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The Fault Lines of Faith

Remove one brick from the cunningly adjusted fabric of orthodoxy, prove that a line of the Hebrew Scriptures was erroneous, and God would vanish from the world, heaven and hell become empty names, all motives for doing good be removed, and the earth become a blank and dreary wilderness. In remote country towns and small clerical coteries some vestiges of this cheerful opinion still exist.
— Leslie Stephen: “Darwinism and Divinity”.1

Among the first to remonstrate with Robertson Smith following publication of his earliest Encyclopaedia articles was George Smeaton, Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at New College and one of Smith’s former teachers. His letter of July, 1876, strikingly illustrates that combination of conscious sincerity and unconscious prejudice which characterised the reaction of the majority of the Free Church old guard. Smeaton writes more in sorrow than in anger and, in solemnly paternalistic terms, entreats his young colleague to repudiate his ill-considered sortie into perilous territory:

If you will not deem it an intrusion on my part, I w^d take the liberty of a man twice your age to remonstrate with you in the most earnest & solemn way on the attitude which you are now taking up on the authorship & composition of the several books of Scripture … Nothing since the formation of our church has filled me with more foreboding. I would beseech you to pause – to take counsel with your Father and your seniors – before committing yourself to positions from which you will find it every day more difficult to recede… The peril is in a public committal to crude notions. I wish I could rescue a gifted young mind and save it for the future usefulness which we all fondly anticipated.2

Smeaton acknowledges Smith’s ability and can only attribute his errors to a youthful inexperience which has led him to flirt with the “so-called criticism” of what ought to be called “the conjectural school”, whose views on biblical authorship are based “on the most shadowy of grounds – & commonly on no grounds at all”. He continues in the same vein:

I never supposed that your mathematical mind would find its pabulum there [in that school] & am surprised at the article “Bible” because the department of speculative unhistorical criticism never seemed to me the sphere which wd have any attractions for you. Are not the theories without any basis of historical fact? And what is the worth of such theories where the basis is mere conjecture or petty internal criticism leaping to arbitrary conclusions. I hope your mind will soon revolt from this castle-building in the air… I fear that many a Christian mind has been shocked by your inconsiderate attack on what is regarded as sacred… We Professors are not appointed by the Church to teach what tends to shake the faith of any or to advocate a criticism which is not legitimate.3

Smeaton observed that this was, to his knowledge, the first instance of an actual attack from within “any Scottish church” on the authenticity of the Bible – and, after enumerating some of those Continental critics who had produced such a “sad & bitter harvest”, he concluded:

My dear Sir let me entreat you by every consideration that is most sacred to extricate yourself from this perilous position. What w^d I not do to save you – to rescue you – from what I see is coming. Whether I think of your own future usefulness to be blighted (let no false friend persuade you otherwise), or of the honour of divine [sic] which I believe you value – or the reputation of our own Church among other Churches – surely not to be given only to inaugurate a school of irreverent criticism – I w^d adjure you to disclaim the errors of that article. Do you ask me how? You may say that you do not identify yourself with those opinions though you have sketched them, & express your regret that you have done so by words which were fairly construed as seeming to cast a shield over them. I may have to act agt these opinions being made open questions in the church: but I implore you to save us all from this painful alternative.4

The interest of this letter does not lie in Smeaton’s argument, since essentially there is none, but in the expression of raw emotions – pain, repugnance, incredulity and panic – affording some indication of the sentiments of all conservatively-minded Free Church men of the time. Smeaton has no understanding of the meaning or purpose of the higher criticism, as conceived by Smith: he perceives it only as a monstrous blasphemy which imperils the soul of his former student and which, by association, risks contaminating the entire church. The contents of Smith’s article represent, for Smeaton, an infection which is every bit as contagious as the worst of prevalent diseases, and even more dire in its ultimate consequences insofar as it will wreak spiritual perdition rather than simply physical dissolution.5

In his Rectorial address of 1874 to the students of Aberdeen University, Thomas Huxley had spoken of the instinctual aversion of traditional religious beliefs towards the growth of the physical sciences:

People do not always formulate the beliefs on which they act. The instinct of fear and dislike is quicker than the reasoning process; and I suspect that, taken in conjunction with some other causes, such instinctual aversion is at the bottom of the long exclusion of any serious discipline in the physical sciences from the general curriculum of Universities …6

Smeaton’s reaction was of this kind and only marginally more extreme than that of many others within the Free Church of the day. The sentiment of odio et arceo represented an elementary visceral response to what was perceived as a direct threat of almost unimaginable consequence, not only to established faith, but to the very body of Christ and thus to the souls of the faithful. It was not that the Free Church had been unaware of regrettable lapses elsewhere, nor that it failed to recognise, in part, the source of the “infection”, but that (as Smeaton had indicated) the disease had now penetrated within the body of the Free Church itself. It is hardly surprising therefore that, for many, only the radical extirpation of such a cancerous growth was seen as the effectual remedy if the souls of the faithful were to be protected from eternal destruction. In an earlier age, the life of the infected heretic would unhesitatingly have been sacrificed, through incarceration, torture and fire, for the protection of the community. While those ultimate remedies were now denied by law, the underlying urge remained as potent as ever and was to lead ineluctably to the symbolic auto-da-fé of Smith’s trial.

