The Fair Haven

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To some he might appear to be approaching too nearly to the "Sed tu
vera puta" argument of Juvenal. I greatly fear that an attempt may
be made to misrepresent him as taking this line; that is to say, as
accepting Christianity on the ground of the excellence of its moral
teaching, and looking upon it as, indeed, a superstition, but
salutary for women and young people. Hardly anything would have
shocked him more profoundly. This doctrine with its plausible show
of morality appeared to him to be, perhaps, the most gross of all
immoralities, inasmuch as it cuts the ground from under the feet of
truth, luring the world farther and farther from the only true
salvation--the careful study of facts and of the safest inferences
that may be drawn from them. Every fact was to him a part of nature,
a thing sacred, pregnant with Divine teaching of some sort, as being
the expression of Divine will. It was through facts that he saw God;
to tamper with facts was, in his view, to deface the countenance of
the Almighty. To say that such and such was so and so, when the
speaker did not believe it, was to lead people to worship a false God
instead of a true one; an e?d????; setting them, to quote the words
of the Psalmist, "a-whoring after their own imaginations." He saw
the Divine presence in everything--the evil as well as the good; the
evil being the expression of the Divine will that such and such
courses should not go unpunished, but bring pain and misery which
should deter others from following them, and the good being his sign
of approbation. There was nothing good for man to know which could
not be deduced from facts. This was the only sound basis of
knowledge, and to found things upon fiction which could be made to
stand upon facts was to try and build upon a quicksand.

He, therefore, loathed the reasoning of Juvenal with all the
intensity of his nature. It was because he believed that the
Resurrection and Ascension of our Lord were just as much matters of
actual history as the assassination of Julius Caesar, and that they
happened precisely in the same way as every daily event happens at
present--that he accepted the Christian scheme in its essentials.
Then came the details. Were these also objectively true? He
answered, "Certainly not in every case." He would not for the world
have had any one believe that he so considered them; but having made
it perfectly clear that he was not going to deceive himself, he set
himself to derive whatever spiritual comfort he could from them, just
as he would from any noble fiction or work of art, which, while not
professing to be historical, was instinct with the soul of genius.
That there were unhistorical passages in the New Testament was to him
a fact; therefore it was to be studied as an expression of the Divine
will. What could be the meaning of it? That we should consider them
as true? Assuredly not this. Then what else? This--that we should
accept as subjectively true whatever we found spiritually precious,
and be at liberty to leave all the rest alone--the unhistoric element
having been introduced purposely for the sake of giving greater scope
and latitude to the value of the ideal.

Of course one who was so firmly persuaded of the objective truth of
the Resurrection and Ascension could be in no sort of danger of
relapsing into infidelity as long as his reason remained. During the
years of his illness his mind was clearly impaired, and no longer
under his own control; but while his senses were his own it was
absolutely impossible that he could be shaken by discrepancies and
inconsistencies in the gospels. What small and trifling things are
such discrepancies by the side of the great central miracle of the
Resurrection! Nevertheless their existence was indisputable, and was
no less indisputably a cause of stumbling to many, as it had been to
himself. His experience of his own sufferings as an unbeliever gave
him a keener sympathy with those who were in that distressing
condition than could be felt by any one who had not so suffered, and
fitted him, perhaps, more than any one who has yet lived to be the
interpreter of Christianity to the Rationalist, and of Rationalism to
the Christian. This, accordingly, was the task to which he set
himself, having been singularly adapted for it by Nature, and as
singularly disciplined by events.

