rx , mtttarg __ _ A _ _ AC 8 . G52 1897 1 , Gladstone, W. E. 1809-1898. Later gleanings ■ jfl Is w;~. LATER GLEANINGS. A NEW SERIES OF GLEANINGS OF PAST YEARS. 0" ' BY THE RIGHT HON. W. E /GLADSTONE. THEOLOGICAL AND ECCLESIASTICAL. NEW YOEK : CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS, 153-157, FIFTH AVENUE. 1897. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/latergleaningsneOOglad TABLE OF CONTENTS. - KX - PAGES I. Dawn op Creation and of Worship ... 1-39 II. Proem to Genesis ... ... ... 40-76 III. ‘Robert Elsjiere:’ the Battle op Belief... 77-117 IV. Ingersoll on Christianity ... ... 118-158 V. The Elizabethan Settlement of Religion 159-180 Yl. Queen Elizabeth and the Church of England 181-218 VII. The Church under Henry VIII. ... ... 219-245 VIII. Professor Huxley and the Swine-Miracle 246-279 IX. The Place of Heresy and Schism in the Modern Christian Church ... ... 280-311 X. True and False Conceptions of the Atone¬ ment ... ... ... ... ... 312-337 XI. The Lord’s Day ... ... ... ... 338-351 XII. General Introduction to Sheppard’s Pic¬ torial Bible ... ... ... ... 352-403 XIII. SOLILOQUIUM AND POSTSCRIPT ... ... 404-426 I. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP.* 1885. t Among recent works on the origin and history of reli¬ gions by distinguished authors, a somewhat conspicuous place may be awarded to the ‘ Prolegomenes de l’Histoire des Religions,’ by Dr. Reville, Professor in the College of France, and Hibbert Lecturer in 1884. The volume has been translated into English by Mr. Squire, and the translation comes forth with all the advantage, and it is great, which can be conferred by an Introduction from the pen of Professor Max Muller ; and it appears, if I may presume so to speak of it, to be characterized, among other merits, by marked ingenuity and acuteness, breadth of field, great felicity of phrase, evident candour of intention, and abundant courtesy. Whether its contents are properly placed as prolego¬ mena may at once be questioned ; for surely the proper office of prolegomena is to present preliminaries, and not results. Such is not, however, the aim of this work. It starts from assuming the subjective origin of all * Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century. f See the ‘ Prolegomena to the History of Religions/ by Dr. Reville. My references throughout are to the translation by Mr. Squire (Williams & Norgate, 1884). I. B 2 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. religions, which are viewed as so many answers to the call of a strong human appetite for that kind of food, and are examined as the several varieties of one and the same species. The conclusions of opposing inquirers, however, are not left to be confuted by a collection of facts and testimonies drawn from historical investiga¬ tion, but are thrust out of the way beforehand in this preface ; for, after all, prolegomena can be nothing but a less homely phrase for a preface. These inquirers are so many pretenders, who have obstructed the passage of the rightful heir to his throne, and they are to be put summarily out of the way, as disturbers of the public peace. The method pursued appears to be not to allow the facts and arguments to dispose of them, but to condemn them before the cause is heard. I do not know how to reconcile this method with Dr. Reville’s declaration that he aims (p. vi.) at proceeding in a “ strictly scientific spirit.” It might be held that such a spirit required the regular presentation of the evidence before the delivery of the verdict upon it. In any case I venture to observe that these are not truly prolego¬ mena, but epilegomena to a History of Religions not yet placed before us. The first enemy whom Dr. Reville despatches is M. de Bonald, as the champion of the doctrine that “ in the very beginning of the human race the creative power revealed to the first men by supernatural means the essential principles of religious truth,” together with “ language and even the art of writing” (pp. 35, 36). In passing, Dr. Reville observes that “ the religious schools, which maintain the truth of a primitive reve¬ lation, are guided by a very evident theological interest ” {ibid.) ; the Protestant, to fortify the authority of the DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 3 Bible ; and the Roman Catholic, to prop the infallibility of the Church. It is doubtless true that the doctrine of a primitive revelation tends to fortify the authority of religion. But is it not equally true, and equally obvious, that the denial of a primitive revelation tends to undermine it ? and, if so, might it not be retorted upon the school of Dr. Reville that the schools which deny a primitive revelation are guided by a very evident anti-theological interest ? Against this antagonist Dr. Reville observes, inter alia (p. 37), that an appeal to the supernatural is per se inadmissible ; that a divine revelation, containing the sublime doctrines of the purest inspiration, given to man at an age indefinitely remote, and in a state of “ absolute ignorance,” is “ infinitely hard ” to imagine ; that it is not favoured by analogy ; and that it con¬ tradicts all that we know of prehistoric man (p. 40). Thus far it might perhaps be contended in reply, (1) that the preliminary objection to the supernatural is a pure petitio principii, and wholly repugnant to “ scientific method ; ” (2) that it is not inconceivable that revelation might be indefinitely graduated, as well as human know¬ ledge and condition ; (3) that it is in no way repugnant to analogy, if the greatest master of analogy, Bishop Butler,* may be heard upon the subject ; and (4) that our earliest information about the races from which we are least remote, Aryan, Semitic, Accadian, or Egyptian, offers no contradiction and no obstacle to the idea of their having received, or inherited, portions of some knowledge divinely revealed. I will take upon me to * ‘Analogy,’ P. II. ch. ii. § 7. 4 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. add, that they offer many topics of support to such a supposition. But I do not now enter upon these topics, as I have a more immediate and defined concern with the work of Dr. Reville. It only came within the last few months to my know¬ ledge that, at a period when my cares and labours of a distinct order were much too absorbing to allow of any attention to archaeological history, Dr. Reville had done me the honour to select me as the representative of those writers who find warrant for the assertion of a primitive revelation in the testimony of the Holy Scriptures. This is a distinction which I do not at all deserve ; first, because Dr. Reville might have placed in the field champions much more competent and learned * than myself ; secondly, because I have never attempted to give the proof of such a warrant. I have never written cx professo on the subject of it ; but it is true that, in a work published nearly thirty years ago, when destructive criticism was less advanced than it now is, I assumed it as a thing generally received, at least in this country. Upon some of the points, which group themselves round that assumption, my views, like those of many other inquirers, have been stated more crudely at an early, and more maturely at more than one later period. I admit that variation or development imposes a hardship upon critics, notwithstanding all their desire to be just ; especially, may I say, upon such critics as, traversing ground of almost boundless extent, can hardly, except in the rarest cases, be minutely and closely acquainted with every portion of it. * I will only name one of the most recent, Dr. Reusch, the author of ‘ Bibel und Natur’ (Bonn, 1876). DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. I also admit to Dr. Reville, and indeed I contend by his side, that in an historical inquiry the mere authority of Scripture cannot be alleged in proof of the existence of a primitive revelation. So to allege it is a preliminary assumption of the supernatural, and is in my view a manifest departure from the laws of “ scientific ” pro¬ cedure : as palpable a departure, may I venture to say ? as that preliminary exclusion of the supernatural which I have already presumed to notice. My own offence, if it be one, was of another character ; and was committed in the early days of Homeric study, when my eyes per¬ haps were dazzled with the amazing richness and variety of the results which reward all close investigation of the text of Homer, so that objects were blurred for a time in my view, which soon came to stand with greater clearness before me. I had better perhaps state at once what my contention really is. It is, first, that many important pictures drawn, and indications given, in the Homeric poems supply such evidence as cannot be confuted not only of an ideal but of an historical relationship to the Hebrew traditions, (1) and mainly, as they are recorded in the Book of Genesis ; (2) as less authentically to be gathered from the later Hebrew learning ; and (3) as illustrated from extraneous sources. Secondly, any attempt to expound the Olympian mythology of Homer wholesale, and by simple reference to a solar theory, or even to Nature worship in a larger sense, is simply a plea for a verdict against the evidence. It is also true that I have an unshaken belief in a Divine Revelation, not resting on assumption, but made obligatory upon me by reason. But I hold the last of these convictions entirely apart from the others, and I derived the first and second not 6 PAWN OF CREATION ANP OF WORSHIP. from preconception, of which I had not a grain, but from the poems themselves, as purely as I derived my knowledge of the Peloponnesian War from Thucydides or his interpreters. The great importance of this contention I do not deny. I have produced in its favour a great mass of evidence, which, as far as I have seen, there has been no serious endeavour, if indeed any endeavour, to repel. Dr. Reville observes that my views have been subjected to “ very profound criticism ” by Sir G. Cox in his learned work on Aryan mythology (p. 41). That is indeed a very able criticism ; but it is addressed entirely to the statements of my earliest Homeric work.* Now, apart from the question whether those statements have been rightly understood (which I cannot admit), that which he attacks is beyond and outside of the proposition which I have given above. Sir G. Cox has not attempted to decide the question whether there was a primitive revelation, or whether it may be traced in Homer. And I may say that I am myself so little satisfied with the precise form, in which my general conclusions were originally clothed, that I have not reprinted and shall not reprint the work, which has become very rare, only appearing now and then in some catalogue, and at a high price. When there are repre¬ sentatives living and awake, why disturb the ashes of the dead? In later works, reaching from 1865 to 1875, f I have confessed to the modification of my results, and have stated the case in terms which appear to me, using * ‘ Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age,’ 3 vols. Oxford, 1858, f ‘Address to the University of Edinburgh’ (Murray, 1865); ‘ Juventus Mundi ’ (Macmillan, 1868); ‘Primer of Homer’ (Mac¬ millan, 1878); especially see Preface to ‘ Juventus Mundi,’ p. 1. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 7 the common phrase, to be those yielded by the legitimate study of comparative religion. But why should those, who think it a sound method of comparative religion to match together the Yedas, the Norse legends, and the Egyptian remains, think it to be no process of com¬ parative religion to bring together, not vaguely and loosely, but in searching detail, certain traditions of the Book of Genesis and those recorded in the Homeric poems, and to argue that their resemblances may afford proof of a common origin, without any anticipatory assumption as to what that origin may ultimately prove to be ? It will hardly excite surprise, after what has now been written, when I say I am now unable to accept as mine any one of the propositions which Dr. Reville (pp. 41-2) affiliates to me. (1) I do not hold that there was a “ systematic ” or wilful corruption of a primitive religion. (2) I do not hold that all the mythologies are due to any such corruption systematic or otherwise. (3) I do not hold that no part of them sprang out of the deification of natural facts. (4) I do not hold that the ideas conveyed in the Book of Genesis, or in any Hebrew tradition, were developed in the form of dogma, as is said by Sir G. Cox,* or in asix great doctrines’’ as is conceived by Dr. Reville ; and (5) I am so far from ever having held that there was “ a primitive orthodoxy ” revealed to the first men (p. 43) that I have carefully from the first referred not to developed doctrine, but to rudimentary indications of what are now developed and established truths. So that, although Dr. Beville asks me for proof, I decline to supply proofs * ‘Aryan Mythology,’ vol. i. p. 15. 8 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. of what I disbelieve. What I have supplied proofs of is the appearance in the Poems of a number of traits, incongruous in various degrees with their immediate environment, but having such marked and characteristic resemblances to the Hebrew tradition as to require of us, in the character of rational inquirers, the admission of a common origin, just as the markings, which are sometimes noticed upon the coats of horses and donkeys, are held to require the admission of their relationship to the zebra. It thus appears that Dr. Reville has discharged his pistol in the air, for my Homeric propositions involve no assumption as to a revelation contained in the Book of Genesis, while he has not ex jprofesso contested my statements of an historical relationship between some traditions of that book and those of the Homeric poems. But I will now briefly examine (1) the manner in which Dr. Reville handles the Book of Genesis, and (2) the manner in which he undertakes, by way of specimen, to construe the mythology of Homer, and enlists it, by comparison, in the support of his system of interpretation. And first with the first-named of these two subjects. Entering a protest against assigning to the Book “ a dictatorial authority,” that is, I presume, against its containing any Divine revelation to anybody, he passes on to examine its contents. It contains, he says, scientific errors, of which (p. 42, n.) he specifies three. His charges are that (1) it speaks of the heaven as a solid vault; (2) it places the creation of the stars after that of the earth, and so places them solely for its use ; (3) it introduces the vegetable kingdom before that kingdom could be subjected to the action of solar light. All these condemnations are quietly enunciated in a DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 9 note, as if they were subject to no dispute. Let us see. As to the first : if our scholars are right in their judgment, just made known to the world by the recent revision of the Old Testament, the “firmament ” is, in the Hebrew original,* not a solid vault, but an expanse. As to the second (a) it is not said in the sacred text that the stars were made solely for the use of the earth ; ( b ) it is true that no other use is mentioned. That is to say, in the case of the stars, no use or time is named. They give us light, but an ineffectual light ; and the reference to them is little more than parenthetical, and is in keeping with that secondary character, which alone they hold in reference to the earth. For, all along, we must here inquire what was the purpose of the narrative ? Not to rear cosmic philosophers, but to furnish ordinary, and especially primitive, men with some idea of what the Creator had done in the way of providing for them a home, and giving them a place in nature. The assertion that the stars are stated to have been “created ” after the earth is more serious. But here it becomes necessary first of all to notice the recital in this part of the indictment. In the language of Dr. Reville, the Book speaks of the creation of the stars after the formation of the earth. Now, curiously enough, the Book says nothing either of the “ formation ” of the earth, or of the “ creation ” of the stars. It says in its first line that “ in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” It says further on,j “He made the stars also.” Can it be urged that this is a fanciful distinction between * The (TTepew/bia of the Septuagint is construed in conformity with the Hebrew. f Gen. i. 16. 10 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. creating on the one hand and making, forming, or fashioning on the other ? Dante did not think so, for, speaking of the Divine Will, he says : — “ Cio ck’ Ella cria, e che Natura face.” * Luther did not think so, for he uses scJiuf in the first verse, and maclite in the sixteenth. The English Trans¬ lators and their Revisers did not think so, for they use the words “ created ” and “ made ” in the two passages respectively. The main question, however, is what did the author of the Book think, and what did he intend to convey ? The LXX drew no distinction, pro¬ bably for the simple reason that, as the idea of creation proper was not familiar to the Greeks, their language conveyed no word better than poiein to express it, which is also the proper word for fashioning or making. But the Hebrew, it seems, had the distinction, and by the writer of Genesis i. it has been strictly, to Dr. Reville I might almost say scientifically, followed. He uses the word “created” on the three grand occasions (1) of the beginning of the mighty work (v. 1) ; (2) of the beginning of animal life (v. 21) “And God created great whales,” and every living creature that peoples the waters ; (3) of the yet more important beginning of rational and spiritual life ; “ so God created man in His own image ” (v. 27). In every other instance, the simple command is recited, or a word implying less than creation is employed. From this very marked mode of use, it is surely plain that a marked distinction of sense was intended by the sacred writer. I will not attempt a definition of the * ‘ Paradiso,’ iii, 87. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 11 distinction further than this, that the one phrase points more to calling into a separate or individual existence, the other more to shaping and fashioning the conditions of that existence ; the one to quid , the other to quale. Our Earth, created in v. 1, undergoes structural change, different arrangement of material, in v. 9. After this, and in the fourth day, comes not the original creation, but the location, or exhibition in the firmament, of the sun and the moon. Of their “ creation ” nothing particular has been said ; for no use, palpable to man, was associated with it before their perfect, or at least sufficient, equipment. Does it not seem allowable to suppose that in the “heavens” '* (v. 1), of which after the first outset we hear no more, were included the planetary bodies ? In any case what is afterwards con¬ veyed is not the calling into existence of the sun and moon, but the assignment to them of a certain place and orbit respectively, with a light-giving power. Is there the smallest inconsistency in a statement which places the emergence of our land, and its separation from the sea, and the commencement of vegetable life, before the more full and gathered concentration of light in the sun, and its reflection on the moon and the planets ? In the gradual severance of other elements, would not the severance of the luminous body, or force, be gradual also? And why, let me ask of Dr. Reville, as there would plainly be light diffused before there was light concentrated, why may not that light diffused have been * In our translation, and in the recent Revision, the singular is used. But we are assured that the Hebrew word is plural (Bishop of Winchester on Genesis i. 1 in the Speaker’s Bible). If so taken, we have the creation, visible to us, treated conjointly in verses 1-5, dis- tributively in verses 6-19; surely a most orderly arrangement. 12 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. sufficient for the purposes of vegetation ? There was soil, there was atmosphere, there was moisture, there was light. What more could be required ? Need we go beyond our constant experience to be aware that the process of vegetation, though it may be slackened or suspended, is not arrested, when, through the presence of cloud and vapour, the sun’s globe becomes to us in¬ visible ? The same observations may apply to the light of the planets ; while as to the other stars, such as were then perceptible to the human eye, we know nothing. The planets, being luminous bodies only through the action of the sun, could not be luminous until such a degree of light, or of light-force, was accumulated upon or in the sun, as to make them spherically luminous, instead of being either “ silent as tlie moon, When she deserts the night Hid in her vacant interlunar cave,” * or at least unprovided with definite luminous figure. Is it not then the fact, thus far, that the impeachment of the Book has fallen to the ground ? There remains to add only one remark, the propriety of which is, I think, indisputable. Easy comprehension and impressive force are the objects to be aimed at in a composition at once popular and summary ; but these cannot always be had without some departure from accurate classification, and from the order of minute detail. It seems much more easy to justify the language of the opening verses of Genesis than, for example, the convenient usage by which we affirm that the sun rises, or mounts above the horizon, and sets, or descends below it, when we * ‘ Samson Agonistes.’ DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 13 know perfectly well that he does neither the one nor the other. As to the third charge of scientific error, that the vegetable kingdom appeared before it could be subjected to the action of solar light, it has already been in substance disposed of. If the light now appro¬ priated to the sun alone was gradually gathering towards and round his centre, why may it not have performed its proper office in contributing to vegetation when once the necessary degree of severance between solid and fluid, between wet and dry, had been effected ? And this is just what had been described in the forma¬ tion of the firmament, and the separation of land from sea. More singular still seems to be the next observation offered by Dr. Reville in his compound labour to satisfy his readers, first, that there is no revelation in Genesis, and secondly that, if there be, it is one which has no serious or relevant meaning. He comes to the remark¬ able expression, in v. 26, “ Let us make man in our own image.” There has, it appears, been much difference of opinion even among the Jews on the meaning of this verse. The Almighty addresses, as some think, His own powers ; as others think, the angels ; others, the earth ; other writers, especially, as it appears, Germans, have understood this to be a plural of dignity, after the manner of kings. Others, of the rationalising school, conceive the word Elohim to be a relic of polytheism. The ancient Christian interpreters,* from the Apostle Barnabas onwards, find in these words an indication of a plurality in the Divine Unity. Dr. Reville (p. 43) * On this expression, I refer again to the commentary of Bishop Harold Browne. Bishop Mant supplies an interesting list of testimonies. 14 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. holds that this is “ simply the royal plural used in Hebrew as in many other languages,” or else, “ and more probably,” that it is an appeal to the Bene Elohim or angels. But is not this latter meaning a direct assault upon the supreme truth of the Unity of God ? If he chooses the former, from whence does he derive his knowledge that this “ royal plural ” was used in Hebrew ? Will the royal plural account for (Gen. iii. 22), “ when the man is become as one of us”? and would George the Second, if saying of Charles Edward, “ the man is become as one of us,” have intended to convey a singular or a plural meaning ? Can we dis¬ prove the assertion of Bishop Harold Browne, that this plurality of dignity is unknown to the language of Scripture ? And further, if we make the violent assumption that the Christian Church with its one voice is wrong and Dr. Beville right, and that the words were not meant to convey the idea of plurality, yet, if they have been such as to lead all Christendom to see in them this idea through 1800 years, how can he be sure that they did not convey a like signification to the earliest hearers or readers of the Book of Genesis ? The rest of Dr. Reville’s criticism is directed rather to the significance or propriety, than to the truth, of the record. It is not necessary to follow his remarks in detail, but it will help the reader to judge how far even a perfectly upright member of the scientific and com¬ parative school can indulge an unconscious bias, if notice be taken in a single instance of his method of com¬ paring. He compares together the two parts of the prediction that the seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent, and that the serpent shall bruise the heel of the seed of the woman (iii. 15); and he DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 15 conceives the head and the heel to be so much upon a par in their relation to the faculties and the vitality of a man that he can find here nothing to indicate which shall get the better, or, in his own words, “ on which side shall be the final victory ” (p. 45). St. Paul seems to have taken a different view when he wrote, “ the God of peace shall bruise Satan under your feet shortly ” (Rom. xvi. 20). Moreover “ our author ” (in Dr. Reville's phrase) is censured because he “takes special care to point out” (p. 44) u that the first pair are as yet strangers to the most elementary notions of morality,” inasmuch as they are unclothed, yet without shame ; nay, even, as he feelingly says, “ without the least shame.” In what the morality of the first pair consisted, this is hardly the place to discuss. But let us suppose for a moment that their morality was simply the morality of a little child, the undeveloped morality of obedience, without distinctly formed conceptions of an ethical or abstract standard. Is it not plain that their feelings would have been exactly what the Book describes (Gen. ii. 25), and yet that in their loving obedience to their Father and Creator they would certainly have had a germ, let me say an opening bud, of morality ? But this proposition, taken alone, by no means does justice to the case. Dr. Reville would probably put aside with indifference or contempt all that depends upon the dogma of the Fall. And yet there can be no more rational idea, no idea more palpably sustained, whether by philosophy or by experience. Namely this idea : that the commission of sin, that is the act of deliberately breaking a known law of duty, injures the nature and composition of the being who commits it. It injures that nature by 16 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. deranging it, by altering the proportion of its parts and powers, by introducing an inward disorder and rebellion of the lower against the higher, too mournfully corre¬ sponding with all the disorder and rebellion produced outwardly, as towards God, of which the first sin was the fountain head. Such is, I believe, the language of Christian theology, and in particular of St. Augustine, one of its prime masters. On this matter I apprehend that Dr. Reville, when judging the author of Genesis, judges him without regard to his fundamental ideas and aims, one of which was to convey that before sinning man was a being morally and physically balanced, and nobly pure in every faculty ; and that, by and from his sinning, the sense of shame found a proper and necessary place in a nature which before was only open to the sense of duty and of reverence. One further observation only. Dr. Reville seems to 11 score one” when he finds (Gen. iv. 26) that Seth had a son, and that “ then began men to call on the name of the Lord ; ” “ but not,” he adds, “ as the result of a recorded revelation.” Here at last he has found, or seemed to find, the beginning of religion, and that beginning subjective, not revealed. So hastily, from the first aspect of the text, does he gather a verbal advantage, which, upon the slightest inquiry, would have disappeared, like dew in the morning sun. He assumes the rendering of a text which has been the subject of every kind of question and dispute, the only thing apparently agreed on by others being, that his interpretation is wholly excluded. Upon a disputed original, and a disputed interpretation of the disputed original, he founds a signification in flat contradiction to the whole of the former narrative, to Elohist and DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 17 Jehovist alike ; which narrative, if it represents any¬ thing, represents a continuity of active reciprocal rela¬ tion between God and man both before and after the transgression. Not to mention differences of transla¬ tion, which essentially change the meaning of the words, the text itself is given by the double authority of the Samaritan Pentateuch * and of the Septuagint in the singular number, which of itself wholly destroys the construction of Dr. Reville. I do not enter upon the difficult question of conflicting authorities : but I urge that it is unsafe to build an important conclusion upon a seriously controverted reading, f In the criticisms, then, of Dr. Reville we find what rather tends to confirm than to impair the old-fashioned belief that there is a revelation in the Book of Genesis. With his argument outside this proposition I have not dealt. I make no assumption as to what is termed a verbal inspiration, and of course, in admitting the variety, I give up the absolute integrity of the text. Upon the presumable age of the book and its compila¬ tion I do not enter — not even to contest the opinion which brings it down below the age of Solomon — beyond observing that in every page it appears from internal evidence to belong to a remote antiquity. There is here no question of the chronology, or of the date of man, or of knowledge or ignorance in the primitive man ; or whether the element of parable enters into any portion * See Bishop of Winchester’s ‘ Commentary.’ f This perplexed question is discussed, in a sense adverse to the Septuagint, by the critic of the recent Revision, in the Quarterly Review for October, No. 322. The Revisers of the Old Testament state (Preface, p. vi.) that in a few cases of extreme difficulty they have set aside the Massoretic Text in favour of a reading from one of the Ancient Versions. I. C 18 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. of the narrative ; or whether every statement of fact contained in the text of the Book, can now be made good. It is enough for my present purpose to point to the cosmogony, and the fourfold succession of the living organisms, as entirely harmonising, according to present knowledge, with belief in a revelation, and as presenting to the rejector of that belief a problem, which demands solution at his hands, and which he has not yet been able to solve. Whether this revelation was conveyed to the ancestors of the whole human race who have at the time or since existed, I do not know, and the Scrip¬ ture does not appear to me to make the affirmation, even if they do not convey certain indications which favour a contrary opinion. Again, whether it contains the whole of the knowledge specially vouchsafed to the parents of the Noachian races, may be very doubtful ; though of course great caution must be exercised in regard to the particulars of any primaeval tradition not derived from the text of the earliest among the sacred Books. I have thus far confined myself to rebutting objections. But I will now add some positive considera¬ tions which appear to me to sustain the ancient, and as I am persuaded impregnable, belief of Christians and of Jews concerning the inspiration of the Book. I offer them as one wholly destitute of that kind of knowledge which carries authority, and who speaks derivatively as best he can, after listening to teachers of repute and such as practise rational methods. I understand the stages of the majestic process de¬ scribed in the Book of Genesis to be in general outline as follows : — 1. The point of departure is the formless mass, created by God, out of which the earth (and not the earth DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 19 alone) was shaped and constituted a thing of individual existence (vers. 1, 2). 2. The detachment and collection of light, leaving in darkness as it proceeded the still chaotic mass from which it was detached (vers. 3-5). The narrative assigning a space of time to each process appears to show that each was gradual, not instantaneous. 3. The detachment of light from darkness is followed by the detachment of wet from dry, and of solid from liquid, in the firmament, and on the face of the earth. Each of these operations occupies a “ day ; ” and the conditions of vegetable life, as known to us by experience, being now provided, the order of the vegetable kingdom began (vers. 6-13). 4. Next comes the presentation to us of the heavenly bodies — sun, moon, and stars — in their definite forms, when the completion of the process of light-collection and concentration in the sun, and the due clearing of the intervening spaces, had enabled the central orb to illuminate us both with direct and with reflected light (vers. 14-19). 5. So far, we have been busy only with the adjust¬ ment of material agencies. We now arrive at the dawn of animated being ; and a great transition seems to be marked as a kind of recommencement of the work, for the name of creation is again introduced. God created — (a) The water-population ; ( b ) The air-population. And they receive His benediction (vers. 20-23). 6. Pursuing this regular progression from the lower to the higher, from the simple to the complex, the text now gives us the work of the sixth “day,” which supplies 20 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. the land-population — air and water having already been supplied. But in it there is a sub-division, and the transition from (c) animal to ( d ) man, like the transition from inanimate to animate, is again marked as a great occasion, a kind of recommencement. For this purpose the word ‘ £ create ” is a third time em¬ ployed. “ God created man in His own image,” and once more He gave benediction to this the final work of His hands, and endowed our race with its high dominion over what lived and what did not live (vers. 24-31). I do not dwell on the cessation of the Almighty from the creating and (ii. 1) “finishing” work, which is the “ rest” and marks the seventh “day,” because it intro¬ duces another order of considerations. But glancing back at the narrative which now forms the first Chapter, I offer perhaps a prejudiced, and in any case no more than a passing, remark. If we view it as popular narrative, it is singularly vivid, forcible, and effective ; if we take it as poem, it is indeed sublime. No wonder if it became classical and reappeared in the glorious devotions of the Hebrew people,* pursuing, in a great degree, the same order of topics as in the Book of Genesis. But the question is not here of a lofty poem, or a skilfully constructed narrative: it is whether natural science, in the patient exercise of its high calling to examine facts, finds that the works of God cry out against what we have fondly believed to be His Word, and tell another tale ; or whether, in this nineteenth century of Christian progress, it substantially echoes * Ps. civ. 2-20 ; exxxvi. 5-9 ; and the Song of the Three Children in vers. 57-60. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 21 back the majestic sound which, before physical science existed as a pursuit, went forth into all lands. First, looking largely at the latter portion of the narrative, which describes the creation of living organ¬ isms, and waiving details, on some of which (as in ver. 24) the Septuagint seems to vary from the Hebrew, there is a grand fourfold division, set forth- in an orderly succession of times as follows : on the fifth day — 1. The water-population ; 2. The air-population ; and, on the sixth day, 3. The land-population of animals ; 4. The land-population consummated in man. Now, this same fourfold order is understood to have been so affirmed in our time by natural science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and estab¬ lished fact/"' Then, I ask, how came Moses, or, not to cavil on the word, how came the author of the first Chapter of Genesis, to know that order, to possess knowledge which natural science has only within the present century for the first time dug out of the bowels of the earth ? It is surely impossible to avoid the conclusion, first, that either this writer was gifted with faculties passing all human experience, or else his know¬ ledge was divine. The first branch of the alternative is truly nominal and unreal. We know the sphere within which human inquiry toils. W e know the heights to * The proposition conveyed in this sentence requires some qualifica¬ tion. As regards the general sketch of the fourfold order, it is too succinct to convey anything material. But the candid reader will observe that while this order is stated generally, no attempt is made to assert the completeness of the outline, or to exclude the overlapping of periods, or the intermixture of processes, neither of which impair the force of the argument. See a following paper, ‘ Proem to Genesis.’ 22 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. which the intuitions of genius may soar. We know that in certain cases genius anticipates science ; as Homer, for example, in his account of the conflict of the four winds in sea-storms. But even in these anticipa¬ tions, marvellous, and, so to speak, imperial as they are, genius cannot escape from one inexorable law. It must have materials of sense or experience to work with, and a ttov crrco from whence to take its flight ; and genius can no more tell, apart from some at least of the results attained by inquiry, what are the contents of the crust of the earth, than it could square the circle, or annihilate a fact.* So stands this particular plea for a revelation of truth from God, a plea only to be met by questioning its possibility ; that is, as Hr. Salmon f has observed with great force in a recent work, by suggesting that a Being, able to make man, is unable to communicate with the creature He has made. If, on the other hand, the objector confine himself to a merely negative position, and cast the burden of proof on those who believe in revelation, it is obvious to reply by a reference to the actual constitution of things. Had that constitution been normal or morally undisturbed, it might have been held that revelation as an adminiculum, an addition to our natural faculties, would itself have been a disturb¬ ance. But the disturbance has in truth been created in the other scale of the balance by departure from the Supreme Will, by the introduction of sin ; and revelation, * In conversation with Miss Burney (‘ Diary,’ i. 576), Johnson, using language which sounds more disparaging than it really is, declares that ‘ Genius is nothing more than knowing the use of tools; but then there must be tools for it to use.’ f ‘Introduction to the New Testament,’ p. ix. Murray, 1885. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 23 as a sjiecial remedy for a special evil, is a contribution towards symmetry, and towards restoration of the original equilibrium. Thus far only the fourfold succession of living orders has been noticed. But among the persons of very high authority in natural science quoted by Dr. Reusch,* who held the general accordance of the Mosaic cosmo¬ gony with the results of modern inquiry, are Cuvier and Sir John Herschel. The words of Cuvier show he con¬ ceived that “ every day ” fresh confirmation from the purely human source accrued to the credit of Scripture. And since his day, for he cannot now be called a recent authority, this opinion appears to have received some remarkable illustrations. Half a century ago, Dr. Whewell f discussed, under the name of the nebular hypothesis, that theory of rotation which had been indicated by Herschel, and more largely taught by La Place, as the probable method through which the solar system has taken its form. Carefully abstaining, at that early date, from a formal judgment on the hypothesis, he appears to discuss it with favour ; and he shows that this hypothesis, which assumes “ a beginning of the present state of things,” | is in no way adverse to the Mosaic cosmogony. The theory has received marked support from opposite quarters. In the ‘ Y estiges of Creation 5 it is frankly adopted ; the very curious experiment of Professor * ‘ Bibel und Natur,’ pp. 2, 63. The words of Cuvier are: ‘Moyses hat uns eine Kosmogonie hinterlassen, deren Genauigkeit mit jedem Tage in einer bewunderungswiirdigern Weise bestatigt ist.’ The declaration of Sir John Herschel was in 1864. f Whewell’s ‘ Astronomy and General Physics,’ 1834, p. 181 seqq. X Whewell, op. cit. p. 206. 24 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. Plateau is detailed at length on its behalf ; * and the author considers, with La Place, that the zodiacal light, on which Humboldt in his 1 Kosmos ’ has dwelt at large, may be a remnant of the luminous atmosphere originally diffused around the sun. Dr. McCaul, in his very able argument on the Mosaic Record, quotes f Humboldt, Pfaff, and Madler — a famous German astronomer — as adhering to it. It appears on the whole to be in possession of the field ; and McCaul observes J that, ‘ ‘ had it been devised for the express purpose of re¬ moving the supposed difficulties of the Mosaic record, it could hardly have been more to the purpose.” Even if we were, somewhat daringly, to conceive, with Dr. Reville, that the “creation,” the first gift of separate existence or configuration, to the planets is declared to have been subsequent to that of the earth, there seems to be no known law which excludes such a supposition, especially with respect to the larger and more distant of their number. These, it is to be noticed, are of great rarity as compared with the earth. Why should it be declared impossible that they should have taken a longer time in condensation, like in this point to the comets, which still continue in a state of excessive rarity ? Want of space forbids me to enter into further explanation ; but it requires much more serious efforts and objections than those of Dr. Reville to confute the statement that the extension of knowledge and of inquiry has confirmed the Mosaic record. One word, however, upon the “ days ” of Genesis. We do not hear the authority of Scripture impeached * ‘ Vestiges,’ etc., pp. 11-15. t Ibid. f ‘ Aids to Faith,’ p. 210. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 25 on the ground that it assigns to the Almighty eyes and ears, hands, arms, and feet ; nay, even the emotions of the human being. This being so, I am unable to under¬ stand why any disparagement to the credit of the sacred books should ensue because, to describe the order and successive stages of the Divine working, these have been distributed into “ days.1’ What was the thing required in order to make this great procession of acts intelligible and impressive ? Surely it was to distribute the parts each into some integral division of time, having the character of something complete in itself, of a revo¬ lution, or an outset and return. There are but three such divisions familiarly known to man. Of these the day was the most familiar to human perceptions ; and probably on this account its figurative use is admitted to be found in prophetic texts, as, indeed, it largely pervades ancient and modern speech. Given the object in view, which indeed can hardly be questioned, does it not appear that the “ day,” more definitely separated than either month or year from what precedes and what follows, was appropriately chosen for the purpose of conveying the idea of development by gradation in the process which the Book sets forth ? I now come to the last portion of my task, which is to follow Dr. Reville into his exposition of the Olympian mythology. Not, indeed, the Homeric or Greek religion alone, for he has considered the case of all religions, and disposes of them all with equal facility. Of any other system than the Olympian, it would be presumption in me to speak, as I have, beyond this limit, none but the most vague and superficial knowledge. But on the Olympian system in its earliest and least adulterated, namely its Homeric, development, whether with success 26 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. or not, I have freely employed a large share of such leisure as more than thirty years of my Parliamentary life, passed in freedom from the calls of office, have supplied. I hope that there is not in Dr. Reville’s treatment of other systems that slightness of texture, and that facility and rapidity of conclusion, which seem to me to mark his performances in the Olympian field. In the main he follows what is called the solar theory. In his widest view, he embraces no more than “the religion of nature” (pp. 94, 100), and he holds that all religion has sprung from the worship of objects visible and sensible. His first essay is upon Heracles, whom I have found to be one of the most difficult and, so to speak, irre¬ ducible characters in the Olympian mythology. In the Tyrian system Heracles, as Melkart, says Dr. Reville in p. 95, is “ a brazen god, the devourer of children, the terror of men ; ” but, without any loss of identity, he becomes in the Greek system “ the great lawgiver, the tamer of monsters, the peacemaker, the liberator.” I am deeply impressed with the danger that lurks in these summary and easy solutions ; and I will offer a few words first on the Greek Heracles generally, next on the Homeric presentation of the character. Dr. L. Schmidt has contributed to Smith's great Dictionary a large and careful article on Heracles ; an article which may almost be called a treatise. Unlike Dr. Reville, to whom the matter is so clear, he finds himself out of his depth in attempting to deal with this highly incongruous character, which meets us at so many points, as a whole. But he perceives in the Heracles of Greece a mixture of fabulous and historic elements ; and the mythical basis is not, according to DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 27 him, a transplanted Melkart, but is essentially Greek.* He refers to Buttmann’s ‘ Mythologus ’ and Muller’s ‘ Dorians ’ as the best treatises on the subject, “ both of which regard the hero as a purely Greek character.” Thus Dr. Reville appears to be in conflict with, leading authorities, whom he does not confute, but simply ignores. Homer himself may have felt the difficulty which Dr. Reville does not feel, for he presents to us, in one and the same passage, a divided Heracles. Whatever of him is not eidolon f dwells among the Olympian gods. This eidolon , however, is no mere shade, but something that sees and speaks, that mourns and threatens ; no “lawgiver,” or “peacemaker,” or “ liberator,” but one from whom the other shades fly in terror, set in the place and company of sinners suffering for their sins, and presumably himself in the same predicament, as the sense of grief is assigned to him : it is in wailing that he addresses Odysseus. J Accordingly, while on earth, he is tlirasumemnoii'fe huperthumosfh a doer of me gala crga,\\ which with Homer very commonly are crimes. He is profane, for he wounded Here, the specially Achaian goddess ; ** and he is treacherous, for he killed Iphitos, his host, in order to carry oft* his horses, ff A mixed character, no doubt, or he would not have had Hebe for a partner ; but those which I have stated are some of the difficulties which Dr. Reville quietly rides over to describe him as lawgiver, peacemaker, and liberator. In Homer he is no lawgiver, and he never makes peace. But I proceed. * Smith’s ‘Diet.’ ii. 400. f ‘ Od.’ xi. 601-4. t ‘ Od.’ xi. 605-16. § ‘ Od.’ xi. 267. If ‘ II.’ xiv. 250. [| ‘Od.’ xxi. 26. ** ‘II.’ v. 392. ff ‘ Od.’ xxi. 26-30. 28 DAWN OP CREATION AND OP WORSHIP. Nearly everything, with Dr. Reville, and, indeed, with his school, has to be pressed into the service of the solar theory ; and if the evidence will not bear it, so much the worse for the evidence. Thus Ixion, tortured in the later Greek system on a wheel, which is some¬ times represented as a burning wheel, is made (p. 105) to be the Sun ; the luminary whose splendour and beneficence had rendered him, according to the theory, the centre of all Aryan worship. A sorry use to put him to ; but let that pass. Now the occasion that supplies an Ixion and a burning wheel available for solarism — a system which prides itself above all things on its exhibiting the primitive state of things — is that Ixion had loved unlawfully the wife of Zeus. And first as to the wheel. We hear of it in Pindar ;* but as a winged, not a burning wheel. This “ solar ” feature appears, I believe, nowhere but in the latest and most defaced and adulterated mythology. Next as to the punishment. It is of a more respectable antiquity. But some heed should surely be taken of the fact that the oldest authority upon Ixion is Homer ; and that Homer affords no plea for a burning or any other wheel, for according to him,| instead of Ixion’s loving the wife of Zeus, it was Zeus who loved the wife of Ixion. Errors, conveyed without testimony in a sentence, commonly require many sentences to confute them. I will not dwell on minor cases, or those purely fanciful ; for mere fancies, which may be admired or the reverse, are impalpable to the clutch of argument, and thus are hardly subjects for confutation. Paulo major a canamus. I continue to tread the field of Greek mythology, * 4 Pyth.’ ii. 39. f ‘II.* xiv. 317. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 29 because it is the favourite sporting-ground of the exclusivists of the solar theory. We are told (p. 80) that because waves with rounded backs may have the appearance (but query ?) of horses or sheep throwing themselves tumultuously upon one another, therefore “ in maritime regions, the god of the liquid element, Poseidon or Neptune, is the breeder, protector, and trainer of horses.” Then why is he not also the breeder, protector, and trainer of sheep ? They have quite as good a maritime title ; according to the line line of Ariosto — “ Muggendo van per mare i gran montoni.” I am altogether sceptical about these rounded backs of horses, which, more, it seems, than other backs, become conspicuous like a wave. The resemblance, I believe, has commonly been drawn between the horse, as regards his mane, and the foam-tipped waves, which are still sometimes called white horses. But we have here, at best, a case of a great superstructure built upon a slight foundation ; when it is attempted, on the ground¬ work of a mere simile, having reference to a state of sea which in the Mediterranean is not the rule but the rare exception, to frame an explanation of the close, per¬ vading, and almost profound relation of the Homeric Poseidon to the horse. Long and careful investigation has shown me that this is an ethnical relation, and a key to important parts of the ethnography of Homer. But the proof of this proposition would require an essay of itself. I will, therefore, only refer to the reason which leads Hr. Reville to construct this (let me say) castle in the air. It is because he thinks he is account¬ ing hereby for a fact, which would indeed, if established, 30 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. be a startling one, that the gocl of the liquid element should also be the god of the horse. We are dealing- now especially with the Homeric Poseidon, for it is in Homer that the relation to the horse is developed ; and the way to a true explanation is opened when we observe that the Homeric Poseidon is not the god of the liquid element, as such, at all. The truth is that the Olympian and ruling gods of Homer are not elemental. Some few of them bear the marks of having been elemental in other systems ; but, on admission into the Achaian heaven, they are divested of their elemental features. In the case of Poseidon, there is no sign that he ever had these elemental features. The signs are unequivocal that he had been worshipped as supreme, as the Zeus-Poseidon, by certain races and in certain, viz. in far southern, countries. Certainly he has a special relation to the sea. Once, and once only, do we hear of his having a habitation under water.* It is in ‘II.’ xiii. where he fetches his horses from it, to repair to the Trojan plain. He seems to have been an habitual absentee ; the prototype, he might be called, of that ill-starred, ill-favoured class. We hear of him in Samothrace, on the Solyman moun¬ tains, as visiting the Ethiopians f who worshipped him, and the reek of whose offerings he preferred at such times to the society of the Olympian gods debating on Hellenic affairs ; though, when we are in the zone of the Outer Geography, we find him actually presiding in an Olympian assembly marked with foreign associa¬ tions. J Now compare with this great mundane figure the true elemental gods of Homer : first, Okeanos, a * ‘II.* xiii. 17-31. f ‘ Od.’ i. 25, 26. X ‘ Od.’ viii. 321-66. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 31 venerable figure, who dwells appropriately by the furthest * bound of earth, the bank of the Ocean-river, and who is not summoned f even to the great Olympian assembly of the Twentieth Book ; and secondly, the greybeard of the sea, whom only from the patronymic of his Nereid daughters we know to have been called Nereus, and who, when reference is made to him and to his train, is on each occasion £ to be found in one and the same place, the deep recesses of the Mediter¬ ranean waters. If Dr. Reville still doubts who was for Homer the elemental god of water, let him note the fact that while neros is old Greek for iret, nero is, down to this very day, the people’s word for water. But, con¬ clusive as are these considerations, their force will be most fully appreciated only by those who have closely observed that Homer’s entire theurgic system is reso¬ lutely exclusive of Nature- worship, except in its lowest and most colourless orders, and that where he has to deal with a Nature-power of serious pretensions, such as the Water-god would be, he is apt to pursue a method of quiet suppression, by local banishment or otherwise, that space may be left him to play out upon his board the gorgeous and imposing figures of his theanthropic system. As a surgeon performs the most terrible operation in a few seconds, and with unbroken calm, so does the school of Dr. Reville, at least within the Homeric pre¬ cinct, marshal, label, and transmute the personages that are found there. In touching on the “log,” by which Dr. Reville says Hera was represented for ages, she is quietly described as the “Queen of the shining * ‘II.’ xir. 201. t ‘ II.’ xx. 7. X ‘ II.’ i. 358 ; xviii. 36. 32 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. Heaven ” (p. 79). For this assumption, so naively made, I am aware of no authority whatever among the Greeks ; a somewhat formidable difficulty for others than solarists, as we are dealing with an eminently Greek conception. Euripides, a rather late authority, says,* she dwells among the stars, as all deities might be said, ex officio, to do ; but gives no indication either of identity or of queenship. Etymology, stoutly disputed, may afford a refuge. Schmidt f refers the name to the Latin hera ; Curtius J and Preller § to the Sanscrit svar, meaning the heaven ; and Welcker,1f with others, to what appears the more obvious form of epa, the earth. Dr. Reville, I presume, makes choice of the Sanscrit svar. Such etymologies, however, are, though greatly in favour with the solarists, most uncertain guides to Greek interpre¬ tation. The effect of trusting to them is that, if a deity has in some foreign or anterior system had a certain place or office, and if this place or office has been altered to suit the exigencies of a composite mythology, the Greek idea comes to be totally misconceived. If we take the pre-name of the Homeric Apollo, we may with some plausibility say the Phoibos of the poet is the Sun ; but we are landed at once in the absurd consequence that we have got a Sun already, || and that the two are joint actors in a scene of the eighth ‘Odyssey.’** Strange, indeed, will be the effect of such a system if applied to our own case at some date in the far-off future ; for it will be shown, inter alia, that there were * Eurip. ‘ Helena,’ 109. f Smith’s ‘ Diet.’ art. “ Hera.” X 4 Griech. Etymol.’ p. 119. § Preller, ‘ Griech. Mythol.’ i. 121. ‘Griech. Gotterlehre,’ i. 362-3, || See infra. ** * Od.’ v'lii. 302, 334. