CHAPTER V

AUTHORITY AS A GROUND OF FAITH

To class Authority as a secondary ground of Faith is a proceeding which needs some defence. For it is certain that in individual experience Authority is the earliest ground of belief. We are none of us born with a belief in God; but we are all born with a tendency to believe what we are told. A child can be made to believe almost anything. He does not believe because he wishes to believe, or because the things presented to him for acceptance appear to him to be useful or beautiful or desirable in any way. He is quite as ready to believe in ghosts and hobgoblins as in angels and good fairies. As he began to speak by parrottalk, so he begins to think by accepting facts without criticising them, and assumes that whatever he hears and understands has a place in the world of reality. It is only after sad experience of the deceitfulness of appearances that he unlearns his first confidence, and begins to doubt and question and disbelieve.

This natural tendency to believe what we are told remains with us, though more or less impaired by experience, through life. Some may protest that no one except a young child believes anything merely because he is told, without any thought of the trustworthiness of the authority; but I am convinced that this is a mistake. A great many grown persons will accept almost any statements put before them (not on all subjects, of course, but on some subjects) from pure inertia, because it is easier for them to believe than to disbelieve. Some popular superstitions,

which show such astonishing vitality, must be transmitted and accepted in this lazy fashion. Such notions as that it is unlucky to walk under a ladder, or to be married in May, could not survive a moment's thought about the value of the evidence in their favour. They are simply taken at their face value, with no questions asked.

If pure credulity is an actual cause of belief, even in cases where disproof is possible and easy, we cannot be surprised that it is largely instrumental in forming beliefs about the unseen world, where no contradiction from experience is possible. Among savages, myths about gods and spirits are handed down from father to son, and believed implicitly. They become part of the mental capital of the tribe or nation, and any attempt to damage their credit is visited with great indignation. This is quite natural. When an old master' has been in a family for generations, the owner is not likely to be grateful for being told that it is a sham. Or if he has acquired it himself without asking questions, and has frequently spoken of it as undoubtedly genuine, he will be at least equally unwilling to admit that he has been deceived. As a general rule, we say a thing for the first time because we have heard some one else say it, and stick to it because we have said it ourselves.

It follows that the diffusion and persistence of a belief is not always a presumption in favour of its truth. Many beliefs, which are purely silly and destitute of any foundation, have been kept alive by mere credulity, even in Europe, for thousands of years. When a superstition once establishes itself, it does not become any more respectable by growing old. Its antiquity gives it a sort of prestige which helps to keep it alive, but adds nothing to its weight. For instance, all housemaids everywhere believe that you can make a fire burn by tilting a poker against the bars. I dare say this curious manœuvre was originally an attempt

to make the sign of the cross, and so conjure the fire to burn; but for centuries it has been a purely irrational superstition. Or take the cock-and-lion story, solemnly told by Aristotle that the lion is afraid of the cock. This superstition lasted till Cuvier at last thought of putting a cock into a lion's cage, with results fatal to the cock. Intellectual indolence has perpetuated a great many bits of antiquated science. The history of popular quack remedies supplies a mass of instances of a highly instructive kind; for the same mental attitude which leads uneducated people to resort to quacks when they are ill makes them victims of religious imposture when they are in trouble about their souls.

Excessive reverence for tradition, deference to the opinions of our forefathers, who had more wit and wisdom than we,' must be distinguished from mere credulity. This reverence for the supposed wisdom of the past, which we find everywhere in primitive societies, must have been very useful in the early stages of civilisation, when the difficulty of preserving the hardly-won gains of humanity was far greater than at present. The tendency to put the golden age in the past may have been caused partly by a consciousness of the real sacrifices which civilisation entails. The fruit of the tree of knowledge, as I have said elsewhere,1 always expels us from some paradise or other, even if it be only the paradise of fools. And when the art of writing was discovered, a superstitious veneration for the written word was universal, and so persistent that I do not think it is extinct yet. If the words of wisdom were enshrined in verse, that made the glamour even more potent. The old Greek sentiment about the inspiration of poets survived to the end of the classical period. To the poets sometimes,' says Dion Chrysostom,-'I mean the very ancient poets-there came a brief utterance from the Muses, a kind of inspiration of the divine nature and truth, 1 Truth and Falsehood in Religion, p. 153.

It was thus

like a flash of light from an unseen fire.'1 that the belief in an infallible literature grew up, of which I must say more in a later lecture. To-day my subject is Authority in general, its meaning and significance for Faith. And I have to justify my classification of it as a secondary ground of belief.

Authority is defined by Professor Gwatkin 2 as all weight allowed to the beliefs of persons or the teachings of institutions beyond their reasonable value as personal testimony.' The phrase reasonable value' raises at once the question as to the relation of authority to reason. 'Reason' is one of those ambiguous words which have been the cause of endless controversies, because the combatants have not been careful enough to define their terms. It is a pity, I think, that we have not accepted Coleridge's distinction between reason and understanding, corresponding to the German words Vernunft and Verstand, and (less exactly) to the Greek vous and diavola as used by Platonists. Reason' would then be used for a philosophy of life based on full experience, a synthesis doing justice to the claims of the moral and æsthetic consciousness, while ' understanding' would be reserved for logical reasoning of a more abstract kind. We should then have been spared such confused arguments as are found, for example, in Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief (in which, as Leslie Stephen said, the foundations are ingeniously supported by the superstructure), or Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution.

It is by no means certain that we are right in looking for the Foundations of Belief.' The metaphor may be a misleading one. Some things have no foundations. An organism, for instance, has no foundations. Perhaps rational Faith may prove to be part of the life of the universe, in which case we need not look for its foundations outside of itself. Perhaps there is no elephant' to hold

1 Dion Chrysostom, Orat. 36, vol. ii. p. 59; Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 51. 2 Gwatkin, The Knowledge of God, vol. i. p. 3.

up the world of ideas, and no tortoise' to support the elephant.1

1

Mr. Kidd is anxious to prove that there is no rational sanction for progress,' and he chooses to regard 'reason' as a shortsighted, selfish faculty, which has nothing to do with any existence but the present, which, it insists, it is our duty to ourselves to make the most of.2 Professor Wallace, usually the most courteous of critics, is for once goaded into using a sharp expression. 'It is simply impossible to allow any one thus to play the fool with language.' Similarly for Mr. Balfour, authority is called 'the rival and opponent of reason.' Authority 'stands for that group of non-rational causes, moral, social, and educational, which produces its results by psychic processes other than reasoning.' , 4 To authority, he considers, we owe the order and stability of the moral world; by it the operations of reason are 'coerced to a fore-ordained issue it generates' psychological climates' (like the atmosphere of Church schools, I suppose, about which we heard so much two years ago), that is, habits of belief which reason has no power to influence. Indeed, it is from authority that reason itself draws its most important premises.' 'To authority, in the main, we owe, not religion only, but ethics and politics.' 'Reasoning is a force most apt to divide and disintegrate.'

This is a return to a long discredited method of apologetics. In the Middle Ages John of Salisbury wrote: As both the senses and human reason frequently go astray, God has laid in Faith the first foundation for the knowledge of truth.' So Bayle, the French Encyclopædist, says, not very sincerely, perhaps : Human reason is a principle of destruction, not of construction; it is capable solely of raising questions, and of doubling about to make

1 Cf. Professor H. Jones in Hibbert Journal (Jan. 1906), p. 801.

2 Kidd, Social Evolution, p. 73.

W. Wallace, Lectures and Essays, p. 104.

4 Balfour, Foundations of Belief, p. 219.