"It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford had expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would have read his book? Where would have been that influence in the direction of truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent during the last twenty years? As it was, the freedom with which the Dean wrote was the cause of no inconsiderable scandal. Or, again, he may not have been fully conscious of his own position: few men are; he had taken the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct than by conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectual faculties. Finally, compromise is not a matter of good policy only, it is a solemn duty in the interests of Christian peace, and this not in minor matters only--we can all do this much--but in those concerning which we feel most strongly, for here the sacrifice is greatest and most acceptable to G.o.d. There are, of course, limits to this, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in the present instance, but it is very transparent. The narrowness which leads the author of The Jesus of History to strain at such a gnat is the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of our Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of the life and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion."
It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have shown himself so little able to apply his own principles. He seems to have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting spirits--at one time writing as though there were nothing precious under the sun except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing fire and smoke against even very trifling deviations from the path of exact criticism--at another, leading the reader almost to believe that he disregarded the value of any objective truth, and speaking of endeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively contemptuous.
Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to forget the possibility of any other; so much so that I have sometimes thought that he did this deliberately and for the same reasons as those which led Adam Smith to exclude one set of premises in his Theory of Moral Sentiments and another in his Wealth of Nations. I believe, however, that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother was inclined to underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth of any other individual features in the life of our Lord than his Resurrection and Ascension. All else seemed dwarfed by the side of these events. His whole soul was so concentrated upon the centre of the circle that he forgot the circ.u.mference, or left it out of sight.
Nothing less than the strictest objective truth as to the main facts of the Resurrection and Ascension would content him; the other miracles and the life and teaching of our Lord might then be left open; whatever view was taken of them by each individual Christian was probably the one most desirable for the spiritual wellbeing of each.
Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatly value the detail. Provided these facts were so established that they could never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the less detail the broader and more universally acceptable would be the effect. Hence, when Dean Alford"s notes seemed to jeopardise the evidences for these things, he could brook no trifling; for unless Christ actually died and actually came to life again, he saw no escape from an utter denial of any but natural religion. Christ would have been no more to him than Socrates or Shakespeare, except in so far as his teaching was more spiritual. The triune nature of the Deity--the Resurrection from the dead--the hope of Heaven and salutary fear of h.e.l.l--all would go but for the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would remain except a sense of the Divine as a subst.i.tute for G.o.d, and the current feeling of one"s peers as the chief moral check upon misconduct. Indeed, we have seen this view openly advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in the very plainest terms. My brother did not live to see it, but if he had, he would have recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies as to what must be the inevitable sequel of a denial of our Lord"s Resurrection.
It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carried away by a "pet theory." Where light and definition were essential, he would sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous for his highest light, and felt "that the whole effect of the Christian scheme was indefinitely heightened by keeping all other lights subordinate"--this at least was the ill.u.s.tration which he often used concerning it. But as there were limits to the value of light and "finding"--limits which had been far exceeded, with the result of an unnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of garishness and unreality--so there were limits to the as yet unrecognised preciousness of "losing" and obscurity; these limits he placed at the objectivity of our Lord"s Resurrection and Ascension. Let there be light enough to show these things, and the rest would gain by being in half-tone and shadow.
His facility of ill.u.s.tration was simply marvellous. From his conversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted with all manner of arts and sciences of which he knew little or nothing.
It is true, as has been said already, that he had had some practice in the art of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the masterpieces of Raphael, t.i.tian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; but he could never have been called a painter; for music he had considerable feeling; I think he must have known thorough-ba.s.s, but it was hard to say what he did or did not know. Of science he was almost entirely ignorant, yet he had a.s.similated a quant.i.ty of stray facts, and whatever he a.s.similated seemed to agree with him and nourish his mental being. But though his acquaintance with any one art or science must be allowed to have been superficial only, he had an astonishing perception of the relative bearings of facts which seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the range of one another, and of the relations between the sciences generally; it was this which gave him his felicity and fecundity of ill.u.s.tration--a gift which he never abused. He delighted in its use for the purpose of carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of another, but I never remember to have heard him mistake ill.u.s.tration for argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating but irrelevant simile. The subtlety of his mind was a more serious source of danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by it in comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of distinctions was so fine that it would sometimes distract his attention from points of infinitely greater importance in connection with his subject than the particular distinction which he was trying to establish at the moment.
