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Text
ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
BY THE LATE
EEV. JAMES CRANBROOK,
EDINBURGH.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Threepence.
��ON THE
FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS OPINIONS.
-----------------PURPOSE this evening to discourse to you upon
“The Formation of Religious Opinions.” The
subject is closely connected with, and arises out of
what I was saying last Sunday evening. I shall
therefore quote the same passage as a text, 1 Cor. x.
15, “I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say.”
But what I aim at to-night is to make some practical
observations that I think we are too apt to lose sight
of. Indeed, people seldom follow any principle or
rule in forming their opinions upon questions of
religion. They pick them up at hap-hazard; or
simply retain what they had been taught in their
youth. And even where they come to a resolution to
investigate the subject, and form a judgment for
themselves, they seldom go about it systematically.
One person recommends this book, another person
recommends that book. They read them, and adopt
the opinions which seem the more probable, or to
which particular circumstances incline them. But it
is very seldom they can give you a reason which will
bear strict scrutiny and investigation why they have
chosen one opinion rather than another.
The general spirit of one’s culture and mental
character has more to do with the adoption of
opinions in the majority of cases than anything else.
I
�4
The Formation of
Some men are naturally very narrow-minded, and the
education they have received has not tended to cor
rect the narrowness. They will incline, therefore, to
whatever is. narrow and bigoted. Others, again, are
generous, liberal, and free: whatever partakes of
their own generosity, liberality, and freedom will
therefore seem to them to have a preponderance of
evidence on its side. Some are learned in ancient
literature, and have thoroughly imbibed its spirit.
What harmonises with this will seem to them as
true. Others are addicted to metaphysical specula
tions, and can only discern truth in what presents
itself under the formulae sanctioned by their school.
Whilst others have the purely scientific spirit, and
require all religious opinions before they accept them
to be subjected to the tests of their special methods.
And thus it is each one has certain predilections
which very materially influence him when he thinks
about religious questions and endeavours to make
up his mind as to what is true. They look at
the questions subjectively, rather than objec
tively—study them in relation to their own
thoughts and feelings rather than as they are in
themselves, and resting on evidence which needs to
be examined simply according to its own merits.
And this will be the case with a large number for a
long time to come.
To form an independent rational opinion upon
any subject affecting the higher interests of life re
quires an amount of training and leisure few possess.
The majority must take their opinions at second
hand, and they will naturally take those which are
most in accordance with their own tastes, inclinations,
and culture. It is just the same, for example, in
questions of politics or legislation, as in questions of
religion. These questions depend upon a scientific
knowledge of human nature, its laws and tendencies,
upon a thorough knowledge of all the circumstances,
�Religious Opinions.
5
the conditions physical, intellectual, and moral of
the country, and a foreseeing sagacity capable of
calculating the effects of a given measure upon a
country in such a condition and in such circumstances,
the people of which are subject to those fixed laws of
human nature. Now, I suppose there are not fifty
members of the House of Commons who possess this
knowledge, or who attempt to study these questions
scientifically. Yet we all hold some opinion or
other about the questions. And the opinions we
hold are adopted just in the same way as the majority
adopt their religious opinions, i.e., according as they
agree, harmonise and are in accordance with our
tastes, inclinations, tendencies and general culture.
And opinions upon very many other subjects are
adopted by the mass of people in just the same way.
But you will see that there can properly be no cer
tainty about opinions so received. Their truth or
untruth will be a mere matter of chance, depending
upon accidental circumstances. And it is unworthy
of a man capable of thought and reasoning, not to
form his opinions upon a rational and trustworthy
method. It becomes, therefore, each one of us to seek
out the true method by which our religious opinions
may be formed.
The methods by which real students have formed
their religious opinions have always been the methods
they have followed in their philosophical enquiries—
indeed, religious opinions have never been anything
more than the outcoming of the various systems of
philosophy in this region of religious thought. It
was, for example, the imaginative philosophy of
Plato, modified by neo-Platonism and the Alexand
rian school which determined the theological or reli
gious opinions of the Church of the third, fourth, and
fifth centuries. The method of inquiry pursued by
the philosophers was the method adopted by the
theologians, and the resultant philosophy and theology
�6
The Formation of
were one harmonious whole. So again the special
philosophy which embodied itself in the writings of
Locke, found its religious expression in the theological
school of the English Deists, in the Unitarianism of
Priestley and Belsham, and in certain broad, or, as
they were then called, latitudinarian sections of the
reputed orthodox churches. So, once more, the
transcendental philosophy which Coleridge did so
much to bring into reputation, has furnished F. D.
Maurice and his school with their method and the
basis of their system, and is greatly influencing the
thinking and forms of religious opinion amongst
many who are striving hard to retain their orthodox
position. At the same time the severe method of
positivism is working in another direction and revo
lutionizing the religious opinions of all who come
under its influence.
These illustrations, then, will serve to show you
that the very first step for us to take, when seeking to
form our religious opinions, is to determine upon the
method by which our enquiries shall be conducted.
The method will inevitably determine the conclusions
at which we shall arrive.
But here a certain school interposes and claims for
its method an absolute control over our inquiries. It
says, “ God has given us a revelation in a book, and
the only method we ought to pursue is to take a
grammar and dictionary, ascertain the precise literal
meaning of the book, and accept that as the absolute
truth and rule.” But let us see if this method be as
conclusive as they seem to suppose. We will take a
precept, not a dogma, and that one spoken by the
highest, truest lips, Matt. v. 38, &c., “Ye have heard
that it hath been said, an eye for an eye, and a tooth
for a tooth—(you will recollect that that is a law laid
down for the guidance of courts of justice, see Ex. xxi.
23, &c., so that Christ is here referring not to taking
personal vengeance, but to getting one who has injured
�Religious Opinions.
7
you punished by law): but I say unto you resist not
evil (by bringing him before the magistrate); but
whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn
to him the other also. And if any man will sue
thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have
thy cloak also. And whosoever shall compel thee to
go a mile, go with him twain. Give to him that
asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee
turn not thou away.”
Now, I ask respecting these precepts, as I have asked
before on frequent occasions, does any sensible per
son in the present day think they are to be obeyed?
Are we never to prosecute at law those doing us an
injury ? If any one prosecute us for an unjust claim
are we not to defend our cause ? Are we to give
to every beggar ? And are we never to refuse to
lend to those who want to borrow ? There can be
but one answer, and that answer will be in direct
contradiction to the precepts. I ask then upon what
ground, by what authority, these plain, simple and
direct precepts of Christ, spoken in unmistakeable
language, are modified or set on one side ? It will be
said, one's common sense sees they are inapplicable,
and would be unworkable in the present day in our
circumstances. Precisely so. But see what this in
volves. You apply your common sense, or reason, or
judgment, whatever you like to call it, to these pre
cepts and set them aside by its authority. Then you
apply your common sense, reason, or judgment to
other precepts, and by its authority pronounce them
still obligatory. You have left your grammar and
lexicon, and you are trying these precepts by tests
furnished by your own mind. Their authority really
rests therefore not upon the claims of him who
spoke them, but upon the judgments you have
formed respecting them. It is you who pronounce
them binding or not binding in virtue of some
test your judgment has supplied.
�8
The Formation of
. Now, what I say, and what the whole drift of this
discourse is intended to shew, is that it is of the
first importance that in selecting this test by which
moral precepts, doctrines and religious opinions of
all kinds are to be tried, you be guided by right and
rational principles or rules, in other words that
your method of enquiry be sound and good.
In searching for this method it is a fortunate thing
for us that we have the history and experience of up
wards of two thousand years to help us. For we are
thus enabled at all events to see where and how
others have failed, and to avoid the same blunders.
All the old systems of opinion have broken down
and failed to hold their ground against the advancing
tide of progress. Each one in turn has given place
to something fresh and has never revived excepting
under a new phase and with great modifications.
The system of St Augustine, for example, is said to
have been revived by Luther and other Reformers.
And without doubt the statement is partially true,
but no one who knows the writings of Augustine and
Luther would say the Augustine theology of the
sixteenth century is precisely the same as the
Augustine theology of the fourth. The questions are
looked at, argued, and concluded upon under different
phases, under different modes of culture. It is not
the theology of Augustine, it is the theology of
Augustine moulded, modified and permeated by the
spirit of the sixteenth century. The old questions
come up, but they come in a new dress, and they are
discussed from a different standing ground. And so
it has ever been, a constant flux of systems, succeed
ing and superseding each other, but the old questions
ever returning to be debated over again.
Now, how is it that all these discussions and
philosophies have failed to settle these questions or
to give us, at least, some points settled which should
be debateable no more for ever, and from which we
�Religious Opinions.
9
might set out upon fresh and more extended inquiries.
The answer appears to me quite plain. They failed
because their methods of inquiry were vicious from
the very beginning. They started upon untested
assumptions, and built up their theories by imagin
ative reasonings, the elements of which were furnished
by their fancies alone. Sometimes, indeed, they
would appeal to facts of consciousness or of man’s
history, i.e., facts of the inner or of the outer life ;
but when they did so, they interpreted them by
assumptions or fancies wholly gratuitous, and the
facts therefore became as worthless as their fancies.
Thus, as an example, the Semitic and Western con
ceptions of God assumed his similitude to man in
mind, while not also in body. Now, that assump
tion once made the remaining conceptions, and the
interpretations of his proceedings would legitimately
follow according to what men at the time being found
in themselves. Accordingly, at one time his govern
ment was represented as that of an arbitrary despot;
at another time, as that of a constitutional king, his
actions being limited by supposed principles of eternal
right and fitness; at another, as that of a still more
merciful sovereign striving to find a remedy against
the terrible mischief done by his too severe law; and
now recently as a father governing his family and
never chastening but in love. But each and all of
these representations are equally true for those who
have believed them, and equally founded upon a
purely gratuitous assumption, viz., that there is such
a resemblance between the mind of God and man
that you may reason from the principles, modes of
thought, and of action in the one, to the principles,
modes of thought, and of action in the other.
Now, I deny that there is the least pretence in
reason for this assumption. It is purely fanciful and
baseless. There are no means of proving that it is
true, if it be true. And therefore the whole system
�io
The Formation of
of the divine government built upon it is as worthless,
as uncertain, and as irrational as its base. But, say
those who make and rest upon this assumption, if
God be not like to man in his mental character and
principles of action, what is He like ? I answer, I
do not know. But say they, if you do not know,
what affections, dispositions, characteristics, will you
ascribe to him 1 I answer, I ascribe none. Then say
they, you are left in the hands of this terrible
almighty power, in total ignorance of his intentions
towards you. I reply, not so, I know many of
his intentions towards me with tolerable certainty.
I find that he always acts in the same way,
by the same laws, causing the same antecedents
to be followed by the same consequents, the same
causes by the same effects, the same conditions by the
same results. So far, therefore, as I know these
causes, conditions, laws (call them what you please),
I know precisely what God’s intentions are. His
intentions concerning me are, that whenever I come
under any one of these laws, conditions, or causes,
that the consequences he has attached to it in the
order of things shall inevitably follow. And that is
enough for me to know. I have no longing after the
impossible, the comprehension of the Infinite and
Absolute. . I know, as the late Sir William Hamilton .
expressed it, the length of my tether. I acquiesce in
my conditioned knowledge.
Now, this illustration has not been a digression
from our enquiry into the right method of forming
religious opinions. It has expounded it. It lias
shown how baseless, uncertain and fluctuating must
be all systems originated in mere speculative fancies
and assumptions. It has shewn there can be only
one method fixed, certain, and unchangeable—that,
namely, which is purely based upon facts, and brings
all its reasonings to the test of facts before it finally
accepts as true its conclusions. It is by this method
�Religious Opinions.
11
the whole advance in every kind of human knowledge
has been made. So far as it was pursued in ancient
times what was discovered by it, is as true to day as
it was then. Every great deliverance from human
ignorance and superstition has been wrought out by it.
There is not an enlightened conception of the divine
government but what may be traced to its influence
acting directly or indirectly upon the mind. From
its conclusions there can be no possible appeal. It
is the highest and ultimate test of all truth, of all
speculation, of all reasoning. What it ascertains
must be true as long as the world lasts, and its
judgments can never be set aside, excepting by
assumption into higher and more general truths. It
is the only method left to us in this nineteenth
century. But now, you say, where shall we find the
facts to which this method is to be applied, and upon
the study of which all our religious opinions are to be
formed ? I answer, in the whole experience of man,
in general, and in your own special experience in
particular, and this experience carries us out of
ourselves recollect, in virtue of the relations we
sustain to the external world. Whatever is evolved
in your religious experience constantly, under the
same conditions that is for you a religious fact, and
forms the basis of a true religious opinion—the basis
of a true religious opinion for you, recollect, not the
basis of a general religious opinion true for all men.
For our individual peculiarities and circumstances
constitute individual conditions which may lead to
results altogether untrue in the experience of other
men. Yet that these conditions may be true for you
cannot be questioned. It is an individual truth
affecting only yourself. You come into contact, for
example, with some great and sublime object in
nature which immediately produces in you feelings
of reverence and awe, and suggests the idea of a
present good and beneficent Creator calling forth
�12
The Formation of
your love and trust. That, therefore, is the fact of
your experience, and you found upon it the opinion
that it is the tendency of such objects to produce
such results. Now that opinion is true for you
individually. But you extend your inquiries to the
experience of other men, and then you find that
these results do not always follow. In some you find
there is the deep feeling produced by contemplating
the object, but no suggestion of the idea of God.
In others, the idea of God is suggested, but it is
accompanied by fear and terror. So that you correct
the conclusion of your personal experience by the
wider experience of mankind, and instead of
saying that the grand objects of nature tend to
suggest the idea of God and to produce love and
trust, you say these objects tend to produce these
effects under certain conditions only.
Your re
ligious. opinion is modified, generalized by a more
extensive observation of facts. The first opinion
founded upon your own experience is still true for
you, because your mind is in that condition under
which this love for and trust in God follow; but it is
not a general truth and your opinion has to be
modified accordingly.
But now, suppose you are not content to rest here.
You want to ascertain which is the normal, proper
and natural condition and result, that which ends, as
in your own mind, in love and trust, or that which
ends in terror and apprehension. Still you have
nothing but the facts to guide you. You begin
therefore by examining and scrutinizing more closely
the facts. You find in those in whom the terror is
excited some humanised conception of God which
clothes him with attributes which have a malignant
aspect towards man, and by examination you find
that this conception rests upon the baseless assumption
that God must be like man, and so like malignant
and fierce men. Or in other cases you find it has
�Religious Opinions.
13
been produced by some great calamity, which has
produced the impression that God delights in calamity,
an impression depending upon a few circumstances
and not upon general observation. On the other hand,
your own trust and love rest upon no such ground.
You do not pretend to know God as he is in himself;
but by extensive observation you find that upon the
whole his operations in nature are beneficent and
good, leading to human well being and happiness.
You observe that the calamities are the result of
conditions which may for the most part be controlled
and constitute a system of discipline which is benefi
cial and merciful. Seeing therefore that the real facts
call forth the love and trust, and that it is fancy or
an imperfect observation of a few facts that inspire
the mistrust and fear, you form the generalized
religious opinion that those conditions in which the
apprehensions of God’s presence call forth trust and
love, are the true, normal, and proper conditions of
man. Nor could anything possibly shake that opinion
but such an appeal to the facts as would shew you
had misconceived or misinterpreted them.
But possibly some one may say, this method will
answer very well in such a question as you have pro
posed, but will it apply to all, such as the peculiar
doctrines of Christianity for example1? Now, I have
already answered that question in effect. For leaving
out of consideration the evidences by which the
authority of Christianity has to be established,
involving as they do the questions of miracles, which
is purely one of facts, I remind you of what I have
already said about the interpretation. Every one
interprets by his system of philosophy formed by his
judgment according to certain methods. The ultimate
appeal in these questions of interpretation is not to
the grammar and lexicon, but to the principles held
by the interpreter. Hence the opposite conclusions
come to by men equally sincere, equally learned,
�14
Fhe Formation of
equally pious, and equally skilled in interpretation.
The Calvinists, for example, the older Unitarians, and
the Arminians equally believe in the divine authority
of the New Testament or of Christ. They equally
strive to find out the meaning of the text. They
come to opposite conclusions. Why1? Oh, the bigots
of each party would say, because the others do not
come with an open mind, but seek only their own
preconceived opinions. I have, however, nothing to
do with the bigots just now. The real cause is,
because each comes with his own system to the inter
pretation, and so arrives at different results. And
it could not from the nature of things be otherwise,
whether men know it or not. So that in reality the
ultimate appeal is to these judgments formed before
consulting the oracle, and all depends upon the method
by which those judgments are formed.
Take, for example, the doctrine of the atonement.
Now, the Calvinist holding certain views about
God’s justice, government &c., interprets the passages
speaking of Christ’s death in one way, and gives to the
atonement one meaning. The Arminian, holding
modified views of God’s justice and government, and
exalting higher his love, interprets the same passages
in another way, and gives to the atonement a modified
meaning. Whilst the older Unitarian, holding other
views of God’s character, apd exalting his love still
higher than the Arminian, interprets the passages in
quite another way, and does not hold the doctrine of
the atonement in the Calvinistic sense at all. Now
how can any one form an opinion upon these three
different modes of interpretation ? Only by determin
ing the truth or the untruth of the principles upon
which their system of interpretation is based; and that
must be done by the method I have explained. If
any one do not care for any of these systems, and
wishes to determine the question simply upon its
own merits, how can he do so but by a reference to
�Religious Opinions.
15
facts ? Do all those who believe in the atonement get
delivered, so far as we see, from the consequences of
their past sins 1 Would the drunkard, for example,
who has drunk himself into a state verging on
delirium tremens, get saved from the fit which was
coming upon him to-night, by a sudden conversion
experienced at twelve o'clock this morning ? And
secondly, do none but those who so believe, amend
their lives and reap all the good and happiness of
the amendment ? There can be but one answer to
such questions, and it is determined by matters of
fact easily ascertained, and from which there can be
no appeal.
I trust, then, I have said enough to explain the
method by which our religious opinions must be
formed. There is none other left to us amidst the
jarring controversies of the day. At all events, of
this we are quite sure, whatever we come short of,
through this method (for myself I do not think we
shall come short of any then) yet whatever we do
grasp will be unalterable and infallibly sure.
