Part 14

Besides the objection to miracles that they are not capable of attestation, Hume's objection is not that they are false, but that they are incommunicable. Two different duties arise for the man who witnesses a miracle and for him who receives traditionally. The duty of the first is to confide in his own experience, which may, besides, have been repeated; of the second, to confide in his understanding, which says: 'Less marvel that the reporter should have erred than that nature should have been violated.'

How dearly do these people betray their own hypocrisy about the divinity of Christianity, and at the same time the meanness of their own natures, who think the Messiah, or God's Messenger, must first prove His own commission by an act of power; whereas (1) a new revelation of moral forces could not be invented by all generations, and (2) an act of power much more probably argues an alliance with the devil. I should gloomily suspect a man who came forward as a magician.

Suppose the Gospels written thirty years after the events, and by ignorant, superstitious men who have adopted the fables that old women had surrounded Christ with--how does this supposition vitiate the report of Christ's parables? But, on the other hand, they could no more have invented the parables than a man alleging a diamond-mine could invent a diamond as attestation. The parables prove themselves.

_XXII. 'LET HIM COME DOWN FROM THE CROSS.'_

Now, this is exceedingly well worth consideration. I know not at all whether what I am going to say has been said already--life would not suffice in every field or section of a field to search every nook and section of a nook for the possibilities of chance utterance given to any stray opinion. But this I know without any doubt at all, that it cannot have been said effectually, cannot have been so said as to publish and disperse itself; else it is impossible that the crazy logic current upon these topics should have lived, or that many separate arguments should ever for very shame have been uttered. Said or not said, let us presume it unsaid, and let me state the true answer as if _de novo_, even if by accident somewhere the darkness shelters this same answer as uttered long ago.

Now, therefore, I will suppose that He _had_ come down from the Cross. No case can so powerfully illustrate the filthy falsehood and pollution of that idea which men generally entertain, which the sole creditable books universally build upon. What would have followed? This would have followed: that, inverting the order of every true emanation from God, instead of growing and expanding for ever like a [symbol: <], it would have attained its _maximum_ at the first. The effect for the half-hour would have been prodigious, and from that moment when it began to flag it would degrade rapidly, until, in three days, a far fiercer hatred against Christ would have been moulded. For observe: into what state of mind would this marvel have been received? Into any good-will towards Christ, which previously had been defeated by the belief that He was an impostor in the sense that He pretended to a power of miracles which in fact He had not? By no means. The sense in which Christ had been an impostor for them was in assuming a commission, a spiritual embassy with appropriate functions, promises, prospects, to which He had no title. How had that notion--not, viz., of miraculous impostorship, but of spiritual impostorship--been able to maintain itself? Why, what should have reasonably destroyed the notion? This, viz., the sublimity of His moral system. But does the reader imagine that this sublimity is of a nature to be seen intellectually--that is, insulated and _in vacuo_ for the intellect? No more than by geometry or by a _sorites_ any man constitutionally imperfect could come to understand the nature of the sexual appetite; or a man born deaf could make representable to himself the living truth of music, a man born blind could make representable the living truth of colours. All men are not equally deaf in heart--far from it--the differences are infinite, and some men never could comprehend the beauty of spiritual truth. But no man could comprehend it without preparation. That preparation was found in his training of Judaism; which to those whose hearts were hearts of flesh, not stony and charmed against hearing, had already anticipated the first outlines of Christian ideas. Sin, purity, holiness unimaginable, these had already been inoculated into the Jewish mind. And amongst the race inoculated Christ found enough for a central nucleus to His future Church. But the natural tendency under the fever-mist of strife and passion, evoked by the present position in the world operating upon robust, full-blooded life, unshaken by grief or tenderness of nature, or constitutional sadness, is to fail altogether of seeing the features which so powerfully mark Christianity. Those features, instead of coming out into strong relief, resemble what we see in mountainous regions where the mist covers the loftiest peaks.

We have heard of a man saying: 'Give me such titles of honour, so many myriads of pounds, and then I will consider your proposal that I should turn Christian.' Now, survey--pause for one moment to survey--the immeasurable effrontery of this speech. First, it replies to a proposal having what object--our happiness or his? Why, of course, his: how are we interested, except on a sublime principle of benevolence, in his faith being right? Secondly, it is a reply presuming money, the most fleshly of objects, to modify or any way control religion, _i.e._, a spiritual concern. This in itself is already monstrous, and pretty much the same as it would be to order a charge of bayonets against gravitation, or against an avalanche, or against an earthquake, or against a deluge. But, suppose it were _not_ so, what incomprehensible reasoning justifies the notion that not we are to be paid, but that he is to be paid for a change not concerning or affecting our happiness, but his?

