result of these inquiries must be allowed to be, to a large extent,
negative. In many quarters, where thirty or forty years ago we should
certainly have found acquiescence, honest if dull, in the received
religious systems of Europe, we now discern incredulity, more or less
far-reaching, about "revealed religion" altogether, and, at the best,
"faint possible Theism," in the place of old-fashioned orthodoxy. And
earnest men, content to bear as best they may their own burden of doubt
and disappointment, do not dissemble to themselves that the immediate
outlook is dark and discouraging. Like the French monarch they discern
the omens of the deluge to come after them; a vast shipwreck of all
faith, and all virtue, of conscience, of God; brute force, embodied in
an omnipotent State, the one ark likely to escape submersion in the
pitiless waters. A world from which the high sanctions of religion,
hitherto the binding principle of society, are relegated to the domain
of old wives' fables; a march through life with its brief dream of
pleasure and long reality of thought to lie deeper than _all_ systems.
Those current abstractions, which make up all the morality and all the
philosophy of most people, have been brought under suspicion. Mind and
matter, duties and rights, morality and expediency, honour and interest,
virtue and vice--all these words, which seemed once to express
elementary and certain realities, now strike us as just the words which,
thrown into the scientific crucible, might dissolve at once. It is thus
not merely philosophy which is discredited, but just that homely and
popular wisdom by which common life is guided. This too, it appears,
instead of being the sterling product of plain experience, is the
overflow of an immature philosophy, the redundance of the uncontrolled
speculations of thinkers who were unacquainted with scientific method"
(p. 8). And then, moreover, there is that great political movement which
has so largely and directly affected the course of events and the
organization of society on the Continent of Europe, and which in less
measure, and with more covert operation, has notably modified our own
ways of thinking and acting in this country. Now the Revolution in its
ultimate or Jacobin phase, is the very manifestation, in the public
order, of the tendency which in the intellectual calls itself
"scientific." It bitterly and contemptuously rejects the belief in the
supernatural hitherto accepted in Europe. It wages implacable war upon
the ancient theology of the world. "It delights in declaring itself
atheistic"[28] (p. 37). It has "a quarrel with theology as a doctrine.
'Theology,' it says, even if not exactly opposed to social improvement,
is a superstition, and as such allied to ignorance and conservatism.
Granting that its precepts are good, it enforces them by legends and
fictitious stories which can only influence the uneducated, and
therefore in order to preserve its influence it must needs oppose
education. Nor are these stories a mere excrescence of theology, but
theology itself. For theology is neither more nor less than a doctrine
of the supernatural. It proclaims a power behind nature which
occasionally interferes with natural laws. It proclaims another world
quite different from this in which we live, a world into which what is
called the soul is believed to pass at death. It believes, in short, in
a number of things which students of Nature know nothing about, and
which science puts aside either with respect or with contempt.
These supernatural doctrines are not merely a part of theology, still
less separable from theology, but theology consists exclusively of them.
Take away the supernatural Person, miracles, and the spiritual world,
you take away theology at the same time, and nothing is left but simple
Nature and simple Science" (p. 39). Such, as the author of "Ecce Homo"
considers, is "the question between religion and science" now before the
world. And his object[29] in his new work is not to inquire whether the
"negative conclusions so often drawn from modern scientific discoveries
are warranted," still less to refute them, but to estimate "the precise
amount of destruction caused by them," admitting, for the sake of
argument, that they are true. His own judgment upon their truth he
expressly reserves, with the cautious remarks, that "it is not the
greatest scientific authorities who are so confident in negation, but
rather the inferior men who echo their opinions:"[30] that "it is not on
the morrow of great discoveries that we can best judge of their negative
effect upon ancient beliefs:" and that he is "disposed to agree with
those who think that in the end the new views of the Universe will not
gratify an extreme party quite so much as is now supposed."[31]
The argument, then, put forward in "Natural Religion," and put forward,
as I understand the author, tentatively, and for what it is worth, and
by no means as expressing his own assured convictions, is this:--that to
banish the supernatural from the human mind is "not to destroy theology
or religion or even Christianity, but in some respects to revive and
purify all three:"[32] that supernaturalism is not of the essence but of
the accidents of religion; that "the _unmiraculous_ part of the
Christian tradition has a value which was long hidden from view by the
blaze of supernaturalism," and "that so much will this unmiraculous part
gain by being brought, for the first time into full light ... that faith
may be disposed to think even that she is well rid of miracle, and that
she would be indifferent to it, even if she could still believe it" (p.
