HISTORY DISCOVERED TO BE NO PART OF RELIGION.

After renouncing any “Canon of Scripture” or Sacred Letter at the end of my fourth period, I had been forced to abandon all “Second-hand Faith” by the end of my fifth. If asked why I believed this or that, I could no longer say, “Because Peter, or Paul, or John believed, and I may thoroughly trust that they cannot mistake.” The question now pressed hard, whether this was equivalent to renouncing Christianity.

Undoubtedly, my positive belief in its miracles had evaporated; but I had not arrived at a positive disbelief. I still felt the actual benefits and comparative excellencies of this religion too remarkable a phenomenon to be scored for defect of proof. In Morals likewise it happens, that the ablest practical expounders of truth may make strange blunders as to the foundations and ground of belief: why was this impossible as to the apostles? Meanwhile, it did begin to appear to myself remarkable, that I continued to love and have pleasure in so much that I certainly disbelieved. I perused a chapter of Paul or of Luke, or some verses of a hymn, and although they appeared to me to abound with error, I found satisfaction and profit in them. Why was this? was it all fond prejudice, an absurd clinging to old associations?

A little self-examination enabled me to reply, that it was no ill-grounded feeling or ghost of past opinions; but that my religion always had been, and still was, a state of sentiment toward God, far less dependent on articles of a creed, than once I had unhesitatingly believed. The Bible is pervaded by a sentiment, which is implied everywhere, viz. the intimate sympathy of the Pure and Perfect God with the heart of each faithful worshipper. This is that which is wanting in Greek philosophers, English Deists, German Pantheists, and all formalists. This is that which so often edifies me in Christian writers and speakers, when I ever so much disbelieve the letter of their sentences. Accordingly, though I saw more and more of moral and spiritual imperfection in the Bible, I by no means ceased to regard it as a quarry whence I might dig precious metal, though the ore needed a refining analysis: and I regarded this as the truest essence and most vital point in Christianity, to sympathize with the great souls from whom its spiritual eminence has flowed; to love, to hope, to rejoice, to trust with them; and not, to form the same interpretations of an ancient book and to take the same views of critical argument.

My historical conception of Jesus had so gradually melted into dimness, that he had receded out of my practical religion, I knew not exactly when I believe that I must have disused any distinct prayers to him, from a growing opinion that he ought not to be the object of worship, but only the way by whom we approach to the Father; and as in fact we need no such “way” at all, this was (in the result) a change from practical Ditheism to pure Theism. His “mediation” was to me always a mere name, and, as I believe, would otherwise have been mischievous. Simultaneously a great uncertainty had grown on me, how much of the discourses put into the mouth of Jesus was really uttered by him; so that I had in no small measure to form him anew to my imagination.

But if religion is addressed to, and must be judged by, our moral faculties, how could I believe in that painful and gratuitous personality, The Devil? He also had become a waning phantom to me, perhaps from the time that I saw the demoniacal miracles to be fictions, and still more when proofs of manifold mistake in the New Testament rose on me. This however took a solid form of positive disbelief, when I investigated the history of the doctrine, I forget exactly in what stage. For it is manifest, that the old Hebrews believed only in evil spirits sent by God to do his bidding, and had no idea of a rebellious Spirit that rivalled God. That idea was first imbibed in the Babylonish captivity, and apparently therefore must have been adopted from the Persian Ahriman, or from the “Melek Taous,” the “Sheitan” still honoured by the Yezidi with mysterious fear. That the serpent in the early part of Genesis denoted the same Satan, is probable enough; but this only goes to show, that that narrative is a legend imported from farther East; since it is certain that the subsequent Hebrew literature has no trace of such an Ahriman. The Book of Tobit and its demon show how wise in these matters the exiles in Nineveh were beginning to be. The Book of Daniel manifests, that by the time of Antiochus Épiphanes the Jews had learned each nation to have its guardian spirit, good or evil; and that the fates of nations depend on the invisible conflict of these tutelary powers. In Paul the same idea is strongly brought out. Satan is the prince of the power of the air; with principalities and powers beneath him; over all of whom Christ won the victory on his cross. In the Apocalypse we read the Oriental doctrine of the “seven angels who stand before God.” As the Christian tenet thus rose among the Jews from their contact with Eastern superstition, and was propagated and expanded while prophecy was mute, it cannot be ascribed to “divine supernatural revelation” as the source. The ground of it is dearly seen in infant speculations on the cause of moral evil and of national calamities.