The development hypothesis

While George Smeaton and his colleagues firmly believed, with some justice, that Robertson Smith had contracted the scourge of Continental infidelity through his excursions abroad, they failed completely at the outset to identify the broader contaminating factors which had been endemic within Scotland itself since the days of Hume. In his earliest days at New College, WRS had seemingly remained untouched by the growth of scientific scepticism, writing to his friend Archie McDonald in 1867:

We get a list of about 50 [homily topics] to choose our subject from. I chose what I found to be a very difficult one – the theory of development in its bearings on Apologetics. Of course you will guess that I did not go in for the natural history of the subject but worked from Spencer not Darwin. I endeavoured to show not [only] that Nat. Hist. had not proved but that it never could prove such a theory and that the theory was metaphysically absurd and physically incorrect.7

Since there is no record of the homily itself having been preserved, it is difficult to guess at Smith’s actual approach to the topic. From W.S. Bruce’s autograph memoir of family life in 1862 at the Keig manse, however, we have a very clear indication of the freedom of discussion that William Pirie Smith permitted on all aspects of scientific discovery and theory – as well as of the young Robertson Smith’s zest for intellectual argument for its own sake:

The elder brother [WRS] at table and in walks was inclined to be disputatious & critical. Genesis & Geology was a favourite topic. Hugh Miller’s Old Red Sandstone on the one side and the Vestiges of Creation on the other gave occasion for very different views: while Darwin’s Book on The Origin of Species had made a tremendous sensation in the theological world & found a supporter with the Editor of the Aberdeen newspaper which came weekly to the Manse. This produced endless talk, & father & son took different sides to some extent… . I confess I was lost in wonder at the grip which the young man had of the questions & at the – as it appeared to me – daring presumption with which he questioned old-fashioned views about the age of the earth & of Man.8

Bruce’s colourful description (of which this is only a fragment) provides a far clearer and more rounded picture of Smith’s temperament, as well as that of the father, than we would otherwise possess. With visiting elders and their wives, the tea-table conversation was, by Bruce’s account, all of “Church questions and theological points”. Outwith those constraints, there were few barriers to discussion and obviously the young Smith was thoroughly conversant with those scientific issues of the day which were, for the most part, judiciously ignored by contemporary Free Church theologians.

Scotsmen had been at the forefront of geological discovery since the eighteenth century, with James Hutton, John Playfair and Charles Lyell successively establishing the principles of uniformitarianism, thus laying the groundwork for modern geology and disposing in the process of the Noachian deluge as well as creating a framework within which the Darwinian theory of evolution could be rationally accommodated.9 With the publication of Lyell’s Principles of Geology, such eminent figures as William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford, quickly revised their previous views and only isolated scientists – pre-eminently Philip Gosse and Hugh Miller – maintained a lingering resistance. As an ardent Free Church layman, a meticulous observer of natural phenomena and a valued publicist for that Church through his editorship of The Witness from 1840 until his death in 1854, Hugh Miller struggled continually to reconcile the findings of geology with scriptural testimony.10 To the end of his life, he fought valiantly against any “development theory” which did not incorporate some form of catastrophism or special creation capable of being harmonised with the Creation account in Genesis. Miller was determined, moreover, to endorse the converse theory of species degradation, since that was (he believed) not only a phenomenon manifested clearly in the divinely-degraded serpent but also a confirmation of the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination.11

For all its faults, Robert Chambers’ anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation12 was startlingly ahead of its time. Written in an easy, flowing and thoroughly optimistic style, it drew together the latest ideas in astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, palaeontology, philology, physiology and psychology in order to fashion an impressive array of evidence in support of a “development hypothesis” which presupposed only the operation of natural laws:

We have seen powerful evidence, that the construction of this globe and its associates, and inferentially all the other globes of space, was the result not of any immediate personal exertion on the part of the Deity, but of natural laws which are an expression of his will.13

If, argued Chambers, the new geological evidence demonstrated unequivocally a very long process of gradual development, then:

What is to hinder our supposing that the organic creation is also the result of natural laws, which are in like manner an expression of his will? More than this, the fact of the cosmical arrangements being an effect of natural law, is a powerful argument for the organic arrangements being so likewise, for how can we suppose the august Being, who brought all these countless worlds into form by the simple establishment of a natural principle flowing from his mind, was to interfere personally and specially on every occasion when a new shell-fish or reptile was to be ushered into existence on one of these worlds? Surely this idea is too ridiculous to be for a moment entertained.14

Even Hugh Miller, in Foot-prints of the Creator, had accepted the reality of a very lengthy process of terrestrial formation – for that had been, he agreed, a necessary work of divine preparation for mankind’s dwelling-place:

And yet the record does seem to speak of development and progression;—not, however, in the province of organized [sc. organic] existence, but in that of insensate matter, subject to the purely chemical laws. It is in the style and character of the dwelling-place that gradual improvement seems to have taken place,—not in the functions or the rank of any class of its inhabitants; and it is with special reference to this gradual improvement in our common mansion-house the earth, in its bearing on the “conditions of existence,” that not a few of our reasonings regarding the introduction and extinction of species and genera must proceed.15

Applied to the introduction of organic beings upon the earth, the development hypothesis, as adumbrated by de Maillet and Lamarck, before being continued by the author of Vestiges, was (for Miller) a plausibly seductive yet truly Satanic temptation, to be resisted at all costs, since it implied an unacceptable ontological relationship between humanity and the insensate herd. There was no transmutation of species; the lower did not produce the higher; and the superposition of fossiliferous deposits was “not identical with the fact of parental relation, nor even in any degree an analogous fact”.16 The author of Vestiges and his predecessors were mere dreamers of dreams,17 for:

When the coniferae could flourish on the land, and fishes subsist in the ocean, fishes and cone-bearing plants were created; when the earth became a fit habitat for reptiles and birds, reptiles and birds were produced; with the dawn of a more stable and mature state of things the sagacious quadruped was ushered in; and, last of all, when man’s house was fully prepared for him,—when the data on which it is his nature to reason and calculate had become fixed and certain,—the reasoning, calculating brain was moulded by the creative finger, and man became a living soul. Such seems to be the true reading of the wondrous inscription chiselled deep into the rocks.18

