Within the last fifty years particularly the fundamentals of the
Christian faith have not only come up for reexamination but have been
compelled to adapt themselves to facts and forces which have gone
farther toward recasting them than anything for a millennium and a half
before. The Reformation went deep but it did not go to the bottom. There
are differences enough in all reason between Protestantism and
Catholicism, but their identities are deeper still. The world of Martin
Luther and John Calvin was not essentially different in its outlook upon
life from the world of Augustine and Athanasius. The world of Jonathan
Edwards was much the same as the world of John Calvin and the world of
1850 apparently much the same as the world of Jonathan Edwards. There
was, of course, an immense difference in the mechanism with which men
were working but an unexpectedly small difference in their ruling ideas.
_The Readjustments of Christian Faith More Far-reaching in the Last
Fifty Years Than for a Thousand Years Before; Science Releases the
Challenging Forces_
We should not, of course, underestimate the contribution of the
Reformation to the breaking up of the old order. It left the theologies
more substantially unchanged than Protestantism has usually supposed,
but it did mark the rise of changed attitudes toward authority. The
reformers themselves did not accept without protest the spirit they
released. They imposed new authorities and obediences upon their
churches; they distrusted individual initiative in spiritual things and
the more democratic forms of church organization. John Calvin sought in
his Institutes to vindicate the law-abiding character of his new gospel;
Luther turned bitterly against the German peasants in their demand for a
most moderate measure of social justice; the Anglican leaders exiled the
Pilgrims; the Puritan drove the Quaker out of Boston through an
instinctive distrust of inward illumination as a safe guide for faith
and religious enthusiasm as a sound basis for a new commonwealth. But
the spirit was out of the bottle and could not be put back.
The right of the individual to make his own religious inquiries and
reach his own religious conclusions was little in evidence for almost
two hundred years after the Reformation, partly because the reactions of
the post-Reformation period made the faithful generally content to rest
in what had already been secured, partly because traditional authority
was still strong, and very greatly because there was neither in history,
philosophy nor science new material upon which the mind might exercise
itself. We may take 1859, almost exactly two hundred years after the
final readjustments of the Reformation period, as the point of departure
for the forces which have so greatly modified our outlook upon our
world and our understanding of ourselves; not that the date is
clean-cut, for we see now how many things had already begun to change
before Darwin and the Origin of Species.
Darwin's great achievement is to have suggested the formula in which
science and history have alike been restated. He had no thought at all
that what he was doing would reach so far or change so much. He simply
supposed himself, through patient and exhaustive study, to have
accounted for the rich variety of life without the supposition of a
special creation for each form. But the time was ripe and longing for
what he supplied and his hypothesis was quickly taken and applied in
almost every field of thought. Nor does it greatly matter that Darwinism
has been and may be still greatly modified. We have come under the spell
of evolution. Our universe is no longer a static thing; it is growing
and changing. Our imaginations are impressed by long sequences of
change, each one of them minute in itself but in the mass capable of
accounting for immense transformations. Darwin's initiative released the
scientific temper which has been the outstanding characteristic of our
own age. The physicist, the chemist and the biologist re-related their
discoveries in the light of his governing principle and supplied an
immense body of fact for further consideration. Geology was reborn, the
records of the rocks came to have a new meaning, every broken fossil
form became a word, maybe a paragraph, for the retelling of the past of
the earth.
Astronomy supplied cosmic backgrounds for terrestrial evolution and
Physics became a kind of court of appeal for both. The physicist
proclaimed the conservation of energy, reduced seeming solidities to
underlying force and resolved force itself into ultimate and tenuous
unities. The processes thus discovered and related seemed to be
self-sufficient. No need to bring in anything from the outside; unbroken
law, unfailing sequence were everywhere in evidence. Where knowledge
failed speculation bridged the gap. One might begin with a nebula and go
on in unbroken sequence to Plato or Shakespeare without asking for
either material, law or force which was not in the nebula to begin with.
Man himself took his own place in the majestic procession; he, too, was
simply the culmination of a long ascent, with the roots of his being
more deeply in the dust than he had ever dreamed and compelled to
confess himself akin to what he had aforetime scorned.
_The Reaction of Evolution Upon Religion_
All our old chronologies became incidental in a range of time before
which even imagination grew dizzy. We found fragments of the skulls of
our ancestors in ancient glacial drifts and the traditional 6,000 years
since creation hardly showed on the dial upon which Geology recorded its
conclusions. There is no need to follow in detail how all this reacted
upon religion. The accepted religious scheme of things was an
intricately interlocking system irresistible in its logic as long as the
system remained unchallenged in its crucial points. If these should
begin to be doubted then the Christian appeal would have lost, for the
time at least, a most considerable measure of its force. The inner peace
which we have already seen to be the keystone of the Protestant arch
grew in part out of the sense of a universal condemnation from which the
believer was happily saved; this in turn was conditioned by the
unquestioned acceptance of the Genesis narrative. We can see clearly
enough now that Christianity, and Protestant Christianity especially,
really depended upon something deeper than all this. Still for the time
being all these things were locked up together and once the accepted
foundations of theology began to be questioned far-reaching adjustments
were inevitable and the time of readjustment was bound to be marked by
great restlessness and confusion.
