CRUDENESS IN RELIGIOUS CRITICISM.
THERE is no quality in a religious critic which is more bewildering to deal with than what we may call the quality of crudeness,—i.e., unripeness of mind so great that it is always bringing up false issues, and trying to force a decision on a point on which nothing really hinges. This is what makes the questions of children on religious matters usually so un- answerable. They see so little of the true aspects of the case, that they do not even know how to ask the right questions ; they put irrelevant questions, questions whose irrelevance is due to their crudeness of mind. The remark of the French Princess, that if the poor could not get bread to eat, they should eat cakes, was crude. She did not understand the difficulties she was talking about. The criticism of Lord Jeffrey on Wordsworth's "Excur- sion," "This won't do," was crude. He did not estimate rightly what the hunger of the spiritual imagination was, and had no conception how far Wordsworth was or was not able to satisfy it. Again, the idea of a prayer-gauge, devised to measure the exact power of prayer by trying its effect on the health of a hospital- ward, which was presented to the readers of one of the great monthly reviews by an eminent surgeon some fifteen years ago, was crude; he had not the smallest insight into any serious aspect of the question which he proposed to treat in this puerile fashion. Well, in precisely this sense of the word " crude," we have read nothing so " crude " for many months as Mr. Voysey's paper on " The New Reformation," in the last number of the Fort-
nightly Review. It is evidently a sincere enough paper, written by a man who has read and studied theology. But the unripe- ness of mind which Mr. Voysey seems to us to reveal in that paper is so astonishing, that it might almost remind the reader of the French Princess who found it odd that when bread was so dear, the masses did not have recourse to cakes. And, of course, when we say this of Mr. Voysey, we do not in the least mean to complain that he looks at every religious question from a point of view which seems to us mistaken. We should say the same more emphatically of Mr. Matthew Arnold, with whose real mind on religious questions we differ far more profoundly than we do from Mr. Voysey's. But Mr. Arnold, though he seems to us to undermine the whole drift of the Bible while pro- fessing to confirm it, is never crude. He sees the true issue, and appreciates it with the utmost delicacy, though he accepts the solution which seems to us to make the most theological of all literatures a mere prelude to Positivism. Mr. Voysey, on the contrary, holds by his faith in God in the truest sense of the word, but seems to have no idea of the meaning to be attached to the word " Revelation," and challenges his adversaries after a fashion so eccentric, that it is impossible for them either to admit or to assail his positions. Take, for example, Mr. Voysey's remarks on the Bible :—
"My 'Lecture on the Bible' no one has ever answered or attempted to answer, though it has been published and circulated in England, America, and the Colonies for fifteen years. I have attacked the Bible on moral grounds, thus going to the root of the whole matter, and not wasting time in critical research about the dates and author- ship of its various books. But every one who knows me knows that some parts of the Bible are extremely precious to me, and are con- sidered by me as the despair of imitators for their beauty, their piety, and their truth. Why, then, do I not accept such portions as divine revelation and reject the rest ? Because the secret of their production rests and must for ever rest with God. No one, not the very saints who spoke them, can tell anything truly about inspiration, or how the divine can act upon the human mind. We reverently thank God for all good things, most of all for the power of seeing the truth and discerning it from falsehood ; but beyond that all is dark and un- known as to the process of enlightenment. If the Bible contain falsehoods or impious or immoral teaching of any kind or degree, it cannot be the writing or word of God. This the Bible does, and therefore I reject it as an authority. It would be absurd to call that our master which we deliberately sifted, and from which we ven- tured boldly to pick and choose what we accepted as true and what we denied."
We grieve to say that, in spite of the fifteen years during which Mr. Voysey's remarks on the Bible have been before the public,
the present writer has been absolutely ignorant of their existence, and for the simple reason that whenever he has read anything of Mr. Voysey's, he has found the mode in which Mr. Voysey approached religious questions almost as inappropriate to the attainment of theological truth as the mode (say) in which Mr.