It seemed to him that the first thing was to make the two parties
understand one another--a thing which had never yet been done, but
which was not at all impossible. For Protestantism is raised
essentially upon a Rationalistic base. When we come to a definition
of Rationalism nothing can be plainer than that it demands no
scepticism from any one which an English Protestant would not approve
of. It is another matter with the Church of Rome. That Church
openly declares it as an axiom that religion and reason have nothing
to do with one another, and that religion, though in flat
contradiction to reason, should yet be accepted from the hands of a
certain order as an act of unquestioning faith. The line of
separation therefore between the Romanist and the Rationalist is
clear, and definitely bars any possibility of arrangement between the
two. Not so with the Protestant, who as heartily as the Rationalist
admits that nothing is required to be believed by man except such
things as can be reasonably proved--i.e., proved to the satisfaction
of the reason. No Protestant would say that the Christian scheme
ought to be accepted in spite of its being contrary to reason; we say
that Christianity is to be believed because it can be shewn to follow
as the necessary consequence of using our reason rightly. We should
be shocked at being supposed to maintain otherwise. Yet this is pure
Rationalism. The Rationalist would require nothing more; he demurs
to Christianity because he maintains that if we bring our reason to
bear upon the evidences which are brought forward in support of it,
we are compelled to reject it; but he would accept it without
hesitation if he believed that it could be sustained by arguments
which ought to carry conviction to the reason. Thus both are agreed
in principle that if the evidences of Christianity satisfy human
reason, then Christianity should be received, but that on any other
supposition it should be rejected.

Here then, he said, we have a common starting-point and the main
principle of Rationalism turns out to be nothing but what we all
readily admit, and with which we and our fathers have been as
familiar for centuries as with the air we breathe. Every Protestant
is a Rationalist, or else he ought to be ashamed of himself. Does he
want to be called an "Irrationalist"? Hardly--yet if he is not a
Rationalist what else can he be? No: the difference between us is
one of detail, not of principle. This is a great step gained.

The next thing therefore was to make each party understand the view
which the other took concerning the position which they had agreed to
hold in common. There was no work, so far as he knew, which would be
accepted both by Christians and unbelievers as containing a fair
statement of the arguments of the two contending parties: every book
which he had yet seen upon either side seemed written with the view
of maintaining that its own side could hold no wrong, and the other
no right: neither party seemed to think that they had anything to
learn from the other, and neither that any considerable addition to
their knowledge of the truth was either possible or desirable. Each
was in possession of truth already, and all who did not see and feel
this must be either wilfully blinded, or intensely stupid, or
hypocrites.

So long as people carried on a discussion thus, what agreement was
possible between them? Yet where, upon the Christian side, was the
attempt to grapple with the real difficulties now felt by
unbelievers? Simply nowhere. All that had been done hitherto was
antiquated. Modern Christianity seemed to shrink from grappling with
modern Rationalism, and displayed a timidity which could not be
accounted for except by the supposition of secret misgiving that
certain things were being defended which could not be defended
fairly. This was quite intolerable; a misgiving was a warning voice
from God, which should be attended to as a man valued his soul. On
the other hand, the conviction reasonably entertained by unbelievers
that they were right on many not inconsiderable details of the
dispute, and that so-called orthodox Christians in their hearts knew
it but would not own it--or that if they did not know it, they were
only in ignorance because it suited their purpose to be so--this
conviction gave an overweening self-confidence to infidels, as though
they must be right in the whole because they were so in part; they
therefore blinded themselves to all the more fundamental arguments in
support of Christianity, because certain shallow ones had been put
forward in the front rank, and been far too obstinately defended.
They thus regarded the question too superficially, and had erred even
more through pride of intellect and conceit than their opponents
through timidity.

What then was to be done? Surely this; to explain the two contending
parties to one another; to show to Rationalists that Christians are
right upon Rationalistic principles in all the more important of
their allegations; that is to say, to establish the Resurrection and
Ascension of the Redeemer upon a basis which should satisfy the most
imperious demands of modern criticism. This would form the first and
most important part of the task. Then should follow a no less
convincing proof that Rationalists are right in demurring to the
historical accuracy of much which has been too obstinately defended
by so-called orthodox writers. This would be the second part. Was
there not reason to hope that when this was done the two parties
might understand one another, and meet in a common Christianity? He
believed that there was, and that the ground had been already cleared
for such mutual compromise as might be accepted by both sides, not
from policy but conviction. Therefore he began writing the book
which it has devolved upon myself to edit, and which must now speak
for itself. For him it was to suffer and to labour; almost on the
very instant of his having done enough to express his meaning he was
removed from all further power of usefulness.