The evolutionary hypothesis profoundly affected man's thought about
himself. It challenged even more sharply his thought about God. Atheism,
materialism and agnosticism are an old, old trinity, but they had up to
our own time been at the mercy of more positive attitudes through their
inability to really answer those insurgent questions: Whence? Whither?
and Why? Creation had plainly enough demanded a creator. When Napoleon
stilled a group of debating officers in Egypt by pointing with a
Napoleonic gesture to the stars and saying, "Gentlemen, who made all
these?" his answer had been final. Paley's old-fashioned turnip-faced
watch with its analogies in the mechanism of creation had supplied an
irresistible argument for a creation according to design and a designing
creator. But now all this was changed. If Napoleon could have ridden
out from his august tomb, reassembled his officers from the dust of
their battlefields and resumed the old debate, the officers would have
been apparently in the position to answer--"Sire, they made themselves."
Our universe seemed to be sufficient unto itself.
We have reacted against all this and rediscovered God, if indeed we had
ever lost Him, but this ought not to blind those who have accomplished
the great transition to the confusion of faith which followed the
popularization of the great scientific generalizations, nor ought it to
blind us to the fact that much of this confusion still persists.
Christian theism was more sharply challenged by materialism and
agnosticism than by a frankly confessed atheism. Materialism was the
more aggressive; it built up its own great system, posited matter and
force as the ultimate realities, and then showed to its own satisfaction
how everything that is is just the result of their action and
interaction. Nor did materialism pause upon the threshold of the soul
itself. Consciousness, so conceived, was a by-product of the higher
organization of matter, and we ourselves a spray flung up out of the
infinite ocean of being to sparkle for a moment in the light and then
fall back again into the depths out of which we had been borne.
Those who so defined us made us bond-servants of matter and force from
birth to death though they drew back a little from the consequences of
their own creeds and sought to save a place for moral freedom and
responsibility and a defensible altruism. It is doubtful if they
succeeded. Materialism affected greatly the practical conduct of life.
It offered its own characteristic values; possession and pleasure became
inevitably enough the end of action, and action itself, directed toward
such ends, became the main business of life. Science offered so
fascinating a field for thought as to absorb the general intellectual
energy of the generation under the spell of it; the practical
application of science to mechanism and industry with the consequent
increase in luxury and convenience, absorbed the force of practical men.
It naturally went hard with religion in a world so preoccupied. Its
foundations were assailed, its premises questioned, its conclusions
denied, its interests challenged. The fact that religion came through it
at all is a testimony both to the unconquerable force of faith and the
unquenchable need of the soul for something greater than the scientific
gospel revealed or the achievements of science supplied.
_The Reaction of Biblical Criticism Upon Faith_
The first front along which the older faith met the impact of new forces
was scientific; the second drive was at a more narrow but, as far as
religion goes, an even more strategic front. The Bible had to submit to
those processes of inquiry and criticism which had so greatly altered
the scientific outlook. The Old and New Testaments, as has been said,
supplied really the basal authority for the whole Protestant order, and
speaking merely as a historian one is well within the facts when one
says that even before the enlightenment of the last two generations the
traditional way of thinking about the Bible had not proved satisfactory.
The more free-minded were conscious of its contradictions; they could
not reconcile its earlier and later moral idealisms; they found in it as
much to perplex as to help them. Some of them, therefore, disowned it
altogether and because it was tied up in one bundle with religion, as
they knew religion, they disowned religion at the same time. Others who
accepted its authority but were unsatisfied with current interpretations
of it sought escape in allegorical uses of it. (We shall find this to be
one of the distinct elements in Christian Science.) But after all it did
answer the insistent questions, Whence? and Whither? and Why? as nothing
else answered them. Therefore, in spite of challenge and derelict faith
and capricious interpretations and forced harmonies it still held its
own. Directly science began to offer its own answers to Whence? and
Whither? and Why? curiosity found an alternative. Science had its own
book of genesis, its own hypothesis as to the creation of man, its own
conclusions as to his ascent. These had a marvellously emancipating and
stimulating power; they opened, as has been said, vast horizons; they
affected philosophy; they gave a new content to poetry, for the poet
heard in the silences of the night:
"AEonian music measuring out
The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance--
The blows of Death."
The challenge of science to the book of Genesis specifically and to the
miraculous narratives with which both the Old and the New Testaments are
veined more generally, doubtless stimulated Biblical criticism, but the
time was ripe for that also. The beginnings of it antedate the
scientific Renaissance, but the freer spirit of the period offered
criticism its opportunity, the scientific temper supplied the method and
the work began.
Inherited faith has been more directly affected by Biblical criticism
than by the result of scientific investigation and the generalizations
based thereon. The Bible had been the average man's authority in science
and history as well as faith. That statement naturally needs some
qualification, for before evolution took the field it was possible not
only to reconcile a fair knowledge of the natural sciences with the
Bible, but even, as in the argument for design, to make them
contributory to Bible teaching. But evolution changed all that and it
was really through the impact of the more sweeping scientific
conclusions upon his Bible that the average man felt their shock upon
his faith. If he had been asked merely to harmonize the genesis of the
new science with the genesis of the Old Testament he would have had
enough to occupy his attention, though perhaps he might have managed it.
