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The Harp of Prophecy

Sweet is the harp of prophecy: too sweet
Not to be wrong’d by a mere mortal touch
— William Cowper: The Task, vi. 747-8

Robertson Smith’s letters from Edinburgh to his parents at Keig picture him as a highly ambitious and somewhat priggish young man, still greatly constrained by an upbringing that was both strict and sheltered. Writing in May, 1868, for example, about his teaching work with the junior Hebrew class, he remarks to his father:

The Juniors are perhaps improving a little; but that is very doubtful. I think I have considerably modified their open profanity in my presence; but I do not know if I have touched their consciences – if indeed they have any. It is pretty clear however that they respect me, which is so far an advantage.1

The absolute embargo on any kind of recreational activity on the Sabbath (beyond improving reading and regular church attendance) was to linger with him for many years and caused some heart-searching both in Edinburgh2 and Germany.3 Smith’s education at home did not otherwise inhibit his capacity to form relationships (with his own sex at least) and by this stage he was very thoroughly involved socially. Having become a member of the New College Theological Society in 1867, he was anxious to make his mark and at the start of 1868 began to draft a paper on Prophecy. The first intimation of this comes in a letter to his father on 3rd January of that year, in which he indicates that he has written an essay on the subject of Old Testament prophecy for Professor A.B. Davidson:

I have not been doing much this week since I got D’s essay4 fairly finished. I may perhaps modify the latter part a little still. The subject needs very nice treatment and it requires very exact handling to bring out that the Prophet’s mind acting according to its natural laws was yet the organ of a supernatural Revn. My leading idea is a parallelism between prophecy and the Xn. life. Man’s agency forms the connecting power by which God’s Creation is moulded into conformity with his spirit. Man and the world at large were made by God Supernaturally and fitted for his divine purpose, but that purpose is only reached through the Free Activity of Xn. men guided by the spirit of G. as a formative principle. So in prophecy there was provided a certain supernatural matter of thought in visions &c. prob. by supern. actions on the nervous system. This fitted into the natural matter present to the prophet’s mind and the two thus combined were moulded into a thought by the action of the Prophet’s mental powers guided by the formative influence of the divine spirit. The double divine action below and above the Prophet’s own activity sufficed perfectly to control the result without interfering in a magical way with the laws of Human thought.

I do not know if this is intelligible but I think the thought has some apologetic and scientific value.5

This is one of the rare instances from the extant correspondence in which Smith reveals his exploratory thinking on theological and metaphysical matters. It certainly implies that father and son had been accustomed to exchanging views on such matters in discussion at home; even more importantly it strongly betrays the penetrating influence of Alexander Bain on Smith’s metaphysical thinking (e.g. “the laws of Human thought”) and it contains the first recorded reference to his own determination to follow a scientific approach in his theological studies. It is important to note that the writing of this essay pre-dates, by almost a year, Smith’s involvement with P.G. Tait and it is clear that this youthful and bold attempt at a scientific analysis of human thought owes most to the direct influence of Bain and William Pirie Smith.

Prophecy and Personality

The paper was quickly finished and presented to the Theological Society on the evening of 24th January, 1868, even before Professor Davidson had read the original essay. There had been a storm in Edinburgh of particular ferocity that day6 and Smith’s audience was accordingly “very small”, as he notes when writing to his father the following day, but:

My essay was very favourably received tho’ I think that no one except Lindsay fully understood it. Lindsay gave a very favourable criticism, declaring that the psychological part was perfect so far as our psychology went, but doubting whether psychology was far enough developed to base a theory on.

Black the regular critic praised me highly but quite missed some important points and did not profess fully to understand me. Kippen said he thought it was the best essay he ever heard and began to pitch into its main thesis as contrary to the doctrine of predestination – by a complete misconception of a term I had used. Bell gave a very kind laudatory criticism praising the conscientiousness with which the thoughts were worked out, and also praising the style …

The general agreement was that the essay was somewhat German and obscure, that the obscurity was due to the subject matter rather than the treatment which was clear as far as possible in so abstract a subject, that there was no padding in it, and that it was very ingenious [and] that the thoughts were beautiful and all wrong …

I think I may say on the whole that my essay could not have been received with more respect. No one ventured to attack it strongly because no one quite followed the course of thought.7

