CHAPTER III

THE NEW TESTAMENT CRITIC

BEHIND belief is a reason for believing. What is the 'seat of authority,' or the ultimate support of religious belief? Keeping ourselves within Christian boundaries, and discarding mere eccentricities of opinion, we find three answers to this question.

First, there is that of the Roman Catholic. His ultimate authority is his Church. Its origin is divine: it is the earthly embodiment of a heavenly ideal; its head is the vicegerent of Christ and speaks in his name. natural attitude before it, therefore, is one of reverent submission. To question is irreverence, to doubt is impiety.

The

The second is that of the evangelical Protestant. His appeal is to an infallible Bible. The Scriptures, Jewish and Protestant, are a message by which heaven makes known its will to man. Theories of inspiration have differed; was it only an illumination of the intellect? or did the Holy Spirit subdue the mind of prophet and apostle to its thrall, and make them the amanuenses of its word? These questions suggest divergent theories on which contention has sometimes been earnest; but under both alike the doctrine of inerrancy has been maintained. The revelation has, indeed, been allowed to have been progressive, more primitive when the law was given by Moses, more fully unfolded when the prophets spoke; but in this progressive feature we have been shown a divine economy which adapts the lesson to the learner. By such consider

ation, together with rules of interpretation which explain the obscure by the clear, the morally doubtful by the morally indubitable, which see in seeming discrepancies but surface denials of profounder harmonies, is the august thesis maintained. Here, says the apologist, is the oracle of Heaven's will. Here is wisdom without alloy of error, light and no darkness at all, beauty and no blemish anywhere. To one who holds the Bible thus there is no question of authority. Will he learn respecting God, his nature, his will? of man, his origin or destiny? of sin, perdition, redemption? the ethics that are unerring, the worship that will be accepted, the faith that will save? why, he will open this book and learn.

These two forms of authority we distinguish as outward. They speak to man as from the skies, whose depths his unaided vision may not penetrate. Listen to the apologist of either, and the supreme and only assurance is in its word. Man only guesses till it instructs, and is ever a wanderer without its light.

The third answer is that of the philosopher, who finds the ultimate warrant of conviction, not without, but within. Grant truth offered from without, still, he will argue, it must be received within; and receiving implies, not passive acquiescence, but active embrace. Merely granting a teaching true, as the unlettered man may grant the formula of the asymptote, is surely not a receiving to which we can attach a religious value; but only that in which the teaching is met with responsive embrace. But this implies what? Simply that the mind shapes its judgment according to criteria of its own. It is not enough that a dictum be true; in order that I may receive it, it must be true to me. If dissonant with my intellect or conscience, however I may assent to it outwardly, I inwardly repudiate it; and it is rather luggage that I carry than light upon my path. As respects truth in general, so as respects

the distinction between truth in its human proclamation and its divine. Telling me this is divine truth, made known through inspiration, that is mere human truth, reached through investigation, is to little purpose unless there be that within me which marks the difference: some deep sense that discerns the peculiarities of the divine speech or the intonations of the divine voice. Such sense our philosopher will claim. The soul, he will say, not only proves all oracles but discriminates them as of earth or of heaven.

Thus the ultimate warrant of religious belief he finds, not without, but within. He does not, indeed, claim for all men the ability to find this warrant, but that it is within the range of human faculty. He finds it in the "summit minds," which, through the unity of the race, represent the unfolded possibilities of all. From the mountain crest they report the vision to those upon the slopes below. Herein is the element of just thought in the claim of outward authority. Human society is not an association of equals; everywhere is the relation of dependence, those of dimmer upon those of clearer vision. The parent must be authority to the child, the teacher to the pupil, the statesman to those that follow him. The fundamental truths of science, the great principles of social organization, met and dealt with in all the practical relations of life, how many can render an ultimate account of them? Men may be found who claim to put by outward authority; yet their social ethics, their business rules, their political maxims, their literary judgments, their philosophical opinions, closely examined, confute them. These illustrations, however, hardly illustrate the authority claimed for Church and Bible. The child gives up the parent's guidance at last, and walks wisely in ways of his own selecting; the pupil outstrips his master; the statesman may be forsaken for another leader; the science we

learn from an Agassiz we may surrender with a Darwin, and the Social Physics of a Comte we may give up for the Sociology of a Spencer. In all these cases the mind acts freely, following by natural attraction what seems to it the clearer light. Not thus, however, are we permitted to treat Church or Bible, which, speaking from above reason, demands its surrender rather than seeks its persuasion.

The Catholic and Protestant, while most fiercely contending with each other, unite in common abhorrence of such a philosopher. He is rationalist, infidel, mere theist, or whatever other bad thing, according to the time and tenor of debate, it is most convenient to call him. He is apt, too, to intensify the dislike of both by holding either under the like adverse judgment. Whether on easier terms with the followers of Luther or of Hildebrand, whether for practical use he may prefer the Bible or the Hierarchy, he finds no better warrant in one than in the other for the tremendous claim of infallibility, and so of ultimate outward authority; and in the argument with which he exposes the pretensions of either, the other may see the indictment of his own. He has, not unlikely, a far kindlier feeling for either than either cherishes towards the other; both he may allow to be depositories of divine truth and to convey the monitions of the Divine Spirit; and here again either is displeased at seeing the other allowed to be the almoner of a grace of which it claims to be the sole dispenser. These attitudes may wear a very human look, but they are not without deep reason. Neither could allow the claim of the other without the destruction of itself. To an infallible authority any rival must be a pretender. It discredits its own title when it admits the legitimacy of another. In another aspect, too, the common objection to the philosopher may be seen to be well taken. On the assumption that there is an outward authority that is the ultimate support of religion, the

structures of Catholic and Protestant dogma are reared; in this transfer of the seat of authority from without to within, a new departure is undertaken than which no other could be more revolutionary. Our philosopher may be one of ready sensibility and most generous appreciation; to the noble work of the Catholic Church he may bear most willing testimony; the great lessons of Holy Writ he may ponder with surrendered heart. His, however, is just a natural response to a truth or a divineness that has beamed upon him. He embraces it for no other reason than because it justifies itself to his interior nature. His theology will be no system of dogma supported by Scripture texts or the decrees of councils, but a body of convictions, won it may be through divine provocation, but with the soul for its central light.

Undoubtedly the predilection of most men is for an outward authority, a voice that speaks to them a decisive word. It is not strange, therefore, that, accustomed to its tone, they do not surrender it with glad alacrity, and that they look with a prevailing distrust upon a competing doctrine that implies a transition so momentous. An inward authority, that suggests to them mere personal opinion, personal idiosyncrasy, a hazy talk of intuitions, a vaporing of ideals; - where, they ask, is the all-persuading and unifying truth? That a wide acceptance of an inward authority would involve difficulties is very probable, though it might prove with respect to this, as with so many other matters, that "the evils from which we suffer most are those that never come." It may be that man, by nature a religious being, would find his way to a proximate unanimity of thought; that his worship, while in spirit more real, would be no more multifarious than now. In ethics there is no prevailing appeal to an outward standard, yet the Moral Philosophy of the world is classified on two or three lines of thought. Men who must