new era of Catholic expansion in Asia and America, finding footing
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Japan, China, India,
Siam, Tonkin, as well as in North and South America. Sent forth by the
College of Propaganda (Congregatio de Propaganda Fide) founded in 1622,
they displayed a zeal never surpassed in the Church's history. In Japan
and China, in particular, they had for a time a dazzling success,
largely through the address of the Jesuits--whose policy was to win
converts by identifying native rites and beliefs with Christian,
never openly assailing but always seeking to assimilate them. As
early as 1549, Francis Xavier had preached the faith in Japan,
and at the beginning of the seventeenth century it seemed likely to
become the religion of the State. But Christians undid the Christian
cause. Between the various orders of Catholic missionaries there were
always deadly jealousies, all the others denouncing the Jesuits,
who in turn charged incompetence and malevolence on all; and the
increasing arrogance of the propagandists in Japan gave colour
to the hints of the Protestant traders, Dutch and English, that
Catholic missions were a prelude to Catholic conquest. The Japanese
emperor, accordingly, began a great persecution in 1587, and during
a number of years the Christian converts were slaughtered by tens of
thousands. Still the Jesuits persevered; but in the next generation
persecution began afresh. At length, in 1637, by a supreme effort,
the weakened Catholic flock were wholly destroyed or expelled. Once
more it had been demonstrated that really determined and rigorous
persecution by a majority in power can eradicate the Christian or
any other religion in a given sphere.
In Siam in the next century a slight success was similarly followed
by expulsion; and in China, where an outward success had been won as
a sequel to the expansion in Japan, and where the Christian cause
subsisted longer, despite some persecution and despite the fierce
dissensions of the different orders on points both of doctrine and
corporate conduct, it dwindled in the eighteenth century. The success,
indeed, had been all along illusory, as the Chinese had adapted
rather than adopted Christian forms, and merely carried on their
usual rites under Christian auspices. When, accordingly, the rival
orders at length forced on the papacy, in the teeth of the Jesuits,
a decision as to whether Chinese Christians should or should not truly
conform to Christian doctrine, and a decision against the Jesuits
was given, the semblance of conversion melted away, and a reversion
to Jesuit methods could not restore it. A similar decision made an
end of a rather flourishing movement of Jesuit Brahmanism in India
about the middle of the eighteenth century; and the other labours of
the Catholic missionaries in India were undone by the cruelties of
their own Inquisition.
Jesuitism had by this time been convicted of aiming in the old fashion
at its own worldly wealth, of troubling by its political plottings
the peace of every country it could enter, and of setting up its own
ambitions against the papal authority. In the East it had become a
great wealth-hunting corporation; in South America it was the same,
contriving for some generations to govern Paraguay in particular
wholly for its own enrichment; in Europe it provoked every Catholic
government in turn by its audacious attempts to control them. Thus it
was expelled from Portugal in 1759, from France in 1762, from Bohemia
in 1766; from Spain, Genoa, and Venice in 1767; and from Naples, Malta,
and Parma in 1768. At length, in 1773, the Society was suppressed by
a papal bull, and though it was revived in the nineteenth century it
has never since been the power it was, whether for evil or for good.
Of her extensions beyond Europe there thus remained substantially
to the Church of Rome at the end of the eighteenth century only
the Catholic populations of Central and South America and Canada;
and at the outbreak of the French Revolution, marked as it was by the
wholesale abjurations of Catholic priests and populace, it might have
seemed as if the reign of Rome in Europe were coming to an end. The
political movement, however, had outrun the educational; and as we have
seen, there was even a literary reaction at the Restoration. In Italy,
where the revolutionary movement had been hostile to the Church, the
reaction after 1815 was very marked. All criticism of Catholicism was
made a penal offence, and in the Kingdom of Naples alone, in 1825,
there were twenty-seven thousand priests, eight thousand nuns, as
many monks, twenty archbishops, and seventy-three bishops. In Spain
and France, too, the clergy worked hard to recover authority over
the people; and in Catholic Ireland they had never lost it, despite
all the efforts of Protestantism.
Everywhere, however, save in America, the struggle for existence has
gone against Catholicism in the nineteenth century. Catholic Ireland
has been in large measure depopulated through the failure of Protestant
England to solve its economic problems; and though this means a gain
to Romanism in the United States, there is no great likelihood that
that is permanent, or that Catholicism there will ever be very docile
to the papacy. France has become gradually more rationalistic, so much
so that the municipal government of Paris is usually in the hands of
freethinkers; and the recent expulsion of the recalcitrant religious
orders has proved the determination of the republican majority to put
down clerical influence. The movement of anti-theological Positivism,
founded by the teaching of Auguste Comte (d. 1857) on bases laid
by Saint-Simon, has never been numerically strong, but has affected
all French thought; and to-day there is scarcely one eminent French
writer who professes religious opinions. Even in Spain, so long the
stronghold of the faith, and still more generally in Italy, educated
men are as a rule either indifferent or hostile to the Church; and
the common people, especially the Socialists in the towns, have
gone the same way. Both in Spain and Portugal there are journals
zealously devoted to a propaganda of freethought; and the judicial
murder of Ferrer has but intensified hostility to the Church. National
union in Italy, accomplished in the middle of the century, has been
fatal to ecclesiastical supremacy. The papacy is unable to recover
its temporal power at Rome. In Catholic Belgium, the action of the
clergy is constantly fought by a ubiquitous freethought propaganda;
and Dutch Catholicism does not gain ground.
Some appearance of Catholic revival occurred in England in the second
and third generations of the nineteenth century, the "Oxford movement"
preparing the ground; but though John Henry Newman was followed
into the Catholic Church by a number of clergymen and rich laymen,
the movement soon ceased to be intellectually important, and the
popular success seems to have reached its limits. Though there is
much leaning to Rome in the High Church section of the heterogeneous
Anglican body, it is certain that while the economic basis remains
Protestant there will be no great secession. Economic considerations,
again, have latterly set up even in Catholic Austria--which with
Southern Germany is perhaps the most believing section of the Catholic
world--a movement with the watchword "Loose from Rome." In Brazil,
again, there has been a quite extraordinary development of Positivism
among the educated class; and the revolution which peacefully expelled
the last emperor--himself personally estimable, and not an orthodox
Catholic--was ostensibly wrought by the Positivist party. Portugal,
finally, has taken the same path.
Thus the age which saw the promulgation of the formal decree of Papal
Infallibility (1870) has seen the most vital decline that has ever
taken place in the total life and power of the Church of Rome. It
preserves its full hold to-day only on (1) the most ignorant or
most rural sections of the population of Catholic countries, (2)
the unintellectual sections of their middle and upper classes, and
(3) the emotionally religious or pietistic types, who are still,
by reason of the total circumstances, more numerous among women than
among men. Hence in the Catholic countries, female education being
there specially backward, the Church depends relatively even more on
women than do the churches of the Protestant world. But among women in
the Catholic countries also there goes on a process of rationalization,
Socialism doing some of the work of education where the other machinery
is inadequate.
§ 2. Protestant Christianity
The failure of Protestantism to gain any ground in Europe after the
sixteenth century had naturally the effect of increasing the zeal
of its adherents within their own sphere; and though nowhere did
Protestant organization compare in energy with that shown by the
Society of Jesus and the Roman College of Propaganda, the system of
popular education in several countries--as Switzerland, Scotland,
and parts of Germany--was raised much above the popular Catholic
level. Presbyterians in particular felt the need of popular schools
for the maintenance of their polity. The result was, after a time, a
certain improvement in the capacity and conditions of the common people
where other causes did not interfere. Thus the Protestant cantons
of Switzerland have in general been noted for a greater material
prosperity than that of the Catholic cantons; and in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries Presbyterian Scotland, though naturally much
the poorer country, admittedly turned out a larger proportion of men
qualified for responsible positions than did episcopalian England.
All the while, the influence of a Presbyterian clergy, in touch with
the people and able to ostracize socially those who avowed unbelief,
maintained in the Calvinistic countries a higher average of professed
orthodoxy, the normal effect of higher education being thus checked
on the side of religion. Scotland contributed little to the earlier
deistic movement of the eighteenth century, Smith and Hume having
taken it up after it had flourished for a generation in England;
and at no time was rationalism socially avowed to the same extent
in the north as in the south, the enlightenment of the lay authors
being confined to a small town circle.
On the moral and æsthetic side, however, popular Presbyterianism
tended to be hard and joyless, with the natural result, seen alike in
Geneva and in Scotland, of breeding much licence. On the other hand
there arose a higher reaction, towards intellectual interests; and
the Switzerland of the eighteenth century produced a remarkably large
proportion of scientific men; while in Scotland, where centuries of
theological life and strife set up even in the Church a notable spirit
of "moderation," both the physical and the moral or social sciences
were conspicuously cultivated. Popular freethinking was beginning to
follow in both cases, when the reaction against the French Revolution
arose to arrest it. When in the next generation there began in Scotland
the ecclesiastical struggle which ended in the formation of the Free
Church (1842) a new impulse was given to doctrinal fanaticism, which
the competition of three rival Presbyterian Churches was well fitted
to maintain.
Thus, though Scottish scholars have contributed largely to the "higher
criticism," the middle and working classes of Scotland all through
the nineteenth century have been at least outwardly more orthodox
than even those of England. They, too, however, have begun to exhibit
the common critical tendencies. As the results of Biblical criticism
become more generally known, church attendance tends to fall off,
despite the economic pressure Churchmen are able to use in small
communities. It is perhaps as much on account of the common need as
by reason of the growth of liberality that the two chief dissenting
Scottish Churches, the Free and the United Presbyterian (Voluntary),
have latterly amalgamated. Were it not that a large proportion of
the more energetic and stirring youth of the country leave it for
England and the colonies, the more conservative staying at home,
the process of change would probably be more rapid.
In the small communities of Protestant Switzerland a democratic
church polity had equally served to maintain a greater stress of
orthodox belief and practice than was seen in surrounding countries;
and the appointment of Strauss to a chair of theology at Zurich by a
Radical Government in 1839 led to an actual insurrection, set up and
led by fanatical clergymen. Catholic cantons later showed themselves
no less medieval. Nothing, however, avails to shut out critical
thought; Zeller received a chair at Berne in 1847; rationalism has
ever since steadily progressed; the number of theological students
as steadily falls off; and among the Swiss theologians of to-day
are some of the most "subversive" of the professional writers on
Christian origins. Popular rationalism necessarily begins to follow,
though less rapidly than in countries where the people and the clergy
do not ecclesiastically govern themselves.
In Protestant Holland and the Scandinavian States, of late years,
the decline of Christian faith has been still more marked. All are
considerably influenced by German culture; and in Protestant Germany
orthodoxy is gradually disappearing. There the long depression of
civilization begun by the troubles of the Reformation, and clinched
by the vast calamity of the Thirty Years War, was favourable to
a sombre religious feeling; and this, under the name of Pietism,
actually prevailed in the latter part of the seventeenth century,
triumphing over a movement of spontaneous freethinking. Peace and
the development of universities thereafter built up a learned class,
who especially cultivated ecclesiastical history; and as we have seen,
German theology had become in the primary sense rationalistic by the
end of the eighteenth century. After the fall of Napoleon there began
in earnest the education of the Prussian common people; and though to
this day the learned class are more apart from the general public in
Germany than in most other countries, the latter half of the nineteenth
century has seen a great development of popular secularism.
