CHAPTER VI

THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES: ACTION AND REACTION

In those aspects of our subject with which we have thus far dealt,

leadership has been largely with the Germans. Effort was indeed made in

the chapter on the sciences to illustrate the progress of thought by

reference to British writers. In this department the original and

creative contribution of British authors was great. There were, however,

also in the earlier portion of the nineteenth century movements of

religious thought in Great Britain and America related to some of those

which we have previously considered. Moreover, one of the most

influential movements of English religious thought, the so-called Oxford

Movement, with the Anglo-Catholic revival which it introduced, was of a

reactionary tendency. It has seemed, therefore, feasible to append to

this chapter that which we must briefly say concerning the general

movement of reaction which marked the century. This reactionary movement

has indeed everywhere run parallel to the one which we have endeavoured

to record. It has often with vigour run counter to our movement. It has

revealed the working of earnest and sometimes anxious minds in

directions opposed to those which we have been studying. No one can fail

to be aware that there has been a great Catholic revival in the

nineteenth century. That revival has had place in the Roman Catholic

countries of the Continent as well. It was in order to include the

privilege of reference to these aspects of our subject that this chapter

was given a double title. Yet in no country has the nineteenth century

so favourably altered the position of the Roman Catholic Church as in

England. In no country has a Church which has been esteemed to be

Protestant been so much influenced by Catholic ideas. This again is a

reason for including our reference to the reaction here.

According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy may be said to

have begun in Great Britain in the year 1825, with the publication of

Coleridge's _Aids to Reflection_. In Coleridge's _Confessions of an

Enquiring Spirit_, published six years after his death in 1834, we have

a suggestion of the biblical-critical movement which was beginning to

shape itself in Germany. In the same years we have evidence in the works

of Erskine and the early writings of Campbell, that in Scotland

theologians were thinking on Schleiermacher's lines. In those same years

books of more or less marked rationalistic tendency were put forth by

the Oriel School. Finally, with Pusey's _Assize Sermon_, in 1833, Newman

felt that the movement later to be called Tractarian had begun. We shall

not be wrong, therefore, in saying that the decade following 1825 saw

the beginnings in Britain of more formal reflexion upon all the aspects

of the theme with which we are concerned.

What went before that, however, in the way of liberal religious

thinking, though informal in its nature, should not be ignored. It was

the work of the poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the beginning

of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of the great revolt against

the traditional in state and society and against the conventional in

religion, had been voiced in Britain largely by the poets. So vigorous

was this utterance and so effective, that some have spoken of the

contribution of the English poets to the theological reconstruction. It

is certain that the utterances of the poets tended greatly to the

dissemination of the new ideas. There was in Great Britain no such unity

as we have observed among the Germans, either of the movement as a whole

or in its various parts. There was a consecution nothing less than

marvellous in the work of the philosophers from Kant to Hegel. There was

a theological sequence from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an

unceasing critical advance from the days of Strauss. There was nothing

resembling this in the work of the English-speaking people. The

contributions were for a long time only sporadic. The movement had no

inclusiveness. There was no aspect of a solid front in the advance. In

the department of the sciences only was the situation different. In a

way, therefore, it will be necessary in this chapter merely to single

out individuals, to note points of conflict, one and another, all along

the great line of advance. Or, to put it differently, it will be

possible to pursue a chronological arrangement which would have been

bewildering in our study heretofore. With the one great division between

the progressive spirits and the men of the reaction, it will be possible

to speak of philosophers, critics and theologians together, among their

own contemporaries, and so to follow the century as it advances.

In the closing years of the eighteenth century in England what claimed

to be a rational supernaturalism prevailed. Men sought to combine faith

in revealed religion with the empirical philosophy of Locke. They

conceived God and his relation to the world under deistical forms. The

educated often lacked in singular degree all deeper religious feeling.

They were averse to mysticism and spurned enthusiasm. Utilitarian

considerations, which formed the practical side of the empirical

philosophy, played a prominent part also in orthodox belief. The theory

of the universe which obtained among the religious is seen at its worst

in some of the volumes of the Warburton Lectures, and at its best

perhaps in Butler's _Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion_. The

character and views of the clergy and of the ruling class among the

laity of the Church of England, early in the nineteenth century, are

pictured with love and humour in Trollope's novels. They form the

background in many of George Eliot's books, where, in more mordant

manner, both their strength and weaknesses are shown. Even the remarks

which introduce Dean Church's _Oxford Movement_, 1891, in which the

churchly element is dealt with in deep affection, give anything but an

inspiring view.

The contrast with this would-be rational and unemotional religious

respectability of the upper classes was furnished, for masses of the

people, in the quickening of the consciousness of sin and grace after

the manner of the Methodists. But the Methodism of the earlier age had

as good as no intellectual relations whatsoever. The Wesleys and

Whitefield had indeed influenced a considerable portion of the Anglican

communion. Their pietistic trait, combined, for the most part, with a

Calvinism which Wesley abhorred and an old-fashioned low church feeling

with which also Wesley had no sympathy, shows itself in the so-called

evangelical party which was strong before 1830. This evangelical

movement in the Church of England manifested deep religious feeling, it

put forth zealous philanthropic effort, it had among its representatives

men and women of great beauty of personal character and piety. Yet it

was completely cut off from any living relation to the thought of the

age. There was among its representatives no spirit of theological

inquiry. There was, if anything, less probability of theological

reconstruction, from this quarter, than from the circles of the older

German pietism, with which this English evangelicalism of the time of

the later Georges had not a little in common. There had been a great

enthusiasm for humanity at the opening of the period of the French

Revolution, but the excesses and atrocities of the Revolution had

profoundly shocked the English mind. There was abroad something of the

same sense for the return to nature, and of the greatness of man, which

moved Schiller and Goethe. The exponents of it were, however, almost

exclusively the poets, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats and Byron. There was

nothing which combined these various elements as parts of a great whole.

Britain had stood outside the area of the Revolution, and yet had put

forth stupendous efforts, ultimately successful, to make an end of the

revolutionary era and of the Napoleonic despotism. This tended perhaps

to give to Britons some natural satisfaction in the British Constitution

and the established Church which flourished under it. Finally, while men

on the Continent were devising holy alliances and other chimeras of the

sort, England was precipitated into the earlier acute stages of the

industrial revolution in which she has led the European nations and

still leads. This fact explains a certain preoccupation of the British

mind with questions remote from theological reconstruction or religious

speculation.

THE POETS

It may now sound like a contradiction if we assert that the years from

1780 to 1830 constitute the era of the noblest English poetry since the

times of great Elizabeth. The social direction of the new theology of

the present day, with its cry against every kind of injustice, with its

claim of an equal opportunity for a happy life for every man--this was

the forecast of Cowper, as it had been of Blake. To Blake all outward

infallible authority of books or churches was iniquitous. He was at

daggers drawn with every doctrine which set limit to the freedom of all

men to love God, or which could doubt that God had loved all men. Jesus

alone had seen the true thing. God was a father, every man his child.

Long before 1789, Burns was filled with the new ideas of the freedom and

brotherhood of man, with zeal for the overthrow of unjust privilege. He

had spoken in imperishable words of the holiness of the common life. He

had come into contact with the most dreadful consequences of Calvinism.

He has pilloried these mercilessly in his 'Holy Tulzie' and in his 'Holy

Willie's Prayer.' Such poems must have shaken Calvinism more than a

thousand liberal sermons could have done. What Coleridge might have done

in this field, had he not so early turned to prose, it is not easy to

say. The verse of his early days rests upon the conviction, fundamental

to his later philosophy, that all the new ideas concerning men and the

world are a revelation of God. Wordsworth seems never consciously to

have broken with the current theology. His view of the natural glory and

goodness of humanity, especially among the poor and simple, has not much

relation to that theology. His view of nature, not as created of God. in

the conventional sense, but as itself filled with God, of God as

conscious of himself at every point of nature's being, has still less.

Man and nature are but different manifestations of the one soul of all.

Byron's contribution to Christian thought, we need hardly say, was of a

negative sort. It was destructive rather than constructive. Among the

conventions and hypocrisies of society there were none which he more

utterly despised than those of religion and the Church as he saw these.

There is something volcanic, Voltairean in his outbreaks. But there is a

difference. Both Voltaire and Byron knew that they had not the current

religion. Voltaire thought, nevertheless, that he had a religion.

Posterity has esteemed that he had little. Byron thought he had none.

Posterity has felt that he had much. His attack was made in a reckless

bitterness which lessened its effect. Yet the truth of many things which

he said is now overwhelmingly obvious. Shelley began with being what he

called an atheist. He ended with being what we call an agnostic, whose

pure poetic spirit carried him far into the realm of the highest

idealism. The existence of a conscious will within the universe is not

quite thinkable. Yet immortal love pervades the whole. Immortality is

improbable, but his highest flights continually imply it. He is sure

that when any theology violates the primary human affections, it

tramples into the dust all thoughts and feelings by which men may become

good. The men who, about 1840, stood paralysed between what Strauss

later called 'the old faith and the new,' or, as Arnold phrased it, were

'between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born,' found

their inmost thoughts written broad for them in Arthur Clough. From the

time of the opening of Tennyson's work, the poets, not by destruction

but by construction, not in opposition to religion but in harmony with

it, have built up new doctrines of God and man and aided incalculably in

preparing the way for a new and nobler theology. In the latter part of

the nineteenth century there was perhaps no one man in England who did

more to read all of the vast advance of knowledge in the light of higher

faith, and to fill such a faith with the spirit of the glad advance of

knowledge, than did Browning. Even Arnold has voiced in his poetry not a

little of the noblest conviction of the age. And what shall one say of

Mrs. Browning, of the Rossettis and William Morris, of Emerson and

Lowell, of Lanier and Whitman, who have spoken, often with consummate

power and beauty, that which one never says at all without faith and

rarely says well without art?

COLERIDGE

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772 at his father's vicarage,

Ottery St. Mary's, Devonshire. He was the tenth child of his parents,

weak in frame, always suffering much. He was a student at Christ's

Hospital, London, where he was properly bullied, then at Jesus College,

Cambridge, where he did not take his degree. For some happy years he

lived in the Lake region and was the friend of Wordsworth and Southey.

He studied in Göttingen, a thing almost unheard of in his time. The

years 1798 to 1813 were indeed spent in utter misery, through the opium

habit which he had contracted while seeking relief from rheumatic pain.

He wrote and taught and talked in Highgate from 1814 to 1834. He had

planned great works which never took shape. For a brief period he

severed his connexion with the English Church, coming under Unitarian

influence. He then reverted to the relation in which his ecclesiastical

instincts were satisfied. We read his _Aids to Reflection_ and his

_Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit_, and wonder how they can ever have

exerted a great influence. Nevertheless, they were fresh and stimulating

in their time. That Coleridge was a power, we have testimony from men

differing among themselves so widely as do Hare, Sterling, Newman and

John Stuart Mill. He was a master of style. He had insight and breadth.

