In another volume recently written by Mr. Congreve, the Positivist, the author maintains in the plainest possible language, what is the immediate and practical object of the small sect to which he has allied himself:--“The professed servants of Humanity must lead in the struggle to eliminate God; and that this is the essential element in the whole existing perplexity is forcing itself upon all.” Again, man’s duty is said to be “openly and avowedly to take service in one or the other of the opposing camps; to bring face to face the two beliefs; the belief in the Past, the belief in God, and the belief in the Future, the belief in Humanity; and to choose deliberately between them.” Furthermore, he avers: “We contemplate the Trinity of our religion, Humanity, the World, and Space.” A Christian critic has made the following terse comments on Mr. Congreve’s book:--
“The chief feeling which possesses us in reading these Essays is one of sorrow for the writer. It is really sad that a man of education should lend himself to such a delusion. The ‘Religion’ itself is ridiculous; indeed it has not so much as a theory. Not even on paper can its doctrines be stated, for the simple reason that it has no doctrines whatever. But it is always melancholy to watch a naturally good intellect under the sway of a fantastic idea, or to see an educated gentleman writing 500 pages on the ‘Worship’ of what does not exist. The sensation of the reader, as he turns page after page, is expressed in such an inquiry as this: Since the writer himself believes in nothing whatever, how can he invite my conversion?”
“And He said unto them, Go ye into all the World, and preach the Gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.
“And these signs shall follow them that believe: In My Name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover.”--_S. Mark_ xvi. 15-18.
The important subject of the Miraculous in Church History sufficiently well known to students of it, involves the existence of a religious principle of universal application. This will be apparent, in due course, from the following preliminary considerations:--“A miracle,” writes Hume, “is a violation of the laws of Nature; and, as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”[10] Further on, he declares “that a miracle supported by any human testimony is more properly a subject of derision than of argument.”[11] On these statements, definite and precise as they appear, and yet not sufficiently definite, it may be remarked in the first place that no human experience is unalterable: it may to a certain person or certain persons have been hitherto unaltered. But this is all. Are there then no facts beyond our experience--no natural positions or states with which we are unacquainted? When a man writes of “unalterable experience,” he obviously means so much of that experience, as either mediately or immediately has come to his knowledge; in other words his own past experience.[12] And this Hume declares sufficient to enable him to determine what are the unvarying laws of Nature, and, by consequence, what are miracles. But surely here is something akin to arrogance. For what modest person would venture to maintain his own experience to be altogether and absolutely firm and unalterable? Who would declare of a witness, who testified, for example, what was contrary to that experience, that such a man was worthy only of disbelief and derision? And yet many, in the present day, adopt and put into practice this unstable and imperfect theory of Hume.