Smith’s gratification at the reception of his maiden speech is very evident here – particularly in the rather uncharacteristic shafts of humour that shine through the letter. Here too, there occur the first overt references to the formative influence of German theological and psychological ideas upon his thinking and to his awareness that this is by no means to the liking of his compatriots. Equally interesting is the comment that his close friend, Lindsay, had been the only person fully to understand the paper – there are several subsequent references in Smith’s correspondence which indicate that others often failed to follow his rapid thinking and that he should strive to communicate his ideas in simpler, more lucid terms.8

The paper itself, of which a sizeable part only remains, is of exceptional interest in foreshadowing many of the ideas which Smith was to develop systematically in the years to come and which were to prove so cataclysmic in their effects upon Free Church susceptibilities.9 Its main thesis indeed was to be encapsulated in one of the more notorious aperçus made by Smith in his 1875 article “Bible” for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “There is no reason to think that a prophet ever received a revelation which was not spoken directly and pointedly to his own time”.10 Smith’s essay, however, while presenting his arguments systematically, logically and in great depth, does not succeed in communicating his message with all the clarity one might wish and it is entirely understandable that most of his New College peers found it hard to follow him at times. Lindsay’s remarks on the limitations of contemporary psychology are especially pertinent, for it is evident that WRS is struggling here to write at what may fairly be described as the cutting edge of mid-nineteenth century psychology, which itself lacked the range of appropriate terminology that Whewell and others had devised by then for the physical sciences.11 Inevitably, Robertson Smith had recourse to the so-called “Laws of Association”, developed (speculatively for the most part) by the eminent “Scotch School” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, from Hume to Bain himself, by way of Dugald Stewart, David Hartley, Sir William Hamilton and the Mills, father and son.12 Smith did not then have the advantage of Bain’s later ideas (and improved terminology) but had the decided benefit of the latter’s already carefully developed concept of mind/body parallelism.13

“Prophecy and Personality” begins with two fundamental propositions: that history14 and prophecy are alike the work of God; and that both are products of the human personality. Thus, while the supernatural is always at work, so too are the processes of the human intellect. The two contributory factors cannot be separated and their action (in this world) is necessarily conjoined in an intimate fashion.15 Prophecy does not emerge as a kind of supernatural implant in the mind of the prophet but is mediated through the active emotional and cognitive involvement of the human being concerned:

For many who claim to have risen above a mere mechanical theory of prophecy yet seem to think that what the Spirit presented to the prophet was a ready-made thought or a complete visionary picture of a purely objective kind which he was then able to lay hold of, embody in words, and utter.16

Even in the case of a “vision”, which (like “a dream or reverie”) may come unbidden into the mind, the elements, Smith insists, are “intelligently apprehended” and worked over by the subconscious mind. Here Smith is using ideas developed by Bain and J.S. Mill (and also by Helmholtz) that elementary sense impressions are integrated by the mind’s active perception into a coherent picture. In other words (as Smith says): “The prophet is not a mere lyre struck by the plectrum … the revelation was not only through the prophet but to the prophet, and so had to be intelligently apprehended by him”.17 Hence, he continues, “… all talk of an objective vision is absurd … objective images or objective thoughts are produced by the pure activity of the mind”.18 Such conclusions, Robertson Smith asserts, are accepted generally by “competent psychologists”19 and “the whole process of mental combination … may be regarded as fully explained by psychologists”.20 The exact nature of the prophetic vision will, WRS argues, be determined by the personality of the prophet as well as by the historical circumstances prevailing at the time:

The strong productiveness of the prophet’s mind became a most important factor in the production of the divine visions even where the prophet’s personality was properly not involved; and these visions were generally built out of the various elements familiar to the mind of the seer. In the case of men possessed, like all prophets, of a strong historic sense we must expect that the events of contemporary history would play an important part in moulding the visions.21

The matter of spoken revelation (“such divine communications as took the form of an internal voice”22) is, Smith concedes, more complex, partly because such messages were bound to be influenced all the more by the prophet’s own conscious thoughts and emotional bias. Indeed the prophet’s strong ethical character would necessarily predispose him “to view everything in its bearings on the moral necessities of the age”.23 The prophetic revelation could not possibly be “evil” in content, given the seer’s moral disposition.24

Whether the prophet could be expected to offer a truly significant long-term prediction (“any new moral development of history, which represented quite a new turn in the contest of good and evil”25) is dependent, Smith continues, upon the intensity of the man’s faith, on “a full sympathy with the Divine activity in Redemption” and on his possession of “the grand idea that filled the prophet’s mind and … which for the Hebrews was summed up in the word Jehovah”.26 Even granting the weight of such factors on the Prophet, Smith concludes, with an unusual display of caution:

