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THE THREATENED DESTRUCTION OF THE SIMPLE FAITH OF THE FATHERS BY THE
VAIN DECEITS OF MODERN PHILOSOPHERS.—AN ATTACK CHRISTIANS MUST MEET.
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[WRITTEN FOR THE CONSTITUTION, 1881.]
NEW YORK, January 26.—The dread of the times, as I see it, is the
growing skepticism in the leading circles of thought and action
throughout the country—a swelling tide of atheism and unbelief that has
already swept over the outposts of religion.
I am not alarmed by the fact that Henry Ward Beecher shook hands with
Ingersoll on a public stand, and has since swung beyond the limit of
orthodoxy, any more than I am reassured by the fact that Stephen H. Tyng
has, by indorsing the miracles at Lourdes, swung back into the
stronghold of superstition. These are mere personal expressions that may
mean much or little. They may be classed with the complaint of Dr.
Talmage that he found religion dead in a circuit of 3000 miles of travel
last year, which complaint is balanced by the assertion of Dr. Hall that
the growth of religious sentiment was never so decisive as at present.
I have noted, in the first place, that the latter-day writers—novelists,
scientists and essayists—are arraying themselves in great force either
openly on the side of skepticism, or are treating religious sentiment
with a readiness of touch and lack of reverence, that is hardly less
dangerous. I need not run over the lists of scientists, beginning with
Tyndall, Huxley and Stephens, that have raised the banner of
negation—nor recount the number of novelists who follow the lead of
sweet George Eliot, this sad and gentle woman, who allied sentiment to
positivism so subtly, and who died with the promise on her lips that her
life would “be gathered like a scroll in the tomb, unread forever”—who
said that she “wanted no future that broke the ties of the past,” and
has gone to meet the God whose existence she denied. We all know that
within the past twenty years there has been an alarming increase of
atheism among the leading writers in all branches. But it is the growth
of skepticism among the people that has astonished me.
I am not misled by the superb eloquence of Ingersoll nor the noisy
blasphemy of his imitators. I was with five journalists, and I found
that every one of them were skeptics, two of them in the most emphatic
sense. In a sleeping-car with eight passengers, average people I take
it, I found that three were confirmed atheists, three were doubtful
about it, and two were old-fashioned Christians. A young friend of mine,
a journalist and lecturer, asked me a few months ago what I thought of
his preparing a lecture that would outdo Ingersoll—his excuse being that
he found Ingersoll so popular. I asked Henry Watterson once what effect
Ingersoll’s lectures had on the Louisville public. “No more than a
theatrical representation,” was the quick reply. Watterson was wrong. I
have never seen a man who came away from an Ingersoll lecture as stout
of faith and as strong in heart as he was when he went there.
I do not know that this spirit of irreligion and unbelief has made much
inroad on the churches. It is as yet simply eating away the material
upon which the churches must recruit and perpetuate themselves. There is
a large body of men and women, the bulk probably of our population, that
is between the church and its enemies; not members of the church or open
professors of religion, they have yet had reverence for the religious
beliefs, have respected the rule of conscience, and believed in the
existence of one Supreme Being. These men and women have been useful to
the cause of religion, in that they held all the outposts about the camp
of the church militant, and protected it with enwrapping conservatism
and sympathy. It is this class of people that are now yielding to the
assaults of the infidel. Having none of the inspiration of religion, and
possessing neither the enthusiasm of converts nor the faith of veterans,
they are easily bewildered and overcome. It is a careless and unthinking
multitude on which the atheists are working, and the very inertia of a
mob will carry thousands if the drift of the mass once floats to the
ocean. And the man or woman who rides on the ebbing tide goes never to
return. Religious beliefs once shattered are hardly mended. The church
may reclaim its sinners, but its skeptics, never.
It is not surprising that this period of critical investigation into all
creeds and beliefs has come. It is a logical epoch, come in its
appointed time. It is one of the penalties of progress. We have stripped
all the earth of mystery, and brought all its phenomena under the square
and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery
of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the
Eternal, and pitched its crucible for an analysis of the soul. It was
natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical
gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine—a
vastness and vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have
fathomed its uttermost secret; felt its most secret pulse, girdled it
with steel, harnessed it and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery
is now demonstrated; what was vague is now apparent. Science has
dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made
plain all that was vague on earth, and reduced every mystery to
demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last having reduced all
the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a
fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself, and warn the
world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul.
The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that
was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its
builders as the shores of a star that lights the space beyond our vision
are to us to-day; the Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the
centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of
wonder; ships that were freighted from the heart of Africa lie in our
harbor, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than
bewildered the builders at Babel; a letter slips around the earth in
ninety days, and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean;
we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the
stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined; we even
read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable
distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor,
shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not
shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and
measureless depths of the universe. Fit time is this, then, for science
to make its last and supreme assault—to challenge the last and supreme
mystery—defy the last and supreme force. And the church may gird itself
for the conflict! As the Pope has said, “It is no longer a rebel that
threatens the church. It is a belligerent!” It is no longer a shading of
creed. It is the upsettal of all creeds that is attempted.
It is impossible to conceive the misery and the blindness that will come
in the wake of the spreading atheism. The ancients witnessed the fall of
a hundred creeds, but still had a hundred left. The vast mystery of life
hung above them, but was lit with religions that were sprinkled as stars
in its depths. From a host of censers was their air made rich with
fragrance, and warmed from a field of altars. No loss was irreparable.