Tulloch says of the _Aids_, that it is a book which none but a thinker

upon divine things will ever like. Not all even of these have liked it.

Inexcusably fragmentary it sometimes seems. One is fain to ask: What

right has any man to publish a scrap-book of his musings? Coleridge had

the ambition to lay anew the foundations of spiritual philosophy. The

_Aids_ were but of the nature of prolegomena. For substance his

philosophy went back to Locke and Hume and to the Cambridge Platonists.

He had learned of Kant and Schleiermacher as well. He was no

metaphysician, but a keen interpreter of spiritual facts, who himself

had been quickened by a particularly painful experience. He saw in

Christianity, rightly conceived, at once the true explanation of our

spiritual being and the remedy for its disorder. The evangelical

tradition brought religion to a man from without. It took no account of

man's spiritual constitution, beyond the fact that he was a sinner and

in danger of hell. Coleridge set out, not from sin alone, but from the

whole deep basis of spiritual capacity and responsibility upon which sin

rests. He asserts experience. We are as sure of the capacity for the

good and of the experience of the good as we can be of the evil. The

case is similar as to the truth. There are aspects of truth which

transcend our powers. We use words without meaning when we talk of the

plans of a being who is neither an object for our senses nor a part of

our self-consciousness. All truth must be capable of being rendered into

words conformable to reason. Theologians had declared their doctrines

true or false without reference to the subjective standard of judgment.

Coleridge contended that faith must rest not merely upon objective data,

but upon inward experience. The authority of Scripture is in its

truthfulness, its answer to the highest aspirations of the human reason

and the most urgent necessities of the moral life. The doctrine of an

atonement is intelligible only in so far as it too comes within the

range of spiritual experience. The apostolic language took colour from

the traditions concerning sacrifice. Much has been taken by the Church

as literal dogmatic statement which should be taken as more figure of

speech, borrowed from Jewish sources.

Coleridge feared that his thoughts concerning Scripture might, if

published, do more harm than good. They were printed first in 1840.

Their writing goes back into the period long before the conflict raised

by Strauss. There is not much here that one might not have learned from

Herder and Lessing. Utterances of Whately and Arnold showed that minds

in England were waking. But Coleridge's utterances rest consistently

upon the philosophy of religion and theory of dogma which have been

above implied. They are more significant than are mere flashes of

generous insight, like those of the men named. The notion of verbal

inspiration or infallible dictation of the Holy Scriptures could not

possibly survive after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had made

itself felt. The rabbinical idea was bound to disappear. A truer sense

of the conditions attending the origins and progress of civilisation and

of the immaturities through which religious as well as moral and social

ideas advance, brought of necessity a changed idea of the nature of

Scripture and revelation. Its literature must be read as literature, its

history as history. For the answer in our hearts to the spirit in the

Book, Coleridge used the phrase: 'It finds me.' 'Whatever finds me bears

witness to itself that it has proceeded from the Holy Ghost. In the

Bible there is more that finds me than in all the other books which I

have read.' Still, there is much in the Bible that does not find me. It

is full of contradictions, both moral and historical. Are we to regard

these as all equally inspired? The Scripture itself does not claim that.

Besides, what good would it do us to claim that the original documents

were inerrant, unless we could claim also that they had been inerrantly

transmitted? Apparently Coleridge thought that no one would ever claim

that. Coleridge wrote also concerning the Church. His volume on _The

Constitution of Church and State_ appeared in 1830. It is the least

satisfactory of his works. The vacillation of Coleridge's own course

showed that upon this point his mind was never clear. Arnold also,

though in a somewhat different way, was zealous for the theory that

Church and State are really identical, the Church being merely the State

in its educational and religious aspect and organisation. If Thomas

Arnold's moral earnestness and his generous spirit could not save this

theory from being chimerical, no better result was to be expected from

Coleridge.

THE ORIEL SCHOOL

It has often happened in the history of the English universities that a

given college has become, through its body of tutors and students,

through its common-room talk and literary work, the centre, for the

time, of a movement of thought which gives leadership to the college. In

this manner it has been customary to speak of the group of men who,

before the rise of the Oxford Movement, gathered at Oriel College, as

the Oriel School. Newman and Keble were both Oriel tutors. The Oriel men

were of distinctly liberal tendency. There were men of note among them.

There was Whately, Archbishop of Dublin after 1831, and Copleston, from

whom both Keble and Newman owned that they learned much. There was

Arnold, subsequently Headmaster of Rugby. There was Hampden, Professor

of Divinity after 1836. The school was called from its liberalism the

Noetic school. Whether this epithet contained more of satire or of

complacency it is difficult to say. These men arrested attention and

filled some of the older academic and ecclesiastical heads with alarm.

Without disrespect one may say that it is difficult now to understand

the commotion which they made. Arnold had a truly beautiful character.

What he might have done as Professor of Ecclesiastical History in Oxford

was never revealed, for he died in 1842. Whately, viewed as a noetic,

appears commonplace.

Perhaps the only one of the group upon whom we need dwell was Hampden.

In his Bampton Lectures of 1832, under the title of _The Scholastic

Philosophy considered in its Relation to Christian Theology_, he

assailed what had long been the very bulwark of traditionalism. His idea

was to show how the vast fabric of scholastic theology had grown up,

particularly what contributions had been made to it in the Middle Age.

The traditional dogma is a structure reared upon the logical terminology

of the patristic and mediæval schools. It has little foundation in

Scripture and no response in the religious consciousness. We have here

the application, within set limits, of the thesis which Harnack in our

own time has applied in a universal way. Hampden's opponents were not

wrong in saying that his method would dissolve, not merely that

particular system of theology, but all creeds and theologies whatsoever.

Patristic, mediæval Catholic theology and scholastic Protestantism, no

less, would go down before it. A pamphlet attributed to Newman,

published in 1836, precipitated a discussion which, for bitterness, has

rarely been surpassed in the melancholy history of theological dispute.

The excitement went to almost unheard of lengths. In the controversy the

Archbishop, Dr. Howley, made but a poor figure. The Duke of Wellington

did not add to his fame. Wilberforce and Newman never cleared themselves

of the suspicion of indirectness. This was, however, after the opening

of the Oxford Movement.

ERSKINE AND CAMPBELL

The period from 1820 to 1850 was one of religious and intellectual

activity in Scotland as well. Tulloch depicts with a Scotsman's

patriotism the movement which centres about the names of Erskine and

Campbell. Pfleiderer also judges that their contribution was as

significant as any made to dogmatic theology in Great Britain in the

nineteenth century. They achieved the same reconstruction of the

doctrine of salvation which had been effected by Kant and

Schleiermacher. At their hands the doctrine was rescued from that

forensic externality into which Calvinism had degenerated. It was given

again its quality of ethical inwardness, and based directly upon

religious experience. High Lutheranism had issued in the same

externality in Germany before Kant and Schleiermacher, and the New

England theology before Channing and Bushnell. The merits of Christ

achieved an external salvation, of which a man became participant

practically upon condition of assent to certain propositions. Similarly,

in the Catholic revival, salvation was conceived as an external and

future good, of which a man became participant through the sacraments

applied to him by priests in apostolical succession. In point of

externality there was not much to choose between views which were felt

to be radically opposed the one to the other.

Erskine was not a man theologically educated. He led a peculiarly

secluded life. He was an advocate by profession, but, withdrawing from

that career, virtually gave himself up to meditation. Campbell was a

minister of the Established Church of Scotland in a remote village, Row,

upon the Gare Loch. When he was convicted of heresy and driven from the

ministry, he also devoted himself to study and authorship. Both men seem

to have come to their results largely from the application of their own

sound religious sense to the Scriptures. That the Scottish Church should

have rejected the truth for which these men contended was the heaviest

blow which it could have inflicted on itself. Thereby it arrested its

own healthy development. It perpetuated its traditional view, somewhat

as New England orthodoxy was given a new lease of life through the

partisanship which the Unitarian schism engendered. The matter was not

mended at the time of the great rupture of the Scottish Church in 1843.

That body which broke away from the Establishment, and achieved a purely

ecclesiastical control of its own clergy, won, indeed, by this means the

name of the Free Church, though, in point of theological opinion, it was

far from representing the more free and progressive element. Tulloch

pays a beautiful tribute to the character of Erskine, whom he knew.

Quiet, brooding, introspective, he read his Bible and his own soul, and

with singular purity of intuition generalised from his own experience.

Therewith is described, however, both the power and the limitation of

his work. His first book was entitled _Remarks on the Internal Evidence

for the Truth of Revealed Religion_, 1820. The title itself is

suggestive of the revolution through which the mind both of Erskine and

of his age was passing. His book, _The Unconditional Freeness of the

Gospel_, appeared in 1828; _The Brazen Serpent_ in 1831. Men have

confounded forgiveness and pardon. They have made pardon equivalent to

salvation. But salvation is character. Forgiveness is only one of the

means of it. Salvation is not a future good. It is a present fellowship

with God. It is sanctification of character by means of our labour and

God's love. The fall was the rise of the spirit of freedom. Fallen man

can never be saved except through glad surrender of his childish

independence to the truth and goodness of God. Yet that surrender is the

preservation and enlargement of our independence. It is the secret of

true self-realisation. The sufferings of Christ reveal God's holy love.

It is not as if God's love had been purchased by the sufferings of his

Son. On the contrary, it is man who needs to believe in God's love, and

so be reconciled to the God whom he has feared and hated. Christ

overcomes sin by obediently enduring the suffering which sin naturally

entails. He endures it in pure love of his brethren. Man must overcome

sin in the same way.

Campbell published, so late as 1856, his great work _The Nature of the

Atonement and its Relation to the Remission of Sins and Eternal Life_.

It was the matured result of the reflections of a quarter of a century,

spent partly in enforced retirement after 1831. Campbell maintains

unequivocally that the sacrifice of Christ cannot be understood as a

punishment due to man's sin, meted out to Christ in man's stead. Viewed

retrospectively, Christ's work in the atonement is but the highest

example of a law otherwise universally operative. No man can work

redemption for his fellows except by entering into their condition, as

if everything in that condition were his own, though much of it may be

in no sense his due. It is freely borne by him because of his

identification of himself with them. Campbell lingers in the myth of

Christ's being the federal head of the humanity. There is something

pathetic in the struggle of his mind to save phrases and the

paraphernalia of an ancient view which, however, his fundamental

principle rendered obsolete, He struggles to save the word satisfaction,

though it means nothing in his system save that God is satisfied as he

contemplates the character of Christ. Prospectively considered, the

sacrifice of Christ effects salvation by its moral power over men in

example and inspiration. Vicarious sacrifice, the result of which was

merely imputed, would leave the sinner just where he was before. It is

an empty fiction. But the spectacle of suffering freely undertaken for

our sakes discovers the treasures of the divine image in man. The love

of God and a man's own resolve make him in the end, in fact, that which

he has always been in capacity and destiny, a child of God, possessed of

the secret of a growing righteousness, which is itself salvation.