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. no priests, but only presbyters, in any portion of Western Christendom ; that our dukes were simply generals leading us in war ; that we broke our fast at eight in the evening (for diner is but a compression of dejeuner ) ; and even, possibly, that the Howards, one of the noblest and most famous of English houses, pursued habitually the humble occupation of a pig-driver. The character of Hera, or Here, has received from Homer a full and elaborate development. There is in it absolutely no trace whatever of “the queen of the shining heaven.” In the action of the ‘ Odyssey ’ she has no share at all — a fact absolutely unaccountable if her function was one for which the voyages of that poem give much more scope than is supplied by the ‘Iliad.’ The fact is, that there is no queen of heaven in the Achaian system ; nor could there be without altering its whole genius. It is a curious incidental fact that, although Homer recognizes to some extent humanity in the stars (I refer to Orion and Leucothee, both of them foreign personages of the Outer Geography), he never even approximates to a personification of the real queen of heaven, namely, the moon. There happens to be one marked incident of the action of Hera, which stands in rather ludicrous contrast with this lucent queenship. On one of the occasions when, in virtue of her birth and station, she exercises some supreme pre¬ rogative, she directs the Sun (surely not thus to her lord and master) to set, and he reluctantly obeys. * Her character has not any pronounced moral elements ; it exhibits pride and passion ; it is pervaded intensely with policy and nationalism ; she is beyond all others i. * ‘II.’ xviii. 239, 240. D 34 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. the Achaian goddess, and it is sarcastically imputed to her by Zeus that she would cut the Trojans if she could, and eat them without requiring in the first instance any culinary process.* I humbly protest against mauling and disfiguring this work ; against what great Walter Scott would, I think, have called “ mashackering and misguggling” it, after the manner of Nicol Muschat, when he put an end to his wife Ailie f at the spot after¬ wards marked by his name. Why blur the picture so charged alike with imaginative power and with historic meaning, by the violent obtrusion of ideas, which, what¬ ever force they may have had among other peoples or in other systems, it was one of the main purposes of Homer, in his marvellous theurgic work, to expel from all high place in the order of ideas, and from every corner, every loft and every cellar, so to speak, of his Olympian palaces ? If the Hera of Homer is to own a relationship outside the Achaian system, like that of Apollo to the Sun, it is undoubtedly with Gaia, the Earth, that it can be most easily established. The all-producing function of Gaia in the Theogony of Hesiod J and her marriage with Ouranos, the heaven, who has a partial relation to Zeus, points to Hera as the majestic successor who in the Olympian scheme, as the great mother, and guardian of maternity, bore an analogical resemblance to the female head of one or more of the Pelasgian or archaic theogonies that it had deposed. I have now done with the treatment of details, and I must not quit them without saying that there are some of the chapters, and many of the sentences, of * ‘IP iv. 35. f ‘Heart of Midlothian.’ J ‘ Theog.’ 116-136. DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. Dr. Reville which appear to me to deserve our thanks. And, much as I differ from him concerning an essential part of the historic basis of religion, I trust that nothing which I have said can appear to impute to him any hos¬ tility or indifference to the substance of religion itself. I make, indeed, no question that the solar theory has a most important place in solving the problems pre¬ sented by many or some of the Aryan religions ; but whether it explains their first inception is a totally different matter. When it is ruthlessly applied, in the teeth of evidence, to them all, in the last resort it stifles facts, and reduces observation and reasoning to a mockery. Sir George Cox, its able advocate, fastens upon the admission that some one particular method is not available for all the phenomena, and asks, Why not adopt for the Greek system, for the Aryan systems at large, perhaps for a still wider range, “ a clear and simple explanation,” namely, the solar theory ? * The plain answer to the question is, that this must not be done, because, if it is done, we do not follow the facts, nor are led by them ; but, to use the remarkable phrase of iEschylus,f we ride them down, we trample them under foot. Mankind has long been too familiar with a race of practitioners, whom courtesy forbids to name, and whose single medicine is alike available to deal with every one of the thousand figures of disease. There are surely many sources to which the old religions are refer¬ able. We have solar worship, earth worship, astronomic worship, the worship of animals, the worship of evil powers, the worship of abstractions, the worship of the * ‘Mythology of Aryan Nations,’ i. 18. f KadnrirdCeadaL : a remarkable word, as applied to moral subjects, found in the ‘Eumenides’ only. 4/ 36 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. dead, the foul and polluting worship of bodily organs, so widespread in the world, and especially in the East ; last, but not least, I will name terminal worship, the remarkable and most important scheme which grew up, perhaps first on the Nile, in connection with the stones used for marking boundaries, which finds its principal representative in the god Hermes, and which is very largely traced and exhibited in the first volume of the work of M. Dulaure i:? on ancient religions. But none of these circumstances discredit or impair the proof that in the Book, of which Genesis is the opening section, there is conveyed special knowledge to meet the special need everywhere so palpable in the state and history of our race. Far indeed am I from asserting that this precious gift, or that any process known to me, disposes of all the problems, either insoluble or unsolved, by which we are surrounded ; of “ tlie burden and the mystery Of all this unintelligible world.” f But I own my surprise not only at the fact, but at the manner in which in this day, writers, whose name is Legion, unimpeached in character and abounding in talent, not only put away from them, but cast into shadow or into the very gulf of negation itself, the con¬ ception of a Deity, an acting and a ruling Deity. Of this belief, which has satisfied the doubts, and wiped away the tears, and found, guidance for the footsteps of so many a weary wanderer on earth, which among the best and greatest of our race has been so cherished by those who had it, and so longed and sought for by those * ‘ Histoire abregee de differens Cultes.’ Seconde edition. Paris, 1825. + Wordsworth’s ‘ Excursion.’ DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 37 who had it not, we might suppose that if at length we had discovered that it was in the light of truth unten¬ able, that the accumulated testimony of man was worth¬ less, and that his wisdom was but folly, yet at least the decencies of mourning would be vouchsafed to this irre¬ parable loss. Instead of this, it is with a joy and exul¬ tation that might almost recall the frantic orgies of the Commune, that this, at least at first sight terrific and overwhelming calamity is accepted, and recorded as a gain. One recent, and in many ways, respected writer — a woman long wont to unship creed as sailors dis¬ charge excess of cargo in a storm, and passing at length into formal atheism — rejoices to find herself on the open, free, and “ breezy common of the universe.” Another, also woman, and dealing only with the workings and manifestations of God, finds * in the theory of a physical evolution as recently developed by Mr. Darwin, and received with extensive favour, both an emancipation from error and a novelty in kind. She rejoices to think that now at last Darwin “ shows life as an harmonious whole, and makes the future stride possible by means of the past advance.” Evolution, that is physical evolu¬ tion, which alone is in view, may be true (like the solar theory), may be delightful and wonderful, in its right place ; but are we really to understand that varieties of animals brought about through domestication, the wasting of organs (for instance, the tails of men) by disuse, that natural selection and the survival of the fittest, all in the physical order, exhibit to us the great arcanum of creation, the sum and centre of life, so that * I do not quote names, but I refer to a very recent article in one of our monthly periodicals. 38 DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. mind and spirit are dethroned from their old supremacy are no longer sovereign by right, but may find somewhere by charity a place assigned them, as appendages, perhaps only as excrescences, of the material creation ? I con¬ tend that Evolution in its highest form has not been a thing heretofore unknown to history, to philosophy, or to theology. I contend that it was before the mind of Saint Paul when he taught that in the fulness of time God sent forth His Son, and of Eusebius, when he wrote the ‘ Preparation for the Gospel,’ and of Augustine when he composed the ‘ City of God ; ’ and, beautiful and splendid as are the lessons taught by natural objects, they are, for Christendom at least, indefinitely beneath the sublime unfolding of the great drama of human action, in which, through long ages, Greece was making ready a language and an intellectual type, and Rome a framework of order and an idea of law, such that in them were to be shaped and fashioned the destinies of a regenerated world. For those who believe that the old foundations are unshaken still, and that the fabric built upon them will look down for ages on the floating wreck of many a modern and boastful theory, it is difficult to see anything but infatuation in the destructive temperament which leads to the notion that to substitute a blind mechanism for the hand of God in the affairs of life is to enlarge the scope of remedial agency ; that to dismiss the highest of all inspirations is to elevate the strain of human thought and life ; and that each of us is to rejoice that our several units are to be disintegrated at death into “ countless millions of organisms ; ” for such, it seems, is the latest “ revelation ” delivered from the fragile tripod of a modern Delphi. Assuredly, either on the DAWN OF CREATION AND OF WORSHIP. 39 minds of those who believe, or else on the minds of those who after this fashion disbelieve, there lies some deep judicial darkness, a fog of darkness that may be felt. While disbelief in the eyes of faith is a sore calamity, this kind of disbelief, which renounces and repudiates with more than satisfaction what is brightest and best in the inheritance of man, is astounding, and might be deemed incredible. Nay, some will say, rather than accept the flimsy and hollow consolations which it makes bold to offer, might we not go back to solar adoration, or, with Goethe, to the hollows of Olympus ? “ Wenn die Funke spriiht, Wenn die Asche gliiht, Eilen wir den alten Gdttern zu.” * NOTE. Hawarden Castle, Chester, July 11, 1886. Mr. Gladstone presents his compliments to the Editor of the Nineteenth Century, and requests, with reference to an observation by Professor Huxley on Mr. Gladstone’s neglect duly to consult the works of Professor Dana, whom he had cited, that the Editor will have the kindness to print in his next number the accompanying letter, which has this morning been sent to him from America. “ Rev. Dr. Sutherland, “My dear Sir, — I do not know that in my letter of yesterday, in which I referred you to the ‘ Bibliotheca Sacra,’ I answered directly your question, and hence I add a word to say that I agree in all essential points with Mr. Gladstone, and believe that the first chapters of Genesis and Science are in accord. “ Yours very truly, “James D. Dana. “Newliaven, April 16, 1886.” * ‘ Braut von Corinth.’ II. PROEM TO GENESIS: A PLEA FOR A FAIR TRIAL.* 1885. Vous avez une maniere si aimahle d’annoncer les plus mauvaises nouvelles , qyHelles perdent par la de leurs desagremens. So wrote, de haut en has, the Duchess of York to Beau Brummell, sixty or seventy years back ; f and so write I, de has en haut, to the two very eminent champions who have in the Nineteenth Century of December entered appearances on behalf of Dr. Reville’s ‘ Prolegomenes,’ with a decisiveness of tone, at all events, which admits of no mistake : Professor Huxley and Professor Max Muller. My first duty is to acknow¬ ledge in both cases the abundant courtesy and indulgence with which I am personally treated. And my first thought is that, where even disagreement is made in a manner pleasant, it will be a duty to search and see if there be any points of agreement or approximation, which will be more pleasant still. This indulgence and courtesy deserves in the case of Professor Huxley a special warmth of acknowledgment, because, while thus more than liberal to the individual, he has for the class * Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century. f ‘ Life/ by Jesse. Revised edition, i. 260. PROEM TO GENESIS. 41 of Reconcilers, in which he places me, an unconcealed and unmeasured scorn. These are they who impose upon man a burden of false science in the name of religion , who dictate as a Divine command “an implicit belief in the cosmogony of Genesis;” and who “stir unwisdom and fanaticism to their depths.” Judgments so severe should surely be supported by citation or other evidence, for which I look in vain. To some they might suggest the idea that Passion may sometimes unawares intrude even within the precincts of the temple of Science. But I admit that a great master of his art may well be provoked, when he finds his materials tumbled about by incapable hands, and may mistake for irreverence what is only want of skill. While acknowledging the great courtesy with which Professor Huxley treats his antagonist individually, and while simply listening to his denunciations of the Re¬ concilers as one listens to distant thunders, with a sort of sense that after all they will do no great harm, I must presume to animadvert with considerable freedom upon his method ; upon the sweeping character of his advocacy ; upon his perceptible exaggeration of points in controversy ; upon his mode of dealing with authorities ; and upon the curious fallacy of substitution by which he enables himself to found the widest proscriptions of the claim of the Book of Genesis to contain a Divine record upon a reasoned impeachment of its scientific accuracy in, as I shall show, a single particular. As to the first of these topics, nothing can be more equitable than Professor Huxley’s intention to intervene as a “science proctor ” in that part of the debate raised * Nineteenth Century , Dec. 1885, pp. 859, 860. 42 PROEM TO GENESIS. by M. Reville, “ to which he proposes to restrict his observations ” (N. C. p. 849). This is the part on which he proposes in his first page to report as a student — and every reader will inwardly add, as one of the most eminent among all students — of natural science. Now this is not the cosmogonical part of the account in Genesis. On Gen. i. 1-19, containing the cosmogony, he does not report as an expert, bu.t refers us (p. 859) to “ those who are specially conversant with the sciences involved ; ” adding his opinion about their opinion. Yet in his second page, without making any reference to this broad distinction, he at once forgets the just limitation of his first, and our “proctor for science” pronounces on M. Reville’s estimate, not of the fourfold succession in the stratification of the earth, but of “ the account of the Creation given in the Book of Genesis,” that its terms are as “ respectful as in his judgment they are just ” (ibid.). Thus the proctorship for science, justly assumed for matters within his province as a student, is rather hastily extended to matters which he himself declares to be beyond it. In truth it will appear, that as there are many roads to heaven with one ending, so, provided only a man arrives at the conclusion that the great Proem of Genesis lends no support to the argument for Revelation, it does not much matter how he gets there. For in this “just” account of the Creation I have shown that M. Reville supports his accusation of scientific error by three particulars (N. C. p. 639) : that in the first he contradicts the judgment of scholars on the sense of the original ; in the second he both misquotes (by inadvertence) the terms of the text, and overlooks the distinction made so palpable (if not earlier) half a century ago, by the work of Dr, PROEM TO GENESIS. 43 Buckland,* between bara and asa ; while the third proceeds on the assumption that there could be no light to produce vegetation, except light derived from a visible sun. These three charges constitute the head and front of M. Reville’s indictment against the cosmogony ; and the fatal flaws in them, without any notice or defence, are now all taken under the mantle of our science proctor, who returns to the charge at the close of his article (p. 859), and again dismisses with comprehensive honour as “ wise and moderate ” what he had ushered in as reverent and just. So much for the sweeping, un¬ discriminating character of an advocacy which, in a scientific writer, we might perhaps have expected to be carefully limited and defined ; and which does not seem to belong to science-proctorship. I take next the exaggeration which appears to me to mark unhappily Professor Huxley’s method. Under this head I include all needless multiplication of points of controversy, whether in the form of overstating dif¬ ferences, or understating agreements, with an adversary. As I have lived for more than half a century in an atmosphere of contention, my stock of controversial fire has perhaps become abnormally low ; while Professor Huxley, who has been inhabiting the Elysian regions of science, the edita doctrind sapientum templet serena, f may be enjoying all the freshness of an unjaded appetite. Certainly one of the lessons life has taught me is, that where there is known to be a common object, the pur¬ suit of truth, there should also be a studious desire to interpret the adversary in the best sense his words will * ‘Bridgewater Treatise/ vol. i. pp. 19-28. Chap. i. : “Consistency of Geological Discoveries with Sacred History.” f Lucr. ii. 8. 44 PROEM TO GENESIS. fairly bear ; to avoid whatever widens the breach ; and to make the most of whatever tends to narrow it. These I hold to be part of the laws of knightly tourna¬ ment. I do not, therefore, fully understand why Professor Huxley makes it a matter of objection to me that, in rebuking a writer who had treated evolution wholesale as a novelty in the world, I cited a few old instances of moral and historical evolution only, and did not extend my front by examining Indian sages and the founders of Greek philosophy (W. G. p. 854). Nor why, when I have spoken of physical evolution as of a thing to me most acceptable, but not yet in its rigour (to my knowledge) proved (JV. C. p. 705), we have only the rather niggardly acknowledgment that I have made “ the most oblique admissions of a possible value ” (JY. 0. p. 854). Thus it is when agreement is threat¬ ened, but far otherwise when differences are to be blazoned. When I have spoken of the succession of orders in the most general terms only, this is declared to be a sharply divided succession in which the last species of one cannot overlap the first species of another (p. 857). When I have pleaded on simple grounds of reasoning for the supposition of a substantial corre¬ spondence between Genesis i. and science (i\r. C. p. 696), have waived all question of a verbal inspiration, all question whether the whole of the statements can now be made good (i\7. C. p. 694), I am treated as one of those who impose “ in the name of religion” as a divine requisition “ an implicit belief in the accuracy of the cosmogony of Genesis,” and who deserve to have their heads broken in consequence (AT. C. p. 860). I have urged nothing “ in the name of religion.” I PROEM TO GENESIS. 45 have sought to adduce probable evidence that a guidance more than human lies within the great Proem of the Book of Genesis (JY. G. p. 694), just as I might adduce probable evidence to show that Francis did or did not write Junius, that William the Third was or was not responsible for the massacre of Glencoe. I have ex¬ pressly excepted detail (p. 696), and have stated (JV. G. p. 687) that in my inquiry “the authority of Scripture cannot be alleged in proof of a primitive revelation ” (N. C. p. 687). I object to all these exaggerations of charge, as savouring of the spirit of the Inquisition, and as restraints on literary freedom. My next observation as to the Professor’s method refers to his treatment of authorities. In one passage (JV. C. p. 851) Mr. Huxley expresses his regret that I have not named my authority for the statement made concerning the fourfold succession, in order that he might have transferred his attentions from myself to a new delinquent. Now, published works are (as I may show) a fair subject for reference. But as to pointing out any person who might have favoured me with his views in private correspondence, I own that I should have some scruple in handing him over to be pilloried as a Reconciler, and to be pelted with charges of unwisdom and fanaticism, which I myself, from long use, am perfectly content to bear. I did refer to three great and famous names : those of Cuvier, Sir John Herschel, and Whewell (JV. G. p. 697). Mr. Huxley speaks of me as having quoted them in support of my case on the fourfold succession ; and at the same time notices that I admitted Cuvier not to be a recent authority, which in geology proper is, I believe, nearly equivalent to saying he is, for 46 PROEM TO GENESIS. particulars, no authority at all. This recital is singu¬ larly inaccurate. I cited them (iV. C. p. 697), not with reference to the fourfold succession, but generally for “the general accordance of the Mosaic cosmogony with the results of modern inquiry ” (ibid.), and parti¬ cularly in connection with the nebular hypothesis. It is the cosmogony (Gen. i. 1-19), not the fourfold suc¬ cession, which was the sole object of Reville’s attack, and the main object of my defence ; and which is the largest portion of the whole subject. Will Mr. Huxley venture to say that Cuvier is an unavailable authority, or that Herschel and Whewell are other than great and venerable names, with reference to the cos¬ mogony? Yet he has quietly set them aside without notice ; and they with many more are inclusively be¬ spattered with the charges, which he has launched against the pestilent tribe of Reconcilers. My fourth and last observation on the “method ” of Professor Huxley is that, after discussing a part, and that not the most considerable part, of the Proem of Genesis, he has broadly pronounced upon the whole. This is a mode of reasoning which logic rejects, and which I presume to savour more of licence than of science. The fourfold succession is condemned with argument ; the cosmogony is thrown into the bargain. True, Mr. Huxley refers in a single sentence to three detached points of it partially touched in my observa¬ tions (p. 853). But all my argument, the chief argu¬ ment of my paper, leads up to the nebular or rotatory hypothesis (N. G. 689-694 and 697, 698). This hypo¬ thesis, with the authorities cited — of whom one is the author of ‘ Y estiges of the Creation ’ — is inclusively condemned, and without a word vouchsafed to it. PROEM TO GENESIS. 47 I shall presently express my gratitude for the scien¬ tific part of Mr. Huxley’s paper. But there are two sides to the question. The whole matter at issue is, (1) a comparison between the probable meaning of the Proem to Genesis and the results of cosmological and geological science ; (2) the question whether this com¬ parison favours or does not favour the belief that an element of divine knowledge — knowledge which was not accessible to the simple action of the human faculties — is conveyed to us in this Proem. It is not enough to be accurate in one term of a comparison, unless we are accurate in both. A master of English may speak the vilest and most blundering French. I do not think Mr. Huxley has even endeavoured to understand what is the idea, what is the intention, which his opponent ascribes to the Mosaic writer : or what is the conception which his opponent forms of the weighty word Revelation. He holds the writer responsible for scientific precision : I look for nothing of the kind, but assign to him a statement general, which admits exceptions ; popular, which aims mainly at producing moral impression ; summary, which cannot but be open to more or less of criticism in detail. He thinks it is a lecture. I think it is nearer to a sermon. He describes living creatures by structure. The Mosaic writer describes them by habitat. Both I suppose are right. I suppose that description by habitat would be unavailing for the purposes of science. I feel sure that description by structure, such as the geologists supply, would have been unavailing for the purpose of summary teaching with religious aim. Of Revelation I will speak by- and-by. In order to institute with profit the comparison, now 48 PROEM TO GENESIS. in view, the very first thing necessary is to determine, so far as the subject-matter allows, what it was that the Pentateuchal or Mosaic writer designed to convey to the minds of those for whom he wrote. The case is, in more ways than one, I conceive, the direct reverse of that which the Professor has alleged. It is not bringing Science to be tried at the bar of Religion. It is bring¬ ing Religion, so far as it is represented by this part of the Holy Scriptures, to be tried at the bar of Science. The indictment against the Pentateuchal writer is, that he has written what is scientifically untrue. We have to find, then, in the first place, what it is that he has written, according to the text, not an inerrable text, as it now stands before us. First, I assume there is no dispute that in Gen. i. 20-27 he has represented a fourfold sequence or succes¬ sion of living organisms. Aware of my own inability to define in any tolerable manner the classes of these organisms, I resorted to the general phrases — water- population, air -population, land-population. The imme¬ diate purpose of these phrases was not to correspond with the classifications of Science, but to bring together in brief and convenient form the larger and more varied modes of expression used in vers. 20, 21, 24, 25 of the Chapter. I think, however, I have been to blame for having brought into a contact with science, which was not sufficiently defined, terms that have no scientific mean¬ ing : water-population, air-population, and (twofold) land-population. I shall now discard them, and shall substitute others, which have the double advantage of being used by geologists, and perhaps of expressing better than my phrases what was in the mind of the PROEM TO GENESIS. 49 Mosaic writer. These are the words — 1, fishes ; 2, birds ; 3, mammals ; * 4, man. By all, I think, it will be felt that the first object is to know what the Penta- teuchal writer means. The relation of his meaning to science is essential, but, in orderly argumentation, subsequent. The matter now before us is a matter of reasonable and probable interpretation. What is the proper key to this hermeneutic work ? In my opinion it is to be found in a just estimate of the purpose with which the author wrote, and with which the Book of Genesis was, in this part of it, either composed or compiled. If this be the true point of departure, it opens up a question of extreme interest, at which I have but faintly glanced in my paper, and which is nowhere touched in the reply to me. What proper place has such a compo¬ sition as the first Chapter of Genesis in such a work as the Scriptures of the Old Testament 1 They are indis¬ putably written with a religious aim ; and their subject- matter is religious. We may describe this aim in various ways. For the present purpose, suffice it to say they are conversant with belief in God, with inculcation of duties founded on that belief, with history and pro¬ phecy obviously having it for their central point. But this chapter, at the least down to ver. 25, and perhaps throughout, stands on a different ground. In concise and rapid outline, it traverses a vast region of physics. It is easy to understand St. Paul when he speaks of the world as bearing witness to God.f What he said * I wish to be understood as speaking here of the higher or ordinary mammals, which alone I assume to have been probably known to the Mosaic writer. f Acts xiv. 17 ; Rom. i. 20. I. E 50 PROEM TO GENESIS. was capable of being verified or tested by the common experimental knowledge of all who heard him. Of it, of our Saviour’s mention of the lilies — and may it not be said generally of the references in Scripture to natural knowledge ? — they are at once accounted for by the positions in which they stand. But this first Chapter of Genesis professes to set out in its own way a large and comprehensive scheme of physical facts : the transi¬ tion from chaos to kosmos, from the inanimate to life, from life in its lower orders to man. Being knowledge of an order anterior to the creation of Adamic man, it was beyond verification, as being beyond experience. As a physical exposition in miniature, it stands alone in the Sacred Becord. And, as this singular composition is solitary in the Bible, so it seems to be hardly less solitary in the sacred books of the world. “ The only important resemblance of any ancient cosmogony to the Scriptural account, is to be found in the Persian or Zoroastrian : ” this Bishop Browne * proceeds to account for on the following among other grounds : that Zoroaster was probably brought into contact with the Hebrews, and even perhaps with the prophet Daniel ; a supposition which supplies the groundwork of a recent and remark¬ able romance, not proceeding from a Christian school, f Again, the Proem does not carry any Egyptian marks. In the twenty-seven thousand lines of Homer, archaic as they are and ever turning to the past, there is, I think, only one J which belongs to physiology. The beautiful sketch of a cosmogony by Ovid § seems in * Note on Gen. i. 5. t ‘Zoroaster.’ By F. M. Crawford. Macmillan, 1885. X ‘ 11.’ vii. 99. § Ovid, ‘ Metam.’ i. 1-38. PROEM TO GENESIS. 51 considerable degree to follow the Mosaic outline ; but it was composed at a time when the treasure of the Hebrew records had been for two centuries imparted, through the Septuagint, to the Aryan nations. Professor Huxley, if I understand him rightly (A. C. pp. 851, 852), considers the Mosaic writer, not perhaps as having intended to embrace the whole truth of science in the province of geology, but at least as liable to be convicted of scientific worthlessness if his language will not stand the test of a strict construction. Thus the “ water-population ” is to include “ the innumerable hosts of marine invertebrated animals.” It seems to me that these discoveries, taken as a whole, and also taken in all their parts and particulars, do not afford a proper, I mean a rational, standard for the interpreta¬ tion of the Mosaic writer ; that the recent discovery of the Silurian scorpion, a highly organised animal (p. 858), is of little moment either way to the question now before us ; * that it is not an account of the extinct species which we should consider the Mosaic writer as intending to convey ; that while his words are capable of covering them, as the oikoumene of the New Testament covers the red and yellow man, the rules of rational construction recommend and require our assigning to them a more limited meaning, which I will presently describe. Another material point in Professor Huxley’s inter¬ pretation appears to me to lie altogether beyond the natural force of the words, and to be of an arbitrary * Because my argument in no way requires universal accordance, what bearing the scorpion may have on any current scientific hypothesis, it is not for me to say. 52 PROEM TO GENESIS. character. He includes in it the proposition that the production of the respective orders was effected (p. 857) during each of “ three distinct and successive periods of time ; and only during those periods of time ; ” or again, in one of these, “ and not at any other of these ; ” as, in a series of games at chess, one is done before another begins ; or as in a “ march-past,” one regiment goes before another comes. No doubt there may be a degree of literalism which will even suffice to show that, as “ every winged fowl ” was produced on the fourth day of the Hexaemeron, therefore the birth of new fowls continually is a contradiction to the text of Genesis. But does not the equity of common sense require us to understand simply that the order of “ winged fowl,” whatever that may mean, took its place in creation at a certain time, and that from that time its various component classes were in course of production? Is it not the fact that in synoptical statements of successive events, distributed in time for the sake of producing easy and clear impressions, general truth is aimed at, and periods are allowed to overlap? If, with such a view, we arrange the schools of Greek philosophy in numerical order, according to the dates of their incep¬ tion, we do not mean that one expired before another was founded. If the archaeologist describes to us as successive in time the ages of stone, bronze, and iron, * he certainly does not mean that no kinds of stone * I use this enumeration to illustrate an argument, but I must, even in so using it, enter a caveat against its particulars. I do not conceive it to be either probable or historical that, as a general rule, mankind passed from the use of stone implements to the use of bronze, a composite metal, without passing through some intermediate (whether longer or shorter) period of copper. PROEM TO GENESIS. 53 implement were invented after bronze began, or no kinds of bronze after iron began. When Thucydides said that the ancient limited monarchies were succeeded by tyrannies, he did not mean that all the monarchs died at once, and a set of tyrants, like Deucalion’s men, rose up and took their places. Woe be, I should say, to anyone who tries summarily to present in series the phases of ancient facts, if they are to be judged under the rule of Professor Huxley. Proceeding, on what I hold to be open ground, to state my own idea of the true key to the meaning of the Mosaic record, I suggest that it was intended to give moral, and not scientific, instruction to those for whom it was written. That for the Adamic race, recent on the earth, and young in faculties, the traditions here incorporated, which were probably far older than the Book, had a natural and a highly moral purpose in conveying to their minds a lively sense of the wise and loving care with which the Almighty Father, who demanded much at their hands, had beforehand given them much, in the provident adaptation of the world to be their dwelling-place, and of the created orders for their use and rule. It appears to me that, given the very nature of the Scriptures, this is clearly the rational point of view. If it is so, then, it follows, that just as the tradition described earth, air, and heaven in the manner in which they superficially presented themselves to the daily experience of man — not scientifically, but “ The common air, the sun, the skies ” — - so he spoke of fishes, of birds, of beasts, of what man was most concerned with ; and, last in the series, of man himself, largely and generally, as facts of his 54 PROEM TO GENESIS. experience ; from which great moral lessons of wonder, gratitude, and obedience were to be deduced, to aid him in the great work of his life-training.'" If further proof be wanting, that what the Mosaic writer had in his mind were the creatures with which Adamic man was conversant, we have it in the direct form of ver. 28, which gives to man for meat the fruit of every seed-yielding tree, and every seed-yielding herb, and the dominion of every beast, fowl, and reptile living. There is here a marked absence of reference to any but the then living species. This, then, is the key to the meaning of the Book, and of the tradition, if, as 1 suppose, it was before the Book, which seems to me to offer the most probable, and therefore the rational guide to its interpretation. The question we shall have to face is whether this state¬ ment so understood, this majestic and touching lesson of the childhood of Adamic man, stands in such a; relation to scientific truth, in the forms in which it is now known, as to give warrant to the inference that the guidance under which it was composed was more than that of faculties merely human, at that stage of development, and likewise of information, which belonged to the child¬ hood of humanity. We have, then, before us one term of the desired comparison. Let us now turn to the other. And here my first duty is to render my grateful thanks to Professor Huxley for having corrected my either erroneous or superannuated assumption as to the state of scientific opinion on the second and third terms * See also my * General Introduction to Sheppard’s Pictorial Bible,’ infra. PROEM TO GENESIS. 55 of the fourfold succession of life. As one probable doctor sufficed to make an opinion probable, so the dissent of this eminent man would of itself overthrow and pulverise my proposition that there was a scientific consensus as to a sequence like that of Genesis in the production of animal life, as between fishes, birds, mammals, and man. I shall compare the text of Genesis with geological statements ; but shall make no attempt, unless this be an attempt, to profit by a consensus of geologists. * I suppose it to be admitted on all hands that no perfectly comprehensive and complete correspondence can be established between the terms of the Mosaic text and modern discovery. No one, for instance, could conclude from it that which appears to be generally recognised, that a great reptile- age would be revealed by the mesozoic rocks. Yet I think readers, who have been swept away by the torrent of Mr. Huxley’s denunciations, will feel some surprise when on drawing summarily into line the main allegations, and especially this ruling order of the Proem, they see how small a part of them is brought into question by Mr. Huxley, and to how large an extent they are favoured by the tendencies, presumptions, and even conclusions of scientific inquiry. First, as to the cosmogony, or the formation of the earth and the heavenly bodies — 1. The first operation recorded in Genesis, after the creative act, appears to be the formation of light. It * With regard, however, to the counter-statement of Mr. Huxley, see the letter of Mr. Dana (appended supra ) to the ‘ Dawn of Creation.’ 56 PROEM TO GENESIS. is detached, apparently, from the waste or formless elemental mass (vers. 2-5), which, as it proceeds, is left relatively dark by its withdrawal. 2. Next we hear of the existence of vapour, and of its condensation into water on the surface of the earth (vers. 6-10). Vegetation subsequently begins : but this belongs rather to geology than to cosmogony (vers. 11, 12). 3. In a new period, the heavenly bodies are declared to be fully formed and visible, dividing the day from the night (vers. 14-18). Under the guidance particularly of Dr. Whewell, I have referred to the nebular hypothesis as confirmatory of this account. Mr. Huxley has not either denied the hypothesis, or argued against it. But I turn to Phillips’s ‘ Manual of Geology,’ edited and adapted by Mr. Seeley and Mr. Etheridge (1885). It has a section in vol. i. (pp. 15-19) on “ Modern Speculations concerning the Origin of the Earth.” The first agent here noticed as contributing to the work of production is the “ gas hydrogen in a burning state,” which now forms the enveloping portion of the sun’s atmosphere ; whence we are told the inference arises that the earth also was once u incandescent at its surface,” and that its rocks may have been “ products of combustion.” Is not this representation of light with heat for its ally, as the first element in this Speculation, remarkably accordant with the opening of the Proem to Genesis ? Next it appears (ibid.) that “the product of this combustion is vapour,” which with diminished heat condenses into water, and eventually accumulates “ in PROEM TO GENESIS. 57 depressions on the sun’s surface so as to form oceans and seas.” “It is at least probable that the earth has passed through a phase of this kind” (ibid.). “The other planets are apparently more or less like the earth in possessing atmospheres and seas.” Is there not here a remarkable concurrence with the second great act of the cosmogony ? Plainly, as I conceive, it is agreeable to these sup¬ positions that, as vapour gradually passes into water, and the atmosphere is cleared, the full adaptation of sun and moon by visibility for their functions should come in due sequence, as it comes in Gen. i. 14-18. Pursuing its subject, the ‘Manual’ proceeds (p. 17) : “ This consideration leads up to what has been called the nebular hypothesis,” which “supposes that, before the stars existed, the materials of which they consist were diffused in the heavens in a state of vapour ” {ibid.). The text then proceeds to describe how local centres of condensation might throw off rings, these rings break into planets, and the planets, under con¬ ditions of sufficient force, repeat the process, and thus produce satellites like those of Saturn, or like the Moon. I therefore think that, so far as cosmogony is con¬ cerned, the effect of Mr. Huxley’s paper is not by any means to leave it as it was, but to leave it materially fortified by the ‘ Manual of Geology,’ which I under¬ stand to be a standard of authority at the present time. Turning now to the region of that science, I under¬ stand the main statements of Genesis, in successive order of time, but without any measurement of its divisions, to be as follows : — 1. A period of land, anterior to all life (vers. 9, 10). 58 PROEM TO GENESIS. 2. A period of vegetable life, anterior to animal life (vers. 11, 12). 3. A period of animal life, in the order of fishes (ver. 20). 4. Another stage of animal life, in the order of birds A 5. Another, in the order of beasts (vers. 24, 25). 6. Last of all, man (vers. 26, 27). Here is a chain of six links, attached to a previous chain of three. And I think it not a little remarkable that of this entire succession, the only step directly challenged is that of numbers four and five, which (p. 858) Mr. Huxley is inclined rather to reverse. He admits distinctly the seniority of fishes. How came that seniority to be set down here ? He admits as probable upon present knowledge, in the person of Homo sajoie7is, the juniority of man (p. 856). How came this juniority to be set down here % He proceeds indeed to describe an opposite opinion concerning man as hold¬ ing exactly the same rank as the one to which he had given an apparent sanction {ibid.). As I do not pre¬ cisely understand the bearing of the terms he uses, I pass them by, and I shall take the liberty of referring presently to the latest authorities, which he has himself suggested that I should consult. But I add to the questions I have just put this other inquiry : How came the Mosaic writer to place the fishes and the men in their true relative jjositions not only to one another, and not only to the rest of the animal succession, but in a definite and that a true relation of time to the origin of the first plant-life, and to the colossal operations * Only several from No. 3 by the order of succession in the narra¬ tive, not by any fresh grammatical recommencement. — W. E. G., 1897. PROEM TO GENESIS. 59 by which the earth was fitted for them all? Mr. Huxley knows very well that it would be in the highest degree irrational to ascribe this correct distribution to the doctrine of chances ; nor will the stone of Sisyphus of itself constitute a sufficient answer to inquiries which are founded, not upon a fanciful attempt to equate every word of the Proem with every dictum of science, but upon those principles of probable reasoning by which all rational lives are and must be guided. I find the latest published authority on geology in the Second or Mr. Etheridge’s volume of the ‘ Manual ’ * of Professor Phillips, and by this I will now proceed to test the sixfold series which I have ventured upon presenting. First, however, looking back for a moment to a work, obviously of the highest authority,! on the geology of its day, I find in it a table of the order of appearance of animal life upon the earth, which, beginning with the oldest, gives us — • 1. Invertebrates. 4. Birds. 2. Fishes. 5. Mammals. 3. Reptiles. 6. Man. I omit all reference to specifications, and speak only of the principal lines of division. In the Phillips-Ftheridge ‘ Manual,’ beginning as before with the oldest, I find the following arrangement, given partly by statement, and partly by diagram. 1. “The Azoic or Arctuean time of Dana;” called Pre-Cambrian by other physicists (pp. 3, 5). * Phillips’s ‘ Manual of Geology ’ (vol. ii.), part ii., by R. Etheridge, F.R.S, New edition, 1885. f ‘ Paleontology, ’ by Richard Owen (now Sir Richard Owen, K.C.B.). Second edition, p. 5, 1861. 60 PROEM TO GENESIS. 2. A commencement of plant-life indicated by Dana as anterior to invertebrate animal life ; long anterior to the vertebrate forms, which alone are mentioned in Genesis (pp. 4, 5). 3. Three periods of invertebrate life. 4. Age of fishes. 5. Age of reptiles. 6. Age of mammals, much less remote. 7. Age of man, much less remote than mammals. As to birds, though they have not a distinct and separate age assigned them, the ‘ Manual ’ (vol. i. ch. xxv. pp. 511-520) supplies us very clearly with their place in “ the succession of animal life.” We are here furnished with the following series, after the fishes : 1. Dossil reptiles (p. 512). 2. Ornithosauria (p. 517) ; they were “ flying animals, which combined the charac¬ ters of reptiles with those of birds.” 3. The first birds of the secondary rocks with “ feathers in all respects similar to those of existing birds” (p. 518). 4. Mammals (p. 520). I have been permitted to see in proof another state¬ ment from an authority still more recent, Professor Prestwich, which is now passing through the press. In it (pp. 80, 81) I find the following seniority assigned to the orders which I here name : — 1. Plants (cryptogamous). 4. Mammals. 2. Pishes. 5. Man. 3. Birds. It will now, I hope, be observed that, according to the probable intention of the Mosaic writer, these five orders enumerated by him correspond with the state of geo¬ logical knowledge, presented to us by the most recent PROEM TO GENESIS. 61 authorities, in this sense ; that the origins of these orders respectively have the same succession as is assigned in Genesis to those representatives of the orders, which alone were probably known to the experience of Adamic man. My fourfold succession thus, without suffering any shock, grows into a fivefold one. By placing before the first plant-life the azoic period, it becomes sixfold. And again by placing before this the principal stages of the cosmogony, it becomes, according as they are stated, nine or tenfold ; every portion holding the place most agreeable to modern hypothesis and modern science respectively. I now notice the points in which, so far as I under¬ stand, the text of the Proem, as it stands, is either incomplete or at variance with the representations of science. 1 . It does not notice the great periods of invertebrate life standing between (1) and (2) of my last enumeration. 2. It also passes by the great age of Reptiles, with their antecessors the Amphibia, which come between (2) and (3). The secondary or Mesozoic period, says the £ Manual ’ (i. 511), “ has often been termed the age of Reptiles.” 3. It mentions plants in terms which, as I understand from Professor Huxley and otherwise, correspond with the later, not the earlier, forms of plant-life. 4. It mentions reptiles in the same category with its mammals. Now, as regards the first two heads, these omissions, enormous with reference to the scientific record, are completely in harmony with the probable aim of the Mosaic writer, as embracing only the formation of the objects and creatures with which early man was 62 PROEM TO GENESIS. conversant. The introduction of these orders, invisible and unknown, would have been not agreeable, but injurious, to his purpose. As respects the third, it will strike the reader of the Proem that plant-life (vers. 11, 12) is mentioned with a particularity which is not found in the accounts of the living orders ; nor in the second notice of the Creation, which appears, indeed, pretty distinctly to refer to recent plant-life (Gen. ii. 5, 8, 9). Questions have been raised as to the translation of these passages, which I am not able to solve. But I bear in mind the difficulties which attend both oral traditions and the conservation of ancient MSS., and I am not in any way troubled by the discrepancy before us, if it be a discrepancy, as it is the general structure and effect of the Mosaic state¬ ment on which I take my stand. With regard to reptiles, while I should also hold by my last remark, the case is different. They appear to be mentioned as contemporary with mammals, whereas they are of prior origin. But the relative significance of the several orders evidently affected the method of the Mosaic writer. Agreeably to this idea, insects are not named at all. So reptiles were a family fallen from greatness ; instead of stamping on a great period of life its leading character, they merely skulked upon the earth. They are introduced, as will appear better from the LXX than from the A.Y. or B.Y., as a sort of appendage to mammals. Lying outside both the use and the dominion of man, and far less within his probable notice, they are not wholly omitted like insects, but treated apparently in a loose manner as not one of the main features of the picture which the writer meant to draw. In the Song of the Three Children, where the PROEM TO GENESIS. 63 four principal orders are recited after the series in Genesis, reptiles are dropped altogether, which suggests either that the present text is unsound, or, perhaps more probably, that they were deemed a secondary and insignificant part of it. But, however this case may be regarded, of course I cannot draw from it any support to my general contention. I distinguish, then, in the broadest manner, between Professor Huxley’s exposition of certain facts of science, and his treatment of the Book of Genesis. I accept the first, with the reverence due to a great teacher from the meanest of his hearers, as a needed correction to myself, and a valuable instruction for the world. But, subject to that correction, I adhere to my proposition respecting the fourfold succession in the Proem ; which further I extend to a fivefold succession respecting life, and to the great stages of the cosmogony to boot. The five origins, or first appearances of plants, fishes, birds, mammals and man, are given to us in Genesis in the order of succession, in which they are also given by the latest geological authorities. It is, therefore, by attaching to words a sense they were never meant to bear, and by this only, that Mr. Huxley establishes the parallels (so to speak) from which he works his heavy artillery. Land-population is a phrase meant by me to describe the idea of the Mosaic writer, which I conceive to be that of the animals familiarly known to early man. But, by treating this as a scientific phrase, it is made to include extinct reptiles, which I understand Mr. Huxley (N. C. p. 853) to treat as being land-animals ; as, by taking birds of a very high formation, it may be held that mammal forms existed before such birds were produced. These are 64 PROEM TO GENESIS. artificial contradictions, set up by altering in its essence one of the two things which it is sought to compare. If I am asked whether I contend for the absolute accordance of the Mosaic writer, as interpreted by me, with the facts and presumptions of science, as I have endeavoured to extract them from the best authorities, I answer that I have not endeavoured to show either that any accordance has been demonstrated, or that more than a substantial accordance — an accordance in principal relevant particulars — is to be accepted as shown by probable evidence. In the cosmogony of the Proem, which stands on a distinct footing as lying wholly beyond the experience of primitive man, I am not aware that any appreciable flaw is alleged ; but the nebular hypothesis with which it is compared appears to be, perhaps from the necessity of the case, no more than a theory ; a theory, however, long discussed, much favoured, and widely accepted in the scientific world. In the geological part, we are liable to those modifi¬ cations or displacements of testimony which the future progress of the science may produce. In this view, its testimony does not in strictness pass, I suppose, out of the category of probable into that of demonstrative evidence. Yet it can hardly be supposed that careful researches, and reasonings strictly adjusted to method, both continued through some generations, have not in a large measure produced what has the character of real knowledge. With that real knowledge the reader will now have seen how far I claim for the Proem to Genesis, fairly tried, to be in real and most striking accordance. And this brings me to the point at which I have to observe that Mr. Huxley, I think, has not mastered PROEM TO GENESIS. 65 and probably has not tried to master, the idea of his opponent as to what it is that is essentially embraced in the idea of a Divine revelation to man. So far as I am aware, there is no definition, properly so called, of revelation either contained in Scripture or established by the general and permanent consent of Christians. In a word polemically used, of indetermi¬ nate or variable sense, Professor Huxley has no title to impute to his opponent, without inquiry, anything more than it must of necessity convey. But he seems to assume that revelation is to be con¬ ceived of as if it were a lawyer’s parchment, or a sum in arithmetic, wherein a flaw discovered at a particular point is ipso facto fatal to the whole. Very little re¬ flection would show Professor Huxley that there may be those who find evidences of the communication of Divine knowledge in the Proem to Genesis as they read it in their Bibles, without approaching to any such con¬ ception. There is the uncertainty of translation ; trans¬ lators are not inspired. There is the difficulty of tran¬ scription ; transcribers are not inspired, and an element of error is inseparable from the work of a series of copyists. How this works in the long courses of time, we see in the varying texts of the Old Testament, with rival claims not easy to adjust. Thus the authors of the recent Revision * have had to choose in the Massoretic text itself between different readings, and “ in exceptional cases” have given a preference to the Ancient Versions. Thus, upon practical grounds quite apart from the higher questions concerning the original composition, we seem at once to find a human element in the sacred i. * Preface to the Revised Old Testament, p. vi. F 66 PROEM TO GENESIS. text. That there is a further and larger question, not shut out from the view even of the most convinced and sincere believers, Mr. Huxley may perceive by reading, for example, Coleridge’s c Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit.’ The question whether this Proem bears witness to a Divine communication, to a working beyond that of merely human faculties in the composition of the Scriptures, is essentially one for the disciples of Bishop Butler ; a question, not of demonstrative, but of probable evidence. I am not prepared to abandon, but rather to defend, the following proposition. It is perfectly con¬ ceivable that a document penned by the human hand, and transmitted by human means, may contain matter questionable, uncertain, or even mistaken, and yet may by its contents as a whole present such 7rto-Tei5, such moral proofs of truth Divinely imparted, as ought irrefragably pro tanto to command assent and govern practice. A man may possibly admit something not reconciled, and yet may be what Mr. Huxley denounces as a Reconciler. I do not suppose it would be feasible, even for Professor Huxley, taking the nebular hypothesis and geological discovery for his guides, to give, in the com¬ pass of the first twenty-seven verses of Genesis, an account of the cosmogony, and of the succession of life in the stratification of the earth, which would combine scientific precision of statement with the majesty, the simplicity, the intelligibility, and the impressiveness of the record before us. Let me modestly call it, for argument’s sake, an approximation to the present pre¬ sumptions and conclusions of science. Let me assume that the statement in the text as to plants, and the statement of vers. 24, 25 as to reptiles, cannot in all points be sustained ; and yet still there remain great PROEM TO GENESIS. 