In 1881 the church accommodation in Berlin sufficed for only two per
cent of the population, and even that was not at all fully used. This
is the social aspect of Protestant Germany; and it effectively
confutes the periodic statements as to revivals of orthodoxy in the
universities. Such revivals are officially engineered and financially
stimulated: the mass of the people of Protestant Germany, at least in
the towns, have practically given up the Christian creed, even when
they do not renounce their nominal membership in the State Church;
and the great Socialistic party, which contains over three millions
of adult males, is pronouncedly rationalistic. In Scandinavia the
literary influence of such masters of drama and fiction as Ibsen and
Björnson creates a freethinking spirit on a very wide scale among the
middle classes, though the clergy are still illiberal; and in Holland,
where the churches are increasingly latitudinarian, there has been a
more competent journalistic propaganda of rationalism than in almost
any other country.
That the same general movement of things goes on in England
may be proved by reference to the almost daily complaints of the
clergy. Rationalism and secularism have advanced in all classes during
half a century, until their propaganda is accepted as a quite normal
activity; such writers as Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and Clifford being
read by the more studious of all ranks. In recent years the cheap
reprints of the Rationalist Press Association have had millions of
readers. Churchgoing constantly declines in the towns; agnosticism
becomes more and more common among the educated classes; the average of
the workers in the large towns are fixedly alienated from the Church;
and the latter-day propaganda of the Salvation Army affects only the
less intelligent types even since, after refusing for twenty years
to deal with material problems, it has sought to establish itself as
a charitable organization for dealing with the "lapsed masses." As
regards the general influence of the churches it is observable that
whereas fifty years ago there were many clergymen and prelates noted
as important writers on non-theological matters, and whereas even
a few years ago there were still several bishops distinguished as
scholars and historians, there is now none so describable. So, in the
department of fine letters, there is scarcely a poet or novelist of
high standing who can be called a believing Christian. In the last
generation some distinguished men who were openly heterodox, as the
late Mr. Matthew Arnold, or very dubiously orthodox, as Mr. Lecky,
were wont to profess themselves good members of the Church of England;
but the normal tendency of rationalists is now to give the churches
up. The leading names in serious and even imaginative literature,
with a few exceptions which stand for popularity rather than weight,
are those of known unbelievers. In that category stood the late
Mr. George Meredith.
Of the state of thought in the United States it is difficult to speak
with precision. The latitude allowed to or taken by the majority of
the clergy keeps within the ostensible pale of the numerous churches
much opinion that elsewhere would rank as extremely heterodox; and
it was from American churchmen that there came the project of the
so-called "Rainbow Bible," in which the heterogeneous sources of the
Old Testament books are indicated by printing in variously coloured
inks. As in all countries where the clergy are democratically in touch
with the people, the breach between authority and modern thought is
thus less marked than in the sphere of the Catholic and Anglican
Churches. But in such a civilization, development is inevitably
continuous.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the prevailing creed
of educated New England, then noted for "plain living and high
thinking," was Unitarianism. This seems to have grown rapidly after the
Revolution, partly from seed sown by Priestley, who made New England
his home, partly from the Deism of the educated class. Nearly all the
leaders of the Revolution--Washington, Paine, Franklin, Jefferson,
Adams--had been Deists. But Deism is an inconvenient creed for
public men in a church-going or clerically-influenced world; and
Unitarianism, with its decorous worship and use of the Bible, was a
convenient compromise. Later "transcendental" teaching, such as the
movement around Emerson, led men in the same direction. Latterly,
however, the Unitarian congregations relatively dwindle; and while
some of the defection stands for the relapse of the children from
the strenuous thought of their fathers, some stands for complete
abandonment of the habit of worship.
At the same time popular rationalism has been greatly diffused in the
United States by the lecturing of the late Colonel Ingersoll, one of
the greatest orators of his time, as was his contemporary Charles
Bradlaugh in England. Each of those men probably convinced more of
his fellow countrymen of the untruth of the Christian creed than were
ever rationally persuaded of its truth by the preachers or teachers
of modern times. What preserves the form of faith in the States is
probably less the socio-economic pressure seen so commonly in England
and Scotland (since all life is franker and freer in the New World,
especially in the West) than the simple lack of leisure for study in
a community where competition for income drives all men at a pace
that almost seems to belie prosperity. A shrewd and pliable clergy
keeps itself rather better abreast of new scholarship and criticism
than does the mass of the flock; and men and women who first learn
from the pulpit something of the change of view passing over Biblical
study are not apt to turn away from the teacher as Europeans do from
an unteachable priest. But despite all accommodation the sense of an
absolute change is diffused, and there is record of western preachers
bidding farewell to the pulpit and being chorussed by laymen forsaking
the pew.
In strict keeping with the shrinkage of faith among the "higher" races
is the expenditure of effort to spread it among the "lower." Faith
naturally seeks the comfort of converts at lower intellectual levels;
and it is in some quarters able to report a certain expansion of
territory by such means. But the total statistics of Protestant
missions tell only of handfuls of converts scattered among the yellow
and brown and black races, a number grotesquely disproportionate to
the immense outlay. This goes on in virtue of the still sufficient
wealth of the churches, which are in consistency bound to respond to
missionary appeals while they profess belief in the Christian doctrine
of salvation. It is found, however, that the missionary system needs,
to maintain it, either an ever more substantial stipend or some other
opportunity of gain to the individual missionary; and the triviality
of the results becomes increasingly discouraging to all save the most
fervent faith. Disparagement of missionary labours on both moral and
political grounds is probably more common among professed churchmen
than among unbelievers, who sometimes, as in the case of Darwin, bear
cordial testimony to the merits and the success of some missionaries
as against the egoism of the normal trader in his relations with the
undeveloped races.
The final problem of Protestantism is its collective relation to
Catholicism; and in the first half of the nineteenth century many
Protestants still hoped to gain ground at the expense of the Church
of Rome, now that propaganda was free. No such success, however,
has taken place. It is found on the contrary that the more devotional
types tend to revert from Protestantism to Rome, while those who reject
Catholicism rarely become Protestants. In France this is peculiarly
apparent. At the Revolution, it was found that proportionally as
many Protestant pastors as Catholic priests were ready to abjure
their creed. In the religious reaction both Churches alike regained
ground; and the Protestant Church in France has always had adherents
distinguished for learning and moral earnestness. To-day, however,
though its members are relatively numerous in places of political
power, by reason doubtless of their serious and practical education,
their Church does not make any corresponding gains. Its numbers may
not latterly dwindle as steadily as those of the Catholic mass; but
there is no prospect that it will recover strength through Catholic
defections. In Austria, the anti-Roman movement already mentioned may
conceivably give rise to a non-Romish Church; but it is impossible
to forecast the issue.
§ 3. Greek Christianity
It is the pride of the Greek Church to call itself Orthodox; and in no
part of Christendom has the faith had less to fear from unbelief. Mere
sectarian strife, indeed, has never been lacking; and at the very
moment of the fall of Constantinople there was deadly schism between
the orthodox and those who were politically willing to unite with the
Latin Church. But vital heresy never throve. Political vicissitude in
the Eastern empire, from Constantine onwards, seems always to have
thrown the balance of force on the side of religious conservatism;
and so devoid is Greek ecclesiastical history since the Middle Ages
of any element of innovating life that the student is tempted almost
to surmise a national loss of faculty. Greek intellectual life since
the fall of Constantinople, however, is only a steady sequence from
that which went before. After the overthrow of the Latin kingdom set
up by the Crusaders, and the restoration of Greek rule, the whole
nation was very naturally thrown back on its traditions, recoiling
from further contact with the West; and the process of fixation
was repeated for what of Greek life was left after the Turkish
conquest. The extraordinary gift for despotic government shown by the
first race of Ottoman Turks brought about a resigned degradation on
the Christian side. Allowed a sufficient measure of toleration to make
them "prefer the domination of the Sultan to that of any Christian
potentate," they paid to him not only their taxes, but, for a time,
a large annual tribute of children, with perfect submission; and
thus, in the words of the British historian of modern Greece, they
"sank with wonderful rapidity, and without an effort, into the most
abject slavery." Many indeed became Mohammedans to escape the tribute
of children, which after a time ceased to be exacted, becoming rare
in the seventeenth century.
In such circumstances the Christian priesthood and remaining laity
were thrown very closely together, somewhat as happened in Ireland
under English rule, and the result was a perfect devotion on the
part of the Greek peasantry to their creed. It is accordingly
claimed as the force which preserved their nationality. But the
nationality so preserved could not well do much credit to the creed,
which, in turn, gave Greeks a ground of differentiation from their
conquerors without supplying any force of retrieval or progress. What
was secured was not moral union but merely doctrinal persistence in
the state of subjection; and the conqueror "availed himself of the
hoary bigotry and infantine vanity of Hellenic dotage to use the
Greek Church as a means of enslaving the nation." The first Sultan
sagaciously appointed a conservative Patriarch, and left Christian
disputes alone. The result was that the Church was kept impotent
by its own quarrels and corruptions. Unity of forms alone remained;
simony "became a part of the constitution of the Orthodox Church,"
the women of the Sultan's harem selling Christian ecclesiastical
offices; and Christian life as such set up in the Moslem onlookers an
immovable contempt. "No more selfish and degraded class of men has
ever held power," says Finlay, "than the archonts of modern Greece
and the Phanariots of Constantinople." Greek life remained at its
best in the rural districts, where the old village governments were
allowed to subsist, and where accordingly the people kept apart from
the corrupt and oppressive Turkish law courts. And in these districts,
as it happens, there has been the maximum of pagan survivals.
The Church in particular exhibited in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, in a worse degree, all the corruption and backwardness of
that of the West in the pre-Reformation period. Greek monasteries,
despite attempts at reform by single emperors, had long been in large
measure places of comfortable retreat for members of the upper classes;
and under Turkish rule they became still more so, acting however as
centres of political intrigue in addition. The result was that, with
every facility for such study as the Benedictines carried on in the
West, the Greek monks as a rule left learning alone, and were active
chiefly as Turkish political agents, in the manner of the Western
Jesuits. The secular clergy at the same time became so depressed
economically that they were commonly obliged to work with their
hands for a living; and though those of the country districts were
as a rule morally much superior to those of the towns, all alike were
necessarily very ignorant. In the towns, where many of the aristocracy
had become Moslems at the conquest, both clergy and monks frequently
apostatized to Islam, three cases being recorded in the year 1675;
and about that time there is a curious record of the Turks putting
a Christian renegade to death for cursing his own religion in the
divan. Moslems seem always to have retained a reverence for the Gospel
Jesus, considered as apart from his Church.
It is needless to say that Greek Christianity never had the slightest
countervailing success in converting Moslems. In addition to the
spectacle of Christian degradation constantly under their eyes,
the Turks were in a position to say that no trust could ever be
put in the good faith of a Christian State which made a treaty with
them. Thus even when the usual diseases of despotism and dogmatism
corroded the Turkish polity, the Christians counted for nothing as
an element either of regeneration or of criticism; and no Turk ever
looked to their creed as a possible force of reform, though in the
period of energy the ablest Turkish statesman always saw the wisdom
of ruling them tolerantly, in the Turkish interest, and sought to win
them to Islam. Outside of Greece proper, accordingly, the Greek Church
never regained any ground in the Turkish empire; and in the age of the
conquest, when the expulsion of Jews from Spain drove many of that
race to Turkey, they were everywhere preferred to Christians, whom
they ousted, further, from many industrial and commercial positions
in the towns, becoming the chief bankers, physicians, and merchants,
and so helping to depress the Christians.