It
will rest on a basis of fact which cannot be
removed. In this method is certainty, and in this
alone. All others are a delusion and a snare.
But let me conclude with one caution. Above all
things, in the use of this method, do not too hastily
generalize your conclusions. See to it that you have
a sufficient number of facts to form your opinion upon.
There is no greater evidence of a philosophical ’mind
than the power of suspending one’s judgment until
all the evidence is before one; as there is no greater
proof of a weak mind than hesitancy after the con
clusions are formed. And herein doubtlessly lies the
danger to which those employing this method are
exposed. Too often they want to rise to certainty
by a leap. Most enquirers get impatient of delay.
After a rapid glance over a few facts, selected it may
be but from one class, age, or type, they rashly conclude
�16
The Formation of Religious Opinions.
that they have comprehended the universal law. They
mistake the individual and it may be accidental
process for the general, and therefore go blundering
on into all sorts of errors. The very first requisite
to the formation of true religious opinions, as of all
others, is patience, caution, suspension of judgment
until the whole field of facts is surveyed and nothing
left out that is essential to the result. Then the con
clusion, so far as it goes, will be as certain as the fact of
one’s own existence. And then recollect, as an
encouragement to this patience and suspension of
judgment, that religion may exist actively where the
opinions are yet in abeyance, for truthful, well
formed opinions are not necessary to religious feeling
and life; although on the other hand the opinions
once formed have a momentous result on the
religious life.
Be deliberate then, scrutinize, weigh, compare,
discount all fancies and all prejudices, earnestly
judge by the facts widely inducted, and God will
guide you into all truth.
TURNBULL AND SPEABS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
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On the formation of religious opinions
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Cranbrook, James
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Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 16 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh.
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Thomas Scott
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[1871]
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RA1602
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Rationalism
Religion
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Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason
-
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REASON
VERSUS
AUTHORITY.
BY
W. 0. GARR BROOK.
“ Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”
Thess., v. 21.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
1871.
Price Threepence.
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET,
HAYMARKET, W.
�REASON
VERSUS
AUTHORITY.
HE present is a sceptical age. We do not, as
in former times, believe, but criticise. Faith,
in these days, has no province, but the whole area of
human expectation is limited to the range of our
reason. If a truth can be shown to be probable, we
accept it. If it is not, in our estimation, reasonable,
we reject it. We assert, in short, that the instrument
and method of our apprehension is the same, whether
the thing to be apprehended be an episode in Homer’s
Iliad or an incident in Luke’s Life of Christ.
If we interpret aright the intellectual position of
those who urge this as a sign of our spiritual deca
dence, they are, in some sense or measure, prepared
to affirm that reason is unrelated to the subject of
religion. We should not, they think, consider the pro
priety or impropriety of a given religious observance,
the reasonableness or unreasonableness of a supposed
religious obligation, the credibility or incredibility of
an affirmed revelation from heaven, but, with regard
to such matters, our reason is to be held in abeyance.
Within the sphere of our higher life, we are not to
argue, but accept; not criticise, but believe; not ask
for evidence, but proceed upon authority.
T
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Reason versus Authority.
Taken absolutely and universally, this instruction
to us for our guidance needs, we think, but to be
touched to be disproved. If everywhere and at all
times, within the sphere of religion, reason is to be
quiescent and faith supreme, either we must adopt
every creed, however opposite, in turn, as the advo
cate of each presses it upon us, or we must, under all
circumstances, abide by our original religious impres
sions, and refuse to relinguish them whatever a deeper
experience may say in opposition. In the former
case, it will be our duty, to-day, being urged thereto
by the Protestant, to denounce Mariolatry, and, to
morrow, pressed by the Catholic, to bow down, in
utmost reverence, to the Virgin Mother. In the
latter, it will be incumbent upon us, whether we are
the children of Protestant or Catholic parents, to ask
no questions and to listen to no persuasion to change
our religious sentiments, but accepting them at first
without inquiry, and abiding by them ever afterwards
irrespective of their hold upon our judgment, to
reduce the problem of the growth or retrogression
of Protestant or Roman Catholic sentiment in this
country to the question of the relative fruitfulness of
Protestant or Roman Catholic parentage.
If they who affirm the supremacy of faith and the
unrelatedness of reason to religion do not affirm it
always and everywhere, they, then, affirm it some
times and somewhere, and the question, of course, is
when and where. In reply, if we ask the Protestant,
he informs us that our reason is to give place to our
faith when we read a certain book, but that our faith
is to give place to our reason when we read any
interpretation of the book which is not our own.
The Catholic, in opposition, says, with much show of
sense, that if we need an infallible book we must,
being often ignorant and always liable to err, need,
from the same consideration, an infallible interpreter,
�Reason versus Authority.
y
and offers us that which he esteems to be so. If we
.relinquish our reason, however, since we cannot
assent to both, we can assent to neither. The double
assertion of our duty to accept and not to question is
equivalent, in force, to the single assertion to ques
tion and not to accept. Where there are two autho
rities, each of which denounces the other and claims
exclusive obedience from ourselves, it may or may
not be fortunate, but it is inevitable that we should
withhold our faith till we have exercised our reason.
Regarding the position more leisurely, we think
that whether or not it may be otherwise defensible, it
is not to be expected that we should admit it merely
because they who assert it have the strongest possible
impression that it is so. They may, as they no doubt
most unquestionably do, very sincerely believe that
they are not, but, unless they are prepared, in addi
tion, to affirm their personal infallibility, they must
admit that they may be, mistaken. The positive
certainty which they assert themselves to possess in
an inward impression which they consider transcends
their reason, they must, nevertheless, when affirmed
by others on behalf of an opposing conclusion, and,
therefore, in their case, on behalf of their own, allow,
at least, admits of question. Since Jew and Gentile,
Catholic and Protestant, Christian and Heathen,
have, in turn, been so assured of the truth of their
convictions as to die for them, and such convictions
have, necessarily, been not merely dissimilar but
professedly antagonistic, it is evident that no con
viction can be so strong, and no fidelity to it so
persistent, as to yield, therein, any, much less a
perfect, guarantee, that their faith is a synonym for
the truth.
Neither can we consent to the relinquishment of
our reason in our religion from the affirmed necessity
of an exact intellectual conception of God, and the
�8
Reason versus Authority.
impossibility, by reason, of attaining to it. Were it
true that a certain intellectual conception were essen
tial to the divine favour, it would, of course, follow
that we might expect the Divine Being to supply us
with an unquestionable method of attaining to it.
On the other hand, it is to be inferred that if the
Divine Being has not placed within the reach of men
generally an infallible method of arriving at an
absolute knowledge of him, it is because it is not
necessary to his favour that they should possess it.
The question, then, is, which of the two is the more
reasonable alternative ? and the answer, we think, is
obvious. Which of the many existing and opposing
conclusions, from Catholicism to Rationalism, shall
be ours, in our youth, will be dependent upon the
accidental circumstances of our birth, and, if we are
not to reason but acquiesce in our original religious
impressions, will continue to be so always. But, if
so, there can be no more unquestionable method of
knowing God without than with our reason—rather,
the alternative to which we fly will be worse than
that from which we flee. The assertion that we
should judge for ourselves renders it possible that we
should mistake, but the assertion that we should not
judge for ourselves makes it inevitable that the
greater portion of mankind must do so, and, accord
ing to the theory of those who affirm the necessity
for an exact intellectual conception of God, to their
eternal ill-doing.
We must, also, we think, reject the argument that
the subject-matter of religion is of that kind which
precludes the competency of our reason. Admitted
that the divine existence is not cognisable by our
senses, it does not therefore follow that we should
accept the opinions of other persons with similarly
imperfect bodily organs, but, simply, that we should
listen to them upon this as upon other questions
�Reason versus Authority.
9
with a view to form a correct opinion of our own.
Admitted that the certainty of a future life is not to
be proved by our reason, so, neither, on the other
hand, can we be certain, though we may feel so, with
out it. He who tells us aught which we could not
know without his telling, must bring proof to us that
he has special or exclusive information upon the sub
ject, and the only part of us which is capable of
dealing with proof is our reason. Admitted that
theological truths cannot be known but must be
believed, the conclusion to which it leads is, not
unreasoning acquiescence in anything or everything
which may be affirmed, but a rational endeavour to
discover that which, if not certain, is most probable.
There may or may not in the circumstance that we
cannot know God fully without a revelation, be
ground to expect one, but, even upon the supposi
tion that one is to be expected, whether or not it has
been given, and if so, when and where, and what its
purport, must be matter of opinion ; and inasmuch
as experience teaches us that men are positive upon
such questions, not in proportion to the breadth, but
the limitation of their vision, the strength and extent
to which a conclusion thereon is positively affirmed
is the measure of the necessity for calling it into
question.
Relinquishing our, so far, merely defensive position,
and assuming the initiative in the controversy, we
think we are justified in saying that the primd facie
argument is opposed to the conclusion. If there is a
distinguishing mark of Divine Authorship, it is the
relatedness of the means to the end, and the sub
ordination of the lower to the higher methods of
nature. The unreasoning trust of the child, how
ever, is not equal to the intelligent appreciation of
the man, and the higher purpose of our life is not in
eating or drinking, or buying or selling, or marrying
�io
Reason versus Authority.
and giving in marriage, but in the right understanding
and performance of our spiritual relationships. But
if our reason is the highest endowment, as it un
questionably is, with which the Divine Being has
favoured us, and if, even in the estimation of those
who differ from us, the highest purpose of our life is
not in the enjoyment of the present but in prepar
ation for the future, it would seem that if our reason
were intended to serve any purpose whatever, it was,
in any case, intended to guide us in the matter of our
religious hopes and expectations.
This impression is confirmed, we do not hesitate to
say, by the circumstance that the same persons who
call upon us to suspend our reason, nevertheless find
themselves under the ceaseless necessity to appeal to
it upon the subject of our religion. If we remind
the Catholic, for instance, when he presses us to
assent to his proposition, that the Protestant also puts
in a claim, he brings to our mind the modern origin
of the Protestant, calls him a schismatic, and, gene
rally, uses his best endeavours to prove that the
Protestant claim is inadmissible. If, on the other
hand, we inform the Protestant, when he calls upon
us to urge his authoritative dogma, that the Catholic
has anticipated him, the Protestant proceeds to re
mind us that the Catholic is an image worshipper,
quotes secular and ecclesiastical history to bedaub
his church, and, imitating his Roman Catholic
compeer in this at least, uses all his art to
persuade our judgment that he is, and that tho
Catholic is not, entitled to prescribe our religious
opinions. But, if it be true that we should not
reason, why do they each play the part of tempter,
and solicit from us a judgment ? Is it not singular
that our reason should be unfitted to deal with a
subject, and yet that, upon it, the several parties to
the affirmative should never hesitate to appeal to it.
�Reason versus Authority.
11
Surely, of all the transcending mysteries of life,
that which most transcends is the mystery that each
should systematically deny the competency of an
authority to which they appeal, repudiate a right
which they equally recognise, advance and with
draw, according to the conveniences of their argu
ment, the intellectual position, upon which, they
assert, hangs the eternal destinies of their race.
If the pertinency of their conclusion, however, is
not apparent, its wondrous impertinency, if we ex
amine it, it will not be difficult to discover. Traced
to its mental base, is not the meaning of those who
assert that we should not reason but believe, that
they have themselves come to a conclusion upon re
ligious subjects which they wish, whether or not it is
agreeable to our judgment, to impose upon us? Is it
not that the training of their youth, the prejudices of
their class, or the intellectual preferences they have
acquired, point in a certain direction, and that these
appearing to themselves to be sacred, they cannot
understand, and are not prepared to allow, prejudices
and opinions which are not their own ? The reason
why we should not reason is, after all, simply that
they wish to undertake the duty for us. The ground
of their objection is, not that we should come to a
conclusion, bat that we should not come to their con
clusion. If this be not so, wherefore do they recom
mend us to listen to their own polemical discourses ?
How does it happen that books written in defence of
“ the truth,” as they regard it, are laudable, and only
those written in opposition are pernicious ? Of
what other solution is their conduct capable when
they permit — nay, commend — our disposition to
reason, so long as it results in the adoption of their
sentiments ? Stripped of its unintentional disguise,
the assertion that we should not criticise but accept,
�12
Reason versus Authority.
is, simply, the assertion that they who make it believe
that their judgment is, and that the judgment of those
who differ from them is not, to be trusted.
Studiously regarded, indeed, the recommendation
to us for our guidance is not more intellectually
puerile than practically impossible. If the Catholic
has faith in the teaching of his Church, it is not
because he does not exercise his reason, but because,
owing to early training, social circumstance, or
tendency of mind, its claims, upon the whole, appear
to him more rational than any alternative of which
he takes note. If the Protestant is averse to the
claims of the Catholic Church, and sympathises with
the Anglican or any Dissenting formulary, it is not
because he does not come to a judgment upon the
subject of their respective merits, but because, how
ever ignorant and swayed by prejudice, and however
unconscious of the mental operation, his judgment,
nevertheless, inclines to the one in preference to the
other. Nay ! our reason is the only instrument with
which we can assent. Our intellect is the only part
of us capable of faith. Diversity in the things to be
apprehended involves no diversity in the instrument
of our apprehension. Two and two are four, and the
mental operation is the same, when the addition is
of men or angels. The things which are believable
by us, and they only, are such as appear to us
to be probable, whether they be secular or sacred.
Paith is not opposed to, but is the product of, our
reason, alike when it relates to our anticipation of
a summer shower and the second coming of the
Saviour. Taste, feeling, hope, fear, love, hate, educa
tion, or the want thereof, may, as the atmosphere
influences the pendulum, influence the judgment;
but as the eye only sees, and the ear only hears, so
the reason only can assent or dissent, whether the
�Reason versus Authority.
13
proposition submitted to it be the physical relation of
the earth to the sun, or the moral relation of the
human to the Divine Spirit.
In conclusion, we must regard the moral as of
equal value with the intellectual position assigned us
by our critics. The interpretation which they who
do not approve put upon the change which they
correctly assert is coming over society, is that the
present, by consequence, is the less religious age.
Other nations and earlier races, they argue, believed
more readily because they were more spiritual than
we : we are more critical because we are less subject
to a sense of divine obligation. Were we as desirous
of doing God’s will as they were who preceded or
they are who rebuke us, we should be as ready as
they to accept their theological opinions and act upon
their sense of duty. We cannot accept this interpre
tation of our position. Orthodox opinion is sufficiently
tyrannous and persecuting to deter any merely pre
sumptuous person from lightly setting at defiance the
opinion of the many, and asserting, from sheer pride
of intellect, as it is called, a new creed. Were there
no external disadvantage in professing singularity
of religious belief, the force of early association, and
the merely superstitious regard which we have for
the sentiments of our youth, whatever they may be,
would be a sufficiently penal preventive from change,
for the sake of it. The ordinary interests of life
are too present and pressing to admit of length
ened study of religious questions, unless the spirit
within, under the impulse of some strong conviction,
is constrained to give personal attention to a matter
which people generally are willing to leave to
the decision of others. In short, so long as excep
tional attention to a subject is regarded, not as
an indication of the want of ordinary, but of the
possession of a special interest in it, it must be
�14
Reason versus Authority,
assumed that those amongst us who see reason to
change their religious attitude and stand apart, do
so, not because they are less but more impressed;
and they who do not understand and therefore mis
interpret their motive will do well, if not because it is
rational, because, by an authority which they do not
dispute, it is commanded, to follow their example,
and “ prove all things, and hold fast that which is
good.”
�
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Reason versus authority
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Faith and Reason
Rationalism
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PDF Text
Text
REASON, RELIGION,
AND
REVELATION.
BY
EDWARD VANSITTART NEALE.
“ Yet let us ponder boldly. ’ Tis a base
Abandonment of Reason to resign
Our right of thought.”
Cliilde Harold, iv. 137.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
NO. 11 THE TERRACE, FARQUHAR ROAD, UPPER NORWOOD,
LONDON, S.E.
1875.
Price One Shilling,
�LONDON:
PRINTED BY C. W. REYNELL, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET
HAYMARKET, W.
�/
REASON, RELIGION,
AND
REVELATION.
----------- ♦—■
HE course taken by religious controversy of late
seems to impose upon us the necessity of making
clear to our own minds what we mean by Revelation,
to which the one party insist that an unquestioning
obedience should be yielded by the Reason, whose
indefeasable superiority is asserted by the other. To
reconcile these conflicting pretensions must appear,
at first sight, a very hopeless task. And, in truth,
they are commonly brought forward in such a
manner, that the principle of Faith or Trust, which
is of the essence of Religion, is in danger of being
squeezed out of existence between the contending
powers. It is my object, in the present tract, to
offer some considerations adapted to remove this
danger, and point out to the principle of Faith, which
I regard as of the highest importance in the economy
of human nature, a way of escape from the opposed
foes, by showing that Reason and Revelation are
really not antagonistic, but, on the contrary, are the
inseparable factors of all solid knowledge—all that
the Reason can be truly said to know, being a matter
of Revelation ; while, on the other hand, there is no
faculty except the Reason to which this Revelation
could be made, and to it a Revelation has been made
sufficient for its wants. So that faith, instead of
being driven to a perplexing choice between Reason
and Revelation, is called on only to follow her native
instinct, by trusting in that which the Reason can
accept as the Truth of Revelation.
T
�6
Reason, Religion,
Knowledge of whatever kind, I conceive, ultimately
rests upon the consciousness of some act of our wills,
either in using the powers placed at their command,
or in suffering some limitation of their action from
that which acts upon us, and restricts the action of
our wills. That which can be produced directly by
the action of our wills we know, or may know, abso
lutely. But the sphere of this knowledge is limited,
though within that sphere the ingenuity and patience
of successive generations has built up a marvellous
structure of knowledge absolutely certain—namely,
the knowledge called pure mathematics. But of
what our wills are in themselves, apart from what
they have done, we have no inherent knowledge : no
knowledge from which we can predict positively what
they will do under any given circumstances. All our
knowledge of their tendencies arises from Revelation,
i.e., from our consciousness of the way in which they
commonly do act in ourselves, or our observation of
their action in other persons, whom we assume to be
constituted like ourselves, and to whom we turn in
order to learn what we might become, or be disposed
to do, under circumstances different from those which
we have personally experienced. While of that which
acts upon us we have no knowledge at all, except
from observing how we are affected, and comparing
these observations with the affections of other persons
to whom we ascribe a natural constitution similar to
our own. Setting aside the knowledge of our acts,
all our knowledge, whether of ourselves or of that
which is not ourselves, is strictly a matter of revela
tion. That we are subject to likings or dislikings of
various degrees of strength, to sensations of pleasure
or pain, and impulses to action arising out of them
that we can, to a great extent, control these impulses,
and determine which we shall yield to, and how far
that we have within, a resisting power which asserts
the right to control them; all these, and manifold
�and Revelation.
