see the bitterness of the conflict now raging. It has become customary
for us to look upon the nineteenth century as an age of the comprehension
of religion, and to distinguish it from the eighteenth century, which
is regarded as a period of mere religious criticism. We boast of
having rediscovered religion, and of having secured to it a permanent
province in the dominion of the mind. But the facts of our public life
stand in curious contradiction to these assertions. In all civilised
nations, in literature, in parliamentary procedures, in all questions
that relate to religious and moral life or to education, the attentive
observer will find that a profound chasm divides humanity. Every one
feels the desirableness of bridging over this chasm, that the members of
society may be united in common labor; but again and again we are made
to experience how irreconcilable the respective claims of the opposed
parties are. He who has studied the bulls and encyclical letters of the
last two popes, Pius IX. and Leo XIII., and the commentaries on these
utterances in the _Civiltà Cattolica_, the official organ of the curia;
he who is acquainted with the polemical diatribes of the French Catholics
against the positivists and freethinkers, and against the school and
church legislation of the third republic; he who has any knowledge of
that mass of controversial literature, which the proclamation of the
doctrine of papal infallibility in the year 1870 evoked; he who has
followed the eventful and varied history of the so-called “Culturkampf”
in the German Empire, from the era of the minister Falk, down to the
recent bill for a new School-law in Prussia, defeated amidst the greatest
excitement in all parts of Germany; he who is the least bit at home in
the literary feuds which are being fought out in the domain of historical
theology concerning the validity and credibility of the original sources
of Christianity; he, finally, who will place the writings of Cardinal
Newman or of the Jesuits Pesch and Cathrein by the side of those of
Huxley and Spencer, by the side of those of Du Bois-Reymond, Strauss,
and Dühring: he, I say, who has gone through with a critical spirit all
that I have cited in the preceding sentences, will surely not be apt
to contradict this assertion of mine that civilised humanity to-day is
separated into two groups which no longer understand each other, which do
not speak the same language, and which live in totally different worlds
of thought and sentiment—at least so far as this one critical point is
concerned of man’s relation to religion.
“_Wie Ja und Nein sind sie,_
_Wie Sturm und Regenbogen._”
Have we, then, learned nothing and forgotten nothing since the days of
rationalism? The tremendous labors which our own century has devoted
to the investigation of religion in all its forms, to the unfolding of
its connection with racial mind and sentiment, and of its relation to
civilisation generally, and finally to the elucidation of the origin and
development of the great forms of religion: has all this had no other
result than that we, after a century of the most laborious research,
again find ourselves in the same attitude of unintelligent hostility
towards religion and Christianity in which the eighteenth century
revelled, and out of which we have only fought our way by the united
efforts of a host of profoundly enlightened minds?
This argument has been advanced in opposition to the leaders of the
rationalistic movement and to the work of the eighteenth century in
varying forms, by the party which seeks to ally the science of the
present and the religion of the past. It is seriously said and enjoined
that only they who are far behind the science of the times and hold aloof
from the true spirit of the age can still assume the repugnant attitude
toward religion which was characteristic of the mind of the eighteenth
century.
It is high time to point out the crude confusion of ideas which lies at
the basis of this argument. It confounds the historical understanding
of a thing with the philosophical approval of it. But these are two
totally distinct things. We understand a phenomenon historically, when
we are clear in our minds concerning the external conditions and habits
of thought of humanity from which it sprung; when its main-springs of
action and its purposes, as well as the effects which have proceeded
from it, are distinctly traceable. The more closely our mental pictures
of these things correspond to the facts as they actually were at the
origin, and the more they conduct us from the mere surface of phenomena
into the secrets of their psychological and sociological connection, and
teach us to understand these things as products of mind and of society,
the higher will our historical knowledge of them be rated. In this sense
the knowledge which the eighteenth century had of religious phenomena
was undoubtedly very imperfect. True, even here great advances beyond
the age which preceded, are noticeable. People had ceased to regard
the origin of the Jewish and Christian religion as a supernatural event
and as the immediate work of God; all religions were placed upon the
same footing, as species of the same kind; and efforts were made to
discover their common characteristics and the law of their origin. But
the people of that period were not yet able to arrive at the true essence
of religious ideas and sentiments. They were hardly in a position to
describe them properly, let alone to explain them. Of the hypotheses
devised to throw some light into the darkness that hung over the
beginnings of religions, not one proved itself competent to supply what
was hoped for. All that they could derive from these fictions was that
notable caricature of religion which their age had directly before its
eyes, and to free themselves from which they strained every nerve. With
the keen vision of hate they uncovered all the infirmities of religion,
all the terrors and iniquities which have followed in its train, all
the injurious effects to civilisation which have proceeded from it.