Thus Christ and the Devil, the two poles of Christendom, had faded away out of my spiritual vision; there were left the more vividly, God and Man. Yet I had not finally renounced the possibility, that Jesus might have had a divine mission to stimulate all our spiritual faculties, and to guarantee to us a future state of existence. The abstract arguments for the immortality of the soul had always appeared to me vain trifling; and I was deeply convinced that nothing could assure us of a future state but a divine communication. In what mode this might be made, I could not say a priori: might not this really be the great purport of Messiahship? was not this, if any, a worthy ground for a divine interference? On the contrary, to heal the sick did not seem at all an adequate motive for a miracle; else, why not the sick of our own day? Credulity had exaggerated, and had represented Jesus to have wrought miracles: but that did not wholly disprove the miracle of resurrection (whether bodily or of whatever kind), said to have been wrought by God upon him, and of which so very intense a belief so remarkably propagated itself. Paul indeed believed it from prophecy; and, as we see this to be a delusion, resting on Rabbinical interpretations, we may perhaps account thus for the belief of the early church, without in any way admitting the fact. Here, however, I found I had the clue to my only remaining discussion, the primitive Jewish controversy. Let us step back to an earlier stage than John’s or Paul’s or Peter’s doctrine. We cannot doubt that Jesus claimed to be Messiah: what then was Messiah to be? and, did Jesus (though misrepresented by his disciples) truly fulfil his own claims?

The really Messianic prophecies appeared to me to be far fewer than is commonly supposed. I found such in the 9th and 11th of Isaiah, the 5th of Micah, the 9th of Zechariah, in the 72nd Psalm, in the 37th of Ezekiel, and, as I supposed, in the 50th and 53rd of Isaiah. To these nothing of moment could be certainly added; for the passage in Dan. ix. is ill-translated in the English version, and I had already concluded that the Book of Daniel is a spurious fabrication. From Micah and Ezekiel it appeared, that Messiah was to come from Bethlehem and either be David himself, or a spiritual David: from Isaiah it is shown that he is a rod out of the stem of Jesse. It is true, I found no proof that Jesus did come from Bethlehem or from the stock of David; for the tales in Matthew and Luke refute one another, and have clearly been generated by a desire to verify the prophecy. But genealogies for or against Messiahship seemed to me a mean argument; and the fact of the prophets demanding a carnal descent in Messiah struck me as a worse objection than that Jesus had not got it, if this could be ever proved. The Messiah of Micah, however, was not Jesus; for he was to deliver Israel from the Assyrians, and his whole description is literally warlike. Micah, writing when the name of Sennacherib was terrible, conceived of a powerful monarch on the throne of David who was to subdue him: but as this prophecy was not verified, the imaginary object of it was looked for as “Messiah,” even after the disappearance of the formidable Assyrian power. This undeniable vanity of Micah’s prophecy extends itself also to that in the 9th chapter of his contemporary Isaiah, if indeed that splendid passage did not really point at the child Hezekiah. Waiving this doubt, it is at any rate clear that the marvellous child on the throne of David was to break the yoke of the oppressive Assyrian; and none of the circumstantials are at all appropriate to the historical Jesus.

In the 37th of Ezekiel the (new) David is to gather Judah and Israel “from the heathen whither they be gone” and to “make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel:” and Jéhovah adds, that they shall “dwell in the land which I gave unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers dwelt: and they shall dwell therein, they and their children and their children’s children for ever: and my servant David shall be their prince for ever.” It is trifling to pretend that the land promised to Jacob, and in which the old Jews dwelt, was a spiritual, and not the literal Palestine; and therefore it is impossible to make out that Jesus has fulfilled any part of this representation. The description however that follows (Ezekiel xl. &c.) of the new city and temple, with the sacrifices offered by “the priests the Levites, of the seed of Zadok,” and the gate of the sanctuary for the prince (xli, and his elaborate account of the borders of the land (xlvii-23), place the earnestness of Ezekiel’s literalism in still clearer light.

