Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688-1750. By MARK PATTISON B.D.
(Continued.)
The preachers of any period are not to be censured for adapting their style of address and mode of arguing to their hearers. They are as necessarily bound to the preconceived notions, as to the language of those whom they have to exhort. The pulpit does not mould the forms into which religious thought in any age runs, it simply accommodates itself to those that exist. For this very reason, because they must follow and cannot lead, sermons are the surest index of the prevailing religious feeling of their age. When we are reminded of the powerful influence of the pulpit at the Reformation, in the time of the Long Parliament, or at the Methodist revival, it must also be remembered that these preachers addressed a different class of society from that for which our classical pulpit oratory was written. . . He cannot supply them with a new set of principles, or alter their fixed forms of thought. The ideas out of which the Protestant or the Puritan movement proceeded were generated elsewhere than in the pulpit.
The Rationalist preachers of the eighteenth century are usually contrasted with the Evangelical pulpit which displaced them. . . Great part of this fanciful allegorising is lost, apart from the Vulgate translation. But of this the more learned of them were quite aware, and on their theory of Scripture interpretation, according to which the Church was its guaranteed expositor, the verbal meanings of the Latin version were equally the inspired sense of the sacred record. It was otherwise with the English divine of the 18th century. According to the then received view of Scripture, its meaning, was not assigned by the Church, but its language was interpreted by criticism—i.e., by reason. The aids of history, the ordinary rules of grammar and logic, were applied to find out what the sacred writers actually said. That was the meaning of Scripture, the message supernaturally communicated. Where each text of Scripture has but one sense—that sense in which the writer penned it—it can only be cited in that sense without doing it violence. This was the turn by which Selden so discomfited the Puritan divines, who, like the Catholic mystics, made Scripture words the vehicle of their own feelings. 'Perhaps in your little pocket-Bibles with gilt leaves the translation may be thus, but the Greek or Hebrew signifies otherwise.' (Whitelocke, np. Johnson's Life of Selden, p. 303.) If the preacher in the 18th century had allowed himself to make these allusions, the taste of his audience would have rejected them. He would have weakened his argument instead of giving it effect.
No quality of those 'Discourses' strikes us more now than the good sense which pervades them. They are the complete reaction against the Puritan sermon of the 17th century. We have nothing far-fetched, fanciful, allegoric. The practice of our duty is recommended to us on the most undeniable grounds of prudence. Barrow had indulged in ambitious periods, and South had been jocular. Neither of these faults can be alleged against the model sermon of the Hanoverian period.' No topic is produced which does not compel our assent as soon as it is understood, and none is there which is not understood as soon as uttered. It is one man of the world speaking to another. Collins said of St. Paul, 'that he had a great respect for him, as both a man of sense and a gentleman.' He might have said the same of the best pulpit divines of his own time. They bear the closest resemblance to each other; because they all use the language of fashionable society, and say exactly the proper thing. 'A person,' says Waterland, 'must have some knowledge of men, besides that of books, to succeed well here; and must have a kind of practical sagacity which nothing but the grace of God joined with recollection and wise observation can bring, to be able to represent truths to the life, or to any considerable degree of advantage.' This is from, his recommendatory preface prefixed to an edition of Blair's Sermons (1789); not the Presbyterian Dr. Hugh Blair, but John Blair, the founder and first President of a Missionary College in Virginia, whose 'Sermons on the Beatitudes' were among the most approved models of the day, and recommended by the bishops to their candidates for orders. . .
Not only the pulpit, but the whole theological literature of the age, takes the same tone of appeal. Books are no longer addressed by the cloistered academic to a learnedly educated class, they are written by popular divines —'men of leisure,' Butler calls them—for the use of fashionable society. There is an epoch in the history of letters when readers and writers change places; when it ceases to be the reader's business to come to the writer to be instructed, and the writer begins to endeavour to engage the attention of the reader. The same necessity was now laid upon the religious writer. He appeared at the bar of criticism, and must gain the wits and the town. At the debate between the Deists and the Christian apologists the public was umpire. 'The time was past when Baxter 'talked about another world like one that had been there, and was come as a sort of express from thence to make a report concerning it ' (Calamy, Life i. ,290.) As the preacher now no longer spake with the authority of a heavenly mission, but laid the state of the argument be fore his hearers, so philosophy was no longer a self-centered speculation, an oracle of wisdom. The divine went out into the streets, with his demonstration of the being and attributes of God printed on a broadside; he solicits your assent in 'the new court-jargon.' When Collins visited Lord Barrington at Tofts, 'as they were all men of letters, and had a taste for Scripture criticism, it is said to have been their custom after dinner to have a Greek Testament laid on the table." (Biog Brit. Art. 'Barrington.') These discussions were not necessarily unprofitable. Lord Bolingbroke 'was seldom in the company of the Countess of Huntingdon without discussing some topic beneficial to his eternal interests, and he always paid the utmost respect and deference to her ladyship's opinion.' (Memoirs of Countess of Hunt., i. 180.) Bishop Butler gives his clergy hints how to conduct themselves when 'sceptical and profane men bring up the subject (religion) at meetings of entertainment, and such as are the freer sort; innocent ones, I mean, otherwise I should not suppose you would be present at them.' (Durham Charge, 1751.) Tindal's reconversion from Romanism is said to have been brought about by the arguments he heard in the coffee-houses. This anecdote, given in Curll's catch-penny 'Life,' rests, not on that bookseller's authority, which is worthless, but on that of the medical man who attended him in his last illness. It was the same with the controversy on the Trinity, of which Waterland says, in 1723, that it was 'spread abroad among all ranks and degrees of men, and the Athanasian creed become the subject of common and ordinary conversation.' (Critical Hist. of the Atthan. Creed. Introd.) The Universities were invaded by the spirit of the age, and instead of taking students through a laborious course of philosophy, natural and moral, turned out accomplished gentlemen upon 'the classics' and a scantling of logic. Berkeley's ironical portrait of the modish philosopher is of date, 1732. 