came with the discovery of Copernicus and Galileo that the current
astronomy was fundamentally wrong. No sun-star or swarm of worlds in
the infinite azure could be so precious in God's sight as this earth of
ours, it was believed, for had it not been chosen as the scene and
stage of that transcendent act whereby the Deity had consecrated
humanity for ever to himself? Now it turns out that the physical
origin of this world of ours is precisely that of others, while, so far
from being the centre of the universe, it is but a speck in infinity,
positively invisible from any of the million suns that light the
eternal way from our own central orb to the infinities that range
beyond. The ecclesiastical mind of those days astutely fastened on the
charge of impugning the sacred record of Moses--itself a phenomenal
instance of incompetent infallibility--but the real explanation of
Galileo's persecution lies in the fact that, with this earth in a
dependent position and in ceaseless motion, the whole system of
theology suffered a serious shock. Where were heaven and hell in the
new version astronomy gave of things? Where did Jesus' spirit go on
his death? Where is limbo, and where is purgatory? Whither did he go
when he ascended bodily into the air? Since this earth is uncounted
myriads of miles from the spot in space which it occupied this morning
when we awoke, what became of the inspired geography of the _terra
incognita_, according to which the several receptacles of spirits were
mapped out with such unfaltering precision?
With the vanishing of the pre-eminent claims advanced by a rudimentary
science on behalf of this earth, and supported by the unsuspecting
theology of the childhood of the world, the earth-born philosophy of
things wrapped up in its fate must also disappear. While the earth
dwindles into a spot in endless space, its "little systems" share its
fate, and our Western cathedral shrinks to the dimensions of "a chapel
in the infinite".
Or, look at the matter numerically. Jesus, who avowedly confined his
missionary efforts to his own race, "for to them only am I sent," is
made by the writer of Matthew's Gospel to give a world-wide commission
to his disciples on the very eve of his mysterious disappearance from
earth: "Go ye and teach all nations," he is reported to have enjoined
upon them. Peter, doubtless, was present upon this occasion, or, at
any rate, we cannot conceive him ignorant of the commission; and yet we
find him refusing point-blank to admit Cornelius the centurion--the
first candidate who offered himself--into the Church, and, according to
the Acts, a sheet full of animals had to be let through the roof of his
house before he could be turned from his purpose of confining the new
religion exclusively to Jews. The explanation, of course, of such
universality as Christianity has attained is mainly due to the
influence of the cosmopolitan Saul of Tarsus, though the idea of an
Oecumenical Society was by no means his original thought. The Stoics
were full of the ideal, and the Cynics before them, while Socrates
refused to describe himself as a citizen of Athens, but claimed the
whole world as his fatherland, and the outer barbarians, as the
exclusive Greeks styled them, he called his brethren.
And, now, how many of the human family are enrolled as "citizens of the
holy places"; what numbers assemble for worship in the great cathedral?
Statistics are unnecessary, but we cannot but remember the temples to
God raised in other ages and other lands, which endure to this hour,
imperishable witnesses to a truth which is "the light of life". What
that truth is, we shall see later. But when we remember the great
pre-Christian systems of the East and of Egypt, and the very stones dug
out of the earth cry aloud in witness to the eternal truths, God, Soul,
Hereafter; when we realise the devotion of martyred Israel to the faith
of their fathers, and the great Mohammedan revolt against the
dogmatical puerilities of the sixth century; when, I say, we remember
that one and all endure to this hour, and in unimpaired vigour, and
still more, when that absorbingly interesting study known as the
science of Comparative Religion has shown us that of orthodoxy is true
what is true of all religious systems--that it enjoys a monopoly of
nothing save of errors peculiar to itself, and that of its doctrines,
all that is true is not new, and all that is new is not true--we are in
a fairer position to estimate its precise place and influence in the
world and the sources from which it has drawn its inspiration.
