On the other side, Scott's honest but unintellectual romanticism,

as we know from Newman, certainly favoured the Tractarian reaction,

to which it was æsthetically though hardly emotionally akin. Yet

George Eliot could say in later life that it was the influence

of Scott that first unsettled her orthodoxy; [1841] meaning,

doubtless, that the prevailing secularity of his view of life and

his objective handling of sects and faiths excluded even a theistic

solution. Scott's orthodoxy was in fact nearly on all fours with his

Jacobitism--a matter of temperamental loyalty to a tradition. [1842]

But the far more potent influence of Byron, too wayward to hold a

firm philosophy, but too intensely alive to realities to be capable

of Scott's feudal orthodoxy, must have counted much for heresy even

in England, and was one of the literary forces of revolutionary

revival for the whole of Europe. Though he never came to a clear

atheistical decision as did Shelley, [1843] and often in private gave

himself out for a Calvinist, he so handled theological problems in

his Cain that he, like Shelley, was refused copyright in his work;

[1844] and it was widely appropriated for freethinkers' purposes. The

orthodox Southey was on the same grounds denied the right to suppress

his early revolutionary drama, Wat Tyler, which accordingly was made

to do duty in Radical propaganda by freethinking publishers. Keats,

again, though he melodiously declaimed, in a boyish mood, against

the scientific analysis of the rainbow, and though he never assented

to Shelley's impeachments of Christianity, was in no active sense a

believer in it, and after his long sickness met death gladly without

the "consolations" ascribed to creed. [1845]

5. One of the best-beloved names in English literature, Charles Lamb,

is on several counts to be numbered with those of the freethinkers

of his day--who included Godwin and Hazlitt--though he had no part

in any direct propaganda. Himself at most a Unitarian, but not at

all given to argument on points of faith, he did his work for reason

partly by way of the subtle and winning humanism of such an essay as

New Year's Eve, which seems to have been what brought upon him the

pedantically pious censure of Southey, apparently for its lack of

allusion to a future state; partly by his delicately-entitled letter,

The Tombs in the Abbey, in which he replied to Southey's stricture. "A

book which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful

as it is original" had been Southey's pompous criticism, in a paper on

Infidelity. [1846] In his reply, Lamb commented on Southey's life-long

habit of scoffing at the Church of Rome, and gravely repudiated the

test of orthodoxy for human character.

Lamb's words are not generally known, and are worth remembering. "I

own," he wrote, "I never could think so considerably of myself

as to decline the society of an agreeable or worthy man upon

difference of opinion only. The impediments and the facilitations

to a sound belief are various and inscrutable as the heart of

man. Some believe upon weak principles; others cannot feel the

efficacy of the strongest. One of the most candid, most upright,

and single-meaning men I ever knew was the late Thomas Holcroft. I

believe he never said one thing and meant another in his life;

and, as near as I can guess, he never acted otherwise than

with the most scrupulous attention to conscience. Ought we to

wish the character false for the sake of a hollow compliment to

Christianity?" Of the freethinking and unpopular Hazlitt, who had

soured towards Lamb in his perverse way, the essayist spoke still

more generously. Of Leigh Hunt he speaks more critically, but with

the same resolution to stand by a man known as a heretic. But the

severest flout to Southey and his Church is in the next paragraph,

where, after the avowal that "the last sect with which you can

remember me to have made common profession were the Unitarians,"

he tells how, on the previous Easter Sunday, he had attended the

service in Westminster Abbey, and when he would have lingered

afterwards among the tombs to meditate, was "turned, like a dog

or some profane person, out into the common street, with feelings

which I could not help, but not very congenial to the day or the

discourse. I do not know," he adds, "that I shall ever venture

myself again into one of your churches."

These words were published in the London Magazine in 1825; but

in the posthumous collected edition of the Essays of Elia all

the portions above cited were dropped, and the paragraph last

quoted from was modified, leaving out the last words. The essay

does not seem to have been reprinted in full till it appeared in

R. H. Shepherd's edition of 1878. But the original issue in the

London Magazine created a tradition among the lovers of Lamb,

and his name has always been associated with some repute for

freethinking. There is further very important testimony as to

Lamb's opinions in one of Allsopp's records of the conversation

of Coleridge:--

"No, no; Lamb's skepticism has not come lightly, nor is he

a skeptic [sic: Query, scoffer?]. The harsh reproof to Godwin

for his contemptuous allusion to Christ before a well-trained

child proves that he is not a skeptic [? scoffer]. His mind,

never prone to analysis, seems to have been disgusted with the

hollow pretences, the false reasonings and absurdities of the

rogues and fools with whom all establishments, and all creeds

seeking to become established, abound. I look upon Lamb as one

hovering between earth and heaven; neither hoping much nor fearing

anything. It is curious that he should retain many usages which he

learnt or adopted in the fervour of his early religious feelings,

now that his faith is in a state of suspended animation. Believe

me, who know him well, that Lamb, say what he will, has more

of the essentials of Christianity than ninety-nine out of a

hundred professing Christians. He has all that would still have

been Christian had Christ never lived or been made manifest upon

earth." (Allsopp's Letters, etc., as cited, p. 46.) In connection

with the frequently cited anecdote as to Lamb's religious feeling

given in Leigh Hunt's Autobiography (rep. p. 253), also by

Hazlitt (Winterslow, essay ii, ed. 1902, p. 39), may be noted the

following, given by Allsopp: "After a visit to Coleridge, during

which the conversation had taken a religious turn, Leigh Hunt

... expressed his surprise that such a man as Coleridge should,

when speaking of Christ, always call him Our Saviour. Lamb, who

had been exhilarated by one glass of that gooseberry or raisin

cordial which he has so often anathematized, stammered out:

'Ne-ne-never mind what Coleridge says; he is full of fun.'"

6. While a semi-Bohemian like Lamb could thus dare to challenge the

reigning bigotry, the graver English writers of the first half of the

century who had abandoned or never accepted orthodoxy felt themselves

for the most part compelled to silence or ostensible compliance. It

was made clear by Carlyle's posthumous Reminiscences that he had

early turned away from Christian dogma, having in fact given up a

clerical career because of unbelief. Later evidence abounds. At the

age of fifteen, by his own account, he had horrified his mother with

the question: "Did God Almighty come down and make wheel-barrows in a

shop?" [1847] Of his college life he told: "I studied the evidences

of Christianity for several years, with the greatest desire to be

convinced, but in vain. I read Gibbon, and then first clearly saw

that Christianity was not true. Then came the most trying time of my

life." [1848] Goethe, he claimed, led him to peace; but philosophic

peace he never attained. "He was contemptuous to those who held

to Christian dogmas; he was angry with those who gave them up;

he was furious with those who attacked them. If equanimity be the

mark of a Philosopher, he was of all great-minded men the least of a

Philosopher." [1849] To all freethinking work, scholarly or other,

he was hostile with the hostility of a man consciously in a false

position. Strauss's Leben Jesu he pronounced, quite late in life,

"a revolutionary and ill-advised enterprise, setting forth in

words what all wise men had in their minds for fifty years past,

and thought it fittest to hold their peace about." [1850] He was,

in fact, so false to his own doctrine of veracity as to disparage all

who spoke out; while privately agreeing with Mill as to the need for

speaking out. [1851] Even Mill did so only partially in his lifetime,

as in his address to the St. Andrews students (1867), when, "in the

reception given to the Address, he was most struck by the vociferous

applause of the divinity students at the freethought passage." [1852]

In the first half of the century such displays of courage were rare

indeed. Only after the death of Romilly was it tacitly avowed, by

the publication of a deistic prayer found among his papers, that he

had had no belief in revelation. [1853] Much later in the century,

Harriet Martineau, for openly avowing her unbelief, incurred the

angry public censure of her own brother.

Despite his anxious caution, Carlyle's writing conveyed to susceptible

readers a non-Christian view of things. We know from a posthumous

writing of Mr. Froude's that, when that writer had gone through the

university and taken holy orders without ever having had a single doubt

as to his creed, Carlyle's books "taught him that the religion in which

he had been reared was but one of many dresses in which spiritual truth

had arrayed itself, and that the creed was not literally true so far as

it was a narrative of facts." [1854] It was presumably from the Sartor

Resartus and some of the Essays, such as that on Voltaire--perhaps,

also, negatively from the general absence of Christian sentiment in

Carlyle's works--that such lessons were learned; and though it is

certain that many non-zealous Christians saw no harm in Carlyle,

there is reason to believe that for multitudes of readers he had

the same awakening virtue. It need hardly be said that his friend

Emerson exercised it in no less degree. Mr. Froude was remarkable

in his youth for his surrender of the clerical profession, in the

teeth of a bitter opposition from his family, and further for his

publication of a freethinking romance, The Nemesis of Faith (1849);

but he went far to conciliate Anglican orthodoxy by his History. The

romance had a temporary vogue rather above its artistic merits as a

result of being publicly burned by the authorities of Exeter College,

Oxford, of which he was a Fellow. [1855]

7. This attitude of orthodoxy, threatening ostracism to any avowed

freethinker who had a position to lose, must be kept in mind in

estimating the English evolution of that time. A professed man of

science could write in 1838 that "the new mode of interpreting the

Scriptures which has sprung up in Germany is the darkest cloud which

lowers upon the horizon of that country.... The Germans have been

conducted by some of their teachers to the borders of a precipice,

one leap from which will plunge them into deism." He added that in

various parts of Europe "the heaviest calamity impending over the

whole fabric of society in our time is the lengthening stride of bold

skepticism in some parts, and the more stealthy onwards-creeping

step of critical cavil in others." [1856] Such declamation could

terrorize the timid and constrain the prudent in such a society as

that of early Victorian England. The prevailing note is struck in

Macaulay's description of Charles Blount as "an infidel, and the head

of a small school of infidels who were troubled with a morbid desire to

make converts." [1857] All the while, Macaulay was himself privately

"infidel"; [1858] but he cleared his conscience by thus denouncing

those who had the courage of their opinions. In this simple fashion

some of the sanest writers in history were complacently put below

the level of the commonplace dissemblers who aspersed them; and the

average educated man saw no baseness in the procedure.

The opinion deliberately expressed in this connection by the late

Professor Bain is worth noting:--

"It can at last be clearly seen what was the motive of Carlyle's

perplexing style of composition. We now know what his opinions

were when he began to write, and that to express them would have

been fatal to his success; yet he was not a man to indulge in

rank hypocrisy. He accordingly adopted a studied and ambiguous

phraseology, which for long imposed upon the religious public,

who put their own interpretation upon his mystical utterances, and

gave him the benefit of any doubt. In the Life of Sterling he threw

off the mask, but still was not taken at his word. Had there been a

perfect tolerance of all opinions, he would have begun as he ended;

and his strain of composition, while still mystical and high-flown,

would never have been identified with our national orthodoxy.

"I have grave doubts as to whether we possess Macaulay's real

opinions on religion. His way of dealing with the subject is

so like the hedging of an unbeliever that, without some good

assurance to the contrary, I must include him also among the

imitators of Aristotle's 'caution.'...

"When Sir Charles Lyell brought out his Antiquity of Man, he too

was cautious. Knowing the dangers of his footing, he abstained

from giving an estimate of the extension of time required by the

evidences of human remains. Society in London, however, would

not put up with this reticence, and he had to disclose at dinner

parties what he had withheld from the public--namely, that in his

opinion the duration of man could not be less than 50,000 years"

(Practical Essays, p. 274.)

8. Thus for a whole generation honest and narrow-minded believers were

trained to suppose that their views were triumphant over all attacks,

[1859] and to see in "infidelity" a disease of an ill-informed past;

and as the Church had really gained in conventional culture as well

as in wealth and prestige in the period of reaction, the power of

mere convention to override ideas was still enormous. But through

the whole stress of reaction and conservatism, even apart from the

positive criticism of creed which from time to time forced its head

up, there is a visible play of a new spirit in the most notable

of the serious writing of the time. Carlyle undermined orthodoxy

even in his asseveration of unreasoned theism; Emerson disturbs it

alike when he acclaims mystics and welcomes evolutionary science;

and the whole inspiration of Mill's Logic no less than of his Liberty

is something alien to the principle of authority. Of Ruskin, again,

the same may be asserted in respect of his many searching thrusts at

clerical and lay practice, his defence of Colenso, and the obvious

disappearance from his later books of the evangelical orthodoxy of the

earlier. [1860] Thus the most celebrated writers of serious English

prose in the latter half of the century were in a measure associated

with the spirit of critical thought on matters religious. In a

much stronger degree the same thing may be predicated finally of

the writer who in the field of English belles lettres, apart from

fiction, came nearest them in fame and influence. Matthew Arnold,

passing insensibly from the English attitude of academic orthodoxy

to that of the humanist for whom Christ is but an admirable teacher

and God a "Something not ourselves which makes for righteousness,"

became for the England of his later years the favourite pilot across

the bar between supernaturalism and naturalism. Only in England,

perhaps, could his curious gospel of church-going and Bible-reading

atheism have prospered, but there it prospered exceedingly. Alike as

poet and as essayist, even when essaying to disparage Colenso or to

confute the Germans where they jostled his predilection for the Fourth

Gospel, he was a disintegrator of tradition, and, in his dogmatic way,

a dissolver of dogmatism. When, therefore, beside the four names just

mentioned the British public placed those of the philosophers Spencer,

Lewes, and Mill, and the scientists Darwin, Huxley, Clifford, and

Tyndall, they could not but recognize that the mind of the age was

divorced from the nominal faith of the Church.

9. In English fiction, the beginning of the end of genuine faith

was apparent to the prophetic eyes of Wilberforce and Robert Hall,

of whom the former lamented the total absence of Christian sentiment

from nearly all the successful fiction even of his day; [1861] and

the latter avowed the pain with which he noted that Miss Edgeworth,

whom he admired for her style and art, put absolutely no religion

in her books, [1862] while Hannah More, whose principles were so

excellent, had such a vicious style. With Thackeray and Dickens,

indeed, serious fiction might seem to be on the side of faith,

both being liberally orthodox, though neither ventured on religious

romance; but with George Eliot the balance began to lean the other

way, her sympathetic treatment of religious types counting for little

as against her known rationalism. At the end of the century almost

all of the leading writers of the higher fiction were known to be

either rationalists or simple theists; and against the heavy metal of

Mr. Meredith, Mr. Conrad, Mr. Hardy, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Moore (whose

sympathetic handling of religious motives suggests the influence of

Huysmans), and the didactic-deistic Mrs. Humphry-Ward, orthodoxy can

but claim artists of the third or lower grades. The championship of

some of the latter may be regarded as the last humiliation of faith.

