ART. II. THE DOGMATIC AND SPECULATIVE IN RELA

TION TO THEOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION.

MY object in the present essay is-first, to bring under review

some of the fundamental principles of our holy religion; and second and chiefly, to bring under review also the different methods of dealing with those principles pursued by the dogmatist on the one hand, and the speculatist, or rationalist, on the other. Each of these methods of dealing with theological questions is attracting a great amount of attention in the present day; each is advocated with an amount of talent and energy truly surprising; but each appears to me to be equally fraught with danger. The advocates of each method have forsaken the golden via media-the only safe path in theological investigation--and wandered into opposite extremes-in the one case, almost ignoring reason; in the other, unduly exalting reason, as the one criterion by which all questions are to be decided. To ignore reason is to make an intelligent faith impossible; while unduly to exalt reason is certain to involve us in serious, if not fatal, errors.

In the remarks we are about to make we shall assume, as granted alike by the dogmatist and rationalist, three things

1st. The existence of one God.

2nd. The mutual relation between God and man, as Creator and creature.

3rd. The necessity of a knowledge of God's will and character, to discharge the duties which that relation entails.

So far the two travel together; but now they approach a book which claims to be a revelation of the will and character of God; it is in their treatment of this book that the distinctive peculiarities of the two methods are most clearly seen.

It is necessary exactly to define what we mean by the dogmatist and the rationalist. The dogmatist regards the church as the apostolic depositum of faith, as the infallible expositor of the Divine word and will, from whose ipse dixit there is no appeal. Whether he is found in the Roman or Anglican Communion, the authority to which he bows is the church. Newman, in his Apologia, page 388, says, "Experience proves, surely, that the Bible does not answer a purpose for which it was never intended. It may be accidentally the means of the conversion of individuals; but a book, after all, cannot make a stand against the wild living intellect of man; and in this day it begins to testify, as regards its contents and structure, to the power of that universal solvent, which is so successfully acting on all religious establishments."

He then tells us that a power invested with the prerogative of infallibility is the one thing which Infinite wisdom has deemed it fit to provide, to make a stand against what he calls "the wild living intellect of man." The set of credenda imposed by this power is to be received without question-received because issued from such a source. The Anglican would hardly claim for his church such a prerogative; but he is pursuing the path of the Romanist; he claims for his church authority over the consciences of men, the right to interpret the Scriptures, and requires that the articles of faith the church formulates, professedly from God's word, be received without question. The only difference between the Anglican and Romanist is, that the latter boldly asserts the claims of his church, while the former advances the claims of his, with some hesitation; both reply to the question, "What is truth ?" by pointing, not to the Bible, but the church. I would, in one sentence, define the dogmatist as the man who subordinates the Bible to the Church.

The rationalist, on the other hand, exalts reason to the supreme place; he may be defined as the man who puts reason before the Bible, who goes through the Bible as an eclectic, bringing all its teachings to the test of reason, and rejecting whatever he deems unsound, or which reason is not able to understand and demon

strate.

Butler, in his Analogy, Part I., chaps. iv. and v., has shown that the constitution and condition of man suggest the conclusion that our state is a probationary discipline-that we are being educated for another state of existence. The grand end of this probation, this education, according to Butler, is enlightened obedience to the law of virtue. It is clear, that if this end is to be attained, every faculty we possess must be legitimately exercised. We cannot attain to an enlightened obedience to the law of virtue, or, which is the same thing, a state of holiness, by faith alone, or by reason alone. Each faculty of the mind must be developed, and must play its proper part in attaining the great end of our probation. "Reason and faith," says an old divine, "are like the two sons of the Patriarch: reason is the firstborn, but faith obtains the blessing." This is the general view of reason and faith; but it appears to me hardly true to fact. So far from faith being younger than reason, it is co-eval with it; the one is the complement of the other-neither can exclude the other. I do not mean that the same kind of faith of which Paul speaks when he says, "Being justified by faith," &c., is co-eval with reason. This faith he expressly tells us is a gift of God. But what does he mean? Surely not that God gives us a new faculty, but simply that he gives a right character and right direction to a power of the mind which previously existed. It is as much a natural act of the mind to

exercise faith, as it is to reason. Reason and faith, then, are natural faculties, and they supplement each other. Only an intelligent faith, or in other words, a faith which has its foundation in reason, reacts upon the soul, so as to strengthen every good quality, and nerve it with power to resist every form of evil. There is nothing of which we are more conscious than the power of motives, and there is nothing which the history of human thought more conclusively proves, than that mere reason the unaided intellect-could not discover those higher truths, which, when embraced, become the most powerful of all motives. The relation, then, of faith and reason is this-faith grasps the truths which reason could not discover, which lie beyond the province of reason; and reason investigates the evidence which accompanies these truths, so as to supply a firm, intelligible basis for faith. Faith is the ear of the soul, by which she catches the words which reveal the highest of spiritual truths; reason is the eye which reads with piercing gaze the credentials these truths bring with them. Without faith the soul would be deaf; without reason it would be blind; and in either case, no amount of probationary discipline could ever lead us to render enlightened obedience to the law of virtue. Such obedience is impossible, apart from an intelligent faith; an intelligent faith is impossible, apart from the exercise of reason.

