Of the books passed in review in the preceding pages, as of several others couched in the same vein and recently published in England and Germany, perhaps the best that can be said is this, that, at any rate, they are untrammelled by orthodox prejudice, and fearlessly written. That they belong, so to speak, to the extreme left, explains the favour with which they are received by that section of the middle-class reading public which has conceived a desire to learn something of the origins of Christianity. Unschooled in the criticism of documents, such readers have learned in the school Bible-lesson and in the long hours of instruction in what is called Divinity, to regard the Bible as they regard no other collection of ancient writings. It is, as a rule, the only ancient book they ever opened. They have discovered that orthodoxy depends for its life on treating it as a book apart, not to be submitted to ordinary tests, not to be sifted and examined, as we have learned from Hume and Niebuhr, Gibbon and Grote, to sift ancient documents in general, rejecting ab initio the supernatural myths that are never absent from them. The acuter minds among the clergy themselves begin nowadays to realize that the battle of Freethought and Rationalism is won as far as the miracles of the Old Testament are concerned; but as regards those of the New they are for ever trying to close up their ranks and rally [215]their hosts afresh. Nevertheless, the man in the street has a shrewd suspicion that apologetics are so much special pleading, and that miracles cannot be eliminated from the Old and yet remain in the New Testament. He has never received any training in methods of historical research himself, and it is no easy thing to obtain; but he is clever enough to detect the evasions of apologists, and, with instinctive revulsion, turns away to writers who “go the whole hog” and argue for the most extreme positions, even to the length of asserting that the story of Jesus is a myth from beginning to end. Any narratives, he thinks, that have the germs of truth in them would not need the apologetic prefaces and commentaries, the humming and hawing, the specious arguments and wire-drawn distinctions of divines, any more than do Froissart or Clarendon or Herodotus. If the New Testament needs them, then it must be a mass of fable from end to end. Such is the impression which our modern apologists leave on the mind of the ordinary man.

I can imagine some of my readers objecting here that, whereas I have so rudely assailed the method of interpretation of New Testament documents adopted by the Nihilistic school—I only use this name as a convenient label for those who deny the historical reality of Jesus Christ—I nevertheless propound no rival method of my own. The truth is there is no abstract method of using documents relating to the past, and you cannot in advance lay down rules for doing so. You can only learn how to deal with them by practice, and it is one of the chief functions of any university or place of higher education to imbue students with historical method by setting before [216]them the original documents, and inspiring them to extract from them whatever solid results they can. A hundred years ago the better men in the college of Christchurch at Oxford were so trained by the dean, Cyril Jackson, who would set them the task of “preparing for examination the whole of Livy and Polybius, thoroughly read and studied in all their comparative bearings.”1 No better curriculum, indeed, could be devised for strengthening and developing the faculty of historical judgment; and the schools of Literae Humaniores and Modern History, which were subsequently established at Oxford, carried on the tradition of this enlightened educationalist. In them the student is brought face to face in the original dialects with the records of the past, and stimulated to “read and study them in their comparative bearings.” One single branch of learning, however, has been treated apart in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and pursued along the lines of tradition and authority—I mean the study of Christian antiquities. The result has been deplorable. Intellectually-minded Englishmen have turned away from this field of history as from something tainted, and barely one of our great historians in a century deems it worthy of his notice. It has been left to parsons, to men who have never learned to swim, because they have never had enough courage to venture into deep water. As we sow, so we reap. The English Church is probably the most enlightened of the many sects that make up Christendom. Yet [217]what is the treatment which it accords to any member of itself who has the courage to dissociate himself from the “orthodoxy” of the fourth century, of those Greek Fathers (so-called) in whom the human intelligence sank to the nadir of fanaticism and futility? An example was recently seen in the case of the Rev. Mr. W. H. Thompson, a young theological tutor of Magdalen College in Oxford, who, animated by nothing but loyalty for the Church, recently liberated his soul about the miracles of the Gospels in a thoroughly scholarly book entitled Miracles in the New Testament. The attitude of the clergy in general towards a work of genuine research, which sets truth above traditional orthodoxy, was revealed in a conference of the clergy of the southern province, held soon after its publication on May 19, 1911. The following account of that meeting is taken from the Guardian of May 26, 1911:—

    The Rev. R. F. Bevan, in the Canterbury Diocesan Conference on May 19, 1911, proposed “that this Conference is of opinion that the clergy should make use of the light thrown on the Bible by modern criticism for the purposes of religious teaching.” The Bishop of Croydon moved the following rider: “But desires to record its distrust of critics who, while holding office in the Church of Christ, propound views inconsistent with the doctrines laid down in the creeds of the Church.”