In 1905 there was current a vulgar novel entitled When it was

Dark, wherein was said to be drawn a blood-curdling picture

of what would happen in the event of a general surrender of

Christian faith. Despite some episcopal approbation, the book

excited much disgust among the more enlightened clergy. The

preface to Miss Marie Corelli's Mighty Atom may serve to

convey to the many readers who cannot peruse the works of

that lady an idea of the temper in which she vindicates her

faith. Another popular novelist of a low artistic grade, the

late Mr. Seton-Merriman, has avowed his religious soundness in a

romance with a Russian plot, entitled The Sowers. Referring to

the impressions produced by great scenes of Nature, he writes:

"These places and these times are good for convalescent atheists

and such as pose as unbelievers--the cheapest form of notoriety"

(p. 168). The novelist's own Christian ethic is thus indicated:

"He had Jewish blood in his veins, which ... carried with it

the usual tendency to cringe. It is in the blood; it is part of

that which the people who stood without Pilate's palace took

upon themselves and their children" (p. 59). But the enormous

mass of modern novels includes some tolerable pleas for faith,

as well as many manifestoes of agnosticism. One of the works of

the late "Edna Lyall," We Two, was notable as the expression of

the sympathy of a devout, generous, and amiable Christian lady

with the personality and career of Mr. Bradlaugh.

10. Among the most artistically gifted of the English story-writers and

essayists of the last generation of the century was Richard Jefferies

(d. 1887), who in The Story of My Heart (1883) has told how "the last

traces and relics of superstitions acquired compulsorily in childhood"

finally passed away from his mind, leaving him a Naturalist in every

sense of the word. In the Eulogy of Richard Jefferies published

by Sir Walter Besant in 1888 it is asserted that on his deathbed

Jefferies returned to his faith, and "died listening with faith and

love to the words contained in the Old Book." A popular account of this

"conversion" accordingly became current, and was employed to the usual

purpose. As has been shown by a careful student, and as was admitted

on inquiry by Sir Walter Besant, there had been no conversion whatever,

Jefferies having simply listened to his wife's reading without hinting

at any change in his convictions. [1863] Despite his biographer's

express admission of his error, Christian journals, such as the

Spectator, have burked the facts; one, the Christian, has piously

charged dishonesty on the writer who brought them to light; and a

third, the Salvationist War Cry, has pronounced his action "the basest

form of chicanery and falsehood." [1864] The episode is worth noting

as indicating the qualities which still attach to orthodox propaganda.

11. Though Shelley was anathema to English Christians in his own

clay, his fame and standing steadily rose in the generations after

his death. Nor has the balance of English poetry ever reverted

to the side of faith. Even Tennyson, who more than once struck at

rationalism below the belt, is in his own despite the poet of doubt

as much as of credence, however he might wilfully attune himself to

the key of faith; and the unparalleled optimism of Browning evolved a

form of Christianity sufficiently alien to the historic creed. [1865]

In Clough and Matthew Arnold, again, we have the positive record of

surrendered faith. Alongside of Arnold, Swinburne put into his verse

the freethinking temper that Leconte de Lisle reserved for prose;

and the ill-starred but finely gifted James Thomson ("B.V.") was no

less definitely though despairingly an unbeliever. Among our later

poets, finally, the balance is pretty much the same. Mr. Watson has

declared in worthily noble diction for a high agnosticism, and the

late John Davidson defied orthodox ethics in the name of his very

antinomian theology; [1866] while on the side of the regulation

religion--since Mr. Yeats is but a stray Druid--can be cited at best

the regimental psalmody of Mr. Kipling, lyrist of trumpet and drum;

the stained-glass Mariolatries of the late Francis Thompson; the

declamatory orthodoxy of Mr. Noyes; and the Godism of W. E. Henley,

whereat the prosaic godly look askance.

12. Of the imaginative literature of the United States, as of that of

England, the same generalization broadly holds good. The incomparable

Hawthorne, whatever his psychological sympathy with the Puritan past,

wrought inevitably by his art for the loosening of its intellectual

hold; Poe, though he did not venture till his days of downfall to write

his Eureka, thereby proves himself an entirely non-Christian theist;

and Emerson's poetry, no less than his prose, constantly expresses

his pantheism; while his gifted disciple Thoreau, in some ways a

more stringent thinker than his master, was either a pantheist or a

Lucretian theist, standing aloof from all churches. [1867] The economic

conditions of American life have till recently been unfavourable to

the higher literature, as apart from fiction; but the unique figure

of Walt Whitman stands for a thoroughly naturalistic view of life;

[1868] Mr. Howells appears to be at most a theist; Mr. Henry James

has not even exhibited the bias of his gifted brother to the theism

of their no less gifted father; and some of the most esteemed men

of letters since the Civil War, as Dr. Wendell Holmes and Colonel

Wentworth Higginson, have been avowedly on the side of rationalism,

or, as the term goes in the States, "liberalism." Though the tone of

ordinary conversation is more often reminiscent of religion in the

United States than in England, the novel and the newspaper have been

perhaps more thoroughly secularized there than here; and in the public

honour done to so thorough a rationalist as the late Dr. Moncure Conway

at the hands of his alma mater, the Dickinson College, West Virginia,

may be seen the proof that the official orthodoxy of his youth has

disappeared from the region of his birth.

13. Of the vast modern output of belles lettres in continental Europe,

finally, a similar account is to be given. The supreme poet of modern

Italy, Leopardi, is one of the most definitely rationalistic as well

as one of the greatest philosophic poets in literature; Carducci,

the greatest of his successors, was explicitly anti-Christian; and

despite all the claims of the Catholic socialists, there is little

modern Catholic literature in Italy of any European value. One of

the most distinguished of modern Italian scholars, Professor A. de

Gubernatis, has in his Letture sopra la mitologia vedica (1874)

explicitly treated the Christian legend as a myth. In Germany we

have seen Goethe and Schiller distinctly counting for naturalism;

and of Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) an orthodox historian declares

that his "religion was a chaotic fermenting of the mind, out of

which now deism, then Christianity, then a new religion, seems to

come forth." [1869] The naturalistic line is found to be continued

in Heinrich von Kleist, the unhappy but masterly dramatist of Der

Zerbrochene Krug, one of the truest geniuses of his time; and above

all in Heine, whose characteristic profession of reconciling himself

on his deathbed with the deity he imaged as "the Aristophanes of

heaven" [1870] serves so scantily to console the orthodox lovers of

his matchless song. His criticism of Kant and Fichte is a sufficient

clue to his serious convictions; and that "God is all that there is"

[1871] is the sufficient expression of his pantheism. The whole purport

of his brilliant sketch of the History of Religion and Philosophy

in Germany (1834; 2nd ed. 1852) is a propaganda of the very spirit

of freethinking, which constitutes for Germany at once a literary

classic and a manifesto of rationalism. As he himself said of the

return of the aged Schelling to Catholicism, we may say of Heine, that

a deathbed reversion to early beliefs is a pathological phenomenon.

The use latterly made of Heine's deathbed re-conversion by

orthodoxy in England is characteristic. The late letters and

conversations in which he said edifying things of God and the

Bible are cited for readers who know nothing of the context,

and almost as little of the speaker. He had similarly praised

the Bible in 1830 (Letter of July, in B. iii of his volume on

Börne--Werke, vii, 160). To the reader of the whole it is clear

that, while Heine's verbal renunciation of his former pantheism,

and his characterization of the pantheistic position as a "timid

atheism," might have been made independently of his physical

prostration, his profession of the theism at which he had formerly

scoffed is only momentarily serious, even at a time when such a

reversion would have been in no way surprising. His return to and

praise of the Bible, the book of his childhood, during years of

extreme suffering and utter helplessness, was in the ordinary way

of physiological reaction. But inasmuch as his thinking faculty

was never extinguished by his tortures, he chronically indicated

that his religious talk was a half-conscious indulgence of the

overstrained emotional nature, and substantially an exercise of

his poetic feeling--always as large a part of his psychosis as his

reasoning faculty. Even in deathbed profession he was neither a

Jew nor a Christian, his language being that of a deism "scarcely

distinguishable in any essential element from that of Voltaire

or Diderot" (Strodtmann, Heine's Leben und Werke, 2te Aufl. ii,

386). "My religious convictions and views," he writes in the

preface to the late Romancero, "remain free of all churchism.... I

have abjured nothing, not even my old heathen Gods, from whom I

have parted in love and friendship." In his will he peremptorily

forbade any clerical procedure at his funeral; and his feeling on

that side is revealed in his sad jests to his friend Meissner in

1850. "If I could only go out on crutches!" he exclaimed; adding:

"Do you know where I should go? Straight to church." On his friends

expressing disbelief, he went on: "Certainly, to church! Where

should a man go on crutches? Naturally, if I could walk without

crutches, I should go to the laughing boulevards or the Jardin

Mabille." The story is told in England without the conclusion,

as a piece of "Christian Evidence."

But even as to his theism Heine was never more than wilfully and

poetically a believer. In 1849 we find him jesting about "God" and

"the Gods," declaring he will not offend the lieber Gott, whose

vultures he knows and respects. "Opium is also a religion," he

writes in 1850. "Christianity is useless for the healthy ... for

the sick it is a very good religion." "If the German people in

their need accept the King of Prussia, why should not I accept the

personal God?" And in speaking of the postscript to the Romancero

he writes in 1851: "Alas, I had neither time nor mood to say there

what I wanted--namely, that I die as a Poet, who needs neither

religion nor philosophy, and has nothing to do with either. The

Poet understands very well the symbolic idiom of Religion, and the

abstract jargon of Philosophy; but neither the religious gentry nor

those of philosophy will ever understand the Poet." A few weeks

before his death he signs a New Year letter, "Nebuchadnezzar

II, formerly Prussian Atheist, now Lotosflower-adorer." At

this time he was taking immense doses of morphia to make his

tortures bearable. A few hours before his death a querying

pietist got from him the answer: "God will pardon me; it is his

business." The Geständnisse, written in 1854, ends in absolute

irony; and his alleged grounds for giving up atheism, sometimes

quoted seriously, are purely humorous (Werke, iv, 33). If it be

in any sense true, as he tells in the preface to the Romancero,

that "the high clerisy of atheism pronounced its anathema" over

him--that is to say, that former friends denounced him as a weak

turncoat--it needed only the publication of his Life and Letters

to enable freethinkers to take an entirely sympathetic view of his

case, which may serve as a supreme example of "the martyrdom of

man." On the whole question see Strodtmann, as cited, ii, 372 sq.,

and the Geständnisse, which should be compared with the earlier

written fragments of Briefe über Deutschland (Werke, iii, 110),

where there are some significant variations in statements of fact.

Since Heine, German belles lettres has not been a first-rate influence

in Europe; but some of the leading novelists, as Auerbach and Heyse,

are well known to have shared in the rational philosophy of their age;

and the Christianity of Wagner, whose precarious support to the cause

of faith has been welcomed chiefly by its heteroclite adherents,

counts for nothing in the critical scale. [1872]

14. But perhaps the most considerable evidence, in belles lettres,

of the predominance of rationalism in modern Europe is to be found

in the literary history of the Scandinavian States and Russia. The

Russian development indeed had gone far ere the modern Scandinavian

literatures had well begun. Already in the first quarter of the century

the poet Poushkine was an avowed heretic; and Gogol even let his

art suffer from his preoccupations with the new humanitarian ideas;

while the critic Biélinsky, classed by Tourguénief as the Lessing

of Russia, [1873] was pronouncedly rationalistic, [1874] as was his

contemporary the critic Granovsky, [1875] reputed the finest Russian

stylist of his day. At this period belles lettres stood for every

form of intellectual influence in Russia, [1876] and all educated

thought was moulded by it. The most perfect artistic result is the

fiction of the freethinker Tourguénief, [1877] the Sophocles of the

modern novel. His two great contemporaries, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy,

count indeed for supernaturalism; but the truly wonderful genius of

the former was something apart from his philosophy, which was merely

childlike; and the latter, the least masterly if the most strenuous

artist of the three, made his religious converts in Russia chiefly

among the uneducated, and was in any case sharply antagonistic to

orthodox Christianity. It does not appear that the younger writer,

Potapenko, a fine artist, is orthodox, despite his extremely

sympathetic presentment of a superior priest; and the still younger

Gorky is an absolute Naturalist.

15. In the Scandinavian States, again, there are hardly any

exceptions to the freethinking tendency among the leading living men

of letters. In the person of the abnormal religionist Sören Kierkegaard

(1813-1855) a new force of criticism began to stir in Denmark. Setting

out as a theologian, Kierkegaard gradually developed, always on

quasi-religious lines, into a vehement assailant of conventional

Christianity, somewhat in the spirit of Pascal, somewhat in that

of Feuerbach, again in that of Ruskin; and in a temper recalling

now a Berserker and now a Hebrew prophet. The general effect of his

teaching may be gathered from the mass of the work of Henrik Ibsen,

who was his disciple, and in particular from Ibsen's Brand, of which

the hero is partly modelled on Kierkegaard. [1878] Ibsen, though

his Brand was counted to him for righteousness by the Churches,

showed himself a thorough-going naturalist in all his later work;

Björnson was an active freethinker; the eminent Danish critic, Georg

Brandes, early avowed himself to the same effect; and his brother,

the dramatist, Edward Brandes, was elected to the Danish Parliament in

1871 despite his declaration that he believed in neither the Christian

nor the Jewish God. Most of the younger littérateurs of Norway and

Sweden seem to be of the same cast of thought.

Section 4.--The Natural Sciences

1. The power of intellectual habit and tradition had preserved

among the majority of educated men, to the end of the eighteenth

century, a notion of deity either slightly removed from that of the

ancient Hebrews or ethically purified without being philosophically

transformed, though the astronomy of Copernicus, Galileo, and

Newton had immensely modified the Hebraic conception of the physical

universe. We have seen that Newton did not really hold by the Christian

scheme--he wrote, at times, in fact, as a pantheist--but some later

astronomers seem to have done so. When, however, the great Laplace

developed the nebular hypothesis, previously guessed at by Bruno and

outlined by Kant, orthodox psychological habit was rudely shaken

as regards the Biblical account of creation; and like every other

previous advance in physical science this was denounced as atheistic

[1879]--which, as we know, it was, Laplace having declared in reply

to Napoleon that he had no need of the God hypothesis. Confirmed

in essentials by all subsequent science, Laplace's system widens

immensely the gulf between modern cosmology and the historic theism

of the Christian era; and the subsequent concrete developments

of astronomy, giving as they do such an insistent and overwhelming

impression of physical infinity, have made the "Christian hypothesis"

[1880] fantastic save for minds capable of enduring any strain on the

sense of consistency. Paine had brought the difficulty vividly home

to the common intelligence; and though the history of orthodoxy is

a history of the success of institutions and majorities in imposing

incongruous conformities, the perception of the incongruity on this

side must have been a force of disintegration. The freethinking of the

French astronomers of the Revolution period marks a decisive change;

and as early as 1826 we find in a work on Jewish antiquities by a

Scotch clergyman a very plain indication [1881] of disbelief in the

Hebrew story of the stopping of the sun and moon, or (alternatively) of

the rotation of the earth. It is typical of the tenacity of religious

delusion that a quarter of a century later this among other irrational

credences was contended for by the Swiss theologian Gaussen, [1882]

and by the orthodox majority elsewhere, when for all scientifically

trained men they had become untenable. And that the general growth

of scientific thought was disintegrating among scientific men the

old belief in miracles may be gathered from an article, remarkable

in its day, which appeared in the Edinburgh Review of January, 1814

(No. 46), and was "universally attributed to Prof. Leslie," [1883] the

distinguished physicist. Reviewing the argument of Laplace's essay,

Sur les probabilités, it substantially endorsed the thesis of Hume

that miracles cannot be proved by any testimony.