The 72nd Psalm, by the splendour of its predictions concerning the grandeur of some future king of Judah, earns the title of Messianic, because it was never fulfilled by any historical king. But it is equally certain, that it has had no appreciable fulfilment in Jesus.

But what of the 11th of Isaiah? Its portraiture is not so much that of a king, as of a prophet endowed with superhuman power. “He shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked.” A Paradisiacal state is to follow. This general description may be verified by Jesus hereafter; but we have no manifestation, which enables us to call the fulfilment a fact. Indeed, the latter part of the prophecy is out of place for a time so late as the reign of Augustus; which forcibly denotes that Isaiah was predicting only that which was his immediate political aspiration: for in this great day of Messiah, Jéhovah is to gather back his dispersed people from Assyria, Egypt, and other parts; he is to reconcile Judah and Ephraim, (who had been perfectly reconciled centuries before Jesus was born,) and as a result of this Messianic glory, the people of Israel “shall fly upon the shoulders of the Philistines towards the west; they shall spoil them of the east together: they shall lay their hand on Edom and Moab, and the children of Ammon shall obey them.” But Philistines, Moab and Ammon, were distinctions entirely lost before the Christian era. Finally, the Red Sea is to be once more passed miraculously by the Israelites, returning (as would seem) to their fathers’ soil. Take all these particulars together, and the prophecy is neither fulfilled in the past nor possible to be fulfilled in the future.

The prophecy which we know as Zechariah ix.-xi. is believed to be really from a prophet of uncertain name, contemporaneous with Isaiah. It was written while Ephraim was still a people, i.e. before the capture of Samaria by Shalmanezer; and x-3 appears to howl over the recent devastations of Tiglathpilezer. The prophecy is throughout full of the politics of that day. No part of it has the most remote or imaginable similarity to the historical life of Jesus, except that he once rode into Jerusalem on an ass; a deed which cannot have been peculiar to him, and which Jesus moreover appears to have planned with the express purpose of assimilating himself to the lowly king here described. Yet such an isolated act is surely a carnal and beggarly fulfilment. To ride on an ass is no mark of humility in those who must ordinarily go on foot. The prophet clearly means that the righteous king is not to ride on a warhorse and trust in cavalry, as Solomon and the Egyptians, (see Ps. x. Is. xxx-3, xx,) but is to imitate the lowliness of David and the old judges, who rode on young asses; and is to be a lover of peace.

Chapters 50 and 53 of the pseudo-Isaiah remained; which contain many phrases so aptly descriptive of the sufferings of Christ, and so closely knit up with our earliest devotional associations, that they were the very last link of my chain that snapt. Still, I could not conceal from myself, that no exactness in this prophecy, however singular, could avail to make out that Jesus was the Messiah of Hezekiah’s prophets. There must be some explanation; and if I did not see it, that must probably arise from prejudice and habit. In order therefore to gain freshness, I resolved to peruse the entire prophecy of the pseudo-Isaiah in Lowth’s version, from ch. xl. onward, at a single sitting.

This prophet writes from Babylon, and has his vision full of the approaching restoration of his people by Cyrus, whom he addresses by name. In ch. xliii. he introduces to us an eminent and “chosen servant of God,” whom he invests with all the evangelical virtues, and declares that he is to be a light to the Gentiles. In ch. xliv. also he is named as “Jacob my servant, and Israel whom I have chosen.” The appellations recur in xl: and in a far more striking passage, xli-12, which is eminently Messianic to the Christian ear, except that in , the speaker distinctly declares himself to be (not Messiah, but) Israel. The same speaker continues in ch. l., which is equally Messianic in sound. In ch. lii. the prophet speaks of him, (v-15) but the subject of the chapter is restoration from Babylon; and from this he runs on into the celebrated ch. liii.

