第163章 Chapter VI(27)

The unintentional shifting is implied in the process by which Maurice manages to accept the Thirty-nine Articles.Taken as truths,they utter the voice of the heart,or imply an apprehension of the divine light.Taken as merely logical,they are but tenets or 'notional'dogmas.The doctrine of the Atonement,for example,as made into a quasi-legal theory by Archbishop Magee,is simply horrible:it deserves all that Paine could have said of it,and actually 'confounds the evil spirit with God.'But take it in another sense-not as proclaiming the supremacy of a harsh and unjust ruler,but as declaring the process by which the love of God and of his son reconciles men to himself --and it becomes infinitely comforting,and expresses the feelings of 'tens of thousands of suffering human beings.'(177)So the doctrine of 'endless'punishment is horrible and revolting.But eternity has properly nothing to do with time.'Eternal punishment is the punishment of being without the knowledge of God.'(178)That knowledge does not procure but constitutes the life.This is no metaphysical theory,but gives the natural meaning which commends itself to 'peasants,women,and children.'(179)To the ordinary mind,the natural inference would be that we should throw aside dogmas so capable of misinterpretation,and which admittedly have,as a historical fact,covered a confusion between God and the devil.The Athanasian Creed appears to be at least an awkward and ambiguous mode of expressing a universal benevolence and an aversion to metaphysical dogma.But to reject it would be,as Maurice thinks,to fall into mere rationalism.The formulae which are so revolting in the mouth of the mere dogmatist are essential when read as utterances of the deepest feelings of the human heart.We can only hold to their true meaning and denounce their misapplication.

After all comes the real difficulty of fitting a 'subjective'religion to a historical religion.The Christian creed does assert facts,and facts to which historical evidence is applicable.A dogma can be made into an utterance of sentiment.Astatement that there was a deluge in the year 4004B.C.must be decided by evidence.Maurice was painfully shocked when the excellent and simple-minded Colenso brought up this plain issue.(180)Though Colenso had stood by him generously in the king's College time,Maurice,who had fully recognised the generosity,felt himself bound to protest.The dilemma was,in fact,most trying.To declare that historical evidence is irrelevant,that our faith is independent of the truth of the Old Testament narrative,is really to give up historical Christianity.On the other hand,to argue that the criticisms are trifling or captious is to stake the truth of the religion upon the issue of facts.Maurice complains of Colenso for beginning at the wrong end.(181)As,however,Colenso has made certain statements,whatever his method,the truth must be either denied or admitted.Are they true but irrelevant,or relevant but false?

Maurice cannot unequivocally take either side.He appears to hold that we may accept the deluge because it teaches us a good lesson (that bad people will be drowned,apparently),that is,to accept whatever is edifying;or to think perhaps the deluge was a little one,that is,to put himself on the ground of historical criticism.Here,in fact,was the growing difficulty.Mansel could still speak scornfully of the quibblings of Strauss.But historical criticism had now to be reckoned with,and subjective religion must consent to be merely subjective,or submit to have its results tested by the broad daylight of common sense.

From Maurice I turn to Carlyle,the beacon-light of the age,according to his disciples --the most delusive of wildfires,according to his adversaries;but in any case the most interesting literary figure of his time.Extraordinary force of mind and character are manifested in the struggles with inward difficulties and external circumstances,which made much of his life tragic and his teaching incoherent.With the imagination of a poet he yet cannot rise above the solid ground of prose:a sense of pervading mystery blends with his shrewd grasp of realities;he is religious yet sceptical;a radical and a worshipper of sheer force;and a denouncer of cant and yet the deviser of a jargon.Such contrasts are reflected in his work,and are not really hard of solution.A spiritual descendant of John Knox,he had the stern sense of duty,the hatred of priestcraft,and the contempt for the aesthetic side of things which had been bred in or burned into the breed.He came into the outer world,like his hero Teufelsdrkh,(182)as a 'Baptist living on locusts and wild honey,'and occasionally presented himself to others as a dyspeptic polar bear.(183)He had imbibed radicalism in a home of sturdy peasants,pinched by all the sufferings of the poorer classes in the war time.When the yeomanry was called out in 1819he was more disposed to join the sufferers than the guardians of order.(184)So far,Carlyle was in sympathy with James Mill,whose career also illustrated one mode of passage from Puritanism to political radicalism.Nor would Carlyle differ from Mill widely on certain religious points.The conventional dogmatism of the kirk had lost its savour for both,and meant a blind tradition,not a living force.

Carlyle only went with the general current of youthful intellect in abandoning the dogmatic creed.When Irving made a painful effort to put life into the dead bones,Carlyle recognised the hopelessness of the enterprise.But he was no nearer to Mill.