The credulity of unbelief.
I. UNBELIEF INVOLVES CREDULITY. Johanan and his companions here bring before us a striking instance of the credulity of unbelief. Refusing to admit that Jeremiah was divinely inspired, they asserted that he was instigated by Baruch the scribe. Now, we have seen Baruch acting solely as the amanuensis and spokesman of the prophet—indeed, effacing himself with genuine humility and wisdom to serve the prophet the more faithfully; could this man be the inspirer of his master's most decided utterances? The idea is preposterous. It is an evidence of gross credulity—the credulity that believes in one's own inventions, though they are infinitely less reasonable than the opposite ideas they are set up to oppose. All unbelief is belief—it is belief in the negation of a proposition, and it requires as much evidence as the proposition it denies. It also has its consequences in reason which should be followed out remorselessly. Defenders of the faith have been too apologetic. They would often have been wiser if they had turned the flank of opponents and exposed the weakness of their position. It might often be shown that, in accepting this position, the opponents were standing on less firm ground than that which they dispute. For something must be true. If we came down to absolute nihilism, and discovered that nothing existed, even that discovery would be a truth. The absolute rejection of one proposition involves the acceptance of its opposite. But this opposite may be beset with heavier difficulties or favoured with weaker evidences than those which accompany the rejected proposition. If so, to accept the opposite proposition is really a mark of greater credulity than to admit that which presented the first claims.
II. THE CREDULITY OF UNBELIEF MAY BE ILLUSTRATED IN THE CONTROVERSIES OF THE AGE. Consider it in relation to the main topics of these controversies, viz.:
1. The being of God. If there be no God, then the world must be eternal or self-created—conclusions which may be shown to leave more difficulties than the hypothesis of a Creator—and all the best thoughts of the highest orders of minds must be misconceptions—a strange result for those who would regard the mind of man as the highest existence in the universe.
2. The immortality of the soul. Difficulties beset the theory of immortaIity. But what greater difficulties they have to face who, first believing in God (and we now have a right to start from that position), hold that the deepest appetite of man is destined never to be satisfied, that his highest aspirations are directed to an impossibility, and that his greatest powers are doomed to be blighted before they have grown to their full development? What credulity is required to make us believe that a good God could create a Tantalus!
3. The inspiration of the Bible. if the Bible be not inspired of God, the first literature of the world, containing by far its deepest, wisest, purest thoughts, and exercising unbounded influence for good, is founded on a delusion or a lie; for the writers of the Bible plainly claim to be inspired.
4. The Divine origin of Christianity. Christianity is the greatest fact in history; it revolutionized the decaying life of the old world, and gave a fresh upward movement to humanity; it is now the leading factor in the highest life of the foremost races of mankind; and it claims to be Divine. It seems to some of us that to say this claim is false, and thus to force upon us the inevitable alternative that its founders were deluded, and that it is a mere growth of human thought and effort, requires a faith which is so irrational as to be justly characterized as credulity.