what will follow? A feeling, not merely of contempt, but of absolute
hatred, towards the Catholic theologian and the dogmatic teacher. The
patriot abhors and loathes the partizans who have degraded and injured his
country; and the citizen of the world, the advocate of the human race,
feels bitter indignation at those whom he holds to have been its
misleaders and tyrants for two thousand years. “The world has lost two
thousand years. It is pretty much where it was in the days of Augustus.
This is what has come of priests.” There are those who are actuated by a
benevolent liberalism, and condescend to say that Catholics are not worse
than other maintainers of dogmatic theology. There are those, again, who
are good enough to grant that the Catholic Church fostered knowledge and
science up to the days of Galileo, and that she has only retrograded for
the last several centuries. But the new teacher, whom I am contemplating
in the light of that nebula out of which he will be concentrated, echoes
the words of the early persecutor of Christians, that they are the
“enemies of the human race.” “But for Athanasius, but for Augustine, but
for Aquinas, the world would have had its Bacons and its Newtons, its
Lavoisiers, its Cuviers, its Watts, and its Adam Smiths, centuries upon
centuries ago. And now, when at length the true philosophy has struggled
into existence, and is making its way, what is left for its champion but
to make an eager desperate attack upon Christian theology, the scabbard
flung away, and no quarter given? and what will be the issue but the
triumph of the stronger,—the overthrow of an old error and an odious
tyranny, and a reign of the beautiful Truth?” Thus he thinks, and he sits
dreaming over the inspiring thought, and longs for that approaching, that
inevitable day.
There let us leave him for the present, dreaming and longing in his
impotent hatred of a Power which Julian and Frederic, Shaftesbury and
Voltaire, and a thousand other great sovereigns and subtle thinkers, have
assailed in vain.
§ 2.
Its Policy.
1.
It is a miserable time when a man’s Catholic profession is no voucher for
his orthodoxy, and when a teacher of religion may be within the Church’s
pale, yet external to her faith. Such has been for a season the trial of
her children at various eras of her history. It was the state of things
during the dreadful Arian ascendancy, when the flock had to keep aloof
from the shepherd, and the unsuspicious Fathers of the Western Councils
trusted and followed some consecrated sophist from Greece or Syria. It was
the case in those passages of medieval history when simony resisted the
Supreme Pontiff, or when heresy lurked in Universities. It was a longer
and more tedious trial, while the controversies lasted with the
Monophysites of old, and with the Jansenists in modern times. A great
scandal it is and a perplexity to the little ones of Christ, to have to
choose between rival claimants upon their allegiance, or to find a
condemnation at length pronounced upon one whom in their simplicity they
have admired. We, too, in this age have our scandals, for scandals must
be; but they are not what they were once; and if it be the just complaint
of pious men now, that never was infidelity so rampant, it is their boast
and consolation, on the other hand, that never was the Church less
troubled with false teachers, never more united.
False teachers do not remain within her pale now, because they can easily
leave it, and because there are seats of error external to her to which
they are attracted. “They went out from us,” says the Apostle, “but they
were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have
continued with us: but that they might be made manifest that they are not
all of us.” It is a great gain when error becomes manifest, for it then
ceases to deceive the simple. With these thoughts I began to describe by
anticipation the formation of a school of unbelief external to the Church,
which perhaps as yet only exists, as I then expressed it, in a nebula. In
the middle ages it might have managed, by means of subterfuges, to
maintain itself for a while within the sacred limits,—now of course it is
outside of it; yet still, from the intermixture of Catholics with the
world, and the present immature condition of the false doctrine, it may at
first exert an influence even upon those who would shrink from it if they
recognized it as it really is and as it will ultimately show itself.
Moreover, it is natural, and not unprofitable, for persons under our
circumstances to speculate on the forms of error with which a University
of this age will have to contend, as the medieval Universities had their
own special antagonists. And for both reasons I am hazarding some remarks
on a set of opinions and a line of action which seems to be at present, at
least in its rudiments, in the seats of English intellect, whether the
danger dies away of itself or not.
I have already said that its fundamental dogma is, that nothing can be
known for certain about the unseen world. This being taken for granted as
a self-evident point, undeniable as soon as stated, it goes on, or will go
on, to argue that, in consequence, the immense outlay which has been made
of time, anxiety, and toil, of health, bodily and mental, upon theological
researches, has been simply thrown away; nay, has been, not useless
merely, but even mischievous, inasmuch as it has indirectly thwarted the
cultivation of studies of far greater promise and of an evident utility.
This is the main position of the School I am contemplating; and the
result, in the minds of its members, is a deep hatred and a bitter
resentment against the Power which has managed, as they consider, to stunt
the world’s knowledge and the intellect of man for so many hundred years.
