1849.] The chief Sceptical Tendencies of the Times.

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yourself attacked you use me in your defence, if you do not rely upon bare assertion or unwise determination. Without me you are a mystic or a fanatic. In the early church I aided in expelling superstitions; I sharpened your weapons, and burnished your armor. The precision of your theological terms is owing to my logic; your accredited formulas of doctrine could never have been built up without my hard toil. Those systems of theology which have been your boast and your defence are among the ripest products of philosophic culture. When the apostle speaks of the "opposition of science, falsely so called," does he not imply that there is a science, truly to be so called? And that same God who gave to man the illumination of his Spirit, did he not also give the light of reason, and give reason first, and reason always, and reason unto all and, even if it be granted, that the highest joys of the heart are found only in submission to his revealed will, yet it must also be conceded that the chief delight of reason is in philosophy.

Thus would philosophy speak in the language of apology; but it has other words when it accepts the formula faith or philosophy. And there are four chief tendencies of our times in which its deliberate and conscious opposition to faith is manifest.

The first is that in which all certainty is found in the facts and laws of the material world. The laws and analogies of nature are forced to explain the laws of mind and of morals. Ethics and metaphysics are subordinated to what is dogmatically called positive science. To conform to natural laws, and not to transgress them is esteemed the great end. Law has no sanctions excepting the direct consequences of obedience or transgression. The harmony of man with nature is the great ideal, is the perfect state. There is no law reaching beyond this life. This world is the boundary of all real human hope and of all well-founded human fear. All else is doubtful.

The second form utters its oracles in a higher mood; it recognizes justice and love and the brotherhood of the race as great ends. It would relieve the wretched; give man his rights; introduce a new social state. It is animated by humane principles, and seeks great moral, though worldly ends. These it believes in; these it judges to be effective and sufficient. It has faith, but a faith which centres in humanity, and not in a personal God or an incarnate Redeemer. It seeks a kingdom: but it is a kingdom which is to be of this world, though it is not yet in the world. Its heaven, the only one which is certain, is to be realized on earth.

There is a third tendency more religious in its language, and which may be and is combined with these others, though as a tenden

cy it is distinct. God, it says, is to be loved and served; he can be loved. But, it is argued, if I have that love which is the very essence of all religion, what need I more? How can it aid or mar this love to believe in a Bible, a Trinity, an external atonement and such long confessions of doctrine? The state of the heart is all. You call the Bible inspired, so am I; you call it a revelation, I have one within, more constant and persuasive. Such a mind contemplates the grand and distinctive realities of the Christian faith, as we gaze upon the sculptured gods of a Grecian temple; we may be lost in wonder and enraptured by their beauty: but they have for the soul no divine reality, as object of faith and love; they are memorials of an antiquated superstition; we have thought and felt above and beyond them, we cannot find our whole selves in them.

The fourth form of philosophic unbelief is the pantheistic and this combines in itself elements from all the others. Here philosophy, as though conscious of its full power, asserts its absolute supremacy. By the assumed universality of its principles, the undeniable compre. hensiveness of its aims, the rigor of its logic, and the steadiness of its philosophical processes; by its high ideal character; by its claim to be the result of the concentrated thought of the race, and to contain in itself all that is essential in the Christian faith, and to give the law and the explanation to all other sciences; this system seizes with an almost demoniacal power upon minds that would laugh to scorn the dreamy fantasies of the East, that see the rottenness of bare materialism and that feel something of the inherent might of Christianity. Never did a philosophical system take such an attitude towards the Christian faith; it does not make it a superstition, as did atheism ; it does not neglect it, as does our popular philosophy; it does not scout its mysteries, as does an irrational common-sense; nor does it attenuate it into a mere ethical system: but it grants it to be the highest possible form of man's religious nature, it strives to transform its grandest truths into philosophical principles; it says that only one thing is higher, and that is pantheism. It claims to have transmuted Christianity into philosophy, and to stand above it, triumphant, dominant, exultant. And thus it is the most daring, subtle, consistent, destructive and energetic philosophy which ever reared its front against the Christian faith. It has the merit of recognizing the grandeur of Christianity; it has the audacity to boast that itself is more sublime. It professes to have systematized all thought; to have possession of the aboriginal substance and the perfect law of its development; to be able to unfold all our ideas in their right connections, and to explain nature, mind, art, history, all other philosophies, and also Christianity.

1849.]

Do Faith and Philosophy exclude each other?

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All this, it says, is but the unfolding of its own inner life. It weaves its subtle dialectics around everything, that thus it may drag all into its terrific vortex. It has a word for almost every man excepting for the Christian established in his faith. By the very extravagance of its pretensions it seduces many; by its harmony with the life of sense it attracts those who love the world; and by its ideal character it sways such as would fain be lifted above the illusions of sense and the visions of imagination, and the contradictions of the understanding, into a region of rarer air where reason sways a universal sceptre. Its system includes all things. God is all things; or rather all is God; he that knows this system knows and has God. And it claims that it thus gives a higher idea of deity than when he is limited by a definite personality; assuming, without any philosophical ground, that personality is in its very nature finite, and cannot be connected with infinite attributes. It professes to give man a system which shall make him wise and it is with the oldest temptation, ye shall be as gods.

Thus does philosophy, in its most daring mood accept the alternative, philosophy or faith; and gives us the choice between Christ and Spinoza. And this is the great alternative of our times.

III. Leaving these two powers, for the present, in this attitude of opposition, we next inquire whether they can be rationally held to be utterly exclusive of each other.