They created a negative picture of religion, which has lost nothing of
its partial historical truth by the fact that many of its features are
farther withdrawn from our immediate experience than they were from that
of the times in question.
But it was the nineteenth century that first worked out the true
psychology of religious man, and again came into possession of that
spirit of congeniality which is absolutely necessary to our entering into
the mental life of far-distant times. To the men of the rationalistic
age the history of religion was simply the history of the obscuration
of the pure, natural religion, which was supposed to be constituted of
a rational idea of God and a system of humane ethics, and which was
indistinctly conceived at times as the logical, and at times as the
historical, antecedent of the concrete religions. The latter appeared as
the corruption of the natural and simple order of things—a corruption
produced by superstition, by the wily exploitation of human credulity and
human needs, by the scheming machinations of the founders of religions
and of priests, by human delight in the marvellous, by the falsification
of the natural moral sentiments, and by the stirring into life of
fanatical passions. We know to-day that this so-called natural religion
is nothing more than a product of late abstraction and reflection; that
the motives and selfish interests above cited have been abundantly
at work in religious history, but are nevertheless unable to explain
the internal motive force and tremendous vitality of these spiritual
products. We know to-day that religions spring with the same necessity
and in conformity with similar laws from the depths of the human mind
as language and art, and that they form an integral constituent part of
the structure of civilisation and an important weapon of humanity in
the struggle for existence. In symbolical form they embody the highest
treasures and highest ideals of national existence; in its gods humanity
beholds the imaginative perfection and explanation of its view of the
world; and in its religious practices, in its worship, in prayer, it
strives to realise the wishes and aspirations which seem to lie beyond
the reach of its powers.
Many a riddle still remains to be solved, as is natural in a domain
that extends into the most hidden recesses of the human soul, and whose
obscurity is augmented by the fact that in the majority of cases the
most important and significant elements must be collected with infinite
pains from the rubbish of fantastic traditions. But upon the whole the
active labors of a century which calls itself with pride “the historical
century,” have borne their fruits. With respect to the intrinsic
character and the significance of religion for civilisation, there is now
every reason why a unity of opinion should prevail among all who take
their stand on the common ground of modern scientific research, whether
they be friends or opponents of religion.
But how does a knowledge of what religion has been in the past affect
our estimate of it in the present? Do we approve of an institution or
phenomenon, because we understand how it was once possible, nay, must
have existed, and what it signified? We understand to-day the Roman
law, the Ptolemaic astronomy, the scholastic philosophy, feudalism, and
absolute monarchy, thoroughly; we know the conditions which gave rise
to them, the necessity of their appearance, and the measure of their
performances; but does it occur to us, for these reasons, to perpetuate
and make them immortal because they had once an historical significance?
What an institution in its essence is, what in past times it has
accomplished, is an inquiry that must be conducted with quite different
means from that whether it is applicable to a definite present set of
relations and necessities. The historian can render this task more easy
by teaching us to understand the general laws and necessities of national
life from the analogies of the past; but as a prophet he will always
be one that looks backwards, and it is ever to be feared that he, too,
will see the present in the light of the past. For to him alone does the
past lift its obscuring veil, who, forgetful of self and unmindful of
sacrifices, can listen to the voices of remote times and peoples, who
with a mind of Protean cast has the power to transform his intellectual
being into that to which, solely by description, he seeks to give new
life and form. The past becomes a part of him; he loves it, he admires
it. And from the reanimation of the past in historical pictures to the
attempt of a renewal of it in life is but a single step.
Innumerable are those who have succumbed to this temptation. The entire
religious tendency of the nineteenth century exhibits this process on a
grand scale. This tendency is based on profound antiquarian studies of
the past—on that newly awakened historical interest, which aims not only
to criticise but to understand religion and ecclesiastical institutions.
Much that in the previous century seemed dead or destined to perish,
had been restored to life by it. The whole historical structure of the
Christian religion, which at the close of the age of rationalism only
existed, it would seem, as an artificially preserved ruin, has received,
through the instrumentality of these methods of thought, new supports,
and has again been made habitable for the human mind. Unmindful of the
complaints of churchmen, the future historian of civilisation will have
to characterise the second half of the nineteenth century as a period
of religious renaissance. And it is no accident, but a symptom of deep
import, that this century has completed almost all the great cathedrals
which were left unfinished and in partial ruins by the middle ages,
and placed them in their colossal grandeur before the world as lasting
monuments of its habits and tendencies of thought.
