FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
The Reaction
All over the civilized world, as we have seen, the terrors of the
French Revolution evoked an intellectual no less than a political
reaction, its stress being most apparent and most destructive in
those countries in which there had been previously the largest
measure of liberty. Nowhere was it more intense or more disastrous
than in England. In countries such as Denmark and Spain, only lately
and superficially liberalized, there was no great progress to undo:
in England, though liberty was never left without an indomitable
witness, there was a violent reversal of general movement, not to be
wholly rectified in half a century. Joined in a new activity with the
civil power for the suppression of all innovating thought, the Church
rapidly attained to an influence it had not possessed since the days
of Sacheverel and a degree of wealth it had not before reached since
the Reformation. The wealth of the upper class was at its disposal
to an unheard-of extent, there being apparently no better way of
fighting the new danger of democracy; and dissent joined hands with
the establishment to promote orthodoxy.
The average tone in England in the first quarter of the century may be
gathered from the language held by a man so enlightened, comparatively
speaking, as Sydney Smith, wit, humourist, Whig, and clergyman. In
1801 we find him, in a preface never reprinted, prescribing various
measures of religious strategy in addition "to the just, necessary,
and innumerable invectives which have been levelled against Rousseau,
Voltaire, D'Alembert, and the whole pandemonium of those martyrs to
atheism, who toiled with such laborious malice, and suffered odium with
such inflexible profligacy, for the wretchedness and despair of their
fellow creatures." [1663] That this was not jesting may be gathered
from his daughter's account of his indignation when a publisher sent
him "a work of irreligious tendency," and when Jeffrey admitted
"irreligious opinions" to the Edinburgh Review. To the former he
writes that every principle of suspicion and fear would be excited
in me by a man who professed himself an infidel"; and to Jeffrey:
"Do you mean to take care that the Review shall not profess infidel
principles? Unless this is the case I must absolutely give up all
connection with it." [1664] All the while any semblance of "infidelity"
in any article in the Review must have been of the most cautious kind.
In the Catholic countries, naturally, the reaction was no less
violent. In Italy, as we saw, it began in Tuscany almost at once. The
rule of Napoleon, it is true, secured complete freedom of the Press
as regarded translation of freethinking books, an entire liberty of
conscience in religious matters, and a sharp repression of clericalism,
the latter policy going to the length of expelling all the religious
orders and confiscating their property. [1665] All this counted
for change; but the Napoleonic rule all the while choked one of the
springs of vital thought--to wit, the spirit of political liberty;
and in 1814-15 the clerical system returned in full force, as it did
all over Italy. Everywhere freethought was banned. All criticism
of Catholicism was a penal offence; and in the kingdom of Naples
alone, in 1825, there were 27,612 priests, 8,455 monks, 8,185 nuns,
20 archbishops, and 73 bishops, though in 1807 the French influence
had caused the dissolution of some 250 convents. [1666] At Florence
the Censure forbade, in 1817, the issue of a new edition of the
translated work of Cabanis on Les Rapports du physique et du moral;
and Mascagni, the physiologist, was invited to delete from his work
a definition of man in which no notice was taken of the soul. [1667]
It was even proclaimed that the works of Voltaire and Rousseau were not
to be read in the public libraries without ecclesiastical permission;
but this veto was not seriously treated. [1668] All native energy,
however, was either cowed or cajoled into passivity. If, accordingly,
the mind of Italy was to survive, it must be by the assimilation of the
culture of freer States; and this culture, reinforced by the writings
of Leopardi, generated a new intellectual life, which was a main factor
in the ultimate achievement of Italian liberation from Austrian rule.
Spain, under Charles IV, became so thoroughly re-clericalized at the
very outbreak of the Revolution that no more leeway seemed possible;
but even in Spain, early in the nineteenth century, the government
found means to retrogress yet further, and the minister Caballero
sent an order to the universities forbidding the study of moral
philosophy. The king, he justly declared, did not want philosophers,
but good and obedient subjects. [1669]
In France, where the downfall of Napoleon meant the restoration of
the monarchy, the intellectual reaction was really less powerful
than in England. The new spirit had been too widely and continuously
at work, from Voltaire onwards, to be politically expelled; and
the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 gave the proof that even on the
political side the old spirit was incapable of permanent recovery. In
Germany, where freethinking was associated not with the beaten cause
of the Revolution but in large measure with the national movement
for liberation from the tyranny of Napoleon, [1670] the religious
reaction was substantially emotional and unintellectual, though it
had intellectual representatives, notably Schleiermacher. Apart
from his culture-movement, the revival consisted mainly in a new
Pietism, partly orthodox, partly mystical; [1671] and on those
lines it ran later to the grossest excesses. But among the educated
classes of Germany there was the minimum of arrest, because there the
intellectual life was least directly associated with the political,
and the ecclesiastical life relatively the least organized. The very
separateness of the German States, then and later so often deplored
by German patriots, was really a condition of relative security for
freedom of thought and research; and the resulting multiplicity of
universities meant a variety of intellectual effort not then paralleled
in any other country. [1672] What may be ranked as the most important
effect of the reaction in Germany--the turning of Kant, Fichte, and
Hegel in succession to the task of reconciling rational philosophy
with religion in the interests of social order--was in itself a
rationalistic process as compared with the attitude of orthodoxy in
other lands. German scholarship, led by the re-organized university of
Berlin, was in fact one of the most progressive intellectual forces
in Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century; and only
its comparative isolation, its confinement to a cultured class,
prevented it from affecting popular thought as widely as deism had
done in the preceding century. Even in the countries in which popular
and university culture were less sharply divided, the German influence
was held at bay like others.
But in time the spirit of progress regained strength, the most
decisive form of recovery being the new development of the struggle
for political liberty from about 1830 onwards. In England the advance
thenceforward was to be broadly continuous on the political side. On
the Continent it culminated for the time in the explosions of 1848,
which were followed in the Germanic world by another political
reaction, in which freethought suffered; and in France, after a
few years, by the Second Empire, in which clericalism was again
fostered. But these checks have proved impermanent.
The Forces of Renascence
As with the cause of democracy, so with the cause of rationalism, the
forward movement grew only the deeper and more powerful through the
check; and the nineteenth century closed on a record of freethinking
progress which may be said to outbulk that of all the previous
centuries of the modern era together. So great was the activity
of the century in point of mere quantity that it is impossible,
within the scheme of a "Short History," to treat it on even such
a reduced scale of narrative as has been applied to the past. A
detailed history on national lines from the French Revolution onwards
would mean another book as large as the present. On however large a
scale it might be written, further, it would involve a recognition
of international influences such as had never before been evolved,
save when on a much smaller scale the educated world all round read
and wrote Latin. Since Goethe, the international aspect of culture upon
which he laid stress has become ever more apparent; and scientific and
philosophical thought, in particular, are world-wide in their scope
and bearing. It must here suffice, therefore, to take a series of
broad and general views of the past century's work, leaving adequate
critical and narrative treatment for separate undertakings. [1673]
The most helpful method seems to be that of a conspectus (1) of
the main movements and forces that during the century affected
in varying degrees the thought of the civilized world, and (2)
of the main advances made and the point reached in the culture of
the nations, separately considered. At the same time, the forces of
rationalism may be discriminated into Particular and General. We may
then roughly represent the lines of movement, in non-chronological
order, as follows:--
I.--Forces of criticism and corrective thought bearing expressly
on religious beliefs.
1. In Great Britain and America, the new movements of popular
freethought begun by Paine, and lasting continuously to the
present day.
2. In France and elsewhere, the reverberation of the attack
of Voltaire, d'Holbach, Dupuis, and Volney, carried on most
persistently in Catholic countries by the Freemasons, as against
official orthodoxy after 1815.
3. German "rationalism," proceeding from English deism, moving
towards naturalist as against supernaturalist conceptions,
dissolving the notion of the miraculous in both Old and New
Testament history, analysing the literary structure of the sacred
books, and all along affecting studious thought in other countries.
4. The literary compromise of Lessing, claiming for all religions
a place in a scheme of "divine education."
5. In England, the neo-Christianity of the school of Coleridge,
a disintegrating force, promoting the "Broad Church" tendency,
which in Dean Milman was so pronounced as to bring on him charges
of rationalism.
6. The utilitarianism of the school of Bentham, carried into
moral and social science.
7. Comtism, making little direct impression on the "constructive"
lines laid by the founder, but affecting critical thought in
many directions.
8. German philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian, in particular
the Hegelian, turned to anti-Christian and anti-supernaturalist
account by Strauss, Vatke, Bruno Bauer, Feuerbach, and Marx.
9. German atheism and scientific "materialism"--represented
by Feuerbach and Büchner (who, however, rejected the term
"materialism" as inappropriate).
10. Revived English deism, involving destructive criticism
of Christianity, as in Hennell, F. W. Newman, R. W. Mackay,
W. R. Greg, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Scott, partly in
co-operation with Unitarianism.
11. American transcendentalism or pantheism--the school of Emerson.
12. Colenso's preliminary attack on the narrative of the
Pentateuch, a systematized return to Voltairean common-sense,
rectifying the unscientific course of the earlier "higher
criticism" on the historical issue.
13. The later or scientific "higher criticism" of the Old
Testament--represented by Kuenen, Wellhausen, and their successors.
14. New historical criticism of Christian origins, in particular
the work of Strauss and Baur in Germany, Renan and Havet in France,
and their successors.
15. Exhibition of rationalism within the churches, as in Germany,
Holland, and Switzerland generally; in England in the Essays and
Reviews; later in multitudes of essays and books, and in the
ethical criticism of the Old Testament; in America in popular
theology.
16. Association of rationalistic doctrine with the Socialist
movements, new and old, from Owen to Bebel.
17. Communication of doubt and moral questioning through poetry and
belles-lettres--as in Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Clough, Tennyson,
Carlyle, Arnold, Browning, Swinburne, Goethe, Schiller, Heine,
Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Leopardi, and certain French and
English novelists.
II.--Modern Science, physical, mental, and moral, sapping the
bases of all supernaturalist systems.
1. Astronomy, newly directed by Laplace.
2. Geology, gradually connected (as in Britain by Chambers) with
3. Biology, made definitely non-deistic by Darwin.
4. The comprehension of all science in the Evolution Theory,
as by Spencer, advancing on Comte.
5. Psychology, as regards localization of brain functions.
6. Comparative mythology, as yet imperfectly applied to Christism.
7. Sociology, as outlined by Comte, Buckle, Spencer, Winwood Reade,
Lester Ward, Giddings, Tarde, Durkheim, and others, on strictly
naturalistic lines.
8. Comparative Hierology; the methodical application of principles
insisted on by all the deists, and formulated in the interests
of deism by Lessing, but latterly freed of his implications.
9. Above all, the later development of Anthropology (in the wide
English sense of the term), which, beginning to take shape in the
eighteenth century, came to new life in the latter part of the
nineteenth; and is now one of the most widely cultivated of all the
sciences--especially on the side of religious creed and psychology.
On the other hand, we may group somewhat as follows the general forces
of retardation of freethought operating throughout the century:--
1. Penal laws, still operative in Britain and Germany against
popular freethought propaganda, and till recently in Britain
against any endowment of freethought.
2. Class interests, involving in the first half of the century
a social conspiracy against rationalism in England.
3. Commercial pressure thus set up, and always involved in the
influence of churches.
4. In England, identification of orthodox Dissent with political
Liberalism--a sedative.
5. Concessions by the clergy, especially in England and the United
States--to many, another sedative.
6. Above all, the production of new masses of popular ignorance
in the industrial nations, and continued lack of education in
the others.
7. On this basis, business-like and in large part secular-minded
organization of the endowed churches, as against a freethought
propaganda hampered by the previously named causes, and in England
by laws which veto all direct endowment of anti-Christian heresy.
It remains to make, with forced brevity, the surveys thus outlined.
Section 1.--Popular Propaganda and Culture
1. If any one circumstance more than another differentiates the life
of to-day from that of older civilizations, or from that of previous
centuries of the modern era, it is the diffusion of rationalistic
views among the "common people." In no other era is to be found the
phenomenon of widespread critical skepticism among the labouring
masses: in all previous ages, though chronic complaint is made of
some unbelief among the uneducated, the constant and abject ignorance
of the mass of the people has been the sure foothold of superstitious
systems. Within the last century the area of the recognizably civilized
world has grown far vaster; and in the immense populations that have
thus arisen there is a relative degree of enlightenment, coupled with
a degree of political power never before attained. Merely to survey,
then, the broad movement of popular culture in the period in question
will yield a useful notion of the dynamic change in the balance of
thought in modern times, and will make more intelligible the special
aspects of the culture process.