Both Miller and Chambers appealed moreover to probability theory. Going back to Pierre Laplace, Hugh Miller set out to controvert Hume on miracles: if an event were possible, no matter how extraordinary, its probability could be calculated mathematically and it was therefore bound to occur eventually. Hence such miracles as the creation or the incarnation were plainly reasonable possibilities. Chambers (somewhat more abreast of the times) turned to Charles Babbage and his calculating engine19 for an almost identical argument. Natural laws were discovered by observation, when events were perceived to occur in a regular pattern. Such a pattern or sequence could be reproduced algebraically using Babbage’s engine – but, by “programming” his device appropriately, it would be perfectly possible to introduce any number of remote and (to the observer) quite unpredictable changes of pattern or sequence of events. Any such change would appear to be a violation of the hitherto observed laws of nature – and would thus constitute a miracle in Humean terms.20

Both men employed the same reasoning to reach opposing conclusions: Chambers to demonstrate that the hitherto unobserved transmutation of species could occur, given a sufficient lapse of time; Miller to justify his belief in the Creator’s active and on-going intervention through a succession of special creations.21 The seemingly unbridgeable gulf between Chambers and Miller rested, not on scientific issues at all, but on matters of religious belief; and the tragedy of Miller’s suicide must ultimately be assigned to the profound antinomy that existed between his personal faith and the findings of his scientific pursuits.22 As his widow, Lydia, ambiguously wrote of her late husband in her Prefatory Remarks to the fifth edition of The Footprints of the Creator, “He was not able to keep up with the demands of the time”; and Miller himself made it clear that, from a purely scientific point of view:

God might as certainly have originated the species by a law of development, as he maintains it by a law of development; the existence of a First Great Cause is as perfectly compatible with the one scheme as with the other …
There are, however, beliefs, in no less degree important to the moralist or the Christian than even that in the being of a God, which seem wholly incompatible with the development hypothesis. If, during a period so vast as to be scarce expressible by figures, the creatures now human have been rising, by almost infinitesimals, from compound microscopic cells … until they have become men and women whom we see around us, we must hold either the monstrous belief, that all the vitalities, whether those of monads or of mites, of fishes or of reptiles, of birds or of beasts, are individually and inherently immortal and undying, or that human souls are not so.23

The influence of Herbert Spencer

Robertson Smith chose not to pursue the problematic geological or biological routes in making his student critique of the development theory, electing instead to challenge the influential writings of Herbert Spencer. In part, this may have been due to Smith’s antipathy towards John Duns, the New College professor of Natural Science, for whose lectures he expressed wholehearted contempt:

Duns’ class (Nat. Hist.) is you will be sorry to hear so conducted as to be an unmitigated nuisance. In the first place it is impossible as a rule to find out what the lecture is about. Then the specimens never accompany the lecture but are given a few days before or the day after. In the next place the spelling on them is execrable and the lectures are full of technicalities that are never written down or explained. To crown all we have popular lectures on Thursdays crowded with bad metaphors from Tennyson, Ruskin &c.24

Smith’s early grounding in the natural sciences, both at Aberdeen University and under his father’s instruction at home, had left him profoundly impatient of what passed for instruction in those subjects at New College.25 Spencer’s wide-ranging arguments presented a much more stimulating challenge and WRS was probably well ahead of his New College mentors in this respect, as his father’s Memorandum (quoting from one of Smith’s letters) implies:

“I am working at the Development theory for my Homily. In Spencer’s book the fallacies are very obvious. The manner in which Spencer contrives really to assume the materiality of the soul, in particular, (which of course is the foundation of the whole doctrine) is very ingenious, but contains an egregious petitio principii. Of course the doctrine of the correlation of forces forms a great feature in the argument. I think however that I can show that the doctrine is not understood by the development school, and that the doctrine of the dissipation of energy directly disproves the theory of evolution. In this point of view I think I might bring into my Homily something different from the common arguments”.26

Herbert Spencer had been actively promoting an evolutionary theory well before Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859 and his basic tenets were first set out in two short essays – “ The Development Hypothesis” and “Progress: its Law and Cause”27 – which well exhibit his strengths and weaknesses alike. Building upon Chambers (and thus also on Lamarck) he not only sets about providing a more secure logical basis for the arguments contained in Vestiges but seizes on the strongly environmentalistic attitude which permeates Chambers’ book and begins to extend this to an analysis of the social, political and cultural world of his day.28

From the beginning, Spencer adopts the term “evolution” to describe a principle or law which he finds immanent throughout the universe, from microcosm to macrocosm. Observable phenomenologically as “change”, evolution consists in a progressive process of functional transformation from simplicity to complexity, from homogeneity to heterogeneity, and from primitivism to civilisation. It is inconceivable, argues Spencer, that the opponents of development can really imagine living organisms to have come into being through millions of discrete “special creations”:

Careful introspection will show them that they have never yet realized to themselves the creation of even one species. If they have formed a definite conception of the process, let them tell us how a new species is constructed, and how it makes its appearance. Is it thrown down from the clouds? or must we hold to the notion that it struggles up out of the ground? Do its limbs and viscera rush together from all points of the compass? or must we receive the old Hebrew idea, that God takes clay and moulds a new creature? If they say that a new creature is produced in none of these modes, which are too absurd to be believed; then they are required to describe the mode in which a new creature may be produced—a mode which does not seem absurd: and such a mode they will find that they neither have conceived nor can conceive.29

For Spencer, the Development Hypothesis had the distinct merit of being at least conceivable, unlike its rival. More than that, however, it could be demonstrated already that:

… any existing species—animal or vegetable—when placed under conditions different from its previous ones, immediately begins to undergo certain changes of structure fitting it for the new conditions. They can show that in successive generations these changes continue, until ultimately the new conditions become the natural ones. They can show that in cultivated plants, in domesticated animals, and in the several races of man, such alterations have taken place.30