'Lysicles smiled, and said he believed Euphranor had figured to himself philosophers in square caps and long gowns, but thanks to these happy times, the reign of pedantry was over. Our philosophers are of a very different kind from those awkward students who think to come at knowledge by poring on dead languages and old authors, or by sequestering themselves from the cares of the world to meditate in solitude and retirement. They are the best bred men of the age, men who know the world, men of pleasure, men of fashion, and fine gentlemen. EUPH.: I have some small notion of the people you mention, but should never have taken them for philosophers. CRI.: Nor would any one else till of late. The world was long under a mistake about the way to knowledge, thinking it lay through a tedious course of academical education and study. But among the discoveries of the present age, one of the principal is the finding out that such a method doth rather retard and obstruct, than promote knowledge. LYS.: I will undertake, a lad of fourteen, bred in the modern way, shall make a better figure, and be more considered in any drawing-room, or assembly of polite people, than one of four-and-twenty, who hath lain by a long time at school and college. He shall say better things, in a better manner, and be more liked by good judges. EUPH. : Where doth he pick up his improvement; CRI. : Where our grave ancestors would never have looked for it, in a drawing-room, a coffee-house, a chocolate-house, at the tavern, or groom-porter's. In these and the like fashionable places of resort, it is the custom for polite persons to speak freely on all subjects, religious, moral, or political. So that a young gentleman who frequents them is in the way of hearing many instructive lectures, seasoned with wit and raillery, and uttered with spirit. Three or four sentences, from a man of quality, spoken with a good air, make more impression, and convey more knowledge, than a dozen dissertations in a dry academical way. . . . . You may now commonly see a young lady, or a petit maître, non-plus a divine or an old fashioned gentleman, who hath read many a Greek and Latin author, and spent much time in hard methodical study.' (Alciphron, Dial. i. §11.)
Among a host of mischiefs thus arising, one positive good may be signalised. If there must be debate, there ought to be fair play; and of this, publicity is the best guarantee. To make the public arbiter in an abstract question of metaphysics is doubtless, absurd; yet it is at least a safeguard against extravagance and metaphysical lunacy. The verdict of public opinion on such topics is worthless, but it checks the inevitable tendency of closet speculation to become visionary. There is but one sort of scepticism that is genuine, and deadly in proportion as it is real : that, namely, which is forced upon the mind by its experience of the hollowness of mankind; for 'men may be read, as well as books, too much,' That other logical scepticism which is hatched by over-thinking can be cured by an easy remedy; ceasing to think.
The objections urged against revelation in the course of the Deistical controversy were no chimeras of a sickly brain, but solid charges; the points brought into public discussion were the points at which the revealed system itself impinges on human reason. No time can lessen whatever force there may be in the objection against a miracle; it is felt as strongly in one century as in another. The debate was not frivolous; the objections were worth answering, because they were not pitched metaphysically high. To a platonizing divine they look trivial, picked up in the street. So Origen naturally thought 'that a faith which could be shaken by such objections as those of Celsus was not worth much.' (Cont, Cels., Pref. § 4) Just such were the objections of the Deists; such as come spontaneously into the thoughts of practical men, who never think systematically, but, who are not to be imposed upon by fancies. Persons sneer at the 'shallow Deism' of the last century'; and it is customary to reply that the antagonist orthodoxy was at least as shallow. The truth is, the 'shallowness' imputed belongs to the mental sphere into which the debate was for the time transported. The philosophy of the age was not above its mission. 'Philosophy,' thought Thomas Reid, in 1764, 'has no other root but the principles of common sense; it grows out of them, it draws its nourishment from them; severed from this root, its honours wither, its sap is dried up, it dies and rots.' (Inquiry, &c, Intr. § 4.) We in the present generation have seen the great speculative movement in Germany die out from this very cause, because it became divorced from the facts on which it speculated. Shut up in the Universities, it turned inwards on itself, and preyed on its own vitals. It has only been neglected by the world, because it first neglected the great facts in which the world has, and feels, an interest.
If ever there was a time when abstract speculation was brought down from inaccessible heights and compelled to be intelligible, it was the period from the Revolution to the middle of the last century. Closet speculation has been discredited; the cobwebs of scholasticism were exploded; the age of feverish doubt and egotistical introspection had not arrived. In that age the English higher education acquired its practical aim; the aim in which the development of the understanding, and the acquisition of knowledge are considered secondary objects to the formation of a sound secular judgment, of the scholar and the gentleman of the old race of schoolmaster. Burke, contrasting his own times with the preceding age, 'considered our forefathers as deeper thinkers than ourselves, because they set a higher value on good sense than on knowledge in various sciences, and their good sense was derived very often from as much study and more knowledge, though of another sort.' (Recollections by Samuel Rogers, p. 81.)