Leslie's own case is one of the milestones marking the slow recovery

of progress in Britain after the Revolution. His appointment to the

chair of Mathematics, after Playfair, at Edinburgh University in

1805 was bitterly resisted by the orthodox on the score that he was

a disbeliever in miracles and an "infidel" of the school of Hume,

who had been his personal friend. Nevertheless he again succeeded

Playfair in the chair of Physics in 1819, and was knighted in 1832. The

invention of the hygrometer and the discovery of the relations of light

and heat had begun to count for more in science than the profession

of orthodoxy.

2. From France came likewise the impulse to a naturalistic handling

of biology, long before the day of Darwin. The protagonist in this

case was the physician P.-J.-G. Cabanis (1737-1808), the colleague of

Laplace in the School of Sciences. Growing up in the generation of

the Revolution, Cabanis had met, in the salon of Madame Helvétius,

d'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condorcet, Laplace, Condillac,

Volney, Franklin, and Jefferson, and became the physician of

Mirabeau. His treatise on the Rapports du physique et du morale de

l'homme (1796-1802) [1884] might be described as the systematic

application to psychology of that "positive" method to which all

the keenest thought of the eighteenth century had been tending,

yet with much of the literary or rhetorical tone by which the French

writers of that age had nearly all been characterized. For Cabanis,

the psychology of Helvétius and Condillac had been hampered by their

ignorance of physiology; [1885] and he easily put aside the primary

errors, such as the "equality of minds" and the entity of "the soul,"

which they took over from previous thinkers. His own work is on the

whole the most searching and original handling of the main problems

of psycho-physiology that had yet been achieved; and to this day its

suggestiveness has not been exhausted.

But Cabanis, in his turn, made the mistake of Helvétius and

Condillac. Not content with presenting the results of his study

in the province in which he was relatively master, he undertook

to reach ultimate truth in those of ethics and philosophy, in

which he was not so. In the preface to the Rapports he lays down

an emphatically agnostic conviction as to final causes: "ignorance

the most invincible," he declares, is all that is possible to man

on that issue. [1886] But not only does he in his main work freely

and loosely generalize on the phenomena of history and overleap the

ethical problem: he penned shortly before his death a Lettre sur les

causes premières, addressed to Fauriel, [1887] in which the aging

intelligence is seen reverting to à priori processes, and concluding

in favour of a "sort of stoic pantheism" [1888] with a balance towards

normal theism and a belief in immortality. The final doctrine did not

in the least affect the argument of the earlier, which was simply one

of positive science; but the clerical world, which had in the usual

fashion denounced the scientific doctrine, not on the score of any

attack by Cabanis upon religion, but because of its incompatibility

with the notion of the soul, naturally made much of the mystical,

[1889] and accorded its framer authority from that moment.

As for the conception of "vitalism" put forward in the Letter to

Fauriel by way of explanation of the phenomena of life, it is but

a reversion to the earlier doctrine of Stahl, of which Cabanis had

been a partisan in his youth. [1890] The fact remains that he gave an

enduring impulse to positive science, [1891] his own final vacillation

failing to arrest the employment of the method he had inherited and

improved. Most people know him solely through one misquotation, the

famous phrase that "the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes

bile." This is not only an imperfect statement of his doctrine: it

suppresses precisely the idea by which Cabanis differentiates from pure

"sensationalism." What he taught was that "impressions, reaching the

brain, set it in activity, as aliments reaching the stomach excite it

to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice.... The function proper

to the first is to perceive particular impressions, to attach to them

signs, to combine different impressions, to separate them, to draw from

them judgments and determinations, as the function of the second is to

act on nutritive substances," etc. [1892] It is after this statement

of the known processus, and after pointing out that there is as much

of pure inference in the one case as in the other, that he concludes:

"The brain in a manner digests impressions, and makes organically the

secretion of thought" and this conclusion, he points out, disposes of

the difficulty of those who "cannot conceive how judging, reasoning,

imagining, can ever be anything else than feeling. The difficulty

ceases when one recognizes, in these different operations, the action

of the brain upon the impressions which are passed on to it." The

doctrine is, in short, an elementary truth of psychological science,

as distinguished from the pseudo-science of the Ego considered as

an entity. To that pseudo-science Cabanis gave a vital wound; and

his derided formula is for true science to-day almost a truism. The

attacks made upon his doctrine in the next generation only served to

emphasize anew the eternal dilemma of theism. On the one hand his

final "vitalism" was repugnant to those who, on traditional lines,

insisted upon a distinction between "soul" and "vital force"; on

the other hand, those who sought to make a philosophic case for

theism against him made the usual plunge into pantheism, and were

reproached accordingly by the orthodox. [1893] All that remained was

the indisputable "positive" gain.

3. In England the influence of the French stimulus in physiology

was seen even more clearly than that of the great generalization of

Laplace. Professor William Lawrence (1783-1867), the physiologist,

published in 1816 an Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and

Physiology, containing some remarks on the nature of life,

which elicited from the then famous Dr. Abernethy a foul attack

in his Physiological Lectures delivered before the College of

Surgeons. Lawrence was charged with belonging to the party of French

physiological skeptics whose aim was to "loosen those restraints on

which the welfare of mankind depends." [1894] In the introductory

lecture of his course of 1817 before the College of Physicians,

Lawrence severely retaliated, repudiating the general charge, but

reasserting that the dependence of life on organization is as clear

as the derivation of daylight from the sun. The war was adroitly

carried at once into the enemy's territory in the declaration that

"The profound, the virtuous, and fervently pious Pascal acknowledged,

what all sound theologians maintain, that the immortality of the

soul, the great truths of religion, and the fundamental principles

of morals cannot be demonstrably proved by mere reason; and that

revelation alone is capable of dissipating the uncertainties

which perplex those who inquire too curiously into the sources of

these important principles. All will acknowledge that, as no other

remedy can be so perfect and satisfactory as this, no other can

be necessary, if we resort to this with firm faith." [1895] The

value of this pronouncement is indicated later in the same volume

by subacid allusions to "those who regard the Hebrew Scriptures as

writings composed with the assistance of divine inspiration," and

who receive Genesis "as a narrative of actual events." Indicating

various "grounds of doubt respecting inspiration," the lecturer adds

that the stories of the naming of the animals and their collection

in the ark, "if we are to understand them as applied to the living

inhabitants of the whole world, are zoologically impossible." [1896]

On the principle then governing such matters Lawrence was in 1822,

on the score of his heresies, refused copyright in his lectures,

which were accordingly reprinted many times in a cheap stereotyped

edition, and thus widely diffused. [1897]

This hardy attack was reinforced in 1819 by the publication of

Sir T. C. Morgan's Sketches of the Philosophy of Life, wherein the

physiological materialism of Cabanis is quietly but firmly developed,

and a typical sentence of his figures as a motto on the title-page. The

method is strictly naturalistic, alike on the medical and on the

philosophic side; and "vitalism" is argued down as explicitly as is

anthropomorphism. [1898] As a whole the book tells notably of the

stimulus of recent French thought upon English.

4. A more general effect, however, was probably wrought by the science

of geology, which in a stable and tested form belongs to the nineteenth

century. Of its theoretic founders in the eighteenth century, Werner

and Dr. James Hutton (1726-1797), the latter and more important [1899]

is known from his Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge (1794)

to have been consciously a freethinker on more grounds than that of

his naturalistic science; and his Theory of the World (1795) was

duly denounced as atheistic. [1900] Whereas the physical infinity

of the universe almost forced the orthodox to concede a vast cosmic

process of some kind as preceding the shaping of the earth and solar

system, the formation of these within six days was one of the plainest

assertions in the sacred books; and every system of geology excluded

such a conception. As the evidence accumulated, in the hands of men

mostly content to deprecate religious opposition, [1901] there was duly

evolved the quaint compromise of the doctrine that the Biblical six

"days" meant six ages--a fantasy still cherished in the pulpit. On

the ground of that absurdity, nevertheless, there gradually grew

up a new conception of the antiquity of the earth. Thus a popular

work on geology such as The Ancient World, by Prof. Ansted (1847),

could begin with the proposition that "long before the human race

had been introduced on the earth this world of ours existed as the

habitation of living things different from those now inhabiting its

surface." Even the thesis of "six ages," and others of the same order,

drew upon their supporters angry charges of "infidelity." Hugh Miller,

whose natural gifts for geological research were chronically turned to

confusion by his orthodox bias, was repeatedly so assailed, when in

point of fact he was perpetually tampering with the facts to salve

the Scriptures. [1902] Of all the inductive sciences geology had

been most retarded by the Christian canonization of error. [1903]

Even the plain fact that what is dry land had once been sea was

obstinately distorted through centuries, though Ovid [1904] had put

the observations of Pythagoras in the way of all scholars; and though

Leonardo da Vinci had insisted on the visible evidence; nay, deistic

habit could keep even Voltaire, as we saw, preposterously incredulous

on the subject. When the scientific truth began to force its way in

the teeth of such authorities as Cuvier, who stood for the "Mosaic"

doctrine, the effect was proportionately marked; and whether or not the

suicide of Miller (1856) was in any way due to despair on perception of

the collapse of his reconciliation of geology with Genesis, [1905] the

scientific demonstration made an end of revelationism for many. What

helped most to save orthodoxy from humiliation on the scientific side

was the attitude of men like Professor Baden Powell, whose scientific

knowledge and habit of mind moved him to attack the Judaism of the

Bibliolaters in the name of Christianity, and in the name of truth

to declare that "nothing in geology bears the smallest semblance to

any part of the Mosaic cosmogony, torture the interpretation to what

extent we may." [1906] In 1857 this was very bold language.

5. Still more rousing, finally, was the effect of the science of

zoology, as placed upon a broad scientific foundation by Charles

Darwin. Here again steps had been taken in previous generations on the

right path, without any general movement on the part of scientific

and educated men. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had in

his Zoonomia (1794) anticipated many of the positions of the French

Lamarck, who in 1801 began developing the views he fully elaborated

in 1815, as to the descendance of all existing species from earlier

forms. [1907] As early as 1795 Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire had begun to

suspect that all species are variants on a primordial form of life;

and at the same time (1794-95) Goethe in Germany had reached similar

convictions. [1908] That views thus reached almost simultaneously in

Germany, England, and France, at the time of the French Revolution,

should have to wait for two generations before even meeting the

full stress of battle, must be put down as one of the results of

the general reaction. Saint-Hilaire, publishing his views in 1828,

was officially overborne by the Cuvier school in France. In England,

indeed, so late as 1855, we find Sir David Brewster denouncing the

Nebular Hypothesis: "that dull and dangerous heresy of the age.... An

omnipotent arm was required to give the planets their position and

motion in space, and a presiding intelligence to assign to them the

different functions they had to perform." [1909] And Murchison the

geologist was no less emphatic against Darwinism, which he rejected

till his dying day (1871).

6. Other anticipations of Darwin's doctrine in England and elsewhere

came practically to nothing, [1910] as regarded the general opinion,

until Robert Chambers in 1844 published anonymously his Vestiges of

the Natural History of Creation, a work which found a wide audience,

incurring bitter hostility not only from the clergy but from some

specialists who, like Huxley, were later to take the evolutionist

view on Darwin's persuasion. Chambers it was that brought the

issue within general knowledge; and he improved his position in

successive editions. A hostile clerical reader, Whewell, admitted of

him, in a letter to a less hostile member of his profession, that,

"as to the degree of resemblance between the author and the French

physiological atheists, he uses reverent phrases: theirs would not be

tolerated in England"; adding: "You would be surprised to hear the

contempt and abhorrence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the

Vestiges." [1911] Hugh Miller, himself accused of "infidelity" for

his measure of inductive candour, held a similar tone towards men of

greater intellectual rectitude, calling the liberalizing religionists

of his day "vermin" and "reptiles," [1912] and classifying as "degraded

and lost" [1913] all who should accept the new doctrine of evolution,

which, as put by Chambers, was then coming forward to evict his own

delusions from the field of science. The young Max Müller, with the

certitude born of an entire ignorance of physical science, declared

in 1856 that the doctrine of a human evolution from lower types

"can never be maintained again," and pronounced it an "unhallowed

imputation." [1914]

7. "Contempt and abhorrence" had in fact at all times constituted

the common Christian temper towards every form of critical dissent

from the body of received opinion; and only since the contempt,

doubled with criticism, began to be in a large degree retorted on

the bigots by instructed men has a better spirit prevailed. Such a

reaction was greatly promoted by the establishment of the Darwinian

theory. It was after the above-noted preparation, popular and academic,

and after the theory of transmutation of species had been definitely

pronounced erroneous by the omniscient Whewell, [1915] that Darwin

produced (1859) his irresistible arsenal of arguments and facts, the

Origin of Species, expounding systematically the principle of Natural

Selection, suggested to him by the economic philosophy of Malthus,

and independently and contemporaneously arrived at by Dr. Alfred

Russel Wallace. The outcry was enormous; and the Church, as always,

arrayed itself violently against the new truth. Bishop Wilberforce

pointed out in the Quarterly Review that "the principle of natural

selection is absolutely incompatible with the word of God," [1916]

which was perfectly true; and at a famous meeting of the British

Association in 1860 he so travestied the doctrine as to goad Huxley

into a fierce declaration that he would rather be a descendant of

an ape than of a man who (like the Bishop) plunged into questions

with which he had no real acquaintance, only to obscure them and

distract his hearers by appeals to religious prejudice. [1917]

The mass of the clergy kept up the warfare of ignorance; but the

battle was practically won within twenty years. In France, Germany,

and the United States leading theologians had made the same suicidal

declarations, entitling all men to say that, if evolution proved

to be true, Christianity was false. Professor Luthardt, of Leipzig,

took up the same position as Bishop Wilberforce, declaring that "the

whole superstructure of personal religion is built upon the doctrine

of creation"; [1918] leading American theologians pronounced the new

doctrine atheistic; and everywhere gross vituperation eked out the

theological argument. [1919]

8. Thus the idea of a specific creation of all forms of life by an

originating deity--the conception which virtually united the deists

and Christians of the eighteenth century against the atheists--was

at length scientifically exploded. The principle of personal divine

rule or providential intervention had now been philosophically

excluded successively (1) from astronomy by the system of Newton;

(2) from the science of earth-formation by the system of Laplace

and the new geology; (3) from the science of living organisms by

the new zoology. It only needed that the deistic conception should

be further excluded from the human sciences--from anthropology, from

the philosophy of history, and from ethics--to complete, at least in

outline, the rationalization of modern thought. Not that the process

was complete in detail even as regarded zoology. Despite the plain

implications of the Origin of Species, the doctrine of the Descent of

Man (1871) came on many as a shocking surprise and evoked a new fury

of protest. The lacunæ in Darwin, further, had to be supplemented;

and much speculative power has been spent on the task by Haeckel,

without thus far establishing complete agreement. But the desperate

stand so long made on the score of the "missing link" seems to have

been finally discredited in 1894; and the Judæo-Christian doctrine

of special creation and providential design appears, even in the

imperfectly educated society of our day, to be already a lost cause.