No race could under such conditions maintain a high intellectual life;
and among Greek Christians orthodoxy was a matter of course. While
Venice held the Morea at the end of the seventeenth century, and while
Genoa ruled some of the islands, the same state of things prevailed
under Catholic rule. When accordingly the sense of nationality began to
grow in the eighteenth century, it was from the first associated with
the national religion. In the first quarter of the eighteenth century,
Catholic propaganda was carried on in Chios and elsewhere under French
auspices, and the Greek Church persuaded the Turkish Government to
prohibit proselytism. At no period does the strife between easterns
and westerns at the Holy Sepulchre seem to have ceased; and it
now began to worsen. The wars between Austria and Turkey, however,
began the gradual emancipation of the Greek people from servitude, by
putting an outside pressure on the Turkish Government; the Russians
continued the process; and the new friendly relations now set up
between Greek and other Christians developed a new Greek sentiment of
racial hostility to the Turks. At the same time, the hostility of the
Christian powers made the Porte inclined to attach the Greek upper
class by giving them privileges as Turkish officials, and thus the
national self-respect was on that side further encouraged, despite the
corruption of the favoured class. Probably Russian influence in the
eighteenth century did most to arouse national aspirations, Russia
being specially welcome as holding the Greek form of Christianity;
but the Russian attempt to secure sovereignty as the price of military
help checked the movement for independence; and it needed the contagion
of the French revolutionary movement to cause a vigorous revival. Then
Russia on political grounds combined with the Porte to resist French
influence from the Levant and the Ionian islands; and when in 1815 the
revived Ionian Republic was placed under British protection, Russia
and Turkey continued to combine in jealousy of Western influence.
English rule in the Ionian Islands in turn was "neither wise nor
liberal," and while it subsisted did nothing for Greek development;
but it remains the fact that Russia, holding the Greek creed, never
aimed sympathetically at Greek liberation. That came about at length
through the fervour of national feeling set up at the French Revolution
and encouraged by a common European sympathy, grounded not on religion
but on admiration for ancient and pagan Greece as the great exemplar
of civilization and intellectual life. The same admiration for their
ancestors was naturally aroused among the Greeks themselves, and
was their strongest political impulse. "Ecclesiastical ties greatly
facilitated union, but they neither created the impulse towards
independence, nor infused the enthusiasm which secured success."
Since the achievement of Greek independence, however, the people
have remained substantially orthodox. Though they are no longer
withheld from intercourse with the West, but have on the contrary
shown a large measure of cosmopolitanism, their intellectual life has
remained relatively fixed till the other day, the new complacency of
independence backing the old complacency of orthodoxy. An excessive
devotion to politics and political intrigue has absorbed the mental
activity of the people; and literary veneration for the classic past
has hampered the free play of intelligence on higher problems. The
"Gospel Riots" at Athens a dozen years ago exhibited the state of real
culture. On the urging of the Queen there had been made a translation
of the New Testament into the living language of the people, or into
one midway between that and the artificial academic tongue which
has been developed among the literary class. About that period,
however, what appears to be a more truly vernacular version began to
be published in an Athenian journal; and it was against this that the
students and others concerned directed their indignation, bringing
about by their disturbances an actual change of ministry. Orthodox
sentiment and orthodox ignorance appeared to be the moving forces;
so that at the beginning of the twentieth century Greece could
claim to be the most bigoted of Christian countries. Doubtless the
consciousness of possessing the continuous apostolic tradition has
been an important psychological factor in the special conservatism
of belief, as is literary past-worship in the conservatism of speech.
When we turn to Russia, where the creed of the Greek Church, though
under an independent Patriarch, is that of the State, we find the
usual phenomena of European intellectual life specially marked. In no
other country, perhaps, is rationalism or indifference more nearly
universal among the educated class, which is relatively small; and
nowhere is faith more uncritical among the mass. Among them the use
and adoration of icons--pictures or images of Jesus or the Madonna
or of the saints, embellished in various ways--is universal in both
private and public devotion; and a certain number of images, credited
with miraculous virtue, earn great revenues for the monasteries or
churches which possess them. The mass of the parish clergy (who like
those of Greece may marry before ordination, but not a second time)
are so ignorant as to be unconcerned about educated unbelief; and
the Church as a whole has little or no political influence, being
thoroughly subject to the political administration, or at least to
the authority of the Tsar.
In the medieval period monasteries in Russia underwent the same
evolution as elsewhere, the monks passing from poverty to corporate
wealth, and owning in particular multitudes of serfs. Their lands and
serfs, however, were secularized in the eighteenth century; and since
then, though some five hundred monasteries continue to exist, they have
counted for little in the national life. Ecclesiastical discipline
has in general been always rigorous under the autocracy; and in the
eighteenth century it was common to flog priests cruelly for almost
any breach of discipline. And though Russia has for ages abounded in
dissenting sects, at no time has any movement of reform come from the
clergy. No Church has been more steadily unintellectual. All progress
in Russia has come from the stimulus of western culture, beginning
under Peter the Great, and continuing throughout the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries; and though some men of genius, as the great
novelist, Dostoyevsky, who was anti-rationalist, and Count Tolstoy,
who was heretically religious, have been exceptions to the rule, the
higher Russian culture is predominantly rationalistic. The greatest
Russian novelist, Tourguénief, was a freethinker, as is Gorky to-day.
The numerous dissident sects of Russia, which represent in general
unorganized developments of the spirit of Bible-worshipping
Protestantism, have been broadly classed as follows: (1) Sects
such as the Molokani and Stundists, which found on the Scriptures,
but are not literalists, and resort at times to inward light for
interpretation. (2) Sects which disregard Scripture, and follow
the doctrine of special leaders. (3) Sects which believe in the
re-incarnation of Christ. (4) Sects given to the religion of physical
excitement; some being erotic, as the Jumpers; some flagellant, as
the Khlysti; some fanatically ascetic, as the Skoptsi or Eunuchs. All
alike, however near they may be to orthodoxy, are liable to official
persecution equally with the members of the modern sect of Dukhobortsi,
associated with Count Tolstoy, whose doctrine is non-resistance
and refusal to bear arms. Thus Christianity in Russia is variously
identified with the most medieval formalism and bigotry and the most
exalted enthusiasm for concord; while the march of intelligence
proceeds as far as it may in disregard of all supernaturalist
creeds. But the vast mass of the Russian peasantry stands for the
faith of the Middle Ages, and may now be said to constitute the most
religious section of total Christendom.
Between eastern and western Christianity, finally, there seems to be no
prospect of ecclesiastical fraternization, though hopes of that kind
have been sometimes floated in the Anglican Church. At the church of
the Holy Sepulchre the Greeks and the Latins are in chronic strife;
it was one of their squabbles that brought about the Crimean War; and
in the present year they have shed blood in one of their scuffles. [26]
The visitor to Jerusalem thus witnesses the standing spectacle of an
impassive Turkish soldier keeping the peace between mobs of Christian
devotees, eager to fly at each other's throats.
CHAPTER IV
THE RELATION TO PROGRESS
§ 1. Moral Influence
It is a deeply significant fact that in recent times the defence
of Christianity takes much more often the form of a claim that it
is socially useful than that of an attempt to prove it true. The
argument from utility is indeed an old one: it is an error to say,
as did J. S. Mill, that men have been little concerned to put it in
competition with the argument from truth; but the former is now in
special favour. Insofar as it proceeds upon a survey of Christian
history it may here be left to the test of confrontation with the
facts; but as it is constantly urged with regard to the actual state
of life and faith, it is necessary to consider it in conclusion.
The chief difficulty in such an inquiry is that the most irreconcilable
formulas are put forth on the side and in the name of belief. Commonly
it is claimed that all that is good in current morality is derived from
Christian sources; that morally scrupulous unbelievers are so because
of their religious training or environment; and that a removal of the
scaffolding of creed will bring to ruin the edifice of conduct that is
held to have been reared by its means. It is not usually realized that
such an argument ends in crediting to paganism and Judaism the alleged
moral merits of the first Christians. It might indeed be suggested,
as against the traditional account of their pre-eminent goodness,
that either they, in turn, owed their character to their antecedents,
or their creed lost its efficacy after the first generation. But the
historic answer to the claim is that there has never been any such
moralizing virtue in the Christian or any other creed in historically
familiar times as need alarm any one for the moral consequences of its
gradual disappearance. All sudden and revolutionary changes in popular
moral standards certainly appear to be harmful; but the great majority
of such changes in the Christian era have been worked under the
auspices of faith, having consisted not in the abandonment of belief,
but in the restatement of ethics in terms of "inspiration." Unbelief
proceeds with no such cataclysmic speed. It is not conceivable that
the gradual dissolution of supernaturalist notions will ever of itself
work such evil as is told of in the story of the military evangel
of Christianity in the Dark Ages, the Crusades, the Albigensian
massacres, the conquests of Mexico and Peru, the Anabaptist movement
at the outset of the Reformation, or the massacre of St. Bartholomew,
to say nothing of the death-roll of the Inquisition and the mania
against witchcraft. Even the bloodshed of the Reign of Terror in the
French Revolution, wrought under peculiar political perturbation,
was under the auspices not of atheists but of theists.
If it be asked wherein lies the specific value of dogma as a moral
restraint, in terms of actual observation, there are to be found
no facts that can induce a scientific inquirer to struggle for the
maintenance of a creed believed to be untrue in the hope that it will
prove morally useful. Moral evils may for the purposes of such an
inquiry be broadly classed under the heads of vice, crime, poverty,
and war; and only in regard to the first is there even a plausible
pretence that supernaturalist belief is a preventive. It might indeed
seem likely, on first thought, that a cancelling of supernaturalist
vetoes on the pleasures of the senses may lead to increased indulgence;
but those vetoes apply to all sensual indulgence alike, and no one now
pretends that unbelievers are more given to gluttony and drunkenness
than believers; though the latter may doubtless claim, in respect of
the Catholic Church, to include a larger number of extreme ascetics, as
do the votaries of faiths pronounced by Catholics to be false. While,
then, there may and do arise modifications of the religious formulas
of ethics, there is absolutely no reason to apprehend that any form of
conduct will be less considerate on naturalist than on supernaturalist
principles. The Christian doctrine of forgiveness for sins must do more
to encourage licence than can be done by any rationalistic ethic. Even
where naturalism might give a sanction which Christian dogma withholds,
as in the case of suicides, it is not found that any statistical change
is set up by unbelief. Poverty, again, has probably been normally
worse in Christian Europe throughout the whole Christian era than in
any previous or non-Christian civilization; and the most systematic
schemes for its extinction in recent times are of non-Christian
origin, though a personal and habitual effort to modify the stress of
poverty is one of the more creditable features of organized Christian
work. As regards crime, the case is much the same. The vast majority
of criminals hold supernaturalist beliefs, atheism being extremely
rare among them; and while many Christians have in the past done good
and zealous work towards a humane and rational treatment of criminals,
the only scientific and comprehensive schemes now on foot are framed
on naturalist lines, and are denounced by professed Christians on
theological lines, either as being sinfully lenient to wrongdoing
or as being "cold-blooded." Thus supernaturalism remains prone to
a cruel and irrational ideal of retribution, even while some of its
champions profess to combat scientific methods in the name of humanity.
It is in regard to the influence of religious teaching on international
relations, however, that the saddest conclusions are forced upon the
student of Christian history. The foregoing pages have shown how potent
has been organized Christianity to promote strife and slaughter, how
impotent to restrain them. If any instance could be found in history of
a definite prevention of war on grounds of Christian as distinguished
from prudential motive, it would have been there recorded. So flagrant
is the record that when it is cited the Christian defence veers round
from the position above viewed to one which unconsciously places the
source of civilization in human reason. Yet even thus the historic
facts are misstated. The enormity of Christian strifes in the past is
now apologetically accounted for by the fantastic theorem that hitherto
men have not "understood" Christianity, and that only in modern times
have its founder's teachings been properly comprehended. Obviously
there has been no such development: the gospel's inculcations of
love and concord are as simple as may be, and have at all times been
perfectly intelligible: what has been lacking is the habit of mind
and will that secures the fulfilment of such precepts. And recent
experience has painfully proved, once for all, that the religious or
"believer's" temper, instead of being normally conducive to such
action, is normally the worst hindrance to it.
