The Fair Haven

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Thus he became truly a broad Churchman. Not broad in the ordinary
and ill-considered use of the term (for the broad Churchman is as
little able to sympathise with Romanists, extreme High Churchmen and
Dissenters, as these are with himself--he is only one of a sect which
is called by the name broad, though it is no broader than its own
base), but in the true sense of being able to believe in the
naturalness, legitimacy, and truth qua Christianity even of those
doctrines which seem to stand most widely and irreconcilably asunder.

CHAPTER II

But it was impossible that a mind of such activity should have gone
over so much ground, and yet in the end returned to the same position
as that from which it started.

So far was this from being the case that the Christianity of his
maturer life would be considered dangerously heterodox by those who
belong to any of the more definite or precise schools of theological
thought. He was as one who has made the circuit of a mountain, and
yet been ascending during the whole time of his doing so: such a
person finds himself upon the same side as at first, but upon a
greatly higher level. The peaks which had seemed the most important
when he was in the valley were now dwarfed to their true proportions
by colossal cloud-capped masses whose very existence could not have
been suspected from beneath: and again, other points which had
seemed among the lowest turned out to be the very highest of all--as
the Finster-Aarhorn, which hides itself away in the centre of the
Bernese Alps, is never seen to be the greatest till one is high and
far off.

Thus he felt no sort of fear or repugnance in admitting that the New
Testament writings, as we now have them, are not by any means
accurate records of the events which they profess to chronicle.
This, which few English Churchmen would be prepared to admit, was to
him so much of an axiom that he despaired of seeing any sound
theological structure raised until it was universally recognised.

And here he would probably meet with sympathy from the more advanced
thinkers within the body of the Church, but so far as I know, he
stood alone as recognising the wisdom of the Divine counsels in
having ordained the wide and apparently irreconcilable divergencies
of doctrine and character which we find assigned to Christ in the
Gospels, and as finding his faith confirmed, not by the supposition
that both the portraits drawn of Christ are objectively true, but
THAT BOTH ARE OBJECTIVELY INACCURATE, AND THAT THE ALMIGHTY INTENDED
THEY SHOULD BE INACCURATE, inasmuch as the true spiritual conception
in the mind of man could be indirectly more certainly engendered by a
strife, a warring, a clashing, so to speak, of versions, all of them
distorting slightly some one or other of the features of the
original, than directly by the most absolutely correct impression
which human language could convey. Even the most perfect human
speech, as has been often pointed out, is a very gross and imperfect
vehicle of thought. I remember once hearing him say that it was not
till he was nearly thirty that he discovered "what thick and sticky
fluids were air and water," how crass and dull in comparison with
other more subtle fluids; he added that speech had no less deceived
him, seeming, as it did, to be such a perfect messenger of thought,
and being after all nothing but a shuffler and a loiterer.

With most men the Gospels are true in spite of their discrepancies
and inconsistencies; with him Christianity, as distinguished from a
bare belief in the objectively historical character of each part of
the Gospels, was true because of these very discrepancies; as his
conceptions of the Divine manner of working became wider, the very
forces which had at one time shaken his faith to its foundations
established it anew upon a firmer and broader base. He was gradually
led to feel that the ideal presented by the life and death of our
Saviour could never have been accepted by Jews at all, if its whole
purport had been made intelligible during the Redeemer's life-time;
that in order to insure its acceptance by a nucleus of followers it
must have been endowed with a more local aspect than it was intended
afterwards to wear; yet that, for the sake of its subsequent
universal value, the destruction of that local complexion was
indispensable; that the corruptions inseparable from viva voce
communication and imperfect education were the means adopted by the
Creator to blur the details of the ideal, and give it that breadth
which could not be otherwise obtainable--and that thus the value of
the ideal was indefinitely enhanced, and DESIGNEDLY ENHANCED, alike
by the waste of time and by its incrustations; that all ideals gain
by a certain amount of vagueness, which allows the beholder to fill
in the details according to his own spiritual needs, and that no
ideal can be truly universal and permanents unless it have an
elasticity which will allow of this process in the minds of those who
contemplate it; that it cannot become thus elastic unless by the loss
of no inconsiderable amount of detail, and that thus the half, as Dr.
Arnold used to say, "becomes greater than the whole," the sketch more
preciously suggestive than the photograph. Hence far from deploring
the fragmentary, confused, and contradictory condition of the Gospel
records, he saw in this condition the means whereby alone the human
mind could have been enabled to conceive--not the precise nature of
Christ--but THE HIGHEST IDEAL OF WHICH EACH INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIAN SOUL
WAS CAPABLE. As soon as he had grasped these conceptions, which will
be found more fully developed in one of the later chapters of his
book, the spell of unbelief was broken.