MAURICE

Scottish books seem to have been but little read in England in that day.

It was Maurice who first made the substance of Campbell's teaching known

in England. Frederick Denison Maurice was the son of a Unitarian

minister, educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, at a time when it was

impossible for a Nonconformist to obtain a degree. He was ordained a

priest of the Church of England in 1834, even suffering himself to be

baptised again. He was chaplain of Lincoln's Inn and Professor of

Theology in King's College, London. After 1866 he was Professor of Moral

Philosophy in Cambridge, though his life-work was over. At the heart of

Maurice's theology lies the contention to which he gave the name of

universal redemption. Christ's work is for every man. Every man is

indeed in Christ. Man's unhappiness lies only in the fact that he will

not own this fact and live accordingly. Man as man is the child of God.

He cannot undo that fact or alter that relation if he would. He does not

need to become a child of God, as the phrase has been. He needs only to

recognise that he already is such a child. He can never cease to bear

this relationship. He can only refuse to fulfil it. With other words

Erskine and Coleridge and Schleiermacher had said this same thing.

For the rest, one may speak briefly of Maurice. He was animated by the

strongest desire for Church unity, but at the back of his mind lay a

conception of the Church and an insistence upon uniformity which made

unity impossible. In the light of his own inheritance his ecclesiastical

positivism seems strange. Perhaps it was the course of his experience

which made this irrational positivism natural. Few men in his generation

suffered greater persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the

part of contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men

in his generation had less of a quality which, had he possessed it,

would have given him peace and joy even in the midst of his

persecutions. The casual remark above made concerning Campbell is true

in enhanced degree of Maurice. A large part of the industry of a very

industrious life was devoted to the effort to convince others and

himself that those few really wonderful glimpses of spiritual truth

which he had, had no disastrous consequences for an inherited system of

thought in which they certainly did not take their rise. His name was

connected with the social enthusiasm that inaugurated a new movement in

England which will claim attention in another paragraph.

CHANNING

Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took

place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in

Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure here, the protagonist

of the movement, is William Ellery Channing. It may be doubted whether

there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its

Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology,

than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth

century. There had been indeed a marked decline in religious life. The

history of the Great Awakening shows that. Remonstrances against the

Great Awakening show also how men's minds were moving away from the

theory of the universe which the theology of that movement implied. One

cannot say that in the preaching of Hopkins there is an appreciable

relaxation of the Edwardsian scheme. Interestingly enough, it was in

Newport that Channing was born and with Hopkins that he associated until

the time of his licensure to preach in 1802. Many thought that Channing

would stand with the most stringent of the orthodox. Deism and

rationalism had made themselves felt in America after the Revolution.

Channing, during his years in Harvard College, can hardly have failed to

come into contact with the criticism of religion from this side. There

is no such clear influence of current rationalism upon Channing as, for

example, upon Schleiermacher. Yet here in the West, which most Europeans

thought of as a wilderness, circumstances brought about the launching of

this man upon the career of a liberal religious thinker, when as yet

Schleiermacher had hardly advanced beyond the position of the

_Discourses_, when Erskine had not yet written a line and Campbell was

still a child. Channing became minister of the Federal Street Church in

Boston in 1803. The appointment of Ware as Hollis Professor of Divinity

in Harvard College took place in 1805. That appointment was the first

clear indication of the liberal party's strength. Channing's Baltimore

Address was delivered in 1819. He died in 1847.

In the schism among the Congregational Churches in New England, which

before 1819 apparently had come to be regarded by both parties as

remediless, Channing took the side of the opposition to Calvinistic

orthodoxy. He developed qualities as controversialist and leader which

the gentler aspect of his early years had hardly led men to suspect.

This American liberal movement had been referred to by Belsham as

related to English Unitarianism. After 1815, in this country, by its

opponents at least, the movement was consistently called Unitarian.

Channing did with zeal contend against the traditional doctrine of the

atonement and of the trinity. On the other hand, he saw in Christ the

perfect revelation of God to humanity and at the same time the ideal of

humanity. He believed in Jesus' sinlessness and in his miracles,

especially in his resurrection. The keynote of Channing's character and

convictions is found in his sense of the inherent greatness of man. Of

this feeling his entire system is but the unfolding. It was early and

deliberately adopted by him as a fundamental faith. It remained the

immovable centre of his reverence and trust amid all the inroads of

doubt and sorrow. Political interest was as natural to Channing's

earlier manhood as it had been to Fichte in the emergency of the

Fatherland. Similarly, in the later years of his life, when evils

connected with slavery had made themselves felt, his participation in

the abolitionist agitation showed the same enthusiasm and practical

bent. He had his dream of communism, his perception of the evils of our

industrial system, his contempt for charity in place of economic remedy.

All was for man, all rested upon supreme faith in man. That man is

endowed with knowledge of the right and with the power to realise it,

was a fundamental maxim. Hence arose Channing's assertion of free-will.

The denial of free-will renders the sentiment of duty but illusory. In

the conscience there is both a revelation and a type of God. Its

suggestions, by the very authority they carry with them, declare

themselves to be God's law. God, concurring with our highest nature,

present in its action, can be thought of only after the pattern which he

gives us in ourselves. Whatever revelation God makes of himself, he must

deal with us as with free beings living under natural laws. Revelation

must be merely supplementary to those laws. Everything arbitrary and

magical, everything which despairs of us or insults us as moral agents,

everything which does not address itself to us through reason and

conscience, must be excluded from the intercourse between God and man.

What the doctrines of salvation and atonement, of the person of Christ

and of the influence of the Holy Spirit, as construed from this centre

would be, may without difficulty be surmised. The whole of Channing's

teaching is bathed in an atmosphere of the reverent love of God which is

the very source of his enthusiasm for man.

BUSHNELL

A very different man was Horace Bushnell, born in the year of Channing's

licensure, 1802. He was not bred under the influence of the strict

Calvinism of his day. His father was an Arminian. Edwards had made

Arminians detested in New England. His mother had been reared in the

Episcopal Church. She was of Huguenot origin. When about seventeen,

while tending a carding-machine, he wrote a paper in which he

endeavoured to bring Calvinism into logical coherence and, in the

interest of sound reason, to correct St. Paul's willingness to be

accursed for the sake of his brethren. He graduated from Yale College in

1827. He taught there while studying law after 1829. He describes

himself at this period as sound in ethics and sceptical in religion, the

soundness of his morals being due to nature and training, the

scepticism, to the theology in which he was involved. His law studies

were complete, yet he turned to the ministry. He had been born on the

orthodox side of the great contention in which Channing was a leader of

the liberals in the days of which we speak. He never saw any reason to

change this relation. His clerical colleagues, for half a life-time,

sought to change it for him. In 1833 he was ordained and installed as

minister of the North Church in Hartford, a pastorate which he never

left. The process of disintegration of the orthodox body was continuing.

There was almost as much rancour between the old and the new orthodoxy

as between orthodox and Unitarians themselves. Almost before his career

was well begun an incurable disease fastened itself upon him. Not much

later, all the severity of theological strife befell him. Between these

two we have to think of him doing his work and keeping his sense of

humour.

His earliest book of consequence was on _Christian Nurture_, published

in 1846. Consistent Calvinism presupposes in its converts mature years.

Even an adult must pass through waters deep for him. He is not a sinful

child of the Father. He is a being totally depraved and damned to

everlasting punishment. God becomes his Father only after he is

redeemed. The revivalists' theory Bushnell bitterly opposed. It made of

religion a transcendental matter which belonged on the outside of life,

a kind of miraculous epidemic. He repudiated the prevailing

individualism. He anticipated much that is now being said concerning

heredity, environment and subconsciousness. He revived the sense of the

Church in which Puritanism had been so sadly lacking. The book is a

classic, one of the rich treasures which the nineteenth century offers

to the twentieth.

Bushnell, so far as one can judge, had no knowledge of Kant. He is,

nevertheless, dealing with Kant's own problem, of the theory of

knowledge, in his rather diffuse 'Dissertation on Language,' which is

prefixed to the volume which bears the title _God in Christ_, 1849. He

was following his living principle, the reference of doctrine to

conscience. God must be a 'right God.' Dogma must make no assertion

concerning God which will not stand this test. Not alone does the dogma

make such assertions. The Scripture makes them as well. How can this be?

What is the relation of language to thought and of thought to fact? How

can the language of Scripture be explained, and yet the reality of the

revelation not be explained away? There is a touching interest which

attaches to this Hartford minister, working out, alone and clumsily, a

problem the solution of which the greatest minds of the age had been

gradually bringing to perfection for three-quarters of a century.

In the year 1848 Bushnell was invited to give addresses at the

Commencements of three divinity schools: that at Harvard, then

unqualifiedly Unitarian; that at Andover, where the battle with

Unitarianism had been fought; and that at Yale, where Bushnell had been

trained. The address at Cambridge was on the subject of _the Atonement_;

the one at New Haven on _the Divinity of Christ_, including Bushnell's

doctrine of the trinity; the one at Andover on _Dogma and Spirit_, a

plea for the cessation of strife. He says squarely of the old school

theories of the atonement, which represent Christ as suffering the

penalty of the law in our stead: 'They are capable, one and all of them,

of no light in which they do not offend some right sentiment of our

moral being. If the great Redeemer, in the excess of his goodness,

consents to receive the penal woes of the world in his person, and if

that offer is accepted, what does it signify, save that God will have

his modicum of suffering somehow; and if he lets the guilty go he will

yet satisfy himself out of the innocent?' The vicariousness of love, the

identification of the sufferer with the sinner, in the sense that the

Saviour is involved by his desire to help us in the woes which naturally

follow sin, this Bushnell mightily affirmed. Yet there is no pretence

that he used vicariousness or satisfaction in the same sense in which

his adversaries did. He is magnificently free from all such indirection.

In the New Haven address there is this same combination of fire and

light. The chief theological value of the doctrine of the trinity, as

maintained by the New England Calvinistic teachers, had been to furnish

the _dramatis personæ_ for the doctrine of the atonement. In the

speculation as to the negotiation of this substitutionary transaction,

the language of the theologians had degenerated into stark tritheism.