This vital change in the distribution of knowledge is largely to
be attributed to the written and spoken teaching of a line of men
who made popular enlightenment their great aim. Their leading type
among the English-speaking races is Thomas Paine, whom we have seen
combining a gospel of democracy with a gospel of critical reason in
the midst of the French Revolution. Never before had rationalism been
made widely popular. The English and French deists had written for
the middle and upper classes. Peter Annet was practically the first
who sought to reach the multitude; and his punishment expressed
the special resentment aroused in the governing classes by such
a policy. Of all the English freethinkers of the earlier deistical
period he alone was selected for reprinting by the propagandists of the
Paine period. Paine was to Annet, however, as a cannon to a musket,
and through the democratic ferment of his day he won an audience
a hundredfold wider than Annet could have dreamt of reaching. The
anger of the governing classes, in a time of anti-democratic panic,
was proportional. Paine would have been at least imprisoned for
his Rights of Man had he not fled from England in time; and the
sale of all his books was furiously prohibited and ferociously
punished. Yet they circulated everywhere, even in Protestant Ireland,
[1674] hitherto affected only under the surface of upper-class life by
deism. The circulation of Bishop Watson's Apology in reply only served
to spread the contagion, as it brought the issues before multitudes
who would not otherwise have heard of them. [1675] All the while,
direct propaganda was carried on by translations and reprints as
well as by fresh English tractates. Diderot's Thoughts on Religion,
and Fréret's Letter from Thrasybulus to Leucippus, seem to have been
great favourites among the Painites, as was Elihu Palmer's Principles
of Nature; and Volney's Ruins of Empires had a large vogue. Condorcet's
Esquisse had been promptly translated in 1795; the translation of
d'Holbach's System of Nature reached a third edition in 1817; [1676]
that of Raynal's History had been reprinted in 1804; and that of
Helvétius On the Mind in 1810; while an English abridgment of Bayle
in four volumes, on freethinking lines, appeared in 1826.
2. Meantime, new writers arose to carry into fuller detail the attacks
of Paine, sharpening their weapons on those of the more scholarly
French deists. A Life of Jesus, including his Apocryphal History,
[1677] was published in 1818, with such astute avoidance of all
comment that it escaped prosecution. Others, taking a more daring
course, fared accordingly. George Houston translated the Ecce Homo of
d'Holbach, first publishing it at Edinburgh in 1799, and reprinting it
in London in 1813. For the second issue he was prosecuted, fined £200,
and imprisoned for two years in Newgate. Robert Wedderburn, a mulatto
calling himself "the Rev.," in reality a superannuated journeyman
tailor who officiated in Hopkins Street Unitarian Chapel, London, was
in 1820 sentenced to two years' imprisonment in Dorchester Jail for a
"blasphemous libel" contained in one of his pulpit discourses. His
Letters to the Rev. Solomon Herschell (the Jewish Chief Rabbi) and to
the Archbishop of Canterbury show a happy vein of orderly irony and
not a little learning, despite his profession of apostolic ignorance;
and at the trial the judge admitted his defence to be "exceedingly
well drawn up." His publications naturally received a new impetus,
and passed to a more drastic order of mockery.
3. As the years went on, the persecution in England grew still fiercer;
but it was met with a stubborn hardihood which wore out even the
bitter malice of piety. One of the worst features of the religious
crusade was that it affected to attack not unbelief but "vice," such
being the plea on which Wilberforce and others prosecuted, during a
period of more than twenty years, the publishers and booksellers who
issued the works of Paine. [1678] But even that dissembling device
did not ultimately avail. A name not to be forgotten by those who
value obscure service to human freedom is that of Richard Carlile,
who between 1819 and 1835 underwent nine years' imprisonment in his
unyielding struggle for the freedom of the Press, of thought, and of
speech. [1679] John Clarke, an ex-Methodist, became one of Carlile's
shopmen, was tried in 1824 for selling one of his publications,
and "after a spirited defence, in which he read many of the worst
passages of the Bible," was sentenced to three years' imprisonment,
and to find securities for good behaviour during life. The latter
disability he effectively anticipated by writing, while in prison, A
Critical Review of the Life, Character, and Miracles of Jesus, wherein
Christian feelings were treated as Christians had treated the feelings
of freethinkers, with a much more destructive result. Published first,
strangely enough, in the Newgate Magazine, it was republished in 1825
and 1839, with impunity. Thus did a brutal bigotry bring upon itself
ever a deadlier retaliation, till it sickened of the contest. Those
who threw up the struggle on the orthodox side declaimed as before
about the tone of the unbeliever's attack, failing to read the plain
lesson that, while noisy fanaticism, doing its own worst and vilest,
deterred from utterance all the gentler and more sympathetic spirits
on the side of reason, the work of reason could be done only by
the harder natures, which gave back blow for blow and insult for
insult, rejoicing in the encounter. Thus championed, freethought
could not be crushed. The propagandist and publishing work done by
Carlile was carried on diversely by such free lances as Robert Taylor
(ex-clergyman, author of the Diegesis, 1829, and The Devil's Pulpit,
1830), Charles Southwell (1814-1860), and William Hone, [1680] who
ultimately became an independent preacher. Southwell, a disciple of
Robert Owen, who edited The Oracle of Reason, was imprisoned for a year
in 1840 for publishing in that journal an article entitled "The Jew
Book"; and was succeeded in the editorship by George Jacob Holyoake
(1817-1906), another Owenite missionary, who met a similar sentence;
whereafter George Adams and his wife, who continued to publish the
journal, were imprisoned in turn. Matilda Roalfe and Mrs. Emma Martin
about the same period underwent imprisonment for like causes. [1681]
In this fashion, by the steady courage of a much-enduring band of men
and women, was set on foot a systematic Secularist propaganda--the
name having relation to the term "Secularism," coined by Holyoake.
4. In this evolution political activities played an important
part. Henry Hetherington (1792-1849), the strenuous democrat who
in 1830 began the trade union movement, and so became the founder of
Chartism, fought for the right of publication in matters of freethought
as in politics. After undergoing two imprisonments of six months
each (1832), and carrying on for three and a half years the struggle
for an untaxed Press, which ended in his victory (1834), he was in
1840 indicted for publishing Haslam's Letters to the Clergy of all
Denominations, a freethinking criticism of Old Testament morality. He
defended himself so ably that Lord Denman, the judge, confessed to have
"listened with feelings of great interest and sentiments of respect
too"; and Justice Talfourd later spoke of the defence as marked by
"great propriety and talent." Nevertheless, he was punished by four
months' imprisonment. [1682] In the following year, on the advice of
Francis Place, he brought a test prosecution for blasphemy against
Moxon, the poet-publisher, for issuing Shelley's complete works,
including Queen Mab. Talfourd, then Serjeant, defended Moxon, and
pleaded that there "must be some alteration of the law, or some
restriction of the right to put it in action"; but the jury were
impartial enough to find the publisher guilty, though he received
no punishment. [1683] Among other works published by Hetherington
was one entitled A Hunt after the Devil, "by Dr. P. Y." (really by
Lieutenant Lecount), in which the story of Noah's ark was subjected
to a destructive criticism. [1684]
5. Holyoake had been a missionary and martyr in the movement
of Socialism set up by Robert Owen, whose teaching, essentially
scientific on its psychological or philosophical side, was the first
effort to give systematic effect to democratic ideals by organizing
industry. It was in the discussions of the "Association of all Classes
of all Nations," formed by Owen in 1835, that the word "Socialism"
first became current. [1685] Owen was a freethinker in all things;
[1686] and his whole movement was so penetrated by an anti-theological
spirit that the clergy as a rule became its bitter enemies, though
such publicists as Macaulay and John Mill also combined with them
in scouting it on political and economic grounds. [1687] Up till
the middle of 1817 he had on his side a large body of "respectable"
and highly-placed philanthropists, his notable success in his own
social and commercial undertakings being his main recommendation. His
early Essays on the Formation of Character, indeed, were sufficient
to reveal his heterodoxy; but not until, at his memorable public
meeting on August 21, 1817, he began to expatiate on "the gross
errors that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every
religion that has hitherto been taught to men" [1688] did he rank as
an aggressive freethinker. It was in his own view the turning-point of
his life. He was not prosecuted; though Brougham declared that if any
politician had said half as much he would have been "burned alive";
but the alienation of "moderate" opinion at once began; and Owen,
always more fervid than prudent, never recovered his influence among
the upper classes. Nonetheless, "his secularistic teaching gained
such influence among the working classes as to give occasion for the
statement in the Westminster Review (1839) that his principles were
the actual creed of a great portion of them." [1689]
Owen's polemic method--if it could properly be so called--was not
so much a criticism of dogma as a calm impeachment of religion in a
spirit of philanthropy. No reformer was ever more entirely free from
the spirit of wrath: on this side Owen towers above comparison. "There
is no place found in him for scorn or indignation. He cannot bring
himself to speak or think evil of any man. He carried out in his daily
life his own teaching that man is not the proper object of praise or
blame. Throughout his numerous works there is hardly a sentence of
indignation--of personal denunciation never. He loves the sinner, and
can hardly bring himself to hate the sin." [1690] He had come by his
rationalism through the influence rather of Rousseau than of Voltaire;
and he had assimilated the philosophic doctrine of determinism--of all
ideals the most difficult to realize in conduct--with a thoroughness
of which the flawed Rousseau was incapable. There was thus presented
to the world the curious case of a man who on the side of character
carried rationalism to the perfection of ideal "saintliness," while
in the general application of rational thought to concrete problems
he was virtually unteachable. For an absolute and immovable conviction
in his own practical rightness was in Owen as essential a constituent
as his absolute benevolence. [1691] These were the two poles of his
personality. He was, in short, a fair embodiment of the ideal formed
by many people--doctrine and dogma apart--of the Gospel Jesus. And
most Christians accordingly shunned and feared or hated him.
Such a personality was evidently a formidable force as against the
reinforced English orthodoxy of the first generation of the nineteenth
century. The nature of Owen's propaganda as against religion may
be best sampled from his lecture, "The New Religion: or, Religion
founded on the Immutable Laws of the Universe, contrasted with all
Religions founded on Human Testimony," delivered at the London Tavern
on October 20, 1830: [1692]--
"Under the arrangements which have hitherto existed for educating
and governing man, four general characters have been produced
among the human race. These four characters appear to be formed,
under the past and present arrangements of society, from four
different original organizations at birth....
"No. 1. May be termed the conscientious religious in all countries.
No. 2. Unbelievers in the truth of any religion, but who
strenuously support the religion of their country, under the
conviction that, although religion is not necessary to insure
their own good conduct, it is eminently required to compel others
to act right.
No. 3. Unbelievers who openly avow their disbelief in the truth
of any religion, such as Deists, Atheists, Skeptics, etc., etc.,
but who do not perceive the laws of nature relative to man as an
individual, or when united in a social state.
No. 4. Disbelievers in all past and present religions, but
believers in the eternal unchanging laws of the universe, as
developed by facts derived from all past experience; and who,
by a careful study of these facts, deduce from them the religion
of nature.
Class No. 1 is formed, under certain circumstances, from those
original organizations which possess at birth strong moral and
weak intellectual faculties.... Class No. 2 is composed of those
individuals who by nature possess a smaller quantity of moral
and a larger quantity of intellectual faculty.... Class No. 3
is composed of men of strong moral and moderate intellectual
faculty.... Class No. 4 comprises those who, by nature, possess
a high degree of intellectual and moral faculty...."
Thus all forms of opinion were shown to proceed either from
intellectual or moral defect, save the opinions of Owen. Such
propositions, tranquilly elaborated, were probably as effective
in producing irritation as any frontal attack upon any dogmas,
narratives, or polities. But, though not even consistent (inasmuch as
the fundamental thesis that "character is formed by circumstances" is
undermined by the datum of four varieties of organization), they were
potent to influence serious men otherwise broadly instructed as to the
nature of religious history and the irrationality of dogma; and Owen
for a generation, despite the inevitable failure and frustration of
his social schemes, exercised by his movement a very wide influence
on popular life. To a considerable extent it was furthered by the
popular deistic philosophy of George and Andrew Combe--a kind of
deistic positivism--which then had a great vogue; [1693] and by
the implications of phrenology, then also in its most scientific
and progressive stage. When, for various reasons, Owen's movement
dissolved, the freethinking element seems to have been absorbed in the
secular party, while the others appear to have gone in large part to
build up the movement of Co-operation. On the whole, the movement of
popular freethought in England could be described as poor, struggling,
and persecuted, only the most hardy and zealous venturing to associate
themselves with it. The imprisonment of Holyoake (1842) for six months,
on a trifling charge of blasphemy, is an illustration of the brutal
spirit of public orthodoxy at the time. [1694] Where bigotry could
thus only injure and oppress without suppressing heresy, it stimulated
resistance; and the result of the stimulus was a revival of popular
propaganda which led to the founding of a Secular Society in 1852.
6. This date broadly coincides with the maximum domination of
conventional orthodoxy in English life. From about the middle
of the century the balance gradually changes. In 1852 we find the
publisher Henry Bohn reissuing the worthless apologetic works of the
Rev. Andrew Fuller, with a "publisher's preface" in which they are
said to "maintain an acknowledged pre-eminence," though written "at a
period of our national history when the writings of Volney and Gibbon,
and especially of Thomas Paine, fostered by the political effects
of the French Revolution, had deteriorated the morals of the people,
and infused the poison of infidelity into the disaffected portion of
the public." We have here still the note of early-nineteenth-century
Anglican respectability, not easily to be matched in human history
for hollowness and blatancy. Fuller is at once one of the most
rabid and one of the most futile of the thousand and one defenders
of the faith. A sample of his mind and method is the verdict that
"If the light that is gone abroad on earth would permit the rearing
of temples to Venus, or Bacchus, or any of the rabble of heathen
deities, there is little doubt but that modern unbelievers would in
great numbers become their devotees; but, seeing they cannot have
a God whose worship shall accord with their inclinations, they seem
determined not to worship at all." [1695] In the very next year the
same publisher began the issue of a reprint of Gibbon, with variorum
notes, edited by "An English Churchman," who for the most part defended
Gibbon against his orthodox critics. This enterprise in turn brought
upon the pious publisher a fair share of odium. But the second half
of the century, albeit soon darkened by new wars in Europe, Asia, and
America, was to be for England one of Liberalism alike in politics and
in thought, free trade, and relatively free publication, with progress
in enlightenment for both the populace and the "educated" classes.