Yet the spirit of science has also not been inactive. Political progress
has freed it from the despotic police supervision which even in the
eighteenth century heavily oppressed it. In principle at least, freedom
of thought and inquiry are to-day acknowledged by all governments, with
the single exception of the Roman curia, although in practice there are
by no means few efforts made, by influencing its representatives, to have
that proclaimed which it is desired should be proclaimed. Infinitely
great has the number of workers grown, the instruments of inquiry, the
confidence of the human mind in itself, and our power generally. And if
formerly people could conceive of no other science than such as stood in
the service of the church, to-day science claims it most emphatically
and confidently as its privilege and duty to search and test the logical
truth of the most sacred traditions, and thus to base the thought of
future generations, not on the naïve faith of their fathers, but on the
demonstrable truths of actual present knowledge.
II.
Between the two groups of modern humanity, of which the one seeks to
retain the Christian religion in its historical form as the precious,
heritage of the past, and the other to supplant it by a new Idealism
formed in harmony with the spirit of science, a third class stands, which
plays the part of a mediator. This class concedes that the traditional
forms of religion are in great part unadapted to the modern mind, and
that historical Christianity is in need of improvement, but contends
that religion is an ineradicable constituent of all higher civilisation,
and must remain so, and, particularly, that Christianity is the absolute
religion, that is to say, that in Christianity as rightly understood and
naturally developed all the necessary elements of the true religion of
the future are contained.
I should like, in the following pages, to subject the contentions of this
mediatory group to a critical examination, and to discuss the question
whether it is at all possible for one who resolutely takes his stand on
the ground of modern scientific thought, logically to have religion in
the historical sense at all.
In effecting a mediation between the religious and scientific views
of the world,—views which appear to be separated from each other by
a profound intellectual abyss,—two ways may, generally speaking, be
pursued. Both have been frequently trodden since the days of rationalism.
I shall discuss each separately.
The attempt may be made to resume, in a form more adapted to modern
times, the work of the reformers of the sixteenth century; to go back
even more thoroughly than they did to the original and simplest forms
of Christianity, to remove _in toto_ the superstructure which has been
reared upon it in the course of time, and to exhibit to humanity “the
pure doctrine of Christ” as the source from which to-day, as a thousand
years ago, true comfort may proceed, as the simplest, purest, and most
exalted expression of the divine and human that has ever yet been
discovered. Many of the most erudite workers in the field of critical
theology which this century can show have placed themselves in the
service of this idea, which is preached with particular enthusiasm by the
so-called “free-religious” and Unitarian confessions, and which at times
has also exhibited a noble and conciliatory activity in the homiletical
work of some mild-minded and liberal clergymen in the evangelical
churches. But our special inquiry here must be concerning the logical
and scientific foundation of this modernised primitive Christianity, and
on this point it must be frankly stated that the more faithfully such a
Christianity reflects the biblical character, the remoter it is from our
modern thought, and the more it is dominated by modern ways of thinking,
the more unhistorical and hence the more unchristian it becomes.
The “pure doctrine of Christ,” the genuine, primitive form of
Christianity, is a Utopia of biblical criticism. What we actually
possess, in the form of historical documents, is that conception of the
doctrines and life of Christ which was put in writing several generations
after his death, and which, from amid a much greater number of
contemporaneous attempts, met by preference with the approbation of the
church. It is a hopeless task to attempt from these late records, which
betray the most various intellectual influences, to derive the authentic
doctrines of the oldest form of Christianity. No method, subjective
prepossession only, can here render a verdict. The things that appear
especially consistent and homogeneous to individual theologians and
critics are stamped as the genuine utterances of the Master. As every
time has done, so ours also constructs its picture of Christ to conform
with its wishes and wants.
But granting even that there is nothing objectionable in this, and that
this procedure is perfectly justified, a number of difficulties still
stand in the way of this movement which have stamped the procedure of
even the most ingenious of its representatives as the outcome of pure
subjective caprice. All the written sources which we possess of the
life and teachings of Christ contain much that is in the highest degree
repugnant to the modern mind. I refer particularly to the miracles. The
difficulties which they present may be disposed of in various ways; as,
to give an example, by the method of the early rationalistic thinkers,
who accepted the miracles as facts, but sought to give them a rational
explanation, or by that of Strauss, who held that they were the mythical
and poetical raiment of religious ideas and sentiments. Yet no art of
interpretation will banish from the world that fact which the poet
expressed in the words:
“_Das Wunder ist des Glaubens liebstes Kind._”
The fact that the entire cast of thought and sentiment of early
Christianity is saturated with the belief in the marvellous, and with
the expectations, nay, with the actual need of miracles, and that this
is not an adscititious ornament which can be doffed at pleasure, like a
dress which we have outgrown, but is of the very essence of Christianity.
