THEOLOGY, NEW AND OLD.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIB.,—An article on " Miss Cobbe's Theology " in the Spectator of January 9, touches upon matters so deeply connected with the religious wants and difficulties of the day, and with much, to me profoundly true, combines so much tending, in my judgment, to hinder that reconciliation of the revelations of nature with the revelation of man's spiritual history and personal experience, on which the future of religion seems to depend, that I ask for a little space iu your columns to point out what seems to me thus defective. It concerns matters discussed by me in them before, but of ever fresh interest,—the province of prayer, and the reality of miracles,— matters in which I acknowledge my agreement with Miss Cobbe, the differing from her in accepting,—and this on purely scientific grounds, because this conception appears to me to give the most reasonable explanation of the great facts of man's spiritual history,—that faith in the Divine Being of Christ, which is commonly assumed to involve the belief in the efficacy of prayer to change the course of nature, and in the reality of miracle, but which to me seems logically to involve the opposite conclusions.
Man is generally admitted to have, in himself, no power of affecting nature, otherwise than by the use of the finite means placed at the command of his will, in his body. If Christ really partook of the nature of man, as the Catholic faith has always strenuously affirmed, if His human being were not a mere sham, a mask hiding another nature not human, then He must have partaken of this incapacity. And if lie was, as the Catholic faith asserts, also really God, it follows that the Divine action is to be looked for not in that which subverts the natural, but in that which perpetually sustains and uniformly works through it. Consequently, in accepting the strict necessity of all natural phenomena, which makes science possible, we recognize the presence in the world of that God whose inner being Christ manifested. I do not contend that this conception is expressed in the New Testament. I know that it is not, except in the few pregnant words of Christ, which pierce the haze thrown round him by the Christo-Jewish imagination of His first followers. Had it been otherwise, the faith in His Divinity would never have grown up. Until men had learned how grand and wonderful the universe of finite powers is, the Semitic ' God says and it is done' seemed far more divine than the Aryan 'In him we live, and move, and have our being.' In Nature we have now a schoolmistress, who may teach us to understand Christ better than those could do, who lived under the perpetual dream of His coming in the clouds of heaven to renew the world by a coup de theatre.
You see, in the words of Christ as to the death of a sparrow, compared with " the wanton slaughter of birds and insects by the wastefulness and negligence of man," a saying which "produces in you an intense and increasing conviction that Christ was at the root of the mystery in a manner in which we are not." I agree with you; but why ? Because this saying, by the apparent absurdity of its minute application,—and you must remember that Christ extends it to the "falling of a hair,"—proves that He saw the true providence of God in what we call natural laws, and so teaches us that no event, however insignificant, can happen without realizing the special will of God ; because God always works through fixed means, and therefore His special will, in every case, is that these means should bring about that particular result which, at that particular moment, in virtue of what we call their natural constitution, they are adapted to produce. But thus it may be urged, man is bound by the chain of an iron necessity, which must crush down all expansion of his soul towards God. Not so. For He whose teaching leads us to see in this all-embracing physical necessity the true manifestation of God's perpetual presence in the world, is the very Being through whom we learn that the essence of the Deity is the tenderest love ; love which sympathizes with all our weaknesses, and will bear us unharmed through every trial which the hard necessity of nature can heap upon us, if we cast ourselves upon Him in prayer. But prayer for what? That our will may be done in the world otherwise than through our acts? No. But that our will may be assimilated to Ills will, and so His will be universally done on earth.
When you say of the view which I advocate here, it teaches that " God helps us by His Spirit in our conscience to make the best of a lot which has been determined by much wider and more general considerations than by any bearing on our private ends," you speak, I think, only half the truth. God, as I apprehend, leads us through the faith in the Incarnation of Christ to realize that to be placed in a world thus determined, is precisely the very thing required to promote our private ends, if these ends are, spiritual good. We cannot by prayer make corn grow, or rain fall, or build houses, or obtain clothes, or cure disease, or win battles, or effect any physical, social, or political object whatever. We can only affect our own selves. Why are we dissatisfied with this effect? The answer is simple : because we are not spiritually minded. We say, "Thy will be done," but we mean, "Do thou do my will." In proportion as we are content to accept God's world as it is, and confine prayer to that function which the best of men of all ages have recognized as its highest function, namely, the producing in man the sense of communion with God, shall we effect our escape from the maze of perplexity in which we are now wandering in religious matters. The true " point of union of the parallel lines of natural and spiritual" is to be found, I apprehend, in the fact, that the will of God, which in nature acts only though necessary means, acts on those who, like man, are capable of conscious freedom, immediately ; because here the will of the individual, by turning towards God, opens the door through which the infinite can influence the finite without destroying i t.—I am, Sir, &c., E. V. N.
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