_XXIII. IS THE HUMAN RACE ON THE DOWN GRADE?_

As to individual nations, it is matter of notoriety that they are often improgressive. As a whole, it may be true that the human race is under a necessity of slowly advancing; and it may be a necessity, also, that the current of the moving waters should finally absorb into its motion that part of the waters which, left to itself, would stagnate. All this may be true--and yet it will not follow that the human race must be moving constantly upon an ascending line, as thus:

B / / / / / / A

nor even upon such a line, with continual pauses or rests interposed, as thus:

[Illustration]

where there is no going back, though a constant interruption to the going forward; but a third hypothesis is possible: there may be continual loss of ground, yet so that continually the loss is more than compensated, and the total result, for any considerable period of observation, may be that progress is maintained:

[Illustration]

At O, by comparison with the previous elevation at A, there is a repeated falling back; but still upon the whole, and pursuing the inquiry through a sufficiently large segment of time, the constant report is--ascent.

Upon this explanation it is perfectly consistent with a general belief in the going forward of man--that this particular age in which we live might be stationary, or might even have gone back. It cannot, therefore, be upon any _à priori_ principle that I maintain the superiority of this age. It is, and must be upon special examination, applied to the phenomena of this special age. The last century, in its first thirty years, offered the spectacle of a death-like collapse in the national energies. All great interests suffered together. The intellectual power of the country, spite of the brilliant display in a lower element, made by one or two men of genius, languished as a whole. The religious feeling was torpid, and in a degree which insured the strong reaction of some irritating galvanism, or quickening impulse such as that which was in fact supplied by Methodism. It is not with that age that I wish to compare the present. I compare it with the age which terminated thirty years ago--roused, invigorated, searched as that age was through all its sensibilities by the electric shock of the French Revolution. It is by comparison with an age so keenly alive, penetrated by ideas stirring and uprooting, that I would compare it; and even then the balance of gain in well-calculated resource, fixed yet stimulating ideals, I hold to be in our favour--and this in opposition to much argument in an adverse spirit from many and influential quarters. Indeed, it is a remark which more than once I have been led to make in print: that if a foreigner were to inquire for the moral philosophy, the ethics, and even for the metaphysics, of our English literature, the answer would be, 'Look for them in the great body of our Divinity.' Not merely the more scholastic works on theology, but the occasional sermons of our English divines contain a body of richer philosophical speculation than is elsewhere to be found; and, to say the truth, far more instructive than anything in our Lockes, Berkeleys, or other express and professional philosophers. Having said this by way of showing that I do not overlook their just pretensions, let me have leave to notice a foible in these writers which is not merely somewhat ludicrous, but even seriously injurious to truth. One and all, through a long series of two hundred and fifty years, think themselves called upon to tax their countrymen--each severally in his own age--with a separate, peculiar, and unexampled guilt of infidelity and irreligion. Each worthy man, in his turn, sees in his own age overt signs of these offences not to be matched in any other. Five-and-twenty periods of ten years each may be taken, concerning each of which some excellent writer may be cited to prove that it had reached a maximum of atrocity, such as should not easily have been susceptible of aggravation, but which invariably the _relays_ through all the subsequent periods affirm their own contemporaries to have attained. Every decennium is regularly worse than that which precedes it, until the mind is perfectly confounded by the _Pelion upon Ossa_ which must overwhelm the last term of the twenty-five. It is the mere necessity of a logical _sorites_, that such a horrible race of villains as the men of the twenty-fifth decennium ought not to be suffered to breathe. Now, the whole error arises out of an imbecile self-surrender to the first impressions from the process of abstraction as applied to remote objects. Survey a town under the benefit of a ten miles' distance, combined with a dreamy sunshine, and it will appear a city of celestial palaces. Enter it, and you will find the same filth, the same ruins, the same disproportions as anywhere else. So of past ages, seen through the haze of an abstraction which removes all circumstantial features of deformity. Call up any one of those ages, if it were possible, into the realities of life, and these worthy praisers of the past would be surprised to find every feature repeated which they had fancied peculiar to their own times. Meanwhile this erroneous doctrine of sermons has a double ill consequence: first, the whole chain of twenty-five writers, when brought together, consecutively reflect a colouring of absurdity upon each other; separately they might be endurable, but all at once, predicating (each of his own period exclusively) what runs with a rolling fire through twenty-five such periods in succession, cannot but recall to the reader that senseless doctrine of a physical decay in man, as if man were once stronger, broader, taller, etc.--upon which hypothesis of a gradual descent why should it have stopped at any special point? How could the human race have failed long ago to reach the point of _zero_? But, secondly, such a doctrine is most injurious and insulting to Christianity. If, after eighteen hundred years of development, it could be seriously true of Christianity that it had left any age or generation of men worse in conduct, or in feeling, or in belief, than all their predecessors, what reasonable expectation could we have that in eighteen hundred years more the case would be better? Such thoughtless opinions make Christianity to be a failure.