7
other facts concerning our nature, we learn only from
the revelation of experience. The knowledge is not
born with us; it is not a something discoverable by
carefully looking into ourselves, as if it had always
belonged to us. We learn it only by finding that the
impulses come, and that the controlling power shows
itself as occasion calls the one or the other forth.
Only experience reveals to us what it lies in us to be.
And what is true of ourselves, and of the powers
immediately subject to our will, is true still more
emphatically of that which acts upon these powers,
which we call our bodies. That we live upon a solid
mass of something on which we can move about;
that we can get off it, by our unassisted strength,
little more if so much as half our own height, and
are always pulled back again, by a force which we
cannot resist; that we are exposed to alternations of
darkness and light, of greater or less heat or cold;
that these changes are connected with the presence
to, or absence from, our sight of a body which we call
the sun ; all these and countless other similar facts,
the materials of what we call science, are entirely
matters of Revelation. We should not have any
notion of them at all, if we did not find them
experimentally to be what they actually are.
*
All our knowledge, then, except pure mathe
matics, is revealed; but how is it revealed ?
To what faculty is this revelation made ? To our
Reason. That we know anything at all about the
matters thus revealed, beyond the fact that there is
some power not originating in our own wills, which
* There is an additional element necessary before either
class of facts mentioned in the text can become the ground
work of science, on which I will not dwell further than to say
that it appears to me to be an instinct of the Reason, namely
the assumption that from similar antecedents similar conse
quences will follow—that what has happened once will, under
the like circumstances, happen again.
�8
Reason, Religion,
acts upon them, depends upon a two-fold action,
proper to this Reason. 1st. Its constructive power
of Imagination.
2nd. Its analytical power of
Reflection.
By these powers, acting within our own minds or
upon materials which we present to our senses by
our own act, the science of mathematics has been
built up; and it is by applying these powers to inter
pret what acts upon us that we have arrived at
whatever knowledge of this external agent we have
attained. Let us follow the process.
1. By our imaginative power we combine the reveal
ing action of that which acts upon our wills under
the forms of Space and Time, and the so-called cate
gories of Quality, Quantity, Relation, Cause, &c.,
which belong to the constructive action of our ima
gination, and constitute the staple of metaphysics.
Thus we form to ourselves, out of that which affects
our wills, objects on which we can reflect, as in
mathematical science, by a similar action, we form such
objects out of that which our wills determine for
themselves. What is the purpose of this reflection ?
Primarily, and in the objects of pure mathematical
science exclusively, it is to understand our own work
—to make clear to ourselves what is involved in the
constructions of our imagination, by pulling them to
pieces, and examining all their parts in their several
relations, till they have become thoroughly intelligible
to ourselves. Secondly, in all but pure mathematical
science there comes in, after the first operation of
reflection is ended, a second operation, without which
what we call science would not exist, namely, the
testing our imaginative constructions by carefully com
paring what is observable in nature with what ought
to be observable, if the action upon ourselves, which
we observe, really arises from objects so constituted
as those constructed by our imaginations; in other
words, to ascertain whether the action of nature will
�and Revelation.
9
fit into our ideas about it, so that these ideas, which
we know in themselves, may furnish to us an intel
ligible explanation of this action, which we know
only by its effect on us.
How great the importance of this careful testing
of our imaginative constructions really is, modern
science is a conclusive witness, by the almost total
revolution made by it, through this operation, in the
conceptions about the universe which formed the
staple of ancient speculation. But at present I
would especially call attention to the progressive
character which this double action of the Reason
necessarily imparts to the whole of the Revelations
made to it. Bor, although the matter revealed is
quite independent of our imaginations, and we have
no ground for supposing it to have been essentially
different in the earlier ages of human existence to
what it is now, the real revelation to us, that is all
the knowledge of it resting on any solid basis which we
possess, has depended upon our success in inter
preting the revealing record, by the conceptions
which our imaginations have constructed ; and these
Conceptions have required to be continually re
moulded so as to adapt themselves to the observa
tions made by successive generations of mankind
about what they thus attempted to interpret.
To the imagination of the ancient Greeks, for
instance, it was revealed that the earth is round; not a
mere round, flat surface, as the Jews of old appear to
have imagined, but around ball. But the further revela
tion that this ball turns on its own axis and moves
round the sun, and thus produces day and night,
summer and winter, was only suspected as a possi
bility by some of the most sagacious of the Greek
race, who were deterred from following up their pro
found conception by the outcry of impiety raised
against them, as it is now against those who, in inter
preting records held to be divine, depart materially
�IO
Reason, Religion,
from, the imaginations sanctified by popular faith.
These conceptions had not then attained that cer
tainty, produced by independent conspiring evidences,
■which to us has raised them, to the rank of unques
tioned revelations.
Now these modifications in our interpretation of
the revealing record, however great the revolution in
our conceptions to which they may give rise-—how
ever considerable the disturbance produced in our
minds from the necessity of recasting ideas grown
venerable from the colouring of antiquity, obviously
furnish no ground at all for doubting the reality of a
revealing action addressed to the interpreting imagi
nation.. The changes in our constructive imaginings
prove, not that there is nothing behind the veil, but
only that the veil has been imperfectly lifted, and
that, in consequence, the nature of the permanent
reality has been inadequately apprehended. Never
theless, in the course of this world-wide revelation,
there has often arisen a disturbing action, producing
unnecessary doubt and distrust, from the claim unduly
set up on behalf of some interpreting imagination to
be the last word, the unerring utterance of absolute
truth on the matters to which it relates. The rival
ries of sects and schools in the ancient world, the
long enslavement of thought in the Mediseval ages, to
the teachings, actual or supposed, of Aristotle, the
throes attending that great struggle for the “ right
to ponder boldly,” of which the religious reforma
tion of the sixteenth century was only one phase, are
familiar but instructive instances of the danger in
curred by the imagination, of becoming stifled by the
products of its own creative action. The past of
human effort seemed so vast, when men looked back
upon it, that it dwarfed the present. The contrast
in the individual of the wisdom of age with the rash
ness of youth misled men by a false analogy. They
forgot that, as has since been well said, if age owes
�and Revelation.
11
its increased wisdom to a longer experience, each suc
cessive generation of mankind, since it inherits the
experience of its predecessors, may reasonably expect
to attain a deeper insight into that which this expe
rience can teach—that there is no ground whatever
for supposing the Divine, revealing action to be limited
to one age or race which has passed away—and that,
therefore, to test the conformity of any received
opinion to the reality of things, far from being an act
of irreverent scepticism, is, truly, the evidence of a
profound faith ; a proof of our belief in the continuous
operations of that Divine Spirit in which the un
wearied questionings of our intelligence originate.
And we have, in modern science, an ever-growing
testimony to the solid realities of truth thus attain
able, by the greater clearness and comprehensiveness
of the conceptions to which this process of faithful
inquiry has conducted us.
But, as I began by saying, the immediate revealing
agent in all these operations is the human imagina
tion, which, no doubt, fills only the office of an inter
preter, and requires us at every step carefully to
compare the interpretation with the document to be
interpreted, but affords, in the continually increasing
perfection of its interpretations, an ever-accumulating
proof of the inherent correspondence between the
interpreting faculty and that which is to be inter
preted. Take away the imagination from the mind
of man—you would perform on his intelligence an
operation very analogous in its effects to the effect
upon his power of perception of taking away that
great instrument of the imagination—the eye. The
consciousness of will, of the power which will can
direct, of the affections to which it is exposed, and
the impulses by which it is moved, might remain.
The memory of sensation once experienced, if under
such circumstances we possessed such a memory,
might lead us to avoid what had caused us pain, and
�12
Reason, Religion^
welcome what had caused us pleasure; but from all
that constitutes the noble domain of knowledge, we
should be shut out as completely as we should be
from all that attracts or elevates us in poetry, or art.
How could the astronomer have attained the con
viction that the earth is a sphere, or learned to ascribe
day and night to its regular rotation, if he had not
been able to build up in his imagination the form of
a spherical body in order, by an accurate analysis of
its properties, to show that the phenomena observable
upon the earth correspond to them. And if this first
step in the revelation of the deeper secrets of the
universe depends upon the constructive power of the
imagination, much more is this the case with the
following steps, where the imagination has enlarged
the boundaries of space of which experience gives
us any direct indication, first to the orbits of the
planets in their courses round the sun, and then to
the distances of the stars, now beginning to be mea
sured through the ingenuity of the same creative
faculty, by processes of which no abstraction from
sensation^ can furnish the slightest exception F Or, to
take an illustration from another science, how could
the geologist have read into consistent meaning the
revelations of the “ stone book,” if his imagination had
not been competent to enlarge the bounds of time
derived from experience, as widely as the imagination
of the astronomer has been competent to enlarge the
bounds of space derivable by abstraction from sensa
tion ?
Nor is the action of this constructive faculty con
fined to the indefinite multiplication or more perfect
determination of that of which the revelations of sense
give it either direct intimations, as in the case of the
fundamental conditions belonging to the exercise of
will—space and time, or suggestive hints as in the
case of the primitive geometrical forms—straight or
curved lines, angles, circles, squares, spheres, cubes,
�and Revelation.
13
cones, many-sided figures, &c. The greatest triumphs
of scientific explanation in recent times have been
won by the aid of an imaginative construction to
which sensation cannot give the least assistance,
because what is thus constructed is imagined to
underlie all sensation and make the action of the
senses possible. Read any recent exposition of the
sciences of Heat and Light, you will find yourselves
in the presence of an all-pervading something called
the 2Ether, neither fluid nor solid, but uniting the
properties characteristic of both, which, eye hath
*
never seen nor can see, nor tongue taste, nor nose
smell, nor ear hear, nor body touch, but without which
sight, and taste, and smell, and hearing, and touch
would alike be impossible—the most daring creation
ever made by the poetic faculty of imagination ; and
yet a substance whose action is conceived to be sub
ject to the strictest determinations of mathematical
analysis; the practically unlimited agent of a power
everywhere limited by the most stringent law, in
which the indefinitely vast is inseparably bound up
with the indefinitely little—the all-embracing, all
separating, all-uniting, invisible, intangible, insensible
condition of all that is visible, tangible, or sensible.
It seems to me impossible that, before this proof
of the extent to which the constructive ideality of
the imagination enters into the conclusions of scientific
research, the popular philosophy of the eighteenth
Century, which resolved this ideal principle of know
ledge into so-called abstractions from the assumed
realities of sensation, can long continue to hold its
* Every phenomenon of light points strongly to the concep
tion of a solid rather than a fluid constitution of the luminife
rous sether, and that in the sense that none of the luminous
particles are supposed capable of interchanging places, or of
bodily transfer to any considerable distance from their own
special locality in the universe. —Sir John Herschell, ‘ ‘ Good
Words,” 1865, 506.
�14
Reason, Religion,
ground * The little, hard, round, indestructible ab
surdities which these philosophers called “ matter,”
and were pleased to scatter in patches over the
boundless void, have vanished before the profounder
researches of later physicists. The long words
Attraction, Repulsion, Gravitation, Electricity, Gal
vanism, Magnetism, Affinity, Caloric, &c., &c., in
which the idealising imagination of these naive
deniers of ideas dressed up their imaginary matter,
deluding themselves into supposing that they had ex
plained natural phenomena if they succeeded in tying
them into proper bundles, and ticketing each with a
name of its own, are coming to be recognised for
what they really are—namely, elastic strings by
which the imagination has bound together the mate
rials supplied it by the senses, for the more convenient
examination of their mutual relations. And the ex
planation of the phenomena thus classified is beginning
to be found, and, from the success attending the
attempts already made, is being everywhere sought,
in the conception of modes of pressure, and the
motions produced by their actions and reactions—■
conceptions in which the reflective Reason can find
-verce causae, revealing the origin of phenomena, because
in them the imagination deals with that of which it
can form distinct ideas, inasmuch as it is that which
our own will is able to produce by the powers at its
immediate command.f
* I say “so-called” abstractions because the process of un
limited addition by which the notions of a boundless Time or
Space are supposed to be formed out of sensations of limited
Space or Time is clearly more than abstraction.
+ This statement may perhaps be objected to as not treat
ing with proper respect Newton’s claim to have found in his
conceptions of gravitating force the vera causa of the motions
of the moon and planets. But my criticism affects not the
claims of Newton so much as those set up by his followers.
Newton, setting off from a phenomenon directly observable
—namely, that a body unsupported falls to the earth with a
�and Revelation.
15
1
Now what the imagination has done, more or less
perfectly, during the whole recorded history of man
kind, bnt especially during the four last centuries,
for the world of natural phenomena, it has done
also, but more especially during the earlier ages of
our race, for the world of internal emotions, pro
duced by the action of these phenomena upon us—
the fear, dread, awe, on the one hand, and on the
other the joy, hope, trust, confidence, which the great
universe around us, by its mysterious union of that
which lends itself to our desires with that which
certain initial rate of movement, continually accelerated in
proportion to the time of its continuance,said, “I will explain
this phenomenon, the motions of the moon round the earth,
and of the earth and other planets round the sun, and a
number of other phenomena, if you grant me two supposi
tions :—1st. That the power which makes bodies fall to the
earth resides in each elementary part, both of the earth and
of these bodies, each of which acts on all the others at the
same distance from it with the same force, the total force
exerted by any body depending on the number of these
elementary parts contained in it—whence it followed that, as
Galileo had shown, in opposition to the teaching of the Aris
totelians, a piece of gold and a piece of paper will fall to
the earth in the same time if the resistance of the air is taken
away, and that the earth falls to a stone as truly as the stone
falls to it. 2nd. That this power diminishes in proportion to
the surface over which it is exerted—that is, in the inverse
ratio of the square of the radius drawn from the centre of the
body to this surface. I do not question the right of Newton
to claim for this offspring of his imagination the character of
a vera causa; that is to say, it furnishes conceptions from
which the phenomena to be explained may be deduced with
strict numerical precision, and thus satisfactorily accounted
for. How bodies are able to exercise on each other the
power thus defined, is quite another question—one in no
way answered, as is often assumed, by saying that the attrac
tion of gravitation is a property inherent in all matter, which,
in fact, is only to say, in other words, ‘bodies attract each
other in the way imagined by Newton because they do.’
What can be truly said is only ‘bodies act as if they did
attract each other in the way supposed by Newton.’” The
speculations referred to in the text make it probable that, by
�16
Reason, Religion,
thwarts them, of order and disorder, of tenderness
and sternness, of the pleasurable and the painful, of
growth and decay, of life and death, is adapted to
produce, and which it produced with the greater
vividness in the ages when the imagination had not
yet seriously set itself to that task of drawing back
the veil from the mysteries of nature, in which, by
the help of the faculty of reflective analysis, it has
gradually made so much progress. The first work
of the imagination, in the exercise of its revealing
function, was to create and mould into shape the idea
another happy exercise of imaginative genius, we may ere
long be able to demonstrate why they do thus act.
Further, I would observe, that the phenomena really ex
plained by the theory of gravitation are so explained only by
means of an assumption, of which no other proof can be given
but its power of explaining these phenomena. The attractive
force ascribed by astronomers to the different celestial bodies
is not the force with which they are experimentally familiar
on the earth. If the sun, for instance, exercised as much
attractive power in proportion to its bulk, as the earth exer
cises, its attractive force would be fourfold that ascribed to it
by astronomers. But then, if the theory of gravitation is
true, its action upon the earth and the other planetary bodies
would be very different from what it is. Now the astrono
mers find that, if they assume the attractive power of the sun
to be only one quarter of that which the earth would exert if
it were as large as the sun, and if its power increased in pro
portion to its size, the action of the sun is what, according to
the theory of gravitation, it ought to be. Therefore they
ascribe to the sun an attractive power diminished to the
degree above stated when compared with the ascertained
power of the earth; or, in the received scientific phraseology,
they say “the density of the sun is only one fourth” that of
the earth. I do not contest the conformity of this hypothesis
to the nature of things; I wish only to call attention to the
fact that it is an hypothesis—a creation of the human imagina
tion in the exercise of its revealing function. And that our
confidence in the truth of this revelation depends upon the
completeness with which we can deduce from this creation of
our imaginations, results corresponding to the phenomena
ascertained by observation.
�and Revelation.
17
of God. To borrow the profound words of the great
German poet—•
In Innern ist ein Universum auch,
Daher der Volker loblicher Gebrauch,
Das Jeglicher das Beste was er kennt
Es’sGott Ja seinen Gott ernennt.
j
Ihm Himmel und Erde ubergiebt,
Ihn furchtet, und wo moglich liebt.
*
It is with these creations of the imagination in
former ages, among races necessarily and in some
respects very widely different from ourselves; races
whose languages have passed away from living speech,
whose modes of life and thought we can only imper
fectly realise, whose ideas of the world in which they
lived, in so far as we are able to compare them with
our present knowledge, were in almost every point
mistaken; it is, I repeat, with the conceptions by
which the imagination of these races strove to make
comprehensible to themselves the nature of the
mysterious power underlying our own consciousness,
and all the phenomena made known to us through its
means, that we have to deal when we approach the
precincts asserted to be the special home of Revela
tion. Hence arises the difficulty noticed above.
Men have set up for these conceptions, or rather
for some particular set of them to which they pin
their own faith, a claim to be not of human parentage
but of superhuman origin : not one of the forms
under which the imagination of man has endeavoured
to apprehend God, but special divine acts; peculiar
* Goethe—Gott Gemuth und Welt. I subjoin a paraphrase
for the benefit of those who do not understand the original;—
A universe there is within the mind,
Hence the praiseworthy custom of mankind;
From that which each as noblest can conceive,
To frame a God, in whom he may believe—•
Supreme o’er all, beneath, around, above—•
Object of awe, and, if he can, of love.