Newdegate used to approach political questions was to the attainment of political truth, or the mode in which Mr. Henry George approaches economical questions is to the attainment of economical truth. What a confusion of ideas is involved in this short extract ! Mr. Voysey knows that the Bible contains not a single writer's thoughts, but a great literature ; that the distinctive note of that literature is its passion of belief that the mind and destiny of man is swayed from above by a Being of perfect holiness ; that this passion of belief is expressed in all sorts of ways by all sorts of minds, many of these mingling with the notes of divine passion very audible notes of human passion very far from divine ; and that not only none the less, but all the more vivid, for this great variety in the human keys on which the same great note is struck, becomes the consciousness of a steady divine guidance impressed upon the Hebrew literature. Hence it is just as irrelevant to the total effect of the teaching of this literature to say that it con- tains much which is irreligious, as it is irrelevant to the total effect of the impression made by a great commander on his troops to say that he did not turn them all into heroes.
Of course, the Hebrew literature contains a great deal to revolt and shock, or it would be, not the image of God's mind as reflected and refracted in this history of a carnal and ferocious race, but the image of God himself. The ques- tion is not whether the Bible does not contain a great deal of evidence that the Hebrew people were hard and fleshly and arrogant and obstinate, but whether it does not contain the most overpowering evidence that that hard and fleshly and arrogant and obstinate race was, in unnumbered instances, made pliant and spiritual and humble and obedient, by the moulding influence of that divine spirit in which all their greatest men felt such a passion of belief. No reasonable man nowadays looks upon the Bible as his " master." He looks upon the Bible as the freshest record of an influence which ought to master him much more completely than it mastered many of the antique Hebrew heroes. He looks upon it as the freshest record of the fact of divine influence and divine inspiration, partly because the minds influenced and inspired were so completely out of sympathy with the spiritual influence which overpowered and possessed them. But it is no more a reproach to the Bible that it contains ample evidence of the unpromising character of the material with which God dealt in training the Hebrew people for the very purpose of making them the instruments of revealing his purposes to the world at large, than it was a reproach to the great English translators of the Bible in the reign of James I. that their work contained ample evidence of the difficulties of the task which they accomplished so triumphantly. Why Mr. Voysey should regard the difficulty or impossibility of analysing inspira- tion as a reason against accepting the fact of inspiration, and of inspiration on a great scale, as moulding the whole destinies of a race, we cannot in the least understand. It is the fact, not the rationale of it, that is important.
Again, take the following passage from Mr. Voysey's paper :—
" He [Christ] could not have been God, because he was not a perfect man. True and genuine, in many things lovable and worthy of imitation, especially kind and friendly towards outcasts and sinners, nevertheless be was not perfect. He had faults which neither I nor my readers would venture to imitate without loss of self-respect or without incurring the blame of the good. He [Christ] was put to death owing to the claim he made—and which he would not repudiate at his trial—to be equal with God ; and this, in my opinion, if the gospels be true, proves that his mind gave way,
and he was not responsible for what he said. I utterly reject the position into which some Christian apologists would force me when they declare that if Jesus was not God, he was a base impostor and one of the vilest among men. I see no necessity for so shocking, so odious, an alternative. He was simply mistaken and finally insane. Bat I for one refuse to impute to him the smallest shade of insin- cerity or wilful falsehood, albeit I reject many of his sayings with abhorrence. He was an honest good man with manifest faults. His teaching contains lovely and imperishable truths, and ghastly, impious errors. He is the first known founder of a religion to make endless bell a prominent feature in his doctrine, and belief in himself and his own claims a condition of salvation. He was wanting in filial love and duty to his parents, in brotherly affection to his own family. He plainly taught men to love him
best. He that loveth father or mother more than me, is not worthy of me,' and many more words to that effect. He was abusive in his vituperation against certain individuals, calling them frightful names. Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell ?' His manners were not always suph as to be followed ; and he betrayed the weakness of much self-conceit, pro- mising rewards to his followers and threatening with perdition those who rejected him. If the New Testament, whioh records all this, be true, then Christ is neither a God to be worshipped, nor a teacher to be implicitly trusted, nor an example to be in all things followed. From first to last, and with only one exception, I reject the foregoing Christian dogmas on moral grounds alone."