The happy change from unbelief to faith had already taken place some
three or four years before my return from America. With it had also
come that sudden development of intellectual and spiritual power
which so greatly astonished even those who had known him best. The
whole man seemed changed--to have become possessed of an unusually
capacious mind, instead of one which was acute, but acute only. On
looking over the earlier letters which I received from him when I was
in America, I can hardly believe that they should have been written
by the same person as the one to whom, in spite of not a few great
mental defects, I afterwards owed more spiritual enrichment than I
have owed to any other person. Yet so it was. It came upon me
imperceptibly that I had been very stupid in not discovering that my
brother was a genius; but hardly had I made the discovery, and hardly
had the fragment which follows this memoir received its present
shape, when his overworked brain gave way and he fell into a state
little better than idiocy. His originally cheerful spirits left him,
and were succeeded by a religious melancholy which nothing could
disturb. He became incapable either of mental or physical exertion,
and was pronounced by the best physicians to be suffering from some
obscure disease of the brain brought on by excitement and undue
mental tension: in this state he continued for about four years, and
died peacefully, but still as one in the profoundest melancholy, on
the 15th of March, 1872, aged 40.

Always hopeful that his health would one day be restored, I never
ventured to propose that I should edit his book during his own life-
time. On his death I found his papers in the most deplorable
confusion. The following chapters had alone received anything like a
presentable shape--and these providentially are the most essential.

A dream is a dream only, yet sometimes there follows a fulfilment
which bears a strange resemblance to the thing dreamt of. No one now
believes that the Book of Revelation is to be taken as foretelling
events which will happen in the same way as the massacre, for
instance, of St. Bartholomew, indeed it is doubtful how far the whole
is not to be interpreted as an allegory, descriptive of spiritual
revolutions; yet surely my mother's dream as to the future of one, at
least, of her sons has been strangely verified, and it is believed
that the reader when he lays down this volume will feel that there
have been few more potent witnesses to the truth of Christ than John
Pickard Owen.

THE FAIR HAVEN

CHAPTER I--INTRODUCTION

It is to be feared that there is no work upon the evidences of our
faith, which is as satisfactory in its completeness and convincing
power as we have a right to expect when we consider the paramount
importance of the subject and the activity of our enemies. Otherwise
why should there be no sign of yielding on the part of so many
sincere and eminent men who have heard all that has been said upon
the Christian side and are yet not convinced by it? We cannot think
that the many philosophers who make no secret of their opposition to
the Christian religion are unacquainted with the works of Butler and
Paley--of Mansel and Liddon. This cannot be: they must be
acquainted with them, and find them fail.

Now, granting readily that in some minds there is a certain wilful
and prejudiced self-blindness which no reasoning can overcome, and
granting also that men very much preoccupied with any one pursuit
(more especially a scientific one) will be apt to give but scant and
divided attention to arguments upon other subjects such as religion
or politics, nevertheless we have so many opponents who profess to
have made a serious study of Christian evidences, and against whose
opinion no exception can be fairly taken, that it seems as though we
were bound either to admit that our demonstrations require
rearrangement and reconsideration, or to take the Roman position, and
maintain that revelation is no fit subject for evidence but is to be
accepted upon authority. This last position will be rejected at once
by nine-tenths of Englishmen. But upon rejecting it we look in vain
for a work which shall appear to have any such success in arresting
infidelity as attended the works of Butler and Paley in the last
century. In their own day these two great men stemmed the current of
infidelity: but no modern writers have succeeded in doing so, and it
will scarcely be said that either Butler or Paley set at rest the
many serious and inevitable questions in connection with Christianity
which have arisen during the last fifty years. We could hardly
expect one of the more intelligent students at Oxford or Cambridge to
find his mind set once and for ever free from all rising doubt either
by the Analogy or the Evidences. Suppose, for example, that he has
been misled by the German writers of the Tubingen school, how will
either of the above-named writers help him? On the contrary, they
will do him harm, for they will not meet the requirements of the
case, and the inference is too readily drawn that nothing else can do
so. It need hardly be insisted upon that this inference is a most
unfair one, but surely the blame of its being drawn rests in some
measure at the door of those whose want of thoroughness has left
people under the impression that no more can be said than what has
been said already.

