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
This will not
recommend it to readers who themselves are not fond of trouble; a book
of hard thinking cannot be a book of easy reading; nor is it a book for
people to go to who only want available arguments, or to see a question
apparently settled in a convenient way. But we think it is a book for
people who wish to see a great subject handled on a scale which befits
it and with a perception of its real elements. It is a book which will
have attractions for those who like to see a powerful mind applying
itself without shrinking or holding back, without trick or reserve or
show of any kind, as a wrestler closes body to body with his
antagonist, to the strength of an adverse and powerful argument. A
stern self-constraint excludes everything exclamatory, all glimpses and
disclosures of what merely affects the writer, all advantages from an
appeal, disguised and indirect perhaps, to the opinion of his own side.
But though the work is not rhetorical, it is not the less eloquent; but
it is eloquence arising from a keen insight at once into what is real
and what is great, and from a singular power of luminous, noble, and
expressive statement. There is no excitement about its close subtle
trains of reasoning; and there is no affectation,--and therefore no
affectation of impartiality. The writer has his conclusions, and he
does not pretend to hold a balance between them and their opposites.
But in the presence of such a subject he never loses sight of its
greatness, its difficulty, its eventfulness; and these thoughts make
him throughout his undertaking circumspect, considerate, and calm.
The point of view from which the subject of miracles is looked at in
these Lectures is thus stated in the preface. It is plain that two
great questions arise--first, Are miracles possible? next, If they are,
can any in fact be proved? These two branches of the inquiry involve
different classes of considerations. The first is purely philosophical,
and stops the inquiry at once if it can be settled in the negative. The
other calls in also the aid of history and criticism. Both questions
have been followed out of late with great keenness and interest, but it
is the first which at present assumes an importance which it never had
before, with its tremendous negative answer, revolutionising not only
the past, but the whole future of mankind; and it is to the first that
Mr. Mozley's work is mainly addressed.
The difficulty which attaches to miracles in the period of thought
through which we are now passing is one which is concerned not
with their evidence, but with their intrinsic credibility. There
has arisen in a certain class of minds an apparent perception of
the impossibility of suspensions of physical law. This is one
peculiarity of the time; another is a disposition to maintain the
disbelief of miracles upon a religious basis, and in a connection
with a declared belief in the Christian revelation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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