THE WISH TO BELIEVE.*
WE bave once or twice called attention to the earlier of these dialogues at the time they first appeared in the Nineteenth Century. The second of the two is, however, much enlarged
since its publication in that periodical, and the third is entirely new. Taken together, the three form a very valuable introduction concerning the principles of religious inquiry for any good elementary treatise on Christian evidence; and may prove, we hope, to be in Mr. Wilfrid Ward's hands the preparation for such a treatise, for which he might, we believe, very easily make himself singularly well-fitted.
The clue to Mr. Wilfrid Ward's view of the tendency of religious bias is to be found really in the Gospels themselves. "Ask, and it shall be given you ; seek, and ye shall find ; knock, and it shall be opened unto you : for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh fiudeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened." It is obvious that not only is nothing said here about a judicial and impartial attitude of mind, but that, on the contrary, a petitio principii is assumed. No one asks without a strong belief that some one is within hearing who will answer; the seeker assumes by the very attitude of seeking that the thing to be found is in existence ; a knock is only contemplated by one who believes that there is some one on the other side of the door by whom his signal will be answered. You never find, either in the greater philosophies or in Revelation, a judicial or balanced state of mind insisted on as the best condition of the search for truth. On the contrary, the old Greek philosophers insisted on the love of wisdom' as the essence of the higher intellect; and yet the love of wisdom,' of course, implied a petitio principii,— namely, that wisdom is within our reach, and so clearly within our reach, that it may inspire love even before it is in any sense fully reached. Any thinker who had told his pupils not to prejudge the question whether there was such a thing as a wisdom worthy of love to be found, but to assume that it was at least as likely that no wisdom worth passionate desire was within the scope of human faculties, as that such a wisdom existed and could be made our own, would, we suspect, have had the greatest possible difficulty in founding a. school at all. At all events, all the great teachers of the world, philosophic as well as religious, have taken for granted that truth iu some grand and inspiring sense is attainable by man. And that it must be loved before it can be fully known is at least as true and at least as universally assumed by the greater teachers as that it must be known before it can be fully loved. In other words, they assumed what they knew to be true, that there is a passion for something of the nature of truth or wisdom so deeply implanted in the heart of man, that it would be a gross affectation to pretend that you should begin an investigation into its e.cistence ; whereas all you have to do is " to follow, in the purest possible spirit, the clues which are from time to time furnished to you as to its nature and scope, its qualities and accidents. Well, this is Mr. Wilfrid Ward's conclusion; but the merit of this thoroughly able little book is that it makes the reader feel the vast chasm which divides the wish to entertain, a belief from the true wish to believe,—that is, from the ardent desire to be convinced that the belief is true. He shows you in the first dialogue how sentimentalists who do not really care about the truth of their belief, but only about furnishing themselves with sufficient excuses for professing it, will shrink from testing their professed belief, lest they should find it wrong; whereas, those who do not care to have excuses for entertaining a belief, but care solely and only to be convinced of the truth of it, and who would cast it away with scorn if they really looked upon it only as a plausible illusion, are compelled to look in the face every serious objection to that truth, until at least they have found so complete a certainty that they regard further objections much in the same light in which a man who has probed his father's or brother's character to the very bottom regards the objections raised by a comparative stranger against his own view of that character.
Perhaps the newest part of the book is the discussion bearing on the subject of the rules of judicial impartiality in eases tried in our Law Courts. Mr. Wilfrid Ward holds that the rules of our Law Courts are by no means the highest instruments for the attainment of absolute truth, though they are the highest instruments for the attainment of what the public mind will rightly accept as the nearest thing to truth attainable by fixed modes of procedure conducted by dispassionate officials. But as he shows us, there are cases in which the confidence of personal knowledge is justified, even where it calmly sets at nought all that a Judge and Jury are bound by the very principles of their office to decide :—
"'Now we are really getting at what I want,' said Walton. I maintain that in estimating considerations such as I have mentioned, an active interest and sense of the importance' of the conclusion to
which they point, and a certain amount of emotional sympathy with them, are absolutely necessary. A man who does not apply his emotional and imaginative faculties cannot feel them, cannot get be.
yond the mere logic of them—that hard rind of truth (for it is tree as far as it goes) which George Eliot lays down as the limit of the knowledge of the unimaginative and unsympathetic. The calm, lawyer-like man who studies the matter as though it were an illustration of some interesting legal principle, and not of deep practical importance to himself, stands no chance of knowing their full force.