Even of the comparatively few in the vast family of humanity who own
its supremacy, how many can repeat its shibboleths in common? And if
disunion, the true mark of error, be at work among them, can we believe
that the future is reserved for it? It is unquestionable that the
cultivated intellect of the Continent is profoundly estranged from the
version prevalent there, while it is only the spirit of compromise, so
characteristic of the race, carried into the domain of dogmatism which
prevents a similar insurrection in England. If the sacerdotal lion can
lie down side by side with the Broad Church lambs, it is only because
the wicked world, symbolised for the moment by the strong arm of the
law and the public sense of decency, curbs the ferocity of heresy
hunters and bids them look to their manners lest some worse thing
befall them. It is felt instinctively that the popular phylacteries,
the peculiar trappings in which Divine truth has been set forth in
England, are not worth discussion among serious men.
And this will help us to estimate at its true value the argument which
lost John Henry Newman to rational religion and won him for Roman
Catholicism. What finally decided him that the Ultramontane version of
religion was the true one, was the famous _Securus judicat orbis
terrarum_ of Augustine. The verdict of the world is against you, he
had urged against the Donatists, and what was conclusive against them
appeared to be conclusive against Anglicans, who could only appeal for
support to their own kith and kindred. However that may be, what
answer is forthcoming to the retort which the phenomena of to-day
unmistakably suggest? If the universal consent of the fourth century,
semi-barbarous, uneducated, profoundly credulous, and avowedly
uncritical, serves to prove the truth of that form of Gnosticism known
as orthodoxy, what are we to say of the uniform rejection of it, as
such, by the decidedly cultivated intellect of the nineteenth century?
If the prior unanimity was adequate to prove its dogmatic truth, why
should not the spectacle offered by educated Europe and America be
sufficient to show its groundlessness? Whatever it may be to "babes"
and "little ones" to whom it loves to appeal from the "undue exaltation
of intellect" which can see no basis whatsoever on which to rest the
_historical_ Christianity of the Churches, certain it is to those who
know, it is among those things which "have their day and cease to be".
It cannot be a cathedral vast as the race, it can never be more than a
system among systems, a chapel isolated in the infinite.
The truth of this will be more clearly seen if we reflect on the nature
of the claim of the Churches to be in exclusive possession of Divine
knowledge, the sole revealer of God to man. Ever since the words of
the Gnostic gospeller, "He shall lead you unto all truth," were
written, it has been claimed that the authentic medium of Divine
communications has been a corporation or a book, one or the other being
affirmed to be an exhaustive and infallible philosophy of God and man.
Solomon is said to have had grievous misgivings as to the Lord of
heaven and earth being enclosed within the temple he had built, but no
such anxieties beset the framers of the Nicene or Athanasian Creeds, or
their imitators in subsequent ages. What a spectacle for gods and men!
"All truth" summed up in Thirty-nine Articles, or a score of
Oecumenical Councils! It is the profanity, I had almost said the
sacrilege, of it, which is so shocking to the instinctive reverence of
our minds. And what truths, too, are commended to our keeping in these
canons and articles! Beginning with the natural depravity of human
affections, purposely inflicted upon us because of another's
transgression, we are taught, as a direct corollary from this, that the
Deity is no more moral in his emotions than ourselves; for, in order to
right the first wrong, he is made to perpetrate another which no one
would hesitate to pronounce immoral in us, _viz._, the chastisement of
the innocent in the place of the guilty. We need say nothing of the
lie direct and overwhelming which the unanswerable facts of science, in
many of its departments, give to the whole story of "the fall" of a
first man, and the consequent superstructure which the perverse
ingenuity of man has erected upon it. We need only confine ourselves
to the plain fact that the so-called scheme is an outrage upon the
ethical nature of man, and therefore that it can never have emanated
from God. In the latest explanations of "the Atonement," the Anglican
theologians explain it away, "the redemption" of Jesus being no more
than the example of his saintly life and his uncomplaining submission
to death. The angry God, who will not relax his frown save at the
sight of blood, is conveniently forgotten in the more refined circles
of ecclesiasticism, and is now left to the meditations of Little Bethel
or Breton peasants.
