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V
THE
COLLECTED WRITINGS
James Henley Thornwell, d.d.. ll.d..
; j^.^., JLJJL^.^ .,
LATE PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY AT COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA.
EDITED BY
JOHN B. ADGER, D.D. JOHN L. GIRAEDEAU, D.D.
VOL. III. -THEOLOGICAL AND CONTROVERSIAL
E I C H M O N D : PEESBYTEEIAN COMMITTEE OF PUBLICATION.
NEW YORK: ROBEKT CARTER & BROS. PHILADELPHIA: ALFRED 5IARTIKX. 1873.
Entered according to Act of Congress, iu the year 1S72, by
CHARLKS GEN NET,
in trust, as
Treasurer of Pubucation of the Gexeral Assembly of the Presbyterian
Church in the United States,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at "Washington.
S:
CONTENTS.
PAET I.— KATIONALIST CONTEOVERSY.
PAGE
Prefatory Note by the Editor 7
The Standard and Nature of Religion in three Sections.. 9
Section 1. An External Standard Vindicated 9
" 2. Religion Psychologically Considered 78
" 3. Revelation and Religion 153
The Office of Reason in regard to Revelation 183
Miracles 221
Their Nature 228
Their Apologetic Worth 233
Their Credibility 251
PART II.— PAPAL CONTROVERSY.
Prefatory Note by the Editor 279
The Validity of the Baptism of the Church of Rome 283
Romanist Arguments for the Apocrypha Discussed 413
Letter I. Preliminary Statements — Council of Trent and the
Canon 413
" II. The Argument for Inspiration Examined 430
" IIL The Argument for an Infallible Body 439
" IV. Historical Argument 460
" V. Infallibility— Historical Difficulties 475
" VL Infallibility and Skepticism 493
" VII. Infallibility and Superstition 51fi
" VIIL Infallibility and Civil Government 540
" IX. The Apocrypha not quoted in the New Testament 558
" X. The Apocrypha and the Jewish Canon 569
" XI. Silence of Christ as to the Apocrypha 584
" XII. The Apocrypha and the Jewish Church — The Apoc- rypha and the Primitive Church 600
" XIII. The Apocrypha and Ancient Versions of Scripture —
The Apocrypha and the Apostolic Fathers 611
" XIV. Patristic terms applied to the Apocrypha 628
3
4 CONTENTS.
PAOE
Letter XV. Testimonies from the Second Century 644
" XVI. Testimonies from the Tiiird Century 665
" XVir. Testimonies from the Fourth Century G77
" XVIII. The Keal Testimony of tiie Primitive Church 711
Appendix 743
Original Article on the Apocrypha by the Author 745
Specimen Letters of a Keply by the Kev. P. N. Lynch, D. D 753
Collection of Passages in wliich Dr. Lynch represents the Fathers
as quoting the Apocrypha 802
PART I. RATIONALIST CONTROYERSY.
'^
OBTOH
^,„ ,,i
PREFATOKY NOTE.
These contributions to the Controversy with the Eationalists consist of— 1. An examination of Mr. Morell's celebrated work, entitled The Philos- ophy of Religion; 2. A discussion of the Office of Eeason in regard to Eevelation ; and 3. A Treatise on Miracles. They were all published in the Southern Presbyterian Keview, and the last one appeared likewise in the Southern Quarterly during the short period for which Dr. Thornwell was the conductor of that work.
Our authority for the titles we have given to the Examination of Morell, and to its different portions, will be found in the first pages of the second section of it. Dr. Thornwell /rs< considers the Philosophy of Religion in the light of an argument against an external Eevelation as the authoritative Standard of Eeligion ; and secondly, he examines the Psycnoiogy of Morell in relation to the question, What is the nature of the Subject in which Ee- ligion inheres? There remains, for the full execution of his plan as announced, the consideration, thirdly, of the Essence of Eeligion itself, and fourthly, of the Mode in which Eeligion is produced — in other words, the question. How is the given Subject put in possession of the given Essence? These two last points he subsequently threw together, and discussed them in the form of a sermon preached in Charleston before the Young Men's Christian Association. This sermon constitutes Section third of the Ex- amination of Morell's work.
Section First appeared first in October, 1849, Section Second in January, 1850, but Section Third not until April, 1856.
The discussion of the Office of Eeason in regard to Eevelation was published in June, 1847, as the first article of Volume First of that Ee- view whose pages during some fifteen years were illuminated with so many of the productions of his pen. The question, which he considers here is not the office of Eeason in relation to doctrines known to be a Eevelation from God— where, of course, the understanding is simply to believe— but
8 PREFATORY NOTE.
the office of Reason -where tlie reality of the Eevelation remains to be proved and the interpretation of the doctrine to be settled. The general principle is maintained that the competency of Eeason to judge in any case is the measure of its right. And — a distinction being made in the contents of the Scriptures betwixt the Supernatural or what is strictly Re- vealed, and the Katural or what is confirmed but not made known by the Divine testimony — it is argued that the office of Eeason in the Super- natural department of Eevelation may be positive, but never can be neg- ative, while in the Natural it is negative, but to a very limited extent, if at all, positive. In other words, in the Supernatural, Eeason may prove, but cannot refute — in the Natural, she may refute, but cannot establish.
The Treatise on Miracles was published July, 1857, in the form of a Eeview of the works of Trench, Wakdlaw and Hinds. It opens with a brief history of the Controversy with tlie Eationalists, and then discusses the Nature, the Apologetic Worth and the Credibility of the Miracle. It is supernatural — a temporary suspension of the laws of nature; it is, in itself, a sufficient credential of a Divine commission ; it is as credible as any other fact, and may be proved by competent testimony. The possi- bility of the event is thje sole limit to the credibility of testimony, and the question of the possibility of the Miracle is simply the question of the Existence of a personal God.
THE
STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION.
A REVIEW, IN THREE SECTIONS,
OF
MORELL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.
SECTION I.
AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED.
" rpHE design of this book," ^ we are told in the preface, _L "grew out of some of the reviews which appeared upon a former work of the author's, entitled An Historical and Critical View of the Speculative Philosophy of Europe in the Nineteenth Century." These reviews evinced, at least to the mind of Mr. Morell, "such a vast fluctuation of opinion," and such deplorable obscurity and confusion of ideas upon the whole subject of the connection betwixt philosophy and religion, that, in mercy to the general igno- rance, and particularly in deference to a suggestion of Tho- luck, he was induced "to commence a discussion" which, he evidently hoped, might have the effect of imparting in- tensity to the religious life, vigour to the religious literature and consistency to the religious sentiments of his country. He is at pains to inform us,^ and we thank him for the information — the book itself furnishing abundant internal evidence, which, in the absence of such a declaration, would ^ Page iii. ^ Preface, p. xxxii.
9
10 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
have been decisive to the coutrarv — that he has not rushed "hastily and unpreparedly into the region of theological inquirv." ""While philosophy has been the highest recrea- tion, theology," he declares, "has ever been the serious business of my whole life. To the study of this science I gave my earliest thoughts, under the guidance of one^ who is recognized by all parties as standing amongst the leading theologians of our age ; I pursued it through many succeeding years; and if I have found any intense pleasure, or felt any deep interest in philosophy at large, it has been derived, mainly, from the consciousness of its high import- ance, as bearing upon the vastest moral and religious in- terests of mankind." Trained by this fitting discipline for the task, it is perhaps no presumption in Mr. Morell to have published a book which professes to be not " a popular and attractive exposition" of the questions which come within its scope, but a thorough philosopliical discussion, developing "from the beginning, as far as possible in a connected and logical form," a subject which involves the fundamental principles of human knowledge, and that any- thing like justice may be done to it, demands, at every step, the subtlest analysis, the profouudest reasoning and the in- tensest power of reflection. These qualities Mr. Morell may possess in an eminent degree — he may even feel that the possession of them implies a vocation of God to give a new and nobler impulse to the. religion of his country, and that, like all apostles, he is entitled to use great boldness of speech — still we cannot but suggest that, as modesty be- comes the great, a little less pretension would have de- tracted nothing from the charms of his performance. The perpetual recurrence of phrases which seem to indicate the conviction of the author that his book is distinguished by extraordinary depth, and that he is gifted M'ith a superior degree of mental illumination, is, to say the least of it, ex- tremely ofiensive to the taste of his readers; and he Mill
* We learn from the 'Son\\ British Review that Dr. 'NVarillaw is the di- vine referred to.
Sect. I.] an external standard vindicated. 11
probably find few who are prejiared to share in the super- ciKous contempt which he lavishes upon the prospective opponents of his system. The philosophy with which Mr. Morell is impregnated is essentially arrogant ; and it is more to it than to him that we ascribe the pretending tone of his work. The pervading consciousness of the weakness and ignorance of man, the diffidence of themselves, the profound impression of the boundlessness of nature and of the limitless range of inquiry which lies beyond the present grasp of our faculties, the humility, modesty and caution which characterize the writings of the great Eng- lish masters, will in vain be sought among the leading philosophers of modern Germany and France. Aspiring to penetrate to the very essence of things, to know them in themselves as well as in the laws which regulate their changes and vicissitudes, they advance to the discussion of the sublimest problems of God, the soul and the universe with an audacity of enterprise in which it is hard to say whether presumption or folly is most conspicuous. They seem to think that the human faculties are competent to all things, that whatever reaches beyond their compass is mere vacuity and emptiness, that omniscience, by the due use of their favourite organon, may become the attainment of man, as it is the prerogative of God, and that, in the very structure of the mind, the seeds are deposited from which may be developed the true system of the universe.
Within the limits of legitimate inquiry we would lay no restrictions upon freedom of thought. All truly great men are conscious of their powers; and the confidence which they have in themselves inspires the strength, intensity and enthusiasm which enable them to conceive and to execute purposes worthy of their gifts. To the timid and distrustful their excursions may often seem bold and j^resumptuous; but in the most daring adventures of their genius they are restrained, as if by an instinct, from the visionary projects and chimerical speculations which transcend the sphere of their capacities, as the eagle, in his loftiest flights, never
12 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
soars beyond the strength of his pinion. Confidence ad- justed to the measure of power never degenerates into arrogance. It is the soul of courage, perseverance and heroic achievement; it supports its possessor amid discour- agements and obstacles; it represses the melancholy, languor and fits of despondency to which the choicest spirits are subject; it gives steadiness to efibrt, patience to industry and sublimity to hope. But when men forget that their capa- cities are finite, that there are boundaries to human investi- gation and research, that there are questions which, from the very nature of the mind and the necessary conditions of human knowledge, never can be solved in this sublunary state — ^when they are determined to make their understand- ings the sole and adequate standard of all truth, and pre- sumptuously assume that the end of their line is the bottom of the ocean, — this is intolerable arrogance, the very spirit of ISIoloch,
"Whose trust was with the Eternal to be deemed Equal in strength ; and rather than be less Cared not to be at all."
We can have no sympathy with the pretensions of any method, whether inductive or reflective, which aims at a science of being in itself, and professes to unfold the nature of the Deity, the constitution of the universe and the mys- teries of creation and providence. To say, as INIr. INIorell docs,^ that " our knowledge of mind, in the act of reflective consciousness, is perfectly adequate, that it reaches to the whole extent of its essence, that it comprehends the intui- tion of its existence as a jpoiver or activiUj, and likewise the observation of all its determinations," is sheer extravagance and rant, which can be matched by nothing but the astounding declaration of the same author, that "to talk of knowing mind beyond the direct consciousness of its spontaneous being, and all the affections it can undergo, is absurd ; there is nothing more to know." We are not to be
1 History of Modern Philosophy, p. 53, vol. ii., second Loudon edition.
^
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 13
surprised that such a philosophy should find nothing to rebuke it in the awful and impenetrable depths of the Di- vine nature, that it should aspire to gaze directly upon the throne of God, and profess to give a "direct apperception" of Him^ whom no man hath seen or can see, and whose glory would be intolerable to mortal eyes. Titanic audacity is the native spirit of the system ; and it is in the imper- ceptible influence of this spirit upon a mind otherwise generous and manly that we find the explanation of the fact that ]Mr. Morell, in the tone and temper of his per- formance, has departed so widely from the modesty of true science.
There is one feature of the book before us which is par- ticularly painful, and we confess our embarrassment in find- ing terms to express it. Hypocrisy would precisely indicate the thing, but as that word cannot be employed without casting a serious and, we believe, an undeserved imputation upon the personal integrity of the author, we shall forbear to use it. We have no doubt that he is cordial and sincere in the zeal which he manifests for an earnest and vital re- ligion ; but what we object to is, that he should so often employ a phraseology, and employ it in such connections, as to convey the idea to undiscriminating readers — which the whole tenor of his argument proves to be false — that the earnest and vital religion which enlists his zeal em- braces the distinctive features of the system of grace. When he speaks of Christianity, in its essence, as a deep inward life in the soul, and pours contempt upon the barren forms and frigid deductions of logic as a substitute for piety — when he contends for divine intuitions, heavenly im- pulses and a lofty sympathy and communion with God — there is something in all this so much like the language of converted men that untutored minds are apt to be caught with the guile, and under the impression that they
^ Ibid., p. 52. It is refreshing to contrast with such pretensions the statements of Locke in the introduction of his celebrated Essay on the Human Understanding.
14 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
are still clinging to the doctrines of a living, in opposition to a formal and dead, Christianity, may imbibe, without suspicion, a system which saps the foundations of the whole economy of the Gospel. Mr. Morell is no friend to what is commonly denominated Evangelical Religion. His divine life is not that which results from mysterious union with the Son of God, as the Head of a glorious covenant and the Father of a heaven-born progeny. His divine intuitions are not the illuminations of that Sjjirit which irradiates the written Word, and reveals to our hearts the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ; his communion with the Father is not the fellowship of a child, who rejoices in the assurance of his gracious adoption, and renders unceasing thanks for his marvellous deliverance, through the blood of a great Me- diator, from sin, condemnation and ruin. His religion embraces no such elements ; and he ought not, in candour, to have disguised sentiments, utterly at war with the com- mon conceptions of piety, in the very dress in which these conceptions are uniformly presented. If he has intro- duced a new religion, he should not have decked it in the habits of the old. It is the same species of dishonesty, the same paltering in a double sense, as that to which we object in Cousin, who, in seeming to defend the inspiration of Prophets and Apostles, and to rebut the assaults of a rationalistic infidelity, really denies the possibility of any distinctive and peculiar inspiration at all, and places Divine revelation upon the same platform with human discoveries. We acquit Mr. Morell of any intention to deceive. We rather suspect that he has partially imposed upon himself. We can understand his declaration,^ that he "does not know that he has asserted a single result the germs and principles of which are not patent in the writings of various of the most eminent theologians of the Church of Eng- land, or of other orthodox communities," in no other Avay than by supposing that he has been so long accustomed to ^ Preface, p. xxxiii.
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 15
associate his own philosophical opinions with the character- istic phraseology of spiritual religion that the terms have ceased to suggest any other ideas to his mind; so that he is unconscious of the change of meaning which they have imperceptibly undergone from his habits of thought. His honesty, however, does not diminish the danger which results from the ambiguity of his language. A corrupt system, disguised in the costume of the true, is like Satan transformed into an angel of light. We should have rejoiced if Mr. MorelFs religion could have been more nakedly presented. It is not the ingenuity of his arguments, .nor the subtlety of his analysis, it is not the logical state- ment or the logical development of any of his principles, from which the most serious mischief is to be apprehended : it is from his fervour, his earnestness and zeal, which, in seeming to aim at a higher standard of Christian life, will enlist the sympathies of many, who feel that there is some- thing more in the Gospel than a meagre skeleton of doc- trines. They will be apt to think that the words which he speaks to them, resembling so often the tone of Christ and His Apostles, are, like theirs, spirit and life. They will take the draught as a healthful and vivifying potion, and find, too late, that it is a deadly mixture of hemlock and nightshade. Here is the danger ; in this covert insinuation of false principles, this gilding of a nauseous pill. If there were less in the book which counterfeits the emotions that spring from religion, the operation of its poison would be comparatively circumscribed.
The danger, in the present instance, is incalculably in- creased by the surpassing enchantment of the style, which, though not distinguished by the precision of Stewart, the energy of Burke or the exquisite elegance of Hall, has a charm about it which holds the reader spell-bound from the beginning to the end of the volume. We will venture to assert that no man ever took up the book who was will- ing to lay it down until he had finished it; and very few, we apprehend, have finished it who were willing to dismiss
16 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I
it without another, and perhaps still another, perusal. Mr, Morcll is never dull; in his abstrusest speculations, in his most refined and subtle efforts of analysis, there is an unc- tion Avhich fascinates the reader; he has the art, the rare and happy art, of extracting from the dry bones of meta- physics a delightful entertainment. The sorcery of his genius and the magic of his eloquence conceal the naked deformity of his principles ; and attention is beguiled from the hideousness of the object by the finished beauty of the painting.
The transparency of his diction, the felicity of his illus- trations, the admirable concatenation of his thoughts, his freedom from the extremes of prolixity and brevity, and his skill in evolving and presenting in beautiful coherence and consistency the most complicated processes of thought, justly entitle him to rank among the finest philosophical writers of his country. Imbued as he is with the spirit of German philosophy, and thoroughly conversant with the productions of its best masters, it is no small praise that in his own compositions he has avoided all affectation of foreign idioms, and that at a time when our language seems likely to be flooded with the influx of a " pedantic and un-Eng- lish phraseology." He has found his mother-tongue amply adequate to the expression of his thoughts, and even the misty ideas of Germany, which its own authors have sel- dom been able to render intelligible in a dialect of amazing flexibility and compass, are seized with so firm and mascu- line a grasp, are so clearly defined and so luminously con- veyed, that we hardly recognize their identity, and can- not but think that if Kant could rise from the dead and read his speculations in the pages of Mr. Morell, he would understand them better than in his own uncouth and bar- barous jargon. We could wish that all importers of Ger- man metaphysics and German theology would imitate the example of Mr. Morell in his use of the vernacular tongue. We want no kitchen-Latin, and we strongly suspect that anv ideas which refuse to be marslialled in Enulish sen-
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 17
tences, or to be obedient to English words, are unsuited to our soil, and had better be left to vegetate or perish on the banks of the Rhine.
As Mr. Morell nowhere tells us precisely what he means by the philosophy of religion, we are left to collect its im- port from his occasional statements of the scope and design of philosophy in general, his definition of religion, and the nature of the whole discussion. Religion he carefully dis- tinguishes from theology ; they are, as he insists in his former work,^ "■ two widely different things. Theology implies a body of truth founded upon indisputable principles, and having a connection capable of carrying our reason with it running through all its parts. Religion, on the other hand, is the spontaneous homage of our nature, j)oured forth with all the fragrance of holy feeling into the bosom of the Infi- nite. Religion may exist without a theology at all, prop- erly so called." Or, as the same sentiments are expressed in the work before us,
"Let it be distinctly understood in tlie outset that we are speaking of religion now as a fact or phenomenon in human nature. There is a very common but a very loose employment of the term religion, in which it is made to designate the outward and formal principles of a community quite independently of the region of human experience, as when we speak of the Protestant religion, the religion of Moham- med, the religions of India, and the like. The mixing up of these two significations in a philosophical treatise cannot fail to give rise to unnumbered misunderstandings, and we emphatically repeat, there- fore, that in our present use of the term we are not intending to express any system of truth or form of doctrine whatever, but simply an inward fact of the human consciousness — a fact, too, the essential nature of which it is of the utmost importance for us to discover. ' ' '^
By religion, then, we are to understand not a system of doctrine or a creed, but those states of the mind and those inward experiences of the heart which spring from a sense of the Infinite and Eternal. But religion, in general, occu- pies a very subordinate jilace in the book ; it is only intro- duced at all in order to prepare the way for what Mr.
