ENGLAND: THE SOIL PREPARED FOR THE INTRODUCTION OF RATIONALISM.
The religious lesson taught by the condition of England during the
eighteenth century is this: The inevitable moral prostration to which
skepticism reduces a nation, and the utter incapacity of literature to
afford relief. English Deism had advantages not possessed by the
Rationalism of Germany. Some of its champions were men of great
political influence; and in no case was there a parallel to the
abandoned Bahrdt. The Deists were steady in the pursuit of their game,
for when they struck a path they never permitted themselves to be
deflected. But the Rationalists were ever turning into some by-road and
weakening their energies by traversing many a fruitless mile.
The literature of England, during the most of the last century, presents
a picture of literary ostentation. The Deists had toiled to build up a
system of natural religion which would not only be a monument to their
genius, but serve as an impassable barrier to all such claims as were
urged by the zealous and loud-spoken Puritans. But early Deism lacked an
indispensable element of strength,--the power of adapting itself to the
people. Its best priests could not leave the tripod, though many of the
oracular responses were heard some distance from the temple-doors. In
time, there arose a group of essayists and poets, who, with a similar
coterie of novelists, dictated religion, morals, politics, and
literature to the country. Their influence was so great that when they
flattered the heads of government, the latter were equally assiduous in
playing the Mæcenas to them.
The writers of the eighteenth century, viewed in a literary sense alone,
have never had their superiors in English literature. The works of
Addison, Pope, Gray, Thomson, Goldsmith, and Johnson will continue to be
classics wherever the English language is spoken. The British metropolis
was pervaded with the atmosphere of Parnassus. It was a time when
literature was the El Dorado of youth and old age. Those were the days
when clubs convened statedly in the neighborhood of the Strand, and
when, every night, the attics of Grub street poured out their throngs of
quill-heroes, who were welcomed into the parlors of the nobility as
cordially as to their own club-houses. The last new work engaged
universal attention. Society was filled with rumors of books commenced,
half finished, plagiarized, successful, or defunct. Literary
respectability was the "Open Sesame" to social rank. There has never
been a season when cultivated society was more imbued with the mania of
book-writing and criticism than existed in England during at least
three-quarters of the eighteenth century.
While many of the publications of that time were prompted by Deism,
French society and literature were contributing an equal share toward
poisoning the English mind. France and England were so intimately
related to each other that the two languages were diligently studied in
both countries. If the English adventurer in letters had not spent a few
months in Paris, and could not read Corneille almost as readily as
Spenser or Shakspeare, he was cashiered by certain Gallicists west of
the Channel as a sorry aspirant to their coveted favor.[129] The rise of
the French spirit in England was mainly due to Bolingbroke, who was as
much at home in Paris as in London. He had numerous friends and admirers
in the former metropolis, and at two different times made it his
residence. Freely imbibing the skeptical opinions of the court of Louis
XIV., he dealt them out unsparingly to his English readers. He was one
of the most accomplished wits who frequented the _salon_ of Madame de
Croissy, and he developed his skeptical system through the medium of the
French language, in a series of letters to M. de Pouilly.[130]
Bolingbroke accused the greatest divines and philosophers of leading a
great part of mankind into inextricable labyrinths of reasoning and
speculation. Natural theology and religion, he held, had become corrupt.
In view of these results of mental infirmities, he applied himself to
correct all errors. He proposed "to distinguish genuine and pure theism
from the profane mixtures of human imagination; and to go to the root of
that error which encourages our curiosity, sustains our pride, fortifies
our prejudices, and gives pretense to delusion; to discover the true
nature of human knowledge, how far it extends, how far it is real, and
where and how it begins to be fantastical; that, the gaudy visions of
error being dispelled, men may be accustomed to the simplicity of
truth."[131] The Scriptures, according to Bolingbroke, are unworthy of
our credence. They degrade the Deity to mean and unworthy offices and
employments.[132] The New Testament consists of two distinct gospels;
one by Christ, the other by St. Paul. The doctrine of future rewards and
punishments is absurd, and contrary to the divine attributes.[133]
Christianity has been of no advantage to mankind. "The world hath not
been effectually reformed, nor any one nation in it, by the promulgation
of the gospel, even where Christianity flourished most."[134] There is a
supreme All-Perfect Being, but he does not concern himself with human
affairs as far as individuals are concerned. The soul is not distinct
from the body, and both terminate at death. The law of nature, being
sufficient for the purposes of our being, is all that God has proclaimed
for our guidance.[135]
There were other members of the English nobility who used their
influence for the introduction of French infidelity, literature, morals,
and fashions. Some did not equal Bolingbroke in repudiating the spirit
of the gospel, but nearly all were willing students at the feet of their
pretentious Gallic instructors. The house of Lady Mary Wortley Montague,
at Wickenham, was the centre whither gravitated that large class of
acknowledged chiefs in letters represented by Steele, Pope, and the
Walpoles. They thought, spoke, and dressed according to the French
standard, which, in respect to religion and morals, was never lower than
at that very time. The attempt to rear a Paris on English soil was a
complete success. The young were delighted with the result; the aged had
been too ill-taught in early life to raise the voice of remonstrance.