With these views of the respective parts which reason and faith play in our moral and spiritual education, and of their mutual relation, let us proceed to examine the positions of the dogmatist and rationalist. The insuperable difficulty in the way of the dogmatist is to prove that infallibility is a prerogative of any church. Nothing can free us from the duty of weighing evidence, of investigating claims. There is no "short and easy way" to an intelligent and powerfully operative faith. The man who accepts as infallibly true the dogma of his church, must have previous y convinced himself that his church is infallible, or stand convicted of surrendering himself blindly to the guidance of others that is, of not rendering an intelligent obedience, but merely a passive one. He is a mere automaton, bending this way, or that, as the strings are pulled. Such a faith is utterly worthless for all purposes of moral education or spiritual improvement. does not deliberately choose to obey the law of virtue-as the free act of his own mind does not receive freely the truths he believes, on the ground of the evidence which he sees to accredit them; but he closes his eyes, and holds out his hands for others to lead him. Here, then, the position of the dogmatist breaks down; his very first step must either involve the severest and most protracted exercise of that reason he would ignore, or he must make a moral probation impossible, by ignoring our responsibility. The position. of the dogmatist is, indeed, a miserable petio principici. It as

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The man

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sumes that the church is infallible, or that it is the true expositor of God's word, because the church has claimed these prerogatives. Speaking of his own reception of the infallibility of the Roman Church, Newman says "I believe the whole revealed dogma, as taught by the apostles, as committed by the apostles to the church, and as declared by the church to me."-" I receive it as it is infallibly interpreted, by the authority to whom it was given, and as it shall be in like manner further interpreted by that same authority to the end of time"-that is, being interpreted, "I believe the church is infallible, because the church tells me it is so. I assume the conclusion to prove the conclusion." Of what earthly use is a faith like this? In what way can it benefit the soul? How can it further the end, which Butler shows, that our constitution and condition manifest to be the purpose of God, our moral and spiritual elevation to an enlightened obedience to the law of virtue? The position of the dogmatist is, therefore, an impossible and useless one.

His axiom is, in

Let us now turn to that of the rationalist. everything subordinate faith to reason; accept nothing which cannot be brought to the test of reason. The question which at once confronts us here is this-Are there any truths which lie beyond the province of reason? any truths to the discovery of which reason is unequal? Before I can safely accept the position of the rationalist, I must be convinced that no such truths exist. It is clearly impossible, unless reason is omniscient, for reason to know whether any such truths exist-truths which she could neither discover nor fully comprehend, if revealed; and may it not be a priori concluded, that if there are truths which lie beyond the province of reason, which it could not discover, and cannot fully comprehend, that reason is not the criterion by which such trutlis are to be judged? If reason could discover every truth it is necessary for us to know, then a revelation is superfluous; if it could not, then it is certain the revelation will contain much, which reason can neither demonstrate nor fully comprehend, but which must be received, as matters of faith, because contained in a revelation which comes to us accredited with sufficient evidence to command our enlightened belief; in fact, the chief province of reason is the investigation of evidence. We accept a professed revelation after a careful investigation of the evidence which supports its claims, on our own responsibility. If the duty of sifting the evidence appear onerous, and the responsibility attached to the inquiry into the claims of a professed revelation, heavy, we must remember that keystone of ethical truth, that only voluntary error condemns us. It may be safely affirmed, that he who seeks to know the truth, who calmly, patiently, candidly investigates the evidence which ever attends truth, finds, not indeed all truth, but

enough for his safety. It does not fall within the province of this essay to examine the evidence of the credentials which attest the veracity of the revelation contained in the Bible, as it only deals with modes of theological investigation; but I may say in passing, that my own firm conviction is, no man can rigidly examine that evidence, can intelligently read those credentials, and not arrive at a firm conviction that Christianity is from God. There is no truth so well attested by irrefragable evidence as the truth of our holy religion.

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But to return, -the fundamental error of the rationalist-a error which makes it impossible for him to arrive at the truth— lies in exalting reason to a position which it is incompetent to fill; he makes reason sit in judgment on that which reason could not discover, and can only inadequately comprehend. The dogmatist makes reason the slave of a blind and ignorant faith; the rationalist makes faith the slave of a blind and ignorant reason.

If, then, these extremes are so pernicious, which is the true method of theological investigation?

It requires only a slight acquaintance with history-only a limited part of the knowledge the oracle enjoined "Know thyself," to convince any man that our race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It requires only a slight acquaintance with human nature, with our mental and moral constitution, to convince us that we cannot be brought to obey the law of virtue by mechanical contrivances. Goodness, holiness, cannot be hung upon our souls, as mere outward appendages; they must be woven into the texture of our being; they must become constituent parts of our nature, or we cannot have them at all. If, as Butler shows, our present course is a moral education, it must, to answer its end, be remedial, corrective, and the education must be so conducted as to appeal to our consciences, control, without forcing our wills, and command our affections. We already feel, that before we can be brought into harmony and sympathy with a holy God, much in us must be changed; new motives must actuate us, new purposes engage our minds, new feelings pervade our hearts, and new thoughts-the spontaneous products of a changed mindshape our course; in other words, we must be regenerated; our abnormal nature must be brought back to its original state. From the very constitution of our nature, a change like this can only result from the free action of the mind itself. If our sympathy with God, if our holiness, are to be real, and not spurious-if our obedience to the law of virtue is to be genuine, and not fictitious, the mind must be left to its own free action. And yet it is a fact, attested by experience and consciousness, that the mind has no power to change itself. We cannot control the action of the mind and heart, as we can that of the hand; we have a perfect