But, once broken, it was dissolved utterly and entirely; he could
allow himself to contemplate fearlessly all sorts of issues from
which one whose experiences had been less varied would have shrunk.
He was free of the enemy's camp, and could go hither and thither
whithersoever he would. The very points which to others were
insuperable difficulties were to him foundation-stones of faith. For
example, to the objection that if in the present state of the records
no clear conception of the nature of Christ's life and teaching could
be formed, we should be compelled to take one for our model of whom
we knew little or nothing certain, I have heard him answer, "And so
much the better for us all. The truth, if read by the light of man's
imperfect understanding, would have been falser to him than any
falsehood. It would have been truth no longer. BETTER BE LED ARIGHT
BY AN ERROR WHICH IS SO ADJUSTED AS TO COMPENSATE FOR THE ERRORS IN
MAN'S POWERS OF UNDERSTANDING, THAN BE MISLED BY A TRUTH WHICH CAN
NEVER BE TRANSLATED FROM OBJECTIVITY TO SUBJECTIVITY. In such a
case, it is the error which is the truth and the truth the error.

Fearless himself, he could not understand the fears felt by others;
and this was perhaps his greatest sympathetic weakness. He was
impatient of the subterfuges with which untenable interpretations of
Scripture were defended, and of the disingenuousness of certain
harmonists; indeed, the mention of the word harmony was enough to
kindle an outbreak of righteous anger, which would sometimes go to
the utmost limit of righteousness. "Harmonies!" he would exclaim,
"the sweetest harmonies are those which are most full of discords,
and the discords of one generation of musicians become heavenly music
in the hands of their successors. Which of the great musicians has
not enriched his art not only by the discovery of new harmonies, but
by proving that sounds which are actually inharmonious are
nevertheless essentially and eternally delightful? What an outcry
has there not always been against the 'unwarrantable licence' with
the rules of harmony whenever a Beethoven or a Mozart has broken
through any of the trammels which have been regarded as the
safeguards of the art, instead of in their true light of fetters, and
how gratefully have succeeding musicians acquiesced in and adopted
the innovation." Then would follow a tirade with illustration upon
illustration, comparison of this passage with that, and an exhaustive
demonstration that one or other, or both, could have had no sort of
possible foundation in fact; he could only see that the persons from
whom he differed were defending something which was untrue and which
they ought to have known to be untrue, but he could not see that
people ought to know many things which they do not know.

Had he himself seen all that he ought to have been able to see from
his own standpoints? Can any of us do so? The force of early bias
and education, the force of intellectual surroundings, the force of
natural timidity, the force of dulness, were things which he could
appreciate and make allowance for in any other age, and among any
other people than his own; but as belonging to England and the
Nineteenth Century they had no place in his theory of Nature; they
were inconceivable, unnatural, unpardonable, whenever they came into
contact with the subject of Christian evidences. Deplorable, indeed,
they are, but this was just the sort of word to which he could not
confine himself. The criticisms upon the late Dean Alford's notes,
which will be given in the sequel, display this sort of temper; they
are not entirely his own, but he adopted them and endorsed them with
a warmth which we cannot but feel to be unnecessary, not to say more.
Yet I am free to confess that whatever editorial licence I could
venture to take has been taken in the direction of lenity.

