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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 3

Reply No. 1., By Professor F. W. Newman

page 8

Reply No. 1., By Professor F. W. Newman.

My Dear Scott,—

You write to me a pressing letter, begging me to reply (since your own replies, somehow or other, do not bring satisfaction,) to those who ask, "What have we got to rely on, if we cannot rely on the Bible?"

I have written two books which expressly treat this question at largo. The one is called 'The Soul the other, which is the more mature and comprehensive work, is called 'Theism,' that is, the doctrine of God; and aims to develop the religion which is common to Judaism, Christianity, and Moham-medism. I have very little confidence that I can treat so great a subject concisely, with much chance of giving satisfaction. A short reply can easily confute the questioner, if he is a more objector; but it cannot possibly give him peace and rest of soul, if he is sincerely uneasy;—for two reasons; first, because the mind of the questioner is clearly unexercised; next, because religion is a life, not a mere theory; and it is only by the life of religion that faith in God can grow up into active force.

I. I have already move than once printed what, I think, is a sufficient confutation of those who fancy that the Bible can ever be the ultimate restingplace of legitimate and wanly faith.

If we be ever so sure that the Bible is dictated by a superhuman Mind, this cannot be to us any guarantee of truth, while that mind is unknown to us. We cannot talk of the book's being guaranteed to us by God, unless we first know both that there is a God, and what sort of God he is; that he attends to our conduet; approves of our virtue, and of our justice; disaoproves of our vice and injustice; is likely to send us a book to teach us; is himself Holy and good. Until we know all this, the Bible cannot have authority, if it be ever so much a book from him. A book written by a Fairy or a Devil would not have the more authority, though the Fairy were to say, "I am not capricious; or the Devil, "I am not malignant." We need to know the moral character of the Spirit who dictates the book, independently of what that Spirit says of himself in the book. A lying Spirit will tell lies his word is absolutely' worthless. We must know that the inspirer of the book is truthful, wise, and good, by some surer mode than by his own word. His self-laudation goes for nothing, unless we first know his character. Hence, until we have something surer than God's word, God's word is invalid as an authority.

I have here laboriously said in many lines what will go into few, because I find people to be upon this matter wonderfully dull and puzzle-headed. No one believes a man to be truthful upon his own testimony. It is equally irrational to believe an unknown Spirit to be truthful upon his own testimony. We need to believe God to be truthful and good because we see it ourselves, and not because he tells us. Until then, we have no foundation for religion in any imaginable Bible.

Now if, prior to and independent of book-authority, we know that God exists, and is truthful and good (which is the highest and most important of all truths), surely it is absurd to say that Man, without an authoritative Bible, has no religious foundation; or to undervalve that revelation which God has given us of himself, in the universe and in the human heart. And to undervalue it, is nothing but a modern, a contemptible, and, I may add, a detestable heresy It is not found in the Old Testement, nor yet in the New, nor in the ancient Christian Fathers, nor even in the Catholic Church. It is nothing but the error of a very narrow Protestantism, which insists on looking into a book for what cannot be found there. And this evidently bréala down of itself, the moment a missionary attempts to preach the gospel to the heathen. Not one was ever so unwise as to go to a barbarian and say, "Believe that there is a God, because this Book says that there is a God; moreover that he is Holy, Just, Loving, and True." This could only [unclear: esiest] page 9 the reply, "What is the Book to me? What do I know about it, that I should believe it?" But the preacher says boldly: "The God who made Heaven and Earth, the God who abhors wickedness and loves righteousness, commands you to repent of your sins, calls you to do justice, to love mercy, and adore God humbly." And, if he can get the intelligence of the hearers, as he generally can, to accept this statement, as verified by the world around and by the conscience within, he further proceeds to set before the hearer the great gravity of Sim—presses on him that he needs some mode of acquittal from Guilt and Punishment, and urges him to flee from the Wrath to come. (Such, at least, is the ordinary process.) If he can gain this second step, he takes a third, and propounds a salvation from heaven and a Saviour. Of course, if the hearer asks how this is known, the preacher at last brings in the Bible and the Apostles and the other Christian apparatus. Such is the outline of what not only the first preachers did, but what all reasonable missionaries do,—all whom a Protestant will endure; for to act upon barbarians by carrying about pictures and flags and such like sensuous demonstrations, does not approve itself to us. It is therefore really too late, and too absurd, for Protestant Christians to deny or doubt that the belief in a holy God is necessarily prior to any rational belief in a Bible. The Bible may perhaps build something more upon the foundation, but cannot lay the foundation. If it cannot be laid independently of the Bible, it can never be laid at all. And nothing that a Bible can build upon Natural Religion (so called) can ever be half so valuable as that which pre-existed—the belief in God, Holy and Good. To undervalue this belief is the weakest form of Scepticism, the direct token of religious rottenness.

