The expression which we have put at the head of this article, and which is often used by Mr. Matthew Arnold in his theological writings, is one which in very small compass states his point of view, and accounts for the very telling force of his simple style of argument. He emphatically represents the "spirit of the time," and it is this spirit of common-sense rationality speaking in his pages which gives them their effectiveness, and secures them the response they receive from so large a number of the cultivated classes who here find their beliefs and questionings formulated for them with a power and distinctness they could not themselves command. Without assuming any conflict between modern science and the doctrines of religion, he says that our point of view whence we regard those teachings has been profoundly altered in these latter days. The consequence is that we do not see them on the same side, nor do they wear the same appearance. When tested by being placed side by side by the truths of experience and scientific knowledge, many of them in some way grow to be incredible. To us, in dealing with the subject of the Christian miracles, he does not elaborately inquire into the possibility of miracles, or judicially estimate the sufficiency of the evidence by which these are supported, but he says we have come to disbelieve in miracles altogether and the chief reason of our disbelief is that we are exactly acquainted with the conditions in which so called miracles originate. Given a certain set of conditions a certain mental atmosphere, so to speak, and the belief in miracles will arise and will produce the miracles themselves. So has it always been, so must it always be. But this readiness to receive ac counts of these manifestations of irregular supernatural power is fatally weakened when some of these cases which happily fall within historical times have been traced back to their origin. The explanation which is then reached for them is by the mind applied to all others of the same kind, and the belief in such miracles is henceforth practically extinct. The mind has perhaps no counter evidence to adduce against them. It does not undertake to expose the precise point in which their proof fails in validity, but it simply refuses to believe in them as being deviations from the course of universal experience, which would require for their establishment an overwhelming weight of proof which it is quite impossible that they should receive. The induction against them, he observes, may not be complete, but it is sufficient.
The present volume of separate essays gives an illustration of this style of argument in the paper headed "A Psychological Parallel." He supposes the question asked how the evidence of St. Paul, in favour of the physical resurrection of Christ, is to be set aside, unless Paul is believed to be an "imbecile or credulous enthusiast." To this our author replies by saying that we often do set aside the testimony of some highly able, serious, thoughtful witnesses to the exercise of supernatural power, and that we sometimes are enabled to do this the more effectually by showing the particular prepossessions which coloured their vision and vitiated all of their observations. He proceeds to develops this argument by an account of the remarkable trial for witchcraft held before Sir Matthew Hale in 1664. But we must quote from his essay the paragraphs in which the comparison of the two cases is most essentially stated. "Popular religion," be observes, "is too forward to employ arguments which may well be called arguments of despair." He subsequently proceeds :—
" I have formerly spoken at much length of the writings of St. Paul, pointing out what a clue he gives us to the right understating of the word resurrection, the great word of Christianity , and how he deserves, on this account, our special interest and study. It is the spiritual resurrection of which he is thus the instructive expounder to us. But undoubtedly he believed also in the miracle of the physical resurrection, both of Jesus himself and for mankind at large. This belief those who do not admit the miraculous will not share with him. And one who does not admit the miraculous, but who yet had continued to think St Paul worthy of all honour and his teaching full of instruction, brings forward to me a sentence from an eloquent and most popular author, wherein it is said that ' St Paul—surely no imbecile or credulous enthusiast—vouches for the reality of the (physical) resurrection, of the appearances of Jesus after it, and of his own vision.' Must then St. Paul, he asks, if he was mistaken in thus vouching —which whoever does not admit the miraculous cannot but suppose,—of necessity be an 'imbecile and credulous enthusiast,' and his words and character of no more value to us than those of that slight sort of people? And again, my questioner finds the same author saying, that to suppose St. Paul and the Evangelists mistaken about the miracles which they allege, is to 'insinuate that the faith of Christendom was founded on most facile and reprehensible credulity, and this in men who have taught the spirit of truthfulness as a primary duty of the religion which they preached.' And he inquires whether St Paul and the Evangelists, in admitting the miraculous, were really founding the faith of Christendom on most facile and reprehensible credulity, and were false to the spirit of truthfulness taught by themselves as the primary duty of the religion which they preached. Let me answer by putting a parallel case. The argument is that St. Paul, by believing and asserting the reality of the physical resurrection and subsequent appearances of Jesus proves himself, supposing those alleged facts not to have happened, an