The massive mind of Gladstone accomplished just that to its own entire
satisfaction.
But the matter went deeper. A wealth of slowly accumulated knowledge was
brought to bear upon the Scriptures and a critical acumen began to
follow these old narratives to their sources. There is no need here to
follow through the results in detail. They[6] were seen to have been
drawn from many sources, in some cases so put together that the joints
and seams were plainly discernible. One wonders how they had so long
escaped observation. The Bible was seen to contain contributory elements
from general ancient cultures; its cosmogony the generally accepted
cosmogony of the time and the region; its codes akin to other and older
codes. It contained fragments of old songs and the old lore of the
common folk. It was seen to record indisputably long processes of moral
growth and spiritual insight. Its prophets spoke out of their time and
for their time. It was plainly enough no longer an infallible dictation
to writers who were only the automatic pens of God, it was a growth
rooted deep in the soil out of which it grew and the souls of those who
created it. The fibres of its main roots went off into the darkness of a
culture too long lost ever to be quite completely understood. It was no
longer ultimate science or unchallenged history.
[Footnote 6: The Old Testament narratives particularly. The results of
New Testament criticism have not yet fully reached the popular mind.]
We have come far enough now to see that nothing really worth while has
been lost in this process of re-interpretation, and much has been
gained. If, as the French say in one of their luminous proverbs, to
understand is to pardon, to understand is also to be delivered from
doubts and forced apologies and misleading harmonies and the necessity
of defending the indefensible. In our use of the Bible, as in every
other region of life, the truth has made us free. It possesses
still--the Bible--the truth and revelation and meaning for life it
always possessed. We are gradually realizing this and gaining in the
realization. But the Bible has been compelled to meet the challenge of
an immensely expanded scientific and historical knowledge. We have had
to test its supposed authority as to beginnings by Astronomy, Geology
and Biology; we have had to test its history by the methods and
conclusions of modern historical investigation. The element of the
supernatural running through both the Old and New Testaments has been
compelled to take into account that emphasis upon law and ordered
process which is, perhaps more than any other single thing, the
contribution of science to the discipline of contemporaneous thought.
_The Average Man Loses His Bearings_
The whole process has been difficult and unsettling. There was and is
still a want of finality in the conclusions of Biblical scholars. It
needed and needs still more study than the average man is able to give
to understand their conclusions; it needed and it needs still a deal of
patient, hard, clear-visioned thinking to win from the newer
interpretations of the Bible that understanding and acceptance of its
value which went with the inherited faith. The more liberal-minded
religious teachers doubtless very greatly overestimate the penetration
of popular thought already accomplished, by what seems to them a
familiar commonplace. The New Testament is still, even for the scholar,
a challenging problem. Conclusions are being bitterly contested and
where the specialist is himself in doubt the average man is naturally in
utter confusion. The more conservative communions neither accept nor
teach the results of the higher criticism, and so it reaches the body of
their communicants only as rumour and a half-understood menace to the
truth.
Religion is naturally the most conservative thing in the world and even
when we think ourselves to have utterly changed our point of view
something deeper than mere intellectual acceptance protests and will not
be dismissed. We pathetically cling to that to which we, at the same
time, say good-bye. The average man somewhat affected by the modern
scientific spirit is greatly perplexed by the miraculous elements in the
Bible and yet he still believes the Bible the word of God with an
authority nothing else possesses. In fact, by a contradiction easy
enough to understand, what puzzles him most seems to him the clearest
evidence of the supernatural character of the narrative itself. His
religion is not so much the interpretation of what he does understand as
the explanation of what he does not understand. If he gives up the
supernatural his faith goes with it, and yet the other side of him--the
scientifically tempered side--balks at the supernatural.
It is hard to know what to do with such a temper. Indeed, just this
confused temper of believing and doubting, with miracles for the storm
center, has offered a rich field for those interpretations of the
miraculous, particularly in the New Testament, in terms of faith and
mental healing, to which Christian Science and New Thought are so much
given. We may conclude in a sentence by saying that since the
infallibility of the Bible was one of the flying buttresses which upheld
the inherited structure of religion, those changes and confusions which
have grown out of two generations of Biblical criticism have greatly
affected the popular faith.
_The New Psychology Both a Constructive and Disturbing Influence_
A third influence tending to break up the stability of the old order has
been the new psychology. So general a statement as this needs also to be
qualified, for, suggestively enough, the new psychology has not so much
preceded as followed the modern multiplication of what, using James'
phrase, we may call the "Varieties of Religious Experience." It has
been, in part, a widening of our conclusions as to the mind and its
processes to make room for the puzzling play of personality which has
revealed itself in many of these experiences. Hypnotism necessarily
antedated the interest of psychology in the hypnotic state; it compelled
psychology to take account of it and for the explaining of hypnotism
psychology has been compelled to make a new study of personality and its
more obscure states. The psychologists have been far more hospitable to
the phenomena of mental healing than have the faculties of medicine.