The process of change, over time and under conditions of great environmental variation, was infinitesimally gradual yet inexorable – comparable, Spencer added, with the perceived metamorphosis of a geometrical curve from circle to ellipse, to parabola, to hyperbola; or, in terms of human development, with the progression from “germinal vesicle” to newly-born child, and thence to grown man. To ignore or deny such obvious illustrations of a common principle operating throughout all aspects of existence merely demonstrated (Spencer concluded) “the tenacious vitality of superstition”:

Ask one of our leading geologists or physiologists whether he believes in the Mosaic account of the creation, and he will take the question as next to an insult. Either he rejects the narrative entirely, or understands it in some vague non-natural sense. Yet part of it he adopts; and that, too, literally. For whence has he got this notion of “special creation”, which he thinks so reasonable, and fights for so vigorously? Evidently he can trace it back to no other source than this myth which he repudiates. He has not a single fact in nature to quote in proof of it; nor is he prepared with any chain of abstract reasoning by which it may be established. Catechise him, and he will be forced to confess that the notion was put into his mind in childhood as part of a story which he now thinks absurd. And why, after rejecting all the rest of the story, he should strenuously defend this last remnant of it as though he had received it on valid authority, he would be puzzled to say.31

It is improbable that Robertson Smith ever consciously applied such reasoning to his own theological position, either as a student of New College or at the time of his trial. But it may fairly be inferred that his early reading of Spencer unconsciously reinforced those critical habits of mind already established in the dialectic between father and son at Keig, and presented him with an array of arguments that were readily and subliminally assimilated.

Spencer’s strengths were twofold: on the one hand, his robust style of debate (much superior to Lewes’ more ponderous approach) was backed by an impressive wealth of illustrative examples derived from a multiplicity of diverse sources; on the other, his remarkable talent for generalising and synthesising from such data enabled him to formulate principles that were capable of being applied both to traditionally “scientific” issues and also to the phenomena of human organisation and behaviour. In the longer essay, “Progress: its Law and Cause”, Spencer set out his theme of progress in precisely this fashion – as a process of organic growth, always moving from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.32 The paradigms of geological and biological evolution were, he maintained, directly applicable to the progress of mankind in its social aspects:

The change from homogeneity to heterogeneity is displayed equally in the progress of civilization as a whole, and in the progress of every tribe or nation; and is still going on with increasing rapidity. As we see in existing barbarous tribes, society in its first and lowest form is a homogeneous aggregation of individuals having like powers and like functions; the only marked difference of function being that which accompanies difference of sex. Every man is warrior, hunter, fisherman, tool-maker, builder; every woman performs the same drudgeries; every family is self-sufficing, and save for purposes of aggression and defence, might as well live apart from the rest.33

Religious practice followed the same course towards increasing complexity, demonstrating all those features associated with the division of labour and rôle specialisation that were to be found elsewhere in social organisms. The formation of ecclesiastical hierarchies was only one instance of that process of continuing differentiation which characterised all developed societies; and the self-same principle could be seen to operate in the formation of languages, the growth of art forms, the development of literature and the evolution of science. The universality of this progress from homogeneity to heterogeneity implied a general law – and thus some underlying cause which, though noumenally unfathomable, was still capable, Spencer argued, of being described with as much precision as any Newtonian law of physics.34 Formulated in the most general terms, the law stated that: Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect.35

In support of his “Law”, Spencer proceeded characteristically to offer abundant illustrations drawn from cosmology, geology, biology and sociology. Of these, the example of the steam locomotive is perhaps the most intriguing and impressive, typifying his awareness of the unprecedented and revolutionary concatenation of effects – administrative, economic, industrial, demographic and cultural – which the introduction of the railways had heralded. His long and detailed description ends:

Classes who never before thought of it, take annual trips to the sea; visit their distant relations; make tours; and so we are benefited in body, feelings and intellect. Moreover, the more prompt transmission of letters and of news produces further changes—makes the pulse of the nation faster. Yet more, there arises a wide dissemination of cheap literature through railway bookstalls, and of advertisements in railway carriages: both of them aiding ulterior progress.36

For Spencer, all change was progress; and evolution, by definition, was progressive change.37 Until 1858, however, when Darwin and Wallace jointly communicated their Theory of Natural Selection to a receptive scientific world, Spencer had lacked the final key to the problem of species variation and had resorted in the customary style to Lamarckian factors for an explanation of the mystery of organic development.38 In any case, he was content to acknowledge certain limits to human reason and, in the concluding paragraphs of his essay, presents the reader with yet another Tyndallic poisoned chalice to the religious sentiment:

Little as it may seem to do so, fearless inquiry tends continually to give a firmer base to all true Religion. The timid sectarian, alarmed at the progress of knowledge, obliged to abandon one by one the superstitions of his ancestors, and daily finding his cherished beliefs more and more shaken, secretly fears that all things may some day be explained; and has a corresponding dread of Science: thus evincing the profoundest of all infidelity—the fear lest the truth be bad. On the other hand, the sincere man of science, content to follow wherever the evidence leads him, becomes by each new inquiry more profoundly convinced that the Universe is an insoluble problem.39

Progress and truth

Ten years after his initially hostile reading of Spencer, Robertson Smith completed a paper, entitled “The Progress of Old Testament Studies”, which James Candlish, his ever-supportive friend and editor of The British and Foreign Evangelical Review, published in the summer of 1876.40 While the link with Spencer’s essay, “Progress: its Law and Cause” may seem remote at first sight, the coincidence of the term “Progress” in the titles of both papers is scarcely fortuitous, for by now Smith’s own scientific outlook and approach were thoroughly Spencerian. WRS had become acutely conscious of being an “agent for change” within the realm of Old Testament criticism, even although he could not yet have realised the full extent to which his work would radically reshape the pattern of theologico-critical orthodoxy by the end of the nineteenth century.