When a dispute is joined, e g. on the origin and composition of the Gospels, it is, from the nature of the case, confined to an inner circle of Biblical scholars. The mass of the public must wait outside, and receive the result on their authority. The religious public were very reluctant to resign the verse I John v. 7, but they did so at last on the just ground that after a philological controversy conducted with open doors, it had been decided to be spurious. No serious man would consider a popular assembly a proper court to decide on the doctrine of transubstantiation, or on the Hegelian definition of God, though either is easily capable of being held up to the ridicule of the half educated from the platform or the pulpit. It is otherwise with the greater part of the points raised in the Deistical controversy. It is not the speculative reason of the few, but the natural conscience of the many, that questions the extirpation of the Canaanites, or the eternity of hell-torments. These are points of divinity which are at once fundamental and popular. Butler, though not approving of entering into an argumentative defence of religion in common conversation, recommends his clergy to do so from the pulpit on the ground that, 'such as are capable of seeing the force of objections, are also capable of seeing the force of the answers which are given to them.' (Durham Charge.) If the philosophic intellect be dissatisfied with the answers which the divines of that day gave to the difficulties started, let it show how, on the rationalist hypothesis, these difficulties are removeable for the mass of those who feel them. The transcendental reason provides an answer which possibly satisfies itself; but to the common reason the answer is more perplexing than the difficulty it would clear.
M. Villemain has remarked in Pascal, 'that foresight which revealed to him so many objections unknown to his generation, and which inspired him with the idea of fortifying and intrenching positions which were not threatened. The objections which Pascal is engaged with are not only not those of his age, they are not such as could ever be come general in any age. They are those of the higher reason, and the replies are from the same inspiration. Pascal's view of human depravity seems to the ordinary man but the despair and delirium of the self-tormenting ascetic. The cynical view of our fallen nature however, is at least a possible view. It is well that it should be explored, and it will always have its prophets Calvin or Rochefaucault. But to ordinary men an argument in favour of revelation, founded on such an assumption, will seem to be in contradiction to his daily experience. Pascal's Pensees stand alone ; a work of individual genius, not belonging to any age. The celebrity which the Analogy of Bishop Butler has gained is due to the opposite reason. It is no paradox to say that the merit of the Analogy lies in its want of originality. It came (1736) towards the end of the Deistical period. It is the result of twenty years' study—the very twenty years during which the Deistical notions formed the atmosphere which educated people breathed. The objections it meets are not new and unseasoned objections, but such as had worn well, and had borne the rub of controversy, because they were genuine. And it will be equally hard to find in the Analogy any topic in reply, which had not been suggested in the pamphlets and sermons of the preceding half-century. Like Aristotle's physical and political treatises, it is a resume of the discussions of more than one generation. Its admirable arrangement only is all its own. Its closely packed and carefully fitted order speaks of many years' contrivance. Its substance or the thoughts of a whole age, not barely compiled, but each reconsidered and digested. Every brick in the building has been rung before it has been relaid, and replaced in its true relation to the complex and various whole. In more than one passage we see that the construction of this fabric of evidence, which 'consists in a long series of things, one preparatory to and confirming another from the beginning of the world to the present time,' (Durham Charge) was what occupied Butler's attention. 'Compass of thought, even amongst persons of the lowest rank' (Pref. to Sermons), is that form of the reflective faculty to which he is fond of looking both for good and evil. He never will forget that 'justice must be done to every part of a subject when we are considering it.' (Sermon iv.) Harmony, and law, and order, he will suppose, even where he does not find them. The tendency of his reason was that which Bacon indicates; 'the spirit of a man being of an equal and uniform substance doth usually suppose and feign in nature a greater equality and uniformity than is in truth.' (Advancement of Learning.) This is, probably, the true explanation of the 'obscurity' which persons sometimes complain of in Butler's style. The reason or matter he is producing is palpable and plain enough. But he is so solicitous to find its due place in the then stage of the argument, so scrupulous to give it its exact weight, and no more, so careful in arranging its situation relatively to the other members of the proof, that a reader who does not bear in mind that 'the effect of the whole' is what the architect is preparing, is apt to become embarrassed, and to think that obscurity which is really logical precision. The generality of men are better qualified for understanding particulars one by one, than for taking a comprehensive view of the whole. The philosophical breadth which we miss in Butler's mode of conceiving is compensated for, by this judicial breadth in his mode of arguing, which gives its place to each consideration, but regards rather the cumulative force of the whole. Many writers before Butler had insisted on this character of the Christian evidences. Dr. Jenkin, Margaret Professor, at Cambridge, whose Reasonableness and Certainly of the Christian Religion (1721) was the ' Paley' of divinity students then, says, 'there is an excellency in every part of our religion, separately considered, but the strength and vigour of each part is in the relation it has to the rest, and the several parts must be taken altogether, if we would have a true knowledge, and, make a just estimate of the whole. (Reasonableness, &c. Pt. ii. Pref. 1721.) But Butler does not merely take the hint from others. It is so entirely the guiding rule of his hand and pen that it would appear to have been forced upon him by some peculiar experience of his own. It was in society, and not in his study, that he had learned the weight of the Deistical arguments. At the Queen's philosophical parties, where those topics were canvassed with earnestness and freedom, he must have often felt the impotence of reply in detail, and seen, as he says, 'how impossible it must be, in a cursory conversation, to unite all this into one argument, and represent it as it ought.' (Durham Charge.) Hence his own labour to work up his materials into a connected framework, a methodized encyclopaedia of all the extant topics.
