Such being their view, American Chris- at present, we preach Christ with all boldtians are not especially disturbed by the fact that there are different forms of unbelief and misbelief in the land. The fact is a sad one, but it is only a small fraction of the infinitely sadder fact of man's universal blindness and corruption.

REASON AND FAITH.

BY THE REV. E. A. WASHBURN, D.D., OF NEW YORK.

It may seem to some who hear me that my subject is only a renewal of the wornout theological battle of centuries. Yet, brethren and friends, it touches the deepest intellectual as well as religious want of the time. It is but yesterday since the Council of Latin Christendom met to decree that infallibility, the attribute of the all-wise God alone, is officially incarnate in the person of the Pontiff; and absurd as we may hold it, it is impossible to believe that a decision which bore with it so many learned and devout minds, which swept at last into the tide able opponents like a Gratry, and is now fighting for life or death with the heroic chiefs of the Old Catholic party, can have come from the mere vanity of a Pope or the craft of the Jesuit. It was the conviction of that Church that here was the only position against the inroads of Protestant freedom. And on the other side you see a modern, growing school of science, which, with a dogmatism as strong as that of the Papal decrees, affirms that our faith in those oldfashioned phrases, God, soul, cause, substance, in any thing beyond phenomena, has no worth for reason at all. In a word, it is the same unsettled conflict between the two powers of superstition and unbelief. The form of it differs with the modes of thought in every time, but the strife was never more earnest than now. And if, then, it be asked, What can be the hope of adjusting the endless quarrel of the past? I reply that the whole growth of Christian thought in the study of the Scriptures, in the history of doctrine, in the relations of revealed truth to science, leads me to believe that we are abler than before to meet it. I speak as one of those who earnestly hope for such mediation between the Church and the criticism of the time. I believe that the principle of a Protestant freedom is a sober and sacred one. And if I can so handle the question as to take it out from the older formulas in which it has been imbedded, and reach the living thought of men; if I can help any, however humbly, to know that our faith in a Divine Christ and Christianity is as reasonable as it is heart-felt, I shall speak what thousands of minds are seeking in the twilight of opinion.

I shall begin, therefore, with showing the aim and province of revealed truth, as the way to understand the harmony of reason with faith. It is from a want of a clear view

of this, as I believe, that the mistake arises which seems hopelessly to divide the champions of religion and of science.

It will, then, be the admission of all who hold the divine origin of Christianity, that its essential purpose is to reveal redemption from sin, and the life of holiness through an incarnate Redeemer. In such a view, its truth has a direct bearing on the manifold questions of human thought. It concerns our deepest knowledge of the being of God; the laws of his action in nature and the soul; the inward facts of our own consciousness; and still more, as a religion that comes down to us in its sacred books, it has a connection with our large inquiries of the origin of the world and the primitive state of man. We have here the groundwork of Christian science. Theology is its noblest fruit. We can never fall into that shallow scorn of it so common among the talkers of our modern time. It was the theology of the Church that led the intellectual as well as religious civilization of the world through its great ages of life, as it bloomed in Origen in Athanasius; and fed the whole Latin mind through Augustin, before it became the barren logic of the schools.

Yet we are always to distinguish, although we can not divide, the theology of the Church from the essential truth of the Gospel. The New Testament is not and was not meant to be a system of philosophy. As a revelation of life to men, it is only concerned with the questions of our theoretical study in so far as they affect the one central fact of God in Christ reconciling the world. It is not an absolute knowledge of the nature of God, but as he reveals his incarnate love in His Son; not a psychology of man, but the truth of his divine origin, and his sin as it is broadly evidenced in the moral consciousness of the race; not the science of the globe or the complete history of the race, but the record of redemption. I can not pause here to show how such a view affects in many points our treatment of Scripture, as, e. g., our theory of inspiration. Here it is enough to note its general bearing on the subject before us. We give its true sphere to theology. But we must not forget that it is in its very nature a changing and a partial growth; not changing, indeed, in its substantial truth, but in the mode in which that truth has been presented by devout thinkers, as the Church has passed through

its great orbit of knowledge, and surveyed we call reason, and another which we call one after another the phases of its divine light. The Greek mind was wholly absorbed in the doctrine of the Incarnation; the Latin, in the nature of man, of sin and grace; the Protestant has unfolded the meaning of a spiritual faith in our RedeemAthanasius, Augustin, Anselm, Calvin, Schleiermacher, represent this varied expres

er.