An explanation is to be found in a study of the normal results
of guiding conduct by emotional leanings rather than by critical
reflection. The former is peculiarly the process of evangelical
religion. Hence comes the practical inefficacy of a love of peace
derived either inertly through acceptance of a form of words declared
to be sacred, or through an emotional assent to such words emotionally
propounded. Emotions so evolved are of the surface, and are erased
as easily as they are induced, by stronger emotions proceeding from
the animal nature. Only a small minority of Christians, accordingly,
are found to resist the rush of warlike passions; and some who call
most excitedly for peace when there is no war are found among those
most excited by the war passion as soon as the contagion stirs. It
may be noted as a decisive fact in religious history that in regard
to the war which raged while these pages were first being penned,
[27] the movement of critical opposition and expostulation succeeded
almost in the ratio of men's remoteness from the Christian faith. Among
the Quaker sect, so long honourably distinguished by its testimony
against war, there was a considerable reversion to the normal temper,
as if the old conviction had been in many cases lost in the process
of merely hereditary transmission. Among the Christian Churches so
called, by far the most peace-loving is the Unitarian, which rejects
the central Christian dogma. And among the public men associated with
the protest against the war, the number known to be rationalists was
proportionally as large as that of the supernaturalists was small. The
personal excellence and elevation of moral feeling shown among the
latter group is thus no warrant for seeing the cause in their creed. In
such matters there is no invariable rule, every section exhibiting
psychical divergence within itself; but it is now statistically clear
that the standing claim for the conventional creed as being peculiarly
helpful to the cause of peace is false. The title of "Bible-loving"
had for a generation been applied to England by its pietists. The same
title is confessedly applicable to the Boers of South Africa. Yet no
consciousness of a common creed ever availed to restrain the hatred
of the Christian mass in England towards their "enemy."
The recent history of the near East conveys a similar lesson. For
generations the Turkish autocracy was able to keep down the Christian
peoples under its rule by means of their mutual hates. It was
not community of religion that brought about the Balkan and Greek
combination of 1912: it was military and political calculation; and
the overthrow of Turkey was no sooner completed than the Christian
combatants were on the verge of war with each other. Between Greek and
Bulgarian there seems to be to-day the same animosity as existed in
the Dark Ages; and Greek orthodoxy declaims against the "irreligion"
of educated Bulgaria, while the mass of the Bulgarian people remains as
superstitious as that of Greece. As regards standards of conduct, the
former seem to have capped every savagery of which Turkish irregulars
have ever been guilty. Whatever may be the outcome of freedom for
self-development in the light of western civilization, there is plainly
nothing to choose as between Christian and Moslem moral material in
those regions after two thousand years of Christianity. Such facts
bring out once for all the sociological truth as to the part played
by Christianity in civilization. The progress of the more advanced
States has not been caused by creed. If that were the lifting factor,
Abyssinia should be on the same plane with the leading European
States. Once more, it is not Christianity that has civilized modern
Europe, but the variously caused and conditioned progress of Europe
that has civilized Christianity; even as the conditions and forces
of ancient Hellas civilized its paganism.
Such tests are of course not those that will be first put by a
scrupulous mind seeking to know whether the Christian creed be
true. Rather they are forced on such a mind by the tactics of
believers, who as a rule seek to evade the fundamental issue. It
is not unlikely, therefore, in view of present painful experience,
that for some time to come the stress of defence will shift to the
attempt, never entirely abandoned, to defend the faith on evidential
or philosophic grounds. We have thus to consider finally the apparent
effects of Christian credences and institutions on the intellectual
life of the time.
§ 2. Intellectual Influence
So far as it can be historically traced, the intellectual influence
of Christianity was relatively at its best when it began to be
propounded as a creed in critical relation to Judaism. Intellectual
gain was checked as soon as it became a substantive creed, demanding
submissive acceptance. From that point forward it becomes a restraint
on intellectual freedom, save insofar as it stirred believers to
a one-sided criticism of pagan beliefs, a process of which the
educational effect was promptly annulled by a veto on its extension
to the beliefs of the critics. It has been argued indeed that modern
science has been signally advanced by the mental bias that goes
with monotheism; but the historical fact is that Jewish monotheism
was much less friendly to science than Babylonian polytheism; that
the beginnings of Greek science were among polytheists and, perhaps,
atheists; that Saracen monotheism owed its scientific stimulus to the
recovered thought of polytheistic Greece; and that, whatever impulse
a truly monotheistic philosophy may have given to modern science,
the usual influence of Christian belief has been to override the idea
of invariable causation in nature. Even after the belief in recurrent
miracles is disavowed, the doctrine and practice of prayer remain to
represent the old concept.
On the other hand, the kind of violence done to the instinct for
concrete or historical truth by the frauds and delusions of the early
and medieval Church, though greatly attenuated in modern times, has
never ended. Critical judgment has only slowly recovered the strength
and stature it had in the pre-Christian world; and wherever faith
has plenary rule such judgment is liable to arbitrary interdict. It
is true that even in the nineteenth century some great servants of
science have been either orthodox Christians or devout theists. Faraday
and Joule, Pasteur and Kelvin, are cases in point. But instead of the
religious creed having in such cases furnished the cue or the motive
to the scientific work done, it is found to be out of all logical
relation to it, and to be a mere obstruction to the scientific use
of the reason on the religious problem itself.
To a considerable extent the rigid adherence to religious beliefs or
professions in defiance of evidence is on all fours with any other
form of conservatism, as the social and the political. Inasmuch,
however, as religion proffers both a specific comfort in this life and
a specific reward in another, it has a power of intellectual fixation
with which no other can compare; and there is something unique in the
spectacle of religious doctrines kept in an unchanged form by means
of an economic basis consecrated to them. It has been seen in the
foregoing history that for two thousand years no creed with such a
basis has been overthrown either wholly or locally save by a force
which confiscated its endowments or suppressed its worship. Thus,
and thus only, did Christianity triumph over southern and northern
paganism; thus did Islam triumph over Christianity in parts of its
world, and fall again before it in others; and thus did Protestantism
expel Catholicism from many countries and suffer expulsion in turn
from some of them. Where endowments can subsist, with freedom of
worship, no form of doctrine that is wedded to the endowments ever
yields directly to criticism.
Christianity has thus had in the modern world a relatively more
sinister influence on the intellectual life than was wrought by any
phase of paganism even in periods when the intelligence of the ancient
world was divorced from its established religion. The divorce is now
more complete than ever before; but the bribe to conformity is greater
than ever, relatively at least to the light of the time. The result
is a maximum of insincerity, whether or not the bribe is given by a
standing endowment. Dissenting or voluntary churches in the Protestant
countries offer an income to more or less educated men on condition of
propounding the creed of the past; and the more intelligent minority
within the churches are weighed down in every effort at a modification
of doctrine by the orthodoxy of the uncritical or fanatical many,
who control the endowments. Social and commercial life conform
to the conditions, and everywhere the profession of belief is far
in excess of the actuality--a state of things unfavourable to all
morality. The very attempt to adjust the system to the pressure of
modern thought exhibits the process of demoralization. From the clergy
we have neither straightforward defence nor straightforward avowal of
old error. Christianity is defended not as being true but as being
socially useful and privately comforting; and a general pretence is
made of maintaining the continuity of a historic creed whose central
and fundamental dogmas are no longer held save by the most uncritical.
It is not only in religion and ethics that the influence of endowed and
organized Christianity is thus intellectually baneful. Every science in
turn, from the days of Galileo, has had to fight for its life against
the sanctified ignorance of all the churches; and while the physical
sciences, which can be taught without open reference to traditional
error, have carried their point and received endowment in turn,
happily without being tied down to any documents, the moral sciences
are either kept in tutelage to theology in the universities of many
countries, our own included, or forced to leave out of their scope
the phenomena of religion itself, and in particular the sociological
problem of Christian history. At the beginning of the present century
there was not a single chair of sociology in a British university
[28]; and even in the United States, where such chairs are common,
they and the historical chairs alike are barred from any free treatment
of religious evolution. Ethical teaching is similarly limited; and a
science which on that side threatened to turn the flank of religious
doctrine--to wit, phrenology--was at an early stage of its progress
in the first half of the nineteenth century successfully ostracized,
so that, lacking the expert handling without which no science can
be kept sound, it has been relegated even for most naturalists to
the limbo of exploded error, without ever having been scientifically
developed or confuted.
In fine, the science of society, the most momentous of all, is by
reason of the very nature of organized religion kept in trammels,
lest it should undermine the reign of faith. It makes its way in
virtue of the whole scientific movement of the age, and is perhaps most
progressive in the countries where, as in France and Italy, an official
Catholicism has prevented the academic compromise between faith and
science which is effected in the Protestant world, but is powerless to
keep independent science out of the universities. In those countries,
however, there are compromises of other kinds; and in modern France
there has been seen, in the case of Captain Dreyfus, the spectacle
of the clerical influence combining with that of the army to enforce
an insensate act of injustice, less from any intelligent motive of a
direct bearing than for the sake of a general alliance in which each of
the two great conservative and anti-progressive institutions backs the
other for general reactionary ends. Thus religious feeling abets social
and political malice; and such movements as that of anti-Semitism,
fostered by Christian organizations, can secure support from others
as the price of clerical support.
As a result of its autocratic and centralized system, further,
Catholicism is a special force of political conservatism in Catholic
countries, with the single exception of Ireland, where its dependence
on the mass of the people has thus far kept it in close alliance with
their nationalist movement in despite of any papal restrictions. Such
an alliance is of course unfavourable to intellectual progress on other
lines; and English Protestant policy, largely directed by sectarian
feeling, has thus preserved in Ireland the type of Catholicism it
fears. Such Catholicism still tends to retard popular education;
and the one general advantage the Protestant countries can claim over
the Catholic is their lower degree of illiteracy. On the other hand,
the rationalism of the more enlightened Catholic countries, where the
Church lacks official power, is as a rule more explicit, more awake
to the nature of the force opposed to it; while in Protestant Germany
it is little concerned to oppose a Church with small organized or
academic influence, and till lately attempted little popular criticism
of faith. Every country thus presents some special type of intellectual
harm or drawback resulting from the presence of organized Christianity;
and in all alike it makes in varying degrees an obstacle to light.
In the highest degree does this seem to be true of the land where it
has had the longest continuous life. Alone among the nations Greece
contributes nothing to the world's renovation. Italy, despite the
papacy, has a swarm of eager and questioning thinkers, working
at the human sciences; Spain stirs under all the leaden folds of
clericalism; but Greece, where the faith has never undergone eclipse
since Justinian's day, remains intellectually almost Byzantine, vainly
divided between Christian dogma and an external classic tradition,
neither ancient nor modern. Yet this is the one European country where
belief is ostensibly untroubled by its enemy. It is hard to say how
far the surface of orthodoxy conforms to the mental life underneath;
but there is no escape from the conclusion that a new mental life can
return to the land of Aristotle only in the measure in which it fully
readmits from the West the spirit of search and challenge which he
and Socrates left to re-inspire a world growing moribund under the
spell of faith.