1 Vol. ii., Appendix, 2d Edition, p. G50. - Pages 62, 03.
Vol. III.— 2
18 STANDARD AND XATUKE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
Morell (lonoiniuates "the Christian consciousness." It is Christian exjierience, particularly, which he proposes to investigate. But what is the ]^)liilosophy of religion ? AYe have a clue to what the author means by it in the following passage of the preface :
"All great systems of philosophy are simply methods ; they do not give us the material of truth : they only teach us how to realize it, to make it reflective, to construct it into a system." ^
The inquiries which, in conformity with this definition — a definition, we would add, rather of logic than philosophy —we should expect to find him conducting as obviously falling under the import of his title, are such as have ref- erence to the department of the soul in which religion is pre-eminently seated, the nature and origin of our religious affections, the laws of their development and growth, the process by which a theology may be formed, and the grounds of certainty in regard to religious truth. In this expectation we are not disappointed; these are the high themes that he discusses — the pith and staple of his argu- ment. But we must take the liberty to say that in our humble judgment the analysis of these points, whatever appearances of candour and impartiality may be impressed upon it, was instituted and shaped with special reference to a foregone conclusion. The author was in quest of what Archimedes w^anted in order to move the world — a tzou arco — by means of which he could overturn the foundations of the Christian faith. There was a darling hypothesis in relation to the authority of the Bible which he was de- termined to establish; and with an eye to this result his philosophy, though digested into the form of a regular and orderly development of principles, was invented and framed. It is a species of special pleading, ingeniously disguised in the mask of philosophical research against the great distinct- ive feature of Protestant Christianity. AVhen we contem- plate the havoc and desolation of his theory — the Bible as an authoritative standard of faith, and creeds and confes- ' Page xxiv.
^
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 19
sions as bonds of Christian communion and fellowship, involved in a common ruin, with nothing to supply their place but the dim intimations of sentiment and feeling, chastened and regulated by the natural sympathy of earnest and awakened minds — we might be appalled at the pros- pect, if it were not for the consolatory reflection which the author himself has suggested, that his "philosophy does not give us the material of truth."
But to be a little more minute, the book is divided into twelve chapters, the first of which presents us with a gen- eral survey of the human mind. And as two of its powers are found to be of fundamental importance to the subse- quent discussion, the second is devoted to a somewhat ex- tended elucidation of the distinction betwixt them. In these two chapters the "philosophical groundwork" is laid of the author's whole system. If he is at fault in any essential point of his analysis, or has misapprehended the nature and relations of the "two great forms of our intel- lectual being" which play so conspicuous a part in his theory, his speculations labour at the threshold, the founda- tions are destroyed and the superstructure must fall to the ground. Since a human religion must be adjusted to the faculties of the human mind, an important step is taken toward the determination of its real nature when these faculties are explored and understood. Mr. Morell is, accordingly, conducted by his mental analysis to an inquiry into "the peculiar essence of religion in general," which he prosecutes in the third, and to a similar inquiry into the essence of Christianity in particular, which he prosecutes in the fourth, chapter of the book. He is now prepared to enter into the core of the subject ; and as it is in the applica- tion of his psychology to the affiliated questions of Revela- tion and Inspiration, and to the construction of a valid system of Theology, that the poison of his principles most freely works, we must invite particular attention to his opinions upon these points, the development of which occupies the fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of the work.
20 STANDARD AND NATURE OF JfKLlCJION. [Sect, I.
Revelation he regards as a "mode of intelligence" — a process by which a new field of ideas or a new range of experience is opened to the mind. It is jirecisely analo- gous to external perception, or that more refined sensibility to beauty and goodness upon which we are dependent for the emotions of taste and the operations of conscience. It consists in the direction of an original faculty to a class of objects which it is caj)able of apprehending. It is wholly a subjective state, and should never be confounded with the things revealed; a spiritual clairvoyance which brings the soul into contact w^itli spiritual realities, and enables it to gaze ujion invisible glories. Hence an external revelation, or a revelation which does not exist in the mind, is a con- tradiction in terms. We might just as reasonably suppose that the Bible or any other book could supply the place of the senses in giving us a knowledge of the material w^orld, as to snppose that it can supply the place of revelation in giving us a knowledge of religion. It can no more see for us in the one case than in the other; this is a personal operation, a thing which every man must do for himself. And as each individual must have his own power of per- ception, that he may know the existence of the objects around him, so each individual must have a personal and distinct revelation in himself, that he may come into the possession of the "Christian consciousness;" he must be brought immediately into contact with the object, and con- template it "face to face." Inspiration is not essentially difl'erent from revelation ; they are rather different aspects of the same process. As in all immediate knowledge there is an intelligent subject and an intelligible object brought into union, revelation, for the convenience of distinction, may be regarded as having primary reference to the act of God in presenting spiritual realities to the mind; and inspiration to wdiatever influence may be exerted upon the soul in order that it may be able to grasp and comprehend the realities presented. Revelation, in other words, gives the object; inspiration, the eye to behold it. The concur-
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 21
rence of both is essential to the production of knowledge. As inspiration, therefore, indicates, exclusively, a state of the mind, and that a state in whicli we are conscious of immediate knowledge, it cannot be affirmed of any class of writings nor of any processes of reasoning. An inspired book or an inspired argument is as senseless a form of expression as an intelligent book or an intelligent argu- ment. Hence the whole question of an authoritative standard of religious truth, commended to our faith by the testimony of God, is summarily dismissed as involving an absurdity — a discovery which relieves us from all those perplexing speculations in relation to the proofs of a Divine commission, and the criteria which distinguish the Word of God from the delusions of man or the impostures of the Devil, upon which theologians, from the earliest age, have been accustomed, in their ignorance and folly, to waste their ingenuity. The doctrine is avowed, openly and broadly avowed, that God cannot, without destroying the very nature of the human understanding, put us in possession of an infallible system of truth. A book or an argument can be inspired in no other sense than as it proceeds from a man under the influence of holy and devout sensibilities, and contains the results of his reflection — in the develop- ment of which the Almighty cannot protect him from error — upon the facts of his own experience. The Pilgrim's Progress is, accordingly. Divine, or the Word of God, in precisely the same sense in which the Scriptures are Divine ; and the productions of Prophets and Apostles are entitled to no different kind of respect, however different in degree, from that which attaches to the writings of Owen and Bax- ter and Howe. Theology, in every case, results from the application of logic and philosophy to Christian experience; it is necessarily a deduction from subjective processes, and not the offspring of the comparison and arrangement of doctrines derived from an external source. Being the crea- ture of the human understanding, and tlie understanding being above or below the immediate guidance and control
22 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
of God — we do not know exactly where the author places it — every theology must be fallible and human, whether it be that of Paul, or Peter, or James, or John, or — for such is the fearful sweep of the argument — that of Jesus Christ himself
Having settled the principles upon which theology must be constructed, he proceeds to apply them in the eighth chapter, with remorseless havoc, to the i)opular faith of his age and country. His next step is to investigate the grounds of religious fellowship — an investigation which turns out to be a spirited and earnest assault upon creeds and confessions. AYhen the Bible is gone, these beggarly children of the understanding can, of course, show no cause why sentence of death should not be pronounced upon them. The tenth chapter, which is a sort of summary of all his previous speculations, discusses the grounds of certainty in reference to spiritual truth, which are resolved partly into our own consciousness, or immediate knowledge of its reality, and partly into the consciousness of other similarly inspired people. The eleventh chapter, on the significancy of the past, seems to us to be a logical append- age of the seventh or eighth, mercifully intended to relieve our minds from the despondency and gloom which were likely to over^^•llelra them on account of the loss of the Bible, and the feebleness and imperfection of the instrument which we must use in its place in "realizing" a system of faith. After all, he tells us, among earnest and awakened minds there is no danger of miscarriage. Error is the fiction of bigotry rather than a stern and sober reality. All contradictions and discordancies of opinion are only the divergencies or polar extremities of some higher unity of truth, in which they are blended and reconciled, as the mnnberless antagonisms of nature contribute to the order and harmony of the universe. The progress of Theology depends upon the success of the effort to discover those higher realities in M'hich heresy and orthodoxy sweetly unite, and hence all opposition to error and zeal for the
'^s
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 23
truth, overlooking the important fact that they are different phases of the same thing — that error, in other words, is only a modification of truth — are very wicked and indecent.
The relation between Philosophy and Theology is the subject of the last chapter, in which he undertakes to vin- dicate himself from the anticipated charge of Rationalism. How successful he has been we shall see hereafter; but one thing is certain, his Rationalism has but little tendency to exalt the understanding. In 'the pictures Avliich he occa- sionally draws of a perfect Christian state, this perverse and unruly faculty, it seems, is to be held in abeyance ; the soul is to be all eye, all vision, everlastingly employed in the business of looking, so completely absorbed in the rapture of its scenes that it cannot descend to the cold and barren formalities of thought. But while the understanding is degraded, another element of our being is unduly promoted. Throughout the volume we find attributed to sympathy the effect, in producing and developing the Divine life, which the Scriptures uniformly ascribe to the Holy Spirit. Society and fellowship are, indeed, the Holy Ghost of Mr. JNIorell's gospel. They beget us again to a lively hope, they refine and correct our experiences, they protect us from dangerous error, they establish our minds in the truth, and through them w^e are enabled to attain the stature of perfect men in Christ Jesus.
From this general survey of the scope and contents of the book, it must be obvious to the reader that we are called to contend with a new and most subtle form of infi- delity. The whole ground of controversy is shifted. The end aimed at is the same — the destruction of the Bible as a Divine revelation, in the sense in which the Christian world has heretofore been accustomed to use the term — but the mode of attack is entirely changed. The infidels of former times impugned Christianity either in its doctrines or evi- dences, but never dreamed of asserting that an external standard of faith was inconceivable and impossible. Some denied that it was necessary, as the light of nature is suf-
24 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
ficient for all the purposes of religion ; the ground generally taken being that the Scriptures were wanting in the proofs by which a Divine revelation ought to be authenticated, or that they were self-condemned in consequence of the absurd- ity and contradiction of their contents, or that no proofs could ascertain to others the reality of a revelation to our- selves; but whatever was the point of assault, whether miracles, prophecy or doctrines, the genuineness and authen- ticity of the records, the origin and propagation of Chris- tianity in the world and its moral injfluence on society, it was always assumed that there was sense in the proposition which affirmed the Bible to be a Divine and authoritative standard of faith. Elaborate apologies for it, under this extraordinary character, Avere deemed worthy of the powers and learning of the most gifted members of the race. But Mr. IMorell takes a widely different position. He under- takes to demonstrate, by a strictly a priori argument, drawn from the nature of the mind and of religion, that a revealed theology is a psychological absurdity. His design is, from the philosophy of Christian experience, to demolish the foundations of Christianity itself. His method requires him to attack neither miracles, prophecy nor doctrines ; you may believe them all, provided you do not regard them as proving the Bible to be a rule of faith, nor receive them on the ground that they are attested by the seal of Heaven. In the application of his boasted reflective method he has plunged into the depths of consciousness and fetched from its secret recesses the materials for proving that, in the very nature of the case, every system of doctrine not only is, but must be, human in its form and texture. It is on this ground that we charge him with infidelity. He takes away the Bible, and w^e deliberately assert that, when that is gone, all is lost. He talks, indeed, of his intuitions and fellowship and sympathy and his all-powerful organon of rcflecticMi, but when he proposes these as a substitute for the lively oracles of God, our minds labour for a greater ability of (k'spising than they have ever had occasion to exert
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 25
before. Let the authority of the Bible be destro}'ed, and Christianity must soon perish from the earth. Put its doc- trines upon any other ground than a "thus saith the Lord," and every one of them will soon be denied, and from the dim territory of feeling in which Mr. Morell has placed reli- gion we shall soon cease to hear any definite reports of God. What has been the effect upon himself since he has declined to receive his theology from the Bible? How many of the doctrines which he was, no doubt, taught in his infancy and childhood has he been able to "realize" by his own method of construction? The plan of his work has not required him to treat of particular articles of faith, but from occa- sional glimpses which we catch, it is easy to collect that his creed is anything but evangelical. The doctrine of the incarnation, for example, is reduced to nothing but "the realization of divine perfection in humanity." "We need," says the author,^ "to have the highest conceptions of divine justice and mercy, and the highest type of human resigna- tion and duty realized in an historical fact, such as we can ever gaze upon with wonder andi delight; not till then do they become mighty to touch the deepest springs of our moral being." Jesus is, accordingly, represented as a fin- ished model of ideal excellence, combining in his own per- son all that is pure and lovely and sublime, a living em- bodiment of the moral abstractions which, it seems, are powerless to aflFect the heart until they are reduced to "an historical and concrete reality," and which then, as if by an electric shock or a wizard's spell, can stir the depths of our nature, rouse our dormant energies and inspire us with zeal to imitate what we are obliged to admire. Hence the whole mystery of godliness — of the Word made flesh — is a very simple aifair; it is just God's giving us a pattern to copy. This is what reflection makes of it from the intui- tions of religion without the Bible. Justification by faith, the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesice — " the very life- spring," as Mr. Morell admits,^ " of the Beformation " — 1 Page 241. ^ Page 253.
26 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
fares no better in his hands as it passes, through his con- structive method, from the region of experience to that of doctrine. It is not a little remarkable, too, and sets this method in a very unfavourable light, that while our author professes to have the same " moral idea " with Lutlier and the Reformers, his statement of it as a doctrine is precisely opposite to theirs. Total depravity, and the consequent ne- cessity of regeneration, he must, to be consistent, deny, as his theory requires that religious sensibility, even in our fallen state, should be viewed as an original faculty of the soul; and from the beginning to the end of the volume there is not a single passage wliich even remotely squints at the doctrine of atonement in the sense of a satisfaction to the justice of God for the guilt of men. What, then, of real Christianity does he believe? Echo answers. What?
These specimens are sufficient to show what success crowns the effi)rts of our author in constructing a theology without the Bible. We want no better illustration of what is likely to become of our religion when we give up an external standard for the dim intuitions of inspired philos- ophers. We are not, however, without other lessons of experience, which Mr. Morell must admit to be applicable. Upon his principles, the construction of the universe is a process exactly analogous to the construction of a creed. The ontological systems of the German masters may, accord- ingly, be taken as a fair sample of what reflection is able to achieve in the science of world-making; and, judging from them, we can form something more than a conjecture of the extravagance and folly which will be palmed upon us for the pure and wholesome doctrines of the Cross, should the same method be admitted into the department of Christian theology. It would be sheer insanity to suppose that it will make less havoc of our creeds than it has made of nature, of the soul and God. Upon one thing Ave might count witli certainty — the being speedily overwhelmed with a species of Pantheism, in which all sense of duty and reli- gion would perish. The fatalism of Mohammed has the merit
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 27
of being consistent, but the transcendental philosophy, as if impelled by an irresistible instinct to contradictions and absurdity, makes its boast, in one breath, of the demonstra- tion of the essential and indestructible freedom of man as its greatest triumph, and in the next does not scruple to deduce the contingent, finite and variable from their neces- sary relations to the absolute, infinite and eternal. No man can turn from these speculations and laugh at the Geeta or the Ramayuna of Yalmeeki. They teach us — what it wonld be madness to disregard — that, in relation to theo- logy, the real issue is between the Bible and a wild imagina- tion "in endless mazes lost;" between the Bible, in other words, and Atheism. We do not hesitate, therefore, to rank Mr. Morell's book in the class of infidel publications. He has assailed the very foundations of the faith ; and in resist- ing his philosophy we are defending the citadel of Chris- tianity from the artful machinations of a traitor, who, with honeyed words of friendship and allegiance upon his tongue, is in actual treaty to deliver it into the hands of the enemy of God and man.
Entertaining these opinions of the character and tendency of the work, we shall make no apology for entering with great freedom into a critical estimate of its merits. It is, perhaps, only the first-fruits of what we may yet expect from larger importations of the same philosophy into Britain and America, and, as is generally the case with first- fruits, it is probably the best of its kind. We apprehend that no man who shall undertake a similar work will be able to bring to it a larger variety of resources, a more pro- found acquaintance with ancient and modern speculations, a nicer critical sagacity or an intenser power of reflection, than have fallen to the lot of Mr. Morell ; and we are glad that it is a man thus eminently gifted, the great hiero- phant of German mysteries, and not the humble and con- temptible retailer of oracles hawked about as divine only because they defy all eifort to understand them, who has brouti-ht on the first serious collision in the field of English
28 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
literature betwixt evangelical religion and the new discov- eries in metaphysics. The vigour of his assault may be taken as a fair specimen of the power and resources of the enemy ; and we rejoice in being able to say that whatever vague and undefined fears may have floated through our minds for the security of our faith while the conflict was' yet at a distance, and the ^proportions of the foe unduly magni- fied by the fogs and mists through which he was contem- plated, they have turned out to be, upon the first demonstra- tion of his real dimensions and his skill in battle, like the shudder and dismay conjured up by a moonlight ghost.
The book may be considered in the double light of a philosophy and an argument, the philosophy supplying the premises of the argument. We intend to examine it in both aspects; and as in every instance of ratiocination the first and most obvious inquiry is in regard to the validity of the reasoning. Does it hold, do the premises contain the conclusion? we shall pursue in the present case the natural order of thought, and inquire into the merits of the argu- ment before we investigate the claims of the philosophy. We hope to show that there is a double escape from the infidelity and mysticism into which the author would conduct us — one through the inconclusivcness of his reasoning, the other through the falsehood or unsoundness of his premises. He is signally at fault in both his logic and his philosophy.
The fundamental proposition of the treatise in which its preliminary speculations were designed to terminate, and upon which its subsequent deductions are dependent for all the value they possess, is, that a valid theology is never the gift of Heaven, but is always the creature of the human understanding. This is assumed as a settled point in the last six chapters of the book. The seventh, which devel- ops the process by which, in conformity with the laws of mind, wc are able to construct a theology for ourselves, evi- dently takes it for granted that this is a thing which we have to do for ourselves, unless the author intended tlicse discus- sions as a mere exhibition of his skill, an amusing play of
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 29
ingenuity and fancy, like Ferguson's Natural History of Society, or Smith's Theory of the Origin of Language. If God has given us a body of divinity, it is of very little consequence to speculate on what might have taken place had we been left to ourselves. Theology, in this aspect of the case, being reduced to the condition of any other science, perhaps the method described by our author is, as he asserts it to be, the omly method by which we could successfully proceed. But the very stress of the controversy turns upon the question. Whether we have been left to ourselves whe- ther theology is in fact, like all other sciences, the produc- tion of man, or whether God has, framed it for us ready to our hands? The same assumption in regard to the human origin of theology pervades all the speculations of the eighth chapter, professedly on Fellowship, but really on Creeds and Confessions. If there be a faith once delivered to the saints, it may be our duty to contend for it, and to withdraw from those who consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness, and to reject those after the first and second admonition who bring in damnable heresies. If there be such a thing as a form of sound words, there may be an obligation to teach it, and hence an analogy betwixt the Church and the School, in consequence of which believers may be termed disciples, ministers teachers, and Christ the great Prophet of all. These things cannot be gainsaid until we have something more than assertion that there is no authoritative type of doctrine into which we ought to be cast. As to the chapter on Certitude, that never could have been written by a man in whose philosophy it was even dreamed of that there might be a ground of assurance in a Divine testimony fully equal to dim and misty intuitions, which require to be corrected by the generic consciousness of the race. Let it be admitted that God has given us a theology, and evinced it to be His by signs and wonders or any species of infallible proofs, and we certainly need no firmer basis for our faith than that the mouth of the Lord
30 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Skct. I.
lias spoken. All such sijeculations as those of our author are darkening counsel by words without knowledge. The relation, too, in which philosophy stands to theology — the subject of the last chapter of the book — is materially changed when it is denied that philosophy is the organon to form it, or when the whole question concerning the triith or falsehood of any doctrinal system is made a question of authority, and not a question of abstract speculation.
It is hence obvious that the human origin of theology is the soul of this system ; it pervades all the author's specula- tions. Without it one-half of his book falls to the ground, and the conclusions which palpably contravene the popular faith are strij)ped of all plausibility and consistency. As a logical production his entire treatise is a failure unless this principle can be established.
