p. 89Have you thought over the arguments brought forward last month?—Yes.
What have you to say to them?—I think there is much force in them; in fact, I am inclined to think they cannot be disposed of.
I am glad to hear you say so. You seemed to hang back unreasonably, I thought.—Well, I like to hold out till I cannot hold out any longer. Honestly, I think this is the case on the Bible argument. Still, even conceding this, there are difficulties which I do not feel capable of clearing away to my own satisfaction—difficulties, I mean, as to the exhibition of God which the Bible gives us in various places. I admit that the conception it places before us, as to His greatness, His eternity, His kindness, His wisdom, etc., are all such as we should look for in a revelation of Him; but there are views and aspects which strike me as petty and incongruous, and, if I may so say, foreign to the general idea advanced.
p. 90 If you would particularize some of these views and aspects, we might consider them.—Well, there is what has been termed the “tribal” aspect of the Divine procedure as exhibited in the Bible, which seems to me inconsistent with the idea of a universal God. Then there is His shewing anger, which I have a difficulty in reconciling with the idea that He is love. The requiring of sacrifice as the basis of human approach seems to me to present the same contradiction. Then there is something so very local in the recorded manifestation of Deity which staggers me when I think of the insignificance of the earth in the boundless realms of creation. The idea of God coming down to speak with Abraham, and His dwelling in a temple, and of His taking Christ to His right hand, is in my mind unadjustable to the infinite scale of things mapped out in the sky. I can understand such ideas being conceivable and receivable at a time when it was supposed the earth was the universe, and the sun, moon, and stars were lights hung up in the sky for its convenience; but now that we know that the earth is relatively but a speck in the boundless fields of space, that the sun is about a million times larger than the earth, and that the myriads of fixed stars hung in the sky are all of them suns, most of them larger than our sun, these ideas referred to seem excluded by the mere magnitude of things. I feel simply paralysed in any attempt to harmonize them. I admit the strength of the argument for the Bible as a Divine thing. At the same time, I cannot help a feeling of distress at the want of the correspondence which I should have expected between the views it propounds and the actual constitution of heaven and earth as discovered by modern science.
p. 91 You state your difficulties with clearness and force, and your earnest candour must necessarily secure for them respectful consideration. They can all be cleared away, I am certain; but it will be necessary to take them one at a time, and to frankly admit, one by one, the elementary facts which, when all put together, yield the solution.—I am prepared to admit anything, I believe, that I perceive to be true; and I feel encouraged somewhat by your confident assurance that the difficulties can be cleared away.
I do not express the assurance lightly. The difficulties you describe are all such as must have occurred to every reflective believer of the Bible; and must receive at least an approximate solution before faith can rest with strength and satisfaction.—It is my leading encouragement to hold converse with you on the matter, that you do not displace natural truth in your arguments for the truth of the Bible. I have met extreme defenders of the Bible, who have denied geology and astronomy. Their arguments for the Bible could naturally have no weight with me in those circumstances. Whatever vagaries may have been broached by students of geology and astronomy, there is a solid basis of truth in both sciences that I can no more shut my eyes to than to the existence of the Bible.
I concur. Natural truth must not be ignored. It must be allowed its place. The problem is to give it that place without doing violence to other truth. This problem is not usually solved with success. Where you meet with one extreme Bible-defender of the type you mention—who would deny the most obvious demonstrations of science because of his inability to square them with his reading of the Bible—you will meet with a hundred of another type p. 92 who, without openly rejecting the Bible, will squeeze and crush and destroy it, to harmonize with the extravagant conclusions at which mere speculative science has arrived. The only tenable ground is the acceptance of unmutilated truth in both cases, and their fusion into a harmonious whole.
That is what I want to arrive at.—You are on the road. You have made a great stride in conceding the Bible argument. Science you already recognize. You have only to put the two together.
It seems to me easier said than done. I have indicated what I might call the unmixability of the the two things.—Yes; you are in the position of a person who hasn’t learnt the trick of a puzzle. He is shewn two rings: he is assured one can be made to pass into the other so as to form a link. He examines them: he does not see how it can be done: he tries—and fails: and tries and tries again many times: and still he fails. If he is a wise man, he will lay them down with the admission that the thing is beyond his ability. If he is a fool, he will impatiently protest that he is being fooled and that the thing cannot be done. There is a third alternative: a friend may shew him how the thing is done, and he experiences the satisfaction of performing the apparently impossible. Too many are in the position of the fool.
I hope I am not a fool. I hope I shall always guard against the mistake of rejecting a truth because I cannot make it square with some other truth.—That is the mistake that a great many make in this matter. The true policy is to seek truth and wait its reconciliations. They will come to patient and honest search. Even in the sciences we have spoken of it has often happened that facts have seemed p. 93 to look in two directions at once: that is to say, two facts or two sets of facts have seemed to look opposite ways. Haste would have discarded one of them, and come to wrong conclusions. Patience has found the explanation, and preserved both. Scientific men are pre-eminently distinguished by patience in this department. How much more essential it is to be patient with Divine truth whose issues are so momentous, especially considering the extreme liability of the human intellect to be superficial, and therefore erring in its reading of such lofty matters.
I agree with you, and have therefore resisted the temptation to come to a negative conclusion. I desire to come to a conclusion in harmony with your own. For this reason, I shall be interested to hear how you deal with the difficulties I have outlined.—We shall enter upon their consideration the next time we meet.