CHAPTER VI

AUTHORITY AS A GROUND OF FAITH-continued

AUTHORITY in religion, as I showed in my last lecture, means Divine authority; and to rest one's Faith on Authority means to act on the belief that information about divine things has been communicated to mankind, immediately and unmistakably. I have shown that this belief is held by most religious people, and that they for the most part accept unexamined, and maintain through life, the forms of Faith which were first presented to them, refusing even to contemplate any change. I have admitted the necessity of this naïve, childlike Faith; but I have shown that its forms are determined by the accidents of early surroundings, and that by excluding self-criticism it is condemned to stationariness in the midst of a changing world.

In this lecture and the next I wish to consider the historical forms which the belief in authority has taken.

The chief of these are the theories of the Infallible Church, and of the Infallible Book. But there is another form of supernatural authority, which is historically prior to these, and which even in the history of the Christian Church comes before them. I mean belief in the supernatural inspiration of individual men, prophets, seers, visionaries, and the like. I have already mentioned this as the most typical form of religious authority properly so called.

The prophet conceives himself to be the mouthpiece of

God, and his utterances as prophet are held to convey direct information about the will and purposes of the Almighty. This is a case of belief on authority, in the true sense. It differs from the intuitivism which we discussed the other day, in that the prophet regards his message as something special and miraculous. He is merely the vehicle, not the organ of the revelation. Other men accept his utterances as coming straight from God. They have lost nothing, it is thought, by passing through a transparent medium.

In the New Testament this individual inspiration is spoken of as being filled with the Holy Ghost.' The religious instinct, which is the foundation of true Faith, was justly traced to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit of God. But there is a right and a wrong view of individual inspiration. In St. Paul, the action of the Holy Spirit is looked for in all that goes to make up character in its widest sense, and it appears in all religious experience. The Holy Ghost is the guide of prayer, the illuminator of the intellect, the kindler of love, the inspirer of every noble deed and work. But the operation of this Spirit is not wholly miraculous, wholly foreign to their own true nature. It is, in truth, their own best nature. 'God in them is the fulfilment of the best that they have it in them to become. The higher nature begotten in them is the first-fruits of the Spirit, with promise of ever richer fruition. The groanings which cannot be uttered, with which the Spirit comes in on our behalf, are identical with the groanings which we ourselves utter in the longing for a fuller experience of God (Rom. viii. 23-27). And so the light within is the light of God, as we allow Him to become one with us.' 1 But St. Paul's contemporaries could not all rise to this conception. They traced the operation of the Spirit rather in fitful and unaccountable manifestations of religious enthusiasm. The more strange and 1 Grubb, Authority and the Light Within, p. 62.

wild these were, the more sure they were that there was something divine in them. In the various charismata, especially, they found unmistakable evidence of an influx of the supernatural. The 'pneumatic' or spiritual man was one who spoke with tongues or prophesied. This undisciplined enthusiasm was discouraged, and in the end suppressed or expelled by the Catholic Church, though it lived on in a different form, in the strange belief in visions. Tertullian, writing about A.D. 200, has the startling and very significant statement that the majority of men derive their knowledge of God from visions. In the following centuries, the visions of the monks and nuns were the chief sources of supposed information about the life after death. All the horrors of the medieval Inferno were thus guaranteed, and a great part of the terrible pictures of hell, which seem to us so grotesque and wantonly cruel, was the direct result of the supernatural authority attributed to the nightmares of holy men..

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In our own day, the belief in directly inspired prophets among our contemporaries has practically disappeared, as it disappeared in Palestine between Malachi and John the Baptist. But the belief in supernatural guidance vouchsafed to individuals survives both in its true and in its more dubious form.

The distinguishing mark of this belief in individual illumination is the acceptance of the supposed divine communication simply and without question. A man, for instance, will hesitate about accepting an appointment until he feels a distinct 'leading' to say yes or no; then he will act at once, putting aside any self-questionings as to his fitness for the post.

I must try to indicate what measure of truth and error I consider to reside in this Faith in direct inspiration.

1 See the interesting note in Harnack, History of Dogma, vol. i. p. 53 (English translation).

Assuredly all good men are guided in various degrees by the Spirit of God who dwells, St. Paul says, in all but the reprobate. We have within us a tribunal before which it is our right and our duty to bring every doubtful case. And in this discerning of spirits' we may hope that we are guided not by our own unaided wisdom, but by the divine gift of grace which is only the other side of the human virtue of Faith. In trusting miraculous' leadings,' the error is in supposing that we can accept any mental suggestion, without question, as coming from God. The suggestion may come to us in a mysterious manner—in a vivid dream, or associated with a strange coincidence, or in some other way unlike our usual mental processes. But these are no necessary tokens of divine inspiration; it is superstition, not religion, to suppose that they are. Divine guidance is given us; but the degree of it is determined by our spiritual and mental condition, and it is not communicated in a magical manner, so as to save us the trouble of further inquiry. If the man who, when he has been offered an appointment, waits for some 'leading,' and does not try to weigh the pros and cons fairly, were to consider the reasons for and against acceptance, prayerfully, but with the best use of his reason, he would be more likely to be guided aright in his decision. In short, the error is in trying to fix the immediacy of special inspiration, as Quietists try to fix the immediacy of general, diffused inspiration. Special guidance in emergencies comes to us through our ordinary faculties if it comes at all. Sanctity does not confer the power of divination.

The theory of individual inspiration, if pushed to its logical conclusion, is too absurd to be widely held. It would result in making each Christian, who believed himself inspired, his own church and his own Bible. But even in a democratic age it would seem ridiculous to apply the theory of one man one vote' to religion. This

type of Faith can be studied in its most favourable form in the writings of the earlier Quakers. In the words of a living member of the Society of Friends, whom I have already quoted in this lecture, they made the inner light something wholly alien to man's nature. It was not an attribute of man, but a substance entirely separate from man's own being. "The light of which we speak," says Barclay, "is not only distinct but of a different nature from the soul of man and its faculties." It is not to be identified with the conscience any more than a candle is the same as the lantern that holds it.' 1 The error here, which, as this passage shows, is fully admitted by modern Friends,' is substantially the same as that of quietistic mysticism.

This extreme form of individualism has not been very prominent in the history of Christianity. The authorities which in history have swayed the destiny of nations have been more external and more august. They have spoken to man, not within him.

2

Let us first consider the historical evolution of the idea of the Church, as the divinely inspired source of authority. I have already shown that the conception of Faith as a body of doctrine, supernaturally accredited and therefore to be accepted in its entirety, is primitive. The guiding idea of Catholicism began to establish itself as soon as there was a Church for it to grow in. 'The Catholic theory of apostolic tradition,' says Sabatier, who writes from a Protestant standpoint, is found clearly defined and established as an infallible and sovereign law in the times of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus.' The concentration of power in the hands of the Roman Church, as the authoritative interpreter of this tradition, advanced as if by an automatic process. To quote Sabatier again : 'The future centre of the Catholic Church appeared from

1 Grubb, Authority and the Light Within, p. 81.

Sabatier, Les Religions d'Autorité et la Religion de l'Esprit.