MR. MARTINEAU ON THE CRISIS OF FAITH.
STIHE new series of the National Review begins very powerfully, nor has the confession of individual authorship, now intro- duced for the first time, apparently caused any diminution in the general unity of aim. Perhaps the title of the Review needs a rather broad interpretation to adapt it to its latest phase. It is pecu- liarly National only so far as it is certainly a national duty to open the eyes of the nation to its own deficiencies, and to the value of that Continental culture which it is too apt to despise. This num- ber at least is "nothing if not critical," and its ablest criticism is directed against the narrowness of our national views. Mr. Matthew Arnold preaches once more with his usual emphasis and felicity of scorn the need of criticism—sharp criticism—of the narrow indi- vidualism of English taste. Mr. Walter Bagehot, in an article which exhibits the negligent power of his lucid exposition at its highest point of subtlety and force, surprises us with a theory that the duty of the poet is to exhibit types of character and life in their simplest and most effective form, and having prepared himself with this formidable critical weapon, uses it to lower the estimate of Tennyson's " ornate " art, and to hold up the frankly admitted but " grotesque " power of Browning to something like the loathing of intellectual men, as a species of poetry which only half-taught, self-educated persons could be excused for admir- ing. Mr. W. R. Greg has made no ineffectual effort to show us the inherent deficiencies of our constitutional statesmen. An able writer, who does not give his name, in a review of the life of Madame De Sevigne has compared English with French women considerably to the mental advantage of the latter. Mr. J. J. Tayler and Mr. Martineau, in two remarkable theological essays, the former showing wide and thoughtful critical scholarship, the latter great force of conception and unequalled strength of statement, on which we have much to say, have called the German critics and theologians to deliver their evidence that the domestic manufac- ture of Biblical criticism is utterly unworthy to compete with the ripest judgments of foreign learning ; and perhaps the only article in this new number of the National Review which is not mainly concerned in taking active measures to reduce the self- esteem of English national feeling, is the interesting criticism on the Russian version of the Crimean war, which misses an oppor- tunity of comparing our army with the French or Russian to the disadvantage of our own.
However, we are by no means sure that any more press- ing national duty can be discharged than thus to confront our deep English self-satisfaction with the learning of more profound scholars and the culture of a less eccentric taste. Only in assuming this calm and impartial attitude, Criticism may be in danger of rearing, or fancying that she rears, her head not only above prejudices of which we ought to be deprived, but above faiths which are not indeed beyond the reach of judicial reason—that no faith can be—but above in- stead of beneath the level of the critic's mind. There is a scepticism which arises simply out of assuming a mistaken ele- vation for the critic's point of view,—from taking for granted that the whole " case" for belief or disbelief lies within the grasp of the reason, instead of being a chain of points of confluence for diver- gent testimonies which branch and radiate far beyond the grasp of any single act of survey however wide, into a whole world of thought above our heads. The theological writers in the National Review, enlightened, learned, and powerful as they are, seem to us to apply the criticism of the mere understanding, which is applicable to all questions of external evidence and historical analysis, to test principles and faiths which lie as much above the grasp of mere understanding as the existence and personality of God. If the child is to form any notion of its parent it must in some sense criticize, but if it is to form a true notion it must criti- cize from below, not from above,—it must be satisfied to recognize much that it cannot fathom or measure, to accept personal im- preesions of truth vividly made without being able to justify them intellectually,—it must be content to demand no further demon.
stration of many communicated truths than the fact that they
pro-
vide the key to much childish experience that would otherwise be inexplicable, and that they come home with some force to its mind. To assume that a superior being should be limited to the intellectual avenues of reaching an inferior, is to assume that by far the most numerous and powerful influences of one life over another should be surrendered altogether in the very case where they are most needed.
Mr. Martineau is probably the greatest abstract thinker in Eng- land. The strength of his grasp over metaphysical and psycholo- gical problems is beyond comparison greater than that of any recent writer, the late Sir William Hamilton not excepted ; and no man marshals his thoughts and his knowledge with so much strategic skill. But he seems to us to have made up his mind that he can- not learn from the Scriptures,—almost that the Scriptures shall not teach him—anything whatever which he would not equally believe if they had never existed ; and he cross-examines them with more of the manner of an experienced barrister determined to explode their evidence where it in any way passes the limits of that of his own witnesses—philosophy and religious sentiment—than of a student anxious to elicit from the supernatural experience of a nation which through centuries produced a succession of the most sublime prophetic teachers, the truths to which this unique ex- perience may have led them, and which we, but for their aid, should miss, even though we have deep in our own hearts the wants to which they supply the answer.