Smith began with a spirited attack on the view expressed by E.B. Pusey in his lavishly produced work, The Minor Prophets with a Commentary, that the Authorised Version of the Old Testament represented a wholly satisfactory and sufficient rendering of the original Hebrew text.41 Not only had Pusey inveighed against “the arbitrary textual criticism, and the reckless use of the cognate dialects which prevailed in some of the schools of last century”,42 but he had proceeded to condemn recent critical work on the Hebrew text as equally arbitrary and as providing “chaff for wheat, introducing an indefinite amount of error into the Word of God”.43 In many ways, Pusey represented an ideal opening target for Smith: the two men were at opposite poles in terms of ecclesiastical practice and principle, and, in repudiating Puseyite ideas, WRS was at one with the Free Church membership. Moreover, as Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford until his death in 1882 (to be succeeded by S.R. Driver), Pusey epitomised in Presbyterian eyes all those insidious recent developments in English ecclesiastical procedure which constituted the wanton abandonment of Reformation principles and an effectual capitulation to Rome.44 And for Smith himself, Pusey stood also as a convenient scapegoat for all those, of whatever denominational allegiance, who were either intellectually incompetent or wilfully opposed to progress in the field of biblical criticism:

The conclusion which the learned Professor of Oxford puts forth, with the proud consciousness that he “has proved all” that modern scholars have to say, is doubtless entertained with equal assurance by a large proportion of the less learned readers, who in four years called for eleven thousand copies of his Commentary; and in truth any one who is prepared to assert with an air of authority the comparative infallibility of the English Version, is certain to find many listeners among the timidly pious, the narrowly conservative, and the intellectually ignorant.45

Robertson Smith expressed nothing but contempt for a Church which did not even require of its ministerial candidates a knowledge of Hebrew: if there were truly nothing further to be learned from a study of the Hebrew text, then it would be “inexcusable cruelty to compel all our students to pass through the grammatical purgatory of the first divinity session”.46 The reality was, Smith proclaimed, that the Scottish curriculum resulted in a continuing progress within Old Testament studies which its own ministers could understand, whereas in England there was currently a theology which was static, thanks to a combination of “indolence and ignorance”. He added, as if with prescience of the storm about to break around him:

Yet even those who in the abstract admit that true knowledge is necessarily progressive are often inclined to dread a progress from which they cannot extort a pledge that it will never come into collision with cherished opinions.47

New ideas, Smith observed perceptively, were readily accepted by the uncritical mass of believers, provided they did not appear to overturn traditional, comfortable notions. When such dearly-held prejudices were threatened, however, it required a genuine effort of faith to come to terms with innovative thinking. Yet no forward movement was possible without the painful sacrifice of obsolete and erroneous ideas:

The rise of new difficulties is as essential to the progress of truth as the removal of old puzzles; and it not seldom happens that the defects of current opinions as to the sense of scripture are most palpable to the man whose spiritual interest in Bible truths is weak, and who is therefore little apt to allow the religious beauty of a thought to conceal the flaws of the interpretation on which it rests. Thus the natural conservatism of those who study the Bible mainly for purposes of personal edification is often intensified by suspicion of the motives of innovating interpreters; and even so fruitful an idea as the doctrine of a gradual development of spiritual truth throughout the whole course of the Bible history has had to contend, from the days of Calvin down to our own time, with an obstinate suspicion that nothing but rationalism can make a man unwilling to find the maximum of developed spiritual truth in every chapter of Scripture.48

God worked, said Smith, “by slow degrees” because, as Lessing had written, truth could be reached only by “pursuit and toilsome effort”,49 and “spiritual sluggishness” was always the hallmark of theological conservatism. The never-ending search for theological truth was, in effect, a “seeking after Christ” and any failure to prosecute that mission was to ignore a “law” of universal validity. After this powerful introduction, Robertson Smith moved to a detailed vindication of modern critical and philological methods. The Rabbinical transmission of the ancient Hebrew texts had inevitably been inaccurate, while their exegesis had been faulty, because concerned primarily with an allegorical interpretation of Scripture. No attempt had been made to attain an understanding of the grammatical structure of the language.50 Pusey’s over-valuing of tradition as a safeguard for uncorrupted textual transmission was “mere sophistry” and there was abundant evidence that both grammatical and lexical inaccuracies had steadily crept in, despite the “laborious diligence of the Massorets” [sic].51

When the Authorised Version was prepared by King James’ scholars, no true understanding of philological principles existed and the translators were dependent upon rabbinical tradition. True progress lay in the establishment of a scientific method:

The rational treatment of the language of the Old Testament must proceed on the principle that Hebrew, like every other human speech, is an organism, possessed of an internal unity of structure, related in a definite way to other languages, and bearing with it marks of growth and decay… Let me simply remind you, that during the seventeenth century the current opinion was, that Hebrew was the language of Paradise, and that the cognate languages were all derived from the dialect of the Old Testament… In a word, Hebrew was not treated in the same way as a genuine human language, to be understood in the same way as any other language, but as a sort of miraculous phenomenon, the one relic of a lost Eden, exempt alike from growth and decay.52

Smith went on to trace the development of modern Hebrew philology, beginning with Reuchlin and drawing especial attention to the work of Silvestre de Sacy, whose pioneering study of Semitic philology, “has given us a scientific grammar of Hebrew”.53 That some theologians could still deny the value of such studies betrayed either “gross ignorance, or a wilful adherence to the obsolete idea that Hebrew is a unique and supernatural language”.54 The Septuagint, Smith observed, had proved of value for checking, and in some cases amending, the Hebrew but was no more free than the Hebrew text from corruption. Smith’s summing up of this section of his lecture illustrates particularly well the developmental paradigm on which he is now framing his argument:

