The Fair Haven

[Here, perhaps, will be the fittest place for introducing a letter to my brother from a gentleman who is well known to the public, but who does not authorise me to give his name.  I found this letter among my brother’s papers, endorsed with the words “this must be attended to,” but with nothing more.  I imagine that my brother would have incorporated the substance of his correspondent’s letter into this or the preceding chapter, but not venturing to do so myself, I have thought it best to give the letter and extract in full, and thus to let them speak for themselves.—­W.  B. O.]

June 15, 1868.

My dear Owen,

Your brother has told me what you are doing, and the general line of your argument.  I am sorry that you should be doing it, for I need not tell you that I do not and cannot sympathise with the great and unexpected change in your opinions.  You are the last man in the world from whom I should have expected such a change:  but, as you well know, you are also the last man in the world whose sincerity in making it I should be inclined to question.  May you find peace and happiness in whatever opinions you adopt, and let me trust also that you will never forget the lessons of toleration which you learnt as the disciple of what you will perhaps hardly pardon me for calling a freer and happier school of thought than the one to which you now believe yourself to belong.

Your brother tells me that you are ill; I need not say that I am sorry, and that I should not trouble you with any personal matter—­I write solely in reference to the work which I hear that you have undertaken, and which I am given to understand consists mainly in the endeavour to conquer unbelief, by really entering into the difficulties felt by unbelievers.  The scheme is a good one if thoroughly carried out.  We imagine that we stand in no danger from any such course as this, and should heartily welcome any book which tried to grapple with us, even though it were to compel us to admit a great deal more than I at present think it likely that even you can extort from us.  Much more should we welcome a work which made people understand us better than they do; this would indeed confer a lasting benefit both upon them and us.

However, I know you wish to do your work thoroughly; I want, therefore, to make a trifling suggestion which you will take pro tanto:  it is this:-Paley, in his third book, professes to give “a brief consideration of some popular objections,” and begins Chap.  I. with “The discrepancies between the several Gospels.”

Now, I know you have a Paley, but I know also that you are ill, and that people who are ill like being saved from small exertions.  I have, therefore, bought a second-hand Paley for a shilling, and have cut out the chapter to which I especially want to call your attention.  Will you kindly read it through from beginning to end?

Is it fair?  Is the statement of our objections anything like what we should put forward ourselves?  And can you believe that Paley with his profoundly critical instinct, and really great knowledge of the New Testament, should not have been perfectly well aware that he was misrepresenting and ignoring the objections which he professed to be removing?

He must have known very well that the principle of confirmation by discrepancy is one of very limited application, and that it will not cover anything approaching to such wide divergencies as those which are presented to us in the Gospels.  Besides, how can he talk about Matthew’s object as he does, and yet omit all allusion to the wide and important differences between his account of the Resurrection, and those of Mark, Luke, and John?  Very few know what those differences really are, in spite of their having the Bible always open to them.  I suppose that Paley felt pretty sure that his readers would be aware of no difficulty unless he chose to put them up to it, and wisely declined to do so.  Very prudent, but very (as it seems to me) wicked.  Now don’t do this yourself.  If you are going to meet us, meet us fairly, and let us have our say.  Don’t pretend to let us have our say while taking good care that we get no chance of saying it.  I know you won’t.

However, will you point out Paley’s unfairness in heading this part of his work “A brief consideration of some popular objections,” and then proceeding to give a chapter on “the discrepancies between the several Gospels,” without going into the details of any of those important discrepancies which can have been known to none better than himself?  This is the only place, so far as I remember, in his whole book, where he even touches upon the discrepancies in the Gospels.  Does he do so as a man who felt that they were unimportant and could be approached with safety, or as one who is determined to carry the reader’s attention away from them, and fix it upon something else by a coup de main?

This chapter alone has always convinced me that Paley did not believe in his own book.  No one could have rested satisfied with it for moment, if he felt that he was on really strong ground.  Besides, how insufficient for their purpose are his examples of discrepancies which do not impair the credibility of the main fact recorded!

How would it have been if Lord Clarendon and three other historians had each told us that the Marquis of Argyll came to life again after being BEHEADED, and then set to work to contradict each other hopelessly as to the manner of his reappearance?  How if Burnet, Woodrow, and Heath had given an account which was not at all incompatible with a natural explanation of the whole matter, while Clarendon gave a circumstantial story in flat contradiction to all the others, and carefully excluded any but a supernatural explanation?  Ought we to, or should we, allow the discrepancies to pass unchallenged?  Not for an hour—­if indeed we did not rather order the whole story out of court at once, as too wildly improbable to deserve a hearing.

You will, I know, see all this, and a great deal more, and will point it better than I can.  Let me as an old friend entreat you not to pass this over, but to allow me to continue to think of you as I always have thought of you hitherto, namely, as the most impartial disputant in the world.—­Yours, &c.