Mr. Martineau would, we imagine, agree with us that there is no real line of separation between natural and revealed religion except the difference between the mere result of shrewd intellectual infer- ence, such as we have in the "argument from design," and the direct result of personal communion. He would no doubt (as we should) call the personal guidance of which Socrates had so deep a con- sciousness, a fact of revealed religion, though the revelation, com- ing without the same preparation of centuries as that by which the Jewish prophets were educated, was necessarily less clear and keen. But Mr. Martineau avails himself much more of this prin- ciple to challenge the inspirations of the higher revelation than to exalt those of the lower. Instead of recognizing, as we should, that the special gift of God to the Jews was the force and delicacy of their impressions of spiritual personality, the vividness with which they felt the movements of the invisible Will in their con- science where other nations would have detected only blind im- pulses,—instead of assigning therefore a higher and higher value to their strictly theological teachings, as the great stream of prophecy broadened and widened down to the time of our Lord, Mr. Martineau uses the uncertainty and ambiguity of ordinary spiritual instincts in general to throw discredit on all those which took shape during the later Jewish history in the form of distinct Messianic yearnings, and which at length reached their full significance iu the theology of St. Paul and of St. John. We need not say that we heartily agree with him,—for, in these columns we have maintained it at the expense of no little obloquy,—that the literature in which the Jewish communion with God is recorded, is subject to the ordinary conditions of human literature, that is, to such general disturbing influences of error and passion as affect all literature, and also, like every other literature, to special disturbing influences of its own, and that only by anxiously allowing for the effect of such refracting media can we make it as truly revealing as God intends it to be. But Mr. Martineau seems to us to use these disturbing influences almost with triumph to prove that God could not reveal any- thing to us through the Jewish inspiration which He had not given us the power of amply verifying in other ways. If you admit freely to him that the "highest religious light is not free from the shadows of humanity," he works the admission with so much effect that one wonders what has become of the light. We do not see, for instance, why almost all the masterly but one- sided argument by which he attempts to break down the credibility of any inspiration which should assert the Incarnation, might not be turned with equal effect, by one who did not accept Mr. Alartineau's spiritual philosophy, to show that the Jewish prophets, Christ, and His apostles, give no evidence worthy of a moment's consideration to the existence of God. Probably Mr. Mar- tineau would at once admit this, and say that the higher inspiration only teaches us as it does, by bringing up into conscious thought, and interpreting, the true meaning of the lower inspiration which we all receive. And this is no doubt true ; but it is none the less true that but for the influence of Jewish history and teaching on the world the religions problem would probably be for all of us pre- cisely as unsolved as it was for Aristotle or Cicero. But if Mr. Slartineau admits that in spite of the unscientific errors of the Jewish intellect and the dark vindictive passions of the Jewish heart, Jewish inspiration has been amply sufficient to explain and purify our own glimpses of the fundamental fact of God's personality, we certainly are wholly, unable to understand why the same may not be said of that great truth which so long brooded dimly in the mind of the Jews, and gave rise to so many grand but enigmatic prophecies concerning a Being uniting God with Man, who was des-
, tined to !OM in himself the ideal of human righteousness and purify • it thenceforth. "Such a fact as the Incarnation," says Mr. Marti- neau "namely, that a seeming man, born, suffering, dying, was really,
• Infinite God, incapable of birth, suffering, death, could never be assured to us but by those who are admitted behind the scene of the finite world. Mere witnesses, few or many, are useless here ; they can tell us only what they have seen and heard ; and this is a thing neither visible, nor audible, and traceable by no characteristic and exclusive signs. Unlese therefore those who affirm it can make good a claim to know what humanly is unknowable, the doctrine must be left to its place among the historical developments of religious faith." Let us read in place of this :—" Such a fact as the personal existence of God could never be assured to us but by those who are admitted behind the scene of the finite world. Mere witnesses, few or many, are useless here ; they can tell us only what they have seen and heard ; and this is a thing neither visible nor audible, and traceable by no characteristic and exclusive signs. Unless therefore those who affirm it can make good a claim to know what humanly is unknowable, tile doctrine must be left to its place among the historical developments of the reverential sentiment,"—and we do not see how the force of the argument, if it has any at all, would be affected, though no one would dispose of it with more ease than Mr, Martineau. Of course no one supposes that the witnesses of Christ's external life, merely as such, can give any testimony as to hie divine nature. Our Lord himself denied the possibility of such testimony ; when Peter confessed his belief "Thou art Christ the Son of the living God," He replied "Flesh and blood have not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which is in Hea- ven." St Paul speaks in precisely the same manner of God having revealed His son in him, nor can we understand how any revelation at all of divine personality is possible, if it is not equally possible for the Father or the Son. That all revelation implies "admission behind the scene of the finite world" is, we should have supposed, a truism rather than a truth. But whatever doubt there may be as to the composition of the Gospels, there is -eertainly none as to the direct and constantly repeated evidence of St. Paul in the Epistles that he had been admitted "behind the scene of the finite world," to communion with the Son of God through whom all things were made.