The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retaining the unhistoric pa.s.sages of Scripture. Would he wish to see them sought for and sifted out? Or, again, what would he propose concerning such of the parables as are acknowledged by every liberal Churchman to be immoral, as, for instance, the story of Dives and Lazarus and the Unjust Steward--parables which can never have been spoken by our Lord, at any rate not in their present shape? And here we have a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly English good sense. "Do not touch one word of them," was his often-repeated exclamation. "If not directly inspired by the mouth of G.o.d they have been indirectly inspired by the force of events, and the force of events is the power and manifestation of G.o.d; they could not have been allowed to come into their present position if they had not been recognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of indirect service to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by these parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of other and objective truths which they could not else have grasped.
"There can be no question that the communistic utterances of the third gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew"s more spiritual and doubtless more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been of inestimable service to Christianity. Christ is not for the whole only, but also for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and what we are pleased to call "dangerous" cla.s.ses, as well as for the more sober thinkers. To how many do the words, "Blessed be ye poor: for your"s is the kingdom of Heaven" (Luke vi., 20), carry a comfort which could never be given by the "Blessed are the poor in spirit" of Matthew v., 3. In Matthew we find, "Blessed are the poor in spirit: for their"s is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see G.o.d. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of G.o.d. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness" sake: for their"s is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you." In Luke we read, "Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.
Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . . But woe unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did THEIR fathers to the false prophets,"
where even the grammar of the last sentence, independently of the substance, is such as it is impossible to ascribe to our Lord himself.
"The "upper" cla.s.ses naturally turn to the version of Matthew, but the "lower," no less naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely that the ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had not this provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of the Saviour, but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were seen by the Almighty to be necessary for the full development of the highest ideal of which mankind was capable. All that we have in the New Testament is the inspired word, directly or indirectly, of G.o.d, the unhistoric no less than the historic; it is for us to take spiritual sustenance from whatever meats we find prepared for us, not to order the removal of this or that dish; the coa.r.s.er meats are for the coa.r.s.er natures; as they grow in grace they will turn from these to the finer: let us ourselves partake of that which we find best suited to us, but do not let us grudge to others the provision that G.o.d has set before them. There are many things which though not objectively true are nevertheless subjectively true to those who can receive them; and subjective truth is universally felt to be even higher than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty of obeying our consciences (which is the right TO US) rather than any dictate of man however much more objectively true. It is that which is true TO US that we are bound each one of us to seek and follow."
Having heard him thus far, and being unable to understand, much less to sympathise with teaching so utterly foreign to anything which I had heard elsewhere, I said to him, "Either our Lord did say the words a.s.signed to him by St. Luke or he did not. If he did, as they stand they are bad, and any one who heard them for the first time would say that they were bad; if he did not, then we ought not to allow them to remain in our Bibles to the misleading of people who will thus believe that G.o.d is telling them what he never did tell them--to the misleading of the poor, whom even in low self-interest we are bound to instruct as fully and truthfully as we can."
He smiled and answered, "That is the Peter Bell view of the matter.
I thought so once, as, indeed, no one can know better than yourself."
The expression upon his face as he said this was sufficient to show the clearness of his present perception, nevertheless I was anxious to get to the root of the matter, and said that if our Lord never uttered these words their being attributed to him must be due to fraud; to pious fraud, but still to fraud.