7. In 1858 there was elected to the presidency of the London Secular
Society the young Charles Bradlaugh, one of the greatest orators of
his age, and one of the most powerful personalities ever associated
with a progressive movement. Early experience of clerical persecution,
which even drove the boy from his father's roof, helped to make him
a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity. In the main self-taught,
he acquired a large measure of culture in French and English, and
his rare natural gift for debate was sharpened by a legal training. A
personal admirer of Owen, he never accepted his social polity, but was
at all times the most zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward
the working masses in England were in large part kept in touch
with a freethought which drew on the results of the scientific and
scholarly research of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which
trained opponents confessed the power. [1696] In the place of the bland
dogmatism of Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind could and
should be schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert
recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards conviction,
and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements. Every
thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence; and in due
course many who had complained that Owen would not argue, complained
that the new school argued everything. The essential thing was that
the people were receiving vitally needed instruction; and were being
taught with a new power to think for themselves. Incidentally they were
freed from an old burden by Bradlaugh's successful resistance to the
demand of suretyship from newspapers, and by his no less successful
battle for the right of non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation
instead of taking the oath in the law courts. [1697]
The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement thus
maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical,
scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet; Voltaire its first
story-teller; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy,
Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza; in Biblical
criticism--himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew--he
collated the work of English and French specialists, down to
and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated
record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time,
the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned
against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures
of Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages
of his journal, The National Reformer. The general outcome was
an unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English
masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought
such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned for
political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task
of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened his
life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series
of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for
Northampton in 1880; and the House of Commons in a manner enacted
afresh the long resistance made to him in that city. [1698] When,
however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began
the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did
even more to deepen and diffuse the popular freethought movement than
Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous career. The
process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and imprisoning
(1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker, under the Blasphemy
Laws--a course not directly ventured on as against Bradlaugh, though it
was sought to connect him with the publication of Mr. Foote's journal.
To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin of
the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having "forced" his opinions
on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly to avoid
wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by law in the
courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to the "oath of
allegiance," and felt that it would be unseemly on his part to use
the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On this point
he expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and they gave
the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his own belief
as a lawyer. The faction called the "fourth party," however, saw an
opportunity to embarrass the Gladstone Government by challenging the
act of affirmation, and thus arose the protracted struggle. Only when
a committee of the House decided that he could not properly affirm
did Bradlaugh propose to take the oath, in order to take his seat.
The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who had
raised the issue, was known by all men to be the merest hypocrisy. Lord
Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself by insisting on the moral
necessity for a belief in "some divinity or other," is recorded to
have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now Lord) Morley, the most
distinguished Positivist of his time. [1699] The whole procedure,
in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of the lowest political
malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance, that it turned
into active freethinkers many who had before been only passive
doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity of zeal
never before seen. At no period in modern British history had there
been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of unbelief; so
unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history, and practice;
such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pretension; such asperity
of spirit against the creed which was once more being championed by
chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In those five years of indignant
warfare were sown the seeds of a more abundant growth of rationalism
than had ever before been known in the British Islands. With invincible
determination Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the
law courts, incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that
clearly shortened his life, but never yielding for an instant in his
battle with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by
many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Balfour, was
solid for injustice; [1700] and in the entire Church of England less
than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake was
indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and his seat
in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which stultified the
whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the previous Parliament,
and no less that of the law courts, straightforward freethought stood
three-fold stronger in England than in any previous generation. Apart
from their educative work, the struggles and sufferings of the
secularist leaders won for Great Britain the abolition within one
generation of the old burden of suretyship on newspapers, and of
the disabilities of non-theistic witnesses; the freedom of public
meeting in the London parks; the right of avowed atheists to sit
in Parliament (Bradlaugh having secured in 1888 their title to
make affirmation instead of oath); and the virtual discredit of the
Blasphemy Laws as such. It is probable also that the treatment meted
out to Mrs. Besant--then associated with Bradlaugh in freethought
propaganda--marked the end of another form of tyrannous outrage,
already made historic in the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of
her children under a marital deed of separation, she was deprived of
it at law (1879) on her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result
that her influence as a propagandist was immensely increased.
8. The special energy of the English secularist movement in the ninth
decade was partly due to the fact that by that time there had appeared
a remarkable amount of modern freethinking literature of high literary
and intellectual quality, and good "social" status. Down to 1870
the new literary names committed to the rejection of Christianity,
apart from the men of science who kept to their own work, were the
theists Hennell, F. W. Newman, W. E. Greg, R. W. Mackay, Buckle,
and W. E. H. Lecky, all of them influential, but none of them at once
recognized as a first-rate force. But with the appearance of Lecky's
History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in
Europe (1865), lacking though it was in clearness of thought, a new
tone began to prevail; and his History of European Morals from Augustus
to Charlemagne (1869), equally readable and not more uncompromising,
was soon followed by a series of powerful pronouncements of a more
explicit kind. One of the first of the literary class to come forward
with an express impeachment of Christianity was Moncure Daniel Conway,
whose Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a gifted
preacher's progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through Unitarianism,
to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism. In 1871 appeared
the remarkable work of Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, wherein
a rapid survey of ancient and medieval history, and of the growth of
religion from savage beginnings, leads up to a definitely anti-theistic
presentment of the future of human life with the claim to have shown
"that the destruction of Christianity is essential to the interests of
civilization." [1701] Some eighteen editions tell of the acceptance
won by the book. Less vogue, but some startled notice, was won by
the Duke of Somerset's Christian Theology and Modern Scepticism
(1872), a work of moderate rationalism, but by a peer. In 1873
appeared Herbert Spencer's Introduction to the Study of Sociology,
wherein the implicit anti-supernaturalism of that philosopher's First
Principles was advanced upon, in the chapter on "The Theological Bias,"
by a mordant attack on that Christian creed.
That attack had been preceded by Matthew Arnold's Literature and
Dogma (1872), wherein the publicist who had censured Colenso for not
writing in Latin described the Christian doctrine of the Trinity
as "the fairy-tale of three Lord Shaftesburys." Much pleading for
the recognition by unbelievers of the value of the Bible failed to
convince Christians of the value of such a thinker's Christianity. A
more important sensation was provided in 1873 by the posthumous
publication of Mill's Autobiography, and, in the following year,
by his Three Essays on Religion, which exhibited its esteemed author
as not only not a Christian but as never having been one, although he
formulated a species of limited liability theism, as unsatisfactory to
the rationalists as to the orthodox. Still the fresh manifestations of
freethinking multiplied. On the one hand the massive treatise entitled
Supernatural Religion (1874), and on the other the freethinking
essays of Prof. W. K. Clifford in the Fortnightly Review, the most
vigorously outspoken ever yet written by an English academic, showed
that the whole field of debate was being reopened with a new power and
confidence. The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century,
by Leslie Stephen (1876), set up the same impression from another side;
yet another social sensation was created by the appearance of Viscount
Amberley's Analysis of Religious Belief (1877); and all the while the
"Higher Criticism" proceeded within the pale of the Church.
The literary situation was now so changed that, whereas from 1850
to 1880 the "sensations" in the religious world were those made
by rationalistic attacks, thereafter they were those made by new
defences. H. Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World (1883),
Mr. Balfour's Defence of Philosophic Doubt (1879) and Foundations
of Belief (1895), and Mr. Kidd's Social Evolution (1894), were
successively welcomed as being declared to render such a service. It is
doubtful whether they are to-day valued upon that score in any quarter.
9. In the first half of the century popular forms of freethought
propaganda were hardly possible in other European countries. France
had been too long used to regulation alike under the monarchy and
under the empire to permit of open promotion of unbelief in the early
years of the Restoration. Yet as early as 1828 we find the Protestant
Coquerel avowing that in his day the Bourbonism of the Catholic clergy
had revived the old anti-clericalism, and that it was common to find
the most high-minded patriots unbelievers and materialists. [1702]
But still more remarkable was the persistence of deep freethinking
currents in the Catholic world throughout the century. About 1830
rationalism had become normal among the younger students at Paris;
[1703] and the revolution of that year elicited a charter putting
all religions on an equality. [1704] Soon the throne and the chambers
were on a footing of practical hostility to the Church. [1705] Under
Louis Philippe men dared to teach in the Collège de France that
"the Christian dispensation is but one link in the chain of divine
revelations to man." [1706] Even during the first period of reaction
after the restoration numerous editions of Volney's Ruines and of the
Abrégé [1707] of Dupuis's Origine de tous les Cultes served to maintain
among the more intelligent of the proletariat an almost scientific
rationalism, which can hardly be said to have been improved on by such
historiography as that of Renan's Vie de Jésus. And there were other
forces, over and above freemasonry, which in France and other Latin
countries has since the Revolution been steadily anti-clerical. The
would-be social reconstructor Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was an
independent and non-Christian though not an anti-clerical theist,
and his system may have counted for something as organizing the
secular spirit among the workers in the period of the monarchic and
Catholic reaction. Fourier approximated to Christianity inasmuch as he
believed in a divine Providence; but like Owen he had an unbounded and
heterodox faith in human goodness and perfectibility; and he claimed
to have discovered the "plan of God" for men. But Fourier was never,
like Owen, a popular force; and popular rationalism went on other
lines. At no time was the proletariat of Paris otherwise than largely
Voltairean after the Revolution, of which one of the great services
(carried on by Napoleon) was an improvement in popular education. The
rival non-Christian systems of Saint-Simon (1760-1823) and Auguste
Comte (1798-1857) also never took any practical hold among them;
but throughout the century they have been fully the most freethinking
working-class population in the world.
As to Fourier see the OEuvres Choisies de Fourier, ed. Ch. Gide,
pp. 1-3, 9. Cp. Solidarité: Vue Synthétique sur la doctrine de
Ch. Fourier, par Hippolyte Renaud, 3e édit. 1846, ch. i: "Pour
ramener l'homme à la foi" [en Dieu], writes Renaud, "il faut lui
offrir aujourd'hui une foi complète et composée, une foi solidement
assise sur le témoignage de la raison. Pour cela il faut que la
flambeau de la science dissipe toutes les obscurités" (p. 9). This
is not propitious to dogma; but Fourier planned and promised
to leave priests and ministers undisturbed in his new world,
and even declared religions to be "much superior to uncertain
sciences." Gide, introd. to OEuvres Choisies, pp. xxii-xxiii,
citing Manuscrits, vol. de 1853-1856, p. 293. Cp. Dr. Ch. Pellarin,
Fourier, sa vie et sa théorie, 5e édit. p. 143.
Saint-Simon, who proposed a "new Christianity," expressly guarded
against direct appeals to the people. See Weil, Saint-Simon et
son OEuvre, 1894, p. 193. As to the Saint-Simonian sect, see an
interesting testimony by Renan, Les Apôtres, p. 148.
The generation after the fall of Napoleon was pre-eminently the period
of new schemes of society; and it is noteworthy that they were all
non-Christian, though all, including even Owen's, claimed to provide
a "religion," and the French may seem all to have been convinced by
Napoleon's practice that some kind of cult must be provided for the
peoples. Owen alone rejected alike supernaturalism and cultus; and
his movement left the most definite rationalistic traces. All seem
to have been generated by the double influence of (1) the social
failure of the French Revolution, which left so many anxious for
another and better effort at reconstruction, and (2) of the spectacle
of the rule of Napoleon, which seems to have elicited new ideals of
beneficent autocracy. Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Comte were all
alike would-be founders of a new society or social religion. It seems
probable that this proclivity to systematic reconstruction, in a world
which still carried a panic-memory of one great social overturn, helped
to lengthen the rule of orthodoxy. Considerably more progress was made
when freethought became detached from special plans of polity, and
grew up anew by way of sheer truth-seeking on all the lines of inquiry.
In France, however, the freethinking tradition from the eighteenth
century never passed away, at least as regards the life of the great
towns. And while Napoleon III made it his business to conciliate the
Church, which in the person of the somewhat latitudinarian Darboy,
Archbishop of Paris, had endorsed his coup d'état of 1851, [1708]
even under his rule the irreversible movement of freethought revealed
itself among his own ministers. Victor Duruy, the eminent historian,
his energetic Minister of Education, was a freethinker, non-aggressive
towards the Church, but perfectly determined not to permit aggression
by it. [1709] And when the Church, in its immemorial way, declaimed
against all forms of rationalistic teaching in the colleges, and
insisted on controlling the instruction in all the schools, [1710]
his firm resistance made him one of its most hated antagonists. Even
in the Senate, then the asylum of all forms of antiquated thought and
prejudice, Duruy was able to carry his point against the prelates,
Sainte-Beuve strongly and skilfully supporting him. [1711] Thus in
the France of the Third Empire, on the open field of the educational
battle-ground between faith and reason, the rationalistic advance
was apparent in administration no less than in the teaching of the
professed men of science and the polemic of the professed critics
of religion.