On the whole, however, he valued Dean Alford's work very highly,
giving him great praise for the candour with which he not
unfrequently set the harmonists aside. For example, in his notes
upon the discrepancies between St. Luke's and St. Matthew's accounts
of the early life of our Lord, the Dean openly avows that it is quite
beyond his purpose to attempt to reconcile the two. "This part of
the Gospel history," he writes, "is one where the harmonists, by
their arbitrary reconcilement of the two accounts, have given great
advantage to the enemies of the faith. AS THE TWO ACCOUNTS NOW
STAND, it is wholly impossible to suggest any satisfactory method of
UNITING THEM, every one who has attempted it has in some part or
other of his hypothesis violated probability and common sense," but
in spite of this, the Dean had no hesitation in accepting both the
accounts. With reference to this the author of The Jesus of History
(Williams and Norgate, 1866)--a work to which my brother admitted
himself to be under very great obligations, and which he greatly
admired, in spite of his utter dissent from the main conclusion
arrived at, has the following note:-

"Dean Alford, N.T. for English readers, admits that the narratives as
they stand are contradictory, but he believes both. He is even
severe upon the harmonists who attempt to frame schemes of
reconciliation between the two, on account of the triumph they thus
furnish to the 'enemies of the faith,' a phrase which seems to imply
all who believe less than he does. The Dean, however, forgets that
the faith which can believe two (apparently) contradictory
propositions in matters of fact is a very rare gift, and that for one
who is so endowed there are thousands who can be satisfied with a
plausible though demonstrably false explanation. To the latter class
the despised harmonists render a real service."

Upon this note my brother was very severe. In a letter, dated Dec.
18, 1866, addressed to a friend who had alluded to it, and expressed
his concurrence with it as in the main just, my brother wrote: "You
are wrong about the note in The Jesus of History, there is more of
the Christianity of the future in Dean Alford's indifference to the
harmony between the discordant accounts of Luke and Matthew than
there would have been EVEN IN THE MOST CONVINCING AND SATISFACTORY
explanation of the way in which they came to differ. No such
explanation is possible; both the Dean and the author of The Jesus of
History were very well aware of this, but the latter is unjust in
assuming that his opponent was not alive to the absurdity of
appearing to believe two contradictory propositions at one and the
same time. The Dean takes very good care that he shall not appear to
do this, for it is perfectly plain to any careful reader that he must
really believe that one or both narratives are inaccurate, inasmuch
as the differences between them are too great to allow of
reconciliation by a supposed suppression of detail.

"This, though not said so clearly as it should have been, is yet
virtually implied in the admission that no sort of fact which could
by any possibility be admitted as reconciling them had ever occurred
to human ingenuity; what, then, Dean Alford must have really felt was
that the spiritual value of each account was no less precious for not
being in strict accordance with the other; that the objective truth
lies somewhere between them, and is of very little importance, being
long dead and buried, and living in its results only, in comparison
with the subjective truth conveyed by both the narratives, which
lives in our hearts independently of precise knowledge concerning the
actual facts. Moreover, that though both accounts may perhaps be
inaccurate, yet that A VERY LITTLE natural inaccuracy on the part of
each writer would throw them apparently very wide asunder, that such
inaccuracies are easily to be accounted for, and would, in fact, be
inevitable in the sixty years of oral communication which elapsed
between the birth of our Lord and the writing of the first Gospel,
and again in the eighty or ninety years prior to the third, so that
the details of the facts connected with the conception, birth,
genealogy, and earliest history of our Saviour are irrecoverable--a
general impression being alone possible, or indeed desirable.

"It might perhaps have been more satisfactory if Dean Alford had
expressed the above more plainly; but if he had done this, who would
have read his book? Where would have been that influence in the
direction of truly liberal Christianity which has been so potent
during the last twenty years? As it was, the freedom with which the
Dean wrote was the cause of no inconsiderable scandal. Or, again, he
may not have been fully conscious of his own position: few men are;
he had taken the right one, but more perhaps by spiritual instinct
than by conscious and deliberate exercise of his intellectual
faculties. Finally, compromise is not a matter of good policy only,
it is a solemn duty in the interests of Christian peace, and this not
in minor matters only--we can all do this much--but in those
concerning which we feel most strongly, for here the sacrifice is
greatest and most acceptable to God. There are, of course, limits to
this, and Dean Alford may have carried compromise too far in the
present instance, but it is very transparent. The narrowness which
leads the author of The Jesus of History to strain at such a gnat is
the secret of his inability to accept the divinity and miracles of
our Lord, and has marred the most exhaustively critical exegesis of
the life and death of our Saviour with an impotent conclusion."

