which Christendom might cultivate with advantage, but
which, in all the long centuries of ignorance, were hopelessly
forgotten both by friends and foes. A great religion is not
dead because it is not immediately comprehended, or because
it is subsequently perverted, if only its primitive elements
contain, along with the seeds of decay and transformation,
the seeds of living truth. Especially is this the case in
Christianity, which is not only (like Mohammedanism) the
religion of a sacred book, but the religion of a sacred litera-
ture and a sacred life.

Putting aside for the moment all question of the divine
authority of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, and of
the dogmatic systems built upon them, it is certain that
their original force and grace is far more keenly appreciated
now than it was when they were overlaid with fanciful
allegories and scholastic perversions. The spirit of the
time, the " Zeit-Geist," as Matthew Arnold says, " has
turned the rays of his lantern " full upon them, and in " the
fierce light " that beats upon their structure through this
process, if some parts have faded away, if the relation of all
the parts to each other has been greatly altered, yet there
can be no question that by its influence, which has pene-
trated, more or less, all modern theology, the meaning, and
with the meaning the grandeur and the beauty, of the
Sacred Volume has been brought out with a fulness which
was unknown to Hume and Voltaire, because it had been
equally unknown to Aquinas and Augustine. Whole systems
of false doctrine or false practice, whole fabrics of barbarous
phraseology, have received their death-blow, as the Ithuriel
of modern criticism has transfixed with his spear here a
spurious text, there an untenable interpretation, here a
wrong translation, there a mistaken punctuation.

Or again, with regard to our increased knowledge of the



218 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

dates and authorship of particular books, much, no doubt,
remains obscure ; but this partial ignorance is as the fulness
of knowledge compared with the total blank which prevailed
in the Church for a thousand years or more. All the in-
struction, inward and outward, which we have acquired from
our discovery of the successive dates, and therewith of the
successive phases, of St. Paul's Epistles, was lost almost
until the beginning of this century, but has now become the
starting-point of fresh inquiry and fresh delight in every
historical or theological treatise. The disentanglement of
the Psalter, the Pentateuch, and the Book of Isaiah, from the
artificial and fallacious monotony in which, regardless of
times and circumstances, a blind tradition had involved them,
gives a significance to the several portions of the respective
books which no one who has once grasped it will ever
willingly abandon. The Parables, as has been of late well
described, have by their very nature an immortality of ap-
plication, which could never have been perceived had they
been always, as they were in many instances at the time of
their first delivery, shut up within the gross, carnal, matter-
of-fact interpretation of those who said, " How can this man
give us his flesh to eat ? " or " It is because we have taken
no bread." In short, when it was perceived, in the noble
language of Burke, 1 that the Bible was not a dead code, or
collection of rigid dogmas, but, " an infinite variety of a
most venerable and most multifarious literature," from that
moment it became as impossible in the nature of things
that the educated portion of mankind should ever cease to
take an interest in the Old and New Testament, as it would
be that they should cease to take an interest in Homer, or
Shakespeare, or Dante, or Scott. The Sacred Books, which
were once regarded as the stars were regarded by ancient
astronomers, spangles set in the sky, or floating masses of
nebulous light, ,or a galaxy of milky spots, have now been
resolved by the telescope of scholarship into their com-
ponent parts. Lord Macaulay would not have denied that
astronomy has undergone a total revolution through Coper-
1 Burke's Works, x. 21, Speech on Acts of Uniformity.



ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 219

nicus, Galileo, and Newton a revolution which has im-
mensely extended its grandeur and its usefulness. Erasmus,
Lowth, Herder, and Ewald have effected for Biblical know-
ledge a revolution no less complete and no less beneficent.
There has been, as it were, a triple chain of singular, one
may almost say providential, coincidences. The same
critical investigation which has opened our eyes to the
beauty and the wisdom of the sacred records, has by revealing
to us the large infusion of the poetic element, enabled us
to distinguish between the temporary and the essential,
between the parabolical and the historical ; and thus, at the
moment when science and ethnology are pointing out diffi-
culties, which, on a literal and mechanical view of the
Biblical records, are insuperable, a door of escape has been
opened by the disclosure of a higher aspect of the Scriptures,
which would be equally true and valuable, were there no
scientific difficulty in existence. Except in the lowest and
most barbarous classes of society, the invectives and the
scoffs of the last century have ceased. They have been
extinguished, not by the fires of the Inquisition, or the
anathemas of Convocations or General Assemblies, but by the
steady growth of the same reverential, rational appreciation
of the divine processes for the revelation of great truths, as
has shut the mouths of the defamers of Milton and covered
with shame the despisers of Shakespeare.

