BOOKS.
MR. CRAUFURD'S "ENIGMAS OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE."'
MR. CRAUFURD states in his preface that though all the shorter addresses in this book were delivered as sermons to a London
congregation, the longer ones were written entirely for this book, and were not in reality delivered as sermons at all, so that he hardly knew whether to describe the book as a volume of sermons or of essays. We think that the latter title better describes them, more especially as the texts usually serve rather as mottoes than as in any sense the authoritative expression of his teaching, and might, we think, in several cases have been omitted with advantage rather than disadvantage to the address. They are very thoughtful, and often very wise essays, with here and there a passage that reads to us strained, and verging on what in a less earnest and real- minded thinker we should have called stilted metaphor, though it is impossible to apply such a phrase to the author of the great majority of these addresses. We refer in this criticism on his style to such a passage as that on p. 73, where Mr. Craufurd, referring to St. Paul's description of Christianity as a gospel which uses the weak things of this world to confound the mighty, goes on to say :—" Though all others should forsake Jesus and flee, one aged, hoary priestess, the marred form of the
eternal pathos of the universe, would still kneel on with resolute fidelity at the feet of the Crucified ; for this mater dolorosa with
her sword-pierced heart, has no other refuge in all the wide realms of the illimitable creation." Surely that does not express with anything like simplicity what Mr. Craufurd wished to say. Nor does it, in our opinion, add to the force of another remark of his, namely, that the noblest examples of spiritual power are to be found amongst the most fear- ful moral wrecks of humanity, to expound his meaning thus :— "Here amidst the most frightful precipices and yawning chasms of the moral world, are faintly discerned the dim out- lines of the mighty Himalayas of a Godlike holiness, radiant with the celestial purity of those snow-white peaks, alike un- trodden and unstained by men." But though Mr. Craufurd is too fond of metaphor, we should give a very false impression of his addresses if we intimated that passages as flowery as these are characteristic of them, or, indeed, very common. Still, we wish that they had been absent altogether, as they will give occasion to the enemy to represent his volume as ambitious. And ambitious, on the whole, these addresses certainly are not. In some cases they may be said even to understate the great truths which Mr. Craufurd aims at teaching. For example, in the sermon on "The Limits of Religious Know- ledge," Mr. Craufurd seems to us to understate rather than to overstate the total effect of our knowledge of God, though he says almost as much as he could say in the first part of the following sentence :—" The Christian doctrine of the incarnation seems to me both a revelation of that part of God's nature which it most concerns us to know, and an implicit denial that we can know God in the dread depths of His infinite being." We do not follow the last part of this sentence, because we cannot conceive how the assertion that "the Word was with God, and the Word was God," and that "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt amongst us full of grace and truth," can be regarded as an implicit denial that we can know God "in the dread depths of his infinite being ;" nor, indeed, does it need any denial to tell us that human nature cannot comprehend powers and purposes altogether beyond its own limits, even though God could imprint "the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person" upon a human nature created for the purpose. Mr. Craufurd gives us the following account
of what be calls the " reasonable " agnosticism of which he is the preacher :— "The cause of a wise, devout, and Christian agnosticism has suffered immensely from the strange and repulsive writings of the late Dean Mansel on this subject. His views were founded on a mutilated fragment of truth. He heard God saying, My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways any ways ;' but he did not hear what immediately follows : 'For as the heavens are higher than the earth, Bo are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.' God is plainly superhuman ; whereas, for aught that Manselism could say, he might be infre.httman. Mill's attack on Mauna's teaching has never been answered. There can be no doubt that to logical and daring minds Manses famous Bampton Lectures must appear to be a kind of introduction to Atheism. If • Enigmas of the Spiritual We. By the Rev. Alexander H. Craufurd, LA. Loudon : DaTid Stott, God's goodness is totally different from ours, it inevitably follows that we can have no true idea at all concerning the Creator's nature. And so it would be just as pious to say that He is what we call cruel, as to say that He is what we call merciful. And with regard to the mind:or intellect of God, it would