imbecile or credulous enthusiast, and an unprofitable guide. St. Paul's vision we need not take into account, because even those who do not admit the miraculous will readily admit that he had his vision, only they say it is to be explained naturally. But they do not admit the reality of the physical resurrection of Jesus and of his appearances afterwards, while yet they must own that St. Paul did. The question is, does either the belief of these things by a man of signal truthfulness, judgment, and mental power, in St. Paul's circumstances, prove them to have really happened or does his believing them, in spite of their not having really happened, prove that he cannot have been a man of great truthfulness, judgment, and mental power? Undeniably St. Paul was mistaken about the imminence of the end of the world. But this was a matter of expectation, not experience. If he was mistaken about a grave fact alleged to have already positively happened, such as the bodily resurrection of Jesus, he must, it is argued, have been a credulous and imbecile enthusiast. "
The parallel case is then stated in the following terms :—
" I have already mentioned elsewhere Sir Matthew Hale's belief in the reality of witchcraft. The contemporary records of this belief in our own country and among our own people, in a century of great intellectual force and achievement, and when the printing press fixed and preserved the accounts of public proceedings to which the charge of witchcraft gave rise, are of extraordinary interest. They throw an invaluable light for us on the history of the human spirit. I think it is not an illusion of national self esteem to flatter ourselves that something of the English 'good nature and good humour ' is not absent even from these repulsive records ; that from the traits of infuriated, infernal cruelty which characterise similar records elsewhere, particularly among the Latin nations, they are in a great measure free. They reveal, too, beginnings of that revolt of good sense, gleams of that reason, that criticism, which was presently to disperse the long-prevailing belief in witchcraft. At the beginning of the eighteenth century Addison, though he himself looks with disfavour on a man who wholly disbelieves in ghosts and apparitions, yet smiles at Sir Roger De Coverley's belief in witches, as a belief which intelligent men had outgrown, a survival from times of ignorance. Nevertheless, in 1716, two women were hanged at Huntingdon for witchcraft. But they were the last victims, and in 1738 the penal statutes against witchcraft were repealed. And by the end of the eighteenth century, the majority of rational people had come to disbelieve, not in witches only, but in ghosts also. Incredulity had become the rule, credulity the exception. But through the greater part of the seventeenth century things were just the other way. Credulity about witchcraft was the rule incredulity the exception. It is by its all-pervadingness, its seemingly inevitable and natural character, that this credulity of the seventeenth century is distinguished from modern growths which are sometimes compared with it. In the addiction to what is called spiritualism, there is something factitious and artificial. It is quite easy to pay no attention to spiritualists and their exhibitions , and a man of serious temper, a man even of matured sense will in general pay none. He will instinctively apply Goethe's excellent caution; that we have all of us a nervous system which can easily be worked upon, that we are most of us very easily puzzled, and that it is foolish, by idly perplexing our understanding and playing with our nervous system, to titillate in ourselves the fibre of superstition. Whoever runs after our modern sorcerers may indeed find them. He may make acquaintance with their new spiritual visitants who have succeeded to the old fashioned imps of the seventeenth century—to the Jarmara, Elemauzer, Sack and Sugar, Vinegar Tom, and Grizzel Greedigut, of our trials for witchcraft. But he may also pass his life without troubling his head about them and their masters. In the seventeenth century, on the other hand, the belief in witches and their works met a man at every turn, and created an atmosphere for his thoughts which they could not help feeling. A man who scouted the belief, who even disparaged it was called Sadducee, atheist, and infidel. Relations of the conviction of witches had their sharp word of 'condemnation for the particular opinion of some men who suppose there be none at all.' They had their caution to him 'to take heed how he either despised the power of God in his creatures or vilipended the subtlety and fury of the Devil as God's minister of vengeance.' The ministers of religion took a leading part in the proceedings against witches; the Puritan ministers were here particularly busy. Scripture had said, 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' And, strange to say, the poor creatures tried and executed for witchcraft appear to have usually been themselves firm believers in their own magic. They confess their compact with the Devil, and specify the imps, or familiars whom they have at their disposal. All this, I say, created for the mind an atmosphere from which it was hard to escape. Again and again we hear of the 'sufficient justices of the peace and discreet magistrates, ' of the ' persons of great knowledge,' who were satisfied with the proofs of witchcraft offered to them, it is abundantly clear that to take as solid and convincing, where a witch was in question evidence which would now be accepted by no reasonable man, was, in the 17th century quite compatible with truthfulness of disposition, vigour of intelligence, and penetrating judgment on other matters.