"Not so," he answered, "it is due to the weakness of man"s powers of memory and communication, and perhaps in some measure to unconscious inspiration. Moreover, even though wrong of some sort may have had its share in the origin of certain of the sayings ascribed to our Saviour, yet their removal now that they have been consecrated by time would be a still greater wrong. Would you defend the spoliation of the monasteries, or the confiscation of the abbey lands? I take it no--still less would you restore the monasteries or take back the lands; a consecrated change becomes a new departure; accept it and turn it to the best advantage. These are things to which the theory of the Church concerning lay baptism is strictly applicable. Fieri non debet, factum valet. If in our narrow and unsympathetic strivings after precision we should remove the hallowed imperfections whereby time has set the glory of his seal upon the gospels as well as upon all other aged things, not for twenty generations will they resume that ineffable and inviolable aspect which our fussy meddlesomeness will have disturbed. Let them alone. It is as they stand that they have saved the world.
"No change is good unless it is imperatively called for. Not even the Reformation was good; it is good now; I acquiesce in it, as I do in anything which in itself not vital has received the sanction of many generations of my countrymen. It is sanction which sanctifieth in matters of this kind. I would no more undo the Reformation now than I would have helped it forward in the sixteenth century. Leave the historic, the unhistoric, and the doubtful to grow together until the harvest: that which is not vital will perish and rot unnoticed when it has ceased to have vitality; it is living till it has done this. Note how the very pa.s.sages which you would condemn have died out of the regard of any but the poor. Who quotes them? Who appeals to them? Who believes in them? Who indeed except the poorest of the poor attaches the smallest weight to them whatever? To us they are dead, and other pa.s.sages will die to us in like manner, noiselessly and almost imperceptibly, as the services for the fifth of November died out of the Prayer Book. One day the fruit will be hanging upon the tree, as it has hung for months, the next it will be lying upon the ground. It is not ripe until it has fallen of itself, or with the gentlest shaking; use no violence towards it, confident that you cannot hurry the ripening, and that if shaken down unripe the fruit will be worthless. Christianity must have contained the seeds of growth within itself, even to the shedding of many of its present dogmas. If the dogmas fall quietly in their maturity, the precious seed of truth (which will be found in the heart of every dogma that has been able to take living hold upon the world"s imagination) will quicken and spring up in its own time: strike at the fruit too soon and the seed will die."
I should be sorry to convey an impression that I am responsible for, or that I entirely agree with, the defence of the unhistoric which I have here recorded. I have given it in my capacity of editor and in some sort biographer, but am far from being prepared to maintain that it is likely, or indeed ought, to meet with the approval of any considerable number of Christians. But, surely, in these days of self-mystification it is refreshing to see the boldness with which my brother thought, and the freedom with which he contemplated all sorts of issues which are too generally avoided. What temptation would have been felt by many to soften down the inconsistencies and contradictions of the Gospels. How few are those who will venture to follow the lead of scientific criticism, and admit what every scholar must well know to be indisputable. Yet if a man will not do this, he shows that he has greater faith in falsehood than in truth.
CHAPTER III
On my brother"s death I came into possession of several of his early commonplace books filled with sketches for articles; some of these are more developed than others, but they are all of them fragmentary.
I do not think that the reader will fail to be interested with the insight into my brother"s spiritual and intellectual progress which a few extracts from these writings will afford, and have therefore, after some hesitation, decided in favour of making them public, though well aware that my brother would never have done so. They are too exaggerated to be dangerous, being so obviously unfair as to carry their own antidote. The reader will not fail to notice the growth not only in thought but also in literary style which is displayed by my brother"s later writings.