As we have seen, however, it was not merely the clerical class that

resisted the new truth: the men of science themselves were often

disgracefully hostile; and that "class" continued to give a sufficiency

of support to clericalism. If the study of the physical sciences be no

guarantee for recognition of new truth in those sciences, still less is

it a sure preparation for right judgment in matters of sociology, or,

indeed, for a courageous attitude towards conventions. Spencer in his

earlier works used the language of deism [1920] at a time when Comte

had discarded it. It takes a rare combination of intellectual power,

moral courage, and official freedom to permit of such a directly

rationalistic propaganda as was carried on by Professor Clifford, or

even such as has been accomplished by President Andrew White in America

under the comparatively popular profession of deism. It was only in

his leisured latter years that Huxley carried on a general conflict

with orthodoxy. In middle age he frequently covered himself by attacks

on professed freethinkers; and he did more than any other man of his

time in England to conserve the Bible as a school manual by his politic

panegyric of it in that aspect at a time when bolder rationalists were

striving to get it excluded from the State schools. [1921] Other men of

science have furnished an abundance of support to orthodoxy by more or

less vaguely religious pronouncements on the problem of the universe;

so that Catholic and other obscurantist agencies are able to cite from

them many quasi-scientific phrases [1922]--taking care not to ask what

bearing their language has on the dogmas of the Churches. Physicists

who attempt to be more precise are rarely found to be orthodox; and

the moral and social science of such writers is too often a species

of charlatanism. But the whole tendency of natural science, which as

such is necessarily alien to supernaturalism, makes for a rejection of

the religious tradition; and the real leaders of science are found more

and more openly alienated from the creed of faith. We know that Darwin,

though the son and grandson of freethinkers, was brought up in ordinary

orthodoxy by his mother, and "gave up common religious belief almost

independently from his own reflections." [1923] All over the world that

has since been an increasingly common experience among scientific men.

Section 5.--The Sociological Sciences

1. A rationalistic treatment of human history had been explicit or

implicit in the whole literature of Deism; and had been attempted with

various degrees of success by Bodin, Vico, Montesquieu, Mandeville,

Hume, Smith, Voltaire, Volney, and Condorcet, as well as by lesser

men. [1924] So clear had been the classic lead to naturalistic views

of social growth in the Politics of Aristotle, and so strong the

influence of the new naturalistic spirit, that it is seen even in the

work of Goguet (1769), who sets out as biblically as Bossuet; while

in Germany Herder and Kant framed really luminous generalizations;

and a whole group of sociological writers rose up in the Scotland

of the middle and latter parts of the century. [1925] Here again

there was reaction; but in France the orthodox Guizot did much to

promote broader views than his own; Eusèbe Salverte in his essay De

la Civilisation (1813) made a highly intelligent effort towards a

general view; and Charles Comte in his Traité de Législation (1826)

made a marked scientific advance on the suggestive work of Herder. As

we have seen, the eclectic Jouffroy put human affairs in the sphere

of natural law equally with cosmic phenomena. At length, in the great

work of Auguste Comte, scientific method was applied so effectively and

concretely to the general problem that, despite his serious fallacies,

social science again took rank as a solid study.

2. In England the anti-revolution reaction was visible in this as

in other fields of thought. Hume and Gibbon had set the example

of a strictly naturalistic treatment of history; and the clerical

Robertson was faithful to their method; but Hallam makes a stand

for supernaturalism even in applying a generally scientific critical

standard. The majority of historical events he is content to let pass

as natural, even as the average man sees the hand of the doctor in

his escape from rheumatism, but the hand of God in his escape from

a railway accident. Discussing the defeat of Barbarossa at Legnano,

Hallam pronounces that it is not "material to allege ... that the

accidental destruction of Frederic's army by disease enabled the

cities of Lombardy to succeed in their resistance.... Providence

reserves to itself various means by which the bonds of the oppressor

may be broken; and it is not for human sagacity to anticipate whether

the army of a conqueror shall moulder in the unwholesome marshes of

Rome or stiffen with frost in a Russian winter." [1926]

But Hallam was nearly the last historian of distinction to vend

such nugatory oracles as either a philosophy or a religion of

history. Even the oracular Carlyle did not clearly stipulate for

"special providences" in his histories, though he leant to that

conception; and though Ranke also uses mystifying language, he writes

as a Naturalist; while Michelet is openly anti-clerical. Grote

was wholly a rationalist; the historic method of his friend and

competitor, Bishop Thirlwall, was as non-theological as his; Macaulay,

whatever might be his conformities or his bias, wrote in his most

secular spirit when exhibiting theological evolution; and George

Long indicated his rationalism again and again. [1927] It is only

in the writings of the most primitively prejudiced of those German

historians who eliminate ethics from historiography that the "God"

factor is latterly emphasized in ostensibly expert historiography.

3. All study of economics and of political history fostered such

views, and at length, in England and America, by the works of Draper

and Buckle, in the sixth and later decades of the century, the

conception of law in human history was widely if slowly popularized,

to the due indignation of the supernaturalists, who saw the last

great field of natural phenomena passing like others into the realm

of science. Draper's avowed theism partly protected him from attack;

but Buckle's straightforward attacks on creeds and on Churches brought

upon him a peculiarly fierce hostility, which was unmollified by

his incidental avowal of belief in a future life and his erratic

attacks upon unbelievers. For long this hostility told against his

sociological teaching. Spencer's Principles of Sociology nevertheless

clinched the scientific claim by taking sociological law for granted;

and the new science has continually progressed in acceptance. In the

hands of all its leading modern exponents in all countries--Lester

Ward, Giddings, Guyau, Letourneau, Tarde, Ferri, Durkheim, De Greef,

Gumplowicz, Lilienfeld, Schäffle--it has been entirely naturalistic,

though some Catholic professors continue to inject into it theological

assumptions. It cannot be said, however, that a general doctrine

of social evolution is even yet fully established. The problem is

complicated by the profoundly contentious issues of practical politics;

and in the resulting diffidence of official teachers there arises a

notable opening for obscurantism, which has been duly forthcoming. In

the first half of the century such an eminent Churchman as Dean Milman

incurred at the hands of J. H. Newman and others the charge of writing

the history of the Jews and of early Christianity in a rationalistic

spirit, presenting religion as a "human" phenomenon. [1928] Later

Churchmen, with all their preparation, have rarely gone further.

4. Two lines of scientific study, it would appear, must be thoroughly

followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear for authoritative

conclusions--those of anthropological archæology (including comparative

mythology and comparative hierology) and economic analysis. On both

lines, however, great progress has been made; and on the former in

particular the result is profoundly disintegrating to traditional

belief. The lessons of anthropology had been long available to the

modern world before they began to be scientifically applied to the

"science of religion." The issues raised by Fontenelle and De Brosses

in the eighteenth century were in practice put aside in favour of

direct debate over Christian history, dogma, and ethic; though many

of the deists dwelt on the analogies of "heathen" and "revealed"

religion. As early as 1824 Benjamin Constant made a vigorous attempt

to bring the whole phenomena under a general evolutionary conception

in his work De la Religion. [1929] But it was not till the treasure of

modern anthropology had been scientifically massed by such students

as Theodor Waitz (Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 6 Bde. 1859-71) and

Adolf Bastian (Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 Bde. 1860), and above

all by Sir Edward Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science

of it all, that the arbitrary religious conception of the psychic

evolution of humanity began to be decisively superseded.

In 1871 Tylor could still say that "to many educated minds there seems

something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of

mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts,

wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern

the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth

of plants and animals." [1930] But the old repulsion had already been

profoundly impaired by biological and social science; and Tylor's book

met with hardly any of the odium that had been lavished on Darwin and

Buckle. "It will make me for the future look on religion--a belief

in the soul, etc.--from a different point of view," wrote Darwin

[1931] to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the book press

home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from savagery

that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet

risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle,

began to be decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.

In the hands of Spencer [1932] all the phenomena of primitive mental

life--beliefs, practices, institutions--are considered as purely

natural data, no other point of view being recognized; and the

anthropological treatises of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at

the same standpoint. When at length the mass of savage usages which

lie around the beginnings of historic religion began to be closely

scanned and classified, notably in the great latter-day compilations

of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be sacred peculiarities

of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of universal

primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers

was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation--the

supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion--but whether

the central narrative is historical in any degree whatever. The defence

is latterly conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable from the

Unitarian. But an enormous amount of anthropological research is

being carried on without any reference to such issues, the total

effect being to exclude the supernaturalist premiss from the study

of religion as completely as from that of astronomy.

Section 6.--Philosophy and Ethics

1. The philosophy of Kant, while giving the theological class a new

apparatus of defence as against common-sense freethinking, forced none

the less on theistic philosophy a great advance from the orthodox

positions. Thus his immediate successors, Fichte and Schelling,

produced systems of which one was loudly denounced as atheistic, and

the other as pantheistic, [1933] despite its dualism. Neither seems

to have had much influence on concrete religious opinion outside the

universities; [1934] and when Schelling in old age turned Catholic

obscurantist, the gain to clericalism was not great. Hegel in turn

loosely wrought out a system of which the great merit is to substitute

the conception of existence as relation for the nihilistic idealism

of Fichte and the unsolved dualism of Schelling. This system he

latterly adapted to practical exigencies [1935] by formulating, as

Kant had recently done, a philosophic Trinity and hardily defining

Christianity as "Absolute Religion" in comparison with the various

forms of "Natural Religion." Nevertheless, he counted in a great

degree as a disintegrating influence, and was in a very practical

way anti-Christian. More explicitly than Kant, he admitted that the

Aufklärung, the freethinking movement of the past generation, had

made good its case so far as it went; and though, by the admission

of admirers, he took for granted without justification that it had

carried its point with the world at large, [1936] he was chronically

at strife with the theologians as such, charging them on the one hand

with deserting the dogmas which he re-stated, [1937] and on the other

declaring that the common run of them "know as little of God as a

blind man sees of a painting, even though he handles the frame." [1938]

Of the belief in miracles he was simply contemptuous. "Whether at the

marriage of Cana the guests got a little more wine or a little less is

a matter of absolutely no importance; nor is it any more essential to

demand whether the man with the withered hand was healed; for millions

of men go about with withered and crippled limbs, whose limbs no man

heals." On the story of the marks made for the information of the

angel on the Hebrew houses at the Passover he asks: "Would the angel

not have known them without these marks?", adding: "This faith has

no real interest for Spirit." [1939] Such writing, from the orthodox

point of view, was not compensated for by a philosophy of Christianity

which denaturalized its dogmas, and a presentment of the God-idea and

of moral law which made religion alternately a phase of philosophy

and a form of political utilitarianism.

As to the impression made by Hegel on most Christians, compare

Hagenbach, German Rationalism (Eng. tr. of Kirchengeschichte),

pp. 364-69; Renan, Études d'histoire religieuse, 5e édit. p. 406;

J. D. Morell, Histor. and Crit. View of the Spec. Philos. of

Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 2nd ed. 1847, ii, 189-91;

Robins, A Defence of the Faith, 1862, pt. i, pp. 135-41, 176;

Eschenmenger, Die Hegel'sche Religions-philosophie, 1834; quoted

in Beard's Voices of the Church, p. 8; Leo, Die Hegelingen,

1838; and Reinhard, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie,

2nd ed. 1839, pp. 753-54--also cited by Beard, pp. 9-12.

The gist of Hegel's rehabilitation of Christianity is well

set forth by Prof. A. Seth Pringle-Pattison in his essay on

The Philosophy of Religion in Kant and Hegel (rep. in The

Philos. Radicals and other Essays, 1907), ch. iii. Considered

in connection with his demonstration that in politics the

Prussian State was the ideal government, it is seen to be even

more of an arbitrary and unveridical accommodation to the social

environment than Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen

Vernunft. It approximates intellectually to the process by which

the neo-Platonists and other eclectics of the classic decadence

found a semblance of allegorical or symbolical justification for

every item in the old theology. Nothing could be more false to

the spirit of Hegel's general philosophy than the representing

of Christianity as a culmination or "ultimate" of all religion;

and nothing, in fact, was more readily seen by his contemporaries.

We who look back, however, may take a more lenient view of Hegel's

process of adaptation than was taken in the next generation

by Haym, who, in his Hegel und seine Zeit (1857), presented

him as always following the prevailing fashion in thought, and

lending himself as the tool of reactionary government. Hegel's

officialism was in the main probably wholehearted. Even as Kant

felt driven to do something for social conservation at the outbreak

of the French Revolution, and Fichte to shape for his country

the sinister ideal of The Closed Industrial State, so Hegel,

after seeing Prussia shaken to its foundations at the battle of

Jena and being turned out of his own house by the looting French

soldiers, was very naturally impelled to support the existing

State by quasi-philosophico-religious considerations. It was an

abandonment of the true function of philosophy; but it may have

been done in all good faith. An intense political conservatism

was equally marked in Strauss, who dreaded "demagogy," and in

Schopenhauer, who left his fortune to the fund for the widows and

families of soldiers killed or injured in the revolutionary strifes

of 1848. It came in their case from the same source--an alarmed

memory of social convulsion. The fact remains that Hegel had no

real part in the State religion which he crowned with formulas.

Not only does Hegel's conception of the Absolute make deity simply

the eternal process of the universe, and the divine consciousness

indistinguishable from the total consciousness of mankind, [1940]

but his abstractions lend themselves equally to all creeds; [1941]

and some of the most revolutionary of the succeeding movements of

German thought--as those of Vatke, Strauss, [1942] Feuerbach, and

Marx--professedly founded on him. It is certainly a striking testimony

to the influence of Hegel that five such powerful innovators as Vatke

[1943] in Old-Testament, Bruno Bauer and Strauss in New-Testament

criticism, Feuerbach in the philosophy of religion, and Marx in social

philosophy, should at first fly the Hegelian flag. It can hardly have

been that Hegel's formulas sufficed to generate the criticism they

all brought to bear upon their subject matter; rather we must suppose

that their naturally powerful minds were attracted by the critical

and reconstructive aspects of his doctrine; but the philosophy which

stimulated them must have had great affinities for revolution, as

well as for all forms of the idea of evolution.