It is strange that one who could write thus should occasionally have
shown himself so little able to apply his own principles. He seems
to have been alternately under the influence of two conflicting
spirits--at one time writing as though there were nothing precious
under the sun except logic, consistency, and precision, and breathing
fire and smoke against even very trifling deviations from the path of
exact criticism--at another, leading the reader almost to believe
that he disregarded the value of any objective truth, and speaking of
endeavour after accuracy in terms that are positively contemptuous.
Whenever he was in the one mood he seemed to forget the possibility
of any other; so much so that I have sometimes thought that he did
this deliberately and for the same reasons as those which led Adam
Smith to exclude one set of premises in his Theory of Moral
Sentiments and another in his Wealth of Nations. I believe, however,
that the explanation lies in the fact that my brother was inclined to
underrate the importance of belief in the objective truth of any
other individual features in the life of our Lord than his
Resurrection and Ascension. All else seemed dwarfed by the side of
these events. His whole soul was so concentrated upon the centre of
the circle that he forgot the circumference, or left it out of sight.
Nothing less than the strictest objective truth as to the main facts
of the Resurrection and Ascension would content him; the other
miracles and the life and teaching of our Lord might then be left
open; whatever view was taken of them by each individual Christian
was probably the one most desirable for the spiritual wellbeing of
each.

Even as regards the Resurrection and Ascension, he did not greatly
value the detail. Provided these facts were so established that they
could never henceforth be controverted, he thought that the less
detail the broader and more universally acceptable would be the
effect. Hence, when Dean Alford's notes seemed to jeopardise the
evidences for these things, he could brook no trifling; for unless
Christ actually died and actually came to life again, he saw no
escape from an utter denial of any but natural religion. Christ
would have been no more to him than Socrates or Shakespeare, except
in so far as his teaching was more spiritual. The triune nature of
the Deity--the Resurrection from the dead--the hope of Heaven and
salutary fear of Hell--all would go but for the Resurrection and
Ascension of Jesus Christ; nothing would remain except a sense of the
Divine as a substitute for God, and the current feeling of one's
peers as the chief moral check upon misconduct. Indeed, we have seen
this view openly advocated by a recent writer, and set forth in the
very plainest terms. My brother did not live to see it, but if he
had, he would have recognised the fulfilment of his own prophecies as
to what must be the inevitable sequel of a denial of our Lord's
Resurrection.

It will be seen therefore that he was in no danger of being carried
away by a "pet theory." Where light and definition were essential,
he would sacrifice nothing of either; but he was jealous for his
highest light, and felt "that the whole effect of the Christian
scheme was indefinitely heightened by keeping all other lights
subordinate"--this at least was the illustration which he often used
concerning it. But as there were limits to the value of light and
"finding"--limits which had been far exceeded, with the result of an
unnatural forcing of the lights, and an effect of garishness and
unreality--so there were limits to the as yet unrecognised
preciousness of "losing" and obscurity; these limits he placed at the
objectivity of our Lord's Resurrection and Ascension. Let there be
light enough to show these things, and the rest would gain by being
in half-tone and shadow.

