Henry Scott Holland

“ Revelation, then, does not only fail to clear up the difficulties that Nature has presented to us already; but, leaving them as they were, it adds many more perplexities of its own.
What, then, is the advantage, of a Revelation? For what has it been given? Why should we care to add to our troubles?
Butler's answer is as noble as it is inspiring.
Revelation is simply the call of God to man to 'Come up higher'. If man has shown himself faithful in few things, let him have, as his reward, the fresh responsibility of showing himself faithful in many things. ”

“ It is that which first comes down to us, perhaps, as we look down upon the quiet face, so cold and white, of one who has been very near and dear to us. There it lies in possession of its own secret. It knows it all. So we seem to feel. And what the face says to us in its sweet silence to us as a last message from the one whom we loved is: “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. ”

“ Nor is he left to tread the quiet ways of the scholar; the fierce energy of political life and religious strife plucks him out of the cloister and clamours to him to act—to deal with the dangers of Rome and the difficulties of science, to succeed the expelled Massey and to banish Locke. He acts as determinedly as men can wish—but there is a something in his modesty, in his calm, in his soft kindliness, which disarms anger and shames malice. ”

“ Butler had looked, with serious eyes, into the black abyss of sin; he allowed no easy tolerance to blind him to the turbid disgrace of the story that man had made for himself. He loathed the airy optimism which would not face the fact. Nevertheless, after solemn survey of the whole tumultuous disarray, he deliberately pronounces that all the positive evidence of the facts declares for the right. The underlying principles of Nature are always working for virtue, and against vice. Judged, as they should be, by their tendency, they tally with the verdict of conscience. ”

“ The long, horrible silence that follows when we become aware of what we have lost out of our daily intercourse by the withdrawal of the immediate presence will cut its way into our souls. We shall feel it impossible to keep at the high level without a word, without a sign to reassure us of its truth. The blank veil will hang on unlifted, unstirred. Not a glimpse to be had of the world inside and beyond! How black, how relentless, this total lack of tangible evidence for the certainty that we believe in! Once again the old terror will come down upon us. ”

“ Metaphysic itself, when it comes again to its own, will do so by verifying, with a closer intimacy than ever, its inevitable inherence within the very heart's core of our common average experience.
And it is within this human experience of ours that Butler does all his work. It is our daily Experience that he fastens on, clings to, accepts. For him, it holds the entire secret. He has no desire to go behind it, or beyond it. It is sufficient. It justifies itself. It supplies the standard to which reality must conform. ”

“ Therefore it is our reasonable act of faith to stand by our highest experience, and to assert its validity even when its light has faded out of our lives and we have sunk back under the shadows. Though we have returned to the twilight of the valleys, yet we will ever recall the moment when we stood upon the sunlit heights and saw the far horizons. It was a true value that we then gave to life and death. That act of insight cannot be disproved or discredited; even though there be a counter judgement which will not be gainsaid, and which still presses its conclusion and penetrating insistence. ”

“ This is the history of Aldrich's Logic. At a time when the New Philosophy of Bacon was driving the withered relics of Scholasticism out of the field, and was prone, in the novel pride of its revolutionary Puritanism, to trample Idealism to death, Aldrich succeeded in so rescuing the naked symbols of a forgotten faith, that the sign of a higher presence could never be entirely withdrawn from Oxford. Baroko has been to us the flag of a cause otherwise lost and hopeless. ”

“ That expectation rests on probability, says Butler. But that does not mean that the plain man is uncertain about the issue. To him, the fact that the sun is sure to rise is a type of all he means by certainty. It is for him the least improbable thing that he can think of. He cannot bring himself to doubt it. He would stake his life on it. Sun-rise, sun-setting—these embody the fixed immutabilities of Nature; they stand for the undeviating persistence of Physical Law; they are the fundamental basis on which he builds his experience as on a rock. ”

“ Brethren, today these two moods which we have rehearsed are peculiarly ours— the mood of violent recoil, the mood of quiet continuity. Today the white light of Pentecost pours itself around us, and we know ourselves to be in the possession of the first fruits of the Spirit. Yet the white light breaks itself against the blackness of a closed coffin, flung up before the eyes of all, to embody the irreparable disaster of a death which has touched the very heart of our National life. ”