I must add, with some hesitation, a doubt whether any of the highest forms of revelation, any essentially new thought, not merely a combination of old principles, could occur where the personality of the prophet was not consciously at work. The laws of association are only capable of rearranging representative notions (Vorstellungen27) already familiar to the mind … but where a new thought had to be reached, some new principle deduced from the general law of Jehovah’s working among men and revealing a new part of the redemptive work – here, I imagine, the prophet must have felt he was thinking out quite a new thought … The power of producing a new thought depends on man’s spiritual nature, and the only means by which this faculty can be raised to correspond with the necessities of prophecy is by a direct action of the Spirit of God on the spirit of man. What this action is we cannot tell: it lies in a region even the natural features of which have baffled human science.28

The whole essay represents a remarkable tour de force on the part of the twenty-two year old, startling in its novelty and arresting in its rationalistic and at times almost sceptical tone. It was hardly surprising that Smith was soon to be charged by at least one of his fellow students at New College with impugning the scriptures; nor is it at all unexpected that its tone was closely in keeping with Professor Davidson’s own expressed views, that:

The books of Scripture, so far as interpretation and general formal criticism are concerned, must be handled very much as other books are handled.29

Although Smith’s topic is prophecy in the Hebrew scriptures, the paper is far more psychological than theological in its approach and breaks new ground in venturing to speculate upon the psychical processes involved in prophetic utterances. Already the style contains more than a hint of Smith’s impatient and, at times, quite dogmatic assertiveness – as when he writes, “And in this case, all talk of an objective vision is absurd”.30 As has already been indicated, Smith’s debt to Bain31 is very plain, not simply in the paper’s emphasis upon “the Laws of Association” (which were common currency in one form or another amongst nineteenth century philosophers and proto-psychologists) and in its somewhat awkward use of contemporary concepts from neuro-physiology,32 but also in its daring espousal of the notion of mind and body interaction, together with the emphatic assertion that perception was much more than the aggregation of sense-impressions.33

Bain was fully aware that, by insisting that mind needed body as much as body needed mind, he was challenging an old and cherished theological belief – not only that mind was immaterial in itself but that it could necessarily exist without its material accompaniment. Bain’s argument had profound implications for the concept of immortality and, as we shall see, to this issue we can trace the source of Tait and Balfour Stewart’s motivation for their subsequent book, The Unseen Universe. Robertson Smith’s blunt emphasis on the creative power of the prophet’s mind, in “processing” the external stimuli, whether natural or supernatural, is handled with greater circumspection by Bain34 but is evidently the main point of departure for WRS’s bold and innovative application of the principle to prophecy.35

The personal equation

With his avowedly “scientific” approach to the analysis of the phenomenon of prophecy, Robertson Smith sets out from the premise that supernatural elements (the raw material of revelation) impinge from without upon the prophet’s mind, exactly as do normal sensory data, but while “the outward [i.e. natural] senses were generally closed”.36 Precisely how the working of the divine Spirit comes thus to act upon the human mind is not elucidated: as we have seen, Smith held that aspect of the phenomenon to be one which “baffled human science”; on the other hand, he is insistent that the prophetic vision or utterance is, beyond question, the outcome of an interaction between man’s intellect and God’s spirit – a conviction that lay at the heart of all his later work. In this regard, one senses that Smith is continuously wrestling with these ideas and maintaining with difficulty an equipoise between scepticism and belief. What came across to so many of his fellow churchmen as a rationalistic attempt to “explain away” the supernatural was, for Smith himself, an entirely legitimate and reverential effort to demystify revelation and thus to bring it out of the dark realms of magical intervention and into the modern arena of scientific investigation.

It is from this personal perspective that the earliest of Smith’s papers deserves particularly to be viewed and interpreted. Not only does the personality of the young Robertson Smith emerge vividly, with all its intemperate yet driving zeal, in his mode of presentation, in the polemical style of his argument and in his relentless insistence upon facing up to what (for him) are patently obvious facts; but, as he writes, so he reveals his own unconscious identification with the prophetic rôle itself. Like those dominating figures from the pages of the Old Testament – those “strong” personalities with a mission towards their fellow men – so Robertson Smith is inspired to know that he too has “a new thought” to communicate; “some new principle deduced from the general law of Jehovah’s working among men”37 – and this new thought or principle is the fruit of collaboration between the divine spirit and WRS’s own intellectual effort or “mental energy”, backed by emotional zeal, tenacity of purpose and an insight into what he describes as “the moral bearings of the age”.

