Complete works of samuel.., p.127
Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 127
Either Christianity is the truth of truths — the one which should in this world overmaster all others in the thoughts of all men, and compared with which all other truths are insignificant except as grouping themselves around it — or it is at the best a mistake which should be set right as soon as possible. There is no middle course. Either Jesus Christ was the Son of God, or He was not. If He was, His great Father forbid that we should juggle in order to prove Him so — that we should higgle for an inch of wound more, or an inch less, and haggle for the root νυy in the Greek word ενυξε. Better admit that the death of Christ must be ever a matter of doubt, should so great a sacrifice be demanded of us, than go near to the handling of a lie in order to make assurance doubly sure. No truthful mind can doubt that the cause of Christ is far better served by exposing an insufficient argument than by silently passing it over, or else that the cause of Christ is one to be attacked and not defended.
Chapter VII Difficulties felt by our Opponents
There are some who avoid all close examination into the circumstances attendant upon the death of our Lord, using the plea that however excellent a quality intellect may be, and however desirable that the facts connected with the Crucifixion should be intelligently considered, yet that after all it is spiritual insight which is wanted for a just appreciation of spiritual truths, and that the way to be preserved from error is to cultivate holiness and purity of life. This is well for those who are already satisfied with the evidences for their convictions. We could hardly give them any better advice than simply to “depart from evil, do good, seek peace and ensue it” (Psalm xxxiv., 14), if we could only make sure that their duty would never lead them into contact with those who hold the external evidences of Christianity to be insufficient. When, however, they meet with any of these unhappy persons they will find their influence for good paralysed; for unbelievers do not understand what is meant by appealing to their spiritual insight as a thing which can in any way affect the evidence for or against an alleged fact in history — or at any rate as forming evidence for a fact which they believe to be in itself improbable and unsupported by external proof. They have not got any spiritual insight in matters of this sort; nor, indeed, do they recognise what is meant by the words at all, unless they be interpreted as self-respect and regard for the feelings and usages of other people. What spiritual insight they have, they express by the very nearly synonymous terms, “current feeling,” or “common sense,” and however deep their reverence for these things may be, they will never admit that goodness or right feeling can guide them into intuitive accuracy upon a matter of history. On the contrary, in any such case they believe that sentiment is likely to mislead, and that the well-disciplined intellect is alone trustworthy. The question is, whether it is worth while to try and rescue those who are in this condition or not. If it is worth while, we must deal with them according to their sense of right and not ours: in other words, if we meet with an unbeliever we must not expect him to accept our faith unless we take much pains with him, and are prepared to make great sacrifice of our own peace and patience.
Yet how many shrink from this, and think that they are doing God service by shrinking; the only thing from which they should really shrink, is the falsehood which has overlaid the best established fact in all history with so much sophistry, that even our own side has come to fear that there must be something lurking behind which will not bear daylight; to such a pass have we been brought by the desire to prove too much.
Now for the comfort of those who may feel an uneasy sense of dread, as though any close examination of the events connected with the Crucifixion might end in suggesting a natural instead of a miraculous explanation of the Resurrection, for the comfort of such — and they indeed stand in need of comfort — let me say at once that the ablest of our adversaries would tell them that they need be under no such fear. Strauss himself admits that our Lord died upon the Cross; he does not even attempt to dispute it, but writes as though he were well aware that there was no room for any difference of opinion about the matter. He has therefore been compelled to adopt the hallucination theory, with a result which we have already considered. Yet who can question that Strauss would have maintained the position that our Lord did not die upon the Cross, unless he had felt that it was one in which he would not be able to secure the support even of those who were inclined to disbelieve? We cannot doubt that the conviction of the reality of our Lord’s death has been forced upon him by a weight of testimony which, like St. Paul, he has found himself utterly unable to resist.
Here then, we might almost pause. Strauss admits that our Lord died upon the Cross. Yet can the reader help feeling that the vindication of the reality of our Lord’s reappearances, and the refutation of Strauss’s theories with which this work opened, was triumphant and conclusive? Then what follows? That Christ died and rose again! The central fact of our faith is proved. It is proved externally by the most solid and irrefragable proofs, such as should appeal even to minds which reject all spiritual evidence, and recognise no canons of investigation but those of the purest reason.
But anything and everything is believable concerning one whose resurrection from death to life has been established. What need, then, to enter upon any consideration of the other miracles? Of the Ascension? Of the descent of the Holy Spirit? Who can feel difficulty about these things? Would not the miracle rather be that they should not have happened! May we not now let the wings of our soul expand, and soar into the heaven of heavens, to the footstool of the Throne of Grace, secure that we have earned the right to hope and to glory by having consented to the pain of understanding?
We may: and I have given the reader this foretaste of the prize which he may justly claim, lest he should be swallowed up in overmuch grief at the journey which is yet before him ere he shall have done all which may justly be required of him. For it is not enough that his own sense of security should be perfected. This is well; but let him also think of others.
What then is their main difficulty, now that it has been shewn that the reappearances of our Lord were not due to hallucination?