67 unshaken facts to be weighed. First, the fact that such a record should have been made at all. Secondly, the fact that, instead of dwelling in generalities, it has placed itself under the severe conditions of a chrono¬ logical order, reaching from the first nisus of chaotic matter to the consummated production of a fair and goodly, a furnished and a peopled world. Thirdly, the fact that its cosmogony seems, in the light of the nineteenth century, to draw more and more of counte¬ nance from the best natural philosophy ; and fourthly, that it has described the successive origins of the five great categories of present life, with which human ex¬ perience was and is conversant, in that order which geological authority confirms. How came these things to b el How came they to be, not among Accadians, or Assyrians, or Egyptians, who monopolised the stores of human knowledge when this wonderful tradition was born ; but among the obscure records of a people who, dwelling in Palestine for twelve hundred years from their sojourn in the valley of the Nile, hardly had force to stamp even so much as their name upon the history of the world at large, and only then began to be admitted to the general communion of mankind when their Scriptures assumed the dress which a Gentile tongue was needed to supply1? It is more rational, I contend, to say that these astonishing anticipations were a God-given supply, than to suppose that a race, who fell uniformly and entirely short of the great intellectual development* of antiquity, should here not only have * I write thus bearing fully in mincl the unsurpassed sublimity of much that is to be found in the Old Testament. The consideration of this subject would open a wholly new line of argument, which the present article does not allow me to attempt. 68 PROEM TO GENESIS. equalled and outstripped it, but have entirely trans¬ cended, in kind even more than in degree, all known exercise of human faculties. Whether this was knowledge conveyed to the mind of the Mosaic author, I do not presume to determine. There has been, in the belief of Christians, a profound providential purpose, little and not uniformly visible to us, which presided, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, over the formation of the marvellous compound, which we term the Holy Scriptures. This we wonderingly embrace without being much perplexed by the questions which are raised on them ; for instance, by the question, In what exact relation the books of the Apocrypha, sometimes termed deutero-canonical, stand to the books of the Hebrew Canon. Difficulties of detail, such as may (or ultimately may not) be found to exist in the Proem to Genesis, have much the same relation to the evidence of revealed knowledge in this record, as the spots in the sun to his all-unfolding and sufficing light. But as to the Mosaic writer himself, all I presume to accept is the fact that he put upon undying record, in this portion of his work, a series of particulars which, interpreted in the growing light of modern knowledge, require from us, on the whole, as reasonable men, the admission that we do not see how he could have written them, and that in all likelihood he did not write them, without aid from the guidance of a more than human power. It is in this guidance, and not necessarily or uniformly in the consciousness of the writer, that, according to my poor conception, the idea of Revelation mainly lies. And now one word on the subject of Evolution. I cannot follow Mr. Huxley in his minute acquaintance PROEM TO GENESIS, 60 with Indian sages, and I am not aware that Evolution has a place in the greater number of the schools of Greek philosophy. Nor can I comprehend the rapidity with which persons of authority have come to treat the Darwinian hypothesis as having reached the final stage of demonstration. To the eye of a looker-on their pace and method seem rather too much like a steeple¬ chase. But this may very well be due to their want of appropriate knowledge and habits of thought. For myself, in my loose and uninformed way of looking at Evolution, I feel only too much biassed in its favour, by what I conceive to be its relation to the great argument of design.* Not that I share the horror with which some men of science appear to contemplate a multitude of what they term “sudden” acts of creation. All things considered, a singular expression : but one, I suppose, meaning the act which produces, in the region of nature, something not related, by an unbroken succession of measured and equable stages, to what has gone before it. But what has equality or brevity of stage to do with the question how far the act is creative ? I fail to see, or indeed am somewhat disposed to deny, that the short stage is less creative than the long, the single than the manifold, the equable than the jointed or graduated stage. Evolution is, to me, series with development. And like series in mathematics, whether arithmetical or geometrical, it * “ Views like these, when formulated by religious instead of scientific thought, make more of Divine Providence and fore-ordination, than of Divine intervention ; but perhaps they are not the less theistical on that account.” (From the very remarkable Lectures of Professor Asa Gray on ‘Natural Science and Religion,’ p. 77. Scribner, New York, 1880.) 70 PROEM TO GENESIS. establishes in things an unbroken progression ; it places each thing (if only it stand the test of ability to live) in a distinct relation to every other thing, and makes each a witness to all that have preceded it, a prophecy of all that are to follow it. It gives to the argument of design, now called the teleological argument, at once a wider expansion, and an augmented tenacity and solidity of tissue. But I must proceed. I find Mr. Huxley asserting that the things of science, with which he is so splendidly conversant, are “ suscep¬ tible of clear intellectual comprehension” (N. C. p. 859). Is this rhetoric, or is it a formula of philosophy? If the latter, will it bear examination? He pre-eminently understands the relations between those things which Nature offers to his view ; but does he understand each thing in itself, or how the last term but one in an evolutional series passes into and becomes the last ? The seed may produce the tree, the tree the branch, the branch the twig, the twig the leaf or flower ; but can we understand the slightest mutation or growth of Nature in itself? can we tell how the twig passes into leaf or flower, one jot more than if the flower or leaf, instead of coming from the twig, came directly from the tree or from the seed ? I cannot but trace some signs of haste in Professor Huxley’s assertion that, outside the province of science (ibid.), we have only imagination, hope, and ignorance. Not, as we shall presently see, that he is one of those who rob mankind of the best and highest of their inheritance, by denying the reality of all but material objects. But the statement is surely open to objection, as omitting or seeming to omit from view the vast fields of knowledge only probable, which are not of mere hope, PROEM TO GENESIS. 71 nor of mere imagination, nor of mere ignorance ; which include alike the inward and the outward life of man ; within which lie the real instruments of his training, and where he is to learn how to think, to act, to be. I will now proceed to notice briefly the last page of Professor Huxley’s paper, in which he drops the scientist and becomes simply the man. I read it with deep interest, and with no small sympathy. In touching upon it, I shall make no reference (let him forgive me the expression) to his “ damnatory clauses,” or to his harmless menace, so deftly conveyed through the Prophet Micah, to the public peace. The exaltation of Religion as against Theology is at the present day not only so fashionable, but usually so domineering and contemptuous, that I am grateful to Professor Huxley for his frank statement (p. 859) that Theology is a branch of science ; nor do I in the smallest degree quarrel with his contention that Religion and Theology ought not to be confounded. We may have a great deal of Religion with very little Theology ; and a great deal of Theology with very little Religion. I feel sure that Professor Huxley must observe with pleasure how strongly practical, ethical, and social is the general tenor (especially) of the three synoptic Gospels ; and how the appearance in the world of the great doctrinal Gospel was reserved to a later stage, as if to meet a later need, when men had been toned anew by the morality and, above all, by the life of our Lord. I am not, therefore, writing against him, when I remark upon the habit of treating Theology with an affectation of contempt. It is nothing better, I believe, than a mere fashion ; having no more reference to per¬ manent principle, than the mass of ephemeral fashions, 72 PROEM TO GENESIS. that come from Paris, have with the immovable types of Beauty. Those who take for the burden of their song, “ Respect Religion, but despise Theology,” seem to me just as rational as if a person were to say, “ Admire the trees, the plants, the flowers, the sun, moon, or stars, but despise Botany, and despise Astronomy.” Theology is ordered knowledge ; representing in the region of the intellect what religion represents in the heart and life of man. And this religion, Mr. Huxley says a little further on, is summed up in the terms of the Prophet Micah (vi. 8) : “ Do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.” I forbear to inquire whether every addition to this — such, for instance, as the Beati¬ tudes — is (A. C. p. 860) to be proscribed. But I will not dispute that in these words is conveyed the true ideal of religious discipline and attainment. They really import that identification of the will which is set out with such wonderful force in the very simple words of the 1 Paradiso : ’ “ In la sua volontade e nostra pace,” and which no one has more beautifully described than (I think) Charles Lamb : “ He gave his heart to the Purifier, his will to the Will that governs the universe.” It may be we shall find that Christianity itself is in some sort a scaffolding, and that the final building is a pure and perfect theism : when * the kingdom shall be “ delivered up to God,” “ that God may be all in all.” j* * 1 Cor. xv. 24, 28. f On the publication of this paper I received from two quarters prompt remonstrances against the passages ending with these words, as one disparaging to the honour of our Lord’s humanity. My intention in it was simply to conform to the declaration of St. Paul : Avhatever may go beyond that, I disavow and retract. But in those concurrent remonstrances there was one extremeR interesting feature, PROEM TO GENESIS. 73 Still, I cannot help being struck with an impression that Mr. Huxley appears to cite these terms of Micah, as if they reduced the work of religion from a difficult to a very easy performance. But look at them again. Examine them well. They are, in truth, in Cowper’s words — “ Higher than the heights above, Deeper than the depths beneath.” Do justly, that is to say, extinguish self; love mercy, cut utterly away all the pride and wrath, and all the cupidity, that make this fair world a wilderness ; walk humbly with thy God, take His will and set it in the place where thine own was used to rule. “ Ring out the old, ring in the new.” Pluck down the tyrant from his place ; set up the true Master on His lawful throne. There are certainly human beings, of happy com¬ position, who mount these airy heights with elastic step, and with unbated breath. “ Sponte sua, sine lege, fidem rectumque colebat.” * This comparative refinement of nature in some may even lead them to undervalue the stores of that rich armoury, which Christianity has provided to equip us for our great life-battle. The text of the Prophet Micah, developed into all the breadth of St. Paul and St. Augustine, is not too much — is it not often all too little h — for the needs of ordinary men. I must now turn, by way of epilogue, to Professor namely, the wide apparent severance of the quarters from which they proceeded. One was from Cardinal Manning ; the other from Dr. Hutton, a leading minister of the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland. * Ovid, ‘Metam.’ i. 90. 74 PROEM TO GENESIS. Max Miiller ; and I hope to show him that on the questions which he raises we are not very far apart. One grievous wrong, indeed, he does me in (apparently) ascribing to me the execrable word “ theanthromorphic ” ( N . C. p. 920), of which I wholly disclaim the paternity, and deny the use. Then he says, I warn him not to trust too much to etymology (p. 921). Not so. But only not to trust to it for the wrong purpose, in the wrong place : just as I should not preach on the virtue and value of liberty to a man requiring handcuffs. I happen to bear a name known, in its genuine form, to mean stones or rocks frequented by the gled ; and pro¬ bably taken from the habitat of its first bearer. Now, if any human being should ever hereafter make any inquiry about me, trace the current form of my name to its origin, and therefore describe the susceptibility of stones to gladness, he would not use etymology too much, but would use it ill. What I protest against is a practice, not without example, of taking the etymology of mythologic names in Homer, and thereupon supposing that in all cases we have thus obtained a guide to their Homeric sense. The place of Nereus in the mind of the poet is indisputable ; and here etymology helps us. But when a light-etymology is found for Hera, and it is therefore asserted that in Homer she is a light- goddess, or when, because no one denies that Phoibos is a light- name, therefore the Apollo of Homer was the Sun, then indeed, not etymology, but the misuse of etymology, hinders and misleads us. In a question of etymology, however, I shall no more measure swords with Mr. Max Muller than with Mr. Huxley in a matter of natural science, and this for the simple reason that my sword is but a lath. I therefore surrender to the mercy of this PROEM TO GENESIS. 7 n great philologist the conjectural derivation of dine and diner' from dejeuner; which may have been suggested by the use of the word dine in our Bible (as John xxi. 12) for breakfasting ; a sense expressed by La Bruyere (xi.) in the words, Cliton n’a jamais eu, toute sa vie, que deux affaires , qui sont de diner le matin, et de soujper le soir. But, Mr. Max Muller says, I have offended against the fundamental principles of comparative mythology (A. C. p. 919). How, where, and why, have I thus tumbled into mortal sin ? By attacking solarism. But what have I attacked, and what has he defended1? I have attacked nothing, but the exclusive use of the solar theory to solve all the problems of the Aryan religions ; and it is to this monopolising pretension that I seek to apply the name of solarism, while admitting that “ the solar theory has a most important place ” in solving such problems (A. C. p. 704). But my vis-a-vis, whom I really cannot call my opponent, declares (A. C. p. 919) that the solarism I denounce is not his solarism at all ; and he only seeks to prove that “ certain portions of ancient mythology have a directly solar origin.” So it proves that I attack only what he repudiates, and I seem even to defend what he defends. That is, I humbly subscribe to a doctrine, which he has made famous throughout the civilised world. It is only when a yoke is put upon Homer’s neck, that I presume to cry “hands off.” The Olympian system, of which Homer is the great architect, is a marvellous and splendid structure. Following the guidance of ethnological affinities and memories, it incorporates in itself the most diversified traditions, and binds them into an unity by the plastic power of an unsurpassed creative imagination. Its dominating spirit is intensely 76 PROEM TO GENESIS. human. It is therefore of necessity thoroughly anti- elemental. Yet, when the stones of this magnificent fabric are eyed singly by the observer, they bear obvious marks of having been appropriated from elsewhere by the sovereign prerogative of genius ; of having had an anterior place in other systems ; of having largely belonged to Nature- worship, and in some cases to Sun- worship ; of having been drawn from many quarters, and among them from those which Mr. Max Muller excludes (p. 921) : from Egypt, and either from Palestine, or from the same traditional source, to which Palestine itself was indebted. But this is not the present question. As to the solar theory, I hope I have shown either that our positions are now identical, or that, if there be a rift between them, it is so narrow that we may con¬ veniently shake hands across it. III. ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : 5 THE BATTLE OF BELIEF.* 1888. t Human nature, when aggrieved, is apt and quick in devising compensations. The increasing seriousness and strain of our present life may have had the effect of bringing about the large preference, which I understand to be exhibited in local public libraries, for works of fiction. This is the first expedient of revenge. But it is only a link in a chain. The next step is, that the writers of what might be grave books, in esse or in posse, have endeavoured with some success to circumvent the multitude. Those who have systems or hypotheses to recommend in philosophy, conduct, or religion induct them into the costume of romance. Such was the second expedient of nature, the counterstroke of her revenge. When this was done in 1 Telemaque,’ £ Rasselas,’ or ‘ Ccelebs,’ it was not without literary effect. Even the last of these three appears to have been successful with its own generation. It would now be deemed intolerably dull. But a dull book is easily renounced. The more didactic * ‘Robert Elsmere. ’ By Mrs. Humphry Ward, author of ‘Miss Bretherton.’ In 3 vols. London : Smith, Elder, & Co., 1888. f Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century. 78 ‘ROBERT elsmere:’ the battle of belief. fictions of the present day, so far as I know them, are not dull. We take them up, however, and we find that, when we meant to go to play, we have gone to school. The romance is a gospel of some philosophy, or of some religion ; and requires sustained thought on many or some of the deepest subjects, as the only rational alternative to placing ourselves at the mercy of our author. We find that he has put upon us what is not indeed a treatise, but more formidable than if it were. For a treatise must nowhere beg the question it seeks to decide, but must carry its reader onwards by reasoning patiently from step to step. But the writer of the romance, under the convenient necessity which his form imposes, skips in thought, over undefined distances, from stage to stage, as a bee from flower to flower. A creed may (as here) be accepted in a sentence, and then abandoned in a page. But we the common herd of readers, if we are to deal with the consequences, to accept or repel the influence of the book, must, as in a problem of mathematics, supply the missing steps. Thus, in perusing as we ought a propagandist romance, we must terribly increase the pace ; and it is the pace that kills. Among the works to which the preceding remarks might apply, the most remarkable within my knowledge is ‘ Bobert Elsmere.’ It is indeed remarkable in many respects. It is a novel of nearly twice the length, and much more than twice the matter, of ordinary novels. It dispenses almost entirely, in the construction of wha must still be called its plot, with the aid of incident in the ordinary sense. We have indeed near the close a solitary individual crushed by a waggon, but this catas¬ trophe has no relation to the plot, and its only purpose c ROBERT ELSMERE:’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 79 is to exhibit a good death-bed in illustration of the great missionary idea of the piece. The nexus of the structure is to be found wholly in the workings of character. The assumption and the surrender of a Rectory are the most salient events, and they are simple results of what the actor has thought right. And yet the great, nay, paramount function of character-drawing, the projection upon the canvas of human beings endowed with the true forces of nature and vitality, does not appear to be by any means the master-gift of the authoress. In the mass of matter which she has prodigally expended there might obviously be retrenchment ; for there are certain laws of dimension which apply to a novel, and which separate it from an epic. In the extraordinary number of personages brought upon the stage in one portion or other of the book, there are some which are elaborated with greater pains and more detail, than their relative importance seems to warrant. ‘ Robert Elsmere 5 is hard reading, and requires toil and effort. Yet, if it be difficult to persist, it is impossible to stop. The prisoner on the treadmill must work severely to perform his task : but if he stops he at once receives a blow which brings him to his senses. Here, as there, it is human infirmity which shrinks ; but here, as not there, the propelling motive is within. Deliberate judgment and deep interest alike rebuke a fainting reader. The strength of the book, overbearing every obstacle, seems to lie in an extra¬ ordinary wealth of diction, never separated from thought ; in a close and searching faculty of social observation ; in generous appreciation of what is morally good, impartially * exhibited in all directions : above * Mrs. Ward has given evidence of this impartiality in her Dedi¬ cation to the memory of two friends, of whom one, Mrs. Alfred 80 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. all in the sense of mission with which the writer is evidently possessed, and in the earnestness and per¬ sistency of purpose with which through every page and line it is pursued. The book is eminently an offspring of the time, and will probably make a deep or at least a very sensible impression ; not, however, among mere novel-readers, but among those who share, in what¬ ever sense, the deeper thought of the period. The action begins in a Westmoreland valley, where the three young daughters of a pious clergyman are grouped around a mother infirm in health and without force of mind. All responsibility devolves accordingly upon Catherine, the eldest of the three ; a noble character, living only for duty and affection. When the ear heard her, then it blessed her ; and when the eye saw her, it gave witness to her.* Here comes upon the scene Robert Elsmere, the eponymist and hero of the book, and the ideal, almost the idol, of the authoress. He had been brought up at Oxford, in years when the wholesale discomfiture of the great religious movement in the University, which followed upon the secession of Cardinal Newman, had been in its turn succeeded by a new religious reaction. The youth had been open to the personal influences of a tutor, who is in the highest degree beautiful, classical, and indifferentist ; and of a noble-minded rationalising teacher, whose name, Mr. Grey, is the thin disguise of another name, and whose lofty character, together with his gifts, and with the tendencies of the time, had made him a power in Oxford. Lyttelton, lived and died unshaken in belief. The other is more or less made known in the pages of the work. * See Job xxix. 11. ‘ROBERT ELSMERE:’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 81 But, in its action on a nature of devout susceptibilities as well as active talents, the place is stronger than the man, and Robert casts in his lot with the ministry of the Church. Let us stop at this point to notice the terms used. At St. Mary’s “the sight and the expe¬ rience touched his inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical and dramatic instincts of a passionate nature.” * He “ carried his religious passion . . . into the service of the great positive tradition around him.” This great, and commonly life-governing decision, is taken under the influence of forces wholly emotional. It is first after the step taken that we have an inkling of any reason for it.j This is not an isolated phenomenon. It is a key to the entire action. The work may be summed up in this way : it represents a battle between intellect and emotion. Of right, intellect wins ; and, having won, enlists emotion in its service. Elsmere breaks upon us in Westmoreland, prepared to make the great commission the business of his life, and to spend and be spent in it to the uttermost. He is at once attracted by Catherine ; attention forthwith ripens into love ; and love finds expression in a proposal. But, with a less educated intelligence, the girl has a purpose of life not less determined than the youth. She believes herself to have an outdoor vocation in the glen, and above all an indoor vocation in her family, of which she is the single prop. A long battle of love ensues, fought out with not less ability, and with even greater tenacity, than the remarkable conflict of intellects, carried on by correspondence, which ended in the mar¬ riage between Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle. The resolute * i. 121, 123. f i. 12b. I, G 82 £ ROBERT ELSMERE I ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. tension of the two minds has many phases ; and a double crisis, first of refusal, secondly of acceptance. This part of the narrative, wrought out in detail with singular skill, will probably be deemed the most successful, the most normal, of the whole. It is thoroughly noble on both sides. The final surrender of Catherine is in truth an opening of the eyes to a wider view of the evolution of the individual, and of the great vocation of life ; and it involves no disparagement. The garrison evacuates the citadel, but its arms have not been laid down, and its colours are flying still. So the pair settle themselves in a family living, full of the enthusiasm of humanity, which is developed with high energy in every practical detail, and based upon the following of the Incarnate Saviour. Equipped thus far with all that renders life desirable, their union is blessed by the birth of a daughter, and everything thrives around them for the formation of an ideal parish. But the parish is adorned by a noble old English man¬ sion, and the mansion inhabited by a wealthy Squire, who knows little of duty, but is devoted to incessant study. As an impersonated intellect, he is abreast of all modern inquiry, and, a “ Tractarian ” in his youth, he has long abandoned all belief. At the outset, he resents profoundly the Hector’s obtrusive concern for his neglected tenantry. But the courage of the clergy¬ man is not to be damped by isolation, and in the case of a scandalously insanitary hamlet, after an adequate number of deaths, Mr. Wendover puts aside the screen called his agent, and rebuilds with an ample generosity* This sudden and complete surrender seems to be intro¬ duced to glorify the hero of the work, for it does not ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 83 indicate any permanent change in the social ideas of Mr. Wendover, but only in his relations to his clergyman. There is, however, made ready for him a superlative revenge. Robert has enjoyed the use of his rich library, and the two hold literary communications, but with a compact of silence on matters of belief. This treaty is honourably observed by the Squire. But the clergyman invites his fate.* Mr. Wendover makes known to him a great design for a “History of Testimony,” j* worked out through many centuries. The book speaks indeed of “the long wrestle” of the two men, and the like.£ But of Elsmere’s wrestling there is no other trace or sign. What weapons the Rector wielded for his faith, what strokes he struck, has not even in a single line been recorded. The discourse of the Squire points out that theologians are men who decline to examine evidence, that miracles are the invention of credulous ages, that the preconceptions sufficiently explain the results. He wins in a canter. There cannot surely be a more curious contrast than that between the real battle, fought in a hundred rounds, between Elsmere and Catherine on marriage, and the fictitious battle between Elsmere and the Squire on the subject of religion, where the one side is a paean, and the other a blank. A great creed, with the testimony of eighteen centuries at its back, cannot find an articulate word to say in its defence, and the downfall of the scheme of belief shatters also, and of right, the highly ordered scheme of life that had nestled in the Rectory of Mure- well, as it still does in thousands of other English parsonages. * ii. 243. f ii. 240. + + ii. 244, 245, 84 £ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OP BELIEF. It is notable that Elsmere seeks, in this conflict with the Squire, no aid or counsel whatever. He encounters indeed by chance Mr. Newcome, a Ritualistic clergyman, whom the generous sympathies of the authoress place upon the roll of his friends. But the language of Mr. Newcome offers no help to his understanding. It is this : — “ Trample on yourself. Pray down the demon, fast, scourge, kill the body, that the soul may live. What are we miserable worms, that we should defy the Most High, that we should set our wretched faculties against His Omnipotence ? ” * Mr. Newcome appears everywhere as not only a respectable but a remarkable character. But as to what he says here, how much does it amount to ? Considered as a medicine for a mind diseased, for an unsettled, dislocated soul, is it less or more than pure nonsense? In the work of an insidious non-believer, it would be set down as part of his fraud. Mrs. Ward evidently gives it in absolute good faith. It is one in a series of indications, by which this gifted authoress conveys to us what appears to be her thoroughly genuine belief that historical Christianity has, indeed, broad grounds and deep roots in emotion, but in reason none whatever. The reA7elation to the wife is terrible ; but Catherine clings to her religion on a basis essentially akin to that of Newcome ; and the faith of these eighteen centuries, and of the prime countries of the world, “ Bella, immortal, benefica Fede, ai trionfi avvezza,” f is dismissed without a hearing. * ii. 270. f JVlanzoni’s ‘Cinque Maggio.’ £ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 85 For my own part, I humbly retort on Robert Elsmere. Considered intellectually, his proceedings in regard to belief appear to me, from the beginning as well as in the downward process, to present dismal gaps. But the emotional part of his character is complete — nay, redun- dant. There is no moral weakness or hesitation. There rises up before him the noble maxim, assigned to the so-called Mr. Grey (with whom he has a consultation of foregone conclusions), “ Conviction is the conscience of the mind.” He renounces his parish and his orders. He still believes in God, and accepts the historical Christ as a wonderful man, good among the good, but a primus inter pares. Passing through a variety of stages, he devotes himself to the religion of humanity ; reconciles to the new gospel, by shoals, skilled artisans of London who had been totally inaccessible to the old one ; and nobly kills himself with overwork, passing away in a final flood of light. He founds and leaves behind him the “New Christian Brotherhood ” of Elgood Street ; and we are at the close apprised, with enthusiastic sincerity, that this is the true effort of the race,* and “ Others I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see.” Who can grudge to this absolutely pure-minded and very distinguished writer the comfort of having at last found the true specific for the evils and miseries of the world? None surely who bear in mind that the Salva¬ tion Army has been known to proclaim itself the Church of the future, or who happen to know that Bunsen, * iii. 411 5 comp, 276. 86 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. when in 1841 he had procured the foundation of the bishopric of Jerusalem, suggested in private correspond¬ ence his hope that this might be the Church which would meet the glorified Redeemer at His coming. It is necessary here to revert to the Squire. Himself the fiolpa 7re7rpa)/x€j/?7, the supreme arbiter of destinies in the book, he is somewhat unkindly treated ; his mind at length gives way, and a darkling veil is drawn over the close. Here seems to be a little literary intoler¬ ance, something even savouring of a religious test. Robert Elsmere stopped in the downward slide at theism, and it calms and glorifies his death-bed. But the Squire had not stopped there. He had said to Elsmere,'"" “You are playing into the hands of the Blacks. All this theistic philosophy of yours only means so much grist to their mill in the end.” But the great guide is dismissed from his guiding office as summarily as all other processes are conducted, which are required by the purpose of the writer. Art everywhere gives way to purpose. Elsmere no more shows cause for his theism than he had shown it against his Christianity. Why was not Mr. Wendover allowed at least the con¬ solations which gave a satisfaction to David Hume ? Hot yet, however, may I wholly part from this sketch of the work. It is so large that much must be omitted. But there is one limb of the plan which is peculiar. Of the two sisters not yet named, one, Agnes by name, appears only as quasi-chaperon or as “ dumrnie.” But Rose, the third, has beauty, the gift of a musical artist, and quick and plastic social faculties. Long and elaborate love relations are developed between her and * iii. 226. ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 87 the poco-curante tutor and friend, Mr. Langham. Twice she is fairly embarked in passion for him, and twice he jilts her. Still she is not discouraged, and she finally marries a certain Flaxman, an amiable but somewhat manufactured character. From the standing point of art, can this portion of the book fail to stir much mis¬ giving ? We know from Shakespeare how the loves of two sisters can be comprised within a single play. But while the drama requires only one connected action, the novel, and eminently this novel, aims rather at the exhibition of a life : and the reader of these volumes may be apt to say that in working two such lives, as those of Catherine and Rose, through so many stages, the authoress has departed from previous example, and has loaded her ship, though a gallant one, with more cargo than it will bear. It may indeed be that Mrs. Ward has been led to charge her tale with such a weight of matter from a desire to give philosophical completeness to her repre¬ sentation of the main springs of action which mark the life of the period. For in Robert Elsmere we have the tempered but aggressive action of the sceptical intellect ; in Catherine the strong reaction against it ; in Rose the art-life ; and in Langham the literary and cultivated indifference of the time. The comprehensiveness of such a picture may be admitted, without withdrawing the objection that, as a practical result, the cargo is too heavy for the vessel. Apart from this question, is it possible to pass without a protest the double jilt? Was Rose, with her quick and self-centred life, a well-chosen corpus vile upon whom to pass this experiment ? More broadly, though credible perhaps for a man, is such a process in any case possible 88 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. by the laws of art for a woman? Does she not violate the first conditions of her nature in exposing herself to so piercing an insult ? An enhancement of delicate self- respect is one among the compensations, which Provi¬ dence has supplied in woman, to make up for a deficiency in some ruder kinds of strength. Again, I appeal to the laws of art against the final disposal of Catherine. Having much less of ability than her husband, she is really drawn with greater force and truth ; and possesses so firm a fibre that when, having been bred in a school of some intolerance, she begins to blunt the edge of her resistance, and to tolerate in divers ways, without adopting, the denuded system of her husband, we begin to feel that the key-note of her character is being tampered with. After his death, the discords become egregious. She remains, as she sup¬ poses, orthodox and tenaciously Evangelical. But every knee must be made to bow to Elsmere. So she does not return to the northern valley and her mother’s declining age, but in London devotes her week-days to carrying on the institutions of charity he had founded on behalf of his new religion. He had himself indig¬ nantly remonstrated with some supposed clergyman, who, in the guise of a Broad Churchman, at once held Elsmere’s creed and discharged externally the office of an Anglican priest. He therefore certainly is not responsible for having taught her to believe the chasm between them was a narrow one. Yet she leaps or steps across it every Sunday, attending her church in the forenoon, and looming as regularly every afternoon in the temple of the New Brotherhood. Here surely the claims of system have marred the work of art. Characters might have been devised whom this see-saw ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OP BELIEF. 89 would have suited well enough ; but for the Catherine of the first volume it is an unmitigated solecism ; a dismal, if not even a degrading compromise. It has been observed that the women of the book are generally drawn with more felicity than the men. As a work of art, Rose is in my view the most successful of the women, and among the men the Squire. With the Squire Mrs. Ward is not in sympathy, for he destroys too much, and he does nothing but destroy. She cannot be in sympathy with Rose ; for Rose, who is selfishly and heartlessly used, is herself selfish and heartless ; with this aggravation, that she has grown up in imme¬ diate contact with a noble elder sister, and yet has not caught a particle of nobleness, as well as in view of an infirm mother to whom she scarcely gives a care. On the other hand, in her Robert, who has all Mrs. Ward’s affection and almost her worship, and who is clothed with a perfect panoply of high qualities, she appears to be less successful and more artificial. In the recently published correspondence * of Sir Henry Taylor, who was by no means given to paradox, we are told that great earnestness of purpose and strong adhesive sym¬ pathies in an author are adverse to the freedom and independence of treatment, the disembarrassed move¬ ment of the creative hand, which are required in the supreme poetic office of projecting character on the canvas. If there be truth in this novel and interesting sugges¬ tion, we cannot wonder at finding the result exhibited in £ Robert Elsmere,’ for never was a book written with greater persistency and intensity of purpose. Every page of its principal narrative is adapted and addressed * Page 17, 90 c ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. by Mrs. Ward to the final aim which is bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh. This aim is to expel the preternatural element from Christianity, to destroy its dogmatic structure, yet to keep intact the moral and spiritual results. The Brotherhood presented to us with such sanguine hopefulness is a u Christian ” brother¬ hood, but with a Christianity emptied of that which Christians believe to be the soul and springhead of its life. For Christianity, in the established Christian sense, is the presentation to us not of abstract dogmas for acceptance, but of a living and a Divine Person, to whom they are to be united by a vital incorporation. It is the reunion to Cod of a nature severed from God by sin, and the process is one, not of teaching lessons, but of imparting a new life, with its ordained equipment of gifts and powers. It is, I apprehend, a complete mistake to suppose, as appears to be the supposition of this remarkable book, that all which has to be done with Scripture, in order to effect the desired transformation of religion, is to eliminate from it the miraculous element. Tremendous as is the sweeping process which extrudes the Resur¬ rection, there is much else, which is in no sense miracu¬ lous, to extrude along with it. The Procession of Palms, for example, is indeed profoundly significant, but it is in no way miraculous. Yet, in any consistent history of a Robert Elsmere’s Christ, there could be no Proces¬ sion of Palms. Unless it be the healing of the ear of Malchus, there is not a miraculous event between the commencement of the Passion and the Crucifixion itself. Yet the notes of a superhuman majesty overspread the whole. We talk of all religions as essentially one ; but what religion presents to its votaries such a tale as this ? ‘ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 91 Bishop Temple, in his sermons at Rugby, has been among the later teachers who have shown how the whole behaviour of our Lord, in this extremity of His abase¬ ment, seems more than ever to transcend all human limits, and to exhibit without arguing His Divinity. The parables, again, are not less refractory than the miracles, and must disappear along with them : for what parables are there which are not built upon the idea of His unique and transcendent office 1 The Gospel of St. John has much less of miracle than the Synoptics ; but it must of course descend from its pedestal, in all that is most its own. And what is gained by all this condemnation, until we get rid of the Baptismal formula 1 It is a question not of excision from the Gospels, but of tearing them into shreds. Far be it from me to deny that the parts which remain, or which remain legible, are vital parts ; but this is no more than to say that there may remain vital organs of a man, after the man himself has been cut in pieces. I have neither space nor capacity at command for the adequate discussion of the questions, which shattered the faith of Robert Elsmere : whether miracles can happen, and whether “an universal preconception” in their favour at the birth of Christianity “ governing the work of all men of all schools,” * adequately accounts for the place which has been given to them in the New Testament, as available proofs of the Divine Mission of our Lord. But I demur on all the points to the authority of the Squire, and even of Mr. Grey. The impossibility of miracle is a doctrine which appears to claim for its basis the results of physical * ii. 246, 247. 92 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. inquiry. They point to unbroken sequences in material nature, ancl refer every phenomenon to its immediate antecedent as adequate to its orderly production. But the appeal to these great achievements of our time is itself disorderly, for it calls upon natural science to decide a question which lies beyond its precinct. There is an extraneous force of will which acts upon matter in derogation of laws purely physical, or alters the balance of those laws among themselves. It can be neither philosophical nor scientific to proclaim the im¬ possibility of miracle, until philosoj)hy or science shall have determined a limit, beyond which this extraneous force of will, so familiar to our experience, cannot act upon or deflect the natural order. Next, as to that avidity for miracle, which is sup¬ posed by the omniscient Squire to account for the invention of it. Let it be granted, for argument’s sake, that if the Gospel had been intended only for the J ews, they at least were open to the imputation of a biassing and blinding appetite for signs and wonders. But scarcely had the Christian scheme been established among the Jews, when it began to take root among the Gentiles. It will hardly be contended that these Gentiles, who detested and despised the Jewish race, had any predisposition to receive a religion at their hands or upon their authority. Were they then, during the century which succeeded our Lord’s birth, so swayed by a devouring thirst for the supernatural as to account for the early reception, and the steady if not rapid growth, of the Christian creed among them? The statement of the Squire, which carries Robert Els- mere, is that the preconception in favour of miracles at the period “governed the work of all men of all ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 93 schools.” * A most gross and palpable exaggeration. In philosophy the Epicurean school was atheistic, the Stoic school was ambiguously theistic, and doubt nestled in the Academy. Christianity had little direct contact with these schools, but they acted on the tone of thought, in a manner not favourable but adverse to the pre¬ conception. Meantime the power of religion was in decay. The springs of it in the general mind and heart were weakened. A deluge of profligacy had gone far to destroy, at Rome, even the external habit of public worship ; and Horace, himself an indifferentist, j de¬ nounces the neglect and squalor of the temples ; while further on we have the stern and emphatic testimony of Juvenal— “ Esse aliquid Manes, et snbterranea regna, Et contum, et Stygio ranas in gurgite nigras, Nee pueri credunt, nisi qui nondura sere lavantur. ” j The age was not an age of faith, among thinking and ruling classes, either in natural or in supernatural reli¬ gion. There had been indeed a wonderful “evangelical preparation ” in the sway of the Greek language, in the unifying power of the Roman State and Empire, and in the utter moral failure of the grand and dominant civilisations ; but not in any virgin soil, yearning for the sun, the rain, or the seed of truth. But the Squire, treading in the footprints of Gibbon’s fifteenth Chapter, leaves it to be understood that, in the appeal to the supernatural, the new religion enjoyed an exclusive as well as an overpowering advantage ; * ii. 247. f Hor. ‘ Od.’ i* 34; iii. 6. x ‘ Sat.’ ii. 150. 94 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. that it had a patent for miracle, which none could infringe. Surely this is an error even more gross than the statement already cited about all men of all schools. The supernatural was interwoven with the entire fabric of the religion of the Roman State, which, if weak and effete as a religious discipline, was of extraordinary power as a social institution. It stood, if not on faith, yet on nationality, on tradition, on rich endowments, on the deeply interested attachment of a powerful aristo¬ cracy, and on that policy of wide conciliation, which gave to so many creeds, less exclusive than the Christian, a cause common with its own. Looking for a comprehensive description of miracles, we might say that they constitute a language of heaven embodied in material signs, by which communication is established between the Deity and man, outside the daily course of nature and experience. Distinctions may be taken between one kind of miracle and another. But none of these are distinctions in principle. Some¬ times they are alleged to be the offspring of a divine power committed to the hands of particular men ; some¬ times they are simple manifestations unconnected with human agency, and carrying with them their own meaning, such as the healings in Bethesda; sometimes they are a system of events and of phenomena subject to authoritative and privileged interpretation. Miracle, portent, prodigy and sign are all various forms of one and the same thing, namely, an invasion of the known and common natural order from the side of the super¬ natural. In the last-named case, there is an expression of the authorised human judgment upon it, while in the earlier ones there is only a special appeal to it. They rest upon one and the same basis. We may assign to ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 95 miracle a body and a soul. It has for its body some¬ thing accepted as being either in itself or in its incidents outside the known processes of ordinary nature, and for its soul the alleged message which in one shape or another it helps to convey from the Deity to man. This supernatural element, as such, was at least as familiar to the Roman heathenism, as to the Christian scheme. It was indeed more highly organised. It was embodied in the regular and normal practice of the ministers of religion, and especially, under the juris¬ diction of the pontifical college, it was the regular and standing business of the augurs to observe, report, and interpret the supernatural signs, by which the gods gave reputed instructions to men outside the course of nature. Sometimes it was by strange atmospheric phenomena ; sometimes by physical prodigies, as when a woman produced a snake, * or a calf was born with its head in its thigh ; | whereupon, says Tacitus, secuta harusjpicum inter pretatio. Sometimes through events only preternatural from the want of assignable cause, as when the statue of Julius Caesar, on an island in the Tiber, turned itself round from west to east.J Some¬ times with an approximation to the Christian signs and wonders, as when Vespasian removed with spittle the tabes oculorum , and restored the impotent hand.§ It does not readily appear why in principle the Romans, who had the supernatural for their daily food in a shape sustained by the unbroken tradition of their country, should be violently attracted by the mere exhibition of it from a despised source, and in a manner less formal. f Ibid. xv. 47. § Ibid, iv. 81. * Tac. ‘Ann.’ xiv. 12. X Tac. ‘ Hist/ i. 86. 96 ‘ROBERT elsmere:’ the battle of belief. less organised, and less known. In one important way we know the accepted supernatural of the Romans operated with direct and telling power against the Gospel. Si cselum stetit, si terra movit , Christianos ad leones * Or, in the unsuspected language of Tacitus, dim latius metuitur , trepidatione vulgi , invalidus quisque obtriti. When the portents were unfavourable, and there was fear of their extension, the weak had to suffer for the popular alarms.! The upshot of the matter then appears to be some¬ thing like this. The lowly and despised preachers of Christian portent were confronted everywhere by the highborn and accom¬ plished caste sworn to the service of the gods, familiar from centuries of tradition with the supernatural, and supported at every point with the whole force and influence of civil authority. Nor has there ever pro¬ bably been a case of a contest so unequal, as far as the powers of this world are concerned. Tainted in its origin by its connection with the detested Judaism, odious to the prevailing tone by its exclusiveness, it rested originally upon the testimony of men few, poor and ignorant, and for a length of time no human genius was enlisted in its service, with the single exception of St. Paul. All that we of this nineteenth century know, and know so well, under the name of vested interests, is insignificant compared with the embattled fortress that these humble Christians had to storm. And the Squire, if he is to win the day with minds less ripe for conversion than Robert Elsmere, must produce some other suit of weapons from his armoury. * Tertul], ‘ Apol. 40. f Tac. ‘Ami.’ xii. 43. ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 97 With him I now part company, as his thoroughgoing negation parts company with the hybrid scheme of Mrs. Ward. It is of that scheme that I now desire to take a view immediately practical. In a concise but striking notice in the Times * it is placed in the category of “ clever attacks upon revealed religion.” It certainly offers us a substitute for revealed religion ; and possibly the thought of tho book might be indicated in these words : “ The Christianity accepted in England is a good thing ; but come with me, and I will show you a better.” It may, I think, be fairly described as a devout attempt, made in good faith, to simplify the difficult mission of religion in the world by discarding the supposed lumber of the Christian theology, while retain¬ ing and applying, in their undiminished breadth of scope, the whole personal, social, and spiritual morality which has now, as matter of fact, entered into the patrimony of Christendom ; and, since Christendom is the dominant power of the world, into the patrimony of our race. It is impossible indeed to conceive a more religious life than the later life of Robert Elsmere, in his sense of the word religion. And that sense is far above the sense in which religion is held, or practically applied, by great multitudes of Christians. It is, however, a new form of religion. The question is, can it be actually and beneficially substituted for the old one'? It abolishes, of course, the whole authority of Scripture. It abolishes also Church, priesthood or ministry, sacraments, and the whole established ma¬ chinery which trains the Christian as a member of a * I. Times , April 7, 1888. H 98 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF, religious society. These have been regarded by fifty generations of men as wings of the soul. It is still required of us by Mrs. Ward to fly, and to fly as high as ever ; but it is to fly without wings. For baptism, we have a badge of silver, and inscription in a book.* For the Eucharist there is at an ordinary meal a recital of the fragment, “This do in remembrance of Me.” The children respond, “ Jesus, we remember Thee always.” It is hard to say that prayer is retained. In the Elgood Street service “it is rather an act of adoration and faith, than a prayer properly so called,” f and it appears that memory and trust are the instru¬ ments on which the individual is to depend, for main¬ taining his communion with God. It would be curious to know how the New Brotherhood is to deal with the great mystery of marriage, perhaps the truest touchstone of religious revolution. It must be obvious to every reader that in the great duel between the old faith and the new, as it is fought in c Robert Elsmere,’ there is a great inequality in the distribution of the arms. Reasoning is the weapon of the new scheme ; emotion the sole resource of the old. Neither Catherine nor Newcome have a word to say beyond the expression of feeling ; and it is when he has adopted the negative side that the hero himself is fully introduced to the faculty of argument. This is a singular arrangement, especially in the case of a writer who takes a generous view of the Christianity that she only desires to supplant by an improved device. The explanation may be simple. There are abundant signs in the book that the negative speculatists have been * iii. 358. f iii. 360. ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 99 consulted if not ransacked ; but there is nowhere a smn that the authoress has made herself acquainted with the Christian apologists, old or recent ; or has weighed the evidences derivable from the Christian history ; or has taken measure of the relation in which the doctrines of grace have historically stood to the production of the noblest, purest, and greatest characters of the Christian ages. If such be the case, she has skipped lightly (to put it no higher) over vast mental spaces of literature and learning relevant to the case, and has given sentence in the cause without hearing the evidence. It might perhaps be not unjust to make a retort upon the authoress, and say that while she believes herself simply to be yielding obedience to reason, her movement is in reality impelled by bias. We have been born into an age when, in the circles of literature and science, there is a strong anti-dogmatic leaning, a prejudice which may largely intercept the action of judgment. Partly because belief has its superstitions, and the detection of these superstitions opens the fabric to attack, like a breach in the wall of a fortress when at a given point it has been stuffed with unsound material. Partly because the rapidity of the movement of the time predisposes the mind to novelty. Partly because the multiplication of enjoyments, through the progress of commerce and invention, enhances the materialism of life, strengthens by the forces of habit the hold of the seen world upon us, and leaves less both of brain power and of heart power available for the unseen. Enormous accretion of wealth is no more deprived of its sting now, than it was when Saint Paul penned his profoundly penetrating admonition to Timothy.* And when, under the present * 1 Tim. iv. 9. 100 ‘ROBERT elsmere:’ the battle of belief. conditions, it happens that the environment of personal association represents either concentrated hostility or hopeless diversity in religion, there may be hardly a chance for firm and measured belief. What we find to be troublesome, yet from some inward protest are not prepared wholly to reject, we like to simplify and reduce ; and the instances of good and devoted men who are- averse to dogma, more frequent than usual in this age, are powerful to persuade us that in lightening the cargo we are really securing the safe voyage of the ship. “ About dogma we hear dispute, but the laws of high social morality no speculation is disposed to question. Why not get rid of the disputable, and concentrate all our strength on grasping the undisputed ? ” We may by a little wresting quote high authority for this recom¬ mendation. “ Whereto we have already attained . . . let us mind the same thing. . . . And if in anything ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.” * It is not difficult to conceive how, under the action of causes with which the time abounds, pure and lofty minds, wholly guiltless of the intention to impair or lower the motive forces of Christianity, may be led into the snare, and may even conceive a process in itself destructive to be, on the contrary, conservative and reparatory. But it is a snare none the less. And first let us recollect, when we speak of renouncing Christian dogma, what it is that we mean. The germ of it as a system lies in the formula, “ Baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” f This was speedily developed into the substance of the Apostles’ * Phil, iii. 15, 16. f St. Matt, xxviii. 