B
�i8
Reason, Religion,
manifestations of the being and action of God made
by Him to some favoured men, in modes which their
intelligence could grasp and transmit to others less
favoured than themselves. And if this claim is con- tested, if matters are pointed out in these supposed
■especial revelations inconsistent with the super
natural origin asserted for them; if the evidence by
which the claim is sought to be supported is shown
to be of uncertain age or untrustworthy character,
and the weakness of the alleged proofs is opposed
to the validity of the claim, those who make it raise
a cry that the criticism strikes at the root of all
faith in a Divine Revelation; and if this faith be lost
then farewell, they say, to all the consolations of
religious trust, and the surest stay of any morality
but that of enlightened self-interest.
But if the natural action of the Reason be what I
have endeavoured to point out; if the whole series
of its operations is really a continuous revealing, and
this revelation is made by the free action of the ima
gination in forming conceptions which the analysing
intellect tests, then it must be clear—1st, that the
criticism of any particular set of conceptions which
are asserted to constitute an especially profound
revelation, cannot in any way interfere with the
revealing process, since criticism constitutes a very
important part of it; 2nd, that the fact of any
particular creation of the imagination proving to
be erroneous, is not a proof that the imagination
is not a true source of revelation on the matters
to whioh that conception may relate; for all
its revelations are essentially free creations, which
acquire their revealing character through the action
of the imaginative power in remoulding them to
meet the objections of criticising reflection, till they
become correct interpretations of the observed
phenomena.
But, it may be urged, granting the imagination to
�and Revelation.
*9
have the revealing function ascribed to it, yet since,
by your own showing, we cannot rely upon its crea
tions as true interpretations of the reality of Being
unless we can test them, how can we discriminate
between the truth or falsehood of the conceptions
which it may form about the source of all existence F
Set aside, as you apparently ask us to do, those
proofs of the authority of the teacher on which the
asserters of Revelation have relied in every case
where the claim has been made, miracle, and pro
phecy, the so-called “signs and seals” of revealed
truth, and what remains to point out among the diver
sity of conceptions which the imagination of man
kind has evolved about God,—a variety not inferior
to that of the conceptions by which it has striven
to interpret the world of sense,—which are to be
rejected and which retained F How are we to
apply to them that testing process through which
alone the voice of our interpreter can acquire reliable
accuracy F I do not undertake to answer this ques
tion in detail within the limits of the present tract.
But I will endeavour to point out the kind of answer
which may, I think, be given to it. In the first
place, then, I conceive that there is between the
imaginative conceptions forming the subjects of reli
gious faith and the conclusions resulting from scientific
research a general consonance, which must increase
our trust in the essential conformity of these primitive
creations of the imagination to the reality of Being.
All the great religions of the earth have the common
character of presenting the actual condition of man
as one of imperfection, falling short of the ideal law
of his nature, for which some have endeavoured to
account, by assuming a degeneracy of the race—a fall
from a condition of original perfection—-while all,
with more or less distinctness, have looked forwards
to a time of restoration and general happiness either
on the earth itself or, if not here, in some future life
�20
Reason, Religion,
to succeed and make up for this. Thus, in one shape
or other, the conception of a progress of mankind
from their actual condition to a higher one has formed
an essential element in the imaginative conceptions
which have given shape to Religion. But this idea of
progress is now beginning, through the scientific
study of the earth’s past history, to colour all the
conclusions of scientific reasoning. Man, according
*
to the teachings of geology, has slowly grown to the
fulness of his present power and the maturity of his
present knowledge by a gradual ascent from the com
mon level of animal life. We can trace him back, in
all parts of the earth, to a time when his arts and his
knowledge seem to have been summed up in the dis
covery that it was possible to make tools of flint. We
trace back this time to a geological epoch so remote
that it forces us to count by tens of thousands of
years the interval between it and the formation of the
societies whose history constitutes what we call the
records of civilisation. The slow advance of this
civilisation in its higher forms, the periods of sta
tionaryness—even of decline and absolute decay—
which have marked its course; the partial ebb of the
fertilising waters from lands once irrigated by their
presence—all this, so full of perplexing doubt when
looked at in detail, sinks into insignificance, as a
ground for reasonable inference, when compared with
the enormous evolution of the race attested by the
“ stone book.” Even if we do not accept the con
clusions of Mr. Darwin and his followers—to which
reasonable probability seems to me to attach—as to the
gradual development of the human form from some
ape-like ancestor, still we have but to compare the
men of the age of flint implements with the men of
the present day, or with those whose remains we pos
sess in the monuments of Egypt or Assyria, Greece
or Rome, to satisfy ourselves that the principle of
progress, which the imagination of our ancestors con-
�and Revelation.
21
gecrated as an essential part of their religious trust,
does really constitute the governing influence in our
earthly existence. The form given by the imagina
tion to its bright creations may have been far from
the truth, but those creations themselves represent a
Conception profoundly true.
Surely, then, we have, in this coincidence between
the results to which the study of the phenomenal
world lead under the interpreting light cast upon it
by the imagination when subjected to the careful
testing of scientific analysis, and the forebodings of
this same power when left to follow its own nature
freely, a circumstance adapted to increase our con
fidence in those teachings of this inward guide which
from their nature do not admit of the sort of verifica
tion possible in regard to its interpretation of the
sensible universe—namely, the conceptions by means
of which mankind have endeavoured to lift the veil
that hides the All-sustaining power from the sustained.
Now, in all these instinctive creations of the free
imagination we find it introducing into its conception
of God that notion of intelligent will, of will working
for definite purposes and conscious of its own acts,
which lies at the root of what we call personality.
And to this Divine, conscious, intelligent will we find
that the imagination has also uniformly ascribed a sym
pathy of some sort with the wants and wishes of man
kind. No doubt the reflective criticism of the Reason
has continually cast doubt upon these creations of its
imaginative power. It has pointed out the inappro
priateness of a conception derived from our conscious
ness of ourselves, as individuals limited by a being
which we cannot change and distinguished by it from
other beings, to that Being who ex hypotliesi has no
limitations but those expressing its own will. It has
insisted on the dissimilarity between our conscious
action, which can do only one thing at a time but
exerts all its faculties to do that one thing perfectly,
�22
Reason, Religion,
and the Divine action which does a countless mass of
things at the same time while it appears utterly in
different to whether any one of them is or is not done
as perfectly as it can be done; and in every action is
preparing the way for another distinct action to grow
out of it. If it admits the marks of tender sympathy,
of provident care disclosed by the world of organized
life, it dwells, in opposition to them, upon the un
sparing, undiscriminating destruction which con
tinually sweeps this living world away, not only by
gradual decay, a process, perhaps, to be accepted as
the necessary accompaniment of individual existence,
but by overwhelming disasters, arresting the living
creature in the very beginnings of its existence, or in
mid career, in the full swing of its active energy, and
consigning it, without any fault of its own or the pos
sibility of escape, to irretrievable destruction. It may
point out that the personal Deities whom the imagina
tion has created for itself are but “ magnified men,” and
that if the anthropomorphic element is excluded, the
conceptions lose all their distinctness. In vain. The
imagination is perplexed, but not satisfied. There
remains the instinctive conviction that consciousness
cannot arise from that which is essentially uncon
scious, nor sympathy originate in that which is
*
unsympathetic.
And as the analysing reflection,
though it may pull the constructions of the imagina
tion to pieces, cannot show that some future effort
* The last conviction is apparently the most deeply rooted
—at least, this seems so from the case of the Buddhists, who
retain prayer as a mysterious form of motion, it may be of the
lips of men in uttering certain consecrated words or it may
be of any substance on which these words are written, capable
of securing benefit to those who originate it, while they deny
to the Deity who sympathetically responds to this movement
that conscious perception of the prayer offered, without which,
to our European judgment, prayer becomes absurd. Hence
the construction of those strange phenomena, abundant in
Thibet, Praying machines.
�and Revelation.
may not be more successful, men are inclined, on the
whole, to trust their constructive instincts rather
than their critical analyses, and, taking refuge in the
possibilities of the unknown, prop up by faith what
they cannot sustain by demonstration.
Is this tendency justifiable ? Is it possible to
satisfy the analysing faculty of the Reason that there
are matters on which it ought not to exercise itself ?
I do not think it is possible. But, on the other hand,
is it possible to induce the constructive imaginative
faculty of this same Reason to sit down contented
with treating its own conscious, intelligent action as
a sort of accident in existence ; an inexplicable and.
occasional offshoot or outcome of a power which,
except in these partial manifestations of conscious
ness and intelligence, is unconscious and unintelli
gent — to rest satisfied with assuming that its
inherent desire to trace a principle of unity in all
that it perceives is a delusion; and to substitute for
the belief in an ever-present conscious Power which
eternally gives rise to the unconscious by processes as
yet unimagined, a belief in an ever present uncon
scious power which, by processes as yet unimagined,
occasionally gives rise to the conscious ? * Equally do
I think that it is not possible.
Are we, then, shut up to a perpetual irreconcilable
antagonism between these two constituents of our
Reason, its constructive Imagination and its analys
ing Reflection. Can no test be found sufficient to
decide our judgments on the one side or the other ?
* A belief well described in the following vigorous lines of
a song called the “Fine Old Atom Molecule,” in Punch, for
the 12th December, 1874, that—Design sprang up by accident, Law’s rule from hazard blind,
The soulless soul-evolving, against not after kind,
As the lifeless life developed, and the mindless ripened mind,
In the fine old atom molecule
Of the young world’s protoprime.
�24
Reason, Religion,
I think such a test does exist, and that its application
justifies the claim made by me for the imagination
to be the true revealer of the mysteries of Being.
The test of which we are in search appears to me to
be furnished by the ascertainable facts of human
progress. Whatever judgment we may pass on
the trustworthiness of the conceptions about the
universe and its author formed by the imagination, it
is clear that the nature of man is itself a part of
the great whole, and must be assumed to participate
in that harmony and mutual suitableness, which we
find to prevail generally between the constituent
parts of this universe; at least until we have some
overwhelming proof that it is an exception, out of
harmony with all around it. And certainly if we
accept the hypothesis of the gradual evolution of
man out of the races inferior to him in mental and
moral power, by the continuation of a process
common to the whole series of living beings, the
idea of such a want of harmony between his nature
and the general constitution of things is absurd.
Assuming, then, that man’s nature is in harmony
with the universe, it follows that if the history of
human development shows clearly a tendency to
favour the growth of any particular’ character, the
conceptions about the universe which accord best
with this character, and so account for the develop
ment of man having taken this line, must derive from
the known history of mankind strong evidence of
their truth. Now I think it must be admitted, by
any one at all conversant with human history, that the
principle of sympathy has been continually advancing
in its influence over mankind. We have but to think
•of the general abolition of slavery, in the nations of
Europe and their off-shoots, and the earnest efforts
made by these nations to suppress, at least the trade
in slaves, even where the existence of slavery cannot
be as yet touched, compared with its universal prac-
�and Revelation.
tice in the ancient world, and its approval even by the
noblest spirits and deepest thinkers ; or to name the
word hospital; or to consider how different is the
position occupied by women among ourselves from
that generally recognised in Greece or Rome, at a
stage of civilisation comparable with our present life,
in order to satisfy ourselves on this point. Probably
no one will contest that there is a marked difference
in this respect between the civilisation which has
grown up since the Christian era, and the civilisation
in the midst of which Christianity appeared. And
the change thus manifested is upon so vast a scale,
it affects so deeply the life and character of those
nations whom the course of events unmistakably
designates to be the leaders of the human race, that
it cannot be set aside as not a legitimate growth from
the constitution of the universe, without contraven
ing those conclusions about the unity of all Being, to
which as we have seen scientific research conducts us.
But the principle of sympathetic tenderness, which
thus vindicates its right to be recognised as a true
manifestation of the all-sustaining source of existence,
requires for its satisfaction the faith in a Divine
sympathy responsive to its movements. It is not
content to rest upon itself, and leave the question
whether there is any sympathetic being except that
manifested on the earth unsettled, as the self-deter
mining ego of Fichte’s earliest philosophy might have
been. It needs to feel that it is leaning on the
eternal. It demands a God with whom the spirit of
man can hold communion ; because it cannot find
in the beings around it that perfect response which
it requires for its entire satisfaction.
“ Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe
Our hermit spirits range and dwell apart.”
“ Nor can the tenderest heart and next our own,
Know half the reasons why we smile or sigh,”
says Keble, in one of those passages where he writes
�<16
Reason, Religion,
with the insight of the true poet, undimmed by the
theologic dust which he was apt to throw into his
eyes. Doubtless true sympathy must not confine
itself to such mysterious responses from an inward
power, but is bound to go forth, and labour in the
world around us for the good of others. But it
needs to refresh itself in its work, by the sense of
a universal Presence sympathetic with its efforts,
which the idea of Humanity substituted by A.
Comte is inadequate to replace; as Comte himself
felt when, in his later life, he came under the influence
of the sentiment of love, and was driven to supple
ment the worship of Humanity by the concrete adora
tion of a deceased woman, who in truth became for
him God; much as the Chinese supplement their
formal respect for the Gods whom, according to the
advice of Confucius, they “ honour and keep far from
them,” by their reverence for the spirits of their an
cestors. What can we say, then, but that here, as in
the idea of progress, the imagination has anticipated
the slow progress of inference ? God, argues Ludwig
Feuerbach, is only a name for our own desires,
which we set over against ourselves as a Being en
dowed with the power and the will to gratify them.
The reproach is not undeserved by the purposes for
which men often raise their prayers. But history
justifies the act. The imagination, forestalling the
course of human progress, at a time when the spirit of
sympathy had very little influence over human action,
placed the universe under its care, and thus consti
tuted it into a home fit for that spirit which was to be,
and was to be the great source of blessings to man
kind. The voice of history, which is entirely beyond
the control of the will of man, has justified the crea
tions originating in his imaginative will; and thus
furnishes a test of the general truth of his religious
conceptions, which reduces the part of the criticising
reflection in this matter to a protest against investing
�and Revelation.
the details of these conceptions with that degree of
reasonable assurance, to be claimed, on this historical
ground for the common basis of all religious trust—
the assumption, which is what men really mean by
speaking of the personality of God, that the universe
*
arises from the action of a conscious, wise, and loving
Being, who sympathises with men.
It may be objected, perhaps, to this argument that,
if it were true, men ought to have become more pro
foundly religious as the ages rolled on, w’hile, in
fact, an opposite tendency has manifested itself, both
in the world of ancient Greece and Rome, where the
original, warm, popular faith gradually died away
under the criticism of philosophy, and in our modern
world, since the Reformation. But strong as this
objection appears at first sight, it loses its force when
closely examined. What happened in the ancient
world is just what happens under our eyes. The
adherents of the traditionary religious faith failed to
distinguish the fundamental principle of religion from
the conceptions about the Divinity, in which their
Scriptures had embodied their consciousness of a
Divine presence, and the latter was in danger of
perishing before the criticism directed against the
former. But the reign of ancient scepticism was ter
minated by the instrumentality which produced it.
* In support of the claim here advocated for the emotions,
I may refer to an interesting article by Mr. James Hinton, in
the Contemporary Review for December, 1874. I would espe
cially call attention to a suggestion, which 1 do not remember
to have ever met with before, that the principle of self-sacri
fice—that is, the voluntary giving-up of itself by one existence
to another—if presented as a phenomenal action, would assume
the scientific aspect of cause and effect—that is to say, of one
thing merging itself in another ; so that the unvarying succes
sion of cause and effect, which above all, things appears to
“banish spirituality from nature,” assumes the character of
an embodiment of this spirituality, taking the form of ‘ ‘ meet
ing every fresh demand with a new sacrifice.”
�28
Reason, Religion,
Philosophy, as time advanced, became religious. To
Plutarch the Divine is as real as the moral. The
Jupiter of Epictetus and Marcus Antoninus differs
from the Jupiter of Cleanthes by being invested with
that element of personal sympathy with man, which
is the characteristic assumption of religious faith.
And with the rise of Neoplatonism the philosophic
thinker gradually merged into the religious mystic.
No doubt the growth of Christianity deprived these
later phases of philosophic thought in the Roman
world from passing down into the beliefs of the
people, who in the mean time had become Christians.
But no one, I think, familiar with these philosophies,
can doubt that they constitute a genuine, spontaneous
development of the speculative imagination entirely
independent of the new religious creed destined to
undermine their labours; and thus are an evidence of
the truth that criticism cannot permanently destroy
Religion, but only change its form.
The free thought of modern times has been nur
tured under influences giving to it a direct antagonism
to the contemporary religious conceptions unknown
to ancient philosophy, which, in its opposition to the
ancient creeds, had but to “ come, be seen, and con
quer” in the minds of any who would attend to its
voice at all, and found itself confronted by no organised
bodies of religious teachers, no wide-spread system of
'popular instruction, no catechisms or Sunday Schools,
no Church or Bible invested by the uncriticizing ima
gination of the faithful with infallibility, whence the
opposition directed against its criticisms might derive
strength. All this, modern criticism has had to en
counter. And, but for the aid afforded it by the enor
mous growth of physical knowledge, the unexpected
revelations made by its means, and the habits of
accurate investigation thus fostered, we may well
question whether the criticisms of the Reason would
not have been always turned aside by the combined
�and Revelation.
29
influences leagued in support of the traditionary con
ceptions consecrated by religious faith. As it is,
though the old intrenchments are now pierced with
a thousand breaches by the powerful artillery of
scientific and critical research, the criticising Reason
has still to sustain a constant fight with a fresh host
of defenders, who press on to guard the shattered
bulwarks by their personal trust. It is, therefore, of
necessity so much occupied in effectually pulling down
what is thus perpetually attempted to be again set
up, that it can scarcely be expected to make progress
in reconstructing a religious ideal of its own. And
yet indications, by no means obscure, seem to me to
be showing themselves that modern philosophy is
advancing in the same direction as that taken by an
cient philosophy in the ages between Augustus and
Justinian—that is, towards the transformation into
new religious ideals of the ideals destroyed by criti
cism in their original shape. How unlike, for in
stance, is the treatment of religious faiths by Emile
Burnouf to their treatment by Voltaire ! How dif
ferent the tone of the life of Jesus by Renan from the
writings of Tom Paine ! And yet, so long as the
critical analysis of religious conceptions, or of the
writings on which they are founded, is regarded as
a religious crime, those only will commonly deal
with the criticism of religious beliefs whose inclina
tions dispose them to criticise rather than to con
struct ; while, obviously, it is to the latter class—•
those who are not satisfied with destroying, but desire
to build what will bear examination, in order to dwell
there in peace—that we must look for conceptions
capable of replacing the conceptions which criticism
has swept away.
