no à priori road, but as the result of wide observation and unprejudiced scrutiny of evidence. Now it is not at all meant to be asserted that the conviction against miracle is itself reached merely by an à priori method. No doubt it has, in fact, been arrived at, in those minds which have fully arrived at it, not à priori, but as the result of a great induction from experience; practically indeed, as it seems to them, from experience as good as universal. The weight of the evidence in this direction is neither denied nor forgotten. Yet even when it most impresses us, of course it is obvious still to reply to ourselves that however powerful this array of experience may appear so long as there are no instances to the contrary, yet any one contrary instance will break at once the cogency of the induction. The case of Jesus Christ is put forward as being unique. Its uniqueness is not really qualified by the fact that some others, among those nearest to Himself, were by Him enabled—avowedly in His power, not their own,—to do acts which were impossible to other men. This is only a wider extension of His unique power, not a qualification of it. Against such a case, put forward on evidence definite and multiform, and put forward as essentially unique, an argument from induction is no argument at all. It is a misnomer to call the induction an argument. The induction, in fact, is merely an observation that other persons did not perform similar miracles; and that, if Jesus Christ did so, He was unique. But this is no answer to the Christian position. It is part of the position itself.

And so the matter must be referred for settlement to the evidence that is actually forthcoming about Jesus Christ. But it is plain that the inductive presumption against miracle, derived from experience of other men, must not come in to warp or rule this evidence. It may be present indeed as a sort of cross-examining counsel, as a consideration requiring that the evidence should be most minutely scrutinized, and suggesting all sorts of questions with a view to this. But into the evidence itself, it cannot be permitted to intrude.

Now, it is part of our complaint against such writers as the author of The Kernel and the Husk, that however much their general presumption against miracle may have been inductively and patiently reached; yet when they come to deal with the evidence about Jesus Christ, this conviction (which ought to stand on one side inquiringly) becomes to them an underlying postulate; it is settled beforehand; it is present with them in their exegesis, not simply as a motive for sifting the evidence carefully, but as a touchstone of truth by which it may all be tried. Probably the author would believe that he has reached his conviction against the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth, not merely from a general induction as to the absence of miracle in the lives of others, but also from an unprejudiced scrutiny of the evidence of the life of Jesus Christ Himself. But this is just what we are not at all prepared to concede. On the contrary, we maintain that his scrutiny is wholly prejudiced. Examine the evidence with a bias sufficiently powerful against belief in miracle; and you may end in the result which this author reaches. Examine it without such a bias; and you will find yourself at every turn protesting against his mode of treating the evidence. It is a scrutiny of the evidence on the basis of the inadmissibleness of miracles, which gives him that coherent theory about the growth of the Christian tradition, and those consequent principles of interpretation of the text of the Gospels, which he appears to regard as the simple result of the evidence itself.

We shall very likely be surprised to find that, after all, the abstract impossibility of miracle is not laid down,—nay, is expressly disclaimed,—by him. Miracle (if we rightly understand) is not impossible absolutely,—not even, he adds, à priori improbable; yet it is equivalent to an impossibility, because the will of the Father indwelt wholly in Jesus, and because the perfect uniformity of natural processes as we have experienced them, is, in fact, and with no exceptions, the will of the Father215. No general reflections upon our dependence, in ordinary life, on the good faith of an uniform nature, ought to blind us to the fact that this last position neither has, nor can have, any adequate ground at all. It is surprising that with so weak a statement of the impossibility of miracle, the principle of the impossibility of miracle should have to bear the extraordinary weight that is put upon it. Nothing short of a demonstration of this impossibility would fully justify the critical position that is adopted. For it is, in fact, upon this impossibility that the whole re-reading of the history is based.

It is probably true that if once the hypothesis of the impossibility of miracle be accepted as practically certain, an earnest mind, penetrated with this as its overruling principle, and dwelling upon the Gospels always and only in the light of this, will be compelled gradually to re-read in one place and re-interpret in another, until the whole has been, by steps that upon the hypothesis were irresistible, metamorphosed into a form as unlike as possible, indeed, to what it wore at first, but still one which can be felt to be precious and beautiful. But we are entitled to point out how absolutely this re-reading of the evidence depends upon the truth of the principle which underlies it. For the sake of this, all sorts of violence has to be done to what would otherwise be, in one incident after another, the obvious meaning of words, the obvious outcome of evidence. Without the certainty of this, the new method of reading must be critically condemned as baseless and arbitrary. This alone makes it rationally possible. Without the strong cogency of this it falls instantly to pieces.