It is essential to understand the same “elect servant” all along. He is many times called Israel, and is often addressed in a tone quite inapplicable to Messiah, viz. as one needing salvation himself; so in ch. xliii. Yet in ch. xlix. this elect Israel is distinguished from Jacob and Israel at large: thus there is an entanglement. Who can be called on to risk his eternal hopes on his skilful unknotting of it? It appeared however to me most probable, that as our high Churchmen distinguish “mother Church” from the individuals who compose the Church, so the “Israel” of this prophecy is the idealizing of the Jewish Church; which I understood to be a current Jewish interpretation. The figure perhaps embarrasses us, only because of the male sex attributed to the ideal servant of God; for when “Zion” is spoken of by the same prophet in the same way, no one finds difficulty, or imagines that a female person of superhuman birth and qualities must be intended.

It still remained strange that in Isaiah liii. and Pss. xxii. and lxix. there should be coincidences so close with the sufferings of Jesus: but I reflected, that I had no proof that the narrative had not been strained by credulity, to bring it into artificial agreement with these imagined predictions of his death. And herewith my last argument in favour of views for which I once would have laid down my life, seemed to be spent.

Nor only so: but I now reflected that the falsity of the prophecy in Dan. vii. (where the coming of “a Son of Man” to sit in universal judgment follows immediately upon the break-up of the Syrian monarchy,) to say nothing of the general proof of the spuriousness of the whole Book of Daniel, ought perhaps long ago to have been seen by me as of more cardinal importance. For if we believe anything at all about the discourses of Christ, we cannot doubt that he selected “Son of Man” as his favourite title; which admits no interpretation so satisfactory, as, that he tacitly refers to the seventh chapter of Daniel, and virtually bases his pretensions upon it. On the whole, it was no longer defect of proof Which presented itself, but positive disproof of the primitive and fundamental claim.

I could not for a moment allow weight to the topic, that “it is dangerous to disbelieve wrongly;” for I felt, and had always felt, that it gave a premium to the most boastful and tyrannizing superstition: as if it were not equally dangerous to believe wrongly! Nevertheless, I tried to plead for farther delay, by asking: Is not the subject too vast for me to decide upon? Think how many wise and good men have fully examined, and have come to a contrary conclusion. What a grasp of knowledge and experience of the human mind it requires! Perhaps too I have unawares been carried away by a love of novelty, which I have mistaken for a love of truth.

But the argument recoiled upon me. Have I not been 25 years a reader of the Bible? have I not full 18 years been a student of Theology? have I not employed 7 of the best years of my life, with ample leisure, in this very investigation; without any intelligible earthly bribe to carry me to my present conclusion, against all my interests, all my prejudices and all my education? There are many far more learned men than I, many men of greater power of mind; but there are also a hundred times as many who are my inferiors; and if I have been seven years labouring in vain to solve this vast literary problem, it is an extreme absurdity to imagine that the solving of it is imposed by God on the whole human race. Let me renounce my little learning; let me be as the poor and simple: what then follows? Why, then, still the same thing follows, that difficult literary problems concerning distant history cannot afford any essential part of my religion.

It is with hundreds or thousands a favourite idea, that “they have an inward witness of the truth of (the historical and outward facts of) Christianity.” Perhaps the statement would bring its own refutation to them, if they would express it clearly. Suppose a biographer of Sir Isaac Newton, after narrating his sublime discoveries and ably stating some of his most remarkable doctrines, to add, that Sir Isaac was a great magician, and had been used to raise spirits by his arts, and finally was himself carried up to heaven one night, while he was gazing at the moon; and that this event had been foretold by Merlin: it would surely be the height of absurdity to dilate on the truth of the Newtonian theory as “the moral evidence” of the truth of the miracles and prophecy. Yet this is what those do, who adduce the excellence of the precepts and spirituality of the general doctrine of the New Testament, as the “moral evidence” of its miracles and of its fulfilling the Messianic prophecies. But for the ambiguity of the word doctrine, probably such confusion of thought would have been impossible. “Doctrines” are either spiritual truths, or are statements of external history. Of the former we may have an inward witness; that is their proper evidence; but the latter must depend upon adequate testimony and various kinds of criticism.

How quickly might I have come to my conclusion, how much weary thought and useless labour might I have spared, if at an earlier time this simple truth had been pressed upon me, that since the religious faculties of the poor and half-educated cannot investigate Historical and Literary questions, therefore these questions cannot constitute an essential part of Religion. But perhaps I could not have gained this result by any abstract act of thought, from want of freedom to think: and there are advantages also in expanding slowly under great pressure, if one can expand, and is not crushed by it.

I felt no convulsion of mind, no emptiness of soul, no inward practical change: but I knew that it would be said, this was only because the force of the old influence was as yet unspent, and that a gradual declension in the vitality of my religion must ensue. More than eight years have since past, and I feel I have now a right to contradict that statement. To any “Evangelical” I have a right to say, that while he has a single, I have a double experience; and I know, that the spiritual fruits which he values, have no connection whatever with the complicated and elaborate creed, which his school imagines, and I once imagined, to be the roots out of which they are fed. That they depend directly on the heart’s belief in the sympathy of God with individual man, I am well assured: but that doctrine does not rest upon the Bible or upon Christianity; for it is a postulate, from which every Christian advocate is forced to start. If it be denied, he cannot take a step forward in his argument. He talks to men about Sin and Judgment to come, and the need of Salvation, and so proceeds to the Saviour. But his very first step, the idea of Sin, assumes that God concerns himself with our actions, words, thoughts; assumes therefore that sympathy of God with every man, which (it seems) can only be known by an infallible Bible.

I know that many Evangelicals will reply, that I never can have had “the true” faith; else I could never have lost it: and as for my not being conscious of spiritual change, they will accept this as confirming their assertion. Undoubtedly I cannot prove that I ever felt as they now feel: perhaps they love their present opinions more than truth, and are careless to examine and verify them; with that I claim no fellowship. But there are Christians, and Evangelical Christians, of another stamp, who love their creed, only because they believe it to be true, but love truth, as such, and truthfulness, more than any creed: with these I claim fellowship. Their love to God and man, their allegiance to righteousness and true holiness, will not be in suspense and liable to be overturned by new discoveries in geology and in ancient inscriptions, or by improved criticism of texts and of history, nor have they any imaginable interest in thwarting the advance of scholarship. It is strange indeed to undervalue that Faith, which alone is purely moral and spiritual, alone rests on a basis that cannot be shaken, alone lifts the possessor above the conflicts of erudition, and makes it impossible for him to fear the increase of knowledge.

I fully expected that reviewers and opponents from the evangelical school would laboriously insinuate or assert, that I never was a Christian and do not understand anything about Christianity spiritually. My expectations have been more than fulfilled; and the course which my assailants have taken leads me to add some topics to the last paragraph. I say then, that if I had been slain at the age of twenty-seven, when I was chased by a mob of infuriated Mussulmans for selling New Testaments, they would have trumpeted me as an eminent saint and martyr. I add, that many circumstances within easy possibility might have led to my being engaged as an official teacher of a congregation at the usual age, which would in all probability have arrested my intellectual development, and have stereotyped my creed for many a long year; and then also they would have acknowledged me as a Christian. A little more stupidity, a little more worldliness, a little more mental dishonesty in me, or perhaps a little more kindness and management in others, would have kept me in my old state, which was acknowledged and would still be acknowledged as Christian. To try to disown me now, is an impotent superciliousness.

At the same time, I confess to several moral changes, as the result of this change in my creed, the principal of which are the following.