Now, has it been proved? Has the author anywhere demonstrated that theology, as contradistinguished from religion, must necessarily be human, and can possess no other authority but that which attaches to it from the laws of thought ? Or, has he even succeeded in showing that as a historical fact it is human, though it might have been other- wise, and therefore subject to the same criticisms to which every human production is amenable ? Let it be remem- bered that the real issue betwixt himself and the popular faith is. Whether or not God has communicated in the lan- guage of man a perfect logical exposition of all the truths which in every stage of its religious development the human mind is capable of experiencing. Islv. Morell denies ; the popular faith affirms. If he can make good his negative, then we must create theology for ourselves ; his speculations upon that point become natural and proper, and all the con- clusions which are subsequently drawn from them in rela- tion to fellowship, certitude, and the precise office of philos- ophy with respect to systems of Christian doctrine, become consistent and legitimate. If, on the contrar}^, he fails to do so, then all these speculations are premature, they have no solid foundation in truth ; and though they may still be
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 31
interesting as a new and curious department of fiction, they should drop the name of philosophy or couple it with that of romance, and assume a title which would indicate the fact that their logic is purely hypothetical. Has he suc- ceeded, or has he failed ? This question we shall be able to answer by considering wdiat the exigencies of his argument demanded, and the manner in which he has addressed him- self to the task of meeting them — by comparing, in other words, what he had to do with what he has done. What, then, is necessary in order to prove that no such Divine communication as the popular faith maintains has ever been made to men? There are, obviously, only two lines of reasoning that can be pursued in an argument upon this subject. It must either be shown a priori that such a Divine communication is impossible, involving a contradic- tion to the very nature of theology, or a posteriori that such a Divine communication as a matter of fact never has been made, or, what upon the maxim, de nan apparentibus, etc., is equivalent to that, never has been proved. This last proposition may be established, in turn, either by showing that no testimony and no evidence can authenticate such a communication ; or that the evidence, in the given case, falls short of Avhat ought to be afforded ; or that it is set aside by countervailing evidence ; or that there is positive proof that some other method has been adopted. This seems to us to be a true statement of the logical condition of the question. Mr. Morell was bound to prove either that a Divine revelation, in the ordinary sense of the term, is impossible, a psychological absurdity, or that no book pro- fessing to be a revelation is w^orthy of credit ; there can be, or there has been, none. This being the state of the con- troversy, let us proceed to examine how he has acquitted himself in disposing of these points, the last of which alone has given rise to a larger body of literature than perhaps any other subject in the world.
The premises of the argument, in both aspects, whether a priori or a posteriori, are contained in the chapters on
' 32 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Si:cT. I.
Kevelation and Inspiration. It was evidently the design of these chapters to develop a theory Mhich should explode the vulgar notions in relation to the Bible as at once absurd in a philosophical point of view and destitute of evidence as a matter of fact. His whole view of inspira- tion he represents as "a protest and an argument"^ against "the formal use of the letter of Scripture," which is made by " those who ground their theology, professedly at least, upon an induction of individual passages, as though each passage, independently of the spirit of the whole, were of Divine authority." "To suppose that we should gain the slightest advantage" by accuracy of definitions and con- sistency of reasoning on the part of the sacred writers, "implies," he informs us,^ "an entire misapjirehension of what a revelation really is, and of what is the sole method by which it is possible to construe^ a valid theology. An actual revelation can only be made to the intuitional faculty, and a valid theology can only be constructed by giving a formal expression to the intuitions thus granted." We understand these passages, especially when taken in connec- tion Avith the spirit of the whole discussion, as distinctly asserting the projaosition that theology, as a formal state- ment of doctrine, can never be divinely communicated, and that upon the ground that it involves elements which are incompatible with the very nature of revelation — a revealed theology being a contradiction in terms. Clearly, if "the giving of a formal expression to the intuitions" of religion be the sole method by which it is possible to construct it, there is no place for an authoritative standard of faith.
Now does the author's theory of revelation, admitting it to be true, preclude the possibility of a Divine theology ? AVe shall not deny — for we have no disposition to dispute about a word — that it is inconsistent with a revealed theology, in the author^s sense of the term. We may here take occa- sion to say that much of the impression which his reasoning makes upon the mind of his readers is due to the ambi- 1 Page 205. ' Page 175.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 33
guity of language. They, from old associations and familiar usage, mean one thing by revelation, and he another; and it is hard to keep distinctly in view that conclusions which may be legitimate in his sense may not be legitimate in theirs. If Mr. Morell chooses to restrict the application of the term to the subjective processes by which the mind is brought into contact with spiritual realities, and then infer that an external standard of faith cannot be a revela- tion, the inference may be just ; but it no more concludes against the reality or possibility of such a standard than to restrict the term animal exclusively to quadrupeds, and then infer that neither men nor birds were animals, con- cludes against the truth of their existence or their possession of life. What Mr. Morell undertakes to settle is not a question of words and names, not whether the Bible shall receive this title or that (no one dreams that it is a spir- itual vision, or any special mode of intelligence), but whether God can communicate, in writing or in any other form, a perfect logical exposition of those very intuitions which he makes it the office of revelation to imj)art. That such a Divine communication is, in the nature of the case, impossible — not that it cannot be called by a given name — is what he represents his theory of revelation as necessarily involving ; and that, if it does not involve, it is not per- tinent to the argument.
This theory is designed to give an answer to the question. In what manner does a man become a Christian? The essential elements included in that form of man^ religious life which he denominates the Christian consciousness having been previously enumerated, he proceeds, in his account of revelation, to describe the "process by which such phenomena of man's interior being are produced — the secret link which unites them with an outward causality, and the laws by which they are brought into existence, regulated, and finally developed to their full maturity." It is only " in relation to the method by which it is commu- nicated to the human mind" that Christianity can be prop-
VoL. III.— 3
34 STAXDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Skct. I.
erly designated "as a revelation from God."* That is, if we understand the author, it is the office of revehxtion to excite the emotions which are characteristic and distinct- ive of the religion of Jesus. It has reference, therefore, exclusively to what, in common language, would be styled experimental religion, and includes nothing but the means by which the state of heart is engendered, which entitles a man to be considered as a real, in contradistinction from a formal, believer. But as religion consists, essentially, in emotions, and emotions are dependent upon that form of intelligence which supplies the objects adapted to awaken them — a direct correspondency always subsisting between the intellectual and emotional activity — the question arises, To which faculty are we indebted for the objects that aAvaken religious emotions? We must know them, they must be present to the mind, or no affections can be excited ; through what form of intelligence, then, do we become cognizant of spiritual realities? The answer is. Intuition.
" In considei'ing, then, under which of the two great generic modes of intelligence we have to class the particular case involved in the idea of revelation, we can have 'but little hesitation in referring it, at once, to the category of intuition. The idea of a revelation is univer- sally considered to imply a case of intelligence in which something is presented direcfh/ to the mind of the subject ; in which it is conveyed by the immediate agency of God himself; in which our own efforts would have been unavailing to attain the same conceptions ; in which the truth communicated could not have been drawn by inference from any data previously known ; and, finally, in which the whole result is one lying beyond the reach of the logical understanding." ^
The author then proceeds to run the parallel betwixt this account of revelation and intuition in its lowest form — that of external perception ; and finding a perfect corre- spondence, he does not hesitate to rank them as kindred species of the same mode of intellectual activity. But, to make assurance doubly sure, he undertakes to show that revelation cannot be addressed to the understanding — "that the whole of the logical processes of the human mind are 1 Page 122. 2 Page 126.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 35
such that the idea of a revelation is altogether incompatible with them ; that they jire in no sense open to its influence, and that they can neither be improved nor assisted by it."^ His meaning is that no new original elements of knowledge, or, as Locke would call them, no new simple ideas, can be imparted to the mind by definition, analysis or reasoning. He regards revelation as a source of original and peculiar ideas, like the eye or the ear, or what Hutcheson felicitously styles the internal senses of the mind. " The object of a revelation is to bring us altogether into another and higher region of actual experience, to increase our mental vision, to give us new data from which we may draw new infer- ences ; and all this lies quite apart from the activity of the logical faculty."^
The author still further, though not more plainly, de- velops his views in the answer he returns to the question, " Could not a revelation from God consist in an exposition of truth, made to us by the lips or from the pen of an inspired messenger, that exposition coming distinctly under the idea of a logical explication of doctrines, which it is for mankind to receive as sent to us on Divine authority ?" Let us hear him upon this point :
" Now this is a case of considerable complexity, and one which we must essay as clearly as possible to unravel. First of all, then, we have no doubt whatever but that there have been agents commis- sioned by God to bring mankind to a proper conception of Divine truth ^nd comprehension of the Divine will. But now let us look a little more closely into their real mission, and consider the means by which alone it was possible for them to fulfil it.
"These Divine messengers, we will suppose, address their fellow- men in the words and phrases they are accustomed to hear, and seek in this way to expound to them the truth of Grod. If we imagine oiu'selves, then, to be the listeners, it is needless to say that so long as they treat of ideas which lie icithm the range of our present expe- rience, we should be well able at once to comprehend them, and to judge of the grounds on which they urge them upon our attention. But it is manifest that such a discourse as I describe could in no proper sense be termed a revelation. So long as the Divine teacher keeps
» Page 131. ^ Page 133.
86 STANDARD AND NATL'RH OF KKLIGIOX. [Si:CT. I.
witliiii the ranjre of our jjresont iiit<'ll<(tual oxperionce, he miirht itvU'od tlirow things into a new light, he iniglit point out more accu- rately their connection, he might show us at once their importance and their logical consistency, hut all this would not amount to n revr- hitloii, it would give us no linmidintr manifestation of truth from (lod. it woiild offer no conee|>tions lying heyond the range of our pres- ent data, it would quite fail in hringing us into contact with new real- ities, nor would it at all extend the sweep of our mental vision. Mere exposition always ]msii])pniies some familiarity with the suhject in hand ; one idea lias always, in .such a ca.se, to he exjjlained by another; but suppo.«ing there to be an entire blindness of mind upon the whole question, then it is manifest that all mere logical definition and expli- cation is for the time entirely thrown away.
'"Illustrations of this are as numerous as are the sciences or the subjects of human research. Let a man, for example, totally unac- quainted with the matter, hear another converse with the greatest clearness about differential quantities in physics or mathematics, how much of the explanation would he be able to comprehend ? He has not yet the experiences of space, number or motion on which the intelli- gibleness of the whole dejiends, and in want of these the whole of the explanations offered are involved in the darkest ob.scurity. Take up any other subject, such as biology, ethics or metaphysics in their higher and more recondite branches. Exi)lication here is of no avail, unless the mind first realize for itself, and reproduce in its own think- ing, the fundamental conceptions of the teacher. TNTiat is true of perceptive teaching in the case of the infant is true in a modified sense of all human education, to the most advanced stage of intelli- gence. You must in every instance alike take proper means to awaken the power of vision within, to furni.-*h direct experiences to the mind ; in l)rief to give clear intuitions of the iJrmrnts of tnith, before you can produce any effect by the most complete process of defining or exjtlanation.
'• Ijet us return, then, to the supposed ca.se of the inspired feacher, and imx'ced with our analysis of the conditions that are necessiiry to his becoming the medium of a revelation, proi)erly so called. We have seen that if he always kept within the region of oxir jiresent cxiterience, there would Ik' no fresh ri'vclation made to us at all ; but imw let us imagine him to trnuscnul the jiresent sphere of our mental vision, it is evident from what 1 have first .«aid that in such a case we slmuld be by no means in a condition to comi)rchend his meaning, on the sullpo^ition, of course, that he was to confine himself to vure crpiisitiini. The only way in which he could give us a revelation of truth hitht'rto unrealized woidd be by becoming t^ic agent of elevat- ing our inward religious consciousness uji to the same or a similar
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 37
Standard as his own, which is the same thing as if we had said that all revelation, ijroperly so called, can be made to us primarily only in the form of religious intuition. ' ' ^
We have now said enough to put our readers completely in possession of the author's views of revelation. It implies a direct perception of spiritual realities, a gazing upon eter- nal verities, which, upon the principle that the eye affects the heart, produces those peculiar emotions in which the essence of religion consists. It communicates to us the ele- mental ideas of all religious knowledge, the primary data, without which the science of theology would be as unmean- ing as the science of optics to a man born blind. As per- ception gives us all our original and simple ideas of matter, the moral sense our notions of the good, taste our notions of the beautiful and sublime, so revelation imparts to us the ideas of God, of Christ, of redemption and of sin. The subjective processes in all these cases are the same. Nature, the beautiful, the good, are just as truly and properly reve- lations as the verities embraced in Christian experience. There was, however, in the case of Christianity, a series of " Divine arrangements through the medium of which the loftiest and purest conceptions of truth were brought before the immediate consciousness of the Apostles, and through them of the whole age, at a time, too, when in other respects the most universal demoralization abounded on every side."^ These arrangements the author admits to be supernatural, the result of a " Divine plan altogether distinct from the general scheme of Providence as regards human develop- ment ;" but the revelation consequent upon them is purely natural. Man was elevated to a mountain which com- manded prospects beyond the ordinary range of his eyes, but the vision which ensued was in strict obedience to the laws of sight.
Now we ask our readers to ponder carefully this account of revelation, and to lay their fingers on the principle which cither directly or indirectly proves that a perfect standard 1 Pages 134-137. ' Page 145.
38 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [SECT. I.
of theology cannot be imparted to us by God, or that any and every theology must be the offspring of the human understanding. This aceount, we are told, is at once a pro- test and an argument against the popular notions on the sub- ject. The protest w^e can find, it is patent on every page, but the ' argument we are utterly unable to discover. Does it follow that because religion as a matter of experience is Divine, therefore theology as a matter of science must be human ? Does it follow that because God gives us all the direct and immediate cognitions out of which the science can be framed, therefore He is unable to construct the science Himself? Does it follow that because He makes us feel and see, therefore He is incompetent to describe either our visions or emotions ? We confess that our sin- cerest efforts cannot render palpable to our thinking faculty the least incongruity betwixt the notions of a Divine the- ology and a revealed religion in the sense of Mr. Morell. For aught that we can see to the contrary, his whole psychol- ogy might be granted ; all that he says of the understand- ing and intuition, their differences and relations, with his whole scheme of revelation, all might be granted, and yet nothing be conceded at all destructive of the doctrine that we have a faith ready developed to our hands which we are bound to receive upon the authority of God. We might no longer call it a revealed faith, but it Avould be none the less infallible and Divine on that account.
Mr. Morell admits that man can construct a theology for himself, that " he is able to give a definite form and scien- tific basis to his religious life, and to the spiritual truth involved in it." The intuitions of religion, like all other intnitions, can be submitted to the operations of the under- standing ; they can be compared, classified and arranged ; they are as really the materials of a science as the fiicts of pereejition or the phenomena of conscience. Xow, what is ther(> in the process of constructing a science from religion which limits it exclusively to man? Is there any absurdity in supjjosing that God can communicate in writing or in
Sect. L] AX EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 39
some other form a perfect logical exposition of all the intui- tions which in every stage of its religious history the human mind is capable of exj)eriencing ? any absurdity in suppos- ing that God can do perfectly and infallibly for His weak and ignorant creatures what it is conceded they can do im- perfectly and fallibly for themselves ? What is there incon- ceivable in God's giving a logical and formal expression to the religious mind of man ? We do not deny that a Divine theology, though it might be strictly scientific in its form, and capable of the same proofs to which all human sciences appeal, must yet challenge our assent upon a higher ground. Tt is to be received, not because it accords witli'our expe- rience, but because it is the testimony of God. It comes to us, and must come to us, with authority. It is truth, because it proceeds from the fountain of truth. If Mr. Morell contends that this peculiarity removes it from the category of science, we shall not dispute about a word ; all that we contend for is, that it is and must be a more full and complete representation of all the phenomena of relig- ion than reflection itself could give with the aid of the best conceivable organon aj^plied to intuitions as strong, distinct and clear as the most definite percej)tions of sense.
It is clear that Mr. Morell, in representing his scheme of revelation as an a priori argument against the possibility of a Divine theology, has quietly assumed that the agency there described is the sole agency of the Deity in relation to the religion of His creatures. He seems to think that the Almighty exhausted Himself in the production of spiritual perceptions, and therefore could not reduce them to the forms of the understanding — that in the process of engendering religion he lost the ability to describe it. But where is the proof that revelation, in our author's sense, includes the whole agency of God? Not a particle is adduced, and hence, as a Divine theology is not inconsistent with a revealed religion, as there is no shadow of contra- diction betwixt them, and not the slightest proof that the revelation of religion is the only form in which God conde-
40 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect, I
scends to His ignorant and sinful creatures, Mr. Morell has signally failed to establish, on philosophical grounds, the human origin of theology. His premises do not contain his conclusion. For aught that he has alleged to the con- trary, we may be as truly indebted to the Divine benignity for a perfect and infallible standard of faith as for those other operations in consequence of which we feel the pulsa- tions of the Christian life.
The only thing, indeed, in the whole chapter on Revela- tion which seems remotely to bear upon the subject is the passage already quoted, in which he states the question only to evade it. He shows, indeed, that a logical explication of doctrines could not awaken ideas in a mind destitute of the capacity to apprehend them. We may cheerfully con- cede that no painting can make a blind man see, that no music can ravish a deaf man with the rapture of its sounds; but still the painting and the music may both exist and be perfect in their kind. No one claims for a Divine theology the power of making men Christians ; it is universally con- ceded that the letter killeth, but the controversy betwixt Mr. Morell and the popular faith is, whether that letter can exist. It is a poor evasion to say, because it cannot perform an office which no one has ever thought of ascribing to it, that, therefore, it is essentially and necessarily inconceivable as a real and substantive entity. All that our author proves is, that it cannot enlighten ; that it can impart no new simple idea ; that it presupposes all the elemental germs of thought which enter into theology, as natural philosophy presupposes the informations of sense, and psychology those of consciousness. It supposes, in other words, that men are capable of religion, but it by no means follows that because a Divine theology can neither create the religious faculty nor immediately produce its appropriate intuitions, therefore it cannot express them with logical exactness, nor describe the objects on which they are dependent. Moral philosophy camiot originate a conscience, but it may still be a scientitic exhibition of all the operations of the moral
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 41
nature. What Mr. Morell's argument requires him to prove is, that a Divine theology is impossible — that a science of religion being admitted, that science cannot be imparted to us by God, it must, from the nature of the case, be human in its origin ; and this proposition is not aifected by the inadequacy of such a science to accomplish a certain subjective effect, unless it can be shown that its ability to do this is the condition of its existence.
But perhaps the proof we are seeking may be found in the chapter on Inspiration. It is the object of that chap- ter to show that
"Inspiration does not imply anj'thing generically new in the actual processes of the human mind ; it does not involve any form of intel- ligence essentially different from what we already possess ; it indicates rather the elevation of the religious consciousness, and with it, of course, the power of spiritual vision, to a degree of intensity peculiar to the individuals thus highly favoured. We must regard the whole process of inspiration, accordingly, as being in no sense tneclianical, but purely dynamical ; involving, not a novel and supernatural faculty, but a faculty already enjoyed, elevated supernaturally to an extra- ordinary power and susceptibility ; indicating, in fact, an imvard nature so perfectly harmonized to the Divine, so freed from the distorting influences of prejudice, passion and sin, so simply recipient of the Divine ideas circumambient around it, so responsive in all its strings to the breath of heaven, that truth leaves an imjiress upon it which answers perfectly to the objective reality. ' ' ^
All which, being interpreted, is that inspiration and holi- ness, or sanctijieation, are synonymous terms. The author apprehends, in its literal sense, the benediction of our Sa- viour on the pure in heart, and makes them seers not only of God, but of those things of God which, the Apostle assures us, none can understand but the Spirit of God Himself It will certainly strike our readers as a novelty that there should be any inconsistency betwixt the grace of holiness and the gift of knowledge. They will be slow to comprehend how sauctifi- cation and instruction can be contradictory processes — so much so that He who sanctifies cannot teach. ''Sanctify them through thy truth : thy word is truth." " (iod liath from 1 Page 151.
42 STAKDAED AND NATURE OF RELIGIOX. [Skct. I.
the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctifi- cation of the Spirit and belief of the truth." For aught that we can see, it may be granted to the author that the measure of piety is the exact measure of ability to appre- ciate, to understand, to know Divine truth, that holiness is essential to a living faith ; and yet it will not follow that God cannot communicate the truth with which, as holy beings, we are brought into harmony. If our holiness were perfect, it would enable us, according to the author, to apprehend the objects of religion in their concrete reality, but not in their scientific form ; and there is nothing absurd in the idea that the things which have aroused our moral sensibilities should be presented, in their full and perfect proportions, to the contemplation of the understanding.
