BOOKS.

MISS COBBE'S THEOLOGY.*

Miss COWIE is a fair, graphic, and vigorous critic, and writes, though this is by no means peculiar to her, very touch better when she is criticizing others than when she is constructing for herself. The early part of this book, in which she reviews suc- cessively the positions taken up by High Church, Low Church, and the two schools of Broad Church,—though in dividing the latter she makes some errors front defective knowledge,—is as masculine and yet sincerely reverent a piece of sceptical criticism (sceptical we mean as regards revelation, Miss Cobbe's doubts go no further) as we have read for years. Though keenly criticizing

the theological principles we have stood by in these columns, we find what she writes profitable reading, for it is the writing of one who honestly strives to see the truth and not merely to find an answer to others. We cannot say that the conclusion of her book seems to us equally useful. It is full of that vague metaphysical religion which always gives us the sense, however little writers of this school may intend it, that God is "evolved," to use a favourite word of Miss Cobbe's, out of the human mind, that He owes his existence to good men's feelings, instead of good men's feelings owing their existence to Him. We know Miss Cobbe does not mean this, and we are not going to be guilty of the injustice of writing as if she did; but in return for a criticism on our own faith in Christ, which we confess,—while strengthening that faith, as all clear and honest thought, whether in sympathy or antagonism to it, ought to do,—has been of use to us, let us attempt to point out to her what it is in her own theology which so often leaves the impression that God is, after all, as Jean Paul Richter once expressed it (very unjustly, we imagine, to his own faith) only an infinite " sigh of the human heart" after the diviner world.

Miss Cobbe observes (p. 153) "for the theology which the human consciousness will evolve when freed from the trammels, and only aided by the suffrage, of history, we believe it will be a theology; avowedly seeking to harmonize and unite the claims of all the functions of our nature, of the Intellect and the Religious Sentiment, of the Head and the Heart." (May we observe, parenthetically, that it is characteristic of this school of theology always to print the abstract metaphysical and religious terms with capital letters, as if they were themselves gods ? the symptom is a trivial one, but that of which it is the symptom is one of the great characteristics of the school. Miss Cobbe, for instance,

does not, of course, believe, but she often seems to us to think under the delusive hypothesis, that Religious Sentiment is a kind of mediator between man and God, not the feeling which God inspires in us, but which exists as a distinct power in the human mind, and propels us by its own force towards something unde- fined and undiscovered of the religious kind, which may turn out

to be not sanctioned either by the Head or by the Intellect.) Now what strikes us in this language, and in all Miss Cobbe's language in the constructive part of her book, is, that according to her mode of thought, the whole process of human religion begins with man, while God does nothing but accept our aspira-

tions; that, theology to her mind consists in the metaphysical analysis of the efforts by which, to use the language of the Poet Laureate,

"We lift lame hands of faith and grope,

And gather dust and chaff, and call To what we feel is Lord of all,

And faintly trust the larger hope."

Thus, again, "the faith of the future will not leave men to their pre- sent task of seeking to form an idea of God, accommodating as best they may their sense of righteousness with presentations of His character and dealings contained in sacred books and schemes of salvation. It will bid them descend into their own hearts, and find there the ideal of Holiness and Love." In other words, while Miss Cobbe's imagination puts scarcely any limit at all on man's power of finding out God by analysis, there is scarcely any room in her imagination for any power by which God could find out man. Profound theist as she is, she declares the most trivial obstacles almost insuperable in the way of anything that can be called revelation. History, for example, she regards as a barrier God cannot pass; through history divine power itself is • Broken Lights. An Inquiry into the present Condition and future Prospects of Religious Faith. By Frances Power Cobbs. London: Trubner. helpless to aid us, for history must refract by its human condi- tions of error and uncertainty, and the law which determines how much the refraction may be is unknown to us. Nobody, then, so Miss Cobbe evidently thinks, can learn anything of God at all that he ought to rely oust secondhand, for facts cease to be facts to us when their evidence becomes uncertain, and you must not give the atheist the enormous advantage of having historical evidence to analyze away. Her object is to reduce religious truth to the lowest terms and least mysterious form, partly in order not to give any needless purchase (to use a mechanical expression) to the enemies of all religious truth,—partly because though she admits, we suppose, in the abstract, that "as the Heavens are higher than the Eel th so are Thy ways higher than our ways, and Thy though:s than our thoughts," she yet assumes that, in practice,—those divine ways and thoughts not approaching us, but lying infinitely above us,—the only clue to conceiving them at all is indefinitely to magnify the best we can discover of our own; and she conceives that any revelation which professes not to be natural at all, but supernatural, is in fact only a distortion of nature, that is, preternatural.