1. I have found that my old belief narrowed my affections. It taught me to bestow peculiar love on “the people of God,” and it assigned an intellectual creed as one essential mark of this people. That creed may be made more or less stringent; but when driven to its minimum, it includes a recognition of the historical proposition, that “the Jewish teacher Jesus fulfilled the conditions requisite to constitute him the Messiah of the ancient Hebrew prophets.” This proposition has been rejected by very many thoughtful and sincere men in England, and by tens of thousands in France, Germany, Italy, Spain. To judge rightly about it, is necessarily a problem of literary criticism; which has both to interpret the Old Scriptures and to establish how much of the biography of Jesus in the New is credible. To judge wrongly about it, may prove one to be a bad critic but not a less good and less pious man. Yet my old creed enacted an affirmative result of this historical inquiry, as a test of one’s spiritual state, and ordered me to think harshly of men like Marcus Aurelius and Lessing, because they did not adopt the conclusion which the professedly uncritical have established. It possessed me with a general gloom concerning Mohammedans and Pagans, and involved the whole course of history and prospects of futurity in a painful darkness from which I am relieved.

2. Its theory was one of selfishness. That is, it inculcated that my first business must be, to save my soul from future punishment, and to attain future happiness; and it bade me to chide myself, when I thought of nothing but about doing present duty and blessing God for present enjoyment.

In point of fact, I never did look much to futurity, nor even in prospect of death could attain to any vivid anticipations or desires, much less was troubled with fears. The evil which I suffered from my theory, was not (I believe) that it really made me selfish other influences of it were too powerful: but it taught me to blame myself for unbelief, because I was not sufficiently absorbed in the contemplation of my vast personal expectations. I certainly here feel myself delivered from the danger of factitious sin.

The selfish and self-righteous texts come principally from the three first gospels, and are greatly counteracted by the deeper spirituality of the apostolic epistles. I therefore by no means charge this tendency indiscriminately on the New Testament.

3. It laid down that “the time is short; THE LORD IS AT HAND: the things of this world pass away, and deserve not our affections: the only thing worth spending one’s energies on, is, the forwarding of men’s salvation.” It bade me “watch perpetually, not knowing whether my Lord would return at cockcrowing or at midday.”

While I believed this, (which, however disagreeable to modern Christians, is the clear doctrine of the New Testament,) I acted an eccentric and unprofitable part. From it I was saved against my will, and forced into a course in which the doctrine, having been laid to sleep, awoke only now and then to reproach and harass me for my unfaithfulness to it. This doctrine it is, which makes so many spiritual persons lend active or passive aid to uphold abuses and perpetuate mischief in every department of human life. Those who stick closest to the Scripture do not shrink from saying, that “it is not worth while trying to mend the world,” and stigmatize as “political and worldly” such as pursue an opposite course. Undoubtedly, if we are to expect our Master at cockcrowing, we shall not study the permanent improvement of this transitory scene. To teach the certain speedy destruction of earthly things, as the New Testament does, is to cut the sinews of all earthly progress; to declare war against Intellect and Imagination, against Industrial and Social advancement.

There was a time when I was distressed at being unable to avoid exultation in the worldly greatness of England. My heart would, in spite, of me, swell with something of pride, when a Turk or Arab asked what was my country: I then used to confess to God this pride as a sin. I still see that that was a legitimate deduction from the Scripture. “The glory of this world passeth away,” and I had professed to be “dead with Christ” to it. The difference is this. I am now as “dead” as then to all of it which my conscience discerns to be sinful, but I have not to torment myself in a (fundamentally ascetic) struggle against innocent and healthy impulses. I now, with deliberate approval, “love the world and the things of the world.” I can feel patriotism, and take the deepest interest in the future prospects of nations, and no longer reproach myself. Yet this is quite consistent with feeling the spiritual interests of men to be of all incomparably the highest.