Now orthodox Christians are sometimes accused of reading their historical evidence in the light of a preconception. They begin with the doctrine of the Creed, and read all records of fact with the conviction of that doctrine in their hearts and consciences. We need not be altogether concerned to combat this statement. Perhaps few records are read, or would ever be read intelligently, except in the light of the reader’s preconceptions. But our point is to see clearly that at all events the new reading of the Gospel history is itself so entirely the outcome and creature of its antecedent principle, that it cannot without that hold together for an instant.

Let us be content, for the moment, to view the orthodox Christian and the new rationalist as both alike really reading the Gospel narrative in the light of a preconceived principle; the one viewing everything on the basis of the perfect Divinity of the historical Jesus Christ (with the corollary that it is impossible for us to determine à priori what power His perfect Humanity—for which we have no precedent—would, or would not, naturally and necessarily exhibit); the other viewing everything on the basis of the absolute impossibility, or at least the incredibleness, of miracle. We might point out that the former in his hypothesis has a principle which absolutely fits and perfectly accounts for every part of the evidence which confronts him; while the latter is compelled, by the cogency of his principle, to reconstruct for himself almost every chapter of the evidence. And if we go one step further back, and ask, what is the antecedent reasonableness of the one hypothesis, or of the other? from what source is each derived? We must claim it as simple fact, that the former hypothesis is itself the direct outcome of the evidence,—the inevitable outcome, indeed, so long as the evidence stands: while the other is at bottom, an assumption, held absolutely in the teeth of the evidence actually existing in respect of the life and consciousness of Jesus of Nazareth, and itself on other grounds not merely unproved, but essentially incapable of proof216.

But if our hypothesis is itself the outcome of the evidence, and fits with perfect exactness into all its intricacies, then we yield far too much if we treat it as on the level of a mere preconception. To persist in reading the New Testament by the light of the preconception of the dogma of Christ’s Godhead (with the corollary that no miracle is incredible as miracle), is to be prejudiced only in the same sense in which the scientist is prejudiced who persists in studying the records of astronomy in the light of certain preconceptions as to the parabola or the law of gravitation.

But what is the case with the other hypothesis? By it the historical Jesus Christ is swept away; and another personality, which does not exist in the history at all, but which the history has suggested to certain earnest-minded critics of our own day, is substituted in His place. All those who witnessed of His words and deeds to the Church, all those whose witness the Church has accepted and sealed, are thoroughly mistaken, mistaken in the very points which to them were fundamental. However honest they may have been in their superstitious ignorance, they certainly bore to the world what was, in fact, false testimony. It is impressive, with a strange impressiveness, to follow this hypothesis through the story of Christ’s life; and see with what ingenuity, often plausible, often pathetic, the old facts are refashioned to meet the new principle.

Cardinal, of course, in difficulty as in importance, is the narrative of the Resurrection; that plain statement of fact, to testify whereto was the primary qualification, and primary function, of Apostleship; and which, from S. Peter and S. Paul downwards, has always been recognised as cardinal to the faith of the Church.

Now given; first, the certain conviction that no miracle occurred; and secondly, a working hypothesis as to the growth of the Christian Scriptures, which not only enables, but requires, you to set aside, on grounds of subjective criticism, all such evidence as seems to you to be improbable; and it follows that, if you are still of a very religious mind, you will probably have to take refuge in what may yet be to you the beautiful story of a Resurrection exclusively spiritual.

You must, of course, deal very violently with the direct evidence. But that is already covered by the general theory you have reached as to the historical genesis and value (or lack of value) of the books of the New Testament. And, of course, in adopting such a view of the books of the New Testament, you are reducing to a phantasm the reality of your belief in the Holy Catholic Church, which has enshrined and consecrated, as perfectest truth, what are really at best only fables,—capable, indeed, of clumsily representing the truth to the childish or the stupid, but beginning to be absolutely pernicious to minds which have reached a certain point of intelligent education.