sion.

faith. "Reason," in the clear language of Augustin, "should not submit, unless it decide for itself that there are occasions when it ought to submit. Its very submission is then reasonable." Nothing can be the source of worse confusion than the notion of our popular theology that Revelation is the gift of certain incomprehensible doctrines which are to be believed without any effort at understanding. This is the exact opposite of the Scriptural idea. It is the mystery, hidden from the ages, and now opened to our knowledge, of which the apostle speaks so often; and so far as the Gospel is a revelation of any essential truth, there is in it "no darkness at all." Such an error confounds its simple character with all the glosses of a speculative theology, the perplexities of human theory, the purely critical questions of science; and leads at last to that skepticism which sweeps away the wheat with the chaff. Let us not mistake this point, my friends. In the beginning of the last century the learned Huet, bishop of Avranches, wrote his "Demonstratio Evangelica" to show that the ancient skeptics were the masters of philosophy, because they proved that we knew nothing. We have had too many who held that human folly was a Gospel demonstration. Pardon me if I speak specially here of a book which has been much praised in our own day-I mean the "Limits of Religious Thought"-as it best illustrates this sad fallacy. It was re

All have their harmony, as they are studied in their relations to the history of doctrine; yet all are but fallible teachers of a system never complete so long as the devout mind of man shall study afresh the mind of Christ. But Christianity is not a gnosis; not a theory, but a living Gospel. It remains the same-yesterday, to-day, and forever. Creeds are its outer walls, but not its sanctuary. Schools of theology defend it against false speculation, but they neither give nor take away its deepest influence over the life of men. We prize the symbol of Nice as one of the truly Catholic landmarks of the historic Church; and we claim it as the wisdom of the English Communion that it has placed it in its Liturgy far above all special articles or confessions; yet we must never make a Nicene Council the doctrinal basis of all Christian theology, and still less rest upon it the central truth of the Incarnation. That truth has a surer evidence. It speaks to the thought, the affections of all in the immortal page of the New Testament, in the perfect holiness and love of the Son of God. In such an understanding of the charac-served for an English divine to set up the ter of Christianity, we know the harmony most thorough system of Pyrrhonism as a of faith with reason. In whatever sphere Christian apologetic. The position of the Revelation has to do with the theoretical writer is this: that we can have nothing questions of our knowledge-Biblical sci- beyond relative knowledge, and therefore ence, theology, history-reason is organ and there can be no certitude in any of our ideas, arbiter. But as a practical truth which intellectual or moral. It follows that our touches other powers-conscience, affection, | ideas of God, his nature, his character, are will-it has another and inward sphere. purely subjective; and thus, whatever may We may thus briefly consider the place of be the representations of him in Revelation, the reason. It must be plain that, in so far they can not be within the sphere of real as Revelation contains any truth that asks and positive truth. We have, he affirms, a mental assent, it must appeal to the mental regulative wisdom, enough for our practifaculty. None denies this, unless he masks cal minds, but no more. It was the honclear sense under some vague sophism. The est aim of this thinker to defend the Scriponly question is not as to the use of reason, ture against the objections so often urged but as to its abuse. What are its capacities by the unbeliever. But it is not seen by and what its limits? We admit with read-many who hailed the book as the triumph iness that it is a finite power, and that, as Butler claimed in his immortal work, there are mysteries as well in nature as in the realm of religious truth, in the vital force lurking in the blade of grass as in the problem of the will or the nature of the Atonement. All truth has its penumbra; and a divine wisdom, above all, must have its infinity of shadow with the light. But to say that there are truths transcending the reason is not to deny its use in any sphere where we can exercise the intellectual powers. There is not one mental faculty which

of Christian thought, that the weapon which wounds the Rationalist kills the truth of Revelation. If we can not know that our intellectual or moral conceptions of God have a real basis, then every revelation of him in his Word may be an imagination. I can not adore him as a Father in his blessed Son, for the paternal relation is a purely human idea; I can not know that the love, the pity, the holiness, I only discern by my moral affection have any ground in his own nature. But further yet, this regulative wisdom is folly, for if my faith have no assurance in

pel is a deeper process. No theory of depravity can teach me the meaning of sin, unless I have first felt its reality as a moral fact in myself. No theory of the Atonement

reason, then to follow it may be to follow a will-o'-the-wisp along the marshes of human ignorance. And this is the defense of faith! I hold it an utter surrender to unbelief. It is the most pregnant of facts that the lead-can teach the dependence of my soul on the er of English positivism has cited this very reasoning in support of his own conclusion that science can not reach or admit any idea of Cause, or Person, or God. Hume said, with his inimitable sneer, "Our holy religion does not rest on reason, but on faith." Our modern champion gravely repeats it. And is this a sound Christianity? I answer --not in the name of reason, but of the very truth of God and Christ-No! If I must keep my belief by such skepticism, it is lost forever.