" Certainly these three advantages—truthfulness of disposition, vigour of intelligence and penetrating judgment—were possessed in a signal degree by the famous chief justice of Charles the Second's reign, Sir Matthew Hale. Burnet notices the remarkable mixture in him of sweetness with gravity, so to the three forenamed advantages we may add gentleness of temper. There is extant the report of a famous trial for witchcraft before Sir Matthew Hale. .. The report was taken in court during the trial, but was not published till l8 years afterwards, in 1682. Every decade at that time saw a progressive decline in the belief in witchcraft. The person who published the report was, however, a believer, and he considered, he tells us, that ' so exact a relation of this trial would probably give more satisfaction to a great many persons, by reason that it is pure matter of fact, and that evidently demonstrated, than the arguments and reasons of other very learned men that probably may not be so intelligible to all readers ; especially, this being held before a judge whom for his integrity, learning, and law, hardly any age, either before or since, could parallel, who not only took a great deal of pains and spent much time in this trial himself, but had the assistance and opinion of several other very eminent and learned persons.' One of these persons was Sir Thomas Browne of Norwich, the author of the Religio Medici, and of the book on Vulgar Errors."
It is not necessary to quote Mr Arnold's summary of the evidence given against the accused persons, who were accused of bewitching two children. He says of the statements :—"It seems almost an impertinence nowadays to suppose that anyone can require telling how self explanatory all this is, without recourse to witchcraft and magic. These poor rickety children, full of disease, and with morbid tricks, have their imagination possessed by the two famed and dreaded witches of their native place, of whose prowess they have heard tale after tale, whom they have often seen with their own eyes, whose presence has startled one of them in her hour of suffering, and round whom all those ideas of diabolical agency in which they have been nursed converge and cluster." It is well known that the prisoners were convicted, that "the judge and all the court were fully satisfied with the verdict," and that the prisoners were sentenced to death and executed. On this Mr. Arnold comments :—
" The inference to be drawn from this trial is not by any means that Hale was 'an imbecile or credulous enthusiast.' The whole history of his life and doings disproves it. But the belief in witchcraft was in the very atmosphere which Hale breathed, as the belief in miracles was in the very atmosphere which St. Paul breathed. What the trial shows us is—that a man of veracity, judgment, and mental power, may have his mind thoroughly governed on certain subjects by a foregone conclusion as to what is likely and credible."
After quoting from a divine (John Smith, of Cambridge, tho author of Select Discourses, and a contemporary of Hale's), who also accepted the prevailing belief in witchcraft, Mr. Arnold proceeds :—
"Everyone knows how St. Paul declares his belief that ' Christ rose again the third day, and was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve ; after that He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once.' Those who do not admit the miraculous can yet well conceive how such a belief arose, and was entertained by St. Paul. The resurrection of the just was at that time a ruling idea of a Jew's mind. Herod at once, and without difficulty, supposed that John the Baptist was risen from the dead. The Jewish people without difficulty supposed that Jesus might be one of the old prophets risen from the dead. In telling the story of the crucifixion men added, quite naturally, that when it was consummated, 'many bodies of the saints which slept arose and appeared unto many.' Jesus Himself, moreover, had in His lifetime spoken frequently of His own coming resurrection. Such beliefs as the belief in bodily resurrection were thus a part of the mental atmosphere in which the first Christians lived. It was inevitable that they should believe their Master to have risen again in the body, and that St Paul, in becoming a Christian, should receive the belief and build upon it.
