The Eclipse of Faith | Page 7

Each man, it seems has his own particular spade and mattock in his "spiritual faculty"; so off with you to the diggings in these spiritual mines of Ophir. You will say, Why not stay at home, and be content at once, with the advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the internal oracle, listen to its responses exclusively? Ask these men--for I am sure I do not know; I only know that the results are very different--whether the possessor of "insight" listens to its own rare voice, or puts on spectacles and reads aloud from the New Testament. Generally, as I say, these good folks are resolved that all that is supernatural and specially inspired in sacred volume is to be rejected; and as to the rest, which by the way might be conveniently published as the "Spiritualists' Bible" (in two or three sheets, 48mo, say), that would still require a careful winnowing; for, while one man tells us that the Apostle Paul, in his intense appreciation of the "spiritual element," made light even of the "resurrection of Christ," and everywhere shows his superiority to the beggarly elements of history, dogma, and ritual, another declares that he was so enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and the trumpery he had picked up at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knew but little or next to nothing of the real mystery of the very Gospel he preached; that while he proclaims that it is "revealed, after having been hidden from ages generations," he himself manages to hide it afresh. This you will be told is a perpetual process, going on even now; that as all the "earlier prophets" were unconscious instruments of a purpose beyond their immediate range of thought, so the Apostles themselves similarly illustrated the shallowness of their range of thought; that, in fact, the true significance of the Gospel lay beyond them, and doubtless also, for the very same reasons, lies beyond us. In other words, this class of spiritualists tell us that Christianity is a "development," as the Papists also assert, and the New Testament its first imperfect and rudimentary product; only, unhappily, as the development, it seems, may be things so very different as Popery and Infidelity, we are as far as ever from any criterion as to which, out of the ten thousand possible developments, is the true; but it is a matter of the less consequence, since it will, on such reasoning, be always something future.
"Unhappy Paul!" you will say. Yes, it is no better with him than it was in our youth some five-and-twenty years ago. Do you not remember the astute old German Professor in his lecture-room introducing the Apostle as examining with ever-increasing wonder the various contradictory systems which the perverseness of exegesis had extracted from his Epistles, and at length, as he saw one from which every feature of Christianity had been erased, exclaiming in a fright, "Was ist das?" But I will not detain you on the vagaries of the new school of spiritualists. I shall hear enough of them, I have no doubt, from Harrington; he will riot in their extravagances and contradictions as a justification of his own scepticism. In very truth their authors are fit for nothing else than to be recruiting officers for undisguised infidelity; and this has been the consistent termination with very many of their converts. Yet, many of them tell us, after putting men on this inclined plane of smooth ice, that it is the only place where they can be secure against tumbling into infidelity, Atheism, Pantheism, Scepticism. Some of Oxford Tractarians informed us, a little before Crossing the border, that their system was the surest bulwark against Romanism; and in the same way is this site "spiritualism", a safeguard against infidelity.
Between many of our modern "spiritualists" and Romanists there is a parallelism of movement absolutely ludicrous. You may chance to hear both claiming, with equal fervor, against "intellect" and "logic" as totally incompetent to decide on "religion" or "spiritual" truth, and in favor of a "faith" which disclaims all alliance with them. You may chance hear them both insisting on an absolute submission to an "infallible authority" other than the Bible; the one external,--that is, the Pope; the other internal,--that is, "Spiritual Insight"; both exacting absolute submission, the one to the outward oracle, the Church, the other to the inward oracle, himself; both insisting that the Bible is but the first imperfect product of genuine Christianity, which is perfected by a "development," though as to the direction of that development they certainly do not agree. Both, if I may judge by some recent speculations, recoil from the Bible even more than they do from one another; and both would get rid of it,--one by locking it up, and the other tearing it