Is it possible at all to forecast what form such
imaginations are likely to take ; by what road they
can carry us beyond that general trust in the basis
of religious conception, for which, as I have endea
�30
Reason^ Religion,
voured to show, a sufficient positive foundation is
laid in the accordance between the historical develop
ment of man and the qualities ascribed by the ima
gination to God at a time long anterior to this de
velopment. One principle, I think, we may lay
down with confidence. Whatever permanent work
of this nature can be done must be done scientifically.
That is to say, it must rest, not on any supposed
intuitions into the Divine nature, but on the revealed
facts relating to Religion ; that is, upon the concep
tions by which men have attempted to embody their
consciousness of the Divine. The effort of such a
theology will be to account satisfactorily for the
different modes in which the great interpreter has
endeavoured to solve the problem of the Divine
essence, by gathering them up under some uniting
conception, by which they may be shown to represent
divers sides of the Divine reality, and thus receive a
satisfactory explanation as being essentially all parts
of one revealing action. It may appear a very hope
less task to construct anything like such a consistent
system of theology out of the manifold imaginations,
for each of which a fit place should be found in it. But
I do not despair of its accomplishment if it be un
dertaken in that spirit of patient inquiry, and the
acceptance of those conceptions which most completely
explain the whole body of known facts as presumably
true, on which scientific certainty rests. I am per
suaded that, in the case of these phenomena, as in
that of other natural phenomena, apparent confusion
will resolve itself into an intelligible order ; because I
am satisfied that the freedom of the human imagina
tion is no more devoid of law than the necessity of the
physical world. Each mode of Being, the interpreting
imagination, and the nature which it has to interpret,
including the nature of man, is to me the expression
of the same Eternal Reason. And of Reason, we
must affirm, from our own experience of its action,
�and Revelation.
3i
that it is the property to harmonise freedom with
order. Of this harmony the religious conceptions of
mankind have, I conceive, partaken, in their instinc
tive attempts to apprehend the Divine under the in
fluence of the providential course of circumstances.
It is the office of a true Science of Religion, in my
judgment, to appreciate justly these attempts, and
combine their characteristic ideas, purified and trans
formed by the refining fire of criticism, into one con
nected whole, by the constructive action of the
Imagination, which would thus reveal in its great
outlines the deepest mystery of existence; and, I
believe, will make this Revelation by a conception
approaching the fundamental ideas of the Catholic
Faith much more nearly than those commonly sup
pose who now dwell only on the opposition apparent
at present between the Catholic dogmas and scientific
thought.
C. W. EEYNELL, PRINTER, LITTLE PULTENEY STREET, HAYMARKET.
�
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Reason, religion and revelation
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Neale, Edward Vansittart [1810-1892]
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Notes: Includes bibliographical references. From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by C.W. Reynell, Little Pulteney Street, London.
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Thomas Scott
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1875
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Religion
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Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason
Philosophy and Religion
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Text
INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY
THE
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF CHRISTIANITY
AND OF PROTESTANTISM.
BY
JOHN ROBERTSON,
AUTHOR OF “THE FINDING OF THE BOOK.”
“ The Christianity of Christ is not one thing, and human nature another;—
it is human Virtue, human Religion, man in his highest moments; the effect
no less than the cause of human development, and can never fail till man
ceases to be man.”—Theodore Parker.
“ The simple believeth every word; but the prudent man looketh well to
his going.”—Solomon.
PUBLISHED BY THOMAS SCOTT,
MOUNT PLEASANT, RAMSGATE.
Price Sixpence.
�“Far, very far be it from any devout mind, out of an unwarranted,
unreasonable, and most unnecessary jealousy, to arrest or stay the progress
of inquiry, or look with a timid and suspicious eye on any honest efforts
made to extend and diffuse the knowledge of nature. The. upright search
after truth can never be dangerous to him who lovingly engages in it, or dis
honourable to Him who is the God of truth. All scope is given to inquiry
into all the wonders, whether of the material world without, or of the moral
world within. It is your dignity, and duty so to inquire. You are men,
and you are commanded to be men in understanding. As men, you may
assert your privilege of investigating all the works of your Creator; and in
doing so, you are to follow truth whithersoever it may lead. You are not
constituted the judges of consequences and results. Your business is with the
facts and principles of truth itself. You are not to determine what should
be, or what might be,—you are to discover what is. This is the course be
coming alike the power and the infirmity of reason. Within this limit you
tread surely and safely. Cast aside, then, all alarm as to what may follow
from, your inquiries. Only prosecute these inquiries with due caution, and
put them fairly and faithfully together, so as to ascertain real facts and
draw none but legitimate conclusions. And we may fearlessly ran the
hazard of any inferences which they may suggest, confident that they will
all tend to shed new light and lustre on the wisdom in which the Lord hath
made all his manifold works.”—Dr Candlish, in “Reason and Revelation,"
pp. 139, 140.
“ Every one declares against blindness, and yet who almost is not fond of
that which dims his sight, and keeps the clear light out of his mind, which
should lead him into truth and knowledge? False or doubtful positions,
relied upon as unquestionable maxims, keep those in the dark from truth
who build on them. Such are usually the prejudices imbibed from educa
tion, party, reverence, fashion, interest, &c. This is the mote which every
one sees in his brother’s eye, but never regards the beam in his own. For
who is there almost that is ever brought fairly to examine his own prin
ciples, and see whether they are such as will bear the trial? But yet this
should be one of the first things every one should set about, and be scrupul
ous in, who would rightly conduct his understanding in the search of truth
and knowledge.”—John Locke.
�INTELLECTUAL LIBERTY
THE
FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE OF CHRISTIANITY
AND OF PROTESTANTISM.
--------- ♦---------
PROPOSE an experiment. Before reading my
next sentence, I invite those who favour me with
their attention to write down, or to think out, as I
have just now been trying to do, such a general defi
nition and explanation of the word Priest, as shall
*
fairly describe, and apply to, most or all of the dif
ferent varieties of men, to whom the word is appli
cable.
Those who have done so may now compare their
definition with mine, and see whether they at all
agree or totally differ, and whether they contradict
or supplement each other.
The definition which I propose is, that a priest is
an officer or minister of a traditional or authorita
tive, and national or corporate, religious institution;
and, as such, his distinctive mission is to be an
exponent or advocate of a religious system or creed,
I
* “ Our word Priest is corrupted of Presbyter. Our
ancestors, the Saxons, first used Preostre, whence by further
contraction came Preste and Priest. The high and low
Dutch have Priester; the French Prestre; the Italian
Prete; but the Spaniard only speaks full Presbytero.”—
Packardson's English Dictionary.
�4
Reason and the Bible.
inculcating the belief or observance of certain dogmas
or ceremonies, as the fundamental and indispensable
condition of merit, privilege, and welfare, here or
hereafter.
The language of the consistent priest is never—
‘ Come, up hither. Open your eyes, look around, and
behold and judge for yourselves, as I judge for
myself, the goodness, the truth, and the reality, or
the wickedness, the falsehood, and the delusion of
those things to which I shall direct your attention,
and which I shall endeavour to make you understand.’
But his language is, ‘ Stand down. If you wish to be
regarded as a brother, and as a worthy member of
the church or of the community, you must not place
any reliance on the guidance of your own reason in
those matters which I instruct you to regard as
settled by the supreme authority; nor must you take
the liberty to investigate for yourself the evidences
of correctness and reality; but you must be content
to receive, with faithful and entire submission of the
intellect, the doctrines, the ceremonies, or the book,
which I hold out to you authoritatively as the revealed
Will or Word of God; and you must, in like manner,
faithfully accept and adhere to that interpretation or
application of what God has revealed, which has
been sanctioned by the traditions of the institution,
or by the institution itself, whose officer I am, as the
only true interpretation or application thereof, and
therefore as the rule and guide of your belief, wor
ship, and life.’ *
Reason is never invited by the priest to criticize,
test, and candidly weigh the evidence for and against
the authority to which he appeals. That authority
* “ The whole order of the clergy are appointed by God to
pray for others, to be ministers of his priesthood, to be
followers of his advocation, to stand between God and the
people, and to present to God all their needs, and all their
desires. Bishop Taylor, Sermon 6.
�Reason and the Bible.
5
is assumed to be supreme, and therefore above reason,
and beyond the reach of argument, commanding
absolutely the believing assent, with or without the
rational verdict, of all men to whom it comes, and in
some cases not even hesitating to doom, for their
unbelief, those who never heard of it.
*
The one fundamental argument of the priest, on
which his entire system of belief is based, is—Thus
saith the Oracle, or, Thus it is written. The truthful
ness of the oracle or of the writing, as well as of the
priestly or traditional interpretation, is postulated,
not proved. The priest does not profess to have,
but professes not to require, for himself or for
others, such evidence and arguments in support of
what he inculcates, as to secure the ratifying and
approving verdict of the unprejudiced inquiring
mind. His appeal is not primarily to the reason
and conscience of men, but to their prejudices and
emotions, such as those which arise from the influ
ence of traditions and customs, or from habitual
veneration and attachment to some external symbol
or standard of authority, such as a Church, a Pope,
an oracle, an image, or a book. He may, indeed,
welcome with approval, and may even condescend to
employ, a selection of evidences and arguments in sup
port of the supreme authority to which he appeals j
but such support is only regarded at the most as
secondary and subsidiary, and is never represented
by the consistent priest as the primary and essential
basis, on which to found and establish the supremacy
What are they that imbrace the gospell but sonnes of
God ? AV hat are churches but his families ? Seeing there
fore wee receive the adoption and state of sonnes by their ministrie whom God hath chosen out for that purpose, seeing also
that when, we are the sonnes of God, our continuance is still
vnder their care which were our progenitors, what better
title could there bee given them than the reuerend name
of presbyters, or fatherly guidesZfooto- Eccl. Pol.,
b. v., s. 78.
�6
Reason and the Bible.
of his authoritative standard or oracle. To find or
exhibit any evidence or argument against the genuine
ness of this assumed supremacy, is by the priest ac
cordingly denounced as a moral delinquency, a sacri
lege or blasphemy, not to be met with rational
reply and confutation, but to be simply abhorred and
condemned as treason against the Supreme.
The assertion of some supreme external standard
or symbol of authority, being thus the distinc
tive and fundamental doctrine of every priest, it
follows unavoidably that he practically assumes infal
libility for himself, or for the institution whose views
he expresses ; because he requires his assertion to be
believed without being tested, by the submission, and
not by the free action and verdict of reason, and be
cause he ignores or denies the right of reason to
investigate and to weigh impartially the evidence
and arguments on all sides, and so to judge of the
truth or falsehood—the certainty or uncertainty of
the supreme authority asserted by him. It is mani
fest that the supreme authority, thus dogmatically
and authoritatively ascribed to a book or to anything
external and apart from individual reason, not being
based upon the free appreciation of its intrinsic and
demonstrable merits and evidences, is practically
and truly based upon some other assumed authority,
to which reason is required to bow. It is impos
sible to get out of the dilemma, however much
sophistry may be employed to disguise it. The
man who declares to other men that a book or other
external thing is a revelation, and that its autho
rity is above reason, practically claims for himself
infallibility and supreme authority on that point, and,
by necessary logical implication, on all points.
If the supreme authority of the book, or other ex
ternal thing, is based on the manifest or provable
truthfulness and harmony of all that it attests, or
upon the clearness and completeness of all the evi
�Reason and the Bible.
7
dence regarding it, then reason must be invited and
employed to scrutinize its purport and its claims, in
order that these qualities may be ascertained and re
cognised. But if all such rational tests be rejected,
there is only one other ground that can possibly be
taken, and that is an appeal to another external autho
rity for support to the first. The claims of the high
est authority must either rest upon the manifestation
to reason of its evidence and merits, or else upon an
other authority behind it; and, in either case, that
which is appealed to must be at least equal in dignity
to that which it has to sustain. Perfection cannot be
rationally inferred where imperfection is discerned;
neither can infallibility be sufficiently attested by
aught that is fallible, nor supreme authority by aught
that is not itself supreme.
I conceive that thus far these remarks and reflec
tions have been so framed as to be fairly applicable
to the priests of many and widely different religions,
ancient and modern, as well as to those of popular
Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant. But my
readers will, of course, have understood that I have
kept the priests of Protestantism especially in view.
The modern Protestant Christian Churches, though
in many speculative inferences and doctrines widely
differing from each other, are generally understood
and represented as, all alike, asserting, appealing to, and
resting on, the infallibility or supreme authority of
the Bible, while renouncing all pretensions to infalli
bility of their own, as Churches or as men. None of
them, so far as I can learn, has ever ventured formally
to declare that the authority of the Church or of tradi
tion, as embodied in the “ Articles of Religion,” the
“Confession of Faith,” or any other “Ecclesiastical
Standard,” is sufficient to establish, and to impose
upon the human conscience, the duty of believing the
infallibility or supreme authority of the Bible,
or indeed the duty of believing any doctrine
�8
Reason and the Bible.
whatever. On the contrary, it is expressly declared
by every Protestant Church, that no Church is
infallible,—that Synods and Councils have erred,
and are Hable to err, from which the inference is
direct and inevitable, that any doctrine, resting
merely on such authority, ought to be held subject to
the free investigation, reconsideration, and inde
pendent judgment, not only of all succeeding synods
and councils, but of every individual who has light
enough to discern the vast difference, which dis
tinguishes faith in God and in truth from faith in
the faith of other men. And yet, with gross inconsis
tency and self-contradiction, partly in the several
ecclesiastical “ Standards,” but much more glaringly
in the ministrations of very many priests, the idea is
constantly inculcated, and therefore of course it
is widely entertained, that the traditional dogmas
of the Churches are indisputable and infallible, at
least on those points which are considered funda
mental and essential, and especially on this point, viz.
the supreme authority of the Bible; and that it is
blasphemous presumption for any inquirer to subject
their assertion on this point to rational investigation,
and to the free judgment of his individual reason.
*
They who are fallible are continually asserting that
the Bible is the holy, authoritative, infallible, Word
of God; and that no man is at liberty to form a dif* “Orthodoxy, finding itself unsafe in the domains of
argument, flies towards those of moral sentiments ; and just
at the moment when it might be expected to surrender, it
turns sharply round, and boldly charges reason with sin.
This is an alarming charge. Before this moral discovery, we
exerted our reason to the utmost of our power, confident
that we had no spiritual danger to fear : now, most unfortu
nately, we are made to suspect that our sin may be great in
proportion to the power of our arguments. What indeed, in
common language, we call pride, is usually connected with
power, and the existence of the latter is for most people, a
pretty strong presumption of the presence of the former.
It must therefore happen, that, when reason is accused of
�Reason and the Bible.
9
ferent opinion, nor has a right to investigate, nor
freely to discuss the evidence for and against their
assertion-, but that every man is bound to submit his
reason to that supreme authority above reason, which
they assert that the Bible rightfully claims and pos
sesses. Those who do so are driven to employ any
amount of sophistry to conceal from others and per
haps even from themselves the plain logical fact, that
to assert in this absolute way the infallibility or
supremacy of the Bible, and the imperative duty of
human reason bowing to its teaching, is really and
practically to assert the infallibility or supreme au
thority of the Church, or of the man, by whom such
assertion is made.
This absurd and self-condemned position appears
to be at present held, in some degree, by every Pro
testant Church. But far beyond the comparatively
mild and half-concealed absurdity of any Protestant
Confession, very many of those clergymen and clerical
men, who delight to be called “ orthodox,” habitually
state and vindicate this “ Gospel of Unreason ” in all
its barefaced breadth of boldness and inconsistency.
The attempt has indeed been often made, by rea
soning against reason, to reconcile freedom of thought
with intellectual submission to the Bible; “to re
concile Reason and the Bible,” by so displaying and
enhancing all available internal and external evi
dence in support of the Bible, and by so ignoring
pride, the charge will appear .already more than half sub
stantiated, if reason has been too hard for the opponents.
Power of any kind, unless it can reward and punish to a cer
tain degree, is not an enviable possession. I have no doubt
that if a sin, to be called pride of sight, had been as neces
sary to some influential class, as the pride of reason is to
the orthodox parties all over the world; every long and
sharp-sighted man, who wished to live in peace, and avoid
the scandal of discovering things which his neighbours either
could or would not see, would now be obliged to wear
spectacles.”—Observations on Heresy and Orthodoxy, by the
Rev. Jos. Blanco White.
�IO
Reason and the Bible.
and disparaging, or endeavouring to explain away,
all internal and external evidence of an opposite
kind, as to make it appear to many superficial thinkers,
or too willing believers, that the whole is in harmony
with every part, that all its doctrines and statements
are in perfect accordance with the evidence and
with each other, and that all the relative evidence
will bear the strictest investigation, being such as,
when justly weighed, will carry complete conviction
to every honest candid mind, appealing to the serious,
upright exercise of unprejudiced human reason, and
thus meriting and commanding the approving and
ratifying verdict of all but those who are too stupid
or too wicked to give it proper attention.
So long as the belief in the Bible was an honest
and sincere belief, such was the reasoning, variously
illustrated, by which that belief was sustained and
propagated. Such is the language of the- “ Articles,”
and especially of the “ Confession of Faith” :—
Confession i. 5. “ We may be moved and induced by
the testimony of the Church to an high and reverend
esteem of the Holy Scripture, and the heavenliness of the
matter, the efficacy of the- doctrine, the majesty of the
style, the consent of all the parts, the scope of the whole
(which is to give all glory to God), the full discovery it
makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other
incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof,
are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence
itself to be the Word of God.”
Such was the language of the Reformers in the six
teenth century, and of the great Protestant divines
in the seventeenth. Listen to Richard Hooker, one
of the most learned and gifted theological writers of
the post-Reformation period :—
“ Judge you of that which I speak, saith the apostle.
In vain it were to speak anything of God, but that by
reason, men are able somewhat to judge of what they hear,
and by discourse to- discern how consonant it is to truth.
Scripture, indeed, teacheth things above nature, things
�Reason and the Bible.