" But St Paul, like our Cambridge Platonist, instinctively sought in an idea, used for religion, a side by which the idea could enter into his religious experience and become real to him. No such side could be afforded by the mere external fact and miracle of Christ's bodily resurrection. Paul, therefore, as is well known, by a prodigy of religious insight, seized another aspect for the resurrection than the aspect of physical miracle. He presented resurrection as a spiritual rising which could be appropriated and enacted in our own living experience. 'If one died in the name of all, then all died , and He died in the name of all that they who live should no more live unto themselves, but unto Him who died and rose again in in their name.' Dying became thus no longer a bodily dying but a dying to sin ; rising to life no longer a bodily resurrection, but a living to God. St Paul here comes, therefore upon that very idea of death and resurrection which was the central idea of Jesus Himself. At the very same moment that be shares and professes the popular belief in Christ's miraculous bodily resurrection—the idea by which our Saviour's own idea of resurrection has been overlaid and effaced—St Paul seizes also this other truer idea, or is seized by it, and bears unconscious witness to its unique legitimacy."
In the introduction to the book, Mr Arnold finally, before quitting further reference to theological questions generally, reviews the attitude of the time, as he conceives it, towards the Christian religion, and gives his views as to their future relations. He says :—
" The conditions of the religious question are, in truth, profoundly misapprehended in this country. In England and in America religion has retained so much hold upon the affections of the community, that the partisans of popular religion are easily led to entertain illusion ; to fancy that the difficulties of their case are much lees than they are, that they can make terms which they cannot make, and save things which they cannot save. A good medicine for such illusions would be the perusal of the criticisms which Literature and Dogma has encountered on the Continent. Here in England that book passes, in general, for a book revolutionary and anti-religious. In foreign critics of the liberal school it provokes a feeling of mingled astonishment and impatience—impatience, that religion should be set on new grounds when they had hoped that religion—the old ground having, in the judgment of all rational persons, given way—was going to ruin as fast as could fairly be expected; astonishment that any man of liberal tendencies should not agree with them."
After quoting some of these opinions, he goes on :—
"Here we have undoubtedly the genuine opinion of Continental liberalism concerning the religions of the Bible and its future. It is stated with unusual frankness and clearness, but it is the genuine opinion. It is not an opinion which at present prevails at all widely either in this country or in America. But when we consider the immense change which, in other matters where tradition and convention were the obstacles to change, has befallen the thought of this country since the Continent was opened at the end of the great war, we cannot doubt that in religion too the mere barriers of tradition and convention will finally give way, that a common European level of thought will establish itself, and will spread to America also. Of course there will be backwaters more or less strong of superstition and obscurantism, but I speak of the probable development of opinion in those classes which are to be called progressive and liberal. Such classes are undoubtedly the multiplying and prevailing body both here and in America. And I say that if we judge the future from the past these classes in any matter where it is tradition and convention that at present isolate them from the common liberal opinion of Europe will, with time be drawn almost inevitably into that opinion.
" The partisans of traditional religion in this country do not know, I think, how decisively the whole force of progressive and liberal opinion on the Continent has pronounced against the Christian religion. They do not know how surely the whole force of progressive and liberal opinion in this country tends to follow so far as traditional religion is concerned the opinion of the Continent. They dream of patching up things unmendable, of retaining what can never be retained of stopping change at a point where it can never be stopped. The undoubted tendency of liberal opinion is to reject the whole anthropomorphic and miraculous religion of tradition as unsound and untenable. On the Continent such opinion has rejected it already. One cannot blame the rejection. 'Things are what they are and the religion of tradition, Catholic or Protestant, is unsound and untenable. A greater force of tradition in favour of religion is all which now prevents the liberal opinion in this country from following Continental opinion. That force is not of a nature to be permanent and it will not in fact hold out long. But a very grave question is behind.
"Rejecting henceforth all concern with the obsolete religion of tradition the liberalism of the Continent rejects also and on the like grounds all concern with the Bible and Christianity. To claim for the Bible the direction in any way of modern life is, we hear, as if Plato had sought to found his ideal republic upon a text of Hesiod. The real question is whether this conclusion, too, of modern liberalism is to be admitted, like the conclusion that traditionary religion is unsound and obsolete. And it does not find many gainsayers. Obscurantists are glad to see the question placed on this footing—that the cause of traditionary religion and the cause of Christianity in general must stand or fall together. For they see but very little way into the future; and in the immediate present this way of putting the question tells, as they clearly perceive, in their favour. In the immediate present many will be tempted to cling to the traditionary religion with their eyes shut, rather than accept the extinction of Christianity. Other friends of religion are busy with fantastic projects which con never come to anything, but which prevent their seeing the real character of tho situation. So the thesis of modern liberals on the Continent, that Christianity in general stands on the same footing as traditionary religion, and must share its fate meets with little direct discussion or opposition. And liberal opinion everywhere will at last grow accustomed to finding that thesis put forward as certain, will become familiarised with it, will suppose that no one disputes it. This in itself will tend to withhold men from any serious return upon their own minds in the matter. Meanwhile the day will most certainly arrive when the great body of liberal opinion in this country will adhere to the first half of the doctrine of Continental liberals—will admit that traditionary religion is utterly untenable. And the danger is that from the habits of their minds and from seeing the thing treated as certain, and from hearing nothing urged against it, our liberals may admit as indisputable the second half of the doctrine too— that Christianity also is untenable.
