Horace Bushnell - Nature and the Supernatural: As Together Constituting the One System of God

As Together Constituting the One System of God

HORACE BUSHNELL

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6516-9

PREFACE

T HE treatise here presented to the public was written, as regards the matter of it, some years ago. It has been ready for the press more than two years, and has been kept back, by the limitations I am under, which have forbidden my assuming the small additional care of its publication. It need hardly be said that the subject has been carefully studied, as any subject rightfully should be, that raises, for discussion, the great question of the age.

Scientifically measured, the argument of the treatise is rather an hypothesis for the matters in question, than a positive theory of them. And yet, like every hypothesis, that gathers in, accommodates, and assimilates, all the facts of the subject, it gives, in that one test, the most satisfactory and convincing evidence of its practical truth. Any view which takes in easily, all the facts of a subject, must be substantially true. Even the highest and most difficult questions of science are determined in this manner. While it is easy therefore to raise an attack, at this or that particular point, call it an assumption, or a mere caprice of invention, or a paradox, or a dialectically demonstrable error, there will yet remain, after all such particular denials, the fact that here is a wide hypothesis of the world, and the great problem of life, and sin, and supernatural redemption, and Christ, and a christly Providence, and a divinely certified history, and of superhuman gifts entered into the world, and finally of God as related to all, which liquidates these stupendous facts, in issue between Christians and unbelievers, and gives a rational account of them. And so the points that were assaulted, and perhaps seemed to be carried, by the skirmishes of detail, will be seen, by one who grasps the whole in which they are comprehended, to be still not carried, but to have their reason certified by the more general solution of which they are a part. One who flies at mere points of detail, regardless of the whole to which they belong, can do nothing with a subject like this. The points themselves are intelligible only in a way of comprehension, or as being seen in the whole to which they are subordinate.

It will be observed that the words of scripture are often cited, and its doctrines referred to, in the argument. But this is never done as producing a divine authority on the subject in question. It is very obvious that an argument, which undertakes to settle the truth of scripture history, should not draw on that history for its proofs. The citations in question are sometimes designed to correct mistakes, which are held by believers themselves, and are a great impediment to the easy solution of scripture difficulties; sometimes they are offered as furnishing conceptions of subjects, that are difficult to be raised in any other manner; sometimes they are presented because they are clear enough, in their superiority, to stand by their own self-evidence and contribute their aid, in that manner, to the general progress of the argument.

I regret the accidental loss of a few references that could not be recovered, without too much labor.

H. B.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY.QUESTION STATED

I N the remoter and more primitive ages of the world, sometimes called mythologic, it will be observed that mankind, whether by reason of some native instinct as yet uncorrupted, or some native weakness yet uneradicated, are abundantly disposed to believe in things supernatural. Thus it was in the extinct religions of Egypt, Phnicia, Greece, and Rome; and thus also it still is in the existing mythologic religions of the East. Under this apparently primitive habit of mind, we find men readiest, in fact, to believe in that which exceeds the terms of mere nature; in deities and apparitions of deities, that fill the heavens and earth with their sublime turmoil; in fates and furies; in nymphs and graces; in signs, and oracles, and incantations; in "gorgons and chimeras dire." Their gods are charioteering in the sun, presiding in the mountain tops, rising out of the foam of the sea, breathing inspirations in the gas that issues from caves and rocky fissures, loosing their rage in the storms, plotting against each other in the intrigues of courts, mixing in battles to give success to their own people or defeat the people of some rival deity. All departments and regions of the world are full of their miraculous activity. Above ground, they are managing the thunders; distilling in showers, or settling in dews; ripening or blasting the harvests; breathing health, or poisoning the air with pestilential infections. In the ground they stir up volcanic fires, and wrestle in earthquakes that shake down cities. In the deep world underground, they receive the ghosts of departed men, and preside in Tartarean majesty over the realms of the shades. The unity of reason was nothing to these Gentiles. They had little thought of nature as an existing scheme of order and law. Every thing was supernatural. The universe itself, in all its parts, was only a vast theater in which the gods and demigods were acting their parts.

But there sprung up, at length, among the Greeks, some four or five centuries before the time of Christ, a class of speculative neologists and rationalizing critics, called Sophists, who began to put these wild myths of religion to the test of argument. If we may trust the description of Plato, they were generally men without much character, either as respects piety or even good morals; a conceited race of Illuminati, who more often scoffed than argued against the sacred things of their religion. Still it was no difficult thing for them to shake, most effectually, the confidence of the people in schemes of religion so intensely mythical. And it was done the more easily that the more moderate and sober minded of the Sophists did not propose to overthrow and obliterate the popular religion, but only to resolve the mythic tales and deities into certain great facts and powers of nature; and so, as they pretended, to find a more sober and rational ground of support for their religious convictions. In this manner we are informed that one of their number, Eumerus, a Cyrenian, "resolved the whole doctrine concerning the gods into a history of nature."

The religion of the Romans, at a later period, underwent a similar process, and became an idle myth, having

Or, we may take the declaration of Pliny, from the side of the heathen philosophy itself, though many were not ready to go the same length, preferring to retain religion, which they oftener called superstition, as a good instrument for the state and useful as a restraint upon the common people. He says:"All religion is the offspring of necessity, weakness, and fear. What God is, if in truth he be any thing distinct from the world, it is beyond the compass of man's understanding to know."

Thus, between the destructive processes of reason entering on one side to demolish, and Christianity on the other to offer itself as a substitute, the old mythologic religions fell, and were completely swept away.