It is the object, therefore, of this book to contribute towards
establishing Christian evidences upon a more secure and self-evident
base than any upon which they are made to rest at present, so far,
that is to say, as a work which deliberately excludes whole fields of
Christian evidence can tend towards so great a consummation. In
spite of the narrow limits within which I have resolved to keep my
treatment of the subject, I trust that I may be able to produce such
an effect upon the minds of those who are in doubt concerning the
evidences for the hope that is in them, that henceforward they shall
never doubt again. I am not sanguine enough to suppose that I shall
be able to induce certain eminent naturalists and philosophers to
reopen a question which they have probably long laid aside as
settled; unfortunately it is not in any but the very noblest
Christian natures to do this, nevertheless, could they be persuaded
to read these pages I believe that they would find so much which
would be new to them, that their prejudices would be greatly shaken.
To the younger band of scientific investigators I appeal more
hopefully.

It may be asked why not have undertaken the whole subject and devoted
a life-time to writing an exhaustive work? The answer suggests
itself that the believer is in no want of such a book, while the
unbeliever would be repelled by its size. Assuredly there can be no
doubt as to the value of a great work which should meet objections
derived from certain recent scientific theories, and confute
opponents who have arisen since the death of our two great
apologists, but as a preliminary to this a smaller and more
elementary book seems called for, which shall give the main outlines
of our position with such boldness and effectiveness as to arrest the
attention of any unbeliever into whose hands it may fall, and induce
him to look further into what else may be urged upon the Christian
side. We are bound to adapt our means to our ends, and shall have a
better chance of gaining the ear of our adversaries if we can offer
them a short and pregnant book than if we come to them with a long
one from which whole chapters might be pruned. We have to bring the
Christian religion to men who will look at no book which cannot be
read in a railway train or in an arm-chair; it is most deplorable
that this should be the case, nevertheless it is indisputably a fact,
and as such must be attended to by all who hope to be of use in
bringing about a better state of things. And let me add that never
yet was there a time when it so much behoved all who are impressed
with the vital power of religion to bestir themselves; for the
symptoms of a general indifference, not to say hostility, must be
admitted to be widely diffused, in spite of an imposing array of
facts which can be brought forward to the contrary; and not only
this, but the stream of infidelity seems making more havoc yearly, as
it might naturally be expected to do, when met by no new works of any
real strength or permanence.

Bearing in mind, therefore, the necessity for prompt action, it
seemed best to take the most overwhelming of all miracles--the
Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and show that it can be so
substantiated that no reasonable man should doubt it. This I have
therefore attempted, and I humbly trust that the reader will feel
that I have not only attempted it, but done it, once and for all so
clearly and satisfactorily and with such an unflinching examination
of the most advanced arguments of unbelievers, that the question can
never be raised hereafter by any candid mind, or at any rate not
until science has been made to rest on different grounds from those
on which she rests at present.

But the truth of our Lord's resurrection having been once
established, what need to encumber this book with further evidences
of the miraculous element in his ministry? The other miracles can be
no insuperable difficulty to one who accepts the Resurrection. It is
true that as Christians we cannot dwell too minutely upon every act
and incident in the life of the Redeemer, but unhappily we have to
deal with those who are not Christians, and must consider rather what
we can get them to take than what we should like to give them: "Be
ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves," saith the Saviour. A
single miracle is as good as twenty, provided that it be well
established, and can be shewn to be so: it is here that even the
ablest of our apologists have too often failed; they have professed
to substantiate the historical accuracy of all the recorded miracles
and sayings of our Lord, with a result which is in some instances
feeble and conventional, and occasionally even unfair (oh! what
suicidal folly is there in even the remotest semblance of
unfairness), instead of devoting themselves to throwing a flood of
brilliancy upon the most important features and leaving the others to
shine out in the light reflected from these. Even granting that some
of the miracles recorded of our Lord are apocryphal, what of that?
We do not rest upon them: we have enough and more than enough
without them, and can afford to take the line of saying to the
unbeliever, "Disbelieve this miracle or that if you find that you
cannot accept it, but believe in the Resurrection, of which we will
put forward such ample proofs that no healthy reason can withstand
them, and, having accepted the Resurrection, admit it as the
manifestation of supernatural power, the existence of which can thus
no longer be denied."

