Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

hesitating carnage of all who, for the time being, have been regarded as the enemies of God, whether Albigenses, Huguenots, or Catholics,-which Christians in all ages of the Church have fancied they were justified in perpetrating. Dr. Stanley explains the transaction by comparing it with Cromwell's conduct in Ireland and our recent treatment of the rebel sepoys in India. The plea set up is the necessity of moral and social self-preservation; the means of effecting it determined and so far justified by the moral standard of the times. The explanation and the plea involved in it are valid, according to the view that we take of the history. If we insist with our author (p. 308) in drawing a sharp distinction between sacred history and common history, maintaining that "there is a barrier between them which, with all their points of resemblance, cannot be overleaped," and that the sacred history of the Bible is the vehicle of a "special revelation," the comparison fails, and the plea is unavailing. The explanation is, that the Israelites did what every other people would have done under similar circumstances and in the same stage of social advancement; and that the effects of their ferocious passions were providentially overruled to subserve the highest ends in the spiritual education of the human race. We accept this explanation, provided the history be regarded as common history. But the moment we assume any special influence, by which the passions of men were inspired with a force and a direction which they would not have had if left to their own free agency, we make the just and merciful God directly accountable for the sins and excesses of his creatures; and this is a shocking consequence, which we do not see how the ordinary views of the Bible can escape. If you allow the comparison with other peoples, you destroy the

* Dr. Stanley quotes the following passage from Professor Max Müller's essay on Semitic Monotheism (p. 393): "The Father of Truth chooses His own prophets; and He speaks to them in a voice stronger than the voice of thunder. It is the same inner voice through which God speaks to all of us. That voice may dwindle away, and become hardly audible; it may lose its divine accent, and sink into the language of a worldly prudence; but it may also from time to time assume its real nature with the chosen of God, and sound into their ears as a voice from heaven. A'divine instinct' would neither be an appropriate name for what is a gift or grace accorded but to a few, nor would it be a more intelligible word than 'special revelation."" We adopt without qualification the doctrine of this extract, for it represents the special revelation granted to only a few, as but a larger measure of that common religious inspiration which comes to them as to all men, however at times dimmed or diminished, equally from God. It is a difference not of kind but of degree, leaving the history of the race among which such eminent prophets arose, to be governed by the same laws and present the same phenomena as all other history, and distinguishable from it only by their stronger influence, amidst much darkness and obstruction, over the thoughts and actions of their countrymen. We do not suppose Dr. Stanley meant more than this, when he drew the distinction between common and sacred history. But his language is not perfectly clear.

specialty; if you insist on the specialty, the comparison will not hold without implicating God. Dr. Arnold's explanation (quoted by Stanley, p. 332) of the commendation bestowed on Jael in Deborah's song seems to us in every sense unsatisfactory. Jael's assassination of the confiding Sisera admits of no vindication whatever. It was a sin not only against the higher law of Christian mercy as yet unknown to her, but against the then clearly recognised standard of Arab honour and faith. She murders, while sleeping under her own tent, an ally of her tribe, and apparently a friend of her husband, who had thrown himself on her protection and partaken of her hospitality; and yet, in spite of this, the prophetess proclaims her "blessed above women." We see no other solution of these difficulties than to hand over these personages of the Biblical story, and the approval pronounced on them by the Biblical writers, unconditionally to the free judgment of the Christian conscience of the nineteenth century, and to regard their history as simply a human history; marking, however, at the same time, with reverent eye, how, amidst this dark chaos of blood and crime, bright spirits arose, one after another in uninterrupted succession, to break the gloom, and permeate it more and more with a light from God.

We have not scrupled to notice in this admirable work some points which we thought ought not to be passed over in silence, -less as positive blemishes than as deficiencies, a falling-short of what might have been expected from the author,-a failure to carry out to their full and legitimate consequences, principles which underlie the entire structure of his volume, and which no one could have applied more felicitously and with richer fruit than himself. We regret this the more, because such omissions must become more perceptible as the knowledge and intelligence of the public on these subjects increases, and they are better prepared for that large and generous interpretation of the Bible, to which nothing will have more powerfully contributed than his own book. Our thanks to him, however, for what he has done are not the less hearty, because we are confident that he is capable of doing, and, as we venture to hope, will hereafter do, a great deal more.

We crave room for a few additional words, ere we conclude. We have observed in some quarters a disposition to draw an invidious comparison between the author of the present volume and Bishop Colenso,-the first part of whose work on the Pentateuch and Joshua was noticed in our last number-as though the former had rendered as much service to the religion of the Bible, as the latter by his free criticisms had damaged it. We think such a comparison not only invidious but singularly un

