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so distinctly marked that no careful reader can mistake one Gospel for the other.

The above-quoted Dean Alford has ably proved this, both in his edition of the Greek Testament, and, in a more popular form, in one of his lectures. In the latter, he says of the writers, "Their mental character, bound up as "it always is with physical temperament, and the incidents of life, appear as "clearly in their writings, as does that of ordinary writers in theirs. The style "and habit of thought of St. Paul differs as entirely from that of St. Peter" and those of St. James from both-and those of St. John again from all-as "the style and habit of any mere human author from those of another."* Gaussen, also, without appearing to perceive the consequences of his argument, exults in this mark of human working. He says, "So far are we from dis"avowing this individuality, everywhere stamped upon our sacred books, "that, on the contrary, it is with the deepest gratitude and an ever-growing "admiration that we reflect on that living, real, human, dramatic character, extending with so powerful a charm through every portion of the word. "Yes, we rejoice in saying, in the language of our opponents, here is the phrase, the love, the accent, of Moses; there of St. John; they can be "recognised, heard, and seen."+

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This important fact is not only generally admitted, but is most skilfully employed by the Biblical Critics to assist in establishing the truth of the Gospel history. They argue, that as each book bears the marks of individuality, so the authors are all to be viewed as independent witnesses; that as by his style of composition, each writer manifests that he was perfectly independent in his composition, we may not say we have one only, but that they are so many distinct authorities. It is a very proper argument, faithful alike to common-sense, and to the laws of sound criticism. But whoever urges it, whether he knows it or not, gives up the theory of special Inspiration, for practically, he abandons the idea that the books were written by chosen men according as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.' They could not be both free and bound. If in their writing they were directed by a superior power, then there could be no marks of their own individuality; and if it be true, as undoubtedly it is, that such marks are visible, then we cannot reasonably believe them to have been Heaven-directed in the manner generally asserted.

It must not, however, be overlooked that the attempt has been made to harmonise these statements. For instance, it is said that they were not ver'bally inspired, but inspired only in relation to the ideas they were to convey.' The meaning is, that the Spirit of God put certain ideas into their minds, but left them free to express their ideas in their own language; thus, substantially, their works are to be taken as inspired, although their freedom and style of expression remained in every sense undiminished. The arbitrary character of this assumption is too obvious to need exposure. Who can avoid asking how a third person can be capable of discovering that the ideas expressed by a second were given to him by a first, when no traces of that fact are to be found in the writing, and the writer has not intimated that anything of the kind occurred? It is evident, also, that if the proposition be true, there can be no authority in the writing. We may put ideas into a man's mind, but unless we supervise the writing, we cannot be sure that he has conveyed our meaning, Words are merely the clothes of ideas, and no man can, in writing, convey the ideas of another in a long series so exactly that no correction shall be

*The Intelligent Study of Holy Scripture. Ex. Hall Christ. Young Men's Lect. 1855, p. 212. + Théopneustie, p. 54.

required. Thus it follows, that for a written revelation from Heaven to be perfect, the writer must be inspired and guided, not merely in relation to the ideas, but in relation to the language also.

It was the conclusion of Lardner that "the Canon of the New Testa"ment was not determined by the authority of Councils, but the books of "which it consists were known to be the genuine writings of the Apostles "and Evangelists, in the same way and manner that we know the works "of Cæsar, Cicero, Virgil, and Homer; and the Canon has been formed "upon the ground of an unanimous or generally concurring testimony, and "tradition."* No man was better qualified by his preceding inquiries to express an opinion upon this point, in its historical aspect, than he was. But he should have added, that the Fathers who preserved the books, were guided not by the evidence of their genuineness so much as by the nature of the doctrines they contained. They received or rejected books, without regard to their authors. If the works contained the theories which they were pledged to support, then it was quite certain they would be exalted to the seventh heaven. Ignatius, who must be classed with the earliest Fathers, speaks of the "Christian Consciousness" as the supreme judge. He advised his people to read the prophets and other good books; but not to receive any which did not completely harmonise with their consciousness. A doctrine which would horrify half the clergy in England, yet none the less deserving of being preached.

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That theory of the " supremacy of the consciousness was cherished in the better days of the Church. It probably led to some errors, and opened a way for some fanaticism; but better a goodly measure of wild life, than mere somnolence and no activity. The people who were allowed to test all by their own consciences were in no danger so long as only moral questions were concerned; but when it became a question of speaking with tongues and prophesying, there was danger. Still, with all the errors, the ultimate result would have been good, had it not been for the growth of a party who were to live by the gifts of the altar, and to administer instruction unto others. P. W. P.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE REFORMATION.-V.

THE SCHOOLMEN.