Edwards, describing the councils of the trinity, spoke of the three

persons as 'they.' Bushnell saw that any proper view of the unity of God

made the forensic idea of the atonement incredible. He sought to replace

the ontological notion of the trinity by that of a trinity of

revelation, which held for him the practical truths by which his faith

was nourished, and yet avoided the contradictions which the other

doctrine presented both to reason and faith. Bushnell would have been

far from claiming that he was the first to make this fight. The American

Unitarians had been making it for more than a generation. The Unitarian

protest was wholesome. It was magnificent. It was providential, but it

paused in negation. It never advanced to construction. Bushnell's

significance is not that he fought this battle, but that he fought it

from the ranks of the orthodox Church. He fought it with a personal

equipment which Channing had not had. He was decades later in his work.

He took up the central religious problem when Channing's successors were

following either Emerson or Parker.

The Andover address consisted in the statement of Bushnell's views of

the causes which had led to the schism in the New England Church. A

single quotation may give the key-note of the discourse:--'We had on our

side an article of the creed which asserted a metaphysical trinity. That

made the assertion of the metaphysical unity inevitable and desirable.

We had theories of atonement, of depravity, of original sin, which

required the appearance of antagonistic theories. On our side,

theological culture was so limited that we took what was really only our

own opinion for the unalterable truth of God. On the other side, it was

so limited that men, perceiving the insufficiency of dogma, took the

opposite contention with the same seriousness and totality of

conviction. They asserted liberty, as indeed they must, to vindicate

their revolt. They produced, meantime, the most intensely human and, in

that sense, the most intensely opinionated religion ever invented.'

THE CATHOLIC REVIVAL

The Oxford Movement has been spoken of as a reaction against the

so-called Oriel Movement, a conservative tendency over against an

intellectualist and progressive one. In a measure the personal

animosities within the Oxford circle may be accounted for in this way.

The Tractarian Movement, however, which issued, on the one hand, in the

going over of Newman to the Church of Rome and, on the other, in a great

revival of Catholic principles within the Anglican Church itself, stands

in a far larger setting. It was not merely an English or insular

movement. It was a wave from a continental flood. On its own showing it

was not merely an ecclesiastical movement. It had political and social

aims as well. There was a universal European reaction against the

Enlightenment and the Revolution. That reaction was not simple, but

complex. It was a revolt of the conservative spirit from the new ideals

which had been suddenly translated into portentous realities. It was

marked everywhere by hatred of the eighteenth century with all its ways

and works. On the one side we have the revolutionary thesis, the rights

of man, the authority of reason, the watchwords liberty, equality,

fraternity. On the other side stood forth those who were prepared to

assert the meaning of community, the continuity of history, spiritual as

well as civil authority as the basis of order, and order as the

condition of the highest good. In literature the tendency appears as

romanticism, in politics as legitimism, in religion as ultramontanism.

Le Maistre with his _L'Eglise gallicane du Pape_; Chateaubriand with his

_Génie du Christianisme_; Lamennais with his _Essai sur l'Indifference

en Matière, de Religion_, were, from 1820 to 1860, the exponents of a

view which has had prodigious consequences for France and Italy. The

romantic movement arose outside of Catholicism. It was impersonated in

Herder. Friedrich Schlegel, Werner and others went over to the Roman

Church. The political reaction was specifically Latin and Catholic. In

the lurid light of anarchy Rome seemed to have a mission again. Divine

right in the State must be restored through the Church. The Catholic

apologetic saw the Revolution as only the logical conclusion of the

premises of the Reformation. The religious revolt of the sixteenth

century, the philosophical revolt of the seventeenth, the political

revolt of the eighteenth, the social revolt of the nineteenth, are all

parts of one dreadful sequence. As the Church lifted up the world after

the first flood of the barbarians, so must she again lift up the world

after the devastations made by the more terrible barbarians of the

eighteenth century. England had indeed stood a little outside of the

cyclone which had devastated the world from Coronna to Moscow and from

the Channel to the Pyramids, but she had been exhausted in putting down

the revolution. Only God's goodness had preserved England. The logic of

Puritanism would have been the same. Indeed, in England the State was

weaker and worse than were the states upon the Continent. For since 1688

it had been a popular and constitutional monarchy. In Frederick

William's phrase, its sovereign took his crown from the gutter. The

Church was through and through Erastian, a creature of the State.

Bishops were made by party representatives. Acts like the Reform Bills,

the course of the Government in the matter of the Irish Church, were

steps which would surely bring England to the pass which France had

reached in 1789. The source of such acts was wrong. It was with the

people. It was in men, not in God. It was in reason, not in authority.

It would be difficult to overstate the strength of this reactionary

sentiment in important circles in England at the end of the third decade

of the nineteenth century.

THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

In so far as that complex of causes just alluded to made of the Oxford

Movement or the Catholic revival a movement of life, ecclesiastical,

social and political as well, its history falls outside the purpose of

this book. We proposed to deal with the history of thought. Reactionary

movements have frequently got on without much thought. They have left

little deposit of their own in the realm of ideas. Their avowed

principle has been that of recurrence to that which has already been

thought, of fidelity to ideas which have long prevailed. This is the

reason why the conservatives have not a large place in such a sketch as

this. It is not that their writings have not often been full of high

learning and of the subtlest of reasoning. It is only that the ideas

about which they reason do not belong to the history of the nineteenth

century. They belong, on the earnest contention of the conservatives

themselves--those of Protestants, to the history of the Reformation--and

of Catholics, both Anglican and Roman, to the history of the early or

mediæval Church.

Nevertheless, when with passionate conviction a great man, taking the

reactionary course, thinks the problem through again from his own point

of view, then we have a real phenomenon in the history of contemporary

thought. When such an one wrestles before God to give reason to himself

and to his fellows for the faith that is in him, then the reactionary's

reasoning is as imposing and suggestive as is any other. He leaves in

his work an intellectual deposit which must be considered. He makes a

contribution which must be reckoned with, even more seriously, perhaps,

by those who dissent from it than by those who may agree with it. Such

deposit Newman and the Tractarian movement certainly did make. They

offered a rationale of the reaction. They gave to the Catholic revival a

standing in the world of ideas, not merely in the world of action.

Whether their reasoning has weight to-day, is a question upon which

opinion is divided. Yet Newman and his compeers, by their character and

standing, by their distinctively English qualities and by the road of

reason which they took in the defence of Catholic principles, made

Catholicism English again, in a sense in which it had not been English

for three hundred years. Yet though Newman brought to the Roman Church

in England, on his conversion to it, a prestige and qualities which in

that communion were unequalled, he was never _persona grata_ in that

Church. Outwardly the Roman Catholic revival in England was not in large

measure due to Newman and his arguments. It was due far more to men like

Wiseman and Manning, who were not men of argument but of deeds.

NEWMAN

John Henry Newman was born in 1801, the son of a London banker. His

mother was of Huguenot descent. He came under Calvinistic influence.

Through study especially, of Romaine _On Faith_ he became the subject of

an inward conversion, of which in 1864 he wrote: 'I am still more

certain of it than that I have hands and feet.' Thomas Scott, the

evangelical, moved him. Before he was sixteen he made a collection of

Scripture texts in proof of the doctrine of the trinity. From Newton _On

the Prophecies_ he learned to identify the Pope with anti-Christ--a

doctrine by which, he adds, his imagination was stained up to the year

1843. In his _Apologia_, 1865, he declares: 'From the age of fifteen,

dogma has been a fundamental principle of my religion. I cannot enter

into the idea of any other sort of religion.' At the age of twenty-one,

two years after he had taken his degree, he came under very different

influences. He passed from Trinity College to a fellowship in Oriel. To

use his own phrase, he drifted in the direction of liberalism. He was

touched by Whately. He was too logical, and also too dogmatic, to be

satisfied with Whately's position. Of the years from 1823 to 1827 Mozley

says: 'Probably no one who then knew Newman could have told which way he

would go. It is not certain that he himself knew.' Francis W. Newman,

Newman's brother, who later became a Unitarian, remembering his own

years of stress, speaks with embitterment of his elder brother, who was

profoundly uncongenial to him.

The year 1827, in which Keble's _Christian Year_ was published, saw

another change in Newman's views. Illness and bereavement came to him

with awakening effect. He made the acquaintance of Hurrell Froude.

Froude brought Newman and Keble together. Henceforth Newman bore no more

traces either of evangelicalism or of liberalism. Of Froude it is

difficult to speak with confidence. His brother, James Anthony Froude,

the historian, author of the _Nemesis of Faith_, 1848, says that he was

gifted, brilliant, enthusiastic. Newman speaks of him with almost

boundless praise. Two volumes of his sermons, published after his death

in 1836, make the impression neither of learning nor judgment. Clearly

he had charm. Possibly he talked himself into a common-room reputation.

Newman says: 'Froude made me look with admiration toward the Church of

Rome.' Keble never had felt the liberalism through which Newman had

passed. Cradled as the Church of England had been in Puritanism, the

latter was to him simply evil. Opinions differing from his own were not

simply mistaken, they were sinful. He conceived no religious truth

outside the Church of England. In the _Christian Year_ one perceives an

influence which Newman strongly felt. It was that of the idea of the

sacramental significance of all natural objects or events. Pusey became

professor of Hebrew in 1830. He lent the movement academic standing,

which the others could not give. He had been in Germany, and had

published an _Inquiry into the Rationalist Character of German

Theology_, 1825. He hardly did more than expose the ignorance of Rose.

He was himself denounced as a German rationalist who dared to speak of a

new era in theology. Pusey, mourning the defection of Newman, whom he

deeply loved, gathered in 1846 the forces of the Anglo-Catholics and

continued in some sense a leader to the end of his long life in 1882.

The course of political events was fretting the Conservatives

intolerably. The agitation for the Reform Bill was taking shape. Sir

Robert Peel, the member for Oxford, had introduced a Bill for the

emancipation of the Roman Catholics. There was violent commotion in

Oxford. Keble and Newman strenuously opposed the measure. In 1830 there

was revolution in France. In England the Whigs had come into power.

Newman's mind was excited in the last degree. 'The vital question,' he

says, 'is this, how are we to keep the Church of England from being

liberalised?' At the end of 1832 Newman and Froude went abroad together.

On this journey, as he lay becalmed in the straits of Bonifacio, he

wrote his immortal hymn, 'Lead, Kindly Light.' He came home assured that

he had a work to do. Keble's Assize Sermon on the _National Apostasy_,

preached in July 1833, on the Sunday after Newman's return to Oxford,

kindled the conflagration which had been long preparing. Newman

conceived the idea of the _Tracts for the Times_ as a means of

expressing the feelings and propagating the opinions which deeply moved

him. 'From the first,' he says, 'my battle was with liberalism. By

liberalism I mean the anti-dogmatic principle. Secondly, my aim was the

assertion of the visible Church with sacraments and rites and definite

religious teaching on the foundation of dogma; and thirdly, the

assertion of the Anglican Church as opposed to the Church of Rome.'