But with us it is different. We have reached the end. Destroy our one
belief and we are left hopeless, helpless, blind. Our air will be
odorless, chill, colorless. Huxley, the leader of the positivists,
himself confesses—I quote from memory: “Never, in the history of man,
has a calamity so terrific befallen the race, as this advancing deluge,
black with destruction, uprooting our most cherished hopes, engulfing
our most precious creed, and burying our highest life in mindless
desolation.” And yet Mr. Huxley urges on this deluge with furious
energy. The aggressiveness of the atheists is inexplicable to me. Why
they should insist on destroying a system that is pure and ennobling,
when they have nothing to replace it with; why they should shatter a
faith that colors life, only to leave it colorless; why they should rob
life of all that makes life worth living; why they should take away the
consolation that lifts men and women from the despair of bereavement and
desolation, or the light that guides the feet of struggling humanity, or
the hope that robs even the grave of its terror,—why they should do all
this, and then stand empty-handed and unresponsive before the yearning
and supplicating people they have stripped of all that is precious, is
more than I can understand. The best atheist, to my mind, that I ever
knew, was one who sent his children to a convent for their education. “I
cannot lift the blight of unbelief from my own mind,” he said, “but it
shall never fall upon the minds of my children if I can help it. As for
me, I would give all I have on earth for the old faith that I wore so
lightly and threw off so carelessly.”
The practical effects of the growth of atheism are too terrible to
contemplate. A vessel on an unknown sea that has lost its rudder and is
tossed in a storm—that’s the picture. It will not do for Mr. Ingersoll
to say that a purely human code of right and wrong can be established to
which the passions of men can be anchored and from which they can swing
with safety. It will not do for him to cite his own correct life or the
correct lives of the skeptical scientists, or of leading skeptics, as
proof that unbelief does not bring license. These men are held to
decency by a pride of position and by a sense of special responsibility.
It is the masses that atheism will demoralize and debauch. It is
thousands of simple men and women, who, loosed of the one restraint that
is absolute and imperious, will drift upon the current of their
passions, colliding everywhere, and bringing confusion and ruin. The
vastly greatest influence that religion has exercised, as far as the
world goes, has been the conservative pressure that it has put upon the
bulk of the people, who are outside of the church. With the pressure
barely felt and still less acknowledged, it has preserved the integrity
of society, kept the dangerous instincts within bounds, repressed
savagery, and held the balance. Conscience has dominated men who never
confessed even to themselves its power, and the dim, religious memories
of childhood, breathing imperceptibly over long wastes of sin and
brutality, have dissolved clouds of passion in the souls of veterans.
Atheism will not work its full effect on this class of men. Even after
they have murdered conscience by withholding the breath upon which it
lives, its ghost will grope through the chambers of their brain,
menacing and terrible, and to the last,—
Creeping on a broken wing
Through cells of madness, haunts of horror and fear!
It is on the young men and women—the generation bred in the chill
atmosphere of unbelief—that atheism will do its worst. With no
traditions in which to guide their faith, no altar before which they can
do reverence, no ideal to which their eyes can turn, no standard lofty
enough to satisfy, or steadfast enough to assure—with no uplifting that
is not limited, no aspiration that has wings, and no enthusiasm that is
not absurd—with life but a fever that kindles in the cradle and dies in
the grave,—truly atheism meets youth with a dread prospect, sullen,
storm-swept, hopeless.
In the conflict that is coming, the church is impregnable, because the
church is right; because it is founded on a rock. The scientists boast
that they have evolved everything logically from the first particles of
matter; that from the crystal rock to sentient man is a steady way,
marked by natural gradations. They even say that, if a new bulk were
thrown off from the sun to-morrow it would spin into the face of the
earth, and the same development that has crowned the earth with life
would take place in the new world. And yet Tyndall says: “We have
exhausted physics, and reached its very rim, and yet a mighty mystery
looms up before us.” And this mystery is the kindling of the atoms of
the brain with the vital spark. There science is baffled, for there is
the supreme force that is veiled eternally from the vision of man.
The church is not bound to the technicalities of argument in this
contest. It has the perfect right to say, and say logically, that
something must rest on faith—that there must be something in the heart
or soul before conviction can be made perfect. Just as we cannot impress
with the ecstasies and transports of earthly love a man who has never
loved, or paint a rainbow to a man who has never seen. And yet the time
has passed when religion can dismiss the skeptic with a shriek or a
sneer. I read one little book a year ago, gentle, firm, decisive; a book
that demonstrated the necessity and existence of the Supreme Being, as
clearly and as closely as a mathematical proposition was worked out. But
the strength of the church is, after all, the high-minded consistency of
its members; the warmth and earnestness of its evangelism; the purity
and gentleness of its apostles. If the creeds are put at peace, and
every man who wears the Christian armor will go forth to plead the cause
of the meek and lowly Nazarene, whose love steals into the heart of man
as the balm of flowers into the pulses of a summer evening—then we shall
see the hosts of doubt and skepticism put to rout.
Of course I have no business to write all this. It is the province of
the preachers to talk of these things, and many no doubt will resent as
impertinent even the suggestion of a worldling. And yet it seems so sure
to me that in the swift and silent marshaling of the hosts of unbelief
and irreligion there is presaged the supremest test that the faith of
Christians has ever undergone, that I felt impelled to write. There are
men, outside of the active workers of the church, who have all reverence
for its institutions and love for its leaders; whose hearts are stirred
now and then by a faith caught at a mother’s knee, or the memory of some
rapt and happy moment; who want to live, if not in the fold of the
chosen, at least in the shadow of the Christian sentiment, and among the
people dominated by Christian faith; and who hope to die at last, in the
same trust and peace that moved the dying Shakespeare—wisest, sweetest
mind ever clothed in mortal flesh—when he said: “I commend my soul into
the hands of God, my Creator, hoping and assuredly believing, through
the only merits of Jesus Christ, my Saviour, to be made partaker of life
everlasting.”
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