LOGIC, like many other things, good in themselves, is capable of being misapplied and prostituted to base uses. Ignorance has been so wide-spread, and even among the educated, the right use of the thinking and reasoning powers has been so little known or attended to, that mankind has furnished but too easy a prey for false and dishonest reasoners in every path of human inquiry. To the evil disposed, the temptation has thus been great, and easy the achievement, to deceive men into accepting falsities as truth; and by reason of the frequency with which this has been done, and the amount of evil and misery caused thereby, a deep-seated hatred of logic has frequently taken possession of the minds of honest men-earnest lovers of the truth; and logicians have, by consequence, been most unjustly classed with sophists. This feeling has led to much misapprehension and misrepresentation with regard to the Schoolmen, with their subtle dialectics and strange logical processes. But the difference between the true logician and the sophist is great*Lardner's books, Vol. vi. p. 27. + Epist. ad Philadelph.

as great as between the wilful deceiver and the earnest truth-seeker; and if there were many of the former, there were also not a few of the latter among the Schoolmen. The sophist, truly, uses the same means as the logician, but it were as honest and fair to compare the mad Malay who runs-a-muck through the streets killing and wounding defenceless passengers, with the patriot who fights in defence of hearth and home, because they both carry sharp-edged weapons. It is true they may carry the same weapons, but nevertheless the one is a murderer, the other a man armed in a just cause; the one abuses, the other uses the instruments of death which he carries. So with the sophist and the logician; the one seeks to kill the truth, the other is the slayer of error. In judging the Schoolmen, it is necessary to bear this distinction in mind; and to remember that both classes had representatives among them.

The ends proposed to be achieved by logic rightly used are well worthy; and it would be well had the achievement thereof been more successful. Logic is the hewer and modeller of the stones which go to build up the temple of truth; and many a rough-hewn truth has been rejected because the would-be builders have been destitute of the needful instruments of labour, or have made wrong use of them. So it has not unfrequently happened that men have disputed and fought over what was true, merely because in using vague terms, capable of different meanings, they have been led to mistake the aims of those they have opposed. In the eternal squabbles of the Schools we have an illustration of this; for many of the disputes which lasted for centuries were rather about words than ideas. If the real meaning which lay beneath the propositions of the disputants-where indeed there was any meaning-had been correctly ascertained preliminary to the commencement of the debate, there would have been no room for discussion at all. We may at once mention, for the comfort of our readers, that it is not our intention to enter into any description of these disputes, or discuss the merits of the questions raised thereby; that would indeed be both an endless and a useless task, and ineffably disgusting to modern intellects. Except so far as any reference thereto may be needed for illustration, we will leave those questions, with the questioners, to sleep the sleep of ages.

The theses upon which these Ineffable Doctors, Perspicuous Doctors, Seraphic Doctors, Subtle Doctors (for such were the ridiculous titles the Schoolmen loved to bestow and receive), expended their intellectual activity were of the most absurd nature, and were only important (speaking generally) as having been the apprenticeship and training of the European mind to the work it afterwards accomplished. Our aim now is to show the relation of the Schoolmen (who were the only representatives of intellect in the Middle Ages) to the Church, and also to call attention to the fact, that out of the intellectual efforts of Scholasticism there grew, in after times, a race of thinkers who sought to raise Reason above Faith, and under the guise of arguments in proof of theological mysteries were undermining-generally, unconsciously, it is true-their only stable basis, the authority of the Church. It is because these things were so, that those ridiculous word-battles, that barren syllogising, which obtained in the Schools, become surrounded with interest to the student, and demand the respect of every one who loves the Truth.

As an example of the matters upon which the Scholastic philosophy expended its resources, and the questions upon which generation after generation of the Schoolmen made it their life-work to dispute, as also as an apt illustration of the way in which, by their consequences, these wordy battles became important to the progress of mankind, we may very briefly call attention to

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that grand dispute of the Middle Ages-that between the Nominalists and Realists-about which more was said and written than about any other. The great question between them was, Have both genera and species a real objective existence? The point in dispute can scarcely be understood, except by those versed in metaphysical subtilties; we will, however, try to make it plain. The one party-and they were the Nominalists-maintained that "all knowledge must proceed from experience, that therefore individuals (or in "the language of the schools, species) alone had any real existence, and all general conceptions were without objective significance-they were but abstractions, necessary helps to the understanding, to enable it to grasp the "infinite manifoldness of things." The proposition supported by this party, put into their own language is: Nomina non res (Names are not things). It was from this that their cognomen of Nominalists was derived. The Realists supported the converse of this, and maintained that conceptions, as well as perceptions, had a real objective existence. The dispute is as old as Plato and Aristotle, and as modern as Kant and Fichte. It raged through the Schools for centuries, but would never have obtained the importance it did had not Roscelin allied it to Church doctrine. He used the nominalist arguments to

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question the objective reality of the Christian Trinity, and the Church found her authority interested in the dispute. It afterwards became the cause of the charge of Polytheism against the Nominalists, it being argued that if they denied general conceptions to have an objective value, the Trinity must resolve itself into three Gods; the idea of God also being "general," His attributes alone being "special," if they believed in a Deity at all they must make a God of every attribute. The Church accordingly took up the quarrel ; persecution on the one hand, and a consequent antagonism to the Church on the other, thus grew out of this Scholastic quarrel, and a mere wordy dispute became of practical value to humanity.