Thus much I have already said, and now I am going to state the line of
policy which these people will adopt, and the course of thought which that
policy of theirs will make necessary to them or natural.
2.
Supposing, then, it is the main tenet of the School in question, that the
study of Religion as a science has been the bane of philosophy and
knowledge, what remedy will its masters apply for the evils they deplore?
Should they profess themselves the antagonists of theology, and engage in
argumentative exercises with theologians? This evidently would be to
increase, to perpetuate the calamity. Nothing, they will say to
themselves, do religious men desire so ardently, nothing would so surely
advance the cause of Religion, as Controversy. The very policy of
religious men, they will argue, is to get the world to fix its attention
steadily upon the subject of Religion, and Controversy is the most
effectual means of doing this. And their own game, they will consider, is,
on the contrary, to be elaborately silent about it. Should they not then
go on to shut up the theological schools, and exclude Religion from the
subjects scientifically treated in philosophical education? This indeed
has been, and is, a favourite mode of proceeding with very many of the
enemies of Theology; but still it cannot be said to have been justified by
any greater success than the policy of Controversy. The establishment of
the London University only gave immediate occasion to the establishment of
King’s College, founded on the dogmatic principle; and the liberalism of
the Dutch government led to the restoration of the University of Louvain.
It is a well-known story how the very absence of the statues of Brutus and
Cassius brought them more vividly into the recollection of the Roman
people. When, then, in a comprehensive scheme of education, Religion alone
is excluded, that exclusion pleads in its behalf. Whatever be the real
value of Religion, say these philosophers to themselves, it has a name in
the world, and must not be ill-treated, lest men should rally round it
from a feeling of generosity. They will decide, in consequence, that the
exclusive method, though it has met with favour in this generation, is
quite as much a mistake as the controversial.
Turning, then, to the Universities of England, they will pronounce that
the true policy to be observed there would be simply to let the schools of
Theology alone. Most unfortunate it is that they have been roused from the
state of decadence and torpor in which they lay some twenty or thirty
years ago. Up to that time, a routine lecture, delivered once to
successive batches of young men destined for the Protestant Ministry, not
during their residence, but when they were leaving or had already left the
University,—and not about dogmatics, history, ecclesiastical law, or
casuistry, but about the list of authors to be selected and works to be
read by those who had neither curiosity to read them nor money to
purchase;—and again a periodical advertisement of a lecture on the
Thirty-nine Articles, which was never delivered because it was never
attended,—these two demonstrations, one undertaken by one theological
Professor, the other by another, comprised the theological teaching of a
seat of learning which had been the home of Duns Scotus and Alexander
Hales. What envious mischance put an end to those halcyon days, and
revived the _odium theologicum_ in the years which followed? Let us do
justice to the authoritative rulers of the University; they have their
failings; but not to them is the revolution to be ascribed. It was
nobody’s fault among all the guardians of education and trustees of the
intellect in that celebrated place. However, the mischief has been done;
and now the wisest course for the interests of infidelity is to leave it
to itself, and let the fever gradually subside; treatment would but
irritate it. Not to interfere with Theology, not to raise a little finger
against it, is the only means of superseding it. The more bitter is the
hatred which such men bear it, the less they must show it.
3.
What, then, is the line of action which they must pursue? They think, and
rightly think, that, in all contests, the wisest and largest policy is to
conduct a positive, not a negative opposition, not to prevent but to
anticipate, to obstruct by constructing, and to exterminate by
supplanting. To cast any slight upon Theology, whether in its Protestant
or its Catholic schools, would be to elicit an inexhaustible stream of
polemics, and a phalanx of dogmatic doctors and confessors.
“Let alone Camarina, for ’tis best let alone.”
The proper procedure, then, is, not to oppose Theology, but to rival it.
Leave its teachers to themselves; merely aim at the introduction of other
studies, which, while they have the accidental charm of novelty, possess a
surpassing interest, richness, and practical value of their own. Get
possession of these studies, and appropriate them, and monopolize the use
of them, to the exclusion of the votaries of Religion. Take it for
granted, and protest, for the future, that Religion has nothing to do with
the studies to which I am alluding, nor those studies with Religion.
Exclaim and cry out, if the Catholic Church presumes herself to handle
what you mean to use as a weapon against her. The range of the
Experimental Sciences, viz., psychology, and politics, and political
economy, and the many departments of physics, various both in their
subject-matter and their method of research; the great Sciences which are
the characteristics of this era, and which become the more marvellous, the
more thoroughly they are understood,—astronomy, magnetism, chemistry,
geology, comparative anatomy, natural history, ethnology, languages,
political geography, antiquities,—these be your indirect but effectual
means of overturning Religion! They do but need to be seen in order to be
pursued; you will put an end, in the Schools of learning, to the long
reign of the unseen shadowy world, by the mere exhibition of the visible.