just. Dr. Stanley and Dr. Colenso are each doing a good work in their own way,-each doing what the other perhaps could not do. The task of a rigid analyst, involving of necessity some destruction of cherished prepossessions, is always a less agreeable one than that of the creative fancy which can combine and reproduce. It is the difference between the anatomist and the painter of the living form. But as the painter can never attain to a truthful representation without the previous science of the anatomist, so the historian can never convey a correct impression of a past age without the foregoing labours of the critic. The bishop's strictures on the Biblical account of the Exodus have been derided as minute and unimportant; but if they test the correctness or the incorrectness of a history that has been treated as infallible, by a plain matter-of-fact criterion, which the popular intelligence can at once seize and appreciate, they are neither one nor the other; and they supply just that element to the investigation in which Dr. Stanley's delightful narrative is confessedly defective. The real objection to the bishop's criticisms is not that they are insignificant, but that they are felt to be unanswerable. They dissipate, by the dissolving touch of fact and figure, that vague mistiness of statement in which a half liberalism, with one meaning for the learned and another for the vulgar, loves to shroud its imbecility, and compel the answer of a decided yes or no to their straightforward and searching questions. The prevailing cant is, We do not care for the history; we want to preserve our theology. But a true theology can never be based on a rotten history; and if much which has been taken for history is really not history, our vast theological systems which assume a foundation in fact, rest on tottering supports; and he who discovers their true character, is rendering an inestimable service to the highest truth. Agassiz has well said, that every new view which upsets predominant and deeply-rooted opinions, has to pass through three stages. First, its truth is boldly denied. Then, when it is seen to be making its way among the thoughtful, the outcry is, that it is hostile to religion. Lastly, when it can no longer be resisted, people all at once find out that there is nothing new in it, and wonder why such a fuss should be made about a thing which every body knew and perfectly well understood long ago. From the disposition in certain circles to pooh-pooh Dr. Colenso's book, it may not unreasonably be inferred that the view which he advocates is rapidly approaching the last of these stages, and that its truth is being tacitly admitted where it is not openly avowed. In the same spirit are vented depreciatory judgments on his scholarly attainments and his knowledge of the original languages of the Bible. What these

may be, we have no means of knowing except from his writings. Foreign scholars, with whom no living English theologian will admit of a moment's comparison-such men as Ewald and Hupfeld-certainly do not think meanly of them or of their fruits. They are at least equal to those of his assailants, and amply sufficient to qualify him for the treatment of a question mainly historical. In his last volume we might point to his dissertation on the origin of the name Jehovah, and its occurrence in proper names as an evidence of date, as an excellent specimen of clear and exhaustive philological analysis. Probably many errors in detail will be discovered; nor can it be expected that one mind in a single inquiry should be able to take in all the points that must enter into a thorough investigation of the whole of this complicated problem. But what then? Such deficiencies do not affect the soundness of his general views, or prove to be misdirected the great final end of his researches. Nothing is more disgraceful in our modern controversy than the disingenuous trick of fastening on and magnifying small and unavoidable mistakes, for the purpose of damaging an adversary in the opinion of the ignorant, while the great principle to which he is committed, and which involves the very essence of the question, is not only unrefuted, but carefully left untouched. How much more befitting an honest mind the generous concession, that if we would ultimately gain any truth worth having, we must allow for many errors by the way!

We write earnestly on this subject, because we regard the recognition of the great services in different directions of two such men as Dr. Stanley and Dr. Colenso, within the pale of our national Establishment, as absolutely essential to the justification of its claim to be considered the first of Protestant Churches, and a true exponent, under diversified intellectual forms, of the religious spirit of the age. Unhappily there is much latent liberalism diffused through society, unaccompanied by the moral earnestness which would dictate an unreserved utterance of individual conviction. There is a so-called liberal school which can make any thing out of every thing,-which twists old formulas into any shape like a glove, and avoids with instinctive aversion, as the worst of heretics, those more decided and manly intellects which seek for facts, and insist on calling things by their right names. We confess we have no faith in this party. No healthy progress is to be expected from them. They will keep every thing as it is, by discovering some mystical reason for it; and will never, we are convinced, be brought to face courageously the critical questions which cannot be evaded, if we are to renovate our theology by a more enlightened interpretation of the Bible and ecclesiastical history. It

seems strange that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the most thoughtful and earnest minds should be expected to limit their ideas by the ignorance of the past, and be hampered in their efforts to elevate the spiritual condition of their contemporaries by the timid or worldly prejudices of the present. What is the meaning of doctors and leaders in the Church? Is new truth forbidden to them? Are they only to conserve, and never to acquire? If the free movement which is a condition of all life is to be withheld from them, they are in a worse condition than the bishops of the primitive Church in the second and third centuries, who within the limits of their respective Tapoikiaι were at liberty, under certain conditions that secured a vital Christianity, to modify the liturgy and the creed in accordance with the needs of their locality and their time, and held themselves for all such discretionary reforms responsible to their Lord alone.* Ought not the Church to demand the restoration of her ancient franchises? Ought not the bishop, the presbyters, and the people to resume their former relations, and once more consult together for their common spiritual weal? A momentous alternative is now impending-whether the Church shall receive new blood into her veins, and expand into national breadth and comprehensiveness, or lapse into the cold and petrified formalism of an obsolete sect. Di meliora piis is our fervent prayer.

ART. VI.-BOLINGBROKE AS A STATESMAN. The Life of Henry St. John Viscount Bolingbroke, Secretary of State in the reign of Queen Anne. By Thomas Macknight, author of the "History of the Life and Times of Edmund Burke." WHO now reads Bolingbroke? was asked sixty years ago. Who knows any thing about him? we may ask now. Professed students of our history or of our literature may have special knowledge; but out of the general mass of educated men, how many could give an intelligible account of his ca

* "Scimus quosdam quod semel imbiberint nolle deponere, nec propositum suum facile mutare, sed salvo inter collegas pacis et concordiæ vinculo quædam propria, quæ apud se semel sint usurpata, retinere. Qua in re nec nos vim cuiquam facimus, aut legem damus, cum habeat in ecclesiæ administratione voluntatis suæ arbitrium liberum unusquisque præpositus, rationem actus sui domino redditurus." Cyprian. Stephano Epist. ii. 1, edit. Erasm. This last expression occurs in two other epistles, "ad Magnum" and "ad Cornelium." It seems to have been a favourite one with the author; and we must remember who he was, not the high-flying nonconformist Tertullian, but the conservative Cyprian, the model high-churchman to all future time. Bingham, himself a high-churchman, has discussed this matter with his usual learning in his Origines Ecclesiasticæ, b. ii. c. vi.

« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »