Painted Windows: Studies in Religious PersonalityBegbie, Harold
Religion
Painted Windows: Studies in Religious Personality
Begbie, Harold
Clergy -- England
At the conclusion of one of his celebrations abroad, an Englishman in
the congregation exclaimed, "Thank God that's over." After his first
sermon in Trinity Chapel, an undergraduate ("afterwards not only my
friend but my penitent") was heard to declare excitedly:
"Such fun! The new Fellow's been preaching heresy--all about
Transubstantiation."
Such fun! This note runs through the whole of _A Spiritual Æneid_. A
thoroughly undergraduate spirit inspires every page save the last.
Religion is treated as a lark. It is full of opportunities for plotting
and ragging and pulling the episcopal leg. One is never conscious, not
for a single moment, that the author is writing about Jesus of Nazareth,
Gethsemane, and Calvary. About a Church, yes; about ceremonial, about
mysterious rites, about prayers to the Virgin Mary, about authority, and
about bishops; yes, indeed; but about Christ's transvaluation of values,
about His secret, about His religion of the pure heart and the childlike
spirit, not one single glimpse.
Now let us examine his intellectual position.
In the preface to _Some Loose Stones_[7], written before he went over to
Rome, he explains his position to the modernist:
. . . there are limits defined by authority, within which theorising
is unnecessary and speculation forbidden.
But I should like here to enter a protest against the assumption
. . . that the obscurantist, having fenced himself in behind his wall
of prejudices, enjoys an uninterrupted and ignoble peace.
The soldier who has betaken himself to a fortress is thereby in a
more secure position than the soldier who elects to fight in the
open plain. He has ramparts to defend him. But he has, on the other
hand, ramparts to defend. . . . For him there is no retreat.
The whole position stands or falls by the weakest parts in the
defences; give up one article of the Nicene Creed, and the whole
situation is lost; you go under, and the flag you loved is forfeit.
[Footnote 7: An answer to the volume called _Foundations_.]
And yet:
I can feel every argument against the authenticity of the Gospels,
because I know that if I approached them myself without faith I
should as likely as not brush them aside impatiently as one of a
whole set of fables.
They would be fables to him unless he approached them with faith. And
what is faith? He tells us in the same preface: "Faith is to me, not an
intellectual process, but a divine gift, a special privilege."
It is fair to say that he would now modify this definition, for he has
told me that it is a heresy to exclude from faith the operations of the
intellect. But the words were written when he was fighting the battle of
the soul, written almost on the same page as that which bears these
words:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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