“From one thing to another,” said Tom, “they got to cathedrals, and one of them called St. Paul’s ‘a disgrace to a Christian city.’ I couldn’t stand that, you know. I was always bred to respect St. Paul’s; weren’t you?”

“My education in that line was neglected,” said Hardy, gravely. “And so you took up the cudgels for St. Paul’s?”

“Yes, I plumped out that St. Paul’s was the finest cathedral in England. You’d have thought I had said that lying was one of the cardinal virtues – one or two just treated me to a sort of pitying sneer, but my neighbors were down upon me with a vengeance. I stuck to my text though, and they drove me into saying I liked the Ratcliffe more than any building in Oxford; which I don’t believe I do, now I come to think of it. So when they couldn’t get me to budge for their talk, they took to telling me that everybody who knew anything about church architecture was against me – of course meaning that I knew nothing about it – for the matter of that, I don’t mean to say that I do.” Tom paused; it had suddenly occurred to him that there might be some reason in the rough handling he had got.

“But what did you say to the authorities?” said Hardy, who was greatly amused.

“Said I didn’t care a straw for them,” said Tom; “there was no right or wrong in the matter, and I had as good a right to my opinion as Pugin – or whatever his name is – and the rest.”

“What heresy!” said Hardy, laughing; “you caught it for that, I suppose?”

“Didn’t I! They made such a noise over it, that the men at the other end of the table stopped talking (they were all freshmen at our end), and when they found what was up, one of the older ones took me in hand, and I got a lecture about the middle ages, and the monks. I said I thought England was well rid of the monks; and then we got on to Protestantism, and fasting, and apostolic succession, and passive obedience, and I don’t know what all! I only know I was tired enough of it before coffee came; but I couldn’t go, you know, with all of them on me at once, could I?”

“Of course not; you were like the six thousand unconquerable British infantry at Albuera. You held your position by sheer fighting, suffering fearful loss.”

“Well,” said Tom, laughing, for he had talked himself into good humor again. “I dare say I talked a deal of nonsense; and, when I come to think it over, a good deal of what some of them said had something in it. I should like to hear it again quietly; but there were others sneering and giving themselves airs, and that puts a fellow’s back up.”

“Yes,” said Hardy, “a good many of the weakest and vainest men who come up take to this sort of thing now. They can do nothing themselves, and get a sort of platform by going in for the High Church business from which to look down on their neighbors.”

“That’s just what I thought,” said Tom; “they tried to push mother Church, mother Church, down my throat at every turn. I’m as fond of the Church as any of them, but I don’t want to be jumping up on her back every minute, like a sickly chicken getting on the old hen’s back to warm its feet whenever the ground is cold, and fancying himself taller than all the rest of the brood.”

CXIII

I have spoken of that which I cannot believe; let me speak to you now of that which I do believe, of that which I hold to be a faith, the faith, the only faith for mankind. Do not turn from it because it seems to be egotistic. I can only speak for myself, for what I know in my own heart and conscience. While I keep to this, I can speak positively, and I wish above all things to speak positively.

I was bred as a child and as a boy to look upon Christ as the true and rightful King and Head of our race, the Son of God and the Son of man. When I came to think for myself I found the want, the longing for a perfectly righteous king and head, the deepest of which I was conscious – for a being in whom I could rest, who was in perfect sympathy with me and all men. “Like as the hart panteth after the water-brooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God,” – these, and the like sayings of the Psalmist, began to have a meaning for me.

Then the teaching which had sunk into me unconsciously rose up and seemed to meet this longing. If that teaching were true, here was He for whom I was in search. I turned to the records of His life and death. I read and considered as well as I could, the character of Christ, what he said of himself and his work; his teachings, his acts, his sufferings. Then I found that this was indeed He. Here was the Head, the King, for whom I had longed. The more I read and thought the more absolutely sure I became of it. This is He. I wanted no other then, I have never wanted another since. Him I can look up to and acknowledge with the most perfect loyalty. He satisfies me wholly. There is no recorded thought, word or deed of his that I would wish to change – that I do not recognize and rejoice in as those of my rightful and righteous King and Head. He has claimed for me, for you, for every man, all that we can ask for or dream of, for He has claimed every one of us for his soldiers and brethren, the acknowledged children of his and our Father and God.