His facility of illustration was simply marvellous. From his
conversation any one would have thought that he was acquainted with
all manner of arts and sciences of which he knew little or nothing.
It is true, as has been said already, that he had had some practice
in the art of painting, and was an enthusiastic admirer of the
masterpieces of Raphael, Titian, Guido, Domenichino, and others; but
he could never have been called a painter; for music he had
considerable feeling; I think he must have known thorough-bass, but
it was hard to say what he did or did not know. Of science he was
almost entirely ignorant, yet he had assimilated a quantity of stray
facts, and whatever he assimilated seemed to agree with him and
nourish his mental being. But though his acquaintance with any one
art or science must be allowed to have been superficial only, he had
an astonishing perception of the relative bearings of facts which
seemed at first sight to be quite beyond the range of one another,
and of the relations between the sciences generally; it was this
which gave him his felicity and fecundity of illustration--a gift
which he never abused. He delighted in its use for the purpose of
carrying a clear impression of his meaning to the mind of another,
but I never remember to have heard him mistake illustration for
argument, nor endeavour to mislead an adversary by a fascinating but
irrelevant simile. The subtlety of his mind was a more serious
source of danger to him, though I do not know that he greatly lost by
it in comparison with what he gained; his sense, however, of
distinctions was so fine that it would sometimes distract his
attention from points of infinitely greater importance in connection
with his subject than the particular distinction which he was trying
to establish at the moment.

The reader may be glad to know what my brother felt about retaining
the unhistoric passages of Scripture. Would he wish to see them
sought for and sifted out? Or, again, what would he propose
concerning such of the parables as are acknowledged by every liberal
Churchman to be immoral, as, for instance, the story of Dives and
Lazarus and the Unjust Steward--parables which can never have been
spoken by our Lord, at any rate not in their present shape? And here
we have a remarkable instance of his moderation and truly English
good sense. "Do not touch one word of them," was his often-repeated
exclamation. "If not directly inspired by the mouth of God they have
been indirectly inspired by the force of events, and the force of
events is the power and manifestation of God; they could not have
been allowed to come into their present position if they had not been
recognised in the counsels of the Almighty as being of indirect
service to mankind; there is a subjective truth conveyed even by
these parables to the minds of many, that enables them to lay hold of
other and objective truths which they could not else have grasped.

"There can be no question that the communistic utterances of the
third gospel, as distinguished from St. Matthew's more spiritual and
doubtless more historic rendering of the same teaching, have been of
inestimable service to Christianity. Christ is not for the whole
only, but also for them that are sick, for the ill-instructed and
what we are pleased to call 'dangerous' classes, as well as for the
more sober thinkers. To how many do the words, 'Blessed be ye poor:
for your's is the kingdom of Heaven' (Luke vi., 20), carry a comfort
which could never be given by the 'Blessed are the poor in spirit' of
Matthew v., 3. In Matthew we find, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for their's is the kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are they that mourn:
for they shall be comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall
inherit the earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart: for
they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be
called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted
for righteousness' sake: for their's is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and
shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.
Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven:
for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.' In Luke
we read, 'Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.
Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh. . . . But woe
unto you that are rich! for ye have received your consolation. Woe
unto you that are full! for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh
now! for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you, when all men shall
speak well of you! for so did THEIR fathers to the false prophets,'
where even the grammar of the last sentence, independently of the
substance, is such as it is impossible to ascribe to our Lord
himself.

"The 'upper' classes naturally turn to the version of Matthew, but
the 'lower,' no less naturally to that of Luke, nor is it likely that
the ideal of Christ would be one-tenth part so dear to them had not
this provision for them been made, not by the direct teaching of the
Saviour, but by the indirect inspiration of such events as were seen
by the Almighty to be necessary for the full development of the
highest ideal of which mankind was capable. All that we have in the
New Testament is the inspired word, directly or indirectly, of God,
the unhistoric no less than the historic; it is for us to take
spiritual sustenance from whatever meats we find prepared for us, not
to order the removal of this or that dish; the coarser meats are for
the coarser natures; as they grow in grace they will turn from these
to the finer: let us ourselves partake of that which we find best
suited to us, but do not let us grudge to others the provision that
God has set before them. There are many things which though not
objectively true are nevertheless subjectively true to those who can
receive them; and subjective truth is universally felt to be even
higher than objective, as may be shown by the acknowledged duty of
obeying our consciences (which is the right TO US) rather than any
dictate of man however much more objectively true. It is that which
is true TO US that we are bound each one of us to seek and follow."

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