With the exception of the Puritan opposition, the gratification was
universal; and that took place in religion and literature which, had it
occurred in warfare, would have kindled a flame of national indignation
in every breast: England fell powerless, contented, and doomed into the
arms of France.
The attacks of Hume and Gibbon on the divine origin of Christianity take
rank with the mischievous influences imparted by the elder school of
Deists, and by French taste and immorality.
Hume was a philosopher who drew his inspiration directly from his own
times. Attaching himself to the Encyclopædists, he played the wit in the
_salons_ of Paris. He became fraternally intimate with Rousseau, and
brought that social dreamer back with him to England as a mark of high
appreciation of his talents. He was a metaphysician by nature, but he
erred in speculating with theology. That was the mistake of his life. He
fell into Bolingbroke's error of excessive egotism. Standing before the
superstructure of theology, he carefully surveyed every part of it, and
deemed no theme too lofty for his reasonings, and no mystery beyond the
reach of his illuminating torch. He lamented the absence of progress in
the understanding of that evidence which assures us of any real
existence and matter of fact. But this difficulty did not impede him
from an attempted solution. He thought himself performing a great
service when he addressed himself to the "destruction of that implicit
faith and credulity which is the bane of all reasoning and free
inquiry."[136] He refused to acknowledge a Supreme Being, in the
following words: "While we argue from the course of nature, and infer a
particular intelligent cause, which at first bestowed and still
preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle which is both
uncertain and useless, because the subject lies entirely beyond the
reach of human experience."[137]
The miraculous evidences of Christianity were also opposed by Hume. His
_Essay on Miracles_ (1747), consists of two parts; the former of which
is an attempt to prove that no evidence would be a sufficient ground for
believing the truth and existence of miracles. Experience is our only
guide in reasoning on matters of fact; but even this guide is far from
infallible, and liable at any moment to lead us into errors. In judging
how far a testimony is to be depended upon, we must balance the opposite
circumstances, which may create any doubt or uncertainty. The evidence
from testimony may be destroyed either by the contrariety and opposition
of the testimony, or by the consideration of the nature of the facts
themselves. When the facts partake of the marvelous there are two
opposite experiences with regard to them, and that which is most
credible is to be preferred. Now the uniform experience of men is
against miracles. We should not, therefore, believe any testimony
concerning a miracle, unless the falsehood of that testimony should be
more miraculous than the miracle it is designed to establish. Besides,
as we cannot know the attributes or actions of God otherwise than by our
experience of them, we cannot be sure that he can effect miracles; for
they are contrary to our own experience and the course of nature.
Therefore, it is impossible to prove miracles by any evidence.
The second part of the _Essay on Miracles_ is intended to show that,
supposing a miracle capable of being proved by sufficient testimony, no
miraculous event in history has ever been established on such evidence.
The witnesses of a miracle should be of such unquestionable good sense,
education, and learning, as to secure us against all delusion in
themselves. They should also be of such undoubted integrity as to place
them beyond all suspicion of design to deceive others. Then they should
be of such credit and reputation in the eyes of mankind as to have a
great deal to lose if detected in any falsehood. Last of all, the facts
attested by the witnesses should be performed in such a public manner,
and in so celebrated a part of the world, as to render detection
unavoidable.[138]
Now, according to Hume, these requisitions are not met in the supposed
witnesses of the miracles of Christ. Consequently, we are no more
obliged to believe their accounts than the reports of miracles alleged
to have been wrought at the tomb of the Abbé de Paris. All must be
rejected together.