11
which our reason, by itself, could not reach unto. Yet
those also we believe, knowing by reason that the Scrip
ture is the Word of God............. A number there are who
think they cannot admire as they ought the power and
authority of the Word of God, if in things divine they
should attribute any force to man’s reason ; for which
cause they never use reason so willingly as to disgrace
reason............... By these and the like disputes, an opinion
hath spread itself very far in the world, as if the way to
be ripe in faith were to be raw in wit and judgment; as
if reason were an enemy unto religion, childish simplicity
the mother of ghostly and divine wisdom.”
Or let us consult, upon this subject, William Chil
lingworth, author of the famous work entitled “ The
Beligion of the Protestants a Safe Way to Salvation,”
published in 1637, and of the still more famous say
ing which is so often quoted: “ The Bible, and the
Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants ” :—
“ But you that would not have men follow their reason,
what would you have them follow ? their passions, or
pluck out their eyes and go blindfold ? No, you say ; you
would have them follow authority. In God’s name, let
them : we also would have them follow authority; for it
is upon the authority of universal tradition that we would
have them believe Scripture. But then, as for the authority
which you would have them follow, you will let them see
reason why they should follow it. And is not this to go a
little about—to leave reason for a short turn, and then to
come to it again, and to do that which you condemn in
others ? It being, indeed, A plain impossibility for any
MAN TO ■ SUBMIT HIS REASON BUT TO REASON ; for he that
doth it to authority must of necessity think himself to
have greater reason to believe that authority.”
It is not likely to be denied that these specimens
fairly and fitly represent the distinctive views and
teachings of the Beformers and early Protestant
divines, on reason as the basis of all religious belief,
and on the complete harmony which they conceived
to exist between reason and the Bible. Assuming,
as we well may, that their language is honest and
�12
Reason and the Bible.
sincere, and that they meant exactly what they have
said, it is clear that, as held by them, theirs was a
reasonable faith, and that they did not feel called
upon to settle any visible conflict between the claims
of reason and those of the Bible, nor experience any
difficulty in harmonizing these with each other, and
putting faith in both. Their religious belief was by
them identified with their intellectual conclusion re
garding the authority of the Bible; so that their
utterances on the subject express both the conviction
of their hearts and the rational judgment of their
minds. The same kind of reasoning may even now
be heard from some believers, in whose experience
these two things still go together, and from some
others who wish to make it appear that they find it so.
But the conflict which then slumbered, being
apparently unsuspected by religious men in those
days, has been since then steadily growing in urgency
and importance, exactly in proportion to the increas
ing diffusion of knowledge and general progress of
intelligence, until it has now become difficult to
find an intelligent thinking man who believes, as
the Reformers did, in both Reason and the Bible,
as harmonizing together, and mutually supporting
each other. The conflict has, in recent times, and
especially of late, become so manifest and notorious,
that a profession of faith, in the old alliance or com
promise of the two rival claims, now suggests ignor
ance, imbecility, or wilful deception; and the ordinary
experience of an inquirer is accordingly very different
from what it formerly was, for he finds that the
question fronting him no longer admits of any but
an alternative and one-sided solution ; so that, if he
does not shirk it altogether, and remain indifferent
or in suspense, he must decide for himself whether
his reason shall be subjected to the Bible, or whether
the Bible shall be subjected to his reason.
The reconciliation of the two is a task very seldom
�Reason and the Bible.
13
now undertaken for the public, or accomplished by
individuals for themselves, except by the uninformed,
the shallow-minded/ or the unthinking. Easy-going,
peace-loving clergymen may sometimes still be heard
trying it in the pulpit; but it has almost ceased to
appear in print, the advocates on both sides appear
ing to be nearly unanimous on this one point, that
such an undertaking is now hopelessly difficult, and
that a genuine reconciliation is henceforth impossible,
on any conditions short of the subjection of one
claimant to the supremacy of the other.
It is, therefore, not my purpose to enter here upon
an examination of the various methods of reconcilia
tion which have been suggested. Some of them are
utterly absurd, and even ridiculous; and it is safe to
say that none of them can have any plausibility be
yond what may be purchased by the free employment
of sophistry and assumption, tricks which, until
recent times, were comparatively safe from detection
and exposure, though it is gradually becoming more
difficult and more hazardous to employ them.
One of the latest and ablest attempts of this kind,
that of the late Dean Alford, in his “New Testament
for English Readers,” which may fairly be regarded as
embodying the best and most plausible features of all
previous attempts to effect the desired reconciliation,
has been most skilfully and completely sifted and
exploded in previous pamphlets of this series, which
probably most of my readers have seen, and which
any of them may easily procure.
*
My intention is to deal here only with the plead
ings and pretensions of those more numerous (at
least in Scotland), and in their own way more con
sistent, advocates of the Bible, who apparently do
not believe, as the old Protestant divines and the
* “Commentators and Hierophants,” Parts I. and II.
price Sixpence each. See list on the last page of this
pamphlet.
�14
Reason and the Bible.
Westminster Assembly did, in the possibility and
duty of the reconciliation, and who do not even seem
to desire it, preferring to insist, .as honest true Pro
testants never did, upon the absolute surrender and
submission of Reason to the Bible.
Those who hold the views which these advocates
express have, apparently without knowing it, as
completely departed in one direction from the stand
point of the men of the Reformation, as those who
require the submission of the Bible to Reason have
departed from it in another and opposite direction.
Both parties alike have felt compelled to settle the
question one way or another. Neither party has
found it possible to harmonize the conflicting claims,
nor to find any satisfaction in compromising them.
The one party has decided one way, and the other
another way, that question which the Reformers did
not take up, and did not feel called upon to settle.
Let neither of these parties be deluded with the idea
that they are maintaining the standpoint of the Re
formers with regard to the Bible. That standpoint
was, as they clearly tell us, the then generally admitted
harmony and agreement of Reason and the Bible. If we
only try seriously to imagine such men as the old
Protestant Reformers compelled, as both of the parties
in question have been compelled, to abandon that
standpoint, to acknowledge the irreconcilable anta
gonism of the two, and to take the one side or the
other, by deciding for themselves whether their reason
should submit to be judged by the Bible, or the
Bible to be judged by their reason ; we can scarcely
fail to understand which side ought to be taken by
true Protestants now, and which side savours more of
the old Popish superstition.
It has of late been remarked by many, that, instead
of grappling with, and undertaking to refute, in the
pulpit or in the press, any or all of the really formid
�Reason and the Bible.
15
able and increasing arguments of objectors,—those
who maintain the traditional dogma, that the Bible
is the Word of God, have for some time past, almost
without exception, been timidly affecting to treat
the arguments with silent contempt, while at the
same time treating the persons, by whom these argu
ments are urged, with wrathful condemnation instead
of any reply.
It is usual for them to say that none of these
arguments or objections are new, which, nevertheless,
some of them are, though surely age alone is no dis
honour ; and that they have all been, long ago, hun
dreds of times, satisfactorily answered. The ex
planation of which appears to be, that when the
minds of men were more easily satisfied with such
answers as might still be given, there was no lack of
satisfactory answers. Whether this sufficiently ex
plains it or not, the phenomenon is notorious, that
the arguments of the objectors are from day to day
becoming more general, more formidable, and more
convincing than ever; while the arguments in reply,
as distinguished from the mere denunciations by the
maintainers, are becoming more and more obsolete,
impotent, and worthless; so much so, that they seem
to have very much escaped the notice or memory of
both parties alike. Unquestionably, however, there
have been, and must have been, plenty of “ sound
orthodox” arguments and replies, which may have
done good service to their employers in their own
day and generation, though these might now have an
effect quite opposed to that which they were formerly
understood to have; because the question now agi
tating men’s minds is comparatively A new question,
to which the old arguments and replies cannot be
easily adapted, having been originally addressed to
the reason; whereas men would now employ them
to reason against reason—a peculiarly delicate task !
There was a time when a very distinguished
�16
Reason and the Bible.
Father of the Church, the earliest distinct witness
for the authenticity of the fourth Gospel, could
argue with acceptance that there must be four Gos
pels, and only four, because—there were four winds,
and four elements, and four beasts in the vision of
Ezekiel! Such an argument is of no use now.
There was a time, not so long ago, when it was
generally considered satisfactory to argue that, as
God’s ancient people were commanded to extirpate
heretics, and to destroy them utterly, so it was
clearly the duty of God’s people still to do the same
thing; and the stake, or the dungeon, or some suffi
cient penalty, was deemed by Catholics and Protes
tants alike, as it had been deemed by the Jews of
old, the most appropriate answer to all sorts of ob
jections. Such arguments are now out of date, at
least in this part of the world.
There has been a time, not yet gone by, though
we may hope that it is now gradually passing away,
when, beyond “ the three mechanical P’s,” the whole
idea of ordinary education has been, to furnish the
mind of the pupil with a complete panoply of stereo
typed ideas and ready-made conclusions, handed
down by tradition, regarding every branch of know
ledge, as well as regarding religion and the Bible.
It is only now, or of late years, that the idea has
begun to prevail, and no doubt is very rapidly
spreading, that, instead of merely cramming the
mind with assertions and dogmas, the far nobler
aim of education ought to be, the instruction and
training of each individual in the separate personal
use of his own mental faculties, by calling these
faculties constantly into exercise upon his own ex
perience and observation, as well as upon all his
lessons and studies, which for children ought to be
selected and directed by teachers or guardians,
having the principle of intellectual liberty rooted
in their hearts, and keeping that principle steadily
in view.
�Reason and the Bible.
17
The foremost educationists are now striving to1
discover the most effectual methods of accustoming
the young mind to think, to reflect, to investigate,
to compare, and to test everything for itself, search
ing everywhere, and always, for truthfulness and
reality, so that it may learn to know and understand
the certainty, or the certain doubtfulness, of every
thing in which it is instructed; and, above all, that
it may, as it ripens, become acquainted with its own
natural inherent right to judge for itself of the good
or evil, the truth or falsehood, the certainty or un
certainty of everything to which its attention may
be directed; of which right, at least in several of its
most important applications, the vast majority of
minds have hitherto been trained in profound prac
tical ignorance, thinly veiled, if veiled at all, by a
few fine-sounding phrases about the reverence or
respect due to this or that authority.
There cannot be a doubt about it, that a great
change in this direction, is coming gradually over
the whole united nation. There is at present a very
distinct prospect and intention of improvement. We
really do seem to be making a fresh start onwards
towards liberty and light. It is indeed both a grand
and a true thing to say, in the prophetic words of
our greatest orator,. John Bright,—“ I think I see,,
as it were, above the hill-tops of time, the glimmer
ing of the dawn of a better day, for the people and
the country that I love so well! ” It may seem rather
sanguine, but no longer seems chimerical, to hope
that even a middle-aged man may live to see the'
children of the people trained, each in the knowledge
and use of his or her birthright as one of God’s chil
dren,—the birthright of liberty,—complete freedom
of reason tod of conscience,—the very liberty which
the “Sons of God ” and “ enlightened ones ” have in
all ages striven, and often sacrificed themselves in
the attempt, to make mankind understand and use
B
�18
Reason and the Bible.
as their own. This is at once the scientific and the
truly Protestant, because truly Christian idea of edu
cation,—the education of the future,—a religious,
moral, and intellectual education.
Surely it would be an evidence of blind delusion,
or else of gross presumption and falsehood, were any
man to say that this aspiration is evil, or to condemn
it with opprobrious epithets as scepticism and infi
delity. It is the result and expression of Faith,—
religious faith in God, in Goodness, and in Truth, as
revealed to the inquiring mind, chiefly through the
contrasts drawn and discerned, between these intel
lectual conceptions on the one hand, and atheism,
idolatry, falsehood, or evil, on the other, by the free
and serious exercise of Reason—God’s gift for man’s
guidance, the conscientious verdict of which may
well be called, figuratively, “the Word of God” to
each individual. As to the duty or advantage of
faith in the faith of other men, whether these men be
the ancient authors of the Bible, or their more un
reasonable modern expounders, call me sceptic, or
infidel if you will:—only let the distinction which is
here drawn be clearly understood.
We may read the 145th Psalm, for example, with
intense appreciation of the sublime religious thought
which its stanzas express, and our minds may well
be filled with admiration and delight, especially when
due emphasis is laid upon the word “ ALL,” which
frequently recurs and appears to be the key-note of
the piece. If there be anything in the Psalm, such as
the phrase at the close of the 19th verse,—“ All. the
wicked will he destroy,”—which may seem to jar against
or contradict the rest, surely we may freely try to
interpret for ourselves the mind of the poet, so as to
harmonize the apparent discord, as by reflecting that
he has just before expressed his faith in God, as good
to ALL, upholding ALL that fall, and raising up ALL those
that be bowed down, and that therefore the meaning
�Reason and the Bible.
19
of what is said about the wicked must be, that God
will destroy or bring to an end all their wicked
ness, and thus raise up all those whom even their
own wickedness has caused to fall or to be bowed
down, so that there shall be no more any wicked.
Such liberties are taken by all commentators on the
Bible, under the guise of interpretation; but in
reality it is putting one set of words in place of
another ; and we may just as consistently altogether
reject the jarring note, either because we may not be
able to harmonize it with the rest, or because we may
find that its acceptance would upset all our ideas of
intellectual and moral perfection of character, as at
tributed to the “ Father of the spirits of all flesh/’ and
that it is therefore incredible or unintelligible to us.
This Psalm in a high degree, like every other lesson
in its own degree, becomes a revelation to our minds,
just in proportion to the clearness and force of the
free judicial verdict, which our reason and conscience
may be thereby stimulated and assisted to arrive at
regarding those matters which, to our minds, it illus
trates, or brings before our view.
Let us never forget, what it is mere priestcraft to
deny, that it is every man’s inalienable right, and his
duty, so far as it may be opportunely in his power,
as a man, as a Christian, and as a Protestant, to in
vestigate, examine, and judge every portion of the
Bible, as well as every other item of his information
and experience, and to arrive at his own individual
conclusions, with entire fulness of mental freedom.
The serious, honest, and deliberate exercise of this
freedom, is at least one true and real meaning of the
figurative phrase,—“ Faith in the Word of God,”__
which is a quite intelligible way of expressing a re
ligious. man’s experience of it ■ as are also the less
figurative phrases,
true wisdom,” “good under
standing,
liberation of the intellect,” “ rational
belief.”
�20
Reason and the Bible.
It is not improbable that some may condemn these
views, or protest against them, as seeming “ to exalt
reason to the place of God;" but the position here
maintained is merely that Reason is the faculty or
instrument with which God has endowed us, by the
proper personal use of which, alone, it is possible for
any of us to convert information and experience into
sound knowledge about anything whatever.
Those who may say that it is “ spiritual pride” and
“presumption” thus to test everything by the verdict
of Reason, ought to be reminded that, in so far as
Reason may be set aside, the only other test which
can possibly be substituted for it is that of our own
sentiments or emotions, such as veneration, esteem,
attachment, or fear; and this ought to make them
pause and reflect, before venturing to affirm that such
things as these ought to control our Reason, instead
of being regulated and controlled thereby; because,
in the clear and strong words of Archbishop Whately,
the humiliation of Reason which they require “ is a
prostration, not of ourselves before God, but of one
part of ourselves before another part; and there is
surely at least as much presumption in measuring
everything by our own feelings, fancies, and preju
dices, as by our own reasonings.” *
It is beyond a question, that there has of late been
a vast increase of open and avowed opposition to the
dogma, that the Bible, in all its parts and in all its
words, is the Word of God; and, though it is of
course less manifest, it is nearly as certain, that doubt,
unbelief, and silent opposition have increased to an
immeasurably greater extent.
It is also perfectly well known, and quite indisput
able, that the argumentative strength of the opposition
has of late been displayed with very much greater
vigour, fulness, and effect than it ever was in this
* Whately’s Notes to Bacon’s Essay on Truth.
�Reason and the Bible.
21
country before ; partly by the production of new evi
dence, criticism, and arguments ; but chiefly by the
more frequent and more extended publication, read
ing, hearing, and especially understanding, of the old.
With regard to the extent of publication, reading,
and hearing, however, it must be admitted that the
advocates of the dogma have hitherto had, and still
have, an immense advantage over their opponents.
Indeed, they may be said to have had, until recent
years, almost the entire influence of the pulpit, the
press, and the school, on their side ; and the rule is
clearly still the same, although the exceptions are
becoming more numerous. It is only in the matter
of understanding that the strength of the opposition
will bear any comparison; and were it not for this,
the Bible party would have no cause for their present
uneasiness and alarm. The assailants of the dogma
are constantly producing evidence and arguments,
which men can understand and feel the force of;
whereas the very few so-called replies, and the very
many assertions and so-called reasonings, of the de
fenders, are either not understood, or else understood
to be powerless.
It would be cumbrous, and it is not my plan, to
introduce here any quotations or reproductions of
the abundant evidence and arguments, which go to
prove that the dogma is false. Most of my readers
are, probably, in some measure acquainted with them;
and I cannot, for the present, do better than refer the
inquirer on this head to Mr Thomas Scott’s series of
publications, a list of which will be found at the end
of this pamphlet, nearly all bearing directly on the
point.
I prefer here to invite attention to the startling
effect, which the recent attacks of the comparatively
few assailants have had upon the attitude of the
vastly more numerous defenders of the dogma, and
to a few brief illustrations of the mode in which these
�22
Reason and the Bible.
attacks are being met, by some of the most zealous
champions of what is called “ orthodoxy.”
I have already observed how remarkably rare has
become the inclination of these champions to deal
with rational argument, and how chary they generally
are about grappling with the arguments of their op
ponents. Among those who are altogether innocent
of reasoning about the matter, are to be found the
most unrestrained shouters of anathema against the
objectors, whose objections they studiously evade.
They bewail the manifest increase of free thought
among their people, attributing all sorts of evil
motives to those who openly profess it, and proclaim
ing that “ God will surely punish" those who deny the
supreme authority of the Scriptures, but neverattempt
ing a word of rational reply or refutation.
