CHRISTIANITY AND AGNOSTICISM. 347 



been republished after his death, and who wrote in the devoutest 

 spirit of the Lutheran communion. Of course, Harnack regards 

 his point of view as narrow and unsatisfactory ; but he adds that, 

 " equally great are the valuable qualities of this work in partic- 

 ular, in regard of its exemplarily clear exposition, its eminent 

 learning, and the author's living comprehension of religious prob- 

 lems." A man who studies the history of Christian theology in 

 Harnack without reference to Thomasius will do no justice to his 

 subject. 



But, says Mrs. Ward, there is no real historical apprehension 

 in the orthodox writers, whether of Germany or England, and the 

 whole problem is one of "historical translation." Every state- 

 ment, every apparent miracle, everything different from daily 

 experience, must be translated into the language of that experi- 

 ence, or else we have not got real history. But this, it will be ob- 

 served, under an ingenious disguise, is only the old method of 

 assuming that nothing really miraculous can have happened, and 

 that therefore everything which seems supernatural must be ex- 

 plained away into the natural. In other words, it is once more 

 begging the whole question at issue. Mrs. Ward accuses ortho- 

 dox writers of this fallacy ; but it is really her own. Merriman 

 is represented as saying that he learned from his Oxford teachers 

 that 



it was imperatively right to endeavor to disentangle miracle from history, the 

 marvelous from the real, in a document of the fourth, or third, or second century ; 

 . . . but the contents of the New Testament, however marvelous and however 

 apparently akin to what surrounds them on either side, were to be treated from 

 an entirely different point of view. In the one case there must be a desire on 

 the part of the historian to discover the historical under the miraculous, ... in 

 the other case there must be a desire, a strong " affection," on the part of the 

 theologian, toward proving the miraculous to be historical. 



Mrs. Ward has entirely mistaken the point of view of Chris- 

 tian science. Certainly if any occurrence anywhere can be ex- 

 plained by natural causes, there is a strong presumption that it 

 ought to be so explained ; for, though a natural effect may be due 

 in a given case to supernatural action, it is a fixed rule of philoso- 

 phizing, according to Newton, that we should not assume un- 

 known causes when known ones suffice. Bat the whole case of the 

 Christian reasoner is that the records of the New Testament defy 

 any attempt to explain them by natural causes. The German 

 critics Hase, Strauss, Baur, Hausrath, Keim, all have made the 

 attempt, and each, in the opinion of the others, and finally of 

 Pfleiderer, has offered an insufficient solution of the problem. 

 The case of the Christian is not that the evidence ought not to be 

 explained naturally and translated into every-day experience, but 

 that it can not be. But it is Mrs. Ward who assumes beforehand 



