"The shall die," or again, that "England is an island." fact of our death is in the future, and therefore in its nature contingent. We may have never ourselves personally sailed round England. Yet, in neither case, have we any doubt, or can a person of ordinary intelligence admit that there is room for doubt." The appeal to ordinary intelligence corresponds to the appeal at a later stage of the argument to the religious instincts of barbarous nations. Ordinary intelligence jumps hastily to conclusions. It is as often wrong as right, and the strength with which it holds a particular opinion may only be an index of want of thought. The proposition that "I shall die" seems at the first blush as indisputable as that the whole is greater than its part. But those who accept the infallibility of St. Paul believe that, at the last trumpet, those that are alive will be caught up into the air without dying at all. The last day, they are warned, will come like a thief in the night, and they are charged to be on the watch for it. The thought, therefore, that it may come in their time will present itself not as a probability, but certainly as something not utterly impossible. Ordinary intelligence again is similarly absolutely certain that England is an island. The man of science is certain of it too, but in the sense of the word which Father Newman quarrels with. Sudden geographical changes are extremely rare; but the time has been when England was not an island, and the time may come when it will be re-attached to the continent. The Channel is shallow, not much deeper anywhere than the towers of Westminster Abbey. Extensive tracts of the globe have been rapidly depressed and rapidly raised again. It is therefore possible, though very unlikely, that there may be, at some point or other in the Channel, at any moment, a sudden upheaval. 66 Certainty," Father Newman insists, is the same in kind wherever and by whomsoever it is experienced. The gravely and cautiously formed conclusion of the scientific investigator, and the determination of the school-gil that the weather is going to be fine, do not differ from each other so far as they are acts of the mind. And the schoolgirl has pro tanto an evidence in her conviction that the fact will be as she believes. Nay, rather the laborious inference hesitatingly held after patient and skeptical examination, Father Newman considers inferior in character, and likely to be less productive of fruit than assent more impulsively yielded. In such instances of certitude, the previous labor of coming to a conclusion, and that repose of mind which I have above described as attendant on an assent to its truth, often counteracts whatever of lively sensation the fact thus concluded is in itself adapted to excite; so that what is gained in depth and exactness of belief is lost as regards freshness and vigor. Hence it is that literary or scientific men, who may have investigated some difficult point of history, philosophy, or physics, and have come to their own settled conclusion about it, having had a perfect right to form one, are far more disposed to be silent as to their convictions, and to let others alone, than partisans on either side of the question, who take it up with less thought and seriousness. And so again, in the religious world, no one seems to look for any great devotion or fervor in controversialists, writers on Christian Evidences, theologians, and the like, it being taken for granted, rightly or wrongly, that such men are too intellectual to be spiritual, and are more occupied with the truth of doctrine than with its reality. If, on the other hand, we would see what the force of simple assent can be, viewed apart from its reflex confirmation, we have but to look at the generous and uncalculating energy of faith as exemplified in the primitive Martyrs, in the youths who defied the pagan tyrant, or the maidens who were silent under his tortures. It is assent, pure and simple, which is the motive cause of great achievements; it is confidence, growing out of instincts rather than arguments, stayed upon a vivid apprehension, and animated by a transcendent logic, more concentrated in will and in deed for the very reason that it has not been subjected to any intellectual development. Nothing can be more true than this, as applied to moral obligation; nothing more illusory if extended to doctrine or external fact. I may think myself right, but there is still a bridge to be crossed between my thought and the reality. My own experience assures me too painfully of my fallibility. I have experienced equally the fallibility of others. No one can seriously maintain that a consciousness of certitude is an evidence of facts on which I can rely. Yet Father Newman clings to the belief that in some sense or other it is a legitimate proof to any man of the truth of any opinion which he peremptorily holds. "It is characteristic of certitude," he says, "that its object is a truth, a truth as such, a proposition as true. There are right and wrong convictions; and certitude is a right conviction; if it is not right with a consciousness of being