“ While Atterbury is raging up and down the ranks of the foe clamouring for a battle, Aldrich sits aloft in the quiet supremacy of silent influence, if less potent in the fray, yet unsullied by the heat of the mélée, uncorrupted by the fanaticism of conquest. This he can do without ceasing to be looked up to as a champion by his friends, and he can carry himself as a champion without being hated by his foes. In the pamphlets of the time, though temper ran high and words were hot, I have not found a word of malice or offence against our Dean. ”

“ The moral law is the human equivalent of the coherence which knits the universe into unity of purpose; and this same Wisdom, which teaches the circuits of the sun, gives to the man, into whose soul it enters, knowledge of judgement and law, by 'which to frame his life in righteousness, and to execute judgement with an upright heart. She leads him soberly in all his ways; so that his works are acceptable, and he is worthy to sit in his father's seat'.
Butler would delight in bringing the moral life of humanity into this complete accord with the conception of Natural Law. ”

“ So that black coffin harbours its black secret. But over it and round it and about it the light of Whitsuntide sweeps in to scatter all our fears. Why are we afraid? Have we not the gift of the Spirit? Has it not swept in upon us with a mighty wind? Is it not in our heart as a fire? Surely it has become our very own possession, one with our very life. And the Spirit which we now possess is itself the Life of all Life, the Life of the Life beyond death. It is the Eternal Life of God. ”

“ On every side our knowledge is confined and our means of enlarging it small. Of this the outer world takes no heed; Nature is "unfeeling"; her laws roll on; "beautiful and dumb," she passes forward and vouchsafes no sign. Indeed, she seems to hide, as one might fancy, the dark mysteries of life which seem to lie beneath; our feeble eyes strain to look forward, but her "painted veil" hangs over all, like an October mist upon the morning hills. Here, as it seems, revelation intervenes; God will break the spell that is upon us; will meet our needs ”

“ In this light, this Pentecost, you know your sin, your own personal sin, the sin that is under condemnation.
Well, let this sin go, then. Uproot it. Cut it away. Bury it. Burn it out. Die to it. Kill it. You can, for you are a son of God, and the spirit of sonship will do its good work in you. It will slay in you the thing that offends. It will kill in you that sin which is the only sting in death. It will expel the devil from you who alone has power in death. It gives you the weapon. Trust the sword of the Spirit. Yield to it. Let the dead things go, and lay hold on life. ”

“ But, if we do not still study his theology, there is one book of Aldrich's in all our hands, if not in our heads—a book which made his name sound strangely familiar to us from our earliest infancy at Oxford, but which left him draped in all the mythical wonder and awe of a legendary hero. Few of us, as Freshmen, would not have felt a shock at identifying the creator of the Logic with any historic reality. ”

“ And yet, let us remember that this word, for all its doleful associations, stands for that indomitable optimism in man, which defies all misadventure. It is the expression of man's ineradicable conviction that the world exists for Good, and not for Evil; and that God will ever justify Himself, as victorious over adverse circumstances. Such a conviction, faced by pain and evil, and challenged by the heathen taunt, 'Where is, now, thy God?' bravely retorts by the word 'probation'. It is evil that has happened to us, and not good. ”

“ It simply traverses every line on which life runs, cutting across every hope on which life feeds, and every intention which gives life significance. It makes all we do here meaningless and empty. “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.” Everything goes to one place, good and bad, just and unjust, happy and unhappy, rich and poor, all lie down together in one common ruin. All are cut off by the same blind inexorable fate. ”

“ He distrusts profoundly, not reason, but the uninstructed reason—the reason that draws its knowledge out of itself. Reason has nothing of its own to draw upon. It is, itself, the faculty to know facts; and, in knowing facts, it carries with it its own guarantee. It knows them as they are meant to be known. So Butler's appeal is ever from the reason uninformed by experience to the reason which has accepted the facts set before it—from the reason e. g. which decrees what a Revelation must involve, to the reason which will be content to understand what a Revelation, in fact, actually is. ”

“ We go out stripped of all that has made us intelligible to ourselves, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be. Death, then, must retain its terror, even though it is but a stage in our growth, the terror of the unknown, the terror of loss, the terror of finality to what have been hitherto the movements of our very life. ”