But this loyalty I could never have rendered, no man can ever render, I believe, except to a Son of man. He must be perfect man as well as perfect God to satisfy us – must have dwelt in a body like ours, have felt our sorrows, pains, temptations, weaknesses. He was incarnate by the Spirit of God of the Virgin. In this way I can see how he was indeed perfect God and perfect Man. I can conceive of no other in which he could have been so. The Incarnation is for me the support of all personal holiness, and the key to human history.

What was Christ’s work on earth? He came to make manifest, to make clear to us, the will and nature of this Father, our God. He made that will and nature clear to us as the perfectly loving and long-suffering and righteous will and nature. He came to lead us men, his brethren, back into perfect understanding of and submission to that will – to make us at one with it; and this he did triumphantly by his own perfect obedience to that will, by sacrificing himself even to death for us, because it was the will of his and our Father that he should give himself up wholly and unreservedly; thus, by his one sacrifice, redeeming us and leaving us an example that we too should sacrifice ourselves to Him for our brethren. Thus I believe in the Atonement.

CXIV

Christ was not only revealed to those who saw him here. He did not only go about doing his Father’s will here on earth for thirty-three years, eighteen hundred years ago, and then leave us. Had this been so, he would certainly in one sense have been revealed, in the only sense in which some orthodox writers seem to teach that he has been revealed. He would have been revealed to certain men, at a certain time, in history, and to us in the accounts which we have of him in the Gospels, through which accounts only we should have had to gain our knowledge of him, judging of such accounts by our own fallible understandings. But He said, “I will be with you always, even to the end of the world.” “I will send my Spirit into your hearts to testify of me;” and He has fulfilled his promise. He is revealed, not in the Bible, not in history, not in or to some men at a certain time, or to a man here and there, but in the heart of you, and of me, and of every man and woman who is now, or ever has been, on this earth. His Spirit is in each of us, striving with us, cheering us, guiding us, strengthening us. At any moment in the lives of any one of us we may prove the fact for ourselves; we may give ourselves up to his guidance, and He will accept the trust, and guide us into the knowledge of God, and of all truth. From this knowledge, (more certain to me than any other, of which I am ten thousand times more sure than I am that Queen Victoria is reigning in England, that I am writing with this pen at this table,) if I could see no other manifestation of Christ in creation, I believe in the Trinity in Unity, the name on which all things in heaven and earth stand, which meets and satisfies the deepest needs and longings of my soul.

The knowledge of this name, of these truths, has come to me, and to all men, in one sense, specially and directly through the Scriptures. I believe that God has given us these Scriptures, this Bible, to instruct us in these the highest of all truths. Therefore I reverence this Bible as I reverence no other book; but I reverence it because it speaks of him, and his dealings with us. The Bible has no charm or power of its own. It may become a chain round men’s necks, an idol in the throne of God, to men who will worship the book, and not Him of whom the book speaks. There are many signs that this is, or is fast becoming, the case with us; but it is our fault, and not the Bible’s fault. We persist in reading our own narrowness and idolatry into it, instead of hearing what it really is saying to us.

CXV

I believe that the writers of Holy Scripture were directly inspired by God, in a manner, and to an extent, in and to which no other men whose words have come down to us have been inspired. I cannot draw the line between their inspiration and that of other great teachers of mankind. I believe that the words of these, too, just in so far as they have proved themselves true words, were inspired by God. But though I cannot, and man cannot, draw the line, God himself has done so; for these books have been filtered out, as it were, under his guidance, from many others, which, in ages gone by, claimed a place beside them, and are now forgotten, while these have stood for thousands of years, and are not likely to be set aside now. For they speak if men will read them, to needs and hopes set deep in our human nature, which no other books have ever spoken to, or ever can speak to, in the same way – they set forth his government of the world as no other books ever have set it forth, or ever can set it forth.