Newman grew greatly in personal influence. His afternoon sermons at St.

Mary's exerted spiritual power. They deserved so to do. Here he was at

his best. All of his strength and little of his weakness shows. His

insight, his subtility, his pathos, his love of souls, his marvellous

play of dramatic as well as of spiritual faculty, are in evidence. Keble

and Pusey were busying themselves with the historical aspects of the

question. Pusey began the _Library of the Fathers_, the most elaborate

literary monument of the movement. Nothing could be more amazing than

the uncritical quality of the whole performance. The first check to the

movement came in 1838, when the Bishop of Oxford animadverted upon the

_Tracts_. Newman professed his willingness to stop them. The Bishop did

not insist. Newman's own thought moved rapidly onward in the only course

which was still open to it.

Newman had been bred in the deepest reverence for Scripture. In a sense

that reverence never left him, though it changed its form. He saw that

it was absurd to appeal to the Bible in the old way as an infallible

source of doctrine. How could truth be infallibly conveyed in defective

and fallible expressions? Newman's own studies in criticism, by no means

profound, led him to this correct conclusion. This was the end for him

of evangelical Protestantism. The recourse was then to the infallible

Church. Infallible guide and authority one must have. Without these

there can be no religion. To trust to reason and conscience as conveying

something of the light of God is impossible. To wait in patience and to

labour in fortitude for the increase of that light is unendurable. One

must have certainty. There can be no certainty by the processes of the

mind from within. This can come only by miraculous certification from

without.

According to Newman the authority of the Church should never have been

impaired in the Reformation. Or rather, in his view of that movement,

this authority, for truly Christian men, had never been impaired. The

intellect is aggressive, capricious, untrustworthy. Its action in

religious matters is corrosive, dissolving, sceptical. 'Man's energy of

intellect must be smitten hard and thrown back by infallible authority,

if religion is to be saved at all.' Newman's philosophy was utterly

sceptical, although, unlike most absolute philosophical sceptics, he had

a deep religious experience. The most complete secularist, in his

negation of religion, does not differ from Newman in his low opinion of

the value of the surmises of the mind as to the transcendental meaning

of life and the world. He differs from Newman only in lacking that which

to Newman was the most indefeasible thing which he had at all, namely,

religious experience. Newman was the child of his age, though no one

ever abused more fiercely the age of which he was the child. He supposed

that he believed in religion on the basis of authority. Quite the

contrary, he believed in religion because he had religion or, as he

says, in a magnificent passage in one of his parochial sermons, because

religion had him. His scepticism forbade him to recognise that this was

the basis of his belief. His diremption of human nature was absolute.

The soul was of God. The mind was of the devil. He dare not trust his

own intellect concerning this inestimable treasure of his experience. He

dare not trust intellect at all. He knew not whither it might lead him.

The mind cannot be broken to the belief of a power above it. It must

have its stiff neck bent to recognise its Creator.

His whole book, _The Grammar of Assent_, 1870, is pervaded by the

intensest philosophical scepticism. Scepticism supplies its motives,

determines its problems, necessitates its distinctions, rules over the

succession and gradation of its arguments. The whole aim of the work is

to withdraw religion and the proofs of it, from the region of reason

into the realm of conscience and imagination, where the arguments which

reign may satisfy personal experience without alleging objective

validity or being able to bear the criticism which tests it. Again, he

is the perverse, unconscious child of the age which he curses. Had not

Kant and Schleiermacher, Coleridge and Channing sought, does not Ritschl

seek, to remove religion from the realm of metaphysics and to bring it

within the realm of experience? They had, however, pursued the same end

by different means. One is reminded of that saying of Gretchen

concerning Mephistopheles: 'He says the same thing with the pastor, only

in different words.' Newman says the same words, but means a different

thing.

Assuming the reduction of religion to experience, in which Kant and

Schleiermacher would have agreed, and asserting the worthlessness of

mentality, which they would have denied, we are not surprised to hear

Newman say that without Catholicism doubt is invincible. 'The Church's

infallibility is the provision adopted by the mercy of the Creator to

preserve religion in the world. Outside the Catholic Church all things

tend to atheism. The Catholic Church is the one face to face antagonist,

able to withstand and baffle the fierce energy of passion and the

all-dissolving scepticism of the mind. I am a Catholic by virtue of my

belief in God. If I should be asked why I believe in God, I should

answer, because I believe in myself. I find it impossible to believe in

myself, without believing also in the existence of him who lives as a

personal, all-seeing, all-judging being in my conscience.' These

passages are mainly taken from the _Apologia_, written long after Newman

had gone over to the Roman Church. They perfectly describe the attitude

of his mind toward the Anglican Church, so long as he believed this, and

not the Roman, to be the true Church. He had once thought that a man

could hold a position midway between the Protestantism which he

repudiated and the Romanism which he still resisted. He stayed in the

_via media_ so long as he could. But in 1839 he began to have doubts

about the Anglican order of succession. The catholicity of Rome began to

overshadow the apostolicity of Anglicanism. The Anglican formularies

cannot be at variance with the teachings of the authoritative and

universal Church. This is the problem which the last of the _Tracts_,

_Tract Ninety_, sets itself. It is one of those which Newman wrote. One

must find the sense of the Roman Church in the Thirty-Nine Articles.

This tract is prefaced by an extraordinary disquisition upon reserve in

the communication of religious knowledge. God's revelations of himself

to mankind have always been a kind of veil. Truth is the reward of

holiness. The Fathers were holy men. Therefore what the Fathers said

must be true. The principle of reserve the Articles illustrate. They do

not mean what they say. They were written in an uncatholic age, that is,

in the age of the Reformation. They were written by Catholic men. Else

how can the Church of England be now a Catholic Church? Through their

reserve they were acceptable in an uncatholic age. They cannot be

uncatholic in spirit, else how should they be identical in meaning with

the great Catholic creeds? Then follows an exposition of every important

article of the thirty-nine, an effort to interpret each in the sense of

the Roman Catholic Church of to-day. Four tutors published a protest

against the tract. Formal censure was passed upon it. It was now evident

to Newman that his place in the leadership of the Oxford Movement was

gone. From this time, the spring of 1841, he says he was on his deathbed

as regards the Church of England. He withdrew to Littlemore and

established a brotherhood there. In the autumn of 1843 he resigned the

parochial charge of St. Mary's at Oxford. On the 9th of October 1845 he

was formally admitted to the Roman Church. On the 6th of October Ernest

Renan had formally severed his connexion with that Church.

It is a strange thing that in his _Essay on the Development of Christian

Doctrine_, written in 1845, Newman himself should have advanced

substantially Hampden's contention. Here are written many things

concerning the development of doctrine which commend themselves to minds

conversant with the application of historical criticism to the whole

dogmatic structure of the Christian ages. The purpose is with Newman

entirely polemical, the issue exactly that which one would not have

foreseen. Precisely because the development of doctrine is so obvious,

because no historical point can be found at which the growth of doctrine

ceased and the rule of faith was once for all settled, therefore an

infallible authority outside of the development must have existed from

the beginning, to provide a means of distinguishing true development

from false. This infallible guide is, of course, the Church. It seems

incredible that Newman could escape applying to the Church the same

argument which he had so skilfully applied to Scripture and dogmatic

history. Similar is the case with the argument of the _Grammar of

Assent_. 'No man is certain of a truth who can endure the thought of its

contrary.' If the reason why I cannot endure the thought of the

contradictory of a belief which I have made my own, is that so to think

brings me pain and darkness, this does not prove my truth. If my belief

ever had its origin in reason, it must be ever refutable by reason. It

is not corroborated by the fact that I do not wish to see anything that

would refute it.[8] This last fact may be in the highest degree an act

of arbitrariness. To make the impossibility of thinking the opposite,

the test of truth, and then to shut one's eyes to those evidences which

might compel one to think the opposite, is the essence of irrationality.

One attains by this method indefinite assertiveness, but not certainty.

Newman lived in some seclusion in the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in

Birmingham for many years. A few distinguished men, and a number of his

followers, in all not more than a hundred and fifty, went over to the

Roman Church after him. The defection was never so great as, in the

first shock, it was supposed that it would be. The outward influence of

Newman upon the Anglican Church then ceased. But the ideas which he put

forth have certainly been of great influence in that Church to this day.

Most men know the portrait of the great cardinal, the wide forehead,

ploughed deep with horizontal furrows, the pale cheek, down which 'long

lines of shadow slope, which years and anxious thought and suffering

give.' One looks into the wonderful face of those last days--Newman

lived to his ninetieth year--and wonders if he found in the infallible

Church the peace which he so earnestly sought.

[Footnote 8: Fairbairn, _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_, p. 157.]

MODERNISM

It was said that the Oxford Movement furnished the rationale of the

reaction. Many causes, of course, combine to make the situation of the

Roman Church and the status of religion in the Latin countries of the

Continent the lamentable one that it is. That position is worst in those

countries where the Roman Church has most nearly had free play. The

alienation both of the intellectual and civil life from organised

religion is grave. That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a

position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and

better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth

century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the

movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the

beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical,

low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. At the beginning of

the twentieth it is dominantly ritualistic and disposed to minimise its

relation to the Reformation. This resurgence of Catholic principles is

another effect of the movement of which we speak. Other factors must

have wrought for this result besides the body of arguments which Newman

and his compeers offered. The argument itself, the mere intellectual

factor, is not adequate. There is an inherent contradiction in the

effort to ground in reason an authority which is to take the place of

reason. Yet round and round this circle all the labours of John Henry

Newman go. Cardinal Manning felt this. The victory of the Church was not

to be won by argument. It is well known that Newman opposed the decree

of infallibility. It cannot be said that upon this point his arguments

had great weight. If one assumes that truth comes to us externally

through representatives of God, and if the truth is that which they

assert, then in the last analysis what they assert is truth. If one has

given in to such authority because one distrusts his reason, then it is

querulous to complain that the deliverances of authority do not comport

with reason. There may be, of course, the greatest interest in the

struggle as to the instance in which this authority is to be lodged.

This interest attaches to the age-long struggle between Pope and

Council. It attaches to the dramatic struggle of Döllinger, Dupanloup,

Lord Acton and the rest, in 1870. Once the Church has spoken there is,

for the advocate of authoritative religion, no logic but to submit.