“ Is that the invariable type of your activities in contact with facts, in your natural existence? Well, then, why be surprised if you have to repeat exactly the like process in Religion; if here, too, you have to feel your way forward by hints, and suggestions, and experiments, and expectations, and probabilities? God is the same God, at whatever level of life you encounter Him. And always He will guide you by His eye, and not, as if you were a mule, by bit and bridle. Religion is no exception to what you already know so familiarly: it follows the same rule. ”

“ Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind because I am out of sight? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. ”

“ It holds, for him, the entire Universe together in a coherent and progressive Purpose, stretching from the lowest point of physical existence, through all the grades of Natural Development, up to the highest order of the Spiritual Heaven disclosed to us through the open door of Revelation. One secret makes itself known everywhere: one mind is everywhere reiterating its tireless delight: one pressure sets everywhere towards one far-off event. ”

“ It may be, no doubt, that it may come to the very old as the fitting close of an honourable life. But how often it smites, without discrimination, as if it had no law! It makes its horrible breach in our gladness with careless and inhuman disregard of us. We get no consideration from it. Often and often it stumbles in like an evil mischance, like a feckless misfortune. ”

“ He enjoys common things. He keeps close in touch with things as they are. He goes along with a healthy cheerfulness, resolute in his determination to be loyal to the actual, and to demand no exceptional treatment for Religion or Revelation, as if they lay apart from ordinary human life. Their strength lies in their conformity to natural conditions. The closer their coherence with the common type of human experience and human history, the greater is their reality and the more convincing their evidence. Everything that is most familiar to us in our daily habits reappears in them. ”

“ We act on them without a fear. Yes! and we are perfectly right, Butler would say. In all practical affairs we have no other way of acting.
And Religion is a practical affair. Religion is a problem of action. It is no metaphysic; it is a life. As action, as life, it conforms to all other types of life and action. It finds its certainties (that is) in what the metaphysician would condemn as probabilities. Religion is asking no more of you than your daily common practical experience does, when it invites you to trust to convictions that you cannot prove by syllogisms. ”

“ We have shaken ourselves free. We are in the Spirit. We have passed over to the other side. Now, even now, brethren, we are the sons of God; we have the Spirit of Him Who says: “I am the Resurrection and the Life; He that believeth on Me, though he die, yet shall he live. And whoso liveth and believeth on Me shall never die.”
Stand on the strong Word. In its strength you can even now use your remaining days to bury that which is already dead. You can strip off the clinging garments of decay, the deceits of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Has not the Spirit in you convicted you of sin? ”

“ The stress of the argument, after all, is not on the melancholy fact that we cannot know more, but on the kindling truth that we do know so much. We are inside this scheme that we imperfectly comprehend. That is the great point. We are in actual contact with its reality; and that is why our knowledge of any single object in it cannot be rounded off and completed. If it could, it would prove that we were not knowing the object as it really is: for, in its reality, it cannot be cut off; it cannot be isolated; it cannot be detached from the whole sum of things. ”

“ We shall simply go on being what we already are, only without disguise, without qualification. We shall use the same forces, live according to the same methods, be governed by the same motives, realize the same intention. We are what we shall be. That is why, standing by the dead, we know nothing for them is changed. We are to use the same language as of old, to think of them under the same form, to follow them with our intimate and habitual familiarities. Yes, for they are what they were. Death does not count. ”

“ Wisdom has shown him, moreover, that 'the principal things for the whole use of man's life are water, fire, iron, and salt, flower of wheat, honey, milk, and the blood of the grape, and oil, and clothing' (Ecclus. xxxix) . Herein lies his intellectual delight. It is Natural Science that is his mistress. Knowledge is, for him, above all things progressive. It draws all things one way, according to a practical determination of the will; it goes through from end to end, sweetly ordering all things. It makes of the universe a co-ordinate scheme which can only be understood in its entire sum. ”

“ Dare we make the awful venture? Who can endure such a sight and not die? Who would not shrink from so fierce a test? So this unknown experience which awaits us on the far side is charged with the terror of the unknown. We flinch from it as we look merely at the isolated coffin awaiting its last burial, the symbol of disaster. ”