But though I do not believe that the difference between the inspiration of Isaiah and Shakespeare is expressible by words, the difference between the inspiration of the Holy Scripture – the Bible as a whole – and any other possible or conceivable collection of the utterances of men seems to me clear enough. The Bible has come to us from the Jewish nation, which was chosen by God as the one best fitted to receive for all mankind, and to give forth to all mankind, the revelation of Him – to teach them His name and character – that is, to enable them to know Him and in knowing Him, to feel how they and the world need redemption, and to understand how they and the world have been redeemed. This Bible, this Book of the chosen people, taken as a whole, has done this, is in short the written revelation of God. This being so, there can be no other inspired book in the same sense in which the Bible is inspired, unless we, or some other world, are not redeemed, require another redemption and another Christ. But as we and all worlds are redeemed, and Christ is come, and God has revealed his name and his character in Christ so that we can know Him, the Bible is and must remain the inspired Book, the Book of the Church for all time, to which nothing can be added, from which nothing can be taken, as they will find who try to take from it or add to it. There may be another Homer, Plato, Shakespeare; there can be no other Bible.

CXVI

The longing for a Deliverer and Redeemer of himself and his race was the strongest and deepest feeling in the heart of every Jewish patriot. His whole life was grounded and centred on the promise and hope of such an one. Just therefore when his utterances would be most human and noble, most in sympathy with the cries and groanings of his own nation and the universe, they would all point to and centre in that Deliverer and Redeemer – just in so far as they were truly noble, human, and Godlike, they would shadow forth His true character, the words He would speak, the acts He would do. Doubtless the prophet would have before his mind any notable deliverance, and noble sufferer, or deliverer of his own time; his words would refer to these. But from these he would be inevitably drawn up to the great promised Deliverer and Redeemer of his nation and his race, because he would see after all how incomplete the deliverance wrought by these must be, and his faith in the promise made to his fathers and to his nation – the covenant of God in which he felt himself to be included – would and could be satisfied with nothing less than a full and perfect deliverance, a Redeemer who should be the Head of men, the Son of man, and the Son of God.

Men may have insisted, may still insist, on seeing all sorts of fanciful references to some special acts of his in certain words of the Bible. But I must again insist that men’s fancies about the Bible and Christ are not the question, but what the Bible itself says, what Christ is. The whole book is full of Him, there is no need to read Him into any part of it as to which there can be any possible doubt.

Holding this faith as to the Scriptures, I am not anxious to defend them. I rejoice that they should be minutely examined and criticised. They will defend themselves, one and all, I believe. Men may satisfy themselves – perhaps, if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me – that the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a part of Isaiah; that David did not write the Psalms, or the Evangelists the Gospels; that there are interpolations here and there in the originals; that there are numerous and serious errors in our translation. What is all this to me? What do I care who wrote them, what is the date of them, what this or that passage ought to be? They have told me what I wanted to know. Burn every copy in the world to-morrow, you don’t and can’t take that knowledge from me, or any man. I find them all good for me; so, as long as a copy is left, and I can get it, I mean to go on reading them all, and believing them all to be inspired.

CXVII

Our Lord came proclaiming a kingdom of God, a kingdom ordained by God on this earth, the order and beauty of which the unruly and sinful wills of men had deformed, so that disease, and death, and all miseries and disorder, had grown up and destroyed the order of it, and thwarting the perfectly loving will of God.

In asserting this kingdom and this order, our Lord claimed (as he must have claimed if indeed he were the Son of God) dominion over disease and death. This dominion was lower than that over the human heart and will, but he claimed it as positively. He proved his claim to be good in other ways, but specially for our present purpose by healing the sick, and raising the dead. Were these works orderly or disorderly? Every one of them seems to me to be the restoring of an order which had been disturbed. They were witnesses for the law of life, faithful and true manifestations of the will of a loving Father to his children.

Yes, you may say, but he did other miracles besides those of healing. He turned water into wine, stilled the waves, multiplied loaves and fishes. These at any rate were capricious suspensions of natural laws. You say you believe in natural laws which have their ground in God’s will. Such laws he suspended or set aside in these cases. Now were these suspensions orderly?