III. Leaving the grounds of hope furnished to us by the
original documents of our faith, let us turn to those whicli
are supplied from the study of its doctrines and institutions.
And here I will name two bridges, as it were, by which the
passage to a brighter prospect may be effected. One is the
increasing consciousness of the importance of definition. It
was said by a famous theologian of Oxford thirty years ago
that " without definition controversy is either hopeless or
useless." He has not, in his subsequent career, applied
this maxim, as we might fairly have expected from his
subtle intellect, to the clearing away of obstructions and
frivolities. But the maxim is true, not only in the negative
sense in which he pronounced it, but in the more important



220 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

sense of the pacifying and enlightening tendency necessarily
implied in all attempts to arrive at the clear meaning of
the words employed. It was a sagacious remark which I
heard not long ago from a Scottish minister on the shores
of Argyleshire, that the vehemence of theological controversy
has been chiefly in proportion to the emptiness of the
phrases used. So long as an expression is employed merely
as a party watchword, without inquiring what it means, it
acts like a magical spell ; it excites enthusiasm ; it spreads
like an infectious malady ; it terrifies the weak ; it acts as a
stimulant to the vacant brain. But the moment that we
attempt to trace its origin, to discover in what other words
it can be expressed, the enthusiasm cools, the panic subsides,
the contagion ceases to be catching, the dram ceases to in-
toxicate, the cloud disperses, and the clear sky appears.
This pregnant reflection might be aptly illustrated by
examples in the history of the Scottish Churches. But I
will confine myself to two instances drawn from other
countries. One is that of which I have before spoken, the
doctrine of the Double Procession, which was sufficient to
tear asunder the Eastern and Western Churches ; to give the
chief practical occasion for the terrible anathemas of the
Athanasian Creed ; to precipitate the fall of the Empire of
Constantinople; and therefore to sow the original seed of
the present formidable Eastern Question. This controversy
lias in later days, with very few exceptions, fallen into
entire obscurity. But in those cases where it has occupied
the attention of modern theologians, its sting has been taken
out by the process, simple as it would seem, but to which
resort had never been had before, of inducing the combatants
to express their conflicting opinions by other phrases than
those which had been the basis of the original antagonism.
This, and this only, is the permanent interest which attached
to a recent Conference at Bonn, between certain theologians
of the Greek, Latin, and English Churches. What was then
done with much satisfaction, at least to those more im-
mediately concerned, might be applied with still more
advantage to many other like phrases, which have acted as



ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 221

mischievous a part in the disintegration and disunion of
Christendom. Another instance shall be given from a
Church nearer home. In the Gorham Controversy, which
in 1850 threatened to rend the Church of England from its
summit to its base, and which produced the widest theo-
logical panic of any within our time, the whole question
hinged on the word " regeneration " ; and yet, as Bishop
Thirlwall showed in one of those charges, which I would
recommend to all theological students, of whatever church,
who wish to see the value of severe discrimination and
judicial serenity on the successive controversies of our time,
it never occurred to the disputants that there was an am-
biguity in the word itself it never occurred to either of
them to define, or explain, what either of them intended to
express by it. 1 What is there said with withering irony of
" regeneration " is true of the larger number of theological
phrases by which truth has been veiled and charity stifled.
Differences and difficulties will remain. But the bitterness
of the fight is chiefly concerning words ; the fight itself is
what the apostle denounced as " a battle of words." 2 Ex-
plain these define these the party collapses, the bitter-
ness exhales, the fear is cast out.