10. In other Catholic countries the course of popular culture in
the first half of the century was not greatly dissimilar to that
seen in France, though less rapid and expansive. Thus we find the
Spanish Inquisitor-General in 1815 declaring that "all the world
sees with horror the rapid progress of unbelief," and denouncing
"the errors and the new and dangerous doctrines" which have passed
from other countries to Spain. [1712] This evolution was to some
extent checked; but in the latter half of the century, especially
in the last thirty years, all the Catholic countries of Europe were
more or less permeated with demotic freethought, usually going hand
in hand with republican or socialistic propaganda in politics. It is
indeed a significant fact that freethought propaganda is often most
active in countries where the Catholic Church is most powerful. Thus
in Belgium there are at least three separate federations, standing
for hundreds of freethinking "groups"; in Spain, a few years ago,
there were freethought societies in all the large towns, and at
least half-a-dozen freethought journals; in Portugal there have
been a number of societies--a weekly journal, O Secolo, of Lisbon,
and a monthly review, O Livre Exame. In France and Italy, where
educated society is in large measure rationalistic, the Masonic
lodges do most of the personal and social propaganda; but there are
federations of freethought societies in both countries. In Switzerland
freethought is more aggressive in the Catholic than in the Protestant
cantons. [1713] In the South American republics, again, as in Italy
and France, the Masonic lodges are predominantly freethinking; and in
Peru there was, a few years ago, a Freethought League, with a weekly
organ. As long ago as 1856 the American diplomatist and archæologist,
Squier, wrote that, "Although the people of Honduras, in common with
those of Central America in general, are nominally Catholics, yet,
among those capable of reflection or possessed of education, there
are more who are destitute of any fixed creed--Rationalists or, as
they are sometimes called, Freethinkers, than adherents of any form
of religion." [1714] That the movement is also active in the other
republics of the southern continent may be inferred from the facts
that a Positivist organization has long subsisted in Brazil; that its
members were active in the peaceful revolution which there substituted
a republic for a monarchy; and that at the Freethought Congresses of
Rome and Paris in 1904 and 1905 there was an energetic demand for a
Congress at Buenos Aires, which was finally agreed to for 1906.
While popular propaganda is hardly possible save on political lines,
freethinking journalism has counted for much in the most Catholic parts
of Southern Europe. The influence of such journals is to be measured
not by their circulation, which is never great, but by their keeping up
a habit of more or less instructed freethinking among readers, to many
of whom the instruction is not otherwise easily accessible. Probably
the least ambitious of them is an intellectual force of a higher order
than the highest grade of popular religious journalism; while some of
the stronger, as De Dageraad of Amsterdam, have ranked as high-class
serious reviews. In the more free and progressive countries, however,
freethought affects all periodical literature; and in France it partly
permeates the ordinary newspapers. In England, where a series of
monthly or weekly publications of an emphatically freethinking sort
has been nearly continuous from about 1840, [1715] new ones rising
in place of those which succumbed to the commercial difficulties,
such periodicals suffer an economic pinch in that they cannot hope
for much income from advertisements, which are the chief sustenance
of popular journals and magazines. The same law holds elsewhere; but
in England and America the high-priced reviews have been gradually
opened to rationalistic articles, the way being led by the English
Westminster Review [1716] and Fortnightly Review, both founded with
an eye to freer discussion.
Among the earlier freethinking periodicals may be noted The
Republican, 1819-26 (edited by Carlile); The Deist's Magazine,
1820; The Lion, 1828 (Carlile); The Prompter, 1830 (Carlile);
The Gauntlet, 1833 (Carlile); The Atheist and Republican, 1841-42;
The Blasphemer, 1842; The Oracle of Reason (founded by Southwell),
1842, etc.; The Reasoner and Herald of Progress (largely conducted
by Holyoake), 1846-1861; Cooper's Journal; or, unfettered
Thinker, etc., 1850, etc.; The Movement, 1843; The Freethinker's
Information for the People (undated: after 1840); Freethinker's
Magazine, 1850, etc.; London Investigator, 1854, etc. Bradlaugh's
National Reformer, begun in 1860, lasted till 1893. Mr. Foote's
Freethinker, begun in 1881, still subsists. Various freethinking
monthlies have risen and fallen since 1880--e.g., Our Corner,
edited by Mrs. Besant, 1883-88; The Liberal and Progress, edited
by Mr. Foote, 1879-87; the Free Review, transformed into the
University Magazine, 1893-1898. The Reformer, a monthly, edited by
Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner, subsisted from 1897 to 1904. The Literary
Guide, which began as a small sheet in 1885, flourishes. Since
1900, a popular Socialist journal, The Clarion, has declared for
rationalism through the pen of its editor, Mr. R. Blatchford
("Nunquam"), whose polemic has caused much controversy. For a
generation back, further, rationalistic essays have appeared
from time to time not only in the Fortnightly Review (founded
by G. H. Lewes, and long edited by Mr. John (now Lord) Morley,
much of whose writing on the French philosophes appeared in its
pages), but in the Nineteenth Century, wherein was carried on,
for instance, the famous controversy between Mr. Gladstone and
Prof. Huxley. In the early 'seventies, the Cornhill Magazine,
under the editorship of Leslie Stephen, issued serially Matthew
Arnold's Literature and Dogma and St. Paul and Protestantism. In
the latter years of the century quite a number of reviews, some of
them short-lived, gave space to advanced opinions. But propaganda
has latterly become more and more a matter of all-pervading
literary influence, the immense circulation of the sixpenny
reprints of the R. P. A. having put the advanced literature of
the last generation within the reach of all.
11. In Germany, as we have seen, the relative selectness of culture,
the comparative aloofness of the "enlightened" from the mass of the
people, made possible after the War of Independence a certain pietistic
reaction, in the absence of any popular propagandist machinery
or purpose on the side of the rationalists. In the opinion of an
evangelical authority, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
"through modern enlightenment (Aufklärung) the people had become
indifferent to the Church; the Bible was regarded as a merely human
book, the Saviour merely as a person who had lived and taught long ago,
not as one whose almighty presence is with his people still." [1717]
According to the same authority, "before the war, the indifference to
the word of God which prevailed among the upper classes had penetrated
to the lower; but after it, a desire for the Scriptures was everywhere
felt." [1718] This involves an admission that the "religion of the
heart" propounded by Schleiermacher in his addresses On Religion
"to the educated among its despisers" [1719] (1799) was not really a
Christian revival at all. Schleiermacher himself in 1803 declared that
in Prussia there was almost no attendance on public worship, and the
clergy had fallen into profound discredit. [1720] A pietistic movement
had, however, begun during the period of the French ascendancy; [1721]
and seeing that the freethinking of the previous generation had been
in part associated with French opinion, it was natural that on this
side anti-French feeling should promote a reversion to older and more
"national" forms of feeling. Thus after the fall of Napoleon the tone
of the students who had fought in the war seems to have been more
religious than that of previous years. [1722] Inasmuch, however, as
the "enlightenment" of the scholarly class was maintained, and applied
anew to critical problems, the religious revival did not turn back the
course of progress. "When the third centenary commemoration, in 1817,
of the Reformation approached, the Prussian people were in a state
of stolid indifference, apparently, on religious matters." [1723]
Alongside of the pietistic reaction of the Liberation period there
went on an open ecclesiastical strife, dating from an anti-rationalist
declaration by the Court preacher Reinhard at Dresden in 1811, [1724]
between the rationalists or "Friends of Light" and the Scripturalists
of the old school; and the effect was a general disintegration of
orthodoxy, despite, or it may be largely in virtue of, the governmental
policy of rewarding the Pietists and discouraging their opponents
in the way of official appointments. [1725] The Prussian measure
(1817) of forcibly uniting the Lutheran and Calvinistic Churches,
with a neutral sacramental ritual in which the eucharist was treated
as a historical commemoration, tended to the same consequences,
though it also revived old Lutheran zeal; [1726] and when the
new revolutionary movement broke out in 1848, popular feeling was
substantially non-religious. "In the south of Germany especially
the conflict of political opinions and revolutionary tendencies
produced, in the first instance, an entire prostration of religious
sentiment." The bulk of society showed entire indifference to worship,
the churches being everywhere deserted; and "atheism was openly avowed,
and Christianity ridiculed as the invention of priestcraft." [1727]
One result was a desperate effort of the clergy to "effect a union
among all who retained any measure of Christian belief, in order to
raise up their national religion and faith from the lowest state into
which it has ever fallen since the French Revolution."
But the clerical effort evoked a counter effort. Already, in 1846,
official interference with freedom of utterance led to the formation
of a "free religious" society by Dr. Rupp, of Königsberg, one of
the "Friends of Light" in the State Church; and he was followed by
Wislicenus of Halle, a Hegelian, and by Uhlich of Magdeburg. [1728]
As a result of the determined pressure, social and official, which
ensued on the collapse of the revolution of 1848, these societies
failed to develop on the scale of their beginnings; and that of
Magdeburg, which at the outset had 7,000 members, has latterly
only 500; though that of Berlin has nearly 4,000. [1729] There is
further a Freidenker Bund, with branches in many towns; and the two
organizations, with their total membership of some fifty thousand,
may be held to represent the militant side of popular freethought
in Germany. This, however, constitutes only a fraction of the
total amount of passive rationalism. There is a large measure of
enlightenment in both the working and the middle classes; and the
ostensible force of orthodoxy among the official and conformist
middle class is in many respects illusory. The German police laws
put a rigid check on all manner of platform and press propaganda
which could be indicted as hurting the feelings of religious people;
so that a jest at the Holy Coat of Trèves could even in recent years
send a journalist to jail, and the platform work of the militant
societies is closely trammelled. Yet there are, or have been, over
a dozen journals which so far as may be take the freethought side;
[1730] and the whole stress of Bismarckian reaction and of official
orthodoxy under the present Kaiser has never availed to make the tone
of popular thought pietistic. Karl Marx, the prophet of the German
Socialist movement (1818-1883), laid it down as part of its mission
"to free consciousness from the religious spectre"; and his two most
influential followers in Germany, Bebel and Liebknecht, were avowed
atheists, the former even going so far as to avow officially in the
Reichstag that "the aim of our party is on the political plane the
republican form of State; on the economic, Socialism; and on the plane
which we term the religious, atheism"; [1731] though the party attempts
no propaganda of the latter order. "Christianity and Social-Democracy,"
said Bebel again, "are opposed as fire and water." [1732]
Some index to the amount of popular freethought that normally exists
under the surface in Germany is furnished, further, by the strength of
the German freethought movement in the United States, where, despite
the tendency to the adoption of the common speech, there grew up in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century many German freethinking
societies, a German federation of atheists, and a vigorous popular
organ, Der Freidenker.
Thus, under the sounder moral and economic conditions of the life of
the proletariate in Germany, straightforward rationalism, as apart
from propaganda, is becoming among them more and more the rule. The
bureaucratic control of education forces religious teaching in the
common schools; and there is no "conscience clause" for unbelieving
parents. [1733] A Protestant pastor at the end of the century made
an investigation into the state of religious opinion among the
working Socialists of some provincial towns and rural districts,
and found everywhere a determined attitude of rationalism. The
formula of the Social Democrats, "Religion is a private matter," he
bitterly perceives to carry the implication "a private matter for the
fools"; and while he holds that the belief in a speedy collapse of
the Christian religion is latterly less common than formerly among
the upper and middle classes, he complains that the Socialists are
not similarly enlightened. [1734] Bebel's drastic teaching as to the
economic and social conditions of the rise of Christianity, [1735]
and the materialistic theory of history set forth by Marx and Engels,
he finds generally accepted. Not only do most of the party leaders
declare themselves to be without religion, but those who do not so
declare themselves are so no less. [1736] Nor is the unbelief a mere
sequel to the Socialism: often the development is the other way. [1737]
The opinion is almost universal, further, that the clergy in general
do not believe what they teach. [1738] Atheists are numerous among the
peasantry; more numerous among the workers in the provincial towns;
and still more numerous in the large towns; [1739] and while many take
a sympathetic view of Jesus as a man and teacher, not a few deny his
historic existence [1740]--a view set forth in non-Socialist circles
also. [1741]
12. Under the widely-different political conditions in Russia and
the Scandinavian States it is the more significant that in all alike
rationalism is latterly common among the educated classes. In Norway
the latter perhaps include a larger proportion of working people
than can be so classed even in Germany; and rationalism is relatively
hopeful, though social freedom is still far from perfect. It is the
old story of toleration for a dangerously well-placed freethought,
and intolerance for that which reaches the common people. In Russia
rationalism has before it the task of transmuting a system of autocracy
into one of self-government. In no European country, perhaps, is
rationalism more general among the educated classes; and in none
is there a greater mass of popular ignorance. [1742] The popular
icon-worship in Moscow can hardly be paralleled outside of Asia. On
the other hand, the aristocracy became Voltairean in the eighteenth
century, and has remained more or less incredulous since, though it
now joins hands with the Church; while the democratic movement, in its
various phases of socialism, constitutionalism, and Nihilism, has been
markedly anti-religious since the second quarter of the century. [1743]
Subsidiary revivals of mysticism, such as are chronicled in other
countries, are of course to be seen in Russia; but the instructed
class, the intelliguentia, is essentially naturalistic in its cast of
thought. This state of things subsists despite the readiness of the
government to suppress the slightest sign of official heterodoxy in
the universities. [1744] The struggle is thus substantially between
the spirit of freedom and that of arbitrary rule; and the fortunes
of freethought go with the former.