It may be objected, however, that although Mr. Morell's 2)hilosophy does not prove a Divine theology to be impossible or absurd, in the strict acceptation of the terms, yet it demonstrates what, in reference to any dispensation of God, amounts to the same thing, that it is unnecessary or useless. This is no doubt the real scope of his argument, though he has been bold enough to assert that the only way, the sole method, by which a valid theology can be constructed is by human reflection on the phenomena of religion. But widely diiferent as the issues of possibility and expediency evidently are, we shall concede, in the present instance, that the proof of uselessness is tantamount to the proof of absurdity, and proceed to inquire how Mr. Morell has succeeded in even this aspect of the case. " To a man utterly ignorant," says he,^ " of all spiritual conceptions, and altogether insensible to Divine things, the mere exposition of the truths and doctrines of Christianity is useless. He does not grasp them at all in their proper meaning and intensity ; ranging as they do beyond the sphere of his present experience, the very terms of the propositions employed awaken no cor- responding idea within his mind." That is, theology, under a certain contingency, is powerless to produce a given 1 Page 137.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 43
eifect. But a specific incompetency and a general useless- ness are very diiferent things. Because, in a " man utterly ignorant of all spiritual conceptions and altogether insen- sible to Divine things," the mere exposition of the truths and doctrines of Christianity cannot supply the place of faculties to apprehend them, it by no means follows that, to the man who has spiritual conceptions and is " sensible to Divine things," theology may not be of incalculable ser- vice. To a man destitute of senses, natural philosophy would, no doubt, be a very unintelligible jargon ; but does it follow that it must be correspondingly useless to one who has all the simple ideas of which it is composed? But Mr. Morell has himself settled the question. He represents theology, in our present condition, as a necessity^ of our nature, and ascribes to it offices of immense importance in the development of the religious life. It is true that he has his eye only on human theology, but the uses which he admits are not at all dependent upon its origin, but upon its truth. It answers these valuable ends, not because it has been reached by reflection, but because it has a real existence and is capable of a real application. It is the thing itself which is useful, and not the mode of its dis- covery. It would seem, too, that the more perfect it was, the better ; and that the circumstance of its being Divine, so far from detracting from its value, would immensely enhance it. Let us now attend to the author's admissions :
" Theology, having once been created, can be presented didactically to the understanding before there is any awakening of the religious nature, and can even lead the mind to whom it is presented to such an interest in the subject as may issue in his spiritual enlightenment." *
Here it is obvious that the use of the Theology is not at all dependent upon its origin; it is useful to a mind which has not been in a situation to construct a system reflectively for itself. This is just what we attribute to a Divine theo- logy ; it is the means under God of awakening the religious 1 Page 196. ^ i3 207.
44 STANDARD AXD NATURE OF RELIGION. [SECT. I.
nature, the incorruptible seed by which we are begotten to newness of life, and the standard to which all our expe- riences must be brought, and by which their soundness must be tried. This single consideration, that the science of religion may be the means of awakening the religious nature, that theology may be the parent of piety, is enough to set aside all that the author has said against the value of a logical exposition of the truths and doctrines of Chris- tianity.
The following remarks, professedly intended to elucidate the subject, are applicable with tenfold power to such a sys- tem as the Bible claims to be. We ask nothing more than what the author has himself suggested, to remove all cavils against the letter because it killeth, while the spirit only is competent to quicken into life :
" The uses of Christian theology are —
"1. To show the internal consistency of religious truth. Little as we need to see this consistency whilst our inmost souls are burning with a deep and holy enthusiasm, yet in the ordinaiy state of human life, beset as we are with a thousand repressive influences, it is highly important to strengthen ourselves with every kind of armour against skepticism and indiiFerence. In proportion as our zeal and excite- ment become cooler, do we need so much the more the concurring testimony of reason to support us in the pursuit of the Christian life. It is upon this we fall back when the fire of life burns dim, until we can kindle it again from the altar of God. Hence, the importance of hav- ing Christian truth presented to us in such a form that we may see its harmony with all the laws of our intellectual being, and have their witness to seal its truth on our hearts.
"2. Another use of Christian theology is to repel philosophical objections. The unbeliever has not the witness within himself, and, what is more, he would fain destroy the validity of the truths of Christianity to others by affirming their inconsistency with reason or with one another. The moral influences of the religious life do not ansicer these objections, although they may disarm them greatly of their force. To answer them the truth convej-ed in the religious life must be made reflective and scientific; then, indeed, and not till then, can itself be maintained, and its consistency be defended upon the grounds of the philosojihical objector himself
" 3. A third use of Christian theology is to preserve mankind from vague enthusiasm. A strong religious excitement is not inconsistent
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 45
with a weak judgment, a feeble conscience, and active tendencies to foil}', and even sin. Under such circumstances the power of the emo- tions will sometimes overbalance the better dictates of Christian faith, love and obedience, so as to impel the subject of them into something bordering upon fanaticism. Against this evil religion alone is often unable to struggle ; it needs the stronger element of calm reason to curb these wandering impulses, and bring them into due subjection to duty and to trath. Here, then, the influence of theology bears upon the whole case, and to its power is it mainly owing that the intense incentives oifered by Christianity to the emotive nature of man have been so ordered and directed as to keep him from vague enthusiasm in his belief and an unsober fmaticism in his actions.
"4. The last use we mention to which theology may be applied is to embody our religious ideas in a complete and connected system. In this form they appeal to every element in the nature of man. The moral influence they exert upon the whole spirit is coupled with the power of their appeal to the reason, and the intellect of mankind becomes satisfied as the heart becomes softened and renewed.
"Such, in brief, are some of the principal uses of theology, form- ally considered. ' ' ^
Having shown that our author has signally failed in his a priori argument against the existence of a Divine stand- ard of theology — that is, that his philosophy, even upon the supposition of its truth, is not inconsistent with the 23opular faith in regard to the authority of the Bible — we shall next notice the several considerations by which he attempts to prove that, as a matter of fact, no such Divine standard has ever been vouchsafed to our race. His first argument is drawn from the proofs by which Christianity has been revealed to man.
"The aim of revelation," he informs us, "has not been formally to expound a system of doctrine to the understanding, but to educate the mind of man gradually to an inward appreciation of the truth concerning his own relation to Grod. Judaism was a propedeutic to Christianity, but there was no formal definition of any one spiritual truth in the whole of that economy. The purpose of it was to school the mind to spiritual contemplation, to awaken the religious consciousness by types and symbols and other perceptive means to the realization of certain great spiritual ideas, and to furnish words and analogies in which the truths of Christianity could be embodied and proclaimed to 1 Pages 225-227.
46 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
the world. If wc iiass on to the Christian revelation itself, the mode of procedure we find was generic-ally the same. There was no formal exposition of Christian doctrine in the whole of the discourses of the Saviour. His life and teaching, His character and suiferiiig, His death and resurrection, all appealed to the deeper religious nature of man ; they were adapted to awaken it to a newer and higher activity ; instead of offering a mere explication to the understanding, thej^ were intended to furnish altogether new experiences, to widen the sphere of our spiritual insight, to embody a revelation from God. The Apos- tles followed in the same course. They did not start from Jerusalem with a system of doctrine to propound intellectually to the world. It would have been no revelation to the world if they had, for with his moral and spiritual nature sunk down into insensibility and sin, man would have had no real spiritual pei-ception associated with the very terms in which their arguments and propositions must have been couched. The Apostles went forth to awaken man's power of spirit- ual intuition — to impress upon the world the great conceptions of sin, of righteousness, of judgment to come, of salvation, of pm-ity and of heavenly love. This they did by their lives, their teaching, their spirit- ual intensify m action and suffering, their whole testimony to the word, the person, the death and the resurrection of the Saviour." ^
We do not remember ever to have seen a more signal exemplification of a theory breaking down under its own weight than that wliich is presented in the preceding extract. The end of all revelation is to furnish, we are told, intui- tional perceijtions of religious truth ; it cannot, therefore, be addressed to the understanding, neither can it contain logi- cal and definite statements of doctrine. But still this rev- elation is to be imparted through the instrumentality of commissioned agents, and these agents fulfil their vocation by teaching. Now, if the reader will turn to the second chapter of our author's book, in which the distinctions are drawn out at length betwixt the intuitional and logical con- sciousness, he will find that the very first point insisted on is that the " knowledge we obtain by the logical consciousness is representative and indirect, while that which we obtain by the intuitional consciousness is presentative and immediate" To produce an intuition, consequently, the mind and tlie object must be brought together in actual contact. It must 1 Pages 139, 140.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED, 47
not be some description or representation, but the reality of truth itself, which must stand face to face with the knowing subject. Where essential existence or original elements of knowledge are concerned, the power of language is utterly inadequate to convey any ideas to the mind ; the intuitions themselves must exist, or all efforts to awaken the concep- tions are utterly hopeless. If, in conformity with these principles, Christ and His Apostles were commissioned to make a revelation to men whose moral and spiritual nature was sunk down into insensibility and sin, all that they could have done was to present the spiritual realities which they themselves apprehended, and then impart a corresponding power to perceive them. They went, according to the theory, among the blind to make known glorious objects of sight. Their first business must have been to place the objects within the reach of the eye, and then purge the eyes to behold them. This is the only way in which we can conceive that they could have succeeded in eflPecting vision. But what has teaching to do with this process? All the knowledge acquired from another through the medium of signs is indirect and representative, and there- fore addressed not to intuition, but to the understanding. How will our author explain this inconsistency? He, in the first place, represents Christ and His Apostles as spiritual mesmerizers, whose whole business it is to bring their fellow-men face to face with a class of transcendental realities, and then at the very time that he is disproving the possibility of an appeal to the understanding, he converts them into teachers, dealing not with the realities themselves, but with their signs and logical exponents. They a^vaken intuitions by teaching! Hence, upon his own admission, the process by which Christianity has been revealed to man is not in accordance with the fundamental principles of his system. The inconsistency of his statements is still more glaring in reference to the JNIosaic institute. That, it seems, was a propredcutic to Christianity, but it had nothing logi- cal, nothing in the way of representative instruction, and
48 STAND AUD AND XATUKE OF EELIGIOX. [Skct. T.
"yet aAvakened the religious consciousness by types and symbols." Now, we would humbly ask, What are types and symbols but a language through which, in the one case, instruction is communicated by means of analogy, and in the otlicr by means of visible and exj^ressive signs? In what way could these figured representations of truth- sug- gest the spiritual realities to the mind, but through the operations of the understanding, comparing the type with the antitype, the sign with the thing signified ? From the author's own account, then, it is evident that both Judaism and Christianity were propagated by appeals to the under- standing, that the agents of the revelation in both cases were, in the strict and proper sense of the term, teacherSf and that it was a part of their commission to embody in language of some sort the high conceptions to which they were anxious to elevate their race. These conceptions when embodied in language became doctrines, so that there must have been, to the same extent to which Christ and His Apostles were teachers, "a formal exposition of Christian doctrine."
But we would ask our author, How, apart from didactic appeals — which, we have already seen, he confesses may be the means of spiritual awakening — spiritual intuitions could be engendered by any merely human agency ? In what way is it possible for one man to present a spiritual reality to another, except through its verbal sign, or by a descrip- tion of the occasions on which the intuitions are expe- rienced ? His whole office must be logical. He can neither give eyes to see, nor can he bring the objects themselves in their essential and substantive existence into contact with the mind. He can, in other words, do nothing, according to Mr. Morell's own psychology, but make a logical state- ment of his own experiences. How could the Apostles, for example, impress upon the world the great conceptions of sin, of righteousness, of judgment to come, of salvation, of purity, of heavenly love, but by some definite — that is to say, logical — expression of these very conceptions as they
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 49
existed in their own minds, or, if they were simple and elementary ideas, by referring to the occasions or circum- stances connected with their first suggestion to themselves ? The intuitions they could no more produce than they could create a soul. Through a strong ideal presence of the scenes amid which their own experiences had been awa- kened, they might rouse the latent susceptibilities of their hearers, but their office terminated with the descriptions suited to produce this presence, Avhich is purely a logical pro- cess. " Their testimony to the word, the person, the death and the resurrection of the Saviour" must, in the same way, have been conveyed in words ; they could only hope to reach the sensibilities through the understanding ; they could set Christ and his life in vivid distinctness before the minds of men, but it could only be by signs which repre- sented the realities ; and therefore their appeals must have been exclusively logical. Their intensity in action and suffering, as a mere phenomenon, suggested no definite idea; it might have been madness, fanaticism or any other extra- vagance ; it could have no moral import to spectators until it was explained ; and we see no way of explaining it but by signs which should represent the moral enthusiasm from which it sprung. Hence, according to the author's own showing, the labours of Apostles and Evangelists were con- fined exclusively to the faculty which deals with signs. They testified to facts, and embodied in words the great moral conceptions which these facts involved; and hence Christianity then was diffused so far as the agency of men was employed by addresses to the logical faculty. The Apostles taught, testified, acted ; their teaching and testimony were obviously to the understanding, and action has no meaning except as its principles and motives are understood. Direct appeals to the intuitional consciousness would evidently liave been preposterous. That faculty deals immediately with things themselves ; and unless the Apostles were gifted with power to command the presence of spiritual realities at pleasure, to bring God and Heaven and Hell into direct
Vol. III.— 4
50 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
contact witli the minds of men, and possessed a similar power over the hardened hearts, the slumbering consciences and the stupid sensibility of their age — unless they could give eyes to the blind and ears to the deaf — to have sent them into the world to awaken religious intuitions would have been about as sensible an errand as to have sent them into a cemetery to quicken corpses and make the dead entranced admirers of the beauty of nature. If they were to be debarred from addressing the understanding, we are utterly at a loss to conceive in what manner they would pro- ceed. Mr. Morell has involved himself in perplexity and contradiction by confounding the real mission of the Apos- tles, which was purely logical, and from the nature of the case could not have been otherwise, with the results which God intended to effect, and which, if he likes the expres- sion, were purely intuitional. The whole process, as it is described in the New Testament, is plain, simple, intelli- gible. It consisted, in the fii'st place, in that very logical explication or statement of doctrines which Mr. IMorell so much abhors ; and then in a process of supernatural illumi- nation which it was the prerogative of God alone to com- municate. The Apostles described the realities of religion, and the Holy Ghost enabled the hearers to understand. They made the sounds, the Spirit imparted the hearing ear ; they presented the scenes, the Spirit gave the seeing eye ; they announced the truth, the Spirit vouchsafed the under- standing heart. They, in other words, upon the authority of God, proclaimed an infallible theology ; and the Spirit of all grace produced the religion of which that theology was the logical expression. He used their truth to renew, to sanctify, to purify, to save. Their business was to teach ; it was the office of an Agent more august and glorious than themselves to awaken the conceptions which that teaching embodied.
It is particularly in the chapter on Inspiration that the author points out the difficulties with which the vulgar
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 51
theory of the Divine authority of the Scriptures is encum- bered. We have seen that he regards inspiration as efj[uiva- lent to holiness ; and most of the chapter is occupied in refuting what he has chosen to designate the mechanical view of the question. It is, of course, indispensable to the authority of the Scriptures as the Word of God that the men who wrote them should have written as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. Any hypothesis which sets aside a Divine testimony to every statement and doctrine of the Bible is inconsistent with the exercise of that faith which the Scriptures exact, and which is the only adequate foundation of infallible assurance. So far as responsible authorship is concerned, a Divine rule of faith must be the production of God. The design of such a rule is not simply to give us truth, but truth which we know to be truth, specifically on the ground that the Lord has declared it. Hence the theory of " verbal dictation," which our author declares ^ " has been so generally abandoned by the thought- ful in the present day," is the only theory which we have ever regarded as consistent with the exigencies of the case, the only theory which makes the Bible what it professes to be, the Word of God, and an adequate and perfect mea- sure of our faith. If its contents, in any instances, however insignificant, rest only upon the testimony of the human agents employed in writing it, in those instances we can only believe in man ; the statements may be true, but they cease to be Divine and infallible, and the assent which we yield to them becomes opinion and not faith. If, therefore, the author has succeeded in demolishing the theory of ver- bal dictation or of a distinct commission — which he treats separately, though they are only different expressions of the same thing — it must be confessed that, however he has failed in his philosophy, he has completely triumphed in the a posteriori aspect of his argument.
His first consideration is, that '' there is no positive evi- dence of such a verbal dictation having been granted." 1 Page 154.
52 STANDAED AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
This is summary enough. But the reason assigned is still more remarkable.
"The supposition of its existence would demand a twofold kind of inspiration ; each kind entirely distinct from the other. The Apostles, it is admitted, were inspired to preach and to teach orajh/, but we have the most positive evidence that this commission did not extend to their very words. Often they were involved in minor misconcep- tions ; and sometimes they taught specific notions inconsistent with a pure spiritual Christianity, as Peter did when he was chided by Paul. The verbal scheme, therefore, demands the admission of one kind of inspiration having been given to the Apostles as men, thinkers, moral agents and preachers, and another kind having been granted to them as writers.^' ^
In the first place, this twofold inspiration is the result of Mr. Morell's own arbitrary use of language. If he chooses to describe the influences under Avhich men are converted and sanctified as one kind of inspiration, the theory of verbal dictation, of course, implies another, but another by no means inconsistent with the former. The process by which a man is transferred from sin to holiness is very diiferent from the process by which he receives a message to be announced in the terms of its conveyance. There is nothing in personal integrity incompatible with the ojffice of a secretary or amanuensis.
In the next place, Mr. Morell begs the question in assum- ing that the commission of the Apostles as teachers and preachers involved no other inspiration but that which changed their hearts. The very stress of the controversy turns upon the question. What was the apostolic commis- sion ? Whatsoever it was, it is universally conceded that it extended to their writings in exactly the same sense in which it extended to their preaching. If their preaching, in the discharge of their functions as Apostles, was not verbally dictated, no more were their letters. If they sjxd'e not by the Holy Ghost, neither did they zvrite under His suggestions. " But," says our author, " we have the most positive evidence that this commission did not extend to 1 Page 155.
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL standard vindicated. 53
their very words." This, if it coukl be proved, would set- tle the question. But there is something in the first com- mission which our Saviour gave to the Twelve when He sent them out to the lost sheep of the house of Israel which seems to be in such palpable contradiction to this confident assumption that we must be permitted to question whether the evidence can be regarded as superlatively positive. " Behold," says the Master, " I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves ; be ye, therefore, wise as serpents and harmless as doves. But beware of men, for they will deliver you up to the councils, and they will scourge you in their synagogues, and ye' shall be brought before governors and kings for my sake, for a testimony against them and the Gentiles. But when they deliver you up, take no thought how or what ye shall speak ; for it shall be given you in that same hour what ye shall speak. For it is not yc that speak, but the Spirit of your Father which speaketh in you." Or, as it is more pointedly in Mark, " it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Ghost." Paul, too, for whom by the way the author has no great jiartiality, professed to speak the things which had been freely revealed to him of God, " not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but the Holy Ghost teacheth," and had the arrogance to treat his own communications "as the commandments of the Lord." But what is the most positive evidence to which Mr. Morell refers ? Why that the Apostles " were often involved in minor misconceptions, and sometimes they taught spe- cific notions inconsistent with a pure spiritual Christianity, as Peter did when he was chided by Paul." Peter taught no such thing. He was guilty of dissimulation in conduct. He knew the truth and acted in consistency with it before that certain came from James, but when they were come, he was tempted to humour their prejudices. Paul reproved him distinctly upon the ground that he was acting in con- tradiction to what he knew to be the truth of the Gospel. This case, therefore, only proves that Peter, as a man, was partially sanctified ; it does not prove that, as an Apostle,
54 STANDARD AND NATUEE OF EELIGION. [Sect. I.
he was jDcrmittecl to fall into doctrinal error. As to the other minor misconceptions, to which our author refers, it will be time to explain them when we know what they are. Meanwhile, we may be permitted to remark that in this case of Peter, the author has confounded holiness of cha- racter with the apostolic commission. The only inspiration which he seems able to conceive is that of personal purity ; and if a man has any remnants of sin cleaving to his flesh or his spirit, he is, according to Mr. Morell, imperfectly inspired. This, we. repeat, is a begging of the question. No one maintains that the Apostles, as men, were perfect ; they were sinners under the dominion of grace; but as Apostles, in their official relations, it is the doctrine of the popular faith that they were the organs of the Holy Spirit in communicating to the Church an infallible rule of faith and practice. It is no presumption against this hypothesis that they were subject to the weaknesses of fallen humanity; the treasure was put in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power might be confessed as springing from God. It is surely miserable sophistry, when the very question in debate is. What was the apostolic commission? quietly to assume a theory, and then, make that theory the pretext for rejecting another account. And yet this is what our author has done; he assumes that the apostolic commission con- sisted exclusively in the elevation of the religious sensi- bilities, and then, upon the ground of this assumption, re- jects the hypothesis of verbal dictation, as requiring a commission for the writers distinct from that of the apos- tolic office ! We suspect that it would be no hard matter to prove any proposition in heaven or earth, if we can only be indulged in the liberty of taking our premises for granted.