No doubt such a man runs no risk of overrating it, but be runs the greatest risk of underrating it?—' illy dear Walton,' interrupted Darlington, what should we do if we accepted this strange theory of yours ? We should have our law courts supplied by enthusiastic jurymen, or intimate friends of the prisoner or of the witnesses for the prosecation.'—' No ; the cases are not parallel,' said Walton, a little puzzled. The law courts go on the principle that it is better to acqnit a guilty man than to hang one who is innocent. They dare not risk the influence of bias either way. The outside world cannot be sure what is partisanship and what intimate knowledge. Personal certainty of which I speak is safeguarded, as we shall see, by a sense of personal responsibility. The certainty is your own, and if you conclude wrongly it affects yourself and no one else. The case is different with the juror, who is deciding what affects another, and
fears no evil result to himself from a wrong decision A state of mind which implies equal readiness to be satisfied with Christian belief on the one side and Agnosticism on the other affords no guarantee that the necessary effort will bo made to realise and appreciate the force of the considerations whereby the truth of Christianity is established. An active speculative interest in all views is no sign that the patient reflection and reverent consideration which are necessary if the Christian arguments are really to touch us, will be given. Indifference as to results shows that there is no sense of the danger of ignorance and the blessedness of knowledge. And the mind which fails to realise such truths as these may well fail to realise much more. Absence of passion suggests apathy. A judicial frame of mind will not seem the most hopeful to one who remembers that 'the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent carry it away.' No doubt these qualities are admirable in a court of law, for the very same reason that they are out of place here. The very fact that twelve jurymen are to agree upon their verdict implies that the evidence is to be of such a kind as to exclude special personal appreciation, such as knowledge of an individual character. The outside world cannot be sure whether such professed knowledge is in a particular case genuine or the result of bias, therefore it is eliminated. Then again, so far as personal effort is required, one may say that its necessity is to some extent precluded by the work of counsel. The facts of the case and their connection and &gnificanee are depicted by them in glowing terms, so that all that is required on the part of the jurymen is to be receptive and impartial. In religious inquiry, on the contrary, the really philosophical and reasonable frame of mind is one involving earnestness, effort, and sense of the gravity of the issues, and of the blessedness of knowledge. A passion for knowledge is as indispensable to the religions as to the scientific inquirer. And if knowledge be attained, who can doubt that what is so beautiful will beget enthusiasm—nay, that an enthusiastic love for its beauty will help in the perception of its truth—jest as a love for the goodness of my father may make me delight more and more in his society, and so become more intimately acquainted with his character ?"
The truth we take to be that we should never think of supposing that a Judge and twelve jurymen could decide on the verisimilitude or improbability of such a character as St. Paul's with anything like the confidence with which we ourselves could decide on it for ourselves if we went into the sub ject with an eager purpose to study it to the bottom. Nay, further, the Judge-and-Jury system is excellent to break-up the ground for an inquiry into superficial fraud or superficial honesty, and to carry the process so far as it is desirable in the public interests to carry it,—in other words, for the purpose of obtaining a decision which will command confidence in the public. And more is not only not wanted, but would be hurtful. If you decided civil and criminal cases on principles so fine that they were quite beyond the purview of the average man, even though you decided them rightly in one sense, you would decide them wrongly in another. Justice would be done ; but the public would always believe that injustice had been done. And it is better far that injustice should now and then be done on principles which secure real justice in the great majority of cases, and which secure the popular belief in justice even in the minority, than that injustice should be avoided in a very few cases on principles which would render injustice certain in a vast majority of cases, and which would not even generate popular confidence in the few cases in which justice had really been done. In other words, the judicial system is admirable for getting as near to a true view of public right and wrong, as an average man looking at the conditions of the case from the outside can get ; but it would be childish to suppose that it supplies rules for the weighing of the finer kinds of personal evidence, for the testing of the true drift of conscience, and the exact moral significance of spiritual affections.
We should like, as we have already said, to see Mr. Wilfrid Ward attempt a work supplementary to this admirable little book, or rather in continuation of it,—a work applying his own general principles not only to the different kinds of Christian evidence, bat to the objections which may be and have been brought against it by earnest men truly possessed with a desire to find the truth. For example, there is no trace in this little book of any answer to the very important question,—How much weight should a candid mind give to real difficulties in the way of believing what the heart desires, and what, up to a certain point, it finds historical justification for believing ? Cardinal Newman has said that a hundred difficulties ought not necessarily to be equivalent to one doubt. Now, how is that saying to be justified? Is it to be said that the desire of the mind for the Christian revelation is so fully satisfied by the evidence of its supernatural character in some respects that a host of natural deficiencies in that evidence on other sides ought not to awaken a single doubt ? Suppose we accept, as the present writer at least does heartily accept, Dr. Liddon's argument for the supernatural character of Christ, ought that to make us quite indifferent to evidence as plain as it can be made, that we have in some respects an inconsistent account of its workings in the original accounts given of it,— that St. John, for instance, makes our Lord positively declare his Messiahship to the woman of Samaria at a period in his ministry when the other Evangelists present him as in the highest degree anxious that no such revelation should be openly made ? Is that only a difficulty, or does it justify a doubt ? If it does not justify a doubt, what is the true distinction between difficulties which ought to make a fair-minded man hesitate to believe, and those which ought only to make him anxious to remove them, if it be possible to do so, on the ground that they are stumbling-blocks in the way of others ? Is a difficulty of this kind a difficulty which affects the very ground on which the Church originally built her faith ? and if so, ought it not to be taken as at least one of the prima fade warnings to a candid man not merely that, in this world, faith can never surmount all difficulties, but that reason may sometimes rightly hesitate to follow where the highest spiritual affections lead ? We propose these questions, not because we ourselves feel this particular difficulty to be one of the greatest magnitude, though we feel it to be weighty, but because we can well imagine a serious mind thinking it final, and that in spite of the most passionate love for Christ, and the most eager wish to accept the supernatural guidance of Christianity. Some criterion, then, there should surely be of the distinction between a difficulty which justifies doubt and ono which does not,—between a difficulty which only affects the argumentative validity of the Christian's answer to objections, and one which affects the very sources of Christian faith. As Mr. Wilfrid Ward has given us so excellent an introduction to the subject, we wish he would go on at least up to the point of weighing the elementary Christian evidences, and indicating the difference between the class of objections which really require a complete and satisfactory answer, and those which may fairly be regarded as irreducible but insignificant objections to a faith in which it is reasonable to feel the complete confidence of moral certitude.
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