By the very slightest of shifts, Smith’s own motivational impulses, as reflected in this unconscious but quite transparent personal allegory, might well have been transposed into purely secular or humanistic terms, such as Mill or Bain would have used; and this new view of prophetic revelation could have been construed as a straightforward psychological insight with implications for the “moral bearings” of the current age. Yet, so far as we can tell, Robertson Smith never took that final step, nor indeed is it at all likely that the identification which he made with his Old Testament ego-ideals ever came fully to consciousness. What persisted unflaggingly was the drive to give the world a “new thought”; and what that thought might be was as yet far from clear in his own mind. He writes:

But to other prophets [besides Moses] God spoke behîdôth, an expression that can hardly mean “in enigmas”, but rather points to the more general fact that thought was necessary to apprehend it and bring it into an articulate form. We must not suppose that hîdah is like a cypher which only needs translation.38 The Hebrew enigma does not contain the thought that is expressed in the answer, but only hints at it and affords a direction for the thoughts of the person to whom it is proposed.39

For WRS, the “thinking out” was to be his own doing; but the enigmatic hints – the multiform unexplained phenomena of nature and human behaviour – had been provided by God for men like himself to wrestle with.

More on the supernatural

Smith’s ideas were eventually to arouse controversy and suspicion amongst some of his fellow students but at this stage their presentation had been too enigmatic to raise alarm. In the meantime, he worked very hard during 1868, gaining the Hamilton Scholarship at the start of the new session40 but coming only fourth in the competition for the Shaw Fellowship, which went to his friend Lindsay.41 In his letter home communicating these details (January, 1869) WRS writes: “I have been taking long walks and writing an Essay for the Theol: this week”. By now, he had been elected Secretary of The New College Theological Society and, almost exactly one year on from the date of his first presentation to the Society, Smith delivered a second paper, entitled “Christianity and the Supernatural”,42 in which he not only reasserted many of the views expressed in “Prophecy and Personality” but outlined other seminal ideas that were to reach full expression only much later, in The Religion of the Semites.

He approaches his subject somewhat circuitously, leading off in Austenesque style with the pronouncement: “It is a common observation that all theology is running into apologetics”; and regretting that such apologetics are always defensive in tone and pay scant regard to the “science” of theology.43 Smith himself, he insists, prefers Abelard’s intelligo ut credam to Anselm’s credo ut intelligam and deplores those who will not employ reason in the cause of belief. It is wholly inadequate, however, to accord religious belief the status of a provisional hypothesis, as Bishop Butler had done in his Analogy of Religion, since belief carries an emotional weighting – an “emotional warmth” – and:

I am sure no Christian would feel a hypothetical Christianity was worth having. And the reason is plain. For the essence of personal Christianity lies in love to a personal Saviour. That such a Saviour really lives and really loves me must be more than a hypothesis if I am really to love Him.44

It is at this point that Robertson Smith’s fervent evangelicalism emerges into open tension with his rationalistic tendencies. The essence of Christianity, for Smith, subsists in a trusting, egalitarian and almost “man to man” relationship with Christ:

What makes our Christianity precious to us is that it is essentially a real fellowship between God and man mediated through Jesus Christ as our Redeemer from sin. It is a personal relationship to Christ and to God in Christ that we seek in Christianity, and it is the reality of this relationship that we are concerned to maintain with all the energy we may against all who deny it.”45

This relationship (like that of the prophet to the divine Word) constitutes a two-way process, demanding the individual’s active involvement, intellectual as well as emotional or moral. Such a belief, of course, presupposes the acknowledgement of supernatural stimuli acting upon the individual; and –

It is a notorious fact that the school that attacks the historic truth of Christianity takes for its presupposition the impossibility of the supernatural—does not for a moment profess to be able to carry out its destructive criticism without this presupposition. With such a school Christianity can proclaim no truce. Such theories we can never consent to view as matter for friendly discussion. Our Christian loyalty is tampered with when we are invited to embrace a Christianity that leaves no room for personal intercourse between God and man.46

What is open to “free and friendly discussion” with others, Smith maintains, is precisely the question of how to define the nature of such supernatural activity – to find an “objective criterion” of Christian thought or belief which is acceptable both to his colleagues with their “Scottish orthodoxy” and also to those others beyond the Presbyterian faith who possess “true Christian feeling”: not to attempt this leads to an unforgivable narrowness that amounts to bigotry. The Church’s present apologetical theology, Smith continues, is weak –

and because weak unjust, and because unjust tends continually to repel from Christianity all who are not drawn to the truth by a moral necessity strong enough to overpower their sense of this weakness and injustice.