§ 3. Conclusion and Prognosis
It follows from the foregoing history and survey that Christianity,
regarded by its adherents as either the one progressive and civilizing
religion or the one most helpful to progress and civilization, is in
no way vitally different from the others which have a theistic basis,
and is in itself neither more nor less a force of amelioration than any
other founding on sacred books and supernaturalist dogmas. Enlightened
Christians with progressive instincts have justified them in terms
of Christian doctrine, even as enlightened Moslems, Brahmans,
and Buddhists have justified their higher ideals in terms of their
doctrine; and the special fortune of Christianity has lain in this,
that after nearly a thousand years in which it was relatively
retrograde as compared with Islam, which during a large part of
the time was progressive, both being what they were in virtue of
institutions and environment, the environment was so far politically
changed that the Christian countries gradually progressed, while the
Moslem countries lost ground. To-day it is becoming clear to instructed
eyes that the faiths were not the causal forces; and in Asia the rapid
development of Japan in the past generation has vividly demonstrated
the fallacy of the Christian view. As there was great progress under
ancient paganism, under each one of the great creeds or cults of Asia,
under Islam, and under Christianity, so there may be much greater
progress in the absence of them all, in virtue of a wider knowledge,
a more scientific polity, and a more diffused culture.
The ultimate problem is to forecast the future. A confident faith
in continual progress is one of the commonest states of mind
of the present, the consciously scientific age; and in view of
the unmistakable decadence of the creeds as such, it is natural to
rationalists to expect an early reduction of Christianity to the status
now held by "folk-lore," a species of survival dependent on ignorance
upon the one hand and antiquarian curiosity on the other. But while
this may be called probable, there can be no scientific certainty in
the matter. For one thing, the process must for economic reasons be
much slower than used to be thought likely, for instance, in the time
of Voltaire, who allowed a century for the extinction of the Christian
creed. Voltaire was so far right that a century has seen Christianity
abandoned, after a reaction, by a large part of the best intelligence
of our age, as it was by that of his. But there may be more reactions;
and there is always a conceivable possibility of a total decadence,
such as overtook the civilization of the old Mediterranean world.
The question is at bottom one of political science. Greek and Roman
civilization failed primarily through the incapacity of the ancient
States to set up a polity of international peace, secondarily
through the effects of the military despotism which that failure
superinduced. As the problem is all of a piece, avoidance of the
old error will presumably mean avoidance of the old doom. A similar
political failure in the modern world would in all likelihood mean the
same sequence of military imperialism, possibly with better economic
management, but with the same phenomena of intellectual decline and
reversion to fanaticism and superstition among populations debarred
from political activity and free speech. It is indeed dimly conceivable
that, as has been suggested by way of fiction, the mere warfare of
capital and labour may end in the degradation of the people, and
the consequent reduction of upper-class life to the plane of mere
sensuous gratification and "practical" science. In either event, a
religion now seen by instructed men to be incredible may be preserved
by a community neither instructed nor religious.
The hope of the cause of reason then lies with the political ideals
and movements which best promise to save democracy and to elevate
the mass. It is hopefully significant that, as we have seen, the
most systematic and scientific of these movements are pronouncedly
rationalistic; and it is safe to say that their ultimate success
depends on their rationalism. All past movements for the social
salvation of the mass have failed for lack of social science;
and dogmatic Christianity in its most humane and sympathetic forms
remains the negation of such science. What is called "Christianity
without dogma" is merely humane sentiment misnamed.
It is essential to a durable advance, however, that it should be pure
of violence, and utterly tolerant. When popular education has emptied
all or any of the churches, as it has already gone some way towards
doing, the spontaneous revenue of those which are voluntary bodies will
in the main have ceased; and by that time the majority will be in a
position to dispose of national funds in the social interest. Such
a course will be facile to a society which provides work for all
and sustains all; and when the bribe of sectarian endowment is thus
made void, the more factitious life of ancient error will be at an
end. But the most speculative construction of the future provides for
the widest individual and psychological freedom; and there will have
been no true triumph of reason if philosophic and historic error,
recognized as such, have not a free field. The Utopia of rationalism
will be reached when supernaturalism in the present sense of the
term shall have passed away as the belief in witchcraft has done,
without pressure of pains and penalties. And that Utopia will be the
rendezvous, belike, of more than one social ideal--of all, indeed,
which trust to reason for the attainment of righteousness.
SYNOPSIS OF LITERATURE
Part I--PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY
Chapter I--The Beginnings
§ 1. Documentary Clues
A good introduction to the rational discussion of the whole problem
of origins is furnished in Radical Views about the New Testament,
by Dr. G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, trans. from the Dutch by
S. B. Slack (R. P. A., 1912). The Unitarian view is freshly put by
Wilhelm Soltau in The Birth of Jesus Christ (Eng. tr., Black, 1903). Of
the countless works discussing early Christian literature and the
formation of the New Testament "Canon," the following may be consulted
with profit: All relevant articles in the Encyclopædia Biblica (A. &
C. Black); Supernatural Religion: An Inquiry into the Reality of
Divine Revelation, 6th ed. revised, 1875, two vols.; 3rd vol. 1877;
R. P. A. rep. in one vol., 1902; A Reply to Dr. Lightfoot's Essays,
by the same author, 1889; An Introduction to the Study of the New
Testament, by Dr. Samuel Davidson, 2nd ed. revised, 1882, two vols.;
The Apostolical Fathers, by Dr. James Donaldson, 1874 and later;
Renan's preface to his Saint Paul, the Appendice to his L'Antéchrist,
and his Les Évangiles; E. B. Nicholson's compilation, The Gospel
According to the Hebrews, 1879; History of the Canon in the Christian
Church, by Professor Reuss, Eng. tr. 1890; Apostolical Records of
Early Christianity, by the Rev. Dr. Giles, 1886; Strauss's second Leben
Jesu, tr. in Eng. (not always accurately) as A New Life of Jesus, 2nd
ed. 1879, two vols.; and the old research of Lardner on The Credibility
of the Gospels (Part II, ch. i to xxix in vol. ii of Works, ed. 1835)
which covers the ground pretty fully, indeed diffusely. As to the
Pauline epistles see Van Manen's article in the Encyclopædia Biblica,
and T. Whittaker's Origins of Christianity (R. P. A., 1909). The most
comprehensive account of the early sources is Harnack's Geschichte der
altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius (1893) in two great volumes;
and the still bulkier Chronologie which follows thereon. More
compendious surveys are Professor Gustav Krüger's Geschichte der
altchristlichen Literatur in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten, 1895; and
Dr. James Donaldson's History of Christian Literature and Doctrine,
three vols., 1864-66. Of real value is the survey of Professor Arnold
Meyer, Die moderne Forschung über die Geschichte des Urchristentums,
1898. [The writings ascribed to the Apostolic Fathers are translated
in the first volume of the "Ante-Nicene Library"; those ascribed to
Justin Martyr in the second volume.]
§ 2. The Earliest Christian Sects
The sources as to the Nazarenes and Ebionites are given by Bishop
Lightfoot in his ed. of the Epistle to the Galatians, p. 298,
ff. (diss. reprinted in Dissertations on the Apostolic Age, 1892,
p. 74, ff.); also in W. R. Sorley's Jewish Christians and Judaism,
1881, p. 66, ff. Both proceed on the traditional assumptions. Critical
discrimination between the Ebionites and "Nazarenes" begins in modern
times with Mosheim, Vindicia Antiquæ Christianorum Disciplinæ
contra Tolandi Nazarenum, 1720. See also his Commentarium de
rebus Christianorum ante Constantinum, 1753, Sæc. II, § xxxix
(Eng. tr. vol. ii, p. 194, ff.). His position was developed by
Gieseler (1828), and has become the basis of later ecclesiastical
historiography, as in the above-cited writers, and in Weizsäcker's
Apostolic Age. A new and more searching analysis of the phenomena, on
lines previously suggested but not developed, is made by P. Hochart
in his Études d'histoire religieuse, 1890, chs. iv and v. For the
positions of the present section, in so far as they are not there
fully reasoned, the grounds will be found in the author's Christianity,
and Mythology, Part III, 1st Div. § 9, and in the National Reformer,
1888, March 18 and 25, April 1, 8, and 15. On the Nazareth problem
see Dr. Cheyne's article in the Encyclopædia Biblica, and Professor
Burkitt's paper on The Syriac Forms of New Testament Proper Names
(in Proc. of the British Academy, vol. v, 1912, pp. 17-18).
§ 3. Personality of the Nominal Founder
Of the more rationalistic Lives of Jesus, so-called, that of Renan
is the most charming and the least scientific; those by Strauss the
most systematic and educative; that of Thomas Scott, "The English Life
of Jesus," the most compendious view of the conflicts of the gospel
narratives. Evan Meredith's Prophet of Nazareth (1864) is rather a
stringent criticism of the whole Christian system of ethics, evidences,
and theology (rejecting supernaturalism but assuming a historical
Christ) than a scientific search for a personality behind the
Gospels. It however passes many acute criticisms. Later German Lives
of Christ, such as those of Keim and B. Weiss, are useful in respect
of their scholarly comprehensiveness, but have little final critical
value. A more advanced stage of documentary criticism than is seen in
any of these is reached in the second section of the article Gospels,
by Professor Schmiedel, in the Encyclopædia Biblica. The grounds
on which the present section carries the process of elimination yet
further are developed in the author's Christianity and Mythology, Part
III, The Gospel Myths, Div. ii; also in his Pagan Christs. Concerning
the Talmudic Jesus the documentary data are given by Lardner, Works,
ed. 1835, vol. ii; Baring Gould, The Lost and Hostile Gospels, 1874;
Joel, Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte, Breslau, 1880; Derenbourg,
Essai sur l'histoire et la Géographie de Palestine, 1867; Gustav Rösch,
Die Jesusmythen des Judenthums, in Theolog. Studien und Kritiken,
Jahrg. 1873, 1 Heft, pp. 75-115; R. T. Herford, Christianity in Talmud
and Midrash (1904); T. Theodores, essay on The Talmud in Essays and
Addresses by Professors and Lecturers of Owen's College (Macmillan,
1874), pp. 368-70; and Lightfoot, Horæ Hebraicæ, on Matt. ii, 14,
xxvii, 56, and Luke vii, 2. Later developments of the problem are
to be followed in the works of A. Kalthoff, The Rise of Christianity
(Eng. tr. R. P. A., 1907) and Was wissen wir von Jesus? (pamph. Berlin,
1904); T. Whittaker's Origins of Christianity; Professor Arthur
Drews's The Christ Myth (Eng. tr. Unwin); Professor W. B. Smith's
Der vorchristliche Jesus (1906) and Ecce Deus (R. P. A., 1912); and
Drews's The Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus (Eng. tr. R. P. A.,
1912). Compendious views of the process of textual analysis, as applied
to the Gospels by students who still hold to the historic actuality of
the Gospel Jesus, may be found in The Synoptic Problem, by A. J. Jolly
(Macmillan, 1893); The Formation of the Gospels, by F. P. Badham (Kegan
Paul, 2nd ed. 1892); The Common Tradition of the Synoptic Gospels,
by Dr. Abbott and W. G. Rushbrooke (Macmillan, 1884); and The First
Three Gospels, by J. Estlin Carpenter (Sunday School Association, 2nd
ed. 1890). Of the extensive continental literature of this subject
during the past half-century, typical and important examples are
Baur's Kritische Untersuchungen über die kanonischen Evangelien (1847),
Scholten's Het oudste Evangelie, 1868 (tr. in German, 1869); Gustave
D'Eichthal's Les Évangiles, 1863; H. J. Holtzmann's Die synoptischen
Evangelien, ihr Ursprung und geschichtliche Charakter, 1863; Berthold
Weiss's Text-kritik der vier Evangelien, 1899; J. Wellhausen,
Einleitung in die drei ersten Evangelien, 1905; A. Schweitzer's
Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Eng. tr. The Quest of the Historical Jesus,
Black, 1910); and Alfred Loisy, Le quatrième Évangile, 1903; Les
Évangiles Synoptiques, two vols. 1907-8. Loisy's general conclusions
are given in his Jésus et la tradition évangélique, 1910. Holtzmann's
Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in das Neue Testament
(2te. Aufl. 1885) is a good summary of the general discussion on the
documentary side up to its date.