19. ‘ROBERT ELSMERE:’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 101 Creed : the Creed which forms our confession of in¬ dividual faith, in baptism and on the bed of death. Now belief in God, which forms (so to speak) the first great limb of the Creed, is strictly a dogma, and is on no account, according to Mrs. Ward, to be surrendered. But the second and greatest portion of the Creed con¬ tains twelve propositions, of which nine are matters of fact, and the whole twelve have for their office the setting forth to us of a Personage, to whom a great dispensation has been committed. The third division of the Creed is more dogmatic, but it is bound down like the second to earth and fact by the article of the Church, a visible and palpable institution. The principal purely dogmatic part of this great document is the part which is to be retained. And we, who accept the Christian story, are entitled to say, that to extrude from a history, tied to strictly human facts, that by which they become a standing channel of organic connection between Deity and humanity, is not presumptively a very hopeful mode of strengthening our belief in God, thus deprived of its props and accessories. The chasm between deity and the human soul, over which the scheme of Redemption has thrown a bridge, again yawns beneath our feet, in all its breadth and depth. Although the Divinity of Christ is not put promi¬ nently forward in this book, but rather the broader objection to supernatural manifestations, yet it will be found to be the real hinge of the entire question. For, if Christ be truly God, few will deny that the exceptional incidents, which follow in the train of His appearance upon earth, raise, in substance, no new difficulty. Is it true, then, that Christians have been so divided on this 102 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. ♦ s subject as to promise us a return of peace and progress by its elimination % To answer this question rightly, we must not take the humour of this or that particular time or country, but must regard the Christian system in its whole extension, and its whole duration. So regarding it, we shall find that the assertion, far from being true, is glaringly untrue. The truth in rude outline is surely this. That when the Gospel went out into the world, the greatest of all the groups of controversies, which progressively arose within its borders, was that which concerned the true nature of the Object of worship. That these controversies ran through the most important shapes, which have been known to the professing Church of later years, and through many more. That they rose, especially in the fourth century, to such a height, amidst the conflict of councils, popes, and theologians, that the private Christian was too often like the dove wandering over the waters, and seeking in vain a resting-place for the sole of his foot. That the whole mind and heart of the Church were given, in their whole strength and through a lengthened period, to find some solution of these controversies. That many generations passed before Arianism wholly ceased to be the basis of Christian profession in spots or sections of Christendom, but not so long before the central thought of the body as a whole had come to be fixed in the form of what has ever since, and now for over fourteen hundred years, been known as the orthodox belief. The authority of this tradition, based upon the Scriptures, has through all that period been upheld at the highest point to which a marvellous continuity and universality could raise it. It was not impeached by the questioning mind 1 ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 103 of the thirteenth century. The scientific revolution, which opened to us the antipodes and the solar system, did not shake it. The more subtle dangers of the Renascence were dangers to Christianity as a whole, but not to this great element of Christianity as a part. And when the terrible struggles of the Reformation stirred every coarse human passion as well as every fond religious interest into fury, even then the Ricene belief, as Mohler in his ‘ Symbolik’ has so well observed, sat un¬ disturbed in a region elevated above the controversies of the time ; which only touched it at points so exceptional, and comparatively so obscure, as not appreciably to qualify its majestic authority. A Christianity without Christ is no Christianity ; and a Christ not divine is one other than the Christ on whom the souls of Christians have habitually fed. What virtue, what piety, have existed outside of Christianity, is a question totally distinct. But to hold that, since the great controversy of the early time was wound up at Chalcedon, the ques¬ tion of our Lord’s Divinity (which draws after it all that Robert Elsmere would excide), has generated the storms of the Christian atmosphere, would be simply an historical untruth. How then is the work of peace to be promoted by the excision from our creed of that central truth on which we are generally agreed ? The onward movement of negation in the present day has presented perhaps no more instructive feature than this, that the Unitarian persuasion has, in this country at least, by no means thriven upon it. It might have been thought that, in the process of dilapidation, here would have been a point at which the receding tide of belief would have rested at any rate for a while. But instead of this, we are informed that the numbers of 104 ‘ ROBERT elsmere:’ the battle of belief. professed Unitarians have increased less than those of other communions, and less than the natural growth of the population. And we find Mrs. Ward herself describing the old Unitarian scheme # as one wholly destitute of logic ; but in what respect she improves upon it I have not yet perceived. In order to invest any particular propagandism with a show of presumptive title to our acceptance, its author should be able to refer it to some standard of appeal which will show that it has foundations otherwise than in mere private judgment or active imagination. The books of the New Testament I understand to be, for Mrs. Ward, of no value except for the moral precepts they contain. Still less may we invoke the authority of the Old Testament, where the ethical picture is more checquered. She finds no spell in the great moral miracle (so to phrase it) of the Psalms ; nor in the marvellous jpropaideia of the J ewish history, so strikingly confirmed by recent research • in the Levitical law, the prophetic teaching, the entire dispensation of temporal promise and of religious worship and instruction, by which the Hebrew race was kept in social isolation through fifteen centuries, as a cradle for the Redeemer that was to come. She is not awakened by the Christian more than by the Jewish history. No way to her assent is opened by the great victory of the world’s babes and striplings over its philosophers and scholars, and the serried array of emperors, aristocracies, and statesmen, with their elaborate apparatus of organised institutions. All this cogent mass of human testimony is rendered, I admit, on behalf not of a vague and arbitrary severance * iii. 55. 1 ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 105 of Christian morals from the roots which have produced them, but of what we term the Christian dogma, that is to say, of belief in God supplemented and brought home by the great fact of Redemption, and of the provision made through the Church of Christ for the perpetual conservation and application of its living powers. And it must be observed that, in adducing this evidence from consent, I make no assumption and beg no question as between reformed and unreformed Chris¬ tianity. By any such preferential treatment of a part, I should weaken the authority and betray the sacred cause of the whole. All that can be said or shown of the corruptions that have gathered round the central scheme, of the failure rightly to divide the word of truth, of the sin and shame that in a hundred forms have belied its profession, affords only new proof of the imperishable vitality that has borne so much disease, of the buoyancy of the ark on whose hull has grown so much of excres¬ cence without arresting its course through the waters. And again, the concord of Christians ever since the great adjudication of the fifth century on the central truth has acquired an addition of weight almost incalculable, from the fact that they have differed so sharply upon many of the propositions that are grouped around it. Without doubt human testimony is to be duly and strictly sifted, and every defect in its quantity or quality is to be recorded in the shape of a deduction from its weight. But as there is no proceeding more irreverent, so there is none more strictly irrational, than its whole¬ sale depreciation. Such depreciation is apL infallible note of shallow and careless thinking, for it very generally implies an exaggerated and almost ludicrous estimate of the capacity and performances of the present 106 ‘ROBERT ELSMERE:’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. generation, as compared with those which have preceded it. Judges in our own cause, pleaders with nobody to reply, we take ample note of every comparative advantage we possess, but forget to register deteriorating and dis¬ qualifying influences. Not less commonly is our offence avenged by our own inconsistency. The solemn voice of the ages, the securus judicat orbis t err arum, amounts simply to zero for Robert Elsmere. Yet he can abso¬ lutely surrender to his own selected pope the guidance of his understanding ; and when he asks himself, at the funeral in the third volume, whether the more modest, that is, the emasculated, form of human hope in the presence of the Eternal, may not be “as real, as sustaining,'’ as the old one, his reply to this great question is — •“ Let Grey’s trust answer for me.” * This great buttress of the old religion, whatever its value, is then withdrawn from the new one, which starts like “ a painted ship Upon a painted ocean,” accredited by a successful venture among the London artisans, who differ (so we are told) not only from the classes above and beneath them in the metropolis, as to their disposition to accept the Christian doctrines, but from their own brethren in the north, f It is not, there¬ fore, on testimony that the Elsmere gospel takes its stand. Does it, then, stand upon philosophy, upon inherent beauty and fitness, as compared with the scheme which it dismembers and then professes to re¬ place? Again, be it borne in mind that the essence of the proposal is to banish the supernatural idea and * iii. 284. f iii. 159. ‘ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 107 character of our Lord, but to imbibe and assimilate His moral teachings. From my antiquated point of view, this is simply to bark the tree, and then, as the death which ensues is not immediate, to point out with satisfaction on the instant that it still waves living branches in the wind. We have before us a huge larcenous appropriation, by the modern schemes, of goods which do not belong to them. They carry peacocks’ feathers, which adorn them for a time, and which they cannot reproduce. Let us endeavour to learn whether these broad assumptions, which flow out of the historic testimony of the Christian ages, are also prompted and sustained by the reason of the case. It is sometimes possible to trace peculiar and marked types of human character with considerable precision to their causes. Take, for instance, the Spartan type of character, in its relation to the legislation attributed to Lycurgus. Or take, again, the Jewish type, such as it is presented to us both by the ancient and the later history, in its relation to the Mosaic law and institutions. It would surely have been a violent paradox, in either of these cases, to propose the abolition of the law, and to assert at the same time that the character would continue to be exhibited, not only sporadically and for a time, but normally and in permanence. These were restricted, almost tribal, systems. Chris¬ tianity, though by no means less peculiar, was diffusive. It both produced a type of character wholly new to the Roman world, and it fundamentally altered the laws and institutions, the tone, temper, and tradition of that world. For example, it changed profoundly the rela¬ tion of the poor to the rich, and the almost forgotten 108 ‘ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. obligations of the rich to the poor. It abolished slavery, abolished human sacrifice, abolished gladiatorial shows, and a multitude of other horrors. It restored the position of woman in society. It proscribed polygamy ; and put down divorce, absolutely in the West, though not absolutely in the East. It made peace, instead of war, the normal and presumed relation between human societies. It exhibited life as a discipline everywhere and in all its parts, and changed essentially the place and function of suffering in human experience. Accept¬ ing the ancient morality as far as it went, it not only enlarged but transfigured its teaching, by the laws of humility and of forgiveness, and by a law of purity per¬ haps even more new and strange than these. Let it be understood that I speak throughout not of such older religion as may have subsisted in the lowly and unobserved places of human life, but of what stamped the character of its strongholds ; of the elements which made up the main and central currents of thought, action, and influence, in those places, and in those classes, which drew the rest of the world in their train. All this was not the work of a day, but it was the work of powers and principles which persistently asserted themselves in despite of controversy, of infirmity, and of corruption in every form ; which reconstituted in life and vigour a society found in decadence ; which by degrees came to pervade the very air we breathe ; and which eventually have beyond all dispute made Christen¬ dom the dominant portion, and Christianity the ruling power, of the world. And all this has been done, not by eclectic and arbitrary fancies, but by the creed of the Homoousion, in which the philosophy of modern times sometimes appears to find a favourite theme of ridicule. £ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 109 But it is not less material to observe that the whole fabric, social as well as personal, rests on the new type of individual character which the Gospel brought into life and action : enriched and completed without doubt from collateral sources which made part of the “ Evan¬ gelical preparation,’’ but in its central essence due entirely to the dispensation, which had been founded and wrought out in the land of J udsea, and in the history of the Hebrew race. What right have we to detach, or to suppose we can detach, this type of personal character from the causes out of which as matter of history it has grown, and to assume that without its roots it will thrive as well as with them 1 For Mrs. Ward is so firmly convinced, and so affectionately sensible, of the exquisite excellence of the Christian type that she will permit no abatement from it, though she thinks it can be cast in a mould which is human as well as, nay, better than, in one which is divine. Nor is she the first person who, in renouncing the Christian tradition, has reserved her allegiance to Christian morals and even sought to raise their standard. We have, for instance, in America, not a person only, but a society, which, while trampling on the Divinity and Incarnation of Christ, not only accepts His rule of life, but pushes evangelical counsels into absolute pre¬ cepts, and insists upon them as the rule of life for all who seek, instead of abiding in the “ lower floor churches,” to be Christians indeed. “The fundamental principles of Shakerism ” are “ virgin purity, non-resistance, peace, equality of inheritance, and unspottedness from the world.” * The evidence of travellers appears to show * The quotation is from a preface to ‘ Shaker Sermons,’ by H. L. Eads, Bishop of South Union, Kentucky. Fourth edition, 1887. 110 c ROBERT ELSMEEE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. that the ideal of these projectors has to a certain degree been realised ; nor can we know for how many years an eccentric movement of this kind will endure the test of time without palpably giving way. The power of environment, and the range of idiosyncrasy, suffice to generate, especially in dislocating times, all sorts of abnormal combinations, which subsist, in a large degree, upon forces not their own, and so impose themselves, with a show of authority, upon the world. Let us return to the point. The Christian type is the product and the property of the Christian scheme. No, says the objector, the improvements which we witness are the offspring of civilisation. It might be a sufficient answer to point out that the civilisation before and around us is a Christian civilisation. What civilisation could do without Christianity for the greatest races of mankind, we know already. Philosophy and art, creative genius and practical energy, had their turn before the Advent ; and we can register the results. I do not say that the great Greek and Roman ages lost — perhaps even they improved — the ethics of meum and tuum, in the interests of the leisured and favoured classes of society, as compared with what those ethics had been in archaic times. But they lost the hold which some earlier races within their sphere had had of the future life. They degraded, and that immeasurably, the posi¬ tion of woman. They effaced from the world the law of purity. They even carried indulgence to a worse than bestial type ; and they gloried in the achievement.* Duty and religion, in the governing classes and the governing places, were absolutely torn asunder ; and self- * See, for instance, the "'E pures of Lucian. ‘ROBERT ELSMERE:’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. Ill will and self -worship were established as the unquestioned rule of life. It is yet more important to observe that the very qualities which are commended in the Beatitudes, and elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount, and which form the base of the character specifically Christian, were for the Greek and the Roman mind the objects of contempt. From the history of all that has lain within the reach of the great Mediterranean basin, not a tittle of encouragement can be drawn for the ideas of those, who would surrender the doctrines of Christianity and yet retain its moral and spiritual fruits. Does then that severance, unsustained by authority or by experience, commend itself at any single point by an improved conformity with purely abstract principles of philosophy ? and is the new system better adapted to the condition and the needs of human nature, than the old 'i Does it better correspond with what an enlightened reason would dictate as the best provision for those needs ? Does it mitigate, or does it enhance, the undoubted difficulties of belief ? And if the answer must be given in the negative to both these inquiries, how are we to account for the strange phenomenon which exhibits to us persons sincerely, nay painfully, desirous of seeing Divine government more and more accepted in the world, yet enthusiastically busied in cutting away the best among the props, by which that o’overnment has been heretofore sustained h O As regards the first of these three questions, it is to be observed that, while the older religions made free use of prodigy and portent, they employed these instru¬ ments for political rather than moral purposes ; and it may be doubted whether the sum total of such action tended to raise the standard of life and thought. The 112 4 ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. general upshot was that the individual soul felt itself very far from God. Our bedimmed eye could not perceive His purity ; and our puny reach could not find touch of His vastness. By the scheme of Redemption, this sense of distance was removed. The divine per¬ fections were reflected through the medium of a perfect humanity, and were thus made near, familiar, and liable to love. The great all-pervading law of human sympathy became directly available for religion, and in linking us to the Divine Humanity, linked us by the same act to God. And this not for rare and exceptional souls alone, but for the common order of mankind. The direct contact, the interior personal communion of the individual with God was re-established : for human faculties, in their normal action, could now appreciate, and approach to, what had previously been inappreciable and un¬ approachable. Surely the system I have thus rudely exhibited was ideally a great philosophy, as well as practically an immeasurable boon. To strike out the redemptive clauses from the scheme is to erase the very feature by which it essentially differed from all other schemes ; and to substitute a didactic exhibition of superior morality, with the rays of an example in the preterite tense, set by a dead man in Judaea, for that scheme of living forces, by which the powers of a living Saviour’s humanity are daily and hourly given to man, under a charter which expires only with the world itself. Is it possible here to discern, either from an ideal or from a practical point of view, anything but depletion and impoverishment, and the substitution of a spectral for a living form ? If we proceed to the second question, the spectacle, as it presents itself to me, is stranger still. Although 1 ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 113 \vc know that James Mill, arrested by the strong hand of Bishop Butler, halted rather than rested for a while in theism on his progress towards general negation, yet his case does not supply, nor can we draw from other sources, any reason to regard such a position as one which can be largely and permanently held against that relentless force of logic, which is ever silently at work to assert and to avenge itself. The theist is confronted, with no breakwater between, by the awful problem of moral evil, by the mystery of pain, by the apparent anomalies of waste and of caprice on the face of creation ; and not least of all by the fact that, while the moral government of the world is founded on the free agency of man, there are in multitudes of cases environing circumstances independent of his will which seem to deprive that agency, called free, of any operative power adequate to contend against them. In this bewildered state of things, in this great enigma of the world, “ Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from Bozrah? . . . Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat 1 ” * There has come upon the scene the figure of a Redeemer, human and divine. Let it be granted that the Incarnation is a marvel wholly beyond our reach, and that the miracle of the Resurrection to-day gives serious trouble to some fastidious intellects. But the difficulties of a baffled understanding, lying every¬ where around us in daily experience, are to be expected from its limitations ; not so the shocks encountered by the moral sense. Even if the Christian scheme slightly lengthened the immeasurable catalogue of the first, this l. * Isa. lxiii, 1, 2. I 114 ‘ROBERT ELSMERE.*’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. is dust in the balance compared with the relief it furnishes to the second ; in supplying the most powerful remedial agency ever known, in teaching how pain may be made a helper, and evil transmuted into good ; and in opening clearly the vision of another world, in which we are taught to look for yet larger counsels of the Almighty wisdom, To take away, then, the agency so beneficent, which has so softened and reduced the moral problems that lie thickly spread around us, and to leave us face to face with them in all their original rigour, is to enhance and not to mitigate the difficulties of belief. Lastly, it is not difficult to understand why those who prefer the Pagan ideal, or who cannot lay hold on the future world, or who labour under still greater dis¬ advantages, should put aside as a whole the gospel of God manifest in the flesh. But Mrs. Ward is none of these ; and it is far harder to comprehend the mental attitude, or the mental consistency at least, of those who like her desire to retain what was manifested, but to thrust aside the manifesting Person, and all that His living personality entails : or, if I may borrow an Aristotelian figure, to keep the accidents and discard the substance. I cannot pretend to offer a solution of this hard riddle. But there is one feature which almost uniformly marks writers whose mind as in this case is of a religious tone, or who do not absolutely exclude religion, while they reject the Christian dogma and the authority of Scripture. They appear to have a very low estimate both of the quantity and the quality of sin : of its amount, spread like a deluge over the world, and of the subtlety, intensity, and virulence of its nature. I mean a low estimate as compared with the mournful denunciations of the sacred writings, or with 'ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OP BELIEF. 115 the language especially of the later Christian Con¬ fessions. Now let it be granted that, in interpreting those Confessions, we do not sufficiently allow for the enormous differences among human beings — differences both of original disposition, and of ripened character. We do not sufficiently take account of the fact that, while disturbance and degradation have so heavily affected the mass, there are a happy few on whom nature’s degeneracy has but lightly laid its hand. In the biography of the late Dr. Marsh we have an illus¬ tration apt for my purpose. His family was straitly Evangelical. He underwent what he deemed to be conversion. A like-minded friend congratulated his mother on the work of Divine grace in her son. But, in the concrete, she mildly resented the remark, and replied that in truth “ Divine grace would find very little to do in her son William.” In the novel of 'The Unclassed’ by the author of ‘ Thyrza,’ which like ' Robert Elsmere ’ is of the didactic and speculative class, the leading man-character, when detailing his mental history, says that " sin ” has never been for him a word of weighty import. So ingenuous a confession is not common. I remember but one exception to the rule that the negative writers of our own day have formed, or at least have exhibited, a very feeble estimate of the enormous weight of sin, as a factor in the condition of man and of the world. That excep¬ tion is Amiel. Mrs. Ward has prefixed to her translation of his remarkable and touching work an Introduction from which I make the following extract : — “ His Calvinistic training lingers long in liim ; and what detaches him from the Hegelian school, with which he has much in com¬ mon, is his own stronger sense of personal need, his preoccupation THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 116 ‘ ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ with the idea of sin. He speaks (says M. Kenan contemptuously) of sin, of salvation, of redemption and conversion, as if these things were realities. Ho asks me, ‘What does M. Renan make of sin ? ’ ‘ Eh bien, je crois quo je le supprime.’ ” The closing exjmession is a happy one : sin is for the most part suppressed. We are bound to believe, and I for one do believe, that in many cases the reason why the doctrines of grace, so profoundly embedded in the Gospel, are dis¬ pensed with by the negative writers of the day, is in many cases because they have not fully had to feel the need of them : because they have not travelled with St. Paul through the dark valley of agonising conflict, or with Dante along the circles downward and the hill upward ; because, having to bear a smaller share than others of the common curse and burden, they stagger and falter less beneath its weight. But ought they not to know that they are physicians, who have not learned the principal peril of the patient’s case, and whose prescription accordingly omits the main requisite for a cure? For surely in this matter there should be no mistake. As the entire Levitical institu¬ tions seem to have been constructed to impress upon the Hebrew mind a deep and definite idea of sin, we find in the Hew Testament that that portion of our Lord’s work was so to speak ready-made. But He placed it at the foundation of His great design for the future. “ When the Comforter is come, He will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” * Mrs. Ward seeks, and even with enthusiasm, to “ make for righteousness ; ” but the three terms compose an * John xYu 8 ‘ROBERT ELSMERE : ’ THE BATTLE OF BELIEF. 117 organic whole, and if a part be torn away the residue will bleed to death. For the present, however, we have only to rest in the real though but partial consolation that, if the ancient and continuous creed of Christendom has slipped away from its place in Mrs. Ward’s brilliant and subtle understanding, it has nevertheless by no means lost a true, if unacknowledged, hold upon the inner sanctuary of her heart. IV. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY.* 1888. As a listener, from across the broad Atlantic, to the clash of arms in the combat between Colonel Ingersoll and Dr. Field on the most momentous of all subjects, I have not the personal knowledge which assisted these doughty champions in making reciprocal acknowledg¬ ments, as broad as could be desired, with reference to personal character and motive. Such acknowledgments are of high value in keeping the issue clear, if not always of all adventitious, yet of all venomous matter. * [A controversy on Christianity has now been carried on for some months in the pages of The North American Review between Dr. Field and Colonel Ingersoll, the most eloquent representative of the school of unbelief (in the United States). In the course of the discussion Mr. Gladstone contributed the following paper, which, if we are to judge by the circulation of the number of the Review in which it appears, has excited very considerable interest in America. We believe that some sixty-three editions have been published. By the kind permission of the distinguished author, we are enabled to present it to our readers. If it be possible for party feeling to be suppressed for a time, all Christian men must rejoice that an illustrious statesman should have found time, amid the varied and exciting engagements of his active and honoured old age, to produce this able exposition and defence of his faith in the gospel. Colonel Ingersoll’s reply has been published in this country in pamphlet form. — Editor of The Congre¬ gational Review .] INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 119 Destitute as I am of the experience on which to found them as original testimonies, still, in attempting partially to criticise the remarkable Reply of Colonel Ingersoll, I can both accept in good faith what has been said by Dr. Field, and add that it seems to me consonant with the strain of the pages I have set before me. Having said this, I shall allow myself the utmost free¬ dom in remarks, which will be addressed exclusively to the matter, not the man. Let me begin by making several acknowledgments of another kind, but which I feel to be serious. The Christian Church has lived long enough in external triumph and prosperity to expose those of whom it is composed to all such perils of error and misfeasance, as triumph and prosperity bring with them. Belief in Divine guidance is not of necessity belief that such guidance will never be frustrated by the laxity, the infirmity, the perversity of man, alike in the domain of action and in the domain of thought. Believers in the perpetuity of the life of the Church are not tied to believing in the perpetual health of the Church. Even the great Latin Communion, and that Communion even since the Council of the Vatican in 1870, theoretically admits, or does not exclude, the possibility of a wide range of local and partial error in opinion as well as conduct. Elsewhere the admission would be yet more unequivocal. Of such errors in tenet, or in temper and feeling more or less hardened into tenet, there has been a crop alike abundant and multifarious, Each Christian party is sufficiently apt to recognize this fact with regard to every other Christian party ; and the more impartial and reflective minds are aware that no party is exempt from mischiefs, which lie at the root of the 120 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. human constitution in its warped, impaired, and dis¬ located condition. Naturally enough, these deformities help to indispose men towards belief ; and when this indisposition has been developed into a system of negative warfare, all the faults of all the Christian bodies, and sub-divisions of bodies, are, as it was natural to expect they would be, carefully raked together, and become part and parcel of the indictment against the Divine scheme of redemption. I notice these things in the mass, without particularity, which might be invidious, for two important purposes. First, that we all, who hold by the gospel and the Christian Church, may learn humility and modesty, as well as charity and indulgence, in the treatment of opponents, from our consciousness that we all, alike by our exaggerations and our short¬ comings in belief, no less than by faults of conduct, have contributed to bring about this condition of fashionable hostility to religious faith : and, secondly, that we may resolutely decline to be held bound to tenets, or to consequences of tenets, which represent not the great Christendom of the past and present, but only some hole and corner of its vast organization ; and not the heavenly treasure, but the rust or the canker to which that treasure has been exposed through the incidents of its custody in earthen vessels. I do not remember ever to have read a composition in which the merely local colouring of particular, and even very limited sections of Christianity, was more systemati¬ cally used as if it had been available and legitimate argument against the whole, than in the Reply before us. Colonel Ingersoll writes with a rare and enviable brilliancy, but also with an impetus which he seems enable to control. Denunciation, sarcasm, and invective, INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 121 may in consequence be said to constitute the staple of his work ; and, if argument, or some favourable admis¬ sion here and there, peeps out for a moment, the writer soon leaves the dry and barren heights of careful thought for his favourite and more luxurious galloping- grounds beneath. Thus, when the Reply has consecrated a line * to the pleasing contemplation of his opponent as “ manly, candid, and generous,” it immediately devotes more than twelve to a declamatory denunciation of a practice (as if it were his) altogether contrary to generosity and to candour, and reproaches those who expect f “ to receive as alms an eternity of joy.” I take this as a specimen of the mode of statement which permeates the whole Reply. It is not the statement of an untruth. The Christian receives as alms all whatsoever he receives at all. Qui salvandos salvas gratis is his song of thankful praise. But it is the statement of one-half of a truth, which lives only in its entirety, and of which the Reply gives us only a mangled and bleeding frustum. For the gospel teaches that the faith which saves is a living and energizing faith, and that the most precious part of the alms which we receive lies in an ethical and spiritual process, which partly qualifies for, but also and emphati¬ cally composes, this conferred eternity of joy. Restore this ethical element to the doctrine from which the Reply has rudely displaced it, and the whole force of the assault is gone, for there is now a total absence of point in the accusation; it comes only to this, that “ mercy and judgment are met together,” and that “ righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” J Perhaps, as we proceed, there will be supplied ampler * N. A. R.} No. 372, p. 473, f Ibid, f Ps, lxxxv. 10, 122 TNGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. means of judging whether I am warranted in saying that the instance I have here given is a normal instance of a practice so largely followed as to divest the Reply entirely of that calmness and sobriety of movement which are essential to the just exercise of the reasoning- power in subject matter not only grave, but solemn. Pascal has supplied us, in the ‘ Provincial Letters,’ with an unique example of easy, brilliant, and fascinating- treatment, on sarcastic lines, of a theme both profound and complex. But where shall we find another Pascal ? And, if we had found him, he would be entitled to point out to us that the famous work was not less close and logical than it was witty. In this case, all attempt at continuous argument appears to be deliberately abjured, not only as to pages, but, as may almost be said, even as to lines. The paper, noteworthy as it is, leaves on my mind the impression of a battle-field where every man strikes at every man, and all is noise, hurry, and con¬ fusion. Better surely had it been, and worthier of the great weight and elevation of the subject, if the controversy had been waged after the pattern of those engagements where a chosen champion on either side, in a space carefully limited and reserved, does battle on behalf of each silent and expectant host. The pro¬ miscuous crowds represent all the lower elements which enter into human conflicts : the chosen champions, and the order of their proceeding, signify the dominion of reason over force, and its just place as the sovereign arbiter of the great questions that involve the main destiny of man. I will give another instance of the tumultuous method in which the Reply conducts, not, indeed, its argument, but its case. Pi\ Rield liad exhibited an INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 123 example of what he thought superstition, and had drawn a distinction between superstition and religion. But to the author of the Reply all religion is super¬ stition, and, accordingly, he writes as follows “ You are shocked at the Hindoo mother, when she gives her child to death at the supposed command of her God. What do you think of Abraham? of Jephthah ? What is your opinion of Jehovah Himself?” * Taking these three appeals in the reverse order to that in which they are written, I will briefly ask, as to the closing challenge, “ What do you think of Jehovah Himself ? ” whether this is the tone in which con¬ troversy ought to be carried on ? Not only is the name , of Jehovah encircled in the heart of every believer with the profoundest reverence and love, but the Christian religion teaches, through the Incarnation, a doctrine of personal union with God so lofty that it can only be approached in a deep, reverential calm. I do not deny that a person who deems a given religion to be wicked may be led onward by logical consistency to impugn in strong terms the character of the Author and Object of that religion. But he is surely bound by the laws of social morality and decency to consider well the terms and the manner of his indictment. If he founds it upon allegations of fact, these allegations should be carefully stated, so as to give his antagonists reasonable evidence that it is truth and not temper which wrings from him a sentence of condemnation, delivered in sobriety and sadness, and not without a due commisera¬ tion for those, whom he is attempting to undeceive, who think he is himself both deceived and a deceiver, but * Page 475. 124 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. who surely are entitled, while this question is in process of decision, to require that He whom they adore should at least be treated with those decent reserves, which are deemed essential when a human being, say a parent, wife, or sister, is in question. But here a contemptuous reference to Jehovah follows, not upon a careful investi¬ gation of the cases of Abraham and of Jephthah, but upon a mere summary citation of them to surrender themselves, so to speak, as culprits ; that is to say, a summons to accept at once, on the authority of the Beply, the view which the writer is pleased to take of those cases. It is true that he assures us, in another part of his paper, that he has read the Scriptures with care ; and I feel bound to accept this assurance, but at the same time to add that if it had not been given I should, for one, not have made the discovery, but might have supposed that the author had galloped, not through, but about, the sacred Volume, much as a man lightly glances over the pages of an ordinary newspaper or novel. Although there is no argument as to Abraham or Jephthah expressed upon the surface, we must assume that one is intended, and it seems to be of the following- kind : “You are not entitled to reprove the Hindoo mother who cast her child under the wheels of the car of J uggernaut ; for you approve of the conduct of Jephthah, who (probably) sacrificed his daughter in fulfilment of a vow * that he would make a burnt offering of whatsoever, on his safe return, he should meet coming forth from the doors of his dwelling.” How the whole force of this rejoinder depends upon our * Judg. xi. 31. 1NGERS0LL ON CHRISTIANITY. 125 supposed obligation as believers to approve the conduct of Jephthah. It is, therefore, a very serious question whether we are or are not so obliged. But this question the Beply does not condescend either to argue, or even to state. It jumps to an extreme conclusion without the decency of any intermediate steps. Are not such methods of proceeding more suited to placards at an election, than to disquisitions on these most solemn subjects ? I am aware of no reason why any believer in Chris¬ tianity should not be free to canvass, regret, condemn the act of Jephthah. So far as the narration which details it is concerned, there is not a word of sanction given to it more than to the falsehood of Abraham in Egypt, or of Jacob and Rebecca in the matter of the hunting ; * or to the dissembling of St. Peter in the case of the Judaizing converts. j* I am aware of no colour of approval given to it elsewhere. But possibly the author of the Reply may have thought he found such an approval in the famous eleventh chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews, where the apostle, handling his subject with a discernment and care very different from those of the Reply, writes thus : — “And what shall I say more? For the time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak, and of Samson, and of Jephthah : of David also, and Samuel, and of the prophets.” % Jephthah, then, is distinctly held up to us by a canonical writer as an object of praise. But of praise on what account 1 Why should the Reply assume that * Gen, xx, 1-18, and Gen. xxiii. X Heb, xi, 32. f Gal. ii. 11. 126 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. it is on account of the sacrifice of his child ? The writer of the Reply has given us no reason, and no rag of a reason, in support of such a proposition. But this was the very thing he was bound by every consideration to prove, upon making his indictment against the Almighty. In my opinion, he could have one reason only for not giving a reason, and that was that no reason could be found. The matter, however, is so full of interest, as illus¬ trating both the method of the Reply and that of the Apostolic writer, that I shall enter farther into it, and draw attention to the very remarkable structure of this noble chapter, which is to Faith what the Thirteenth of Cor. I. is to Charity. From the first to the thirty-first verse, it commemorates the achievements of faith in ten persons : Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses (in greater detail than any one else), and finally Rahab, in whom, I observe in passing, it will hardly be pretended that she appears in this list on account of the profession she had pursued. Then comes the rapid recital (ver. 31), without any speci¬ fication of particulars whatever, of these four names : Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah. Next follows a kind of recommencement, indicated by the word also ; and the glorious acts and sufferings of the prophets are set forth largely, with a singular power and warmth, headed by the names of David and Samuel, the rest of the sacred band being mentioned only in the mass. Now, it is surely very remarkable that, in the whole of this recital, the apostle, whose “ feet were shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace,” seems with a tender instinct to avoid anything like stress on the exploits of warriors. Of the twelve persons having a share in INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 127 the detailed expositions, David is the only warrior, and his character as a man of war is eclipsed by his greater attributes as a prophet, or declarer of the Divine counsels. It is yet more noteworthy that Joshua, who had so fair a fame, but who was only a warrior, is never named in the Chapter, and wTe are simply told that “ by faith the walls of Jericho fell down, after they had been compassed about seven times.” * But the series of four names, which are given without any specification of their title to appear in the list, are all names of dis¬ tinguished warriors. They had all done great acts of faith and patriotism against the enemies of Israel — - Gideon against the Midianites, Barak against the hosts of Syria, Samson against the Philistines, and Jephthah against the children of Ammon. Their title to appear in the list at all is in their acts of war, and the mode of their treatment as men of war is in striking accordance with the analogies of the Chapter. All of them, more¬ over, had committed errors. Gideon had again and again demanded a sign, and had made a golden ephocl, ‘ ‘ which thing became a snare unto Gideon and to his house.” f Barak had refused to go up against Jabin unless Deborah would join the venture. J Samson had been in dalliance with Delilah. Last came Jephthah, who had, as we assume, sacrificed his daughter in fulfil¬ ment of a rash vow. No one supposes that any of the others are honoured by mention in the chapter on account of his sin or error : why should that supposition be made in the case of Jephthah, at the cost of all the rules of orderly interpretation ? Having now answered the challenge as to J ephthah, * Heb. xi. 30. f Judg. viii. 27. X Judg. v. 8. 128 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. I proceed to the case of Abraham. It would not be fair to shrink from touching it in its tenderest point. That point is nowhere expressly touched by the commenda¬ tions bestowed upon Abraham in Scripture. I speak now of the special form, of the words that are employed. He is not commended because, being a father, he made all the preparations antecedent to plunging the knife into his son. He is commended (as I read the text) because, having received a glorious promise, a promise that his wife should be a mother of nations, and that kings should be born of her,* and that by his seed the blessings of redemption should be conveyed to man, and it being plain that the fulfilment of this promise depended solely upon the life of Isaac, he was, nevertheless, willing that the chain of these promises should be broken even if it were to be by the extinction of that life, because his faith assured him that the Almighty would find the way to give effect to His own designs, j* The offering of Isaac is mentioned as a completed offering, and the intended blood-shedding, of which I shall speak presently, is not here brought into view. The facts, however, which we have before us, and which are treated in Scripture with caution, are grave and startling. A father is commanded to sacrifice his son. Before consummation, the sacrifice is interrupted. Yet the intention of obedience had been formed, and certified by a series of acts. It may have been qualified by a reserve of hope that God would interpose before the final act, but of this we have no distinct statement, and it can only stand as an allowable conjecture. It may be conceded that the narrative does not supply us * Geu. xvii. t>. f Heb. xi. 17-19. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 129 with a complete statement of particulars. That being so, it behoves us to tread cautiously in approaching the matter. Thus much, however, I think, may further be said by way of preliminary : the command was addressed to Abraham under conditions, essentially different from those which now determine for us the limits of moral obligation. For the conditions, both socially and otherwise, were indeed very different. The estimate of human life at the time was different. The position of the father in the family was different : its members were regarded as in some sense his property. There is every reason to suppose that, around Abraham in “ the land of Moriah,” the practice of human sacrifice as an act of religion was in vigour. [We cannot doubt that Abraham shared that general belief in survival beyond death, which evidently prevailed in his time.] * But we may look yet more deeply into the matter. According to the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were placed under a law, not of consciously perceived right and wrong, but of simple obedience. The tree, of which alone they were forbidden to eat, was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Duty lay for them in following the command of the Most High, before and until they, or their descendants, should become capable of appreciating it by an ethical standard. Their con¬ dition was greatly analogous to that of the infant, who has just reached the stage at which he can comprehend that he is ordered to do this or that, but not the nature of the thing so ordered. To the external standard of right and wrong, and to the obligation it entails per se, the child is introduced by a process, which gradually * Added 1896.— W. E. G. I. K 130 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. unfolds together with the development of his nature, and the opening out of what we term a moral sense. If we pass at once from the epoch of Paradise to the period of the prophets, we perceive the important progress that has been made in the education of the race. The Almighty, in His mediate intercourse with Israel, deigns to appeal to an independently conceived criterion, as to an arbiter between His people and Himself. “ Come, now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.” * “Yet ye say, The way of the Lord is not equal. Hear now, O house of Israel ; Is not My way equal ? are not your ways unequal ? ” f Between these two epochs how wide a space of moral teaching has been traversed ! But Abraham, so far as we may judge from the pages of Scripture, belongs essentially to the Adamic period, far more than to the Prophetic. The notion of right¬ eousness and sin was not indeed hidden from him : transgression itself had opened that chapter, and it was one never to be closed : but as yet they lay wrapped up, so to speak, in Divine command and prohibition. And what God commanded, it was for Abraham to believe that He Himself would adjust to the harmony of His own character. The faith of Abraham, with respect to this supreme trial, appears to have been centred in the one point, that he would trust God to all extremities, and in despite of all appearances. The command received was obviously inconsistent with the promises which had preceded it. It was also inconsistent with the exact morality acknowledged in later times, and perhaps too definitely reflected in our minds, by an anachronism easy to * Isa. i. 18. f Ezek. xviii. 25. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 131 conceive, on the day of Abraham. There can be little doubt, as between these two points of view, that the strain upon his faith was felt mainly, to say the least, in connection with the first mentioned. This faith is not wholly unlike the faith of Job ; for Job believed, in despite of what was to the eye of flesh an unrighteous government of the world. If we may still trust the Authorized Version, his cry was, “though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.” * This cry was, however, the expression of one who did not expect to be slain ; and it may be that Abraham, when he said, “ My son, God will provide Himself a lamb for a burnt offering,” not only believed explicitly that God would do what was right, but, moreover, believed implicitly that a way of rescue would be found for his son. I do not say that this case is like the case of Jephthah, where the intro¬ duction of difficulty is purely gratuitous. I confine myself to these propositions. Though the law of moral action is the same everywhere and always, it is variously applicable to the human being, as we know from experi¬ ence, in the various stages of his development ; and its first form is that of simple obedience to a superior whom there is every ground to trust. And further, if the few straggling rays of our knowledge in a case of this kind rather exhibit a darkness lying around us than dispel it, we do not even know all that was in the mind of Abraham, and are not in a condition to pronounce upon it, and cannot, without departure from sound reason, abandon that anchorage by which he probably held, that the law of Nature was safe in the hands of the Author of Nature, though the means of the reconciliation * Job xiii. 15. 132 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. between the law and the appearances have not been fully placed within our reach. But the Reply is not entitled to so wide an answer as that which I have given. In the parallel with the case of the Hindoo widow, it sins against first principles. An established and habitual practice of child-slaughter, in a country of an old and learned civilization, presents to us a case totally different from the issue of a command, which was not designed to be obeyed, and which belongs to a period when the years of manhood were associated in great part with the character that appertains to childhood. It will already have been seen that the method of this Reply is not to argue seriously from point to point, but to set out in masses, without the labour of proof, crowds of imputations, which may overwhelm an opponent like balls from a mitrailleuse. Instead of arguing, it pelts. As the charges, lightly run over in a line or two, require pages for exhibition and confutation, an exhaustive answer to the Reply within the just limits of an article is on this account out of the question ; and the only proper course left open seems to be, first to exhibit the vicious method of the writer, and then to make a selec¬ tion of what appears to be the favourite, or the most formidable and telling, assertions, and to deal with these in the serious way which the grave interests of the theme, not the manner of their presentation, may deserve. It was an observation of Aristotle that weight attaches to the undemonstrated propositions of those who are able to speak in any given subject matter from experi¬ ence. The Reply abounds in undemonstrated proposi¬ tions. They appear, however, to be delivered without INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 133 any sense of a necessity that either experience or reasoning are required in order to give them a title to acceptance. Thus, for example, the system of Mr. Darwin is hurled against Christianity as a dart which cannot be but fatal. * “ His discoveries, carried to their legitimate conclusion, destroy the creeds and sacred scripture of mankind.” f The wide-sweeping proposition is imposed upon us with no exposition of the how or the why ; and the whole controversy of belief one might suppose is to be deter¬ mined, as if from St. Petersburg, by a series of ukases. It is only advanced, indeed, to decorate the introduction of Darwin’s name in support of the proposition, which I certainly should support and not contest, that error and honesty are compatible. On what ground, then, and for what reason, is the system of Darwin fatal to Scriptures and to Creeds ? I do not enter into the question whether it has passed from the stage of working hypothesis into that of demonstration ; but I assume, for the purposes of the argument, all that, in this respect, the Reply can desire. It is not possible to discover, from the random lan¬ guage of the Reply, whether the scheme of Darwin is to sweep away all theism, or is to be content with extin¬ guishing revealed religion. If the latter is meant, I should reply that the moral history of man, in its principal stream, has been distinctly an evolution from the first until now ; and that the succinct though grand * Page 475. f See the interesting volume of Mr. Capron on ‘The Antiquity of Man,’ who upholds with great force the account given in Gen. i. in the character of a thorough-going Darwinian. — W. E. G.,1896. 