Not that he did not pay attention to the parts. Butler's eminence over his contemporary apologists is seen in nothing more than in that superior sagacity which rejects the use of any plea that is not entitled to consideration singly. In the other evidential books of the time we find a miscellaneous crowd of suggestions of very various value; never fanciful, but often trivial; undeniable, but weak as proof of the point they are brought to prove. Butler seems as if he had sifted these books, and retained, all that was solid in them. If he built with brick, and not with marble, it was because he was not thinking of reputation, but of utility, and an immediate purpose. Mackintosh wished Butler had the elegance and ornament of Berkeley. They would have been sadly out of place. 'There was not a spark of the littleness of literary ambition about him. There was a certain naturalness in Butler's mind, which took him straight to the questions on which men differed around him. Generally it is safer to prove what no one denies, and easier to explain difficulties which no one has ever felt. A quiet reputation is best obtained in the literary quæstiunculæ of important subjects. But a simple and straightforward man studies great topics because he feels a want of the knowledge which they contain. He goes straight to the real doubts and fundamental discrepancies, to those on which it is easy to excite odium, and difficult to give satisfaction; he leaves to others the amusing skirmishing and superficial literature accessary to such studies. Thus there is nothing light in Butler, all is grave, serious, and essential; nothing else would be characteristic of him.' (Bagehot, Estimates,&c, p. 180.) Though he has rifled their books he makes no display of reading. In the Analogy he never names the author he is answering. In the Sermons he quotes, directly, only Hobbes, Shaftesbury, Wollaston, Rochefoucault, and Fenelon. From his writings we should infer that his reading was not promiscuous, even had he not himself given us to understand how much opportunity he had of seeing the idleness and waste of time occasioned by light reading. (Sermons, Pref.)
This popular appeals to the common reason of men, which is one characteristic of the rationalist period, was a first effort of English theology to find a new basis for doctrine which had failed it. The Reformation had destroyed the authority of the Church upon which Revelation had so long rested. The attempt of the Laudian divines to substitute the voice of the national Church for that of the Church universal had met with only very partial and temporary success. When the Revolution of 1688 introduced the freedom of the press and a general toleration, even that artificial authority which, by ignoring non-conformity, had produced an appearance of unity, and erected a conventional standard of truth and falsehood, fell to the ground. The old and venerated authority had been broken by the Reformation. The new authority of the Anglican establishment had existed in theory only, and never in fact, and the Revolution had crushed the theory, which was now confined to a small band of non-jurors. In reaction against Anglican "authority," the Puritan movement had tended to rest faith and doctrine upon the inward light within each man's breast. This tendency of the new Puritanism, which we may call Independency, was a development of the old, purely scriptural, Puritanism of Presbyterianism. But it was its natural and necessary development. It was a consequence of the controversy with the establishment. For both the Church and Dissent agreed in acknowledging Scripture as their foundation, and the controversy turned on the interpreter of Scripture. Nor was the doctrine of the inner light, which individualized the basis of faith, confined to the Nonconformists. It was shared by a section of the Church, of whom Cudworth is the type, to whom 'Scripture faith is not a mere believing of historical things, and upon artificial arguments or testimonies only, but a certain higher and diviner power in the soul that peculiarly corresponded with the Deity.' (Intellectual System, Pref.) The inner light, or witness of the Spirit in the soul of the individual believer, had, in, its turn, fallen into discredit through the extravagances to which it had given birth. It was disowned alike by Churchmen and Nonconformists who agree in speaking with contemptuous pity of the sectaries of the last age.' The re-action against individual religion led to this first attempt to base revealed truth on reason. And for the purpose for which reason was now wanted, the higher, or philosophic, reason was far less fitted than that universal understanding in which all men can claim a share. The 'inner light,' which had made each man the dictator of his own creed, had exploded in ecclesiastical anarchy. The appeal from the frantic discord of the enthusiasts to reason must needs be, not to an arbitrary or particular reason in each man, but to a common sense, a natural discernment, a reason of universal obligation. As it was to be universally binding, it must be generally recognisable. It must be something not confined to the select few, a gift of the self-styled elect, but a faculty belonging to all men of sound mind and average capacity. Truth must be accessible to 'the bulk of mankind.' It was a time when the only refuge from a hopeless maze, or wild chaos, seemed to be the rational consent of the sensible and unprejudiced. 'Have the bulk of mankind,' writes Locke, 'no other guide but accident and blind chance to conduct them to their happiness or misery? Are the current opinions and licensed guides of every country sufficient evidence and security to every man to venture his great concernments on? Or, can those be the certain and infallible oracles and standards of truth which teach one thing in Christendom, and another in Turkey? Or shall a poor countryman be eternally happy, for having the chance to be born in Italy? Or a day labourer be unavoidably lost because he had the ill-luck to be born in England? How ready some men may be to say some of these things I will not here examine; but this I am sure, that men must allow one or other of these to be true, or else grant that God has furnished men with faculties sufficient to direct them in the way they should take, if they will but seriously employ them in that way, when their ordinary vocations allow them the leisure.' (Essay, Book iv. ch. 19, § 3.)
