The Lights of the Church and the Light of Science | Page 5

taught to speak nothing but "Mortimer" into the ears of
King Henry the Fourth, might be a useful inmate of every historian's
library, if "Fiction" were substituted for the name of Harry Percy's
friend.
But it was the chief object of the lecturer to the congregation gathered
in St. Mary's, Oxford, thirty-one years ago, to prove to them, by
evidence gathered with no little labour and marshalled with much skill,
that one group of historical works was exempt from the general rule;
and that the narratives contained in the canonical Scriptures are free
from any admixture of error. With justice and candour, the lecturer
impresses upon his hearers that the special distinction of Christianity,
among the religions of the world, lies in its claim to be historical; to be
surely founded upon events which have happened, exactly as they are
declared to have happened in its sacred books; which are true, that is, in
the sense that the statement about the execution of Charles the First is
true. Further, it is affirmed that the New Testament presupposes the
historical exactness of the Old Testament; that the points of contact of
"sacred" and "profane" history are innumerable; and that the
demonstration of the falsity of the Hebrew records, especially in regard
to those narratives which are assumed to be true in the New Testament,
would be fatal to Christian theology.
My utmost ingenuity does not enable me to discover a flaw in the
argument thus briefly summarised. I am fairly at a loss to comprehend
how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian theology must
stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of the Jewish Scriptures.
The very conception of the Messiah, or Christ, is inextricably

interwoven with Jewish history; the identification of Jesus of Nazareth
with that Messiah rests upon the interpretation of passages of the
Hebrew Scriptures which have no evidential value unless they possess
the historical character assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham
was not made; if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by
Jahveh; if the "ten words" were not written by God's hand on the stone
tables; if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus; the
story of the Deluge a fiction; that of the Fall a legend; and that of the
creation the dream of a seer; if all these definite and detailed narratives
of apparently real events have no more value as history than have the
stories of the regal period of Rome--what is to be said about the
Messianic doctrine, which is so much less clearly enunciated? And
what about the authority of the writers of the books of the New
Testament, who, on this theory, have not merely accepted flimsy
fictions for solid truths, but have built the very foundations of Christian
dogma upon legendary quicksands?
But these may be said to be merely the carpings of that carnal reason
which the profane call common sense; I hasten, therefore, to bring up
the forces of unimpeachable ecclesiastical authority in support of my
position. In a sermon preached last December, in St. Paul's
Cathedral,<2> Canon Liddon declares:--
For Christians it will be enough to know that our Lord Jesus
Christ set the seal of His infallible sanction on the whole of the Old
Testament. He found the Hebrew canon as we have it in our hands
to-day, and He treated it as an authority which was above discussion.
Nay more: He went out of His way--if we may reverently speak
thus--to sanction not a few portions of it which modern scepticism
rejects. When He would warn His hearers against the dangers of
spiritual relapse, He bids them remember "Lot's wife."<3> When He
would point out how worldly engagements may blind the soul to a
coming judgment, He reminds them how men ate, and drank, and
married, and were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered
into the ark, and the Flood came and destroyed them all.<4> If He
would put His finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its
admitted reality, would warrant belief in His own coming Resurrection,
He points to Jonah's being three days and three nights in the whale's
belly (p. 23)."<5>

The preacher proceeds to brush aside the common--I had almost said
vulgar--apologetic pretext that Jesus was using ad hominem
arguments, or "accommodating" his better knowledge to popular
ignorance, as well as to point out the inadmissibility of the other
alternative, that he shared the popular ignorance. And to those who
hold the latter view sarcasm is dealt out with no niggard hand.
But they will find it difficult to persuade mankind that, if He
could be mistaken on a matter of such strictly religious importance as
the value of the sacred literature of