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From the Rev. Ambrose Bradley to the Right Reverend the Bishop of Darkdale and Dells.

Vicarage, May 31, 1880.

My Dear Bishop—I am obliged to you for your kind though categorical letter, to which I hasten to give you a reply. That certain members of my congregation should have forwarded complaints concerning me does not surprise me, seeing that they have already taken me to task on many occasions and made my progress here difficult, if not disagreeable. But I think you will agree with me that there is only one light by which a Christian man, even a Christian clergyman, can consent to be directed—the light of his own conscience and intellect, Divinely implanted within him for his spiritual guidance.

I will be quite candid with you. You ask what has changed me since the day when, zealous, and, as you say, ‘perfervid,’ I was promoted to this ministry. The answer is simple. A deep and conscientious study of the wonderful truths of Science, an eager and impassioned study of the beautiful truths of Art.

I seem to see you raise your hands in horror. But if you will bear with me a little while, perhaps I may convince you that what I have said is not so horrible after all—nay, that it expresses a conviction which exists at the present moment in the bosom of many Christian men.

The great question before the world just now, when the foundations of a particular faith are fatally shaken, when Science denies that Christ as we conceive Him ever was, and when Art bewails wildly that He should ever have been, is whether the Christian religion can continue to exist at all; whether, when a few more years have passed away, it will not present to a modern mind the spectacle that paganism once presented to a mediaeval mind. Now, of our leading Churchmen, not even you, my Lord Bishop, I feel sure, deny that the Church is in danger, both through attacks from without and through a kind of dry-rot within. Lyell and others have demolished and made ridiculous the Mosaic cosmogony Strauss and others have demolished, with more or less success, the Biblical and Christian miracles. No sane man now seriously believes that the sun ever stood still, or that an ass spoke in human speech, or that a multitude of people were ever fed with a few loaves and fishes, or that any solid human form ever walked on the liquid sea. With the old supernaturalism has gone the old asceticism or other-worldliness. It is now pretty well agreed that there are substantially beautiful things in this world which have precedence over fancifully beautiful things in the other. The poets have taught us the loveliness of Nature, the painters have shown us the loveliness of Art. Meantime, what does the Church do? Instead of accepting the new knowledge and the new beauty, instead of building herself up anew on the debris of her shattered superstitions, she buries her face in her own ashes, and utters a senile wail of protestation. Instead of calling upon her children to face the storm, and to build up new bulwarks against the rising wave of secularism, she commands them to wail with her, or to be silent. Instead of perceiving that the priests of Baal and Antichrist might readily be overthrown with the weapons forged by their own hands, she cowers before them powerless, in all the paralysis of superstition, in all the blind fatuity of prayer.

But let us look the facts in the face.

The teachers of the new knowledge have unroofed our Temple to the heavens, but have not destroyed its foundations; they have overthrown its brazen images, but have not touched its solid walls. Put the case in other and stronger words. The God who thundered upon Sinai has vanished into air and cloud, but the God of man’s heavenly aspiration is wonderfully quickened and alive. The Bible of wrath and prophecy is cast contemptuously aside, but the Bible of eternal poetry is imperishable, its wild dreams and aspirations being crystallised in such literature as cannot die. The historic personality of the gentle rounder of Christianity becomes fainter and fainter as the ages advance; but, on the other hand, brighter and fairer grows the Divine Ideal which rose from the ashes of that godlike man. Men reject the old miracles, but they at last accept a miracle of human idealism. In one word, though Christianity has perished as a dogmatic faith, it survives as the philosophic religion of the world.

This being so, how does it behove a Christian minister, eating the Church’s bread, but fully alive to her mortal danger, to steer his course?

Shall he, as so many do, continue to act in the nineteenth century as he would have acted in the fifteenth, or indeed in any century up to the Revolution? Shall he base his teaching on the certainty of miracles, on the existence of supernaturalism, on the evil of the human heart, the vanity of this world, and the certainty of rewards and punishments in another? Shall he brandish the old hell fire, or scatter the old heavenly manna?