I think they were. The natural laws which Christ suspended, such as the law of increase, are laws of God. Being his laws, they are living and not dead laws, but they are not the highest law; there must be a law of God, a law of his mind, above them, or they would be dead tyrannous rules. Christ seems to me to have been asserting the freedom of that law of God by suspending these natural laws, and to have been claiming here again, as part of his and our birthright, dominion over natural laws.

All the other miracles, I believe, stand on the same ground. None have been performed except by men who felt that they were witnessing for God, with glimpses of his order, full of zeal for the triumph of that order in the world, and working as Christ worked, in his spirit, and in the name of his Father, or of him. If there are any miracles which do not on a fair examination fulfil these conditions – which are such as a loving Father educating sons who had strayed from or rebelled against him would not have done – I am quite ready to give them up.

CXVIII

You have another charge against Christianity. You say it is after all a selfish faith, in which, however beautiful and noble the moral teaching may be, the ultimate appeal has always been to the hope of reward and fear of punishment. You will tell me that in ninety-nine of our churches out of a hundred I shall hear this doctrine, and shall find it in ninety-nine out of every hundred of theological or religious works.

If it be so I am sorry for it. But I am speaking of Christ’s Gospel, and I say that you will not find the doctrine you protest against there. I cannot go through our Lord’s teaching and his disciples’ to prove this. I ask you to read for yourselves, bringing honest and clear heads to the study, and not heads full of what you have thought, or this and the other man has preached or written, and I say that then you will give up this charge.

But as I have tried to do in all other cases, so here, I will tell you exactly what my own faith on this matter is.

Christ has told me that the only reward I shall ever get will be “life eternal,” and that life eternal is to know God and Him. That is all the reward I care about. The only punishment I can ever bring on myself will be, to banish myself from his presence and the presence of all who know him, to dwell apart from him and my brethren, shut up in myself. That is the only punishment I dread.

But this reward he has given us already, here. He has given us to know God, and knowing God involves entering his kingdom, and dwelling in it. That kingdom Christ has opened to you, and to me, here. We, you and I may enter in any hour we please. If we don’t enter in now, and here, I can’t see how we are ever likely to enter in in another world. Why should not we enter in? It is worth trying. There are no conditions. It is given for the asking.

I think you will find it all you are in search of and are longing for. Above all, you will find in it and nowhere else, rest, peace – “not a peace which depends upon compacts and bargains among men, but which belongs to the very nature and character and being of God. Not a peace which is produced by the stifling and suppression of activities and energies, but the peace in which all activities and energies are perfected and harmonized. Not a peace which comes from the toleration of what is base or false, but which demands its destruction. Not a peace which begins from without, but a peace which is first wrought in the inner man, and thence comes forth to subdue the world. Not a peace which a man gets for himself by standing aloof from the sorrows and confusions of the world in which he is born, of the men whose nature he shares, choosing a calm retreat and quiet scenery and a regulated atmosphere; but a peace which has never thriven except in those who have suffered with their suffering kind, who have been ready to give up selfish enjoyments, sensual or spiritual, for their sakes, who have abjured all devices of escape from ordained toils and temptations; the peace which was His who bore the sorrows and sins and infirmities of man, who gave up himself that he might become actually one with them, who thus won for them a participation in the Divine nature, and inheritance in that peace of God which passeth all understanding.”

This kingdom of God is good enough for me at any rate. I can trust him who has brought me into it to add what he will, to open my eyes, and strengthen my powers, that I may see and enjoy ever more and more of it, in this world, or in any other in which he may put me hereafter. Where that may be is no care of mine; it will be in his kingdom still, that I know; no power in Heaven or Hell, or Earth can cast me out of that, except I myself. While I remain in it I can freely use and enjoy every blessing and good gift of his glorious earth, the inheritance which he has given to us, his father’s children, his brethren. When it shall be his good pleasure to take me out of it he will not take me out of but bring me into more perfect communion with him and with my brethren. He nourisheth my heart with good things on this earth, he will not cease to do this anywhere else. He reveals himself to me here, though as a man I cannot take in his full and perfect revelation, but when I awake up after his likeness I shall be satisfied – and not till then.