The author's second argument,^ upon which, very pru- dently, he does not insist, is draAvn " from the fact that Ave find a distinctive style maintained by each separate author." He regards it " as a highly improbable, and even extra- 1 Page 15(3.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 55
vagant, supposition, without the most positive proof of it being offered, that each writer should manifest his own modes of thought, his own temperament of mind, his own educational influence, his own peculiar phraseology, and yet, notwithstanding this, every word should have been dictated to him by the Holy Spirit." If Mr. Morell had investigated, a little more fully than he seems to have done, the grounds of the popular faith, he might have found in this very circumstance, which he considers so extremely improbable and extravagant, a fresh illustration of the wisdom of God. The external proofs of inspiration, which consist in the signs of an Apostle or Prophet, found either in the writer himself, or some one commissioned to vouch for his production, require, in most cases, a knowledge of the author. And in conducting an inquiry upon this point, the internal evidence arising from style, structure and habits of thought materially contributes to a satisfactory result. In the first stage of the investigation wc consider the productions simply as human compositions^ s.nd God has wisely distributed the gift of inspiration, so thsA, while He is responsible for all that is said, the individual peculiar- ities of the agent shall designate the person whose instru- mentality He employed. He has facilitated our inquiry into the human organ of the Holy Spirit. Having ascer- tained ourselves as to the human authors or their works, the next question is, as to the claims which they themselves put forward to Divine direction. What are these claims, and how are they substantiated? If they pretend to a verbal dictation, and then adduce the credentials sufficient to authenticate it, we have all which, in the way of external evidence, could be reasonably exacted. The Epistle to the Romans, for example, is put into our hands as a part of the Word of God. The first question is. Who wrote it ? If it can be traced to Paul, we know that he was an Aj^ostle of the Saviour and enjoyed Avhatever inspiration was attached to the apostolic office. He possessed in an eminent degree the signs of an Apostle, and if it were one of tJie privileges
56 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I
of the office that those who were called to it should, in their public instructions and testimonies for Jesus, speak the language of the Holy Ghost, as soon as we are convinced that Paul was the writer of the document, its ultimate emanation from God is settled. Now it obviously facilitates this inquiry to have the mind of Paul stamped upon the letter — to have it distinctly impressed with his image, while it contains nothing but the true and faithful sayings of God. It is consequently no presumption against the Divine dicta- tion of a book that it should exhibit traces of the hand that was employed.
The third argument^ mistakes altogether the very end of inspiration. The purpose was to furnish a statement of facts and an exhibition of doctrines, which should be re- ceived with a faith infallible and Divine, upon the sole con- sideration that God was the Author of both. Its design was to give us a rule of faith and not a standard of opinion. It was to be a Divine testimony ; and therefore, whatever might be the moral and religious qualifications of the wri- ters, however competent they might have been upon their own authority to have told us the same things, their words could, in no sense, be received as the real oracles of God. The Lord Himself must speak ; and this being the purpose of inspiration, verbal dictation detracts in no way from the character or worth of the Apostles. What they were in- spired to teach others was received by themselves upon the same ultimate ground on which it is received by us. They were channels of communication, not because they were fit to be nothing else, but because the end intended to be answered necessarily precluded any other relation, on their part, to the message conveyed.
The fourth argument, which is a repetition, almost for the hundredth time, of the incompetency of the Bible to change the heart and enlighten the understanding, though the author presents it here as a "moral demonstration" against the theory of verbal dictation, has already been 1 Page 156.
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 57
sufficiently answered in what we have said of the uses of theology. Mr. Morell ought to know how to distinguish between an inadequacy to produce a given effect and uni- versal worthlessness. Is the eye useless because it can- not hear, or the ear useless because it cannot see? And must a Divine standard of theology be utterly good for nothing because it cannot perform the office of the Holy Spirit ? Is there nothing else that it can do ? Has not he himself repeatedly admitted that a human theology sub- serves many valuable purposes in the economy of religion ? and in the name of truth and righteousness what is there in the mere circumstance that it is human to give it such an immense advantage over one that is Divine ?
The theory of a distinct commission — which the author treats separately from that of verbal dictation, though they are only different expressions of the same thing — he sum- marily dismisses as destitute of any satisfactory evidence, and indebted for " its growth and progress in the Church to the influence of a low and mechanical view of the whole question of inspiration itself." ^ The compositions of the Prophets and Apostles, whether in the Old or New Testa- ment, he considers as the spontaneous effusions of their own minds, prompted by the motives which usually regu- late good men in their efforts to promote the welfare of their race. The purpose to write and the things they should write were equally the suggestions of their own benevolence and wisdom. The theory of a distinct commission, on the other hand, asserts that they were commanded to write by the special authority of God, and that the things which they wrote were dictated to them by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The settlement of this controversy evidently turns upon two points : the light in which the writers themselves regarded it, or, in the absence of any specific information upon this head, the light in which it was regarded by those who were competent to judge. If they claimed a distinct commission, or if those whose testimony ought to be decisive 1 Page 160.
58 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I
awarded it to them, there is an end of the dispute. With relation to the books of the Old Testament, we receive their verbal insjiiration upon two grounds. The first is the testi- mony of the Jewish Church, which in the successive genera- tions contemporary with the successive writers in its canon known to them, hoAvever unknown to us, possessed the means of determining with accuracy whether the several authors exhibited themselves the external proofs of a Divine commission, or, in the absence of such proofs, whether their productions were vouched by the seal of those who were competent, from the same proofs, to give an infallible decision. The second is the testimony of Christ ^nd His Apostles. These witnesses are competent to judge. Now the question is. What judgment did they give? In what sense did they receive these books as coming from God ? AYe shall not here enter into the question concerning the notions of the Je^vs, although they are patent upon almost every page of the New Testament; but we confidently assert that Christ and His Apostles distinctly and unequi- vocally awarded to the Prophets of the ancient dispensation precisely the verbal inspiration in their writings which Mr. INIorell labours to subvert. Paul declares that " all Scrip- ture is given by inspiration of God ;" ^ Peter, a little more definitely, that " holy men of God sjxihe as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." ^ Our Saviour rebuts a malig- nant accusation of the Jews by an argument which turns upon the Divine authority of the u-ords of the Old Testa- ment;^ and passages are again and again quoted by His Apostles as the ipsissima verba of the Holy Spirit : " Well spake the Holy Ghost," says Paul, " by Esaias the Prophet unto our fathers."* "Wherefore as the Holy Ghost saith, To-day if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts." ® The Old Testament is compendiously described as "the oracles of God,® and the Apostle informs us that it Avas "God who, at sundry times and in divers manners, spake
1 2 Tim. iii. 16. " 2 Pet. i. 21. » John x. 33-36.
* Acts xxviii. 25. * Heb. iii. 7. ' Eom. iii. 2.
SEca. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 59
iu time past unto the fathers by the Prophets."^ Paul goes so far as to identify the Scripture with God Himself — attrib- uting to it what was absolutely true only of Him. " The Scripture saith unto Pharaoh ;" " the Scripture foreseeing that God would justify the heathen;" "the Scripture hath con- cluded all under sin." It is absolutely certain, from these references, that Christ and His Apostles regarded the Old Testament as verbally inspired, and the Prophets as nothing but the agents through whom the Holy Ghost communicated His will. It is of no consequence, therefore, whether we know the human authors of the different books or not, or the times at which they were written, or even the country in which they were composed ; it is enough that what con- stituted the canon of the Jews in the days of our Saviour was endorsed by Him and His own chosen Apostles as the Word of God. He and they referred to that canon as a whole, under the well-known titles of "The Scriptures," "The Law," "The Prophets and the Psalms;" "treated it generally as authoritative;" called it specifically " the Oracles of God;" and, quoted particular passages in a way in which they could not have quoted them if there had been no distinct commission to write them. But these considerations, it ap- pears, are nothing to Mr. Morell. Because we are not in possession of the evidence which justified the reception of each particular book into the Jewish canon, he triumphantly asks what chance we have upon the hypothesis of verbal dictation of being successful in proving the inspiration of the Old Testament against the aggressions of the skeptic.^ " The fact," he adds, " upon which many lay such remark- able stress, that Christ and His Apostles honoured the Old Testament, is nothing to the purpose, as far as the nature of their [its] inspiration is concerned." But is it nothing to the purpose that Christ and His Apostles distinctly de- clare to us that it was God who spake by the Prophets, that the Scriptures are called by our Saviour the Word of God, and that particular passages are repeatedly cited as 1 Heb. i. 1. ^ Page 178.
60 STAND AED AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
the ipsisswia verba of the Holy Ghost? Is this kind of honour nothing ? But he continues:
" They honoured the Divine and the ^toviaHn the old dispensa- tion. They honoured the men who had been servants and prophets of the IMost High. They honoured the writings from which their spirit of piety and of power breathed forth. But never did they affirm the literal and special divinity of all the national records of the Jewish people, as presened and read in the synagogues of that day. ' ' ^
No doubt Christ and His Apostles honoured the Divine and the Eternal in the old dispensation, but, if the Scrip- tures are to be credited, they also honoured the Divine and temporary. They honoured everything that was Divine, whether it was to remain or to be done away. The Master fulfilled all righteousness. As to the men who had been servants and prophets of the ISIost High, they said very lit- tle about them — at least very little is recorded. But it is certain that they never honoured the writings of the Proph- ets because they were the offspring of pious and devo- tional feeling. It was not because the spirit of the men was in them, but because the Spirit of God was there, that they attached the importance which they did attach to the books of the Old Testament; and the passages which we have already quoted put it beyond any reasonable doubt that they did regard God as the real and responsible Author of these books. Their testimony is, or ought to be, deci- sive of the question.
The author's opinion of the inspiration of the New Tes- tament may be collected from the following passage, which, though long, cannot be conveniently abridged :
"Passing from the Old Testament to the New, the same entire absence of any distinct commission given to the writers of the several books (with the exception, perhaps, of the Apocalypse of John) pre- sents itself Mark and Luke were not Apostles, and the latter of them distinctly professes to write from the testimony of eye-witnesses, and to claim the confidence of Theophilus, for whom his two treatises were 1 Page 178.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 61
composed, on this particular ground. Matthew and John wrote their accounts somewhat far in the first century, when the increase of the Christian converts naturally suggested the necessity of some such statements, at once for their information and for their spiritual require- ments generally. Finally, Paul, as we know, wrote his letters as the state of i^articular churches seemed to call for them ; but in no case do we find a sjjecial commission attached to any of these, or of the other Epistles of the New Testament.
"Added to this, the light which history sheds upon the early period of the Christian Church shows us that the writings which now com- pose the New Testament Canon were not at all regarded as express messages to them from God, independently of the conviction they had of the high integrity and spiritual development of the minds of the writers. They received them just as they received the oral teachings of the Apostles and Evangelists ; they read them in the churches to supply the place of their personal instructions ; and there is abundant evidence that many other writings beside those which now form the New Testament were read with a similar reverence and for a sim- ilar edification.
"It was only gradually, as the pressure of heresy compelled it, that a certain number of writings were agreed upon by general consent as being purely apostolic, and designated by the term homologoumena, or agreed upon. But that much contention existed as to which should be acknowledged canonical, and which not, is seen from the fact that a number of the writings now received were long termed ' antilego- mena,' or contested, and that the third century had wellnigh com- pleted its course before the present canon was fixed by universal con- sent. All this shows us that it was not any distinct commission attached to the composition of certain books or documents which imparted a Divine authority to the Apostles' writings, but that they were selected and approved by the Church itself as being veritable productions of men ' who spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost ' — men who were not inspired in order to write any precise documents, but who wrote such documents, amongst other labours, by virtue of their being inspired.
" The conclusion which we necessarily draw from these considerations is, that the canonioity of the New Testament Scriptures was decided upon solely on the ground of their presenting to the whole Church clear statements of apostolical Christianity. The idea of their being wi-itten by any special command of God or verbal dictation of the Spirit was an idea altogether foreign to the primitive churches. They knew that Christ was in Himself a Divine revelation ; they knew that the Apostles had been with Him in His ministiy; they knew that their hearts had been warmed with His truth, that their whole religious
62 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
nature had been elevated to intense spirituality of thinking and feel- ing by the possession of His Spirit, and that this same Spirit was poured out without measure upon the Church. Here it was they took their stand, and in these facts they saw the reality of the apostolic inspiration ; upon these realities they reposed their faith ere ever the sacred books were penned ; and when they icere penned, they re- garded them as valid representations of the living truth which had already enlightened the Church, and as such alone pronounced upon their canonical and truly apostolic character." ^
The substance of these observations may be reduced to three points: 1. That the writers of the New Testament made no pretensions to the sort of inspiration implied in the idea of a Divine commission to write. 2. That the primitive Church did not look upon their productions as the words of the Holy Ghost; and, 3. That the collection of books which constitute the canon of the New Testament was made, not that it might be an authoritative rule of faith, but that precious mementas of the Apostles and of apostolic preaching might be embodied and preserved.
Every one of these propositions is grossly and notoriously false. There are three considerations which to any candid mind put it beyond all reasonable controversy that the Apostles and Evangelists must have claimed the plenary inspiration for which we contend. The first is, that the Saviour, on no less than four different occasions, promised to the Twelve the verbal dictation of the Spirit when they should be called to testify for Him. The last of these prom- ises has no limitation as to time and place, and the language in which it is couched deserves to be seriously pondered : "Howbeit, when He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will guide you into all truth ; for He shall not speak of Himself, but whatsoever He shall hear, that shall He speak, and He will show you things to come."^ These promises explain the nature of the apostolic commission, at least so far as oral teaching was concerned. When the Apostles spake,
1 Pages 163-165.
* John xvi. 13. The other instances are: Matt. x. 19, 20; Mark xiii. 11 ; Luke xii. 11, 12.
Sect. I.] AX EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 63
it was not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, bnt which the Holy Ghost teacheth. The second consideration is, that the Apostles placed their writings upon the same footing exactly with their oral instructions. Est enim Scrip- turce et prcedicationis par ratio} The third is, that they attributed the same authority to their own compositions which they awarded to the Scriptures of the Old Testament. Peter refers to the Epistles of Paul with the same reverence with which he refers to the canon of the Jews,^ and Paul quotes the Law of Moses and the Gospel of Luke as entitled to equal consideration.^ If, now, our Saviour promised the verbal dictation of the Spirit in the oral teaching of the Apostles, and they ascribed the same authority to their writ- ings which belonged to their preaching, if they reckoned their own compositions in the same category with the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, and distinctly traced these to the immediate suggestions of God, what more can be re- quired to establish the unqualified falsehood of Mr. Morell's first position upon the subject? But Luke, it seems — ^whom, be it remembered, Paul quotes as of equal authority with Moses — virtually disclaimed this species of inspiration, since "he professes to write from the testimony of eye-wit- nesses, and to claim the confidence of Theophilus, for whom his two treatises were composed, on this particular ground.'"* Mr. Morell is particularly unfortunate whenever he deals with Scripture. The memorable words of our Saviour to Nicodemus, " God so loved the world," etc., he very amus- ingly expounds^ as a discovery of one of the Apostles — a bright ray of intuition beaming from a mind intensely heated by the marvellous scenes connected with the history of Jesus. And here he blunders sadly in reference to the beloved physician. Luke does not say that he wrote from
1 2 Thess. ii. 15; 1 Cor. xv. 1; John xx. 31; 1 John i. 1-4.
= 2 Pet. iii. 16.
' 1 Tim. V. 18. The labourer is tcorthy of his hire is a passage found no- where else as quoted by Paul but in Luke x. 7, and there it occurs exactly in the words of the Apostle.
* Page 163. 5 Pages 247, 248.
64 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
the testimony of eye-witnesses, but that others had done so. He simply ascribes to himself, according to our English version, an accurate knowledge of the facts, or, according to another version, a thorough investigation of them; and he claims the confidence of Theophilus, because he himself was perfectly ascertained of the truth of what he wrote. His own mind had reached certainty — by what particular steps is not made known to us — and he was anxious to im- part the same certainty to the friend to Avhom his treatises are addressed. Nothing hinders but that this very investi- gation may have been prompted by an impulse which ter- minated in that very dictation of the Spirit without which his book is entitled to no special authority. Mr. Morell is not surely to learn that the theory of verbal inspiration contemplates something more than organic influence ; that it represents the sentiments and language as the sentiments and language of the writers as well as of the Holy Ghost. God employed the minds of the Apostles, with all their faculties and powers, distinctively as minds, and not as machines, to communicate His own will in His own words to mankind. Through their thoughts, memories, reasonings, studies and inquiries He infused His truth into their hearts, put His words into their lips and impressed His own decla- rations on the written page. How these things can be we profess not to determine. Our philosophy cannot penetrate the mysteries of God. But we have the faculty of believing where we cannot explain. The incarnate Word was man and God in one person and two distinct natures, and His divinity stamped ineffable value upon the deeds and suffer- ings of his humanity. The written Word is Divine and human in mysterious concurrence, and the Divine invests it with all its value and authority as a conclusive standard of faith. "We grant," says Dr. Owen,* "that the sacred wri- ters used their own abilities of mind and understanding in the choice of words and expressions. So the preacher sought to find out acceptable words. Eccles. xii. 10. But 1 Works, vol. ii., p. 159— Holy Spirit, book 2d, chap. i.
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 65
the Holy Spirit, who is more intimate into the minds and skill of men than they are themselves, did so guide and operate in them as that the words they fixed upon were as directly and certainly from Him as if they had been spoken to them by an audible voice." "God," says Haldane,^ "did not leave them to the operation of their own mind, but has employed the operations of their mind in His Word. The Holy Spirit could dictate to them His own words in such a way that they would also be their own words, uttered with the understanding. He could express the same thought by the mouth of a thousand persons, each in his own style." It is upon this obvious principle that God employed them as intelligent agents, that they were re- quired to give attendance to all the ordinary means of im- proving their faculties, to reading, study, meditation and prayer, to mutual consultation and advice, and to all the ordinances of the Christian Church. They were, by no means, like Balaam's ass, the passive vehicles of articulate sounds; God spoke through their voice, and communicated ideas through their minds.
The second proposition — that the Primitive Church did not look upon the writings of the Apostles and Evangelists as verbally inspired — is so ludicrously false, and betrays such disgraceful ignorance of the history of opinions upon the subject, that very few words will be sufficient to despatch it. It is well known to every scholar that the theory of verbal dictation, stated often in such forms as to make the sacred writers merely passive instruments of Divine com- munications, is the oldest theory in the Christian Church. Justin, Athenagoras, Macarius and Chrysostom very fre- quently compare them to musical instruments, which obey the breath of the performer in the sounds they emit. Ma- carius tells us that the Holy Scriptures are epistles which God, the King, has sent to men.^ Chrysostom affirms that
^ Haldane on Inspiration, p. 117.
2 All the quotations which follow may be found with many others in Suicerus, Article ypa'Pv, and Conybeare's Bampton Lectures, Lecture 1 Vol. III.— 5
66 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
"all the Scriptures have been written and sent to us, not by servants, but by God, the Master of all" — that "the words which they utter are the words of God Himself." He tells us, farther, that even their very syllables contain some hid- den treasure; that nothing is vain or superfluous about them, everything being the appointment of the wise' and omniscient God. The same opinions are found also in Origen, Cyril of Alexandria, Irenfeus and Gregory Thau- maturgus. And yet the Primitive Church attributed no verbal inspiration to the authors of the Gospels and Epis- tles! It is notorious, too, that the same terms of respect which the Jews were accustomed to appropriate to their canon were promiscuously applied by the Christian Fathers to the whole canon of the Christian Church, and to the books particularly of the New Testament.^ They were called by Irenpeus, Divine Scriptures, Divine Oracles, Scrip- tures of the Lord ; by Clement of Alexandria, Sacred Books, Divine Scriptures, Divinely -inspired Scriptures, Scriptures of the Lord, the true Evangelical Canon; by Origen, the whole canon was called the Ancient and New Oracles; by Cyprian, the books of the New Testament were distin- guished as Boohs of the Spirit, Divine Fountains, Fountain of the Divine Fidlness. We hope Mr. Morell will look a little into history before he ventures to assert again that " in the early period of the Christian Church the writings which now compose the New Testament Canon were not all regarded as express messages to them from God."
The third proposition is, that these books were not collected because they were the canon or authoritative rule of faith, but because they contained interesting memorials of apos- tolic teaching and labours. If INIr. INIorell has not sufficient leisure to peruse the documents of ecclesiastical antiquity, he will find in the treatise appended to the Corpus et Syn- tagma Coufessionum, or the Consent of the Ancient Fathers
at tlie end. The reader is also referred to Taylor's Ductor Dub., Book 2d, Chap, iii., Rule 14.
