Chapter IV
When the Fenians planned their second raid on Canada no fears were entertained as to the final issue of the plot. But the defence of a frontier of more than a thousand miles was an impossible task for the Dominion Government. I undertook, therefore, to ascertain at what point the raiders meant to cross. How I succeeded, with Le Caron’s help, is now a matter of history; and a movement which threatened much injury to property, and possibly loss of life, ended in a fiasco.
In the guerilla war now raging round the Bible the sacred volume lies open to attack on every side. But here the parallel ends. For it is impossible to fix the field on which the battle must be joined. The pending controversy, therefore, finds a fitter illustration in the final stages of the late Boer War. On all the main questions raised by the pseudo-Critics they have been refuted by books as scholarly and able as any which they themselves have written. It is not their way, however, to make either admissions or rejoinders. But they turn up again unabashed. And, as we have seen, their chief successes have been largely due to their habit of “wearing khaki.”
It taxed the energies of nearly a quarter of a million Imperial troops to suppress the Boers. To suppress the Critics would be a task of infinitely greater difficulty; and I am not so vain as to suppose that this volume will have any effect in that direction. But many a skirmish that failed to crush De Wet did much to cheer the loyalists in South Africa, and possibly these pages may serve in some little measure to encourage perplexed and timorous Christians.
My method so far has been clear, and I wish to make my method in the sequel quite as plain. It is not my purpose to discuss Biblical problems, save incidentally, and as the subject may require; but I propose to test the pseudo-Criticism by its results in the case of certain specially selected representative men.
First, however, some prefatory words of another kind may be opportune. Let no one suppose that the Bible itself has suffered by this crusade against its authority, or that the defence of the Bible is a lost or discredited cause. Some of us indeed, whose faith has been endangered by this scepticism, have emerged from the ordeal with a deeper confidence in the Bible than before — deeper, because more intelligent.
But let us be careful to distinguish between the Bible itself, and the meaning which men put upon its words. If orthodoxy were not so self-sufficient in interpreting the Scriptures, heterodoxy would make less headway than it does. For many a heresy is due to recoil from some perversion of the truth. As a recent writer has pleaded, even an apostasy so extreme as that which found expression in the words ecrasez Vinfame, denoted hatred, not of Christ, but of superstition; not of the Christianity of the New Testament, but of the religion of Christendom — “the religion which lit the fires of Smithfield and prompted the tortures of the Inquisition.”
The well-worn theme of the Creation story may illustrate my meaning. How many there are who have turned away from it because they were taught to read into it the figment that on a certain Sunday morning in the year b. c. 4004, the Supreme looked out upon the dark vault of illimitable empty space, and that by the Friday evening following he had started this universe of ours as a “going concern “!
Take another illustration of a different kind. The sixtieth chapter of Isaiah, tradition has labelled “Enlargement of the Church.” Such an exegesis supports the worst pretensions of the Church of Rome; and it justifies the most ‘’ advanced” of the Critics in their unbelief. If the passage is meant to describe the return from the Exile, it is but the ravings of a fanatic. And to regard it as a prophecy about the Church of Christendom, is profanely to ascribe to God the language of wild hyperbole and senseless exaggeration.
Again, let us remember — I make use of borrowed ^ords — that ‘’ no book can be written on behalf of the Bible like the Bible itself.” But the witness of the Bible, like all Divine rewards, is only for diligent seekers. “Orthodoxy” has prepared the way for scepticism, not merely by misinterpreting the Bible, but by neglect of it. The study of prophecy has been disparaged, and the teaching of the types has been ignored. No one who has studied the history of Divine prophecy could be misled by the theory that the prophetic books were earlier than the Pentateuch.
* Mr. S. G. Tallentyre’s “Life of Voltaire,” vol. ii. p. no.
And no one acquainted with the marvellous system of Biblical typology, to which the Epistle to the Hebrews gives the clue, would tolerate the figment that the Mosaic books are forgeries.
“Science is only in its infancy “is the dictum of one who has attained to rank and fame in the pursuit of it.^ And this is no less true of our apprehension of the Bible. No book, indeed, is so little understood. And in forecasting the advance which future years will make in knowledge of the work of God in nature, the same writer uses language which we may adopt in regard to the Word of God in revelation: “Still before them will loom the majestic vision of the Infinite, and still will their men of highest knowledge and deepest insight confess they are but as children who have learned to play on the seashore, while the great ocean of truth still stretches before them unexplored: still will they feel that they are but dimly groping after the great truths of God.”
This leads me to emphasise a further warning. The Christian must be on his guard against allowing the initial assumption of the Critics, that the Bible is to be treated as a purely human book. I have used elsewhere the illustration of the Lincoln church bazaar, where two stolen purses were found in the Bishop’s pocket. If the Bishop had been dealt with like a crossing-sweeper or a shoe-black, he would certainly have been sent to the lock-up. And such treatment would not have been worse than that which the Critics accord to the Bible.