Another ground of hope is the growing sense of the
doctrine of proportion. It is a doctrine which has dawned
slowly and painfully on the theological mind of Christendom.
" In God's matters," said Samuel Eutherford, " there is not,
as in grammar, the positive and comparative degrees ; there
is not a true, a more true, and a most true." " Every pin
of the tabernacle," said Ebenezer Erskine, in his amazement
at the indifference which Whitfield displayed towards
the Solemn League and Covenant, " is precious." :! What
Ilutherford and Erskine thus tersely and quaintly ex-
pressed is but the assumption on which has rested the
vast basis of the liabbinical theology of Judaism, and the
Scholastic Theology, whether of Catholic or Protestant
Churches. But to the better spirits of Christendom there

1 Bishop Thirlwall's Charges, i. 156. - 1 Tim. vi. 4.

:; Lectures on the Church of Scot /and. p. 78.



222 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES



has penetrated the conviction that these maxims are not only
not sound, but are unsound to the very core. " There is
a true, a more true, and a most true." "Every pin of
the tabernacle is not equally precious." Richard Hooker
and Richard Baxter had already begun to perceive that
religion was no exception to the truth, expressed by a
yet greater genius than either, in the magnificent lines of
Troilus and Cressida, which tells us how essential it is in all

things to

Observe degree, priority, and {dace,
Insistence, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order.

This, if not the ultimate, at any rate is the proximate,
solution of some of the difficulties which have threatened,
or which still threaten, the peace of churches and the
growth of religion.

Take the vexed question of church government. The
main source of the gall which once poisoned, and still
in some measure poisons, the relations between Episcopal
and Presbyterian Churches, was not the position that one
or other form was to be found in the Bible, or in antiquity,
or was more conformable to common -sense and order.
These are comparatively innocent and unexciting proposi-
tions. The distracting thought lay in the conviction that
one or other was absolutely perfect, and was alone essential
to the Christian religion. It is for the rectification of
this misplaced exclusiveness that we owe a deep debt of
gratitude to such men as Hooker in England and Leighton
in Scotland. There is much to be said for Presbyterianism ;
there is much to be said for Episcopacy. But there is
much more to be said for the secondary, temporary,
accidental character of both, when compared with the
general principles to which they each minister; and in
the light of these principles we shall view more justly
and calmly the real merits and demerits both of bishops
and of presbyters, than is possible for those who, like
your Scottish or my English ancestors, upheld the con-
stitution of either Church as, in all times and under all



ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 223

circumstances, irrevocably indispensable. What is true with
regard to those two leading distinctions is still more
applicable to all debates on patronage, ecclesiastical courts,
vestments, postures. There is a difference there is, if we
choose so to express it, a right and a wrong in each case.
The appointment by a multitude may be preferable to
the appointment by a single individual ; the appointment
by a responsible layman may be preferable to the appoint-
ment by a synod ; a black gown may, in certain circumstances,
be superior to a white one, or a white one to a red one.
But far more important than any of these positions is the
persuasion that, at most, all of these things, the nomination,
the jurisdiction, the dress, the attitude of ministers, are
but means towards an end very distant means towards
a very distant end. And in measure as we appreciate
this due proportion, scandals will diminish, and the Church
of the future will leap forward on its course, bounding like
a ship that has thrown over its super-charge of cargo, or
quelled an intestine mutiny.

Or take a yet graver question -the mode of regarding
those physical wonders which are called miracles. There
is no doubt an increasing difficulty on this subject a
difficulty enhanced by the incredulity which now besets
the educated sections of mankind, and by the credulity
which has taken hold with a fresh tenacity on the half-
educated. It is a question on which neither science nor
religion, I venture to think, has yet spoken the last word.
It is a complex problem, imperatively demanding that
careful definition of which I spoke before, and the calm
survey of the extraordinary incidents not only of Biblical
but of ecclesiastical history, whether Catholic or Protestant.
On the true aspects of such physical portents as have
been connected with the history of religion, there is much
to be argued. But on these arguments I do not enter.
The point on which I would desire to fix your attention
is this : that whatever view we take of these " signs and
wonders," their relative proportion as grounds of argument
has altogether changed. There is a well-known saying,