^ Paley's Evidences, Part 1, Chap, ix., § 4.
Sect. I.] AX EXTERNAL STAXDARD VINDICATED. 67
to the Doctrines of the Reformation, a very satisfactory account of the precise light in which the Primitive Church looked upon the Holy Scriptures. In the mean time, we may inform our readers that she had exactly the same notions of their Divine authority as the arbiter of faith and the judge of controversies which all evangelical Christians noAv entertain of them. "It behoveth," says Basil of Csesarea, "that every word and every work should be accredited by the testimony of the inspired Scripture." "Let the in- spired Scriptures," he says again, "ever be our umpire, and on whichever side the doctrines are found accordant to the Divine Word, to that side the award of truth may, with entire certainty, be given." And still again, "It is the duty of hearers, when they have been instructed in the Scrip- tures, to try and examine, by them, the things spoken by their teachers, to receive whatever is consonant to those Scriptures, and to reject whatever is alien; for thus they will comply with the injunction of St. Paul, to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good." "We have known the economy of our salvation," says Irenseus, " by no other but by those by whom the Gospel came to us; which truly they then preached, but afterward, by the will of God, delivered to us in the Scriptures, which were to be the pillar and ground of our faith."
The facts upon which ]\Ir. INIorell relies to give counte- nance to his notions in refei'ence to the early estimate of the Scriptures prove to our minds exactly the reverse. Why, when the primitive Christians were pressed by heresy, were they so anxious to be ascertained of the apostolic writ- ings, if these writings were not a standard of truth ? Why so cautious in their inquiries, so watchful against impostures and frauds, so thorough in their investigations, if Avhen they had agreed upon the genuine productions of the Apos- tles they w^ere no nearer settling their controversies than they were before ? Can any satisfactory reason be assigned, but that of the eloquent and fervid Chrysostom ? —
"The apostolical writings are the very walls of the Church. Some
68 STANDAKD AND NATURE OF KELIGION. [Skct. I.
one, perhaps, may ask, What then shall 1 do, who cannot have a Paul to refer to ? Wh.v, if thou wilt, thou mayest still have him more entire than many even with whom he was personally present, for it was not the sight of Paul that made them what they were, but his words. If thou wilt, thou mayest have Paul and Peter and John, yea, and the whole choir of Prophets and Apostles, to converse with thee frequently. Only take the works of these blessed men arid read their writings assiduously. But why do I say to thee, Thou mayest have Paul? If thou wilt, thou mayest have Paul's Master; for it is He Himself that speaketh to thee in Pavd's words."
The Apostles themselves were to the first churches which they collected the Oracles of God. They were inspired to teach and publish the whole counsel of God in reference to the Church. The words which they spake were not theirs, but those of Christ who sent them. To all future genera- tions their writings were designed to occupy the position which they themselves occupied towards the first converts. In these writings we now have what God originally spake through them. The care and anxiety of the primitive churches to guard against delusion and deceit were owing to the belief that all apostolic compositions — that is, all com- positions written either directly by themselves or commended as inspired by their approbation — were, in the proper accep- tation of the term, canonical; they were a rule of faith — they were the Word of God. This being the state of the case, no book was received as of apostolical authority but after full and complete investigation. The evidences of its origin were thoroughly canvassed. The question was. What books has God sent to us ? or, in the language of Chrysostom, What epistles has God sent to us as the stand- ard of truth? The answer was, Those which the Apostles, in the discharge of their apostolic commission, either wrote themselves or sanctioned as written by others. What books were these? The Primitive Church finally settled this question when it agreed upon the canon of the New Testa- ment. The whole history of the matter shows that these documents were honoured, not as memorials of Peter, James and Jolui, but as the words of the Master communicated
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 69
through them. Mark and Luke were not Apostles them- selves, and yet they are included in the canon, and entitled to the same authority with Paul or any other Apostle. The reason was, that the early Church had satisfactory evidence that they wrote under the same guidance which was prom- ised to the Twelve. Mr. Morell is therefore grossly at fault in maintaining that the Apostles themselves made no pre- tensions to verbal or plenary inspiration, that the Primitive Church did not accord it to them, and that their writings were not regarded as a Divine and infallible canon of truth. The testimony of history is clearly, strongly, decidedly against him; and any conclusions against the theory of a Divine commission which he has drawn from the monstrous propo- sitions which, as we have seen, have no existence but in the fictions of his own fancy, are nothing worth.
There remain two other arguments by which he attempts to set aside the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures. The first is the defective morality of the Old Testament, and the second is the inconsistencies and discrepancies of the sacred writers. As to the first, it is obvious, from the whole tenor of the JSTew Testament, that it professes to make no new revelations in morality ; it is only a commentary on the Law and the Prophets. The great principle which is supposed by many to be characteristic of the Gospel, that we should love the Lord our God with all our hearts, and our neigh- bours as ourselves, is distinctly inculcated by Moses; while patience under injuries, alms to the indigent and kindness to the poor, afflicted and oppressed, are the reigning spirit of the ancient institute. The Israelites were indeed com- missioned to wage exterminating wars against the devoted objects of Divine wrath, but in these instances they were the scourge of God. It was not to gratify their private resentments or national ambition, but to execute the ven- geance of Heaven, that they were commanded to destroy the tribes of Cauaan. They were as the plague, pestilence and famine in the hands of the Almighty — God was the real destroyer ; they were but the instruments of His will,
70 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
and they departed from every principle of their institute if they suffered themselves to be influenced by private mialice. There are other instances in which deeds of treach- ery and deceit are recorded, but there is a huge difference betwixt recording and approving them. The drunkenness of Xoah — if indeed he were drunk, which we very much doubt — the lies of Abraham, the cruelty of Sarah, the incest of Lot, the frauds of Jacob and the adultery of David were written not for our example, but our warning. There are other instances in which the moral import of the same material action was very different then from what it is now. There can be no doubt that in the pi-ogress of society rela- tions may be developed and causes unfolded which shall make an act criminal in one age that Avas perfectly blame- less, in another. Incest was lawful in the family of Adam ; under a certain contingency a Jew might marry his brother's widow ; and it remains to be proved that, in the early con- dition of Eastern civilization, the habits and customs which now provoke our censure were possessed of the same moral import which attaches to them now. "With these distinc- tions and limitations, we have no hesitation in asserting that the morality of the Old Testament is precisely what we might expect it to be upon the theory of verbal inspira- tion. The great duties of piety and religion, of truth, justice and benevolence, the charities of life, the virtues of the citizen, the master and tlie man, the husband, the father and the son, are all impressed under the ancient economy with the sanctions peculiar to that dispensation. There is nothing impure, immoral, unworthy of God.
As to inconsistencies and discrepancies in the sacred writers which cannot be fairly explained, we simply deny them. Mr. Morell charges them with inconclusiveness of reasoning, defects of memory and contradictions to science and themselves in their statements of fact. When he con- descends to specify the instances, and to j^^'ove that his alle- gations are true, it will be time to answer yet again these exploded cavils of infidelity, which have a thousand times
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 71
been refuted, and Avliich he ought to know to be worthless. In regard to defects of memory, we beg him to recollect that any effort to substantiate this charge may involve an effort to cast a serious imputation upon the moral character of Jesus Christ Himself. If there was anything which He distinctly and unequivocally promised to His Apostles, it Avas that the Holy Ghost should teach them all things and bring all things to their remembrance which He himself had said unto them.
There is indeed one specification which he has made — the inconsistency of geological speculations with the Mo- saic cosmogony. Mr. Morell, however, is not ignorant that the Mosaic narrative contradicts not a single fact of de- scriptive geology. All that she reports of the shape of the earth, its minerals, and fossils, its marks of convulsion and violence, — all these faets may be fully admitted, and yet not a line of Moses be impugned. It is only when the geologist proceeds to the causes of his facts, and invents hypotheses to explain them, that any inconsistency takes place; and this inconsistency is evidently not betwixt geology and religion, but geologists and Moses. It is a war of theories, of speculation and conjecture, against the historical fidelity of a record supported by evidence in comparison with which they dwindle into the merest fig- ments of the brain.
There is one other consideration which demands our notice, and which we have reserved to this place, because it is evidently not an argument against the abstract possi- bility of a Divine theology — being not at all inconsistent with the patristic notion of organic inspiration — but against that view of the manner in which a Divine theology has been communicated which we have felt it our duty to de- fend. Mr. Morell asserts,
"That the whole of the logical 2:>roeesses of the human mind are such that the idea of a revelation is altogether incompatible with them, that they are in no sense open to its influence, and that they can neither be improved nor assisted by it. All our logical processes
72 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect, I.
of mind, all the operations of the understanding, take place in accord- ance with the most fixed and determinate laws, those which are usually termed the laws of thought. Whatever can be infeiTcd by these laws, whatever can be derived in any way from them, must be strictly within the natural capacity of the human mind to attain. If, on the contrary, there be anything which these laws of thought are naturally unable to reach, no extraneous influence whatever could give thera the power of reaching it. The laws of thought are immovable —to alter them would be to subvert the whole constitution of the human intellect. Whatever is once within their reach is always so. Correct reasoning could never be subverted by revelation itself; bad reasoning could never be improved by it." ^
We are not sure that we understand this passage. If the author means that our logical processes do not originate the materials upon which they are employed, what he says may be true, but it is nothing to the purpose; but if he means that the mind being already in possession of all the simple ideas upon which it is to operate, God, in consistency with its own laws, cannot secure the understanding from error, what he says is contradictory to the revelation of a theology through the agency of men, upon any other hypothesis but that of organic inspiration. The cpiestion is not whether any Divine influence can make bad reasoning good or good reasoning bad, but whether God can exempt men from the bad, and infallibly conduct them to the good, without subverting their intellectual constitution.
Mr. Morell will hardly deny that if all the conditions and laws which ought to be observed in the processes of the understanding were faithfully regarded, there would be no danger of fallacy or mistake. Error is the result of dis- obedience or inattention to the laws of our own nature — the punishment of intellectual guilt. The naked question then is, whether God, by any subjective influence on the soul, can preserve it from eccentricity and disorder, and keep it in harmony with the essential conditions of its healthful operation. Surely it is no subversion of the constitution of the mind to have that constitution protected from violence 1 Pages 141, 142.
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 73
and eucroacliment. The soul is more truly itself when it moves in the orbit prescribed for it than when it deserts its pioper path and wanders into forbidden regions. If God cannot exert a controlling influence upon the understanding, it must be because there is something in the nature of its faculties or exercises incompatible with the direct inter- ference of the Deity. Now the faculties which belong to it are, according to our author's own statement/ memory, conception, imagination, abstraction and generalization, to which may be added the association of ideas; and the pro- cesses which belong to it are definition, division, judgment and reasoning, whether inductive or deductive. Not to enter at this stage of the discussion into any metaphysical an- alysis, it is obvious that these faculties exist, among different men, in very different degrees of perfection, and these pro- cesses are conducted with very different degrees of correct- ness, and yet their essential nature is the same in all. If, then, by the act of God, there can be different degrees of memory in different persons without any infringement of the laws of memory, why may there not be different degrees in the same person? If God can make one man reason better than another, without disturbing the laws of ratioci- nation, why cannot He make the same man reason at one time better than he reasoned at another? Can He not impart additional clearness to conception, vigour to imagination, nicety to analysis, and accuracy to the perception of those resemblances and relations upon which generalization and reasoning proceed? The truth is, one of the most myste- rious features connected with the human mind is its suscep- tibility of growth and improvement without receiving additions to its substance. Perfectly simple and indisccrp- tible in its own nature, incapable of enlargement by accre- tion, it yet begins, in the simplest operations of sense, to exert an activity which waxes stronger and better in every successive period of its existence, and to the development of which there seem to be no natural limits. All the ex- ^ Page 15.
74 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Skct. 1.
prcssions by Avliich we represent this change are borrowed from material analogies, and are evidently liable to the abuse which, from such applications, has made the history of philosophy too much a history of confusion. In rela- tion to our minds, much more than in relation to our bodies, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. And if the natural order of improvement is a mystery, profound and imjjene- trable — if we are unable to comprehend, much less to ex- plain, how a single substance, remaining unchanged in its essence, shall exhibit those wonderful phenomena which we can liken to nothing but growth, expansion and enlarge- ment in material objects — surely it is too much to say that in this world of mystery another mystery still cannot be found, that of supernatural improvement, in which every faculty shall faithfully obey the laws of its structure. To us the idea that any creature, in any of its operations, can be independent of God, involves a gross contradiction. Absolute dependence is the law of its being. As without the concursus of the Deity it must cease to exist, so His sustentation and support are essential to every form of action, every degree of development, every step in improve- ment. It is only in God that it can live and move, as it is only in God that it has its subsistence. We see no more difficulty in supposing that God can superintend and direct the various processes of the understanding than in admitting that He created its powers in the first instance, and impressed upon them the laws which they ought to observe. Prov- idence is no more wonderful than creation.
Mr. Morell admits that the Deity can exert a subjective influence upon the intuitional faculties, that they can be elevated to a supernatural degree of intensity, and that this is actually done in the phenomenon of inspiration. AMiy, then, should the understanding not be accessible to God ? If He can touch the soul in one point, why not in another? If He can improve its vision, what hinders but that He may regulate and assist its reflection ? That He can turn the hearts of men as the rivers of water are turned ; that the
Sect. L] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 75
spirits of all jElesli, in the full integrity of tlieir faculties, are as completely in His hands as clay in the hands of the potter; that He can bring every proud thought and lofty imagination into humble obedience to his will; that the whole man is absolutely and unresistingly in His power, so that He can direct its steps without a contravention of the laws of its being, — is the only hypothesis upon which the great evangelical doctrine of regeneration is consistent or possible. The work of the Spirit is represented as ex- tending to the whole soul ; it gives eyes to the blind, ears to the deaf, knowledge to the ignorant, wisdom to the fool- ish. It enlightens the mind, purifies the heart, cleanses the imagination, purges the conscience, stimulates the mem- ory, quickens the judgment, and imparts an unwonted apt- itude in the perception of spiritual relations. As there is not a faculty which has not suffered from the ruins of the Fall, so there is not a faculty which does not share in the restoration of grace. The testimony of Scripture may be nothing to Mr. Morell; but as his presumptuous asser- tion is unsupported by anything in his own mental analysis ; as it is inconsistent with the analogy which the case of intuition, confessed by him to be susceptible of supernatural influence, obviously suggests; as there is nothing in the nature of the understanding, in any of its faculties or ex- ercises, which places it beyond the reach of Divine regula- tion ; as there is no more absurdity in God's governing than in God's creating its powers, — we may safely receive the declarations of the Bible, as well as the dictates of common sense, until we have some better reason for calling them into question than the ipse dixit of a transcendental philosopher. And that theory is certainly reduced to a desperate ex- tremity which allows its author no refuge but a bold and impudent denial of the essential attributes of God. What- ever does not involve a contradiction, and so prove itself to be nothing, lies within the boundless range of possibilities which Almighty power can achieve. It is the folly and blasphemy of the wicked to reduce their Creator to their
76 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. I.
level, to make Him altogether such an one as they tliem- selves, and to measure His resources by their own insignif- icant capacities. It is His prerogative to lift His hand and swear that as He lives for ever, so He shall accomplish all His will, and rule alike the minds and bodies He has framed. Our God is in the heavens. He has done what- soever He hath pleased; and if among the things which have pleased Him were the purpose to communicate a Di- vine theology through the minds and understandings of men, there could have been no impediment which His power could not easily surmount.
We shall here finish our examination of the book before us with reference to the soundness of its logic. The single point to which our remarks have been directed is, whether the conclusions are legitimately drawn from the premises. We have admitted, for the sake of argument, the principles of the author's philosophy. We have not called in ques- tion his psychology, his analysis of religion, or his accounts of revelation and inspiration. Our object has been to dis- cover whether, granting all these, the popular faith in re- gard to the authority of the Scriptures is necessarily sub- verted. We have attempted to show that though his philosophy pretends to be an a 'priori argument against the possibility of this notion being true, it demonstrates notliing to the purpose; that revelation, in his sense, is not exclusive of revelation in its common and ordinary acceptation ; and that his inspiration is by no means inconsistent Avith the inspiration of the vulgar faith. Divest his argument of the ambiguity of language, and of the gratuitous assumja- tion that the agency which he admits is the sole agency of God, and it is divested of all pertinency and force. We have gone still farther, and convicted of weakness and con- fusion all his efforts to render useless and unnecessary the existence of a canon such as the Bible professes to be. Out of his own mouth have we condemned him. As a philo- sophical argument, therefore, we are compelled to say that his book is utterly wanting — that so far from demonstrat-
Sect. I.] AN EXTERNAL STANDARD VINDICATED. 77
ing that a revealed theology is a psychological absurdity, he has beaten his drums and flourished his trumpets when the enemy had not been even in sight. We have also fol- lowed him in his arguments addressed to the question as a matter of fact. We have seen that he is at fault in charg- ing the- popular faith with a total destitution of positive proof, and that all his objections to the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, whether founded on varieties of style, the necessity of Divine illumination, the diminution of our re- spect for the sacred writers, the history of the canon, the immoralities, absurdities and contradictions of the Bible, or the alleged impossibility of a Divine revelation through the understandings of men, are capable of an easy and obvious refutation. The conclusion of the whole matter is, that as an infidel assault his book is a signal failure. For anything that he has proved to the contrary, by either a priori or a posteriori reasoning, the Bible may be what the Christian world has always been accustomed to regard it. But a harder task remains yet to be performed. His philosophy must be brought to the touchstone of truth ; and we hope at no distant day to be able to convince our readers that no better success has attended his speculations than has rewarded his efforts to apply them.
SECTIOI^ II.
RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED.
HAYIXG, ill our former article, considered the work of Mr. Morell as an argument against an authoritative theology, we proceed, according to our promise, to examine the philosophy on which the argument is founded. This task we undertake with unfeigned reluctance. The ques- tions which it involves demand a poAver of analysis, a pa- tience of reflection, an intensity of thought, a depth of investigation and an amplitude of learning to which, we are conscious, we can make no pretensions. We always return from the stucb^ of the great problems of human knowledge with a conviction of littleness, incapacity and ignorance which, though the process by which it has been produced has disclosed enough to prevent us from " despair- ing of the ultimate possibility of philosophy," teaches us to commiserate rather than denounce the errors of others, and makes us feel that our position must always be that of humble and teachable inquirers. Far from dreaming of the attempt to originate an independent system of our own, or even to combine into a consistent and harmonious whole the various elements of truth which may be elicited from existing systems, we are content, in regard to these high problems, to discharge the negative office of refuting error without presuming to establish its contrary — of saying M'^hat is not, without undertaking to declare what is, truth. The Avork of simple destruction, though often invidious, is some- times necessary. In the case before us we shall feel our- selves to be the authors of an incalculable good if we can convict Mr. Morell's philosophy of inconsistency and false-
78
Sect. II.] EELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 79
hood, though we should fail, in the progress of the argu- ment, to make a single direct contribution to a sounder system.
This philosophy may be embraced under the three heads of Psychology, Religion and Revelation, together with the connection subsisting between them. The first inquiry of the author is in regard to the subject in which religion inheres. What is it that is religious? Then in regard to the essence of religion itself. What is it to be religious? And finally in relation to the mode in which religion is produced. How is the given subject put in possession of the given essence? The answer to the first inquiry constitutes his Psychology ; to the second, his Analysis of religion in general and of Christianity in particular; to the last, his Theories of Revelation and Inspiration. As to the con- nection subsisting between them, the nature of the subject determines, to some extent, the nature of religion ; and the nature of religion, in its relations to the subject, determines the mode and laws of its production. Mind being given, the essential element of Religion is given; mind and relig- ion being both given, the characteristics of Revelation are settled. This is a general outline of the discussions of the book. We begin with the Psychology ; and that our readers may fully understand the strictures which we shall make upon some of the doctrines of our author, it may be well to give a preliminary statement of the essential differences which distinguish existing schools of philosophy.
I. Sir William Hamilton has very justly observed that^ " philosophy proper is principally and primarily the science of knowledge; its first and most important problem being to determine, What can we know? that is, what are the conditions of our knowing, whether these lie in the nature of the object, or in the nature of the subject, of knowledge." The origin, nature, and extent of human knowledge are, accordingly, the questions which have divided the schools, and the answers which have been returned to them have 1 Hamilton's Keid, page 808 : Note.
80 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION, [Sect. II.
determined the place which their authors have taken in the history of speculation.
