Thus far the humanitarian sentiment has been regarded in its
combination with Christian faith, and as giving new force and
distinction to Christian life and thought. But, on the other hand, it
must now be noted that the same force working apart from the Church,
and often in opposition to it, has been a limitation to Christian
progress. In the French Revolution humanitarianism was associated with
a negative, destructive tendency, which overthrew the Church, disowned
God and immortality, and set up in the place of deity a so-called
Goddess of Reason. This negative tendency has continued to exist and
has found influential manifestation. It has attempted the deification
of humanity, as though the human race were worthy in itself of being
an object of worship. It has exalted man at the expense of God,
conceiving of humanity as alone immortal, as competent to steer its own
course without supernatural direction. It has weakened the sense of
nationality, has injured and endangered family life, has taken away the
highest sanctions from morality, and has reduced religion from being a
revelation from God to a purely subjective process in the soul of man,
worthy of respect, but without authority. It has created an abnormal
sensitiveness in many directions. It has swayed socialistic movements
aiming at the rights of man and seeking to achieve universal happiness,
but with an antagonism sometimes latent, sometimes expressed, to God
and Christ and the Christian Church. The prejudice remains which
had its birth in the French Revolution, that religion is a creation
of priests for their own selfish ends, and the Church an agency for
robbing humanity of its rights, liberty, equality, and fraternity.
Principles and convictions like these found utterance in the philosophy
of Comte (1789–1857), who called himself the “founder of the religion
of humanity,” and who proposed the scheme of a humanitarian Church,
limited by no national boundaries, whose only deity was man, whose
ritual found a place only for great men who had been the benefactors
of the race. Theology and metaphysics were discarded as outgrown
methods of explaining the phenomena of the universe, and in the place
they vacated stood the so-called “Positive philosophy” which rejected
all supernatural influence. The Church of humanity had, indeed, no
history and was a failure from its birth. But the combination, first
seen in Comte, of humanitarianism with the methods and principles of
natural science, has been the most formidable opponent against which
Christianity was ever called to struggle. It has been represented in
England by John Stuart Mill and by Herbert Spencer and many others. To
the influential writings of this school of thinkers is due in great
measure the widespread, deep-seated scepticism since the middle of
the century. To the same cause, by way of reaction, are owing the
spiritualistic movement, the so-called “Christian Science” and other
kindred tendencies towards a crude supernaturalism.
Those who entered the controversy in behalf of Christianity and against
the adherents of the Positive philosophy suffered at first for the
lack of any adequate philosophical method on which to rest in the
effort to overcome this stupendous alliance between a humanitarianism
working for the improvement of social conditions in combination with
natural science, whose postulates involved the denial of the miracle,
and indeed of all supernatural agency (agnosticism). It seemed for a
time as though the philosophy of Hegel would serve the purpose of a
stronghold to which Christian warriors might resort while in the stress
of a conflict which involved not only the readjustment of Christian
doctrines to their new environment, but also the maintenance of the
idea of God, of the kingdom of God in this world and of a future life
for the immortal soul. In Germany systems of theology were worked
out on the basis of Hegelian principles, which, as interpreted by
orthodox theologians, stood for a principle of surpassing value if
it could be maintained—that the life of humanity, while dependent in
the present order on physical conditions, was yet above the life in
external nature with which the natural sciences deal; that the very
definition of humanity implies the power of rising to the knowledge of
God. Nature has no knowledge or consciousness of God, or intimation
of immortality. It is in bondage to natural law and without freedom.
