Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

ourselves, we have derived from the book deeply serious impressions; and we never should have dreamed of objections to it on that score, had they not been offered more than once in our hearing by persons whose judgment seemed worthy of respect.

It may be alleged against this book, with more plausible show of truth, that it reaches only indirectly the actual source and seat of infidelity, namely, a moral nature alienated from the spirit of Christianity. It may be asked, of what avail is it to convince the intellect, while the heart is spellbound in self-sufficiency, or distracted by the tumultuous rush of secular affairs, or committed to anti-christian maxims as regards all the great practical issues of the life? We feel the full force of this objection; nor do we imagine that mere logomachy can ever christianize a human soul. Yet in numerous instances, the heart is sounder than the head. The spiritual nature often craves a positiveness of conviction, yearns for an assured repose of faith and trust, when the mind has been bewildered by sophistry and deluded by the impostures of pretended erudition. And where mind and heart have strayed together, definite intellectual convictions are an essential prerequisite to the restoration of the emotional nature and the active powers. Pantheism offers the soul no Father, and the moonshiny travesties of Revealed Religion hold forth but vague and faint promise of the openness of his welcome and the bread of his house; yet without full assurance that God is, and is always our Father, whence shall spring the resolve, “I will arise and go to my Father?" There is a twofold work to be done, and it may not unfittingly be performed through separate instrumentalities. Mr. Rogers has not pretended to enter on the department of parenetic theology; but without the basis which he has endeavored to lay for it, its whole apparatus resolves itself into mawkish sentimentality and paltry rhetorical artifice.

We agree with our author in the fundamental idea of his work, namely, that enlightened skepticism, so far from cherishing infidelity, naturally resolves itself into Christian faith, and that the charge of excessive credulity rests emphatically on those who rejoice to term themselves skeptics. Skepti

cism, strictly speaking, is the attribute of a sound and noble mind. It denotes wariness in the investigation and admission of evidence—the disposition to survey the whole ground before acquiescing in definite convictions. It has its legitimate scope on all subjects beyond the range of mathematical science. It is in pure mathematics alone that we can have positive demonstration. In every other department, belief results from the balancing of opposing argument and testimony,—in fine, from the balancing of probabilities, or rather of improbabilities. A skeptical habit of mind by no means necessitates perpetual doubt or vacillation, but simply assent in every case to the alternative, which is attended with the fewest and the least improbabilities. Every alleged fact is either true or false. Every proposition in morals, economics, and theology is true, or else its converse is true. And skepticism tends to a belief apportioned in each case to the excess of the improbabilities against any given fact or proposition over the improbabilities against its negative or its converse; while credulity disregards this proportion, and believes at haphazard. Infidelity has numbered among its standard-bearers not a few of the most credulous men that ever lived. Voltaire and Rousseau claim a foremost place on this list; for the veriest tyro could detect the incoherency and absurdity of their theories of education and government. The author of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" has carried credulity to its climax, in accounting for the order and beauty of the Cosmos by the fortuitous concourse of atoms, and in tracing man, with his marvellously wrought body, and his soul of boundless capacities and longings, to a primitive ancestry of ambitious animalcules and aspiring tadpoles. Strauss merits a similar distinction for his theory of the Gospels, the composition of which he makes a more stupendous miracle, a wider departure from the natural and experienced order of events, than the walking upon the sea, the transmutation of water into wine, or the recall of Lazarus from the sepulchre. Very many of the disciples of Newman, Gregg, and Parker are enrolling themselves on the same catalogue of the omniverously credulous; for none are so ready to believe in the latest and most absurd forms of necromancy, in the

ready response of beatified spirits to the incantations of itinerant lecturers and monomaniac maidens, as those whose purged spiritual instincts reluct from the sublime and significant marvels, which affixed the seal of omnipotence to the worldredeeming energy and love of the Saviour. Never have words of Scripture been more literally and amply prophetical than these, (as applied to our own times,)—" Because they received not the love of the truth, for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: "we forbear to finish the quotation.

[ocr errors]

On the other hand, the Christian camp numbers among its defenders not a few of the most eminent skeptics of modern times. Such was the character of Bacon, Locke, Newton, Milton, Boyle, Pascal. They had no respect for time-hallowed opinions, as such, and yielded to no merely human authority. They cast ancient systems of mechanics, astronomy, metaphysics, morals, and government, into the crucible of torturing investigation, and unearthed foundations on which the belief of mankind had reposed for centuries. They were all Christians, because they were skeptics. They were not credulous enough to admit the incongruities and absurdities involved in the rejection of Revealed Religion. They were no strangers to the doubts and difficulties in the way of its reception; but found an immeasurably larger array of doubts and difficulties in the way of the opposite hypothesis.