13. "Free-religious" societies, such as have been noted in Germany,
may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propaganda, and
are to be found in all Protestant countries, with all shades of
development. A movement of the kind has existed for a number of
years back in America, in the New England States and elsewhere,
and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic thought too
advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which during the two
middle quarters of the century was perhaps the predominant creed
in New England. The Theistic Church conducted by the Rev. Charles
Voysey after his expulsion from the Church of England in 1871 to
his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh, is
an example. Another type of such a gradual and peaceful evolution
is the South Place Institute (formerly "Chapel") of London, where,
under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally a Unitarian, there was
preached between 1824 and 1852 a theism tending to pantheism, perhaps
traceable to elements in the doctrine of Priestley, and passed on by
Mr. Fox to Robert Browning. [1745] In 1864 the charge passed to Moncure
D. Conway, under whom the congregation quietly advanced during twenty
years from Unitarianism to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing
the shades of philosophic theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In
Conway's Lessons for the Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid
mementos of that period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any
retrospective record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved
in one of the most interesting autobiographies of the century, was
spent between England and the United States and in travel. After
his first withdrawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an
open platform for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social
and historical teaching, and it now stands as an "Ethical Society" in
touch with the numerous groups so named which have come into existence
in England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by
Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing the
English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty, the
majority being in London and its environs. Their open adherents, who
are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-theistic rationalists,
and include many former members of the Secularist movement, of which
the organization has latterly dwindled. On partly similar lines there
were developed in provincial towns about the end of the century
a small number of "Labour Churches," in which the tendency was to
substitute a rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism;
and the same lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and
from those of Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however,
the Labour Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no
resumption of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches,
a completer secularization of the Sunday.
14. Alongside of the lines of movement before sketched, there has
subsisted in England during the greater part of the nineteenth century
a considerable organization of Unitarianism. In the early years of
the nineteenth century it was strong enough to obtain the repeal
(1813) of the penal laws against anti-Trinitarianism, whereafter the
use of the name "Unitarian" became more common, and a sect so called
was founded formally in 1825. When the heretical preachers of the
Presbyterian sect began openly to declare themselves as Unitarians,
there naturally arose a protest from the orthodox, and an attempt
was made in 1833 to save from its new destination the property owned
by the heretical congregations. [1746] This was frustrated by the
Dissenters' Chapels Act of 1844, which gave to each group singly the
power to interpret its trust in its own fashion. Thenceforward the
sect prospered considerably, albeit not so greatly as in the United
States. During the century English Unitarianism has been associated
with scholarship through such names as John Kenrick and Samuel Sharpe,
the historians of Egypt, and J. J. Tayler; and, less directly, with
philosophy in the person of Dr. James Martineau, who, however, was
rather a coadjutor than a champion of the sect. In the United States
the movement, greatly aided to popularity by the eloquent humanism of
the two Channings, lost the prestige of the name of Emerson, who had
been one of its ministers, by the inability of his congregation to go
the whole way with him in his opinions. In 1853 Emerson told the young
Moncure Conway that "the Unitarian Churches were stated to be no longer
producing ministers equal to their forerunners, but were more and more
finding their best men in those coming from orthodox Churches," who
"would, of course, have some enthusiasm for their new faith." [1747]
Latterly Unitarians have been entitled to say that the Trinitarian
Churches are approximating to their position. [1748] Such an approach,
however, involves rather a weakening than a strengthening of the
smaller body; though some of its teachers are to the full as bigoted
and embittered in their propaganda as the bulk of the traditionally
orthodox. Others adhere to their ritual practices in the spirit of
use and wont, as Emerson found when he sought to rationalize in his
own Church the usage of the eucharist. [1749] On the other hand,
numbers have passed from Unitarianism to thoroughgoing rationalism;
and some whole congregations, following more or less the example of
that of South Place Chapel, have latterly reached a position scarcely
distinguishable from that of the Ethical Societies.
15. A partly similar evolution has taken place among the Protestant
Churches of France, Switzerland, Hungary, and Holland. French
Protestantism could not but be intellectually moved by the intense
ferment of the Revolution; and, when finally secured against
active oppression from the Catholic side, could not but develop
an intellectual opposition to the Catholic Reaction after 1815. In
Switzerland, always in intellectual touch with France and Germany,
the tendencies which had been stamped as Socinian in the days
of Voltaire soon reasserted themselves so strongly as to provoke
fanatical reaction. [1750] The nomination of Strauss to a chair of
theology at Zürich by a Radical Government in 1839 actually gave rise
to a violent revolt, inflamed and led by Protestant clergymen. The
Executive Council were expelled, and a number of persons killed in
the strife. [1751] In the canton of Aargau in 1841, again, the cry of
"religion in danger" sufficed to bring about a Catholic insurrection
against a Liberal Council; and yet again in 1844 it led, among the
Catholics of the Valais canton, to the bloodiest insurrection of
all. Since these disgraceful outbreaks the progress of Rationalism
in Switzerland has been steady. In 1847 a chair was given at Berne
to the rationalistic scholar Zeller, without any such resistance
as was made to Strauss at Zürich. In 1892, out of a total number
of 3,151 students in the five universities of Switzerland and in
the academies of Fribourg and Neuchâtel, the number of theological
students was only 374, positively less than that of the teaching
staff, which was 431. Leaving out the academies named, which had
no medical faculty, the number of theological students stood at
275 out of 2,917. The Church in Switzerland has thus undergone the
relative restriction in power and prestige seen in the other European
countries of long-established culture. The evolution, however, remains
negative rather than positive. Though a number of pastors latterly
call themselves libres penseurs or penseurs libres, and a movement
of ethical culture (morale sociale) has made progress, the forces of
positive freethought are not numerically strong. An economic basis
still supports the Churches, and the lack of it leaves rationalism
non-aggressive. [1752]
A somewhat similar state of things exists in Holland, where the
"higher criticism" of both the Old and New Testaments made notable
progress in the middle decades of the century. There then resulted not
only an extensive decay of orthodoxy within the Protestant Church,
but a movement of aggressive popular freethought, which was for a
number of years well represented in journalism. To-day, orthodoxy
and freethought are alike less demonstrative; the broad explanation
being that the Dutch people in the mass has ceased to be pietistic,
and has secularized its life. Even in the Bible-loving Boer Republic
of South Africa (Transvaal), in its time one of the most orthodox of
the civilized communities of the world, there was seen in the past
generation the phenomenon of an agnostic ex-clergyman's election to
the post of president, in the person of T. F. Burgers, who succeeded
Pretorius in 1871. His election was of course on political and not on
religious grounds; and panic fear on the score of his heresy, besides
driving some fanatics to emigrate, is said to have disorganized a
Boer expedition under his command; [1753] but his views were known
when he was elected. In the years 1899-1902 the terrible experience of
the last Boer War, in South Africa as in Britain, perhaps did more to
turn critical minds against supernaturalism than was accomplished by
almost any other agency in the same period. In Britain the overturn
was by way of the revolt of many ethically-minded Christians against
the attitude of the orthodox churches, which were so generally
and so unscrupulously belligerent as to astonish many even of their
freethinking opponents. [1754] As regards the Boers and the Cape Dutch
the resultant unbelief was among the younger men, who harassed their
elders with challenges as to the justice or the activity of a God
who permitted the liberties of his most devoted worshippers to be
wantonly destroyed. Among the more educated burghers in the Orange
Free State commandos unbelief asserted itself with increasing force
and frequency. [1755] An ethical rationalism thus motived is not
likely to be displaced; and the Christian churches of Britain have
thus the sobering knowledge that the war which they so vociferously
glorified [1756] has wrought to the discredit of their creed alike
in their own country and among the vanquished.
16. The history of popular freethought in Sweden yields a good
illustration, in a compact form, [1757] of the normal play of
forces and counter-forces. Since the day of Christina, as we saw,
though there have been many evidences of passive unbelief, active
rationalism has been little known in her kingdom down till modern
times, Sweden as a whole having been little touched by the great
ferment of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution, however,
stirred the waters there as elsewhere. Tegnér, the poet-bishop,
author of the once-famous Frithiof's Saga, was notable in his day
for a determined rejection of the evangelical doctrine of salvation;
and his letters contain much criticism of the ruling system. But the
first recognizable champion of freethought in Sweden is the thinker
and historian E. G. Geijer (d. 1847), whose history of his native
land is one of the best European performances of his generation. In
1820 he was prosecuted for his attack upon the dogmas of the Trinity
and redemption--long the special themes of discussion in Sweden--in
his book Thorild; but was acquitted by the jury. Thenceforth Sweden
follows the general development of Europe. In 1841 Strauss's Leben
Jesu was translated in Swedish, and wrought its usual effect. On the
popular side the poet Wilhelm von Braun carried on an anti-Biblical
warfare; and a blacksmith in a provincial town contrived to
print in 1850 a translation of Paine's Age of Reason. Once more
the spirit of persecution blazed forth, and he was prosecuted and
imprisoned. H. B. Palmaer (d. 1854) was likewise prosecuted for his
satire, The Last Judgment in Cocaigne (Kräkwinkel), with the result
that his defence extended his influence. In the same period the
Stockholm curate Nils Ignell (d. 1864) produced a whole series of
critical pamphlets and a naturalistic History of the Development of
Man, besides supplying a preface to the Swedish translation of Renan's
Vie de Jésus. Meantime translations of the works of Theodore Parker,
by V. Pfeiff and A. F. Akerberg, had a large circulation and a wide
influence; and the courage of the gymnasium rector N. J. Cramer
(d. 1893), author of The Farewell to the Church, gave an edge to
the movement. The partly rationalistic doctrine of Victor Rydberg
(d. 1895) was in comparison uncritical, and was proportionally popular.
On another line the books of Dr. Nils Lilja (d. 1870), written for
working people, created a current of rationalism among the masses;
and in the next generation G. J. Leufstedt maintained it by popular
lectures and by the issue of translations of Colenso, Ingersoll,
Büchner, and Renan. Hjalmar Stromer (d. 1886) did similar platform
work. Meantime the followers of Parker and Rydberg founded in 1877
a monthly review, The Truthseeker, which lasted till 1894, and an
association of "Believers in Reason," closely resembling the British
Ethical Societies of our own day. Among its leading adherents has been
K. P. Arnoldson, the well-known peace advocate. Liberal clerics were
now fairly numerous; Positivism, represented by Dr. Anton Nyström's
General History of Civilization, played its part; and the more radical
freethinking movement, nourished by new translations, became specially
active, with the usual effect on orthodox feeling. August Strindberg,
author and lecturer, was prosecuted in 1884 on a charge of ridiculing
the eucharist, but was declared not guilty. The strenuous Victor
Lennstrand, lecturer and journalist, prosecuted in 1888 and later
for his anti-Christian propaganda, was twice fined and imprisoned,
with the result of extending his influence and discrediting his
opponents. "Utilitarian Associations," created by his activity,
were set up in many parts of the country; and his movement survives
his death.
17. Only in the United States has the public lecture platform been
made a means of propaganda to anything like the extent seen in Britain;
and the greatest part of the work in the States has thus far been done
by the late Colonel Ingersoll, the leading American orator of the last
generation, and the most widely influential platform propagandist of
the last century. No other single freethinker, it is believed, has
reached such an audience by public speech; and between his propaganda
and that of the freethought journals there has been maintained for
a generation back a large body of vigorous freethinking opinion in
all parts of the States. Before the Civil War this could hardly
be said. In the middle decades of the century the conditions had
been so little changed that after the death of President Lincoln,
who was certainly a non-Christian deist, and an agnostic deist at
that, [1758] it was sought to be established that he was latterly
orthodox. In his presidential campaign of 1860 he escaped attack on
his opinions simply because his opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, was
likewise an unbeliever. [1759] The great negro orator, Frederick
Douglas, was as heterodox as Lincoln. [1760] It is even alleged
that President Grant [1761] was of the same cast of opinion. Such
is the general drift of intelligent thought in the United States,
from Washington onwards; and still the social conditions impose
on public men the burden of concealment, while popular history is
garbled for the same reasons. Despite the great propagandist power of
the late Colonel Ingersoll, therefore, American freethought remains
dependent largely on struggling organizations and journals, [1762]
and its special literature is rather of the popularizing than of the
scholarly order. Nowhere else has every new advance of rationalistic
science been more angrily opposed by the priesthood; because nowhere is
the ordinary prejudice of the priest more voluble or better-bottomed in
self-complacency. As late as 1891 the Methodist Bishop Keener delivered
a ridiculous attack on the evolution theory before the OEcumenical
Council of Methodism at Washington, declaring that it had been utterly
refuted by a certain "wonderful deposit of the Ashley beds." [1763]
Various professors in ecclesiastical colleges have been driven from
their posts for accepting in turn the discoveries of geology, biology,
and the "higher criticism"--for instance, Woodrow of Columbia, South
Carolina; Toy of Louisville; Winchell of Vanderbilt University; and
more than one professor in the American college at Beyrout. [1764]
In every one of the three former cases, it is true, the denounced
professor has been called to a better chair; and latterly some of
the more liberal clergy have even commercially exploited the higher
criticism by producing the "Rainbow Bible." Generally speaking,
however, in the United States sheer preoccupation with business,
and lack of leisure, counteract in a measure the relative advantage
of social freedom; and while culture is more widely diffused than
in England, it remains on the whole less radical in the "educated"
classes so-called. So far as it is possible to make a quantitative
estimate, it may be said that in the more densely populated parts of
the States there is latterly less of studious freethinking because
there is less leisure than in England; but that in the Western States
there is a relative superiority, class for class, because of the
special freedom of the conditions and the independent character of
many of the immigrants who constitute the new populations. [1765]
Section 2.--Biblical Criticism
It is within the last generation that the critical analysis of the
Jewish and Christian sacred books has been most generally carried on;
but the process has never been suspended since the German Aufklärung
arose on the stimuli of English and French deism.