Here is rooted that childlike and simple belief in the limitless and
God-coercing power of prayer, for which no natural laws nor force of
necessity exists, which is omnipotent as the Godhead itself, and as
all-powerful as desire. Here is rooted that ardent conviction of the near
collapse of the entire world, of the coming kingdom of perfection which
shall proceed, not from deeds and thought, but from faith and grace, and
shall crown all human desires with glory. And intimately connected with
all this stands the idea, visible in the background of all the moral
prescripts of the gospels, and painted in the strongest colors, of a
system of punishments and rewards in the world beyond; which makes of a
God of love, a pitiless, infuriate God of vengeance.
These things are so intimately interwoven with the modes of thought of
the synoptic writers that it is impossible to separate them therefrom
without doing violence to the internal connection of their doctrines.
They who seek after a more spiritual conception may, it is true, find
it in the gospel of John. But this book is so completely dominated by
the metaphysical-religious speculation of the second century, and by the
effort to bring the history of the life and doctrines of the Nazarene in
the service of the Logos idea, that the modern mind can only with great
difficulty find a common ground of understanding with it.
The task of the modern reformers is, for these reasons, a very difficult
one. They cannot but concede that Christianity, even in its purely
evangelical form, contains much that is foreign to us, and that the
elements of which it is composed must in part be excised and in part
improved by criticism and interpretation.
But the more the critical sense which is brought to bear upon this
task is developed in the spirit of modern scientific thought, the more
will historical Christianity shrink to the form of a mere colorless
abstraction, and ultimately nothing remains of its exuberant yet
visionary mental world but the picture of a philanthropic life joined
to a strongly developed consciousness of God, which proclaims a
popular morality in commandments and parables. But even this latter is
inevitably exposed to the same fate as the other ideas. It is dominated
throughout by the extremest notions of rewards and punishments, which
the expectation of the doom of the world places in the very immediate
future. It is impossible to take the system as a whole, and it must be
made the subject of violent interpretation to acquire any fitness for
the needs of modern life. Its principles are systematically turned and
twisted till they have acquired in some direction practical utility. And
who at this day can forget, that this system of morality, wherever and
whenever attempts have been made literally and faithfully to imitate it
in practical life, has led only to wretched caricatures? Moreover, it is
again and again freely remodelled in the spirit of modern ethics, its
offensive elements charitably cloaked, its useful ones developed to
the utmost, and finally here too a complete set of wholly modern ideas
consecrated by the borrowed authority of a venerable antiquity.
And therefore I repeat my contention, that the modern reformation, this
modern, pure, and scriptural Christianity, will, the honester it is,
all the more surely lead its adherents away from Scripture and from
Christianity and ultimately bring them to the adoption of a popularly
expounded, but philosophically established, ethical system.
I shall now take up the second of the two methods above mentioned.
That which we have just considered was known and affected even by the
eighteenth century. The discovery of the second is a merit of the present
time. The honor belongs in a pre-eminent degree to the speculative
philosophy of Germany, and to the intimate relations with theology which
this philosophy, especially in the school of Hegel and Schleiermacher,
entered into in the first half of the century. (Kant’s philosophy was not
put to similar use until later.) All these movements, whose rich literary
ramifications and development may be followed to the present day in Otto
Pfleiderer’s excellent and erudite work, “The History of Protestant
Theology in Germany Since Kant,”[60] have also begun in recent times,
through Green, Caird, A. Seth, J. Martineau, R. Flint, and F. Robertson,
to exert an influence on Anglo-American intellectual life.
The common fundamental feature of this second movement is, that it
proposes to accept as pure Christianity, not only the most ancient forms
of Christian doctrine accessible to us, but also the entire system
of dogmatic thoughts which in the course of the centuries primitive
Christianity has produced. Christianity, these men say, has historically
existed and acted in these maturer notions. It is not permissible
arbitrarily to separate them from it, and to reverse by any authoritative
edicts the real historical development. On the contrary, we now may and
must continue the process which, by the tenor of dogmatic history, is the
process which has continued for centuries, and give to the dogmas the
form which best accords with modern spiritual needs. To-day as in the
days of incipient Christianity, we see by the side of the naïve literal
belief, which takes no offence at incomprehensible things if they only
suit the needs of its heart, a gnosis arise which strives to reconcile
faith and knowledge, religion and intellectual culture; a gnosis which to
the unbelieving sceptic quotes the words of the poet:
“_Die Geisterwelt ist nicht verschlossen;_
_Dein Sinn ist zu; dein Herz ist todt!_
_Auf! bade, Schüler, unverdrossen_
_Die ird’sche Brust im Morgenroth!_”