Grammatical knowledge took the shape of a steadily growing science; when scholars ceased to look on the Hebrew tongue with superstitious reverence, and began to view it as an organic development, possessing structural unity, and bearing within it traces of a regular growth and decay, and marks of natural relationship with other languages. In like manner the doctrines of the text remained unscientific; so long as it was not clearly apprehended, that the present state of the text is the outcome of a history, which in all its steps, is perfectly natural, and so can be explored by the ordinary methods of scientific research… But instead of losing scientific certainty by giving up superstitions which long seemed necessary to a confident use of authoritative Scripture, we find that we have gained, not indeed a ready-made certainty, but a sure path of progress with the confidence of undelusive results.55

Such progress, WRS suggested, need not be alarming to those of a “weak faith”, when recent progress in the study of biblical geography, natural history or archaeology “is welcomed even in the most conservative circles”.56 Yet it was undeniable, he conceded, that the modern approach to textual criticism of the Bible had aroused grave suspicion; and Smith devoted the remainder of his paper to what amounts to a personal defence of his rôle as proponent of the higher criticism.57

The suspicion which Biblical criticism faced, Smith judged, was due to its firm adoption of a strictly “scientific” method and “the determination of modern scholars to remove all magical haze from the idiom and text of Scripture”.58 By implication, Smith was referring to all those who persistently endued the Bible with some kind of magical aura and who thus held it sacrosanct from all intrusive scrutiny of a rational nature; indeed, he went boldly ahead with a remarkably explicit and perceptive analysis of the problem:

There is still an uneasy feeling that such a style of investigation cannot be applied to biblical subjects without profaning the sanctuary; and when modern scholarship takes yet another step, and proposes to extend the methods of general literary and historical criticism to the examination of the authorship and scope of the Old Testament books, to the history of the covenant people, and to the evolution of the Old Testament ideas; suspicion is apt to develop into open accusations that, under the guise of science, Christianity is robbed of its sacred book.59

If, wrote Smith, these modern methods have indeed undermined both “the authority of Scripture” and God’s gracious revelation (of Christ’s coming) to man, then “indeed we may well despair of the future of theology”. Unless science and religion could be reconciled, Robertson Smith acknowledged that his own personal faith was truly in jeopardy:

But for the personal manifestation of God to man, the personal declaration of his tender redeeming love, the Old Testament would have no value to us. It is nothing to the sinner who feels his need of a saviour, it is nothing to me in my spiritual needs, to have in my hands a supernatural book full of abstract truths that are above reason. But it is everything to me to have a book in which I can find a personal God, revealing himself in the fulness of gracious personal love, and so revealing himself that I, who read the book, can know he reveals himself to me.60

This represents at once Smith’s personal credo and also his unresolved dilemma. By now, he had moved to a point where a faith based wholly upon supernaturalism was no longer acceptable in the way it had been during his student days at New College. Revelation had instead to be founded on scientific principles in some form; and he proceeded to attempt a description of this, with what may be adjudged only a partial degree of success. Any personal relationship, Smith contended, must be founded on “the laws of human personality”. Divine revelation was in part supernatural, since it emanated from God, but the bond established between God and man was necessarily natural in character: it was “a relation which grows up in strict accordance with every psychological law of the human soul”.61 This relationship followed a natural sequence of causal links, just as open to examination as any other observable phenomenon and just as capable of being studied rationally. If this principle did not apply, and if scriptural doctrines required to be “taken on trust intellectually”, then there could be no true spiritual nourishment.62 God’s personal manifestation is supernatural in itself but God’s Spirit can only work “in and through human nature” as a non-supernatural process of historical and personal development. It seems here as if WRS were attempting to reconcile two quite incompatible epistemological approaches – one deriving from his spiritual and intellectual nurture within a richly evangelical home environment; and one stemming from the influence of his University studies under Alexander Bain.63 Both lines of approach co-exist psychologically in Smith’s metaphor of God as a divine teacher, educating the Church and the individual believer alike.64

From this point forward, Smith’s argument flows smoothly into a train of thought which uncompromisingly encompasses the principle of evolution, as developed by Herbert Spencer rather than Charles Darwin:

The Bible and Bible history were still too exclusively looked at from the supernatural point of view. Now the evolution of God’s dealings with man cannot be understood except by looking at the human side of the process. The only idea of moral and spiritual evolution which is possible to us, is that of evolution in accordance with psychological laws. The nexus must always be psychological. The teleology of revelation is divine; but the pragmatism of the revealing history must be human.65

Understandably, Smith refused to abandon the teleological aspect of Old Testament interpretation since it was a fundamental tenet of his Christian faith and embraced the assumption that the Hebrew Bible – fragmentary and unsystematic though it was – comprised an account of God’s physical and pedagogical preparation of mankind for the coming of Christ and the establishment of the “eternal kingdom”.66 The tentative critical approach of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries towards the Bible, following the pioneering literary studies of the Classical scholars, had been “aesthetic” in orientation. Now, Smith argued, the critical approach was much more analytical and searching. “Here”, WRS pronounced, “was a clear case for the application of the doctrine of continuity”.67

The theological counterblast

Initially, Smith’s opponents appeared to have no awareness or understanding of the scientific influences upon Smith’s thinking and to a large extent this ignorance is reflected in the kind of dismayed bewilderment that is exhibited in the appeals made to him by Smeaton, Rainy and the other conservatively-minded Free Church academics.68 More measured attacks took some years to emerge and the two most significant examples of these appeared only in 1880, just as the final act in the judicial drama was about to be played out. Indeed, the battle had by then been effectively both lost and won. The earlier (and less impressive) of those papers appeared in the April issue of BFER for that year, and was the work of Robert Watts, Professor of Theology at Belfast Presbyterian College.69 Its title, “Strictures on the Article ‘Bible’ in the recent edition of the ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’”, both illustrates its focus and betrays its lengthy gestation. For Watts, religion, like creation itself, was brought into being and sustained by “supernatural interpositions occurring at sundry times and in divers manners”.70 Hence Smith’s implication (that the Hebrew religion, prior to the advent of Christ, had fallen into a state of stagnation) was clearly an indication of his contempt for conservative theology. The young Scotsman had been infected by the “spirit of the age”: Man had not acquired his religious understanding through “acquisition or development” but rather by “a supernatural and gracious interposition [through which] he was brought again into covenantal relation”.71 Religion, for Watts, had been inculcated “by a series of supernatural impulses given at different epochs”, just as the earth itself had been the product of a series of divine fiats.