It is now universally conceded that all knowledge begins in experience, but there is not the same agreement as to the conditions which are essential to experience, and under which alone it becomes available. In one class of opinions, the mind, at its first exi.stence, is represented as a tabula rasa or a sheet of blank paper, upon which, from without, are written the characters which, contemplated by itself, constitute the sole materials of cognition. It comes into the world unfurnished, an empty room, and the world fur- nishes it. There is, on the one hand, a capacity to receive, and on the other a power to communicate ; and the relation of the two constitutes experience. Upon the materials thus given the mind can operate — it can combine, compare, de- compose and arrange — but it can add absolutely nothing to the stock which has been imparted to it as a passive recip- ient. Experience is restricted exclusively to sensation ; the mind is a machine, and its various faculties the tools with which it works up the materials afforded in sensible phenomena. This low and contracted hypothesis, which sprang from a corruption of Locke's principles, at best partial and incomplete, was pushed to its legitimate con- sequences of Atheistic Materialism and the blindest chance by the celebrated authors of the French Encyclopaedia. And it is to this scheme that we would confine the distinct- ive title of Sensationalism.
"We need not say that the Sensationalist stumbles at the threshold. He gives no account of hnoioleclge: to receive ideas, as the canvas receives the impression of the brush, is not to know. Intelligence involves judgment, belief, con- viction of certainty, not merely that the thing is there, but, to use a sensible analogy, seen to be there. No mechanical activity, however delicate and refined, is competent to ex- plain the peculiar phenomenon involved in the feeling, 1 know. Experience, therefore, must include conditions in the subject which make it capable of intelligence. There
Skct. il] religion psychologically considered. 81
must be a constitution of mind adapted to that specific activ- ity by which it believes and judges, as it is only by virtue of such a constitution that knowledge can be extracted from experience. This preparation of the mind to know, or its adaptation to intelligence, consists in subjecting it to kiws of belief under which it must necessarily act. Its energies can be exercised only under the condition that it shall know or believe. As it is the necessity of belief which distin- guishes intelligent action from every other species of opera- tion, and as there can be no belief without the belief of something, there must be certain primary truths involved in the very structure of the mind, which are admitted from the simple necessity of admitting them. As undeveloped in experience, they exist not in the form of propositions or general conceptions, but of irresistible tendencies to certain manners of belief when the proper occasions shall be afforded. They are certain " necessities of thinking." But, developed in experience and generalized into abstract state- ments, they are original and elementary cognitions, the foundation and criterion of all knowledge. They are the standard of evidence, the light of the mind, and without them the mind could no more be conceived to know than a blind man to see. Being in the mind, a part of its very structure, they are not the products of experience. Essen- tial conditions of mental activity, they are not the results of it. As experience furnishes the occasions on which they are developed or become manifest in consciousness, it is obviously from experience that we know them as mere men- tal phenomena, in the same way that we know every other faculty of mind ; but as primitive beliefs, as vouchers and guarantees for the truth of facts beyond " their own phe- nomenal reality," ^ they are involved in the very conception
1 For a masterly dissertation on the Philosophy of Common Sense, the reader is referred to Hamilton's Eeid, Appendix, Note A. We deem it just to ourselves (and we hope we shall not be suspected of vanity ) to say that the distinction indicated in the text, and the corresponding distinction in regard to the possibility of doubt illustrated by Hamilton, p. 744, had occurred to us, in our own speculations, before we had ever seen his book. Vol. III.— 6
82 STAXDAIJD AND NATURF: OF RELIGIOX. [Sect. II,
of experience. ''Catholic principles of all philosophy," they have been more or less distinctly recognized, in every school and by every sect, from the dawn of speculation until the present day. According to the different aspects in which they have been contemplated, they have received different titles,^ as innate truths, first principles, maxims, prin- ciples of common sense, general notions, categories of the un- derstanding and ideas of pure reason, fundamental laws of belief and constituent elements of reason; but whatever names they have borne, their character remains unchanged of original, authoritative, incomprehensible faiths.
Though the distinct recognition and articulate enuncia- tion of these principles have played a conspicuous jjart in tlie speculations of modern philosophers, yet the admission of them can hardly be regarded as characteristic of a school. It forms a class, in distinction from that of the ultra Sensa- tionalists, in which two schools" are embraced, discriminated from each other by the application which they make of what both equally admit. They are divided on the ques- tion of the relation which our primary cognitions sustain to the whole fabric of human knowledge.
One party represents them as wholly barren and unpro- ductive in themselves — the forms of knowledge and indis- pensable to its acquisition, but not the sources from which it is derived. It is only when, acting in obedience to them, we come in contact with objective realities that we truly knoAv. All knowledge implies the relation of subject and object ; the laws of belief qualify the subject to know, but cannot give the thing to be known. Hence, we are dependent on experience for all the objects of knowledge. The mind, however richly furnished with all the capacities of cogni- tion and belief, however intelligent in its own nature, can- not create by the laws of its constitution a single material
^ See g 5, Note A, Hamilton's Reid.
^ "What is a school ? It is a certain number of systems, more or less connected by time, but especially connected by intimate relations, and still more so by a certain similarity of principles and of views." Cousin, In- troduct. to the Hist. Phil., Lect. iv., Linberg's Trans., p. 97.
Sect. II.] RELIGIOX PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 83
of thought. The description of our iutelligent constitution is an answer to the question how we know, but not to the equally important question what we know. There must be something distinct from a faculty, something to Avhich it is applied or applies itself in conformity with its nature, before the relation of knowledge can obtain. Or, in one Avord, the laws of belief are the conditions of knowing, but, in themselves considered, are not knowledge. They are not the matter of an argument, but the criterion of the truth of any and of every premiss. According to this class of philosophers, experience not only furnishes the occasions on which our primitive cognitions are developed, but furnishes the objects about which our faculties are conversant. It gives us the toJiat we are to know. From the importance which this school attaches to induction, it may be pre-emi- nently styled the school of Experience}
Others represent our original beliefs not merely as the criterion of truth and the indispensable conditions of know- ledge, but as the data, the «/>/««, in which are imj^licitly contained all that is worthy of the name of science. We are dependent upon experience only to awaken them, but when once awakened and roused into action, they can con- duct us to the fountain of existence and solve all the mys- teries of the universe. As reason is held to be the comple- ment of these universal and all-comprehensive principles, this class of philosophers is commonly denominated Ra- tionalists.
Differing as widely as they do in regard to the matter of our knowledge, it is not to be w^ondered at that these tM'O great schools of Rationalism and Experience should differ as widely in relation to its nature and extent or the precise province of a sound philosophy. Rationalism, in all its forms, aims at a complete science of Ontology; it pretends to be, in the language of Cousin, " the absolute intelli-
^ For a very full and satisfactory account of the relations of our primary beliefs to human knowledge, the reader is referred to Stewart's Elements, vol. ii., chap. i.
84 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
gcnoe, the absolute explanation of everything ;" ^ or, in the language of Sir William Hamilton, " it boldly places itself at the very centre of absolute being, with which it is in fact identified, and, thence surveying existence in itself and in its relations, unveils to us the nature of the Deity, and explains from first to last the derivation of all created things."?
The philosophy of Experience is guilty of no such extrav- agances. Professing to build on observation, its first and fundamental principle is that all knoM'ledge must be rela- tive in its nature and phenomenal in its objects. As specu- lations about abstract being transcend the province of legiti- mate induction, it dismisses them at once as frivolous and absurd, and aspires to know only those qualities and attri- butes of things through which they become related to our minds. What they are in themselves, or what they are to the omniscience of God, it would regard as a no less pre- posterous inquiry than to undertake to determine the size, number and employments of the inhabitants of the moon. Still, phenomena in its vocabulary are not synonymous, as Rationalists constantly assume, with phantoms or delusions. They are realities, the conditions of the objects correspond- ing to the conditions of the subjects of human knowledge, and consequently as truly real as those necessary principles of reason for the sake of which they are despised. " What appears to all," says Aristotle, " that we affirm to be, and he who would subvert this belief will himself assuredly advance nothing more deserving of credit."^
Claiming, therefore, only a relative knowledge of exist- ence, the philosophy of Experience, instead of futile and abortive attempts to construct the universe, takes its stand, in conformity with the sublime maxim of Bacon,^ as the
^ Introduct. Hist. Phil., Lect. i., p. 24, Linberg's Trans.
2 Edinburgh Review, Cross's Selections, vol. iii., p. 176. A masterly article on Cousin's Philosophy.
^ Eth. Nic., Lib. x.. Cap. 2 ; a passage repeatedly quoted by Sir "Wil- liam Hamilton.
* Nov. Organ., Aphor. i. In this age of transcendental speculation the words deserve to be repeated: Homo naturae minister et interpres, tantum
Sect. II.] EELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 85
minister, not the master — the interpreter, not the legislator, of Nature. Professing its incompetence to pronounce before- hand what kinds of creatures the Almighty should have made, and "what kinds of laws the Almighty should have established, it is content to look out upon the world, and to look in upon itself, in order to discover what God has wrought. Without presuming to determine what must be, it humbly and patiently inquires what is. From the very nature of the case it pretends to no science of the Deity. To bring Him within the circle of science would be to degrade Him, to make Him a general law or a constituent element of other existences, instead of the Eternal and Self-exist- ent God.
The two schools of Rationalism and Experience are, accordingly, at war in regard to the scope and province of philosophy. Agreeing in their general views as to the indis- pensable conditions of intelligence, they diifer fundament- ally in the answers which they return to the question. What can man knoAv ? This single consideration is enough to show the futility, or at least the delusiveness, of a classi- fication like that adopted by Mr. Morell in his former work, which brings Stewart, Reid and Brown under the same general category with Fi elite, Schelling and Hegel. The problems which the former undertook to solve were the poles apart from those discussed by the latter. The former were inductive psychologists, apj)lying the same method to the phenomena of mind which Newton had applied with such splendid results to the phenomena of matter; the latter were bold and rampant ontologists, unfolding the grounds of universal Being from the princi- ples of pure reason. The former restricted their inquiries to the phenomenal and relative, the latter pushed into the region of the absolute and infinite ; the former stopped at properties and attributes, the latter plunged into the essence of all things. From Locke to Hamilton, English and
facit et intelligit quantum de naturte ordine re vel mente observaverit, nee amplius scit aut potest.
86 STANDAED A>'D NATURE OF RELIGION. [SECT. II.
Scotch philosophy has been for the most part a confession of human ignorance; from Leibnitz to Hegel, German philosophy has been for the most part an aspiration to omniscience.^
After these preliminary remarks, we can have no diffi- culty as to the general position to which we must assign Mr. Morell. He is a Kationalist, coming nearer, so far as we -can collect his opinions, to the Eclecticism of France than to any other school. His method, the psychological,^ is evidently that of Cousin, and there is the same unsuc- cessful attempt to combine the philosophy of Experience with that of Rationalism.
1. The treatise before us opens with an inquiry into that which constitutes the essence of the mind.
"Now, first," says our author,^ "whenever we speak of the mind, or use the expression, ^myself,'' what is it, we would ask, that we really intend to designate ? What is it in which the mind of man essentially consists?"
The terms in which the question is propounded would seem to indicate that Mr. Morell regards personality and mind as synonymous expressions, the Ego as embracing the whole subject of all the phenomena of consciousness. And yet in another passage he obviously divorces intelli- gence from "self,^' and restricts the jjerson to individual peculiarities.
"Neither, lastlj'," says he,* "can the real man be the complex of our thoughts, ideas or conceptions. These indicate simply the exist- ence of logical forms, intellectual laws or perceptive faculties, which are essentially the same in all minds ; they do not express the real, concrete, individual man ; they do not involve the element which
1 Kantdeservestobespeclallyexcejitedfromthiscensure. The "ontology of piu-e reason" he has remoi-selessly demolished m his celebrated Critique. See also Morell's History of Modern Philosophy, vol. ii., pp. 81, 82.
- Fraginens Philosophiques, Pref. A translation of tliis Preface may be found in the first volume of Eipley's Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature: Boston. 1838. See also Morell's Hist. Mod. Phil., vol. ii. p. 484, 2d London Edit.
3 Page 2. * Page 2.
Sect. IL] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 87
makes each human being enth-ely distinct from the whole mass of humanity around him ; in a word, they do not constitute oiu- jyerson- alitijr
To us, we frankly confess, it is amazing that the essence of mind as mind should consist in something that is not common to all minds. But the difficulty does not stop here. The will, in which ]Mr. Morell fixes the essence of the man as a mere iwwer of spontaneous action, is just as universal and just as uniform as the operations of intel- ligence. It, therefore, "as the capacity of acting independ- ently and for ourselves," cannot be the essential principle of mind, and we are absolutely shut ijp by this species of logic to the idiosyncracies and oddities of individuals. It is strange that Mr. Morell, in adopting the analysis of Maine de Biran, has not admitted the limitations of Cousin, who, it seems to us, has unanswerably proved that, upon this hypothesis, we must deny the personality of reason, at least in its spontaneous manifestations, and make "self and mind expressions of different but related realities. If the Ego is the will, then intelligence is no more of it than the organs of sense. "Eeason," says Cousin,^ adhering rigidly to his conception of personality as involving only the individual and voluntary, to the entire exclusion of the universal and absolute — " reason is not a property of individ- uals; therefore it is not our own, it does not belong to us, it is not human ; for, once more, that which constitutes man, his intrinsic personality, is his voluntary and free activity ; all which is not voluntary and free is added to man, but is not an integrant part of man." This is consistent. But what shall we say, upon this hypothesis, of the veracity of consciousness, the fundamental postulate of all philosophy, which just as clearly testifies that the operations of reason are subjective — that they are, in other words, affections of what we call ourselves — as that the decisions of the will are our own? The distinction betwixt reason, in its sponta- 1 Introduct. Hist. Phil. Lect. v., Linberg's Trans, p. 127 ; Lecture vi.,
88 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [SECT. II.
neous and reflective manifestations, does not touch the point. The " spontaneous apperception of truth," ^ which Cousin boasts to have discovered "within the penetralia of con- sciousness, at a depth to which Kant never penetrated," is either a subjective act, and then it is personal, or it is only another name for the intellectual intuition of Schelling, in M^iich the distinction of subject and object disappears, and we have the miracle of knowledge without anything known or any one to know. If M. Cousin admits that his spon- taneous apperception of truth involves a percipient, relative- ness and subjectivity are not only apparent, but as real as they are in reflection ; if it does not involve a percipient, then we humbly submit that it is self-contradictory, and there- fore equivalent to zero. A theory which defends the im- personality of reason by an assumption which denies the very possibility of thought may be safely remanded to the depths from which its author extracted it, and into which it is not at all astonishing that such a thinker as Kant never penetrated. We cannot but add that as Cousin's ontology is founded on the authority of reason, and the authority of reason founded on its impersonality, and its impersonality founded on the annihilation of thought, his speculations upon this subject end exactly where those of Hegel begin — at nothing.
Mr. Morell, however, rigidly cleaves to Maine de Biran, and saves the personal character of reason by the extraordinary hypothesis — the most extraordinary which, we venture to say, has ever been proposed in the history of philosophy — that will, spontaneity or personality (for they are all, in his vocabulary, synonymous expressions) is the substance of mind — that our various faculties of intelligence sustain the same relations to the will, which, according to popular apprehension, an attribute sustains to that of which it is a
1 Fragmens Philosophiqnes, Pref. Morell Hist. Mod. Phil. vol. ii. p. 495. We take occasion to say that this account of Cousin's Psychology is one of the clearest statements of his system that we have ever seen, apart from his own writings.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 89
property. That unknown substratum which, under the appellations of mind, soul or spirit, other philosophers had been accustomed to represent as the subject in which all our mental capacities and energies inhere, Mr. Morell pro- fesses to have drawn from its concealment, and to have identified with spontaneous activity, or the power of acting independently and for ourselves. Reason or intelligence, accordingly, is a property of the will, in the same sense in which extension is a property of matter. All the opera- tions of the mind are only so many modifications of the will — so many manifestations of activity, not as an element which they include, but as the support upon which they depend. "If, therefore," says he,^ in a passage which shows that we have not misrepresented him — " if, therefore, in our subsequent classification of the faculties of the mind, little appears to be said about the will, it must be remem- bered that we assume the activity it denotes as the essential basis of our whole mental being, and suppose it conse- quently to underlie [the italics are his own, and show that he means, it is the substance of] all our mental operations." And again : ^ " Remembering, then, that the power of the will runs through the whole, we may regard these two classes [the intellectual and emotional] as exhausting the entire sum of our mental phenomena," And again :
"We would also again remind them that the activity of the will must be regarded as running through all these different phenomena ; and that as there is involved in the spontaneous operations of the human mind all the elements vphicli the consciousness at all contains, it must not be imagined that these elements have to be reflectively realized before they can contribute their aid to our mental develop- ment. It is, in fact, one of the most delicate and yet important of all psychological analyses to show how the power of the will operates through all the region of man's spontaneous life, and to ])rove that our activity is equally voluntary and equally moral in its whole aspect, although the understanding may not have brought the ]3rinciples on which we act into the clear light of reflective truth. ' ' *
"To talk of knowing mind," he affirms in his former 1 Pages 3, 4. * Page 4. » Pages 25, 26.
90 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
work/ " beyond the direct consciousness of its spontaneous being and all the affections it can undergo, is absurd ; there is nothing more to know." By spontaneous being he evi- dently means the existence of mind as a spontaneity. Be- yond this and the various properties it exhibits there Ls nothing to be known ; in spontaneity we have the substance, in the " affections it can undergo " the attributes ; and these, in their connection, exhaust the subject.
If, now, spontaneous activity is the substance of the soul, and intelligence and reason, with all our various capa- cities and powers, are only properties or modifications of this spontaneous activity, it necessarily follows that all thought and belief, all knowledge and emotion, are purely voluntary. When we cognize an external object imme- diately present in consciousness, or assent to any universal or necessary truth, such as that the whole is greater than a part, we do it by an act of the will. The cognition is spontaneous ; which means, if it mean anything, that the mind is not irresistibly determined to it; and that, con- sequently, it might refuse to know when the object is act- ually present before it, and refuse to believe when the terms of the proposition are distinctly and adequately apprehended; which, being interpreted, is that a man may refuse to see when he sees, and refuse to believe when he knows. This very circumstance of the independence of truth, especially of necessary and absolute truth, of the human will, is one of the principal arguments of Cousin to establish the im- personality of reason. We cannot help believing when the evidence of truth is clearly before us, says Cousin; we be- lieve in every case only because we loill to believe, says Morell. Doctors diifer.
But passing over this difficulty, and admitting the doc- trine, hard as it is to reconcile with the obvious testimony of consciousness, that all knowledge and belief are the creatures of the will, the products of sj)ontaneous activity, we find ourselves unable to detect in this activity the only ^ Vol. ii., p. 53, 2d London Edition.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 91
criterion by which our faculties are capable of distinguish- ing substance from attributes. "That which is in itself and conceived by itself," is the compendious definition of substance given by Spinoza/ and though it expresses what every human intellect must pronounce to be impossible, and contains the elements of proof that our only notion of substance is a certain relation to attributes — in other words, a postulation of the mind which we are forced to make, by the very constitution of our nature, in order to explain the existence of what is felt to be dependent — ^yet, as Mr. Morell admits it,^ we will apply its canon to the case before us. Everything, then, is an attribute which cannot be recognized as self-subsistent and independent, and everything is a substance which can be construed to the mind as self-subsistent — self-subsistent in the sense that it inheres in nothing as an attribute in it. Hence, whatever is conceived by the mind as having only a dependent and relative existence, or is not conceivable as having a separate and independent existence, must be an attribute; it cannot be a substance. Apply this principle to the case before us. Is activity dependent or independent? In other words, can we conceive of it abstracted from every agent and every form of operation ? Does it not just as much require a subject as intelligence or thought, and some definite mode of manifestation? Can it not just as properly be asked, What acts? as What thinks or believes ? AVe confess that we are no more capable of representing to the mind absolute activity than of representing absolute intelligence or abso- lute motion. We can understand the proposition that the mind is active, that it performs such and such operations, but we can attach no glimmer of meaning to that other proposition, that it is activity itself. Action without some- thing to act and some manner of action is to us as pre- posterously absurd as knowledge without some one to know ;
^ Spinoza, in Howe's Living Temple, Pt. ii., chap, i. * This is evident from what he says of substance, p. 37 ; also Hamilton's Reid, p. 895, note, 1st col.