"And therefore is it so all-important to insist on what I call the natural truth of Christianity, and to bring this out all we can. Liberal opinion tends as we have seen, to treat traditional religion and Christianity as identical, if one is unsound so is the other. Especially, however, does liberal opinion show this tendency among the Latin nations on whom Protestantism did not lay hold; and it shows it most among those Latin nations of whom Protestantism laid hold least, such as Italy and Spain. For Protestantism was undoubtedly, whatever may have been its faults and miscarriages, an assertion of the natural truth of Christianity for the mind and conscience of men. The question is, whether Christianity has this natural truth or not ? It is a question of fact. In the end the victory belongs to facts and he who contradicts them finds that he runs his head against a wall. Our traditional religion turns out not to have, in fact, natural truth, the only truth which can stand. The miracles of our traditional religion, like other miracles did not happen ; its metaphysical proofs of God are mere words. Has or has not, Christianity, in fact, the same want of natural truth as our traditional religion. It is a question of immense importance. Of questions about religion, it may be said to be at the present time, for a serious man, the only important one."
This question is examined by Mr. Arnold in several admirably written pages, the conclusions of which he thus sums up :—
" All this may enable us to understand how admirably fitted are Jesus Christ and His precepts to serve as mankind's standing reminder as to conduct—to serve as men's religion. Jesus Christ and His precepts are found to hit the moral experience of mankind, to hit it in the critical points, to hit it lastingly ; and when doubts are thrown upon their really hitting it, then to come out stronger than ever. And we know how Jesus Christ and His precepts won their way from the very first, and soon became the religion of all that part of the world which most counted, and are now the religion of all that part of the world which most counts. This they certainly in great part owed, even from the first, to that instinctive sense of their natural fitness for such a service, of their natural truth and weight, which, amidst all misapprehensions of them, they inspired.
"Moreover, we must always keep in sight one specially important element in the power exercised by Jesus Christ and His precepts. And that is, the impression left by Jesus of what we call sweet reason in tho highest degree ; of consummate justness in what He said, perfect balance, unerring felicity. For this impression has been a great element of progress. It made half the charm of the religion of Jesus in the first instance, and it makes it still. But it also serves in an admirable way against the misapprehensions with which men received, as we have said, and could not but receive, the natural truth He gave them, and which they made up along with that truth into their religion. For it is felt that anything exaggerated, distorted, false, cannot be from Jesus, that it must be human perversion of Him. There is always an appeal open, and a return possible, to the acknowledged sweet reason of Jesus, to His 'grace and truth.' And thus Christians, in stead of sticking for ever, because of their religion, to errors which they themselves have put into their religion, find in their religion itself a ground for breaking with them. For example, mediæval charity and mediæval chastity are manifestly misgrowths however natural—misgrowths unworkable and dangerous— of the ideas of kindness and pureness. Then they cannot have come from Jesus, they cannot be what Jesus meant. Such is the inevitable inference, and Christianity here touches a spring for self-correction and self-readjustment which is of the highest value.
"And, finally, the figure and sayings of Jesus, embodying and representing men's moral experience to them, serving them as a perpetual reminder of it, by a fixed form of words and observances holding their attention to it, and thus attaching them, have attracted to themselves, by the very force of time, and use, and association, a mass of additional attachment, and a host of sentiments the most tender and profound."
* Last Essays on Church and Religion. By Matthew Arnold. London ; Smith, Elder, and Co. . 1877.
The Argus 14 July 1877, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article5929251
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