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AND RATIONALIST REVIEW.

[ESTABLISHED 1883.]

No. 35. (New Series.)

MAY 1, 1899.

Monthly ; T wopence.

Contents.

The S ick Church. By Charles T. Gorham

Ethics and Religion. By Charles Watts . . 66 “ To Stimulate F reedom of Thought.” By F. J .

PAGE.

. 65

Gould . . . . . , . 6 7 T he G ifford Lectures. By Robert Park, M.D. . 68 Christian and Buddhist Analogies . . , 6 8 Nietzsche on the Genealogy of Morals . . 69 A Painter’s Reminiscences . . . 7<3 S ide Aspects of “ B. V.” . . , ' , , 7 , E dward T ruf.love . . . . , 7I Random J ottings . . . , , 7, L it erary S hrines and Pilgrimages.— Ruskin’s

Museum. By Amos Waters . . . , 73 S igns and Warnings (g lean ed from the Religious Press) 75 Rationalism in the Magazines . . 76 Correspondence ¡—The Basis of Agnosticism . . 77

Hbc Sich Gburcb. “ P h y s ic ia n , heal thyself,” is a maxim said to he quoted by the founder of Christianity. The tu tjuoque argument is sometimes effective. The Church of England at the present moment is in a parlous condition—whether sick unto disestablishment time alone will show. On the face of it, the spectacle is strange, that in the Church of the Prince of Peace there should be almost incessant strife. There is a kind of three cornered duel perpetually going on in the religious world—Roman Catholic versus Anglican, Anglican versus Nonconformist, Nonconformist versus both Anglican and Roman Catholic—and, mingling hotly in the miscellaneous fray, an irresponsible sacerdotal element which purports to belong to one communion, while showing greater affinities with another.

Now, here is an institution founded for the express purpose of promoting spiritual health, which is not itself in a healthy condition. An institution the object of which is the salvation of others on a large scale needs to be saved from itself, from the results of a system instituted by itself, and which it seems powerless to alter or improve. Indeed, it appears to be losing grasp of any vital conception of what salvation really is, to be in danger of allowing the purer elements of religion to be overborne by doctrinal triviality and mechanical worship. “ Physician, heal thyself.” We have the members of the same body disputing as to the meaning of its own formularies, of its own book of devotions, of the articles of belief which it has laid down as essential in its ministers. We find, in fact, that the very ideas on which the Church rests are in dispute. The meaning of the terms “ Protestant” and “ Catholic” is violently debated. The nature of the founder of this institution is felt to be doubtful and mysterious—some thinking that he was God, some that he was the son of God, some that he was a divinely-inspired man. And the sense in which these terms themselves are to be taken is disputable and uncertain. It is true that the Church possesses a “ revelation ” which is assumed to be the final authority on all questions of religion and morals, but the degree and extent of this authority are, even among those who accept it, also widely disputed. And the mere fact that all sections of the Christian Church alike appeal to it for support is sufficient evidence of its ambiguity. Finally, each of the subsidiary doctrines of the Church, being backed by no authority commanding universal assent, is also in dispute, both as to the truth of the doctrines themselves, as to which of the doctrines are essential and which non-essential, and as to the meaning of the very terms in which those doctrines are propounded.

To what is all this lamentable confusion due? As far as the Anglican Church is concerned, it is partly due to lack of clearness and definiteness in the phraseology in which its beliefs and formularies are expressed. The Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England purport to set forth the doctrines of the Christian religion, which the members of that Church accept as true. But the Articles do not define the doctrines. In many cases they make no attempt to do so, or they state the doctrine loosely and broadly, and so give rise to the possibility— or, rather, the certainty— of various interpretations. In other cases they merely protest against the errors of the older branch of the Christian Church from which the Anglican body was an offshoot, without clearly substituting positive truth for comparative error. The Thirty-nine Articles, in fact, were the result of an avowed compromise between the Puritanism of the sixteenth century and the venerable semi-pagan system which that Puritanism bad outgrown. Such a compromise would naturally and inevitably give rise to conflicting interpretations of its terms.

But there is a further cause of this ambiguity—a cause which few Christians will admit in words, though by their deeds they admit it daily. It is th is : The Scriptures upon which the Church rests its supernatural claims are themselves ambiguous. They say one thing in one place, and a contrary thing in another place. And to so great an extent is this the case that there is probably no Christian doctrine whatever which, in the authority that all Christians appeal to, is laid down so plainly and positively as to be beyond question and dispute among the very persons who claim to believe it. Doctrinal chaos is therefore inevitable, and likely to be permanent as long as the Bible is imagined to be, or to contain, a supernatural revelation. It is, indeed, impossible to construct a homogeneous body of doctrine from these strangely conflicting records. On one page we are told that Jesus was born of a Virgin Mother. Other pages imply that his birth was natural. Whichever it was, the belief in the miraculous birth has given rise to a doctrine accepted by that branch of the Christian Church which has stood the longest, but rejected by the other branches. I f Jesus Christ was God, probably his birth was miraculous; but into the evidence for, and the logic of, his belief that God had a mother the believer stops not to inquire. Nor does he face the difficulty that, if God had a mother, her nature must partake of the nature of deity, and, consequently, that she must be as much God as her Son— perhaps more, as having priority of physical existence. I f there is more than one God, we have at least an approach to polytheism; and, though the Romish Church would repudiate it, a practical polytheism is what she attempts to impose on the world. That which is Divine truth to one branch of the Christian Church is a mediaeval superstition to the other.

Take all the dogmas of Christianity in turn, and we shall find that the same uncertainty attaches to each—nay, even to the very incidents in the life of its founder. Here we have the origin of all the confusion—a confusion which exists not merely in the average members of the Churches which oppose one another, but in the cultured defenders of the rival systems of faith. They have a divine revelation at their back; yet every principle, fact, doctrine, detail, is in