Modern religionists profess to be disciples of Christ, and talk high of the perfect morality of the New Testament, when they certainly do not submit their understanding to it, and are no more like to the first disciples than bishops are like the pennyless apostles. One critic tells me that I know that the above is not the true interpretation of the apostolic doctrine. Assuredly I am aware that we may rebuke “the world” and “worldliness,” in a legitimate and modified sense, as being the system of selfishness: true, and I have avowed this in another work; but it does not follow that Jesus and the apostles did not go farther: and manifestly they did. The true disciple, who would be perfect as his Master, was indeed ordered to sell all, give to the poor and follow him; and when that severity was relaxed by good sense, it was still taught that things which lasted to the other side of the grave alone deserved our affection or our exertion. If any person thinks me ignorant of the Scriptures for being of this judgment, let him so think; but to deny that I am sincere in my avowal, is a very needless insolence.

4. I am sensible how heavy a clog on the exercise of my judgment has been taken off from me, since I unlearned that Bibliolatry, which I am disposed to call the greatest religious evil of England.

Authority has a place in religious teaching, as in education, but it is provisional and transitory. Its chief use is to guide action, and assist the formation of habits, before the judgment is ripe. As applied to mere opinion, its sole function is to guide inquiry. So long as an opinion is received on authority only, it works no inward process upon us: yet the promulgation of it by authority, is not therefore always useless, since the prominence thus given to it may be a most important stimulus to thought. While the mind is inactive or weak, it will not wish to throw off the yoke of authority: but as soon as it begins to discern error in the standard proposed to it, we have the mark of incipient original thought, which is the thing so valuable and so difficult to elicit; and which authority is apt to crush. An intelligent pupil seldom or never gives too little weight to the opinion of his teacher: a wise teacher will never repress the free action of his pupils’ minds, even when they begin to question his results. “Forbidding to think” is a still more fatal tyranny than “forbidding to marry:” it paralyzes all the moral powers.

In former days, if any moral question came before me, I was always apt to turn it into the mere lawyerlike exercise of searching and interpreting my written code. Thus, in reading how Henry the Eighth treated his first queen, I thought over Scripture texts in order to judge whether he was right, and if I could so get a solution, I left my own moral powers unexercised. All Protestants see, how mischievous it is to a Romanist lady to have a directing priest, whom she every day consults about everything; so as to lay her own judgment to sleep. We readily understand, that in the extreme case such women may gradually lose all perception of right and wrong, and become a mere machine in the hands of her director. But the Protestant principle of accepting the Bible as the absolute law, acts towards the same end; and only fails of doing the same amount of mischief, because a book can never so completely answer all the questions asked of it, as a living priest can. The Protestantism which pities those as “without chart and compass” who acknowledge no infallible written code, can mean nothing else, than that “the less occasion we have to trust our moral powers, the better;” that is, it represents it as of all things most desirable to be able to benumb conscience by disuse, under the guidance of a mind from without. Those who teach this need not marvel to see their pupils become Romanists.

But Bibliolatry not only paralyzes the moral sense; it also corrupts the intellect, and introduces a crooked logic, by setting men to the duty of extracting absolute harmony out of discordant materials. All are familiar with the subtlety of lawyers, whose task it is to elicit a single sense out of a heap of contradictory statutes. In their case such subtlety may indeed excite in us impatience or contempt; but we forbear to condemn them, when it is pleaded that practical convenience, not truth, is their avowed end. In the case of theological ingenuity, where truth is the professed and sacred object, a graver judgment is called for. When the Biblical interpreter struggles to reconcile contradictions, or to prove that wrong is right, merely because he is bound to maintain the perfection of the Bible; when to this end he condescends to sophistry and pettifogging evasions; it is difficult to avoid feeling disgust as well as grief. Some good people are secretly conscious that the Bible is not an infallible book; but they dread the consequences of proclaiming this “to the vulgar.” Alas! and have they measured the evils which the fostering of this lie is producing in the minds, not of the educated only, but emphatically of the ministers of religion?

Many who call themselves Christian preachers busily undermine moral sentiment, by telling their hearers, that if they do not believe the Bible (or the Church), they can have no firm religion or morality, and will have no reason to give against following brutal appetite. This doctrine it is, that so often makes men atheists in Spain, and profligates in England, as soon as they unlearn the national creed: and the school which have done the mischief, moralize over the wickedness of human nature when it comes to pass instead of blaming the falsehood which they have themselves inculcated.