Does any one doubt it, or think this exaggeration 1
There is abundance of evidence at hand, from which
only a few selections can here be made. Doubtless,
many of my readers are familiar with it. There is
even a strong probability, though the experiment has
not yet been tried, that, in Scotland at least, and I
suppose not in Scotland alone, the specimens, which
I am to quote, would be pronounced “ sound” and
“ orthodox” by the majority of clergymen of all deno
minations. Not a few might perhaps say that they
exemplify “ a somewhat indiscreet advocacy of the truth,”
or that they are decidedly “rather too orthodox;” but
it is very doubtful, whether any considerable num
ber of those who are included under the name Priest,
as defined in the beginning of this tract, would choose
to characterize these things as they deserve, viz.,, as
arrogant Popish assertions and malignant unchristian
calumnies, irreconcilable with reason, truth, and
evidence.
A lecture, addressed to the Students of Divinity,
at the opening of the Free Church College, Glasgow,
�Reason and the Bible.
in November 1870, by the Rev. Dr Gibson, Professor
of Divinity and Church History, on “ Some Present
Aspects of Religious Opinion,” supplies the following
*
illustrations.
“ The more conscience is enlightened by the religion of
Christ as the Great Prophet of His Church—in other words,
by the Bible, the revelation of His Holy Spirit—the more
do the principles of Christianity find in it an approving
response. Hence Paul says, 2 Cor. iv. 2 : ‘ By manifesta
tion of the truth commending ourselves to every man's con
science in the sight of God;' not to every man’s conscience
or reason as the supreme authority to judge, or—as heralded
by a candidate for notoriety in our city—the absolute and
divine authority of reason, conscience, and love as ‘the only
ground of faith,’ but the absolute authority of God in what
He reveals and commands, and to which reason and con
science are bound to submit. ( If they do not, it is at the
peril of the poor mortal who refuses, and puts his poor
reason and conscience and love, small and variable as his
love is, on a level with the authority of the God of truth
and holiness and love. This manifestation of truth to
every man’s conscience as in the sight of God, so as to
leave him without excuse, can be shown of every one of
the doctrines and precepts of Scripture.”
It is not a little surprising that Dr Gibson should
quote these words of Paul, in support of the dogma
that “ reason and conscience are bound to submit ” to the
doctrines and precepts of Scripture, as to “ the abso
lute authority of God in what He reveals and com
mands.” Why ? Because it is that very dogma
against which Paul is there contending, having just
before called the law of Moses “ the ministration of
death,” which, he says, “ is done away.” In contrast
to the deadness of that law, he proposes, by manifes
tation of the truth, to commend his own doctrine to
every man’s conscience. This sounds wonderfully
like appealing to “the authority of reason, conscience,
and love, as the only ground of faith.” But does not
* Published in the “Watchword,” a Free Church Magazine,
for December 1870, and for January 1871.
�24
Reason and the Bible.
the Professor himself virtually make the same appeal,
when he affirms that the truth of every one of the
doctrines and precepts of Scripture can be manifested
to every man's conscience in the sight of God ? It
becomes merely a question of experimental fact, as to
whether or not the assertion will stand the test of
application. Let it be applied, for example, to the
following passages, selected almost at random:—
Exod. xxxii. 27—“ Thus saith the Lord God of
Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go
in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp,
and slay every man his brother, and every man his com
panion, and every man his neighbour.”
Exod. xx. 13—“ Thou shalt not kill.”
Mai. iii. 6—“ I am the Lord ; I CHANGE NOT."
Gen. vi. 6—“ And it repented the Lord that he had
made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his
heart.”
Exod. xxix. 36—“Thou shalt offer every day a
bullock for a sin-offering for atonement.”
Levit. i. 9—“ And the priest shall burn it all on
the altar to be a burnt sacrifice, an offering made by
fire, of a sweet savour unto the Lord.”
Jer. vii. 21, 22—“Thus saith the Lord. - I
spake not unto your fathers nor commanded them in the
day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt,
concerning burnt-offerings or sacrifices.”
Heb. x. 6—“ In burnt offerings and sacrifices for
sin thou hast had no pleasure.”
Acts x. 34—“ God is no respecter of persons.”
Mai. i. 2, 3—-“Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?
saith the Lord : yet I loved Jacob, and I hated Esau.”
(“ The children being not yet born.”—Rom. ix. 11-13.)
Gal. v. 22—“The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy,
peace, gentleness, goodness, faith.”
Jud. xv. 14, 15—“And the Spirit of the Lord
came upon him, and he slew a thousand men.”
Deut. vii. 16—“Thou shalt consume all the people
�Reason and the Bible.
^5
which the Lord thy God shall deliver thee; thine
eye shall have no pity upon them.
1 Sam. xv. 3—“Now go and smite Amalek, and
utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them
not; but slay both man and woman, infant and
suclclin/j.”
Isa. i. 18—“Come now and let us reason together,
saith the Lord.”
Rom. ix. 18-21—“ Nay but, 0 man, who art thou
that repliest against God 1” &c.
Mat. xxiii. 2, 3—■“ The Scribes and the Pharisees
sit in Moses’ seat: all therefore whatsoever they bid
you observe, that observe and do.”
If Dr Gibson really understands how “ the mani
festation of truth to every man’s conscience, as in the
sight of God, so as to leave him without excuse, CAN
BE shown ” of the many such doctrines, precepts,
and contradictions of Scripture as these, it is surely
most desirable, that he should verify his assertion by
showing the manifestation, because few men are
likely to discover it for themselves.
“ Conscience is a creature, therefore a subject, and not a
sovereign, and is under law. What law, and whence does
it proceed? It must rest in, and proceed from Him who is
its Lord. How, then, does He, or has He expressed it?
“Without entering into abstract discussion, I think I
may affirm that it cannot be in natural conscience as man
now exists in the earth. Why so? Because you cannot
survey it in the light of history, of facts, ancient or modern,
either in the most limited or in the widest range either of
time or place, without coming to the conclusion that its
decisions have been so contradictory as to put ‘ darkness for
light and light for darkness, evil for good and good for
evil, bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.’ What, then,
is the expression of His Lordship? and where is it to be
found ? All Christian men must at once say, in the Law of
the Lord revealed in the Bible. It is plain that conscience,
as a subj ect, cannot have a right to rule above its Creator
and Lord. Equally plain is it that this law, if it can be
found, it must obey; in other words, there must be an au
�q.6
Reason and the Bible.
thority. But that authority must be God himself. As
suming that there is a judgment-day, and that man is
responsible for his belief, one can hardly imagine each
mortal man daring to plead, at the great day, his conscience
to determine the judgment of the Most High. The autho
rity, then, must be the authority of God himself. It can
not be anything short of its Lord.
“ It is to this authority I refer when I affirm that a dread,
and consequently a hatred of authority is one present aspect
of religious opinion.”
The argument, here employed against “natural
conscience,” is perfectly good against those who assert
human infallibility or the supreme authority of any
man’s mind, or of any man’s writings, over the minds
of other men. It is, therefore, perfectly good against
the authority claimed for the Bible. Why so? Be
cause we cannot survey the Bible in the light of his
tory and facts, without coming to the conclusion that
its laws, doctrines, and statements are often so con
tradictory as to put darkness for light and light for
darkness, evil for good and good for evil; as witness
the numberless irreconcilable contradictions, which
abound in many parts of it, and even in the Gospels.
*
Natural conscience or reason, when reasonably exer
cised, enables us to discern errors and contradic
tions, and tn draw lessons of wisdom both from
those of other men and from our own, as well as
from those of the Bible.
That which is “affirmed’' about “ dread, and conse
* For countless contradictions, both, historical and doctrinal,
in the Old Testament, I may refer the inquiring reader to
Mr. F. W. Newman’s “History of the Hebrew Monarchy,”
(published by Triibner and Co., London); and I take this
opportunity of acknowledging that the train of argument,
pursued in my own essay on “ The Finding of the Book,” was
suggested and greatly aided by Mr Newman’s most admirable
and instructive work..
For similar criticism of the New Testament, I would refer
especially to “ The Evangelist and the Divine.”—See list on
last page.
�Reason and the Bible.
o.7
quently hatred of authority,” if not purely imaginary,
would require to be supported by evidence showing
to what class of men it applies; because, as regards
such men as Bishop Colenso, Mr Voysey, the authors
of “Essays and Reviews,” or the large class who
sympathise with them, it would be a quite unfounded
calumny to affirm, that they are influenced by “ dread,
and consequently hatred of authority.” It would surely be
both more charitable and more correct to say, that
discovery and rejection offalse authority, proceeding from
the love of truth and the hatred of falsehood, is one
present aspect of religious opinion.
“ Protestantism is not the right in the sight of God to
hold any opinion which each individual pleases, but the
right and duty of every human being to regulate his belief
by the unerring standard of the Holy Scriptures ; and that
God being Lord, and the alone Lord of the conscience, no
man, or set, or combination of men, may resist his authority.
. . . . God’s Word is a law, distinct, intelligible, and
immediate; whereas any other, under whatever guise or
form—the Church, the Pope, the Reason—is a usurpation
of the rights both of God and man.”
When Dr. Gibson says that, if Church, Pope, or
Reason be set up as a law over the individual conscience,
they usurp the rights both of God and man, he utters
a truth which every free man and noble nature
would die to maintain. But then, Reason in this
connection cannot mean a man’s own reason; for it
must be something external to him, as Church and
Pope are.
Not to dwell upon the commonplace absurdity of
imagining that it is in the power of any individual to
believe what he pleases! the question forcibly suggests
itself,—Shall any man, such as Dr Gibson, or shall
any combination of men, such as a Protestant Church,
presume to come between other men and God, by
holding up before them a book, with the assertion
that all are bound to accept it as the Word of God,
�28
Reason and the Bible.
without any evidence, or without any right on their
part to investigate and weigh all available evidence,
—and that if they allow their reason to decide for
themselves individually, whether such assertion is
truthful, credible, uncertain, or false, they are guilty
of “ a usurpation of the rights both of God and man ?”
It would be well for Dr Gibson to ponder over the
following apostolic words :■—“Hast thou faith? Have
IT Tq thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth
not himself in that thing which he alloweth!” (Rom. xiv.
22.)
“Is it bigotry, fanaticism, ecclesiasticism ? Are these
what we wish to defend and establish, as is asserted by great
men and small men? If such things can be justly applied
to the authority of Holy Scripture, we at once say that they
are what we wish to defend and establish. But the asser
tion, by whomsoever made, is a calumny on us, and a blas
phemy against Holy Scripture.” (!) “ The antidote, we
have seen, is the revealed Word of God—the Holy Scrip
tures, to be received and believed, not on the authority of
any man or Church, but on the authority of God himself,
because it is the Word of God" (/) “speaking to us directly
and immediately as a man speaking to his friend. This is
the sure foundation of all belief. If God does speak in His
works, in the conscience, and, above all, in His written.
Word, which is invariable and ‘ endureth for ever,’—all
with His own mouth, or, which is the same thing, by His
own Spirit in His Word, man must listen and obey ; and it
is impious and at man’s peril if he disobey, reason or prate
about inner light or inner consciousness, or spirit of the age,
or public opinion, as he may. Of all the delusions into
which the weak and inexperienced are so apt to fall, none is
greater than that of imagining that running with the tide
is a proof of deep thought, of deep learning, or high courage
and independence. It is the very reverse—a proof of a
weak and slavish spirit that is afraid to stand by the truth
and abide the frown or sneer of men of no higher authority
than itself. Think for yourselves, gentlemen, as against
man ; but beware of thinking for yourselves as against
God.”
In reply to Dr Gibson’s questions, it is sufficient to
�Reason and the Bible.
29
observe that bigotry signifies stubborn adherence to an
unreasonable opinion, and that what he says about
“ blasphemy ” sounds wonderfully like fanaticism, or
excessive and indiscreet zeal.
It would be a grand good thing if all who heard,
and all who may read, the last quoted sentence, would
act upon the advice there given, by thinking for
themselves as against Dr Gibson, or as against any
man who may, like him, dictate dogma in their hear
ing. Scarcely even Dr Gibson will venture to say
that those who do so are therein guilty of thinking
forthemselves “as against God!” On the contrary
it will be, and has been, in many cases, found by in
quirers, that for them to acknowledge all the words
of the Bible to possess the authority of God, would in
volve on their part the quenching or resisting of that
“ Word of God,” which constantly addresses itself to
their reason and conscience in the Books of Creation
and Providence, as well as in the Books of Experience
and History, both past and present, including, of
course, the experience and history of which the Bible
is the vehicle. Just in so far as all these “ Books ”
are observed and studied, will the “Word of God”
which men are often compelled to hear and to obey
even when not listening for it, which can be heard
nowhere but in the reason and conscience of the indi
vidual, and which Dr Gibson also professes to recog
nise, be understood, and its authority be recognised
and acknowledged by Reason.
“ Running with the tide,” as the Professor phrases it,
is, in itself, neither a proof of deep thought and high
courage, nor of the reverse; but is a propensity of
our nature, so strong that good men, and even great
men, have often been led astray by it. In fact it is
much more than probable that this very propensity
restrains many at the present time from thinking
freely, and from saying what they think, about the
Bible. The frown, and sneer, and social intolerance
�3°
Reason and the Bible.
of orthodox people are still powerful enough to be
really dreaded by dependent or timid “ freethinkers;”
for there is no lack of evidence, to prove, that those
bolder ones who do venture to think and to speak
freely, against the unreasonable assertions of the
advocates for the supremacy of the Bible over Rea
son, are not yet “ running with the, tide." It cannot
be denied, however, that there are some signs of
the approaching turning time.
Throughout the whole lecture, there is not the
slightest allusion to evidence, either for or against
the dogma. It would, indeed, appear that, according
to Dr Gibson, all evidence is quite superfluous and
useless or worse; for there is not one single argument
employed by him in support of his dogma, which
does not openly and avowedly rest upon that dogma
itself, as in the passages quoted, and these are the
strongest and most argumentative which I have been
able to select.
It would be amazing, and almost incredible, if it
were not elsewhere so common, to find that an expe
rienced Professor of Church History, and a leading
minister of the Free Church of Scotland, should have,
on such an important occasion, nothing better to say
in support or defence of the dogma which he calls
“ the foundation of all belief," than a mere set of varia
tions upon the words—It is, and it is, and it is, and
you must believe and say that it is, and must never
allow yourself to think that it is not, because it is !
only because it is !
The fair inference from Dr Gibson’s language is,
that he identifies his own opinion with . Revelation.
To dictate dogma, without appealing to evidence, and
without condescending to rational argument upon the
evidence, is to assume infallibility. Dr Gibson mani
festly assumes either that he himself is infallible, or
that he is expressing the opinion of some other
(assumed) infallible man or men, when, regardless of
�Reason and the Bible,
31
evidence and in defiance of reason, he merely asserts
that the Bible is the Word of God. He seems to be
quite unconscious of the absurdity of a Protestant
Divine making his whole system of doctrine rest
upon an assumption of infallibility.
It appears too clearly that the faith professed and
taught by Dr Gibson, and by that very large class of
clerical men whom he may be taken as representing,
is of a radically different kind from that which Jesus
taught his disciples, when he opened, as it is written,
the eyes of their understandings by arousing, instruct
ing, and stimulating them to the consciousness, the
exercise, and the enjoyment of their own duty, right,
and power to judge and to decide by Reason what
they ought to believe, and what they ought not to
believe. Having learned of Jesus, they could no
longer submit their Reason, as they had for many
generations been taught to do, to the traditions and
superstitions of their forefathers and of their priests;
but burst away from the mental yoke of bondage to
these traditions, to these priests, and to the supreme
authority of their old written creed or law, with all
its sacrifices of blood and burnt flesh, to pacify the
wrath and propitiate the favour of a jealous and ter
rible God, whom the law represented as requiring
such sacrifices and delighting in them. We read
that the words of Jesus were quick and powerful,
and that men were astonished at his doctrine, for
that he taught as one having authority, appealing with
all the force of Truth to the hearts and to the minds
of those who understood what he said; and not as the
scribes, who appealed only to chapter, and verse, and
word of their sacred books. Let it be remembered
that the Scribes and Pharisees were not ignorant nor
wicked men, but were the educated, the respectable,
the orthodox, and the synagogue-attending class of
their day, who stood up for the authority of “ God’s
Word ” as opposed to Reason. But the spirit of Jesus
�^2
Reason and the Bible.
they could neither bind nor subdue, though they could
put himself to death; and accordingly we read
that those who became disciples of Jesus were made,
free by the power of the Truth—that they passed
from darkness to marvellous light—from bondage to
liberty—spiritual liberty—mental liberty—the glori
ous liberty of the children of God, whom they ad
dressed, after the example of their elder brother, as
“ Our Father,” worshipping Him only, not with the
signs and symbols of slavish fear and dread, such as
the shedding and sprinkling of blood; but in spirit
and in truth, in confidence and love, as became the
“ Sons of God." There is reason to fear the disciples
of men like Dr Gibson can have little of that exper
ience, which the disciples of Jesus appear so fully to
have enjoyed.
I have already shown that the unreasonable faith
of modern popular Christianity is essentially different
from the orthodox Christian faith of the true prophets
of Protestantism, which was based upon their convic
tion of the entire harmony and agreement of the
Word of God and reason, so that the one voice could
not contradict the other, and so that conflict between
the two, or subjection of the one to the other, was for
them entirely out of the question, liberation and not
submission being then, as always, the experience of
those who listened to the “ still small voice,” and
obeyed the Word of God.
Most of us can now understand that the Reformers
made a critical mistake, in assuming or fancying, as
they manifestly did, that the Bible quite harmonized
with Reason, and that there could be no real conflict
between them, any more than there could be a real
conflict between Reason and the “ Light of Nature,"
which they also recognised as another Word of God.
But we can also understand that they did not err cul
pably, as we judge their opponents to have erred.
They certainly cannot be charged with wilful blindness,
�Reason and the Bible.
33
nor did they ever proclaim the duty of believing the
Bible without investigation, which, on the contrary,
they thought it safe to challenge and invite, by for
mally stating the rational grounds on which their own
belief was based. That to which their reason sub
mitted was tried, judged, and approved by their reason.
Their reason submitted to itself, that is to its own in
terpretation of every Word of God; and all other
submission of Reason those noble men and true pro
phets cast behind them with scorn, as the genuine
disciples and followers of “ the Prophet of Nazareth ”
always have done; for, “ where the Spirit of the
Lord is, there is Liberty.”