The only true question for a Theist is of course not "can God disclose to us what He will of His own personal life," but has He done so? There is no more intrinsic difficulty in His communi- cating to meh, "This is my beloved Son, whom I have sent into the world to save it," than "I am that I am ;" and to many minds, certainly to ours, the former communication is the natural supple- ment of the latter. Mr. Martineau heaps deserved censure on M. Guizot for not admitting that there is visible and rapid " develop- ment " in the prophetic teaching concerning God in the Old Testainent,—but he makes that very development a ground of scepticism directly he arrives at the New. He points out that the first thoughts of the disciples of Christ were vague, doubtful, hesitating, concerning His true nature. Of course they were. The words, "What manner of man is this that even the winds and the seas obey him ?" are surely not dogmatic words. Mr. Martineau distinguishes on a very slender basis (chiefly derived from a hypo- thetical use of the Gospel to the Hebrews) three distinct dog- matic stages in the speculation concerning Christ's person ; the first dating His divine nature only from His baptism, the second from His birth, the third from His eternal life. The truth we take to be, that the stages were not dogmatic at all, but that a varying belief concerning Him did grow gradually into a divine certainty,--oonnecting His personality on the one side with those gleams of prophetic thought concerning a personal Wisdom, or Logos, or Son of God, which answered in the Jewish theology to the theosophy of Babylon and the later " processsions or ..Eons" of both Syrian and Egyptian Gnostics, and on the other side with that conception of One meek and lowly, and made perfect through suffering, which so strangely mingled with the grander Messianic) hopes of the prophets. But why Mr. Martineau, who believes so deeply that God enlarged and purified the concep- tions of the Father's personality from age to age, should declare the impossibility of His doing the same for that of the Son, and regard "development" as a sign of invention in the latter case, of discovery in the former, we confess ourselves unable to see. His treatment of
critical difficulties is almost equally arbitrary. If the divine nature of Christ is dated from the supernatural birth, he pushesit aside as indi- cating the second stage of a fluctuating opinion as to our Lord's nature; but where the miraculous birth is wholly ignored, and the ministry of Christ is recorded only from His baptism,—according to Mr. Martineau a note of comparative antiquity, —as in the fourth Gospel, its evidence is rejected altogether, because the teaching as to Christ's nature is higher still.
For ourselves, we cannot see how any one who has taken the great step of believing in God,—not, that is, in a mechanical intel- ligence contriving the world, but in a spiritual and personal Father, should see more than that kind of strain on revelation which really strengthens it, in the teaching as to the Son. Personality is not personality in the Christian sense at all without divine love ; and eternal divine love implies an eternal divine communion and object of love. All Unitarian systems of thought tend to settle back gradually into Pantheism or Deism, and not only on this account,—but also because their teachers have a constantly increasing difficulty in distinguishing divine revelation from human aspiration. Those who can believe that the Son of God actually passed from the invisible world into ours know the mean- ing of revealing power; the Unitarian may feel the power even more deeply, but he questions and refines as to its origin till he scarcely knows his own belief. Mr. Martineau has done more than almost any living thinker to diffuse a realistic philosophy amongst us, but his realism fails him when he comes to the verge of history. He can almost believe in the invisible divine and self-existent "Ideas" of Plato, but he cannot believe in One who renounced the invisible world for that of time and history. And yet the solution of the question, whether man or God originated the life of self-sacrifice for others, is perhaps the true "crisis of faith." We can enter heartily into all the many perplexities which affect the authenticity of the sacred literature, but we can scarcely conceive literary difficulties which would so dim the splendour of St. Paul's faith concerning Him "who, being in the form of God, made Him- self of no reputation, and took upon Him the form of a servant" as to make it seem rather a human invention than a divine truth.
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