The Eclipse of Faith | Page 7

put these matters into their mouths, how we can be sure that
any thing whatever of the small remainder ever came out of their
mouths. All this, ever, is of the less consequence, as these gentlemen
descend to tell us how we are to separate the "spiritual" gold which
faintly streaks the huge mass of impure ore of fable, legend, and
mysticism. Each man, it seems has his own particular spade and
mattock in his "spiritual faculty"; so off with you to the diggings in
these spiritual mines of Ophir. You will say, Why not stay at home, and
be content at once, with the advocates of the absolute sufficiency of the
internal oracle, listen to its responses exclusively? Ask these men--for I
am sure I do not know; I only know that the results are very
different--whether the possessor of "insight" listens to its own rare
voice, or puts on spectacles and reads aloud from the New Testament.
Generally, as I say, these good folks are resolved that all that is
supernatural and specially inspired in sacred volume is to be rejected;
and as to the rest, which by the way might be conveniently published as
the "Spiritualists' Bible" (in two or three sheets, 48mo, say), that would
still require a careful winnowing; for, while one man tells us that the
Apostle Paul, in his intense appreciation of the "spiritual element,"
made light even of the "resurrection of Christ," and everywhere shows
his superiority to the beggarly elements of history, dogma, and ritual,
another declares that he was so enslaved by his Jewish prejudices and
the trumpery he had picked up at the feet of Gamaliel, that he knew but
little or next to nothing of the real mystery of the very Gospel he
preached; that while he proclaims that it is "revealed, after having been
hidden from ages generations," he himself manages to hide it afresh.
This you will be told is a perpetual process, going on even now; that as
all the "earlier prophets" were unconscious instruments of a purpose
beyond their immediate range of thought, so the Apostles themselves
similarly illustrated the shallowness of their range of thought; that, in
fact, the true significance of the Gospel lay beyond them, and doubtless
also, for the very same reasons, lies beyond us. In other words, this
class of spiritualists tell us that Christianity is a "development," as the
Papists also assert, and the New Testament its first imperfect and

rudimentary product; only, unhappily, as the development, it seems,
may be things so very different as Popery and Infidelity, we are as far
as ever from any criterion as to which, out of the ten thousand possible
developments, is the true; but it is a matter of the less consequence,
since it will, on such reasoning, be always something future.
"Unhappy Paul!" you will say. Yes, it is no better with him than it was
in our youth some five-and-twenty years ago. Do you not remember the
astute old German Professor in his lecture-room introducing the
Apostle as examining with ever-increasing wonder the various
contradictory systems which the perverseness of exegesis had extracted
from his Epistles, and at length, as he saw one from which every
feature of Christianity had been erased, exclaiming in a fright, "Was ist
das?" But I will not detain you on the vagaries of the new school of
spiritualists. I shall hear enough of them, I have no doubt, from
Harrington; he will riot in their extravagances and contradictions as a
justification of his own scepticism. In very truth their authors are fit for
nothing else than to be recruiting officers for undisguised infidelity;
and this has been the consistent termination with very many of their
converts. Yet, many of them tell us, after putting men on this inclined
plane of smooth ice, that it is the only place where they can be secure
against tumbling into infidelity, Atheism, Pantheism, Scepticism. Some
of Oxford Tractarians informed us, a little before Crossing the border,
that their system was the surest bulwark against Romanism; and in the
same way is this site "spiritualism", a safeguard against infidelity.
Between many of our modern "spiritualists" and Romanists there is a
parallelism of movement absolutely ludicrous. You may chance to hear
both claiming, with equal fervor, against "intellect" and "logic" as
totally incompetent to decide on "religion" or "spiritual" truth, and in
favor of a "faith" which disclaims all alliance with them. You may
chance hear them both insisting on an absolute submission to an
"infallible authority" other than the Bible; the one external,--that is, the
Pope; the other internal,--that is, "Spiritual Insight"; both exacting
absolute submission, the one to the outward oracle, the Church, the
other to the inward oracle, himself; both insisting that the Bible is but