1. At the beginning of the century, educated men in general
believed in the Semitic myths of creation, as given in Genesis:
long before the end of it they had more or less explicitly
rectified their beliefs in the light of new natural science and
new archæology. The change became rapid after 1860; but it had
been led up to even in the period of reaction. While in France,
under the restored monarchy, rationalistic activity was mainly
headed into historical, philosophical, and sociological study,
and in England orthodoxy predominated in theological discussion,
the German rationalistic movement went on among the specialists,
despite the liberal religious reaction of Schleiermacher, [1766]
who himself gave forth such an uncertain sound. His case and that of
his father, an army chaplain, tell signally of the power of the mere
clerical occupation to develop a species of emotional belief in one who
has even attained rationalism. When the son, trained for the church,
avowed to his father (1787) that he had lost faith in the supernatural
Jesus, the father professed to mourn bitterly, but three years later
avowed that he in his own youth had preached Christianity for twelve
years while similarly disbelieving its fundamental tenet. [1767] He
professionally counselled compromise, which the son duly practised,
with such success that, whereas he originally addressed his Discourses
on Religion (1799) to "the educated among its despisers," he was able
to say in the preface to the third edition, twenty years later (1821),
that the need now was to reason with the pietists and literalists, the
ignorant and bigoted, the credulous and superstitious. [1768] In short,
he and others had been able to set up a fashion of poetic religion
among deists, but not to lighten the darkness of orthodox belief.
The ostensible religious revival associated with Schleiermacher's
name was in fact a reaction of temperament, akin to the romantic
movement in literature, of which Chateaubriand in France was the
exponent as regarded religious feeling. The German "rationalism"
of the latter part of the eighteenth century, with its stolid
translation of the miraculous into the historical, and its official
accommodation of the result to the purposes of the pulpit, had not
reached any firm scientific foundation; and Schleiermacher on the other
side, protesting that religion was a matter not of knowledge but of
feeling, attracted alike the religious emotionalists, the seekers of
compromise, and the romantics. His personal and literary charm, and
his tolerance of mundane morals, gave him a German vogue not unlike
that of Chateaubriand in France. His intellectual cast and ultimate
philosophic bias, however, together with his freedom of private life,
[1769] ultimately alienated him from the orthodox, and thus it was that
he died (1834) in the odour of heresy. Heresy, in fact, he had preached
from the outset; and it was only in a highly emancipated society that
his teaching could have been fashionable. The statement that by his
Discourses "with one stroke he overthrew the card-castle of rationalism
and the old fortress of orthodoxy" [1770] is literally quite false,
for the old compromising pseudo-rationalism survived a long while,
and orthodoxy still longer; and it is quite misleading inasmuch as
it suggests a resurgence of faith. The same historian proceeds to
record that some saw in the work "only a slightly disguised return
to superstition, and others a brilliant confession of unbelief." "The
general public saw in the Discourses a new assault of romanticism upon
religion. The clergy in particular were painfully aroused, and did not
dissemble their irritation. Spalding himself could not restrain his
anger." Schleiermacher's friend Sach, who had passed the Discourses
in manuscript, woke up to denounce them as unchristian, pantheistic,
and denuded of the ideas of God, immortality, and morality. [1771]
In England the work would have been so denounced on all sides; and
the bulk of Schleiermacher's teaching would there have been reckoned
revolutionary and "godless." He was a lover of both political and
social freedom; and in his Two Memoranda on the Church Question in
regard to Prussia (1803) he made "a veritable declaration of war on the
clerical spirit." [1772] Recognizing that ecclesiastical discipline
had reached a low ebb, he even proposed that civil marriage should
precede religious marriage, and be alone obligatory; besides planning a
drastic subjection of the Prussian Church to State regulation. [1773]
In his pamphlet on The So-called Epistle to Timothy, of which he
denied the authenticity, he played the part of a "destructive"
critic. [1774] He "saw with pain the approach of the rising tide of
confessionalism"--that is, the movement for an exact statement of
creed. [1775] Nor can it be said that, despite his attempts in later
life to reach a more definite theology, Schleiermacher really held
firmly any Christian or even theistic dogma. He seems to have been
at bottom a pantheist; [1776] and the secret of his attraction for
so many German preachers and theologians then and since is that he
offered them in eloquent and moving diction a kind of profession of
faith which avoided alike the fatal undertaking of the old religious
rationalism to reduce the sacred narratives to terms of reason, and
the dogged refusal of orthodoxy to admit that there was anything to
explain away. Philosophically and critically speaking, his teaching
has no lasting intellectual substance, being first a negation of
intellectual tests and then a belated attempt to apply them. It is not
even original, being a development from Rousseau and Lessing. But it
had undoubtedly a freeing and civilizing influence for many years; and
it did little harm save insofar as it fostered the German proclivity to
the nebulous in thought and language, and partly encouraged the normal
resistance to the critical spirit. All irrationalism, to be sure, in
some sort spells self-will and lawlessness; but the orthodox negation
of reason was far more primitive than Schleiermacher's. From that side,
accordingly, he never had any sympathy. When, soon after his funeral,
in which his coffin was borne and followed by troops of students,
his church was closed to the friends who wished there to commemorate
him, it was fairly clear that his own popularity lay mainly with the
progressive spirits, and not among the orthodox; and in the end his
influence tended to merge in that of the critical movement. [1777]
2. Gradually that had developed a greater precision of method,
though there were to be witnessed repetitions of the intellectual
anomalies of the past, so-called rationalists losing the way while
supernaturalists occasionally found it. It has been remarked by
Reuss that Paulus, a clerical "rationalist," fought for the Pauline
authorship of the Epistle to the Hebrews in the very year in which
Tholuck, a reconverted evangelical, gave up the Pauline authorship
as hopeless; that when Schleiermacher, ostensibly a believer in
inspiration, denied the authenticity of the Epistle to Timothy,
the [theological] rationalist Wegscheider opposed him; and that
the rationalistic Eichhorn maintained the Mosaic authorship of
the Pentateuch long after the supernaturalist Vater had disproved
it. [1778] Still the general movement was inevitably and irrevocably
rationalistic. Beginning with the Old Testament, criticism gradually
saw more and more of mere myth where of old men had seen miracle, and
where the first rationalists saw natural events misconceived. Soon the
process reached the New Testament, every successive step being resisted
in the old fashion; and much laborious work, now mostly forgotten,
was done by a whole company of scholars, among whom Paulus, Eichhorn,
De Wette, G. L. Bauer, Wegscheider, Bretschneider, and Gabler were
prominent. [1779] The train as it were exploded on the world in
the great Life of Jesus by Strauss (1835), a year after the death
of Schleiermacher.
This was in some respects the high-water mark of rational critical
science for the century, inasmuch as it represented the fullest use
of free judgment. The powerful and orderly mind of Strauss, working
systematically on a large body of previous unsystematic criticism,
produced something more massive and coherent than any previous writer
had achieved. It was not that he applied any new principle. Criticism
had long been slowly disengaging itself from the primary fallacy of
taking all scriptural records as standing for facts, and explaining
away the supernatural side. Step by step it was recognized that not
misinterpretation of events but mythology underlay much of the sacred
history. Already in 1799 an anonymous and almost unnoticed writer
[1780] had argued that the entire gospel story was a pre-existent
conception in the Jewish mind. In 1802 G. L. Bauer had produced
a treatise on Hebrew Mythology, [1781] in which not only was the
actuality of myth in Bible narrative insisted on, but the general
principle of animism in savage thought was clearly formulated. Semler
had seen that the stories of Samson and Esther were myths. Even
Eichhorn--who reduced all the Old Testament stories to natural
events misunderstood, accepted Noah and the patriarchs as historical
personages, and followed Bahrdt in making Moses light a fire on Mount
Sinai--changed his method on coming to the New Testament, and pointed
out that only indemonstrable hypotheses could be reached by turning
supernatural events into natural where there was no outside historical
evidence. Other writers--as Krug, Gabler, Kaiser, Wegscheider, and
Horst--ably pressed the mythical principle, some of them preceding
Bauer. The so-called "natural" theory--which was not at all that of the
"naturalists" but the specialty of the compromising "rationalists"--was
thus effectively shaken by a whole series of critics.
But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still
strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake
off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to
Abraham as standing for the patriarch's own prophetic anticipation,
set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up
the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to
the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of
the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical
principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them
oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in
its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions
of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus, [1782] the
"Christian Evêmeros"--who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid
of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed
to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank--was
still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher's Reden. The mythical
theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera--saga
and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth,
poetic myth--and the differences of the mythological school over
method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.
3. No less remarkable was the check to the few attempts which had
been made at clearing the ground by removing the Fourth Gospel from
the historical field. Lessing had taken this gospel as peculiarly
historical, as did Fichte and Schleiermacher and the main body of
critics after him. Only in England (by Evanson) had the case been more
radically handled. In 1820 Bretschneider, following up a few tentative
German utterances, put forth, by way of hypothesis, a general argument
[1783] to the effect that the whole presentment of Jesus in the Fourth
Gospel is irreconcilable with that of the Synoptics, that it could
not be taken as historical, and that it could not therefore be the
work of the Apostle John. [1784] The result was a general discussion
and a general rejection. The innovation in theory was too sudden for
assimilation: and Bretschneider, finding no support, later declared
that he had been "relieved of his doubts" by the discussion, and had
thus attained his object. Strauss himself, in his first Leben Jesu,
failed to realize the case; and it was not till the second (1863)
that he developed it, profiting by the intermediate work of F. C. Baur.
4. But as regards the gospel history in general, the first Leben
Jesu is a great "advance in force" as compared with all preceding
work. Himself holding undoubtingly to the vital assumption of the
rationalizing school that the central story of Jesus and the disciples
and the crucifixion was history, he yet applied the mythical principle
systematically to nearly all the episodes, handling the case with
the calmness of a great judge and the skill of a great critic. Even
Strauss, indeed, paid the penalty which seems so generally to attach
to the academic discipline--the lack of ultimate hold on life. After
showing that much of the gospel narrative was mere myth, and leaving
utterly problematical all the rest, he saw fit to begin and end with
the announcement that nothing really mattered--that the ideal Jesus
was unaffected by historic analysis, and that it was the ideal that
counted. [1785] In a world in which nine honest believers out of ten
held that the facts mattered everything, there could be no speedy or
practical triumph for a demonstration which thus announced its own
inutility. Strauss had achieved for New Testament criticism what Kant
and Fichte and Hegel had compassed for rational philosophy in general,
ostensibly proffering together bane and antidote. As in their case,
however, so in his, the truly critical work had an effect in despite
of the theoretic surrender. Among instructed men, historical belief
in the gospels has never been the same since Strauss wrote; and he
lived to figure for his countrymen as one of the most thoroughgoing
freethinkers of his age.
5. For a time there was undoubtedly "reaction," engineered with the
full power of the Prussian State in particular. The pious Frederick
William IV, already furious against Swiss Radicalism in 1847, was
moved by the revolutionary outbreaks of 1848 to a fierce repression
of everything liberal in theological teaching. "This dismal period of
Prussian history was the bloom-period of the Hengsterbergan theology"
[1786]--the school of rabid orthodoxy. In 1854, Eduard Zeller, bringing
out in book form his work on the Acts of the Apostles (originally
produced in the Tübingen Theological Journal, 1848-51), writes that
"The exertions of our ecclesiastics, assisted by political reaction,
have been so effectual that the majority of our theologians not only
look with suspicion or indifference on this or that scientific opinion,
but regard scientific knowledge in general with the same feelings";
and he leaves it an open question "whether time will bring a change, or
whether German Protestantism will stagnate in the Byzantine conditions
towards which it is now hastening with all sail on." [1787] For his own
part, Zeller abandoned the field of theology for that of philosophy,
producing a history of Greek philosophy, and one of German philosophy
since Leibnitz.
6. Another expert of Baur's school, Albrecht Schwegler, author of
works on Montanism, the Post-Apostolic Age, and other problems of early
Christian history, and of a Handbook of the History of Philosophy which
for half a century had an immense circulation, was similarly driven
out of theological research by the virulence of the reaction, [1788]
and turned to the task of Roman history, in which he distinguished
himself as he did in every other he essayed. The brains were being
expelled from the chairs of theology. But this very fact tended to
discredit the reaction itself; and outside of the Prussian sphere of
influence German criticism went actively on. Gustav Volkmar, turning
his back on Germany in 1854, settled in Switzerland, and in 1863 became
professor at Zürich, where he added to his early Religion Jesu (1857)
and other powerful works his treatises on the Origin of the Gospels
(1866), The Gospels (1869), Commentary on the Apocalypse (1860-65),
and Jesus Nazarenus (1881)--all stringent critical performances,
irreconcilable with orthodoxy. Elsewhere too there was a general
resumption of progress.