In other words, Mr. Voysey finds fault with Christ for acting as if he were more than human, on the ground that he was not more than human ; while he shows that he was not more than human by proving that he was human, which he does in the following fashion :—
" I see that he was not a God while on earth, because he did not know that this earth is a sphere. He made mistakes in his quota- tions from the Old Testament, and he spoke with disrespect of part of the Decalogae, which (if he were God) he would have remembered writing on tables of stone on Mount Sinai. Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old time : Thou shalt not kill ; thou shalt not commit adultery.' Twice he so spake. I see that be was not a God, because he prayed to God ; and on the cross, overcome by the disappointment of his hopes and the failure of his effort to be the Messiah, he cried, 'My God, my God, why bast thou forsaken me !"
Does Mr. Voysey really mean that a misquotation of the Old Testament would affect the divine nature of Christ half so much as the statement, accepted fully by every Christian, that our Lord grew " in wisdom " in growing from childhood to youth? Whatever view be taken of Christ, it is simply certain that human limitations are to be assumed as surrounding his whole human life. Without them, grief and anguish and desolation would have been fictitious, and not real. Slips of human memory are no more proofs that Christ was not divine than grief and anguish and desolation. And where is the " disrespect to parts of the Decalogne " in announcing authori- tatively the deeper principle which underlay the Decalogne, and rebuking anger and lust as the roots of murder and adultery P It seems to us that Mr. Voysey assumes the absolute incompatibility of divine with human life
first, and then uses the very evidence which shows Christ's life to be more than human, to disprove its being in the highest sense humanly perfect. If Christ were more worthy of love than human fathers and human mothers, as he certainly was, where was the faultiness in saying so P If Mr. Voysey will not see the doable phenomenon to be accounted for, the extraordinary majesty of Christ, and his utter self-forgetfulness,..–his calm assumption of infinite authority, and his perfect gentleness when scorned by Romans and Jews alike as a mere malefactor,----his strange self-assertion in the very face of death, and his still stranger passion of pity on behalf of those who in rejecting him were consummating their own fate,—he does not see the problem to be solved, and, of course, cannot pretend to solve it. Caa a reasonable creature impute insanity to the man who, on his way to crucifixion, tells the daughters of Jerusalem not to weep for him, but to weep for themselves and for their children P Can he really attribute to mortified vanity or a " sense of failure " the quotation from the Psalmist which expressed so powerfully the utter desolation of the moment, though it was preceded by the calm promise of Paradise to a fellow-sufferer, and followed by the trustful recommendation of his own soul to God P Is there anything but crudeness in the conception of Christ's character as one marked by arrogance and self-decep- tion, when the arrogance is expressed by praying for those who had put all this insult upon him, " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," and the self-deception ends in a resurrection to which all his prophecies had pointed P Of course, if Mr. Voysey claims to deny all the facts that Christians accept, and then to argue as if they agreed with him in that denial, he can easily show us to be in error. But what confusion can be greater than the confusion of such an assumption ? We hold that Christ's authority, and the perfect sanity of his great though mild self-assertion, were justified by the event even more than by the manner and majesty with which they wore originally ear pressed. How is conceit consistent with that majestic indiffer- ence to human scorn ? How is insanity consistent with that com- plete and compassionate self-command, and that Orange sequel of verified prediction P—for even Mr. Voysey must admit that tbe belief of so many millions for so many centuries in the Resurrec- tion is a wonderful verification of Christ's expectation, even if he himself holds that belief to be ill-founded ? Mr. Voysey's view of the Bible and of the Redeemer is essentially crude. If hp disbelieved the miracles and resurrection chiefly on scientific grounds, we could understand him. But when he rejects them on such astonishingly confused moral grounds, and has to assume their falsehood before he can disrobe the character of Christ of its majesty, he seems to us to show that the problem is not one with which he should have grappled at all. If the moral image left by our Lord on his disciples is a misleading one, then the whole structure of the Gospels falls to pieces, and there is nothing left on which Mr. Voysey can safely found his criticism. If it is a true one, then it is, in our opinion, much easier tp believe the marvels in the framework of which it is set, thanip disbelieve them. But, take it which way you will, Mr. Voysey's paper is the crudest of modern criticisms.
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