MR. LILLY AND CHRISTIAN EVOLUTION.
MR. LILLY'S eloquent essay, in the August number of the Nineteenth Century, on " What is Left of Christianity ?" is intended, if we rightly grasp its meaning, to show that, in this age of reason,—and because it is an age of reason,—it is far easier to accept the essential core of Christian teaching than to reject it ; and there we quite agree with him, and heartily thank him for his true and eloquent statement of the reasons for accepting the real existence of a divine Creator, a divine Redeemer, and a divine Sanctifier. But Mr. Lilly does not stop there. He believes that many ingenuous minds will go with him so far, but will state as follows their difficulty in going further :—" We have no sort of objection,' I fancy I hear them say, 'to adore the Father, to venerate the Son, and to be filled with the Holy Ghost. But theological determinations, ecclesiastical theses, in a word, the whole vast secretion of dogma ! That is precisely our real difficulty. And if we excise all these from Christianity, should we not perform a mortal operation on the religion itself ?' Yes, undoubtedly I think you would, I think undoubtedly yon would be a fool for your pains. Nothing is so stupid as an anachronism. Christianity comes before us 'rich with the spoils of time.' We may take it or leave it. But if we cannot take it as it is, with its doctrines and its traditions, we had better leave it. It is hard to imagiiie anything less satisfactory than the results attained by the method called rationalistic Primitive Christianity in this nineteenth century ? You might as well try to return to the primitive fig-leaf. Better to make the beet of Catholic fullness and of modern sartorial art." So that, after all, Mr. Lilly's demonstration that it is far easier to accept than to reject the core of Christian teaching, appears to involve, at least in the writer's belief, the very much larger proposition that it is very much easier to accept than to reject the whole body of Roman Catholic teaching, and that the former assertion involves the latter ; though he hastens to attenuate the revulsion of feeling which this contention is likely to excite, by intimating that, after all, theological definition is rather of the nature of a chain of buoys, to show where you will wreck your- self if you do not keep within it, than of the nature of an exhaustive exposition of the truth, which is too much beyond our grasp to be exhausted positively, though you may show where you are in danger of directly contradicting it. Mr. Lilly does not depreciate the value of dogmatic Christianity, but he does intimate that popular interpretations are very apt to be given of it which are far too definite and confident.. Even Catholic Christianity, as we understand him, if properly in- terpreted, puts a far lighter yoke on the human intellect than is ordinarily supposed. All our conceptions of spiritual truth are anthropomorphic, and anthropomorphism, so far as it involves reproach, is only a question of how much more anthropomorphic we are than we need to be. Catholic dogma, Mr. Lilly would say, is itself anthropomorphic, but is much less so than the human intellect, going out without guidance in search of spiritual truth, would be sure to become by its own unchastened tendencies. We must not imagine that even the best words that we can use are more than imperfect attempts to shadow forth what is in itself beyond expression and beyond comprehension, though the best
words, chosen after careful discrimination and selection, are less inadequate for our purpose than others at which the undisciplined and unguided intellect would be very apt to catch. In other words, Roman Catholic dogma, however distinctively defined, is not quite so explicit and so fettering as it looks to those who consider from outside the great bulk of Catholic dogma and the general range of Catholic traditions.
Well, all this may be granted Mr. Lilly, and yet it may be lawful to find fault with the easy stride at which he passes from the core of Christian teaching to what he calls " Catholic fullness," under cover of the remark that it is as easy to return to primitive Christianity as to the primitive fig-leaf. What we would ask Mr. Lilly to explain is, how it is possible to compare primitive Christianity, which is only another phrase for the Christianity of Christ,—i.e., the greatest
amplitude of Christian teaching which it is possible for us to imagine,—with the bare rudiments of any human institution which is altogether human and only human throughout its growth, being rudimentary in one stage and highly developed in another. We should have thought that Mr. Lilly's metaphor would be earnestly repudiated by the best Catholic theology itself, which, far from regarding "the deposit of faith" as a mere germinal and rudimentary form of undeveloped truth, is wont, as Mr. Lilly himself shows, to speak of the deposit of faith as complete in itself,—all future theological developments being mere explanations of what is implicitly contained in the spiritual teaching of Christ, warnings against false or needlessly inadequate apprehensions of its significance, against attenuations of its meaning, or against excesses in one line of thought which imply defects or distortions in another. Surely Catholic theology, so far from comparing the Christianity of Christ to a mere germ or bare rudimentary form of the Christianity of the Church, would admit freely that the Christianity of the Church has never yet reached and never will reach the full perfection of primitive Christianity, meaning thereby Christianity as it proceeded from the lips of Christ. Catholic theology, if we understand it in the least, has never pretended for a moment that the Church has im- proved on the Christianity of Christ, as the more elaborate dress of later ages must certainly be said to have improved on the fig-leaf. The effort of the Church has been to bring out as fully as it may the full meaning of " the deposit of faith," but never to pretend that that meaning was spiritually imperfect when it proceeded from our Lord's lips, or that it attained a fuller and fuller life as the centuries lengthened out between our Lord's personal teaching and the present day. There may be many explanations to be offered why modem Roman Catholi- cism looks so different from primitive Christianity; but none of them surely can be based on the assumption that Christianity itself has grown since it was embodied in a life at once perfectly divine and human. Whatever the evolution may mean for which Mr. Lilly contends in this airy fashion, it surely cannot mean a development into anything more perfect than an absolutely perfect human life in God, which has never been repeated, and never can be repeated so long as the king- dom of God continues to spread from that centre to the utmost bounds of human existence whether in space or time.