It is said, for example, in faith is the only certainty; all philosophy is dangerous; the natural tendency of scientific research is against revelation; man is so depraved that though a true philosophy were a great good, it is irrational to expect it.

And it is undeniable that much modern speculation, both physical and metaphysical, is opposed to revelation; and that all systems and principles which would explain nature without a God, and man's destiny without Christianity, so far as they logically lead to these results, are an unmixed evil and ought to be exposed and opposed.

But how opposed? Philosophically, or otherwise? He who will answer this question fairly will take the only correct ground. It is, we will say, an objection to the personality of God. How shall we meet it? Shall we simply assert that we believe in the divine personality; that the Bible speaks of God as a personal agent? Or shall we not rather strive to show on the strictest philosophical grounds that the idea of a personal God is the most rational; that without it we cannot really explain the origin or the order of the universe; and that it is a mere assumption to assert, that personality is in its very nature finitesince it is the finiteness of man's attributes, and that alone, which gives the finiteness to his personality. But if we do this we are enter

ing upon a philosophical discussion. And would it not be unfortunate to have taken at the outset a position against all philosophy, which would only serve to throw doubt over our own argument? Is there not ground for a calm distinction between philosophy and false philosophy. We may deny the possibility of a perfect system; we may show that faith is necessary; yet, is it not unwise to doubt, or to seem to doubt, or to say anything that would imply that we ever thought of seeming to doubt, that we might attain entire certainty on some points, and those, too, the most important which man can discuss? Is not any other position suicidal?

And therefore do we maintain that our ground should be, that faith and philosophy are not inherently opposed, but inherently at one; and that this should be our pervading sentiment, influencing our theology, our philosophy, our preaching, our every-day discussions; and that this is a position of prime necessity, now more than ever.

For, if this be not so, the bitterest sneers of a Hume were all true; fortified is the balanced satire of a Gibbon. He who lately wrote in a widely circulated Review: "that almost all sects have agreed to divorce religion from reasoning and to exalt faith by contemning philosophy, and that they thus have left all works of divinity in the hands of one class of writers and of one class of readers," might maintain his vituperation by our own confessions. Can that which is the dextrous and sinister policy of our enemies be a prudent position for ourselves?

If this be not so, then we give over the whole field of modern scientific research, both in nature and in mind, entire and unguarded, to be the grand arena, the pride, the honor and the power of infidelity. We virtually say, that to its benefit shall enure the fruit and glory of the sciences. And thus many minds, not faithless, yet not believing, who know that science has gained and garnered up some solid truth are only repelled from a candid examination of the truths of our faith.

If this be not so, then, further, it is difficult to see the wisdom of that constitution of our being by which we are made cognizant of rational truth, as well as susceptible to the authority of religion.

If this be not so, then do we, in virtue of this constitution, deliver over the human mind to perpetual uncertainty, to an intestine war. And such a war is not like the conflict between sin and holiness, for sin is that which ought not to be, and in overcoming it, man is restored to himself as well as to his God; but, in the other case, prime elements of man's essential nature are set at variance, the foes are they of his own household; and they are contending not upon points of inferior moment, but upon the most vital interests of man. And so

1849.]

The Extremes of Faith.

683 we are in danger of leaving it to be inferred with the schoolman, that one may hold to a truth with all the energy of faith, which is opposed by all the arguments of reason. We shall oscillate like the German who declared: "philosophy plunges me into the arms of faith, and faith sends me back into the arms of philosophy; my spirit is a ball playing between these two extremes." If the soul for a moment be delighted with the enrapturing visions of faith, the next thought will be, these gorgeous palaces may be dissolved, and leave only a wreck behind. And thus the mind will be more ready to infer that all things are uncertain than that faith alone is sure, it is better prepared for scepticism than for trust, if it cannot hold, as an unassailable conviction, that reason and faith may be reconciled.

But this position is not only inconsistent with the rightful claims of reason, it is also repugnant to the real necessities and nature of faith. While it makes us traitors to the one it only dishonors the other. A faith which we do not believe in the very depths of our hearts to be rational, to contain in itself the sum and substance of all philosophy, is a faith which no thinking man can rationally hold; and if he holds it irrationally, it cannot long maintain its sway. "Faith may precede intellect," as Augustine says, but it involves intellect. It has its grounds, reasons and relations. "It appears to me a negligence," are the words of Anselm, "if after we are confirmed in the faith we do not study to understand what we believe." If a Christian man does not really hold that his system of faith has a firmer basis, a nobler end, a more puissant energy, that it solves more vital problems, and is adapted to man's nature in a fuller sense than any other system, that it is the highest reason as well as the only redemption, and the highest reason because the only redemption, he virtually confesses that a greater than Christ is here. We rob faith of one of its strongest persuasions if we do not claim that it is perfectly rational.

Faith, too, has its extremes and perils; and philosophy is needed as a counteracting element. It may degenerate into formality, or be sublimated into mysticism, or glow with fanatical fire. As faith without works is dead, being alone, so faith without knowledge may be superstitious, being unchecked. The divine Spirit alone can indeed save from this and every error, into which man's blind and passionate nature is prone to fall; but does He not often do it, by raising the calm voice of reason, the limitations of reflection, and the power of system against the erratic impulses of an unregulated belief. Knowledge without faith is indeed cold: but faith without knowledge is often blind. It may become the servant of passion, and speak the language of bigotry, if it have not reason for its handmaid. Faith may