Tolerating these things, however, you may admit the truth of the Resurrection (as you may admit every proposition of the Creed) in words; only in a sense so refined, so exclusively spiritual, that no bodily reality of resurrection is left. There is no resurrection in your creed correlative to the dying. There is no resurrection more, or more demonstrable, than what we believe to be true of men in general. There is no resurrection which enters within the ordinary sphere of human history, or admits any direct contact with the normal methods of human evidence or human proof. The question raised is not whether current imaginations of the Resurrection may possibly be more or less exaggerated in the way of materialism, but whether there was any corporeal reality of resurrection at all. And the question is settled in the negative. The foundation fact of the Creed is etherealized away; and all the rest, with it, becomes together impalpable and subjective.

We do not say that there is not a large element which is true, in the thought of such a writer as we have been considering. Where the mind is so devoutly in earnest, it is no hard task to believe that it too must be animated originally by truth. We need not say, therefore, that the work of this earnestness may not serve us all, and contribute to the thought of us all. It may well be true that in our bald understanding of the doctrine of the Resurrection,—or indeed of the whole Incarnation, from beginning to end,—we have, many of us, too little imagined the scope and depth of its spiritual import. If our orthodoxy has been so well content with insisting mechanically upon the literal fact, as not only to forget, but to disdain or disown in any measure, the vast spiritual realities which it ought to express to us; then our stupidity, or narrowness, in orthodoxy, is in part to blame, for the distaste which they have created towards orthodoxy in some natures more sensitive than our own. In so far as they can, in this respect, return good for evil, we will not be slow to acknowledge our debt to them. We will be grateful for any new suggestion they can discover, as to the moral beauty or import of the Resurrection, or of the Incarnation, or of any or every other miracle considered upon its moral side as allegory. Some ways at least there may be, in which their insistance may tend to deepen for us our understanding of truths, whose more spiritual aspects we had dwelt upon perhaps, in some cases,—perhaps had even imagined,—far too little. But doubtless that true element of their work, which the mind of the Catholic Church will assimilate, will be greatly modified from the form in which it now presents itself—to them as to others. It will, to say the least, be positive rather than negative; stimulating spiritual sensibilities, but not by explaining away the facts of the body; widening (it may be) our insight into the divineness of history, and the depth of the meaning of certain events which happened in it,—but not shattering both it and them, by dissolving their historical truth.

Meanwhile of the one-sided aspect we can but say that no doubt transcendental spiritualism has a great attractiveness. The Magian aspiration always was fascinating. Individuals, indeed, of enthusiastic sympathies, trained themselves in dogmatic truth, and indulging their freest speculations always on a background of inveterate dogmatic instinct, may fancy the ‘spiritualized Christianity’ to be in itself a stable and a living completeness; but as a system, it will neither produce life nor perpetuate it. It is an attempt to improve upon the Church of Christ, upon the conditions of human nature, upon the facts of history. The Church of Christ is not so. The Church of Christ does not ignore the fundamental conditions of human experience. The Church of Christ is balanced, harmonious, all-embracing, all-adjusting. The Incarnation was the sanctifying of both parts of human nature, not the abolition of either. The Church, the Sacraments, human nature, Jesus Christ Himself, all are twofold; all are earthly objective, as well as transcendental spiritual. And so long as this world is real as well as the next; so long as man is body as well as soul; so long all attempts to evaporate the body and its realities are foredoomed to a necessary and a salutary failure. The religion, which attempts to be rid of the bodily side of things spiritual, sooner or later loses hold of all reality. Pure spiritualism, however noble the aspiration, however living the energy with which it starts, always has ended at last, and will always end, in evanescence.

Notes

215 See especially the concluding paragraphs of letter xix.

216 ‘The question of miracles seems now to be admitted on all hands to be simply a question of evidence.’ These are the words as much of Professor Huxley as of the Duke of Argyll. Nineteenth Century, April 1887, p. 483: cp. Feb. 1887, pp. 201, etc.