THE BIBLE

ITS MEANING AND SUPREMACY

INTRODUCTION

'Ea quæ aperta continet, quasi amicus familiaris, sine fuco ad cor loquitur indoctorum atque doctorum.'-AUG. Ep. iii. ad Volus.

'Some too have not integrity and regard enough to truth, to attend to evidence which keeps the mind in doubt, perhaps perplexity, and which is much of a different sort from what they expected.'-Bishop BUTLER, Analogy, II. vii.

'We are bound never to countenance any erroneous opinion, however seemingly beneficial in its results.'-Archbishop WHATELY on Bacon's Essays, p. 11.

A CLERGYMAN who is constantly required to address numbers of his countrymen is bound, as far as he can, to ascertain their actual thoughts, and to offer them something less stereotyped and more real than the current conventionalities. He must not live in a fool's paradise. If he wishes to help serious men to meet their religious difficulties, he cannot succeed either by the ostrich policy of ignoring those difficulties, or by sliding over them with 'airy and fastidious levity,' or by trying to overwhelm them with vituperative phrases. He can adopt no policy more fatal than the assumption of a disdainful infallibility which denounces as 'wicked,' 'blasphemous,' or 'dangerous' every conviction which diverges from his own form

of orthodoxy; nor must he assume that everything which he chooses, however ignorantly, to assert with sufficient dogmatism ought to be accepted with humble acquiescence. This was not the policy of the early Christian apologists. They acted like men, and spoke to men. They looked their opponents full in the face. They relied upon solid arguments, not on authoritative anathemas. Instead of meeting the taunts of pagan critics, and the arguments of pagan philosophers, by a conspiracy of silence or threats of eternal damnation, they confronted and grappled with them. Christianity was represented to the heathen in many false lights by Greek scoffers, by Eastern heretics, by Roman satirists. It was the task of such men as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen to prove to the world that, in its true aspect, their holy faith was not open to the objections accumulated against it. They relied upon calm reasoning for the diffusion of truth; not upon rude denunciations, nor upon the torture and persecution to which in later ages Rome so universally resorted. They repudiated all violence as hateful to God. The earnest reasoner can never injure the cause of religion; the inquisitor and the ruthless dogmatist have been its ruin and its curse.

In recent years much has been written under the assumption that Christianity no longer deserves the dignity of a refutation; or that, at any rate, the bases on which it rests have been seriously undermined. The writings of freethinkers are widely disseminated among the working classes. The Church of Christ has lost its hold on multitudes of men in our great cities. Those of the clergy who are working in the crowded centres of English life can hardly be unaware of the extent to which scepticism exists among our artisans. Many of them have been persuaded

REASON AND CONSCIENCE

3

to believe that the Church is a hostile and organised hy-
pocrisy. There are some, in all classes, who take refuge
from doubt in the abnegation of inquiry and the blind
acceptance of an unintelligent traditionalism. To quote
the phrase of Cardinal Newman, they treat their reason
as though it were a dangerous wild beast to be beaten.
back with a bar of iron. There are others to whom such
a resource would be impossible and dishonest. No reli-
gious system will be permanent which relies mainly on the
emotional and the ceremonial and is not based on the con-
victions of the intellect. The human reason is no seducing
enemy, but a heaven-sent guide. The spirit of man is the
lamp of the Lord.' Reason, as Bishop Butler so truly
said, is the only faculty wherewith we can judge of any-
thing, even of revelation itself.2 Locke wisely warns us
that to attempt any subordination or sacrifice of reason
to revelation is to put out the light of both: for revelation
can only come to us through the reason, and one voice
from heaven cannot utter oracles which are in direct con-
tradiction to another. A wise English divine, Benjamin
Whichcote, in his 'Aphorisms,' says: "The sense of the
Church is not a rule but a thing ruled. The Church is
bound unto reason and Scripture and governed by them
as much as any individual person.' 13 'God alone is the
Lord of the conscience,' says the 'Westminster Confession
(ch. xx.), and hath left it free from the doctrines and
commandments of men which are in anything contrary to
this word, or beside it in matters of faith and worship; so
that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such command-
ments out of conscience is to betray the true liberty of
conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an

1 Prov. xx. 27; comp. Rom. i. 19-21, 32; ii. 14, 15.
2 Analogy, II. iii. § 3.

3 Aphorism 921.

absolute blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also.'

He therefore who helps to disencumber Christianity from dubious or false accretions is rendering to it a service which may be more urgently necessary than if he composed a book of evidences. I have frequently observed that the objections urged against Christianity are aimed at dogmas which are no part of the Christian faith, or are in no wise essential to its integrity. It is my humble hope that I shall be strengthening the cause of the Church, if I can succeed in showing that pure religion and undefiled before God even our Father is entirely separable from tenets by which many have supposed it to be hopelessly overweighted. The most effectual defender is often the man who succeeds in putting truths in their right perspective, and saves them from being confounded with illusory semblances and untenable traditions. But I would draw attention to the fact that this book is mainly positive, not negative. The larger part of it is occupied with proofs drawn from literature, history, and experience of what the Bible is-its eternal validity, its unquestionable supremacy, its inestimable preciousness. These indications of its grandeur and authority are not casuistical, nor do they consist of bald assertions. They furnish a demonstration of the unparalleled blessings which the possession of the Bible has in past ages conferred upon the human race. They show, from testimony which none can dispute, that its free study has uplifted nation after nation into grandeur; that it has saved some of the sweetest and loftiest of human souls from despair and death; that its inspiration has kindled the purest fires of genius, and nerved the sons of men to acts of the most heroic valour and the most blessed self-sacrifice. If in any part of the book I seem

CURRENT MISCONCEPTIONS

5

to take away a false exaltation of the prerogative of the Bible, it is only that I may more firmly re-establish its genuine supereminence. Nor must it be supposed that the statement of our beliefs can only be of use to the unlearned. Conversations with men of science and writers of the highest fame have long proved to me how many of the objections entertained against the Catholic faith are based on travesties of its real tenets. There are many scientific and literary men to whom current misconceptions create a far more insuperable obstacle to the acceptance of the faith than the true doctrines with which those misconceptions are confused. What fortifies such men in an attitude of antagonism is often an identification of Christianity with opinions wherewith it has no real connection. One of those opinions is that which maintains the supposed inerrancy and supernatural infallibility of every book, sentence, and word of the Holy Bible. Such a belief, if it were really de fide, would constitute a difficulty as colossal as it is needless to tens of thousands of earnest men. Let it at least be known what we do and what we do not hold; what we are and what we are not prepared to maintain and to defend. Ἐν δὲ φάει καὶ ὄλεσσον (Slay us, so it be but in the light'), prayed the old Homeric hero. It is only imposture which shrinks from light.

I have already been permitted to attempt a similar service to the cause of faith, and, by God's blessing, not without a large success, attested by a widespread modification of opinions once all but universal. What a poet has called 'obscene threats of a bodily hell,' when stated, as they used to be in common manuals and by men like Jonathan Edwards, in their crudest and coarsest form, were sufficient to crush many tender souls under a burden of intolerable agony, and to drive many into fierce revolt against a sys