I do not think so!

Knowing in his heart that these things are merely the cast-off epidermis of a living and growing creed, he may, in perfect consciousness of God’s approval, put aside the miraculous as unproven if not irrelevant; warn the people against mere supernaturalism; proclaim with the apostles of the Renaissance the glory and loveliness of this world—its wondrous scenes, its marvellous story as written on the rocks and in the stars, its divine science, its literature, its poetry, and its art; and treading all the fire of Hell beneath his feet, and denouncing the threat of eternal wrath as a chimera, base his hope of immortality on the moral aspirations that, irrespective of dogma, are common to all mankind.

This I think he may do, and must do, if the Church is to endure.

Let him do this, and let only a tithe of his brethren imitate him in so doing, and out of this nucleus of simple believers, as out of the little Galilean band, may be renewed a faith that will redeem the world. Questioned of such a faith, Science will reply—‘I have measured the heavens and the earth, I have traced back the book of the universe page by page and letter by letter, but I have found neither here nor yonder any proof that God is not; nay, beyond and behind and within all phenomena, there abides one unknown quantity which you are quite free to call—God.

Similarly questioned, Art will answer—‘Since you have rejected what was so hideous, tested by the beauty of this world, and since you hold even my work necessary and holy, I too will confess with you that I hunger for something fairer and less perishable; and in token of that hunger, of that restless dream, I will be your Church’s handmaid, and try to renew her Temple and make it fair.’

The keystone of the Church is Jesus Christ. Not the Jesus of the miracles, not Jesus the son of Joseph and Mary, but Jesus Christ, the Divine Ideal, the dream and glory of the human race. Not God who made himself a man, but man who, by God’s inspiration, has been fashioned unto the likeness of a God.

And what, as we behold him now, is this Divine Ideal—this man made God?

He is simply, as I conceive, the accumulated testimony of human experience—of history, poetry, philosophy, science, and art—in favour of a rational religion, the religion of earthly peace and heavenly love. Built upon the groundwork of what, shorn of its miraculous pretensions, was a gentle and perfect life, the Divine Ideal, or Ideal Person, began. At first shadowy and almost sinister, then clearer and more beautiful; then, descending through the ages, acquiring at every step some new splendour of self-sacrifice, some new consecration of love or suffering, from every heart that suffered patiently, from every soul that fed the lamp of a celestial dream with the oil of sweet human love. And now, far removed as is man himself from the archetypal ape, is the Christ of modern Christendom, this spiritual Saviour of the world, from the ghostly skeleton of the early martyrs, from the Crucified One of early Christian art. The life of generations has gone to fashion him—all our human experience has served to nourish him—gradually from age to age He has drunk in the blood of suffering and the milk of knowledge, till He stands supreme as we see him—not God, but man made God.

Does it matter so much, after all, whether we worship a person or an idea, since, as I suggest, the Idea has become a Person, with all the powers and privileges of divinity? Nay, who in this world is able, even with the help of philosophy, to distinguish what is from what seems—the phenomenal from the real? So long as Our Lord exists as a moral phenomenon, so long in other words as we can apprehend him as an ideal of human life, Christ is not dead, and his resurrection is not a dream. He walks the world. He remembers Greece and Rome, as well as Galilee; He blesses the painter and the poet, as well as the preacher in the Temple. He rejects nothing; He reads the rocks and the stars, and He adds their gospel to his own; He cries to men of all creeds, as his prototype cried to his disciples of yore, ‘Come unto me, all ye that are heavy laden, and ye shall rest.’

Pardon me, my Lord Bishop, the desultory thoughts noted down in this long letter. They perhaps give you some clue as to the sentiments with which I pursue the Christian mission. You will doubtless think me somewhat heterodox, but I have at least the courage of my opinions; and on some such heterodoxy as mine—though on one, I hope, much broader and wiser—it will soon be found necessary to reconstruct the Christian Church, I am, my Lord Bishop, yours,

Ambrose Bradley.