It is absurd47 to attempt to compensate for this narrowness of scientific view by cultivating a sentimental breadth of sympathy … In a word, we must reconsider the whole treatment of the premises of Christianity. Such a treatment the Germans have long seen to be necessary, and have in no small measure succeeded in effecting.48

All this was potentially inflammatory, even within the relatively safe confines of a student association, but Smith now went further, following the path that was to lead him later into open conflict with his church. The Westminster Confession had rightly founded Christian belief upon an acceptance of the supernatural – divine revelation as manifested in “the work of redemption”49 and, most clearly, in the incarnation and resurrection of Christ – which was what proved utterly compelling for the disciples:

The essence of their Christianity was their actual fellowship with their Master, and the new life of which in this fellowship they were conscious. And so it must be still. For the fellowship of men with God in Christ, which was realised in the life of our Lord on earth, can be no passing gleam in the world’s history.50

And it would be “absurd”, Smith observes again, to claim that such work of redemption is conditional upon proving that the Bible is infallible, for the Bible is not revelation in itself but only a record of the historical revelation of God to man. God’s activity in this respect (“an action of God upon human personality”51) demands the reciprocally active intellectual involvement of each Christian. Natural phenomena certainly show the hand of God but the “Evidences” approach of Bishop Butler and his like does not constitute an adequate apologetic. Nor is Smith willing to accept the view that miracles are “products of a higher law of nature” as some were now attempting to imply. Rather, they represent a true incursion of God into historical events:

In a word, God’s supernatural manifestation of himself in redemption is miraculous,—breaking through the natural course of the universe. We do not in saying this deny the reality and necessity of a natural manifestation of God; but we say that such a manifestation is valuable only as a subsidiary to a miraculous and immediate manifestation.52

And Smith concludes:

On these grounds we would wholly exclude the doctrine of the infallible inspiration of Scripture from the sphere of apologetics and relegate it to dogmatic theology … Not on the Bible as an infallible book, but on the historic manifestation of God in Christ must our faith rest. And when this is understood we shall no longer be constantly uneasy at the progress of criticism in Scripture. We shall not hesitate to test the doctrine of inspiration like every other doctrine of Christianity with all impartiality and calmness and by all additional light that science or criticism can cast upon it.53

Thus, with the utmost lucidity and frankness, did the young Robertson Smith set out the agenda for his future work. The challenge to those who still clung to the infallible inspiration of the Bible was unmistakable, albeit set firmly within an evangelical framework of the utmost orthodoxy. Within the Theological Society there were immediate repercussions. One of Smith’s fellow-students, by the name of Reid, accused him of “contempt to Scripture”54 and WRS retaliated with all the wounding verbal resources at his command.55 As he informed his mother, there was some dismay at the violence of Smith’s own attack on Reid, and even some imputation that he (Smith) “had for some time been persecuting Reid”:

I defended myself in a temperate way saying that I did not mean to be personal and withdrew anything personal that I might have said in the heat of debate but adhering to the position that Reid’s accusations of contempt to Scripture showed that he was quite incompetent as to Theological Knowledge to speak on such a subject.

This Explanation clearly satisfied the Society. However the motion for deletion [of Reid’s original motion] was thrown out – tho’ most men took as their ground for this that Reid’s motion tho’ absurd ought to be left in the Minute-Book and in fact hit Reid harder than the opposite side had done. However, R. took this as a victory and asked leave to make some personal explanations which took the form of abuse of me so virulent that he had repeatedly to be called to order … Reid ended by saying that he would allow no man to question his Theological attainments and that if the Society did not call on me to retract he would resign.56

Smith’s letters home continue with a blow-by-blow account of the procedural wrangle that ensued and which was eventually resolved by Reid’s indignant resignation. Although supported by the majority in the Society, Smith quite obviously remained bruised by the ferocity of the attack made upon him, while seeming unaware of the hurt which he himself had caused to the other. Less than a week later, he wrote again to his mother:

I believe our Theol: row is quite over unless it appears in the Watchword for Reid is a strong Beggite.57

This is the first of many reference to Dr James Begg, editor of the Watchword and (as Smith was later to describe him) one of the leaders of the “Highland horde”. Dr Begg had achieved considerable eminence in the Free Church, not least through his work for the socially deprived within the urban areas of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but his rigidly conservative views on the inspiration of Scripture were to become the rallying point for all those in the Free Church who viewed with alarm and despondency the growing inroads upon traditional belief from the higher criticism.