Such an attempt to secure a foundation in a new consensus will obviously forfeit depth to gain in comprehensiveness. This phase of rationalism—'Rationalismus vulgaris'— resigns the transcendental, that it may gain adherents. It wants, not the elect, but all men. It cannot afford to embarrass itself with the attempt to prove what all may not be required to receive. Accordingly there can be no mysteries in Christianity. The 'word' μυστήριον, as Archbishop Whately points out (Essays, 2nd ser., 5th ed.,p. 288), always means in the New Testament not that which is incomprehensible, but that which was once a secret, though now it is revealed it is no longer so. Whately, who elsewhere (Paley's Evidences, new, ed.) speaks so contemptuously of the 'cast-off clothes' of the Deists, is here but adopting the argument of Toland in his Christianity not Mysterious.' (Cf. Balguy, Discourses, p. 237.) There needs no special 'preparation of heart' to receive the Gospel, the evidences of religion are sufficient to convince every unprejudiced inquirer. Unbelievers are blameworthy, as deaf to an argument which is so plain that they cannot but understand it, and so convincing that they cannot but be aware of its force. Under such self-imposed conditions religious proof seems to divest itself of all that is divine, and out of an excess of accommodation to the recipient faculty to cease to be a transforming thought. Rationalism can object to the old sacramental system that it degrades a spiritual influence into a physical effect. But rationalism itself, in order to make the proof of revelation universal, is obliged to resolve religion into the moral government of God by rewards and punishments, and especially the latter. It is this anthropomorphic conception of God, as the Governor of the Universe,' which is presented to us in the theology of the Hanoverian divines, a theology which excludes on principle not only all that is poetical in life, but all that is sublime in religious speculation. To degrade religion to the position of a mere purveyor of motive to morality is not more dishonourable to the ethics which must ask, than to the religion which will render such assistance.' (A. J. Vaughan, Essays, vol. 1. p. 61.) It is this character that makes the reading even of Analogy, so depressing to the soul, as Tholuck (Vermischte Schriften, i. 103) says of it 'we weary of a long journey on foot, especially through deep sand.' Human nature is not only humbled but crushed. It is a common charge against the 18th century divines that they exalt man too much by insisting on the dignity of human nature and its native capacities for virtue. This was the charge urged against the orthodox by the evangelical pulpit. But only very superficial and incompetent critics of doctrine can suppose that man is exalted by being thrown upon his moral faculties. The history of doctrine teaches a very different lesson. Those periods when morals have been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty. The denial of scientific theology, the keeping in the back-ground the transcendental objects of faith and the restriction of our faculties to the regulation of our conduct, seem indeed to be placing man in the foreground of the picture, to make human nature the centre round which all things revolve. But this seeming effect is produced not by exalting the visible, but by materialising the invisible. If there be a sphere of knowledge level to our capacities and of the utmost importance to us we ought surely to apply ourselves with all diligence to this our proper business, and esteem everything else nothing, nothing as to us, in comparison of it. . . . Our province is virtue and religion, life and manners; the science of improving the temper and making the heart better. This is the field assigned to us to cultivate; how much it has lain neglected is indeed astonishing. . . .He who should find out one rule to assist us in this work would deserve infinitely better of mankind than all the improvers of other knowledge put together.' (Sermon xv.) This is the theology of Butler and his contemporaries; a utilitarian theology, like the Baconian philosophy, contemning all employment of mental power which does not bring in fruit. 'Intellectui non plumæ, sed plumbum addendum et pondera,' (Bacon, Nov. Or., i. 104,) might be its device.
In the Analogy it is the same. His term of comparison, the 'constitution and course of nature,' is not what we should understand by that term; not what science can disclose to us of the laws of the cosmos, but a narrow observation of what men do in ordinary life. We see what he means by the 'constitution of things,' by his saying (Sermon xv.) that 'the writings of Solomon are very much taken up with reflections upon human nature and human life; to which he hath added, in Ecclesiastes, reflections upon the constitution of things.' In Part i. ch. 3, of the Analogy, he compares the moral government of God with the natural—the distinction is perhaps from Balguy (Divine Rectitude, p. 39),—that is to say, one part of natural religion with another; for the distinction vanishes, except upon a very conventional sense of the term 'moral.' Altogether we miss in these divines not only distinct philosophical conceptions, but a scientific use of terms. Dr. Whewell considers that Butler shunned 'the appearance of technical terms for the elements of our moral constitution on which he speculated,' and thinks that he 'was driven to indirect modes of expression.' (Moral Philosophy in England, p. 109.) The truth is that Butler uses the language of his day upon the topics on which he writes. The technical terms, and strict logical forms, which had been adhered to by the writers, small as well as great, of the 17th century, had been disused as pedantic; banished first from literature, and then from education. They did not appear in style, because they did not form part of the mental habit of the writers. Butler does not, as Dr. Whewell supposes, think in one form, and write in another, out of condescension to his readers. He thinks in the same language in which he and those around him speak. Mr. Hort's remark, that 'Butler's writings are stoic to the true and ancient sense of the word' (Cambridge Essays, 1850, p. 337), must be extended to their style. The English style of philosophical writing in the Hanoverian period is to the English of the 17th century, as the Greek of Epictetus, Antoninus, or Plutarch, is to that of Aristotle. And for the same reason. The English stoics and their Greek predecessors were practical men who moralised in a practical way on the facts of common life, and in the language of common life. Neither the rhetorical Schools of the Empire, nor the Universities of England, any longer taught the correct use of metaphysical language. To imitate classical Latin was become the chief aim of the University man in his public exercises, and precision of language became under that discipline very speedily a lost art.