_XXIV. BREVIA: SHORT ESSAYS (IN CONNECTION WITH EACH OTHER.)_

1.--PAGANISM AND CHRISTIANITY--THE IDEAS OF DUTY AND HOLINESS.

The Pagan God could have perfect peace with his votary, and yet could have no tendency to draw that votary to himself. Not so with the God of Christianity, who cannot give His peace without drawing like a vortex to Himself, who cannot draw into His own vortex without finding His peace fulfilled.

'An age when lustre too intense.'--I am much mistaken if Mr. Wordsworth is not deeply wrong here. Wrong he is beyond a doubt as to the _fact_; for there could have been no virtual intensity of lustre (unless merely as a tinsel toy) when it was contradicted by everything in the _manners_, _habits_, and situations of the Pagan Gods--they who were content to play in the coarsest manner the part of gay young bloods, _sowing_ their wild oats, and with a recklessness of consequences to their female partners never by possibility rivalled by men. I believe and affirm that lustre the most dazzling and blinding would not have any _ennobling_ effect except as received into a matrix of previous unearthly and holy type.

As to Bacchus being eternally young, the ancients had no idea or power to frame the idea of eternity. Their eternity was a limitary thing. And this I say not empirically, but _à priori_, on the ground that without the idea of holiness and unfleshliness, eternity cannot rise buoyant from the ground, cannot sustain itself. But waive this, and what becomes of the other things? If he were characteristically distinguished as young, then, by a mere rebound of the logic, the others were not so honoured, else where is the special privilege of Bacchus?

'And she shall sing there as in the days of her youth' (Hosea ii. 15).--The case of pathos, a person coming back to places, recalling the days of youth after a long woe, is quite unknown to the ancients--nay, the maternal affection itself, though used inevitably, is never consciously reviewed as an object of beauty.

Duties arise everywhere, but--do not mistake--not under their sublime form _as_ duties. I claim the honour to have first exposed a fallacy too common: duties never did, never will, arise save under Christianity, since without it the sense of a morality lightened by religious motive, aspiring to holiness, not only of act, but of motive, had not before it even arisen. It is the pressure of society, its mere needs and palpable claims, which first calls forth duties, but not _as_ duties; rather as the casting of parts in a scenical arrangement. A duty, under the low conception to which at first it conforms, is a _rôle_, no more; it is strictly what we mean when we talk of a _part_. The sense of conscience strictly is not touched under any preceding system of religion. It is the daughter of Christianity. How little did Wordsworth seize the fact in his Ode: 'Stern Daughter of the Voice of God' is not enough; the voice of God is the conscience; and neither has been developed except by Christianity.

The conscience of a pagan was a conscience pointing to detection: it pointed only to the needs of society, and caused fear, shame, anxiety, only on the principles of sympathy; that is, from the impossibility of releasing himself from a dependence on the reciprocal feelings--the rebound, the dependence on the _re_sentments of others.

_Morals._--Even ordinary morals could have little practical weight with the ancients: witness the Roman juries and Roman trials. Had there been any sense of justice predominant, could Cicero have hoped to prevail by such defences as that of Milo and fifty-six others, where the argument is merely fanciful--such a _Hein-gespinst_ as might be applauded with 'very good!' 'bravo!' in any mock trial like that silly one devised by Dean Swift.

The slowness and obtuseness of the Romans to pathos appears _à priori_ in their amphitheatre, and its tendency to put out the theatre; secondly, _à posteriori_, in the fact that their theatre was put out; and also, _à posteriori_, in the coarseness of their sensibilities to real distresses unless costumed and made sensible as well as intelligible. The grossness of this demand, which proceeded even so far as pinching to elicit a cry, is beyond easy credit to men of their time.

The narrow range of the Greek intellect, always revolving through seven or eight centuries about a few memorable examples--from the Life of Themistocles to Zeno or Demosthenes.

The Grecian glories of every kind seem sociable and affable, courting sympathy. The Jewish seem malignantly [Greek: autarkeis].

But just as Paganism respected only rights of action, possession, etc., Christianity respects a far higher scale of claims, viz., as to the wounds to feelings, to deep injury, though not grounded in anything measurable or expoundable by external results. Man! you have said that which you were too proud and obstinate to unsay, which has lacerated some heart for thirty years that had perhaps secretly and faithfully served you and yours. Christianity lays hold on that as a point of conscience, if not of honour, to make _amends_, if in no other way, by remorse.