254). That religion in some form or another is essential to the world,
the author apparently no more doubts than I do: indeed he expressly
warns us that "at this moment we are threatened with a general
dissolution of states from the decay of religion" (p. 211). "If religion
fails us," these are his concluding words, "it is only when human life
itself is proved to be worthless. It may be doubtful whether life is
worth living, but if religion be what it has been described in this
book, the principle by which alone life is redeemed from secularity and
animalism, ... can it be doubtful that if we are to live at all we must
live, and civilization can only live, by religion?" And now let us
proceed to see what is the hope set before us in this book: and consider
whether the Natural Religion, which it unfolds, is such a religion as
the world can live by, as civilization can live by.
III.
The author of "Natural Religion," it will be remembered, assumes for the
purposes of his argument, that the supernatural portion of Christianity
is discredited, is put aside by physical science; that, as M. Renan has
somewhere tersely expressed it, "there is no such thing as the
supernatural, but from the beginning of being everything in the world of
phenomena was preceded by regular laws." Let us consider what this
involves. It involves the elimination from our creed, not only of the
miraculous incidents in the history of the Founder of Christianity,
including, of course, His Resurrection--the fundamental fact, upon
which, from St. Paul's time to our own, His religion has been supposed
to rest--but all the beliefs, aspirations, hopes, attaching to that
religion as a system of grace. It destroys theology, because it destroys
that idea of God from which theology starts, and which it professes to
unfold. This being so, it might appear that religion is necessarily
extinguished too. Certainly, in the ordinary sense which the word bears
among us, it is. "Religio," writes St. Thomas Aquinas, "est virtus
reddens debitum honorem Deo."[33] And so Cardinal Newman, somewhat more
fully, "By religion I mean the knowledge of God, of His will, and of our
duties towards Him;" and he goes on to say that "there are three main
channels which Nature furnishes us for our acquiring this
knowledge--viz., our own minds, the voice of mankind, and the course of
the world, that is, of human life and human affairs."[34] But that, of
course, is very far from being what the author of "Ecce Homo" means by
religion, and by natural religion, in his new book. Its key-note is
struck in the words of Wordsworth cited on its title-page:--" We live by
admiration."[35] Religion he understands to be an "ardent condition of
the feelings," "habitual and regulated admiration" (p. 129), "worship of
whatever in the known Universe appears worthy of worship" (p. 161). "To
have an individuality," he teaches, "is to have an ideal, and to have an
ideal is to have an object of worship: it is to have a religion" (p.
136). "Irreligion," on the other hand, is defined as "life without
worship," and is said to consist in "the absence of habitual
admiration, and in a state of the feelings, not ardent but cold and
torpid" (p. 129). It would appear then that religion, in its new sense,
is enthusiasm of well-nigh any kind, but particularly the enthusiasm of
morality, which is "the religion of right," the enthusiasm of art, which
is "the religion of beauty," and the enthusiasm of physical science,
which is "the religion of law and of truth" (p. 125).[36] "Art and
science," we read, "are not secular, and it is a fundamental error to
call them so; they have the nature of religion" (p. 127). "The popular
Christianity of the day, in short, is for the artist too melancholy and
sedate, and for the man of science too sentimental and superficial; in
short, it is too melancholy for the one, and not melancholy enough for
the other. They become, therefore, dissenters from the existing
religion; sympathizing too little with the popular worship, they worship
by themselves and dispense with outward forms. But they protest at the
same time that, in strictness, they separate from the religious bodies
around them, only because they know of a purer or a happier religion"
(p. 126). It is useful to turn, from time to time, from the abstract to
the concrete, in order to steady and purge our mental vision. Let us
therefore, in passing, gaze upon Théophile Gautier, the high priest of
the pride of human form, whose unspeakably impure romance has been
pronounced by Mr. Swinburne to be "the holy writ of beauty;" and, on the
other, upon Schopenhauer, the most thorough-going and consistent of
physicists, who reduces all philosophy to a cosmology, and consider
whether, the author of "Ecce Homo" himself being judge, the religion of
the one can be maintained to be purer or that of the other to be
happier, than the most degraded form of popular Christianity. I proceed
to his declaration, which naturally follows from what has been said,
that the essence of religion is not in theological dogma nor in ethical
practice. The really religious man, as we are henceforth to conceive of
him, is, apparently, the man of sentiment. "The substance of religion is
culture," which is "a threefold devotion to Goodness, Beauty, and
Truth," and "the fruit of it the higher life" (p. 145). And the higher
life is "the influence which draws men's thoughts away from their
personal existence, making them intensely aware of other existences, to
which it binds them by strong ties, sometimes of admiration, sometimes
of awe, sometimes of duty, sometimes of love" (p. 236). And as in the
individual religion is identified with culture, so, "in its public
aspect" "it is identical with civilization" (p. 201), which "expresses
the same threefold religion, shown on a larger scale, in the character,
institutions, and ways of life of nations" (p. 202). "The great
civilized community" is "the modern city of God" (p. 204).