Upon the whole, the writings of that period are serviceable to us, chiefly, as showing what can, and what cannot, be effected by common-sense thinking in theology. It is of little consequence to inquire, whether or not the objections of the Deists and the Socinians were removed by the answers brought to meet them. Perhaps, on the whole, we might be borne out in saying that the defence is at least as good as the attack; and so, that even on the ground of common reason, the Christian evidences may be arranged in such a way as to balance the common-sense improbability of the supernatural—that 'there are three chances to one for revelation, and only two against it.' (Tracts for the Times, No. 85.) Had not circumstances given a new direction to religious interests, the Deistical controversy might have gone on indefinitely, and the amoebæan strain of objection and reply, 'et cantare pares et respondere parati'—have been prolonged to this day without any other result. But that result forces on the mind the suggestion that either religious faith has no existence, or that it must be to be reached by some other road than that of the 'trial of the witnesses.' It is a reductio ad absurdum of common-sense philosophy, of home-baked theology, when we find that the result of the whole is that 'it is safer to believe in a God, lest, if there should happen to be one, he might send us to hell for denying his existence.' (Maurice, Essays, p. 236.) If a religion be wanted which shall debase instead of elevating, this should be its creed. If the religious history of the 18th century proves anything it is this:—The good sense, the best good sense, when it sets to work with the materials of human nature and Scripture to construct a religion, will find its way to an ethical code, irreproachable in its contents, and based on a just estimate and wise observation of the facts of life, ratified by Divine sanctions in the shape of hope and fear, of future rewards and penalties of obedience and disobedience. This the 18th century did and did well. It has enforced the truths of natural morality with a solidity of argument and variety of proof which they have not received since the Stoical epoch, if then. But there its ability ended. When it came to the supernatural part of Christianity its embarrassment began. It was forced to keep it as much in the background as possible, or to bolster it up by lame and inadequate reasonings. The philosophy of commonsense had done its own work; it attempted more only to show, by its failure, that some higher organon was needed for the establishment of supernatural truth. The career of the evidential school,its success and failure,—its success in vindicating the ethical part of Christianity and the regulative aspect of revealed truth, its failure in establishing the supernatural and speculative part—have enriched the history of doctrine with a complete refutation of that method as an instrument of theological investigation.
This judgment, however, must not be left unbalanced by a consideration on the other side. It will hardly be supposed that the drift of what has been said is that common-sense is out of place in religion, or in any other matter. The defect of the 18th century theology was not in having too much good sense, but in having nothing besides. In the present day, when a godless orthodoxy threatens, as in the 15th century, to extinguish religious thought altogether, and nothing is allowed in the Church of England but the formulæ of past thinkings, which have long lost all sense of any kind; it may seem out of season to be bringing forward a misapplication of common-sense in a by-gone age. There are times and circumstances when religious ideas will be greatly benefited by being submitted to the rough and ready tests by which busy men try what comes in their way; by being made to stand their trial, and be freely canvassed, coram populo. As poetry is not for the critics, so religion is not for the theologians. When it is stiffened into phrases, and these phrases are declared to be objects of reverence, but not of intelligence, it is on the way to become a useless encumbrance, the rubbish of the past, blocking the road. Theology then retires into the position it occupies in the Church of Rome at present, an unmeaning frostwork of dogma, out of all relation to the actual history of man. In that system, theological virtue is an artificial life quite distinct from the moral virtues of real life. 'Parmi nous,' says Remusat, 'un homme religieux est trop souvent un homme qui se croit entoure d'ennemis, qui voit avec defiance ou scandale les événements et les institutions du siecle, qui se déiole d'êtré ne dans les jours maudits, et qui a besoin d'un grand fond de bonté innée pour impëcher ses pieuses aversions de deviner de mor elles haines.' This system is equally fatal to popular morality and to religious theory. It locks up virtue in the cloister, and theology in the library. It originates caste, sanctity, and a traditional philosophy. The ideal of holiness striven after may once have been lofty, the philosophy now petrified into tradition may once have been a vital faith, but now that they are withdrawn from public life, they have ceased to be social influences. On the other hand, the 18th century exhibits human attainment levelled to the lowest secular model of prudence and honesty, but still, such as it was, proposed to all men as their rule of life. Practical life as it was, was the theme of the pulpit, the press, and the drawing-room. Its theory of life was not lofty, but it was true as far as it went. It did not substitute a factitious phraseology, the pass-words of the modern pulpit, for the simple facts of life, but called things by their right names. " Nullum numen babes si sit prudentia" was its motto, not denying the "numen," but bringing him very close to the individual person, as his "moral governor." The prevailing philosophy was not a profound metaphysic, but it was a soundly based arrangement of the facts of society; it was not a scheme of the sciences, but a manual for every day use. Nothing of the wild spirit of universal negation which was spread over the Continent fifty years later belonged to the solid rationalism of this period. The human understanding wished to be satisfied, and did not care to believe that of which it could not see the substantial ground. The reason was coming slowly to see that it had duties which it could not devolve upon others; that a man must think for himself, protect his own rights, and administer his own affairs. The reason was never less extravagant than in this its first essay of its strength. Its demands were modest, it was easily satisfied; far too easily, we must think, when we look at some of the reasonings which passed as valid.
The habits of controversy in which they lived deceived the belligerents themselves. The controversial form of their theology, which has been fatal to its credit since, was no less detrimental to its soundness at the time. They could not discern the line between what they did, and what they could not, prove. The polemical temper deforms the books they have written. Literature was indeed partially refined from the coarser scurrilities with which the Caroline divines, a century before, had assailed their Romanist opponents. But there is still an air of vulgarity about the polite writing of the age, which the divines adopt along with its style. The cassocked divine assumes the airs of the 'roaring blade,' and ruffles it on the mall with a horsewhip under his arm. Warburton's stock argument is a threat to cudgel any one who disputes his opinion. All that can be said is that this was a habit of treating your opponent which pervaded society. At a much, later period Porson complains, 'In these ticklish times . . . talk of religion it is odds but you have infidel, blasphemer, atheist, or schismatic, thundered in your ears; touch upon politics, you will be in luck if you are only charged with a tendency to treason. Nor is the innocence of your intention any safeguard. It is not the publication that shows the character of the author, but the character of the author that shows the tendency of the publication.' (Luard's ' Porson,' Camb. Essays, 1857.) A license of party vituperation in the House of Commons existed, from the time of the opposition to Walpole onwards, which has long been banished by more humane manners. The men who took a foremost part seemed to be intent on disparaging each other, and proving that neither possessed any qualification of wisdom, knowledge, or public virtue. '. . . . Epithets of reproach were lavished personally on Lord North, which were applicable only to the vilest and most contemptible of mankind.' (Massey, Hist of England, ii. 218.) .