As to the tears of Oedipus in the crises. I am compelled to believe that Sophocles erred as regarded nature; for in cases so transcendent as this Greek nature and English nature could not differ. In the great agony on Mount Oeta, Hercules points the pity of his son Hyllus to the extremity of torment besieging him on the humiliating evidence of the tears which they extorted from him. 'Pity me,' says he, 'that weep with sobs like a girl: a thing that no one could have charged upon the man' (pointing to himself); 'but ever without a groan I followed out to the end my calamities.' Now, on the contrary, on the words of the oracle, that beckoned away with impatient sounds Oedipus from his dear sublime Antigone, Oedipus is made to weep.

But this is impossible. Always the tears arose, and will arise, on the _relaxation_ of the torment and in the rear of silent anguish on its sudden suspense, amidst a continued headlong movement; and also, in looking back, tears, unless checked, might easily arise. But never during the torment: on the rack there are no tears shed, and those who suffered on the scaffold never yet shed tears, unless it may have been at some oblique glance at things collateral to their suffering, as suppose a sudden glimpse of a child's face which they had loved in life.

Is not every [Greek: aiôn] of civilization an inheritance from a previous state not so high? Thus, _e.g._, the Romans, with so little of Christian restraint, would have perished by reaction of their own vices, but for certain prejudices and follies about trade, manufacture, etc., and but for oil on their persons to prevent contagion. Now, this oil had been, I think, a secret bequeathed from some older and higher civilization long since passed away. We have it not, but neither have we so much needed it. Soon, however, we shall restore the secret by science more perfect.

Was Christianity meant to narrow or to widen the road to future happiness? If I were translated to some other planet, I should say:

1. _No_; for it raised a far higher standard--_ergo_, made the realization of this far more difficult.

2. _Yes_; for it introduced a new machinery for realizing this standard: (first) Christ's atonement, (second) grace.

But, according to some bigots (as Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne), as cited by Coleridge, Christianity first opened any road at all. Yet, surely they forget that, if simply to come too early was the fatal bar to their claims in the case, Abraham, the father of the faithful, could not benefit.

Yesterday, Thursday, October 21 (1843), I think, or the day before, I first perceived that the first great proof of Christianity is the proof of Judaism, and the proof of that lies in the Jehovah. What merely natural man capable of devising a God for himself such as the Jewish?

Of all eradications of this doctrine (of human progress), the most difficult is that connected with the outward shows--in air, in colouring, in form, in grouping of the great elements composing the furniture of the heavens and the earth. It is most difficult, even when confining one's attention to the modern case, and neglecting the comparison with the ancient, at all to assign the analysis of those steps by which to us Christians (but never before) the sea and the sky and the clouds and the many inter-modifications of these, A, B, C, D, and again the many interactions of the whole, the sun (S.), the moon (M.), the noon (N. S.)--the breathless, silent noon--the gay afternoon--the solemn glory of sunset--the dove-like glimpse of Paradise in the tender light of early dawn--by which these obtain a power utterly unknown, undreamed of, unintelligible to a Pagan. If we had spoken to Plato--to Cicero--of the deep pathos in a sunset, would he--would either--have gone along with us? The foolish reader thinks, Why, perhaps not, not altogether as to the quantity--the degree of emotion. Doubtless, it is undeniable that we moderns have far more sensibility to the phenomena and visual glories of this world which we inhabit. And it _is_ possible that, reflecting on the singularity of this characteristic badge worn by modern civilization, he may go so far as to suspect that Christianity has had something to do with it. But, on seeking to complete the chain which connects them, he finds himself quite unable to recover the principal link.

Now, it will prove, after all, even for myself who have exposed and revealed these new ligatures by which Christianity connects man with awful interests in the world, a most insurmountable task to assign the total nidus in which this new power resides, or the total phenomenology through which that passes to and fro. Generally it seems to stand thus: God reveals Himself to us more or less dimly in vast numbers of processes; for example, in those of vegetation, animal growth, crystallization, etc. These impress us not primarily, but secondarily on reflection, after considering the enormity of changes worked annually, and working even at the moment we speak. Then, again, other arrangements throw us more powerfully upon the moral qualities of God; _e.g._, we see the fence, the shell, the covering, varied in ten million ways, by which in buds and blossoms He insures the ultimate protection of the fruit. What protection, analogous to this, has He established for animals; or, taking up the question in the ideal case, for man, the supreme of His creatures? We perceive that He has relied upon love, upon love strengthened to the adamantine force of insanity or delirium, by the mere aspect of utter, utter helplessness in the human infant. It is not by power, by means visibly developed, that this result is secured, but by means spiritual and 'transcendental' in the highest degree.