But beneath these social experiences, many of them sufficiently frivolous, and all of them superficial in so far as their interest related to individuals, Oxford provided me with others which went to the very roots of life. Of these deeper experiences the first was due to Jowett, though its results, so far as I was concerned, were neither intended, understood, nor even suspected by him.
The most sensational event which occurred during my first term at Balliol was the suicide of one of the undergraduates. He was a poor Scotch student of a deeply religious character, who had found, so his friends reported, that the faith of his childhood had been taken from him by Jowett's skeptical teachings, and who had ended by cutting his throat with a razor in Port Meadow. Jowett preached his funeral sermon--the only sermon which I ever, so far as my recollection serves me, heard preached in Balliol chapel by himself or by anybody else. Jowett, who on the occasion was obviously much moved, chose for his text the story of the woman taken in adultery, and of Christ's challenge to her judges, "Which of you will dare to assault with the first stone?" The course of his argument was curious. He began with examining the passage from the standpoint of verbal scholarship, the gist of his criticism being that its authenticity was at least doubtful. From this argument he diverged into one of wider scope, insisting on how much is doubtful in what the Gospels record as the sayings of our Lord generally, from which illuminating reflection he advanced to one wider still. It was as follows: Since we know so little of what Christ really said about God, how much less can we really know of the nature of God himself; of what he loves, condemns, or, in his infinite mercy, pardons?--the moral being that we ought to cast stones at nobody, and should in especial refrain from condemning our departed brother, who, for anything which we knew to the contrary, might be just as acceptable to God as any one of ourselves.
All my impressions of Jowett as a religious teacher were summed up in my impressions of that one sermon. Though his tone in delivering it was one of unusual tenderness, there lurked in it, nevertheless, a mordant and petulant animus against the Christian religion as a whole, if regarded as miraculously revealed or as postulating the occurrence of any definite miracle. It was the voice of one who, while setting all belief in the miraculous aside, on the ground that it had no evidence of a scientific kind to support it, was proclaiming with confidence some vague creed as unassailable, the evidence in support of which was very much more nebulous, or what many would describe as _nil_. A story used to be told about him by which his position in this respect is aptly and amusingly illustrated. He was taking a walk with an undergraduate, who confessed to him that his deepest trouble was his failure to find anything which accurate reason could accept as a proof of God's existence. Jowett did not utter a word till he and the young man parted. Then he said, "Mr. Smith, if you can't find a satisfactory proof of God's existence during the next three weeks, I shall have to send you down for a term." Had I been in the young man's place I should have retorted, "And pray, Mr. Jowett, what satisfactory proofs are you able to adduce yourself?"