§ 4. Myth of the Twelve Apostles
As to the Jewish Twelve Apostles, consult Jost, Geschichte des
Judenthums, 1850, ii, 159-60; Kitto's Cyclopedia of Biblical
Literature, art. Apostle; Basnage, Histoire des Juifs, ed. 1716,
liv. iii, ch. ii, §§ 7, 8, 10, 11; Mosheim's Commentaries as before
cited, Eng. tr. i, 121-23; and other authorities discussed by the
author in the National Reformer, 1887, May 8 and 15, November 20
and 27, December 4; also in Christianity and Mythology, Part III,
Div. i, § 19. For recent views on the alleged apostolic epistles
see Professor Arnold Meyer's work, cited under § 1. The text of the
important Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, first published in 1883,
is ably edited and translated by Professors Hitchcock and Brown (London
ed. Nimmo), whose version was made the basis of a revised translation,
with variorum notes, by the author, published in the National
Reformer, November 1 and 8, 1891. The Teaching has appeared also in
the following translations: By Dr. Farrar, in the Contemporary Review,
May, 1884; by the Rev. A. Gordon (tr. sold at Essex Hall, London);
by M. Sabatier with text and commentary (Paris, 1885); by Professor
Harnack; and by the Rev. Mr. Heron in his Church of the Apostolic Age,
1888. As to its obviously Jewish basis compare Dr. Taylor's Teaching
of the Twelve Apostles, 1886, with Harnack's Die Apostellehre und die
jüdischen beiden Wege, 1886. On the "Brethren of the Lord" see Bishop
Lightfoot's excursus, reprinted in his Dissertations on the Apostolic
Age. The Judas myth and the characteristics of Peter are discussed
in Christianity and Mythology, Part III, Div. i, §§ 20, 21; also in
Professor Drews's Die Petrus Legende (Frankfurt a. M., 1910). For
the Egyptian God Petra see the Book of the Dead, Budge's tr., p. 123.
§ 5. Primary Forms of the Cult
The theory that the gospel narrative of the Last Supper, the Passion,
the Betrayal, Trial, Crucifixion, and Resurrection constitute a
mystery-play or plays is set forth by the author in Pagan Christs. On
pre-Christian Semitic "mysteries" see Professor Robertson Smith's
Religion of the Semites, Lect. vi-xi; and on the ancient conception of
sacrifice in general consult that work; also Wellhausen's Prolegomena
to the History of Israel, Eng. tr. Pt. I. ch. iii; the work of Fustel
de Coulanges on La Cité Antique; and Dr. J. G. Frazer's great treatise
The Golden Bough (2nd ed. three vols. 1900, 3rd ed. nine vols.,
now in process of publication). Concerning the private religious
societies among the Greeks, the standard authority is M. Foucart,
Les Associations religieuses chez les Grecs, 1873; see also ch. xviii
of Renan's Les Apôtres. The imitation of pagan institutions in the
Christian Church is dealt with by the late Dr. Edwin Hatch, in his
Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church,
1890; and some of the relations between the Jewish Passover and
coincident pagan feasts are suggested in the valuable old treatise
of J. Spencer, De Legibus Hebræorum (1685 and later), lib. ii,
cap 4. The part played by the child-image in pagan and Christian
mysteries is noted in Christianity and Mythology, Pt. II, Christ
and Krishna, sec. xiii. On other details consult Schürer, History
of the Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Div. II. The question
as to the rise of baptism comes up in the Clementine Homilies and
Recognitions, on which see Baur, Church History, Eng. tr., vol. i;
where also will be found the material of the controversy on the date
of the Easter sacrament. As to the manner of crucifixion in antiquity
see Dr. W. Brandt's Die evangelische Geschichte und der Ursprung des
Christenthums, 1893, Theil II, § 5, and Pf. Hermann Fulda's treatise,
Das Kreuz und die Kreuzigung (Breslau, 1878).
§ 6. Rise of Gentile Christism.
The early and bitter strife between the Jewish and Gentile parties in
the Christist movement was first exhaustively studied by the Tübingen
school. See the important works of its founder, F. C. Baur, Das
Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte,
1853 (Eng. tr. The Church History of the First Three Centuries, 1878,
two vols.) and Paulus, 1845 (Eng. tr. two vols. 1873); also the work
of Zeller on the Contents and Origin of the Acts of the Apostles
(Eng. tr. two vols. 1875, with Overbeck's Introduction to the Acts,
from De Wette's Handbook). Compare the somewhat more conservative
treatise of Weizsäcker, The Apostolic Age of the Christian Church,
Eng. tr. two vols. 1894, and the orthodox Neander's History of
the Planting and Training of the Christian Church by the Apostles
(Eng. tr. two vols. 1851), where however some decisive admissions are
made as to the narrative of the Acts. One of the most comprehensive
surveys of the documentary discussion is J. Jüngst's Die Quellen der
Apostelgeschichte (Gotha, 1895). Some interesting concessions are
made by Professor Ramsay in his work on The Church and the Roman
Empire before A.D. 170 (1893). On the Gentile parallels discussed
consult Frazer's Golden Bough and Havet's Le Christianisme et ses
origines. The questions raised by the vogue of the term "Chrestos" are
well set forth and discussed in the brochure of the late Dr. J. Barr
Mitchell, Chrestos: A Religious Epithet, its Import and Influence
(Williams and Norgate, 1880). Compare Renan, Saint Paul, p. 363,
and refs. Various aspects of the general problem are set forth in
the Monumental Christianity of J. P. Lundy (New York, 1876). For
a full view of Gnosticism see Baur, Die Christliche Gnosis, 1835,
and C. W. King, The Gnostics and their Remains, 2nd ed. 1887; and for
a survey of Samaritan tenets see J. W. Nutt, Fragment of a Samaritan
Targum, 1874 (Introduction), and Reland's Dissertatio de Monte Garizim,
in his Diss. Misc., Pars I, 1706. A view of the ancient practices of
cutting and gashing in the presence of the dead, etc., is given in John
Spencer's treatise De Legibus Hebræorum, lib. ii. cc. 13, 14. The Myth
of Simon Magus was discussed by the author in the National Reformer,
January 29, February 5, and February 19, 1893.
§ 7. Growth of the Christ Myth
For details and references as to the pagan myths embodied in the
Gospels, see the author's Christianity and Mythology, Parts II and
III. The evolution of the doctrine of the Logos is discussed by
Professor James Drummond, in The Jewish Messiah, 1877, and Philo
Judæus, 1888; by M. Nicolas, Des doctrines religieuses des Juifs,
1860; and in Schürer's Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Div. II,
vol. iii. As to its early form among the Babylonians see Tiele,
Histoire comparée des anciennes religions égyptiennes et semitiques,
French tr. 1882, pp. 182-83. Dr. Frazer presents the evidence as to
the Semitic usage of sacrificing a mock king in his Golden Bough,
where however the problem is obscured by the acceptance of the
Gospels as historical records. See also the article on Jesus als
Saturnalien-König, by P. Wendland, in Hermes, xxxiii (1898).
Chapter II--The Environment
§ 1. Social and Mental Conditions in the Roman Empire
The sociological forces and tendencies in the Greek and Roman
civilizations are discussed in the author's Evolution of States,
Part I; also in A Short History of Freethought, vol. i, ch. iii, v,
vi, and vii. For the social bearing of ancient religion consult
Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité Antique; Boissier, La Religion
romaine d'Auguste aux Antonins (2 tom. 4e édit. 1892); Burckhardt,
Griechische Culturgeschichte, 3 Bde. 1898-1900; Farnell, The Cults
of the Greek States (five vols. 1896-1908); Maury, Histoire des
religions de la Grèce antique, 3 tom. 1857; and Kalthoff's Rise of
Christianity. Renan has many suggestive pages on social conditions,
particularly in Les Apôtres; but heed must be taken of the frequent
contradictions in his generalizations. As to the religious life of
the Greek private religious societies, see ch. xvii of Les Apôtres;
the treatise of M. Foucart, before cited; Dr. Hatch's Bampton lectures
on The Organization of the Early Christian Churches; and his Hibbert
lectures on The Influence of Greek Ideas, etc., before cited. For
Rome, see Professor W. Warde Fowler's Social Life at Rome in the Age
of Cicero (1909); and Professor Samuel Dill's Roman Society from Nero
to Marcus Aurelius (1908).
§ 2. Jewish Orthodoxy
Schürer's Jewish People in the Time of Christ gives the main clues
from Josephus, the Talmud, and the O. T. apocrypha. See further
M. Friedländer's Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Christenthums
(Wien, 1894) for light as to the relations between the Pharisees
and the common people. For a good general view see Reuss, Histoire
de la théologie chrétienne au siècle apostolique (2e édit. 1860),
liv. i. Nicolas, Des doctrines religieuses des Juifs, 1860, gives a
fuller research. Accounts of the surviving "Nestorians" are given in
Missionary Researches in Armenia, by E. Smith and H. D. O. Dwight,
1834, and in Dr. A. Grant's The Nestorians, 2nd. ed. 1843.
§ 3. Jewish Sects
A good conspectus and discussion of the data as to the Essenes is given
by Dr. Ginsburg in his pamphlet The Essenes, 1864. On the sects, see
also Schürer, Div. ii, vol. ii; Bishop Lightfoot, Dissertations on the
Apostolic Age; and Oskar Holtzmann, Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte,
1895.
§ 4. Gentile Cults
A general view of non-Christian in relation to Christian religion is
most readably presented in M. Salomon Reinach's Orpheus: Histoire
generale des Religions (6e édit. 1909). The best mythological
dictionary is Roscher's great Ausführliches Lexikon der griechischen
und römischen Mythologie, but Preller's Griechische Mythologie and
Römische Mythologie and Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography
and Mythology (three vols. 1844-49) give most of the data. A general
notion of the infiltration of pagan religion into Christianity may
be gathered from Les Saints Successeurs des Dieux by P. Saintyves
(1907); and Rendel Harris's The Dioscuri in Christian Legend (Oxford,
1903). In regard to the cults of Attis and Adonis, consult Frazer's
Adonis, Attis, Osiris (vol. iv of new ed. of Golden Bough) and Foucart
Des Associations religieuses chez les Grecs; for the cult of Dionysos,
the same and Frazer's Golden Bough; also (with caution) Mr. R. Brown's
Great Dionysiak Myth, two vols. 1877-8, and the older Recherches
sur le Culte de Bacchus of Rolle (3 tom. 1824), both works of great
learning. Lucian's treatise De Dea Syra gives special information
on Syrian religion. Sidelights are thrown on the cults in question
by the Christian Fathers, in particular Julius Firmicus Maternus, De
errore profanarum religionum (best ed. Halm's); Epiphanius, De Hæresis;
Hippolytus, Refutation of all Heresies (trans. in Ante-Nicene Library,
vol. vi). The main clues to the Osiris cult are in The Book of the Dead
(Eng. tr. by Budge, 1898) and Plutarch's treatise On Isis and Osiris,
which should be read, however, in the light of Tiele's or some other
competent History of Egyptian Religion. The main data as to Mithraism
are collected in the author's essay in Pagan Christs. The standard
research on the subject is Cumont's Textes et Monuments Figurés
relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra (1896-9: add. vol. 1913). Valuable
light is thrown on the oriental side of Christian mythology by
Professor Hermann Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis
des Neuen Testaments, 1903, trans. in The Monist, Chicago, 1903.