    He said it was needful to define what was meant by modern criticism. He referred to a book which had been published quite lately by the Dean of Divinity of Magdalen College, Oxford, a review of which would be found in the Guardian of May 12. He must honestly confess he had not read the book for himself?…. He then premised from the review that the work in question rejects the evidence both for the Virgin Birth of Christ and for his bodily [218]Resurrection from the tomb …, and added that the toleration by Churchmen of such doctrines and such views being taught within the bosom of the Church was to him most sad and inexplicable. If such was the instruction which young Divinity students were receiving at the universities, no wonder that the supply of candidates for ordination was falling off.

    The Rev. J. O. Bevan said it was not in the power of any man or any body of men to ignore the Higher Criticism or to suppress it. It had “come to stay,” and its influence for good or evil must be recognized.

    The President (Archbishop of Canterbury) said that “Bible teaching ought to be given with a background of knowledge on the part of the teacher. He should deprecate as strongly as anybody that men who felt that they could not honestly continue to hold the Christian creeds should hold office in the Church of England. But he saw no connection between the sort of teaching which the Conference had now been considering and the giving up of the Christian creed. The Old Testament was a literature which had come down to them from ancient days. Modern investigation enabled them now to set the earlier stages of that literature in somewhat different surroundings from those in which they were set by their fathers and grandfathers.” With regard to the book which had been referred to, the Archbishop said that, if the rider proposed was intended to imply a censure upon a particular writer, nothing would induce him to vote for it, inasmuch as he had not read the book, and knew nothing, at first hand, about it. He thought members ought to pause before they lightly gave votes which could be so interpreted.

    The motion, on being put to the meeting, was carried with one dissentient. The rider was also carried by a majority.

It amounts, then, to this, that a rule of limited liability is to be observed in the investigation of early Christianity. You may be critical, but not up to the point of calling in question the Virgin Birth [219]or physical resurrection of Christ. The Bishop of Croydon opines that the free discussion of such questions in University circles intimidates young men from taking orders. If he lived in Oxford, he would know that it is the other way about.2 If Mr. Thompson had been allowed to say what he thought, unmolested; if the Bishops of Winchester and of Oxford had not at once taken steps to silence and drive him out of the Church, students would have been better encouraged to enter the Anglican ministry, and the more intellectual of our young men would not avoid it as a profession hard to reconcile with truth and honesty and self-respect.

In the next number of the same journal (June 2, 1911) is recorded another example of how little our bishops are inclined to face a plain issue. It is contained in a paragraph headed thus:—

    SYMBOLISM OF THE ASCENSION.

    The Bishop of Birmingham on the Second Coming.

    Preaching to a large congregation in Birmingham Cathedral … the Bishop of Birmingham said that people had found difficulty in modern times about the Ascension, because, they said, “God’s heaven is no more above our heads than under our feet.” That was perfectly true. But there were certain ways of [220]expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought, and we did not the less speak continually of the above and the below as expressing what was morally high and morally low, and we should go on doing so to the end. The ascension of Jesus Christ and his concealment in the clouds was a symbolical act, like all the acts after his Resurrection; it was to impress their minds with the truth of his mounting to the glory of God. Symbols were the best means of expressing the truth about things which lay outside their experience; and the Ascension symbolized Christ’s mounting to the supreme state of power and glory, to the perfect vision of God, to the throne of all the world?…. The Kingdom was coming—had to come at last—“on earth as it is in heaven”; and one day, just as his disciples saw him passing away out of their experience and sight, would they see him coming back into their experience and their sight, and into his perfected Kingdom of Humanity.

Now, I am sure that what people in modern times chiefly want to know about the Ascension is whether it really happened. Did Jesus in his physical body go up like a balloon before the eyes of the faithful, and disappear behind a cloud, or did he not? That is the plain issue, and Dr. Gore seems to avoid it. If he believes in such a miracle, why expatiate on the symbolism of all the acts of Jesus subsequent to his resurrection? Such a miracle was surely sufficient unto itself, and never needed our attention to be drawn to its symbolical aspects and import. Does he mean that the legend is no more than “a certain way of expressing moral ideas rooted in human thought&............