From Secretaryship of the Theological Society, Smith progressed to the Presidency for the session 1869-7058 and delivered his presidential address, “The Work of a Theological Society” at the opening meeting in November, 1869, some weeks before finally deciding to apply for the Aberdeen chair. His talk59 is a masterly example of evangelical rhetoric, characterised moreover by a greater degree of tact and diplomatic circumspection than were his earlier contributions. Views opposed to his own are, for instance, no longer categorised automatically as “absurd”. There is a renewed emphasis on the need for “mutual respect” and for “friendly discussion in spite of fundamental differences” and, while polemical discussion is quite appropriate within a wider context, there should be no destructive debate within the close-knit fellowship of the Society:

But from a Society like ours, hostile discussion must be excluded. The opposition of opinion must be dialectical, not polemical; that is, we must recognise that different views are maintained not from opposing interests, but only because unequal stress is laid by various speakers on different parts of those determining principles which all admit to have real weight.60

This evidence of improved social poise may be related to Smith’s friendship with Tait and to his consequently widening circle of acquaintances in Edinburgh; in part also it may have stemmed from his second visit to Germany, with J.S. Black, in the spring and summer of 1869, where the appropriate letters of introduction secured a most friendly and helpful reception from many of the leading scientists and theologians at Bonn, Göttingen and Heidelberg.61

Nevertheless, it is clear from this final address to the Theological Society that Robertson Smith’s fundamental principles have not changed. In the first place, theology by deduction from doctrine is not enough:

True discussion is found where the inquiry starts not from explicit principles, but from a consciousness which is not yet fully given as scientific knowledge, and from which general principles and special applications may be evolved side by side.62

Secondly, no part of theology ought to be exempt from critical (though not polemical) discussion, if theology is to warrant being treated as a science. As an illustration of this point, Smith hints at matters which will come to concern him more and more in the coming years:

So soon as we pass from the merely grammatical to the real interpretation of Old Testament prophecy, we find a series of difficulties arise which may ultimately be shown to depend in great measure on the true theory of the Hebrew theocracy; and that again is a problem which goes far beyond the sphere of exegesis and can only be resolved from the general principles of God’s historical dealings with man. And this is clearly a question for systematic theology, but one which the orthodox dogmatic has no means of solving.63

The differences that exist between the different branches of the Reformed church are far from negligible: accordingly, argues Smith, we cannot repose that absolute faith in our own particular Confession that was urged upon the Free Church by the Moderator of the last General Assembly, who had proclaimed himself satisfied that the Kirk’s standards were “but an echo in human language of the infallible Word”.64 And, in a strikingly iconoclastic passage, Robertson Smith goes on:

So long as we hold fast the theory that the true ideal of Protestant dogmatic is a mere echo of the infallible Word in human language, we must either despair of the Reformation theology or shut our eyes to obvious historical facts which forbid us to suppose that only accidental causes have operated to prevent the realisation of that ideal in the confessional theology. If it is impossible for us to rest in either of these alternatives we must venture to open up the question of the true relation of theology to Scripture.65

Thirdly, our theological systems are, Smith reasserts:

the product of an activity of the human mind …which is the development, in a dialectical process, into more and more scientific form, of a religious consciousness which must always find its canon in Scripture, but which none the less has a life and growth of its own … theology does not advance by deductions from axioms which lie outside of the theologian, and therefore, if it be a science at all, can only advance by the evolution of a consciousness lying within him [the theologian].66

Not only has Smith returned here to the emphasis, first made in “Prophecy and Personality”, that theology is in part the activity of the human mind, but he now appears to place this intellectual activity above that of revelation. The latter, at most, is the germ within the consciousness from which man develops his theological constructs by a process of evolution – and this appears to be Smith’s first use of the term. He is aware at this stage of risking the accusation of rationalism and quickly therefore reinstates revelation within his equation. Without revelation, rationalism on its own is “Pelagianism of the intellect” – the hubristic confidence that we can know the things of God without that germ of revelation imparted by the influence of the Holy Spirit. For Smith, throughout his life, the testimony of such an influence lay, not in any conviction of “conversion” but in a “consciousness of fellowship with God through Christ Jesus our Redeemer”:67 Butlerian “Evidences” reflect, for Smith, a spirit of Moderatism characteristic of their eighteenth century context and constitute the worst kind of apologetics: “To suppose that the Church has to be nurtured on Christian evidences is to suppose that she has forgotten her own identity” and it was “a melancholy day for Christendom” when the Reformation churches began to rely on “evidences” to justify its existence.68