To this a certain contribution was made by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882),
who, after setting out as an orthodox Hegelian, outwent Strauss
in the opposite direction. In 1838, as a licentiate at Bonn, he
produced two volumes on The Religion of the Old Testament, in which
the only critical element is the notion of a "historical evolution
of revelation." Soon he had got beyond belief in revelation. In
1840 appeared his Critique of the Gospel History of John, and in
1841 his much more disturbing Critique of the Gospel History of the
Synoptics, wherein there is substituted for Strauss's formula of the
"community-mind" working on tradition, that of individual literary
construction. Weisse and Wilcke had convinced him that Mark was
the first gospel, and Wilcke in particular that it was no mere copy
of an oral tradition but an artistic construction. As he claimed,
this was a much more "positive" conception than Strauss's, which was
fundamentally "mysterious." [1789] Unfortunately, though he saw that
the new position involved the non-historicity of the Gospel Jesus,
he left his own historic conception "mysterious," giving no reason why
the "Urevangelist" framed his romance. Bauer was non-anthropological,
and left his theory as it began, one of an arbitrary construction by
gospel-makers. Immediately after his book appeared that of Ghillany
on Human Sacrifice among the ancient Hebrews (1842), which might have
given him clues; but they seem to have had for him no significance.
As it was, his book on the Synoptics raised a great storm; and when
the official request for the views of the university faculties as to
the continuance of his licence evoked varying answers, Bauer settled
the matter by a violent attack on professional theologians in general,
and was duly expelled. [1790] For the rest of his long life he was a
freelance, doing some relatively valid work on the Pauline problem,
but pouring out his turbid spirit in a variety of political writings,
figuring by turns as an anti-Semite (1843), a culture-historian,
[1791] and a pre-Bismarckian imperialist, despairing of German
unity, but looking hopefully to German absorption in a vast empire of
Russia. [1792] Naturally he found political happiness in 1870, [1793]
living on, a spent force, to do fresh books on Christian origins,
[1794] on German culture-history, and on the glories of imperialism.
7. In 1864, after an abstention of twenty years from discussion of
the problem, Strauss restated his case in a Life of Jesus, adapted for
the German People. Here, accepting the contention of F. C. Baur that
the proper line of inquiry was to settle the order of composition of
the synoptic gospels, and agreeing in Baur's view that Matthew came
first, he undertook to offer more of positive result than was reached
in his earlier research, which simply dealt scientifically with the
abundant elements of dubiety in the records. The new procedure was
really much less valid than the old. Baur had quite unwarrantably
decided that the Sermon on the Mount was one of the most certainly
genuine of the discourses ascribed to Jesus; [1795] and Strauss,
while exhibiting a reserve of doubt [1796] as to all "such speeches,"
nonetheless committed himself to the "certain" genuineness alike of
the Sermon and of the seven parables in the thirteenth chapter of
Matthew. [1797] Many scholars who continue to hold by the historicity
of Jesus have since recognized that the Sermon is no real discourse,
but a compilation of gnomic sayings or maxims previously current in
Jewish literature. [1798] Thus the certainties of Baur and Strauss pass
into the category of the cruder certainties which Strauss impugned;
and the latter left the life of Jesus an unsolved enigma after all
his analysis.
As he himself noted, the German New Testament criticism of the
previous twenty years had "run to seed" [1799] in a multitude of
treatises on the sources, aims, composition, and mutual relations of
the Synoptics, as if these were the final issues. They had settled
nothing; and after a lapse of fifty years the same problems are
being endlessly discussed. The scientific course for Strauss would
have been to develop more radically the method of his first Life:
failing to do this, he made no new contribution to the problem,
though he deftly enough indicated how little difference there was,
save in formula, between Baur's negations and his own.
Something of the explanation is to be detected in the sub-title,
"Adapted for the German People." From his first entrance into the
arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once
deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and
virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a
chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something
approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him
was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually
been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens
of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for
the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural
voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person
in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against
the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably
operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the
less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut
short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said,
the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for
theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual
process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to
establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin
to the old; and that the Germans, as the "people of the Reformation,"
would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion
of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit
of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself
fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book
had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his
maxim that "the true criticism of dogma is its history," is a sounder
performance. Strauss's avowed desire to write a book as suitable to
Germans as was Renan's Vie de Jésus to Frenchmen was something less
than scientific. The right book would be written for all nations.
Like most other Germans, Strauss exulted immensely over the war of
1870. In what is now recognized as the national manner, he wrote two
boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that whatsoever Germany
did was right, and whatsoever France did was wrong, and that the
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether just. These letters
form an important contribution to the vast cairn of self-praise
raised by latter-day German culture. But Strauss's literary life
ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare. After all his efforts
at popularity, and all his fraternization with his people on the
ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume of lectures on
Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the Princess Alice),
his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce a final "Confession,"
under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the
questions: "Are we still Christians?"; "Have we still religion?";
"How do we conceive the world?"; "How do we order our life?"; and it
answered them all in a calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense,
dismissing all that men commonly call religious belief. The book
as a whole is heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters,
"Of our Great Poets" and "Of our Great Musicians," which seem to
have been appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national
fraternity evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail
to conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all
their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite
committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical
atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months, and
crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany into
something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new engine of
strife and disintegration; and the aging author, shocked but steadied
by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a quatrain to himself,
ending: "In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end."
On the last day of the year he wrote an "afterword" summing up his work
and his position. He had not written, he declared, by way of contending
with opponents; he had sought rather to commune with those of his own
way of thinking; and to them, he felt, he had the right to appeal to
live up to their convictions, not compromising with other opinions,
and not adhering to any Church. For his "Confession" he anticipated
the thanks of a more enlightened future generation. "The time of
agreement," he concluded, "will come, as it came for the Leben Jesu;
only this time I shall not live to see it." [1800] A little more than
a year later (1874) he passed away.
It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had come as
to the first Leben Jesu. He was in fact convinced that all educated
men--at least in Germany--had ceased to believe in miracles and the
supernatural, however they might affect to conform to orthodoxy. And,
broadly speaking, this was true: all New Testament criticism of
any standing had come round to the naturalistic point of view. But,
as we have seen, the second Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching
a solid historical footing; and the generation which followed made
only a piecemeal and unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.
8. And it was long before even Strauss's early method of scientific
criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament
history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues
given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion
of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names
Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical
skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was
true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional
kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a
quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief. [1801]
Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some,
like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some,
like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most
original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods
and results. [1802] Thus, despite all the German activity, little
sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources,
between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of
the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication
of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch
(1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather
narrow believer, [1803] corrected the initial error of the German
specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests
suggested long before by Voltaire. [1804] That academic scholarship
thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the
"reverent" method, and in its aversion to the "irreverence" which
proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment
on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt
the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of
their flocks, the German theologians injured their own.
As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance
of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's
appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same
spirit sought to revert, even in "intellectually free" Germany, to
its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed
with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu;
[1805] and after a time those who shared his views were excluded
even from philosophical chairs. [1806] Later, the brochure in
which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents
(1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for
publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same
writer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life,
persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence
of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran
polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground
for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced
and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the
stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without
annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which
did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in
our day is German "expert" criticism beginning openly to reckon with
propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three
or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des
Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels,
in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of
the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of
Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited
pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year
pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other
Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included,
pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology
and myth. [1807] The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as
"F. Nork"), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely
speculative works, [1808] indicated many of the mythological elements
in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of
Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus. [1809]
When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant doctrine
was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious
history as Ghillany's Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842),
insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry,
and that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found
even fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching
ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by
Feuerbach. F. Daumer, [1810] who in 1842 published a treatise on the
same lines as Ghillany's (Der Feuer und Molochdienst), and followed it
up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as drastic,
wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion to a species
of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In France the genial
German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published, under the titles
of Qu'est ce que la Religion? and Qu'est ce que la Bible? (1850), two
volumes of very freely edited translations from Feuerbach, Daumer,
Ghillany, Lützelberger (on the simple humanity of Jesus), and Bruno
Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a publisher for years he had
produced the books at his own expense. He had, however, so mutilated
the originals as to make the work ineffectual for scholars, without
making it attractive to the general public; and there is nothing
to show that his formidable-looking arsenal of explosives had much
effect on contemporary French thought, which developed on other lines.
Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been
much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of
advance. After Colenso's rectification of the fundamental error as
to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and
so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt
of Voltaire, the "higher criticism" proceeded with such substantial
certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that,
whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of
Scotland in 1881 [1811] for propagating Kuenen's views, before the
century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with
the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American
preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited
some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this
score had "become merchandise." Nevertheless, the professional tendency
to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most
of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of
M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867-72) repudiates
every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration. [1812] Later clerical
critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which
cannot be read with critical respect. [1813] But among students at the
end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas
the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to
the "argument from prophecy," the conception of prophecy as prediction
has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and
the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others
has discredited it as regards the "prophets" themselves. For the rest,
much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced
to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895-1900). The
peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less "destructive."
9. In New Testament criticism, though the strict critical method of
Strauss's first book was not faithfully followed, critical research
went on continuously; and the school of F. C. Baur of Tübingen in
particular imposed a measure of rational criticism on theologians in
general. Apart from Strauss, Baur was probably the ablest Christian
scholar of his day. Always lamed by his professionalism, he yet toiled
endlessly to bring scientific method into Christian research. His
Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, 1845; Kritische Untersuchungen
über die Kanonischen Evangelien, 1847; and Das Christenthum und
die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853, were
epoch-marking works, which recast so radically, in the name of
orthodoxy, the historical conception of Christian origins, that he
figured as the most unsettling critic of his time after Strauss. With
his earlier researches in the history of the first Christian sects
and his history of the Church, they constitute a memorable mass
of studious and original work. In the case of the Tübingen school
as of every other there was "reaction," with the usual pretence
by professional orthodoxy that the innovating criticism had been
disposed of; but no real refutation has ever taken place. Where Baur
reduced the genuine Pauline epistles to four, the last years of the
century witnessed the advent of Van Manen, who, following up earlier
suggestions, wrought out the thesis that the epistles are all alike
supposititious. This may or may not hold good; but there has been
no restoration of traditionary faith among the mass of open-minded
inquirers. Such work as Zeller's Contents and Origin of the Acts of
the Apostles (1854), produced in Baur's circle, has substantially
held its ground; and such a comparatively "safe" book of the next
generation as Weizsäcker's Apostolic Age (Eng. tr. of 2nd ed. 1893)
leaves no doubt as to the untrustworthiness of the Acts. Thus at the
close of the century the current professional treatises indicated
a "Christianity" stripped not only of all supernaturalism, and
therefore of the main religious content of the historic creed, but
even of credibility as regards large parts of the non-supernaturalist
narratives of its sacred books. The minute analysis and collocation
of texts which has occupied so much of critical industry has but made
clearer the extreme precariousness of every item in the records. The
amount of credit for historicity that continues to be given to them is
demonstrably unjustifiable on scientific grounds; and the stand for a
"Christianity without dogma" is more and more clearly seen to be an
economic adjustment, not an outcome of faithful criticism.
10. The movement of Biblical and other criticism in Germany has had
a significant effect on the supply of students for the theological
profession. The numbers of Protestant and Catholic theological students
in all Germany have varied as follows:--Protestant: 1831, 4,147; 1851,
1,631; 1860, 2,520; 1876, 1,539; 1882-83, 3,168. Catholic: 1831, 1,801;
1840, 866; 1850, 1,393; 1860, 1,209; 1880, 619. [1814] Thus, under
the reign of reaction which set in after 1848 there was a prolonged
recovery; and again since 1876 the figures rise for Protestantism
through financial stimulus. When, however, we take population into
account, the main movement is clear. In an increasing proportion, the
theological students come from the rural districts (69·4 in 1861-70),
the towns furnishing ever fewer; [1815] so that the conservative
measures do but outwardly and formally affect the course of thought;
the clergy themselves showing less and less inclination to make
clergymen of their sons. [1816] Even among the Catholic population,
though that has increased from ten millions in 1830 to sixteen millions
in 1880, the number of theological students has fallen from eleven
to four per 100,000 inhabitants. [1817] Thus, after many "reactions"
and much Bismarckism, the Zeit-Geist in Germany was still pronouncedly
skeptical in all classes in 1881, [1818] when the church accommodation
in Berlin provided only two per cent. of the population, and even
that provision outwent the demand. [1819] And though there have been
yet other alleged reactions since, and the imperial influence is
zealously used for orthodoxy, a large proportion of the intelligent
workers in the towns remain socialistic and freethinking; and the
mass of the educated classes remain unorthodox in the teeth of the
socialist menace. Reactionary professors can make an academic fashion:
the majority of instructed men remain tacitly naturalistic.
Alongside of the inveterate rationalism of modern Germany, however,
a no less inveterate bureaucratism preserves a certain official
conformity to religion. University freedom does not extend to open
and direct criticism of the orthodox creed. On the other hand, the
applause won by Virchow in 1877 on his declaration against the doctrine
of evolution, and the tactic resorted to by him in putting upon that
doctrine the responsibility of Socialist violence, are instances of the
normal operation of the lower motives against freedom in scientific
teaching. [1820] The pressure operates in other spheres in Germany,
especially under such a regimen as the present. Men who never go to
church save on official occasions, and who have absolutely no belief
in the Church's doctrine, nevertheless remain nominally its adherents;
[1821] and the Press laws make it peculiarly difficult to reach the
common people with freethinking literature, save through Socialist
channels. Thus the Catholic Church is perhaps nowhere--save in Ireland
and the United States--more practically influential than in nominally
"Protestant" Germany, where it wields a compact vote of a hundred or
more in the Reichstag, and can generally count on well-filled churches
as beside the half-empty temples of Protestantism.