I propose to shew this by collecting from all the sources with which I was familiar in former years, and throwing the whole together as if it were my own. I shall spare no pains to make the argument tell with as much force as fairness will allow. I shall be compelled to be very brief, but the unbeliever will not, I hope, feel that anything of importance to his side has been passed over. The believer, on the other hand, will be thankful both to know the worst and to see how shallow and impotent it will appear when it comes to be tested. Oh! that this had been done at the beginning of the controversy, instead of (as I heartily trust) at the end of it.
Our opponents, therefore, may be supposed to speak somewhat after the following manner:— “Granted,” they will say, “for the sake of argument, that Jesus Christ did reappear alive after his Crucifixion; it does not follow that we should at once necessarily admit that his reappearance was due to miracle. What was enough, and reasonably enough, to make the first Christians accept the Resurrection, and hence the other miracles of Christ, is not enough and ought not to be enough to make men do so now. If we were to hear now of the reappearance of a man who had been believed to be dead, our first impulse would be to learn the when and where of the death, and the when and where of the first reappearance. What had been the nature of the death? What conclusive proof was there that the death had been actual and complete? What examination had been made of the body? And to whom had it been delivered on the completeness of the death having been established? How long had the body been in the grave — if buried? What was the condition of the grave on its being first revisited? It is plain to any one that at the present day we should ask the above questions with the most jealous scrutiny and that our opinion of the character of the reappearance would depend upon the answers which could be given to them.
“But it is no less plain that the distance of the supposed event from our own time and country is no bar to the necessity for the same questions being as jealously asked concerning it, as would be asked if it were alleged to have happened recently and nearer home. On the contrary, distance of time and space introduces an additional necessity for caution. It is one thing to know that the first Christians unanimously believed that their master had miraculously risen from death to life; it is another to know their reasons for so thinking. Times have changed, and tests of truth are infinitely better understood, so that the reasonable of those days is reasonable to us no longer. Nor would it be enough that the answers given could be just strained into so much agreement with one another as to allow of a modus vivendi between them, and not to exclude the possibility of death, they must exclude all possibility of life having remained, or we should not hesitate for a moment about refusing to believe that the reappearance had been miraculous: indeed, so long as any chink or cranny or loophole for escape from the miraculous was afforded to us, we should unhesitatingly escape by it; this, at least, is the course which would be adopted by any judge and jury of sensible men if such a case were to come before their unprejudiced minds in the common course of affairs.
“We should not refuse to believe in a miracle even now, if it were supported by such evidence as was considered to be conclusive by the bench of judges and by the leading scientific men of the day: in such a case as this we should feel bound to accept it; but we cannot believe in a miracle, no matter how deeply it has been engrained into the creeds of the civilised world, merely because it was believed by ‘unlettered fishermen’ two thousand years ago. This is not a source from which such an event as a miracle should be received without the closest investigation. We know, indeed, that the Apostles were sincere men, and that they firmly believed that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead; their lives prove their faith; but we cannot forget that the fact itself of Christ’s having been crucified and afterwards seen alive, would be enough, under the circumstances, to incline the men of that day to believe that he had died and had been miraculously restored to life, although we should ourselves be bound to make a far more searching inquiry before we could arrive at any such conclusion. A miracle was not and could not be to them, what it is and ought to be to ourselves — a matter to be regarded a priori with the very gravest suspicion. To them it was what it is now to the lower and more ignorant classes of Irish, French, Spanish and Italian peasants: that is to say, a thing which was always more or less likely to happen, and which hardly demanded more than a primâ facie case in order to establish its credibility. If we would know what the Apostles felt concerning a miracle, we must ask ourselves how the more ignorant peasants of to-day feel: if we do this we shall have to admit that a miracle might have been accepted upon very insufficient grounds, and that, once accepted, it would not have had one-hundredth part so good a chance of being refuted as it would have now.
“It should be borne in mind, and is too often lost sight of, that we have no account of the Resurrection from any source whatever. We have accounts of the visit of certain women to a tomb which they found empty; but this is not an account of a resurrection. We are told that Jesus Christ was seen alive after being thought to have been dead, but this again is not an account of a resurrection. It is a statement of a fact, but it is not an account of the circumstances which attended that fact. In the story told by Matthew we have what comes nearest to an account of the Resurrection, but even here the principal figure is wanting; the angel rolls away the stone and sits upon it, but we hear nothing about the body of Christ emerging from the tomb; we only meet with this, when we come to the Italian painters.
“Moreover, St. Matthew’s account is utterly incredible from first to last; we are therefore thrown back upon the other three Evangelists, none of whom professes to give us the smallest information as to the time and manner of Christ’s Resurrection. There is nothing in any of their accounts to preclude his having risen within two hours from his having been laid in the tomb.