Saviour, until I have felt the fitness of that divine grace to my personal need. It is in this true sense we use that phrase of the fathers, "Fides præcedit intellectum"--Faith goes before understanding. All our reasoning must rest at last on certain first truths, at once intellectual and moral, call them what you will, innate or connate, intuitions or cognitions. We see God by this inner eye; we know him not as an inference of our logic, but as the necessary conviction of mind and heart. And thus we know God in Christ by this moral affection, as the perfect holiness, the incarnate grace, and with him all those related truths which are spiritually discerned. Such a knowledge of faith neither contradicts nor excludes nor makes useless the exercise of the highest mental power. The believer is just as dependent as other men on the process and results of Christian learning, when he will pass outside the sphere of this living, practical truth into the domain of theology or criticism. Yet within that sphere he has a satisfying wisdom. There is what Pascal has finely called an "interior reason " in this Christian knowledge, an implicit, harmonious action of the mental and moral powers together, by which instead of a cold analysis the mind seizes the vital truth of the Scriptures; and as it was said of Newton that he could by intuition reach the sum of the most complex reckoning, yet it was not intuition, but only such rapid action of the mind as to lose sight of the steps, so is the synthetic power of faith. It is a knowledge that leads him always, amidst the difficulties 11 of criticism, to rest on the sure foundation. It is a knowledge that keeps him from confounding the Gospel with the theories of men, orthodox or heterodox. And, again, just as the simplest believer receives the truth by the same mental faculty as the scholar, though in a plainer way, so the scholar must gain his real knowledge by the same deep method. An Augustin, although he may range over all systems of philosophic thought, although his own vast genius may have mingled much of the ore of fancy with the gold of his rich theology, comes to Christ, with the deep self-knowledge of a hungering and thirsting heart. A Luther amidst the husks of a scholastic divinity turns to that "theologia pectoris" which he has learned upon his knees. Thus faith and reason are one. The Mécanique Céleste is a grand rationale of the heavens; yet to the child-like mind, as to the man of science, the stars speak a divine law, a beauty greater than the book, and more reasonable to the former than to a Laplace, who found that "his equation

And here we reach the right view of faith. What is it to believe? I turn to the New Testament, and learn it from the lips of Christ. It is a personal trust in him, an act of the mind, heart, and will together. Such is the original force of the word always in the gospels. Faith is not opposed to the intellect, but to the sight, the sensuous appearance. "Blessed are ye that see not, yet believe." And so, when we pass to St. Paul, the great preacher of faith, we find him opposing the "philosophy falsely so called," the gnosis of Judaizing, teachers, but he appeals always to the spiritual mind, the faith rooted in love, ending not in dogma, but life. The thought of personal trust in Christ is the dominant in every chord. There is no such idea as faith in a proposition. We learn hence its Christian meaning. It is not to accept certain opinions about Christ, certain systems of doctrine touching his nature and his offices, the psychology of the will, the theory of redemption, but it is to accept him. It is to come to the New Testament with the simple consciousness of our moral nature that we are children of God, that sin is the root of our spiritual disease, and holiness the want of the soul; to find in him that revealed grace of our Father we need, and to follow him in the renewed and holy life which is life eternal. This is Christianity. It is its beginning and its end. And if, then, you have accepted this definition, you will agree with my whole idea of the office of faith. It is not a special revelation or illumination of the mind. It is not an assent to certain truths which contradict reason, but are given on arbitrary authority. There can be no such assent, save with some intelligent idea of what it assents to. A Christian faith, then, I affirm, is one with reason, but a reason disciplined by and acting with other faculties and within another sphere than that of pure speculative thought. As the revelation of Christ is a practical truth for the life, so it asks the exercise of the conscience, of the affections, and the will. We may construct a perfect system of theology. But to know Christ and his Gos