This was impossible heretofore, for the visible world was so little known
itself; but now, thanks to the New Philosophy, sight is able to contest
the field with faith. The medieval philosopher had no weapon against
Revelation but Metaphysics; Physical Science has a better temper, if not a
keener edge, for the purpose.
Now here I interrupt the course of thought I am tracing, to introduce a
_caveat_, lest I should be thought to cherish any secret disrespect
towards the sciences I have enumerated, or apprehension of their
legitimate tendencies; whereas my very object is to protest against a
monopoly of them by others. And it is not surely a heavy imputation on
them to say that they, as other divine gifts, may be used to wrong
purposes, with which they have no natural connection, and for which they
were never intended; and that, as in Greece the element of beauty, with
which the universe is flooded, and the poetical faculty, which is its
truest interpreter, were made to minister to sensuality; as, in the middle
ages, abstract speculation, another great instrument of truth, was often
frittered away in sophistical exercises; so now, too, the department of
fact, and the method of research and experiment which is proper to it, may
for the moment eclipse the light of faith in the imagination of the
student, and be degraded into the accidental tool, _hic et nunc_, of
infidelity. I am as little hostile to physical science as I am to poetry
or metaphysics; but I wish for studies of every kind a legitimate
application: nor do I grudge them to anti-Catholics, so that
anti-Catholics will not claim to monopolize them, cry out when we profess
them, or direct them against Revelation.
I wish, indeed, I could think that these studies were not intended by a
certain school of philosophers to bear directly against its authority.
There are those who hope, there are those who are sure, that in the
incessant investigation of facts, physical, political, and moral,
something or other, or many things, will sooner or later turn up, and
stubborn facts too, simply contradictory of revealed declarations. A
vision comes before them of some physical or historical proof that mankind
is not descended from a common origin, or that the hopes of the world were
never consigned to a wooden ark floating on the waters, or that the
manifestations on Mount Sinai were the work of man or nature, or that the
Hebrew patriarchs or the judges of Israel are mythical personages, or that
St. Peter had no connection with Rome, or that the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity or of the Real Presence was foreign to primitive belief. An
anticipation possesses them that the ultimate truths embodied in mesmerism
will certainly solve all the Gospel miracles; or that to Niebuhrize the
Gospels or the Fathers is a simple expedient for stultifying the whole
Catholic system. They imagine that the eternal, immutable word of God is
to quail and come to nought before the penetrating intellect of man. And,
where this feeling exists, there will be a still stronger motive for
letting Theology alone. That party, with whom success is but a matter of
time, can afford to wait patiently; and if an inevitable train is laid for
blowing up the fortress, why need we be anxious that the catastrophe
should take place to-day, rather than to-morrow?
4.
But, without making too much of their own anticipations on this point,
which may or may not be in part fulfilled, these men have secure grounds
for knowing that the sciences, as they would pursue them, will at least be
prejudicial to the religious sentiment. Any one study, of whatever kind,
exclusively pursued, deadens in the mind the interest, nay, the perception
of any other. Thus Cicero says that Plato and Demosthenes, Aristotle and
Isocrates, might have respectively excelled in each other’s province, but
that each was absorbed in his own; his words are emphatic; “quorum
uterque, suo studio delectatus, _contemsit_ alterum.” Specimens of this
peculiarity occur every day. You can hardly persuade some men to talk
about any thing but their own pursuit; they refer the whole world to their
own centre, and measure all matters by their own rule, like the fisherman
in the drama, whose eulogy on his deceased lord was, that “he was so fond
of fish.” The saints illustrate this on the other hand; St. Bernard had no
eye for architecture; St. Basil had no nose for flowers; St. Aloysius had
no palate for meat and drink; St. Paula or St. Jane Frances could spurn or
could step over her own child;—not that natural faculties were wanting to
those great servants of God, but that a higher gift outshone and obscured
every lower attribute of man, as human features may remain in heaven, yet
the beauty of them be killed by the surpassing light of glory. And in like
manner it is clear that the tendency of science is to make men
indifferentists or sceptics, merely by being exclusively pursued. The
party, then, of whom I speak, understanding this well, would suffer
disputations in the theological schools every day in the year, provided
they can manage to keep the students of science at a distance from them.