We can best illustrate the legitimate workings of enlightened skepticism by an example; and we will take, for this purpose, the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead-a subject on which it is hardly possible that we should not repeat much that may have been often and better said, yet on which, because it is a common theme of discussion, we can all the more clearly illustrate our proposed line of argument.

In the first place, we admit a strong array of improbabilities in the way of this doctrine. There is the absence of any confirmatory fact within our own or recent observation. There is the destruction of the body by death, and the passage of its material elements into new combinations, undoubtedly, in many instances, into other human bodies. There

is the unanswerable question,-"How are the dead raised, and in what bodies do they come?" There is the intangible, inconceivable nature of the vital principle, which no chemistry can analyze, no philosophy expound.

But, on the other side of the question, we might first allege, that the difference between man and other animals is such as to render his annihilation by death improbable. Other animals evidently do their work and complete their destiny in this world. A summer's life of the insect, two years with the bird, a little longer period for the quadruped of larger growth, has carried him through the whole cycle of his earthly experience, has given him all the knowledge that he will ever attain, has brought his nature to perfection. A dog at two years of age knows as much as at ten. The robin builds her first nest as skilfully, rears her first brood as carefully, as if she had been many times a builder and a mother. Age adds nothing to the resources of bird or beast, whether for shelter, defence, or sustenance. There are no marks of growing wisdom with growing years, no decline of juvenility till enforced by physical decay. Man, on the other hand, improves, or may improve, so long as he lives. His domain of being, thought, intelligence, enlarges; till a late old age, he may go on adding to his treasures of intellectual wisdom; and when the senses and the apprehensive powers become blunted by the decline of the bodily frame, the moral nature may still gain strength, the virtues may be refined and mellowed, the spiritual vision may grow more vivid and penetrating. But on this career, how many fall midway or at the starting point! Humanly speaking, what an immense waste is there of undeveloped capacity, of unused power of progress, of improvable elements that hardly begin to grow! Over how much of promise unfulfilled is the grave continually closing! How incomplete and fragmentary is the condition of man, considered as an earthly being! How much is there, even in the longest and best occupied life, which looks less like living than like laying up materials for living! Especially does this seem the case, when we consider that curiosity grows by what it feeds on,

at aspiration is the invariable consequence of attainment, and that, of wisdom and goodness, it is those who have the

[graphic]

[ocr errors]

most, that most feel the need of more. Here is the point at which the distinction between man and the lower orders of animated being is most sharply drawn. Other animals spend little time in acquiring, acquire only what is to be immediately used, and put whatever they acquire into full and constant use; while acquisition, without reference to immediate or earthly use, seems an innate tendency in man. It is enough for him if his mind and heart are growing richer and better, though of his inward wealth the larger part may be such as he cannot coin into current utilities, such as can in no earthly sense be made manifest or available, so that he seems to be nourishing a hidden life, feeding an under current of being which, in this world, never rises to the surface. Now, what becomes of this under current, this hidden life, this noblest portion of man's acquisition and experience? Is it sucked up by the sands, in the desert of his pilgrimage; or does it keep its own separate flow across the river of death, to spring up beyond into immortal life? Is not all this waste, this fruitless attainment, this laying up treasure for the grave, in the highest degree improbable? Has the unbeliever any mode of accounting for it? It was a difficulty strongly felt by many of the philosophers of classic antiquity, who, because there was so much in man that looked not like undressing for the grave, but like making ready for another life, came to the conclusion that he must needs live again. We deem this difficulty incomparably greater than any which rests on the theory of immortality, when the divine omnipotence is taken into the account.

We find equal improbability in the death of the human affections. When we mark the fondness of birds and beasts for their young, and see that, after a few weeks or months, they no longer recognize their own offspring, we perceive that the care of the defenceless is the only and sufficient end of the instinctive love that they cherish. But in man, when dependence ceases, attachment survives and grows stronger. It is the testimony of those who know, that, severe as is the sorrow when little children are called away, those who die in their maturity carry with them a still larger portion of the parent's heart. The affections grow with the growth of cha

« ZurückWeiter »