2. In respect of his formal championship of Christianity Hegel's

method, arbitrary even for him, appealed neither to the orthodox nor,

with a few exceptions, [1944] to his own disciples, some of whom,

as Ruge, at length definitely renounced Christianity. [1945] In 1854

Heine told his French readers that there were in Germany "fanatical

monks of atheism" who would willingly burn Voltaire as a besotted

deist; [1946] and Heine himself, in his last years of suffering

and of revived poetic religiosity, could see in Hegel's system only

atheism. Bruno Bauer at first opposed Strauss, and afterwards went

even further than he, professing Hegelianism all the while. [1947]

Schopenhauer and Hartmann in turn being even less sustaining to

orthodoxy, and later orthodox systems failing to impress, there came

in due course the cry of "Back to Kant," where at least orthodoxy

had some formal semblance of sanction.

Hartmann's work on The Self-Decomposition of Christianity [1948]

is a stringent exposure of the unreality of what passed for

"liberal Christianity" in Germany a generation ago, and an appeal

for a "new concrete religion" of monism or pantheism as a bulwark

against Ultramontanism. On this monism, however, Hartmann insisted

on grounding his pessimism; and with this pessimistic pantheism he

hoped to outbid Catholicism against the "irreligious" Strauss and the

liberal Christians--in his view no less irreligious. It does not seem

to have had much acceptance. On the whole, the effect of all German

philosophy has probably been to make for the general discredit of

theistic thinking, the surviving forms of Hegelianism being little

propitious to current religion. And though Schopenhauer and Nietzsche

can hardly be said to carry on the task of philosophy either in spirit

or in effect, yet the rapid intensification of hostility to current

religion which their writings in particular manifest [1949] must be

admitted to stand for a deep revolt against the Kantian compromise. And

this revolt was bound to come about. The truth-shunning tactic of Kant,

Fichte, and Hegel--aiming at the final discrediting of the Aufklärung

as a force that had done its work, and could find no more to do,

however it be explained and excused--was a mere expression of their

own final lack of scientific instinct. It is hard to believe that

thinkers who had perceived and asserted the fact of progression in

religion could suppose that true philosophy consisted in putting a

stop on à priori grounds to the historical analysis, and setting up an

"ultimate" of philosophic theory. The straightforward investigators,

seeking simply for truth, have passed on to posterity a spirit

which, correcting their inevitable errors, reaches a far deeper

and wider comprehension of religious evolution and psychosis than

could be reached by the verbalizing methods of the self-satisfied

and self-sufficing metaphysicians. These, so far as they prevailed,

did but delay the advance of real knowledge. Their work, in fact,

was fatally shaped by the general reaction against the Revolution,

which in their case took a quasi-philosophic form, while in France

and England it worked out as a crude return to clerical and political

authoritarianism. [1950]

3. From the collisions of philosophic systems in Germany there

emerged two great practical freethinking forces, the teachings of

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-76), who was obliged to give up his lecturing

at Erlangen in 1830 after the issue of his Thoughts upon Death and

Immortality, and Ludwig Büchner, who was deprived of his chair of

clinic at Tübingen in 1855 for his Force and Matter. The former,

originally a Hegelian, expressly broke away from his master,

declaring that, whereas Hegel belonged to the "Old Testament"

of modern philosophy, he himself would set forth the New, wherein

Hegel's fundamentally incoherent treatment of deity (as the total

process of things on the one hand, and an objective personality

on the other) should be cured. [1951] Feuerbach accordingly, in

his Essence of Christianity (1841) and Essence of Religion (1851),

supplied one of the first adequate modern statements of the positively

rationalistic position as against Christianity and theism, in terms

of philosophic as well as historical insight--a statement to which

there is no characteristically modern answer save in terms of the

refined sentimentalism of the youthful Renan, [1952] fundamentally

averse alike to scientific precision and to intellectual consistency.

Feuerbach's special service consists in the rebuttal of the metaphysic

in which religion had chronically taken refuge from the straightforward

criticism of freethinkers, in itself admittedly unanswerable. They

had shown many times over its historic falsity, its moral perversity,

and its philosophic self-contradiction; and the more astute official

defenders, leaving to the less competent the task of re-vindicating

miracles and prophecy and defending the indefensible, proceeded

to shroud the particular defeat in a pseudo-philosophic process

which claimed for all religion alike an indestructible inner truth,

in the light of which the instinctive believer could again make

shift to affirm his discredited credences. It was this process which

Feuerbach exploded, for all who cared to read him. He had gone through

it. Intensely religious in his youth, he had found in the teaching of

Hegel an attractive philosophic garb for his intuitional thought. But a

wider concern than Hegel's for actual knowledge, and for the knowledge

of the actual, moved him to say to his teacher, on leaving: "Two years

have I attached myself to you; two years have I completely devoted to

your philosophy. Now I feel the necessity of starting in the directly

opposite way: I am going to study anatomy." [1953] It may have been

that what saved him from the Hegelian fate of turning to the end the

squirrel-cage of conformist philosophy was the personal experience

which put him in fixed antagonism to the governmental forces that

Hegel was moved to serve. The hostility evoked by his Thoughts on

Death and Immortality completed his alienation from the official

side of things, and left him to the life of a devoted truth-seeker--a

career as rare in Germany as elsewhere. The upshot was that Feuerbach,

in the words of Strauss, "broke the double yoke in which, under Hegel,

philosophy and theology still went." [1954]

For the task he undertook he had consummately equipped himself. In

a series of four volumes (History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to

Spinoza, 1833; Exposition and Criticism of the Leibnitzian Philosophy,

1837; Pierre Bayle, 1838; On Philosophy and Christianity, 1839)

he explored the field of philosophy, and re-studied theology in

the light of moral and historical criticism, before he produced

his masterpiece, Das Wesen des Christenthums. Here the tactic of

Hegel is turned irresistibly on the Hegelian defence; and religion,

defiantly declared by Hegel to be an affair of self-consciousness,

[1955] is shown to be in very truth nothing else. "Such as are a

man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as

a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is

self-consciousness; knowledge of God is self-knowledge." [1956] This

of course is openly what Hegelian theism is in effect--philosophic

atheism; and though Feuerbach at times disclaimed the term, he declares

in his preface that "atheism, at least in the sense of this work, is

the secret of religion itself; that religion itself ... in its heart,

in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of

human nature." In the preliminary section on The Essence of Religion

he makes his position clear once for all: "A God who has abstract

predicates has also an abstract existence.... Not the attribute of

the divinity, but the divineness or deity of the attribute, is the

first true Divine Being. Thus what theology and philosophy have held

to be God, the Absolute, the Infinite, is not God; but that which they

have held not to be God, is God--namely the attribute, the quality,

whatever has reality. Hence, he alone is the true atheist to whom the

predicates of the Divine Being--for example, love, wisdom, justice--are

nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is

nothing.... These have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force

their recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident

truths to him; they approve, they attest themselves.... The idea of

God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence...."

This is obviously the answer to Baur, who, after paying tribute

to the personality of Feuerbach, and presenting a tolerably fair

summary of his critical philosophy, can find no answer to it save

the inept protest that it is one-sided in respect of its reduction

of religion to the subjective (the very course insisted on by a

hundred defenders!), that it favours the communistic and other extreme

tendencies of the time, and that it brings everything "under the rude

rule of egoism." [1957] Here a philosophic and an aspersive meaning

are furtively combined in one word. The scientific subjectivism

of Feuerbach's analysis of religion is no more a vindication or

acceptance of "rude egoism" than is the Christian formula of "God's

will" a condonation of murder. The restraint of egoism by altruism

lies in human character and polity alike for the rationalist and

for the irrationalist, as Baur must have known well enough after his

long survey of Church history. His really contemptible escape from

Feuerbach's criticism, under cover of alternate cries of "Communism"

and "egoism"--a self-stultification which needs no comment--is simply

one more illustration of the fashion in which, since the time of Kant,

philosophy in Germany as elsewhere has been chronically demoralized

by resort to non-philosophical tests. "Max Stirner" (pen-name of

Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) carried the philosophic "egoism" of

Feuerbach about as far in words as might be; but his work on the Ego

(Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum, 1845) remains an ethical curiosity

rather than a force. [1958]

4. Arnold Ruge (1802-1880), who was of the same philosophical school,

[1959] gave his life to a disinterested propaganda of democracy and

light; and if in 1870 he capitulated to the new Empire, and thereby won

a small pension for the two last years of his life, he was but going

the way of many another veteran, dazzled in his old age by very old

fires. His Addresses on Religion, its Rise and Fall: to the educated

among its Reverers [1960] (1869) is a lucid and powerful performance,

proceeding from a mythological analysis of religion to a cordial

plea for rationalism in all things. The charge of "materialism"

was for him no bugbear. "Truly," he writes, "we are not without the

earth and the solar system, not without the plants and the animals,

not without head. But whoever has head enough to understand science

and its conquests in the field of nature and of mind (Geist) knows

also that the material world rests in the immaterial, moves in it,

and is by it animated, freed, and ensouled; that soul and idea are

incarnate in Nature, but that also logic, idea, spirit, and science

free themselves out of Nature, become abstracted and as immaterial

Power erect their own realm, the realm of spirit in State, science,

and art." [1961]

5. On Feuerbach's Essence of Religion followed the resounding explosion

of Büchner's Force and Matter (1855), which in large measure, but

with much greater mastery of scientific detail, does for the plain

man of his century what d'Holbach in his chief work sought to do

for his day. Constantly vilified, even in the name of philosophy,

in the exact tone and spirit of animal irritation which marks the

religious vituperation of all forms of rationalism in previous ages;

and constantly misrepresented as professing to explain an infinite

universe when it does but show the hollowness of all supernaturalist

explanations, [1962] the book steadily holds its ground as a manual of

anti-mysticism. [1963] Between them, Feuerbach and Büchner may be said

to have framed for their age an atheistic "System of Nature," concrete

and abstract, without falling into the old error of substituting one

apriorism for another. Whosoever endorses Baur's protest against the

"one-sidedness" of Feuerbach, who treats of religion on its chosen

ground of self-consciousness, has but to turn to Büchner's study of

the objective world and see whether his cause fares any better.

6. In France the course of thought had been hardly less

revolutionary. Philosophy, like everything else, had been affected

by the legitimist restoration; and between Victor Cousin and the

other "classic philosophers" of the first third of the century

orthodoxy was nominally reinstated. Yet even among these there was

no firm coherence. Maine de Biran, one of the shrinking spirits who

passed gradually into an intolerant authoritarianism from fear of

the perpetual pressures of reason, latterly declared (1821) that a

philosophy which ascribed to deity only infinite thought or supreme

intelligence, eliminating volition and love, was pure atheism;

and this pronouncement struck at the philosophy of Cousin. Nor

was this species of orthodoxy any more successful than the furious

irrationalism of Joseph De Maistre in setting up a philosophic form of

faith, as distinct from the cult of rhetoric and sentiment founded by

Chateaubriand. Cousin was deeply distrusted by those who knew him, and

at the height of his popularity he was contemned by the more competent

minds around him, such as Sainte-Beuve, Comte, and Edgar Quinet. [1964]

The latter thinker himself counted for a measure of rationalism, though

he argued for theism, and undertook to make good the historicity of

Jesus against those who challenged it. For the rest, even among the

ostensibly conservative and official philosophers, Théodore Jouffroy,

an eclectic, who held the chair of moral philosophy in the Faculté

des Lettres at Paris, was at heart an unbeliever from his youth up,

[1965] and even in his guarded writings was far from satisfying the

orthodox. "God," he wrote, [1966] "interposes as little in the regular

development of humanity as in the course of the solar system." He

added a fatalistic theorem of divine predetermination, which he

verbally salved in the usual way by saying that predetermination

presupposed individual liberty. Eclecticism thus fell, as usual,

between two stools; but it was not orthodoxy that would gain. On

another line Jouffroy openly bantered the authoritarians on their

appeal to a popular judgment which they declared to be incapable of

pronouncing on religious questions. [1967]

7. On retrospect, the whole official French philosophy of the period,

however conservative in profession, is found to have been at bottom

rationalistic, and only superficially friendly to faith. The Abbé

Felice de Lamennais declaimed warmly against L'indifférence en

matière de religion (4 vols. 1818-24), resorting to the old Catholic

device, first employed by Montaigne, of turning Pyrrhonism against

unbelief. Having ostensibly discredited the authority of the senses and

the reason (by which he was to be read and understood), he proceeded

in the customary way to set up the ancient standard of the consensus

universalis, the authority of the majority, the least reflective and

the most fallacious. This he sought to elevate into a kind of corporate

wisdom, superior to all individual judgment; and he marched straight

into the countersense of claiming the pagan consensus as a confirmation

of religion in general, while arguing for a religion which claimed to

put aside paganism as error. The final logical content of the thesis

was the inanity that the majority for the time being must be right.

Damiron, writing his Essai sur l'histoire de la philosophie en

France au XIXe Siècle in 1828, replies in a fashion more amiable than

reassuring, commenting on the "strange skepticism" of Lamennais as

to the human reason. [1968] For himself, he takes up the parable of

Lessing, and declares that where Lessing spoke doubtfully, men had

now reached conviction. It was no longer a question of whether, but of

when, religion was to be recast in terms of fuller intelligence. "In

this religious regeneration we shall be to the Christians what the

Christians were to the Jews, and the Jews to the patriarchs: we shall

be Christians and something more." The theologian of the future will

be half-physicist, half-philosopher. "We shall study God through

nature and through men; and a new Messiah will not be necessary

to teach us miraculously what we can learn of ourselves and by our

natural lights." Christianity has been a useful discipline; but "our

education is so advanced that henceforth we can be our own teachers;

and, having no need of an extraneous inspiration, we draw faith from

science." [1969] "Prayer is good, doubtless," but it "has only a

mysterious, uncertain, remote action on our environment." [1970] All

this under Louis Philippe, from a professor at the École Normale. Not

to this day has official academic philosophy in Britain ventured

to go so far. In France the brains were never out, even under

the Restoration. Lamennais himself gave the proof. His employment

of skepticism as an aid to faith had been, like Montaigne's, the

expression of a temperament slow to reach rational positions, but

surely driven thither. As a boy of twelve, when a priest sought to

prepare him for communion, he had shown such abnormal incredulity

that the priest gave him up; and later he read omnivorously among

the deists of the eighteenth century, Rousseau attracting him in

particular. Later he passed through a religious crisis, slowly covering

ground which others traverse early. He did not become a communicant

till he was twenty-two; he entered the seminary only at twenty-seven;

and he was ordained only when he was nearly thirty-two.