II. What has made so many Protestants thus weak? What has sapped the energy of their faith in God? Principally the perversity and ignorance of preachers, who elaborately inculcate the disuse of our religious faculties. If any one were to dandle a child it: arms long after he ought to run about, Were to have him drawn in a Bath chair or carried in a Utter, and never allow his foot to touch the ground, the boy's muscles would never grow, his legs would be spindles; and if, some day, his vehicles were suddenly withdrawn, he would wallow on the ground miserably, and groan out that God had never made man to walk. This is a close representation of the mental emaciation which false teaching induces. The hearer is made simply receptive of notions authoritatively poured in. All independent thought is repressed and crippled, through alarm lest it reject something in the authoritative Bible; lest it distinguish some things in the Bible, as not only certainly true, but as prior certainties, and thereby become conscious of power to sit in judgment on the book itself. When a great body of preachers in a succession of generations dread lest the human mind become conscious of power, their hearers collectively cannot but be dwarfed in religions intelligence. Such is the state of a very great mass of English devotees. When these discover that their basis is unsound—that the book which they had assumed to be infallible, is no more so than the infallible Church or Pope, they must not expect all at once to recover normal robustness of mind. They have been taught systematically to distrust the human faculties and to abstain from fundamental thought; and then they almost reproach such as you, because you cannot give them, that faith in Man, which is but a part of faith in Man's Creator. the faith is simply this,—that to Man collectively, to normal Man, God has given all that God sees needful "for life and godliness;" hence, so long as sure knowledge is strictly unattainable, neither is it necessary for that measure of perfection for which God designs us, which also he claims of us. Natural talents, which are diligently cultivated, increase immensely in force; but if they are not cultivated, dwindle. Still, while vitality is strong, even late in life much may be done to retrieve past neglect: and in this ease it is, in general, only one side or corner of the mind which has been neglected. page 10 The man who m religion has been merely receptive and credulous, may have been active-minded and bold in other studies or occupations: hence with time and exercise, even when the crutches are pulled from under him, his limbs may gradually recover normal strength.—Yet not all at once; he must have time.

However, I believe that such questions as you say are put to you, are oftenest not put by persons who here really ceased to rely on the Bible; they are meant merely as arguments to shut your mouth. To such, the proper reply is that of my first head. They are alarmed for others, not uneasy themselves. Because they cannot swim they fancy that others cannot; and do not believe that they could ever themselves learn. If they will never go into the water—probably not. If they will not accept a proved truth, because they do not yet foresee all the consequences to which it may lead, they have very little love of truth, and they are never likely to learn much. They deserve no sympathy, for they are not suffering. Why distress yourself about them?

III. But, nest, the religion of which we speak is not, what a Greek philosopher or Herbert Spencer would make it, a part of Physics, an effort to solve the problem of Cosmogony; it is an opening of the human heart to the consciousness of a present living, ruling God. All Christians revere the saying: "Blessed the pure in heart j for they shall see God." They believe it (I hope), not only because they find it written in a book, but also because they see it true and find it true. If so, they will not cease to believe it, when they cease to trust the book as authoritative. But some one has said, "Selfishness is Hell, and Love is Heaven." Those who, with Paul, study whatever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and of good report, whatever is virtuous and praiseworthy; who with James wait for the wisdom from above, pure, peaceable, full of mercy, and good fruits;—are certainly not far from the consciousness of Heaven and of God's presence. The love of man ordinarily leads, by a pretty short cut, both to the knowledge of God and to the love of God: and how else did [unclear: Apostles] get it? Let none imagine that outward sights or miracles avail. What signifies it to sec a bright light or hear a voice? To fling away selfishness, to live for others, to form noble aims, to mortify, mean and base desires, to limit our personal needs and personal indulgences, that we may the better support the weak,—all such moral inward deveopement is to become nobler and calmer, and will, if anything can, quell religious agitations at the loss of a favorite old erred. If any one has dropt belief in God entirely, with his belief that the Bible is immaculate, his paralysis is gone very far, if I may speak thus dogmatically; but if, while thus losing his belief, he is distressed at the loss, my full persuasion is, that by cultivating all noble and loving sentiment he will win back a ereed wiser and happier [unclear: than] the old. But this is no task for mere logic. The weapons of the warfare are spiritual.

