Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Religion
Occasional Papers: Selected from the Guardian, the Times, and the Saturday Review, 1846-1890, Vol. 2
Church, R. W. (Richard William)
Christianity; Church and state -- Great Britain; Great Britain -- Church history -- 19th century
questions, has once more made itself felt. Recent controversy has
forced them again on men's thoughts, and has made us see that, whether
they are accepted or denied, it is idle to ignore them. They mean too
much to be evaded. Like all powerful arguments they cut two ways, and
of all powerful arguments they are the most clearly two-edged. However
we may limit their range, some will remain which we must face; which,
according to what is settled about them, either that they are true or
not true, will entirely change all that we think of religion. Writers
on all sides have begun to be sensible that a decisive point requires
their attention, and that its having suffered from an old-fashioned way
of handling is no reason why it should not on its own merits engage
afresh the interest of serious men, to whom it is certainly of
consequence.
The renewed attention of theological writers to the subject of miracles
as an element of proof has led to some important discussions upon it,
showing in their treatment of a well-worn inquiry that a change in the
way of conducting it had become necessary. Of these productions we may
place Mr. Mozley's _Bampton Lectures_ for last year among the most
original and powerful. They are an example, and a very fine one, of a
mode of theological writing which is characteristic of the Church of
England, and almost peculiar to it. The distinguishing features of it
are a combination of intense seriousness with a self-restrained, severe
calmness, and of very vigorous and wide-ranging reasoning on the
realities of the case with the least amount of care about artificial
symmetry or scholastic completeness. Admirers of the Roman style call
it cold, indefinite, wanting in dogmatic coherence, comprehensiveness,
and grandeur. Admirers of the German style find little to praise in a
cautious bit-by-bit method, content with the tests which have most
affinity with common sense, incredulous of exhaustive theories, leaving
a large margin for the unaccountable or the unexplained. But it has its
merits, one of them being that, dealing very solidly and very acutely
with large and real matters of experience, the interest of such
writings endures as the starting-point and foundation for future work.
Butler out of England is hardly known, certainly he is not much valued
either as a divine or a philosopher; but in England, though we
criticise him freely, it will be a long time before he is out of date.
Mr. Mozley's book belongs to that class of writings of which Butler may
be taken as the type. It is strong, genuine argument about difficult
matters, fairly facing what _is_ difficult, fairly trying to grapple,
not with what _appears_ the gist and strong point of a question, but
with what really and at bottom _is_ the knot of it. It is a book the
reasoning of which may not satisfy every one; but it is a book in which
there is nothing plausible, nothing put in to escape the trouble of
thinking out what really comes across the writer's path.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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