Yet he had experienced much. Already in 1808 his Réflexions sur

l'état de l'église had been suppressed by Napoleon's police; in 1814

he had written, along with his brother, in whose seminary he taught

mathematics, a treatise maintaining the papal claims; and in the

Hundred Days of 1815 he took flight to London. His mind was always at

work. His Essay on Indifference expressed his need of a conviction;

with unbelief he could reckon and sympathize; with indifference

he could not; but when the indifference was by his own account the

result of reflective unbelief he treated it in the same fashion as

the spontaneous form. At bottom, his quarrel was with reason. Yet

the very element in his mind which prompted his anti-rational polemic

was ratiocinative; and as he slowly reached clearness of thought he

came more and more into conflict with Catholicism. It was all very

well to flout the individual reason in the name of the universal;

but to give mankind a total infallibility was not the way to satisfy

a pope or a Church which claimed a monopoly of the gift. In 1824

he was well received by the pope; but when in 1830 he began to write

Liberal articles in the journal L'Avenir, in which he collaborated with

Lacordaire, the Comte de Montalembert, and other neo-Catholics, offence

was quickly taken, and the journal was soon suspended. Lamennais

and his disciples Lacordaire and Montalembert went to Rome to plead

their cause, but were coldly received; and on their way home in 1832

received at Munich a missive of severe reprimand.

Rendering formal obedience, Lamennais retired, disillusioned, with

his friends to his and his brother's estate in Brittany, and began

his process of intellectual severance. In January, 1833, he performed

mass, and at this stage he held by his artificial distinction between

the spheres of faith and reason. In May of that year he declared his

determination to place himself "as a writer outside of the Church and

Catholicism," declaring that "outside of Catholicism, outside faith,

there is reason; outside of the Church there is humanity; I place

myself (je me renferme) in this sphere." [1971] Still he claimed to

be simple fidèle en religion, and to combine "fidelity in obedience

with liberty in science." [1972] In January of 1834, however, he had

ceased to perform any clerical function; and his Paroles d'un Croyant,

published in that year, stand for a faith which the Church reckoned

as infidelity.

Lacordaire, separating from his insubordinate colleague, published

an Examen de la philosophie de M. de Lamennais, in which the true

papal standpoint was duly taken. Thenceforth Lamennais was an

Ishmaelite. Feeling as strongly in politics as in everything else,

he was infuriated by the brutal suppression of the Polish rising

in 1831-32; and the government of Louis Philippe pleased him as

little as that of Charles X had done. In 1841 he was sentenced to

a year's imprisonment for his brochure Le pays et le gouvernement

(1840). Shortly before his death in 1854 he claimed that he had never

changed: "I have gone on, that is all." But he had in effect changed

from a Catholic to a pantheist; [1973] and in 1848, as a member of

the National Assembly, he more than once startled his colleagues by

"an affectation of impiety." [1974] On his deathbed he refused to

receive the curé of the parish, and by his own wish he was buried

without any religious ceremony, in the fosse commune of the poor and

with no cross on his grave.

Such a type does not very clearly belong to rationalism; and Lamennais

never enrolled himself save negatively under that flag. Always

emotional and impulsive, he had in his period of aggressive fervour

as a Churchman played a rather sinister part in the matter of

the temporary insanity of Auguste Comte, lending himself to the

unscrupulous tactics of the philosopher's mother, who did not stick

at libelling her son's wife in order to get him put under clerical

control. [1975] It was perhaps well for him that he was forced out

of the Church; for his love of liberty was too subjective to have

qualified him for a wise use of power. But the spectacle of such

a temperament forced into antagonism with the Church on moral and

social grounds could not but stimulate anti-clericalism in France,

whatever his philosophy may have done to promote rational thinking.

8. The most energetic and characteristic philosophy produced in the new

France was that of Auguste Comte, which as set forth in the Cours de

Philosophie Positive (1830-42) practically reaffirmed while it recast

and supplemented the essentials of the anti-theological rationalism

of the previous age, and in that sense rebuilt French positivism,

giving that new name to the naturalistic principle. Though Comte's

direct following was never large, it is significant that soon after the

completion of his Cours we find Saisset lamenting that the war between

the clergy and the philosophers, "suspended by the great political

commotion of 1830," had been "revived with a new energy." [1976]

The later effort of Comte to frame a politico-ecclesiastical system

never succeeded beyond the formation of a politically powerless sect;

and the attempt to prove its consistency with his philosophic system

by claiming that from the first he had harboured a plan of social

regulation [1977] is beside the case. A man's way of thinking may

involve intellectual contradictions all through his life; and Comte's

did. Positivism in the scientific sense cannot be committed to any

one man's scheme for regulating society and conserving "cultus"; and

Comte's was merely one of the many evoked in France by the memory

of an age of revolutions. It belongs, indeed, to the unscientific

and unphilosophic side of his mind, the craving for authority and the

temper of ascendency, which connect with his admiration of the medieval

Church. Himself philosophically an atheist, he condemned atheists

because they mostly contemned his passion for regimentation. By

reason of this idiosyncrasy and of the habitually dictatorial tone

of his doctrine, he has made his converts latterly more from the

religious than from the freethinking ranks. But both in France and

in England his philosophy tinged all the new thought of his time, his

leading English adherents in particular being among the most esteemed

publicists of the day. Above all, he introduced the conception of a

"science of society" where hitherto there had ruled the haziest forms

of "providentialism." In France the general effect of the rationalistic

movement had been such that when Taine, under the Third Empire,

assailed the whole "classic" school in his Philosophes classiques

(1857), his success was at once generally recognized, and a non-Comtist

positivism was thenceforth the ruling philosophy. The same thing has

happened in Italy, where quite a number of university professors are

explicitly positivist in their philosophic teaching. [1978]

9. In Britain, where abstract philosophy after Berkeley had been mainly

left to Hume and the Scotch thinkers who opposed him, metaphysics

was for a generation practically overriden by the moral and social

sciences; Hartley's Christian Materialism making small headway

as formulated by him, though it was followed up by the Unitarian

Priestley. The reaction against the Revolution, indeed, seems to have

evicted everything in the nature of active philosophic thought from

the universities in the first decade of the nineteenth century; at

Oxford it was taught in a merely traditionary fashion, in lamentable

contrast to what was going on in Germany; [1979] and in Scotland in

the 'thirties things had fallen to a similar level. [1980] It was over

practical issues that new thought germinated in England. The proof of

the change wrought in the direction of native thought is seen in the

personalities of the men who, in the teeth of the reaction, applied

rationalistic method to ethics and psychology. Bentham and James

Mill were in their kindred fields among the most convinced and active

freethinkers of their day, the former attacking both clericalism and

orthodoxy; [1981] while the latter, no less pronounced in his private

opinions, more cautiously built up a rigorously naturalistic psychology

in his Analysis of the Human Mind (1829). Bentham's utilitarianism

was so essentially anti-Christian that he could hardly have been

more disliked by discerning theists if he had avowed his share in

the authorship of the atheistic Analysis of the Influence of Natural

Religion, which, elaborated from his manuscript by no less a thinker

than George Grote, was published in 1822. [1982] Pseudonymous as

that essay is, it seeks to guard against the risk of prosecution

by the elaborate stipulation that what it discusses is always the

influence of natural religion on life, revealed religion being another

matter. But this is of course the merest stratagem, the whole drift of

the book being a criticism of the effects of the current religion on

contemporary society. It greatly influenced J. S. Mill, whose essay

on The Utility of Religion echoes its beginning; and if it had been

a little less drab in style it might have influenced many more.

But Bentham's ostensible restriction of his logic to practical problems

of law and morals secured him a wider influence than was wielded by any

of the higher publicists of his day. The whole tendency of his school

was intensely rationalistic; and it indirectly affected all thought

by its treatment of economics, which from Hume and Smith onwards had

been practically divorced from theology. Even clerical economists,

such as Malthus and Chalmers, alike orthodox in religion, furthered

naturalism in philosophy in spite of themselves by their insistence

on the law of population, which is the negation of divine benevolence

as popularly conceived. A not unnatural result was a religious fear

of all reasoning whatever, and a disparagement of the very faculty

of reason. This, however, was sharply resisted by the more cultured

champions of orthodoxy, [1983] to the great advantage of critical

discussion.

10. When English metaphysical philosophy revived with Sir William

Hamilton, [1984] it was on the lines of a dialectical resistance

to the pantheism of Germany, in the interests of faith; though

Hamilton's dogmatic views were always doubtful. [1985] Admirably

learned, and adroit in metaphysical fence, he always grounded his

theism on the alleged "needs of our moral nature"--a declaration of

philosophical bankruptcy. The vital issue was brought to the front

after his death in the Bampton Lectures (1858) of his supporter

Dean Mansel; and between them they gave the decisive proof that the

orthodox cause had been philosophically lost while being socially

won, since their theism emphasized in the strongest way the negative

criticism of Kant, leaving deity void of all philosophically cognizable

qualities. Hamilton and Mansel alike have received severe treatment

at the hands of Mill and others for the calculated irrationalism

and the consequent immoralism of their doctrine, which insisted on

attributing moral bias to an admittedly Unknowable Absolute, and on

standing for Christian mysteries on the skeptical ground that reason

is an imperfect instrument, and that our moral faculties and feelings

"demand" the traditional beliefs. But they did exactly what was

needed to force rationalism upon open and able minds. It is indeed

astonishing to find so constantly repeated by trained reasoners the

old religious blunder of reasoning from the inadequacy of reason to

the need for faith. The disputant says in effect: "Our reason is not

to be trusted; let us then on that score rationally decide to believe

what is handed down to us": for if the argument is not a process of

reasoning it is nothing; and if it is to stand, it is an assertion

of the validity it denies. Evidently the number of minds capable of

such self-stultification is great; but among minds at once honest

and competent the number capable of detecting the absurdity must be

considerable; and the invariable result of its use down to our own

time is to multiply unbelievers in the creed so absurdly defended.

It is difficult to free Mansel from the charge of seeking to confuse

and bewilder; but mere contact with the processes of reasoning in

his Bampton Lectures is almost refreshing after much acquaintance

with the see-saw of vituperation and platitude which up to that time

mostly passed muster for defence of religion in nineteenth-century

England. He made for a revival of intellectual life. And he suffered

enough at the hands of his co-religionists, including F. D. Maurice,

to set up something like compassion in the mind of the retrospective

rationalist. Accused of having adopted "the absolute and infinite,

as defined after the leaders of German metaphysics," as a "synonym

for the true and living God," he protested that he had done

"exactly the reverse. I assert that the absolute and infinite,

as defined in the German metaphysics, and in all other metaphysics

with which I am acquainted, is a notion which destroys itself by

its own contradictions. I believe also that God is, in some manner

incomprehensible by me, both absolute and infinite; and that those

attributes exist in Him without any repugnance or contradiction at

all. Hence I maintain throughout that the infinite of philosophy is

not the true infinite." [1986] Charged further with borrowing without

acknowledgment from Newman, the Dean was reduced to crediting Newman

with "transcendent gifts" while claiming to have read almost nothing

by him, [1987] and winding up with a quotation from Newman inviting

men to seek solace from the sense of nescience in blind belief.

It was said of Hamilton that, "having scratched his eyes out in the

bush of reason, he scratched them in again in the bush of faith";

and when that could obviously be said also of his reverend pupil,

the philosophic tide was clearly on the turn. Within two years of the

delivery of Mansel's lectures his and Hamilton's philosophic positions

were being confidently employed as an open and avowed basis for the

naturalistic First Principles (1860-62) of Herbert Spencer, wherein,

with an unfortunate laxity of metaphysic on the author's own part,

and a no less unfortunate lack of consistency as regards the criticism

of religious and anti-religious positions, [1988] the new cosmic

conceptions are unified in a masterly conception of evolution as a

universal law. This service, the rendering of which was quite beyond

the capacity of the multitude of Spencer's metaphysical critics, marks

him as one of the great influences of his age. Strictly, the book is a

"System of Nature" rather than a philosophy in the sense of a study

of the grounds and limitations of knowledge; that is to say, it is on

the former ground alone that it is coherent and original. But its very

imperfections on the other side have probably promoted its reception

among minds already shaken in theology by the progress of concrete

science; while at the same time such imperfections give a hostile

foothold to the revived forms of theism. In any case, the "agnostic"

foundation supplied by the despairing dialectic of Hamilton and Mansel

has always constituted the most effective part of the Spencerian case.

11. The effect of the ethical pressure of the deistic attack on

the intelligence of educated Christians was fully seen even within

the Anglican Church before the middle of the century. The unstable

Coleridge, who had gone round the whole compass of opinion [1989] when

he began to wield an influence over the more sensitive of the younger

Churchmen, was strenuous in a formal affirmation of the doctrine of

the Trinity, but no less anxious to modify the doctrine of Atonement

on which the conception of the Trinity was historically founded. In

the hands of Maurice the doctrine of sacrifice became one of example to

the end of subjective regeneration of the sinner. This view, which was

developed by John the Scot--perhaps from hints in Origen [1990]--and

again by Bernardino Ochino, [1991] is specially associated with the

teaching of Coleridge; but it was quite independently held in England

before him by the Anglican Dr. Parr (1747-1825), who appears to have

been heterodox upon most points in the orthodox creed, [1992] and who,

like Servetus and Coleridge and Hegel, held by a modal as against a

"personal" Trinity. The advance in ethical sensitiveness which had

latterly marked English thought, and which may perhaps be traced in

equal degrees to the influence of Shelley and to that of Bentham,

counted for much in this shifting of Christian ground. The doctrine of

salvation by faith was by many felt to be morally indefensible. Such

Unitarian accommodations presumably reconciled to Christianity and

the Church many who would otherwise have abandoned them; and the only

orthodox rebuttal seems to have been the old and dangerous resort to

the Butlerian argument, to the effect that the God of Nature shows no

such benign fatherliness as the anti-sacrificial school ascribe to

him. [1993] This could only serve to emphasize the moral bankruptcy

of Butler's philosophy, to which Mansel, in an astonishing passage

of his Bampton Lectures, [1994] had shown himself incredibly blind.

The same pressure of moral argument was doubtless potent in the

development of "Socinian" or other rationalistic views in the

Protestant Churches of Germany, Holland, Hungary, Switzerland, and

France in the first half of the century. Such development had gone

so far that by the middle of the century the Churches in question

were, to the eye of an English evangelical champion, predominantly

rationalistic, and in that sense "infidel." [1995] Reactions have been

claimed before and since; but in our own age there is little to show

for them. In the United States, again, the ethical element probably

predominated in the recoil of Emerson from Christian orthodoxy even of

the Unitarian stamp, as well as in the heresy of Theodore Parker, whose

aversion to the theistic ethic of Jonathan Edwards was so strong as

to make him blind to the reasoning power of that stringent Calvinist.