But what God? Clearly not that God spoken of by St. Paul--or the author
of the Epistle to the Hebrews, whoever he was--"the God of Peace that
brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus Christ, that Great Shepherd
of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant;" for that
God, the Creator, Witness, and Judge of men--is assuredly _Deus
absconditus_, a hidden God, belonging to "the supernatural;" and the
hypothesis upon which the author of "Ecce Homo" proceeds in his new work
is that men have "ceased to believe in anything beyond Nature" (p. 76).
The best thing for them to do, therefore, he suggests, if they must have
a God, is to deify Nature. But "Nature, considered as the residuum that
is left after the elimination of everything supernatural, comprehends
man with all his thoughts and aspirations, not less than the forms of
the material world" (p. 78). God, therefore, in the new Natural
Religion, is to be conceived of as Physical "Nature, including Humanity"
(p. 69), or "the unity which all things compose in virtue of the
universal presence of the same laws" (p. 87), which would seem to be no
more than a Pantheistic expression, its exact value being all that
exists, the totality of forces, of beings, and of forms. The author of
"Natural Religion" does not seem to be sanguine that this new Deity will
win the hearts of men. He anticipates, indeed, the objection "that when
you substitute Nature for God you take a thing heartless and pitiless
instead of love and goodness." To this he replies, "If we abandoned our
belief in the supernatural, it would not be only inanimate Nature that
would be left to us; we should not give ourselves over, as is often
rhetorically described, to the mercy of merciless powers--winds and
waves, earthquakes, volcanoes, and fire. The God we should believe in
would not be a passionless, utterly inhuman power." "Nature, in the
sense in which we are now using the word, includes humanity, and
therefore, so far from being pitiless, includes all the pity that
belongs to the whole human race, and all the pity that they have
accumulated, and, as it were, capitalised in institutions political,
social and ecclesiastical, through countless generations" (pp. 68-9).
He, then, who would not "shock modern views of the Universe" (p. 157)
must thus think of the Deity. And so Atheism acquires a new meaning. "It
is," we read, "a disbelief in the _existence_ of God--that is, a
disbelief in _any_ regularity in the Universe to which a man must
conform himself under penalties" (p. 27); a definition which surely is a
little hard upon the _libres-penseurs_, as taking the bread out of their
mouths. I remember hearing, not long ago, in Paris, of a young Radical
diplomatist who, with the good taste which characterizes the school now
dominant in French politics, took occasion to mention to a well-known
ecclesiastical statesman that he was an Atheist. "O de l'athéisme à
votre âge," said the Nuncio, with a benign smile: "pourquoi, quand
l'impiété suffit et ne vous engage à rien?" But with the new
signification imposed upon the word, a profession of Atheism would
pledge one in quite another sense: it would be equivalent to a
profession of insanity; for where, except among the wearers of
strait-waistcoats or the occupants of padded rooms, shall we find a man
who does not believe in some regularity in the universe to which he must
conform himself under penalties? But let us follow the author of
"Natural Religion" a step further in his inquiry. "In what relation does
this religion stand to our Christianity, to our churches, and religious
denominations?" (p. 139). Certainly, we may safely agree with him that
"it has a difficulty in identifying itself with any of the organized
systems," and as safely that the "conception of a spiritual city," of an
"organ of civilization," of an "interpreter of human society," is
"precisely what is now needed" (p. 223). "The tide of thought,
scepticism, and discovery, which has set in ... must be warded off the