They took them seriously before the average doctor would even admit that
they existed. Their study led them to a pretty thoroughgoing
consideration of the power of suggestion upon bodily states, and
eventually to formulate, as they have been able, both the laws of
suggestion and the secret of its power. Telepathy and psychic phenomena
generally have also offered a rich field to the student of the abnormal
and psychology has broadened its investigations to include all these
conditions. That is to say, the border-land phenomena of consciousness
as stressed and manifested in the more bizarre cults have really
supplied the material upon which the new psychology has been working,
and the psychologist to-day is seriously trying to explain a good many
things which his predecessors, with their hard and fast analyses of the
mind and its laws, refused to take seriously.
They concede that a complete psychology must have a place in it for the
abnormal as well as the normal, and for the exceptional as well as for
the staid and universally accepted. Those who have been fathering new
religions and seeking to make the abnormal normal have been quick to
avail themselves of the suggestions and permissions in the new
psychology. Once we have crossed the old and clearly defined frontiers,
almost anything seems possible. Personality, we are now taught, is
complex, far-reaching, and is really, like a floating iceberg, more
largely below the sea level of consciousness than above it. How far it
extends and what connections it makes in these its hidden depths, no one
of us may know. Normal consciousness, to change the figure, is just one
brilliantly illuminated center in a world of shadow deepening into
darkness. The light grows more murky, the shadows more insistent, as we
pass down, or out, or back from that illumined center. We cannot tell
how much of the shadow is really a part of us, nor do we dare to be
dogmatic about what may, or may not, there be taking place.
Indeed, we may fill the shadows with almost anything which caprice or
desire may suggest. Our curiously inventive minds have always loved to
fill in our ignorances with their creations. We formerly had the
shadowed backgrounds of the universe to populate with the creatures of
our fear or fancy, but now, strangely enough, since science has let in
its light upon the universe psychology has given us the subconscious as
a region not yet subdued to law or shot through with light. And the
prophets of new cults and border-land movements have taken advantage of
this. "Since there is," they say in substance, "so much in life of which
we are not really conscious, and since there are hints within us of
strange powers, how can we set limits to what we may either be or do,
and may not one man's caprice be as reasonable as another man's reason?"
The popularization of the new psychology has thus created a soil finely
receptive to the unusual. Without understanding what has been
accomplished in the way of investigation, and with little accurate
knowledge of what has actually been tested out, there is amongst us a
widespread feeling that almost anything is possible. Here also we may
end in a sentence by saying that present-day psychology with its wide
sweep of law, its recognition of the abnormal, its acceptance of and
insistence upon the power of suggestion, its recognition of the
subconscious and its tendency to assign thereto a great force of
personal action, has broken down old certainties and given a free field
to imagination. It has, more positively, taught us how to apply the laws
of mental action to the more fruitful conduct of life, and so supplied
the basis for the cults which make much of efficiency and
self-development. It has also lent new meaning to religion all along the
line.
_The Influence of Philosophy and the Social Situation_
How far contemporaneous philosophy has affected inherited faith or
supplied a basis for new religious development, is more difficult to
say. Beyond debate philosophic materialism has greatly influenced the
religious attitude of multitudes of people just as the reactions against
it have supplied the basis for new religious movements. Pragmatism,
affirming that whatever works is true, has tended to supply a
philosophic justification for whatever seems to work, whether it be true
or not, and it has beside tended to give us a world where little islands
of understandings have taken, as it were, the place of a continuous
continent of truth. The tendencies of the leaders of new cults have been
to take the material which science and psychology have supplied and
build them into philosophies of their own; they have not generally been
able or willing to test themselves by the conclusions of more
disciplined thinkers.
New Thought has undoubtedly been affected by the older
idealisms--Berkeley's for example--while James and Royce have supplied
congenial material. The movements are generally selective. New Thought
uses James' applied psychology and possibly Royce's Absolute, but does
not consistently confine itself to any one system. Philosophy also has
been itself of late working in a pretty rarified region. Its problems
have not been the problems of the common mind. It has been trying to
find out how we know, to relate the inner and the outer world, and in
general to account for things which the average man takes for granted,
and in the understanding of which he is more hindered than helped by the
current philosophy of the schools. It takes philosophy a good while to
reach the man in the street, and even then its conclusions have to be
much popularized and made specific before they mean much for him. We
shall know better fifty years from now what philosophy is doing for
religion and life than we know to-day. There are, however, as has been
said, aspects of philosophy which religion generally is beginning to
take into account.
The failure of Christianity to create for itself a distinctly Christian
environment has also had much to do with dissolving old religious
stabilities. Strongly felt social injustices are releasing forces of
discontent and creating a fertile soil for revolutionary experiment,
though it must be said that modern religious cults and movements have
not gained so much from this particular form of discontent as have those
movements which look toward radical social readjustment. But the whole
situation has created a shaken state of public opinion. The fierceness
of modern competition, industrially and economically, finally carried
through to the tragic competition of a world war, has put our tempers on
edge. The extremes of wealth and poverty and the baffling fluctuations
in modern industry have brought the existing order into disrepute. The
very great number of the socially unfit and the grievous number of
social misfits, along with crime and poverty and the deposit of human
sediment in our cities, not only trouble men of good will but create a
human element easily misled. Such conditions as these are in such
painful contrast with the ideals of the Gospel, the spirit of
Christianity and even the potential productive force of modern society
as to lead many to believe that something is radically wrong. Many are
persuaded that Christianity as now organized and led is socially
sterile; they have withdrawn themselves from the church; many of them
have become its mordant critics; the more extreme of them have disowned
religion as well as its organized form, and the violently radical would
dethrone any conception of the Divine and take the word God out of our
vocabulary. This extreme group has not for the most part associated
itself with the new religious movement, but here at least has been a
disintegrating force.