224 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

like other famous axioms 1 of Christian life, erroneously
ascribed to St. Augustine " We believe the miracles for
the sake of the Gospels, not the Gospels for the sake of
the miracles." Fill your minds with this principle, view
it in all its consequences, observe how many maxims both
of the Bible and of philosophy conform to it, and you will
find yourselves in a position which will enable you to
treat with equanimity half the perplexities of this subject.
However valuable the record of extraordinary manifestations
may be in other respects, however impressively they may
be used to convey the truths of which they are confessedly
but the symbols, they have, in the eyes of the very men whom
we most desire to convince, become stumbling blocks and
not supports. External evidence has with the most re-
flecting minds receded to the background, internal evidence
has come to the front. Let us learn by experience to
use with moderation arguments which, at least for the
present, have lost their force. Let us acknowledge that

1 It fell to my lot two years ago to track out the story of another famous
maxim, which was really due to Rupertus Meldenius, an obscure German divine
of the seventeenth century, but, in like manner, falsely ascribed to Augustine,
" In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas. " See " Address
on Richard Baxter," in Macmillan's Magazine, July, 1876. The saying
concerning miracles is sometimes quoted as Augustine's, but on inquiry I
find that there is no ground for ascribing it to him. The nearest approach
to it is the passage from the treatise Dc Unitatc Ecclesicc, c. 19, to which
Archbishop Trench refers in his work on the Miracles. "Quaeeumque
talia [i.e. the Donatist Miracles] in Catholica [Ecclesia] hunt, ideo sunt
approbata, quia in Catholica fiunt ; non ideo manifestatur Catholica, quia haec
in ea fiunt." This, however, is a very inadequate statement of the principle,
if indeed it be not merely the polemical and untenable assertion that, whatever
miracles are wrought by heretics for that very reason go for nothing the
exact opposite of our Lord's words, Mark ix. 38.

The substance of the sentiment, however, has been repeatedly expressed
by writers, who, if less famous than Augustine, have penetrated far more
profoundly into the root of the question. Not to mention Coleridge, Arnold,
and Milman, it may suffice to quote from the work of Archbishop Trench, to
which reference has just been made. '''Miracles,' says Fuller, 'are the
swaddling clothes of the infant Church : ' and. we may add, not the garments
of the full-grown " (Trench on the Miracles, 51). " It may be more truly said,
tliatwe believe the miracles for Christ's sab:, than Christ for the miracles' sake."
{Ibid. 103.)



ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 225

there are greater miracles, more convincing miracles, than
those which appeal only to our sense of astonishment.
" The greatest of miracles," as a venerable statesman has
observed, is the character of Christ. The world was
converted, in the first instance, not by appeals to physical,
but to moral prodigies. Let us recognise that the preter-
natural is not the supernatural, and that, whether the
preternatural is present or absent, the true supernatural
may and will remain unshaken.

IV. And what is the true supernatural ? What are
those essentials in religion which have been the purifying
salt of Christianity hitherto, and will be the illuminating
light hereafter ; which, raising us above our natural state,
point to a destiny above this material world this common-
place existence ? The great advance which, on the whole,
theology has made in these latter centuries, and which it
may be expected still more to make in the centuries which
are to come, is this, that the essential, the supernatural
elements of religion are recognised to be those which are
moral and spiritual. These are its chief recommendations
to the reason of mankind. Without them, it would have
long ago perished. So far as it has lost sight of these, it
has dwindled and faded. With these, it may overcome the
world. Other opportunities will occur in which I shall
hope to draw out at length both the means by which these
spiritual elements of Christianity may be carried on from
generation to generation, and also the characteristics which
distinguish them from like elements in inferior religions. 1 It
is enough to have indicated that in the supremacy of these,
and in their supremacy alone, lies the hope of the future.
To love whatever is truly lovable, to detest whatever is truly
detestable, to believe that the glory and divinity of goodness
is indestructible, and that there has been, is, and will be, a
constant enlargement and elevation of our conceptions of it
furnishes a basis of religion which, whilst preserving all
the best parts of the sacred records and of Christian worship

1 In the two sermons preached in the College Church and in the Parish
Church of St. Andrews on the following Sunday, 18th March.