Were this blustering language a blemish of style and nothing more, it would taint their books with vulgarity as literature, but it would not vitiate their matter. But the fault reaches deeper than skin-deep. It is a most serious drawback on the good-sense of the age that it wanted justice in its estimate of persons. They were no more capable of judging their friends than, their foes. In Pope's satire there is no medium; our enemies combine all the odiousness, however incongruous; our friends have ' every virtue under heaven.' We hear sometimes of Pope's peculiar 'malignity.' But he was only doing what every one around him was doing, only with a greatly superior literary skill. Their savage invective against each other is not a morally worse feature than the style of fulsome compliment in which friends address each other. The private correspondence of intimate friends betrays an unwholesome insincerity which contrasts strangely with their general manliness of character. The burly intellect of Warburton displays an appetite for flattery as insatiable as that of Miss Seward and her coterie.
This habit of exaggerating both good and evil the divines share with the other writers of the time. But theological literature, as a written debate, had a form of malignant imputation peculiar to itself. This is one arising out of the rationalistic fiction which both parties assumed, viz, that their respective beliefs were determined by an impartial inquiry into the evidence. The orthodox writers considered this evidence so clear and certain for their own conclusions, that they could account for its not seeming so to others only by the supposition of some moral obliquity which darkened the understanding in such cases. Hence the obnoxious assumption of the divines that the Deists were men of corrupt morals, and the retort of the infidel writers, that the clergy were hired advocates. Moral imputation, which is justly banished from legal argument, seems to find a proper place in theological. Those Christian Deists who, like Toland or Collins, approached most nearly in their belief to Revelation, were treated, not better, but worse by the orthodox champions; their larger admissions being imputed to disingenuousness or calculated reserve. This stamp of advocacy which was impressed on English theology at the Reformation—its first work of consideration was an 'Apology'—it has not to this day shaken off. Our theologians, with rare exceptions, do not penetrate below the surface of their subject, but are engaged in defending or vindicating it. The current phrases of 'the bulwarks of our faith,' 'dangerous to Christianity,' are but instances of the habitual position in which we assume ourselves to stand. Even more philosophic minds cannot get rid of the idea that theology is polemical. Theological study is still the study of topics of defence. Even Professor Fraser can exhort us 'that by the study of these topics we might not merely disarm the enemies of religion of what, in other times has been, and will continue to be a favourite weapon of assault, but we might even convert that weapon into an instrument of use in the Christian service.' (Essays in Philosophy, p. 4.) 'Modern science,' as it is called, is recommended to the young divine, because in it he may find means of 'confuting infidelity.'
A little consideration will show that the grounds on which advocacy before a legal tribunal rests, make it inappropriate in theological reasoning. It is not pretended that municipal law is coextensive with universal law, and therefore incapable of admitting right on both sides. It is allowed that the natural right may be, at times, on one side, and the legal title on the other; not to mention the extreme case where 'communis error facit jue.' The advocate is not there to supply all the materials out of which the judge is to form his decision, but only one side of the case. He is the mere representative of his client's interests, and has not to discuss the abstract merits of the juridical point which may be involved. He does not undertake to show that the law is conformable to natural right, but to establish the condition of his client relatively to the law. But the rational defender of the faith has no place in his system for the variable, or the indifferent, or the non-natural. He proceeds on the supposition that the whole system of the Church is the one and exclusively true expression of reason upon the subject on which it legislates. He claims for the whole of received knowledge what the jurist claims for international law, to be a universal science. He lays before us, on the one hand, the traditional canon or symbol of doctrine. On the other hand, he teaches that the free use of reason upon the facts of nature and Scripture is the real mode by which this traditional symbol is arrived at. To show, then, that the candid pursuit of truth leads every impartial intellect to the Anglican conclusion was the task which, on their theory of religious proof, their theology had to undertake. The process, accordingly, should have been analogous to that of the jurist or legislator with regard to the internal evidence, and to that of the judge with regard to the external evidence. If theological argument forgets the judge and assumes the advocate, or betrays the least bias to one side, the conclusion is valueless, the principle of free inquiry has been violated. Roman Catholic theologians consistently enough teach that 'apologetics' make no part of theology, as usually conducted by way of reply to special objections urged, but that a true apologetic must be founded (1) on a discovery of the general principle from which the attack proceeds, and (2) on the exhibition, per contra, of that general ground thought of which the single Christian truths are developments. (Hageman, Die Aufgabe der Catholischen Apologetik.)
With rare exceptions the theology of the Hanoverian period is of the most violently partisan character. It sets itself, by its theory, in the judicial chair, but it is only to comport itself there like Judge Jefferies. One of the favourite books of the time was Sherlock's Trial of the Witnesses. First published in 1729, it speedily went through fourteen editions. It concludes in this way:—
'Judge.—What say you ? Are the Apostles guilty of giving false evidence in the case of the resurrection of Jesus, or not guilty?