Hume's _History of England_ met with a cold reception on its first
appearance. But he lived to see the day when, as he egotistically said,
"it became circulated like the newspapers." Yet he wrote that work not
as an end, but as a means. Historical writing was then the medium in
which it was common to couch theology or philosophy. Hume had a profound
contempt for everything Puritanic on the one hand, and hierarchical and
traditional on the other. He would make every trace disappear beneath
his scathing pen. He ignored the development of religious life in
England, and would subject all events which indicated a deep Christian
piety and purpose, to his cold system of philosophy. Writing with an
inflexible adherence to his theological opinions, he cast over
historical events the drapery of his own interpretation. The question
with him was not, "What is the history of England during the period of
which I treat?" but "Does not the history of England sustain my
philosophy?" And his own answer was, "Yes; I record facts, and draw my
own conclusions. Is not that a good philosophy!"
Gibbon was even more of a Frenchman than Hume. Sundering his relation to
Oxford in his seventeenth year, he embarked upon a course of living and
thinking which, whatever advantage it might afford to his purse, was not
likely to aid his faith. By a sudden caprice he became a Roman Catholic,
and afterwards as unceremoniously denied his adopted creed. In due time
he found himself in Paris publishing a book in the French language. He
there fell in with the fashionable infidelity, and so far yielded to the
flattery of Helvetius and all the frequenters of Holbach's house that he
jested at Christianity and assailed its divine character.
While residing at Lausanne, Switzerland, he cultivated the florid French
style of composition, and applied it in his _Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire_. That work has been severely censured, but despite its
defects, it is one of the permanent master-pieces of English literature.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth chapters the author gives his opinion of
Christianity. He attributes the progress of the Christian religion to
the zeal of the Jews, to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul as
stated by philosophers, to the miraculous powers claimed by the
primitive church, to the virtues of the first Christians, and to the
activity of the Christians in the government of the church. He
attributed to outward agencies what could have been effected only by
inward forces. But he did not assume the philosopher's cap, for, not
being metaphysical by nature, he never did violence to his own
constitution. He has left much less on record against Christianity than
Hume, but they must be ranked together as the last of the family of
English Deists.
Gibbon made loud professions of independence and of an earnest desire
for the enlargement of popular liberty. But he was less attached to
principle than to expediency. At the very time the first volume of his
history appeared, in which he pays lofty tributes to human freedom, he
came into Parliament as an avowed abettor of the ministry of George
III., in their attempts to subjugate the American colonies. He was
doubtless well paid for his votes; for he was at the same time a member
of the Board of Trade, a nominal office with a large salary.[139] A
verse, attributed to Fox, expresses the popular sentiment concerning
him;
"King George in a fright
Lest Gibbon should write
The story of England's disgrace,
Thought no way so sure,
His pen to secure,
As to give the historian a place."
In addition to these evidences of religious decay we may add the most
unwelcome of all: the moral prostration of the English Church. Instead
of being "a city set upon a hill," she was in the valley of humiliation;
and few were the faithful watchmen upon her walls. The period commencing
with the Restoration, and continuing down to the time of which we speak,
was one of ministerial and laic degeneracy. Bishop Burnet, writing of
his own generation, said, "I am now in the seventieth year of my age,
and as I cannot speak long in the world, in any sort, I cannot hope for
a more solemn occasion than this of speaking with all due freedom, both
to the present and to the succeeding ages. Therefore I lay hold on it to
give a free vent to those sad thoughts that lie on my mind both day and
night, and are the subject of many secret mournings. I cannot look on
without the deepest concern, when I see the imminent ruin hanging over
this church, and, by consequence, over the whole Reformation. The
outward state of things is black enough, God knows, but that which
heightens my fears rises chiefly from the inward state into which we are
unhappily fallen.... Our ember-weeks are the burden and grief of my
life. The much greater part of those who come to be ordained are
ignorant to a degree not to be apprehended by those who are not obliged
to know it. The easiest part of knowledge is that to which they are the
greatest strangers. Those who have read some few books, yet never seem
to have read the Scriptures. Many cannot give even a tolerable account
of the Catechism itself, how short and plain soever. This does often
tear my heart. The case is not much better in many who, having got into
orders, come for institution, and cannot make it appear that they have
read the Scriptures, or any one good book since they were ordained; so
that the small measure of knowledge upon which they get into holy
orders, not being improved, is in a way to be quite lost; and they think
it a great hardship if told they must know the Scriptures and the body
of divinity better before they can be trusted with the care of
souls."[140]
Archbishop Secker, who wrote at a later period, testifies to the same
state of religious petrification: "In this we cannot be mistaken, that
an open and professed disregard is become, through a variety of unhappy
causes, the distinguishing character of the present age; that this evil
is grown to a great height in the metropolis of the nation; is daily
spreading through every part of it; and, bad in itself as any can be,
must of necessity bring in others after it. Indeed it hath already
brought in such dissoluteness and contempt of principle in the higher
part of the world, and such profligate intemperance, and fearlessness of
committing crimes, in the lower, as must, if this impiety stop not,
become absolutely fatal. And God knows, far from stopping, it receives,
through the ill designs of some persons, and the inconsiderateness of
others, a continual increase. Christianity is now ridiculed and railed
at, with very little reserve; and the teachers of it, without any at
all."[141]
The Church had not the moral power or purity to assert her own
authority. She had lost the respect of the world because she had no
respect for herself. She was therefore enervated at a time when all her
power was needed to resist the skeptical and immoral tendencies of the
day. But a new religious power, from an unexpected source, began to
influence the English mind. We refer to the movement inaugurated by the
Wesleys and Whitefield, who were fellow-students in Oxford University.
