learn how without departing in the least from your traditional beliefs and your chosen standpoint you may have a science containing all that is necessary, nay, a better science than your irreligious neighbours; so cries the other, Come, ye enlightened persons who know what science is, and who stand far above traditions and creeds, and learn how to profess religion without their help a better religion, too, than any of them can boast of, more honest, more liberal, more honouring to God and more loving to man. We see the attractiveness of the claim, and recognize how easily it may approve itself, not only to the superficial and conceited, but even to intelligent and good people. But we believe the system to be essentially bad in its nature. As science, so also religion should be left to work out its results in its own sphere, and by its own proper power. It is a positive influence, with a well-defined circle of operation, upon conscience, mind, and soul. And this operation is completely spoiled when it works under the suspicious eye of a rival power. You cannot conduct education by the power of steam: you cannot foster religion by earthly influences. The power of steam, it is true, connects itself with education in more than one way. In its theory it is a subject of instruction, and in its practical use it whirls the pupil to school, and carries information from one part of the world to every other. And so there are points in which natural knowledge and supernatural touch hands, and in which the conclusions of the one condition the form of the other. But the central power, the motive force, the standpoint of each is different. The independence of each must be maintained, or you lose its characteristic value. Greece taken captive by the Romans had indeed its influence still. It carried with it into their possession the stores of its glorious past, and no small amount of literary and artistic talent even in its present. But the days of original production and power passed away with its independence. The conqueror might make what he could of it-and he made no small gains; but he could not make it yield any more of the same sample as of old, and even the legacy of the past lost most of its value when it passed into the possession of spirits so different from those which had produced it. And such is the case of religion in the hands of the natural man. Its body remains, and even that is beautiful, but its spirit is gone. He may not perceive the loss; he may vehemently deny that anything is lost. And in the first stages of his dominion much may still remain to him which belongs properly to the previous condition. He will still use the old phrases, and with some degree of the old spirit; but it is condemned, it is sure to perish. Only when the supernatural was a reality could it develop its true character or yield its proper fruit. To be sure, Mr. Haweis will vigorously deny that his writings exhibit the operations of the natural man upon religion. And we should be very sorry to deny that he would be able to adduce many signs of a contrary kind. But this we believe to be the essential character of his work, and we do not intend to leave our readers without the opportunity of judging whether the description is deserved or no. Meanwhile there is no harm in saying that it is in this point of view that his volumes are interesting to us. Their learning does not claim to be extensive; their criticism does not profess to be original; their occasional beauties are excelled elsewhere. But they show us how a mind full of the influences of a material age in their most imaginative but still most earthly form fares in dealing with the first records of Christianity and the facts therein disclosed. And first for the date of the records. Mr. Haweis places, as we have seen, the publication of St. Mark's Gospel at A.D. 70-74,' St. Matthew's at circ. 85; 2 St. Luke's, followed by his Acts, at about 90-94.3 St. John's Gospel he regards as due to that Apostle in respect of its material; but it was not written by him, or even read to him after it had been written. It is a redaction by the hand of some individual disciple whose name is unrecorded, and was issued by the presbytery at Ephesus say about A.D. 120.4 We think Mr. Haweis far too late in his dates, and indeed we do not believe in the possibility of preciseness of date at all. But still his statement brings definitely before our minds the fact which Professor Westcott, without assigning an exact date, fully admits-that 'the whole [contents of the Gospels] remained a tradition for the first age,' 5 and we prefer to dwell on the question how the undoubted distance, be it more or less, of the publication of the Gospels from the events which they record affects their trust-worthiness. 6 Mr. Haweis remarks very truly that in those days oral tradition was valued far above written documents. With our facilities of record and publication it seems obvious that writing is the readiest means for either God or man to take in The Story of the Four, 25. 3 Ibid. 71-129. 5 Introduction to the Gospels, 192. 2 Ibid. 43. 4 Ibid. 103-5. conveying instruction or information to the world. Our minds pass without a break from the fact that a revelation has been made, to the fact that it has been written down: the one implies the other. We forget that printing, and that even writing itself, are mere episodes and occasional events in that history of the influence of mind upon mind which began when intelligence first existed on the earth. And as writing is but a particular and occasional means in God's great ordinance of living intercourse between mind and mind, so is Holy Scripture but a particular incidental expedient in that great general inspiration of Christian minds, and of the intercourse between them which is the primary institution of the Holy Ghost, and through which the Catholic Church exists. The Bible is to our present habits of mind the indispensable means of coming in contact with religion. Experience, both of the worth of writing and the defects of oral teaching, went far to justify the Protestant in setting up the Bible in place of the Church. But oral communication is the older and the more universal method ordained by God for the intercourse of man with man, and we are not to take it for granted that this law is superseded in all His dealings with our minds by the subsequent introduction of letters. Something, and that a most important thing in the transmission of religion, is lost, as well as something gained, when