The distinctive peculiarity of the Schoolmen, as a body, was this, that all their discussions centred upon points of Church doctrine. They sought to prove by philosophical formula and logical modes the various dogmas and superstitious notions to which Priestcraft gave the name of Religion; they aimed, in fact, at a rational demonstration of matters having no reasonable basis, and which, to be accepted at all, must be accepted by a blind faith alone. They endeavoured to reduce Theology to a syllogism. What wonder if they failed in their endeavours? For what were they doing in this but seeking to make Reason subservient to Unreason? trying to prove not merely the unproveable, but that which was disproveable? It was the labour of Sisyphus constantly renewed; for centuries they rolled the stone up the logical mountain, but ever it rolled down again, and again the work was renewed, and yet again, but always with the like success. Alas! the process is even now going on; and in the constant attempts made in this nineteenth century to harmonize Science and Theology, we see the deplorable fact exemplified that the race of Schoolmen is not yet extinct, and that we have amongst us men who should have been born seven or eight hundred years ago. Then there would have been some excuse for them; now they must be simply classed as fools or knaves. We, who see further than those old Schoolmen, know that the Theology of the Churches is altogether untenable on reasonable grounds. We know, too, that it has nothing to do with Religion; that its mysteries are man-made, not God-made, and we discard them accordingly. We also know that while there is much of speculative religious truth which the soul of man accepts from faith in its intuitions, and in the God-given

revelation which man finds within himself, yet that nothing so accepted is or can be unreasonable; that is to say, that though reason may fail to demonstrate its truth, yet it is of such a nature that reason marks it with her approval. We believe much we cannot prove, but nothing which is alien to reason. We know that the domains of Faith and Logic are distinct. The Schoolmen sought to make them one, and in so doing attempted an impossible task-impossible but not useless.

These men did not live in vain; for, apart from the fact that by their disputations they were training the nascent intelligence of Europe, they were also proving the uselessness of the endeavour to reconcile the authority and teachings of the Church with the claims of Reason, a fact which in the end not a few of them acknowledged. Thus was the intellect of man directed to nobler fields of inquiry. It is, therefore, this strife between Reason and Authority, between the Spirit of Inquiry and Priestcraft, which the Schoolmen bequeathed to after times. The history of the Church from this point involves the history of the Reformation. Up to the time of the rise of the Schoolmen, in looking through the history of Christendom, we have to trace the growth of the Church of Priestcraft unchecked, and to behold humanity bowing itself in abject humility at the feet of the spiritual despot; from that time the purview becomes at once a more pleasant and a sadder one, for we have still to record a further growth of priestly power, but have also to place side by side therewith the record of continual revolts against it, ending too often, alas! in defeat and misery for the time, but at last succeeding in giving to Priestcraft a blow from which it never will recover. It is true the work even yet is incomplete, but that we have the means of progressing in it we owe to the labours of those who have gone before us.

Those Dark Ages, then, with all their desolation and misery, their darkness and ignorance, form a spectacle worthy of our closest attention, and enlisting our warmest sympathies, in that they present to us the sight of humanity raising itself out of the mire into which priests had thrown it, and walking, even through fire and blood, in the face of persecution, and amid accumulated misery, onwards to the light. In those ages, we mark the first stirrings of the giant awakening to a knowledge of his power, and snapping asunder one by one the chains which had been placed upon him, A noble and an encouraging spectacle for all time; for when we consider the obstacles which had to be overcome, the power which had to be overthrown-when we remember the self-sacrifice which led men to suffer and cast away even life itself in defence of the truth, we cannot fail to learn that humanity is not the despicable thing which priests have ever sought to prove it to be, or to become filled with hope for the issue of that combat which even yet has to be sustained with the old Theology and Priestcraft. Nor shall we say that the accumulated horrors of those medieval times are without their use as a teaching in other ways; for upon the arena of Europe, after the Fall of Rome, a great experiment had its trial. Then was seen what are the results to mankind of the undivided sway of the priest-then was seen what must necessarily be the outcome of a Religion (if we may so far degrade the word as to use it in such a connection) of superstition and intellectual serfdom, and it is not too much to say that never again in the history of the world, after the example shown by the Dark Ages, will humanity (or such part of it as is now enfranchised) consent to place itself under the sway of a dominant priesthood.

JAS. L. GOODING.

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