In Watts’ eyes, Smith’s whole argument for the composite structure of the Pentateuch was “utterly destitute of foundation”:

So far … as the questions raised by the reformations of Josiah are concerned, there is no need for seeking a new book diverse from Exodus, or a new law diverse from anything found in the Pentateuch outside the book of Deuteronomy. All that Josiah wrought has full warrant in and was demanded by the law as given in the Decalogue itself, and as reiterated and illustrated by terrible judgments in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.72

In an elaborately circular argument, Watts goes on to dismiss Smith’s theory that the Deuteronomistic author adapted Mosaic principles to new circumstances and new social or cultural needs; and he concludes;

[The author of Deuteronomy] has not deduced principles from the teaching of Moses and put these into the mouth of Moses, but he has formally given us discourses uttered by Moses, and has told us when and where Moses uttered them… The preface [to Deuteronomy] is plainly historical, and it pledges the truthfulness of its author … There is no more reason for regarding the book thus introduced as a post-Mosaic drama than there is for regarding Genesis, or Exodus, or Leviticus, or Numbers, as post-Mosaic romances.73

If Smith’s approach – the “magic wand of criticism” – is to be accepted, then it is “not only an end to history, but a suicidal termination of all criticism”. Perhaps, speculates Watts ponderously, it is all some kind of joke, comparable to Archbishop Whately’s celebrated “Historical Doubts respecting Napoleon Bonaparte”.74 Whatever Smith had produced for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, it was not Christian criticism. It might well have been prompted by the Zeitgeist, but it was not the work of the Holy Spirit.75 Smith was quite entitled to espouse the theory of development – for, argues Watts, such a theory is perfectly compatible with the divine economy, as the Bible, taken in its traditional sequence, plainly illustrates:

Let any one make the experiment suggested by [Smith’s] theory, and transfer Deuteronomy to the position assigned to it by this novel criticism, and if we have not overrated his claims to intelligence, he will feel shocked at the work of his own hands. Indeed the principle of development itself furnishes a safe guide in all questions pertaining to the time and place of any part of the revelation… If this be a law of the economy, then the books naturally arrange themselves along the pathway of the divine Logos, as He has unfolded, in His sovereign wisdom, the mystery which, from the beginning of the world, was hid in God.76

Referring to the judiciously modest fashion in which WRS proposed that the full development of Levitical ordinances and ritual would appear to be the final stage in a long process of cultural development and hieratic self-aggrandisement,77 Watts contends that Smith’s style suggests that “the author had taken alarm at his former critical deliverances and is here endeavouring to tone them down …”. This is so far from being an accurate representation of Smith’s purpose as to betray the palpable barrier of incomprehension which stood between Watts and any true understanding of Smith’s critical approach. For Watts, as for all the conservatively-minded Free Church faithful, Smith had impugned the word of Scripture, had flouted the principle of plenary inspiration, and was guilty of having gravely insulted God. Especially galling to Watts was Smith’s habitual use of geological and biological metaphors, since these were plainly the product of a rationalistic and materialistic mind. And yet:

Teleologists have been in the habit of arguing that our earth is an organised whole, and have cited in support of their position the correlated strata composing its crust. These strata are not haphazard deposits but, on the contrary, reveal in their mutual relations and in their common subordination to the wants and purposes of man, the presence and control of an infinitely wise and beneficent mind.78

Watts’ strategy is to accept at least part of the scientific position, pour mieux sauter upon the enemy. The Scriptures are both organic and stratified; there had always been traditional acceptance of the Bible’s organic unity, but obviously the scriptural canon had been built up, “part by part”, under the guiding hand of its divine progenitor. It is not, as Smith had tried to suggest, “a congeries of incongruous elements, brought into a sort of external harmony by some ex post facto copyist or final redactor”. And Watts ends his attack in an effusion of indignation and sorrow:

Here is a young man talking about the way in which one of the most ancient of books was composed with as much confidence as if he had lived throughout the 1500 years occupied in the writing of it, and had looked over the shoulder of the writers as from age to age they plied their marvellous task; and when he has told us just how the work was done, turns round and tells us that he was merely presupposing it had been composed in this way! Presupposing! and presupposing all this about the genesis of the Word of God, that cannot be broken and abideth for ever! Let rationalistic, destructive critics utter and give currency to such hypotheses regarding the origin of our Bible, but, “O my soul, come not thou into their secret; unto their assembly, mine honour, be thou not united”.79

The second sustained assault on Robertson Smith from a scholarly perspective was penned by Alfred Cave, a young but already eminent Congregationalist, in the October issue of the same volume of BFER. Entitled “Professor Robertson Smith and the Pentateuch”, this essay was prompted, not by Smith’s “Bible” article (which Cave by now calls “notorious”) but by its EB9 sequel, “Hebrew Language and Literature”, which was to re-ignite the Free Church controversy (following Smith’s formal admonition and discharge in May, 1880, at the conclusion of his protracted case)80 and which was to lead finally to his dismissal.