_An Age of Confusion_
In such ways as these, then, the accepted religious order identified
with historic Catholicism and Protestantism has in the last fifty years
been greatly altered. Science, Biblical criticism, psychology and
philosophy, and social unrest have all had their share in making people
impatient of the inherited order, or doubtful or defiant of it. We have
been asked to relate our old creeds and confidences to new insights and
understandings. The old answers to the questions Whence? and Whither?
and Why? have been challenged by new answers; our horizons have been
pushed back in every direction and a strange sense of mystery both in
personality and the external order has perplexed and stimulated us.
Along with all this and in no little way growing out of it, has gone
impatience of discipline and an undue haste to gain the various goods of
life.
Evolution misled us, to begin with. If the longing for deliverance be
one of the driving forces in religious life, then the vaster scientific
conclusions of the latter part of the nineteenth century offered a new
definition of deliverance. It was not, after all, so much in the travail
of the soul as in a serene and effortless self-commitment to a power,
not ourselves, which makes for righteousness, that we were to be saved.
We had only to push out upon tides which asked of us neither rudder nor
oar, to be brought to our appointed havens. How greatly we have been
disillusioned in all this and how bitterly we have been taught that life
is not so much a drifting with the tide as making brave headway against
it, we all know well enough to-day. Somewhere back of a vast deal in
these modern religious cults and movements, is the smug optimism, now
taking one form and now another, which was the misleading bequest of
the nineteenth century to the twentieth.
The great scientific discoveries and their application to the mechanism
of life led the nineteenth century to believe that nothing was
impossible. Everything we touched became plastic beneath our touch save
possibly ourselves; there seemed to be no limit to what man might do and
he consequently assumed that there was no limit to what he might become.
He disassociated his hopes from both his disciplines and experiences;
everything seemed not only possible but easily possible. A general
restlessness of temper, due in part to the breaking up of the inherited
order, in part to the ferment of new ideas and in part to a general
relaxing of discipline, began to manifest itself.
The demoralizing influence of migratory populations ought not to be
overlooked in this connection. In all the Western nations there has been
an outstanding growth of industrial city populations due to changing
economic conditions. The steadying influences of old environments have
been lost, the influence of the new environment is too stimulating at
its best and demoralizing at its worst. Our cities are not kind to home
life; too often they do not supply a proper physical setting for it. The
specialization of hard driven industries takes the creative joy out of
work and leads to an excess of highly commercialized pleasure. The
result is the modern city worker, never living long enough in one place
to create for himself a normal social environment, always anxious about
his economic future, restless, too largely alternating between
strenuous work and highly coloured pleasure and much open, through
temperament and circumstance, to the appeal of whatever promises him a
new experience or a new freedom.
_The Lure of the Short Cut_
Dean Inge in a recent study of the contribution of the Greek temper to
religion has drawn a strong, though deeply shadowed picture of the
disorganization of modern life through such influences as these. "The
industrial revolution has generated a new type of barbarism, with no
roots in the past. For the second time in the history of Western Europe,
continuity is in danger of being lost. A generation is growing up, not
uneducated, but educated in a system which has little connection with
European culture in its historical development. The Classics are not
taught; the Bible is not taught; history is not taught to any effect.
What is even more serious, there are no social traditions. The modern
townsman is _deracine_: he has forgotten the habits and sentiments of
the village from which his forefathers came. An unnatural and unhealthy
mode of life, cut off from the sweet and humanizing influences of
nature, has produced an unnatural and unhealthy mentality, to which we
shall find no parallels in the past. Its chief characteristic is
profound secularity or materialism. The typical town artisan has no
religion and no superstitions; he has no ideals beyond the visible and
tangible world of senses."[7]
[Footnote 7: "The Legacy of Greece," p. 38.]
Writing as an Englishman Dean Inge did not note the equally unsettling
influence of migratory races. The European peasant in Detroit or Chicago
or New York is still more _deracine_. He has not only left the soil in
whose culture his ancestors had been established for generations, he has
left the tradition and the discipline which have made him what he is.
The necessary readjustments are immensely difficult. For the first
generation they are largely a dumb puzzle, or a dull, aching
homesickness or a gray laborious life whose outcome must be often
strangely different from their dreams, but for the second generation the
whole experience is a heady adventure in freedom not easy to analyze
though social workers generally are agreed that the children of the
immigrant, belonging neither to the old nor the new, are a disturbing
element in American life. A city like Detroit, in which this is being
written, where both movements combine, the American country and village
dweller coming to a highly specialized industrial center and the
European immigrant to an entirely new environment, illustrates the
complex issue of the whole process.
It is just to note that the Catholic immigrant, finding in his Church
the one homelike thing, is often a better Catholic in America than he
was at home. A Protestant writer without accurate information would not
dare to generalize on the religious dislocation of the second Catholic
generation. But there must be a very great loss. The large non-churched
elements in our population must be in part due to Catholic
disintegration as they are certainly due to Protestant disintegration.
