ART. V.-SUPERNATURAL RELIGION.

Supernatural Religion: an Inpuiry into the Reality of Divine Revelation. In 2 volumes. London: Longmans, Green, & Co. 1874.

"Supernatural Religion." By Professor LIGHTFOOT. Article I. In the Contemporary Review for December, 1874.

A Reply. By the Author of "Supernatural Religion," in the Fortnightly Review for January, 1875.

"On the

"Supernatural Religion." By Professor LIGHTFOOT. Article II. : Silence of Eusebius," in the Contemporary Review for January, 1875. "Supernatural Religion." By Professor LIGHTFOOT. Article III.: "On the Ignatian Epistles."

SOME

NOME time since we expressed our judgment on the critical value of the book which stands at the head of this article, and when we have done examining the account which it gives of the historical evidence for the four Gospels, our readers will be able to judge of the reasons for our opinion. Meantime, without repeating what we have said already, we may begin by pointing out the position which the author of " Supernatural Religion" holds with regard to German critics on the negative side. Their names appear often enough in his pages-oftener, perhaps, than in those of any other work which has ever come before the English public; and although the crowd of references which he has copied from others indicates neither learning nor labour of his own, it does mark his respect for the labour and the learning of Germany. Yet the contrast between him and the German critics to whom he constantly appeals can hardly be exaggerated. The latter, however they may fail in soundness of judgment, or impartiality, or consistency, are for the most part competent scholars: they address themselves to a learned audience, and they write with the fear of opponents, who are familiar with the subject, before their eyes. If they are driven into extravagant theorising, this is precisely because they are aware of the facts which they have to meet and reduce at all costs into harmony with their conclusions. The author of "Supernatural Religion" pursues an easier path, and journeys on to his conclusions without meeting many obstacles on the way. When passages by early writers are in question, he settles the whole matter at the outset by a false translation, in the happy unconsciousness all the while that he is setting the most elementary rules of Greek and Latin grammar at defiance. He

is equally ready to invent facts, to quote manuscripts against the very readings which they contain, to indulge in long discussions which abound in irrelevant matter while they never touch the chief difficulty which he is bound to face. All this explains the confidence and even the plausibility of his reasoning, for it is reasoning which proceeds on premises which he has constructed for himself. It enables us further to understand the success of his book. Most of his readers know little or nothing about the matter of which he treats; they are ready to take the facts as he gives them; they are pleased by the absence of subtle theory, by the show of simplicity and of common sense; in short, they are charmed to find criticism so easy, and do not stop to inquire whether the book is the work of a critic at all.

The want of competent knowledge explains another peculiarity in the position of the author. It is not only that he reaches his conclusions more easily than the leaders of the sceptical school; he outstrips them in the conclusions which he reaches. On particular points he maintains theories, some of them refuted long since, and abandoned even by the Tübingen school, some of them inconsistent with each other; and on the whole matter he arrives at conclusions in comparison with which the tenets of the most sceptical among the German critics are moderate and cautious. These conclusions he sums up in clear and straightforward terms. "After having exhausted," he says (vol. ii. p. 248), "the literature and the testimony bearing on the point, we have not found a single distinct trace of any one" of the synoptic Gospels, "during the first century and a half after the death of Jesus. Only once during the whole of that period do we find any tradition even that any one of our evangelists composed a Gospel at all; and that tradition, so for from favouring our synoptics, is fatal to the claims of the first and second." In page 387 of the same volume he asserts that during the same period "there is no certain trace even of the existence of the Gospel" ascribed to S. John. This is his thesis, and we propose to test the reasons on which he grounds it by examining, briefly of course, and without pretence of completeness, the historical evidence for the authenticity of the Gospels. A few words will suffice to explain the details of our plan, and its fitness for conveying an adequate idea of the book which we are reviewing.

But first of all we must lay down a principle which is obvious in itself, but which needs to be stated none the less because it has been obscured by the Protestant theology. The Scriptures of the Old and New Testament never were intended, and in the early Church they never were accepted, as the one authoritative standard of doctrine. Our Lord committed His Church to the

teaching not of a book but of His apostles; and they in turn provided for a succession of faithful men, who were to continue the tradition of their oral teaching. The New Testament then had a definite authority as the inspired record of Christ's life and of apostolic doctrine, but the Scripture never was the sole rule of faith: the private interpretation of its books was not a rule of faith at all for the individual Christian. It is because of this, because the Church had in Tradition a source of doctrine by the side of Scripture, that the canon of the New Testament has a history of its own and has undergone a gradual development which we are able to trace in its successive stages. S. Irenæus, with all his reverence for the New Testament, contemplates a state of things in which the apostles might have provided for the continuance of the faith without leaving any writings,* and speaks of barbarous nations which had accepted and retained the teaching and the traditions of the Church without ability to read the Scriptures.† Moreover, for centuries after his time the Church was content to tolerate great differences of opinion with regard to the authenticity and the authority of a few among the books which found their place at last in the canon of the New Testament, and the first Ecumenical Council met and separated without settling or even discussing these questions.