And this is a Divine revelation, a heavenly system of truth so far
beyond human reason, and so intrinsically unrelated to any of our
faculties, that it could never have been discovered by man's
intelligence, but only preternaturally communicated from without! To
Paul, who is alone responsible for the famous scheme, this is the
"wisdom hidden from the ages, which none of the princes of this world
ever knew"--his peculiar way of describing the superiority of his
teaching to that of the Greek masters like Plato and Aristotle. But
the civilised world--the _orbis terrarum_ of the nineteenth
century--holds with Socrates that the moral law is supreme over gods
and men, and believes that Mill and Carlyle are safer guides when they
teach, that no less than the best moral emotion discoverable in man may
be ascribed to the God of men. "Depend upon it," says the great man of
his hero, Frederick the Great, "it is flatly inconceivable that moral
emotion could have been put into him by an entity which had none of its
own."
Meanwhile, if the universe be good at heart, if reason be indeed its
soul, the tendencies of modern thought must be leading mankind to some
predestined end. The movements known to history as the Renaissance,
Reformation and Revolution, accomplished results which must endure to
all time; they marked the great stages in humanity's onward march.
To-day, when systems and schemes of religion are going to pieces like
the dust of the dead, when mystery and miracle are becoming unthinkable
things in a world where all is law; when the most imposing pretensions
are subjected to so minute and pitiless an analysis; when every dogma
of council or creed can be tracked and traced with an unerring
precision to root ideas which govern the human mind in its undeveloped
stages; to-day, when, in spite of the destructive work being done, a
reverence and a true zeal for truth reigns as it never did before in
this world's history, when the sense of the responsibility and
solemnity of life weighs upon men so profoundly, there must, I say, be
some goal towards which humanity is moving, there must be some
synthesis which shall reconcile for them their aspirations and their
knowledge, some harmony which shall resolve the discordant notes of
life--in a word, there must be some
Far-off, Divine event
Towards which the whole creation moves.
What is that event? Unless a man is prepared to say that the present
chaotic condition of religious thought is to perpetuate itself, or that
we are to revert to the ideal of mediaevalism--a world iron-bound by
the dogmatism of self-appointed representatives of "all truth,"--or
unless we are to expect a mental paralysis consequent upon a universal
scepticism, there must be some definite bourne for which the forces now
at work in humanity are making. We are not able to believe in the
perpetuity of an unstable equilibrium in the world of mind any more
than in the universe of matter, nor does history show any warrant for
the expectation that the world will return to the discarded ideal of a
mediaeval theocracy, nor does the language of modern agnosticism, with
its hesitations and falterings, encourage one to believe that therein
is a solution, complete and final, of those obstinate questionings
which beset us. No; we believe with Kant in the indestructibility of
the religious sentiment. We hold that if the soul of man have not
whereon to feed, it will feed upon itself to its own destruction. We
are persuaded that the Infinite which is necessary to _explain_ the
finite, is alone adequate to satisfy its desires. Our faith is in a
"religion within the boundaries of mere reason".
In the first place, its beliefs are the one element of truth in all the
"little systems" of this and of all time. It is here they touch the
confines of the eternal. It is in this centre of changeless truth that
all their wandering, broken lights do meet. This is the one reality
behind the phantoms and phenomena wherewith they have been perplexing
and confusing man's thoughts; it is at the same time the great ideal,
the passion for which is the star of life.
What a majestic source of unity is there here! The soul positively
thrills at the thought of the boundless possibilities of good which
centre in this conception of religion. That which the faiths of the
world aspired to do, might hope to become an accomplished fact did
their votaries believe with Shelley that only
The One remains, the many change and pass;
did they obey the ancient prophet's command, "Depart from your idols".