Similarly as to the _Encyclical_ and _Syllabus of Errors_ of 1864, which

forecast the present conflict concerning Modernism. The _Syllabus_ had a

different atmosphere from that which any Englishman in the sixties would

have given it. Had not Newman, however, made passionate warfare on the

liberalism of the modern world? Was it not merely a question of degrees?

Was Gladstone's attitude intelligible? The contrast of two principles in

life and religion, the principles of authority and of the spirit, is

being brought home to men's consciousness as it has never been before.

One reads _Il Santo_ and learns concerning the death of Fogazzaro, one

looks into the literature relating to Tyrrell, one sees the fate of

Loisy, comparing the really majestic achievement in his works and the

spirit of his _Simple Reflections_ with the _Encyclical Pascendi_, 1907.

One understands why these men have done what they could to remain within

the Roman Church. One recalls the attitude of Döllinger to the

inauguration of the Old Catholic Movement, reflects upon the relative

futility of the Old Catholic Church, and upon the position of Hyacinthe

Loyson. One appreciates the feeling of these men that it is impossible,

from without, to influence as they would the Church which they have

loved. The present difficulty of influencing it from within seems almost

insuperable. The history of Modernism as an effective contention in the

world of Christian thought seems scarcely begun. The opposition to

Modernism is not yet a part of the history of thought.

ROBERTSON

In no life are reflected more perfectly the spiritual conflicts of the

fifth decade of the nineteenth century than in that of Frederick W.

Robertson. No mind worked itself more triumphantly out of these

difficulties. Descended from a family of Scottish soldiers, evangelical

in piety, a student in Oxford in 1837, repelled by the Oxford Movement,

he undertook his ministry under a morbid sense of responsibility. He

reacted violently against his evangelicalism. He travelled abroad, read

enormously, was plunged into an agony which threatened mentally to undo

him. He took his charge at Brighton in 1847, still only thirty-one years

old, and at once shone forth in the splendour of his genius. A martyr to

disease and petty persecution, dying at thirty-seven, he yet left the

impress of one of the greatest preachers whom the Church of England has

produced. He left no formal literary work such as he had designed. Of

his sermons we have almost none from his own manuscripts. Yet his

influence is to-day almost as intense as when the sermons were

delivered. It is, before all, the wealth and depth of his thought, the

reality of the content of the sermons, which commands admiration. They

are a classic refutation of the remark that one cannot preach theology.

Out of them, even in their fragmentary state, a well-articulated system

might be made. He brought to his age the living message of a man upon

whom the best light of his age had shone.

PHILLIPS BROOKS

Something of the same sort may be said concerning Phillips Brooks. He

inherited on his father's side the sober rationalism and the humane and

secular interest of the earlier Unitarianism, on his mother's side the

intensity of evangelical pietism with the Calvinistic form of thought.

The conflict of these opposing tendencies in New England was at that

time so great that Brooks's parents sought refuge with the low-church

element in the Episcopal Church. Brooks's education at Harvard College,

where he took his degree in 1855, as also at Alexandria, and still more,

his reading and experience, made him sympathetic with that which, in

England in those years, was called the Broad Church party. He was deeply

influenced by Campbell and Maurice. Later well known in England, he was

the compeer of the best spirits of his generation there. Deepened by the

experience of the great war, he held in succession two pulpits of large

influence, dying as Bishop of Massachusetts in 1893. There is a

theological note about his preaching, as in the case of Robertson. Often

it is the same note. Brooks had passed through no such crisis as had

Robertson. He had flowered into the greatness of rational belief. His

sermons are a contribution to the thinking of his age. We have much

finished material of this kind from his own hand, and a book or two

besides. His service through many years as preacher to his university

was of inestimable worth. The presentation of ever-advancing thought to

a great public constituency is one of the most difficult of tasks. It is

also one of the most necessary. The fusion of such thoughtfulness with

spiritual impulse has rarely been more perfectly achieved than in the

preaching of Phillips Brooks.

THE BROAD CHURCH

We have used the phrase, the Broad Church party. Stanley had employed

the adjective to describe the real character of the English Church, over

against the antithesis of the Low Church and the High. The designation

adhered to a group of which Stanley was himself a type. They were not

bound together in a party. They had no ecclesiastical end in view. They

were of a common spirit. It was not the spirit of evangelicalism. Still

less was it that of the Tractarians. It was that which Robertson had

manifested. It aimed to hold the faith with an open mind in all the

intellectual movement of the age. Maurice should be enumerated here,

with reservations. Kingsley beyond question belonged to this group.

There was great ardour among them for the improvement of social

conditions, a sense of the social mission of Christianity. There grew up

what was called a Christian Socialist movement, which, however, never

attained or sought a political standing. The Broad Church movement

seemed, at one time, assured of ascendancy in the Church of England. Its

aims appeared congruous with the spirit of the times. Yet Dean Fremantle

esteems himself perhaps the last survivor of an illustrious company.

The men who in 1860 published the volume known as _Essays and Reviews_

would be classed with the Broad Church. In its authorship were

associated seven scholars, mostly Oxford men. Some one described _Essays

and Reviews_ as the _Tract Ninety_ of the Broad Church. It stirred

public sentiment and brought the authors into conflict with authority in

a somewhat similar way. The living antagonism of the Broad Church was

surely with the Tractarians rather than with the evangelicals. Yet the

most significant of the essays, those on miracles and on prophecy,

touched opinions common to both these groups. Jowett, later Master of

Balliol, contributed an essay on the 'Interpretation of Scripture.' It

hardly belongs to Jowett's best work. Yet the controversy then

precipitated may have had to do with Jowett's adherence to Platonic

studies instead of his devoting himself to theology. The most decisive

of the papers was that of Baden Powell on the 'Study of the Evidences of

Christianity.' It was mainly a discussion of the miracle. It was radical

and conclusive. The essay closes with an allusion to Darwin's _Origin of

Species_, which had then just appeared. Baden Powell died shortly after

its publication. The fight came on Rowland Williams's paper upon

Bunson's _Biblical Researches_. It was really upon the prophecies and

their use in 'Christian Evidences.' Baron Bunsen was not a great

archæologist, but he brought to the attention of English readers that

which was being done in Germany in this field. Williams used the

archæological material to rectify the current theological notions

concerning ancient history. A certain type of English mind has always

shown zeal for the interpretation of prophecy. Williams's thesis,

briefly put, was this: the Bible does not always give the history of the

past with accuracy; it does not give the history of the future at all;

prophecy means spiritual teaching, not secular prognostication. A reader

of our day may naturally feel that Wilson, with his paper on the

'National Church,' made the greatest contribution. He built indeed upon

Coleridge, but he had a larger horizon. He knew the arguments of the

great Frenchmen of his day and of their English imitators who, in Benn's

phrase, narrowed and perverted the ideal of a world-wide humanity into

that of a Church founded on dogmas and administered by clericals. Wilson

argued that in Jesus' teaching the basis of the religious community is

ethical. The Church is but the instrument for carrying out the will of

God as manifest in the moral law. The realisation of the will of God

must extend beyond the limits of the Church's activity, however widely

these are drawn. There arose a violent agitation. Williams and Wilson

were prosecuted. The case was tried in the Court of Arches. Williams was

defended by no less a person than Fitzjames Stephen. The two divines

were sentenced to a year's suspension. This decision was reversed by the

Lord Chancellor. Fitzjames Stephen had argued that if the men most

interested in the church, namely, its clergy, are the only men who

may be punished for serious discussion of the facts and truths of

religion, then respect on the part of the world for the Church is at an

end. By this discussion the English clergy, even if Anglo-Catholic, are

in a very different position from the Roman priests, over whom

encyclicals, even if not executed, are always suspended.

Similar was the issue in the case of Colenso, Bishop of Natal. Equipped

mainly with Cambridge mathematics added to purest self-devotion, he had

been sent out as a missionary bishop. In the process of the translation

of the Pentateuch for his Zulus, he had come to reflect upon the problem

which the Old Testament presents. In a manner which is altogether

marvellous he worked out critical conclusions parallel to those of Old

Testament scholars on the Continent. He was never really an expert, but

in his main contention he was right. He adhered to his opinion despite

severe pressure and was not removed from the episcopate. With such

guarantees it would be strange indeed if we could not say that biblical

studies entered in Great Britain, as also in America, on a development

in which scholars of these nations are not behind the best scholars of

the world. The trials for heresy of Robertson Smith in Edinburgh and of

Dr. Briggs in New York have now little living interest. Yet biblical

studies in Scotland and America were incalculably furthered by those

discussions. The publication of a book like _Supernatural Religion_,

1872, illustrates a proclivity not uncommon in self-conscious liberal

circles, for taking up a contention just when those who made it and have

lived with it have decided to lay it down. However, the names of Hatch

and Lightfoot alone, not to mention the living, are sufficient to

warrant the assertions above made.

* * * * *

More than once in these chapters we have spoken of the service rendered

to the progress of Christian thought by the criticism and interpretation

of religion at the hands of literary men. That country and age may be

esteemed fortunate in which religion occupies a place such that it

compels the attention of men of genius. In the history of culture this

has by no means always been the case. That these men do not always speak

the language of edification is of minor consequence. What is of infinite

worth is that the largest minds of the generation shall engage

themselves with the topic of religion. A history of thought concerning

Christianity cannot but reckon with the opinions, for example, of

Carlyle, of Emerson, of Matthew Arnold--to mention only types.

CARLYLE

Carlyle has pictured for us his early home at Ecclefechan on the Border;

his father, a stone mason of the highest character; his mother with her

frugal, pious ways; the minister, from whom he learned Latin, 'the

priestliest man I ever beheld in any ecclesiastical guise.' The picture

of his mother never faded from his memory. Carlyle was destined for the

Church. Such had been his mother's prayer. He took his arts course in

Edinburgh. In the university, he says, 'there was much talk about

progress of the species, dark ages, and the like, but the hungry young

looked to their spiritual nurses and were bidden to eat the east wind.'

He entered Divinity Hall, but already, in 1816, prohibitive doubts had

arisen in his mind. Irving sought to help him. Irving was not the man

for the task. The Christianity of the Church had become intellectually

incredible to Carlyle. For a time he was acutely miserable, bordering

upon despair. He has described his spiritual deliverance: 'Precisely

that befel me which the Methodists call their conversion, the

deliverance of their souls from the devil and the pit. There burst forth

a sacred flame of joy in me.' With _Sartor Resartus_ his message to the

world began. It was printed in _Fraser's Magazine_ in 1833, but not

published separately until 1838. His difficulty in finding a publisher

embittered him. Style had something to do with this, the newness of his

message had more. Then for twenty years he poured forth his message.