The life of humanity must not be studied from the point of view of
natural science, but is seen in the records of human history. The
influence of Hegel deepened the interest in historical inquiry at a
moment when the absorption in the natural sciences threatened to gain
the ascendency. But the Hegelian philosophy, for reasons which it is
not possible here to render, failed to accomplish the service expected
from it. It may be that the failure was temporary only, and because
it was not fully understood. There arose a school of thinkers—the
Hegelian left wing—who, while retaining their interest in history,
yet fell under the influence of the presuppositions of the natural
sciences. Thus Strauss, in his _Leben Jesu_, conceived of the person of
Christ as a casual product of the human imagination, while Feuerbach,
in his _Essence of Christianity_, reached the conclusion that religion
begins and ends in a subjective process in the soul. Thus, instead of
overcoming the Positive philosophy, German thought gravitated to the
same result, with this difference perhaps, that it assumed the form
of pantheism rather than of atheism. In the Tübingen school, led by
F. C. Baur, whose contributions to the study of Church history are yet
of high value, there was reserve about the miracle, if not its tacit
denial, and a conception of the Christian Church as a product of human
origin rather than the purpose of Christ.
But the effect of Strauss was beneficial in that it sent inquirers
back to the study of the person of Christ and of His age. Never before
was attention so concentrated upon the life of Jesus, as illustrated in
a large number of biographical works, too large to be enumerated here.
As a result of these studies, the conviction grows that while there
is a local aspect of the person of Christ, so that He reflected the
peculiar opinions and living interests of His age, and availed Himself
of current beliefs, yet He was also infinitely above His time. What He
was and did and said in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago must be
supplemented by what He has been to the world in subsequent ages, or
what He is and is doing in the present age.
While Christian thinkers were struggling with the problems raised by
the Positive philosophy, the natural sciences were commanding in an
increasing degree the world’s attention, until Darwin made his great
discovery of a law of evolution, when it seemed as though natural
science had become the arbiter and final tribunal before whose
judgments the world must bow. Then there followed the sharp, even
bitter conflict between science and theology, when scientific men whose
lives had been spent in devotion to the study of natural phenomena
were tempted to write expositions of religious history in order to
show the fallaciousness of the religious attitude, and theologians,
accustomed only to the postulates of the spiritual sphere, ventured
into the domain of science to put a spiritual interpretation on its
conclusions and discoveries. It was a confusing and painful moment
when a subtle scepticism pervaded the Churches and haunted even the
minds of Christian believers. Now that the smoke of the battle has
cleared away, while many tragedies are disclosed, it does not appear
that the Churches have been weakened by the strife or have yielded any
essential truth or conviction. The belief in God, and in his creation
and government of the world, the incarnation of God in Christ, the
miracle for which Christ stands, and pre-eminently the miracle of His
resurrection—in a word, the supernatural interpretation of life,
remains unshaken. It is unjust to charge, as has sometimes been done,
dishonesty and a spirit of evasion against those who, while the fierce
battle was in progress, kept silence, unable to defend by cogent
argument what yet they cherished still as true.
In the latter part of the century there came efforts at the
reconstruction of theology in order to a better adjustment of the
increase of knowledge regarding the nature of God and His relation
to the world. The doctrine of God as immanent in the world, and not
only transcendent or above and apart from it, has proved valuable in
reconciling many of the discoveries of history and of natural science
with the Christian faith. Efforts have also been made to simplify
theology by the reduction of the large and complex, even conflicting,
mass of Christian tenets and beliefs, given in history or represented
in various Christian sects, to a few simple principles in which all
must agree, resting for their confirmation not on metaphysics, but on
the genuine Christian instincts as revealed in the New Testament. There
has been attained also a better philosophical method for meeting the
difficulties and perplexities of the age.
But these attempts at the better interpretation of revealed religion,
and the formation of more consistent theological systems, have found
a temporary rival in efforts to create, first of all, a better system
of “natural theology,” as it may be called, which shall take account
of the doctrine of evolution and other discoveries of natural science
since Paley’s time and the day of the Bridgewater Treatises. Those
who aim at a reconciliation of religion with science treat the idea
of evolution as a mediating principle by which the conflict between
science and religion may be overcome. This effort is the more
significant, in view of the popular interest in evolution—a word
which has become almost the watchword of the age. From this point of
view the invasion of religious territory by scientific men (Huxley,
Tyndale, Haeckel, and others), and the counter-invasion of scientific
territory by philosophers and theologians, give promise of some mutual
understanding in the future.