Natural theology

Consciously or otherwise, Smith was now hitting at the whole tradition and rationale of natural theology, which had reached its peak in terms of elaboration during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and which is well exemplified in the encyclopaedic series of works known as the Bridgewater Treatises, of which Thomas Chalmer’s contribution was perhaps the best known and most influential.69 In signalling his intention to lay an axe to that whole apologetic mode of theological thinking upon which the Free Church had founded its social doctrines, Robertson Smith was by no means unprecedented. Mark Pattison, for one, in Essays and Reviews, had offered a powerful and ironic critique of the rationalistic style of apologetic espoused by Butler and his followers:

There needs [in their eyes] no “preparation of the heart” to receive the Gospel, the evidences of religion are sufficient to convince every unprejudiced enquirer. Unbelievers are blameworthy as deaf to an argument which is so plain that they cannot but understand it. Under such self-imposed conditions religious proof seems to divest itself of all that is divine, and out of an excess of accommodation to the recipient faculty to cease to be a transforming thought. Rationalism can object to the old sacramental system that it degrades a spiritual influence into a physical effect. But rationalism itself, in order to make the proof of revelation universal, is obliged to resolve religion into the moral government of God by rewards and punishments, and especially the latter. It is this anthropomorphic conception of God as the ‘“Governor of the universe”, which is presented to us in the theology of the Hanoverian divines, a theology which excludes on principle not only all that is poetical in life, but all that is sublime in religious speculation.70

For Thomas Chalmers, the intellectual driving-force behind the Disruption of 1843, natural theology was still the ideal medium for providing a complete and comprehensive answer to every moral, social and epistemological question faced by mankind. Such an approach had already proved the existence of God, both through the “argument from design” as set out in William Paley’s Natural Theology in 1802 and through the “argument by analogy” of Joseph Butler (published a century before Chalmers’s Treatise) which set out to demonstrate the essential “reasonableness” of religion;71 likened God’s rule to that of an enlightened monarch, whose mission was the happiness and wellbeing of his subjects;72 and asserted that those very vagaries, contradictions and ambiguities to which we were so accustomed in our secular existences, dictated that God’s revelation of Himself should in like fashion be presented to mortal minds. But there were new problems, such as those raised by Thomas Malthus in his notorious Essay on the Principle of Population,73 concerning the seemingly inadequate provision made by a benevolent Providence for a terrestrial race capable of an exponential rate of increase in its numbers.

In his Bridgewater Treatise, Chalmers set about the task of dispelling the sloppily romantic notion74 of a benign and paternalistic God:

Nevertheless, the same conscience which tells us what is sound in ethics, is ever and anon suggesting what is sound in theology – that we have to do with a God of truth, that we have to do with a God of righteousness; and this lesson is never perhaps obliterated in any breast, by the imagery, however pleasing, of a universal parent, throned in soft and smiling radiance, and whose supreme delight is to scatter beatitudes innumerable through a universal family. We cannot forget, although we would, that justice and judgment are the habitation of His throne; and that His dwelling-place is not a mere blissful elysium or paradise of sweets, but an august and inviolable sanctuary.75

And he sternly warned his readers that not only was it useless to “have recourse to arithmetic” to reckon the balance between good and evil in the world as “our slender and sentimental theists” had done (in an effort to controvert Malthus) but that the very existence of suffering in any form and, a fortiori, of the “great actual wretchedness that is now in the world” was due to moral degradation; or, in a word, to “a vicious and ill-regulated morale”.76 With magnificent and minatory rhetoric, Chalmers deduced an assurance of immortality from the existence of a personal conscience and from his confident assertion that mankind is the unique possessor of that faculty:

Even the hardiest in guilt are not insensible to the force of this sentiment [conscience]. They feel it, as did Catiline and the worst of Roman emperors, in the horrors of remorse. There is, in spite of themselves, the impression of an avenging God—not the less founded upon reasoning, that it is the reasoning of but one truth, or rather of but one transition, from a thing intimately known to a thing intimately concluded, from the reckoning of a felt and present conscience within, to the more awful reckoning of a God who is the author of conscience and knoweth all things. Now, it is thus that men are led irresistibly to the anticipation of a future state—not by their hopes, we think, but by their fears; not by a sense of unfulfilled promises, but by the sense and the terror of unfulfilled penalties; by their sense of a judgment not yet executed, of a wrath not yet discharged upon them. Hence the impression of a futurity upon all spirits, whither are carried forward the issues of a jurisprudence, which bears no marks, but the contrary, of a full and final consummation this side of death.77