134 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. account of the Creation in Genesis is singularly accordant with the same idea, but is wider than Darwinism, since it includes in the grand progression the inanimate world as well as the history of living organisms. But, as this could not be shown without much detail, the Beply reduces me to the necessity of following its own unsatis¬ factory example in the bald form of an assertion, that there is no colourable ground for assuming evolution and revelation to be at variance with one another. If, however, the meaning be that theism is swept away by Darwinism, I observe that, as before, we have only an unreasoned dogma or dictum to deal with, and, dealing perforce with the unknown, we are in danger of striking at a will of the wisp. Still, I venture on remarking that the doctrine of Evolution has acquired both praise and dispraise which it does not deserve. It is lauded, in the sceptical camp, because it is supposed to get rid of the shocking idea of what are termed sudden acts of creation; and it is as unjustly dispraised, on the opposing side, because it is thought to bridge over the gap between man and the inferior animals, and to give emphasis to the relationship between them. But long before the day either of Mr. Darwin or his grandfather, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, this relationship had been stated, perhaps even more emphatically by one whom, were it not that I have small title to deal in undemonstrated assertion, 1 should venture to call the most cautious, the most robust, and the most compre¬ hensive of our philosophers. Suppose, says Bishop Butler,* that it were implied in the natural immortality of brutes, that they must arrive at great attainments, * ‘ Analogy,’ part i. chap. i. sec. 21. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 135 and become (like us) rational and moral agents ; even this would be no difficulty, since we know not what latent powers and capacities they may be endowed with. And if pride causes us to deem it an indignity that our race should have proceeded by propagation from an ascending scale of inferior organisms, why should it be a more repulsive idea to have sprung immediately from something less than man in brain and body, than to have been fashioned according to the expression in Genesis (ii. 7) “ out of the dust of the ground ” ? There are halls and galleries of introduction in a palace, but none in a cottage ; and this arrival of the creative work at its climax through an ever-aspiring preparatory series, rather than by transition at a step from the inanimate mould of earth, may tend rather to magnify than to lower the creation of man on his physical side. But if belief has (as commonly) been premature in its alarms, has non-belief been more reflective in its exulting antici¬ pations, and its paeans on the assumed disappearance of what are strangely enough termed sudden acts of creation from the sphere of our study and contemplation? One striking effect of the Darwinian theory of descent is, so far as I understand, to reduce the breadth of all intermediate distinctions in the scale of animated life. It does not bring all creatures into a single lineage, but all diversities are to be traced back, at some point in the scale and by stages indefinitely minute, to a common ancestry. All is done by steps, nothing by strides, leaps, or bounds ; all from protoplasm up to Shakespeare, and again, as we may suppose, all from primal night and chaos up to protoplasm. I do not ask, and am incom¬ petent to judge, whether this is among the things proven, but I take it so for the sake of the argument ; 136 INGEKSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. and I ask, first, why, and whereby, does this doctrine eliminate the idea of creation ? Does the new philosophy teach that, if the passage from pure reptile to pure bird is achieved by a spring (so to speak) over a chasm, this implies and requires creation; but that if reptile passes into bird, and rudimental into finished bird, by a thou¬ sand slight and but just discernible modifications, each one of these is so small that they are not entitled to a name so lofty, and may be set down to any cause or no cause, as we please ? I should have supposed it miserably unphilosophical to treat the distinction between creative and non-creative function as a simply quantitative dis¬ tinction. As respects the subjective effect on the human mind, creation in small, when closely regarded, awakens reason to admiring wonder, not less than creation in great ; and as regards that function itself, to me it appears no less than ridiculous to hold that the broadly outlined and large advances of so-called Mosaism are creation, but the refined and stealthy onward steps of Darwinism are only manufacture, and relegate the question of a cause into obscurity, insignificance, or oblivion. But does not reason really require us to go farther, to turn the tables on the adversary, and to contend that evolution, by how much it binds more closely together the myriad ranks of the living, ay, and of all other orders, by so much the more consolidates, enlarges, and enhances the true argument of design, and the entire theistic position ? If orders are not mutually related, it is easier to conceive of them as sent at haphazard into the world. We may, indeed, sufficiently draw an argu¬ ment of design from each separate structure, but we have no further title to build upon the position which INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 13? each of them holds as towards any other. But when the connection between these objects has been estab¬ lished as continuous, and so established that the points of transition are almost as indiscernible as those of the passage from day to night, then, indeed, each preceding- stage is a prophecy of the following, each succeeding one is a memorial of the past, and, throughout the immeasurable series, every single member of it is a witness to all the rest. The Reply ought surely to dispose of these, and probably many more arguments in the case, before assuming so absolutely the rights of dictatorship, and laying it down that Darwinism, carried to its legitimate conclusion (and I have nowhere en¬ deavoured to cut short its career), destroys the Creeds and Scriptures of mankind. That I may be the more definite in my challenge, I would, with all respect, ask the author of the Reply to set about confuting the succinct and clear argument of his countryman, Mr. Fiske, who, in the earlier part of the small work entitled £ Man’s Destiny,’ * has given what seems to me an admissible and also striking inter¬ pretation of the leading Darwinian idea in its bearings on the theistic argument. To this very partial treatment of a great subject I must at present confine myself ; and I proceed to another of the notions, as confident as they seem to be crude, which the Reply has drawn into its wide-casting net : “Why should God demand a sacrifice from man ? Why should the Infinite ask anything from the finite ? Should the sun beg of the glow-worm, and should the momentary spark excite the envy of the source of light ? ” f * Macmillan, London, 1887. f Page 475. 138 INGEESOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. This is one of the cases in which happy or showy illustration is, in the Reply before me, set to carry with a rush the position which argument would have to approach more laboriously and more slowly. The case of the glow-worm with the sun cannot but move a reader’s pity • it seems so very hard. But let us suppose for a moment that the glow-worm was so constituted, and so related to the sun that an interaction between them was a fundamental condition of its health and life ; that the glow-worm must, by the law of its nature, like the moon, reflect upon the sun, according to its strength and measure, the light which it receives, and that only by a process involving that reflection its own store of vitality could be upheld 1 It will be said that this is a very large petitio to impart into the glow-worm’s case. Yes, but it is the very petitio which is absolutely requisite in order to make it parallel to the case of the Christian. The argument which the Reply has to destroy is and must be the Christian argument, and not some figure of straw, fabricated at will. It is needless, perhaps, but it is refreshing, to quote the noble Psalm * in which this assumption of the Reply is rebuked. “ All the beasts of the forest are Mine ; and so are the cattle upon a thousand hills. ... If I be hungry I will not tell thee ; for the whole world is Mine, and all that is therein. . . . Offer unto God thanksgiving ; and pay thy vows unto the Most High, and call upon Me in the time of trouble ; so will I hear thee, and thou shalt praise Me.” Let me try my hand at a counter-illus¬ tration. If the Infinite is to make no demand upon the finite, by parity of reasoning the great and strong should * Ps. 1. 10, 12, 14, 15. INGEKSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 139 scarcely make them on the weak and small. Why, then, should the father make demands of love, obedience, and sacrifice from his young child ? Is there not some flavour of the sun and glow-worm here ? But every man does so make them, if he is a man of sense and feeling ; and he makes them for the sake and in the interest of the son himself, whose nature, expanding in the warmth of affection and pious care, requires, by an inward law, to repay as well as to receive. And so God asks of us, in order that what we give to Him may be far more our own than it ever was before the giving, or than it could have been unless first rendered up to Him, to become a part of what the gospel calls our treasure in heaven. Although the Reply is not careful to supply us with ivltys, it does not hesitate to ask for them : “ Why should an infinitely wise and powerful God destroy the good and preserve the vile? Why should He treat all alike here, and in another world make an infinite difference ? Why should your God allow His worshippers, His adorers, to be destroyed by His enemies ? Why should He allow the honest, the loving, the noble to perish at the stake ? ” * The upholders of belief or of revelation, from Claudian down to Cardinal Newman (see the very remarkable passage of the Apologia pro vita sud, pp. 376-378), cannot, and do not, seek to deny that the methods of Divine government, as they are exhibited by experience, present to us many and varied moral problems, insoluble by our understanding. Their existence may not, and should not, be dissembled. But neither should they be exag¬ gerated. Now exaggeration by mere suggestion is the * Page 479. 140 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. fault, the glaring fault, of these queries. One who had no knowledge of mundane affairs beyond the conception they insinuate would assume that, as a rule, evil has the upper hand in the management of the world. Is this the grave philosophical conclusion of a careful observer, or is it a crude, hasty, and careless overstate¬ ment, made in headlong eagerness to destroy ? It is not difficult to conceive how, in times of sadness and of storm, when the suffering soul can discern no light at any point of the horizon, place is found for such an idea of life. It is, of course, opposed to the apostolic declaration that godliness hath the promise of the life that now is,* but I am not to expect such a declaration to be accepted as current coin, even of the meanest value, by the author of the Reply. Yet I will offer two observations founded on experience in support of it, one taken from a limited, another from a larger and more open sphere. John Wesley, in the full prime of his mission, warned the converts whom he was making among English labourers of a spiritual danger that lay far ahead. It was that, becoming godly, they would become careful, and, becoming careful, they would become wealthy. It was a just and sober forecast, and it represented with truth the general rule of life, although it be a rule perplexed with exceptions. But, if this be too narrow a sphere of observation, let us take a wider one, the widest of all. It is comprised in the brief statement that Christendom rules the world, and rules it, perhaps it should be added, by the possession of a vast surplus of material as well as moral force. Therefore the assertions carried by implication in the * 1 Tim. iv. 8. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 141 queries of the Reply, which are general, are because general untrue, although they might have been true within those prudent limitations, which the method of this Reply appears especially to eschew. Taking, then, these challenges as they ought to have been given, I admit that great believers, who have been also great masters of wisdom and knowledge, are not always able to explain the inequalities of adjustment between human beings and the conditions in which they have been set down to work out their destiny. The climax of these inequalities is perhaps to be found in the fact that, whereas rational belief, viewed at large, founds the Providential government of the world upon the hypothesis of free agency, there are so many cases in which the overbearing mastery of circumstance appears to reduce that agency to extinction or paralysis. Now, in one sense, without doubt, these difficulties are matter for our legitimate and necessary cognizance. It is a duty incumbent upon us respectively, according to our means and opportunities, to decide for ourselves, by the use of the faculty of reason given us, the great questions of natural and revealed religion. They are to be decided according to the evidence ; and, if we cannot trim the evidence into a consistent whole, then accord¬ ing to the balance of the evidence. We are not entitled, either for or against belief, to set up in this province any rule of investigation, except such as common-sense teaches us to use in the ordinary conduct of life. As in ordinary conduct, so in considering the basis of belief, we are bound to look at the evidence as a whole. We have no right to demand demonstrative proofs, or the removal of all conflicting elements, either in the one sphere or in the other. What guides us sufficiently in 142 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. matters of common practice has the very same authority to guide us in matters of speculation ; which is more properly, perhaps, to be called the practice of the soul. If the evidence in the aggregate shows the being of a moral Governor of the world, with the same force as would suffice to establish an obligation to act in a matter of common conduct, we are bound in duty to accept it, and have no right to demand as a condition previous that all occasions of doubt or question be removed out of the way. Our demands for evidence must be limited by the general reason of the case. Does that general reason of the case make it probable that a finite being, with a finite place in a comprehensive scheme, devised and administered by a Being who is infinite, would be able either to embrace within his view, or rightly to appreciate, all the motives and the aims that may have been in the mind of the Divine Disposer ? On the con¬ trary, a demand so unreasonable deserves to be met with the scornful challenge of Dante : “ Or tu chi se’, che vuoi sedere a scranna Per giudicar da lungi mille miglia Colla veduta corta d’una spanna ? ” * Undoubtedly a great deal depends here upon the question whether, and in what degree, our knowledge is limited. And here the Reply seems to be by no means in accord with Newton and with Butler. By its con¬ tempt for authority, the Reply seems to cut off from us all knowledge that it is not at first hand ; but then also it seems to assume an original and first hand know¬ ledge of all possible kinds of things. I will take an * ‘Paradise,’ xix. 79. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 143 instance, all the easier to deal with because it is outside the immediate sphere of controversy. In one of those pieces of fine writing with which the Reply abounds, it is determined obiter * by a backhanded stroke that Shakespeare is “by far the greatest of the human race.” I do not feel entitled to assert that he is not ; but how vast and complex a question is here determined for us in this airy manner ! Has the writer of the Reply really weighed the force and measured the sweep of his own words ? Whether Shakespeare has or has not the primacy of genius over a very few other names which might be placed in competition with his, is a question which has not yet been determined by the general or deliberate judgment of lettered mankind. But behind it lies another question, inexpressibly difficult, except for the author of the Reply, to solve. That question is, what is the relation of human genius to human greatness. Is genius the sole constitutive element of greatness, or with what other elements, and in what relations to them, is it combined? Is every man great in pro¬ portion to his genius ? Was Goldsmith, or was Sheridan, or was Burns, or was Byron, or was Goethe, or was Napoleon, or was Alcibiades, no smaller, and was John¬ son, or was Howard, or was Washington, or was Phocion or Leonidas no greater, than in proportion to his genius properly so called ? How are we to find a common measure, again, for different kinds of greatness ; how weigh, for example, Dante against J ulius Cjesar ? And I am speaking of greatness properly so called, not of goodness properly so called. We might seem to be dealing with a writer, whose contempt for authority in * N. A. R. p. 491. 144 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. general is fully balanced, perhaps outweighed, by his respect for at least one authority in particular. The religions of the world, again, have in many cases given to many men material for life-long study. The study of the Christian Scriptures, to say nothing of Christian life and institutions, has been to many and justly famous men a study “never ending, still begin¬ ning ” ; not, like the world of Alexander, too limited for the powerful faculty that ranged over it ; but, on the contrary, opening height on height, and with deep answering to deep, and with increase of fruit ever pre¬ scribing increase of effort. But the Reply has sounded all these depths, has found them very shallow, and is quite able to point out * the way in which the Saviour of the world might have been a much greater teacher than He actually was ; had He said anything, for instance, of the family relation, had He spoken against slavery and tyranny, had He issued a sort of code Napoleon embracing education, progress, scientific truth, and international law. This observation on the family relation seems to me beyond even the usual measure of extravagance, when we bear in mind that, according to the Christian scheme, the Lord of heaven and earth “ was subject ” | to a human mother and a reputed human father, and that He taught (according to the widest and, I believe, the best opinion) the absolute indissolubility of marriage. I might cite many other instances in reply. But the broader and the true answer to the objection is, that the gospel was promul¬ gated to teach principles and not a code ; that it included the foundation of a society in which those * Page 490. f Luke ii. 51. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 145 principles were to be conserved, developed, and applied ; and that down to this day there is not a moral question of all those which the Reply does or does not enumerate, nor is there a question of duty arising in the course of life for any of us, that is not determinable in all its essentials by applying to it as a touchstone the principles declared in the Gospel. Is not, then, the hiatus , which the Reply has discovered in the teaching of our Lord, an imaginary hiatus f Nay, are the suggested im¬ provements of that teaching really gross deteriorations ? Where would have been the wisdom of delivering to an uninstructed population of a particular age a codified religion, which was to serve for all nations, all ages, all states of civilization? Why was not room to be left for the career of human thought in finding out, and in working out, the adaptation of Christianity to the ever- varying movement of the world? And how is it that they who will not admit that a revelation is in place when it has in view the great and necessary work of conflict against sin, are so free in recommending enlarge¬ ments of that Revelation for purposes, as to which no such necessity can be pleaded ? I have known a person who, after studying the old classical or Olympian religion for the third part of a century, at length began to hope that he had some partial comprehension of it, some inkling of what it meant. Woe is him that he was not conversant either with the faculties or Avith the methods of the Reply, Avhich apparently can dispose in half an hour of any problem, dogmatic, historical, or moral • and which accordingly takes occasion to assure us that Buddha Avas “ in many respects the greatest religious teacher this world has ever known, the broadest, the most i. L 146 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY intellectual of them all.” * On this I shall only say that an attempt to bring Buddha and Buddhism in line together is far beyond my reach, but that every Christian, knowing in some degree what Christ is, and what He has done for the world, can only be the more thankful if Buddha, or Confucius, or any other teacher has in any point, and in any measure, come near to the outskirts of His ineffable greatness and glory. It is my fault, or my misfortune, to observe, in this lteply, an inaccuracy of reference, which would of itself suffice to render it remarkable. Christ, we are told,| denounced the chosen people of God as “ a generation of vipers.” This phrase is applied by the Baptist to the crowd who came to seek baptism from him ; but it is only applied by our Lord to Scribes or Pharisees,! w^° are so commonly placed by Him in contrast with the people. The error is repeated in the mention of whited sepulchres. Take again the version of the story of Ananias and Sapphira. We are told § that the apostles conceived the idea “ of having all things in common.” In the narrative there is no statement, no suggestion of the kind ; it is a pure interpolation. || Motives of a reasonable prudence are stated as matter of fact to have influenced the offending couple — another pure inter¬ polation. After the catastrophe of Ananias “ the apostles sent for his wife” — a third interpolation. I refer only to these points as exhibitions of an habitual and dangerous inaccuracy, and without any attempt at present to discuss the case, in which the judgments of * Page 491. f Pages 492, 500. X Luke iii. 7 ; Matt, xxiii. 33, and xii. 34. § Page 494. || Acts iy. 32-37. INGrERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 147 God are exhibited on their severer side, and in which I cannot, like the Reply, undertake summarily to deter¬ mine for what causes the Almighty should or should not take life, or delegate the power to take it. Again, we have * these words given as a quotation from the Bible : “They who believe and are baptized shall be saved, and they who believe not shall be damned ; and these shall go away into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.” The second clause thus reads as if applicable to the persons mentioned in the first ; that is to say, to those who reject the tidings of the gospel. But instead of its being a continuous passage, the latter section is brought out of another Gospel, St. Matthew’s, and another con¬ nection ; and it is really written, not of those who do not believe, but of those who refuse to perform offices of charity to their neighbour in his need. It would be wrong to call this intentional misrepresentation ; but can it be called less than somewhat reckless negligence h It is a more special misfortune to find a writer arguing on the same side with his critic, and yet for the critic not to be able to agree with him. But so it is with reference to the great subject of immortality, as treated in the Reply. “ The idea of immortality, that, like a sea, has ebbed and flowed in the human heart, with its countless waves of hope and fear beating against the shores and rocks of time and fate, was not born of any book, nor of any creed, nor of any religion. It was born of human affection ; and it will continue to ebb and flow beneath the mist and clouds of doubt and darkness, as long as love kisses the lips of death.” f * Page 486. t Page 483. 148 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. Here we have a very interesting chapter of the his¬ tory of human opinion disposed of in the usual summary way, by a statement which, as it appears to me, is developed, not out of history, but out of the writer’s inner consciousness. If the belief in immortality is not connected with any revelation or religion, but is simply the expression of a subjective want, then plainly we may expect the expression of it to be strong and clear in proportion to the various degrees in which faculty is developed among the various races of mankind. But how does the matter stand historically ? The Egyptians were not a people of very high intellectual development, and yet their religious system Was strictly associated with, I might rather say founded on, the belief in immortality. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, were a race of astonishing, perhaps unrivalled, intellec¬ tual capacity. But not only did they, in prehistoric ages, derive their scheme of a future world from Egypt ; we find also that, with the lapse of time and the advance of the Hellenic civilization, the constructive ideas of the system lost all life and definite outline, and the most powerful mind of the Greek philosophy, that of Aristotle, had no clear conception whatever of a personal existence in a future state. The favourite doctrine of the Reply is immunity of all error in belief from moral responsibility. In the first page * this is stated with reserve as the “ innocence of honest error.” But why such a limitation? The Reply warms with its subject ; it shows us that no error can be otherwise than honest, inasmuch as nothing which involves honesty, or its reverse, can, from the INCtERSOLL on CHRISTIANITY, 149 constitution of our nature, enter into the formation of opinion. Here is the full-blown exposition ; “ The brain thinks without asking our consent. We believe, or we disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of him who watches. There is no opportunity of being honest , or dishonest , in the formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entirely independent of desire.” * The reasoning faculty is, therefore, wholly extrinsic to our moral nature, and no influence is or can be received or imparted between them. I know not whether the meaning is that all the faculties of our nature are like so many separate departments in one of the modern shops that supply all human wants ; that will, memory, imagination, affection, passion, each has its own separate domain and that they meet only for a comparison of results, just to tell one another what they have severally been doing. It is difficult to con¬ ceive, if this be so, wherein consists the personality, or individuality, or organic unity of man. It is not difficult to see that while the Reply aims at uplifting human nature, it in reality plunges us f into the abyss of degradation by the destruction of moral freedom, responsibility, and unity. For we are justly told that “reason is the supreme and final test.” Action may be merely instinctive and habitual, or it may be con¬ sciously founded on formulated thought ; but, in the cases where it is instinctive and habitual, it passes over, so soon as it is challenged, into the other category, and finds a basis for itself in some form of opinion. But, says the Reply, we have no responsibility for our * Page 176, f Page 475. 150 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. opinions : we cannot help forming them according to the evidence as it presents itself to us. Observe, the doctrine embraces every kind of opinion, and embraces all alike, opinion on subjects where we like or dislike, as well as upon subjects where we merely affirm or deny in some medium absolutely colourless. For, if a dis¬ tinction be taken between the colourless and the coloured medium, between conclusions to which passion or pro¬ pensity or imagination inclines us, and conclusions to which these have nothing to say, then the whole ground will be cut away from under the feet of this author, and he will have to build again ab initio. Let us try this by a test case. A father who has believed his son to have been through life upright, suddenly finds that charges are made from various quarters against his integrity. Or a friend, greatly dependent for the work of his life on the co-operation of another friend, is told that that comrade is counterworking and betraying him. I make no assumption now as to the evidence or the result ; but I ask which of them could approach the investigation without feeling a desire to be able to acquit ? And what shall we say of the desire to con¬ demn? Would Elizabeth have had no leaning towards finding Mary Stuart implicated in a conspiracy ? Did English judges and juries approach with an unbiassed mind the trials for the Popish plot? Were the opinions formed by the English Parliament on the Treaty of Limerick formed without the intervention of the will ? Did Napoleon judge according to the evidence when he acquitted himself in the matter of the Due d’Enghien ? Does the intellect sit in a solitary chamber, like Galileo in the palace of the Vatican, and pursue celestial observation all untouched, while the turmoil of earthly INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 151 business is raging every where around ? According to the Reply, it must be a mistake to suppose that there is anywhere in the world such a thing as bias, or pre¬ judice, or prepossession : they are words without mean¬ ing in regard to our judgments, for, even if they could raise a clamour from without, the intellect sits within, in an atmosphere of serenity, and, like Justice, is deaf and blind, as well as calm. In addition to all other faults, I hold that this philo¬ sophy, or phantasm of philosophy, is eminently retro¬ gressive. Human nature, in its compound of flesh and spirit, becomes more complex with the progress of civilization ; with the steady multiplication of wants, and of means for their supply. With complication, introspection has largely extended, and I believe that, as observation extends its field, so far from isolating the intelligence and making it autocratic it tends more and more to enhance and multiply the infinitely subtle, as well as the broader and more palpable modes, in which the interaction of the human faculties is carried on Who among us has not had occasion to observe, in the course of his experience, how largely the intellectual power of a man is affected by the demands of life on his moral powers, and how they open and grow, or dry up and dwindle, according to the manner in which those demands are met. Genius itself, however purely a conception of the in¬ tellect, is not exempt from the strong influences of joy and suffering, love and hatred, hope and fear, in the development of its powers. It may be that Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, basking upon the whole in the sunshine of life, drew little supplementary force from its trials and agitations. But the history of one not 152 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. less wonderful than any of these, the career of Dante, tells a different tale ; and one of the latest and most searching investigators of his history * tells, and shows us, how the experience of his life co-operated with his extraordinary natural gifts and capabilities to make him what he was. Under the three great heads of love, belief, and patriotism, his life was a continued course of ecstatic or agonizing trials. The strain of these trials was discipline : discipline was experience ; and experi¬ ence was elevation and expansion. No reader of his greatest work will, I believe, hold with the Reply that his thoughts, conclusions, judgments were simple results of an automatic process, in which the will and affections had no share, that reasoning operations are like the whir of a clock running down, and we can no more arrest the process or alter the conclusion than the wheels can stop the movement or the noise, f The doctrine taught in the Reply, that belief is, as a general, nay, universal, law, independent of the will, surely proves, when examined, to be a plausibility of the shallowest kind. Even in arithmetic, if a boy, through * Scartazzini, Dante Alighieri, ‘Seine zeit, sein leben, und seine werke,’ bk. ii. ch. y. p. 119; also pp. 438, 439. Biel, 1869. f I possess the confession of an illiterate criminal, made, I think, in 1834, under the following circumstances: The new poor law Act had just been passed in England, and it required persons needing relief to go into the workhouse as a condition of receiving it. In some parts of the country, this provision produced a proftmnd popular panic. The man in question was destitute at the time. He was (I think) an old widower with four very young sons. He rose in the night and strangled them all, one after another, with a blue handkerchief, not from want of fatherly affection, but to keep them out of the workhouse. The confession of this peasant, simple in phrase, but intensely im¬ passioned, strongly reminds me of the Ugolino of Dante, and appears to make some approach to its sublimity. Such, in given circumstances, is the effect of moral agony on rnental power, INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 153 dislike of his employment, and consequent lack of attention, brings out a wrong result for his sum, it can hardly be said that his conclusion is absolutely and in all respects independent of his will. Moving onward, point by point, toward the centre of the argument, I will next take an illustration from mathematics. It has (I apprehend) been demonstrated that the relation of the diameter to the circumference of a circle is not susceptible of full numerical expression. Yet, from time to time, treatises are published which boldly announce that they set forth the quadrature of the circle. I do not deny that this may be purely intel¬ lectual error ; but would it not, on the other hand, be hazardous to assert that no grain of egotism or ambition has ever entered into the composition of any one of such treatises'? I have selected these instances as, perhaps, the most favourable that can be found to the doctrine of the Reply. But the truth is that, if we set aside matters of trivial import, the enormous majority of human judgments are those into which the biassing power of likes and dislikes more or less largely enters. I admit, indeed, that the illative faculty works under rules upon which choice and inclination ought to exercise no influence whatever. But even if it were granted that in fact the faculty of discourse is exempted from all such influence within its own province, yet we come no nearer to the mark, because that faculty has to work upon materials supplied to it by other faculties ; it draws conclusions according to premises, and the question has to be determined whether our conceptions set forth in those premises are or are not influenced by moral causes. For, if they be so influenced, then in vain will be the proof that the understanding has dealt loyally 154 INT4ERS0LL ON CHRISTIANITY. and exactly with the materials it had to work upon ; inasmuch as, although the intellectual process be normal in itself, the operation may have been tainted ab initio by colouring and distorting influences which have falsified the initial conceptions. Let me now take an illustration from the extreme opposite quarter to that which I first drew upon. The system called Thuggism, represented in the practice of the Thugs, taught that the act, which we describe as murder, was innocent. Was this an honest error ? Was it due, in its authors as well as in those who blindly followed them, to an automatic process of thought, in which the will was not consulted, and which accordingly could entail no responsibility ? If it was, then it is plain that the whole foundations, not of belief, but of social morality, are broken up. If it was not, then the sweeping doctrine of the present writer on the necessary blamelessness of erroneous conclusions tumbles to the ground like a house of cards under the breath of the child who built it. In truth, the pages of the Reply, and the letter which has more recently followed it, * themselves demonstrate that what the writer has asserted wholesale he over¬ throws and denies in detail. “You will admit,” says the Reply, “ that he who now persecutes for opinion’s sake is infamous.” | But why 1 Suppose he thinks that by persecution he can bring a man from soul-destroying falsehood to soul-saving truth, and thus from misery to felicity, this opinion may reflect on his intellectual debility : but that is his misfortune, not his fault. His * Noi'th American Review for January, 1888, “Another letter to Dr. Field.” f Pnge 477. INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 155 brain has thought without asking his consent ; he has believed or disbelieved without an effort of the will.* Yet the very writer, who has thus established his title to think, is the first to hurl at him an anathema for thinking. And again, in the Letter to Dr. Field, | “ the dogma of eternal pain ” is described as “ that infamy of infamies.” I am not about to discuss the subject of future retribution. If I were, it would be my first duty to show that this writer has not adequately considered either the scope of his own arguments (which in no way solve the difficulties he presents) or the meaning of his own words ; and my second would be to recommend his perusal of what Bishop Butler has suggested on this head. But I am at present on ground altogether different. I am trying another issue. This author says we believe or disbelieve without the action of the will, and, consequently, belief or disbelief is not the proper subject of praise or blame. And yet, accord¬ ing to the very same authority, the dogma of eternal pain is what ? — not “ an error of errors,” but an “ infamy of infamies ; ” and though to hold a negative may not be a subject of moral reproach, yet to hold the affirmative may. Truly it may be asked, is not this a fountain which sends forth at once sweet waters and bitter 1 Once more. I will pass away from tender ground, and will endeavour to lodge a broader appeal to the enlightened judgment of the author. Says Odysseus in the ‘ Iliad,’ ^ ovk uyaOov TroXvKoipavLrj : and a large part of the world, stretching this sentiment beyond its original * Page 476. f N. A. i?., vol. 146, p. 33. X Bk. ii. 204. 156 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY, meaning, have held that the root of civil power is not *in the community, but in its head. In opposition to this doctrine, the American written Constitution, and the entire American tradition, teach the right of a nation to self-government. And these propositions, which have divided and still divide the world, open out respectively into vast systems of irreconcilable ideas and laws, prac¬ tices and habits of mind. Will any rational man, above all will any American, contend that these conflicting systems have been adopted, upheld, and enforced on one side and the other, in the daylight of pure reasoning only, and that moral, or immoral, causes have had nothing to do with their adoption ? That the intellect has worked impartially, like a steam-engine, and that selfishness, love of fame, love of money, love of power, envy, wrath, and malice, or again bias in its least noxious forms, have never had anything to do with generating the opposing movements, or the frightful collisions in which they have resulted ? If we say that they have not, we contradict the universal judgment of mankind. If we say they have, then mental processes are not automatic, but may be influenced by the will and by the passions, affections, habits, fancies, that sway or solicit the will ; and this writer will not have advanced a step toward proving the universal innocence of error, until he has shown that propositions of religion are essentially unlike almost all other propositions, and that no man has ever been, or from the nature of the case can be, affected in their acceptance or rejection by moral causes. To sum up. There are many passages in these note¬ worthy papers which, taken by themselves, are calcu¬ lated to command warm sympathy. Towards the close INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. 157 of his final, or latest letter, the writer expresses himself as follows : “Neither in the interest of truth, nor for the benefit of man, is it necessary to assert what we do not know. No cause is great enough to demand a sacrifice of candour. The mysteries of life and death, of good and evil, have never yet been solved.” * 9 How good, how wise are these words ! But coming at the close of the controversy, have they not some of the ineffectual features of a death-bed repentance ? They can hardly be said to represent in all points the rules under which the pages preceding them have been composed ; or he, who so justly says that we ought not to assert what we do not know, could hardly have laid down the law as we find it a few pages earlier,! when it is pronounced that u an infinite God has no excuse for leaving His children in doubt and darkness.” Candour and upright intention are indeed everywhere manifest amidst the flashing coruscations which really compose the staple of the article. Candour and upright inten¬ tion also impose upon a commentator the duty of formu¬ lating his animadversions. I sum them up under two heads. Whereas we are placed in an atmosphere of mystery, relieved only by a little sphere of light round each of us, like a clearing in an American forest (which this writer has so well described), and rarely can see farther than is necessary for the direction of our own conduct from day to day, we find here, assumed by a particular person, the character of an universal judge without appeal. And whereas the highest self-restraint * N. A. A, vol. 146, p. 46. f Ibid, p. 40. 158 INGERSOLL ON CHRISTIANITY. is necessary in these dark hut, therefore, all the more exciting inquiries, in order to keep steady the ever-quiver¬ ing balance of our faculty of judgment, this writer chooses to ride an unbroken horse, and to throw the reins upon his neck. I have endeavoured to give a sample of the results. V. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION.* 1888. In the great movement of the sixteenth century, England stands contrasted with other great European countries in this vital respect, that the instinct of national unity was throughout more powerful than the disintegrating tendencies of religious controversy. Hence there went abroad a notion, highly injurious to the nation, that it was ready to accept whatever religion the sovereign might think proper to give it. I recollect a slight but curious illustration of this fact as recently as near the beginning of the present auspicious reign. In the year 1838, travelling through Calabria, I fell into conversation with an intelligent Italian of the middle class, interested in the religion of his country. He expressed to me his fervent desire that the Queen might become Roman Catholic ; for in that case it would follow as a matter of course that the English nation would also return to the obedience of the Pope ! It is plain that, both in England and in Scotland, purely secular interests played a very great and important Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century. 160 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. part. In the reign of Mary, the Latin service was soon and easily re-established : but the reaction did not dare to lay a linger on the alienated estates of the dissolved monasteries. There was a strong Roman, and a strong Puritan, sentiment of religion. But what afterwards came to be known as Anglicanism, the product of a composition of heterogeneous forces, had neither a visible nor, except perhaps in individual cases, a con¬ scious existence. There was not, as there was in Scotland and in Ireland, a single dominant religious tendency, Protestant in the one, Roman Catholic (much more decisively) in the other. And it was the com¬ paratively near balance of the various forces, which made it possible to have in England, not merely one, but three or four religious revolutions ; revolutions which, by the action of the same causes, were softened as well as multiplied. The consequence has been that the historic presenta¬ tion of the subject ever since to general readers has been secular, and not religious, or even ecclesiastical. It has been largely overlooked that Avhat the sixteenth century lacked, the seventeenth supplied. The con¬ sciences of the country then came to a settlement of their accounts with one another. The Anglican idea of religion, A^ery traceable in the mind and action of Eliza¬ beth, of Parker, and of Cecil, had received scientific form through the Avorks of Hooker. The Roman antago¬ nist had been reduced, by the accommodations of the Prayer Book and the laAv, to civil impotence ; and he only counted, in the grand struggle under Charles the First, as a minor auxiliary on the royal side. The Church, as its organisation was Avorked under Laud, had become a Arast and definite force, but it was fatally THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 161 compromised by its close alliance with despotism and with cruel severities, and in retribution for its sins it shared the ruin of arbitrary power. In consequence of this association and its result, for nearly twenty years the Puritan element was supreme, and the Anglican almost suppressed. But when the monarchical instinct of the nation brought about the restoration of Charles the Second, and the comparative strength of the religious parties came to be ascertained, what had been taken for a minority asserted itself in overwhelming force, and the ecclesiastical settlement of that epoch, whatever may have been in other respects its merits or defects, ex¬ pressed the prevailing sentiment of probably nine-tenths of the community, and is now running through its third century of stable duration. Down to that time, the question which cast of belief and opinion should prevail, as between Anglican and Puritan, had been fought within the precinct of the National Church. It was now determined by the sum¬ mary method of excluding the weaker party. In its negative or prohibitory part, the settlement accomplished at the Restoration was either wholly new, or it formu¬ lated a tendency, that had become paramount, into a fact. But in its positive bases it was, as to all main interests and purposes, an acceptance and revival of the Elizabethan settlement. On this, therefore, in giving an account of herself, the Church of England must fall back. And such an account it is obvious she must, now and henceforward, be prepared to give. It is no longer with her as it was in the eighteenth century — and God forbid it should ever be so again — when her clergy were the companions of the peers and the gentry, as magistrates i. m 162 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. on the bench of justice, and as sportsmen in the hunting- field ; when she found no immediate occasion to look into her title-deeds, for she rested on possession and on quietude. In that less tranquil but nobler form of existence, which she is now called to sustain, she has to extricate her own religious history from the civil broils, from the economical and literary devastations, from the great national to-and-fro of the sixteenth century ; and to show the world whether, along with an external, material, and legal framework that is unquestioned, she has derived herself as a religious society in historical continuity from the ancient Church of the country, or whether, as her opponents may charge, she is a construc¬ tion of lath and plaster set up, in mean and futile imita¬ tion, by the side of the solid and majestic structure of the middle age. And here I must ask pardon for a momentary digres¬ sion. In recurring to the year 1662, it is impossible wholly to avoid the deeply interesting question, What became of the partner ejected from the firm ? The old English Puritanism has largely passed, on a widened scale, and with features mitigated but developed and magnified, into the modern English Nonconformity. I do not mean that it has been by a direct or uniform, but by a real if mostly a moral succession. In 1662 it expressed, as I believe, the sense of a small numerical minority of the country, but with more than a proportionate share both of its distinguished theologians and of its religious life. The spiritual side of its position has been set forth, within not very many years, in a masterly tract by Dr. Allon. After the ejectment from the national establishment of religion, it travelled through a period of declension. But it has since developed, throughout THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 163 the British Empire, in the United States, and in heathen lands, into a vast and diversified organisation of what may be roughly termed an Evangelical Protestantism, which, viewed at large, is inclusive of the Presbyterian Churches in Scotland and elsewhere ; which has received a large collateral accession from the movement of Wesley ; and which exceeds, if not in aggregate numbers, yet apparently in the average of religious energies, the old Lutheran and Reformed communities on the Continent. It may be estimated moderately at one-tenth of the entire numerical strength of Christendom ; it depends almost entirely on the voluntary tributes of Christian affection ; and it has become a solid inexorable fact of religious history, which no rational inquirer, into either its present or its future, can venture to overlook in any estimate of Christendom at large. But my purpose at this moment is confined within a circle both narrower and far more sharply defined. The Christian Church, as it stood before the Refor¬ mation, was throughout its whole extent an organism governed by fixed laws ; and it possessed a machinery, in which from the very first a lay, and later on a civil or temporal, element found place, and which was applicable both to legislative and to administrative purposes. In the East, the different portions of this vast body were not united by any bond of such a nature as to involve the interference of a central power by the exercise of jurisdiction in the ordinary affairs of the local Church. But in the West there had gradually grown up usages, which became a complex juridical system, and which assigned to the Roman See large, and not everywhere defined, prerogatives of interposition in the affairs of each national Church, In most of the countries of the 164 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. Reformation, the framework, through which this juridical system took effect, was destroyed in those ruling parts, which formed the chief channel of connection with the former organisation. In England they were retained ; and jprima facie the effect of the legislative changes, begun under Henry the Eighth and consummated under Elizabeth, was to place the local or national Church, relatively to the rest of Christendom taken at large, in a position mainly analogous to that occupied by the Churches of the East. Being, however, a society which claims in her present state continuity with what she was in a former state, she is liable to a challenge and to the denial of her claim on any one at least of the four following grounds : — 1. By changes of doctrine, she altered the one per¬ petual Christian faith, and became heretical. 2. By changes of rite, she failed to fulfil the sacra¬ mental communion of the Church, and her ordinances, or vital portions of them, became ineffectual or invalid. 3. By changes of law, she destroyed the jurisdiction of the Roman See in England, which, as being divine, it was beyond her power lawfully to touch, and she thus became schismatical. 4. In the three foregoing propositions, exception is taken only to the nature of the changes made, and not to the nature of the authority which made them. But they were not made, as is alleged, by the Church at all. They were made without or against her by the action of the Civil Power, which as such was incompetent to act in the matter, and the changes were therefore null for want of sanction. Of these four great counts of indictment, the three first are properly theological, and being beyond my THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 165 reach are wholly excluded from the purview of the present paper. But the fourth is as properly historical, and my object in these pages is, without prejudice to any other portion of the subject, to establish the negative of this pro- position, and to show that, in the last and determining resort, the changes in question were not acts of the State forced upon the Church, but acts of the Church herself, which supply the key to her juridical position held ever since down to the present day. A cloud of vague misrepresentation has down to a recent period overlaid the facts. The passions of Henry, the shif tings of Cranmer, the cruel executions of Fisher and More, the contrast of characters between the pre¬ ceding and the succeeding queens, the general prevalence of violence and license, all these are topics which, care¬ lessly blended or confused, have resulted in an ill-defined and unsifted assumption that it is vain to look for legality in the years which followed the fall of Wolsey. Nor has any systematic effort been made to clear the ground even in works so important, because of having been largely drawn from the fountain-heads of infor¬ mation, as those of Burnet and Collier. It will probably be matter of surprise to most readers if they find, not only that a basis of legality, in its determining con¬ ditions, for the proceedings of the Reformation was laid during the tumultuous years of Henry the Eighth, but that it was laid before Cranmer and the reforming pre¬ lates had mounted into seats of power, and that it claims the authority of Warham, of Tunstal, of Gardiner, and (not to mention many others) even of Fisher. I. I will now proceed to the proof of these propositions, 166 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. And I must begin by reminding the reader that, in order to appreciate with accuracy the position assigned to the Church of England under the laws of the Uni¬ versal Church by the great Elizabethan settlement, it is necessary to exclude from the arena of the discussion a multitude of topics, which have heretofore greatly encum¬ bered the ground to the exclusion or the prejudice of the matters really relevant. First, we must disentangle the facts which determine the canonical character of the settlement from the crowd of great transactions, essentially political although with ecclesiastical or moral bearings, which mark the three preceding reigns ; such as the so-called divorce of Henry the Eighth, which was a legal sentence of nullity pro¬ nounced on his marriage with Catherine of Arragon, the suppression of the monasteries, the reintroduction of Papal jurisdiction by the secular power, the sanguinary persecutions, and much besides. These have no bearing on the question whether the position of the Church under the settlement of Eiizabeth was catholic or schismatical. Secondly, we must in like manner put aside all the excesses of executive power, such as the appointment of Cromwell to the office of ecclesiastical vicegerent, the proceedings relating to altars under Edward the Sixth, and the exercise by the Privy Council of acts of eccle¬ siastical jurisdiction, which continued in the reign of Mary, and again under Elizabeth during the brief period that preceded the passing of the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. Thirdly, we must discard from our consideration of the issue before us the private and personal opinions entertained either on religion generally, or even on the THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 167 particular subject-matter, by persons of more or less influence or authority. For example, the mitigatory explanations tendered by Henry the Eighth in 1531 to the clergy respecting the headship are only of importance in so far as they may have affected the conduct of pre¬ lates or others in the Convocation, and cannot govern the legal and constitutional meaning of the documents. The same remark will apply to the observations of the clerical reformers * in answer to the suggestions of Cecil which appear to have deterred Elizabeth from prose¬ cuting her design, or desire, to re-establish the first Prayer-book of Edward the Sixth at the period of her accession. Fourthly, we must bear in mind that the legislation of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, swept away by Mary, was only restored in a modified form by Eliza¬ beth, and we must carefully observe the modifications of that form. Lastly and principally, we have to note that there was throughout a double course of legislative or other public action, and to ascertain what is due to the secular and what to the ecclesiastical power. The distinction between the respective offices of the State and the Church is powerfully stated in the famous Preamble to the Statute of Appeals. Acts of the governing body in the Church, done within its lawful competency under Henry the Eighth, and not validly cancelled under Mary, retained their ecclesiastical force, and were as legitimate a foundation for civil action under Elizabeth, as they had been when they were originally passed. II. In 1530-1, Henry the Eighth by legal chicane * Strype’s ‘Annals,’ vol. i., Appendix. 