In reference to the very subject of the parables above alluded to, he had written during his time of unbelief:- "Why are we to interpret so literally all pa.s.sages about the guilt of unbelief, and insist upon the historical character of every miraculous account, while we are indignant if any one demands an equally literal rendering of the precepts concerning human conduct? He that hath two coats is not to give to him that hath none: this would be "visionary," "utopian,"
"wholly unpractical," and so forth. Or, again, he that is smitten on the one cheek is not to turn the other to the smiter, but to hand the offender over to the law; nor are the commands relative to indifference as to the morrow and a neglect of ordinary prudence to be taken as they stand; nor yet the warnings against praying in public; nor can the parables, any one of them, be interpreted strictly with advantage to human welfare, except perhaps that of the Good Samaritan; nor the Sermon on the Mount, save in such pa.s.sages as were already the common property of mankind before the coming of Christ. The parables which every one praises are in reality very bad: the Unjust Steward, the Labourers in the Vineyard, the Prodigal Son, Dives and Lazarus, the Sower and the Seed, the Wise and Foolish Virgins, the Marriage Garment, the Man who planted a Vineyard, are all either grossly immoral, or tend to engender a very low estimate of the character of G.o.d--an estimate far below the standard of the best earthly kings; where they are not immoral, or do not tend to degrade the character of G.o.d, they are the merest commonplaces imaginable, such as one is astonished to see people accept as having been first taught by Christ. Such maxims as those which inculcate conciliation and a forgiveness of injuries (wherever practicable) are certainly good, but the world does not owe their discovery to Christ, and they have had little place in the practice of his followers.
"It is impossible to say that as a matter of fact the English people forgive their enemies more freely now than the Romans did, we will say in the time of Augustus. The value of generosity and magnanimity was perfectly well known among the ancients, nor do these qualities a.s.sume any n.o.bler guise in the teaching of Christ than they did in that of the ancient heathen philosophers. On the contrary, they have no direct equivalent in Christian thought or phraseology. They are heathen words drawn from a heathen language, and instinct with the same heathen ideas of high spirit and good birth as belonged to them in the Latin language; they are no part or parcel of Christianity, and are not only independent of it, but savour distinctly of the flesh as opposed to the spirit, and are hence more or less antagonistic to it, until they have undergone a certain modification and transformation--until, that is to say, they have been mulcted of their more frank and genial elements. The nearest approach to them in Christian phrase is "self-denial," but the sound of this word kindles no smile of pleasure like that kindled by the ideas of generosity and n.o.bility of conduct. At the thought of self-denial we feel good, but uncomfortable, and as though on the point of performing some disagreeable duty which we think we ought to pretend to like, but which we do not like. At the thought of generosity, we feel as one who is going to share in a delightfully exhilarating but arduous pastime--full of the most pleasurable excitement. On the mention of the word generosity we feel as if we were going out hunting; at the word "self-denial," as if we were getting ready to go to church. Generosity turns well-doing into a pleasure, self-denial into a duty, as of a servant under compulsion.
"There are people who will deny this, but there are people who will deny anything. There are some who will say that St. Paul would not have condemned the Falstaff plays, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, A Midsummer Night"s Dream, and almost everything that Shakspeare ever wrote; but there is no arguing against this. "Every man," said Dr.
Johnson, "has a right to his own opinion, and every one else has a right to knock him down for it." But even granting that generosity and high spirit have made some progress since the days of Christ, allowance must be made for the lapse of two thousand years, during which time it is only reasonable to suppose that an advance would have been made in civilisation--and hence in the direction of clemency and forbearance--whether Christianity had been preached or not, but no one can show that the modern English, if superior to the ancients in these respects, show any greater superiority than may be ascribed justly to centuries of established order and good government."
"Again, as to the ideal presented by the character of Christ, about which so much has been written; is it one which would meet with all this admiration if it were presented to us now for the first time?
Surely it offers but a peevish view of life and things in comparison with that offered by other highest ideals--the old Roman and Greek ideals, the Italian ideal, and the Shakespearian ideal."
"As with the parables so with the Sermon on the Mount--where it is not commonplace it is immoral, and vice versa; the admiration which is so freely lavished upon the teachings of Jesus Christ turns out to be but of the same kind as that bestowed upon certain modern writers, who have made great reputations by telling people what they perfectly well knew; and were in no particular danger of forgetting. There is, however, this excuse for those who have been carried away with such musical but untruthful sentences as "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted," namely, that they have not come to the subject with unbia.s.sed minds. It is one thing to see no merit in a picture, and another to see no merit in a picture when one is told that it is by Raphael; we are few of us able to stand against the PRESTIGE of a great name; our self-love is alarmed lest we should be deficient in taste, or, worse still, lest we should be considered to be so; as if it could matter to any right-minded person whether the world considered him to be of good taste or not, in comparison with the keeping of his own soul truthful to itself.