right, it is not certitude. Now, truth .cannot change: what is once truth is always truth; and the human mind is made for truth, and so rests in truth, as it cannot rest in falsehood. When then it once becomes possessed of a truth, what is to dispossess it?" It is open to Father Newman to distinguish, if he pleases, between certitude and conviction. He may say that we may be convinced of what is false, but only certain of what is true. But this is nothing to the purpose, so long as we have no criterion to distinguish one from the other as an internal impression. Father Newman is certain that the Pope is Vicar of Christ. Luther was no less certain that The Church evidently is the true Deus ex machiná. The Church, in virtue of its infallibility, will resolve this and all other difficulties; and the infallibility, it seems, is somehow or other its own witness, and proves itself as Spi noza demonstrated the existence of God. "I form a conception," Spinoza says, "of an absolutely perfect being. But existence is a mode of perfection; a non-existent being is an imperfect being; and therefore God's existence is involved in the Idea of Him." Father Newman similarly appears to say that the mind is made for truth, and demands it as a natural right. Of the elementary truth that the Church is infallible it can be as sure as that Victoria is Queen of England; and this once established it has all that it requires. It is true that we have made mistakes; but usum non tollit abusus. That we have been often wrong does not imply that we may not be right at last. Our facculties have a correspondence with truth. They were given to us to lead us into truth, and though they fail many times they may bring us right at last. Once established in certitude we have nothing more to fear, and may defy argument thenceforth. Our past mistakes may after all have been only apparent. We have called ourselves certain, when we had only a strong presumption, an opinion, or an intellectual inference. Or again, we may fancy that we have changed our minds when in fact we have not changed our convictions but only developed them; as a Theist remains a Theist though he add to his Theism a faith in revelation; and a Protestant continues to hold the Athanasian Creed though he pass into a Catholic. St. Paul is admitted to be a difficulty; St. Paul indisputably did once hold that Christianity was an illusion; but St. Paul is got rid of by being made an exceptional person. "His conversion, as als> his after life, was miraculous.” Any way, when once possessed of certitude, we cannot lose it. No evidence, however clear, can shake us thenceforward. "Certitude ought to stand all trials or it is not certitude." Its very office is to cherish and maintain its object, and its very lot and duty is to sustain such shocks in maintenance of it without being damaged by them. Father Newman takes an example, and it is an extremely significant one. Let us suppose we are told on an unimpeachable authority, that a man whom we saw die is now alive again and at his work, as it was his wont to be; let us suppose we actually see him and converse with him; what will become of our certitude of his death? I do not think we should give it up; how could we, when we actually saw him die? At first, indeed, we should be thrown into an astonishment and confusion so great, that the world would seem to reel round us, and we should be ready to give up the use of our senses and of our memory, of our reflective powers, and of our reason, and even to deny our power of thinking, and our existence itself. Such confidence have we in the doctrine that when life goes it never returns. Nor would our bewilderment be less, when the first blow was over; but our reason would rally, and with our reason our certitude would come back to us. Whatever came of it, we should never cease to know and to confess to ourselves both of the contrary facts, that we saw him die, and that after dying we saw him alive again. The overpowering strangeness of our experience would have no power to shake our certitude in the facts which created it. a If No better illustration could have been given of the difference between what is called in commendation 66 believing mind," and a mind trained to careful and precise observation. In such a case as Father Newman supposes, a jury of modern physicians would indisputably conclude that life had never been really extinct, that the symptoms had been mistaken, and the phenomena of catalepsy had been confounded with the phenomena of death. catalepsy was impossible, if the man had appeared, for instance, to lose his head on the scaffold, they would assume that there had been a substitution of persons, or that the observers had been taken in by some skillful optical trick. Father Newman may, perhaps, go further and suppose that they had themselves seen the man tied to a gun and blown to pieces beyond possibility of deception. But a man of science would reply that such a case could not occur. That men once dead do not return to life again has been revealed by an experience too uniform to allow its opposite to be entertained even as a hypothesis. |