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General Reflections

1) In what sense does Maurice say that "the words of the Bible generally, the assurance of baptism to you particularly, give you the right to believe" (KC, I, 89). Does man acquire the right solely because of these words or this rite; or are they rather attestations of the right he has already acquired? Maurice's answer clearly seems to be the second. But, then, how has man already acquired the right that Bible and baptism attest to him? Has he acquired it by the Incarnation and Atonement of Christ? Or are they, too, but an attestation – better, a "manifestation" -- of the right which he has always already had by virtue of his having been constituted in Christ? Here Maurice's position seems less clear, though one suspects the answer is, again, the second. In which case, he is really very close to Robertson, who, however, is immeasurably clearer!

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9) Where Maurice comes closest to asserting the traditional dualism, perhaps, is in his doctrine of Christ's sacrifice [Davies]. 10) There is nmuch in Maurice's way of arguing to confirm the conclusion that he had mastered the principles of a theological method that overcomes duaIisln. Thus, e.g., in the early letter to his father just before his ordination (Life, I: 134 ff.), he justifies his trinitarian faith, by contrast with "a hundred thousand simpler faiths/' on the ground that there is no worth in silnplicity "if it does not account for facts which we know; if it does not satisfy wants which we feel; if it does not lead us up to the truth which we desire" (137). In other words, the justification he offers is strictly and entirely an experiential justification, in the sense that faith in the trinity is represented as answering to what men know, want, and desire. Likewise, in his letter to Ludlow SOlne thirty years later on much the same subject (Life, II: 387 f.), he confesses that "the nalne of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, is for me the name of the God in whom I aln living and lnoving, and having my being." Consequently, he says, his only work in the world is "to bear witness of this Natne, not as expressing certain relations, however profound, in the Divine nature but as the underground of all fellowship among men and angels, as that which will at last bind an into one, satisfying all the craving of the reason as well as of the heart, Ineeting the desires and intuitions that are scattered through all the religions of the world" (388). Here, again, it is striking that the trinity is represented as answering to men's desires and intuitions as expressed in their religions and, more significantly, as satisfying "all the craving of the reason" as well as of the heart. And he makes the same point when he speaks of "faith in the Trinity," by which he means "faith in the comprehensive all-elnbracing Nalne of God, the infinite charity/' as "the faith of which an narrower faiths were the anticipation and prophecy" (Life, II: 504). Along much the same lines, ivfaurice is insistent that the authority of the Bible is not a priori, but a posteriori (Life, II:299). But, above all, there is his insistence that his "great desire has been to show that we are dwelling in a NIystery deeper than any of our plumets can fathOln, a Mystery of Love" (TE: 296), which corresponds quite closely, I think, to what amounts to his existentialist interpretation of the Gospel (Life, I: 364) and to his insistence that faith is faith in a Person, not in notions, as well as to his understanding of the Creed as "an act of allegiance or affiance."

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