And new movements find their opportunity in this whole group. In
general, society, through such influences, has grown impatient of
discipline, scornful of old methods, contemptuous of experience and
strangely unwilling to pay the price of the best. The more unstable have
surrendered themselves to the lure of the short cut; they are persuaded
that there are quick and easy roads to regions of well-being which had
before been reached only through labour and discipline and much travail
of body, mind and soul.
_Popular Education Has Done Little to Correct Current Confusions_
Nor has the very great extension of popular education really done much
to correct this; it seems rather to intensify it, for education shared
and shares still the temper of the time. Our education has been more
successful generally in opening vistas than in creating an understanding
of the laws of life and the meaning of experience; it has given us a
love of speculation without properly trained minds; it has furnished us
with the catch words of science and philosophy but has not supplied, in
the region of philosophy particularly, the corresponding philosophic
temper. It has, above all, been fruitful in unjustified self-confidence,
particularly here in America. We have confused a great devotion to
higher education and the widespread taking of its courses with the solid
fruition of it in mental discipline. America particularly has furnished
for a long time now an unusual opportunity for bizarre and capricious
movements. Nothing overtaxes the credulity of considerable elements in
our population. Whatever makes a spacious show of philosophy is sure to
find followers and almost any self-confident prophet has been able to
win disciples, no matter to what extremes he goes.
This has not been equally true of older civilizations with a more
clearly defined culture or a more searching social discipline. Something
must be lacking in the education of a people in which all this is so
markedly possible. The play of mass psychology (one does not quite dare
to call it mob psychology) also enters into the situation. Democracy
naturally makes much of the verdict of majorities. Any movement which
gains a considerable number of adherents is pretty sure to win the
respect of the people who have been taught to judge a cause by the
number of those who can be persuaded to adopt it. This generally
unstable temper, superficial, restless, unduly optimistic, open to
suggestion and wanting in the solid force of great tradition has joined
with the recasting of Science, Theology, Psychology and Philosophy, to
open the door for the entrance of new religions, and in general, to so
unsettle the popular mind as to make almost anything possible.
_The Churches Lose Authority_
In the field of religion certain well-defined consequences have either
followed or accompanied the whole process. There has been, to begin
with, a loosening of church ties. The extent of all this has been
somewhat covered up by the reasonable growth of the historic churches.
In spite of all the difficulties which they have been called upon to
face, the statistics generally have been reassuring. The churches are
attended in the aggregate by great numbers of people who are untroubled
by doubts. Such as these have little sympathy with the more restless or
troubled, and little patience with those who try to understand the
restless and troubled; they do not share the forebodings of those who
look with a measure of apprehension upon the future of Christianity. As
far as they recognize disturbing facts at all they are very much like
Carlyle who, when told that Christianity was upon its last legs, said,
"What of that? Christianity has always been upon its last legs." And
perhaps their simple faith and hope are more to the point than many
opposing attitudes. The churches have grown faster than the population,
or at least they had at the last census. More than that, there has been
a marked increase in church activity. The churches are better organized;
they are learning the secret of cooeperation; they are reaching out in
more directions and all of them, even the more democratic, are more hard
driven from the top.
The result of all this has been a great show of action, though it is
difficult now to say whether the real results of this multiplied
activity have been commensurate in spiritual force and ethical fruitage
with the intensity of their organized life. (The writer thinks not.) But
through all this we discern, nevertheless, a marked weakening of
authority as far as the Church goes and a general loosening of ties;
though the churches in the regions of finance and organization drive
harder than they used to drive, in the matter of creed and conduct they
are driving with an easy rein. Denominational loyalties are relaxed;
there is much changing from one denomination to another and within the
denominations and individual churches there is, of course, a substantial
proportion of membership which is only nominal.
_Efforts at Reconstruction Within the Church_
There are those who view with apprehension the whole future of religion.
They believe that the foundations of the great deep are breaking beneath
us, that Christianity must be profoundly recast before it can go on
prevailingly, and they are reaching in one direction and another for
constructive changes, but all this within the frontiers of historic
Christianity and the Church. They want church unity but they still want
a church; they want a new theology but still a theology; they want new
applications of religion but still substantially the old religion. There
was more of this during the war than just now. Such a book as Orchard's
"Future of Religion," perhaps the most thoughtful analysis of conditions
given us for a long time, was born of the war itself and already many of
its anticipations seem to miss the point. Such expectations of wholesale
religious reconstruction leave out of account the essential conservatism
of human nature, a conservatism more marked in religion than anywhere
else.
There is also a strong and telling group which is seeking so to recast
and interpret inherited faiths as to make them more consonant to modern
needs and more hospitable to new understandings. Such as these have
accepted gladly the tested conclusions of science, the results of
Biblical criticism and the revealing suggestion of both psychology and
philosophy; they have sought to disentangle the essential from the
unessential, the enduring from the transient. They have found in science
not the foe but the friend of religion. Those intimations of unfailing
force, those resolutions of the manifold phases of action and reality
toward which science is reaching have seemed to them a discovery of the
very presence and method of God, and they have found in just such
regions as these new material for their faith. They have dealt
reverently with the old creeds, for they have seen that the forms which
Christianity has taken through the centuries have grown out of enduring
experiences and needs never to be outgrown, and that their finality is
the finality of the deep things of the soul itself. They have been able,
therefore, to make new truth tributary to old faith and to interpret the
central affirmations of Christianity in terms of present-day facts. They
have sought to share their conclusions with others and they have really
been able to carry Christianity through the transitional period of the
last fifty years and continue it open-minded, strongly established,
reverent and enriched rather than impoverished.