If anything in the world is evident, we should have thought that this is evident,—that the doctrine of evolution, as it is understood to explain the gradual development and refine- ment and elaboration of organic forms essentially inchoate and incomplete, cannot properly apply to the development of that which was essentially infinite, perfect, and divine. If Christ is, as Mr. Lilly, like all other Christians, of course maintains, the centre of Christianity, the Christian Church must always look back towards the great epoch of revelation, and forward only to a fuller understanding and appre- ciation of that great epoch. There is nothing that is not essentially and necessarily right in the effort to return to "primitive Christianity." Nay, the Roman Catholic Church herself, though she may and does maintain that all her elabo- rate discipline, ritual, and doctrine are a mere adaptation to new circumstances and more awakened thoughts, of the teaching of the primitive Church, would not for a moment deny that if there were or could be anything in that discipline, ritual, or doctrine inconsistent with the teaching of the primitive Church, that breach with the primitive Church would imply either weakness, or error, or sin. Doubt- less a good Roman Catholic would deny the possibility of dogmatic error in his infallible Church ; but he would be bound to admit that real inconsistency with the teaching of the primitive Church would constitute error, and would never dream of maintaining that the Church of to-day understands Christ's life better than the Apostolic Church understood it. And as this is so, we maintain that the fig-leaf metaphor is wholly misleading. Nobody supposes that the fig-leaf was a piece of clothing so well adapted to the needs of the human body as a more elaborate dress ; every true Christian supposes that primitive Christianity was perfectly adapted to the needs of the human soul, and would apologise, if he apologised at all for the very great apparent difference between modern Roman Catholicism and primitive Christianity, not on the ground that Christianity has in substance grown and developed since then, but that human needs and errors and sins have grown and developed since then, and that primitive Christianity, properly interpreted, prescribes a different treatment for these new needs and errors and sins, from that which was appropriate to the old needs and errors and sins. What we maintain is, that the burden of proof is with those who contend that what is in appearance a very different form of doctrine, discipline, and worship, is in reality only an adaptation of the old form of doctrine, discipline, and worship to new conditions ; and not with those who find fault with the latter forms because they are so different. Mr. Lilly seems to have forgotten that when a genuinely divine faith is grafted on human nature, the retro- spective attitude is the true one, because the full brightness of the revelation is in the past ; and hence that if it be as difficult to go back to primitive Christianity as to the„primi- tive fig-leaf, that is only another way of saying that a form of Christianity which keeps its heart and eye fixed upon Christ, is an impossibility to our age; in other words, that our age is incapable of true Christianity in any form. We maintain, on the contrary, that primitive Christian teaching is the only true Christian teaching, the only Christian teaching which has the sanction of a divine life. Of course, it may be true,—perhaps must be true,—that with new peoples. new knowledge, new powers, new temptations, new sins, the teaching must be expounded in new words, the discipline be transformed, and the worship expressed in acts of devotion that have outwardly a different aspect ; but none the less the sum-total of all these changes must have for its end to keep the attitude of the human mind towards God unchanged, and as nearly as possible morally identical with that of the first true disciples of Christ ; and if this be so, then to restore the essence of primitive Christianity, far from being a perverted aim, is the one aim of every true believer in Christ as the incarnation of the divine character. Mr. Lilly owes us a further explanation of his airy saying that you might as well try to return to the primitive fig-leaf in this nineteenth century, as to return to primitive Christianity.
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