'5



226 RECTORIAL ADDRESSES

and practice, is a guarantee at once for its perpetuity and
for its growth.

Observe also that in proportion to our insistence on the
moral greatness of Christianity as its chief evidence and
chief essence, there accrues an external weight of authority
denied to the lower and narrower, but granted to the higher
and wider, views of religion. When we look over the long-
annals of ecclesiastical history, we shall often find that it is
not within the close range of the so-called orthodox, but
from the outlying camp of the so-called heretic or infidel,
that the champions of the true faith have come. Not from
the logic of Calvin, or the rhetoric of Bossuet, but from the
great scholars and philosophers of the close of the last cen-
tury and the beginning of this, have been drawn the best
portraitures of Christianity and its Founder. A clearer
glimpse into the nature of the Deity was granted to Spinoza, 1
the excommunicated Jew of Amsterdam, than to the com-
bined forces of Episcopacy and Presbytery in the Synod
of Dordrecht. When we cast our eyes over the volumes
which, perhaps, of all others, give us at once the clearest
prospect of the progress of humanity, and the saddest retro-
spect of the mistakes of theology Mr. Lecky's History of
European Morals and of Rationalism when we read there
of the eradication of deeply rooted beliefs which, under the
guidance of ecclesiastics and ecclesiastical rulers, were sup-
posed to be essential to the existence of Religion witchcraft,
persecution, intolerance, prohibition of commercial intercourse
if for one moment our faith is staggered by seeing that
these beneficent changes were brought about by States in
defiance of Churches, by philosophers in defiance of divines,

1 This statement would be justified by a comparison of the best sayings of
Spinoza with the best sayings of the Synod of Dort. The former are still
read with admiration and instruction, even by those who widely differ from
Spinoza's general teaching. The latter are but little known, even to those
who most firmly agree with the theory propounded by the Synod.

It may also be well to record, over against the anathemas which have been
levelled at his name, the epithet by which his humbler acquaintances called
him immediately after his death, "The blessed Spinoza," and the description
given of him by Schleiermacher, ' ; He was a man full of Religion, and of the
Holy Ghost."



ARTHUR PENRHYN STANLEY 227

it is revived when we perceive that the end towards which
those various agencies worked is the same as that desired
by the best of the theologians ; that what Mr. Lecky calls
the secularisation of politics is in fact the Christianisation
of theology. That view of man, of the universe, and of God,
which by a recent able writer is called " Natural Eeligion " x
is in fact Christianity in its larger and wider aspect. The
hope of immortality, which, beyond any other belief of man,
carries us out of the world of sense, was eagerly defended
by Voltaire and Eousseau, no less than by Butler and Paley.
The serious view of duty, the admiration of the heroic and
the generous and the just, the belief in the transcendent
value of the spiritual and the unseen, are cherished posses-
sions of the philosophers of our generation, no less than of
the missionaries and saints of the generation that is past.
The Goliath of the nineteenth century, as was once well
observed by a professor 2 of your own, is not on the opposite
side of the valley he is in our midst ; he is on our side ;
he is not to be slain by sling and stone, but he is if we
did but know it our friend, our ally, our champion. If
there is a constantly increasing tendency, as Mr. Lecky
says, 3 to identify the Bible and conscience, this is in other
words, as he himself well states the case, a tendency to place
Christianity in a position " in which we have the strongest
evidence of the triumph of the conceptions of its Founder,"
a position in which, by the nature of the case, the doubters
will be constantly diminishing and the intelligent believers
constantly increasing.

It is indeed one hope not only for the solution, but for
the pacific solution of our theological problems, that in this
more than in any previous age, in our country more than in
most countries, the critical and the conservative elements
overlap, interweave, and shade off into each other " Ionians,
and Dorians on both sides." The intelligent High Church-

1 See a series of most instructive articles in Macmillans Magazine, on