Nor is this all; they trust to the influence of the modern sciences on
what may be called the Imagination. When any thing, which comes before us,
is very unlike what we commonly experience, we consider it on that account
untrue; not because it really shocks our reason as improbable, but because
it startles our imagination as strange. Now, Revelation presents to us a
perfectly different aspect of the universe from that presented by the
Sciences. The two informations are like the distinct subjects represented
by the lines of the same drawing, which, accordingly as they are read on
their concave or convex side, exhibit to us now a group of trees with
branches and leaves, and now human faces hid amid the leaves, or some
majestic figures standing out from the branches. Thus is faith opposed to
sight: it is parallel to the contrast afforded by plane astronomy and
physical; plane, in accordance with our senses, discourses of the sun’s
rising and setting, while physical, in accordance with our reason,
asserts, on the contrary, that the sun is all but stationary, and that it
is the earth that moves. This is what is meant by saying that truth lies
in a well; phenomena are no measure of fact; _primâ facie_
representations, which we receive from without, do not reach to the real
state of things, or put them before us simply as they are.
While, then, Reason and Revelation are consistent in fact, they often are
inconsistent in appearance; and this seeming discordance acts most keenly
and alarmingly on the Imagination, and may suddenly expose a man to the
temptation, and even hurry him on to the commission, of definite acts of
unbelief, in which reason itself really does not come into exercise at
all. I mean, let a person devote himself to the studies of the day; let
him be taught by the astronomer that our sun is but one of a million
central luminaries, and our earth but one of ten million globes moving in
space; let him learn from the geologist that on that globe of ours
enormous revolutions have been in progress through innumerable ages; let
him be told by the comparative anatomist of the minutely arranged system
of organized nature; by the chemist and physicist, of the peremptory yet
intricate laws to which nature, organized and inorganic, is subjected; by
the ethnologist, of the originals, and ramifications, and varieties, and
fortunes of nations; by the antiquarian, of old cities disinterred, and
primitive countries laid bare, with the specific forms of human society
once existing; by the linguist, of the slow formation and development of
languages; by the psychologist, the physiologist, and the economist, of
the subtle, complicated structure of the breathing, energetic, restless
world of men; I say, let him take in and master the vastness of the view
thus afforded him of Nature, its infinite complexity, its awful
comprehensiveness, and its diversified yet harmonious colouring; and then,
when he has for years drank in and fed upon this vision, let him turn
round to peruse the inspired records, or listen to the authoritative
teaching of Revelation, the book of Genesis, or the warnings and
prophecies of the Gospels, or the Symbolum _Quicumque_, or the Life of St.
Antony or St. Hilarion, and he may certainly experience a most distressing
revulsion of feeling,(44)—not that his reason really deduces any thing
from his much loved studies contrary to the faith, but that his
imagination is bewildered, and swims with the sense of the ineffable
distance of that faith from the view of things which is familiar to him,
with its strangeness, and then again its rude simplicity, as he considers
it, and its apparent poverty contrasted with the exuberant life and
reality of his own world. All this, the school I am speaking of
understands well; it comprehends that, if it can but exclude the
professors of Religion from the lecture-halls of science, it may safely
allow them full play in their own; for it will be able to rear up
infidels, without speaking a word, merely by the terrible influence of
that faculty against which both Bacon and Butler so solemnly warn us.
I say, it leaves the theologian the full and free possession of his own
schools, for it thinks he will have no chance of arresting the opposite
teaching or of rivalling the fascination of modern science. Knowing
little, and caring less for the depth and largeness of that heavenly
Wisdom, on which the Apostle delights to expatiate, or the variety of
those sciences, dogmatic or ethical, mystical or hagiological, historical
or exegetical, which Revelation has created, these philosophers know
perfectly well that, in matter of fact, to beings, constituted as we are,
sciences which concern this world and this state of existence are worth
far more, are more arresting and attractive, than those which relate to a
system of things which they do not see and cannot master by their natural
powers. Sciences which deal with tangible facts, practical results,
evergrowing discoveries, and perpetual novelties, which feed curiosity,
sustain attention, and stimulate expectation, require, they consider, but
a fair stage and no favour to distance that Ancient Truth, which never
changes and but cautiously advances, in the race for popularity and power.
And therefore they look out for the day when they shall have put down
Religion, not by shutting its schools, but by emptying them; not by
disputing its tenets, but by the superior worth and persuasiveness of
their own.
5.
Such is the tactic which a new school of philosophers adopt against
Christian Theology. They have this characteristic, compared with former
schools of infidelity, viz., the union of intense hatred with a large
toleration of Theology. They are professedly civil to it, and run a race
with it. They rely, not on any logical disproof of it, but on three
considerations; first, on the effects of studies of whatever kind to
indispose the mind towards other studies; next, on the special effect of
modern sciences upon the imagination, prejudicial to revealed truth; and
lastly, on the absorbing interest attached to those sciences from their
marvellous results. This line of action will be forced upon these persons
by the peculiar character and position of Religion in England.
And here I have arrived at the limits of my paper before I have finished
the discussion upon which I have entered; and I must be content with
having made some suggestions which, if worth anything, others may use.
Lecture VI.
University Preaching.
1.