What they have done has been doubly hard, once through the sheer
difficulty of the task itself, and once through the hostile and too
often abusive temper with which they and their endeavours have been
opposed. None the less, they have saved for Christendom a reasonable
faith. Science has of late gone half-way to meet them. It is rather
painfully revising a good many of its earlier conclusions and on the
whole walking rather humbly just now before its God, recognizing that
the last word has not yet really been said about much of anything.
_An Age of Doubt and a Twilight-Zone in History_
But the apparently unchanged traditions of the older forms of faith and
the relatively strong position of the Church must not blind us to the
generally disorganized condition of religion to-day. There is much in
evidence a body of doubt which clouds the outlook of multitudes upon
religion generally. Beyond debate a kind of eclipse of faith began to
draw across the Western world so early as the middle of the last
century. The militant skepticism of the brilliant group of younger poets
who sang their defiances in the first two decades of the nineteenth
century to a world which professed itself duly shocked, is wholly
different from the sadness with which the more mature singers of two
generations later announce their questioning and their disillusionment.
The difference is just the difference between Shelley and Matthew
Arnold. There is a philosophic depth in this later music which the
former wholly lacked. Arnold speaks for his time when he announces
himself as standing between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to
be born. A profound disillusionment expressed itself in great ranges of
later nineteenth century literature and confirmed the more sensitive and
despairing in a positive pessimism, strangely contrasted to the
self-assertive temper of the science and industry of the period. It
would need a pretty careful analysis to follow all this to its roots.
Something of it no doubt was due to the inability of poet and
philosopher to reconcile their new understanding of life and the
universe with the old religious forms but more of it was likely due to
some deep exhaustion of spiritual force, an exhaustion which has from
time to time marked transitional periods in the development of cultures
and civilizations.
There have always been twilight zones in history, times in which the
force of the old had spent itself and nothing new had come to take its
place. We are beginning to see now that we too have been passing through
a twilight zone whose contrasts are all the more dramatic through the
more than tropic swiftness with which the high lights of the Victorian
period darkened into the distractions and disillusionments of our own
time. The best one can say is that there was on the part of the more
sensitive a widespread anticipation of all this, as if the chill of a
coming shadow had fallen first of all upon them, and beyond debate, not
a little of the doubt which has been so marked a feature of the last two
generations in literature generally, and in the attitude of a great
number of people toward religion, has been due to just this.
_The Hunger of the Soul and the Need for Faith Persist_
And yet, since religion is so inextinguishable a thing, changing forces
and attitudes have still left untouched the hunger of the soul and the
need of men for faith. Indeed the very restlessness of the time, the
breaking up of the old orders, the failure of the old certainties, has,
if anything, deepened the demand for religious reality and there has
been in all directions a marked turning to whatever offered itself as a
plausible substitute for the old, and above all a turning to those
religions which in quite clearly defined ways promise to demonstrate the
reality of religion through some sensible or tangible experience. If
religion will only work miracles and attest itself by some sign or other
which he who runs may read there is waiting for it an eager
constituency. We shall find as we go on how true this really is, for the
modern religious cult which has gained the largest number of followers
offers the most clearly defined signs and wonders.
If religion cures your disease and you are twice persuaded, once that
you really are cured and once that religion has done it, then you have
something concrete enough to satisfy anybody. Or if, perplexed by death
and with no faith strong enough to pierce that veil through a persuasion
of the necessity of immortality established in the very nature of
things, you are offered a demonstration of immortality through the
voices and presences of the discarnate, then, once more, you have
something concrete enough, if only you were sure of it, to settle every
doubt. And finally, if the accepted religions are too concrete for you
and if you desire a rather vague and poetic approach to religion made
venerable by the centuries and appealingly picturesque through the
personalities of those who present it, you have in some adaptation of
oriental faith to occidental needs a novel and interesting approach to
the nebulous reality which passes in the Eastern mind for God, an
approach which demands no very great discipline and leaves a wide margin
for the play of caprice or imagination.
_Modern Religious Cults and Movements Find Their Opportunity in the
Whole Situation. The Three Centers About Which They Have Organized
Themselves_
There has been, then, as the outcome of the complex of forces which we
have been considering, a new approach to religion distinctive in our own
time and in general taking three directions determined by that against
which it has reacted, or perhaps more positively by the varying
character of what it seeks. A pretty careful analysis of modern
religious cults and movements shows that they have organized themselves,
in action and reaction, around three centers definitely related to three
outstanding deficiencies of inherited faith. I say deficiencies, though
that is of course to beg the question. We saw earlier in this study how
religion everywhere and always grows out of some of the few central and
unexpectedly simple, though always supremely great, needs and how the
force of any religion waxes or wanes as it meets these needs. Religion
is real to the generality of us as it justifies the ways of God to man
and reveals the love and justice of God in the whole of personal
experience. Religion is always, therefore, greatly dependent upon its
power to reconcile the more shadowed side of experience with the Divine
love and power and goodness. It is hard to believe in a Providence whose
dealings with us seem neither just nor loving. Faith breaks down more
often in the region of trying personal experience than anywhere else.