Now, as to Miss Cobbe's first, assumption (evidently a very deeply considered one with her),—that you must incumber your- self with as little " disputable " evidence as possible if you want to make the world religious, let us only say this, that it is an artificial argument addressed to proselytizers, and that it leads a great deal too far. Of course no man should urge in de- fence of a religious truth anything he believes to be unsound, or he is self-convicted of a Jesuitical postponement of truth to piety. But beyond this the principle is worth nothing. If all who believe in God are to disincumber themselves of every assumption which those who do not believe in God cannot grant, they will strip themselves of their natural influence, like people who, having a key in their pocket, still insist out of pedantic im- partiality on first demonstrating that the lock will admit a key, instead of producing the key they have, and showing that it will open the lock. Miss Cobbe evidently thinks the Christian should suppress the " historical " key he thinks he possesses to religious facts, lest some one should point out that the key involves new difficulties of its own, and should turn aside from the discussion whether it tits human nature to the discussion where it came from, how it was fashioned, and end with a request that it might be melted down and chemically analyzed. No doubt that is so, and no doubt this will happen to Miss Cobbe too. Her "intui- tive-consciousness," key will be challenged at least as widely as any other. Ludwig Feuerbach will tell her she is "pro- jecting" her God out of her own mind. Mr. J. S. Mill will dispute the universal validity of her consciousness. Mr. Holyoake will analyze it to atoms. The truth is, there is just as much intellectual danger in artificially contracting the range of your ultimate basis for faith, in order not to expose too many points to an enemy's attack, as in artificially extending that range in the Jesuitical idea that you may win a victory for the truth by help of an error. You can only rest safely on what seems to you the actual basis of your own faith, and if, as Miss Cobbe is half inclined to persuade us, we were to abandon his- torical revelation altogether in order to reduce the number of assailable points,—we should probably only succeed in producing the impression that our faith had struck root very imperfectly into the universe of human things, and that if one single thread of sap from a shadowy psychology could be cut off; it would at once be utterly destroyed. Though evidence ramifying in every direction must, of course, present more numerous points of objec-

tion and assault, it will also present, ceteris paribus, more signs of deeply and widely rooted vitality ; and the one may be fairly set

against the other. Miss Cobbe in arguing in the abstract for a contraction of the base of operations is scarcely true to herself. She is perfectly right not to urge what carries to her own mind

no weight. But there is no general reason in favour of retreating on " consoiousness,"—unless special proof of the unsoundness of Christian conviction in relying also very profoundly on God's historical revelation of Himself can be given.

But further, at the root of all Miss Cobbe's disinclination to Christianity will be found not only the impression that it is a series of weakoutworks round an impregnable fortress, and so wastes human strength in the defence that would be best kept for the citadel itself, but the further impression that historical revelation is in itself inconceivable, since the intellect alone can judge of historical evidence, while a moral and religious faith must depend on moral and religious evidence. In other words, as

we said before, this means that God cannot speak to us effectively through history even if He would, because we may always

legitimately move the previous question whether He did speak or was falsely assumed to have done so by our ancestors. Even though it sound to us the true voice of God,—even though the Spirit of God within us say "This is divine," we must harass ourselves with the refined possibility that it is really only the