Now it is true that there is no trace in the whole history of the Church of any doubts within her pale about the authenticity and authority of the four Gospels; still it is essential to keep in mind the principle which we have just stated if we wish to weigh accurately the historical evidence for the Gospels themselves. Tradition and the Gospels constitute the twofold authority for Christ's life and teaching; and hence we find that the appeal to the latter has varied from age to age, alike in its nature and in its frequency. Thus while the actual disciples of the apostles were still living and working in the Church, there was little of formal appeal to the Gospels as inspired documents: the very use of the Gospels is far less frequent and far less distinct than in later times. The Gospels came into greater prominence and were separated more clearly from uncanonical books, when the generation which had seen the apostles passed away; and a generation later, in her conflict with Gnostic heretics, who denied her claims and repudiated her teaching, the Church appealed to the Gospels as the title-deeds of her inheritance, and gave full and ultimate expression to her belief in their divine authority.

Taking this principle for granted, we shall divide the history of the evidence for the canonical Gospels into three periods. We shall set out from the testimonies of the Fathers in con

flict with Gnosticism, that is to say of S. Irenæus, of Clement of Alexandria, and of Tertullian. We shall see how much this evidence involves, and how far it is confirmed by the little which remains to us of writers, whether within or without the Church, who lived a little earlier in the same generation. We shall pass from them to the time of S. Justin Martyr, (140-167) an age when the Church could point no longer to men who had conversed with the Apostles, and when, as if by natural consequence, we obtain the earliest notice that the Gospels were read publicly in the Churches. We shall conclude by examining the traces of the existence and the evidence for the authenticity of the Gospels in the writings which have come down to us from the disciples of the Apostles themselves. The apostolic Fathers wrote with the living words of the Apostles "ringing in their ears," and they had little motive for reference to their writings. Their evidence for the authority of the Gospels is neither full nor complete, still if we examine it carefully, if we consider it as history compels us to do, in its inseparable connection with the later tradition, we shall find that this evidence does not fail to be sufficient, because it is fragmentary and indirect.

In following this plan we shall consider the statements of "Supernatural Religion" so far only as they run counter to our own argument. In this way we give the best security that we are not selecting incidental mistakes while leaving the main theory of the book untouched. The mistakes with which the book abounds are enough to ruin its pretensions were they made ever so much by the way. But we prefer to forego, at least in the body of this article, any animadversions on blunders which do not immediately affect the argument, and we have the further satisfaction of knowing that our mode of treating the subject is different from that which Professor Lightfoot has marked out for himself in the thorough exposure which he has made of "Supernatural Religion" in the Contemporary Review. Here and there we shall have to refer to his articles, and to the reply which his opponent has made in the "Fortnightly."

The book before us does not deny that in the last decade of the second century our Gospels were acknowledged and received, but it does not betray the faintest notion of the weight which the testimony of the Fathers who wrote at that time carries with it. Our author says little on the evidence of S. Irenæus, who wrote the greater part of his

*Iren., iii. 3, 3.

His

book against heretics before 190, except that he gives a long extract in which that Father insists that there are but four Gospels, and appeals to the four winds, to the four regions of the world, and to the four faces of the Cherubim, in support of his statement. Now the mystical reasons which Irenæus gives for the fourfold number of the Gospels, do but serve to show how absolutely the authority of the four Gospels was to him a first principle placed beyond all possibility of dispute, at least within the Church, by an immemorial tradition. "Nay, so certain," he says, "is the authority of the Gospels that even the heretics themselves bear witness in their behalf."+ He is unable to imagine a time when the Church was without four gos. pels. "It is impossible," he tells us, "that the number of the Gospels should be greater or less than it is," and he finds this number foreshadowed in the order of Nature, and in the covenants of Grace which God has made with his creatures.‡ The use which Irenæus makes of the Gospels, and the mode in which he cites them are proof that their authority had been acknowledged time out of mind within the Church. quotations from the Gospels amount according to Tischendorf's estimate to about four hundred, and of these some eighty are taken from the Gospel of S. John.§ He attributes to them a verbal inspiration || he classes them in express terms with the rest of the Scriptures. It is needless to point out that this separation of the canonical gospels from other writings must have been a work of time, for our argument is not merely that S. Irenæus witnesses to the Existence of the Gospels, not even that he takes for granted their authority and their inspiration, but further that he speaks of them as books collected and set apart, as composing the one "Gospel which is fourfold but bound together by one spirit."** Further, if time was needed before the Gospels could be thus set apart and regarded as forming a single gospel, much more was time needed before the New Testament could be looked upon as a whole, before its books could be classified, before this classification could become so familiar that S. Irenæus might refer to it without need to explain his meaning; yet all this was complete some time before 190, when S. Irenæus wrote. Just as the Jews divided their sacred writings into the Law and the Prophets, so S. Irenæus alludes to the division of the New Testament Scriptures into two parts (εὐαγγελικὰ καὶ ἀποστολικά)++ as they relate more

Tischendorf Origin of the Gospels, Eng. transl., p. 35. || Iren., iii. 16, 2. Tii. 27, 2. ** iii. 11, 8′

Iren., loc. cit. 8.

++ i. 3, 6.