We reach here the

needed no unknown quantity, no God." Rea- | boasts. The gorgeous cloud-land set in the son may end in the intellectual conclusion; darkness of atheism. faith ends in Christ and holiness. Reason alone is barren opinion; faith is reason knit with affection and conscience.

position of our latest rationalism. We need only turn to the views of Strauss in his coarser, later work, or to that romance which Renan has called the "Life of Jesus," to know its type. It has become a destructive criticism. It rests on what it styles the basis of positive science. There, is indeed, in one view a gain, because it has left the ground of myth, and confessed that the person and life of Christ are facts too stubborn to deny some historic basis. But the critic deals with these facts wholly by the laws of a natural science. He comes beforehand with the assumption that there is nothing but a fanciful legend in the gospels; he writes the life of Christ as no more than the history of an Apollonius of Tyana, or a saint like those of the Roman hagiology. The grander fact

the miracle above all else of his wondrous influence over the race, the ideal yet real perfection of wisdom and grace that shine forth in him, the moral convictions of mankind that point to and centre in such a Re

And thus I shall pass from the abstract view to what will doubtless have a more living interest, the battle of our time be- | tween belief and unbelief. I shall strive to show the grand error of rationalism and the spirit of the Christianity which must meet it. If, my friends, we have clearly seen the difference between a purely speculative knowledge and that spiritual truth which a Christian faith grasps, it is in the divorce of the one from the other that rationalism consists. It is not in a just use of our intellect in theology or criticism, nor is it in the claim that any doctrines of the Church must agree with the necessary truths of the reason and the conscience. That is the "reasonable serv-of such a being as he stands alone in history, ice" which the Scripture itself enjoins. But the root of rationalism lies in the assumption that there is already all necessary truth given us in our own consciousness, and therefore we neither want nor can have any divine, special revelation. I do not say a supernat-deemer, the divinity of a religion that has ural revelation; for I hold that all within created a new world of faith and thought the realm of spiritual life is above nature, and life, all these evidences, as rational as and that to limit the supernatural power of they are sacred, are nothing. Such is the God to the age of miracle is a vicious error shape of our modern unbelieving wisdom. which opens the way to a gross materialism. It has reduced Christianity to that which Rationalism, in a word, makes the central Baur claims as the solution of the Resurrectruths of Christianity-the Incarnation, the tion—a faith, a church built on the delusion Atonement, the power of the Holy Spirit of a few fishermen of Galilee. And even unreasonable mysteries. We see the steps this is but one among all delusions. There of this growth in its history. The rational- is no God in history. There is no personal istic spirit is not indeed confined to one time | future. There is no human destiny save or land. It is often the ignorant reproach against Germany that its parentage is there, but if it have produced the school of keenest unbelief, it is because it is the home of the highest philosophic power, the noblest learning; and if it have a Baur and a Strauss, it has also a Neander, a Rothe, a Dorner, a host of devout scholars. In its earlier shape rationalism was chiefly an effort to explain away the miraculous character of the Scripture. But after it took a philosophic basis in the Kantian conception of "religion within the bounds of pure reason," it developed rapidly with the changes of speculative thought, until the work of Strauss gave it its most scientific expression. The religion of Christ was only one of the nature-religions of the past. Its divine author was a myth, wrought out of the fancy of the Jewish believers. Yet there was a brilliant charm to many minds in that stately fabric, which seemed to ideal-Pardon me if I utter with an honest plainize the deepest truths of Christianity into ness my whole mind here. I should do inan absolute religion, while it dismissed its justice to the truth if I should fear to exlegend. But when at last it resulted in pose the error of an irrational belief, as well making God only self-consciousness, and im- as of unbelief. Although I reverence the mortality a dream, it was seen that a ration-heart of piety even in superstition, yet it is al philosophy which denied revelation must folly to forget that the one vice creates the end in denying even the spiritual truths it other. I do not care to choose between

this eternal change of races and opinions, of religious and social struggles, which came forth from the unknown, blind force of nature and return to their nothingness. We stand aghast at the open denial of all reality beyond gases and nervous tissues. Yet I hold we are more indebted than we think to our latest form of unchristian science, for it will prove that a sound Christianity alone can save, as it has done before, not merely revealed truth, but the first principles of all spiritual truth whatever.

And thus I reach the last, weightiest topic, the way in which we must defend the faith of Christ against our modern rationalism. I speak it with an earnest conviction that the Christianity we need is that which shall meet it with that science it abuses, and show to a time which asks a clear, positive truth that we are able to give a reason for our faith.