THE SCOTCH FREE-CHURCH DILEMMA.
THE Free Churchmen of Scotland are more likely, after all, to be converted by Professor Robertson Smith, than they are to convert him. It is quite true that, on the motion of Sir Henry Moncrieff, they have just condemned his view of the Book of Deuteronomy by a majority of twenty-three, in a General Assembly consisting of 579 members. They have declared, not, indeed, that every word of Deuteronomy was written by Moses,—including the account of his own death,—but that the book must be held to be pure and absolutely accurate history ; that all in it which is not attributed to Moses must have been written by Joshua, or some other inspired person who immediately succeeded him ; that the book is, in fact, a body of infallible contemporary evidence, and that any scholar strikes at the root of inspiration who treats Deuteronomy as a second and revised edition, as it were, of the Mosaic Lttw, codified at a period later than that of the first Sinaitic legislation, and adapted to a later stage of the Hebrew people's history. This is what the General Assembly has ruled, and what bids fair, if it is not retracted, to rule Professor Robertson Smith out of the Free Church, and, moreover, a very large body of the best students of divinity whom it contains,with him. But in the meantime, the debates of the Assembly will be carefully read and discussed in thousands of homes ; it will be seen in what difficulties Sir Henry Moncrieff and the rigid party have involved their Church,—how great is the danger of their alienating the very men who are most likely and most able to dispel the many fundamental doubts in the minds of inquirers, and narrowing their Church's foundation till none but ignorant or insincere men can stay in it. And when the Free Church realise this, we trust they will make their peace with the spirit of devout learning and Professor Robertson Smith, even at the risk of sorely perplexing the minds of divines as antiquated as Dr. Begg or Sir Henry Moncrieff.
The truth is that the difficulty against which the Free Church have just stumbled, is one which has arisen before thinking minds century after century, in a hundred different forms, whenever thought has been directed to the conditions involved in the declara- tion of anything like absolute divine truth to a race of beings of no great, though slowly-improving, capacity for understanding it. It would take a changeless and infinite being to apprehend once and for all time the revelation of a changeless and in- finite being's nature. If there is to be no change in the things revealed, there can be no liability to change in the creature to whom they are revealed. If, on the other hand, the creature to be taught is changing, then the thing taught to him must change too. The revelation which brings simple and barbarous races nearer to God, cannot be absolutely the same as that which brings learned and polished nations nearer to God, any more than the rules of conduct which you teach to a child can be the same with the rules of conduct which you teach to a man. But let this once be admitted, and it will follow that time and circumstance are of the essence of revelation, and that what it was fit to reveal to the Jews when they had just left Egypt, was not likely to be what it would have been fit to reveal to them after centuries of discipline in the spirit of the earlier teaching. Even Sir Henry Moncrieff, with all his vigorous efforts to maintain the absolute infallibility of everything in the Bible, is forced to admit that some of the laws laid down were not meant to be always and everywhere observed, even though no exceptions were made to them at the time they were so laid down. But admitting this, he himself introduces in a milder form the very principle of adapta- tion which shocks him so much in its more reasonable form, when enunciated by Professor Robertson Smith. You must not, he says, interpret the law in Deuteronomy "so rigidly" as to make it inconsistent with the law in Exodus. But if you are not to interpret it rigidly, _where is its infallibility ? Every one may qualify it as seems to him most natural and con- sistent with historical conditions. All that the very learned and very orthodox and very straightforward divine who is accused of heresy has ever maintained is this,—that Deutero- nomy is not to be rigidly interpreted as meaning that Moses said in so many words in the old time that which bears the strongest possible evidence of being a new form of the Mosaic Law, after it had been reconsidered and recast for a much later genera- tion than that to which Moses delivered the old Sinaitic Law. He holds that the Deuteronomist was as much inspired as Moses himself ; that what he undertook to do was to adapt the old Mosaic Law to new conditions ; that he did this under divine teaching; and that he was quite within the custom of the age in which he lived in representing this, by a natural figure of speech, as Moses's supplementary teaching to Israel "beside the covenant," as the Deuteronomist says in the first verse of the twenty-ninth chapter, which God "made with them in Horeb." For our own parts, we go far beyond Pro- fessor Robertson Smith, having no belief at all in inspired writing, as distinguished from inspired persons. We should hold that while the Jews were taught by a great succession of inspired persons, the conditions under which their personal inspiration was embodied in their writings, were evidently quite as various,— now more, now less successful in achieving an adequate embodi- ment in the letter of Scripture,—as are the conditions under which conscience, which is the voice of God in man, embodies