dependence on oral tradition is forsaken and recourse had to letters. For if oral teaching be wanting in accuracy, writing is no less imperfect in the conveyance of living influence. Even in respect of trustworthiness we must remember that it is a great mistake to compare oral tradition as it exists among a literary people, with oral tradition among people to whom writing is either not known or not the familiar method of record. It is a conceded fact that the human mind displays a power of retention when record depends entirely upon it, which it loses when conscious that writing will retain the deposit though memory should sleep. And this loss takes place in various proportions according to the various degrees in which the value for the word written may have made its way. We believe that we can notice the process at work even still, and that the modern multiplication of books in every one's house and at every one's hand has diminished the powers of the memory to retain passages from the classics and English literature as our grandfathers used to do. Mr. Haweis does not fail to notice this well-known fact. Yet he uses it only to account for the absence of a written record at the beginning of the Church's history, and forgets it in touching the question of the accuracy of the Gospel record when it did come to be written down. Writing does not in early times hold the value in comparison to memory which we assign to it. Quite true; but this is only the case because the memory proves itself sufficiently powerful and trustworthy for the demands made on it. And this of itself would lead us to attribute greater accuracy to the Gospel records than Mr. Haweis. He habitually treats their claims to accuracy in the freest possible manner. Matthew,' he thinks, 'exhibits the first growth of what we may call a Gospel Haggada, or edifying gloss literature.' 'The pupils and disciples speak and think just like the Master. Önce give them a clue, a method, a specimen, one or two genuine parables beginning "The kingdom of heaven is like this or that," and from such a seed a dozen parables equally forcible will spring up; and though the Master may not have spoken them all, they are all His.' We must remark that we cannot find in any known production of any disciple of Jesus, either at that time or since, the slightest sign of power to do what Mr. Haweis absurdly treats as a simple matter, namely, to invent parables undistinguishable from the work of the Master. Nor can we find in any of them a sign of the special pleading which regards it as true to call a saying Christ's which was not His because it is the offspring of His Spirit. Pupils do paint school pictures like their master, it is true, but never like them in the highest qualities unless they be his equals in nature and power. And if you pass off a picture done by a school pupil as being the work of the master of the school on the ground that it is the offspring of his spirit, you will be held guilty of fraud in any court of law. But the point which we desire at present to notice is the gratuitous character of such a supposed origin of portions of the Gospel so long as you allow that the lapse of time before they were written is not too great to preclude their having been handed down correctly from His mouth. And it is not at all too great, as the above considerations show, even were the case one of ordinary exercise of memory on the part of individuals with assistance from their fellows upon a very interesting matter. But this is only a very small part of the truth. For besides. the ordinary inducements which men feel to preserve correctly and relate accurately matters which are interesting to them, we must recognize as one of the prominent characteristics of early Christianity the value which it attached to the sayings and doings of its Founder, and the importance which it thought to lie in knowing these correctly. St. Paul is careful to hand on to his converts that which he also received, and exhorts Timothy to hold fast the form of sound words which he had heard of him. St. Luke writes his account of the life of Christ that Theophilus might know the certainty of those things in which he had been instructed. And if we mention the record of promises on the part of the Lord, of special assistance from Him and from the Holy Ghost in remembering and understanding what He said and did, we do so not in order to assume that the promise was performed, nor even to assume that it was made, but merely to prove the feeling of a body in which such a doctrine was prevalent as to the vital importance of a correct knowledge of all that Jesus began both to do and teach. Lastly, it is certain that Mr. Haweis exaggerates extremely the length of time which passed before writing was resorted to for the purpose of preserving the record of the Lord's life. We do not argue with him upon the date of the Gospels, nor yet upon the general fact that it was not writing but the memories and words of living men which formed the primary organ of instruction in the Church. But these concessions can be relied on as invalidating the truth of the Gospels only on the supposition that nothing at all was written before they were written. That they are the first written documents known to us is, of course, unimportant if they embody writings which existed before them. It would be absurd to profess yourself uncertain as to the events of the reign of James II. because you know them only through Macaulay, when you know also that he compiled his history from contemporary documents. Much more is it absurd to doubt the story of four writers so much nearer than Macaulay was to the events related, including among them two actual eye-witnesses, and assisted as they were by writings previously existing. 'Still there is no written Gospel,' says Mr. Haweis of the year 63.1 'No trace of a written Gospel,' he repeats at the year 68.2 Yet he himself afterwards tells us that there was a still earlier Hebrew Gospel current in Palestine;'3 and that 'we cannot safely make up the Gospel of Matthew without reference to this Hebrew Gospel, and the Logia which passed under the name of Matthew ;' 4 that in A.D. 57, when St. Paul writes down (1 Cor. xi. 23) the account of the institution of the Eucharist, 'the period of written tradition has arrived,' and 'we assist at the momentous meeting or coalition between the oral freshet and the written rill;'5 though how he can make 2 Ibid. II. 3 lbid. 41. 5 Ibid. 19. 1 The Story of the Four, 7. 4 Ibid. 42. 6 |