Does not the reader feel that there is a ring of truth and candour
about this which must carry more weight with an opponent than any
strained defence of such a doubtful miracle as the healing of the
impotent man at the pool of Bethesda? We weight ourselves as against
our opponents by trying to defend too much; no matter how sound and
able the defence of one part of the Christian scheme may have been,
its effect is often marred by contiguity with argument which the
writer himself must have suspected, or even known, to be ingenious
rather than sound: the moment that this is felt in any book its
value with an opponent is at an end, for he must be continually in
doubt whether the spirit which he has detected here or there may not
be existing and at work in a hundred other places where he has not
detected it. What carries weight with an antagonist is the feeling
that his position has been mastered and his difficulties grasped with
thoroughness and candour.

On this point I am qualified to speak from long and bitter
experience. I say that want of candour and the failure to grasp the
position occupied, however untenably, by unbelievers is the chief
cause of the continuance of unbelief. When this cause has been
removed unbelief will die a natural death. For years I was myself a
believer in nothing beyond the personality and providence of God:
yet I feel (not without a certain sense of bitterness, which I know
that I should not feel but cannot utterly subdue) that if my first
doubts had been met with patient endeavour to understand their nature
and if I had felt that the one in whom I confided had been ready to
go to the root of the matter, and even to yield up the convictions of
a life-time could it be shewn that they were unsafely founded, my
doubts would have been resolved in an hour or two's quiet
conversation, and would at once have had the effect, which they have
only had after long suffering and unrest, of confirming me in my
allegiance to Christ. But I was met with anger and impatience.
There was an instinct which told me that my opponent had never heard
a syllable against his own convictions, and was determined not to
hear one: on this I assumed rashly that he must have good reason for
his resolution; and doubt ripened into unbelief. Oh! what years of
heart-burning and utter drifting followed. Yet when I was at last
brought within the influence of one who not only believed all that my
first opponent did, but who also knew that the more light was thrown
upon it the more clearly would its truth be made apparent--a man who
talked with me as though he was anxious that I should convince him if
he were in error, not as though bent on making me believe whatever
habit and circumstances had imposed as a formula upon himself--my
heart softened at once, and the dry places of my soul were watered.

The above may seem too purely personal to warrant its introduction
here, yet the experience is one which should not be without its value
to others. Its effect upon myself has been to give me an unutterable
longing to save others from sufferings like my own; I know so well
where it is that, to use a homely metaphor, the shoe pinches. And it
is chiefly here--in the fact that the unbeliever does not feel as
though we really wanted to understand him. This feeling is in many
cases lamentably well founded. No one likes hearing doubt thrown
upon anything which he regards as settled beyond dispute, and this,
happily, is what most men feel concerning Christianity. Again,
indolence or impotence of mind indisposes many to intellectual
effort; others are pained by coming into contact with anything which
derogates from the glory due to the great sacrifice of Christ, or to
his Divine nature, and lastly not a few are withheld by moral
cowardice from daring to bestow the pains upon the unbeliever which
his condition requires. But from whichever of these sources the
disinclination to understand him comes, its effect is equally
disastrous to the unbeliever. People do not mind a difference of
opinion, if they feel that the one who differs from them has got a
firm grasp of their position; or again, if they feel that he is
trying to understand them but fails from some defect either of
intellect or education, even in this case they are not pained by
opposition. What injures their moral nature and hardens their hearts
is the conviction that another could understand them if he chose, but
does not choose, and yet none the less condemns them. On this they
become imbued with that bitterness against Christianity which is
noticeable in so many free-thinkers.

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