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A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion
1776 · 70 pages
A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion
by Soame Jenyns
Jenyns sets aside prophecy and miracle, the two usual props of eighteenth-century apologetics, and rests his case on the content of the Christian ethic itself: that its central demands run so hard against natural human instinct, and against everything the ancient moralists praised, that no human being would have thought them up. Short, sharp and unexpected — his contemporaries, knowing his reputation, suspected the whole thing was a joke.
The convert behind the argument
Soame Jenyns was a wealthy Member of Parliament and a fashionable wit whose earlier writing had a distinctly sceptical, near-deist cast. The publication of this defence of Christianity in 1776 surprised his circle enough that some assumed it was an elaborate satire. Later readers, including Paley, took it entirely seriously.
Summary
Jenyns opens by noting that most defenders of Christianity argue from prophecy, from miracles, or from internal evidence — and that he intends to take the third road alone, leaving the other two to others.
His argument is that the morality of the Gospels is not an improvement on ancient ethics but a reversal of it. The virtues it commands — humility, poverty of spirit, forgiveness of injury, patience under insult, indifference to worldly honour — were not merely absent from the classical moral systems but were regarded there as defects. A religion invented by men, he argues, would have flattered the instincts men actually have.
The book was admired well beyond its length. Paley wrote that he would gladly have transcribed the whole of Jenyns on the morality of the Gospel into his own Evidences, because it agreed with his opinion and because it was impossible to say the same things so well; and it was reported of Patrick Henry that he had been sceptical in early life and was satisfied of the truth of Christianity by reading this treatise.
Who was Soame Jenyns?
Soame Jenyns (1704–1787) was an English writer and Member of Parliament for Cambridgeshire and later Cambridge, and a commissioner of the Board of Trade for over twenty years. He was known as a light poet and essayist and as a fixture of literary society.
His earlier work — particularly A Free Enquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil (1757), which Samuel Johnson reviewed with famous severity — had a rationalist and optimistic cast far from orthodoxy. The View of the Internal Evidence appeared in 1776 and went through many editions.
Common questions
- What is the argument of A View of the Internal Evidence?
- That the moral teaching of the Gospels is so contrary to natural human inclination — commending humility, forgiveness of enemies and indifference to worldly honour, where the ancient moralists commended their opposites — that it cannot plausibly be a human invention.
- Why did people think the book was satire?
- Because Jenyns was a fashionable society wit whose earlier writing had a sceptical, rationalist cast. A defence of Christianity from that quarter was unexpected enough that some of his contemporaries assumed he could not be serious.
A note on the text. A View of the Internal Evidence of the Christian Religion is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.