itself in human action. it seems to us idle to suppose that very different accounts of the same history, —as the books of Kings and Chronicles,—and very different and very irregular accounts of the same legislation—as the accounts in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy,—should all be strictly inspired in this very awkward and complicated form, when it is clear that for the purposes of an infallible history, a regular, easily written, not self-repeating, but onward-flowing chain of events would have been so very much more serviceable. If there is one thing clearer to us than another, it is that the events of which Scripture give us the record were not very minutely recorded ; that they were recorded so differently by different writers as to make it sometimes very difficult to say what really happened ;—that one account of them is often greatly to be preferred to another account ; and that not one of the recorders, from one end of the record to the other, betrays the least vestige of an impression that he is under infallible guidance in what he narrates. But this is only our own view. Professor Robertson Smith is a hundred times more orthodox, and takes a very differ- ent view. Ile makes the least possible allowance which it is possible to make, consistently with perfect candour and real learning, for the variable human conditions under which the various books in the Bible were written. He thinks them all inspired," in all their parts, and so inspired as to be a sure rule of faith and life." We confess we do not understand how the orthodoxy of a learned man can go further. True, Professor Robertson Smith does not think that Moses wrote both the earlier and the later Code ;- that he legislated both for the Israelites in the Wilderness, and for the Israelites under the changed conditions of the later Monarchy. But then, how can a reasonable and learned man think anything of the kind? What is the use of learn- ing, if it is never to be trusted ? If l'rofessor Robertson Smith is expected to study Deuteronomy minutely, and then believe just what he would have believed if he had not studied it at all, it is not of much use encouraging him to give his great abilities to the study. And the truth is, as we have shown before, that Sir Ilenry Moncrieff himself differs only from Professor Robertson Smith in degree. Ile, too, has his little expedient for reconciling statements which would otherwise be contradictory, and his little expedient is this,—to conceive that the infallible historian was writing on the assumption that the people would interpret him by other lights than that which he himself at the time chose to give ; that they would assume, for instance, that what he said in one place could not be inconsistent with what another inspired writer had said in another place, and so that some intermediate meaning would be assumed which could be reconciled with either. Well, all we can say is, that if that be so, that is not in any sense an infallible record,—that all the difficulties of fallible records are introduced at once. Directly you band it over to the human reason to con- sider how best to reconcile two verbally different statements, you make the upshot of the divine teaching dependent on human ingenuity and surmise. Hence the whole question between Sir Henry Moncrieff and Professor Robertson Smith is not one between a real infallibiliat and a theorist about Scripture. On the contrary, they are both theorists. The only difference is this,— Sir Henry Moncrieff says that the best way of solving the problem of the discrepancies between different parts of the Pentateuch is to take the writer of one part as writing what he means to be qualified by the statements of a writer of another part, but how qualified every man is to judge for himself ; while Pro- fessor Robertson Smith says that the correct way to account for at least one set of these discrepancies is to assume that the later book was written in a considerably later age,—deliberately adapted to the wants of that age,—and put into the mouth of Moses only as the latest editor of " Blackstone's Cofnmentaries " would still keep for his book the name of Blackstone, though giving some laws of which Blackstone had never heard, and omitting some on which Blackstone laid great stress. It seems to us that both these views are simply hypotheses to account for the facts,—both of them admissions, and very explicit admissions, that a written record cannot really be infallible to us unless you have an infallible in- terpreter; and that Professor Robertson Smith's hypothesis does at least go nearer to accounting for the facts of the Book of Deuteronomy than Sir Henry Moncrieff's, though not perhaps very near.
One thing, however, is clear. If Professor Robertson Smith is driven from the Free Church, it is ten chances to one that his successor will do less to remove scepticism than he does. He is, in a very high degree, learned, straightforward, and orthodox. He opens his eyes to the facts. If he is to be supplanted, the man who supplants him will find it much the most convenient course to shut his eyes to the facts. If, when any such teacher sees the facts, he is not permitted to accept any hypothesis which is really consistent with them, it will be much better be should not see them. But if he shuts his eyes to the facts, he will be quite unable to help sincere students who are not willing to do likewise. In expelling Professor Robertson Smith, the Free Church will do all that is in their power to expel learning which is at once profound and loyal to the Church to which it has hitherto been dedicated.
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