Supernatural Religion (Vol. 1-3) - Walter Richard Cassels

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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 of truth or falsehood enabling us to judge of the ways of God.

      Now, in reference to the assumption of a Personal Deity as a preliminary to the proof of miracles, it must be clearly remembered that the contents of the revelation which miracles are to authenticate cannot have any weight. Antecedently, then, it is admitted that personality is a limitation which is absolutely excluded by the ideas of the Deity, which, it is asserted, the constitution of our minds compete us to form. It cannot, therefore, be rationally assumed. To admit that such a conception is false, and then to base conclusions upon it, as though it were true, is absurd. It is child's play to satisfy our feeling and imagination by the conscious sacrifice of our reason. Moreover, Dr. Mansel admits that the conception of a Personal Deity is really derived from the revelation, which has to be rendered credible by miracles; therefore the consequence already pointed out ensues, that the assumption cannot be used to prove miracles. "It must be allowed that it is not through reasoning that men obtain the first intimation of their relation to the Deity; and that, had they been left to the guidance of their intellectual faculties alone, it is possible that no such intimation might have taken place; or at best, that it would have been but as one guess, out of many equally plausible and equally natural."(1) The vicious circle of the argument is here again apparent, and the singular reasoning by which the late Dean of St. Paul's seeks to drive us into an acceptance of Revelation is really the strongest argument against it. The impossibility of conceiving God as he is,(2) which is insisted upon, instead of being a reason for assuming his personality, or for accepting Jewish conceptions of him, totally excludes such an assumption.

      This "great religious assumption"(1) is not suggested by any antecedent considerations, but is required to account for miracles, and is derived from the very Revelation which miracles are to attest. "In nature and from nature," to quote Words of Professor Baden Powell, "by science and by reason, we neither have nor can possibly have any evidence of a Deity working miracles;—for that we must go out of nature and beyond science. If we could have any such evidence from nature, it could only prove extraordinary natural effects, which would not be miracles in the old theological sense, as isolated, unrelated, and uncaused; whereas no physical fact can be conceived as unique, or without analogy and relation to others, and to the whole system of natural causes."(2) Being, therefore, limited to Reason for any feeble conception of a Divine Being of which we may be capable, and Reason being totally opposed to the idea of an order of nature so imperfect as to require or permit repeated interference, and rejecting the supposition of arbitrary suspensions of Law, such a conception of a Deity as is proposed by theologians must be pronounced irrational and derogatory. It is impossible for us to conceive a Supreme Being acting otherwise than we actually see in nature, and if we recognize in the universe the operation of infinite wisdom and power, it is in the immutable order and regularity of all phenomena, and in the eternal prevalence of Law, that we see their highest manifestation. This is no conception based merely upon observation of law and order in the material world, as Dr. Mansel insinuates,(1) but it is likewise the result of the highest exercise of mind. Dr. Mansel "does not hesitate to affirm with Sir

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