Thirty-four years on, much had changed. The theological assumption of a relationship between sin and adversity (particularly poverty) had increasingly been called into question. Having read Malthus, many had begun to doubt the accuracy of God’s arithmetical calculations with respect to the maintenance of socio-economic equilibrium, while the advent of Benthamite Utilitarianism and Comtean Positivism, together with the writings of James Mill and his son – particularly J.S. Mill’s Political Economy (1848) – had encouraged a belief in the importance of at least a limited and cautious degree of social engineering,78 if only to forestall a proletarian revolution in Britain. The steady progress of geological research had, by the 1860s, conclusively forced the abandonment of a terrestrial chronology based upon the scriptures; and in 1859 Darwin’s theory of evolution had at last been given to a public already prepared by so many other scientific discoveries of that era for a dramatic revision of long-accepted and hitherto sacrosanct beliefs based upon that process of deductive reasoning from dogmatic principles, which Chalmers so fervently upheld and which William Robertson Smith was now determinedly and methodically demolishing.

Smith’s address is so densely written that it is very doubtful if the full impact of his views was felt by his student audience. Moreover, it is thoroughly characteristic of all his writings – published work and correspondence alike – that social comment of any kind is conspicuously absent. Apart from making the most general of allusions to the moral component of the human mind, Smith systematically avoids discussing ethical or social issues. Consequently, his Presidential address contains no overt references of a socio-political nature which might have alerted his audience instinctively to the possibility of controversy or the taint of heterodoxy. Yet, viewed from a century on, his address can be seen to dispose utterly of all the tenets upon which Thomas Chalmers and his contemporaries in the Free Church had founded their religious beliefs: theology could not be based upon deduction either from Scripture or from ecclesiastical dogma; it could only progress by a truly scientific (i.e. inductive) process. The existing theology, Smith reiterated, was “artificial, insecure, and hampering to the legitimate freedom of the individual”;79 and –

In short, the Christian even in his so-called natural theology reasons from a conception of God – a consciousness of the relation of God to man which is not merely natural – because not shared by honest antagonists, – which is in a word specifically Christian, though not supporting itself by an appeal to the authority of Scripture. The sure proof that natural theology is not the scientific basis of revealed theology lies in the fact, which the history of the Deistic controversy made abundantly plain, that natural theology, as a knowledge of God true as far as it goes, is, apart from Christianity, an absolute fiction.80

Smith’s argument is not always easy to follow, even from the printed text. In essence, it is that natural theology (and Christian apologetics generally) operates by deduction from the presuppositions of established Christian dogma and consequently has no general validity for the understanding of religion. This becomes clear when WRS returns to the theme which was to occupy him until his death - the intrinsic sense of fellowship with the divine that is possible whether one is a Christian or not:

The subjective consciousness of union with God in Christ is absolutely the first thing in true Christianity, and it is from this consciousness outwards that the Christian develops for himself a true notion of God and a true notion of man.81

This starkly contradicts Chalmers’ rejection of the “slender and sentimental” notion of “fellowship with God” based upon the paradigm of a family headed by a benevolent parent. Yet precisely such a relationship had been Smith’s personal experience in childhood; and it was to colour indelibly the core of his theological thinking throughout his life. He continues:

Thus the rejection of natural theology in the sense of the old theology bears with it the characteristic principle of the new theology that subjective religion necessarily precedes true religious knowledge. That is, theology is no longer the sum of those doctrines by believing which we are united to God in faith and which, from the witness of the Holy Spirit to this their saving power, are received as indubitably true; but the doctrines of theology are the product of faith, the knowledge of the subject and object of faith which are evolved by dialectical necessity from the assurance of the primitive act itself.82

Convoluted as this passage is, it very clearly marks the direction of Smith’s thinking. Not only is theology now perceived, by him, as an evolving process of “dialectical necessity” but religious belief itself has its germination, not in any “conversion experience”, but in the alliance of knowledge with the “primitive act” which is the consciousness of fellowship in Christ. It can hardly be a coincidence that this address was delivered at the end of November, 1869, a month after Smith had been introduced, during a meeting of the “Edinburgh Evening Club”, to John F. McLennan,83 whose anthropological interests were to exert such a powerful influence upon him, and whose articles on “The Worship of Animals and Plants” were then appearing in the Fortnightly Review.