Never did a man carry such a pair of eyes into the great world of London

or set a more peremptory mark upon its notabilities. His best work was

done before 1851. His later years were darkened with much misery of

body. No one can allege that he ever had a happy mind.

He was a true prophet, but, Elijah-like, he seemed to himself to be

alone. His derision of the current religion seems sometimes needless.

Yet even that has the grand note of sincerity. What he desired he in no

small measure achieved--that his readers should be arrested and feel

themselves face to face with reality. His startling intuition, his

intellectual uprightness, his grasp upon things as they are, his passion

for what ought to be, made a great impression upon his age. It was in

itself a religious influence. Here was a mind of giant force, of

sternest truthfulness. His untruths were those of exaggeration. His

injustices were those of prejudice. He invested many questions of a

social and moral, of a political and religious sort with a nobler

meaning than they had had before. His _French Revolution_, his papers on

_Chartism_, his unceasing comment on the troubled life of the years from

1830 to 1865, are of highest moment for our understanding of the growth

of that social feeling in the midst of which we live and work. In his

brooding sympathy with the downtrodden he was a great inaugurator of the

social movement. He felt the curse of an aristocratic society, yet no

one has told us with more drastic truthfulness the evils of our

democratic institutions. His word was a great corrective for much

'rose-water' optimism which prevailed in his day. The note of hope is,

however, often lacking. The mythology of an absentee God had faded from

him. Yet the God who was clear to his mature consciousness, clear as the

sun in the heavens, was a God over the world, to judge it inexorably.

Again, it is not difficult to accumulate evidence in his words which

looks toward pantheism; but what one may call the religious benefit of

pantheism, the sense that God is in his world, Carlyle often loses.

Materialism is to-day so deeply discredited that we find it difficult to

realise that sixty years ago the problem wore a different look. Carlyle

was never weary of pouring out the vials of his contempt on

'mud-philosophies' and exalting the spirit as against matter. Never was

a man more opposed to the idea of a godless world, in which man is his

own chief end, and his sensual pleasures the main aims of his existence.

His insight into the consequences of our commercialism and luxury and

absorption in the outward never fails. Man is God's son, but the effort

to realise that sonship in the joy and trust of a devout heart and in

the humble round of daily life sometimes seems to him cant or

superstition. The humble life of godliness made an unspeakable appeal to

him. He had known those who lived that life. His love for them was

imperishable. Yet he had so recoiled from the superstitions and

hypocrisies of others, the Eternal in his majesty was so ineffable, all

effort to approach him so unworthy, that almost instinctively he would

call upon the man who made the effort, to desist. So magnificent, all

his life long, had been his protest against the credulity and stupidity

of men, against beliefs which assert the impossible and blink the facts,

that, for himself, the great objects of faith were held fast to, so to

say, in their naked verity, with a giant's strength. They were

half-querulously denied all garment and embodiment, lest he also should

be found credulous and self-deceived. From this titan labouring at the

foundations of the world, this Samson pulling down temples of the

Philistines on his head, this cyclops heaving hills at ships as they

pass by, it seems a long way to Emerson. Yet Emerson was Carlyle's

friend.

EMERSON

Arnold said in one of his American addresses: 'Besides these

voices--Newman, Carlyle, Goethe--there came to us in the Oxford of my

youth a voice also from this side of the Atlantic, a clear and pure

voice which, for my ear at any rate, brought a strain as new and moving

and unforgetable as those others. Lowell has described the apparition of

Emerson to your young generation here. He was your Newman, your man of

soul and genius, speaking to your bodily ears, a present object for your

heart and imagination.' Then he quotes as one of the most memorable

passages in English speech: 'Trust thyself. Accept the place which the

divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries,

the connection of events. Great men have always done so, confiding

themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying a perception

which was stirring in their hearts, working through their hands,

dominating their whole being.' Arnold speaks of Carlyle's grim

insistence upon labour and righteousness but of his scorn of happiness,

and then says: 'But Emerson taught happiness in labour, in righteousness

and veracity. In all the life of the spirit, happiness and eternal hope,

that was Emerson's gospel. By his conviction that in the life of the

spirit is happiness, by his hope and expectation that this life of the

spirit will more and more be understood and will prevail, by this

Emerson was great.'

Seven of Emerson's ancestors were ministers of New England churches. He

inherited qualities of self-reliance, love of liberty, strenuous virtue,

sincerity, sobriety and fearless loyalty to ideals. The form of his

ideals was modified by the glow of transcendentalism which passed over

parts of New England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century,

but the spirit in which Emerson conceived the laws of life, reverenced

them and lived them, was the Puritan spirit, only elevated, enlarged and

beautified by the poetic temperament. Taking his degree from Harvard in

1821, despising school teaching, stirred by the passion for spiritual

leadership, the ministry seemed to offer the fairest field for its

satisfaction. In 1825 he entered the Divinity School in Harvard to

prepare himself for the Unitarian ministry. In 1829 he became associate

minister of the Second Unitarian Church in Boston. He arrived at the

conviction that the Lord's Supper was not intended by Jesus to be a

permanent sacrament. He found his congregation, not unnaturally,

reluctant to agree with him. He therefore retired from the pastoral

office. He was always a preacher, though of a singular order. His task

was to befriend and guide the inner life of man. The influences of this

period in his life have been enumerated as the liberating philosophy of

Coleridge, the mystical vision of Swedenborg, the intimate poetry of

Wordsworth, the stimulating essays of Carlyle. His address before the

graduating class of the Divinity School at Cambridge in 1838 was an

impassioned protest against what he called the defects of historical

Christianity, its undue reliance upon the personal authority of Jesus,

its failure to explore the moral nature of man. He made a daring plea

for absolute self-reliance and new inspiration in religion: 'In the soul

let redemption be sought. Refuse the good models, even those which are

sacred in the imagination of men. Cast conformity behind you. Acquaint

men at first hand with deity.' He never could have been the power he was

by the force of his negations. His power lay in the wealth, the variety,

the beauty and insight with which he set forth the positive side of his

doctrine of the greatness of man, of the presence of God in man, of the

divineness of life, of God's judgment and mercy in the order of the

world. One sees both the power and the limitation of Emerson's religious

teaching. At the root of it lay a real philosophy. He could not

philosophise. He was always passing from the principle to its

application. He could not systematise. He speaks of his 'formidable

tendency to the lapidary style.' Granting that one finds his philosophy

in fragments, just as one finds his interpretation of religion in

flashes of marvellous insight, both are worth searching for, and either,

in Coleridge's phrase, finds us, whether we search for it or not.

ARNOLD

What shall we say of Matthew Arnold himself? Without doubt the twenty

years by which Arnold was Newman's junior at Oxford made a great

difference in the intellectual atmosphere of that place, and of the

English world of letters, at the time when Arnold's mind was maturing.

He was not too late to feel the spell of Newman. His mind was hardly one

to appreciate the whole force of that spell. He was at Oxford too early

for the full understanding of the limits within which alone the

scientific conception of the world can be said to be true. Arnold often

boasted that he was no metaphysician. He really need never have

mentioned the fact. The assumption that whatever is true can be verified

in the sense of the precise kind of verification which science implies

is a very serious mistake. Yet his whole intellectual strength was

devoted to the sustaining, one cannot say exactly the cause of religion,

but certainly that of noble conduct, and to the assertion of the elation

of duty and the joy of righteousness. With all the scorn that Arnold

pours upon the trust which we place in God's love, he yet holds to the

conviction that 'the power without ourselves which makes for

righteousness' is one upon which we may in rapture rely.

Arnold had convinced himself that in an ago such as ours, which will

take nothing for granted, but must verify everything, Christianity, in

the old form of authoritative belief in supernatural beings and

miraculous events, is no longer tenable. We must confine ourselves to

such ethical truths as can be verified by experience. We must reject

everything which goes beyond these. Religion has no more to do with

supernatural dogma than with metaphysical philosophy. It has nothing to

do with either. It has to do with conduct. It is folly to make religion

depend upon the conviction of the existence of an intelligent and moral

governor of the universe, as the theologians have done. For the object

of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not

ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond this,

we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief,

_aberglaube_, which always revenges itself. These are the main

contentions of his book, _Literature and Dogma_, 1875.

One feels the value of Arnold's recall to the sense of the literary

character of the Scriptural documents, as urged in his book, _Saint Paul

and Protestantism_, 1870, and again to the sense of the influence which

the imagination of mankind has had upon religion. One feels the truth of

his assertion of our ignorance. One feels Arnold's own deep earnestness.

It was his concern that reason and the will of God should prevail.

Though he was primarily a literary man, yet his great interest was in

religion. One feels so sincerely that his main conclusion is sound, that

it is the more trying that his statement of it should be often so

perverse and his method of sustaining it so precarious. It is quite

certain that the idea of the Eternal not ourselves which makes for

righteousness is far from being the clear idea which Arnold claims. It

is far from being an idea derived from experience or verifiable in

experience, in the sense which he asserts. It seems positively

incredible that Arnold did not know that with this conception he passed

the boundary of the realm of science and entered the realm of

metaphysics, which he so abhorred.

He was the eldest son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby. He was educated at

Winchester and Rugby and at Balliol College. He was Professor of Poetry

in Oxford from 1857 to 1867. He was an inspector of schools. The years

of his best literary labour were much taken up in ways which were

wasteful of his rare powers. He came by literary intuition to an idea of

Scripture which others had built up from the point of view of a theory

of knowledge and by investigation of the facts. He is the helpless

personification of a view of the relation of science and religion which

has absolutely passed away. Yet Arnold died only in 1888. How much a

distinguished inheritance may mean is gathered from the fact that a

grand-daughter of Thomas Arnold and niece of Matthew Arnold, Mrs.

Humphry Ward, in her novels, has dealt largely with problems of

religious life, and more particularly of religious thoughtfulness. She

has done for her generation, in her measure, that which George Eliot did

for hers.

MARTINEAU

As the chapter and the book draw to their close we can think of no man

whose life more nearly spanned the century, or whose work touched more

fruitfully almost every aspect of Christian thoughtfulness than did that

of James Martineau. We can think of no man who gathered into himself

more fully the significant theological tendencies of the age, or whose

utterance entitles him to be listened to more reverently as seer and

saint. He was born in 1805. He was bred as an engineer. He fulfilled for

years the calling of minister and preacher. He gradually exchanged this

for the activity of a professor. He was a religious philosopher in the

old sense, but he was also a critic and historian. His position with

reference to the New Testament was partly antiquated before his _Seat of

Authority in Religion_, 1890, made its appearance. Evolutionism never

became with him a coherent and consistent assumption. Ethics never

altogether got rid of the innate ideas. The social movement left him

almost untouched. Yet, despite all this, he was in some sense a

representative progressive theologian of the century.