They were appalled at the dissoluteness of the students, the frigid
preaching of the day, and the universal religious destitution of the
nation. These themes burdened the hearts of the "Holy Club" at Oxford
from day to day, and sent them from their cloisters to visit prisons,
preach in surrounding towns, and impart religious truth wherever a
willing recipient could be found. No sooner had John Wesley returned
from his missionary voyage to Georgia than there were unmistakable
evidences of the adaptation of the new preaching to the wants of the
people. The masses, long affected by a deplorable indifference to
religious truths and pious living, heard the earnest preaching of the
Methodists with profound attention and in such large numbers that no
impartial observer could doubt the peculiar fitness of Methodism to the
existing state of society, morals, literature, and philosophy. As a
result, the number of converts multiplied. The Established Church was
aroused to activity. Dissenters began to hope for the return of the good
days of Bunyan and Baxter and Howe.
Isaac Taylor says of the new influence, that "it preserved from
extinction and reanimated the languishing nonconformity of the last
century, which just at the time of the Methodist revival, was rapidly in
course to be found nowhere but in books." But the Wesleyan movement made
little impression on the literary circles to whom Bolingbroke, Hume, and
Gibbon had communicated their gospel of nature. The poets continued to
sing, the essayists to write, and the philosophers to speculate, in a
world peculiarly their own. They shut themselves quite in from the
itinerant "helpers" of Wesley. The large class of English minds which
stood aloof from all ecclesiastical organizations, and failed to see any
higher cause of the revival than mere enthusiasm, were the persons whom
those writers still influenced. But it was plain to both the masters and
their disciples that their principles were in process of transition.
They were therefore ready for the reception of whatever plausible type
of skepticism might present itself for their acceptance.
History is the illustration of cause and effect. The fountain springs up
in one period, and generations often pass before it finds its natural
outlet. The issue of the final efforts of English Deism, of the impure
French taste, and of the works of the grosser class of literary men
living in the last century, is now manifested in that spirit which
welcomes the _Essays and Reviews_, and the criticism of Colenso. It is
not true that these and similar publications have created a
Rationalistic taste in Great Britain. The taste was already in
existence, and has been struggling for satisfaction ever since the
closing decades of the eighteenth century.
FOOTNOTES:
[129] For an excellent view of the relation of France and England in the
eighteenth century, vid. _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1 Dec., 1861.
[130] Schlosser, _History of the Eighteenth Century_, vol. i., p. 98.
[131] _Works_, vol. iii., p. 328. London Edition of 1754. 5 vols.,
quarto.
[132] Ibid. p. 304.
[133] Ibid. vol. v., p. 356.
[134] Ibid. p. 258.
[135] Leland, _View of Deistical Writers of England_, pp. 307-308.
London Edition of 1837, with Appendix and Introduction, by Brown and
Edmonds.
[136] _Philosophical Essays concerning Human Understanding_, p. 49.
London Edition, 1750.
[137] _Philosophical Essays, &c._, p. 224.
[138] Leland, _View of Deistical Writers_, pp. 230-250.
[139] Schlosser, _History of the Eighteenth Century_, vol. ii., p.
85-86.
[140] _Pastoral Care._
[141] _Works_, vol. v., p. 306.