All this is as old as the book of Job but it is none the less true
because it is old.
The accepted theology which explained sin and sorrow in terms of the
fall of man and covered each individual case with a blanket indictment
justified by the condemnation of the whole of humanity has lost its
force. It depended, to begin with, on a tradition of human beginnings
which has not borne examination, and it was beside, in spite of all the
efforts to defend it, profoundly unethical. Calvinistic theology,
moreover, made a difficult matter worse by assuming for every individual
a predestined fate reaching beyond death itself which a man was
powerless to escape. Those chapters in the long story of theology which
record the turning and groping of minds--and souls--enmeshed in this web
of their own weaving and more deeply entangled still in the challenging
experiences of life itself are among the most pathetic and arresting
in the whole story of human thought. We ought to recognize more clearly
than we have generally done and confess more frankly that our inherited
explanations of the problems of pain and sorrow have been markedly
unsatisfactory and have greatly contributed to the justifiable reaction
against them.
One group of modern religious cults and movements, then, has found its
opportunity just here. Christian Science and kindred cults are just an
attempt to reconcile the love and goodness of God with pain, sickness,
sorrow, and to a lesser degree with sin. How they do this remains to be
seen, but the force of their appeal depends upon the fact that a very
considerable and constantly growing number of people believe that they
have really done it. Such cults as these have also found a place for the
New Testament tradition of healing; they have also appealed strongly to
those who seek a natural or a pseudo-natural explanation for the
miraculous elements in religion generally. They have been expectedly
reinforced by the feeling for the Bible which strongly persists among
those who are not able to find in the inherited Protestant position that
real help in the Bible which they had been taught they should there
find, and who are not, on the other hand, sufficiently acquainted with
the newer interpretations of it to find therein a resolution for their
doubts and a vital support for their faith. Finally, Christian Science
and kindred cults offer a demonstration of the reality of religion in
health and happiness, and generally, in a very tangible way of living.
Here, then, is the first region in which we find a point of departure
for modern religious cults and movements.
Spiritualism organizes itself around another center. Religion generally
demands and offers a faith in immortality. We are not concerned here
with the grounds which various religions have supplied for this faith
or the arguments by which they have supported it. Generally speaking,
any religion loses ground as it fails to convince its adherents of
immortality, or justify their longings therefor. Any religion supplying
clear and indisputable proof of immortality will command a strong
following and any seeming demonstration of immortality not particularly
associated with this or that religious form will organize about itself a
group of followers who will naturally give up pretty much everything
else and center their entire interests upon the methods by which
immortality is thus supposed to be demonstrated. Now modern Spiritualism
comes in just here. It professes to offer a sure proof of immortality to
an age which is just scientific enough to demand something corresponding
to scientific proof for the support of its faith and not scientific
enough to accept all the implications of science, or to submit to its
discipline. Theosophy and kindred cults are generally a quest for
deliverance along other than accepted Christian lines; they substitute
self-redemption for Christian atonement, and deliverance through
mystical disciplines for that forgiveness of sin and assurance of
salvation in which Christianity has found its peace.
There is, of course, a vast deal of action and reaction between the
newer movements themselves and between the new faith and the old. There
are elements common to all religions; there are frontiers where all
religions meet and somewhat merge; at some point or other almost every
faith touches its contrary or becomes uncertain and shifts its emphasis.
Religion is always dependent upon changing tempers and very greatly
upon varying personalities; it is always in flux, impatient of
definitions and refusing the rigid boundary lines within which we
attempt to confine it. Though it be clearly possible, therefore, to find
three distinct points of departure for the whole of the border-land
cults and religions, there is running through them all a certain unity
of driving force. They are in general a quest for a new type of
religious reality; they are largely due to certain marked inadequacies
of the more accepted religious teachings and to the want of the more
accepted religious experiences to satisfy certain types. They have come
to light in our own time through the failure of authority in both
Catholicism and Protestantism, through the failure of the accepted
understandings of the Bible to satisfy those who are still persuaded
that it has a real message and through the reaction of the modern spirit
upon religious attitudes. They owe much to the deficiency of the
traditional explanation of sin, sorrow and suffering; they owe something
to the failure of Christianity to create a Christian environment; and
they owe not a little to the natural longing for some positive assurance
of life after death, as well as to the quest of the soul for deliverance
and its longing for a satisfying communion with God. And they are
reinforced in every direction by the restless and unsettled temper of a
time subject to great changes of habit and outlook through the breaking
up of old industrial and social orders and the impact of new forces
driving in from every direction.
We shall need to relate these conditioning causes more definitely to the
various cults and movements as we go on to study them, but here at least
are the backgrounds against which they must be studied and the lines of
testing down which they must be followed. We shall begin in our more
detailed study of these movements with the modern religious quest for
health and healing. But even here we shall find it worth while to trace
broadly the history of faith and mental healing.