The grand distinction, between them and the advo
cates of the Roman Catholic creed, was this very
point. The one party insisted upon the submission of
Reason to that which Reason was forbidden to test
and could not approve. The other party maintained
that:—
Confession of Faith, xx. 2—God alone is Lord of the
conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and
commandments of men which are in any thing contrary to
his word, or beside it, in matters of faith and worship.
So that to believe such doctrines, or to obey such com
mandments out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of
conscience; and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an
absolute and blind obedience, is to destroy liberty of conscience,
and reason also.'"
Strange, indeed, it is to find, that the old Popish,
Jewish, and heathen error, the root of all errors and
superstitions,—that Reason is bound to submit to
authority not approved by Reason, has grown up
again, in a new shape, in the churches which call
themselves Protestant.
While such theology is taught and published by
doctors and professors, reputed highly orthodox, in
high places of the Church, it is perfectly notorious
that, from very many pulpits throughout the land,
C
�24
Reason and the Bible.
the same kind of doctrine is preached, which has
been well called, “ the, Gospel of Unreason." . My own
observation and experience of this preaching are of
course local and limited; but, judging from what I
read and hear, I infer that it is exceedingly common,
and by no means confined to one Church, nor to one
part of Great Britain.
It is probable, therefore, that many of my readers
may have often heard such specimens as the following,
which are supplied by pencil-jottings of sermons,
recently taken in the pews by myself and friends in
whom I have confidence. They are all genuine and
unadorned.
“ Every word of this blessed book, brethren, is
God’s message to us. It is to us individually that
Jehovah there speaks.” . . . “ If we would profit by
the Word of God, we must mix faith with the hearing
and the reading of it. We must believe that every
word of it is true, simply on God’s own authority.”
. . . “ God requires of us a child-like unquestion
ing submission to the divine authority of the Bible,
and a willingness to hear the voice of God in all
that the Bible says to us.” . . . “ A sense of God’s
authority in the Bible, and unquestioning submission
to that authority, is the best evidence of true. Chris
tianity.” . . . “ An atheist is one who denies the
existence of God; an infidel is one who does not
believe that the Bible is the Word of God; and
there is not much difference between the two, for he
who does not believe that the Bible is God’s Word,
does not believe in the God of the Bible.” . . .
11 Beware of hardening your hearts against the Word
of God, which speaks to us in every sentence of the
Bible.” . . “ Before a man can resist the authority
of God speaking to us in the Bible, there must be a
process of hardening the heart, quenching conviction,
and self-deception, by false expectations of safety in
some other way than that which the Bible reveals.”
�Reason and the Bible.
35
... “I believe that opposition and hatred to the
justice of God as revealed in the Bible, the desire to
quiet the accusations of a guilty conscience, and to
get rid of the fear of punishment which the Bible
tells them their sins deserve, are the true reasons
why men begin to question the authority of the
Bible.” . . . “ Those who deny this authority would
not be convinced, even although the most convincing
arguments were presented to them. All their objec
tions and outrageous views have been again and
again refuted. It is in the heart and not in the
head that their opposition has its seat.” ... “If
scenes such as the miraculous deaths of Ananias and
Sapphira were to occur in our own day, would they
not make some of us tremble ! Many an awful sight
would be seen at our communion tables, if those who
come there, and eat and drink damnation, were to be
struck down, as Ananias and Sapphira were. Theirs
was a miraculous death ; and it may appear to some
unreasonable, that Peter should thus have had the
power to deal so terribly with them. But, my
brethren, beware of limiting the power and the
sovereignty of the Most High. Though it may be
unreasonable, it is none the less true—none the less
a miracle. Woe unto the man that disputeth with
his Maker—Almighty God ! ”
I refrain from any particular criticism of these
rash assertions and uncharitable thoughts, to which
the thinking reader will easily apply most of my
remarks on Dr Gibson’s lecture • but that in
quirers may be enabled to judge of the true name
by which to designate the teaching of these too
zealous advocates of the Bible, I subjoin the follow
ing sentences from very high authorities in the
Roman Catholic Church.
*
* All quoted, with Latin originals and particular references,
in “ The Moral Theology of Liguori,” by Pascal the Younger,
London, 1856, pp. 43, 140, 196, 47.
�26
Reason and the Bible.
St Ignatius, the founder of the J esuits, says in his
“Epistle on the Virtue of Obedience,” A.D. 1553,
“ If you would immolate your whole self wholly unto
God, you must offer to Him not the bare will merely,
but the Understanding also.” . . . “The noble
simplicity of Blind Obedience is gone, if in our
secret breast we call in question whether that which
is commanded be right OR WRONG. This is what
makes it perfect and acceptable to the Lord, that the
most excellent and most precious part of man is
consecrated to Him, and nothing whatsoever of him
kept back for himself.”
To show how this principle is applied, Cardinal
Wiseman says, in his preface to “ The Exercises of
St Ignatius —“In the Catholic Church no one is
ever allowed to trust himself in spiritual matters.
The Sovereign Pontiff is obliged to submit himself
to the direction of another in whatever concerns his
own soul.”
To this may be added from the “Exercises —
“ That we may in all things attain the truth, that we
may not err in anything, we ought ever to hold it as
a fixed principle, that what I see white I believe to
be black, if the hierarchical Church so define it.”
It may be instructive, as I am quoting, to take a
specimen of what these outspoken priests have said
about liberty of conscience. Pope Gregory XVI., in an
encyclical letter, dated August 1832, says:—“It is
from that most fetid fountain, indifferentism, springs
the absurd and mistaken notion, or rather raving of
madness, that liberty of conscience is to be recog
nised and vindicated. What has prepared the way
for this most pestilential error is, that ample and
immoderate liberty of opinion which is spreading
far and wide, to the ruin of Church and State,
though there are some men who, out of most con
summate impudence, maintain it is an advantage to
religion. This is the aim of that worst of all liberties,
�Reason and the Bible.
37
that never-enough-to-be-execrated and detestable
liberty of the press (Awe spectat det&rrima ilia ac
nunguam satis execranda et detestabilis libertas artis
librarian ad scripta gucelibet edenda in vulgus), which
some dare so loudly to demand, and even promote.
We are most horribly affrighted {Perhorrescimus'),
venerable brethren, when we see with what monsters
of doctrine, with what portents of evil we are over
whelmed (pbruamur)."
Nearly everything that can be said or thought
against this truly horrible presumption, which ignores
and hushes up, and utterly disregards or sternly con
demns all but its own one-sided kind of evidence or
argument, will be found, on reflection, easily and
equally applicable to such lectures and sermons as
those of which I have given specimens.
Is it not clear that this very same old SPIRIT OF
Popery, with only a slight alteration of form and
expression, has again got possession of our Protestant
pulpits and schools, and that much of the Reforma
tion work will have to be done over again, before we
can expect to get rid of its present unwholesome
superstitious influence in many branches of the
Church 1
The root and essence of Popery, and of all false
religion, the foundation of all superstitious belief, is
the submission of man’s Reason to some external
standard or symbol of “ Authority above Reason.”
The root and essence of true Christianity, of true
Protestantism, and of all true religion, the founda
tion of all rational belief, is the free exercise of Rea
son, liberation of the intellect, liberty of conscience,
private judgment.
These two kinds of religion or belief are as dis
tinctly opposed to each other, as are the two prin
ciples or foundations on which they respectively rest;
and there is no possibility of reconciling them, nor of
finding any tenable middle way or halting place
�28
Reason and the Bible.
between the two ; for all things are full of progress,
and the increase, as a general rule, is according to
the kind. The distinction, moreover, is not merely
such as there is between two opposite positions, but
rather such as there is between two opposite direc
tions; and no man can be travelling simultaneously
towards both the rising and the setting of the equi
noctial sun.
“All worship is idolatry,” says the great thinker,
Thomas Carlyle, the meaning of which appears to be
that every man who worships the Infinite or the
Unseen, worships his own symbol or conception of
the Infinite or the Unseen, which can in no case be
what the Infinite and Unseen is, so that the likeness
or unlikeness of the symbol-—the truth or the false
hood of the conception—can only be relative and
comparative terms, no possible symbol or conception
being absolutely, perfectly appropriate or true. But
he adds,—“Blameable idolatry is insincere idolatry,”
the meaning of which evidently is that, when doubts
have to be stifled, because the only possible solution
of them is unbelief,—when the voice of Reason is
disregarded, that another voice may be obeyed, which
Reason may not test, and therefore cannot approve,
—then begins false worship or blameable idolatry.
So long as there is no conflict between Reason and
Authority,—between the conscience and the Idol, the
worship may be reasonable and sincere, the idolatry is
not blameable, for “ where there is no law there can be
no transgression of the law.” But, so soon as the
conflict arises,—so soon as the antagonism is known
and felt by any individual, all true worship of the old
symbol or conception is at an end for him. Carelesslessness, indifference, and mental sloth may, for a
time, swell the ranks of neutrality; but every serious,
thoughtful mind is, in such circumstances, unable to
rest until it has made the choice, by deciding between
the rival claims of Reason and Conscience on the one
�Reason and the Bible.
39
hand, and of Authority, Tradition, or the Idol, on
the other.
Such is the time in which it is our lot to live.
The conflict has arisen, and has come to such a height,
that it is, now and henceforth, difficult for any think
ing man not to know and feel the antagonism between
the rival claims for supremacy of Reason and the
Bible. Every serious mind is now again being chal
lenged and compelled to make a choice, by determ ining whether the supreme authority of the Bible shall
be maintained by the submission of Reason, or
whether the supreme authority of Reason shall this
time again triumph over the worship of an Idol, con
demned by Reason, over the asserted and assumed
divinity and authority of a book, said to be the Word
of God, but with which Reason does not and cannot
harmonise, as Reason can and does harmonise with
every true Word of God.
The startling fact, to which men are day by day
awakening, is, that this question between Reason and
the Bible, which is at present challenging the verdict
of every inquiring religious mind, is just the very
same old question in a new form, as that which men
were invited, and many constrained, to settle for
themselves individually, at the time when the first
clear light of Christianity shone upon the supersti
tious gloom of J ewish and heathen traditional beliefs,
and again at the time when the dawn of the Protes
tant Reformation broke forth amidst the darkness of
Popish unreasonableness and intellectual submission
to authority. The love of truth and of humanity is
now again constraining men here and there to stand
forth, as of old, against dogmatism and superstition,
and against the antiquated and obstructive idea, that
those who ought to be the leaders and guides of the
people in ascertaining whatever is truest and best,
should be bound by oaths and bribed by emoluments
to maintain the existing fabric of opinion and custom.
�40
Reason and the Bible.
Not from Christianity, nor from Protestantism, have
we received “ the spirit of bondage again to fear.’
Why should not our religious teachers be, as our
scientific teachers are, free to follow evidence, truth,
a,nd fact, wherever these may lead, no matter what
existing theory or practice may thus be imperilled or
overthrown ? Why should they not stir up the gift
of God which is in them, as the Apostle Paul says to
the young preacher, “ for God hath not given us the
spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a
sound mind ? ” Fear cannot enlighten the mind, nor
enlarge and strengthen the understanding—cannot
elevate the emotions, nor purify the affections—can
not subdue the will, even when it forces compliance
or assent—cannot convince the reason, although it
may stifle inquiry and discussion. There may be
much internal rebellion, even where there is so much
external submission and conformity as may be thought
necessary for safety or for comfort. Every one knows
that this is a common fact of daily observation, not
only in religion, but also in politics and in family
affairs. But surely it is the very height of folly to
imagine that we can propitiate or please the Father
of our spirits by being afraid to think. Surely it is
gross superstition to be deterred, by dread of .His
displeasure, from the freest, fullest, upright, serious
exercise of reason. “ If anything is clear,” says an
American writer, “ it is, that faith is large in pro
portion as it dares to put things to the proof. Fear
and laziness can accept beliefs ; only trust and cour
age will question them. To reject consecrated opi
nions demands a consecrated mind; at all events,
the moving impulse to such rejection is faith—faith in
reason ; faith in the mind’s ability to attain truth ;
faith in the power of thought—in the priceless worth
of knowledge. The great sceptic must be a great
believer. None have so magnificently affirmed as
those who have audaciously denied ; none so devoutly
trusted as they who have sturdily protested.”
�Reason and the Bible.
4i
It is not unusual for Bible advocates to declare
that they cannot reason at all with those who deny
the infallibility and supreme authority of the Bible,
because they cannot reason, say they, about that to
which reason is bound to submit, and on which all
reasoning must be based. To dispute or to deny the
supremacy of the Bible is, according to these men,
the same thing as to dispute or to deny the supremacy
of God. They apparently do not see the obvious
fact, that such a declaration is equivalent to a claim
of infallibility for themselves or for their own opinion
that the Bible is infallible : or else they would never
presume to say, that to contend against their opinion
about a book is to contend against God. Can they
not understand that, even though their assertion
about the Bible were clearly and unmistakably set
forth in the Bible itself, which, however, it assuredly
is fiot, it would still be inexcusably absurd to main
tain, that doubt or distrust of God is shown by those
who express their doubt or distrust of any of the
matter recorded in the Bible by the hands of men 1
It seems almost incredible that any intelligent mind
should fail to perceive the obvious, wide, and essential
distinction between these two kinds of doubt or
distrust; but yet it is too well known to need proof,
that many of our teachers think, or at least say, that
these two different things are the same, and both
alike criminal. Who has not heard or read thenstupid declarations, that to trace and exhibit the
various marks of human ignorance, error, and im
perfection, which abound in the Bible as in other
ancient books, is God-dishonouring blasphemy, which
He will surely punish ! No less weak and absurd
would it be for any free-thinking man to be cowed
into submission, or even into deference, by such un
reasonable and presumptuous assertions as these,
than it would be for an educated European to be
similarly influenced by the candid and common
�42
Reason and the Bible.
assertion of an orthodox Chinese, expressing his en
tire confidence in the certainty and truth of his
traditional belief, that the people, customs, and
opinions of the “ Celestial Empire ” are incomparably
superior to all others, and that all men of the Euro
pean persuasion are “ outside barbarians and devils.”
What, then, it is asked, is the use of the Bible 1
Why should it not be utterly abolished 1 If it is not
infallible, it is not to be trusted ; and if it is not to
be trusted, it can hardly fail to mislead ; therefore,
it ought to be destroyed. Freethinkers are often
told that, if they would be consistent, they should
argue thus, and should set the example by throwing
their own Bibles in the fire. I myself have been
thus addressed by “ orthodox ” clergymen, and have
been misrepresented by others as if I argued thus.
It might suffice to reply that the same argument,
if sound, would condemn all the treasures of litera
ture to the flames. The Bible is not infallible;
therefore, it ought to be destroyed. No other book
is infallible; therefore, all other books ought to be
burnt. From Homer to Tennyson, from Herodotus to
Froude, from Plato to Mill, from Aristotle to Hux
ley, from Zoroaster to Dr Cumming,—poets, histo
rians, philosophers, men of science, and divines have
all been fallible, and often in error, whatever pre
tensions to the contrary may have been set up by
themselves or by their admirers ; therefore, destroy
the works of them all, so that none may henceforth
be misled thereby ! Obliterate all the records of the
past, so that we and our children may .be free from
the dangerous influence of past delusions and mis
takes; because in none of these records can be found
perfection or infallibility.
The argument thus refutes itself, and the refutation
applies especially to the Bible. Books, old or new,
are valuable and useful just in proportion as they
�Reason and the Bible.
43
enable the student to profit by the varied experience,
culture, and progress, and even by the errors and
failures of other men. Modern thought and educa
tion, from the village school to the highest walks of
learning, are the still progressive fruits of accumu
lated ages •, and books have, ever since their first
employment, been the safest and most effectual vehicle
for the transmission and propagation thereof from one
age to another.
But let authority set the seal of assumed infallibi
lity upon any one book, and its usefulness will be at
once greatly impaired, if not entirely destroyed. In
stead of a help, it will soon become a hindrance, and
so it is now with the Bible. By the dogmatic ascrip
tion of infallibility and supreme authority, equally
and indiscriminately, to the whole of its contents, it
has come to be regarded through a mystic veil or
cloud of superstition. The intrinsic, direct, and selfevident inspiration of some portions has been de
graded and obscured, by placing these on the same
level with those of an entirely different and even
opposite character; the inspiration of the latter being
assumed and asserted to be no less an authoritative
fact, though neither self-evident, intrinsic, nor direct,
as judged by the free-thinking mind. The undeniable
majesty, truth, and beauty of very many passages are,
by this arbitrary interposition of traditional dogma,
confounded by reduction to equality with the weak
ness, meanness, or repulsiveness of others, which, but
for such interposition, reason would now universally
judge to be evil or incredible. The intellect and
moral conscience of men are stunted, distorted, and
hindered in their growth, by external authority train
ing and constraining one faculty of the mind to usurp
the province of another—by subjecting reason to the
religious sentiment—or, in other words, by cultivating
superstition.
The great value, interest, and use of the Bible, far
�44
Reason and the Bible.
from "being negatived or even impaired, are, in fact,
only discovered or vastly enlarged, when it is ap
proached as a venerable record of human thought,
experience, trial, and progress—the divinely appointed
education of mankind. The study of past errors,
faults, and failures is not less useful nor less instruc
tive than that of past wisdom, worth, and success.
Both alike are “ profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
for correction, and for instruction in righteousness
__ « for WHATSOEVER THINGS WERE WRITTEN AFORE
TIME were written for our learning, that we through
patience and comfort of the Scriptures might have
hope” of better times to come for us and for
humanity.
TURNBULL AND SPEARS, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH.
�
Dublin Core
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Title
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Victorian Blogging
Description
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A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
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Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
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2018
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Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
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Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Intellectual liberty: the fundamental principle of Christianity and Protestantism
Creator
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Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: Ramsgate
Collation: 44 p. ; 18 cm.
Notes: From the library of Dr Moncure Conway. Printed by Turnbull and Spears, Edinburgh. Date of publication from KVK.
Publisher
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Thomas Scott
Date
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[1871]
Identifier
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G5516
Subject
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Christianity
Protestantism
Rights
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<a href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><span> </span><br /><span>This work (Intellectual liberty: the fundamental principle of Christianity and Protestantism), identified by </span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk"><span>Humanist Library and Archives</span></a><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
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application/pdf
Type
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Text
Language
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English
Bible-Evidences
Christianity
Conway Tracts
Faith and Reason
Protestantism
Reason