168 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. entangled the clergy in the penalties of Prsemunire for having acknowledged the legatine jurisdiction of Wolsey. The commons were included within the scope of his extravagant propositions ; but with them the matter was settled by a separate course of proceedings which are irrelevant to the present purpose. From the clergy he demanded (1) a great subsidy and (2) the uncon¬ ditional and unlimited acknowledgment of his headship over the Church. Not, we have to observe, its enact¬ ment, but the acknowledgment of it as a thing already in lawful existence. To this they could not be brought to consent. But they finally agreed to it with a limita¬ tion expressed in the following words, which follow a recital of the services of Henry to the Church. “ Eccle- siae et cleri Anglicani . . . singularem protectorem, unicum et supremum dominum, et, quantum per Christi legem licet, etiam supremum caput ipsius majestatem reco^noscimus.” * The limiting words, it will be noticed, apply to the term of headship only ; and though they are important words they cannot be understood as annulling the whole force of the phrase. They were actually taken, and justly taken, to accept the headship in some substantial sense. But the sentence branches into three divisions ; and its force, as bearing upon the great controversy of eccle¬ siastical jurisdiction, is by no means confined to the phrases which touch the headship. According to the commencing words, the king is the singnlaris protector of the Church ; and they hardly affect the question at issue, as they seem manifestly to refer to action in the exterior * Wilkins’s ‘Concilia,’ iii. 742, Feb. 11, 1530-1. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 169 forum. But the case is very different when we take the next limb of the sentence, which declares the sove¬ reign to be the unicus et supremus dominus of the Church. These words, which excited no scruple on the part either of the prelates or the clergy, appear to indicate with great precision the idea of the relation between the Church and the sovereign, as it has been conceived in English law. They differ from the declaration of head¬ ship, inasmuch as they do not raise the same scruple in religious minds as to invasion of the prerogatives of Him whom the Scripture * proclaims to be the Church’s Head ; but they agree with it in being sufficient to cover and even to require the exclusion of the papal, as of all extraneous, jurisdiction. They were in conformity with the doctrines already announced by Tunstal, and subse¬ quently sustained by Gardiner in his book c He vera obedientia.’ In the convocation of the province of Canterbury, there was no opposition to the Concessio (so it was termed, I presume on account of the subsidy) as thus worded. When the president, Archbishop Warham, stated f that silence was taken for consent, he was answered, “ Then we all are silent.” J “ Unanimi igitur consensu,” says the record, u utraque domus articulo huie subscripsit.” § In the province of York, Tunstal, who presided, registered || a dissent, not from the words themselves, but from a sense in which he observes that they had been malignantly understood. In this protes¬ tation, he limits the headship to temporals, and denies * Eph. i. 22 ; Col. i. 18. f Blunt, 1 Hist. Church of England,’ i. 208. X Wilkins, iii. 725. § Ibid. || Lingard, iv. 215 ; Wilkins, iii. 745. 170 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OE RELIGION. that the king is head next to Christ in spirituals : he submits the whole of the protest to the judgment of the Church ( mater ecclesia ) ; he makes no protestation or reservation whatever on behalf of the Pope. It would appear that either he limited his objection to the affirm¬ ative interpretation of the qualifying words (which treated the headship as positively set up by the law of Christ), or else that his opinions underwent some sub¬ sequent modification. For, when the headship had been enacted by Parliament in 1534 without substantial qualification, and the bishoj)s were required to swear to it, he both complied himself, and promoted the com¬ pliance of others.* Warham, who appears to have been a principal agent in the accommodation based upon the qualifying words, at a later period (on Feb. 24, 1532) protested before witnesses against all statutes of the subsisting Parlia¬ ment which were in derogation of the Pontiff or See of Rome, or which were prejudicial to the ecclesiastical power, or to the metropolitan church of Canterbury. But he does not retract or condemn in any particular his own adhesion to the Concessio of the clergy which has been cited above. It is strange that this protest, such as it was, should not have been made in Parlia¬ ment. It is still more remarkable that Fisher appears to have been an assenting party to the course of pro¬ ceeding adopted in 1531. We are informed that he was one of the nine bishops actually present in the Convo¬ cation ; and further that, after the Act of Headship had been passed by Parliament in 1534, and the Oath of Succession was framed by the king so as to include the * Wilkins, iii. 74G. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 171 headship, Fisher took it.* It seems to be true that he had never admitted the so-called divorce ; and on his trial he refused to swear to the headship in the terms demanded by Henry : but we have no evidence that he at any time dissented from the more guarded language of the Concessio of 1531. The whole body of the bishops with him took the oath. These are interesting matters of illustration. But of course the main argument depends on the corporate action of the Church. Upon the whole it appears that the Becognition of 1531 was a solemn instrument of the kind known as declaratory ; that it was no mere submission to violence, but the result of communications ending in a deliberate arrangement; that it was followed in and after 1534 by the less formal but even wider acknowledgments of the episcopal body at large ; and while some allowance must be made for royal pressure, that it was expressive of that aversion to the papal jurisdiction which had spread generally 'among the English clergy, and which was altogether distinct from the desire for doctrinal reforma¬ tion. In further proof of the sentiments of the clergy with respect to papal jurisdiction, we may refer to their perfectly voluntary, if suggested, petition in Convocation during the year 1531, for the abolition of Annates, or episcopal first-fruits. The petition f prays that, if the Pope should persist in demanding the payment, then and until he cease from such demand “ the obedience of * Burnet’s ‘ Hist.’ i. 206. Also see Sanders, ‘ De Schism. Anglic.,’ pp. 106, 107 (ed. 1586) ; and Brewer, ‘ Letters and Papers of Henry the Eighth,’ v. No. 112, p. 50. f For this important document see Wilkins, iii. 760, and Blunt’s ‘Ecclesiastical History,’ i. 250-253. [Doubts have been cast upon it, but I believe the statement in the text to be right. — W. E. G., 1896.] 172 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. the king and people be withdrawn from the See of Rome,” as in like case the French king “ withdrew his obedience of him and his subjects ” from Pope Benedict XIII. Accordingly it was enacted by 23 Henry VIII. c. 20, that in case the Pope should attempt to enforce such payment by excommunication, interdict, or other¬ wise, the proceeding should be treated as null, and all divine services carried on in the usual course. By the 26 Henry VIII. c. 1, passed in November, 1534, this recognition by “the clergy in their convoca¬ tions ” is recited as a recognition of the headship without qualification ; and although, according to the opening words of the statute, it exists already, nevertheless, “ for corroboration and confirmation and the increase of virtue,” it is also enacted. And this act was at once followed by 26 Henry VIII. c. 13, which made it high treason to deprive the king, queen, or heirs apparent “ of the dignity, title , or name of their royal estates.” The Act declaring the headship gave no power to impose an oath. But such a power had been given by the Act of Succession (1533) for the purposes of the Statute; and Henry, by an act of will, enlarged the oath so as to include the supremacy in the double form of the royal headship and the exclusion of the papal juris¬ diction. The bishops were now required to swear to it. Lingard * says that, though with different motives, Sampson and Stokesley, Tunstal and Gardiner exerted themselves to promote this purpose ; the prelates seem to have sworn without exception ; and the Convocations had already arrived at the conclusion that the Pope “ had not any jurisdiction conferred upon him by God * ‘ Hist. Engl.’ iv. 215. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 173 in this realm of England, [more] than any other foreign bishop.” Such was the language of the Canterbury Convocation in March, 1534. That of York passed a declaration in somewhat different words, but apparently with the same meaning.* III. It is common to represent the antipapal move¬ ment under Henry VIII. as having been due simply to the keen desire of the king for {.he divorce. If any other concurrent causes are taken into view, they are the cupidity of the aristocracy, the indifferent state of the monasteries, which had led Bishop Fox, in founding his college of Corpus Christi, to take into view the evident approach of their ruin, and the existence of a latent vein of Lollardism in the country. It is probably true that, but for the divorce, Henry would have con¬ tinued in that mood of warm attachment to the papacy, which led him so highly to exalt its prerogatives in his controversy with Luther, as to draw down on him the warning expostulation of Sir Thomas More. Conse¬ quently it cannot be denied that, in the actual evolution of events, the King’s resolution to obtain the divorce was an essential factor, and it may have been with him the governing cause. But it is surely now plain that, among the instruments ready to his hand, there was a widespread aversion of the clergy, in its different ranks, to the working prerogatives of the Roman See, which may be referred in part to impatience of taxation, but which obtained even with some of its highest, purest, and ablest members, and which probably stands in historical continuity with much earlier manifestations * Collier’s ‘Hist.’ iv. 266. 174 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OE RELIGION. of the national sentiment both in Church and State, such as the Statute of Provisors, and the Constitutions of Clarendon. The tyrannical threat of the Praemunire in 1530-1 might have had a sufficient motive in the prodigality of the king, which required to be fed by an extravagant subsidy. It is not at first sight so plain why to the grant of the subsidy should have been tacked the acknowledgment of the headship. There was no osten¬ sible plea for the introduction of the subject. There was not a single reforming bishop on the bench. The words of the Goncessio give emphasis to the theological performances of the king, which had been markedly in an anti-reforming sense. There was not the smallest reference made to the approaching exercise in the super¬ lative degree of the papal power by the denunciation of the divorce from Rome. Had there been even a savour of reference to this subject, the opposition of Fisher would probably have been roused, and he might have been supported by a party. Henry committed a gross error in his first demand for the acknowledgment, which was couched in terms so large as to threaten his plan with total failure. But he retreated from this false position, and, in accepting with crafty forethought a qualified recognition, he contrived, without rousing prematurely the enemies of the divorce, to strengthen his own hands for putting them down at the proper season by making what was to all intents and purposes an effectual provision for the determination of the cause within the realm. Accordingly we find that, as early as in February, 1530-1, Chapuys writes to Charles V. that Anne and her father have principally caused the movement.* * Brewer’s ‘Letters and Papers,’ 112, 54. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OE RELIGION. 175 IV. Such was the position of the question between the Church, with the State, on the one side, and the See of Rome on the other, when Mary came to the throne in 1553. In her early measures for the restoration of the Roman worship, she did not touch the supremacy.* At a later period the Parliament proceeded to repeal the Acts which it had passed under Henry the Eighth against the See of Rome, and the Statutes of Appeal, Submission, and Headship. But it is most remarkable that, although the actual bishops and clergy had, through expulsions and burnings, become sufficiently conformable, there was no doctrinal and no legislative action of the Convocations. No attempt was made to disturb the proceedings of 1531 or 1 534, j* while the list of books proscribed does not contain the works of TUnstal and Gardiner against the papal supremacy. It is possible that these prelates were not disposed to assent to the reversal of the former proceedings, and there may also have been a jealousy at Rome, adverse to the revival of anything resembling a national church government by the practical exercise of power. Postponing the general recital of the changes made on the accession of Elizabeth, I will only here notice that the Queen found in full force, as ecclesiastical declarations and enactments, the synodical acts of the reign of her father. All that was wanting to give them legal effect was the action of Parliament in the removal of impediments. This was supplied by the very first * Lingard, vol. v. p. 33. f As in the reign of Elizabeth, the Lower House outstripped the Upper, and petitioned the Bishops for many things, among them the restoration of the liberties of the Church as they were in 1 Henry the Eighth. This was in 1554. Wilkins, iv. 96. 176 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. statute of the reign, 1 Eliz. c. 1. By this statute the regal supremacy was restored. The ideas dominant in it are the renunciation of a “ usurped foreign power ; ” * and the annexation of all such ecclesiastical and spiritual jurisdiction as “hath heretofore been or may lawfully be used” to “the imperial crown of this realm.” Or as it appears in the preamble or first section, it is the “ restoring and reuniting ” to the crown the “ ancient jurisdictions” “to the same of right belonging and appertaining ; ” and the title of the Act is “ An Act to restore to the crown the ancient jurisdiction over the estate ecclesiastical and spiritual, and abolishing all foreign powers repugnant to the same.” The Act provides an oath to be administered among others to bishops ; and this oath declares the sovereign to be the only supreme governor “as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes, as temporal,” and utterly renounces all foreign jurisdiction. It might have been supposed that the episcopal body and the members of the Lower House of Convocation, having their personal composition as yet unaltered, would either not have been allowed to sit, or if so allowed would have bestirred themselves on behalf of the Marian legislation, or in some shape of the papal power. They met, however, under the authority of a “brief” from the Queen: a fact which of itself raises the presumption, that Elizabeth had by some means assured herself that their action would be kept within due bounds. But it is asserted by Lingard that they presented a petition to the House of Lords declaring among other things belief in the papal supremacy. On * Secs, i., ii., xvi., xix. THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 177 reference to the records we find that the allegation is radically erroneous. The facts were as follows.* On the 25th of February, 1559, the Prolocutor, on the part of the Lower House, did make known to the bishops certain articles which that House had framed ‘ ‘ for the exoneration of its conscience and the declaration of its faith.” One of these articles declares that the supreme power of governing the Church belonged to the succes¬ sors of Peter, without however attacking in terms the supremacy of the Crown. Another claims for the clergy the right to discuss and define in matters of faith and discipline. The articles were incorporated in an address to the bishops ; and, according to the narrative portion of the official record, they asked for some kind of co¬ operation in the original words, ut ipsi episcopi sibi sint duces in liac re. But the document itself is more ex¬ plicit ; and only asks that, as they have not of them¬ selves access to the Peers, the prelates would make known the articles for them. On a later day they inquired whether this had been done (an articuli sui propositi prsesentati essent superioribus ordinibus). Bonner, the acting president, replied that he had placed them before the Keeper of the Great Seal, as Speaker of the House of Lords ; who appeared to receive them kindly (gratanter) , but made no reply whateArer ( nullum omnino responsum dedit). The prolocutor and clergy renewed their request, but the Convocation passed on to the business of subsidy ; and nothing further happened but that the concurrence of the Universities with the five articles was made known on a subsequent day. Thus it is plain that, while the lower clergy framed a document * Wilkins’s ‘Concilia,’ iv. 179. 178 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. which, if a little ambiguous, was clearly more or less hostile, the bishops took no part. It is not, I think, too much to say that they carefully and steadily avoided taking a part. There were, indeed, but four of them present. In the Convocation of York no steps whatever bearing on religion were adopted. There never was in either province so much as a question of a synodical act to reverse, or even modify, the formal and valid proceedings taken, with general consent, in the time of Henry. Y. Before any steps were commenced by the Queen, eleven out of the twenty-seven bishops of the two provinces were dead. To the other sixteen the oath was legally tendered, which asserted, on behalf of the Crown, less than was contained in the unrepealed and therefore still operative declarations of the Anglican Convocations. One only, Kitchin, Bishop of Llandaff (an indifferent subject), took it. The other fifteen were deprived. It is difficult to conceive a more regular proceeding : they were put out of their sees for refusing to conform themselves to a law of the utmost practical importance, and one which had the sanction alike of the Anglican Church and of the State. Out of these fifteen, five* died before steps were taken for the appointment of their successors. Of the remaining ten, Palmer f has shown that either eight or nine were liable canonically to expulsion as intruders under the auspices of Mary. If, he says, there was * Lingard, v. 630, note G. t ‘On the Church,’ i. 372; and J. W. Lea on ‘Spiritual Juris¬ diction at the Epochs of the Reformation and Revolution ’ (London : Wells Gardner). THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. 1 I (J irregularity in one or two remaining cases, this cannot impugn the proceedings generally. It appears, however, that, if the foregoing statement be correct, although the circumstances were exceptional there was no juridical irregularity whatever. The sees were legitimately cleared before the new appointments were made. The avoidance was effected in a majority of instances by death, in the remaining minority of cases by expulsion for legal cause, with all the authority which the action of the National Church could give for such a purpose. The episcopal succession through Parker is therefore unassailable up to this point, that it did not displace any legitimate possessors, or claimants, of any of the Sees. This is of course upon the assumption that, in recog¬ nising the supreme governorship of the Crown, and in denying the foreign jurisdiction of the Pope, the Church of England acted within her rights as a distinct national Church. It is not for me to enter upon the question, properly theological, whether the Pope had a jurisdiction which neither the nation nor the Church had power to touch ; or whether the consecration of Parker is assail¬ able on this or on any other ground. I think, however, that it is difficult or impossible to deny that the Anglican bishops and clergy under Henry the Eighth, and before the accession of Cranmer, the divorce, and the re-marriage with Anne Boleyn, believed themselves entitled to deal with what Palmer has well called the ordinary jurisdiction of the Pope. It may be that, under Mary, the conservative party in the Church had narrowed its ground, renounced in a measure the older English tradition, and made a rally round the papal standard. It remains, however, a 180 THE ELIZABETHAN SETTLEMENT OF RELIGION. curious question why they did not, before Elizabeth had re-purged the Convocations by means of the oath of supremacy, avail themselves of their legal standing by some attempt at synodical action in the Roman sense : and it is a question of still greater interest for what reasons no such action was taken during the Marian period, when the episcopate and priesthood had been effectually purged, and the nation at large had been acquiescent in the restoration of the Roman form of worship. Such is the subject which I have endeavoured to present under an aspect free from colour, and with the dryness which properly belongs to an argument upon law. I ought perhaps to make two small additions. First, that my account of the proceedings in the first Elizabethan Convocation, although brief, contains all that is material. Secondly, that I have carefully perused an able article in the Dublin Review for May, 1840, which is believed to have been written by Dr. Lingard, and bears the title “Did the Anglican Church reform herself ? ” It covers the ground of the argument advanced in these pages ; but supplies no reason, I believe, for altering anything that I have written, Vi. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OE ENGLAND.* 1888. Considerations of religion were the chief determining elements, at least for England, in the public affairs of the sixteenth century. Parallel or counter to these ran the motives of private rapine, European influence, and other forces, variously distributed in various countries ; but religion was the principal factor. And yet not religion conceived as an affair of the private conscience : not the yearning and the search for the “ pearl of great price:” not an increased predominance of “other¬ worldliness : ” but the instinct of national freedom, and the determination to have nothing in religion that should impair it. The penetrating insight of Shake¬ speare taught him, in delineating King John’s defiance to the Pope, to base it, not on the monarch’s own very indifferent' individuality, but on the national sentiment. “ Tell him this tale : and from the mouth of England Add thus much more ; that no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions.” f * Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century. f ‘ King John,’ iii. 1. 1 82 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. .tn those words is set down probably the most powerful element of the anti-Homan movement in England for the sixteenth century. It was in the seventeenth that the forms of personal religion were, for the bulk of the English people, principally determined.* Henry the Eighth did not create this hostility, but turned it to account ; added to it the force of his own imperious and powerful will ; and supplied a new ground of action upon which its energies could be mustered and arrayed, in order to sustain a sound or plausible appeal to Scripture against papal prerogative. Henry was, in truth, one of the most papally minded men in England. Sir Thomas More warned him that he had strained the claims of the see of Rome in his book against Luther. But the atmosphere of his soul, like the bag of Aiolos, was charged with violence and tempest, and the stronger blast prevailed. Nothing, Mr. Brewer seems to believe,! but the extravagance of his passion for Ann Boleyn could have overcome the propensity next in vehemence, which was that of attachment to the Pope. In any case, the King showed a great sagacity in the adaptation of his means to his ends. He never questioned the position of the Pope as the head of the Western Church, but he denied that this headship or primacy invested him with ordinary jurisdiction in this realm of England. And this great practical change, which effectually re¬ moved the Pope from the daily view of the English clergy and people, was effected without any shock to the stability of the throne, and even carried with it the * On this not yet fully explored subject, see Weingarten, ‘Kevolu- tions-Kirchen Englands.’ f ‘ Papers of Henry VIII.,’ iv., Introd. p. cxli. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 183 general assent of the bishops and their clergy. At no time, says Hume,* was he hated by his subjects, and the judgment of our historians from the date of Mr. Hallam | has been that the abolition of the papal jurisdiction corresponded, on the whole, with the bent of the national mind. Elizabeth was reported by the Count de Feria, a very competent observer, to have a great admiration for her father’s mode of ruling. Had the course of nature been such as to set her upon the throne at his death, and had she been inclined to pursue a religious policy in some essential points resembling his, she would probably have been more largely supported by the people than were either of the intervening sovereigns in the pursuit of opposite extremes. But the reigns both of Edward and of Mary concurred in this single point — that each of them powerfully tended to develop in the public mind the more unmitigated forms of the two beliefs that were in conflict throughout Europe. The Marian bishops occupied a ground widely apart from that of the prelacy which under Warham accepted, and even enacted, the royal supremacy. The Protestant divines, with whom Elizabeth had to deal on her accession, were for the most part men addicted not to Luther, not even to * ‘ Hist.,’ ch. xxxiii. t ‘Constit. History,’ i. 113 n. Green’s i History,’ ii. 178, 219. Mr. Gairdner says (‘Papers of Henry VIII.,’ vol. viii., Preface, p. 11) that the nation disliked the change. I do not know whether he would speak thus of that portion only of the change which abolished the ordinary jurisdiction of the Pope. The divorce, the modes of proceed¬ ing with the monasteries, the cruel executions, and finally the despotic government of the Church, are separable from those measures of the reign which seem to have carried national approval. J Fronde’s ‘ Hist.,’ vi. 525. 184 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Calvin, but more to Zwingli. An independent ortho¬ dox Anglicanism, as Mr. Froude has happily phrased it, which was once a reality, had become almost a dream. At the moment of Mary’s death, though large masses of the population were without decided leanings, the active religion of the country was divided between purely Homan and strongly puritan opinions. Even Tunstal had been converted to at least an acquiescence in the papal supremacy. As papist or as Zwinglian, the great Queen would at least have had a strong party at her back. To the one and to the other she was inflexibly opposed. If she was resolved to make bricks after her own fashion, she had to make them without straw. For the purposes of religion, she had no party at her back. But she knew that sovereignty in England was a strong reality, and that the will of every Tudor had counted for much in the determination of national policy. She knew, she could not but know, that in strength of voli¬ tion she was at least their equal, and that in the endowments of her intellect, as well as through the preparatory discipline of her life, she excelled them all. In no portion of her proceedings did she more clearly exhibit sagacious discernment and relentless energy of purpose than in her cautious but never wearying effort to manipulate the religion of the country in a sense which should be national, but should not be that either of the Zwinglian or Calvinian exiles, or of the Homan . court. She told the Spanish ambassador on her acces¬ sion, says Strype, that she acknowledged the Heal Presence, and “did now and then pray to the Virgin Mary.” * * Strype’s ‘ Annals,’ vol. i. part 1, p. 3. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 185 Like her sister, she made it her primary object to act upon the form of public worship. And her first effort appears to have assumed the shape of an inquiry whether the Prayer Book of 1549 could be assumed as the basis of the new legislation, or whether she must take that of 1552 for her point of departure. As the Book of 1552 can hardly be supposed to have come into extensive use in the short period of its legal existence before the death of the young King, it is probable that the measure she preferred would, had it been practically available at the moment, have been the safest for the country at large.* Questions were apparently submitted, through Cecil, to the divines that had in charge the preparation of a reformed Common Prayer Book, which proposed for consideration the retention of the cere¬ monies of 1549, and the virtual resumption of the Book of that year.f The reply of Geste (or Guest), who was among the more moderate of these divines (in the absence of Parker through sickness), was unfavourable on all the points, and even proposed to leave open the posture for reception of the elements.^ The second Book of Edward the Sixth was accordingly assumed as a basis : with changes, however, which served to indicate the inner sense of the Queen. They were carefully limited in number, but were chosen with extreme skill, in consonance with the ideas of the Queen, the Secre¬ tary, and (probably) the Archbishop to be. The old * On the state of religious opinion in the country, and on the action of the clergy respecting the Elizabethan settlement, see the ingenious argument of Mr. S. F. Smith, S.J., in ‘The Alleged Antiquity of Anglicanism,’ pp. 61-67. f Dugdale’s 4 Life of Bishop Geste,’ p. 38; Collier’s 4 History,’ vi. 249; Hook’s ‘Archbishops of Canterbury,’ ix. 175. X ‘Annals,’ vol. i. part ii. p. 459, seqq. 186 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. words of delivery in the Holy Communion were prefixed to the new ; and the rubric of 1552, which denied the “ real and essential ” presence, was omitted. Another rubric was framed for the retention of the priestly vest¬ ments such as they had been before the first Book of Edward the Sixth. And, while the Communion Office was to be read at “ the Table ” in the “ accustomed place ” of the church or chancel, where the daily prayers were appointed to be read, yet power was given to the ordinary to vary it, and the chancels were to remain as in time past. Now the altars, displaced wholly or partially under Edward, had been replaced under Mary. And thus they were to continue, but with a discretion which, if ambiguously expressed, was meant without doubt to meet the diversified exigencies of the time. And the clause in the Litany, which prayed for “ deliver¬ ance from the Bishop of Borne and from all his detest¬ able * enormities ” was cancelled. Singular as it may seem, there is every presumption that the important stroke of policy involved in these changes was due, not to clerical, but to royal and indi¬ vidual influences. The answers of Guest, to which I have referred, indicate no leaning to any of them, but recommend a further development of the second Prayer Book of Edward in the direction of Puritanism, by a legalised option to stand at the Holy Communion in the act of reception. Had the divines had their way, there might at once have been a conflict with the whole Boman Catholic party, a crisis in the foreign policy of the country, possibly a war both civil and foreign. Apart from any ritualistic and theological leanings of * In the reign of Henry the epithet was “abominable.” QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 187 the Queen, she did what the national safety and unity evidently required. The spirit of nationalism, generally dominant under Henry the Eighth, had given way first in one direction under Edward the Sixth, apparently without reserves, then in the other direction with some reserves, to polemical interests and passions. In her it found a restorer and a champion. Elizabeth admitted the Protestant claim in. the gross, but admitted it with serious discounts. Yet those discounts were adjusted with extraordinary skill. Every one of the new changes was an important con¬ cession to the Roman Catholic party ; and such on this side was the effect, that the mass of them conformed, and only a sprinkling of individuals or families kept up in secrecy, and with no ostentation, if with more or less of connivance from the Government, the Roman rite. On the other side of the account, there was to be reckoned, first, that the Book, except in a score of lines, was the Book of 1552. Nor was every concession to the Roman party a blow to the Puritans. No one could seriously contend for the irreverent and scurrilous peti¬ tion dropped out of the reformed Litany. The restored words of delivery in the Communion Office did not ope¬ rate as a test ; for it was only by implication that they clashed with the Zwinglian theory. The only change which was as gall and wormwood to the Puritans was the introduction of what is now known as the Ornaments Rubric. This was indeed a daring measure in the face of the reforming divines, who had witnessed only six years before the legislative prohibition of alb, vestment, and cope in the prefatory rubric to the Order for daily prayer. It was probably meant for the rural districts, where there is every reason to suppose it would at the 188 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND* time be popular. I am not aware of any evidence to show that it ever was enforced against unwilling clergy¬ men, or that it supplied a prominent topic for the con¬ troversies of the day. In the matter of clerical habits, these disputes turned mainly on the use of the surplice. It was as much as the Queen and Government could do to hold this narrower ground with success, against the determined opposition of the Puritans in mass, and the leanings of a large proportion of the bishops. But they did hold it : and the experience of the Cromwellian and Restoration periods shows that they rightly gauged the ultimate and fundamental tendencies of the nation, which did not favour a naked Protestantism. They suffered the Ornaments Rubric to lie partially dormant, but they kept it in force, and they sternly resisted all attempts to alter the Prayer Book in the sense of the Swiss Reformation. Even before the Deposing Bull and the consequent breach with the Roman party, these attempts became serious ; and in 1566 a bill “to temper the whole to the Puritan gust ” had been read a third time in the House of Commons, when Elizabeth ordered it to be sent to her, and the order was obeyed. She further commanded that no such bill should thereafter be brought in till it had been examined and approved by the clergy.* In this injunction there was no small astuteness. For the clergy in convocation could not examine or approve without the license of the Queen previously had. The resistance to the surplice was not, however, wholly without effect on the proceedings of authority. By the Advertisements of 1566, it was declared to be * Collier, vi. 514. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 189 sufficient, and the more elaborate vestments were thus far set aside. But the Queen could not be induced to give her sanction, and with it the force of law, to these Advertisements,* which went too far for her, and not far enough for the party of the Puritans either in her council or in the country. She merely connived at them ; and according to Strype j they produced at the time no conspicuous effect. They did not conciliate the Puritans ; but they probably accelerated the disuse of the Ornaments Rubric as a whole. In the preparation of the Elizabethan Prayer Book, more scanty regard appears to have been paid to ecclesiastical authority than in the original introduction of the Book under Edward the Sixth. The small Com¬ mittee of Divines, made small no doubt in order that it might not be formidable, but appointed in order to observe a kind of decency, was invested with no public authority, and (almost of necessity) had not the presence or the countenance of a single bishop. It seems impossible to doubt that, without autocratic dealing in this affair, the Queen would have been unable to secure the concessions to Catholic sentiment which she knew to be necessary, and which she rightly judged that the Protestant leaders among the clergy would not at the time have adopted. That she was not governed by a disposition to withhold from the spiritualty its fair share of influence and power, we shall presently see. In this portion of her work the Queen obtained a substantial though not a complete success. She gave tolerable satisfaction at the time, as is evident, to that large number of her subjects who saw that the * Strype’s ‘Parker,’ i. 317. f Strype’s/ Annals,’ I. ii . 130, 190 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. independence of the nation was safe in her hands, and who were not given to religious extremes. She adjourned her quarrel with the two organised parties which were actively polemical, until an epoch when her position was consolidated and she had strength sufficient to encounter each of them in turn. It was beyond her power to bring about a reconciliation between them, or even to prevent the struggle of the opposing elements within the Church itself from eventually arriving at a crisis, two generations later in our history. But the conclusive issue of that crisis in 1661 clearly showed that, so far as public worship was concerned, and altogether apart from any religious question on the merits, she estimated more correctly than either of the dissatisfied sections the sense and tendencies of the nation. In relation to that exterior, but practically most important, department of a national establishment of religion, the Elizabethan policy was summed up in the sagacious choice of a position, and a determined con¬ servatism in defending it against the mutually inimical but co-operating hosts by which it was attacked. W e have presently to turn from the popular side of the Church system and to consider it in another aspect. But before passing to the conduct of the Queen with respect to its constitutional and juridical side, it may be right to observe that, although she followed former practice in the provisional suppression of preaching by the civil authority, her regard for law was decorous in comparison with that of her sister Mary, who not only punished bishops and clergymen by deprivation under her com¬ mission for marriages which were authorised by statute and which had never been invalidated, but actually committed to prison Sir James Hales, a judge of the QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 191 land, who had distinguished himself by his loyalty, for informing the people in a charge from the bench that it was their duty to conform to the statutes enacted by Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth, and still in force.* In one point of view, indeed, Elizabeth was but a stepmother to the National Church. It was thirteen months after her accession before there was in England a single prelate, except Kitchin only, prepared to con¬ form to the law of the Church respecting the supremacy, such as it had been unanimously declared by the Convocation of 1531, and such as it still remained under that declaration. For nearly six of these months she had no power by statute to proceed against the actual occupants of the sees. When that power had been secured, the deprivations were speedily effected. Many sees had been previously vacated by death, and during the remainder of the time the Crown enjoyed the revenues of them all. A system of exchanges of pro¬ perty was now set in motion, by which they were heavily impoverished ; and Collier is reproved by Burnet for saying that, while Mary made martyrs in the Church, Elizabeth made beggars.j' Mary had actually remitted a tax, due but not levied, on her accession ; and had procured the importation of no less than four hundred thousand pounds in cash, to sweeten, some say by direct bribery, the advent of her husband Philip. She had also done what little in her lay to repair by voluntary foundations the ruin of the ancient monasteries. I now return to the main question. * Collier, Vi. 35. f Burnet, part iii., pref. p. 3; Collier, ix. 438. 192 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. On the legal, political, and exoteric side of eccle¬ siastical policy, the transactions of the Queen’s reign were a series of efforts at reconstruction both positive and negative. Negative, in her resistance to revolu¬ tionary change ; and positive, in providing against a recurrence of the system of governing the Church by the direct agency of the State, which under Henry the Eighth had been largely established through the vicariate of Cromwell, and which had been developed under Edward the Sixth, through the council of State, to such a degree, that the Church of the country either was or would soon have become simply a department of the Executive. The country at large did not wish to see the Bishops, as Cranmer largely helped to make them, reduced to being the holders of a merely deputed and revocable power ; and still less could it observe with satisfaction that the chairs of religious learning were occupied by foreign divines, as though England laboured under the incapacities of a spiritual minority. The Bill to re-establish the Royal Supremacy was introduced when Elizabeth had been only for four months on the throne ; and in the framing of this Bill all the foundation-stones were firmly laid for the legal re-establishment of the National Church, under con¬ ditions which secured the just control of the State, but which likewise restored to it, in its own sphere, a reason¬ able liberty of action. Elizabeth probably gave effect in this matter to her religious convictions ; but can it be doubted that she also perceived how a policy like that of her brother’s reign would have made the Church not indeed tolerant, but yet contemptible, and even incapable of contributing as a great factor in the body politic to the strength of the State, the loyalty of QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 193 the people, and the Imperial independence of the Crown ? In one of the important changes made in this Act, she was enabled to play into the hands of both parties at once. The title of Supreme Head of the Church, enacted by Parliament in 1534 without the qualifying clause of 1531, and borne by Mary until the time of her second Parliament, was dropped from the new Bill. Mr. Froude has shown, from the correspondence with the Spanish Government, how offensive was this title on the Roman side. But all those Protestants who had any worthier conception of the Church than as a mere emanation from the Crown, viewed it as an encroachment on the prerogatives of the Saviour, whose “ alone Headship” has been so manfully asserted in Scotland. It ceased to be a legal title. And yet the ghost of it did not cease to haunt the secular mind ; so that a Parliament of Anne, in the preamble to an Act, idly and untruly recited that the Queen was the head of the Church of England A Elizabeth went even farther than the renouncement of this title. In the language of the unanimous Convocation of 1531, the monarch was also the unicus ac suprcmus dominus, the only and supreme lord of the Church. And while scruple arose upon the supremum caput , about these words there was no controversy at all. The only title adopted by Elizabeth is that embodied in her oath of supremacy, which declared her to be the “ only supreme governor of this realm ... as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal.” t * I understand that the same legend (tor it is no better) appeared on one of the Great Seals of the reign of George the Third. f 1 Eliz. c. 22, sec. vii. I. O 194 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. While extravagant claims were thus abated, and the more modest phrases put in legal use, the necessary substance of power was retained. The general words for the annexation of jurisdiction to the Crown, in section vi. of the Act, are substantially the same as in the Act of 1534. But a different turn is given to it by the oath, which touches only judicial proceedings, and by the title of the Act, which, as well as the Preamble, stamps upon it a conservative character. It is “ an Act to restore the ancient jurisdiction” and to abolish “all foreign power repugnant to the same ; ” and the Pre¬ amble expounds the title exclusively in one sense, that of its relieving the subject from a foreign oppression. In order to bring fully into view the nature of this change, it is needful to remind the reader that the regal headship had in truth two main aspects : in one, it was a defence against the papal jurisdiction ; in the other, it was an assertion of absolute power over the National Church. In the first of these senses it had been accepted and enacted by the clergy in 1531 ; and Tunstal was the only one among the bishops, who appears to have been at that time seriously disquieted by the appre¬ hension that it might become the instrument of a spiritual usurpation. Yet he had already taken the field as an independent champion of the National Church in his work against the jurisdiction of the Pope. It was when Henry’s absolutism began to be developed, mainly through the agency of Cromwell, that it was seen how the royal headship was available for pur¬ poses of oppression, as it was confined and limited by none of the known lines of law. Warham was the next to indicate, by his protestation on behalf of the Pope, his apprehension on this score ; and Fisher, three years QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OB’ ENGLAND. 195 after, witnessed to it with his blood. At a later period, it drove Tunstal and Gardiner, with others, apparently to recede from the ground they had previously taken on behalf of the Crown. Elizabeth therefore declared by her legislation that she desired to govern within the limits of legal precedent, although in the beginning of her reign she had at least on one occasion claimed an absolute sovereignty alike in the civil and in the eccle¬ siastical spheres. There were other manifestations of this legal intention in the Act of Supremacy. But, in order to apprehend them clearly, it is requisite to go back to an important statute of the reign of Henry the Eighth. The Act of 1532-3 * for the Restraint of Appeals is introduced by a Preamble which, though it does not make the law, declares the sense of the legislator and forms a great historic landmark. The leading points of this Preamble are as follows : 1. The realm of England is an Empire, governed by “one supreme head and King.” 2. To this King “ a body politick,” divided in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, is bound to bear “ a natural and humble obedience.” 3. This King is duly furnished by God to render final justice to “ all manner of folk ” within his realm, without appeal to any foreign prince or potentate. 4. The spiritualty, or English Church, “ always hath been reputed” and also found “sufficient and meet of itself,” without any “intermeddling from abroad,” “to declare, interpret, and show” “any cause of the law divine.” * 24 Hen. VIII. c. 12. 196 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 5. The laws temporal have in like manner been administered by the temporalty. 6. And both these authorities and jurisdictions co-operate together. In this Preamble, if anywhere, we may be said to have a specimen of scientific politics. It closes a multi¬ tude of questions. The kingdom is independent. The king is unlimited in all causes which arise. He works through counsellors. The counsellors are ecclesiastical for Church purposes, and temporal for civil purposes. There are two jurisdictions, separate but co-operative. And the old controversy of appeals to Rome, which had raged from before the time of Stephen, is finally decided in the sense of the independence of the realm. This Preamble strikes a death-blow, not at the office of the Pope as primate or patriarch in the corporate action of the Church universal, but at what Palmer terms his ordinary jurisdiction. It seems as if it had been framed to reassure those who, like Tunstal, were alarmed for the autonomy, under the king, of the local Church. It was framed in the year following that pre¬ late’s remarkable protest in the Convocation of York, and appears as if it were intended to meet the claims of that protest. It seems not too much to assume that this Preamble secured the adhesion of the prelates and clergy to the organic change effected by the extinction of the foreign jurisdiction, and even obtained their acquiescence in some measures which did not corre¬ spond with the spirit of the great Preamble itself. For these measures they had not long to wait. In 1533 * was enacted an appeal to the King “in the Court of * 25 Hen. VIII. c. 19. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 107 Chancery,” and each cause was to be decided by a commis¬ sion issued ad hoc ; a derogation from the important prin¬ ciple that divine causes and temporal affairs were to be governed by distinct organs, though it may be allowed that the provision for a separate commission appointed for judicial purposes, was in the spirit of the Preamble. But in executive matters no fit provision was made for applying it, and down to the year 1553 the Preamble passed more and more into practical oblivion. Under the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity, the two statutes to which reference has just been made were revived,* and the Preamble accordingly resumed its proper place as part of the law of the land. The foreign jurisdiction was abolished, and the jurisdiction eccle¬ siastical and spiritual, but only such as had heretofore been or might lawfully be used, was re-annexed to the Crown, f But the Act proceeds by the next section to provide, in exact conformity with the great Preamble, that the Queen may appoint such person or persons, being natural -born subjects, as she shall think fit to exercise the whole of the spiritual and ecclesiastical jurisdiction on her behalf. This is a proceeding analo¬ gous to the creation of a court of civil judicature for civil purposes ; and thus arose the Court of High Com¬ mission. J The proceedings of this court were marked by the spirit of absolutism and of harshness, which belonged to the time : it centralised in the metropolis a portion of the business that should have been locally * 1 Eliz. 1, secs, iv., vi. f Ibid ., secs, xvi., xvii. $ See on this Court, Stephen’s ‘Notes Eccl. Statutes,’ i. 357 ; and Gibson’s ‘Codex,’ i. 44-50. There is a different numbering of the sections in the ‘Statutes at Large.’ 198 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. disposed of, and it trespassed in all directions on com¬ peting jurisdictions. It was not therefore an engine of tolerance ; nor were any of the measures of this reign steps in the direction of civil or religious freedom for individuals. The sore places of the body politic were at the time not civil but ecclesiastical, and with these sore places the court had to deal. It fell therefore into odium, and was justly abolished by 16 Car. I. c. 11. But it was very remarkable as a conservative attempt, made by the Queen to save the religious concerns of the country from becoming the prey, as they had formerly been, of its Cromwells, its Somersets, and its Northumber- lands. It was judicial, not executive ; and, so far as the Act went, it provided for the exercise of the Supremacy only in the judicial sphere. It was an attempt, made apparently in good faith, to place these affairs under the control of qualified persons, in conformity with the declarations of the great Preamble ; and in this sense it appears to be praiseworthy, and to have been successful. A main cause of the failure of the Act, according to the language of the repealing Act, was its assumption of the temporal powers of fine and imprisonment. In the enactment, under which this Court was appointed, there seems to have been a view to dealing with the Marian bishops, as to whom it must, by the month of April (1559), have become certain that they would not consent to abolish the foreign jurisdiction. Queen Mary appears to have appointed a commission for deposing the Edwardian prelates by virtue only of the royal supremacy. But Elizabeth proceeded in the whole of this matter with a strict regard to legality. The full authority of the State was obtained to tender the oath, and to deprive (sec. xx.) for refusal ; while QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 199 the oath itself was founded on, and lay within, the terms of the Act of Convocation in 1531, which had never been annulled. The ecclesiastical moderation of the Queen seems further to have been shown in the precautions taken by the Act against the erection of new forms of heresy, a danger more than usually formidable from the vehemence of religious controversy at the time, and from the strong temptation to imitate with a tu quoque the proceedings of the papal see. By a remarkable provision of the Act (sec. xxxv.), no matter could be adjudged by any com¬ mission under the Act to be heresy, unless either — - 1. It had been so adjudged already by Scripture, or any of the four first general councils, or by some other such council in the words of Scripture ; or — • 2. It should be so adjudged by Parliament, the clergy in Convocation assenting. Since the power to appoint these commissions now no. longer exists, the enactment touching heresy is without legal force, but it is remarkable as a feature of the Elizabethan system ; and the condition which it estab¬ lished for securing the joint assent of Parliament and Convocation before private liberty could be restrained by any new sentence of heresy was in force, and was probably of great and beneficial effect, for more than eighty years. Queen Elizabeth also restored the action of the spiritualty, subject to regal control, in the important matter of episcopal elections. By 31 Hen. VIII. c. 9, and 1 Edw. VI. c. 2, bishops might be appointed by letters patent. Under Mary (1 & 2 P. and M. c. viii.) the old law of election was restored. This Act was repealed in 1 Eliz. c. 1, but with reservations; and, by 200 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. the seventh section, the prior statute of 25 Hen. VIII. c. 20 was revived, and still remains the law of the land.* In the event of failure to elect the person named, the King may present to the Metropolitan without election, and the body of persons in default incur a premunire. But election even under these restraints has proved to be of value. For, first, it is a relic and symbol of the popular as well as clerical powers embodied in the ancient constitution of the Church with regard to episcopal elections.! And, secondly, experience has shown that in England, during times of laxity, the prerogative of the Crown has been exercised with greater moderation and discernment than in the sister kingdom of Ireland, where the bishops were appointed by letters patent. It is scarcely necessary to add that, after the acces¬ sion of Elizabeth, no more was heard of the issue of the commissions subsisting during pleasure, under which the bishops had been content to act during the later years of Henry the Eighth and the reign of his son Edward. There was, however, much negative action, embraced by the policy of Elizabeth, which was not less important than the positive. In the reign of Henry the Eighth there had grown up an apprehension sufficiently reasonable lest some of the canons, “provincial or synodal” (so they were described), might clash with the statutes of the realm, and might be “ much prejudiced to the King’s pre¬ rogative royal ” and onerous both to him and to his * I may add that, within my own recollection, the House of Commons has refused to adopt a Bill which re-established the nomina¬ tion of Bishops where election has hitherto prevailed. f Phillimore, ‘ Eccl. Law,’ i. 38. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 201 subjects. * Accordingly, the clergy had petitioned for the appointment of thirty-two persons — one half to be of their own body, and the other moiety members of one or the other House of Parliament — to examine the said canons, and to present for the King’s assent such of them as should be deemed meet to stand. An Act was passed accordingly ; but with a strict proviso that none of the approved canons should be contrariant to preroga¬ tive, custom, or statute. This law was confirmed by subsequent Acts in 1535 and 1542-3. The appointments were made, and the work was ready, so that when the King died letters patent had been prepared for giving it effect. Another Act was passed in 1549 for the prosecution of the enterprise. There is some confusion in the account of the proceed¬ ings at this stage, and there are differences of opinion among the authorities. What appears probable is that a commission of thirty-two was reconstituted under the Act of Edward for purposes of form, but that the work was delegated in the first place to eight among them, under the name of a preliminary work of preparation ; and then that, as Dr. Cardwell states, there was a further delegation to two — namely, Archbishop Cranmer and, proh pudor , Peter Martyr, j* By these two the work was remodelled or corrected. England must indeed have been poor, when such a share in such a work was accorded to a foreign divine. For it must be observed that, like most other projects of the period, this particular project had now completely * 25 Hen. VIII. c. xix. sec. 1. f See Cardwell's ‘ Reformatio Leg. Eccles.,’pp. viii., xxv., xxvi., 325 (Oxford, 1850); Stephen’s ‘Eccles. Statutes,’ I. 202 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHUKCHI OF ENGLAND. changed its face. It was now no longer the reasonable plan for reforming our synodal and provincial canons, and placing them under due restraint of law. We cannot be altogether surprised to find that the original definition of the aim had been found too narrow ; for, besides native canons, much foreign matter relating to the Church had by use hardened into British law, and required without doubt the application of the pruning hand. But much more was now intended than a corrective work. The title of the Edwardian Act * was “ An Act that the King’s majesty may nominate and appoint two and thirty persons to peruse and make Ecclesiastical Laws.” A material change of plan had been at least theoretically made in 1543, when the title and purpose of the Act were further enlarged by the addition of the words “ and to establish all such laws ecclesiastical as shall be thought by the King and them convenient to be used in all Spiritual Courts.” When to these extensions of project was added the change of agents, as it stood in 1552, we see plainly that not only had the liberty of the subject been seriously imperilled by foregoing the sanction of Parliament, but the ground had been laid for cutting oft' this country from all com¬ munity with Christendom in its laws of religion. It was no longer a plan for a correcting or amending statute, however extensive : the aim, as we find it in the j Reformatio Legum , was to establish by a complete scheme, newly hatched, a new point of departure. This mode of action was utterly alien to the conservative spirit of British legislation.. The ecclesiastical law of the country was, like its temporal law, a gradual growth. There * 3 & 4 Ed. VI., c. xi. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 203 was a common law of the Church, as well as a common law of the State. The new method of procedure seemed to cut away every bond of union with the past, and to establish a kind of legislation absolutely unknown to the national traditions. Accordingly the Preface, which has the merit of being written in admirable Latin, by Cheke or Haddon, decries the old laws in the mass, and describes the provisions of the work as absolutely new : quarurn materia ab optimis undique legibus petita videtur ; non solum ecclesiasticis, sed civilibus etiam , veterumque Romanarum prsecipua antxquitate. This spirit of novelty commended, naturally enough, the Reformatio Legum to the extreme party, which had become so powerful in the Convocation of Elizabeth that it had nearly accomplished what might have proved to be a new religious revolution. In 1562, an obscure state¬ ment of Bishop Gibson appears to intimate that the Con¬ vocation, or its Lower House, moved in favour of the scheme, but without any practical result. In 1571, the Bull of Pope Pius the Fifth against the Queen had brought about a crisis, and attempts were made, both in the House of Commons and in Convocation, to procure the adoption of the work. Gibson states that this movement was promoted by Archbishop Parker.* It is, however, quite impossible that this statement can apply to the text of the volume as we have it now, and as in the main it left the hands of Crammer or of Martyr. For it was in this very Convocation that Parker procured the adoption, by the whole body of his comprovincial bishops, of a canon, by which preachers were enjoined to teach nothing to their people except what was agreeable to Scripture and * Gibson’s ‘Codex,’ p. 952. 204 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. had been collected therefrom by “ the Catholic Fathers and ancient bishops.” * Whereas the 'Reformatio virtu¬ ally sweeps away the whole doctrine of the Church and the ministry, and both expounds the sacraments in a manner wholly incompatible with the Prayer Book and the Articles, and recognises no interpretative office in the Church Universal. Hook says j" that the measure failed through the joint opposition of the Archbishop and the Queen. Cardwell says,J “ So little does the Queen appear either to have approved of the book or to have been in favour of the general measure, that no attempt apparently was made during her reign to revive the Act of 1549, and it seems probable, from the jealousy with which the Queen all along viewed the action of the reforming preachers, that she may have suggested as well as approved the remarkable canon of 1571 which was intended to guarantee their orthodoxy.” On the one hand, the Queen may have regarded this code as importing, by the precision of its terms, an abridgment of her ecclesiastical jurisdiction ; on the other, there were strong reasons for desiring the enact¬ ment of a book of discipline which might raise the standard of practice in the Church. But we cannot suppose the Queen to have overlooked what is obviously the main point in the whole question, namely this : A new code, intended not to consolidate the existing law, but to uproot and replace it, meant a new Church. The Elizabethan policy was to maintain both the personal succession in the Church and the continuity of its law, subject to control from the civil power and to all * Wilkins, 4 Concilia,’ iii. 267. f Hook’s 4 Parker,’ p. 362. X 4 Cardwell,’ pref. p. xii. ; Stephen’s ‘Ecclesiastical Statutes, ’i. 331 n. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHUKCH OF ENGLAND. 205 necessary amendments. What slie seems to have desired was, that the amending laws in the Church should hold the same place for the Church, as great reforming and reconstructing statutes for the State : they maintain the ancient constitution, while they alter and improve it. I have dwelt at some length on what may be called the shelving of the Reformatio , because it was not an omission, but a renunciation, and because its extreme importance as a determining condition in the history of the actual Church of England has not, I think, been sufficiently exhibited by our historians in general. Among the minor inconveniences of such a code, it may be remarked that it would have required, first, a new tradition of interpretation, and, secondly, continual amendment. When we reject wholesale the aid which the labour of preceding generations has provided, we expose our own work to the severest treatment from the generations that are to follow. The legislator, as such, is compelled by his office to judge on their behalf as to particular points. But if he chooses to judge for them on all points, that is his own fault and folly. Men so acting are apt to tumble into pitfalls. Thus, to take a minute instance, the Reformatio orders that where the Old Testament is found obscure it shall be cleared*' from the Hebrew text ; its compilers doubtless being unaware of the fact that the youngest Hebrew MS., from which the LXX worked, was by many centuries older than the oldest of those upon which the pre¬ sent Hebrew text is based ; and perhaps also that the Septuagint is cited as freely as the Hebrew in the Books of the New Testament. Such objections, * ‘ Tit.’ 1. c. 12. 206 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. however, are only accessory to those which lie against the principle or initial conception of the scheme. It still remains to examine the Elizabethan policy in its relation to the creed of the Church. And here again we have to notice both a negative and an affirmative side of this policy. Negatively, the Queen not only withstood all overtures for further change in the Prayer Book, but, during the first twelve years of her reign, she would not suffer the Thirty-nine Articles to be imposed by law even on the clergy. Evidently she regarded them as an instrument which had been required and justified by the circumstances of the time, but one which ought to be kept in hand in a ductile condition, and might be dealt with according as any change in those circumstances might thereafter require. But, when the Pope had launched his Bull of Deposition, she met it by falling back all the more frankly upon her people, and took a step acceptable to the reforming party by allow¬ ing the Articles to find a place upon the statute book.* Even then the obligation was confined to persons under the degree of a bishop and to the Articles which concern the “true Christian faith” and the sacraments. But she had included in her proceedings as to the Articles perhaps the boldest of all her strokes of eccle¬ siastical policy, and had acted in excess of law with a far¬ sighted view to the recognition and consolidation of other law which rested on a deeper and more secure foundation. The twentieth of the Articles of the Church of England begins in these words : “ The Church hath power to decree rites or ceremonies, and authority in controversies of faith.” * 13 Eliz. c. 12. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 20T These words were not in the original draft of the Articles of 1562 ; and the reference in the statute is not to that original, blit to a printed book and to its title, which is not yet perhaps fully identified. It was only as we approached the middle of the present century that Dr. Lamb, Master of Corpus Christi College in Cam¬ bridge, published his ‘ Historical A.ccount of the Thirty- nine Articles’ from 1553 to 1571,* and for the first time placed beyond dispute the question how this most important clause first found its way into the body of the book : that is to say, through the simple method of insertion by the Queen herself. Dr. Lamb observes f that the clause appears in the first printed copy of the Articles, which was issued under the Queen’s authority in 1563. It was inserted there after the Articles had passed the Convocation, and before they could be published with authority. In order to have authority under the Act of Submission, they re¬ quired the Great Seal to be attached to them, and thus came into the hands of the Queen. That she was personally the author of this clause becomes almost a certainty from circumstantial evidence. In the first place, she kept the book in her hands for a twelvemonth. In the second place, when it came forth, she appended to the book a statement that she had assented to it “ after diligent reading and scrutiny by herself : ” quibus omnibus . . . per seipsam diligenter prius lectis et exctmi- natis, regium suum assert sum prsebuit. * Cambridge ; Deightons, 1829. f ‘Historical Account,’ p. 33. Hardwick in 1851 followed Lamb (1829). He examines the subject more at large (pp. 129-52), Various points still remain open to discussion. My attempt is to deal with any of them only so far as they regard the Queen. 208 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Nor was this the only point in which the Queen laboured for the cause of religious reaction and recon¬ struction through the Articles. She obtained for the time the exclusion from the Book of the Twenty-ninth Article (on non-reception by the wicked), which of the whole number was perhaps the most characteristically Protestant. Cecil, who may be regarded as practically one with the Queen in religious position and belief, as well as by general conformity of mind, laboured to bring Archbishop Parker to the excision of this Article. He failed ; but the Article was struck out of the Book, and only reappeared in 1571 when, after the Deposing Bull of the Pope, the reforming party had become too strong for the Queen, and she was compelled partially to beat a retreat. I have said partially, because, when she could no longer prevent the Parliament from intermeddling in the matter, she endeavoured by a side movement in some considerable degree to neutralise their action. The Commons had passed in 1566 a Bill for Subscrip¬ tion ; # but the Queen stopped its progress in the Lords. In 1571 the Parliament again met. It was on April 2 ; and on the 7th a similar Bill was introduced, together with other Bills into the House of Commons. Two of them — the Bill for Subscription being one — appeared on May 3 in the House of Lords. This was in defiance of the Queen, who on May 1 f had given them to understand that she “ liked very well of the Articles ” and would publish them, but “ not to have the same dealt in by Parliament.” She gave her assent to the Bill on May 29. But in the mean time it had been * Dr. Lamb, p. 24. f Ibid. p. 27. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 209 adopted (in a form not identical with that of 1562 *) and subscribed in Convocation on the 11th, with an order for circulation in all the dioceses, and it was published with a royal Ratification,! which makes no reference to the Act, and therefore, I make no doubt, preceded it. In this Book J the Twenty-ninth Article reappears, while the disputed clause in the Twentieth remains excluded. Assent to this was probably the price which Elizabeth had to pay for having the Articles settled, issued, and circulated (as Convocation had ordered) throughout the country without any notice of the action of the Lords and Commons. But prudence did not permit the Queen any longer to baulk her Parliament, and the Bill became an Act. There remains the question, What book or copy of the Articles was that which passed through the Houses h Plainly not that used by the Convocation : for they acted and signed while the House of Lords had in its custody the Book referred to by the Act. In the Book, as Dr. Lamb thinks it was passed by Parliament^ the disputed clause does not appear ; but neither does the Twenty-ninth Article. It appeared, however, in one or more editions published in that year.|| Until the rule of Laud, it was sometimes included and sometimes omitted. It was then de facto fastened into the body of the Articles. It finally obtained ecclesiastical as well as civil authority in the great settlement of 1662 which finally sealed the effort of Queen Elizabeth. The * Dr. Lamb, p. 28. t Ibid. p. 29. I Nos. v. and vi. of the copies printed by Dr. Lamb. § No. iii. of the forms printed by him. || Lamb, p. 87. Hardwick, ‘ Hist, of the Articles,’ pp. 140-5. ^ 13 & 14 Car. II. c. 4, sec. xvii. I. P 210 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. Act declares the Articles to be the same as those named in the statute of 1571. Besides the case of the Articles, there is another instance in which Elizabeth seems clearly to have gone beyond the legal and constitutional limits of her executive power. Edmund Grindal, successor of Parker, became Arch¬ bishop of Canterbury in 1576. His primacy was a very short one. As a man of earnest piety, he was sensible of the grievous defect of preaching power in the clergy, and he appears while Archbishop of York to have encouraged the use of a remedy by what were called the exercises or prophesyings, conferences of the clergy on portions of Scripture, begun and concluded with prayer. His promotion to Canterbury was by some ascribed to the desire of the Queen to have him more under her control. There was much to say for the exercises : which, however, in his first year he had to place under the control of most rigid rules. * But this did not avail, and in his second year the Queen prohibited them by proclamation as not warranted by the laws.t This was in May, 1577. In June he was sequestered, on account of non-compliance, for six months, and confined to his house. He appointed vicars-general for his diocese, and was occasionally called upon to act. He remained a nominal primate, without influence or power, until 1583, when he died just as the arrangements for his resigning his see were approaching completion. £ The reigns of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth * Wilkins, ‘Concilia,’ iv. 287. f Ibid. p. 289. X Strype’s ‘ Life of Grindal,’ chs. v., xiv. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 211 can exhibit no more remarkable exercise of arbitrary- power on the one side, and absolute submission on the other, than we find in the case of Grindal. In 1580, sixteen bishops of his province petitioned for his restoration, but in vain.''" The singular feature of the Queen’s conduct is this, that she used arbitrary power in opposition to the sense of her prelates, in order to maintain the strict law and discipline of the Church. She had not disposed of the Marian bishops by prero¬ gative, but by law. So far as I know, this case, and that of her operations on the Articles, are the only instances in ecclesiastical matters of her going beyond the law ; and in both cases it was clearly with a view not to weakening, but to securing the Church against what she thought more dangerous illegality. It is right that her motive should be observed, without asking how far it affords justification or excuse. Let us now review, in a summary manner, and according to the best evidence in our possession, the chief acts and attempts of this extraordinary woman, done or attempted with a view to determining the character and position of the Reformed Church of England. 1. She began by a tentative effort to use the Book of 1549 as the basis of reformed worship, but desisted for lack of support ; for she had a quick discernment of the practicable. 2. Falling back on the Book of 1552, she made legal provision for continuity as to what met the eye in public worship, by the enactment of the Ornaments Rubric. 3. She provided against a most palpable breach in the * Wilkins, ‘ Concilia,’ iv. 293. 212 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. audible and moral continuity of the service of the Church, by the re-insertion of the ancient words of delivery in the ministration of the Holy Sacrament, and by the abandonment of the Zwinglian rubric at the close of the service. 4. She conciliated those of Homeward leanings with¬ out offending any man of sense by striking out from the Litany the clause which denounced the Pope. 5. She resisted successfully the attempts of the House of Commons to innovate upon the Prayer Book ; and she resisted also the endeavours to enforce the Articles, until the violent hostility of the Pope compelled her to strengthen herself in the quarters opposed to him. 6. She dropped the claim to the headship of the Church, and gave thereby satisfaction to the Puritans, as well as to the friends of the unreformed religion. 7. She limited the supremacy, by defining it to be such as had lawfully belonged from old time to the Sovereigns of England. 8. She provided against the absorption of the spiritual estate in the executive by constituting a separate organ for the disposal in the temporal sphere of ecclesiastical causes, and by confining it to judicial functions. 9. She placed a barrier in the way of dogmatic narrowness by enacting that nothing should be declared anew to be heresy except with the assent both of the spiritualty and the temporalty. 10. She established as her ordinary method of action in Church matters that of communications from herself or her council to the Primate or the bishops, as the actual chief magistrates of the Church, sometimes in the tone of request, sometimes of injunction. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 213 11. Instead of renewing the Act of Edward the Sixth for the appointment of bishops by letters patent, she restored the method of a conge cVelire for their election. 12. She put an end to the system of commissions during pleasure, under which the prelates of Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth had acted. 13. She renounced the policy and plan of a new code of laws for the Church which had been actively prose¬ cuted under both those Sovereigns. 14. When driven by the urgency of affairs to allow the Thirty-nine Articles to take their place on the statute book as a test, she contrived for their issue to the country on her own authority and that of the clergy, without any notice either of the Act or of its limitations. 15. In her jealousy lest the substance of the Eucharistic doctrine should be impaired, she fought hard for the exclusion of the Twenty-ninth Article, which asserts non-reception by the wicked. 16. She introduced into the Twentieth Article the declaration not only of the power to decree rites and ceremonies, but that “ the Church hath authority in controversies of faith.” 17. She used every effort to obtain the aid of some of the bishops in possession for filling the vacant sees, and issued her mandate for the election of Parker only on the day * when she had secured the official adherence of one at least among them. 18. In clearing the sees by the expulsion of the Marian bishops she acted strictly, as has recently been * Lamb, p. 11. 2 14 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHUItCH OP ENGLAND. shown in this Review," according to law both of the State as declared by the first Act of her own reign, and of the Church as established by Convocation in 1531, and never thereafter cancelled. I might refer to the retention of the law of Mary on the marriage of the clergy, to the controversy on images, and to other matters, but the heads here enumerated will probably suffice. It is singular, and somewhat disheartening for the student of human action, to note the manner in which this great scheme of effort, so boldly and so persistently undertaken by Queen Elizabeth, has been estimated by some writers on the history of England and the Church of England. Mr. Hallam, a wise and moderate writer, has noticed the personal leanings of Elizabeth, and thinks she may also have been guided by high motives of equity and prudence, yet inclines towards censuring her for not meeting the demands of the Puritans. | Carwithen commends her for firm resistance on the right hand and the left 4 But neither of these authors appears to perceive or to allow how much there was in her policy of real initiative, of creative or reconstructive energy. Hume accuses the Queen of having by the Act of Supre¬ macy assumed absolute power, among other things, to establish or repeal all canons ; § of which in the Act there is not a word. More strangely still, Dr. Lamb, to whose investigations of facts and documents we are so much indebted, treats || her insertion in the Twentieth Article of the power of the Church to establish rites, * July, 1888. f Hallam, ‘Const. Hist.,’ vol. i. c. iv. p.l 91, 4to. X Vol. ii. c. xv. § Hume, V. xlviii. || Dr. Lamb, p. 33. QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 215 and of her authority in controversies of faith, as equivalent to declaring herself to be not only the protector but the sole director of her subjects’ faith; and again he speaks of her asserting her “ prerogative as supreme Head of the Church,” * which even Hume perceived that she had renounced. Collier censures her for having made beggars in the Church without allow¬ ance for service in any other direction.! Bishop Short appreciates her greatness, gives her credit for personal piety, and blames her love of power.]: None of these writers, I think, have awarded to her exactly that which is her due. And her due is not the praise of an amiable character, or of a friend or promoter of individual freedom as distinguished from national independence. A Tudor from top to toe, her own disposition led her to strong exercises of power, and the real necessities of the case inclined her in the same direction. To modify the Articles of her own motion by insertion and exclusion, to sequester and virtually depose at her will an Arch¬ bishop of Canterbury, were lawless acts. But how can we impute general lawlessness to a Princess who made so many laws in restraint of her own power over the Church ; or how charge her with despotism in the Church, when even those acts which most savoured of it were, whether in themselves wise or unwise, yet certainly addressed in good faith to the establishment and main¬ tenance of a legal constitution and of an effective authority apart from her own ? I think it cannot be denied that the acts and * Dr. Lamb, p. 24. f Collier, ix. 438. X 1 Hist, of Church of England,’ pp. 468-69. 216 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. abstentions which have here been put together were by no means isolated or impulsive, but were parts of a scheme or system. The essence of this scheme or system, undertaken in concurrence with an arbitrary civil government, and as it may be in a larger or smaller degree for the sake of it, was to build up the Church, beneath the shadow of the prerogative, which had been used so largely under Henry and Edward to depress and dishonour it as to threaten depriving it of all capacity to command respect, to train character, or to exercise beneficial influence. Other princes, however, Charle¬ magne for example, have conceived and pursued a con¬ structive policy in the Church. The point in which Elizabeth stands alone, as far as I know, is this, that she pursued her work from first to last mainly in opposi¬ tion to the Church’s rulers and without a party to support her ; that is to say, without a hold in religion on either party, except that they liked her better than they liked the idea of a change which might increase the power of their antagonists. Thus it may truly be said that she rode upon the storm and that she had hardly more than one great, faithful, able servant to help to steady her in her seat. It is true, indeed, that Elizabeth made no direct con¬ tribution by her religious policy to another essential requisite of the national character, that, namely, which was represented and fostered by Puritanism ; and to which we owe it that the doctrine of non-resistance, the birth-sin of the English Reformation and the plague-spot of the Church of England, did not undermine and absorb the political liberties of the nation. The only excuse that can be offered is that if the policy of the Queen was the only one which in those days could have secured QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND. 217 the independence of the kingdom, then she took a certain, though, it must be admitted, a circuitous road towards the establishment of religious freedom. Nothing can be further from the ideal than the English Church has been in its practical development. Perhaps even in its ideal it is assailable enough. Yet it has been a solid and not trifling piece of human his¬ tory, and has had a large- share in moulding the charac¬ ter, and determining the fortunes, of a great nation. This paper, this brief study, if it may so be called, is not a panegyric either upon an institution or a human being ; it simply aims at the exhibition, by the enumera¬ tion of facts in one among many aspects, of a mind per¬ sistent in its work, and singularly powerful while clad in female form. That this nation is what it is, and this Church is what it is, may without praise or blame, but only in acknowledgment of the fact, be owned due to Queen Elizabeth as much as to any human being, that has ever in this island enjoyed or suffered the stern and bracing experience of life. I have stated in this paper that Elizabeth in her operations upon the Church of England had to make her bricks without straw, and had no party to support her. Those operations exhibit an example of the effects which may be produced by strong will combined with con¬ summate skill, such as is rare in history. She took an exact measure of her own strength, and used it accord- ingly. Her father had carried with him, in his proceedings against the Pope, the entire body of the bishops. An interval of years separates the downfall of Fisher from the proceedings of the Convocation which renounced the papal jurisdiction. The accession of Edward YI. did 218 QUEEN ELIZABETH AND THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND not bring about a religious crisis. Nor did the earliest of his measures in the direction of reform. But their result, as a whole, was the deprivation of a number of bishops, and the formation of a Roman party in the episcopal body. It was a natural consequence that men such as Tunstal and Heath should become committed to the proceedings of the Marian period, and should con¬ sequently decline to associate themselves with Elizabeth in her work, much as she appears to have desired it. It is to be observed that both these distinguished pre¬ lates, who had tolerated the Headship under Henry VIII. , refused the milder form of the Supremacy which she introduced, and did not wait to take their objection on the ground of any doctrinal change." * It is interesting to glance at an event, which had taken place in Scotland. The Scottish Church published, in 1552, what is known as the Catechism of Archbishop Hamilton. Its apparent aim was to set forth the established teaching of the pre-reformation Church, but, in doing this, from its first to its last page it contained no recog¬ nition, not even a notice, of the Pope or Church of Rome. It may be inferred that the Scottish bishops and clergy were generally of the same mind, as the English bishops and clergy under Henry VIII. They probably contemplated a National Church, and a free passage through the critical period without violent changes, and without a rupture of internal unity. It seems therefore possible that the changes effected under Edward VI., especially in his later years, may have caused the Scotch bishops to abandon, after publishing the Catechism, hopes which had been alive at the period of its compilation, and may thus have rendered religious revolution certain, to the north as well as to the south of the Border. This important document has recently been reprinted at the Clarendon Press. — W. E. G., 1896. VIL THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII.* 1889. The sixteenth century was highly remarkable in our annals for the production of great facts and strong men. The principle and the basis of its main proceedings in religion have been imperfectly traced by many of our writers under the dauble influence of insufficient access to information and of exuberant partisanship. The facts, complex in themselves and but partially known, have been inaccurately handled even within the limits of that partial knowledge. But a new day has dawned, with the enlarged access to the sources which has been opened by the publication on a large scale of authentic records ; while this has occurred simultaneously with that great extension of historical studies and historical appetite among us, which may almost be called the rise of a new historical school. Such are the impressions I have been led to form by my own doubtless insufficient inquiries. If they are in any degree well-founded there is still a great work to be done in portions of this field. Some¬ thing may be attempted gradually even by piecemeal contributions, such as those which I have taken upon myself to offer. * Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century . 220 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. In this Review for July, 1888, under the title of “ The Elizabethan Settlement of Religion,” I undertook the proof of certain propositions, which may be substantially restated as follows : — 1. A basis of ecclesiastical legality for the proceed¬ ings of the English Reformation, in their determining conditions, was laid in the reign of King Henry the Eighth. 2. This basis was not laid by the persons who are popularly known as Reformers, such as Cranmer and his coadjutors, but was anterior to the rupture with Rome brought about by the (so-called) divorce, and had the sanction of the collective national episcopate, in¬ cluding such great names as those of Warharn, Tunstal, Gardiner, and Fisher, as well as of the clergy of the second order, all represented in Convocation. 3. This being so, the doctrinal assertions and the ritual and other changes of the period have to be tried upon their merits, or upon the competency of a National Church to enact or adopt them, but cannot be dismissed without trial as having been forced upon the Church by the civil authority, which was, I admit, essentially incompetent to constitute an order of bishops, or legiti¬ mately to establish various other changes such as were actually made. To these I will now add a fourth proposition, for the purpose of setting aside, as irrelevant to the present issue, questions which may be raised with reference to some portions of the subject, and especially to the eccle¬ siastical sanction due to the Book of Common Prayer as it stood during the reign of Elizabeth. For us of the present day it seems enough to say, fourthly, that, on the Restoration of Charles the Second, this sanction was THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 221 supplied in a manner thoroughly regular and formal ; and that the scheme thus appointed by the concurrence of the temporalty and the spiritualty of the land has subsisted for more than two centuries and a quarter. I may, perhaps, subjoin that there is no apparent sign of its having come near to the close of its existence. These are propositions turning altogether upon matters of historical fact ; but they tend towards establishing the continuity of the British episcopate from the period before the Reformation downwards ; and, though I have avoided impugning any other scheme or system, they have drawn forth criticism both from Nonconforming * and especially from Roman Catholic quarters. I shall now endeavour to deal with all the principal allegations which have been urged against me, and first with one serious charge of inaccuracy brought by Mr. Morris, S. J.f It relates to Fisher, and the oath exacted under the Succession Act ; and my statement (in p. 8) has led Mr. Morris to assert that Fisher never took any such oath, and that in support of the contrary allegation there is not a corroborating word in Sander’s Book on the Schism. While I admit that my allegation is wrong in one point of chronology, I shall endeavour to support its substance ; and, to proceed in order, I will first quote the important passage from Sander to which I referred. The passage J is as follows : — * The British Weekly , Nov. 23, 1888. f Dublin Review , Oct., 1888, p. 252. X Sander, ‘ De Origine ac Progressu schismatis Anglicam,’ ed. Rome, 1586, pp. 106, 107. I find a corresponding passage in the Cologne edition of 1610, and in the French translation, Paris, 1683. Upon examining, however, an English translation, published in 1877 by Mr. David Lewis, I find that no less than twelve consecutive pages of the original, as it stands in the editions I have cited, do not appear in it. •229 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII, “His inquam aliisque multis rationibus inductus ac deceptus Roffensis (de quo postea ssepissime gravissimeque doluit), neces¬ sitate praesenti cedendum ratus, persuasit reliquis, qui firmiores adkuc erant in Christo (nam plerique jam Arckiepiscopis Cranmero et Leio, kuic Eboracensi, illi Cantuariensi, qui ambo Regis nego- tium promovebant, adhseserant), ut saltern cum exceptione ilia praeclicta (quantum per Dei verbum liceret) obedientiam Regi in causis ecclesiasticis ac spiritualibus jurarent. Cujus facti Roffen- sem postea usque adeo poenituit, ut publice se incusans diceret, suas, id est Episcopi, partes fuisse, non cum exceptione dubia, sed aperte et disertis verbis cseteros potius docuisse quid verbum Dei permitteret, quidve prohiberet, quo minus alii in fraudem incur- rerent: nec unquam sibi deinceps peccatum lioc expiasse videbatur, quousque proprio sanguine banc maculam eluisset.” No one will, I think, deny that this is a passage of great importance, although it has escaped the notice of Mr. Bridgett, S.J., in his able biography of Fisher.* Mr. Morris f quotes the second Act of attainder against Fisher, and Burnet’s account of his behaviour on his trial, to show what requires no showing — namely, that at a certain date in 1534, and in 1535, Fisher refused to take the oath of succession. But these facts do not dispose of the statement of Sander, which is express to this extent, that Fisher recommended those of the chief prelates who were most adverse to the King’s This passage, with the narrative to which it belongs, forms part of them. Some explanation appears to be required. Sander died before the publication of the work by Rishton. The introduction and notes by Mr. Lewis evince great research. Not only, however, does he ascribe the ‘ De Antiquitate ’ to Parker, which though not the truth is not far from it, but he states that the Clergy of 1531 in their terror withdrew the limiting clause, “ per legem Christi,” and thus the Recognition passed without it (note, p. 92). This seems to be rather a gross instance of what I have said in the text as to historical inaccuracies. * ‘Life of Blessed John Fisher.’ Burns & Oates, 1888. t Dublin Review, p. 252. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 223 proceedings to take an oath promising obedience to him even in spiritual causes, and that afterwards he bitterly repented of this conduct and considered that it required expiation by his blood. The questions, which arise upon the passage, seem to be these three : — • 1 . What was the oath to which it refers 1 2. What was the time to which it refers 1 3. Did Fisher himself take the oath, or did he only persuade others to take it ? As to the first question, we know of no novel or special oath of the period anterior to the oath of succes¬ sion. No Act of Parliament had been passed earlier than the Act of Succession, at the beginning of 1534, which in any manner required the taking of an oath. The concessions of the clergy, in 1531 (the Recognition), and in 1532 (the Submission), had not become the law of the land. The Royal Headship was not enacted until the end of 1534, but it was logically involved in the Act of Succession; for that Act defined the oath to be one for maintaining “ the whole effects and con¬ tents ” of the Act. These contents included the dis¬ solution of the marriage with Catherine, and the confirmation of the marriage with Anne. Such deter¬ minations depended entirely upon domestic as opposed to foreign authority ; and this domestic authority, again, depended upon the royal headship. I conclude it, therefore, to be beyond reasonable doubt that the oath treated of by Sander is the oath of succession. As respects the time when Fisher exercised his power of persuasion so effectually, Sander himself supplies us with sufficient means of judgment. He places it in the year 1533 (according to the old method of computation), 224 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. and before the definitive sentence of the Pope, ” which is also assigned to that year ; but after the Act of Suc¬ cession had passed, t and in direct connection with an account of a personal pressure brought to bear upon Fisher by the King, who pointed out to this prelate that his obedience was limited by the condition “so far as the Word of God allowed.” Further, the passage shows that Cranmer was already archbishop, so that Sander cannot refer to anything before the 30th of March, 1533, the day of his consecration. Now Fisher’s refusal to take the oath of succession is defined by his Act of attainder J for refusal to have been on or after the 1st of May, 1534. But many weeks had then elapsed since the passing of the Act ; and Henry, who had obtained the statutory authority on the 23rd of March, named his Commis¬ sioners to enforce it on the 30th. § The only admissible conclusion, upon these facts, as to the question of date seems to be that the King’s urgency, and Fisher’s compliance, belong to the beginning of the period between the passing of the Act in the month of March, and the arrival of the news of the Pope’s sentence on the 12th of April. At first sight it may appear strange that a man of Fisher’s firmness, character, and standing should in so short a time have exhibited so radical a change in his own conduct ; but there had been, within the compass of that short period, a change in the circumstances most likely to affect Fisher’s action, which may go far to explain it. The bolt, suspended for months and years in the sky over England, had fallen. Passing at length * Sander, p. 111. The sentence was dated the 23rd of March, f Sander, p. 104. | Bridgett, p. 283. § Ibid. p. 206. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 225 from the questions of competency and jurisdiction to the merits of the case of divorce, the Pope had, on the 23rd of March, definitively ratified the old marriage of Henry, and annulled the new. To conform to the Act of Succession would, from this time forward, not only have been in conflict with Fisher’s personal opinion on the divorce, which many of his brother bishops did not share ; it would have pledged him to a headship which was no longer abstract, but which had now been placed in direct contradiction to the official judgment of the Pope on a matter of spiritual concern. At the first of the two periods, the Church of England had not pro¬ nounced upon the marriage, and the Pope had not taken the question out of its jurisdiction. At the latter period, both these positions were reversed. Moreover, the parliamentary enactment went beyond the terms of the convocational declaration. 3. Did Fisher himself take the oath, or did he only persuade those among the bishops to take it who were most reluctant? I cannot doubt that he took it. ISTo other conclusion gives effect to the words of Sander, who says ( necessitati prsesenti cedendum ratus ) not that he complied in part, but that he complied simjpliciter. In truth, to persuade others was a greater compliance than to swear himself. To take such a course advisedly would have been a piece of baseness, that cannot be imputed to such a man as Fisher. We should therefore follow the statement of Burnet,*' who says (with some want of distinct specification as to dates, but yet in a manner such as to leave no room for doubt) “ the bishops did all swear their alliance to the King, and swore also l. * Yol. i. p. 330 (ed. Oxf. 1816). 226 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VUE to maintain his supremacy.” If all the bishops swore, Fisher is, of course, included.* The main argument now before us has reference to collective and constitutional authority, and does not depend on the action of individuals ; but it is material to trace the acts of a prelate who, from the combined force of character, learning, and seniority, seems to have possessed a weight of moral influence beyond that ac¬ corded to any other contemporary personage in England. Mr. Bridgett j* well observes that even deep students of the history of that period in some cases know of this remarkable man no more than a few facts of his life, and perhaps the details of his death. I still venture to doubt whether, even by the work of Mr. Bridgett himself, his character has been completely elucidated. In truth, I find in that work, and in the works of other It oman Catholic writers, the omission of a material element of the case before us ; namely, a regard to the National Church in itself, as distinct from the royal influence and power on the one side, and the Papal chair on the other. If I judge aright, this element counts for a great deal in the history of the period. A learned divine, and a man of austere life, Fisher appears to have been totally exempt from the influences of personal selfishness and ambition. He would not leave his poor church of Rochester for a richer one ; and even at the last he valued not, as he said, the Cardinal’s hat un¬ wisely bestowed on him. But he seems to have been wanting in breadth of mind, and in the faculty for * Even if Fisher was excused from attendance in Parliament, he may have seen the King, and the words of Sander on this part of the case (p. 106) seem to imply that they met personally. t Preface, p. vii. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 227 discerning the signs of the times. He did not see the necessity of reforms which was obvious to Wolsey, to Warham, to Gardiner, and to Tunstal ; the last of whom, at any rate, if greatly junior to Fisher, emulated him in his Christian graces. So far as political inclina¬ tion went, Fisher was one of those who would have counted among the Mapadwvo/xayot of Aristophanes, or, in our own day, among a Parliamentary residue, the forlorn hope of Protection, who passed, in the House of Commons, by the name of “ cannon balls ; ” from their impassibility, it would appear, not from their efficacy. In the year 1529-30, Bills were introduced into Parlia¬ ment, which touched neither the faith nor the discipline of the Church, nor yet the Papal power, but sought to deal, as Burnet says, with “ some of the most exorbi¬ tant abuses of the clergy,” touching probates, mortuaries, pluralities and non-residence, and the farming of lands by spiritual persons. Fisher f offered a vehement opposition to these Bills, which he seems to have regarded as indicating “lack of faith only,” and show¬ ing that the mind of the Commons was “ nothing but down with the Church.” Bearing this fact in mind, let us weigh some incidents of his subsequent course. No doubt remains that he concurred in the Recognition of the royal headship in 1531. In 1532 came the large concession with regard to Canons, which is termed the Submission of the clergy. Fisher was absent, probably ill at the time. Mr. Bridgett says he cannot be shown to have had any share in this surrender. But he was formally * Burnet, i. 159; Froude’s ‘Hist.’ i. 248-51 ; Bridgett, pp. 181-5. f Bridgett, pp. 201, 202. 228 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. consulted (on the 6th of May, 1532) by deputies from the two Houses of Convocation, which were adjourned for three days in order to receive his advice. There is no record of what it was. Had he objected, he must have made his objection known, probably by formal protest. He must surely be taken, then, as having given here also a reluctant, perhaps, but honest assent. And the upshot of the matter thus far is that this eminently dauntless man, who had proved in 1529 his ability to confront and denounce a prevailing power, and who maintained an uniform and unflinching resistance to the divorce, yet concurred, even if with reluctance, in the Con vocational Act of 1531, and made no opposition to the submission which followed in 1532. The story told by Chapuys,| that he complied in 1531 because he was threatened with being pitched into the river if he did not comply, is totally at variance with the resolute character of the man, and is evidently the mere gossip of the day. The rational conclusion is that he acted throughout for the best, and according to his conscience. Reluctance of this kind does not take away the effect of responsible concurrence, nor the authority due to it. But, further, I am aware of nothing to show that this reluctance was grounded upon regard for the Papal pre¬ rogatives. To this point I shall presently recur. And I pass now to the main issue, which plainly turns upon the nature and effect of the Recognition of 1531 as matter of law, both constitutional and ecclesiastical. I will first, however, say a word upon a portion of the Recognition which has not attracted much notice * Collier, ii. 68. f ‘ Letters and Papers of Henry the Eighth,’ vol. v. No. 112. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII, 229 in the discussions upon it ; I mean the phrase which declares the King to be “unicus et supremus dominus ” of the Church. Mr. Morris * considers these words to be simply descriptive of the relation held to the Church by its feudal lord. It is at first sight a plausible con¬ tention ; but the balance of argument seems to be very strongly against it. For the King was not feudal lord of the Church at all ; but only of particular fiefs held by certain of its members. And, again, the letter of Henry the Eighth to Tunstal and the Northern Convocation, which cites these words, may seem to give them a wider meaning. The King says that they are open to cavil, like the words touching the headship, on the ground that Christ alone is “ unicus Dominus et supremus, as we confess him in the church daily.” | There is a similar piece of evidence against this limitation of sense in Tunstal’s own protest, namely, that he did not so under¬ stand the words ; for, in his protestation, he treats these words as in pari materia with the rest and says, u Et similiter declarandum et exprimendum puto verba ilia, scil. unicurn et supremum dominum, in temporalibus post Christum accipi.” J Had these words referred to the feudal lordship Tunstal would have urged no such argument, for the feudal lordship obviously required no such limitation. § * Dublin Review , p. 248. f Wilkins, ‘ Concilia,’ iii. 763. X Ibid. iii. 747. § I desire to recede from the statement (article, p. 8) that the remarkable petition against annates proceeded from the clergy, in which I simply followed Strype, Wilkins, and Blunt (‘Ecclesiastical History,’ i. 250-253). Mr. Gairdner considers it to be a petition from Parliament (‘ Letters and Papers,’ vol. v. Nos. 722, 725). [Upon another recon¬ sideration, I must withdraw a concession which was made mainly in deference to the high authority of Mr. Gairdner. — W. E. G., 1896.] 230 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. It must always be borne in mind that the Recognition in 1531 does not stand alone. In 1534, Lee had become Archbishop of York ; Cranmer and Gardiner had been added to the episcopate of the southern province. Ex¬ cept for these successions, made in the usual form, the personal composition of the Convocations continued as it had been in 1531. Mr. Morris* erroneously states that the proceeding in Convocation at this later epoch was ‘‘nothing but an answer by the Lower House” to a question concerning the Pope. On the contrary, the proceeding seems to have been complete in itself ; and it was beyond doubt a proceeding in both the Convocations. It was propounded to them, and to the Universities that the Bishop of Rome by the sacred Scriptures has no greater jurisdiction in the realm of England than any other foreign bishop. To this proposition, on the 2nd of June, 1534, the Convocation of York unanimously agreed. The unanimity is strongly marked by the words used — unanimiter et concorditer, nemine eorum discre- pante.” j* Even from this document alone the previous and concordant action of the province of Canterbury might almost be taken for granted. And, in this purely anti-Papal transaction, there is not a whisper of coercion or of reluctance. But, on the preceding 31st of March, the vote of the Lower House of Canterbury on the same proposition had been repeated in that Convocation. £ Thirty-four asserted it, while one doubted and four denied. The document given by Wilkins is not an ordinary journal of a day’s proceedings, but a summary, and probably a contracted, account of the proceedings of many days. * Dublin Review, p. 257. f Wilkins, iii. 782. J Ibid. iii. 769. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 231 Collier, however, cites the formal record ‘ 4 of the sense of the prelates and clergy ” of Canterbury from the J ournal of Convocation,* He also cites from Wharton a testimony, according to which it would appear that this renunciation of all Papal jurisdiction by Divine right — this being the nature of the power which was in question - — was more formal and general throughout the land, than any other ecclesiastical proceeding of the period. The learned men of the Roman communion enjoy a deserved credit for accurate and careful training, and I must own to some surprise at what seems to me a want of precision in some reasonings of those who have offered replies to my article. The Rev. Mr. Morris | quotes the words of Bishop Stubbs, which are very weighty words, to the effect that neither Fisher, Warham, nor More would have accepted the words of 1531, if they had implied a rejection of “ Papal authority ; ” and, later in the article, my antago¬ nist finds that I am under a “ prepossession ” that “the English clergy were really averse to the Pope and to his authority.” J His proof of this prepossession is that I speak of “that aversion to the Papal jurisdiction which had spread generally among the English clergy.” Can he require to be reminded that jurisdiction is one thing and authority another? “Jurisdiction” is a technical word ; “ authority ” is not, and is of far wider scope. The oath of succession, as found in Burnet, speaks of both, but the two things are distinct though related. For example, no one, I presume, will refuse to admit that the Patriarch of Constantinople enjoys a certain * Collier, ‘ Hist.’ ii. 94. f Dublin Review, p. 250, x Wilkins, p. 254. 2.32 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. authority in Greece ; but in Greece he has no juris¬ diction whatever. It has always seemed to me that the term jurisdiction in its proper sense, drawn legitimately from its basis in the word jus, is stamped ah initio with the idea of defined civil force and effect ; and cannot be separated from this idea even in such a phrase as spiritual jurisdiction, though of course the word is capable, like other words, of being widened into a second intention, and a merely popular use. This distinction was observed by the Church of England, even in the sixteenth century. In 1534, the question put to the clergy was whether the Pope had by Scripture any jurisdiction in England beyond any other foreign bishop ; and when the proposition that he had none was affirmed by the Convocations, the answers in both cases (as in that of the University of Oxford) * adhered strictly to the word jurisdictio. In 1562 Art. xxxvii. only avers that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England.” It might be difficult to show that the English Church in any one of its formal Acts has ever touched the question what attributes might appertain, or be allowed, to the Bishop of Rome in virtue of his Western patriarchate, or even of his Primacy as first among the Patriarchs.! The negation of 1533—4, although it went beyond the Act of 1531, was doubly conditioned; it applied only to juris¬ dictio, and to jurisdictio available in virtue of powers conferred in Holy Scripture. The probable intention of the King at and after this time was to make terms with * Collier, ii. 94; Burnet, ‘ Records,’ vol. iii. Nos. 26, 27; Palmer, ‘On the Church,’ pt. ii. ch. ii. f It would be a further question what powers the Pope might have by allowance or consent. — W. E. G., 1896. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 233 the Pope. The Act of 1532 respecting firstfruits, passed after the Recognition, stood upon this footing.* It in¬ volved the contingency of a total renunciation ; but, in the meantime, it conditionally recognised his intervention even in the appointment of English bishops ; it provided a moderate payment in respect of the forms to be ob¬ served ; and Cranmer in 1533 was consecrated under Bulls from Rome. Nor was it wonderful that this moderation should be observed, when we consider what such a man as Melanchthon thought he believed ; that, if other controversies could be composed, the Papal primacy, rationally handled, need not form an obstacle to the restoration of Christian unity. And the fact remains unshaken that these declarations, made by the representative body of the English Church, never were repealed. The allegations of Mr. Morris are two. Eirst,t that there was a proceeding in the first year of Mary against the Statute of 1534. But that proceeding falls utterly short of the exigencies of Mr. Morris’s argument. It was not the Act of Convocation, but only of the Lower House. It was a Lower House personally remodelled under civil authority. And, finally, it touched neither the acknowledgment of 1531 nor the negation of 1534, but only the Statute of that year. I am not aware of any Convocational action at any date, which has aimed at undoing the legislative proceedings of the Church during the reign of Henry the Eighth. Mr. Morris, indeed, also dwells upon the national Synod, which in November 1555 (when nearly half the reign had already passed away) Pole obtained authority * 23 Henry VIII. c, 20, secs, ii., iii. f Dublin Review, p. 256. 