musical but misleading echo of the voice of man, rendered mellow by time and rich by the chorus of credulous generations. To all which we answer that, preferring to start from Miss Cobbe's conclusion, a living God, rather than from her premisses, namely, isolated "religious ideas,"—believing, in fact, that her conclusion is far more radical than her premisses, and that God is not only the cause of our "religious ideas," but the cause of our own dissatisfaction with them, and our wish to rise above them to Himself,—believing this, we find it simply incredible that He should leave us to evolve a religion "out of consc:ousness," and not rather train us by every influence both inward and outward to rise above our own poor notions to direct study of His own Infinite character and acts. Miss Cobbe will say that human religion must be content at best with a human apprehension of God ;—no doubt, but the question is whether it is to be an apprehension,—that is, a living insight into what is in every way outside ourselves, into facts too great for us, yet always opening new vistas corrective of our natural limitations,—or only an idea, an intuition which is always in danger of shrinking to the dimensions of our own finite faculties. Does God reveal Himself to us and gradually open our narrow minds to His infinitude, or do we aspire to Him, and beat the air with our helpless "intuitions?" Of course, we should maintain as eagerly as Miss Cobbe that if the former be the truer statement of the case, the divine relation is personal, and through con- sciousness as well as through history ; but we should add that the danger in which inward religiousness always lives of mistaking its own favourite notions for God's lessons is, in great measure, counteracted by the necessity of stretching our personal feelings to take in the great scope of His historical revelation. If we can really believe that the divine character shadowed itself out to man on the great scale of a national and universal Providence— in that great series of divine acts of discipline, teaching, and chastisement, which began with the call of Abraham, and ended in the Incarnation, — is it possible to shut oneself up complacently in one's favourite ideas of personal morality, and not rather to see that God expects us to rise, not, in- deed, out of these, but above them, into His different modes of dealing with character at its different stages of develop- ment, of widening a family into a tribe, of fitting a tribe to be a nation, and merging the welfare of a nation into the welfare of the human race? To us nothing seems less credible than the notion that God, while inspiring all individual souls, should not have revealed Himself on the larger spiritual area and in the wider sweep of history ; nor can we stumble at the difficulty that because all details of that history are necessarily of uncertain evidence, the great features of it are to be ignored until human doubt is removed. What we mean by the difference between God's revelation and man's religious aspiration is simply this,— that in the former case our inward wants are not merely their own guides, do not "evolve" themselves, but accept the satisfaction provided them by God. Of course, as the divine world of nature bears poisons as well as food, so the divine history we search will have its poisons, which mistaken theologians may tell us are its best food ; but as the former danger is no reason why we should turn inwards and live on the gnawing sense of want, so the latter is no reason why we should refuse to find the divine teach- ing in history, and retire into the self-communing which eats out its own heart.

But, says Miss Cobbe, when once "the records of the supposed Revelation are placed on a similar (though superior) footing to other books, their authority will no longer be adequate to sup-

port any doctrines beyond those of natural religion, already proveable on other grounds. All that is peculiar in Christianity

must thus fall gradually away, the differences between it and theism [the printers have put" atheism," but this is an obvious blunder of the press] becoming every day more evanescent, till in time they disappear. Historical religion will then be to the Christian only what it is to the Theist—the corroboration of the religion of consciousness." In other words, all that Miss Cobbe aims at is a theology demonstrable or -" proveable," as she says, from the human side; and whatever does not increase the strictly demonstrative force of the evidence, whatever in any

way transcends the limits of the human power of investigation. and proof, is to her so much waste matter to be thrown away. How if that which we can prove least, should have most power to prove us. Can the child prove the right of the father's

• superior knowledge and modes of access to his heart ? Is it not

the very fact that he finds himself approached by so many independent avenues, which be has no power to investi- gate separately, which impresses him with the duty of trust ? No doubt we cannot prove that God reaches us through history, but does that prevent Him from reaching us through history, or afford us any reason for distrusting His hand ? No one can " demonstrate " the fact of the Incarnation, but may not the Incarnation so raise us out of ourselves, so feed, and guide, and elevate those poor intuitions of which Miss Cobbe speaks so much, showing them their birth in the very nature and essence of God's hidden life, that it proves itself to us exactly as God proves Himself to us as the God of our fathers? All we can know of God for ourselves is His momentary relation to ourselves; the instant we believe in Him as the God of all Ages, we are taking for granted a historical truth—that He and no other spoke to our forefathers. Is there anything more of hislotical credulity in believing that the Son of God within us lived and died in Jesus of Nazareth,—if that be essentially a part of a revelation that stirs and raises our hearts and opens our minds to the great universal bond of humanity,—than in the historical credulity of every, theist who holds that God is the bond of the universe throughout all ages ? We cannot better express our fundamental differeuce with Miss Cobbe than by say- ing that while she regards the religious " intuitions " of the private soul as the solid foundations upon which she can build a tower of religious thought that shall scale Heaven and touch the feet of God, we regard these intuitions as the mere footsteps of a presence who besets us behind and before, in Christ and history no less than in nature and conscience, and who finds us out in the very act of proving to us that we cannot find out Him. Intuitions are good enough if they lead us out of our- selves, but if they lead us into ourselves, as if exclusively attended to they are too apt to do, we believe they may as often lead to making God in our own image, as to transforming ourselves into the image of God.