Another circumstance partly favourable to reaction is the simple
maintenance of all the old theological chairs in the universities. As
the field of scientific work widens, and increasing commerce raises
the social standard of comfort, men of original intellectual power
grow less apt to devote themselves to theological pursuits even
under the comparatively free conditions which so long kept German
Biblical scholarship far above that of other countries. It can
hardly be said that men of the mental calibre of Strauss, Baur,
Volkmar, and Wellhausen continue to arise among the specialists in
their studies. Harnack, the most prominent German Biblical scholar
of our day, despite his great learning, creates no such impression of
originality and insight, and, though latterly forced forward by more
independent minds, exhibits often a very uncritical orthodoxy. Thus
it is à priori possible enough that the orthodox reactions so often
claimed have actually occurred, in the sense that the experts have
reverted to a prior type. A scientifically-minded "theologian" in
Germany has now little official scope for his faculty save in the
analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books and the New Testament documents
as such; and this has been on the whole very well done, short of
the point of express impeachment of the historic delusion; but there
is a limit to the attraction of such studies for minds of a modern
cast. Thus there is always a chance that chairs will be filled by
men of another type.
11. On a less extensive scale than in Germany, critical study of the
sacred books made some progress in England, France, and America in the
first half of the century; though for a time the attention even of the
educated world was centred much more upon the Oxford "tractarian"
religious reaction than upon the movement of rationalism. The
reaction, associated mainly with the name of John Henry Newman, was
rather against the political Erastianism and æsthetic apathy of the
Whig type of Christian than against German or other criticism, of
which Newman knew little. But against the attitude of those moderate
Anglicans who were disposed to disestablish the Church in Ireland
and to modernize the liturgy somewhat, the language of the "Tracts
for the Times" is as authoritarian and anti-rationalistic as that
of Catholics denouncing freethought. Such expressions as "the filth
of heretical novelty" [1822] are meant to apply to anything in the
nature of innovation; the causes at stake are ritual and precedent,
the apostolic succession and the status of the priest, not the truth
of revelation or the credibility of the scriptures. The third Tract
appeals to the clergy to "resist the alteration of even one jot or
tittle" of the liturgy; and concerning the burial service the line of
argument is: "Do you pretend you can discriminate the wheat from the
tares? Of course not." All attempts even to modify the ritual are an
"abuse of reason"; and the true believer is adjured to stand fast in
the ancient ways. [1823] At a pinch he is to "consider what Reason
says; which surely, as well as Scripture, was given us for religious
ends"; [1824] but the only "reason" thus recognized is one which
accepts the whole apparatus of revelation. Previous to and alongside
of this single-minded reversion to the ideals of the Dark Ages--a
phenomenon not unconnected with the revival of romanticism by Scott
and Chateaubriand--there was going on a movement of modernism, of which
one of the overt traces is Milman's History of the Jews (1829), a work
to-day regarded as harmless even by the orthodox, but sufficient in
its time to let Newman see whither religious "Liberalism" was heading.
Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of
religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an
Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for
its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss;
and this found a considerable response from the educated English
public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell
spoke very plainly of "the large and probably increasing amount of
unbelief in all classes around us"; and made the then remarkably
courageous declarations that in his experience "neither deism,
pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible
with uprightness and benevolence"; and that "the real or affected
horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their
names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel,
the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind." It was in the circle of
Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot,
grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament;
and it was she who, when Hennell's bride gave up the task, undertook
the toil of translating Strauss's Leben Jesu--though at many points
she "thought him wrong." [1825] In the churches he had of course no
overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast
that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of
rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections
of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced. [1826]
In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing
his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of
much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of
theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox
world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical
reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards,
theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old
country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism
from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother
of John Henry, [1827] produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and
another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting
rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the
same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise
and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method
for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the
Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the
admiration of Buckle; "George Eliot" translated Feuerbach's Essence of
Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg,
one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist
study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with
its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and
is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan
Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales. The book
is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology,
which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian
dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott,
whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence
during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which,
though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than
those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of
the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in
critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was
the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic
standpoint, [1828] in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion
(1874-77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be
disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it. [1829]
Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the
gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the
churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the
historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly
orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were
typical of "German rationalism."
12. In France systematic criticism of the sacred books recommenced
in the second half of the century with such writings as those of
P. Larroque (Examen Critique des doctrines de la religion chrétienne,
1860); Gustave d'Eichthal (Les Évangiles, ptie. i, 1863); and Alphonse
Peyrat (Histoire élémentaire et critique de Jésus, 1864); whereafter
the rationalistic view was applied with singular literary charm, if
with imperfect consistency, by Renan in his series of seven volumes
on the origins of Christianity, and with more scientific breadth
of view by Ernest Havet in his Christianisme et ses Origines (1872,
etc.). Renan's Vie de Jésus (1863) especially has been read throughout
the civilized world. It has been quite justly pronounced, by German
and other critics, a romance; but no other "life" properly so called
has been anything else, Strauss's first Life being an analysis rather
than a construction; and the epithet was but an unwitting avowal
that to accept the gospels, barring miracles, as biography--which
is what Renan did--is to be committed to the unhistorical. He began
by accepting the fourth as equipollent with the synoptics; and upon
this Strauss in his second Life confidently called for a recantation,
which came in due course. But Renan, in his fitful way, had critical
glimpses which were denied to Strauss--for instance, as to the material
of the Sermon on the Mount. The whole series of the Origines, which
wound up with Marc Aurèle (1882), has a similar fluctuating value,
showing on the whole a progressive critical sense. The Saint Paul,
for example, at the close suddenly discards the traditional view
previously accepted in Les Apôtres, and recognizes that the ministry
of Paul can have been no more than a propaganda of small conventicles,
whose total membership throughout the Empire could not have been above
a thousand. But Renan's total service consisted rather in a highly
artistic and winning application of rational historical methods to
early Christian history, with the effect of displacing the traditionist
method, than in any lasting or comprehensive solution of the problem
of the origins. Havet's survey is both corrective and complementary
to his. Renan's influence on opinion throughout the world, however,
was enormous, were it only because he was one of the most finished
literary artists of his time.
Section 3.--Poetry and General Literature
1. The whole imaginative literature of Europe, in the generation
after the French Revolution, reveals directly or indirectly the
transmutation that the eighteenth century had worked in religious
thought. Either it reacts against or it develops the rationalistic
movement. In France the literary reaction is one of the first factors
in the orthodox revival. Its leader and type was Chateaubriand,
in whose typical work, the Génie du Christianisme (1802), lies the
proof that, whatever might be the "shallowness" of Voltairism, it
was profundity beside the philosophy of the majority who repelled
it. On one who now reads it with the slightest scientific preparation,
the book makes an impression in parts of something like fatuity. The
handling of the scientific question at the threshold of the inquiry
is that of a man incapable of a scientific idea. All the accumulating
evidence of geology and palæontology is disposed of by the grotesque
theorem that God made the world out of nothing with all the marks
of antiquity upon it--the oaks at the start bearing "last year's
nests"--on the ground that, "if the world were not at once young and
old, the great, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature,
for these sentiments by their essence attach to antique things." [1830]
In the same fashion the fable of the serpent is with perfect gravity
homologated as a literal truth, on the strength of an anecdote about
the charming of a rattlesnake with music. [1831] It is humiliating,
but instructive, to realize that only a century ago a "Christian
reaction," in a civilized country, was inspired by such an order
of ideas; and that in the nation of Laplace, with his theory in
view, it was the fashion thus to prattle in the taste of the Dark
Ages. [1832] The book is merely the eloquent expression of a nervous
recoil from everything savouring of cool reason and clear thought,
a recoil partly initiated by the sheer stress of excitement of the
near past; partly fostered by the vague belief that freethinking in
religion had caused the Revolution; partly enhanced by the tendency
of every warlike period to develop emotional rather than reflective
life. What was really masterly in Chateaubriand was the style; and
sentimental pietism had now the prestige of fine writing, so long
the specialty of the other side. Yet a generation of monarchism
served to wear out the ill-based credit of the literary reaction;
and belles lettres began to be rationalistic as soon as politics
began again to be radical. Thus the prestige of the neo-Christian
school was already spent before the revolution of 1848; [1833] and
the inordinate vanity of Chateaubriand, who died in that year, had
undone his special influence still earlier. He had created merely a
literary mode and sentiment.
2. The literary history of France since his death decides the question,
so far as it can be thus decided. From 1848 till our own day it has
been predominantly naturalistic and non-religious. After Guizot and
the Thierrys, the nearest approach to Christianity by an influential
French historian is perhaps in the case of the very heterodox Edgar
Quinet. Michelet was a mere heretic in the eyes of the faithful,
Saisset describing his book Du Prêtre, de la Femme, et de la Famille
(1845), as a "renaissance of Voltaireanism." [1834] His whole brilliant
History, indeed, is from beginning to end rationalistic, challenging
as it does all the decorous traditions, exposing the failure of the
faith to civilize, pronouncing that "the monastic Middle Age is an
age of idiots" and the scholastic world which followed it an age of
artificially formed fools, [1835] flouting dogma and discrediting
creed over each of their miscarriages. [1836] And he was popular,
withal, not only because of his vividness and unfailing freshness,
but because his convictions were those of the best intelligence
around him. In poetry and fiction the predominance of one or other
shade of freethinking is signal. Balzac, who grew up in the age of
reaction, makes essentially for rationalism by his intense analysis;
and after him the difficulty is to find a great French novelist who is
not frankly rationalistic. George Sand will probably not be claimed
by orthodoxy; and Beyle, Constant, Flaubert, Mérimée, Zola, Daudet,
Maupassant, and the De Goncourts make a list against which can be
set only the names of M. Bourget, an artist of the second order,
and of the distinguished décadent Huysmans, who became a Trappist
after a life marked by a philosophy and practice of an extremely
different complexion.
3. In French poetry the case is hardly otherwise. Béranger, who
passed for a Voltairean, did indeed claim to have "saved from the
wreck an indestructible belief"; [1837] and Lamartine goes to the
side of Christianity; but de Musset, the most inspired of décadents,
was no more Christian than Heine, save for what a critic has called
"la banale religiosité de l'Espoir en Dieu", [1838] and the pessimist
Baudelaire had not even that to show. De Musset's absurd attack
on Voltaire in his Byronic poem, Rolla, well deserves the same
epithets. It is a mere product of hysteria, representing neither
knowledge nor reflection. The grandiose theism of Victor Hugo,
again, is stamped only with his own image and superscription; and
in his great contemporary Leconte de Lisle we have one of the most
convinced and aggressive freethinkers of the century, a fine scholar
and a self-controlled pessimist, who felt it well worth his while to
write a little Popular History of Christianity (1871) which would have
delighted d'Holbach. It is significant, on the other hand, that the
exquisite religious verse of Verlaine was the product of an incurable
neuropath, like the later work of Huysmans, and stands for decadence
pure and simple. While French belles lettres thus in general made for
rationalism, criticism was naturally not behindhand. Sainte-Beuve,
the most widely appreciative though not the most scientific or just
of critics, had only a literary sympathy with the religious types
over whom he spent so much effusive research; [1839] Edmond Scherer
was an unbeliever almost against his will; Taine, though reactionary
on political grounds in his latter years, was the typical French
rationalist of his time; and though M. Brunetière, whose preferences
were all for Bossuet, made "the bankruptcy of science" the text of
his very facile philosophy, the most scientific and philosophic head
in the whole line of French critics, the late Émile Hennequin, was
wholly a rationalist; and even the rather reactionary Jules Lemaître
did not maintain his early attitude of austerity towards Renan.
4. In England it was due above all to Shelley that the very age of
reaction was confronted with unbelief in lyric form. His immature Queen
Mab was vital enough with conviction to serve as an inspiration to a
whole host of unlettered freethinkers not only in its own generation
but in the next. Its notes preserved, and greatly expanded, the
tract entitled The Necessity of Atheism, for which he was expelled
from Oxford; and against his will it became a people's book, the law
refusing him copyright in his own work, on the memorable principle that
there could be no "protection" for a book setting forth pernicious
opinions. Whether he might not in later life, had he survived, have
passed to a species of mystic Christianity, reacting like Coleridge,
but with a necessary difference, is a question raised by parts of
the Hellas. Gladstone seems to have thought that he had in him such
a potentiality. But Shelley's work, as done, sufficed to keep for
radicalism and rationalism the crown of song as against the final
Tory orthodoxy [1840] of the elderly Wordsworth and of Southey; and
Coleridge's zeal for (amended) dogma came upon him after his hour of
poetic transfiguration was past.
And even Coleridge, who held the heresies of a modal Trinity and
the non-expiatory character of the death of Christ, was widely
distrusted by the pious, and expressed himself privately in
terms which would have outraged them. Miracles, he declared,
"are supererogatory. The law of God and the great principles
of the Christian religion would have been the same had Christ
never assumed humanity. It is for these things, and for such as
these, for telling unwelcome truths, that I have been termed an
atheist. It is for these opinions that William Smith assured the
Archbishop of Canterbury that I was (what half the clergy are in
their lives) an atheist. Little do these men know what atheism
is. Not one man in a thousand has either strength of mind or
goodness of heart to be an atheist. I repeat it. Not one man in
ten thousand has goodness of heart or strength of mind to be an
atheist." Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 47. But at other
times Coleridge was a defender of the faith, while contemning
the methods of the evidential school. Id. pp. 13-14, 31.