“If a man of note were condemned to death, crucified and afterwards seen alive, the almost instantaneous conclusion in the days of the Apostles, and in such minds as theirs, would be that he had risen from the dead; but the almost instantaneous conclusion now, among all whose judgement would carry the smallest weight, would be that he had never died — that there must have been some mistake. Children and inexperienced persons believe readily in all manner of improbabilities and impossibilities, which when they become older and wiser they cannot conceive their having ever seriously accepted. As with men, so with ages; an unusual train of events brings about unusual results, whereon the childlike age turns instinctively to miracle for a solution of the difficulty. In the days of Christ men would ask for evidence of the Crucifixion and the reappearance; when these two points had been established they would have been satisfied — not unnaturally — that a great miracle had been performed: but no sane man would be contented now with the evidence that was sufficient then, any more than he would be content to accept many things which a child must take upon authority, and authority only. We ought to require the most ample evidence that not only the appearance of death, but death itself, must have inevitably ensued upon the Crucifixion, and if this were not forthcoming we should not for a moment hesitate about refusing to believe that the reappearance was miraculous.
“And this is what would most assuredly be done now by impartial examiners — by men of scientific mind who had no wish either to believe or disbelieve except according to the evidence; but even now, if their affections and their hopes of a glorious kingdom in a world beyond the grave were enlisted on the side of the miracle, it would go hard with the judgement of most men. How much more would this be so, if they had believed from earliest childhood that miracles were still occasionally worked in England, and that a few generations ago they had been much more signal and common?
“Can we wonder then, if we ourselves feel so strongly concerning events which are hull down upon the horizon of time, that those who lived in the very thick of them should have been possessed with an all absorbing ecstasy or even frenzy of excitement? Assuredly there is no blame on the score of credulity to be attached to those who propagated the Christian religion, but the beliefs which were natural and lawful to them, are, if natural, yet not lawful to ourselves: they should be resisted: they are neither right nor wise, and do not form any legitimate ground for faith: if faith means only the believing facts of history upon insufficient evidence, we deny the merit of faith; on the contrary, we regard it as one of the most deplorable of all errors — as sapping the foundations of all the moral and intellectual faculties. It is grossly immoral to violate one’s inner sense of truth by assenting to things which, though they may appear to be supported by much, are still not supported by enough. The man who can knowingly submit to such a derogation from the rights of his self-respect, deserves the injury to his mental eye-sight which such a course will surely bring with it. But the mischief will unfortunately not be confined to himself; it will devolve upon all who are ill-fated enough to be in his power; he will be reckless of the harm he works them, provided he can keep its consequences from being immediately offensive to himself. No: if a good thing can be believed legitimately, let us believe it and be thankful, otherwise the goodness will have departed out of it; it is no longer ours; we have no right to it, and shall suffer for it, we and our children, if we try to keep it. It has been said that the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge, but, more truly, it is the eating of sweet and stolen fruit by the fathers that sets the teeth of the children jarring. Let those who love their children look to this, for on their own account they may be mainly trusted to avoid the sour. Hitherto the intensity of the belief of the Apostles has been the mainstay of our own belief. But that mainstay is now no longer strong enough. A rehearing of the evidence is imperatively demanded, that it may either be confirmed or overthrown.”
It cannot be denied that there is much in the above with which all true Christians will agree, and little to find fault with except the self-complacency which would seem to imply that common sense and plain dealing belong exclusively to the unbelieving side. It is time that this spirit should be protested against not in word only but in deed. The fact is, that both we and our opponents are agreed that nothing should be believed unless it can be proved to be true. We repudiate the idea that faith means the accepting historical facts upon evidence which is insufficient to establish them. We do not call this faith; we call it credulity, and oppose it to the utmost of our power.
Our opponents imply that we regard as a virtue well-pleasing in the sight of God, and dignify with the name of faith, a state of mind which turns out to be nothing but a willingness to stand by all sorts of wildly improbable stories which have reached us from a remote age and country, and which, if true, must lead us to think otherwise of the whole course of nature than we should think if we were left to ourselves. This accusation is utterly false and groundless. Faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” but it is not “insufficient evidence for things alleged to have been seen.” It is “the substance of things hoped for,” but “reasonably hoped for” was unquestionably intended by the Apostle. We base our faith in the deeper mysteries of our religion, as in the nature of the Trinity and the sacramental graces, upon the certainty that other things which are within the grasp of our reason can be shewn to be beyond dispute. We know that Christ died and rose again; therefore we believe whatever He sees fit to tell us, and follow Him, or endeavour to follow Him, whereinsoever He commands us, but we are not required to take both the commands of the Mediator and His credentials upon faith. It is because certain things within our comprehension are capable of the most irrefragable proof, that certain others out of it may justly be required to be believed, and indeed cannot be disbelieved without contumacy and presumption. And this applies to a certain extent to the credentials also: for although no man should be captious, nor ask for more evidence than would satisfy a well-disciplined mind concerning the truth of any ordinary fact (as one who not contented with the evidence of a seal, a handwriting and a matter not at variance with probability, would nevertheless refuse to act upon instructions because he had not with his own eyes actually seen the sender write and sign and seal), yet it is both reasonable and indeed necessary that a certain amount of care should be taken before the credentials are accepted. If our opponents mean no more than this we are at one with them, and may allow them to proceed.