For what are all the current creeds and orthodoxies of every age and
land but so many "idols of the market place," veritable _simulacra_ or
images of something ineffable, beyond the power of man's mind to
completely conceive, or of his stammering tongue to utter? They served
their purpose in the childhood of humanity, they were schoolmasters to
train it to higher things, tabernacles of skins wherein to enshrine the
Holy of Holies in rude and uncultured times. But now that humanity is
reaching the full stature of its manhood, is it not time to preach from
the house-tops what philosophers have been thinking ever since the
emancipation of European intellect, aye and before it too, in the great
Moorish schools, which sprung up before the scholasticism of the middle
ages? Is it not time that intelligent clergymen of every school in
Christendom should openly declare in their pulpits what they think,
believe and discuss in the privacies of their studies?
If truth is the one thing which never yet did men any harm, tell them
that the universe is not built upon the narrow plan they had been
taught of old; that its age is immeasurable; that man has been an
inhabitant of this fragment of it for a hundred thousand years at
least; that there never was any such being as a first man, some seven
thousand years old; that his existence, his history, is a myth, traced
upon the cylinders of Babylon; that man never fell except to himself
and his own conscience; that the "redemption" scheme is an idiosyncrasy
of Paul; that a priesthood is avowedly a pagan conception, and
sacrifice a relic of barbarism. Tell them this, for you know it is
true, and that your creeds and confessions are false. Speak out as
your conscience bids you speak, that yours is no temple of truth, no
cathedral vast enough to hold the race, nothing but the dim shadow of a
great reality, one of "the many which change and pass," a spot in
boundless space, "a chapel in the infinite".
For the truth of rational religion is that into which all that is true
in lesser faiths resolves itself. Where they agree with it they are in
agreement amongst themselves. Where they depart from it, there begins
discord--sure sign of error--the confusion and strife of tongues, the
jangling contradictions of men. Are we then dangerously out of the way
in believing that that wherein all the sons of men unite is the
veritable goal towards which they are consciously or unconsciously
reaching--
_Tendentes manus ripae ulterioris amore?_
And there is one other unmistakable evidence that the stream of
tendency is in our direction. I allude to the predominant influence in
our age of science, not merely physical, but science in all its
departments. It is welcome to us as the very handwriting of the
Eternal, as a revelation of the workings of the Infinite Mind. Every
new discovery is welcomed by us as a further revelation of the Being
who "is for ever reason".
But to the "little systems" science can only be welcome in so far as it
fits in with the petty scale upon which their theologies and
theosophies have constructed the universe. At first, everything is
passionately denied, a cry of horror goes up in the land that science
is engaged in an attempt to dethrone the God of their theology. And
then a few years elapse, and for very shame's sake they set about
explaining how that the "God of knowledge" [1] has much in common with
their theosophical Deity, and that by a dexterous manipulation of
infallible texts and articles of religion, a _modus vivendi_ may be
arranged between the two. This is the kind of dialectic that goes on
at every Church Congress--men who know in their hearts that the
"inspired" anthropology of the Bible is contradicted, fully, flatly,
irreconcilably, by the undeniable facts discovered by science, continue
to mystify themselves and their hearers alike by all the pleadings,
glosses, evasions and refinements at their command, with a view to what
they call a "reconciliation between science and religion".
Science and religion, we protest, need no reconciliation, for they
never were at war. Not religion, but pseudo-philosophy and so-called
theology--this it is to which science is an implacable and
irreconcilable foe. And she will never cease from her determined
opposition until the ecclesiastical idol vacates the very last niche it
occupies in its "chapel," clothes itself with the white robe of
contrition, and sits humbly upon the stool of repentance awaiting a
scientific absolution.
For us, such reconciliation is an unmeaning phrase. We never professed
to follow aught but reason's kindly light, for that we _know_ to be the
Divine Light in us. And, therefore, all that comes to us in reason's
name, comes accredited, as though from the innermost court of the Great
Presence itself. We discard nothing but what offends reason and its
ascertained laws; we bring everything before its bar. Science is to us
a Divine revelation, its teachings are among our inspired literature.
No need therefore of reconciliation between religion and science when
we resolve both, as in a final synthesis, into the root fact of all
this wondrous universe--eternal reason. And because of this, a faith
such as ours is part of the order of imperishable realities, for the
kingdom of reason, like the throne of the Eternal, is for ever and ever.
