[British Critic, April 1841]
Perhaps the greatest of the wants under which our religious literature labours at this day is that of an ecclesiastical history. It is inconvenient enough to have no good commentary on Scripture, and so little of systematic theology; but the Creed tells us the principal points of doctrine, and Scripture is to the pious mind, in some sense, its own interpreter. But the providences of God towards His Church during eighteen centuries, though contained in outline in prophecy, are consigned to no formula or document, clear enough to convey its own meaning, and minute enough to impress its peculiarities upon the private Christian. Not even the wildest advocate for the right of Private Judgment ever professed to apprehend past facts, as he might think he discovered revealed doctrines, without the assistance of books or teachers. Rather such an one will commonly be found to depreciate, instead of pretending to, historical knowledge: he will apply the Caliph Omar’s argument to the events of 1800 years, and say that except for the first and three last centuries they are not to be studied at all, as being little or nothing better than the times of predicted evil. He shuts up God’s dealings with His Church under a formula, and is contented with symbols which neither he nor any one else can put into plain English.
It is difficult justly to estimate the injury done to our whole view of Gospel truth by our ignorance of ecclesiastical history. Every department of theology acts upon the rest, and if one is neglected the others suffer. Our view of doctrine affects our view of history, and our view of history our view of doctrine; and our view of doctrine the sense we put upon Scripture: and our interpretation of Scripture our ethics, and our ethics our interpretation of Scripture. And, moreover, the history of the past ends in the present; and the present is our scene of trial; and to behave ourselves towards its various phenomena duly and religiously, we must understand them; and to understand them, we must have recourse to those past events which led to them. Thus the present is a text, and the past its interpretation. To a child there is no difference between one fact and another in the religious world. He does not understand their mutual relations or their respective bearings. He has, when an infant in arms, learned to classify and dispose of objects of sense; he knows that the church spire is not so near him as his nose or his hand, and that leaves are parts of the tree, and not of the sky or the earth, with which they are conterminous. But he cannot learn without the assistance of others the meaning of moral facts; and, as things are, he commonly grows up and lives and dies as ignorant of those of an ecclesiastical character as he was when he first had the faculty of thought. “What is the difference between a Methodist and a Roman Catholic?” and “Why are we not all Quakers?” are the questions which a thoughtful child of five years old may ask; and it is not at all clear whether he is likely to have taken any real steps towards the solution of them by the time he is fifty. This of course is witnessed in the case of political and social facts quite as much as in ecclesiastical. What a different meaning, for instance, has the so-called “Catholic Relief Bill,” or the Reform Bill, to men of twenty and of thirty! How differently has the character of the Duke of Wellington come out to the present generation since the publication of his dispatches! How differently appear our present relations with Russia to those who know and those who are ignorant of the history of the last century! Men enter into life, and take what they find there, and put their own interpretation upon it, if their imaginations are not pre-occupied with the one true historical comment. This is why there is such difficulty in rousing the public mind to understand the importance of certain measures, proposed or resisted: to the public they are facts without meaning. What virtue is there in a name to those who are dead to it? Why should not Brutus stir a spirit as soon as Cæsar? It is the association which is everything; but to those who know not the true history of that to which the name belongs, there are no associations with it, or wrong ones.
The case is the same as regards words written or spoken. Take an orator and he shall make a speech, or an author and he shall write a pamphlet, or a preacher and he shall deliver a sermon; and then let it be considered how differently the speech, or the pamphlet, or the sermon, in each case seems to persons who know him well and those who do not. Very different for better and for worse; let him be a man of pomp and parade, or of smoothness and artifice, and strangers will be taken in, and admire the very words, turns of speech and gestures, which make those who know him well only cry out, “How like so-and-so!” On the other hand, the deep feeling and reality of another sort of man go clean over the heads of those who do not know him, while friends are pierced by every word. Let the very same speech or sentiment come from two persons, and it has quite a different meaning, according to the speaker, and takes a different form in our minds. We always judge of what meets us by what we know already. There is no such thing in nature as a naked text without note or comment.