But here, you tell me, that when you speak to this effect, people reply,—"It is all true, but they cannot be good." Christians and Jews may with reason say this as well as others. Pure perfect goodness cannot be in finite beings; we do but make approaches, each in his own measure, struggling up, day by day, to something higher. Have you really met with so much as one person, who seriously says to you: "While I believed the Bible to be an infallible book, I was conscious of inward power from God to be good (in my measure): his grace supported me in right doing, But, alas! since I have lost my belief in the Bible, I have lost all inward power to be good, in the sense and measure in which I was good before." I never knew such a case. I can only conceive of it in one who has been taught morality on false dogmatic foundations; and when he finds these to be rotten, is carried into immorality by the force of temptation. This is a lamentable possibility, and the recovery may be slow. But then, it is not you whom he must blame, but page 11 the dogmatic system. By this, I do not mean the Bible, but the modern narrowing down of everything to the Bible. At the same time, here also I suspect that your complainant, who says, "I cannot be good," is not speaking for hit actual, but for his theoretical self; and means only to say, "I think I should lose moral power, if I were to lose my faith in live Bible." A sufficient reply is, "Perhaps so, if your morality is puerile and ill-founded; if not, not."

IV. But, after all, I may be told that I quite misstate the case. Your complainant believes in all Natural Religion, but is sad to lose confidence in those things which the Bible has superadded to Natural Religion; and his question was, "What have we got to rely on concerning Immortality or a Futnre State., if we cannot rely on the Bible?" or, "What assurance can I have concerning my own Salvation, if, &c.?" I conjecturally insert such words. At this one must ask, Is it a selfish fear that distresses you? Where did you learn to be afraid that God would be hard upon you? If past guilt, in which you have injured other, lies on you conscience, and you did not make restitution to the utmost of your power while you were a Biblist, such peace as you then had was false and rotten. Let us hope better things. But if nothing of guilt remains, but sin against yourself and God, do you suppose your personality no mighty that God is a sufferer by you? Can you imagine that he desires anything else but your goodness? If you fear his vengeance, whence did you learn to fear? These fears are mere indications that you have not yet duly unlearned the errors of your old creed. His only "vengeance" is felt in the natural consequences of sin and crime, which he is too wise to repeal.

But if the complainant's selfishness take this form, "Alas! I thought I was going to have immortal glory, to sit on a throme with the Almighty Judge, to wear a crown, and to judge the nations with Him, but you, Mr. Scott! have cruelly robbed me of my delicious dream: what do you give me back for it?" I think you may safely reply, "The chance of learning to be less selfish." The true Heaven does not consist in aspirations quite ridiculous in puny man, but rather in self-forgetfulness; in that faith which says, "Let me do the will of God, and be swallowed up in his work. Conscious that his goodness is perfect, let me spend not a thought on the contingencies of my future, which he will provide as his wisdom gees good."

So much for self. But I am gravely sensible that these is another view of Immortality in which self is quite forgotten; in which the enlargement of man's destiny beyond the grave is viewed as ennobling our nature, and assuaging the grief with which we see human afflictions end in dark moral degradation. Such a doctrine of Immortality is incumbered with severe logical difficulties to a Theist, but with fewer (I think) than those which meet a Biblical Christian. To speak egotistically;—in my book on the 'Soul,' I expressed little but negations concerning the doctrine of Immortality: in my book called Theism,' I have elaborately developed all the arguments which commend themselves to me. When I read them, I find them very powerful. Some of them are even short enough, if sound, to generate vivid electric faith. The discomfort to me is, that they do not wholly refute, they rather outweigh, arguments on the other side; and where you deal with a balanced argument, you strike the balance differently, I believe, in different frames of mind, Perhaps when I am too much pre-engaged by sense, and too little devout, the spiritual arguments for Immortality lose force with me. Whether that is the explanation, I cannot tell: but I frankly confess, that what at one time I think to bring full conviction, at another time seems overbalanced by objections. I do not at all imagine (hat I have solved the problem. I sometime think that the half-faith which I sustain may be precisely the thing most wholesome to man: and indeed, is it not unreasonable to expect to see clearly through such a veil as Death? Yet there are Theists, as Theodore Parker, and Muzzini, and earlier, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, with whom page 12 Immortality was an axiom. When many minds cultivate hoi [unclear: less] and piety independently, will not their co-operation gradually develop higher and surer truths than we have yet attained? Let your complainant exercise the grace of waiting for light, and of hoping that more light may dawn on our successors than God has yet granted to us.