be just as reasonable to say that it is impersonal as to say that it is personal. Mansel's position is fairly open to the attacks of Mr. Matthew Arnold. The Dean, however, was constrained by his Christianity to abate somewhat of the rigour of his logic, and to concede, contrary to his own fundamental principles, that the noblest moral qualities in man have some very faint resemblance to the divine attributes. Otherwise, the imitation of Christ as a divine being, or the imitation of the Father himself, would be meaningless and impossible; and so practical Christianity would be destroyed at its very roots. Consequently, Mill presses home this concession of Maned's, and asks whether the likeness between the noblest qualities in man and the corresponding qualities in God is a likeness in essence, or not. If the Dean conceded that the likeness was in essence, then his whole elaborate theory would fall to the ground. On the other hand, if he maintained that the likeness was not in essence, it would follow that it was not a real and important likeness at all; and practical religion, seeking conformity to the divine image, would be as baseless as ever. Surely the right view on this subject is that we do know, as it were, the direction in which some of the divine attributes lie, that we have good grounds for believing that God's goodness is in its essence akin to ours. So far we are not Agnostics. But then we also believe that God is a great deal more than we can conceive—personal and some- thing more, holy in our human sense, and also something more. And it is with regard to this something more, this vast hidden abyss of the divine nature, that we are reasonably Agnostic. We do not believe that our human virtues are copies in miniature of the divine perfections. In the language of the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, we might express our meaning by saying that the grandest btunan qualities have a shadow' of divine glories, and not the very image of the things.' They are only a sort of remote and inadequate incarnation of God. Of them we cannot say what was said of Christ, that they are 'the brightness of God's glory, and the express image of his person.'"
In other words, we suppose, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews made a mistake when he used these words to describe the relation of Christ to God. Yet Mr. Crauford's own position appears to be identical, except that, if we understand him rightly, he maintains that those aspects of God's nature to which we have no key at all, may be more essential, more properly characteristic of him, than even those moral aspects of him to which we have a real clue in the moral nature which he has revealed to us. But surely even this is not in any sense agnosticism in the proper meaning of the term. Agnosticism, of course, originally meant, in the month of Professor Huxley, who first coined the phrase, a devout guess of the same kind which the devout Athenians had conceived when they erected an altar to some God outside the circle of divinities with defined attributes,—some God whose essence could not even be conjectured, though it could be con- jectured that such a God existed. The agnostics have chosen their own title for this very reason. They profess not to know whether God is in any sense akin to humanity at all, whether he is in our sense a God of will, a God of reason, a God of justice, a God of holiness, a God who punishes sin, a God who rewards virtue, a God who has imprinted on our hearts his own moral attributes. Now, on all these points Mr. Cranford takes the Christian view, and utterly disowns the agnostic view. Can it, then, be anything but misleading to call himself even " reasonably" agnostic, only because be regards it as probable that there are infinite regions in the divine nature beyond the reach of our apprehension, and that amongst these may be the most essential of God's characteristics ? Grant it ; but as they are altogether beyond our apprehension, they are not the most characteristic to us. Mr. Craufurd likens our relation to God to that which exists between the dog and the man. Well, a dog knows of the man that there can be love between them, that the man leads where he is to follow, that the man lays down laws which the dog is to obey, that the man trains him to all sorts of duties and occupations which make him (the dog) conscious of greater dignity and importance, and that he finds his happiness in discharging these duties and pursuing these occupations. But would the dog be an agnostic dog, even a " reasonably " agnostic dog, if, admitting all this, he declined to say that he knew what his master was like, because he had discovered that he was a reader of books, and a student of science and language, subjects in which he had no interest, or a painter of pictures in which he saw no beauty, or a maker of money which was to him worth. less, though to the man it seemed of great worth ? We should call such a dog very unreasonably agnostic. He would be de- claring that he did not know what man is in regions in which he could not possibly know what man is, whereas the only sense of the phrase "agnostic" (to a dog supposed capable of using it) would be that he did not know what man is in provinces
