THE MODERN EASTER DIFFICULTY.
DEAN BRADLEY, in his Easter Day sermon at West- minster Abbey, put his finger on the very centre of the contrast between ancient and modern feeling concerning Easter, when he said that while it was the crucifixion of Christ which was to "the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness" in the great day when Christianity first came into the world, it is no longer the Crucifixion but the Resur- rection,—which to both Jews and Greeks, though a great marvel, was a marvel which attracted rather than repelled them, —that seems to modern pride and scepticism a stumbling-block and foolishness. We feel no difficulty where the early believers felt most difficulty, in accepting the tremendous humiliation and sorrow and shame of the cross. On the contrary, as Dean Bradley told his hearers, the story of the Man of Sorrows is wholly credited. by the' sceptical world of to-day, and is accepted with even eager reverence and gratitude. It is the suffering, the forgiveness, the resignation, the peace, the calm, the fortitude, the sympathy, the "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children," the " Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," the "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you ; not as the world giveth give I unto you; let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid," in which we all believe, —even sceptics and those who are more than sceptics, who assert positively that "miracles do not happen." The shame does not humiliate us ; we can see through it to the infinitely greater glory behind ; whereas the Jews found it a sore stumbling-block to their pride of race, and the Greeks looked down upon it as radically inconsistent with that intellectual caste to which they ascribed the sole possession of "the good and beautiful" in all its perfection. To them the asserted resurrection seemed that which alone gave a glimmer of pro- bability to the bold assertion that God had manifested himself in human nature only to die upon the cross, and submit to the jeers and scoffs of Jewish and Roman ridicule. To us there seems something intrinsically convincing in the assertion that this great death was died, that that majestic calm and that magnanimous sympathy prevailed even over the torture of the cross ; we only come to our difficulties when we come to the assertion that he who died that supernatural death really lived again to be recognised by those who saw him die and heard him foretell their own discomfiture and dispersion. The early disciples found it all but impossible to believe that a divine nature could go through physical and moral humiliation. Our difficulty is not in the least in believing in that which is divine enough to overcome any combination, however over- whelming, of physical and moral humiliation. What we find difficulty in believing is, that that which is morally and spiritually supernatural, involves even any power at all of controlling or overruling what we suppose to be the fixed necessities of physical law. Our minds are jaded and hag-ridden, as it were, by the physical fatalities of modern science, and yet modern science itself might, if we only used our eyes, warn us of the extraordinary blunder we are making in thus depreciating the true power of mind over matter. It is generally supposed that physiology is the one department of modern science which has done most to shake the belief of man in the resurrection from the dead; and certainly Professor Huxley has used its teaching with extra- ordinary skill for that end. But let any one who thinks that modern physiology has disposed of the supremacy of the mind over the body, turn to the last Lancet, and read the review of a great German physician's (Dr. Albert Moll's) book on hypnotism ; and what will he find there ? Such sentences as the following :—" It is quite impossible to assign any limit to the influence of mind upon body, which is probably much more potent and far-reaching than we are usually prepared to admit." (Lancet, March 28th, 1891, page 722.) And this is not an assertion due to any a priori theory, but to the bard facts of actual observation,—an inference drawn from such evidence as this, for example, that real blisters,—to take a very petty detail,—will rise on a patient's skin as a consequence merely of persuading him to believe (when it is not true) that one has been applied to him. And this is one of the least remarkable of all the phenomena of what is now called hypnotism. We do not hesitate for a moment to say that the superstition which modern physical science has promoted, that the mind cannot seriously alter the effect or modify the opera- tion of the physical laws of the universe, science itself, carefully interrogated, has swept away ; and that physiologists do not exaggerate when they say, as the Lancet's reviewer said last Saturday, that "it is quite impossible to assign any limit to the influence of mind upon body."