'Foreman— Not guilty.
'Judge.—Very well; and now, gentlemen, I resign my commission, and am your humble tenant.
The company then rose up, and were beginning to pay their compliments to the Judge and the counsel, but were interrupted by a gentleman, who went up to the Judge, and offered him a fee. 'What is this?' says the Judge. 'A fee, sir,' said the gentleman. 'A fee to a judge is a bribe,' said the Judge. 'True, sir,' said the gentleman; 'but you have resigned your commission, and will not be the first judge who has come from the bench to the bar without any diminution of honour. Now, Lazarus's case is to come on next, and this fee is to retain you on his side.'
One might say that the apologists of that day had in like manner left the bench for the bar, and taken a brief for the Apostles. They are impatient at the smallest demur, and deny loudly that there is any weight in anything advanced by their opponents. In the way they override the most serious difficulties they show anything but the temper which is supposed to qualify for the weighing of evidence. The astonishing want of candour in their reasoning, their blindness to real difficulty, the ill-concealed predetermination to find a particular verdict, the rise of their style in passion in the same proportion as their argument fails in strength, constitute a class of writers more calculated than any other to damage their own cause with young ingenuous minds, bred in the school of Locke to believe that 'to love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in this world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues. ' (Locke, set. 73. Letter to Collins.) Spalding has described the moral shock his faith received on hearing an eminent clergyman in confidential conversation with another, who had cited some powerful argument against revelation, say, 'That's truly awkward; let us consider a little how we get out of that; wie wir uns salviren. (Selbstbiographie, p. 128.) A truthful mind is a much rarer possession than is commonly supposed, for, 'it is as easy to close the eyes of the mind as those of the body.' (Butler, Sermon x.) 'And in this rarity there is a natural limit to the injury which uncandid vindications' of revelation can cause. To whatever causes is to be attributed the decline of Deism, from 1750 onwards, the books polemically written against it cannot reckon among them. When Casaubon first visited Paris, and was being shown over the Sorbonne, his guide said, 'This is the hall in which the doctors have disputed for 300 years. Aye! and what have they settled?' was his remark.
Some exceptions, doubtless, there are to the inconclusiveness of this debate. Here again the eminent instance is the Analogy. Butler, it is true, comes forward not as an investigator, but as a pleader. But when we pass from his inferior brethren to this great master of the art, we find ourselves in the hands of one who knows the laws of evidence, and carefully keeps his statements within them. Butler does not, like his fellow apologists, disguise the fact that the evidence is no stronger than it is. 'If it be a poor thing,' to argue in this way, 'the epithet poor may be applied, I fear, as properly to great part, or the whole, of human life, as it is to the things mentioned, (Analogy, part ii. ch. 8) Archbishop Whately, defining the temper of the rational theologian, says:—'A good man will, indeed, wish to find the evidence of the Christian religion satisfactory; but a wise man will not, for that reason, think it satisfactory, but will weigh the evidence the more carefully on account of the importance of the question.' (Essays, 2nd series, p. 24.) This character Butler's argument exemplifies. We can feel, as we read, how his judgment must have been offended in his contemporaries by the disproportion between the positiveness of their assertion and the feebleness of their argument. Nor should we expect that Butler satisfied them. They thought him 'a little too little vigorous,' and 'wished he would have spoke more earnestly.' (Byrom's Journal, March, 1737.) Men who believe that they were in possession of a 'demonstration' of Christianity were not likely to be satisfied with one who saw so strongly 'the doubtfulness in which things were involved' that he could not comprehend 'men's being impatient out of action or vehement in it.' (Unpublished Remains, &c.) Warburton, who has a proof which 'is very little short of mathematical certainty, and to which nothing but a mere physical possibility of the contrary can be opposed' (Divine Leg. b. i. § 1), was the man for the age, which did not care to stand higgling with Butler over the degrees of probability? What could the world do with a man who 'designed the search after truth as the business of my life' (Correspondence with Dr. Clarke); and who was so little prepared to dogmatise about the future world that he rather felt that there is no account to be given in the way of reason of men's so strong attachments to the present world.' (Sermon vii.) Butlers doubtfulness, however, it should be remarked, is not the unsteadiness of the sceptical, but the wariness of the judicial mind; a mind determined for itself by its own instincts, but careful to confine its statements to others within the evidence produced in court. The Analogy does not depicture an inward struggle in his own mind, but as he told a friend, his way of writing it had been to endeavour to answer as he went along, every possible objection that might occur to any one against any position of his in his book.' (Bartlett's Life of Butler, p.1'. 60.) He does not doubt, himself, but he sees, what others do not see, the difficulty of proving religion to others. There is a saying of Pitt circulating to the effect that the Analogy is 'a dangerous book; it raises more doubts than it solves. All that is true in this is, that to a mind which has never nourished objections to revelation, a book of evidences may be the means of first suggesting them. But in 1736 the objections were everywhere current, and the answers to them were mostly of that truly 'dangerous' sort in which assertion runs ahead of proof. The merit of Butler lies not in the 'irrefragable proof,' which Southey's epitaph attributes to his construction, but in his showing the nature of the proof, and daring to admit that it was less than certain; to own that 'a man may be fully convinced of the truth of a matter and upon the strongest reasons, and yet not be able to answer all the difficulties which may be raised upon it. (Durham Charge, 1751.)
(To be continued.)
Empire 1861, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article60495818
No comments:
Post a Comment