12. A powerful and wholesome stimulus was given to English thought

throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century by the many-sided

influence of John Stuart Mill, who, beginning by a brilliant System

of Logic (1843), which he followed up with a less durable exposition

of the Principles of Political Economy (1848), became through his

shorter works On Liberty and on various political problems one of

the most popular of the serious writers of his age. It was not till

the posthumous issue of his Autobiography and his Three Essays on

Religion (1874) that many of his readers realized how complete was

his alienation from the current religion, from his childhood up. In

his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865), indeed,

he had indignantly repudiated the worship of an unintelligibly good

God; but he had there seemed to take for granted the God-idea; and

save in inconclusive passages in the Liberty (1859) he had indicated

no rejection of Christianity. But though the Liberty was praised by

Kingsley and contemned by Carlyle, it made for freethinking no less

than for tolerance; and his whole life's work made for reason. "The

saint of rationalism" was Gladstone's [1996] account of him as a

parliamentarian. His posthumous presentment to the world of the strange

conception of a limited-liability God, the victim of circumstances--a

theorem which meets neither the demand for a theistic explanation of

the universe nor the worshipper's craving for support--sets up some

wonder as to his philosophy; but was probably as disintegrative of

orthodoxy as a more philosophical performance would have been.

Section 7.--Modern Jewry

In the culture-life of the dispersed Jews, in the modern period,

there is probably as much variety of credence in regard to religion

as occurs in the life of Christendom so called. Such names as those

of Spinoza, Jacobi, Moses Mendelssohn, Heine, and Karl Marx tell

sufficiently of Jewish service to freethought; and each one of these

must have had many disciples of his own race. Deism among the educated

Jews of Germany in the eighteenth century was probably common. [1997]

The famous Rabbi Elijah of Wilna (d. 1797), entitled the Gaon, "the

great one," set up a movement of relatively rationalistic pietism

that led to the establishment in 1803 of a Rabbinical college at

Walosin, which has flourished ever since, and had in 1888 no fewer

than 400 students, among whose successors there goes on a certain

amount of independent study. [1998] In the freer world outside

critical thought has asserted itself within the pale of orthodox

Judaism; witness such a writer as Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840),

whose posthumous Guide to the Perplexed of the Time [1999] (1851),

though not a scientific work, is ethically and philosophically in

advance of the orthodox Judaism of its age. Of Krochmal it has been

said that he "was inspired in his work by the study of Hegel, just

as Maimonides had been by the study of Aristotle." [2000] The result

is only a liberalizing of Jewish orthodoxy in the light of historic

study, [2001] such as went on among Christians in the same period;

but it is thus a stepping-stone to further science.

To-day educated Jewry is divided in somewhat the same proportions

as Christendom into absolute rationalists and liberal and fanatical

believers; and representatives of all three types, of different

social grades, may be found among the Zionists, whose movement for the

acquisition of a new racial home has attracted so much attention and

sympathy in recent years. Whether or not that movement attains to any

decisive political success, Judaism clearly cannot escape the solvent

influences which affect all European opinion. As in the case of the

Christian Church, the synagogue in the centres of culture keeps the

formal adherence of some who no longer think on its plane; but while

attempts are made from time to time to set up more rationalistic

institutions for Jews with the modern bias, the general tendency is

to a division between devotees of the old forms and those who have

decided to live by reason.

Section 8.--The Oriental Civilizations

We have already seen, in discussing the culture histories of India,

China, and Moslem Persia, how ancient elements of rationalism continue

to germinate more or less obscurely in the unpropitious soils of

Asiatic life. Ignorance is in most oriental countries too immensely

preponderant to permit of any other species of survival. But sociology,

while recognizing the vast obstacles to the higher life presented by

conditions which with a fatal facility multiply the lower, can set

no limit to the possibilities of upward evolution. The case of Japan

is a sufficient rebuke to the thoughtless iterators of the formula of

the "unprogressiveness of the East." While a cheerfully superstitious

religion is there still normal among the mass, the transformation of

the political ideals and practice of the nation under the influence of

European example is so great as to be unparalleled in human history;

and it has inevitably involved the substitution of rationalism for

supernaturalism among the great majority of the educated younger

generation. The late Yukichi Fukuzawa, who did more than any other man

to prepare the Japanese mind for the great transformation effected in

his time, was spontaneously a freethinker from his childhood; [2002]

and through a long life of devoted teaching he trained thousands to

a naturalist way of thought. That they should revert to Christian

or native orthodoxy seems as impossible as such an evolution

is seen to be in educated Hindostan, where the higher orders of

intelligence are probably not relatively more common than among the

Japanese. The final question, there as everywhere, is one of social

reconstruction and organization; and in the enormous population of

China the problem, though very different in degree of imminence, is

the same in kind. Perhaps the most hopeful consideration of all is

that of the ever-increasing inter-communication which makes European

and American progress tend in every succeeding generation to tell

more and more on Asiatic life.

As to Japan, Professor B. H. Chamberlain pronounced twenty years

ago that the Japanese "now bow down before the shrine of Herbert

Spencer" (Things Japanese, 3rd ed. 1898, p. 321. Cp. Religious

Systems of the World, 3rd ed. p. 103), proceeding in another

connection (p. 352) to describe them as essentially an undevotional

people. Such a judgment would be hard to sustain. The Japanese

people in the past have exhibited the amount of superstition

normal in their culture stage (cp. the Voyages de C. P. Thunberg

au Japon, French tr. 1796, iii, 206); and in our own day they

differ from Western peoples on this side merely in respect of

their greater general serenity of temperament. There were in

Japan in 1894 no fewer than 71,831 Buddhist temples, and 190,803

Shinto temples and shrines; and the largest temple of all, costing

"several million dollars," was built in the last dozen years of

the nineteenth century. To the larger shrines there are habitual

pilgrimages, the numbers annually visiting one leading Buddhist

shrine reaching from 200,000 to 250,000, while at the Shintô

shrine of Kompira the pilgrims are said to number about 900,000

each year. (See The Evolution of the Japanese, 1903, by L. Gulick,

an American missionary organizer.)

Professor Chamberlain appears to have construed "devotional" in the

light of a special conception of true devotion. Yet a Christian

observer testifies, of the revivalist sect of Nichirenites,

"the Ranters of Buddhism," that "the wildest excesses that seek

the mantle of religion in other lands are by them equalled if

not excelled" (Griffis, The Mikado's Empire, 1876, p. 163); and

Professor Chamberlain admits that "the religion of the family binds

them [the Japanese in general, including the 'most materialistic']

down in truly sacred bonds"; while another writer, who thinks

Christianity desirable for Japan, though he apparently ranks

Japanese morals above Christian, declares that in his travels he

was much reassured by the superstition of the innkeepers, feeling

thankful that his hosts were "not Agnostics or Secularists," but

devout believers in future punishments (Tracy, Rambles through

Japan without a Guide, 1892, pp. 131, 276, etc.).

A third authority with Japanese experience, Professor W. G. Dixon,

while noting a generation ago that "among certain classes in Japan

not only religious earnestness but fanaticism and superstition

still prevail," decides that "at the same time it remains true

that the Japanese are not in the main a very religious people,

and that at the present day religion is in lower repute than

probably it has ever been in the country's history. Religious

indifference is one of the prominent features of new Japan" (The

Land of the Morning, 1882, p. 517). The reconciliation of these

estimates lies in the recognition of the fact that the Japanese

populace is religious in very much the same way as those of Italy

and England, while the more educated classes are rationalistic, not

because of any "essential" incapacity for "devotion," but because

of enlightenment and lack of countervailing social pressure. To

the eye of the devotional Protestant the Catholics of Italy,

with their regard to externals, seem "essentially" irreligious;

and vice versâ. Such formulas miss science. Two hundred years ago

Charron, following previous schematists, made a classification in

which northerners figured as strong, active, stupid, warlike, and

little given to religion; the southerners as slight, abstinent,

obstinate, unwarlike, and superstitious; and the "middle"

peoples as between the two. La Sagesse, liv. i, ch. 42. The

cognate formulas of to-day are hardly more trustworthy. Buddhism

triumphed over Shintôism in Japan both in ancient and modern times

precisely because its lore and ritual make so much more appeal

to the devotional sense. (Cp. Chamberlain, pp. 358-62; Dixon,

ch. x; Religious Systems of the World, pp. 103, 111; Griffis,

p. 166.) But the æsthetically charming cult of the family,

with its poetic recognition of ancestral spirits (as to which

see Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, 1904),

seems to hold its ground as well as any.

So universal is sociological like other law that we find in

Japan, among some freethinkers, the same disposition as among

some in Europe to decide that religion is necessary for the

people. Professor Chamberlain (p. 352) cites Fukuzawa, "Japan's

most representative thinker and educationist," as openly declaring

that "It goes without saying that the maintenance of peace and

security in society requires a religion. For this purpose any

religion will do. I lack a religious nature, and have never

believed in any religion. I am thus open to the charge that I

am advising others to be religious while I am not so. Yet my

conscience does not permit me to clothe myself with religion

when I have it not at heart.... Of religions there are several

kinds--Buddhism, Christianity, and what not. From my standpoint

there is no more difference between those than between green

tea and black.... See that the stock is well selected and the

prices cheap...." (Japan Herald, September 9, 1897). To this view,

however, Fukuzawa did not finally adhere. The Rev. Isaac Dooman,

a missionary in Japan who knew him well, testifies to a change

that was taking place in his views in later life regarding the

value of religion. In an unpublished letter to Mr. Robert Young,

of Kobe, Mr. Dooman says that on one occasion, when conversing

on the subject of Christianity, Fukuzawa remarked: "There was

a time when I advocated its adoption as a means to elevate our

lower classes; but, after finding out that all Christian countries

have their own lower classes just as bad, if not worse than ours,

I changed my mind." Further reflection, marked by equal candour,

may lead the pupils of Fukuzawa to see that nations cannot be

led to adore any form of "tea" by the mere assurance of its

indispensableness from leaders who confess they never take

any. His view is doubtless shared by those priests concerning

whom "it may be questioned whether in their fundamental beliefs

the more scholarly of the Shinshiû priests differ very widely

from the materialistic agnostics of Europe" (Dixon, p. 516). In

this state of things the Christian thinks he sees his special

opportunity. Professor Dixon writes (p. 518), in the manner of

the missionary, that "decaying shrines and broken gods are to

be seen everywhere. Not only is there indifference, but there

is a rapidly-growing skepticism.... The masses too are becoming

affected by it.... Shintôism and ... Buddhism are doomed. What

is to take their place?... It must be either Christianity or

Atheism. We have the brightest hopes that the former will triumph

in the near future...."

The American missionary before cited, Mr. Gulick, argues

alternately that the educated Japanese are religious and that

they are not, meaning that they have "religious instincts,"

while rejecting current creeds. The so-called religious

instinct is in fact simply the spirit of moral and intellectual

seriousness. Mr. Gulick's summing-up, as distinct from his

theory and forecast, is as follows: "For about three hundred

years the intelligence of the nation has been dominated by

Confucian thought, which rejects active belief in supra-human

beings.... The tendency of all persons trained in Confucian

classics was towards thoroughgoing skepticism as to divine

beings and their relation to this world. For this reason, beyond

doubt, has Western agnosticism found so easy an entrance into

Japan.... Complete indifference to religion is characteristic

of the educated classes of to-day. Japanese and foreigners,

Christians and non-Christians alike, unite in this opinion. The

impression usually conveyed by this statement, however, is that

agnosticism is a new thing in Japan. In point of fact, the old

agnosticism is merely reinforced by ... the agnosticism of the

West" (The Evolution of the Japanese, pp. 286-87). This may be

taken as broadly accurate. Cp. the author's paper on "Freethought

in Japan" in the Agnostic Annual for 1906. Professor E. H. Parker

notes (China and Religion, 1905, p. 263) that "the Japanese in

translating Western books are beginning, to the dismay of our

missionaries, to leave out all the Christianity that is in them."

But a very grave danger to the intellectual and moral life of Japan

has been of late set up by a new application of Shintôism, on the

lines of the emperor-worship of ancient Rome. A recent pamphlet

by Professor Chamberlain, entitled The Invention of a New Religion

(R. P. A.; 1912), incidentally shows that the Japanese temperament

is so far from being "essentially" devoid of devotion as to be

capable of building up a fresh cultus to order. It appears that

since the so-called Restoration of 1868, when the Imperial House,

after more than two centuries of seclusion in Kyoto, was brought

from its retirement and the Emperor publicly installed as ruler by

right of his divine origin, the sentiment of religious devotion to

the Imperial House has been steadily inculcated, reaching its height

during the Russo-Japanese War, when the messages of victorious generals

and admirals piously ascribed their successes over the enemy to the

"virtues of the Imperial Ancestors." In every school throughout the

Empire there hangs a portrait of the emperor, which is regarded and

treated as is a sacred image in Russia and in Catholic countries. The

curators of schools have been known on occasion of fire and earthquake

to save the imperial portrait before wife or child; and their action

has elicited popular acclamation. On the imperial birthday teachers

and pupils assemble, and passing singly before the portrait, bow in

solemn adoration. The divine origin of the Imperial House and the

grossly mythical history of the early emperors are taught as articles

of faith in Japanese schools precisely as the cosmogony of Genesis

has been taught for ages in the schools of Christendom. Some years

ago a professor who exposed the absurdity of the chronology upon

which the religion is based was removed from his post, and a teacher

who declined to bow before a casket containing an imperial rescript

was dismissed. His life was, in fact, for some time in danger from

the fury of the populace. So dominant has Mikado-worship become that

some Japanese Christian pastors have endeavoured to reconcile it with

Christianity, and to be Mikado-worshippers and Christ-worshippers at

the same time. [2003] All creeds are nominally tolerated in Japan,

but avowed heresy as to the divine origin of the Imperial House is

a bar to public employment, and exposes the heretic to suspicion of

treason. The new religion, which is merely old Shintôism revised,

has been invented as a political expedient, and may possibly not long

survive the decease of Mutsu Hito, the late emperor, who continued

throughout his reign to live in comparative seclusion, and has been

succeeded by a young prince educated on European lines. But the cult

has obtained a strong hold upon the people; and by reason of social

pressure receives the conventional support of educated men exactly

as Christianity does in England, America, Germany, and Russia.