And let it not be overlooked that when ‘’ Higher * Sir Oliver Lodge.
Criticism” claims to rule out miracles it passes entirely beyond the limits of its proper province. Eichhorn himself defined it to mean the analysis of a book into its earlier and its later elements. This leaves untouched every question as to the nature of the book thus submitted to examination. The present wave of scepticism is not caused by the search-light of a true criticism, but by the illicit excesses of a false criticism designed to throw discredit upon miracles, not excepting Inspiration and the Virgin birth — the very foundations of Christianity.
Miracles? the lowest and stupidest type of anthropomorphist is the man whose god can do nothing that he could not do himself. And even the disciples of Hume now avoid their master’s dictum about violation of natural law. Indeed, as the late Duke of Argyll told Professor Huxley, the antithesis between natural and supernatural is not only unknown to revelation, but it is “very bad science, and still worse philosophy.” What we call a miracle implies the presence of some agent, or the exercise of some power, that is more than human. To challenge and sift the evidence is therefore proof of shrewdness and wisdom. But a man who rejects a miracle on a priori grounds, and refuses to examine the .evidence, must obviously be either an atheist or a fool.^
And, if this be admitted, the great miracle of the
Hume admitted that the evidence for one of the most notable of the Jansenist miracles in France was complete on every point on which he challenged the New Testament miracles. But yet he rejected it on purely a priori grounds; and from his standpoint he was possibly right.
Incarnation, so plainly revealed in Scripture, presents no special difficulties. It is free indeed from those elements of incredibility attaching to that other miracle which we all accept — the new birth of a sinner by the Spirit of God. And it will probably be found that those who regard the “Virgin birth “as a mere legend, regard the ‘’ new birth” as a mere theory.
I will venture to offer a novel statement of this question. In giving a legal opinion a lawyer neither questions nor confirms the facts set out in the case submitted to him. He assumes them, and his opinion is based on that assumption. Now I should like to submit the following question to the judgment of some upright and intelligent infidel, who would answer it with the impartiality of a lawyer dealing with a “case.” The Christian system rests on the fact that the Nazarene was the Son of God; assuming that fact, is there anything unreasonable in the hypothesis of the Virgin birth? His answer would be: If the “fact” is to be accepted the birth was presumably miraculous, and the suggested hypothesis is a reasonable one.^
That the child of a woman was the Son of God is a great mystery; that the child of Joseph the carpenter was the Son of God is sheer nonsense. No free and fearless thinker, therefore, rejects belief in the Virgin birth, and yet maintains belief in the Deity of Christ.^
Those who refuse belief in a primeval revelation to account for the legend of a Virgin birth in Old World paganism, must find in that legend a proof that belief in a Divine offspring necessarily implies belief in a miraculous birth.
Of course the expression may still be used in a loose and figurative sense, as, e. g., by Dr. Harnack.
Adam was the son of God in a sense in which no one of his posterity can claim the title. Christ was the Son of God in a sense far higher still. For Adam came into existence by the Hat of the Creator; while our Divine Lord could speak to the Father of “the glory which he had with Him before the world was.” Hence the words, “The first man is of the earth, earthy; the second Man is of heaven.” *
In doctrine as in morals, one fault leads to another. And the denial of the Virgin birth follows upon the figment of redemption by incarnation — that evil leaven of Greek philosophy. The nature which He took was not that of sinful man — albeit “He was made in the likeness of sinful flesh” — but of man as he came from the hand of God.
And as for Inspiration, the real question here is whether we possess a Divine revelation; and, as has been justly said, the idea of a revelation is involved in the conception of a living God. For here, as the same writer argues, “Agnosticism assumes a double incompetence — the incompetence not only of man to know God, but of God to make Himself known. But the denial of competence is the negation of Deity. For the God who could not speak would not be rational, and the God who would not speak would not be moral.”’
As a matter of fact, it is not inspiration that tries the Christian’s faith, but its strange limits; not miracles, but the absence of miracles. Why is God so
JoHn xvii. 5. ‘I Cor. xv. 47, R. V.
The words are Principal Fairbairn’s (“The Place of Christ in Modern Theology,” p. 386).
silent? How is it that Almighty power is passive in a world where sorrow and suffering prevail, and sin and wrong are rampant? To these difficulties enlightened faith can find an answer. But it does not lie upon the surface. It must be sought for as men dig for gold. And even when it has been grasped, and reason bows before the teaching of revelation, the cravings of the inner being still refuse to be satisfied, and “heart and flesh cry out for the Living God.”
* This is the main subject of the author’s “Silence of God.”