"But if this holds good about things which are purely matters of taste, how much more does it do so concerning those who make a distinct claim upon us for moral approbation or the reverse? Such a claim is most imperatively made by the teaching of Jesus Christ: are we then content to answer in the words of others--words to which we have no t.i.tle of our own--or shall we strip ourselves of preconceived opinion, and come to the question with minds that are truly candid?
Whoever shrinks from this is a liar to his own self, and as such, the worst and most dangerous of liars. He is as one who sits in an impregnable citadel and trembles in a time of peace--so great a coward as not even to feel safe when he is in his own keeping. How loose of soul if he knows that his own keeping is worthless, how aspen-hearted if he fears lest others should find him out and hurt him for communing truthfully with himself!
"That a man should lie to others if he hopes to gain something considerable--this is reckoned cheating, robbing, fraudulent dealing, or whatever it may be; but it is an intelligible offence in comparison with the allowing oneself to be deceived. So in like manner with being bored. The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore. He who puts up with shoddy pictures, shoddy music, shoddy morality, shoddy society, is more despicable than he who is the prime agent in any of these things. He has less to gain, and probably deceives himself more; so that he commits the greater crime for the less reward. And I say emphatically that the morality which most men profess to hold as a Divine revelation was a shoddy morality, which would neither wash nor wear, but was woven together from a tissue of dreams and blunders, and steeped in blood more virulent than the blood of Nessus.
"Oh! if men would but leave off lying to themselves! If they would but learn the sacredness of their own likes and dislikes, and exercise their moral discrimination, making it clear to themselves what it is that they really love and venerate. There is no such enemy to mankind as moral cowardice. A downright vulgar self- interested and unblushing liar is a higher being than the moral cur whose likes and dislikes are at the beck and call of bullies that stand between him and his own soul; such a creature gives up the most sacred of all his rights for something more unsubstantial than a mess of pottage--a mental serf too abject even to know that he is being wronged. Wretched emasculator of his own reason, whose jejune timidity and want of vitality are thus omnipresent in the most secret chambers of his heart!
"We can forgive a man for almost any falsehood provided we feel that he was under strong temptation and well knew that he was deceiving.
He has done wrong--still we can understand it, and he may yet have some useful stuff about him--but what can we feel towards one who for a small motive tells lies even to himself, and does not know that he is lying? What useless rotten fig-wood lumber must not such a thing be made of, and what lies will there not come out of it, falling in every direction upon all who come within its reach. The common self- deceiver of modern society is a more dangerous and contemptible object than almost any ordinary felon, a matter upon which those who do not deceive themselves need no enlightenment."
"But why insist so strongly on the literal interpretation of one part of the sayings of Christ, and be so elastic about that of the pa.s.sages which inculcate more than those ordinary precepts which all had agreed upon as early as the days of Solomon and probably earlier?
We have cut down Christianity so as to make it appear to sanction our own conventions; but we have not altered our conventions so as to bring them into harmony with Christianity. We do not give to him that asketh; we take good care to avoid him; yet if the precept meant only that we should be liberal in a.s.sisting others--it wanted no enforcing: the probability is that it had been enforced too much rather than too little already; the more literally it has been followed the more terrible has the mischief been; the saying only becomes harmless when regarded as a mere convention. So with most parts of Christ"s teaching. It is only conventional Christianity which will stand a man in good stead to live by; true Christianity will never do so. Men have tried it and found it fail; or, rather, its inevitable failure was so obvious that no age or country has ever been mad enough to carry it out in such a manner as would have satisfied its founders. So said Dean Swift in his Argument against abolishing Christianity. "I hope," he writes, "no reader imagines me so weak as to stand up in defence of real Christianity, such as used in primitive times" (if we may believe the authors of those ages) "to have an influence upon men"s beliefs and actions. To offer at the restoring of that would be, indeed, a wild project; it would be to dig up foundations, to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and const.i.tution of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts of exchange and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace where he advises the Romans all in a body to leave their city, and to seek a new seat in some remote part of the world by way of cure for the corruption of their manners.