institutions which it attacks as recklessly as if its own existence did
not depend upon them. It introduces everywhere a sceptical condition of
mind, which it recommends as the only way to real knowledge; and yet if
such scepticism became practical, if large communities came to regard
every question in politics and law as absolutely open, their
institutions would dissolve, and science, among other things, would be
buried in the ruin. Modern thought brings into vogue a speculative
Nihilism ... but unintentionally it creates at the same time a practical
Nihilism.... There is a mine under modern society which, if we consider
it, has been the necessary result of the abeyance in recent times of the
idea of the Church" (p. 208). In fact, as our author discerns, the
existence of civilization is at stake. "It can live only by religion"
(p. 262). "On religion depends the whole fabric of civilization, all the
future of mankind" (p. 218). The remedy which he suggests is that the
Natural Religion which we have been considering, the new "universal
religion," should "be concentrated in a doctrine," should "embody itself
in a Church" (p. 207). "This Church," we are told, "exists already, a
vast communion of all who are inspired by the culture and civilization
of the age. But it is unconscious, and perhaps, if it could attain to
consciousness, it might organize itself more deliberately and
effectively" (p. 212). The precise mode of such organization is not
indicated, but its main function it appears would be to diffuse an
"adequate doctrine of civilization," and especially to teach "science,"
in "itself a main part of religion, as the grand revelation of God in
these later times," and also the theory "of the gradual development of
human society, which alone can explain to us the past state of affairs,
give us the clue to history, save us from political aberrations, and
point the direction of progress" (p. 209). Of the _clerus_ of the new
Natural Church we read as follows:--
"If we really believe that a case can be made out for civilization,
this case must be presented by popular teachers, and their most
indispensable qualification will be independence. They perhaps will
be able to show, that happiness or even universal comfort is not,
and never has been, within quite so easy reach, that it cannot be
taken by storm, and that as for the institutions left us from the
past they are no more diabolical than they are divine, being the
fruit of necessary development far more than of free-will or
calculation. Such teachers would be the free clergy of modern
civilization. It would be their business to investigate and to
teach the true relation of man to the universe and to society, the
true Ideal he should worship, the true vocation of particular
nations, the course which the history of mankind has taken
hitherto, in order that upon a full view of what is possible and
desirable men may live and organize themselves for the future. In
short, the modern Church is to do what Hebrew prophecy did in its
fashion for the Jews, and what bishops and Popes did according to
their lights for the Roman world when it laboured in the tempest,
and for barbaric tribes first submitting themselves to be taught.
Another grand object of the modern Church would be to teach and
organize the outlying world, which for the first time in history
now lies prostrate at the feet of Christian civilization. Here are
the ends to be gained. These once recognized, the means are to be
determined by their fitness alone" (p. 221).
IV.
So much must suffice to indicate the essential features of the religion
which would be left us after the elimination of the supernatural. And
now we are to consider whether this religion will suffice for the wants
of the world; whether it is a religion "which shall appeal to the sense
of duty as forcibly, preach righteousness and truth, justice and mercy,
as solemnly and as exclusively as Christianity itself does" (p. 157).