[1] _Deus Scientiarum Dominus._
XVII.
"THE OVER-SOUL."
The most serious errors in the philosophical and religious domains are
generally found to be nothing but the exaggeration, or the minimising,
of a truth, very much as evil, physical and moral, is often the
privation of a corresponding good, the absence of something which ought
to be present. Year by year the vast majority of religionists in this
Western world are seriously engaged in the commemoration of a
transcendent mystery, the humanisation, or incarnation, of the Deity in
the person of the Prophet of Nazara. As might be expected, the
upholders of this belief are by no means all agreed as to the manner in
which this momentous event came about, and, while there are many
prepared to speak of "Our Lord Jesus Christ"--and we certainly feel no
difficulty in so speaking of an elevated and saintly spirit such as
he--all are not prepared to subscribe to the precise formulation of the
mystery as given in an Athanasian creed, or a homily of a fourth
century father. Beyond admitting in a general and rather vague way
that Jesus is "Divine," many people are not prepared to go. They would
shrink from saying that he was the Infinite and Eternal, from whom all
things derive their being; they see no necessity for believing in the
story of his miracles, or the legendary account of his appearance in
this world; above all, his virginal conception and birth they often
repudiate in terms. They are coming to see--these open-minded men and
women of the Anglican body--that the pre-eminence of Jesus must rest,
not upon miracles, but on morals; that it is not his mystic offices,
but his moral grandeur, which makes him to be so great a figure in
history. In a word, that it is not his miracles which prove his
teaching, but his teaching must authenticate his miracles.
Now, all this is, of course, very hopeful, and makes directly for that
reconstruction of religion on an ethical basis which we conceive it our
duty to press upon the attention of our age. Venerable to us is the
memory and teaching of the last of the noble line of Jewish seers. Not
one of the masters of the Church ethical, whom we obediently follow,
but has exhausted, one might say, the possibilities of speech in their
reverence and admiration for the great spirit of Jesus. When Immanuel
Kant published the _Critique of the Practical Reason_, old men and
thinkers of the Fatherland were moved to tears at the thought that the
great deliverance had come at last, that a man had at length arisen who
had penetrated to the core the significance of the great prophet's
teaching. The only true commentator on Jesus and his religion is
Immanuel Kant. Heretofore, men have followed Paul, Athanasius and
Augustine; it is high time the ethics of Kant were substituted in
colleges and seminaries of the clergy, and our ministers of religion
taught to interpret the Gospel from the standpoint of the moral law
instead of the imaginary dogmatics of Paul, and the dialectics of
Athanasius and Augustine.
But the doctrine of incarnation unquestionably embodies a great element
of truth, which it were our very serious loss to overlook. It supplies
us with an admirable illustration of what was asserted in the
beginning, namely, that an error is but a truth misstated, either by
excess or defect. The Christian, or rather the ancient, orthodox
presentation of the dogma errs in both ways. By excess, because it
proclaims a man to be the personal Deity, that the flesh and blood of a
mortal being is adorable, as is the highest Being, with the supreme
offices of religion. It proclaims that Jesus was not a human
individual or person at all, but a Divine being energising in two
natures, the Divine and the human, so that when he used the pronoun
"I," it was the Deity himself, not a man, who spoke. I say this is a
gross misstatement by exaggeration, unknown to the prophet himself,
unknown to his followers and biographers, and unknown to many Christian
writers before the fatal epoch of Athanasius, who emphatically assert
that Jesus is not to be worshipped as the Father.[1] The doctrine errs
also by defect, because it fails to recognise the divinity of all the
sons of the Supreme. Jesus is made to be exclusively Divine, the sole
possessor of Divine sonship, and only through him are others put in the
way of attaining to the same privilege. "But as many as received him,"
says the Alexandrian rhapsodist who wrote the prologue to the fourth
gospel, "he gave them the power or the faculty to be made the sons of
God, as many as believe in his name."