""Therefore, I think this caution was in itself altogether unnecessary (which I have inserted only to prevent all possibility of cavilling), since every candid reader will easily understand my discourse to be intended only in defence of nominal Christianity, the other having been for some time wholly laid aside by general consent as utterly inconsistent with our present schemes of wealth and power."
"Yet but for these schemes of wealth and power the world would relapse into barbarianism; it is they and not Christianity which have created and preserved civilisation. And what if some unhappy wretch, with a serious turn of mind and no sense of the ridiculous, takes all this talk about Christianity in sober earnest, and tries to act upon it? Into what misery may he not easily fall, and with what life-long errors may he not embitter the lives of his children!
"Again, we do not cut off our right hand nor pluck out our eyes if they offend us; we conventionalise our interpretations of these sayings at our will and pleasure; we do take heed for the morrow, and should be inconceivably wicked and foolish were we not to do so; we do gather up riches, and indeed we do most things which the experience of mankind has taught us to be to our advantage, quite irrespectively of any precept of Christianity for or against. But why say that it is Christianity which is our chief guide, when the words of Christ point in such a very different direction from that which we have seen fit to take? Perhaps it is in order to compensate for our laxity of interpretation upon these points that we are so rigid in stickling for accuracy upon those which make no demand upon our comfort or convenience? Thus, though we conventionalise practice, we never conventionalise dogma. Here, indeed, we stickle for the letter most inflexibly; yet one would have thought that we might have had greater licence to modify the latter than the former.
If we say that the teaching of Christ is not to be taken according to its import--why give it so much importance? Teaching by exaggeration is not a satisfactory method, nor one worthy of a being higher than man; it might have been well once, and in the East, but it is not well now. It induces more and more of that jarring and straining of our moral faculties, of which much is unavoidable in the existing complex condition of affairs, but of which the less the better. At present the tug of professed principles in one direction, and of necessary practice in the other, causes the same sort of wear and tear in our moral gear as is caused to a steam-engine by continually reversing it when it is going it at full speed. No mechanism can stand it."
The above extracts (written when he was about twenty-three years old) may serve to show how utter was the subversion of his faith. His mind was indeed in darkness! Who could have hoped that so brilliant a day should have succeeded to the gloom of such mistrust? Yet as upon a winter"s morning in November when the sun rises red through the smoke, and presently the fog spreads its curtain of thick darkness over the city, and then there comes a single breath of wind from some more generous quarter, whereupon the blessed sun shines again, and the gloom is gone; or, again, as when the warm south-west wind comes up breathing kindness from the sea, unheralded, suspected, when the earth is in her saddest frost, and on the instant all the lands are thawed and opened to the genial influences of a sweet springful whisper--so thawed his heart, and the seed which had lain dormant in its fertile soil sprang up, grew, ripened, and brought forth an abundant harvest.
Indeed now that the result has been made plain we can perhaps feel that his scepticism was precisely of that nature which should have given the greatest ground for hope. He was a genuine lover of truth in so far as he could see it.
His lights were dim, but such as they were he walked according to them, and hence they burnt ever more and more clearly, till in later life they served to show him what is vouchsafed to such men and to such only--the enormity of his own mistakes. Better that a man should feel the divergence between Christian theory and Christian practice, that he should be shocked at it--even to the breaking away utterly from the theory until he has arrived at a wider comprehension of its scope--than that he should be indifferent to the divergence and make no effort to bring his principles and practice into harmony with one another. A true lover of consistency, it was intolerable to him to say one thing with his lips and another with his actions. As long as this is true concerning any man, his friends may feel sure that the hand of the Lord is with him, though the signs thereof be hidden from mortal eyesight.
CHAPTER IV