ART. VII.-IS RATIONALISM RATIONAL?

VULGAR rationalism seeks the overthrow of truth, as Absalom undertook to dethrone his aged sire. The picture of the auburn-haired prince standing at the city gate courting the favor of the populace, stirring up sedition, and stealing the hearts of the Jewish yeomanry by kisses and show of sympathy and false promises, is found again in the attempt of rationalism to lead astray the rising generation by holding up an illusory future, and by offering honors and a liberty out of its power to bestow. What of the claims of this pretender to the throne? He may be related to the monarch, but he may have no right to the scepter.

The terms used in the question are of two kinds. A specific and formal meaning belongs to the first. The second is used in its ordinary sense. Etymologically they are nearly related. Yet, as a result of an abuse of reason, they may be made to appear to differ by a whole diameter of thought.

There is unexpected harmony among both friends and foes as to the ideas involved in the word rationalism. It is not a recent term either in theological or philosophical speech. It was applied to the Socinians as early as 1588, and even before the middle of the century it was used to designate a sect in England given over to skepticism.

To all parties having this name, reason is the only rule of truth, its measure and pattern; and for the extremist it is the only source of truth. As a system-if such a babel of thought can be said to have the unity that dignifies a system-rationalism is of quite modern origin. The middle of the last century beheld it gaining definite shape, and the first decade of this century witnessed its culmination. It is not, however, in spirit by any means extinct, but flourishes in minds of oblique tendency under the slightest favoring conditions.

Bacon was right when he pointed out as a source of error exaggerated and almost idolatrous respect for human intellect; a respect which turns men away from the contemplation of nature and experience, and makes them revolve, as it were, in the circle of their own meditations and reflections.*

* Pressensé's Jesus Christ, p. 2.

In order that we may conduct the subject to a right conclusion let us view the common ground upon which the rationalist and the supernaturalist stand, and from that make our start. That common ground is that truth is a unit. All systematic philosophies are simply illustrations of the bent of the human mind to present in one the many diversities of the universe. The statement that truth is one cannot be objected to by the rationalist, for his duty is, as he conceives it, to judge the contents of truth, of which human reason is the source and measure. The supernaturalist must hold it, since he is wont to trace all lines of development in nature and thought, church and state, material forms and spiritual powers, up to the one God.

The question at issue is, What are the contents of this vast body of truth? As we seek an answer we reach another position accepted by both parties, which may be stated as follows: Truth is never self-contradictory, but is supremely self-consistent. Leaving out of sight for the moment all matters of fact over which the tides of speculation have ebbed and flowed with ceaseless movement, this abstract proposition has little less force than an axiom. However small or large the whole body may be it must be coherent, and be marked in all its parts by congruity.

Therefore all parties to the controversy face the question from the same level. But beyond this their ways part. The supernaturalist claims as a part of the contents of truth a system of revelation, and accepts it though declaring that not all of its details are equally clear under reason's analysis, even the most enlightened possible. Such an admission is made by a living theologian of repute. He says of a certain doctrine, "This has for me no solution in rational thought."* So also wrote the illustrious Blaise Pascal. "If we submit every thing to reason our religion will have nothing in it mysterious or supernatural;" and he stands on firmest rock when he says in a sentence further, "If we violate the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous." +

Pascal's second statement stands in fraternal accord with the first, on the ground that it is a rational inference from the claim of the necessity of a revelation to accept certain things in it *Miley's Atonement in Christ. Pascal's Thoughts, p. 278.

which reason may not fathom. Opposed to these is the devotee of reason when he declares he. will accept nothing on, above, or under the earth too wide, too high, or too deep to be measured by the processes of syllogistic thought. And forthwith reason stalks out, to change the figure, "breathing threatenings and slaughter" against the fundamental articles of the faith of Christendom. The venerable servitors of the kingdom -the inspired word, prophecy, miracles, the Deity and resurrection of Jesus Christ-like so many disturbers of peace, are haled, cast into prison, tried, and condemned.

In charging rationalisin with unreason I venture to sustain the charge upon the basis of an admission of rationalismthence to go forward to a fair and unshaken conclusion. The rationalists, with whom our argument is, are in the main theists. Ours is the wooden-horse argument, by use of which the Greeks won Troy. The horse was owned by the Greeks; yet Troy fell not till the Trojans claimed possession of it and dragged it within the famous walls.*

Dogmatism that fights without the walls oft loses as many lives as it takes. I know not how to prove the inspiration of the Bible to an entire disbeliever in inspiration. Christian apologetics is more and more striving after a common ground of belief. This we have in the case at hand. These disbelievers in the miraculous, these deniers even of the veracious historical characters of Christianity, believe in God. They are not atheists. And if many lean to agnosticism it is in the line of inability to prove, rather than in the purpose to disprove, the existence of Deity.