Cave saw in “Hebrew Language and Literature” a hardening of Smith’s attitude and an even bolder expression of his heretical views as to the composition of the Pentateuch.81 After giving a clear and reasonably accurate account of Smith’s views, Cave noted that these were “neither original nor novel” and he provided a succinct history of Pentateuchal criticism, from Richard Simon and Jean Astruc, through De Wette, to Graf and Kuenen, briefly alluding to Colenso and Samuel Davidson in passing.82 More cogently, Cave proceeded to quote from Spencer Baynes’ undertaking (in the Prefatory Notice) to ensure objectivity, impartiality and freedom from sectarian bias in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; and he cited the article “Bible” as being in flagrant breach of those principles.83 The author (said Cave) had failed to give due recognition to the “ninety-nine hundredths of the Biblical scholars of England, Scotland and America” who maintained traditional views on Pentateuchal authorship. Instead he had given countenance to “that cant of some German writers which make a sect in Biblical science alone scientific, and the self-styled ‘critical’ school alone critical”: and Professor Smith “was not at liberty to convert the pages of the Encyclopaedia Britannica into an instrument for ex cathedra dogmatic statement”.84 By doing so, he had allied himself clearly with “a school of thought which had hitherto consisted for the most part, if not wholly, of men of avowed rationalistic tendencies” and had thus prejudiced the “dearest religious convictions of many who were not necessarily unread …”.85

After this distinctly ad hominem attack, Cave acknowledged that Robertson Smith was evidently not antagonistic to the Scriptures as such but, following Kuenen, had rejected the traditional views on their authorship by disallowing any non-naturalistic divine intervention:

So also, if an exceptional revelation such as that at Sinai is supposed, as by Kalisch, to conflict with a fixed belief in evolution, whether that evolution be of the nature of a Hegelian or a Spencerian process, no mere reference to the Bible itself can possibly remove the antecedent opinion… . [Yet Smith] apparently believes in a miraculous prophecy …86

Cave had indeed sensed the essential ambivalence in Robertson Smith’s attitude and now began to unravel the inconsistencies of Smith’s position in a way which no other of his opponents had attempted:

The singular thing is, that whilst accepting a view of inspiration which runs directly counter to the evolutionary theory of religion, he should regard Mosaism as unintelligible if spoken directly to Moses. The whole law, ceremonial, political and moral, is unintelligible, he [Smith] seems to think, if transmitted by one man as a Divine agent, but is intelligible if transmitted gradually by many who “spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost”. On the same rule, we repeat, Christianity may be supposed to be more explicable if Christ is left out, or His influence is reduced to a minimum. 87

Indeed, it is plain from Cave’s protracted discussion that, but for Smith’s adherence to an evolutionary view of Biblical history, there would be no material grounds for disagreement between the two writers:

That the prophets played a larger part than has been commonly suspected in the religious life of Israel and Judah the “critical” school has made increasingly clearer. Hence there is a truth in what Professor Smith says about the prophets as “leaders in a great development” and about the necessity for the spiritual faith “to show constant powers of new development” during the long struggle “which began with the foundation of the theocracy in the work of Moses and did not issue in conclusive victory until the time of Ezra”. But when Professor Smith goes on to add that the prophets were leaders in a great development “in which the religious ordinances of the old Testament advanced from a relatively crude and imperfect to a relatively mature and adequate form,” his opinion manifestly contradicts the statements of the Old Testament itself, even when studied by “the laws of grammatico-historical exegesis”.88

Smith might well have retorted that Cave was guilty of “an egregious petitio principii” – and on this occasion possibly with rather more justice than he had accused Herbert Spencer of a like logical error in 1867, after reading the latter’s First Principles. Indeed, though it would be rash even to guess at the argument followed by Smith in his college “Homily”, it is abundantly evident that Spencer’s writings did penetrate deeply and ineradicably into Robertson Smith’s subconscious mind, eventually bringing about an intuitive grasp of that developmental process which explained the origins of religion as well as those of the physical world,89 and which was not only to determine the dialectical form of his encyclopaedia articles but was to lead him towards the comparative and anthropological studies which absorbed his last years and which bore final fruit in The Religion of the Semites.

The opening chapter of Spencer’s First Principles contains an impressive plea for mutual tolerance and understanding on the part of science and religion; for a recognition that, in any controversy, no one side has a monopoly of the truth and that (as Cave’s attack on Smith well demonstrates) divergent views are seldom so incompatible as the respective protagonists would maintain.90 Spencer sought to establish at least a degree of harmony between science and religion – the oldest of all “antagonisms of belief”; both sides, he insisted, had erred through the limitations of human nature and had illegitimately trespassed on the other’s territory.91 He emphasised that:

It behoves each party to strive to understand the other, with the conviction that the other has something worthy to be understood; and with the conviction that when mutually recognised this something will be the basis of a complete reconciliation.92

At the same time, Spencer made no disguise of his agnostic position. Like Lewes, he judged that religion, being noumenal, is scientifically unknowable. Indeed, it was the unknowableness of religion which constituted its defining characteristic, and it was the establishment of this principle which brought about a radical change in the style of scientific discourse in the fifty years subsequent to the Bridgewater Treatises of the 1830s.93 By the time the Encyclopaedia Britannica’s ninth edition had been completed under Robertson Smith’s editorship, it had become superfluous to describe scientific discovery in terms which presented it as the handmaiden of natural theology or as a cumulative and dramatic illustration of the “Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God”. From the disreputable pen of Swinburne to the magisterially respectable writings of Darwin, but most of all from the avowedly agnostic essays of Huxley, Clifford and Leslie Stephen, this transformation was gradually but inexorably effected in the course of Robertson Smith’s lifetime. His own rôle in this process was both as active participant, through his published work, and as catalyst, in shaping the style and content of the Encyclopaedia. Yet Smith, by reason of his temperament and nurture, could never follow Spencer’s logic through to its ultimate conclusion; and it is this paradoxical element of his nature which remains of such abiding interest.