Yet we cannot well recognise with the Dean of West- minster that the modern world no longer sees any "stumbling- block," any "foolishness," in the story which so deeply offended both Jews and Greeks, of the death on the cross of the most divine of human beings, without also recog- nising the truth of the Dean's assertiofi that the resurrection from the dead has become a much greater stumbling-block, a much greater depth of foolishness, to that same modern world, than the Crucifixion itself appeared to the world nineteen centuries ago. There seems to be no capacity at all left in us to measure the power of the morally and spiritually supernatural against the power of the physically customary and habitual. We can believe in what we have never seen the least hint of in the one region, and yet cannot believe what we have seen many hints of in the other region. Where can we find any trace of experience to render it possible for us to conceive the nature which could spend the last hours of suspense before approaching death, and the first hours of the keen anguish of betrayal, in strengthening others for the shock and the suffering they were about to undergo, and which could lose all sense of the injustice and cruelty and cowardice and terror around, and the torture within, in the passion of pity and the might of forgiveness ? Surely no experience that this generation has had has rendered it easy to conceive of supernatural goodness such as this. And yet we do not stumble at it ; it is not a stumbling- block to us ; it is not " foolishness ;" it is not even difficult to believe. So much as this the modern world will believe without even asking to see anything like it. Yet to us it seems far more wonderful, a far more inconceivable marvel in human life, than any which is involved in the Resurrection. Look at the way the very best men pass through the little trials and struggles of this world. Read Dean Church's account of the Oxford movement, of the bitterness, the jealousy, the alienation, the soreness, the resentment which followed on both sides the very natural and excusable excitements of that great movement, and then ask how far this age has had any experience of the kind of suffering through which our Lord passed on the cross without manifesting any trace of any of these feelings, and yet with all the physical agony to bear which must have intensified the pain and shame and sorrow to an extent which it is impossible for us even in the least degree to measure. To our minds, the spiritual miracle of the Crucifixion was an infinitely greater miracle than the physical miracle of the Resurrection,—a mucb more impressive evidence of the actual mingling of the divine with the human. It is strange that a world which can accept heartily the one should find it so difficult, and in some cases so impossible, to accept the other. This implies, we think, that what it does accept it accepts without any true insight into the wonder and majesty of the personal manifestation the reality of which it professes to recognise. Certainly ours is a super- stitious age, though superstitious rather in the excess of its respect for the physical energies of the universe, than in the excess of its respect for the spiritual. Only on the day before Good Friday, there appeared in the Echo this wonderful letter, which seems to us as astounding an evidence of the physical superstition of our age, as any belief in table. turning or witchcraft could be of superstitions of another species :—
"OXFORD AND THEOLOGY.
"TO THE EDITOR OP THE ECHO: "SIR,—Is it after all true that the only sane folk live in Colney Hatch P That question is apt to arise when we read of the public subscribing 410,000 to endow three studentships in order to stimulate the study of theology in Oxford.' (See the Doan of St. Paul's letter in yesterday's Echo.) Just think ! The idea of devoting the laborious fruits of human industry to tho 'study of theology,' when the very existence of a God is a matter of yes or no, whichever you please ; not the faintest gleam of light being available, or even possible, upon the subject. And this while the burden of life becomes more insupportable day by day for the great majority, owing to the lack of the merest bodily necessaries. When I look at that 410,000 given for the study of theology,' and think of the empty bellies that want filling, I am ashamed of the weakness of my indignation which saves me from a fit or some- thing. Upon my word, there would be more reason in endowing a chair for the study' of the habits of the man who resides on the 'off' side of the moon.—Yours, &c., "Camberwell, March 25. J. FRANCIS."
Could that intensity of superstition be easily surpassed ? For a thinker who knows what faith has done, and has done for the poor, to ridicule the expenditure of 210,000 on theo- logical education as compared with its expenditure on doles of bread and meat,—which for the most part go to increase the number of hunger-ridden paupers,—does seem to us a bewildering depth of superstition. Of course we do not say that this gentleman is wrong in being profoundly sensible of the difficulties which stand in the way of our highest theological beliefs. That is a totally different matter. But that any man of the world even, should suppose that these difficulties arc so overwhelming as to render the prosecution of all theological studies a simple absurdity, appears to us to show that he has never had. the capacity to enter into the foundations of religious belief, or even to measure the significance of the latest evidence of science on the subject of the relations of the mind to the body. That a small mind, under the influence of a false belief, can be made to suffer all the effects of a physical burn, without any application that physical science recognises as adapted to produce such consequences, and yet that a mighty mind possessed by a true belief could not be conceived as controlling the issues of life and death, – though we have quite as good evidence that it did control those issues as we have for what arc termed the phenomena of modern hypnotism, —seems to us a paradox which far exceeds the paradoxes of the great medimval superstitions. That there is a mind expressed in the order of the universe, and that that mind controls the order which it constituted, is surely far more certain than that the influence of belief, —true or false,— over physical life, is a fact of daily scientific experience.
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