Let us not now stop to array the facts over which Christian apologetics presides, but examine from an abstract basis the utter irrationality of that system of human research which professes to be theistic and yet dares to set aside certain features which rational theism holds as essential to a belief in a personal God.

The following five positions will illustrate the argument:

1. In the first place what is, upon a theistic basis, a great a priori possibility, and still further, probability, is the miraculous. This rationalism sets aside. Now for us to admit, as we

*Quos neque Tydides, nec Larissæus Achilles,

Non anni domuere decem, non mille carinæ.-Eneid, book ii, 197, 198.

must, that miracles have less apologetic value than in other days, is not to lose our grip on the main question. Why must the miraculous be made a synonym for the incredible? There can be no fair appeal from the following words of Dr. Pressensé :

Christianity is bound up with the faith of the supernatural, and with it must either conquer or fall. To attempt to maintain it, while robbing it of this, its truly characteristic feature, is to introduce intolerable anarchy into the world of thought.*

I may not pause to emphasize a point so patent to the eye of logical thought. The truest thinking of to-day can simply echo the true voice of yesterday. John Stuart Mill, the drift of whose mind seemed in his last days to be toward Christianity as the supreme revelation of the divine mind, is speaking of the force and grip of Hume's argument against the credibility of miracles, and says:

All, therefore, which Hume has made out-and this he must be considered to have made out-is that no evidence can be sufficient to prove a miracle to any one who did not previously believe the existence of a being or beings with supernatural power, or who believed himself to have full proof that the character of the Being whom he recognizes is inconsistent with his having seen fit to interfere on the occasion in question.†

The meaning of this is clear. The miraculous is not logically incredible to a man who believes in the existence of a God who has made the universe, and peopled our world with moral intelligences, and ordained laws for their rule. To a man who does not believe in such a Deity you waste breath in trying to prove a miracle. That is all there is in Hume's celebrated argument. It is put in another shape in Fénelon's Telemaque. The student recalls the effort of Ulysses to convince one of his men who had been changed to a hog by Circe that it was shameful in him to remain a hog, but without success. So it is ever. But what shall we say of those who refuse to be orphaned of faith in God, and yet who bar the doors of their proud logical abode against nearest kin? That man who adds to his claim of belief in an almighty and all-wise Creator the claim of logical thought is under bonds of reason to accept the miraculous whenever veracious human testimony declares that *Pressense's Life of Christ, p. 27. Mill's Logic, p. 376.

a great on-moving coherent system of divine truth has here and there flowered out in fragrance unmistakably divine, and borne fruit undeniably salutary to man.

The conception of the worth of human testimony opens the way for another charge of unreasonableness against rationalism.

2. It may be framed as follows: In refusing to credit testimony when its burden is the inexplicable, rationalism not only surrenders the past, but subjects the witness of the present day, on all points not immediately open for reason's criticism, to the unjust impeachment of coming generations. If ancestral records are under the ban of my unbelief I have little right to expect posterity to credit the things I tell which neither of us can explain. This folly runs to gross extremes. Professor Baden Powell, in Essays and Reviews, says, "Testimony can avail nothing against reason;" and declares that the question would be unchanged if we ourselves were the witnesses of an alleged miracle. In short, we are not to believe our own eyes. Then we should be better off if we went further to do as the philosopher mentioned by Montaigne, who put out his eyes to free his mind.

What becomes of human history and the true witness of true men to the miraculous? Instead of these exhibitions for spiritual ends of divine might which seem temporarily to set aside the ordained courses of natural law being contrary to the analogy of God's dealings with his material world, in which he shows his power and skill, is it not in finest keeping with his nature thus to proffer to man visible marks of his presence and purpose in things touching the soul's welfare? Upon what else than human testimony are we to depend? The absurd outcome of the denial of the value of testimony when it has to do with the mixed clear and dark is seen in the merciless criticism of Strauss, in which he claims that Christianity needs no historical basis:

The supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historical facts.

Credulity may often play the fool, but verily incredulity here loses its chance of being crowned with a fool's cap only because its proportions are too colossal for the materials which human sarcasm has in hand to match it with. Before his death