There is a parallel between Newman and Martineau. Both busied themselves

with the problem of authority. Criticism had been fatal to the

apprehension which both had inherited concerning the authority of

Scripture. From that point onward they took divergent courses. The

arguments which touched the infallible and oracular authority of

Scripture, for Newman established that of the Church; for Martineau they

had destroyed that of the Church four hundred years ago. Martineau's

sense, even of the authority of Jesus, reverent as it is, is yet no

pietistic and mystical view. The authority of Jesus is that of the truth

which he speaks, of the goodness which dwells in him, of God himself and

God alone. A real interest in the sciences and true learning in some of

them made Martineau able to write that wonderful chapter in his _Seat of

Authority_, which he entitled 'God in Nature.' Newman could see in

nature, at most a sacramental suggestion, a symbol of transcendental

truth.

The Martineaus came of old Huguenot stock, which in England belonged to

the liberal Presbyterianism out of which much of British Unitarianism

came. The righteousness of a persecuted race had left an austere impress

upon their domestic and social life. Intellectually they inherited the

advanced liberalism of their day. Harriet Martineau's earlier piety had

been of the most fervent sort. She reacted violently against it in later

years. She had little of the politic temper and gentleness of her

brother. She described one of her own later works as the last word of

philosophic atheism. James was, and always remained, of deepest

sensitiveness and reverence and of a gentleness which stood in high

contrast with his powers of conflict, if necessity arose. Out of

Martineau's years as preacher in Liverpool and London came two books of

rare devotional quality, _Endeavours after the Christian Life_, 1843 and

1847, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, 1873 and 1879. Almost all

his life he was identified with Manchester College, as a student when

the college was located at York, as a teacher when it returned to

Manchester and again when it was removed to London. With its removal to

Oxford, accomplished in 1889, he had not fully sympathised. He believed

that the university itself must some day do justice to the education of

men for the ministry in other churches than the Anglican. He was eighty

years old when he published his _Types of Ethical Theory_, eighty-two

when he gave to the world his _Study of Religion_, eighty-five when his

_Seat of Authority_ saw the light. The effect of this postponement of

publication was not wholly good. The books represented marvellous

learning and ripeness of reflection. But they belong to a period

anterior to the dates they bear upon their title-pages. Martineau's

education and his early professional experience put him in touch with

the advancing sciences. In the days when most men of progressive spirit

were carried off their feet, when materialism was flaunted in men's

faces and the defence of religion was largely in the hands of those who

knew nothing of the sciences, Martineau was not moved. He saw the end

from the beginning. There is nothing finer in his latest work than his

early essays--'Nature and God,' 'Science, Nescience and Faith,' and

'Religion as affected by Modern Materialism.' He died in 1900 in his

ninety-fifth year.

It is difficult to speak of the living in these pages. Personal

relations enforce reserve and brevity. Nevertheless, no one can think of

Manchester College and Martineau without being reminded of Mansfield

College and of Fairbairn, a Scotchman, but of the Independent Church. He

also was both teacher and preacher all his days, leader of the movement

which brought Mansfield College from Birmingham to Oxford, by the

confession both of Anglicans and of Non-conformists the most learned man

in his subjects in the Oxford of his time, an historian, touched by the

social enthusiasm, but a religious philosopher, _par excellence_. His

_Religion and Modern Life_, 1894, his _Catholicism, Roman and Anglican_,

1899, his _Place of Christ in Modern Theology_, 1893, his _Philosophy of

the Christian Religion_, 1902, and his _Studies in Religion and

Theology_, 1910, indicate the wideness of his sympathies and the scope

of the application, of his powers. If imitation is homage, grateful

acknowledgment is here made of rich spoil taken from his books.

Philosophy took a new turn in Britain after the middle of the decade of

the sixties. It began to be conceded that Locke and Hume were dead. Had

Mill really appreciated that fact he might have been a philosopher more

fruitful and influential than he was. Sir William Hamilton was dead.

Mansel's endeavour, out of agnosticism to conjure the most absurdly

positivistic faith, had left thinking men more exposed to scepticism, if

possible, than they had been before. When Hegel was thought in Germany

to be obsolete, and everywhere the cry was 'back to Kant,' some Scotch

and English scholars, the two Cairds and Seth Pringle-Pattison, with

Thomas Hill Green, made a modified Hegelianism current in Great Britain.

They led by this path in the introduction of their countrymen to later

German idealism. By this introduction philosophy in both Britain and

America has greatly gained. Despite these facts, John Caird's

_Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion_, 1880, is still only a

religious philosophy. It is not a philosophy of religion. His

_Fundamental Ideas of Christianity_, 1896, hardly escapes the old

antitheses among which theological discussion moved, say, thirty years

ago. Edward Caird's _Critical Philosophy of Kant_, 1889, and especially

his _Evolution of Religion_, 1892, marked the coming change more

definitely than did any of the labours of his brother. Thomas Hill Green

gave great promise in his _Introduction to Hume_, 1885, his _Prolegomena

to Ethics_, 1883, and still more in essays and papers scattered through

the volumes edited by Nettleship after Green's death. His contribution

to religious discussion was such as to make his untimely end to be

deeply deplored. Seth Pringle-Pattison's early work, _The Development

from Kant to Hegel_, 1881, still has great worth. His _Hegelianism and

Personality_, 1893, deals with one aspect of the topic which needs ever

again to be explored, because of the psychological basis which in

religious discussion is now assumed.

JAMES

The greatest contribution of America to religious discussion in recent

years is surely William James's _Varieties of Religious Experience_,

1902. The book is unreservedly acknowledged in Britain, and in Germany

as well, to be the best which we yet have upon the psychology of

religion. Not only so, it gives a new intimation as to what psychology

of religion means. It blazes a path along which investigators are

eagerly following. Boyce, in his Phi Beta Kappa address at Harvard in

1911, declared James to be the third representative philosopher whom

America has produced. He had the form of philosophy as Emerson never

had. He could realise whither he was going, as Emerson in his

intuitiveness never did. He criticised the dominant monism in most

pregnant way. He recurred to the problems which dualism owned but could

not solve. We cannot call the new scheme dualism. The world does not go

back. Yet James made an over-confident generation feel that the

centuries to which dualism had seemed reasonable were not so completely

without intelligence as has been supposed by some. No philosophy may

claim completeness as an interpretation of the universe. No more

conclusive proof of this judgment could be asked than is given quite

unintentionally in Haeckel's _Weltrãthsel_.

At no point is this recall more earnest than in James's dealing with the

antithesis of good and evil. The reaction of the mind of the race, and

primarily of individuals, upon the fact of evil, men's consciousness of

evil in themselves, their desire to be rid of it, their belief that

there is a deliverance from it and that they have found that

deliverance, is for James the point of departure for the study of the

actual phenomena and the active principle of religion. The truest

psychological and philosophical instinct of the ago thus sets the

experience of conversion in the centre of discussion. Apparently most

men have, at some time and in some way, the consciousness of a capacity

for God which is unfulfilled, of a relation to God unrealised, which is

broken and resumed, or yet to be resumed. They have the sense that their

own effort must contribute to this recovery. They have the sense also

that something without themselves empowers them to attempt this recovery

and to persevere in the attempt. The psychology of religion is thus put

in the forefront. The vast masses of material of this sort which the

religious world, both past and present, possesses, have been either

actually unexplored, or else set forth in ways which distorted and

obscured the facts. The experience is the fact. The best science the

world knows is now to deal with it as it would deal with any other fact.

This is the epoch-making thing, the contribution to method in James's

book. James was born in New York in 1842, the son of a Swedenborgian

theologian. He took his medical degree at Harvard in 1870. He began to

lecture there in anatomy in 1872 and became Professor of Philosophy in

1885. He was a Gifford and a Hibbert Lecturer. He died in 1910.

When James's thesis shall have been fully worked out, much supposed

investigation of primitive religions, which is really nothing but

imagination concerning primitive religions, will be shown in its true

worthlessness. We know very little about primitive man. What we learn as

to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part

from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living,

thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is

not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of

the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from

earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is

perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which

never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students.

Early Christianity, on its inner and spiritual side, is to be judged by

later Christianity, by present Christianity, by the Christian experience

which we see and know to-day, and not conversely, as men have always

claimed. The modern man is not to be converted after the pattern which

it is alleged that his grandfather followed. For, first, there is the

question as to whether his grandfather did conform to this pattern. And

beyond that, it is safer to try to understand the experience of the

grandfather, whom we do not know, by the psychology and experience of

the grandson, whom we do know, with, of course, a judicious admixture of

knowledge of the history of the nineteenth century, which would occasion

characteristic differences. The modern saint is not asked to be a saint

like Francis. In the first place, how do we know what Francis was like?

In the second place, the experience of Francis may be most easily

understood by the aid of modern experience of true revolt from

worldliness and of consecration to self-sacrifice, as these exist among

us, with, of course, the proper background furnished by the history of

the thirteenth century. Souls are one. Our souls may be, at least in

some measure, known to ourselves. Even the souls of some of our fellows

may be measurably known to us. What are the facts of the religious

experience? How do souls react in face of the eternal? The experience of

religion, the experience of the fatherhood of God, of the sonship of

man, of the moving of the spirit, is surely one experience. How did even

Christ's great soul react, experience, work, will, and suffer? By what

possible means can we ever know how he reacted, worked, willed,

suffered? In the literature we learn only how men thought that he

reacted. We must inquire of our own souls. To be sure, Christ belonged

to the first century, and we live in the twentieth. It is possible for

us to learn something of the first century and of the concrete outward

conditions which caused his life to take the shape which it did. We

learn this by strict historical research. Assuredly the supreme measure

in which the spirit of all truth and goodness once took possession of

the Nazarene, remains to us a mystery unfathomed and unfathomable.

Dwelling in Jesus, that spirit made through him a revelation of the

divine such as the world has never seen. Yet that mystery leads forth

along the path of that which is intelligible. And, in another sense,

even such religious experience as we ourselves may have, poor though it

be and sadly limited, leads back into the same mystery.

It was with this contention that religion is a fact of the inner life of

man, that it is to be understood through consciousness, that it is

essentially and absolutely reasonable and yet belongs to the

transcendental world, it was with this contention that, in the person of

Immanuel Kant, the history of modern religious thought began. It is with

this contention, in one of its newest and most far-reaching applications

in the work of William James, that this history continues. For no one

can think of the number of questions which recent years have raised,

without realising that this history is by no means concluded. It is

conceivable that the changes which the twentieth century will bring may

be as noteworthy as those which the nineteenth century has seen. At

least we may be grateful that so great and sure a foundation has been

laid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

CHAPTER I

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CHAPTER IV

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