Thus there is not "plain sailing" for freethought in Japan. In such a

political atmosphere neither moral nor scientific thought has a good

prognosis; and if it be not changed for the better much of the Japanese

advance may be lost. Rationalism on any large scale is always a product

of culture; and culture for the mass of the people of Japan has only

recently begun. Down till the middle of the nineteenth century nothing

more than sporadic freethought existed. [2004] Some famous captains

were irreverent as to the omens; and in a seventeenth-century manual of

the principles of government, ascribed to the great founder of modern

feudalism, Iyéyasu, the sacrifices of vassals at the graves of their

lords are denounced, and Confucius is even cited as ridiculing the

burial of effigies in substitution. [2005] But, as elsewhere under

similar conditions, such displays of originality were confined to the

ruling caste. [2006] I have seen, indeed, a delightful popular satire,

apparently a product of mother-wit, on the methods of popular Buddhist

shrine-making; but, supposing it to be genuine and vernacular, it can

stand only for that measure of freethought which is never absent from

any society not pithed by a long process of religious tyranny. Old

Japan, with its intense feudal discipline and its indurated etiquette,

exhibited the social order, the grace, the moral charm, and the

intellectual vacuity of a hive of bees. The higher mental life was

hardly in evidence; and the ethical literature of native inspiration

is of no importance. [2007] To this day the educated Chinese, though

lacking in Japanese "efficiency" and devotion to drill of all kinds,

are the more freely intellectual in their habits of mind. The Japanese

feudal system, indeed, was so immitigably ironbound, so incomparably

destructive of individuality in word, thought, and deed, that only

in the uncodified life of art and handicraft was any free play of

faculty possible. What has happened of late is the rapid and docile

assimilation of western science. Another and a necessarily longer

step is the independent development of the speculative and critical

intelligence; and in the East, as in the West, this is subject to

economic conditions.

A similar generalization holds good as to the other Oriental

civilizations. Analogous developments to those seen in the latter-day

Mohammedan world, and equally marked by fluctuation, have been noted in

the mental life alike of the non-Mohammedan and the Mohammedan peoples

of India; and at the present day the thought of the relatively small

educated class is undoubtedly much affected by the changes going on

in that of Europe, and especially of England. The vast Indian masses,

however, are far from anything in the nature of critical culture;

and though some system of education for them is probably on the way

to establishment, [2008] their life must long remain quasi-primitive,

mentally as well as physically. Buddhism is theoretically more capable

of adaptation to a rationalist view of life than is Christianity; but

its intellectual activities at present seem to tend more towards an

"esoteric" credulity than towards a rational or scientific adjustment

to life.

Of the nature of the influence of Buddhism in Burmah, where it

has prospered, a vivid and thoughtful account is given in the

work of H. Fielding, The Soul of a People, 1898. At its best

the cult there deifies the Buddha; elsewhere, it is interwoven

with aboriginal polytheism and superstition (Davids, Buddhism,

pp. 207-211; Max Müller, Anthro. Rel., P. 132).

Within Brahmanism, again, there have been at different times

attempts to set up partly naturalistic reforms in religious

thought--e.g. that of Chaitanya in the sixteenth century; but

these have never been pronouncedly freethinking, and Chaitanya

preached a "surrender of all to Krishna," very much in the manner

of evangelical Christianity. Finally he has been deified by his

followers. (Müller, Nat. Rel. p. 100; Phys. Rel. p. 356.)

More definitely freethinking was the monotheistic cult set up among

the Sikhs in the fifteenth century, as the history runs, by Nanak,

who had been influenced both by Parsees and by Mohammedans, and

whose ethical system repudiated caste. But though Nanak objected

to any adoration of himself, he and all his descendants have

been virtually deified by his devotees, despite their profession

of a theoretically pantheistic creed. (Cp. De la Saussaye,

Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 659-62; Müller,

Phys. Rel. p. 355.) Trumpp (Die Religion der Sikhs, 1881, p. 123)

tells of other Sikh sects, including one of a markedly atheistic

character belonging to the nineteenth century; but all alike seem

to gravitate towards Hinduism.

Similarly among the Jainas, who compare with the Buddhists in

their nominal atheism as in their tenderness to animals and

in some other respects, there has been decline and compromise;

and their numbers appear steadily to dwindle, though in India

they survived while Buddhism disappeared. Cp. De la Saussaye,

Manual, pp. 557-63; Rev. J. Robson, Hinduism, 1874, pp. 80-86;

Tiele, Outlines, p. 141. Finally, the Brahmo-Somaj movement of

the nineteenth century appears to have come to little in the way

of rationalism (Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 224-46; De la Saussaye,

pp. 669-71; Tiele, p. 160).

The principle of the interdependence of the external and the internal

life, finally, applies even in the case of Turkey. The notion

that Turkish civilization in Europe is unimprovable, though partly

countenanced by despondent thinkers even among the enlightened Turks,

[2009] had no justification in social science, though bad politics

may ruin the Turkish, like other Moslem States; and although Turkish

freethinking has not in general passed the theistic stage, [2010]

and its spread is grievously hindered by the national religiosity,

[2011] which the age-long hostility of the Christian States so

much tends to intensify, a gradual improvement in the educational

and political conditions would suffice to evolve it, according to

the observed laws of all civilization. It may be that a result of

the rationalistic evolution in the other European States will be to

make them intelligently friendly to such a process, where at present

they are either piously malevolent towards the rival creed or merely

self-seeking as against each other's influence on Turkish destinies.

In any case, it cannot seriously be pretended that the mental life of

Christian Greece in modern times has yielded, apart from services to

simple scholarship, a much better result to the world at large than

has that of Turkey. The usual reactions in individual cases of course

take place. An American traveller writing in 1856 notes how illiterate

Greek priests glory in their ignorance, "asserting that a more liberal

education has the effect of making atheists of the youth." He adds that

he has "known several deacons and others in the University [of Athens]

that were skeptics even as to the truth of religion," and would gladly

have become laymen if they could have secured a livelihood. [2012]

But there was then and later in the century no measurable movement

of a rationalistic kind. At the time of the emancipation the Greek

priesthood was "in general at once the most ignorant and the most

vicious portion of the community"; [2013] and it remained socially

predominant and reactionary. "Whatever progress has been made in Greece

has received but little assistance from them." [2014] Liberal-minded

professors in the theological school were mutinied against by bigoted

students, [2015] a type still much in evidence at Athens; and the

liberal thinker Theophilus Kaïres, charged with teaching "atheistic

doctrines," and found guilty with three of his followers, died of

jail fever while his appeal to the Areopagus was pending. [2016]

Thus far Christian bigotry seems to have held its own in what

once was Hellas. On the surface, Greece shows little trace of

instructed freethought; while in Bulgaria, by Greek testimony,

school teachers openly proclaim their rationalism, and call for the

exclusion of religious teaching from the schools. [2017] Despite the

political freedom of the Christian State, there has thus far occurred

there no such general fertilization by the culture of the rest of

Europe as is needed to produce a new intellectual evolution of any

importance. The mere geographical isolation of modern Greece from

the main currents of European thought and commerce is probably the

most retardative of her conditions; and it is hard to see how it can

be countervailed. Italy, in comparison, is pulsating with original

life, industrial and intellectual. But, given either a renascence of

Mohammedan civilization or a great political reconstruction such as

is latterly on foot, the whole life of the nearer East may take a new

departure; and in such an evolution Greece would be likely to share.

CONCLUSION

Any fuller survey of the intellectual history of the nineteenth century

will but reveal more fully the signal and ever-widening growth of

rational thought among all classes of the more advanced nations,

and among the more instructed of the less advanced. The retrospect

of the whole past tells of a continuous evolution, which in the

twentieth century proceeds more extensively than ever before. There

has emerged the curious fact that in our own country a measure of

rational doubt has been almost constantly at work in the sphere in

which it could perhaps least confidently be expected--to wit, that

of poetry. From Chaucer onwards it is hard to find a great orthodox

poet. Even Spenser was as much Platonist as Christian; and Marlowe,

Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Burns, Wordsworth, Shelley,

Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Browning (to name no

others) in their various ways baffle the demand of faith. Latterly,

the sex which has always been reckoned the more given to religion

has shown many signs of adaptation to the higher law. In Britain,

as in France, women began to appear in the ranks of reason in the

eighteenth century. [2018] In the nineteenth the number has increased

at a significant rate. Already in the fierce battles fought in the

time of reaction after the French Revolution women took their place on

the side of freedom; and Frances Wright (Madame d'Arusmont) played a

notable part as a freethinking publicist and philanthropist. [2019]

Since her day the names of Harriet Martineau and George Eliot tell

of the continual gain of knowledge; and women rationalists are now

to be counted by thousands in all the more civilized countries.

The same law holds of public life in general. Gladstone eagerly

maintained in his latter years that politicians, in virtue of their

practical hold of life, were little given to skepticism; but the facts

were and are increasingly against him. The balance of the evidence

is against the ascription of orthodoxy to either of the Pitts, or to

Fox; and we have seen that the statesmen of the American Revolution,

as of the French, were in general deists. Garibaldi [2020] in Italy,

and Gambetta in France, were freethinkers; Lincoln and his opponent,

Douglas, were deists; towards the close of the century, in New Zealand,

Sir Robert Stout and the late Mr. John Ballance, avowed rationalists,

were among the foremost politicians of their generation; and in the

English Cabinet rationalism began to be represented in the person of

Lord Morley.

While such developments have been possible in the fierce light of

political strife, the process of disintegration and decomposition has

proceeded in society at large till unbelief can hardly be reckoned a

singularity. Within the pale of all the Christian Churches dogmatic

belief has greatly dwindled, and goes on dwindling: and "Christianity"

is made to figure more and more as an ethical doctrine which has

abandoned its historical foundations, while preserving formulas and

rituals which have no part in rational ethics. The mythical cosmogony

out of which the whole originally grew is no longer believed in by

any educated person, though it is habitually presented to the young

as divine truth. Thousands of clergymen, economically gripped to

a false position, would gladly rectify their professed creeds, but

cannot; because the political and economic bases involve the consent

of the majority, and changes cannot be made without angry resistance

and uproar among the less instructed multitude of all classes. The

Protestant Churches collectively dread to figure as repudiating the

historic creed; while the Roman Catholic Church, conscious of the

situation, maintains a semblance of rigid discipline and a minimum

standard of instruction for its adherents, counting on holding its

ground while the faculty of uncritical faith subsists. Only by the

silent alienation of the more thoughtful and sincere minds from the

priesthood can the show of orthodoxy be maintained even within the

Catholic pale.

In all orders alike, nevertheless, the "practice" of religion

decays with the theory. The Churches are constantly challenged to

justify their existence by social reforms and philanthropic works:

no other plea passes as generally valid; and it is only by reason of

a general transference of interest from religious to social problems

that the decay of belief is disguised. "Piety," in the old sense,

counts relatively for little; and while orthodoxy is still a means

of advantage in political life, religion counts for nothing in

international relations. In the war of 1899-1902, "Bible-loving"

England forced a quarrel on the most Bible-loving race in the

world; and at the time of the penning of these lines six nations

are waging the greatest war of all time irrespectively of racial and

religious ties alike, though all alike officially claim the support

of Omnipotence. In Berlin a popular preacher edifies great audiences

by proclaiming that "God is not neutral"; and his Emperor habitually

parades the same faith, with the support of all the theologians of

Germany--the State supremely guilty of the whole embroilment, and the

deliberate perpetrator of the grossest aggression in modern history. On

the side of the Allies "Christianity" is less systematically but

still frequently invoked. On both sides the forms of prayer are

officially practised by the non-combatants, very much as the Romans

in their wars maintained the practice of augury from the entrails of

sacrificed victims; and "family prayer" is said to be reviving.

Everywhere, nevertheless, the more rational, remembering how in the

"ages of faith" deadly wars were waged for whole generations in the

very name of religion, recognize that Christianity furnishes neither

control for the present nor solution for the future; and that the

hope of civilization lies in the resort of the nations to human

standards of sanity and reciprocity. The ties which hold are those

of fellow-citizenship.

There can be no doubt among rationalists that if modern civilization

escapes the ruin which militarism brought upon those of all previous

eras, the principle of reason will continually widen its control,

latterly seen to be everywhere strengthening apart from the dangerous

persistence of militarist ideals and impulses. When it controls

international relations, it will be dominant in the life of thought. In

the words of a great fighter for freethought, "No man ever saw a

religion die"; and there are abundant survivals of pre-Christian

paganism in Europe after two thousand years of Christianity; but

it seems likely that when the history of the twentieth century is

written it will be recognized that what has historically figured as

religion belongs in all its forms to the past.

The question is sometimes raised whether the age of decline will

be marked by movements of active and persecuting fanaticism. Here,

again, the answer must be that everything depends upon the general

fortunes of civilization. It is significant that a number of clerical

voices proclaim a revival of religion as a product of war, while

others complain that the state of struggle has a sterilizing effect

upon religious life. While organized religions subsist, there will

always be adherents with the will to persecute; and from time to time

acts of public persecution occur, in addition to many of a private

character. But in Britain public persecution is latterly restricted

to cases in which the technical offence of "blasphemy" is associated

with acts which come under ordinary police jurisdiction. After the

unquestionable blasphemies of Arnold and Swinburne had to be officially

ignored, it became impossible, in the present stage of civilization,

that any serious and decent literary indictment of the prevailing

creeds should be made a subject of persecution; and before long,

probably, such indictments will be abandoned in the cases of offenders

against police regulations.

The main danger appears to lie in Catholic countries, and from the

action of the Catholic hierarchy. The common people everywhere,

save in the most backward countries, are increasingly disinclined

to persecution. In Ireland there is much less of that spirit among

the Catholic population than among that of Protestant Ulster. But

the infamous execution of Francisco Ferrer in Spain, in 1909,

which aroused passionate reprobation in every civilized country,

was defended in England and elsewhere with extravagant baseness by

Catholic littérateurs, who, with their reactionary priests, are the

last to learn the lesson of tolerance. The indignation everywhere

excited by the judicial murder [2021] of Ferrer, however, gives

promise that even the most zealous fanatics of the Catholic Church

will hesitate again to rouse the wrath of the nations by such a

reversion to the methods of the eras of religious rule.

NOTES

[1] Stow's Annals, ed. 1615, pp. 570, 575.

[2] Burnet, Hist. of the Reformation, ed. Nares, ii, 179; iii, 289;

Strype, Memorials of Cranmer, ed. 1848-54, ii, 100.

[3] The Marian persecutions undoubtedly did much to stimulate

Protestantism. It is not generally realized that many of the burnings

of heretics under Mary were quasi-sacrifices on her behalf. On each

occasion of her hopes of pregnancy being disappointed, some victims

were sent to the stake. See Strype, ed. cited, iii, 196, and Peter

Martyr, there cited; Froude, ed. 1870, v, 521 sq., 539 sq. The

influence of Spanish ecclesiastics may be inferred. The expulsions

of the Jews and the Moriscoes from Spain were by way of averting the

wrath of God. Still, a Spanish priest at Court preached in favour of

mercy. Lingard, ed. 1855, v, 231.