92 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. IT,
and we are unable to enter into that j^eculiar mode of cogi- tation which can be content to settle down on activity as the substratum, the self-subsisting subject, of all intellectual phenomena. That the mind is active in thought, and that activity thinks, are propositions the poles apart ; that activ- ity is a characteristic and all-pervading quality of every species of mental affection, and accordingly the highest generalization of mental phenomena, is a veiy different statement from that which makes it the mind itself. Hence, according to the canon, activity is only an attribute. Mr. Morell, in fact, admits as much.
"We do not say, indeed," says he, "that we can comprehend the very essence of the soul itself apart from all its determinations ; but that by deep reflection upon our inmost consciousness we can com- prehend the essence of the soul in connection with its operations — that we can trace it through all its changes as a poicer or pure activ- ity, and that in this spontaneous activity alone our real personality consists."^
But it is essential to any positive idea of substance that it should be conceived apart from attributes. It is that "which exists in itself and is conceived by itself, or whose conception needs the conception of nothing else whereby it ought to be formed." In saying, therefore, that activity cannot in thought be abstracted from its manifestations, Mr. Morell has conceded the impossibility of his thesis, and, instead of making it the substance, he has only made it the universal characteristic, of mental operations.
But be it substance or accident, we venture to suggest a doubt whether such a thing as spontaneous activity, in the sense of Mr. Morell, does not involve a contradiction. According to this hypothesis, man is an undetermined cause, or a cause determined by nothing but his own prop- er energy. How shall we account for the first act? It either produced itself or it came into being by chance, for all foreign influences are, ex hypothesi, excluded : to have 1 Page 3.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 93
produced itself it must have existed as a cause before it existed as an effect; that is, it must have existed before it existed, which is self-contradictory. To say that it was produced by chance is to say that the negation of all cause is the affirmation of some cause, or that a thing can be and not be a cause in the same relation and at the same time, which is also self-contradictory. We crave from Mr. Morell and his admirei's a solution of these difficulties. We are utterly unable to absolve the doctrine of spontaneous activity from the charge of implying the doctrine of an absolute commencement, and an absolute commencement we are as incapable of conceiving •as a triangle of four sides. If Mr. Morell takes man " out of the mighty chain of cause and effect, by which all the operations of nature are carried on from the commencement to the end of time," and makes him a separate and independent cause, receiving no causal influence from without, we should like to know how he makes a beginning ? For to us it is as plain that all commencement must be relative as that there is any such thing as a commencement at all. If an absolute com- mencement were possible, Atheism could not be convicted of absurdity; and we see not how they can consistently apply the principle of causation to the proof of theism — how they can deny that all things might have spontaneously sprung from nothing, when they distinctly affirm that our mental acts generate themselves. Upon this subject there are obviously only three suppositions that can be made — that of the Casualist, who asserts an absolute commencement ; that of the Fatalist, who asserts an infinite series of relative commencements ; that of the Theist, who asserts a finite series of relative commencements, carried up in the ascend- ing scale to a necessary Being, at once Creator and Pre- server, the seat of all causation, who is without beginning of days or end of life. The extremes of Fatalism and Casualism are not only inconceivable — for we readily grant that the power of thought is not the measure of existence — but they are palpably and grossly self-contradictory, and
94 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
therefore must be false. The hypothesis of tlie Theist is also inconceivable. We cannot represent in thought a necessary and eternal Being ; but, then, it is not self-con- tradictory, and upon the doctrine of excluded middle it must be true ; so man must take his place in the " mighty chain of cause and effect, by which all the operations of nature are carried on from the commencement to the end of time." In the calumniated doctrine of an universal Providence, extending to all events and to all things, the only depositary of real efficiency and power, we find the true explanation of an activity which is neither casual in its origin nor a dependent link in an endless chain.^ In God we live and move and have our being. Nature and our own minds present us with multifarious phenomena linked together as antecedent and consequent, but all are equally effects. jSTeither nature nor ourselves present us with an instance of a real cause. To Him that sitteth on the throne, and to Him alone, in its just and proper sense, belongs the prerogative of power. He speaks and it is done. He commands and it stands fast.
The proof by which Mr. Morell establishes his proposi- tion that spontaneous activity is the substance of the soul is as remarkable as the proposition itself. His argument is what logicians call a destructive conditional, to the va- lidity of which it is as requisite that all the suppositions which can possibly be made in the case should be given in the major, as that all but the one contained in the con- clusion should be destroyed in the minor — the very spe- cies of argument which we ourselves have employed in regard to the existence of a necessary Being. Now, sayr, Mr. Morell, the essence of mind must consist either in sen- sation, intelligence or will. It does not consist in sensa- tion or intelligence; therefore it must consist in the will. Very plausible, no doubt. But how, we ask, does it ap-
1 Hence we dissent totally from the doctrine laid down by Sir. "Wm. Hamilton, that there is no medium between fatalism and chance. Hamil- ton's Keid, p. 602 : Note.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 95
pear, that it must consist in one of the enumerated ele- ments? Why may it not consist in something else, in that unknown substance denominated spirit — unknown, but yet believed by virtue of the very constitution of our nature ? This supposition is, at least, one which may be made in the case, wliicli has been made by philosophers of the highest repute, and which, we venture to predict, will continue to be made by the great mass of mankind so long as the world shall stand. Then, again, in his process of destruc- tion he removes a great deal more than he intends. He removes whatever " is essentially the same in all minds," and of course the will considered as a mere " spontaneity or capacity of acting independently and for ourselves," for in this sense it is unquestionably common to all mankind. Its modes of manifestation are various in different indi- viduals, and in the same individual at different times ; but as a faculty or a power abstracted from its effects "it is essentially the same in all minds."
We have insisted, at what may seem a disproportionate length, upon this preliminary feature of Mr. Morell's psy- chology, because we believe that it contains the seeds of incalculable mischief. The serious proposal of the ques- tion concerning the substance of the soul, as one that our faculties can answer, involves a complete apostasy from the fundamental principle of the Experimental school. The great masters of that philosophy would as soon have thought of gravely discussing the relations of angels to space, how they can be here and not there, or there and not here, and yet be incorporeal and unextended beings. Des Cartes, indeed, speaks of the essence of the soul, and places it in thought, as he had placed the essence of matter in extension. But he uses essence, not as synonymous with substance — for he expressly distinguishes them — but for the characteristic and discriminating quality.
If there be any principle which we regard as settled, it is that all human knowledge must be phenomenal and relative; and that science transcends its sphere when it
96 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
seeks to penetrate into the region of substances or into that of efficient causes — two things which, we shall afterward have occasion to observe, Rationalists are perpetually con- founding. We will not quote in confirmation of our own, the opinions of philosophers imperfectly or not at all acquainted with the modern speculations of Continental Europe. We choose rather to refer to one who is master of them all; who in depth and acuteness is a rival to Aristotle, in immensity of learning a match for Leibnitz, and in comprehensiveness of thought an equal to Bacon. We allude to Sir William Hamilton. His work on Reid has filled us with amazement at the prodigious extent and critical accuracy of his reading. The whole circle of the ancient classics, poets, philosophers and orators ; the entire compass of Christian literature, Eastern and Western, from Justin to Luther, including the angry controversies and the endless disputes of the Fathers and Schoolmen ; the great works of the Reformation, and the prolific productions of England, Scotland, Germany and France from the period of the Reformers until now, — all seem to be as familiar to his mind as the alphabet to other men ; and, what is more remarkable, this ponderous mass of learning is no incum- brance: he has not swallowed down only, but digested, libraries, and while he carries — it is hardly extravagant to gay — all the thoughts of all other men in his head, he has an immense multitude besides, precious as any he has col- lected, which none have ever had before him, and for which the world will always hold him in grateful remembrance. He is an honour to Scotland and an ornament to letters. Upon this subject of the nature and extent of human know- ledge and the legitimate province of philosophy, we are rejoiced to find that he treads in the footsteps of his illus- trious predecessors of the same school. He fully recognizes the distinction betwixt laith and science.
" All we know," says he,* "either of mind or matter, is only a know- 1 Edinburgh Eeview, Cross's Selections, p. 181. A splendid article on Cousin's Philosophy.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 97
ledge in each, of the particular, of the diiferent, of the modified, of the phenomenal. We admit that the consequence of this doc- trine is, that phi]o8oph.y, if viewed as more than a science of the conditioned, is impossible. Departing from the particular, we can never in our highest generalizations rise above the finite ; that our knowledge, whether of mind or matter, can be nothing more than a knowledge of the relative manifestations of an existence which, in itself, it is our highest wisdom to recognize as beyond the reach of philosophy. ' '
"We know — we can know," he observes again,' " only what is relative. Our knowledge of qualities or phenomena is necessarily relative ; for these exist only as they exist in relation to our faculties. The knowledge, or even the conception of a substance, in itself and apart from any qualities in relation to, and therefoi-e cognizable or conceivahle by, our minds, involves a contradiction. Of such we can form only a negative notion ; that is, we can mereXy conceive it as in- conceivable.''' And again, ^ "We know nothing whatever of mind and matter, considered as substances ; they are only known to us as a twofold series of phenomena, and we can only justify against the law of parcimony, the postulation of two substances, on the ground that the two series of phenomena are reciprocally so contrary and incom- patible that the one cannot be reduced to the other, nor both be sup- posed to combine in the same common substance." And finally,^ "We are aware of a phenomenon. That it exists only as known — only as a phenomenon— only as an absolute relative — we are unable to reahze in thought ; and there is necessarily suggested the notion of an unimaginable something, in which the phenomenon inheres — a subject or substance. ' '
These principles are so intuitively obvious to us that we find it difficult to sympathize with men who can persuade themselves that, with our faculties, they can ever arrive at any other conception of substance but as the unknown and unknowable support of properties. It is not a matter of knowledge, but of belief; it is not an object which, in itself, is ever-present in consciousness ; it is veiled from human penetration by the multitude of attributes and qualities which intervene betwixt it and the mind. It belongs to the dominion of fliith and not of science. We admit its
1 Hamilton's Eeid, p. 322.
2 Hamilton's Eeid. Appendix. Note A, ? 11, p. 751. /■ ^ Ilaniilton's Reid. Appendix. Note D.**
Vol. III.— 7
98 STAND AED AND NATURE OF RELIGION, [Skct. TL
existence, not because we know it, but because we are un- able not to believe it. The unfounded conviction that by some means we can ascend from the phenomenal to the sub- stantial, that we can apprehend existence in itself, that we can know it simply as Being, without qualities, without properties, without any relative manifestations of its reality, that we can comprehend it in its naked essence, and track the progress of all its developments from its abstract esse to its countless forms throughout the universe, has given rise to all the abortive attempts of German and French speculation to fix the absolute as a positive element in know- ledge. These speculations are not the visions of crack- brained enthusiasts. The reader who has judged of the German philosophers from the extravagant conclusions they have reached will find, upon opening their works and mastering their uncouth and barbarous dialects, and, what is often more difficult, their abstract and rugged formulas, that he is brought in contact with men of the highest order of mind, the severest powers of logic and the utmost cool- ness of judgment. They do not rave, but reason. They do not dream, but think; and that, too, with a rigour of abstraction, an intensity of attention, and a nicety of dis- crimination, which he is obliged to respect M'hile he laments the perverseness of their application. The difficulty with them is that they begin wrong. Refusing to recognize the limits which the constitution of our nature and our obvious relations to existence have imposed upon the excursions of our faculties, and inattentive to the great law of our being, that in this sublunary state we are doomed to walk by faith much more than by sight, they undertake to bring within the circle of science the nature and foundation of all reality. Reluctant to accept any constitutional beliefs, they seek to verify the deposition of our faculties by gazing upon the things themselves with the intuition'of God and grasping them in their true and essential existence. Hence, their endless quest of the absolute as the unconditioned ground of being. They suppose that, if they can once com-
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOI-OGICALLY CONSIDERED. 99
prehend in its inmost essence what it is to be, they have the data for "the absokite intelligence and absolute ex])la^ nation of all things." The consequences, too well known, which inattention, in their hands, to the necessary limits of human knowledge has legitimately produced, show the supreme importance of accurately fixing in our minds — to use the homely language of Locke ^ — "how far the under- standing can extend its view, how far it has faculties to attain certainty, and in what cases it can only judge and guess." The salutary lesson of human ignorance is the last to which human pride submits ; but a sound philos- ophy concurs with the sure word of inspiration in pro- nouncing man to be a creature of yesterday, who knows comparatively nothing. It is precisely because we discover, in the preliminary speculations of our author, this tendency to transcend the sphere of our faculties, which, in its last manifestation — when it has grasped the absolute — identifies man with God, that we have adverted with so much earnest- ness to the indispensable conditions of knowledge. In the case before us Mr. Morell has evidently made nothing of substance. After all that he has said of spontaneity, will, power, capacity of acting independently and for ourselves, the real nature of the mind is as inscrutable as it was be- fore; and although he has confidently said that beyond what he has disclosed there is nothing more to know, the instinctive belief of every understanding will instantane- ously suggest that there is something more to know.
2. His classification of the powers of the mind comes next in order. He divides them into two classes or orders — "those relating to the acquisition of knowledge on the one side, and those subserving impulse and activity on the other." The former he terms intellectual, the latter emo- tional. " Between the intellectual and emotional activity," he observes*,^ "there always subsists a direct correspond- ency." The successive stages of human consciousness, in the order of its development and in the correspondence ^ Essay on Human Understanding, Introduct., ^ 4. -' Page 4.
100 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
of the intellectual and emotional activity, he presents in the following tabular view :
MIND,
COMMENCING IN
MERE FEELING (undeveloped Unity),
EVINCES A
TWOFOLD ACTIVITY.
' L n^^
Intellectual. Emotional.
1st Stage. The Sensational
Consciousness, (to which coiTCspond) Tlie Instincts. 2d Stage. The Perceptive
Consciousness, " Animal Passions.
3d Stage. The Logical
Consciousness, " Relational Emotions.
4th Stage. The Intuitional
Consciousness, " ^Esthetic, Moral and
Religious Emotions.
MEETING IN
FAITH (highest or developed Unity ).^
If it is the design of this table, as it seems to be, to indi- cate all our means of knowledge, it is certainly chargeable with an unaccountable defect. There is no faculty which answers to the Reflection of Locke or to the Consciousness of Reid, Stewart and Royer-Collard. Mind can unques- tionably be made an object of thought to itself, and its own powers and operations, its emotions, passions and desires, are materials of knowledge as real and important as the phenomena of sense. Mr. Morell has told us how we be- come acquainted with our material organism, with external objects, with beauty, goodness and God, but he has omitted to' tell us how we can know ourselves. He has made no allusion to that " internal perception or self-consciousness" which, according to Sir William Hamilton,^ whose analysis, in another respect, he has followed, '' is the faculty presen tative or intuitive of the phenomena of the Ego or Mind." 1 Page 5. ' Hamilton's Eeid. Appendix B., § 1, P- 809.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY CONSIDERED. 101
In our author's substitution of the circumlocutory phrases, Sensational Consciousness, Pei-ceptive Consciousness, Log- ical Consciousness, Intuitional Consciousness, for the more common and familiar terms. Sensation, Perception, Under- standing, and Reason, we have an intimation of what he distinctly avows in his former work,^ that he agrees with Sir William Hamilton ^ that Consciousness is not to be con- sidered as a distinct and co-ordinate faculty of the mind, taking cognizance of its other powers and operations to the exclusion of their objects — the opinion of Reid, Stewart and Royer-Collard — but that it is the necessary condition of intelligence, the generic and fundamental form of all intellectual activity. We cannot, in other words, know without knowing that we know. We cannot think, will, feel or remember without knowing, in the exercise and by the exercise of these faculties or powers, that we are the subjects of such operations. Hence, although it is strictly true that every form of mental activity is a form of con- sciousness, yet there is certainly, as Sir William Hamilton himself admits, a logical distinction betwixt a faculty m known and a faculty m exerted; and this logical distinction ought to be preserved in language. It has, indeed, been preserved in the common terminology, which assigns to the separate faculties, considered in themselves, apj^ropriate appellations, while the relation of each and all to our know- ledge of them is denoted by consciousness. It is a word which precisely expresses the formula, toe know that we knoio, and, when employed without an epithet restricting it to some specific mode of cognition, indicates the complement of all our intellectual faculties. It is, therefore, indispens- able to any adequate enumeration of the sources of human knowledge. Those who regard it as a single and distinct power, of course, cannot omit it, and those who regard it as the universal condition of intelligence should include it, because it is a compendious statement of all the faculties in
1 Hist. Mod. Phil,, vol. ii., p. 13, seq.
^ Cross's Selections, Edin. Eeview, vol. iii., p. 197.
102 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
detail, and in that precise relation which the classification contemplates. In tlie table before us, Mr. Morell gives us Perception as known, Sensation as known, Understanding as known, Keason as knoicn, and various departments of Emotion as known, but he does not give us ourselves, the mind in its integrity, as knoicn. This omission is the more remarkable as, in his history of Modern Philosophy, he has himself suggested^ the convenience of the term, self- consciousness, "to express the mind's cognizance of its own operations." We need not say that the faculties which he has enumerated he has illustrated, according to his own views of their connection and dependence, in a very graph- ic and interesting sketch of the natural history of the human mind.
3. AVithout detaining the reader with his accounts of Sensation and External Perception, in which he has pro- fessedly followed Sir William Hamilton — and upon this subject he could not have followed a better or a safer guide — we come to that part of his psychology which bears more immediately upon the main questions of his treatise, and in which error or mistake is likely to be productive of serious consequences. We allude to his doctrine of the Understanding and Reason.
Understanding, as a synonym for logical consciousness, is, so far as we know, utterly without authority in our phil- osophical literature; for we do not regard Coleridge as authority for anything but literary theft. It is a term em- ployed in a wider or narrower sense. In its wider sense it embraces all the powers which relate to the acquisition of knowledge, in contradistinction from those which are subservient to impulse and activity — it answers, in other words, precisely to the division which Mr. Morell has styled intellectual. Hence the common distribution of our fa(^ulties into those of the understanding and those of the will. In its narrower and, as we think, its proper sense, it denotes those higher intellectual faculties which pre- 1 Vol. ii., p. 15: Note.
Sect. II.] RELIGION PSYCHOLOGICALLY C0\SIDERF:D. 103
eminently distinguish man from the brute, to the exclusion of sense, imagination, memory and fancy. But we cannot recollect a single instance in which it has ever been re- stricted to our lower cognitive faculties or to the processes of ratiocination. The change which Mr. Morell has intro- duced, or rather followed Coleridge in introducing, is a radical departure from established usage. There is much more authority for identifying reason with the logical con- sciousness than understanding. For although that word, in its prevailing usage, is exactly synonymous with under- standing, both in its narrower and wider sense, yet it has not unfrequently been employed by writers of the highest repute to denote precisely the Discursive Faculty. This is the first meaning which Johnson assigns to it, and the meaning in which Reid systematically employs it in his Inquiry into the Human Mind; the meaning to which Beattie restricts it in his Essay on Truth, and which Dr. Campbell evidently attached to it when he denied it to be the source of our moral convictions. We would not be understood as objecting, however, to Mr. Morell's employ- ment of reason as synonymous with, common sense, or, as he prefers to style it, the Intuitional Consciousness : this is justified by the highest authority. Dugald Stewart long ago suggested "whether it would not, on some occasions, be the best substitute which our language affords for intuition, in the enlarged acceptation in which it had been made equivalent to the ancient uouc; or locus pinncipiorum.'" But what we deny is, that understanding is ever equivalent to logical consciousness as contradistinguished from reason in its restricted application, or is ever opposed to it in any other sense than a genus is opposed to a species.^ Intelligence is one, and all our faculties, when legitimately exercised, are harmonious and consistent with each other. They all con- spire in the unity of knowledge. It is not one reason which knows intuitively, and another reason which knows deduct-
1 See Stewart's Elements, vol. ii., Prelim. Cons., and Hamilton's Eeid, Appendix. Note A, | v., p. 768, seq. Also p. 511 : Note.
104 STANDARD AND NATURE OF RELIGION. [Sect. II.
ively ; but it is the same reason which knows in each case, though the relations of the object to it are different, but not repugnant or contradictory. To suppose that the logical consciousness, operating in conformity with the laws of thought, shall ever be exclusive of intuitive results, is to suppose that philosophy is impossible, and that skepticism is the highest wisdom of man.
The unity of reason and the harmony of intelligence being kept steadily in view, we have no objections to any form of phraseology which shall exactly designate the rela- tions in which the objects