Supernatural Religion (Discovering the Reality of Divine Revelation). Walter Richard Cassels

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СКАЧАТЬ recognizes, however, that the conception of a Person al" Deity cannot be proved, but he distinctly confesses that it was obtained from revelation,(3) and from nowhere else, and these necessary admissions obviously establish the correctness of the premiss, and involve the consequence pointed out, that the evidence of revelation is a mere vicious circle. Dr. Mozley attempts to argue that, although the idea was first obtained through this channel, "the truth once possessed is seen to rest upon grounds of natural reason."(4) Why, then, does he call it an assumption? The argument by which he seeks to show that the conception is seen to rest upon grounds of natural reason is: "We naturally attribute to the design of a Personal Being a contrivance which is directed to the existence of a Personal Being. … From personality at one end I infer personality at the other." Dr. Mozley's own sense of the weakness of his argument, however, and his natural honesty of mind oblige him continually to confess the absence of evidence. A few paragraphs further on he admits:—"Not, however, that the existence of a God is so clearly seen by reason as to dispense with faith;"(1) but he endeavours to convince us that faith is reason, only reason acting under peculiar circumstances: when reason draws conclusions which are not backed by experience, reason is then called faith.(2) The issue of the argument, he contends, is so amazing, that if we do not tremble for its safety it must be on account of a practical principle, which makes us confide and trust in reasons, and that principle is faith. We are not aware that conviction can be arrived at regarding any matter otherwise than by confidence in the correctness of the reasons, and what Dr. Mozley really means by faith, here, is confidence and trust in a conclusion for which there are no reasons.

      It is almost incredible that the same person who had just been denying grounds of reason to conclusions from unvarying experience, and excluding from them the results of inductive reasoning—who had denounced as unintelligent impulse and irrational instinct the faith that the sun, which has risen without fail every morning since time began, will rise again to-morrow, could thus argue. In fact, from the very commencement of the direct plea for miracles, calm logical reasoning is abandoned, and the argument becomes entirely ad hominem. Mere feeling is substituted for thought, and in the inability to be precise and logical, the lecturer appeals to the generally prevailing inaccuracy of thought.(1) "Faith, then," he concludes, "is unverified reason; reason which has not yet received the verification of the final test, but is still expectant." In science this, at the best, would be called mere "hypothesis," but accuracy can scarcely be expected where the argument continues: "Indeed, does not our heart bear witness to the fact that to believe in a God"—i.e., a Personal God—"is an exercise of faith?" &c.(2)

      It does not help Dr. Mozley that Butler, Paley, and all other divines have equally been obliged to commence with the same assumption; and, indeed, as we have already remarked, Dr. Mozley honestly admits the difficulty of the case, and while naturally making the most of his own views, he does not disguise the insecurity of the position. He deprecates that school which maintains that any average man, taken out of a crowd, who has sufficient common sense to manage his own affairs, is a fit judge, and such a judge as was originally contemplated, of the Christian evidences;(3) and he says: "It is not, indeed, consistent with truth, nor would it conduce to the real defence of Christianity, to underrate the difficulties of the Christian evidence; or to disguise this characteristic of it, that the very facts which constitute the evidence of revelation have to be accepted by an act of faith themselves, before they can operate as a proof of that further truth."(4) Such evidence is manifestly worthless. After all his assumptions, Dr. Mozley is reduced to the necessity of pleading: "A probable fact is a probable evidence. I may, therefore, use a miracle as evidence of a revelation, though

      I have only probable evidence for the miracle."(1) The probability of the miracle, however, is precisely what is denied, as opposed to reason and experience, and incompatible with the order of nature. A cause is, indeed, weak when so able an advocate is reduced to such reasoning.

      The deduction which is drawn from the assumption of a "Personal" Deity is, as we have seen, merely the possibility of miracles. "Paley's criticism," said the late Dean of St. Paul's, "is, after all, the true one—'once believe that there is a God, and miracles are not incredible.'"(2) The assumption, therefore, although of vital importance in the event of its rejection, does not very materially advance the cause of miracles if established. We have already seen that the assumption is avowedly incapable of proof, but it may be well to examine it a little more closely in connection with the inferences supposed to be derivable from it. We must, however, in doing so carefully avoid being led into a metaphysical argument, which would be foreign to the purpose of this inquiry.

      In his Bampton Lectures on "The Limit of Religious Thought," delivered in 1858, Dr. Mansel, the very able editor and disciple of Sir William Hamilton, discussed this subject with great minuteness, and although we cannot pretend here to follow him through the whole of his singular argument—a theological application of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy—we must sufficiently represent it. Dr. Mansel argues: We are absolutely incapable of conceiving or proving the existence of God as he is; and so far is human reason from being able to construct a theology independent of revelation that it cannot even read the alphabet out of which that theology must be formed.(1) We are compelled, by the constitution of our minds, to believe in the existence of an Absolute and Infinite Being; but the instant we attempt to analyse, we are involved in inextricable confusion.(2) Our moral consciousness demands that we should conceive him as a Personality, but personality, as we conceive it, is essentially a limitation; to speak of an Absolute and Infinite Person is simply to use language to which no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself.(3) This amounts simply to an admission that our knowledge of God does not satisfy the conditions of speculative philosophy, and is incapable of reduction to an ultimate and absolute truth.(4) It is, therefore, reasonable that we should expect to find that the revealed manifestation of the Divine nature and attributes should likewise carry the marks of subordination to some higher truth, of which it indicates the existence, but does not make known the substance; and that our apprehension of the revealed Deity should involve mysteries inscrutable, and doubts insoluble by our present faculties, while at the same time it inculcates the true spirit in which doubt should be dealt with by warning us that our knowledge of God, though revealed by himself, is revealed in relation to human faculties, and subject to the limitations and imperfections inseparable from the constitution of the human mind.(1) We need not, of course, point out that the reality of revelation is here assumed. Elsewhere, Dr. Mansel maintains that philosophy, by its own incongruities, has no claim to be accepted as a competent witness; and, on the other hand, human personality cannot be assumed as an exact copy of the Divine, but only as that which is most nearly analogous to it among finite things.(2) As we are, therefore, incapable on the one hand of a clear conception of the Divine Being, and have only analogy to guide us in conceiving his attributes, we have no criterion of religious truth or falsehood, enabling us to judge of the ways of God, represented by revelation,(3) and have no right to judge of his justice, or mercy, or goodness, by the standard of human morality.

      It is impossible to conceive an argument more vicious, or more obviously warped to favour already accepted conclusions of revelation:—As finite beings we are not only incapable of proving the existence of God, but even of conceiving him as he is; therefore we may conceive him as he is not. To attribute personality to him is a limitation totally incompatible with the idea of an Absolute and Infinite Being, in which "we are compelled by the constitution of our minds to believe;" and to speak of him as a personality is "to use language to which no mode of human thought can possibly attach itself;" but, nevertheless, to satisfy supposed demands of our moral consciousness, we are to conceive him as a personality. Although we must define the Supreme Being as a personality to satisfy our moral consciousness, we must not, we are told, make the same moral consciousness the criterion of the attributes of that personality. We must not suppose him to be endowed, for instance, with the perfection of morality according to our ideas of it; but, on the contrary, we must hold that his moral perfections are at best only analogous, and often contradictory, to our standard of morality.1 As soon as we conceive a Personal Deity to satisfy our moral consciousness, we have to abandon the personality which satisfies that consciousness, in order to accept the characteristics of a supposed Revelation, to reconcile certain statements of which we must admit that we have no criterion СКАЧАТЬ