Surely to state the question is enough. In fact the author of "Natural
Religion" quite recognizes that "to many, if not most, of those who feel
the need of religion, all that has been offered in this book will
perhaps at first seem offered in derision" (p. 260), and frankly owns
that "whether it deserves to be called a faith at all, whether it
justifies men in living, and in calling others into life, may be
doubted" (p. 66). He tells us that "the thought of a God revealed in
Nature," which he has suggested, does not seem to him "by any means
satisfactory, or worthy to replace the Christian view, or even as a
commencement from which we must rise by logical necessity to the
Christian view" (p. 25) and it must be hard not to agree with him. It is
difficult to suppose that any one who considers the facts o£ life, who
contemplates not the _individua vaga_ of theories, but the men and women
of this working-day world can think otherwise. Surely no one who really
surveys mankind as they are, as they have been in the past, and, so far
as we are able to judge, will be in the future, can suppose that this
Natural Religion, even if embodied in a Natural Church, and equipped
with "a free clergy," will meet their wants, or win their affections, or
satisfy those "strange yearnings" of which we read in Plato, and which,
in one form or another, stir every human soul; which we may trace in
the chatterings of the poor Neapolitan crone to her Crucifix, or in the
hallelujahs of "Happy Sal" at a Salvationist "Holiness Meeting," as
surely as in the profoundest speculations of the Angelic Doctor, or in
the loftiest periods of Bossuet. Can any one, in this age of all others,
when, as the revelations of the physical world bring home to us so
overwhelmingly what Pascal calls "the abyss of the boundless immensity
of which I know nothing, and you know nothing," man sinks to an
insignificance which, the apt word of the author of "Natural Religion"
"petrifies" him, can--can any one believe that the compound of
Pantheistic Positivism and Christian sentiment--if we may so account of
it--set forth in these brilliant pages, will avail to redeem men from
animalism and secularity? But, indeed, we need not here rest in the
domain of mere speculation. The experiment has been tried. Not quite a
century ago, when Chaumette's "Goddess of Reason," and Robespierre's
"Supreme Being," had disappeared from the altars of France, La
Reveillère-Lepeaux essayed to introduce a Natural Religion under the
name of Theophilanthropy[37] to satisfy the spiritual needs of the
country over which he ruled as a member of the Directory, Chernin
Dupontés, Dupont de Nemours and Bernardin de St. Pierre constituting
with himself the four Evangelists of the new cult. The first mentioned
of these must, indeed, be regarded as its inventor, and his "Manuel des
Théophilanthrophiles" supplies the fullest exposition of it. But it was
La Reveillère-Lepeaux whose influence gave form and actuality to the
speculations of Chemin, and whose credit obtained for the new sect the
use of some dozen of the principal churches of Paris, and of the choir
and organ of Notre Dame. The formal _début_ of the new religion may,
perhaps, be dated from the 1st of May, 1797, when La Reveillère read to
the Institute a memoir in which he justified its introduction upon
grounds very similar to those urged in our own day against "the
theological view of the universe." Moreover, he insisted that
Catholicism was opposed to sound morality, that its worship was
antisocial, and that its clergy--whom he contemptuously denominated _la
prêtraille_, and whom he did his best to exterminate--were the enemies
of the human race. In its leading features the new Church resembled very
closely the system which we have just been considering, offered to the
world by the author of "Ecce Homo." It identified the Deity with
Nature:[38] religion, considered subjectively, with sentiment, and
objectively, with civilization; and it regarded Atheists and the
adherents of all forms of faith--with the sole exception of Catholics
--as eligible for its communion. Its dogmas, if one may so speak, were a
hotchpotch of fine phrases about beauty, truth, right, and the like,
culled from writers of all creeds and of no creed. Its chief public
function consisted in the singing of a hymn to "the Father of the
Universe," to a tune composed by one Gossee, a musician much in vogue at
that time, and in lections chosen from Confucius, Vyasa, Zoroaster,
Theognis, Cleanthes, Aristotle, Plato, La Bruyère, Fénélon, Voltaire,
Rousseau, Young, and Franklin, the Sacred Scriptures of Christianity
being carefully excluded on account, as may be supposed, of their
alleged opposition to "sound morality." The priests of the "Natural
Religion" were vested in sky-blue tunics, extending from the neck to the
feet, and fastened at the waist by a red girdle, over which was a white
robe open before. Such was the costume in which La Reveillére-Lepeaux
exhibited himself to his astonished countrymen, and having the
misfortune to be--as we are told--"petit, bossu, et puant," the
exhibition obtained no great success. It must be owned, however, that
the Natural Church did its best to fill the void caused by the
disappearance of the Christian religion. It even went so far as to
provide substitutes for the Sacraments of Catholicism. At the rite which
took the place of baptism, the father himself officiated, and, in lieu
of the questions prescribed in the Roman Ritual, asked the godfather,
"Do you promise before God and men to teach N. or M. from the dawn of
his reason to adore God, to cherish (_chérir_) his fellows, and to make
himself useful to his country?" And the godfather, holding the child
towards heaven, replied, "I promise." Then followed the inevitable
"discourse," and a hymn of which the concluding lines were:
"Puisse un jour cet enfant honorer sa patrie,
Et s'applaudir d'avoir vécu."