§ 5. Ethics: Popular and Philosophic
The parallels and coincidences between the teachings of Paul and of
Seneca are fully set forth by Bishop Lightfoot in the excursus on
Paul and Seneca reprinted in his Discussions on the Apostolic Age,
where also the significance of the parallels is considered and the
literature of the subject described. In the general connection may be
consulted Havet's Le Christianisme et ses origines, 4 tom. 1872-84;
Martha's Les Moralistes sous l'empire romain, 14e édit. 1881; Lecky's
History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne; Professor
Dill's Roman Society During the Last Century of the Empire of the West;
Baur's Drei Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der alten Philosophie und ihres
Verhältniss zum Christenthum (new ed. 1876), where there is a thorough
discussion of Seneca's case; Professor M. Baumgarten's Lucius Annæus
Seneca und das Christenthum (1895); Uhlhorn's Conflict of Christianity
with Heathenism (Eng. tr. from 3rd Ger. ed. 1879); Renan's Marc Aurèle,
and ch. xvii. of Les Apôtres; W. Soltau's Das Fortleben des Heidentums
in der altchristlichen Kirche, 1906; Professor Max Pohlenz's Vom Zorne
Gottes: Eine Studie über den Einfluss der Griechischen Philosophie auf
das alte Christentum, 1909; J. A. Farrer's Paganism and Christianity,
1891 (rep. R. P. A.); W. M. Flinders Petrie's Religion and Conscience
in Ancient Egypt, 1898; and Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity,
Eng. tr. by Marian Evans (George Eliot). The Jewish Rabbinical ethic is
defended as against Christian attack in an able article on "Rabbinic
Judaism and the Epistles of Paul" by C. G. Montefiore in the Jewish
Quarterly Review for January, 1901. Some of the other issues are
discussed in detail in the author's Short History of Freethought,
vol. i, chs. iv, vi, vii.
Chapter III--Conditions of Survival
§ 1. Popular Appeal
See the references to ch. ii. § 5, concerning the prevalent moral
ideas. As to the Montanists and other ascetic and antinomian sects
see Baur, Church History, Eng. tr. vol. i, Pt. III, also Hatch,
as cited. Concerning the results of the need to appeal to the pagan
populace, note the admissions of Mosheim, Ecclesiastical History,
2 Cent. Pt. II, chs. iii and iv; of Dr. John Stoughton, Ages of
the Church, 1855, Lect. iv; of Waddington, History of the Christian
Church, 1833, pp. 87, 89; and of Milman, History of Christianity,
B. iv, chs. i and iii.
§ 2. Economic Causation
The organization of the Assyrian and Babylonian priesthoods may be
gathered from Sayce, Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient
Babylonians. On the Greek priesthoods compare Burckhardt, Griechische
Culturgeschichte, Bd. II, Abs. II, § ii. As to the wealth of the
priestly caste in Egypt see Diodorus Siculus; and on that of Rome,
Gibbon's 15th chapter. On the later Judaic priestly finance see the
references given as to the Jewish Twelve Apostles under ch. i, § 4. The
process of growth of an order of "ethical lecturers" is indicated by
C. Martha, Les Moralistes sous l'empire romain, 4e édit. 1881; also by
E. Havet, Le Christianisme et ses origines, tom. i, ch. iii. Compare
Grote, History of Greece, end of ch. xlvi, and his Plato and the
Other Companions of Sokrates, per index, as to the sophists. The
financial side of the pagan mysteries is partly illustrated in the
Metamorphoses of Apuleius. Compare also Foucart, Des Associations
religieuses chez les Grecs. Gibbon's fifteenth chapter deals in the
main with a later period, but throws general light on this also. See
also Renan's Marc Aurèle, ch. xxxi; and especially Dr. Hatch's Hibbert
Lectures, lect. iv, and Lecky's History of European Morals.
§ 3. Organization and Sacred Books
Dr. Hatch's Organization of the Early Christian Churches recognizes,
on nominally orthodox principles, the fact that the structure
was a natural adaptation to environment, on old type-lines. Of the
movement of Apollonius of Tyana, good accounts are given by Professor
A. Réville, Apollonius of Tyana, the Pagan Christ of the Third Century,
Eng. tr. 1866; by Mr. T. Whittaker in his Apollonius of Tyana, and
other Essays (Sonnenschein, 1906); and in the essay of Baur in his
Drei Abhandlungen. Two somewhat "free" translations of Philostratus'
Life of Apollonius have lately been produced--by Dr. F. C. Conybeare
and Professor Phillimore (each 2 vols.)--as to which see the Literary
Guide of April, 1913. On the formation of the canon see the references
to ch. i, §§ 1, 3. As to Manichæism see those given below, Pt. II,
ch. ii.
§ 4. Concession and Fixation
On developments of doctrine in general the fullest modern treatise
is Harnack's History of Dogma (Eng. tr. 1894, six vols.), but the
critical student must revise many of Harnack's judgments. The same
author's Outlines of the History of Dogma (Eng. tr. 1893) are at
many points suggestive; and Hagenbach's History of Dogma is still
useful. Hatch is well worth consulting in this connection.
§ 5. Cosmic Philosophy
As to the Fourth Gospel and the doctrine of the Logos see the
references given for ch. i, § 7; also the relevant articles in the
Encyclopædia Biblica; the work of Loisy on the Fourth Gospel, before
cited; the fourth and fifth chapters of Renan's Les Évangiles, which
give his latest ideas on the problem; Reuss's Histoire de la théologie
chrétienne au siècle apostolique, 2e édit. 1860, tom. ii, liv. vii; and
J. J. Tayler's treatise, An Attempt to Ascertain the Character of the
Fourth Gospel (1867). Baur and Strauss may also be profitably studied.
Part II--CHRISTIANITY FROM THE SECOND CENTURY TO THE RISE OF ISLAM
Chapter I--Scope and Character of the Unestablished Church
§ 1. Numbers and Inner Life
Gibbon's fifteenth chapter is still valuable here. Compare Hatch,
Organization; Renan, Saint Paul, concluding chapter; and the church
historians generally. As to Britain, see Wright's The Roman, the Celt,
and the Saxon, 4th ed. 1885. On the personnel and emotional life
of the early church compare Louis Ménard, Études sur les origines
du Christianisme, 1893; Loisy, L'Évangile et L'Église, 1904; Renan,
L'Église Chrétienne and Marc Aurèle; Tertullian, passim; J. A. Farrer,
Paganism and Christianity; Dr. John Stoughton, Ages of the Church
(pp. 42-43--orthodox admissions).
§ 2. Growth of the Priesthood
Hatch, as before cited, is here a specially good guide; and Neander,
General History of the Christian Religion and Church (trans. in Bohn
Lib.), gives a copious narrative (vol. i, sect. ii). On episcopal
policy compare the series of popular monographs under the title "The
Fathers for English Readers" (S.P.C.K.) and the anonymous treatise
On the State of Man Subsequent to the Promulgation of Christianity
(1852), Part II, ch. iv. Mosheim (Reid's ed. of Murdock's trans.) here
deserves study. The question of priestly morals is handled in almost
all histories of the Church. Cp. Gibbon, chs. xxi, xxv, xxxviii. Lea's
History of Sacerdotal Celibacy (2nd ed. 1884) is a full and valuable
record. As to the papacy see references given below, Part III, ch. i,
§ 3.
§ 3. The Gnostic Movement in the Second Century
Baur's Die christiche Gnosis (1835) remains perhaps the most
comprehensive study of this subject; but C. W. King's The Gnostics
and their Remains adds to his elucidations. Matter's Histoire
critique du Gnosticisme (2e édit. 1843-44) remains worth study;
as is Neander's general account of the Gnostic sects in vol. ii of
his General History. See shorter accounts in Baur's Church History
(vol. i), in Mosheim's, and in that of Jeremie (1855).
§ 4. Marcionism and Montanism
Neander, Hatch, and Baur, as last cited, give good views. Tertullian,
who wrote a treatise Against Marcion, and himself became a Montanist,
is a primary authority. See also De Soyres, cited on p. 98.
§ 5. Rites and Ceremonies
Bingham's Christian Antiquities (rep. 1855) gives abundant details;
but see also Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. Mosheim
traces the development century by century.
§ 6. Strifes over Primary Dogma
These may be followed in brief in Mosheim, or at length in Harnack's
History of Dogma, or in Hagenbach's earlier manual, which is more
concise. Hatch's Influence of Greek Ideas is light-giving at some
points; and Dr. Albert Réville's Histoire du dogme de la divinité de
Jésus Christ (2e édit. 1876) is a good conspectus of its subject. For
a briefer general view see Stoughton's Ages of the Church, Lect. v and
vii. The history of the so-called Apostles' Creed is fully discussed
by M. Nicolas, Le Symbole des Apôtres, 1867, and in Harnack's work
on the same subject (Eng. tr. 1901).
Chapter II--Relations of Church and State
§ 1. Persecutions
Consult Gibbon, ch. xvi; Niebuhr, Lectures on Roman History,
Eng. tr. Lect. cxli; and Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme (2e édit. 1894),
tom. i, Appendice, for critical views, as distinguished from those
of the ecclesiastical historians. Compare also Milman's account in
the first chapter of his History of Latin Christianity. The alleged
Neronian persecution is specially sifted by Hochart, Études au sujet de
la persécution des Chrétiens sous Néron, 1885. For a complete record
of the cult of the emperors see Le Culte Impérial, son histoire et
son organisation, par l'Abbé E. Beurlier, 1891.
§§ 2, 3, 4. Establishment and Creed-Making; Reaction under Julian;
Re-establishment; Disestablishment of Paganism.
Boissier's La Fin du Paganisme goes very fully into the question of
Constantine's conversion and policy, but does not supersede Beugnot,
Histoire de la destruction du paganisme en occident, 1835, 2 tom. (Both
are misleading on the subject of the labarum, as to which see the
variorum notes in Reid's Mosheim, and in Bohn Gibbon, ad loc.) Compare
Gibbon, chs. xix-xxv, and Hatch, Organization. A good modern survey
is Victor Schultze's Geschichte des griechischrömischen Heidentums,
2 Bde. 1887. Newman's Arians of the Fourth Century gives an intensely
orthodox view of its subject. Mosheim and Milman and Neander are more
judicial. See also Harnack's Outlines, and the references given above
to ch. i, § 6. On Manichæism it is still well to consult Beausobre,
Histoire critique de Manichée et du Manichéisme. Compare Mosheim,
Commentaries on the Affairs of the Christians, vol. iii, and the
account of Neander, General History, vol. ii. The legend of Manichæus
is discussed in the author's Pagan Christs. Rendall's The Emperor
Julian: Christianity and Paganism, 1879, is a learned and competent
research, usually fair, and gives light on the previous reigns, as well
as on Julian's. Gibbon's survey here remains important. On Gregory
of Nazianzun there is a monograph by Ullmann (Eng. tr. 1851). See
Milman as to the falsity of the death-legend concerning Julian. As
to the disestablishment of paganism, Beugnot and Schultze are the
best guides, but Boissier is discursively instructive.
Chapter III--Failure with Survival
The narrative may be checked throughout by Neander's General History of
the Christian Religion and Church (trans. in Bohn Lib.); by Mosheim,
with the variorum notes of Reid's edition; by Gibbon's chapters;
by the histories of dogma; by the above-cited monographs on the
Fathers, St. Chrysostom's Picture of his Age (S.P.C.K. 1875), and
Rev. W. E. Stephens's St. Chrysostom, His Life and Times (1872);
by Milman's History of Latin Christianity, vols. i and ii; by
Finlay's History of Greece (Tozer's ed.), vols. i and ii; and by
Bury's History of the later Roman Empire (two vols. 1889). On the
intellectual life compare further Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme;
Ampère, Histoire littéraire de la France, 1839, tom. i and ii; and
Lecky's History of European Morals.
Part III--MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY
Chapter I--Expansion and Organization
§ 1. Position in the Seventh Century
Hatch (Organization) is still a guide. For special details consult
Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities. Bede's Ecclesiastical
History gives some specific ideas as to the early life of the medieval
Church. Bryce's Holy Roman Empire is valuable for its general view.