234 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. to call, as a Synod having for its mission to reform the Church of England, ‘ 1 which by the calamity of the late schism was greatly deformed in doctrine and morals.” But these words are not the words of the Synod ; * they are simply the words of Cardinal Pole. And the pro¬ ceedings of the Synod, which seem to have been speedily arrested, but which are on record,! involve no condem¬ nation, and no repeal, of anything done ecclesiastically in the preceding reign. Without doubt, there must have been very strong reasons of policy which caused so remarkable an absten¬ tion : an abstention continued, as 1 have shown, I believe with perfect accuracy, into the reign of Elizabeth by the collective body of Convocation in the province of Canter¬ bury, and by both the Houses in the province of York. Perhaps it was that Gardiner and the other prelates, who had shared in proceedings under Henry, were not willing that their own solemn acts should be directly annulled. Perhaps it was that, as statesmen, they knew that it would be dangerous to stir the public feeling by direct assertions on the part of the Church against the regal and on behalf of the Papal power. Perhaps the Marian councillors speculated a little on the age of the Queen. She was not very far advanced in life. Her reign might well have proved to be of considerable duration. It may have been thought wise to postpone the final stage of ecclesiastical reaction until the heads of the reform¬ ing party should have been forgotten, and the realm thoroughly habituated to the restoration of the Latin forms of worship. Be this as it may, the fact remains. By circuitous means the dominant party cut off all that * Wilkins, iv. 151. f Ibid. iv. 131, THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 235 was for the moment operative in the prior Acts, but they left the Acts themselves. Thus they left it free to Queen Elizabeth, on her accession, by simply repealing the Parliamentary settlement of Mary, to place herself face to face with the unrepealed proceedings of the Church under Henry the Eighth. She then, by a substantive enactment declaring her governorship of the Church, which manifestly lay within and not beyond the declarations of 1531 and 1534, placed herself in a condition to execute the Church law, as well as the State law, against all who might, if challenged, refuse to accept that governorship. I now come to the consideration of reasons alleged by those who, aware that there has been no repeal of the Convocational Acts, think that they can account for the fact, and can deprive them of their presumptive signi¬ ficance. These pleas appear to be as follows : — Firstly, that the Recognition of 1531 was obtained by terrorism, which amounts to coercion ; and it is there¬ fore void. Secondly, that the proceedings of the Marian Convo¬ cation, though they did not involve the repeal of the Recognition, yet were equivalent to a repeal. Thirdly, that the Recognition was so insignificant, that it did not require repeal, or notice of any kind. As to the first contention, I must observe that in the whole field of political argumentation there is no more perilous, I had almost written more pestilent, doctrine than that which exempts persons in authority from obligation to their acts and words on the plea of coercion. I know of no worse fault in the kingship of the past, than its disposition to avail itself of this plea, and thus to obtain release from its covenants. 236 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. Even darker is the case, if darker may be, when the doctrine is applied to bodies, which are obviously less liable, than individuals, to the extremes of compulsory pressure. And most of all in the case of bodies en¬ trusted with functions purporting to be divine. Of course it remains true that there is gross injustice in the fact of terrorism, and loss of moral authority on one side or on both. But there is no proof of what can justly be called terrorism in the case before us, though there is evidence of pertinacity on the part of the King, who doubtless was looking forward to ulterior develop¬ ments. Let us examine the facts of the procedure, about which, so far as I know, there is now no material dispute. I take the account from Collier.* In the first form of the demand the King was to be “protector et supremum caput.” This the clergy would not accept. After three days, the King proposed to add to the foregoing the words “ post Deum.” This again met with no acceptance. Then came in the limitation “quantum per Christi legem licet.” The declaration was accepted unanimously, with this limitation ; and it also met the wishes of the King. It has always been supposed that the limiting words were proposed by Warharn. Mr. Bridgett | prefers, on authority which seems to me highly apocryphal, to ascribe them to Fisher himself, into whose mouth Hall, his biographer, puts a speech with the air of a modern report. In this speech, he advises them to make the recognition, in its qualified form, as a choice of evils. Now the notion of terrorism is really incompatible both with the previous refusals, and with the strictly graduated and deliberative * Vol. ii. pp. 62, 63. f ‘Life of Blessed John Fisher,’ pp. 201, 202. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 237 process, by which an agreement was arrived at. That Fisher was the adviser is highly improbable, for he was a man of aye and no, not of compromises and expedients. That his assent was reluctant we have no evidence warranting assertion or denial. That his reluctance was shared by the clergy we have no contemporary evidence except that of Chapuys, the envoy of the emperor.* But we must remember that it is his incessant endeavour to encourage Charles to vigorous and even military action on Mary’s behalf, by representing that opinion is everywhere against the King. No doubt it became widely adverse, when Henry proceeded to the repudiation of Catherine after twenty-five years of married life, and even anticipated it by disgusting exhibitions of himself in company with Ann Boleyn. But there is no proof whatever of an adverse public opinion either at the period, or on the subject, of the Recognition. The speech attributed to Fisher, which refers to coercion and disinclination, makes no reference to the Pope. Neither does it explain what it was that the clergy feared. This is, however, probably explained by the protest of Tunstal, and by the explanatory argument of Henry in reply.! In neither of these is there a word either respecting danger to the prerogatives of the Pope, or tending to save those prerogatives. They make it plain that the object put forward as requiring care and defence was the prerogative not of the Pope, but of Christ. This indeed would be sufficiently shown by the fact, even if it stood alone, that Tunstal himself had already published his work against the power of the * ‘Letters and Papers of Henry the Eighth,’ vol. v. Nos. 105, 120, 124. f Wilkins, iii. 745. 238 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. Pope in England. The action of 1531, then, has all the appearance of a serious deliberative proceeding ; and, if there be any semblance of fear or of reluctance, it has no regard to the maintenance of the Papal power, but only to the just independence, within her own proper sphere, of the National Church. Of this we have a further and conspicuous proof in 1534. In 1531, when there is no direct reference to the Pope, and the immediate question is of the National local Church, there is a degree of hesitation and reluctance. In 1534, when the Papal jurisdiction is directly assailed and denied, and no word is used which could be prejudicial to the Church, we hear nothing of coercion, and nothing of unwillingness on the part of even a single bishop (Fisher being in prison). Can there be a more conclu¬ sive indication that the men who thus cheerfully com¬ plied in 1534, only the Pope being concerned, when they stickled in 1531 for special forms of limitation did it on behalf of the Church, of which the liberties were directly in question ? As to the second of the three contentions, my reply is that there may be repeal in direct words, or through overriding and contradicting a previous judgment by a later one ; but that, short of such alteration or contra¬ diction by an authority equivalent to that of the original Act, there can be no such thing as an equiva¬ lent of repeal. The performance or allowance, in the face of the original instrument, of administrative pro¬ ceedings apparently or even really inconsistent with it cannot destroy its authority. The legislative power is essentially the highest power, and its Acts cannot be invalidated except by its own authority. It is, of course, to be borne in mind that there was not an THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 239 absolute opposition between the declarations of 1531 and 1534, and the exercise of Papal power in England. Under that of 1534, it might have been exercised as a power of ecclesiastical though not of Scriptural appoint¬ ment. Under that of 1531, it might have been exercised by allowance of the realm through its constituted authorities ; by option, in short, and arrangement, but not by compulsion or command. There was therefore an opportunity, so far as the Church under Mary was concerned, of playing with the subject. It is sometimes thought politic to wink at disobedience to an Act without or before proceeding to repeal it, but those who deem it proper and wise to play such a game must take their chance of themselves disappearing from the scene, and leaving the Act in full force for their successors to deal with. But, according to Mr. Mivart,* who holds so high a place in the world of natural science, the Act of Convo¬ cation was one which might naturally and properly be let alone by both of the parties whom it concerned ; by the friends of the Papal system, because it was ultra vires , and therefore ipso facto null and void ; by the friends of royal power, because in their view it was “ superfluous ” and “ an idle act.” As to the first plea, I admit that, according to the doctrine now recently established, the Convocation would have been incompe¬ tent to determine anything of any kind against the Pope. But (1) we have no reason to believe that a single bishop under Henry held that doctrine, while we know positively that many, including Gardiner and Tunstal, did not ; (2) this act cannot be fully measured, * Tablet newspaper, Dec. 15, 1888. 240 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. for the purpose of the present argument, without taking into view the responses of 1534. Both were perfectly canonical in form. Both unquestionably formed part of the ecclesiastical law of England. As part of the local law, they had a local force, which could not be in the least degree abated by any proceedings not having a legislative character, and there was no proceeding, either of Convocation or of Synod, having such a character, in the reign of Mary. Mr. Mivart finds it necessary to say of my argument that it “ is surely as strange a perversion of ingenuity as was ever invented by an unscrupulous lawyer to defend a position utterly incapable of any straightforward defence.” Declara¬ tions such as this would perhaps, in the political world, be called bluster ; but I should be sorry to apply such a term to a writer so distinguished in his proper line. Convocation might, as he says, be “ impotent to restore that which never had been abolished,” but it was not impotent to cancel errors in its own record. The other horn of his dilemma is even less formidable, as we have the clearest historical proof that the regal or political party did the very things which Mr. Mivart says they might safely, and did, forbear from doing. It is an elementary fact of our history that high importance was attached to the action of the Convocations. The King thought it important, for he pressed for it with eagerness and tenacity, and he personally took up the argument with Tunstal, as he had done with Luther. The clergy thought it important, for they resolutely refused certain forms (even while under the threat of prsemunire), and agreed only when their scruples had been met. Finally the Legislature * thought it impor- * 24 Hen. VIII. c. 12, 1832. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 241 tant, for the Statute of Appeals was framed in complete accordance with it, and the Statute of Headship * recited it in its preamble. I do not deny for a moment that Henry, in his later proceedings, rode roughshod over the constitution of the Church, both as an historic institution and as a Christian society ; but irregularities of government are one thing, formal legislation is another. The legislative proceedings of the reign of Mary were confined to the civil sphere ; and, if we view its administration as a whole, nothing in the entire picture is more curious than its highly Erastian character. There is indeed an argument not yet noticed, which respect for its author forbids me wholly to pass by. Mr. Morris | holds that a statement parenthetically made cannot be a legal enactment, and that if it were found in the sentence of a judge it would only be an obiter dictum. There seems here to be much confusion. An obiter dictum , as I understand it, is an opinion beside the purpose of the instrument in which the opinion is given, and is more commonly found in a speech than in a formal sentence. The question whether this or that were an obiter dictum would not be in the smallest degree affected by its being inside or outside of brackets. What a parenthesis contains is grammatically capable of severance from the sentence in which it is found, but its contents have as full force in regard to their sub¬ stance as if there were no use of parenthetical signs at all. To say that the assertion is beside the purpose of the instrument is to beg the question what was the purpose ; whether the purpose was the single one of * 26 Hen. VIII. e. 1, 1534. f Dublin Review , p. 248. I. R 242 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. granting the subsidy, or the double one of accepting the supremacy together with the grant of the subsidy. The form of expression is “ recognoscimus.” It declares, but it does not create, for the province of Canterbury could not create an attribute for the King of the realm, nor could it put forward in the character of a novelty what it meant to recognise as having existed from immemorial time. In opposition to the argument of unimportance, which seems to me the strangest of all contentions ever imported into this part of our constitutional history, I will in conclusion give some proofs that the Convoca- tional proceeding now directly in question was one of great weight and significance. First, the Recognition of 1531 was an Act of unusual importance and solemnity, because it was not the mere establishment of a certain legal doctrine which might be affirmed to-day and denied to-morrow, and which was without authority both before the affirmation and after the denial ; but it was the assertion and the recognition of a prerogative descended from immemorial time, in lawful existence before as well as after the enactment. In order to get rid of the judicial effect of such an enactment as this, its repeal was necessary ; but further, its mere repeal would have been insufficient. We have an analogous case of great interest in the civil legislation of the eighteenth century, which explains my meaning and, I think, irrefragably confirms my position. In the year 1719 a declaratory Act was passed in England, which asserted the right of Parliament to make laws for the government of Ireland. In 1782 this Act was repealed. But the repeal did not satisfy THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 243 the vigilance of Irish patriotism. Flood argued, that the withdrawal of this particular assertion of the right did not destroy the right itself, nor preclude its reasser¬ tion. His argument prevailed; and in the year 1783 another Act was passed to assert the contradictory of the proposition contained in the Act of 1719. This fresh Act declared that the sole right of making laws for Ireland resided in the King, Lords, and Commons of Ireland. So also it ought to have been in the sixteenth century, in order to make good the argument of my assailants. There ought to have been both a repeal of the express assertion made by the Convocation of 1531 for the present existence of a certain right, and a contradiction of the far more important implied assertion that it had always existed. There was neither the one nor the other. Secondly, the Act of 1531 derived a special impor¬ tance from the authority and weight of the men who concurred in passing it. Warham has received the glowing eulogium of Erasmus. Tunstal, “ a spirit with¬ out spot,” was a person of eminent learning and ability, and one of the best men of the sixteenth century. High praise was bestowed upon him in the sermon preached at his funeral after the Elizabethan settlement ; and his protestation on behalf, not of the Pope but of the Church in the Northern Convocation, shows the courage as well as the deliberation with which he acted. The Recognition had the subsequent adhesion of Gardiner, who became a bishop in December, 1531. He was one of the great statesmen of England, and to him we owe it that foreign influences did not much more largely predominate in the council of Mary. As to Fisher, I 244 THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. will only further say that already in the year 1530 he had been imprisoned for his conduct in defence of the Church,* and he had declared himself ready to die rather than assent to the divorce. This declaration of his (writes the secretary who served Campeggio f ) has created a great stir, for he is in such repute that his opposition would be fatal to the dissolution of the marriage. It may be said that Warham before his death in 1532 made a notarial protestation on behalf of the Church of Canterbury, the Church of England, and the See of Rome. But this protestation, which did not nominatim point to anything that had been done, was expressly confined to statutes of the realm. J It did not include Convocational Acts ; and, as we know from the case of Tunstal that there was a power of protesting in such cases, we are obliged to infer that Warham to the last saw nothing in the recognition of 1531 which he desired to retract or qualify. Thirdly, this act of Convocation is of special authority, because it and it alone among the critical proceedings of the sixteenth century emanates from a Convocation which had not been tampered with. The Convocations of Edward the Sixth, of Mary, and of Elizabeth had been altered in their composition by the imprisonment or deprivation of obnoxious persons before they were put into motion. They differ from the Convocation of 1531, as the Long Parliament after the application of Pride’s purge differs from the Long Parliament before * Bridgett’s ‘ Life of Blessed John Fisher,’ pp. 183, 190. f ‘ Monumenta Vaticana ’ (Lammer), pp. 33, 34. J Wilkins, iii. 746. THE CHURCH UNDER HENRY VIII. 245 it. They were, in fact, packed Convocations ; while the Convocation of 1531 consisted entirely of persons, who had attained their respective places in regular course, and without reference to the controversies of the day, or the exigencies of political convenience. VIII. PROFESSOR HUXLEY AND THE SWINE- MIRACLE.* 1891. The controversy, in which this paper has to take its place, arose out of a statement, indeed a boast, as I understood it, by Professor Huxley, f that the adepts in natural science were assailing the churches with weapons of precision, and that their opponents had only anti¬ quated and worthless implements to employ in the busi¬ ness of defence. I took upon me to impeach at certain points the precision of the Professor’s own weapons.]; Upon one of those points, the miracle of the swine at Gadara, as recorded in the Gospels, he had given us assumption instead of proof upon what he thinks the vital question, whether the keeping of the swine was an innocent and lawful occupation. He has now offered an elaborate attempt at proof that such was its cha¬ racter. The smallest indication of such an attempt in the original article would have sufficed entirely to alter * Reprinted from the Nineteenth Century. f Nineteenth Century , July, 1890, p. 22. X ‘Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture,’ p. 260. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 247 the form of my observation, which would then have been what it will now be ; not that he offers no argu¬ ment, but that his argument is unsound from the begin¬ ning to the end. Of that considerable portion of his article which is devoted to sneers, imputations, and lectures for my profit, I shall take no notice whatever. The question of my guilt or innocence is too insignificant, and even the question whether Mr. Huxley does or does not always use weapons of precision might hardly warrant a prolongation of the warfare. But the personal action of our Lord appertains to the basis of the Christian revelation, and to impugn it successfully in any point is to pierce the innermost heart of every Christian. ISTo inquiry, therefore, can be too painstaking which helps to carry such a question to a conclusive issue. I must, however, in passing, make the confession that I did not state with accuracy, as I ought to have done, the precise form of the accusation. I treated it as an imputation on the action of our Lord : Mr. Huxley replies that it is only an imputation on the narrative of three Evangelists respecting Him. The difference from his point of view is probably material, and I therefore regret that I overlooked it. From the standing ground of those who receive the Scriptures, it is not so consider¬ able. That Christ, who is not only the object of imita¬ tion, love, and worship, but the very food and life of Christians, is the Christ of the Gospels. In a sense relative yet not untrue, they may almost be called “ the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person.” # If the Gospels are put on their trial as * Heb. i. 3. 248 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. literary documents, and if a legitimate though mordent criticism can successfully impugn any portion of them, we cannot complain, and must take our chance. But when their contents are summarily condemned and rejected on a charge of intrinsic unworthiness and immorality, upon no higher authority than that of the private judgment of this or that individual, then, and so long as we are dealing with a portion of the attested portraiture, an arraignment of them becomes, at least in my view, more hard to distinguish from an arraignment of Him whom they pourtray. Told, and told in detail, by all the three Synoptics, the miracle of the demoniac and the swine does not well bear severance from the staple of the biography. Nor, indeed, is it so severed by Mr. Huxley," who frankly treats it as involving at large the authority of the Synoptic Gospels. In itself, it is un¬ doubtedly of the utmost significance, on account of the questions which it raises. One of these is the large subject of demoniacal possession, on which I do not pre¬ sume to enter. Another is whether our Saviour in answering the prayer of the evil spirits by “ saying unto them, Go,” became a co-operator in the destruction of the swine. This has been contested, but I pass by the contest, and for argument’s sake at least admit the affirmative. Then there remains the further question ; whether the beneficent ministry of our Lord on earth included in this instance the infliction of heavy injury upon certain individuals, the owners, or keepers and owners, of the swine, by the destruction of their pro¬ perty lawfully and innocently held ? Mr. Huxley observes that the Evangelists do not * Nineteenth Century, December, 1890, p. 968. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 249 betray any consciousness of the moral and legal diffi¬ culties involved in the question. But if the Evangelists believed that our Lord was dealing in this case with Hebrews, or with persons bound by the law of Moses, then for them, believers in the Messiah, there was no legal or moral difficulties at all. There are, indeed, those who have been content to rest the case on the absolute right of the Deity to deal at will with the property of the creatures whom He has made. “ Of thine own have we given Thee ! ” Com¬ mentators are far from uniform.* But, as it appears to me, the question does not come before us quite in this shape. Apart from any such contention, it is no trivial inquiry whether we have to record in this case the existence of an exception to the general character of our Lord’s ministry, which was both beneficent and law- abiding. So far as regards the taking of animal life, the matter need not be discussed. It was life destined to be taken, taken by violence and probably with greater pain. It may have been, undoubtedly, the highest practical assertion of power, which is recorded by the Evangelists. But there is a remaining question, namely, whether this assertion of power was such as to involve serious injury to the proprietary rights of inno¬ cent persons. This is the character which Professor Huxley stamps upon the narrative ; justly, as he thinks, but, as I hold, in defiance of historical authority, and of the laws of rational and probable interpretation. I can¬ not, however, but agree with him on two points which appear to be important : namely, first, that the excision * Consult Cornelius k Lapide, and his references to others, on Matt. viii. 28 -34. Thomas Scott’s commentary is worthy of notice. 250 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. on moral grounds of this narrative from the Synoptic Gospels affects their credit as a whole, and, secondly, that it is material to know whether the act recorded involved the infliction of a heavy penalty upon conduct in itself innocent. The first question that arises in approaching this inquiry is, where did the miracle take place 1 And I do not well understand how Mr. Huxley, or his authorities, have so readily arrived at the conclusion that the very existence of any place named Gergesa is very question¬ able." Origen was a learned man, of critical mind, and he resided for a large part of his life in Palestine, and travelled there only two centuries after the time of our Lord.f He tells us expressly these three things : — 1. That there was an ancient city named Gergesa on the Lake of Tiberias. 2. That, bordering on the water, there was a precipi¬ tous descent, which it appears, or is proved (SecKwrai), that the swine descended. 3. That Gadara is indeed a city of Judnea, with very famous baths, but has no precipitous ground in the vicinity of water. J This statement from such a source, at such a date, appears to require a treatment much more careful than the dictum that the existence of Gergesa is “ very questionable.” I admit, however, my obligation under the circumstances to inquire also, and fully, into the case of Gadara. Let me now summarily point out what I conceive to * Nineteenth Century , December, 1890, p. 972. f See also M‘Clellan’s ‘New Testament,’ on Matt. viii. 28, for the testimony of St. Jerome. J Orig. ‘ Comment, in Joann.’ p. 145. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 251 be the main sources of error, which, taken together, vitiate the entire argument of Professor Huxley. 1. Throughout the paper he confounds together what I had distinguished, namely, the city of Gadara and the vicinage attached to it, not as a mere pomoeriim, but as a rural district. 2. He more fatally confounds the local civil govern ment and its following, including, perhaps, the whole wealthy class and those attached to it, with the ethnical character of the general population. 3. His one item of direct evidence as to the Gentile character of the city refers only to the former and not to the latter. 4. He fatally confounds the question of political party with those of nationality and of religion, and assumes that those who took the side of Rome in the factions that prevailed could not be subject to the Mosaic law. 5. His examination of the text of Josephus is alike one-sided, inadequate, and erroneous. 6. Finally, he sets aside, on grounds not critical or historical, but purely subjective, the primary historical testimony on the subject, namely that of the three Synoptic Evangelists, who write as contemporaries, and deal directly with the subject, neither of which is done by any other authority. 7. And he treats the entire question, in the narrowed form in which it arises upon secular testimony, as if it were capable of a solution so clear and summary as to warrant the use of the extremest weapons of contro¬ versy against those who presume to differ from him. Our main question, then, is the lawfulness and inno¬ cence of the employment of the swineherds. The ethnical character of Gadara and of its district derives 252 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. its interest from its relation to that main question. In my opinion, not formed without an attempt at full examination, there is no historical warrant for doubting that the swineherds were persons bound by the Mosaic law. In the opinion of Mr. Huxley,* “ the proof that Gadara was, to all intents and purposes, a Gentile and not a Jewish city, is complete.” And, again, j* Gadara was, “for Josephus, just as much a Gentile city as Ptolemais.” Utterly contesting these two propositions, I make two admissions : first, that one or more of the many and sparse references of Josephus may easily mislead a prepossessed and incomplete inquirer ; and secondly, that in the territory of Gadara, and in various other parts of Palestine, it would be a mistake to look for a perfectly homogeneous population either Hebrew or Gentile. Outside the text of J osephus, Professor Huxley adduces but a single fact in support of his allegations concerning Gadara— the fact, namely, that its coinage was Gentile. But coinage is essentially, and is most of all in a conquered country, the work of the governors, wholly apart from the governed. To say that the Gadarenes “ adopted the Pompeian era on their coin¬ age,” J out of gratitude, must almost be a jest. If Pompey re-annexed Gadara to the Syrian province, § it is most improbable that he should have altered its laws respecting religion. Mr. Huxley supposes this change was popular as a restoration of Homan authority. But, had he consulted the text of Josephus, he would have seen it was approved, because the cities were restored * Nineteenth Century , p. 973. f Ibid. p. 974. X Ibid. p. 973. § Josephus, ‘ de Bell. Jud.’ i. 7, 7. 253 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. by him to the “ Home Rule ” of their own proper inhabitants. I. The Revolted Jews. Mr. Huxley comes nearer to the point when he touches the text of Josephus,* on which, indeed, apart from the Synoptic Evangelists, we have chiefly to depend. He deals with the passages found in the 18th chapter of Book II. of the “Judaic War.” Now, these passages are most dangerous and seductive to those of his opinion, because, if severed from other passages, they would prove his point : on one condition, however, namely this, that we admit what is, indeed, his master fallacy, to be sound in logic and in fact. He says f that the revolted J ews are stated by Josephus to have laid waste the villages of the Syrians, “ and their neighbouring cities, and after them Gadara and Hippos.” He then cites from Section 5 the passage which states that Scythopolis, Askelon, Ptolemais, and Tyre slew or put in prison great numbers of Jews. “ Those of Hippos and those of Gadara did the like ; as did the remaining cities of Syria.” And hereupon Professor Huxley assumes that his case is proved : causa finita est. And so, perhaps, it might be were we to adopt what I have termed his master fallacy. That master fallacy is his assumption as to the cleavage of the Palestinian communities. According to him, all that was anti- Roman was Jewish or Hebrew, and all that acted on the other side was Gentile. Where, as in Tyre or Ptolemais, * Nineteenth Century , p. 974. f Ibid, on ‘Bell Jud.’ ii. 18, 1. 254 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. the population generally is known to have been Gentile, this assumption would, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, be a fair one. Such, in Mr. Huxley’s view, was the case of Gadara, where the Jews were only local immigrants, like the inhabitants of a Ghetto.* But this is just what he ought to prove ; and it is not proved by showing either that those Jews who were in revolt attacked a part of the Gadarite population, or that the Gadarite population afterwards did the like to some Jews among themselves. For the whole text of Josephus testifies that the Jews, as often happens in a case where foreign domination exists over a people of high nationalism, were sharply divided among them¬ selves on the point of resistance. There were among them Roman and anti- Roman factions ; ardent spirits always disposed to rise, and spirits more sluggish and pacific, who were either indifferent or indisposed to run the risk. Further, the strife between these sometimes went to blood, and not unfrequently placed the same community on different sides at different times. This, undoubtedly, I have to prove. I will first illustrate it by various cases including even Jerusalem itself, and will afterwards show that, if we wish to make sense and not nonsense out of Josephus, we must apply the same ideas to Gadara, which besides, in all likelihood, had some mixture of population, and classes possessed of wealth and influence, which were sure to take the Roman or anti-national side. I must first, however, observe that Mr. Huxley has quoted the text of Josephus inaccurately. As he has cited it, the revolted Jews proceeded at Gadara and * Nineteenth Century , p. 974. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 255 Hippos as they had done in the cities of Syria that he had previously mentioned. But what Josephus says >;'f is that they devastated (wholesale as it were) these Syrian cities, and that then, proceeding against Gadara and Hippos (which meant territories and not mere cities), they burned some places, and reduced to submission (not the rest but) others ; thus pointing to those differences of local faction, class, or race, in the different neighbour¬ hoods, which Mr. Huxley overlooks. Sepphoris, the chief city of Galilee, and the strongest, exhibits those anomalies of political position which belonged to a conquered, disturbed, and variously divided country. It was one of the five great Hebrew centres, which Gabinius chose to be the seats of Sanhedrims. t After the death of Herod, it was taken and destroyed by the Romans, and the population reduced to slavery. Subsequently it was re-peopled. When Vespasian invaded Palestine, it asked and obtained from him a Roman garrison, | as it had also received Cestius Gallus with acclamations not long before. § Yet, nearly at the same period, and probably between these two occasions, when J osephus was engaged in preparing Galilee for defence, by fortifying at the proper points, he left Sepphoris to raise its own walls, || because while it was rich it was also so zealous for the war. Later on, Sepphoris was required to give hostages to the Romans at the very time when it was exposed to the jealousy and hostility of the Jews. Thus the same city, according to local fluctuations, was the partisan to-day of one side, to-morrow of the other. A * ‘ Bell. Jud.’ ii. 18, 5. t ‘ Antiq.’ xiv. 5, 4 ; ‘ Bell. Jud.’ i. 8, 5. x Ibid, § Ibid. ii. 18, 11. || Ibid, ii. 20, 6. ^ ‘ Vita,’ c. 8. 256 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. clear comprehension of this shifting character in the local facts is vitally necessary for a sound judgment on the case before us. Again, Gamala,5* on the Sea of Tiberias, adhered at this time to Rome ; a little later we find it one of the last and most obstinate strongholds of Judaism against Vespasian. f Further, Gabara, as I shall presently show, exhibited similar variations. In truth, as Milman says,* “every city was torn to pieces by little animosities ; wherever the insurgents had time to breathe from the assaults of the Romans, they turned their swords against each other.” It was in Jerusalem most of all that these bloody factions raged ; they were exasperated by the arrival of strangers ; the peace parties shed the blood of the warlike, and the war parties of the peaceful. § In truth, such had long been the condition of that city, that Vespasian advisedly postponed the commencement of his operations for fear lest he should extinguish the local feuds, which, as he saw, were wasting the strength of the rebels, and should compel them to unite together. || It is, then, quite conceivable that when Josephus says the revolted Jews burned some places and subjugated or kept down others in Gadaris, he means to speak of places where the peace party, which might be Jewish or not J ewish, predominated ; and when he says the Hippenes and the Gadarenes acted against the Jews, he probably means that the Jews of the war party were put down by antagonists averse to war, though of their own race, as much as, and even possibly more than, by * ‘Vita,’ c. 11. f Milman, ‘ Hist. Jews,’ ii. 280-284. J Ibid. ii. 290. § Ibid. ii. 315 seqq. |] Ibid. ii. 305. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 257 Gentile portions of the population. This, I have said, is a conceivable opinion. But, in order to justify what I have said of the argument of Professor Huxley, I must show that it is an opinion not only conceivable, but warranted, and even required, by a consideration of the whole evidence on the record. That is the best conclusion, which best meets all the points of the case. The conclusion reached by Professor Huxley leaves Josephus in hopeless contradiction to himself. For I shall now proceed to show that Gadara or Gadaris, first, was an important centre of Jewish population, by which I mean population subject to the Mosaic law ; secondly, was a recognised seat of Jewish military strength ; and thirdly, according to J osephus himself, acknowledged the law of Moses as its local public law, and was bound to obey it. II. The Ordinance of Gabinius. Mr. Huxley places great reliance on the “ classical ” work of Dr. Schiirer,* which treats of the history of the Jewish people in the time of our Lord. And certainly a high tribute to it is due from him, as it seems to have supplied nearly all his material for the history and character of Gadara ; except, indeed, the exaggeration of the terms in which he describes them. It may, per¬ haps, be questioned whether a work, of which one half bears dates so recent as 1889 and 1890, can yet have fully earned the title of a classical work. I do not, however, presume to question its ability and research. * ‘ Geschichte des judischen Volks im Zeitalter Jesu Christi,’ Leipzig, 1886-90. I. S 258 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. On the other hand, without detracting from its general character, I cannot assume it to be precise and conclusive upon every one of those complicated local histories of Palestinian towns, among which Gadara has to be reckoned. Nor can I help embracing the opinion that he is (in the case before us) over-fond of giving the go¬ by to a difficulty by altering the text of his authority, so as to make it conform to the view he has adopted. No less than five times, # upon this very limited subject, does he accept or propose this method of proceeding. At the same time, he altogether passes by phrases, and even passages, of Josephus, which are of real, and, in one or more cases, even of capital importance. Let the reader test what I have said, in the first place, by reference to the weighty statement of the Jewish historian as to the Sanhedrims of Gabinius. Soon after the conquest by Pompey, who had himself given proof of his moderation and regard for the religion of a conquered people, Gabinius became administrator of the Roman power ; and he divided Palestine into five regions, for the purpose of administering the Jewish law in each of them, through an assembly of elders termed Sanhedrim possibly also with a view to the easier and more effective collection of the Roman tribute. Of these regions, according to the text as it stands, one had Gadara for its centre ; the others being Jerusalem, Sepphoris, Jericho, and Amathus. The measure, and the name of Gadara, are mentioned in two separate passages. Here we have to all appearance a pretty flat contradiction to the theory that Gadara was * ‘ Antiq.’ xiii. 13, 5 (Schurei-, ii. 91); ibid. xiv. 5, 4 ; ‘ Bell. Jud.’ i. 8, 5 ; ibid. iii. 7, 1 ; ‘ Vita,’ e. 15. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 259 a Greek or a Gentile city. Accordingly, says Mr. Huxley/" Schiirer has “pointed out” that what Gabinius really did was to lodge one of these (the Sanhedrims) in Gazara, 1 1 far away on the other side of the Jordan.” Under this facile phrase of “ pointing out ” is signified the deliberate alteration of the text, which inconveniently asserts not only in two separate passages, but in two separate works, f that the place selected was not Gazara, but Gadara. Without doubt any theory can be established with ease, if we are free thus to bend the original text into conformity with its demands. In this instance that text contains, as we shall see, a specific statement, which, as Mr. Huxley must have found if he had referred to Josephus, made it manifestly impossible that he could have written Gazara in these two places. I confess that Dr. Schiirer appears to me to have seriously misapprehended in some degree the spirit of this measure as well as the facts, when he says J that it involved the abolition of whatever residue of political independence had thus long remained to Palestine, because Hyrcanus was now deprived of his temporal and confined to his priestly power. If we examine the matter according to the reason of the case, it was probably a great gain to the population bo have the Mosaic law administered at its own doors by its own local leaders rather than by a priest-king sitting at a distance in Jerusalem. If we test it by the general spirit of the policy of this proconsul, we are led to suppose it friendly, because with it there was combined the rebuilding of some cities which had been overthrown. * Nineteenth Century , p. 973. f ‘ Antiq.’ xiv. 5, 4 ; ‘ Bell. Jud.’ i. 8, 5. $ ‘Gesch.’ i. 276. 260 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. If we follow the authority of J osephus, we are bound to take it as a measure altogether favourable to Jewish liberties ; for, he says,* “thus the Jews were liberated from dynastic rule, and remained under the government of their local heads ” ( kv apio-TOKpareia SLyjyor). Since the text, as it stands, entirely overthrows the doctrine that Gadara was a Gentile city, the propounders of that theory can only meet their difficulty by altering it, although they must surely feel that to mutilate the text of two independent works is a remedy not daring only, but rather desperate. But, independently of the confirmatory witness of a double text, Josephus cannot have written Gazara, for, if he had done so, he would have committed the absurd error of contradicting himself in the very sentence in which he wrote it. Gazara is not only “ far on the other side of Jordan.” We are dealing with the north-east of the country, and Gazara is in the extreme south-west. Josephus says ex¬ pressly that Gabinius divided the country into five equal districts. Now the old kingdom of Judaea may be taken roughly as one-third of Palestine. Samaria was probably excluded : even if it were not, the case is not greatly altered. For the emendation thus “ pointed out ” entirely overthrows the equality of the districts. It gives to Judaea three out of the five Sanhedrims, and, leaving Amathus for the country beyond J ordan, assigns to Sepphoris alone the Galilees and Decapolis, or a terri¬ tory about as large as that given to the three southern centres conjointly. It can hardly be necessary to observe that, besides * ‘ Anliq.’ xiv. 5,4. 261 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. this fatal objection, Gazara seems to be disqualified by its geographical remoteness near the south - western border, and perhaps also by comparative historical insignificance. The emendation, then, has to be committed emenda - turis ignibus, for contradicting not only the authentic record, but also itself ; and the twice-repeated testimony of Josephus stands intact, showing that, shortly after the time of Pompey, Gadara was chosen for a purpose which obviously required, and which therefore estab¬ lishes its being, a great centre of Hebrew or Mosaic population. III. Military Importance. Having shown that Gadara was important as a centre of population which was either J ewish in blood or governed by the Jewish law, I will next show that Gadara was also formidable as a seat of Jewish military power. The time came when Vespasian had to con¬ template operations against Jerusalem. And now, says Josephus,* “ it was necessary for him to subdue what remained unsubdued, and to leave nothing behind him which might prevent his prosecution of the siege.” Accordingly, he marched to the point of danger* This was Gadara, the strong metropolis of Persea, which had once, against Jannseus, stood a siege of ten months. The rich, who were numerous there, escaping the notice of their opponents, had invited him. On the approach of VesjDasian, the party disposed to war found itself (and no wonder) in a minority, and fled ; but not till * ‘ Bell. Jud.’ iv. 7, 3. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. they had massacred Dolesus, the author of the invitation to the Roman general. In their absence, the people received Y espasian with acclamations. But they pulled down the walls of their own accord : and he then left with them a garrison of horse and foot to defend them against the return of the expelled party. Why were the walls pulled down, except to prevent the population from holding the city against the Romans ? Why, although the wealthy and the local governing power was friendly, yet was a Roman garrison left behind, but because the dominant force in the city, apart from foreign intervention, was a Hebrew or anti-Roman, and not a Gentile, force 1 And does not this passage, even if it stood alone, abundantly suffice to show that, what¬ ever the division of parties may have been, Gadara was not, “ to all intents and purposes, a Gentile city ” ? It was a city from which Vespasian apprehended an attack in his rear ; and to prevent this he makes it an open city, and leaves a force in it in order that his partisans might continue to have the upper hand. But let us not suppose that these partisans were necessarily Gentiles. I must again press the proposition that the Jews of that era, or the populations observing the Mosaic law, were largely divided into peace party and war party, and that we may find a peace party acting with the Gentiles against their fellow-country¬ men, in order to avoid the alternative of war. I will now refer to a passage which shows this in a manner quite conclusive. Gischala * appears to have been a city of the extreme war party, though it, too, had partisans of peace. However, it broke away, and was * Josephus, ‘Vita,’ c. x. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 263 in consequence assailed and destroyed by a composite force of Tyrians, Sogarenes, Gadarenes, and Gabarenes. It seems quite natural that the Tyrians, a Gentile people, should actively maintain the Roman domination. And the Gabarenes on this occasion acted with them. Shall this prove Gabara to be a Gentile city 1 Certainly not : for Gabara was a Galilean, and, as Mr. Huxley himself sees, a thoroughly J ewish city, and yet it shared in the overthrow of Gischala. There cannot be a clearer proof that, in certain cases, it was not the question of religion or race that determined the balance of opinion and the action of the community, but the question of war or peace. I rely, then, on the strategical move¬ ment of Vespasian to show that Gadara, an important centre of Jewish population, was also in the main an important seat of J ewish military strength ; most of all, perhaps, as being the centre at which the rural popu¬ lation of Gadaris would muster for war in case of emergency. IV. The Jewish Law in Gadaris. Although, in inquiries of this kind, we may speak of Jewish or Hebrew populations, as Dean Milman does, to describe generally those who were adverse to the Roman power, the expressions are not quite satisfactory, because, in themselves, they involve a condition of race j whereas, to say nothing of those descendants of the ancient Canaanites who had conformed to Judaism, we find that the Mosaic law was imposed at the time of which we treat, as a consequence of conquest, if not on Gentile yet on what were in some sense mixed popu¬ lations. And the real question in respect to the 264 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. Gadarene territory is not exclusively whether the popu¬ lation were of Hebrew extraction, but also, and indeed mainly, whether they were Jewish as being bound by the Jewish law : or, as I should like to call it, whether they were a Mosaic population. To this question let us now further look. According to Origen,* Gadara was simply a city of Judaea. According to Josephus in one passage, it was a Grecian city, as were Hippos and Gaza. I But in another place he includes it in a great group of cities which were Syrian, Idumaean, or Phoenician,^; and he then places it in the Syrian subdivision of that group. We are guided by the nature of the case to the meaning of these two last-named designations. There was no properly Hellenic element reckoned in the population of the country, § though there must have been a sprinkling of Greeks concerned in the administration of the king¬ doms founded by Alexander’s generals. As there were Phoenicians in the earliest Hellas, so now there were important Hellenic settlers in Asia, and, without doubt, a larger number of Hellenised Asiatics. In connection with the name of Gadaris, Strabo || enumerates a few Greek individuals of some distinction. The case has been sufficiently explained by Grote,^[ who allows as the characteristics of what was, he thinks improperly, called Hellenism, in the kingdoms after Alexander, the com¬ mon use of Greek speech, a certain proportion of Greeks, both as inhabitants and as officers, and a partial streak of Hellenic culture. This flavour of Hellenism would * ‘ In Joann.’ p. 141. f ‘ Bell. Jud.’ ii. 6, 3. X ‘ Antiq.’ xiii. 15, 4. § Strabo, xvi. 2. || Ibid. xvi. 2, 29. * Hist, of Greece,’ xii. 362-7. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 265 be found rather at central spots than in the country at large. At Gadara it might be sustained by the baths, which probably made it a place of fashionable resort. But in this qualified or diluted sense, the name of Grecian was applied both to the Syrian and the Egyptian powers,* * * § and the Rescript of Augustus respecting reli¬ gion accordingly describes Judsea as having suffered grievously from Greek cruelty. Politically, Gadara with Hippos and Gaza | were given to Herod, and after his death, on the division of his dominions, they were re-annexed to Syria. But these were administrative changes, made without any effect, so far as appears, on the laws and religion of the country. Very different was the change which ensued when, from having been a Syrian city,;j; it was acquired by Alexander Jannreus for Judaea. § My opponent has overlooked the capital fact, that what J udaea acquired or recovered by conquest was thereupon placed under the Mosaic law. In Samaria, we may safely assume that it was there already when Jannaeus conquered it. When Idumaea was subdued by his father Hyrcanus,|| that law was established, and the people were at once circumcised. In the case now before us the statement, though indirect, is equally conclusive. When Josephus enumerates 11 the cities conquered by J anmeus, Pella closes the list. But Pella, * ‘Antiq.’ xvi. 6, 2. f ‘Bell. Jud.’ ii. 5, 3; ‘Antiq.’ xvii. 11, 4. X Mr. Huxley says, “ It is said to have been destroyed by its captors.” it is not so stated by Josephus in his account of the conquest. But it seems to have undergone some reverse before the time of Pompey (b.C. 65), by whose favour it was restored. § ‘ Antiq.’ xiii. 1 5, 4. j Milman, ‘Hist. Jews,’ ii. 28; ‘ Bell. Jud.’ xix. 9, 1. *|[ ‘ Antiq.’ xiii. 15, 4, 266 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. he adds, they destroyed, because the inhabitants would not submit to the Mosaic law (ra TraTpia raiy TouSouW Wrj). It is plain therefore that the other cities, of which Gadara was one, remained intact, because they allowed the law of Moses to become the law of the land. Alexander Jannaeus died in b.c. 79. But there is not, so far as I know, the smallest evidence that the law was altered here, any more than in Galilee or Jud?ea, before the time of our Saviour. Mr. Huxley indeed again and again assumes the contrary,* but without citing a single authority, or even taking notice of the testimony from Josephus which I have here given ; and it is in the light of this passage that we have to con¬ sider the establishment of the Sanhedrim by Gabinius. He says, indeed (without any reference), that the only laws of Gadara were the Gentile laws sanctioned by the Roman suzerain.! Now we know something of the proceedings of the Roman suzerain in the time of Augustus, with regard to the Jews, not of Judsea merely, but of Asia at large and of Cyrenais, who appealed to Ceesar against what they termed Greek oppression.^ The answer commends the fidelity of the J ews ; it especially lauds Hyrcanus, the actual high priest ; and then grants to the J ews without limit the full enjoyment of their own peculiar laws, after the manner of their fathers, as they were enjoying them under Hyrcanus, the high priest. This charter of con¬ tinuance for the Mosaic law where it prevailed is issued during the lifetime of Herod the Great, and before the re-annexation of Gadara to the Syrian province. I can hardly suppose, however, that any one would assign * Nineteenth Century , pp. 977-8. f Ibid. p. 977. J Josephus, ‘Antiq.’ xvi. 6, 1, 2. THE SWINE-MIRACLE. 267 to that merely administrative change the effect of alter¬ ing the religious law of the country, a matter in which the general rule of Roman policy was that of resolute non-interference. I conceive, then, that the conquest of Jannseus, together with the measures of Gabinius, leave no reasonable ground for doubting that the law established in Gadara at that period was the Mosaic law ; and also that the Rescript of Augustus confirms this proposition. But confirmation is not required. If the religious system of the Jews was established there in the time of Gabinius, we must assume its continuance until we find it changed. Of such a change there is not, I believe, any sign before the time of our Lord. Y. Strabo. Were it only on account of his general authority, we must not omit to notice the particulars which Strabo has supplied with respect to Gadaris. He has indeed fallen into undeniable confusion as to geographical arrangement, yet not so as to hide the real effect of some important statements. In proceeding southwards along the Syrian coast, Strabo # places Gadaris next to Joppa ; then comes Azotus, Ascalon, and Gaza. From Gadara proceeded five persons with Grecian names, of whom he gives a list. Now this Gadara has points of contact with the Gadara of the north, first because he speaks of it as Gadaris, a territory and not only a town ; secondly, because the Greeks whom he names are known to have * Strabo, xvi. 2, p. 759. 268 THE SWINE-MIRACLE. sprung from Gadara of Pertea.* Let us now try to clear up this matter. Proceeding from Gaza towards Pelusium, he intro¬ duces the Sirbonian Lake or morass ; f but, in describing by characteristic details the nature of its waters, he gives them jmoperties which, copied from Diodorus, render it an accurate account of the Dead Sea ; except that he assigns to it only 200 stadia in length, and makes it stretch along the sea coast, which agrees with the Sirbonian Lake, while the length of the Dead Sea nearly reaches forty miles. £ He was in fact almost wholly ignorant of the interior ; and, as he confounded the Dead Sea with the Sirbonian Lake, he probably also confounded the Lake of Tiberias with the Dead Sea, both being on the line of the J ordan ; and thus was led to bring Gadaris into geographical relation with it and with the coast. The chief importance, however, of his account is to be found in a third point of contact with the true Gadaris which it presents. He describes the appro¬ priation of this territory by a remarkable phrase. The Jews, he says, e£i8id