in which he is capable of knowing it. Assuredly the term "agnostic," as originally used, conveyed that by agnostics God is not understood to be endowed with human reason or anything that comprises and includes human reason ; is not understood to be just, or holy, or pure in any sense in which man could come nearer to him by being himself just, or holy, or pure ; is not understood to be capable of love in any sense in which man is capable of love. Now, as Mr. Craufurd affirms all these propositions which the agnostic denies, and only adds that beyond the whole region in which we are capable of judging at all, there probably are divine qualities, some of which may be more important than any of those of which we can judge, he is no more an agnostic than an astronomer who sweeps the horizon with his telescope is a know-nothing of that which lies within that field, because he candidly confesses that he knows nothing of that which lies beyond that field. An agnostic means one who declines to affirm that there is anything essential in God knowable by man in his present state. No theist and no Christian—(and, with great respect to Mr. Craufurd, we would add, least of all the Athanasians whom he reviles, but who, far from pretending to know all about God, carefully define the Father as incomprehensible, the Son as incomprehensible, and the Holy Ghost as incomprehensible, and only even attempt to explain what it is not competent for a believer in the eternal Son and his human nature to think, instead of saying what the divine infinitude really means)—ever dreamt of saying that there are not infinite worlds in God which are unknowable by man.
So, again, with relation to Mr. Cranford's two addresses on the freedom of the human will, we should say that he somewhat falls short of the truth, instead of erring in any way in the direction of an " ambitious " statement of it. To all he says in limitation of the freedom of the human will we assent heartily, excepting, indeed, these two propositions, neither of which is, we believe, true,—first, that "if our actions are not the result of our character, they are therefore meaningless and destitute of all value" (p. 175); and the other, that "we are conscious of being able in some measure to direct force, but not to originate it" (p. 176). But even in these two instances, Mr. Craufurd, we suspect, has expressed himself incautiously, for he says further on what seems to us much more accurate, and yet quite inconsistent first with the one and then with the other. For he says (p. 179),—" I believe that we can gradually alter our characters to some extent." Now,what does that mean? It surely cannot mean that we can only alter our characters in the direc- tion in which our character, as it was before the alteration, determined us to alter it. If so, we do not really alter it at all; for every change in the character as it is, is the mere outcome of the character as it was. What the doctrine of free-will asserts is, that over and above the character, in the sense of the organised feelings, and dispositions, and motives, and tendencies generally of the mind, stands the will ; and that this will has the power at any moment to modify the character as it was, by its own self-caused effort, and to make it become something which before it was not. And so far as we understand Mr. Cranford, to this doctrine he assents in the last passage we quoted from him, though he denies it in the first. And, again, as to the absolute incapacity of the will to originate force, he seems to us to contra- dict himself when he says, a page further on, in the very phrase which the late Dr. Ward first used, and which has since been so often quoted by free-willists from his pages :—" We are per- fectly conscious of anti-impulsive efforts in our own souls. When our impulses by their collective weight threaten, as it were, to over- turn the ship in one direction, we are often perfectly conscious of throwing the weight of our will in the other direction." Well, is not that doing more than directing force, is it not originating force, is it not neutralising force which we did not originate, by force which we did originate P So that, though we think that in two particular sentences Mr. Cranford has understated, and dangerously understated, the true doctrine of limited free-will, we hold that he has corrected himself in two other sentences which seem to us quite inconsistent with the former.
We may say this of Mr. Craufurd's addresses, that while they are now and then overweighted with metaphor and ambitious in style, their teaching is always sober, and seems to us, when- ever we happen to differ from it, not too high-flown, but to fall rather short of the significance of the Christian teaching at which he aims. His intellectual caution and lucidity of thought are always remarkable, though his rhetoric is sometimes too ornate.
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