§ 2. Methods of Expansion
Neander's General History of the Christian Religion and Church,
Milman's History of Latin Christianity, Hardwick's History of the
Christian Church: Middle Age (1853), and the variorum notes in Reid's
Mosheim, give most of the documentary clues. But national histories
should specially be consulted at this stage--e.g., Crichton and
Wheaton's Scandinavia (2nd ed. 1838, two vols.); Geijer's History of
Sweden (Eng. tr. of first three vols. in one, no date); Blok's History
of the Dutch People (Eng. tr., five vols. 1898-1907); Krasinski's
Sketch of the Religious History of the Slavonic Nations (1851). The
subject of Tithes is carefully and compendiously dealt with in A
History of Tithes, by the Rev. H. W. Clarke (Sonnenschein, 1891).
§ 3. Growth of the Papacy
In addition to the general histories consult Gregorovius' Geschichte
der Stadt Rom (Eng. tr. 2nd ed. 1901) and The Pope and the Councils,
by "Janus" (tr. 1869 from German). Hefele's History of the Christian
Councils (Eng. tr., 1871-1896, five vols.), though by a Catholic
scholar, is generally accepted as the standard modern work on its
subject. Hallam's View of the State of Europe during the Middle
Ages is still valuable for its general views. Fuller details may be
had from monographs on leading popes--e.g., Voigt's Hildebrand und
sein Zeitalter (French trans. by Abbé Jager, with added notes and
documents, 1847) and Langeron's Grégoire VII et les origines de la
doctrine ultramontaine (1874). On the ancient Egyptian parallels see
Maspero, Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'orient.
Chapter II--Religious Evolution and Strife
Consult the ecclesiastical historians already cited, and compare
R. L. Poole, Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought (1884),
as to Agobard and Claudius. For the special worships of Mary and
Joseph see the popular Catholic manual "The Glories of Mary,"
and P. Paul Barrie's "Glories of Joseph" (Eng. trans. Dublin,
1843 and later)--extracts in C. H. Collette's Dr. Newman and his
Religious Opinions, 1866--also Newman's Letter to Dr. Pusey, as there
cited. Sketches of the history of auricular confession are given in
Rev. B. W. Savile's Primitive and Catholic Faith, 1875, ch. xiii,
and in Confession, a doctrinal and historical essay, by L. Desanctis,
Eng. tr. 1878; and sketches of the history of indulgences in Lea's
History of the Inquisition, i, 41-47; De Potter's Esprit de l'Église,
vii, 22-29; and Lea's Studies in Church History, 1869, p. 450. Of the
Albigensian crusades a full narrative is given by Sismondi, Histoire
des Français, tom. vi and vii--chapters collected and translated in
Eng. vol., History of the Crusades against the Albigenses (1826). The
most comprehensive study of the chief heresies of the Middle Ages
is Döllinger's Beiträge zur Sektengeschichte des Mittelalters, 2
Bde. 1890. On the rationalistic heresies consult Ueberweg's History
of Philosophy, Hermann Renter's Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung
im Mittelalter (1875-77); Poole's Illustrations of Medieval Thought,
and Renan's Averroës et l'Averroïsme. On the anti-clerical and
anti-papal heresies compare Neander, Mosheim, Milman, Hardwick,
and Poole. The fortunes of the Lollard movement are discussed in the
author's Dynamics of Religion.
Chapter III--The Social Life and Structure
Of the historians cited in the last chapter, most are serviceable
here. Consult in addition Lea's Superstition and Force (3rd ed. 1878),
Berington's Literary History of the Middle Ages, Dunham's Europe in the
Middle Ages, and Ampère's Histoire Littéraire, before cited. There
are good lives of Savonarola by Perrens (French) and Villari,
Eng. tr. See also J. A. Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: Age of the
Despots. On slavery compare Larroque, De l'esclavage chez les nations
chrétiennes (2e édit. 1864); or see the author's Evolution of States,
per index. An excellent general view of the Crusades is given in
the manual by Sir G. W. Cox ("Epochs of History" series). The latest
expert survey of the subject is that of M. Seignobos, in the Histoire
générale of MM. Lavisse and Rambaud. For a survey of the effect of
Christianity on European life in general see Mr. McCabe's The Bible
in Europe: an Inquiry into the Contribution of the Christian Religion
to Civilization (R. P. A., 1907) and The Religion of Woman (1905).
Chapter IV--The Intellectual Life
Again the same general authorities may be referred to, in particular
Lea's History of the Inquisition; also White's History of the Warfare
of Science with Theology (two vols. 1896), Gebhart's Les origines de
la renaissance (1879), Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance
in Italy (Eng. tr. in one vol. 1892), Buckle's Introduction to the
History of Civilization in England, Whewell's History of the Inductive
Sciences, Baden Powell's History of Natural Philosophy (1834); and for
the different countries their special histories. Draper's Intellectual
Development of Europe is to be followed with caution. As to Gerbert
see the Vie de Gerbert of M. Olleris, 1867. On the general question
see the volumes of F. H. Perrycoste on Ritual, Faith, and Morals and
The Influence of Religion Upon Truthfulness (R. P. A. 1910, 1913). The
effect of the Inquisition on literature is exactly and instructively
set forth in G. H. Putnam's The Censorship of the Church of Rome
(two vols. 1906).
Chapter V--Byzantine Christianity
Finlay's History of Greece and Professor Bury's History of the later
Roman Empire and History of the Eastern Roman Empire, 802-867 (1912)
are the main authorities in English apart from the ecclesiastical
histories.
Part IV--MODERN CHRISTIANITY
Chapter I--The Reformation
In addition to Neander, Mosheim, Milman's History of Latin
Christianity, and Hardwick's Church History: The Reformation
(rep. 1886), consult Ullmann's Reformers before the Reformation
(Eng. tr. two vols. 1855), McCrie's Histories of the Reformation in
Spain and Italy, Ranke's History of the Reformation (Eng. tr. one
vol. ed. Routledge), and History of the Popes (Eng. tr. three
vols. Bohn Lib.), Beard's Hibbert Lectures on the Reformation, Felice's
Histoire des Protestants de France (trans. in Eng.), Krasinski's
History of the Reformation in Poland, Professor H. M. Baird's History
of the Rise of the Huguenots, two vols. 1880; also the current
Lives of the leading reformers, and the special histories of the
nations. Creighton's History of the Papacy during the Reformation
(six vols.) has special merit as a fresh and full research. As to the
witch-burning mania consult Lecky's Rise and Influence of Rationalism
in Europe. On the Jesuits compare Nicollini's History of the Jesuits,
1853, and Mr. McCabe's A Candid History of the Jesuits (1913). On
the medical work of Servetus and others see an interesting article
by Dr. Austin Flint, in New York Medical Journal, June 29, 1901.
Chapter II--Progress of Anti-Christian Thought
As to the physical sciences, compare White, Baden Powell, Whewell,
and Draper, as above cited; also Draper's Conflict between Religion and
Science (Internat. Lib. of Science); and the series of Histories of the
Sciences published by the R. P. A. On the development of philosophy,
cosmic and moral, and of Biblical Criticism, see the references in
the author's Short History of Freethought. A specially full and
illuminating study of modern thought is made in Mr. A. W. Benn's
History of English Rationalism in the Nineteenth Century (two
vols. Longmans, 1906).
Chapter III--Popular Acceptance
For the history of Catholicism since the seventeenth century consult
Mosheim and Neander, also the History of the Fall of the Jesuits, by
Count A. de Saint-Priest (Eng. tr. 1845), and Mr. Joseph McCabe's The
Decay of the Church of Rome (1909). There is an extensive literature
on the controversy between Anglicanism and Catholicism in the middle of
the nineteenth century, following on the Tractarian movement, as to the
latest phases of which see the Secret History of the Oxford Movement,
by Walter Walsh. For references as to recent developments in Protestant
and other countries see again the author's Short History of Freethought
and Mr. Benn's full record of the nineteenth century. The fortunes of
Greek Christianity may be traced through Finlay. Compare Villemain,
Essai sur l'état des Grecs depuis la conquête musulmane, in his Études
d'histoire moderne (nouv. ed. 1846). Concerning the state of religion
in modern Russia, see Wallace's Russia. As to missions in general,
see the able and comprehensive survey, Foreign Missions, by C. Cohen
(Freethought Publishing Company), and A Chinese Appeal to Christendom
Concerning Christian Missions (R.P.A., 1912). The existing situation
as between Christianity and rationalism is well set forth in Philip
Vivian's The Churches and Modern Thought (R.P.A., 1911).
NOTES
[1] Subsequently, on other lines, in the volume entitled Pagan Christs.
[2] Comparative Religion, by J. Estlin Carpenter; "Home University
Library," 1912, end.
[3] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. Pt. II, ch. ii, §§ 15-16.
[4] The thesis that the epistles are all supposititious is ably
sustained by Van Manen in the Encyclopædia Biblica. See his positions
well summarised by Mr. T. Whittaker, The Origins of Christianity
(R. P. A.).
[5] The point is discussed in Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. Pt. II, ch. i,
§ 10.
[6] See Wladimir Lessevich, La Légende de Jesus et les traditions
populaires, 1903. (Ext. de la Revue Internationale de Sociologie.)
[7] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. Pt. II, ch. i, §§ 7-12.
[8] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 209; Pagan Christs,
2nd ed. p. 143.
[9] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed., p. 396 and refs.
[10] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. Pt. III, Div. i, § 29.
[11] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. Pt. III, Div. i, § 10.
[12] Id. ib. § 5.
[13] See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. Pt. III, Div. i, § 3.
[14] Id. p. 367; Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 145.
[15] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. Pt. II, ch. ii, §§ 2-3.
[16] Luke xvii, 7-10 (Gr. "Servant" is a wilful mistranslation:
the word is "slave").
[17] See Miss Harrison's Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,
2nd ed. pp. 413-425.
[18] A myth of verbal misunderstanding. The original titanoi were
"white-clay-men," men with whitened faces, after the fashion of so
many mystic mummeries among savages. (Work cited, p. 493.)
[19] This also derives from a primitive concept of a Beer-God. See
Miss Harrison, as cited, p. 419.
[20] See "Mithraism" in Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. Pt. III, p. 327 sq.
[21] See on the whole subject Christianity and Mythology, 2nd
ed. p. 403 sq.
[22] Compare the Second Epistle of John, v. 7, as to the "many
deceivers" who "confess not that Jesus Christ cometh in the flesh."
[23] As to Montanus, see Montanus and the Primitive Church, Hulsean
Prize Essay, by John De Soyres, 1878.
[24] Realism derived from the doctrine, ascribed to Plato by Aristotle,
that "universals," the ideas of species, etc., exist independently of
individual objects, and existed before them. This is "Extreme Realism,"
put in the formula, universalia ante rem. Nominalism was the doctrine
that only individuals have real existence, and that ideas of species
are but names. There was an intermediate position, that of Aristotle,
that universals exist in individual objects--universalia in re. This,
known as Moderate Realism, is but a verbal compromise, which does not
concede the Realist claim. The motive for that lay in the religious
bias to claim for ideas, or "spiritual" concepts, a higher validity
and reality than it accords to "material" things. The same tendency
expressed itself in the Moslem doctrine that the Koran is uncreated
and eternal.
[25] See the author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. ii,
34 sq.: and Montaigne and Shakespeare, 2nd ed. pp. 191, 196, 198 sq.
[26] This was written in 1901. It holds equally true in 1913.
[27] I.e., the South African War, in 1901.
[28] A beginning has since been made.
End of Project Gutenberg's A Short History of Christianity, by J. M. Robertson